Why Agile Isn’t the Silver Bullet You Thought It Was
TL:DR below.
In the lexicon of organizational buzzwords, "agile" has ascended to Olympian heights. Once confined to software development circles, this transformative methodology has spread its wings to revolutionize government sectors, traditional industries, and even spaces as unconventional as church organizations. Amidst this backdrop of seemingly universal endorsement, two questions persist like a haunting melody:
does agile truly deliver on its promises?
and under what conditions does agile flourish?
Yet, there is a dark side to agile that can sometimes be overlooked. Some companies have turned away from agile, abandoned their transformation projects, or have moved on entirely. A notable void exists in the use of key agile techniques such as Scrum at large software powerhouses, and whispers abound that even the well-publicized Spotify model is no longer in use at Spotify.
Consider this piece not as a buzzkill, but rather as a necessary reality check. It's the Michael Pollan of management methods, taking a granular look at what's really on your plate before you swallow it wholesale. As appealing as it may be to go full-throttle into an agile transformation, a reflective pause could save you more than just time and resources—it could be the reality check your employee morale needs.
In this article, we'll explore some of the tensions of agile that you should be aware of. We'll highlight five problems that are either overlooked or ignored, and that could hamper your push for speed, collaboration, and customer intimacy. Finally, we'll examine the driving forces behind agile and discuss strategies mature organizations can deploy to navigate this complex landscape.
Behind the Agile Curtain: A Reality Check
Agile, in essence, is a work philosophy rooted in collaboration and rapid feedback, engineered to make teams fast and flexible in the face of change—a non-negotiable in today's accelerated markets. From its humble origins in software development, Agile has diversified its utility across various sectors, promising quicker, more effective results.
This approach was born out of the tech industry's unique challenges. Software development differed inherently from traditional manufacturing and service models. Early visionaries saw the need for "evolutionary project management" and "adaptive software development." The crux was simple: rigid planning models like "waterfall" often led to inefficient outcomes because of poor customer prediction. They realized that they often build something that didn't work at all. The insight was that software was too new and we're too bad at predicting what the customer wants. Only an iterative approach can help us uncover that. Instead, a more fluid and iterative approach was needed. All this crystallized into the 2001 Agile Manifesto, which encapsulated the guiding principles for this emerging methodology.
So, Agile isn't merely a fad; it's an inversion of traditional management, advocating for flexibility over rigidity, practical outcomes over paperwork, and customer engagement over contractual obligations. If organizational methods were films, Agile would be the "Moneyball"—leveraging real-time data for strategic tweaks and high-impact results.
On a 10-year reflection, many practitioners found tensions and inefficiencies in the applying agile ideas. One participant pointedly summarized the mood:
"The agile movement is in some ways a bit like a teenager: very self-conscious, checking constantly its appearance in a mirror, accepting few criticisms, only interested in being with its peers, rejecting en bloc all wisdom from the past, just because it is from the past, adopting fads and new jargon, at times cocky and arrogant."
As Agile moves from tech corners to corporate boardrooms, its growing pains become more palpable, revealing inherent conflicts with established management practices. This article will delve deeper into these conflicts, outlining five pitfalls you should sidestep in your Agile journey. These issues are not merely footnotes; they're potential tripwires that warrant your full attention.
The Cracks in the Agile Facade: A Solution-Oriented Analysis
1 - Buzzword Bingo
I said it up top. The lingo around agile is intense. Agile, scrum, Kanban, sprint, guilds, tribes, clusters, WIP, ... Sure, none of them is overly complex to understand. Some of them are just a tad unclear. Guilds, for example. Or Squads or tribes.
The jargon of agile methodologies can feel like a secret handshake among initiates. While these buzzwords signal a shift towards more modern, efficient ways of working, they can also create an exclusionary atmosphere, sowing confusion and derailing your change efforts.
Guilds are an org concept coming from the famed Spotify presentation. In their world (at that stage) it was a way to have experts interact. This helps knowledge sharing, cross-pollination of ideas and builds trust across the organization. No formal charter or authority needed. Good idea. Other names for it are expert sessions, round tables, and knowledge networks. Or is it something different?
Well, it is a fast-evolving feed. Words change meanings and organizations use them in their own context. Introducing a bunch of Spotify words can signal a new way of doing things.
However, if people don’t understand thean that does not help. If there is confusion about the purpose or rules for a technique - that cannot be good for implementing it. When you overload the organization with fad-lingo you are not serving your people.
