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Some mornings I wonder… Am I too jaded about Agile, Scrum, and so on? Am I too dismissive towards peddlers of miracle cures to tricky problems of coordination, collaboration, prediction, disagreement, serendipity, exploration, etc.? Perhaps I’m too naive to think that not all companies need to get work done the same way?
Could it be that there are, indeed, surefire ways to run a business or endeavors that guarantee agility and other sought-after virtues that HBR tells us are an absolute must in a VUCA world? Could it be that sticking religiously to Scrum or any other stone-tableted way or working is indeed the final answer? Perhaps I should stick more post-it notes on more canvases? Do more stand-up meetings? Could it be that what is missing from my professional profile is an affiliation with a certification body, an identification with a popular book, the attendance of seminars that will teach me how to “be Agile” or “do Agile”? Could cargo-culting be the answer that cuts through the pesky need to establish how a business is to organize itself for its own purpose(s)?
Then I check LinkedIn threads and comments by Agile priests running their beloved capital-A Agile into the ground with hype, dogma, and zealot-like fervor, treating skeptics as mortal enemies, mixing agility with Agile, refusing to entertain the notion that they are customers of someone’s lucrative Hopium Emporium and Agile Certification Mill Enterprise Inc.
I sigh with relief, and move on with my day. The world is safe; yes, even from SAFe.
(SAFe, BTW, in my opinion, emphasizes the siphoning of money from company budgets through the pretense that it is a one-stop-shop for capital-A Agility, when it’s really a shop selling tailor-made organizational straitjackets.)
Well, sometimes I do comment, and see that the responses are uncritical, defensive, indignant.
The demise of this yet-another-variant-of-Deft cannot come fast enough.
And it will be, to a large part, thanks to all the Agile zealots.
((( (( ( 💥 A G I L E 💥 🤯 🫨 ) )) )))
