Every empire falls, they say. Over the past 20+ years Agile rose to prominence as the way to run, at first, your software development teams and then your entire organization. Books, courses, training companies, certifications, frameworks and endless diagrams flooded the market. Conferences were packed with everyone (me included) clambering to learn more about these revolutionary ideas that were going to save us all from the inefficiency of waterfall style management. However, since late 2023 there have been signs that the business world’s fascination with Agile is waning. Is Agile finally over?

Saturation does not equal maturation

Just because a high percentage of a population has been exposed to an idea doesn’t mean that idea has been internalized and ultimately put to good use. This is certainly true of Agile and the business world. If you took a room full of executives and asked them, “Which of you run your company in an Agile way?” I guarantee you that 99% of the hands in the room would be up in the air. Dig a little deeper though and you’ll find that, yes, Agile is being used in these companies but very few of them are seeing any real benefits. Why is that? 

Consultants like me will tell you that there have been “a lot of bad Agile implementations.” And we’d be right. There have been. These failed transformations have soured many individual contributors and middle managers on the potential benefits Agile offered. In their minds, “Agile sucks.” In addition, there has been a lot of resistance from leaders to change how they work to accommodate greater agility in their teams. They may not come right out and tell you that, but ask a few pointed questions and you’ll see the patterns emerge. 

“We’ve implemented SAFe so we can predictably deploy features every 6 weeks no matter what.” 

“We, on the business side of things, define the product for the development teams so they can just carve it up into stories and keep shipping velocity high.” 

I suspect this sounds familiar to most of you. Agile has saturated the market. However, exposure for most organizations fell at the surface level. Let’s change our language, perhaps our furniture in the office and that should be it for our Agile implementation, right? 

Agile is at a critical point

Despite the seemingly unavoidable influence of Agile on how we run our businesses and teams today, there are still organizations who are now or will soon be new to this. I feel like we, those of us who help shape the narrative around these ideas and those of us who put them into practice, have a responsibility to these organizations. Forcing a framework on an organization and then policing it to a point where it becomes just as rigid as the framework it’s replacing is going to continue to fail. 

Instead, rather than focusing on the strict implementation of an idea, let’s focus on the benefits and desired outcomes we hope to get from it. Rather than enforcing an idea like “2 week sprints” let’s ask our teams to be able to “react to any new data point or insight from the market in 2 weeks or less.” Instead of saying, “you must complete your user stories in a specific format and enter them into this tool” let’s ask the teams to “reduce the number of handoffs between disciplines by half.” 

The difference here is, perhaps not surprisingly, outcomes over output. Rather than telling people how to do their jobs, work with them to set the goals for a process that would make them and the company more successful. Measure success based on improved team behavior rather than adherence to a set of rules. Instead of Agile, push for agility. In that sense, Agile is never really over. It’s just transforming into what it should have always been.