The End of the Line for Agile

"The marvels of today's modern technology include the development of a soda can, when discarded will last forever and a $50,000 car which when properly cared for will rust out in two or three years."

How many ways can you repeat or reword something that's very simple? Apparently the ways are infinite.

The Agile feeds on my RSS reader are still in place and they're active as ever. They've also become more and more repetitive and tiresome. Even the titans of the profession have fallen into the quicksand of mediocrity. In an article from 2017¹, Mike Cohn listed the three top mistakes made by scrum masters:

1. Letting Work Slop Over into the Next Sprint

2. Running the Daily Scrum

3. Allowing a Team to Burn Out

This past week, in a new article², Cohn’s top three mistakes are:

1. Letting Work Spill Over into the Next Sprint

2. Running the Daily Scrum

3. Allowing the Team to Burn Out

Each article with the same suggested fixes.

Zack Chapman with Clearly Agile finds the same #1 mistake³, only different: "Allowing a sprint to be wishy washy." Stefan Wolpers tells us through Scrum.org⁴ that "Ignoring the Importance of the Sprint Goal" is the #1 mistake made by scrum masters. For Jacob Gillingham⁵, the #1 mistake is "Avoiding Daily Scrum Meetings." I could go on, but you get the idea. In addition to repetitive, articles related to Agile have become gagelishously click-baity.

This isn't the same thing as putting lipstick on a pig. Agile's no pig and I still believe Agile methodologies are a far better way to manage projects in rapidly evolving industries like software and hardware technology. It's just that the vast majority of articles being pumped into the InterTubes do little more than rearrange the patio furniture so the author can claim they've a new and important message for the masses. It's Agile, not quantum physics where new thing are being discovered and new books on the subject need to be written. On balance, the articles are more self-referential than insightful. A more honest way to title them would be "Top N Mistakes I've Made Before I Figured Out How To Read What's Already Been Published." And that's fine, making mistakes is how we learn. But I'm more interested in hearing about what you learned, how you solved the problem, and how it relates to my world of woe. To this end, Mary Iqbal sets a good example.⁶

I've certainly contributed my share to this redundancy, but I like to think I had the good sense to stop adding noise to the noise. And since ChatGPT, its only become worse. Echoes of echoes of echoes of the same ideas all the way down. Swallow, regurgitate, chew, repeat. It's as if twenty five years ago a couple of people discovered the crescent wrench and everyone got all excited about what it could do until it became an obsession and hyper hyped into some sort of magical tool that will fix absolutely everything.

Perhaps worse for Agile are the ways its been co-opted in the interests of achieving other ends. Malcontents and unscrupulous people have taken the Agile wrench and are aggressively looking for all the screws they feel need to be pounded on, cautions from the original gangsters not withstanding. And all in the name of Agile.

I can think of several forces that drive this sort of thing. For starters, we're a culture built on the idea of disposability and planned obsolescence. We like new and useful. Old and useful, not so much. Second, we have a strong affinity for the not-invented-here mentality. When a useful idea is found, the impulse is to improve upon it by adding our special insights into how the original idea was incomplete or wrong. Sometimes this is a very good thing. It's a fundamental tenet of classic science. In the world of business and project management, it usually ends with the enshitification of the original idea. Finally, I suppose this is the state of things because like a lot of simple things that become popular, the barrier to entry is extremely low. Anybody can call themselves an Agile Coach or trainer or guru and there isn't a single governing body that can call them to account on that claim. Nor should there be. Agile just isn't that deep.

The saddest aspect of this is how it looks from the outside. It's like a stand-up comic who’s hit a set out of the park and then keeps repeating the same material gig after gig. It gets old and tired. No longer funny, no longer relevant, and more and more people stop paying attention to anything they have to say. I've learned (the hard way) to move on quickly from the wins and free up my brain-space for something new. That way, the wins will always be there, solid memories of accomplishment benefiting no one but me, but from which I can pivot and take things further or move in a new direction.

Like "Total Quality Management" before it and "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" after it, Agile has had a pretty good run as the Kool-Aid of the day. I expect over time the salient elements will stick around as they did with TQM and probably will for DEI but watered down to a palatable dose and wrapped in new terms and jargon that are acceptable for the times - probably lifted from a foreign language deemed duty-free from cultural appropriation taxes.

