There seems to be a debate raging between the Agile and Lean camps, among others, Jurgen Appelo recently leveled some criticism of Lean’s lack of people focus, while Scott Bellware is a critic of Agile from the Lean side of the aisle.

Though both sides have valuable points, I get a little bit of a feeling that this is a little like the conflict between the Peoples Front of Judea and the Judean Peoples Front in the movie “Life of Brian” (see clip above).

Yes, there are certainly differences and differences are worth exploring and debating. Agile focuses on being Agile which may lead to being successful, while Lean focuses on being successful, which may lead to being Agile.
But, at the same time, I see both movements sharing a lot of practices, values and goals.
Personally, I’m not anymore religious about methodologies than I am about.. religion (agnostic with atheist leanings). I’d like to mix and match: Agile methodologies provide me with a lot of answers where Lean does not, and vice versa.

Whereas Appelo’s criticism of Lean lacking a people focus might be on the money (I don’t know, I’m not a lean expert), Agile in general and Scrum in particular (or at least the way it is commonly implemented) has a lot of faults I’ve become aware of over the years: my main problem with Scrum is that it is often too introspective, too focused on methods and means rather than results and outcomes, too focused on tasks and cards rather than goals. To me, this is where Lean thinking steps in and fills the gaps with answers to how to be more result focused and deliver value constantly.

What is my take? Well, there is a lot of overlap, but also a lot of areas that complement eachother. To me, software development is not about finding religion, it is about doing the things that have been empirically proven to work while learning and adapting your way of working to the context of each individual situation and project with only one ultimate goal in mind: the successful delivery of business value.
For me, that tends to mean I try to be both Lean and Agile in whatever combination works for the project at hand. Lean and Agile both provide answers to questions, but they are not all the same questions, so you may have to look in both places and do some thinking of your own.