Consciously Evolving an Agile Team

By now it is common knowledge that it's just as easy for a team to fail using agile practices as it is with waterfall or any other method for building software. So what is the secret to making agile work? How does a team become "self-directed" and "cross-functional?" The key to our team's success was to have the core development team change its attitude toward software development. The team could then work to remove the barriers between individual developers and then between the developers and the larger project team. At first the team struggled putting into practices the ideas from books and papers on agile development. We eventually made headway by focusing on making changes in a very purposeful and incremental fashion, which I call "Conscious Evolution. "