Agility Beyond Buzzwords: How to Spot Real Change in Your Organization

Recent months have seen a surge of blog posts and videos declaring “Agile has Failed.” Tech influencers point to failed transformations, disillusioned teams, and a persistent gap between agile promises and organizational realities. But this chorus of criticism isn’t new. Back in 2014, Dave Thomas famously declared “Agile is Dead,” not mourning the loss of agile principles, but calling out how useful ideas had been buried under an avalanche of certifications, methodologies, and corporate buzzwords.

The language we use reveals a lot about how we think. When organizations talk about “the agile methodology,” they’re already missing the point. If anything, agile approaches are the anti-methodology. If a “methodology” is about “turn your brain off and just do these steps,” agile approaches really require thinking about what you and your team are doing and continually making adjustments.

This gets even worse when the conversation fills with management buzzwords like “value streams,” “flow optimization,” and “resource utilization.” This corporate-speak is just industrial age thinking dressed up in modern words. Agile approaches were meant to simplify how we work, not to create a new vocabulary of business jargon.

The Factory Mindset That Won’t Go Away

Industrial age thinking treats software development like a manufacturing process. You see it when managers talk about “developer productivity” as if programmers were machines on a factory floor. You hear it when they obsess about keeping everyone “fully utilized,” as if creative workers could produce quality software for eight solid hours a day like assembly line workers producing widgets. It shows up in the belief that if we just document everything in enough detail and follow the process precisely, nothing can go wrong.

How this Factory Thinking Ruins Everything It Touches

Consider story points. They were supposed to be a simple way for teams to talk about how complex or uncertain a piece of work might be. But the factory mindset transforms them into productivity metrics. The first question is always “how many hours is a story point?”—missing the whole point of moving away from time estimates. Soon teams are being compared by how many points they complete, as if points were standard units like widgets off an assembly line.

Then there’s the way teams are organized. Instead of working together to build features that users actually need, developers are split into specialized departments like a manufacturing line. The frontend team works in their corner, the backend team in theirs, and the testers wait at the end like quality inspectors in a factory. Everyone's busy, but nothing gets finished.

Quality suffers the same fate. Instead of building quality in from the start—through collaborative design, pair programming, concurrent testing, and constant feedback—organizations treat testing like a final inspection step. They create separate QA departments and detailed test plans, counting bugs like manufacturing defects. Even industrial productivity thinkers like Deming and Dodge repeatedly said you cannot “inspect quality into a product.”

The Many Names for Fake Agile

Smart people in software have noticed this pattern and given it different names. Daniel Terhorst-North calls it “cargo cult agile”—organizations going through the motions of agile practices without understanding why, like islanders building wooden airplanes hoping to summon cargo drops. Martin Fowler talks about “Flaccid Scrum,” where teams do the ceremonies but skip the technical practices that make agile possible. Ron Jeffries warns about “Dark Scrum,” where agile practices become tools for micromanagement instead of empowerment.

What Real Agility Looks Like

Real agile organizations work differently. Instead of trying to keep everyone busy all the time, they focus on finishing useful work that customers can actually use. Rather than pretending they can plan everything upfront, they accept that they’ll learn as they go and adjust based on what they discover. They don’t force every team to work the same way—they let teams figure out what works best for their specific challenges.
Most importantly, they understand that software development is more like creating a new drug therapy than assembling a car. You start with a clear goal—solving a specific problem—but the path to get there involves exploration, experimentation, and discovery. You can’t predict exactly how long it will take, and trying to control every detail just gets in the way of the scientific process. Breakthroughs often come from careful investigation combined with creative problem solving, and you need both technical excellence and room to explore different approaches.

Moving Forward

The basic ideas behind agile development still make sense: build stuff incrementally, get feedback early, adjust as you learn, trust your teams. Agile isn’t dead. `What needs to die is all the management-speak and factory thinking that's been piled on top of these simple ideas.

This means changing how we work:
•    Stop treating developers like factory workers
•    Let teams actually collaborate instead of throwing work over walls
•    Build quality in from the start instead of inspecting it at the end
•    Focus on finishing valuable work rather than keeping everyone busy
•    Trust teams to figure out good ways of working instead of forcing standardization
•    Accept that uncertainty and learning are normal parts of creative work

The path forward isn't about better ceremonies or fancier processes or newer buzzwords. It's about finally accepting that software development is creative knowledge work, not manufacturing. 

A Final Example of Everything Wrong

Here’s a real example that shows how factory thinking destroys agile principles: In one organization, developers were required to select 2-5 personal “stretch goals” during sprint planning—extra work they’d do after completing their “regular” sprint work. Their bonuses were tied to how many such stretch goal story points they completed.

Think about everything wrong with this:
•    It assumes developers aren’t working hard unless incentivized with money
•    It turns story points (meant to be a team planning tool) into an individual performance metric
•    It creates competition between team members instead of collaboration
•    It incentivizes people to rush through their sprint work to get to their bonus-earning stretch goals
•    It completely misses the point of team commitments and shared goals

Most damaging of all, it makes it impossible for the team to actually be a team. Instead of helping each other finish the sprint’s work, developers are incentivized to focus on their individual stretch goals. Why help a teammate who’s stuck when that time could be spent earning your own bonus?

This is industrial age thinking at its worst: treating developers like piece workers in a factory, each cranking out their own widgets for individual reward. It’s the opposite of agility's emphasis on team collaboration and shared responsibility.

Real agility would mean the team working together to deliver what matters, helping each other when needed, and celebrating shared successes rather than individual heroics. But you can't get there if you’re still thinking like a factory manager handing out piece-work bonuses.

And that's really the heart of it: Until we let go of these factory-inspired ideas about individual productivity metrics, standardized processes, and piece-work incentives, we'll never achieve the kind of collaborative, adaptive, truly agile software development that delivers real value.

 

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