How did the creators of the agile manifesto turn from technology leaders to leaders of a cultural change?

This paper tells the story of the emergence of the agile approach, focusing on the role of the originators of the Agile Manifesto in this paradigm shift. Based on in-depth interviews with twelve of the seventeen originators of the Agile Manifesto, we describe how technology-driven forces led to the cultural change introduced by the agile approach. We describe the originators' background as children, their main professional activities prior to the conceptualization of the Agile Manifesto, and the process that led to the formulation of the Agile Manifesto. One of the main messages we wish to convey in this paper is that while the originators of the Agile Manifesto were led by the technology, the software community was in fact captured by the human aspects of the Agile Manifesto. This message implies what human aspects and methods, practices and tools should be emphasized in adoption processes of agile software development.