Several authors have returned to my 1994 pattern language dubbed Episodes. This has been recognized as a founding work in the history of Agile. So an inquiry into roots of the now accepted and consequently diluted practices might want to know more about how Episodes came to be.
Thompson Morrison writes, While the core value of the sprint is primarily externally defined, the core value of these episodes appear to be internally defined, as an essential part of the learning journey of the team.
Episodes have a different character than Sprints wherein critical insight is sough rather than an agreed upon deliverable.
John Bywater begins, Inspired by the turn to eventing in software development, and encouraged both by the modern, event-oriented, process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, and by Christopher Alexander's pattern language technique for describing patterns of events, exampled most brilliantly in Ward Cunningham's EPISODES, ... github 
This pattern language describes software development appropriate for entrepreneurial organizations.
# Correspondence
We begin in a chat room where John brings his recent thinking to our attention. riot
You are on to something here. I've read it slowly and carefully several times now. I find that it holds together on dimensions that I don't fully understand. By this I mean that the parts that I do understand do not in any way conflict with each other. If I were asked to sum it up I could only quote you: "the concept of actual occasions of experience".
Since this has been written under source control, I have also read your commits in order. This gives me a sense of where you chose to anchor your thinking as you set out to write.
You start this inquiry with a short list of points and a longer list of examples that illustrate the comprehensive nature, the expressive range, of those points applied. This one commit is already complete within itself. A summation of months or years of thinking.
# Context
Since you mention EPISODES in good light I think it might be encouraging to recall the circumstances of its creation. It may have similarities to your position at the moment.
I have always been about as old as general purpose computing since EDSAC and I appeared in the same year. (EDSAC was the first computer build without a specific purpose in mind. That is, it was of general purpose.) I learned of computing in my teens and was twice that when I encountered the refined abstractions of Smalltalk and set out to understand their full consequences. At that point in my 30s I had half a lifetime of experience to draw upon.
Although Smalltalk organized its worlds around things, objects, much more fundamentally it was about the exploration of things, things of the imagination at that. Remember that it was itself born over a decade within the Learning Research Group at PARC.
Kent and I had already devoted months exploring with Smalltalk. We built things to see if we could and then played with them to see what else they had to teach us. We sought to explain the methods that had evolved. We had some advantage here since we had done must of that exploration together and had articulated much of what we discovered making up new words if they were needed.
We kept pushing on pattern language which seemed powerful enough to describe our experiences in their most essential. By the time I wrote EPISODES I was several years into commercial software development with the latitude to work the way Kent and I had and see how it applied within a more directed environment. The objects we had by then constructed were interesting but not quite as interesting as how we moved through a complex domain, learning and then turning what we learned into durable value to be sold.
(This has turned out to be a little longer than expected. My point arrives soon.)
# Insight
I wrote EPISODES in an abbreviated style. I had lots to say all based on recent experience. I quit half way through and dubbed my work Part 1. I blamed this on the page count limit but it was really me getting tired.
I have gone back to read this just to make sure I said something as profound as what you have read into it. I did say it. And it might not have been said more clearly if I wrote Part 2. At some point during the writing process I stoped and asked myself, what one word describes this bundle of experience. I chose "episodes". I thought that my choice needed some explanation and those few sentences are where you and I connect.
> We are particularly interested in the sequence of mental states that lead to important decisions. We call the sequence an episode.
I could have called the paper "A Method for the Incremental Discovery and Maintenance of Business Objects". I had pointed out earlier that year that one rarely gets the names of their objects right and would be wise to rename them once they understood what they did. I chose EPISODES because I thought it might fit into a system of names. See wiki