People have pointed out that the Spotify-lingo has sort of a hipster mythology around it. Not getting it and asking too many questions makes you look dumb and out of touch. Questioning a technique is an affront to the “new ways” and puts you into the out-of-date camp.
Again, shakeup can be good. Disorientering is a disservice. As some say: If you confuse you lose.
The remedy is straightforward but critical: Choose your agile language carefully and tailor it to your corporate culture. Pick your lingo carefully and avoid mere copying. Make ideas simple to understand for everyone in everyday language. And then be consistent in application and use of your words. This way, you make the agile model accessible, stripping away the mystique and making room for actual progress. Because in the high-stakes game of corporate management, clarity isn't just a virtue; it's a lifeline.
2- Complexity and Untrue Promises
It's often said that agility is the secret sauce for startups, but what happens when this approach collides with the well-oiled machinery of an established corporation? For a professional manager at the helm of a large enterprise, implementing agile methodologies can feel like retrofitting a speedboat engine into a tanker; it's doable, but not without challenges.
Many companies find themselves in the middle of what's humorously termed "Water-Agile-Fall." It’s a mash-up of traditional waterfall planning with agile elements sprinkled in. You'll see Kanban boards adorning conference rooms, daily stand-ups becoming routine, all while long-term projects and budget cycles persist. The result? A complex patchwork that taxes employees, forcing them to serve two masters: the fast-paced ethos of agile and the stringent control mechanisms that large corporations are built upon.
So why should you care? The key issue is focus. In an agile framework, the endgame is customer value. But, how can one focus on customer value when the layers of corporate bureaucracy dilute end-to-end ownership? Often, employees find themselves bound by delivery plans, devoid of any customer interaction, thereby missing the very essence of agility. This complexity not only erodes efficiency but also frustrates the heck out of people - and is often not faster at all.
The corporate solution for agile is not good news. Some people came up with SAFe and have evolved it over the last years. If you work with SAFe, you acknowledge the need for industrial control while acting agile. The price is an administrative beast that you have to feed. Maybe it will evolve in the future and become light-weight and easy. The promise of being light and fast is certainly not true today.
The takeaway for corporate leaders? Simplify. Agility is fundamentally about enabling teams. Assess the agile framework from the perspective of the average employee; is it adding value or confusion? It's not about adding more; it's about pinpointing what really matters. Successful companies cut through the noise to focus on a few key ideas, aligning their organization around them. As the saying goes, "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
I find that successful companies don’t do a lot of bullshit. They figure a few key things out and align around them. And they have the guts to get rid of what doesn’t work. The key with complexity is simple: check how many key ideas are really relevant and where your limit is.
3 - New Skills Needed
In the industrial era, companies were designed like clockwork; each cog had its function, and employees were the hired hands that kept the wheels turning. Agile disrupts this model, pushing for an environment where ownership is diffused throughout the organization. Why? Because today's volatile business landscape demands it.
For managers steering the ship in large corporations, recognizing that old skills may not service new needs is crucial. The agile ethos doesn't just tweak workflows; it demands a radical rethinking of the skills that drive those workflows. Gone are the days where a defined skillset in isolation would suffice. Now, employees must be adept at communication, creativity, empathy, and decision-making. If your team's CVs haven't been updated in the last 20 years, you've got a talent mismatch on your hands. It's either retraining, new hiring, or fingers crossed for some fast, organic upskilling.
So, what's the game plan? First, perform a realistic skills assessment to identify the gaps and the talents you have on hand. Then decide whether to train, hire, or seek external help. Skill alignment is not just an HR agenda; it's a strategic necessity.
Secondly, optimize your team interactions for speed and clarity. collaboration is a beast. You can meet yourself in circles. As they say in Team Topologies: “collaboration is the most expensive mode of interaction”. If different teams are not clear how they relate to each other, it will slow you down. Someone will always wait, someone will always be under pressure. And if the interaction is not clear then often the ownership to what makes the customer ist just as unclear. The biggest missing value statement in the agile manifesto is: Successful outcomes over efficient delivery. Rather than just everyone doing a piece and pushing it on - who looks that the customer has a solution they love? Ownership and product thinking are key - and those skills are rarely readily available.
So, remove roadblocks and set clear guidelines to enable your team to move with purpose and confidence. The devil is in the details, but your path to agile transformation is paved with these critical considerations. Optimize for fast flow so that people can move with boldness and confidence.
4- Culture eats agile for breakfast
"We don't do agile, we do culture." When a Netflix engineering manager pronounced this, it was more than a catchy phrase. It underscored a truth many ignore: no amount of agile methodology will save a company plagued by a culture that is risk-averse, political, and siloed. Rather than trying to follow a manifesto or some practices, they emphasize the secret sauce behind a successful agile implementation: a culture of trust, collaboration, and risk taking. Peter Drucker would likely nod in approval: culture indeed trumps methods, every time.