The problems and mistakes behind failures to roll smoothly with Agile are much further upstream than anything codified in a methodology. WHY do teams let work spill into subsequent sprints? Why do teams burn out? Why are daily scrums such a painful slog? Chase these questions far enough and you find there is no crystal pure source spring for answers. It's a fetid swamp of human nature where sorting out cause from correlation is tricky business indeed. The list of suspects is long.

• Weak attention

• Competition for status exemplified by things like turf wars, infighting, drama, passive aggression, playing the [INSERT DEI AGENDA ITEM HERE] card, etc.

• No or faux accountability

• No clear responsibility

• Strongly overvalued beliefs around entitlement

• Emotional fragility

• Lethargy/laziness/no ambition

• Learned helplessness

• Extra-team/company priorities

• Assholes being assholes

• And on and on and on and on...

It's certain a tsunami of articles could flood the InterTubes with titles like "Top 3 Human Attributes That Will Tank Your Agile Implementation," each list based on the author's personal experience. Nonetheless, I don't care how good you are as a coach or scrum master or release train engineer or whatever Agile-ish title you've acquired, if these issues aren't addressed your Agile implementation will fail. To be clear, Agile won't fail, just everything you've done to implement it. Worse, the consequences of effects of adverse human characteristics accumulate exponentially. Add two or more of these together and doom is assured.

(Click to enlarge.)

After writing this article, I put the following prompt to Grok: "Write a 200 word paragraph describing how human nature, behaviors, and characteristics cause Agile methodologies to fail."

"Agile methodologies, designed to foster flexibility and collaboration, often falter due to inherent human nature and behaviors. Resistance to change is a primary culprit; people cling to familiar processes, undermining Agile’s iterative approach. Fear of uncertainty leads teams to over-plan or revert to rigid structures, stifling adaptability. Ego and territorialism disrupt collaboration, as individuals prioritize personal recognition over team success, leading to siloed efforts and miscommunication. Poor discipline—skipping stand-ups, neglecting retrospectives, or ignoring feedback—erodes Agile’s emphasis on continuous improvement. Misaligned incentives, where management rewards individual output over collective progress, further fracture teamwork. Cognitive biases, like overconfidence or anchoring to initial estimates, skew prioritization and delivery timelines. Lack of trust, whether in leadership or peers, breeds skepticism toward Agile’s self-organizing principles, causing micromanagement or disengagement. Additionally, humans crave clear direction, yet Agile’s ambiguity can overwhelm those unprepared for autonomy, leading to confusion or inaction. Finally, inconsistent commitment—where stakeholders demand quick results without embracing Agile’s cultural shift—creates pressure that undermines long-term success. These human tendencies, if unaddressed, transform Agile’s promise of agility into chaos, proving that methodology alone cannot overcome deeply rooted behavioral flaws. Training, leadership, and cultural alignment are critical to mitigate these failures."

You could build a successful career based solely on solving the problems described in these 197 words and still only scratch the surface of the potential problem space. But Grok has spoken and you heard it here first. So there's no need for anyone to write any articles on the adverse effects of human behavior on implementing Agile. After close to 25 years mucking about in the Agile soup my conclusion is that the best scenarios for innovative and successful Agile are in non-technical startups or small businesses. But beware, as a company grows - with rare exceptions - the cruft begins to accumulate, attracting the corporate barnacles, and the slow decline begins.

Footnotes

1 Cohn, M. (2017, August 2). Three mistakes Scrum Masters make and how to correct them. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-mistakes-scrum-masters-make-how-correct-them-mike-cohn

2 Cohn, M. (2025, May 15). Scrum master mistakes: 4 pitfalls to watch out for and correct. Mountain Goat Software. https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/three-mistakes-scrum-masters-make-and-how-to-correct-them

3 Chapman, Z. (2021, August 21). 3 mistakes Scrum Masters make. ClearlyAgile. https://www.clearlyagile.com/agile-blog/mistakes-scrum-masters-make

4 Wolpers, S. (2024, June 3). Rookie mistakes scrum masters make. Scrum.org. https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/rookie-mistakes-scrum-masters-make

5 Gillingham, J. (2025, February 20). 8 common scrum master mistakes you should avoid. Invensis Learning Blog. https://www.invensislearning.com/blog/common-mistakes-of-scum-masters/

6 lIqbal, M. (2024, October 21). The 5 worst agile mistakes I’ve made. Rebel Scrum. https://www.rebelscrum.site/post/the-5-worst-agile-mistakes-i-ve-made

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If you have any questions, need anything clarified, or have something else on your mind, please send a DM or email me directly.

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Image credits: Grok 3/Author