A Year, a Bicycle, and Improvement

Agile teams reflect frequently. But toward the end of the year, many of us pause and look back more naturally.

We try to summarize twelve months with a single judgment. Was it a good year or a difficult one? A year of progress, or one filled with challenges? One year feels significant when you are standing inside it, yet it becomes a surprisingly short unit of measure as we grow older.

A year can be counted in months, days, or minutes—525,600 of them, to be exact. But that level of granularity rarely helps us understand progress.

Hold that thought about time for a moment—and let’s step much further back.

In the early nineteenth century, people began experimenting with a new way of moving through the world on two wheels. What emerged was not yet the bicycle we know today, but something that already carried the seed of it.

In 1817, Karl Drais introduced his Laufmaschine, a wooden, pedal-less device powered by pushing against the ground. It was uncomfortable, slow, and unstable. Yet it worked just well enough to reveal what was missing. It showed that the idea had potential, even if the execution did not.

What followed was not a straight line of progress. For decades, designs appeared, stalled, and reappeared. The concept was there, but learning was slow. Improvements were incremental, fragmented, and often disconnected from one another.

It was not until 1885 that the bicycle finally settled into a form that solved the core problem. With the Rover Safety Bicycle, introduced by John Kemp Starley, the concept stabilized. Two equal-sized wheels. Pedals. A chain drive. A geometry that favored balance. A few years later, in 1888, pneumatic tires—introduced by John Boyd Dunlop—transformed comfort and speed.

By the late 1880s, the bicycle had reached a form we would still recognize today.

That moment is often described as a breakthrough. And it was. But the more interesting story begins after the breakthrough.

For roughly the last 140 years, the bicycle has not fundamentally changed. Materials evolved. Weight dropped. Components improved. Performance and safety increased. Even modern e-bikes build on the same underlying idea. The concept itself remained intact.

This was not a lack of innovation. It was a shift in the nature of innovation.

Once the breakthrough occurred, progress moved from invention to improvement. Invention is different than innovation. Drais' Laufmaschine was invention, the Rover Safety Bicycle represents innovation. From rare, dramatic leaps to continuous refinement and continuous innovation. From searching for the right idea to learning how to make an idea work better, again and again.

Now compress time.

Standing at the end of December 2025, it helps to remember that it took roughly seventy years to move from the earliest bicycle concepts to the form we still use today. Using the same time span and looking backward from now brings us to 1955.

In those seventy years, air travel became routine. Medicine advanced dramatically. Computing reshaped nearly every aspect of work and life. Entire industries emerged, matured, and were disrupted again. We even traveled into space and landed on the moon—massive disruptions in a remarkably short period of time.

But the bicycle quietly continued its path. Not by reinventing itself, but by improving continuously within a stable concept.

What is different today—and what makes this reflection timely—is the pace at which change is now occurring.

The bicycle took decades to move from concept to breakthrough. Many modern technologies move from breakthrough to global adoption in a fraction of that time. The cycles are shorter—much shorter. Feedback arrives faster. The consequences of learning too slowly are higher. In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev warned Eastern leaders that “life punishes those who come too late.” He was right.

This changes what matters most.

In a world where change accelerates, the limiting factor is no longer ideas. It comes down to learning. Specifically, how quickly individuals, teams, and organizations can understand their current condition, test assumptions, and adjust direction based on evidence.

This is why continuous improvement is no longer a background activity or an occasional event. It is becoming a core capability—practiced every single one of the 525,600 minutes in a year.

Agile Kata was designed for exactly this condition. Not as a promise of breakthroughs—although those may occur—but as a way to practice learning deliberately under uncertainty. It offers a pattern for navigating toward a target while accepting that the path will be discovered through experimentation, not prediction.

Looking ahead to 2026, the question is not whether change will continue to accelerate. It already is.

The more useful question is whether we are improving our ability to improve.

At year’s end, it is tempting to ask what the past year delivered. A more powerful reflection may be to ask what it prepared us for. Organizations that invest in building learning capability—rather than chasing the next trend—are better positioned to adapt to whatever comes next.

Continuous improvement does not remove uncertainty. But it does make change navigable. And in a world where the pace keeps increasing, that may be the most valuable capability of all.

Happy New Year. Here’s to a year of learning, continuous improvement, and—when they emerge—many breakthrough innovations.