If a culture is political (as most larger companies are), is risk-averse (also most) and siloed (yes) - well any agile introduction will be cut in a thousand pieces. Politics, fears and silos facing an open system lead to less speed, not more. You can’t magicwand your way out of a bad culture through a few Kanban boards.
If you add the aforementioned complexity and confusion, you get more politics not less. The ‘progress over perfection’ mindset might send shivers down the spines of business veterans accustomed to thorough risk assessments. Hence, agility isn't just a toolkit but a cultural paradigm that requires careful nurturing. It can’t just be superimposed upon an existing culture and expected to flourish.
This also sometimes scares away the people you need and want. Richard Cringley made this interesting observation about three waves of cultures - pioneers, settlers, city dwellers. In startups you have pioneers - people who love open spaces, no restraints and blazing their way where no one was. Settlers come next, bringing much-needed maturity and structure to the pioneering spirit. Lastly, enter the city builders or 'suits', who zoom in on profitability and scalability. I'm thinking of companies like trees. When they are young they are still flexible and limber and try to find their place in the world. When they are big, they get harder and hard and less flexible but they can survive a harsh winter.
These three cultures are not mutually exclusive, but they don’t often co-exist in companies. Pirates don’t like to work with bean-counters. Especially since the beanies usually have the money and are so terribly unimaginative. It is rare to keep an innovative edge in a large corporation.
Agile is the main tool for settlers. It can work with pioneers and figure things out. It then hands it over to the suits who deliver efficiency and quality. Agility is about fiddling around till it works.
So, what's the actionable insight here? Know your organizational culture well enough to discern where agile will be most effective. Identify those pockets where agile can offer the maximum return on investment. And, crucially, consider the handoffs between the agile 'settlers' and the more corporate 'city builders'. Each must understand the other's language and imperatives for the company to fully realize the potential of agile. Agile is not a one-size-fits-all proposition; it thrives best when aligned with the right cultural soil.
5 - The Paradox of Excessive Agility: Stability as the Forgotten Virtue
Agile practices are often the silver bullet of adaptability in the corporate world. However, it is important to remember that excessive agility can lead to instability and a lack of stability can be detrimental to organizational success.
This dynamic can be exacerbated when the agile cycles are compounded by shifts in corporate priorities, strategies, and key ideas, making the landscape even more fluid than what agile methods alone would prescribe.
Agility inherently encourages an organization to pivot based on customer feedback and discovery. In an ideal setting, this leads to a virtuous cycle of improvement and adaptability. However, when you add layers of corporate-induced changes—new business strategies, shifting priorities, or evolving key performance indicators—the situation can quickly become overwhelming. Teams find themselves not just adapting to customer needs but also recalibrating for internal shifts, sometimes with conflicting directions.
So, what does this mean for an organization's depth of work? If teams are subjected to a revolving door of priorities and strategies on top of their agile adaptiveness, they have little incentive to delve deep into any project. The sentiment becomes, "Why invest in something that's likely to change tomorrow?" In such an environment, processes rarely mature, and team cohesion can suffer. Constant change doesn't just undercut depth of expertise; it can also lead to burnout and a disillusioned workforce.
It's a complex paradox. On one hand, agility aims to make an organization more responsive and dynamic, but when compounded by corporate fickleness, it risks creating a chaotic environment that is ironically resistant to meaningful, deep-rooted change. It becomes a landscape of constant reaction rather than one of thoughtful, proactive innovation.
In summary, while agile methodologies have their merits, it's important to balance them with periods of stability. Continuous change might seem progressive, but it can also stymie long-term growth and deep expertise. The goal should be a harmonious blend of change and stability, each acting as a counterbalance to the other, allowing for both quick wins and sustained success. Again, pick your battles and look at the initiatives from a perspective of the employee.
How Tech Giants Are Silently Departing from Agile
The "Spotify Model" was an agile framework that initially gained fame for its use of squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds as a way to organize cross-functional teams for product development. It offered a different approach compared to more traditional hierarchical or matrix organizational structures. The model was publicized in 2012 when Hendrik Knieberg share two YouTube videos about it. The Lingo, Spotify's success and a vibe of being fresh and flexbible gave it wide popularity.
However, former Spotify employee Jeremiah Lee shared in 2020 why Spotify has largely discarded their organizational approach. The main reason: it caused organizational chaos, the skills were not in place and it didn't scale with Spotify's growth.
