Déjà vu all over again
Every few years (or weeks lately) a headline pops up declaring The Death of Agile. I’ve been around long enough to remember when “Scrummer-fall” was the scary new term and when DevOps would bury all practices in a shallow CI/CD grave. Today, it’s AI-powered everything. Before that, it was “the cloud". Before that? The Agile Manifesto itself, signed in 2001 by 17 heretics who “shook the tech industry.”
Yet the data keeps ruining the funeral: 71 % of organizations surveyed in the 17th State of Agile Report (2023) say Agile is still how they build software, with Scrum the dominant team-level approach at 63%.
Their top benefits? Improved collaboration and better business alignment (seems like I've read that somewhere else).
If that sounds familiar to you, it should. In VersionOne’s 9th Annual Survey (2015), 94 % of respondents already practiced Agile, citing the same top three benefits as the most recent one.
The movement isn’t dead, really; the conversation has moved on (or we just get bored with stuff as humans).
What is dying?
The easy thing to blame is “Agile coaching.” Let’s be honest: our industry is being disrupted, just as mortgage lending, retail, taxis, and media were before us. The 2-day certifications and the cargo-cult checklist are losing product-market fit (not arguing whether they should or shouldn't, as I still think they have their place).
Good! Disruption clears space for the next evolution.
I recall the great Kent Beck's words, “make it work, make it right, make it fast.” We made Agile “work” for single teams in the 2000s. Folks like Mike Cohn helped us make it right with user stories, estimation, and pragmatic engineering. As Ken Rubin argues in his End-to-End Agility work, we must make it fast across the entire value chain: marketing, finance, compliance, AI-driven ops, the lot.
Many others have great ideas and claims to make organizations better. That is my goal for sure and we can learn from just about anyone as long as they have experience (or better yet, scar tissue).
Why rumours of death feel real
There are good reasons people are tired. I am, too. Some of my tiredness comes from:
- Tooling Whiplash: Teams drown in tools that promise agility while re-centralizing control, from Jira boards to GitOps dashboards to ChatGPT backlog assistants.
- Framework Fatigue: SAFe®, LeSS®, FAST®, {insert-new-acronym}. When every scaling method claims to be the answer, executives tune out after they were enticed the first time with the "magic diet pill" we sold in the 2010's.
- Outcome Blindness: Velocity theatre replaces value. As Martin Fowler warned in 2018, “Agile is not a noun; it’s an adjective.”
I've consistently had the attitude that I want to help. I never really wanted to sell some packaged "thing". I didn't see it as a place in our business as every organization is kind of like a human in the sense that they have a unique personality. We can't do a one-size fits all approach and some of the packaging was making that seem a reality to buyers. I am a bigger fan of borrowing from all kinds of frameworks or just inventing something else that works for that team/organization.
What isn’t dead (and never was)
As much as people like to make noise that it is dead, I don't think it is. That's like saying "healthy is dead"! We all want to be healthy (I think). Most organizations want to be healthy (agile). As Craig Larman said, organizations need to be able to turn on a dime for a dime. They still do, whatever you call it might be dead, but it's still there and waiting for our organizations to address it. We must all work to help our organizations learn:
- Continuous discovery of value (Gary Hamel’s relentless customer focus).
- Short feedback loops (Ron Jeffries’ “We get good at Agile by doing it and reflecting on it”).
- Systems thinking & adaptive leadership (John Kotter’s dual-operating system; Cesario Ramos’ Creating Agile Organizations guide).
Strip away the jargon and Agile founded frameworks are still the best playbook we have for competing in uncertainty:
“Deliver the highest business value, as early as possible, with the least possible cost and friction.” - Lance Dacy (surely someone else has said this as well though)
Drinking our own champagne
We’re the folks who teach organizations to pivot. Now it’s our turn...again. (Remember the Pandemic and online training?)
A manifesto for the next chapter
As we move on (whether you like it or not) to our next chapter, I have been trying to pen some words that I think we need to remind ourselves going forward (in addition to the agile manifesto values and principles):
- Value over Vanity (Trade velocity charts for customer-impact dashboards.)
- Champagne over Dog-food (Run your coaching business on the same cadence & transparency you preach.)
- Ecosystems over Islands (Move from team agility to end-to-end agility: product groups, shared-service flow and humane governance.)
- AI-with-Humans over AI-versus-Humans (Leverage LLMs to amplify insight, not replace it.)
- Continuous learning over Continuous certification (Badge collections don’t trump demonstrable outcomes.)
Next steps?
As we move on, let's see if we can think of a few experiments to try and see how they work. After all, we should be experts by now of experimenting. We have our own cultures in our own organizations that might need an awakening, but let's try:
- Map one critical value stream front-to-back.
- Identify a single dependency pattern you can improve this quarter (Rubin’s “named & dedicated” beats “named individual” every time).
- Replace one lagging vanity metric with a leading outcome metric.
- Share the story, warts and wins, because transparency is our unfair advantage.
Agile isn’t dead; it’s just shedding another skin. Let’s honor our lineage, from Beck’s XP spike to Fowler’s refactor, from Hamel’s management innovation to the AI copilots of today. By drinking the champagne we pour for others.
See you in the next iteration!