Most firms have no clue about ‘Agile’.
There is the theatre.
Why does this theatrical approach persist?
Often because organisational leaders demand “Agile transformation” without understanding what that truly entails.
The visible artefacts — ceremonies, boards, revised titles — provide easy evidence of change. The challenging aspects — decentralised decision-making, comfort with uncertainty, true team empowerment — require deeper cultural shifts that many leaders hesitate to embrace. As Deloitte consultants observed with striking clarity: “staging ‘agile theatre’ is simple, making it work is hard” (Celi et al., 2021).
The consequences appear in team morale and effectiveness. “Zombie Scrum” emerges when teams mechanically perform rituals without connecting to Agile’s purpose. No genuine customer feedback shapes priorities. Product Owners function as requirement scribes rather than value maximisers.
Without true empowerment and leadership support, enthusiasm dies while the ceremonies shamble on — a perfect metaphor for initiative without essence.
When organisations recognise the need to coordinate multiple Agile teams, many turn to scaling frameworks — especially the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), used by 37% of Agile organisations (The Stack, 2022).
SAFe introduces layers of coordination (Team, Program, Large Solution, Portfolio) that can quickly recreate traditional hierarchies under new names. As one practitioner quoted in The Stack observed, SAFe is frequently “imposed top-down, in a hierarchical way — something which goes against the precepts of Agile” (The Stack, 2022). Teams find themselves spending more time managing the framework than delivering value to customers.
The framework appeals precisely because it offers the comfort of structure to organisations uncomfortable with Agile’s inherent ambiguity.
Leaders seek the supposed benefits of Agile without surrendering control. The result becomes “Waterfall with new labels” — departments renamed as “value streams,” project phases rebranded as “program increments,” yet still fundamentally driven by predetermined plans rather than emergent customer needs.
Agile development produces potentially shippable code every sprint. But what happens when operations remains rooted in traditional, risk-averse deployment approaches?
Forrester identified this pattern clearly: development teams may adopt Scrum while “release management and operations stick to traditional methods,” completing the “Fall” portion of “Water-Scrum-Fall” (Forrester Research, 2011). This disconnect creates growing frustration as development velocity increases without corresponding improvements in delivery speed.
This DevOps gap manifests through manual processes, organisational silos, and broken feedback loops. Without automated testing and deployment pipelines, operations becomes a bottleneck that no amount of development agility can overcome. When Development and Operations operate as separate departments with conflicting incentives — one rewarded for feature delivery, the other for system stability — collaboration breaks down at the precise interface where it matters most.
Teams cannot truly inspect and adapt based on outcomes when those outcomes remain theoretical rather than observed. Research confirms the significance of this integration: organisations implementing both Agile and DevOps were twice as likely to achieve desired outcomes than those implementing Agile alone (Accelerate: State of DevOps Report, 2019).
How organisations measure Agile success often undermines the very benefits they seek.
When management treats velocity as a performance indicator, teams respond predictably by gaming the system. They inflate estimates or prioritise easy stories over valuable ones. As one Agile coach warned, “When Velocity is used for anything other than capacity planning, velocity becomes the most dangerous agile metric” (Balegar, n.d.).
Even more fundamentally, organisations fixate on output metrics (features completed, story points delivered) rather than outcome metrics (customer satisfaction, business results). Scrum.org observed this pattern in struggling organisations that “focus on velocity, story points, outputs delivery instead of delivering a potentially releasable increment and customer satisfaction” (Firlit, 2020).
Teams abandon technical excellence and innovation — both temporarily “inefficient” in pure velocity terms — to chase arbitrary numeric targets. Management sees rising velocity and concludes Agile is working, even as technical debt accumulates and customer value stagnates. The organisation optimises what it can measure rather than what actually matters.
In sum, Agile has lost its intent and meaning. Most firms are lost in the Agile forest, without a clue or a path.