Often agile is done on the ground floor. Local work packages are optimized and delivered in agile rhythms. However, the dance in one wagon doesn’t really move the train. The biggest drawback is the absence of agile working from senior levels. Is there a Work-in Progress limit on the portfolio? Is budget allocated to the greatest market needs? Are decisions driven by real customer feedback? Without a serious attempt of the senior leaders to get on the agile train, you will not drive the transformation.
In a brilliant article, Gergely Orosz looked at great software companies and their use of agile. In How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum he analysed over 100 tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber. The results? NO ONE used SAFe. They didn’t even have agile methods. No Scrum. No standard project management. His key takeaway is simple and stunning: great software companies hire great software people, give them a large scope (not just software, but business ownership) and try to empower them as much as possible.
Again, they look at the employee experience. Do developers have what they need to do excellent work? Are they empowered to make decisions? Is the infrastructure and tooling set up to make their live fast and easy?
The New Agile: Building the Right Culture
The world is unpredictable. Customer demands are evolving. Value propositions shift and new competitor emerge. Reinventing yourself and moving into new spaces is not just an option—it's a necessity.
Yet, established organizations often find themselves ensnared in the tension between the need for a scalable structure and the imperative to be nimble. While Agile frameworks promise a way out, their efficacy in established settings depends not just on lip service to new methodologies, but on a comprehensive cultural and mindset transformation.
We think that three key practices might make the most difference in most situations.
1 - Visualizing work and limiting work in progress. Both on the team level but especially on board level. By providing transparency and a well-groomed backlog, you will provide clarity and alignment to the entire organization, enabling teams to prioritize and focus on the most valuable work.
2 - Getting real customer feedback. Many organizations lack the customer interaction and end-to-end ownership that is essential for agile to be successful. This is because organizations are often divided into silos and because teams are often focused on delivering against plans rather than on delivering value to customers. By listening to customer feedback, organizations can help their teams to work on the right things, meeting customer needs and driving value.
3 - Working in short cycles with ownership in the teams. Giving teams a real say in the scope of their work and empowering them to make decisions increases accountability and ownership, resulting in more efficient and effective agile practices.
Agility is not a band-aid for a slightly stiff organization. It is a turning on its head of traditional hierarchies and processes to enable people to act with autonomy, purpose and mastery. The best agile organizations have this down: they work to empower their employees and remove roadblocks for them.
Closing thought: "Building the Right Culture Is the True Agile". In any transformation, it is hard to overemphasize the need for the right culture. Structure is the wrong emphasize, culture is the main focal point.
TL;DR
Agile is a popular work philosophy that emphasizes collaboration, rapid feedback, and flexibility. While it has many benefits, it also has some potential pitfalls, especially for large corporations.
Here are five problems with agile that you should be aware of:
Buzzword bingo: The jargon around agile can be overwhelming and exclusionary. Choose your language carefully and tailor it to your corporate culture.
Complexity and untrue promises: Implementing agile in a large corporation can be challenging, especially if you're trying to retrofit it onto existing processes. Focus on simplifying and focusing on the core agile principles.
New skills needed: Agile requires employees to have a wider range of skills, such as communication, creativity, empathy, and decision-making. If your team doesn't have these skills, you'll need to invest in training or hiring.
Culture eats agile: The success of agile is tied to the culture of an organization. Understanding the company's risk appetite, political landscape, and silo mentality can offer insights into the effectiveness of an agile approach.
Paradox of Excessive Agility: Too much agility can lead to instability. Stability and long-term focus are virtues not to be forgotten in the pursuit of agility.
Case Study
The "Spotify Model" popularized agile concepts but has since been largely abandoned by Spotify itself due to organizational chaos and scalability issues.
Contrary to popular belief, top tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon aren't strictly adhering to well-known agile frameworks like SAFe or Scrum. Instead, they focus on hiring excellent talent and giving them a broad scope and autonomy.
Agile's success isn't about just the methodology but about a fundamental cultural and mindset shift within the organization.
Recommendations
If you're in the middle of an agile transformation, here are a few recommendations:
Visualize Work and Limit WIP: Increases organizational clarity and focus.
Real Customer Feedback: Ensures the work is valuable and aligned with market needs.
Short Cycles with Team Ownership: Empowers teams, increasing efficiency and accountability.
The ultimate takeaway is that the culture—not the structure—is the cornerstone of agile success. The goal is to turn traditional hierarchies upside down to enable autonomy, purpose, and mastery.