Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick discuss all things #agile and product development from a #MobProgramming perspective. What if you could decompose every agile method down to its essential building blocks and recombine them for your own specific context? In this episode, Chris and Austin are joined by Aria Omidvar to explore the HEXI method — a framework-agnostic approach to understanding and applying agile, lean, and software craftsmanship practices through physical hexagon objects and collective sense-making.

Aria shares his journey from software craftsmanship and clean code, through Scrum and XP, to discovering Dave Snowden's HEXI method and building his own independent "Hexiverse" — a modular knowledge map that spans Software Teaming, Extreme Programming, Kanban, Modern Synthesis, the Agile Manifesto, and more. He unpacks how breaking methods into reusable hexagonal pieces allows teams (and individuals) to see the connections between ideas, surface what is missing, and navigate the overwhelming landscape of agile methods without falling into method wars.

We dig into:

What the HEXI method is and how Dave Snowden and Nigel Thurlow introduced it via Scrum.org
How Aria independently adapted HEXI to create a Hexiverse for software teaming and mob programming
Why decomposing methods into building blocks enables recombination for any specific context
The spatial design choices behind the Hexiverse — and why dotted hexagons signal a concept shared across sets
How Alistair Cockburn validated the Agile Manifesto hexiset (and why that meant the world to Aria)
The learning journey metaphor of islands growing large enough to connect — and how the Hexiverse accelerates that
Why "nice" doesn't cut it in high-collaboration environments — and how kindness, consideration, and respect offer a deeper model
The "turn up the good" retrospective format and why it flips the traditional improvement lens
How the Hexiverse serves both as a personal learning quest and a potential onboarding tool for teams new to agile methods
Aria's call to action: check the original HEXI sources, play with the physical kits, and consider building your own Hexiverse