On the Supposed Death of 'Agile'
Thinking out loud about the topic of 'Agile' being dead, and the irony of it being broadly perceived as the very thing it was a reaction to.
There's an interesting irony in that the heralds of the death of “Agile” seem to want to break free of some perceived stricture and dogma to instead have the freedom to pragmatically pursue new ways of working that work for them.
What can we make of this?
Ironic Bastardization
Facing the sentiment that “Agile is Dead” as lack of knowledge or understanding of “Agile” will only serve to create alienation. The message being repeated, that “Agile is dead”, is not critique of the foundational values or principles of agility. It is a reaction to the institutionalization and commodification of its methods, knowledge, and ideas: an ironic bastardization of something that appears too similar to what it was meant to challenge. "Agile" is synonymous with the new orthodoxy.
While it may be easy and tempting to blame this sentiment on ignorance or misunderstanding of what they're criticising, we're just seeing the same things that the "Agile Movement" has been doing all along — only with a different vocabulary and perspective. Perhaps this is the start of a new generation of whatever "Agile" is. A rebirth of sorts.
From the perspective of someone who thinks there is already a useful body of knowledge for finding new ways to work, it does seem a bit wasteful and even counterproductive to restart such a process. What was described in the manifesto from 2001 should still be valid for the most part, after all.
The crux here is that it's not effective to explain that their Scrum is bad, or helpful to point out misapplications of whatever, when those are increasingly becoming the norm of what goes as “Agile” in the industry. It's getting harder to blame anyone for their mistrust of "Agile" when so many people's only experience of it is its corrupted version.
Absorbtion
What we've seen the last decade or so has been a gradual slide of the original ideas, methods and narrative of "Agile" getting repackaged, adopted and co-opted into what the movement sought to change from the beginning. Examples of this is how the business models that have emerged around Scrum and SAFe seem to be driven by their own commercial success through offering palatable “Agile” implementations for enterprises desperate to adapt to the times — the new orthodoxy — without needing fundamental change to their operational models.
If we look outside the methods and process frameworks, “Agile” represents a significant shift in the power dynamics in the organizations. Through human-centric ideas like the empowerment of teams, distributed decision-making and continuous improvement, the “Agile Movement” has acted as a force to move the thinking closer to where the doing is taking place. This inversion is at the core of many of the toughest challenges of enabling organizational agility.
In practice, it takes considerable effort for such ideas to take root in organizations beyond how teams operate, which seems to be where many transformations stall, at which point they continue by just dressing their existing structures with titles, structures and processes that look “Agile” enough. Historically speaking, this echoes the strategies and patterns of how existing powers defend themselves by subsuming the languages and objectives of revolutionary movements, resulting in the dilution and misinterpretation of their strategies and goals. It's starting to look to me like “Agile” is also part of this cycle.
In Conclusion
This realization was disheartening to me at first, but I've concluded that I believe this is a development that can't be outrun anymore. And the greatest irony in all of this is how "Agile", can be so relevant and irrelevant at the same time.
Personally, I think that agility is always going to be relevant in our organisations, regardless of what we call the toolbox we use to achieve it. My conclusion from this is that we need to start talking about it differently - a good wake-up call to reflect and think about what we're trying to achieve anyway. The focus sorely needs to be shifted away from methods, metrics and frameworks to how they are meant to serve the organizations they are employed in.
Whatever emerges out of this all, I just hope it's in the same spirit as “Agile” but resilient enough to withstand being proclaimed "dead" on some forum.
Thanks for reading! As someone who thinks of Agile Coaching as a significant part of my work, it has been very interesting to navigate my own thoughts and feelings around the state of “Agile”.
Don't hesitate to get in touch if you want to have chat about this, or understand my points of view on the topic.