(Fr)Agile?

Why I don't believe most companies will ever be "Agile"

Photo by Navy Medicine on Unsplash

When AI — or rather LLMs — broke into public consciousness a couple of years ago with the launch of ChatGPT, I suspect many people rooting for Agile ways of working felt a quiet thrill. I did.

It seemed obvious. When a technology like this increases uncertainty overnight, when it adds a whole new layer of complexity on top of everything that already feels unstable, agility should finally have its moment.

That was the promise, after all.
Embrace the uncertainty.

I genuinely believed this would be the case. Surely no one in their right mind would think that what we’ve started calling “waterfall” would suddenly make sense in this kind of landscape? It was never really a method anyway. It’s a mindset, the belief that you can know enough upfront to plan your way out of uncertainty.

I had also been telling people in tech to pay more attention to human behavior. To stop pretending that logic and better tools alone determine how we work.

Which makes this next part uncomfortable to admit.

I should have eaten my own dog food.

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The many ways we explained nothing

What has actually happened over the past few years is almost the opposite of what I expected. Instead of Agility thriving, we’ve seen mass layoffs and a sharp reduction in Agile roles. Many experienced Agile coaches and Scrum Masters now carry the green “Open to work” badge on LinkedIn. Alongside that, there’s been a flood of posts trying to explain what’s going on. Most of them sound like confusion talking to itself.

I think it started with the “Agile is dead” posts. That wasn’t tied to LLMs in any way. What followed felt less like analysis and more like a catalogue of very human reactions. Defensive ones, mostly. I recognize them because I’ve used several, if not all of them myself.

Denial shows up fast.
“Agile isn’t dead. You’re just doing it wrong. It’s bad implementation.”

Sure. Sometimes that’s true. But framing this purely as an execution problem is comforting in a very specific way. It keeps the core ideas safe and shifts all responsibility to the people applying them. Structural issues become an optional footnote. I know many people try to address those too. I’m not going down that rabbit hole here. But let’s not pretend denial isn’t part of the mix.

Then there’s gatekeeping.
“It’s about the mindset, not the tools.”

Absolutely. And it’s also a very efficient way to protect expert status. Especially if your job depends on being the one who truly “gets it.” Coaches are not immune to this. I certainly wasn’t.

Tool shaming followed close behind.
“Jira is anti-Agile. SAFe is anti-Agile.”

This one is my personal pet peeve. Often correct. Also often emotionally loaded. The tool becomes a moral failure, which is a convenient shortcut if you don’t want to deal with why organisations keep choosing them in the first place.

Then nostalgia.
“Back in the day we were actually self-organised.”

Maybe we were. Or at least it felt that way. But the past isn’t coming back just because it felt lighter or more meaningful. Context changed. Scale changed. Incentives changed. Pretending otherwise is just comfort wrapped in memory.

Over-adaptation came next.
“I’m more about culture, leadership, complexity now.”

I might still live somewhere around here. But this move only works if the underlying skills actually deepen. Without that, it’s just rebranding. Same person, new label, slightly safer distance from the mess.

And finally, blame shifting.
“Management ruined Agile.”

Of course they did. But not alone. Agile didn’t exactly arrive with a strong immune system either.

Then there’s also a quieter option. Ignoring the whole thing. Posting about how to do Scrum as if nothing has happened. Honestly, if it still pays your bills, why not. But the future might surprise you.

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Uncertainty hurts more than we admit

Seen together, these are clearly status-preserving strategies. When the people most vocal about embracing change are forced to do it themselves, they behave exactly like humans always do. What’s still missing is the reason we’re here in the first place.

What I’ve noticed is this. Most people are simply not willing, or not able, to face sustained uncertainty. And Agile trainings, at least in my experience, rarely state this out loud. They seem to assume that people will just go along with it.

We expect people to learn, adapt, and accept change almost automatically, powered by good intentions and shared willpower. In reality, this is deeply destabilising. Uncertainty makes humans feel threatened. Deep change isn’t uncomfortable because people are stubborn. It’s uncomfortable because it challenges identity. This isn’t “resistance”. It’s a perfectly reasonable threat response.

Saying out loud that you didn’t understand the question. That you don’t know the answer yet. That you misunderstood something, miscalculated, or simply made a mistake. These moments come with a physical sensation. A knot in the stomach.

Will I look unprofessional?
Should I really know this by now?
What does this say about me?

Exposure is the price of learning. And very few organisations are equipped to handle that exposure well, because we built them on demonstrated competence, not on learning in public. So most of us learn to manage risk socially instead. We carefully balance what feels safe to say out loud, rather than jointly looking at where the real problems actually are.

Growth always comes with a cost. It requires letting go of something that used to work. A familiar routine, a trusted way of thinking, a skill you invested time and pride in mastering. And what do you get in return? Something awkward. Something that doesn’t feel natural yet. Something with no guarantee of payoff.

Now imagine saying this upfront when trying to sell Agility: “Oh, by the way, this is going to be highly uncomfortable for you.”

Not exactly a winning marketing pitch.

So organisations are expected to figure this part out on their own. Most don’t. When the pain surfaces, they conclude that “this doesn’t work”. Or they assume people should just deal with it individually. Or they quietly look for ways to avoid the discomfort altogether.

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When uncertainty stopped being temporary

I have no scientific evidence for this, so if that’s what you’re looking for, this isn’t it. What I have is an educated guess. And it has a lot more to do with human behaviour under sustained uncertainty than with methods or frameworks.

When various Agile ways of working started to spread, the world was, at least for the knowledge workers in certain economies, a relatively stable place. Then something shifted. The year 2020 marked a visible turn. Since then, the world has felt more unstable with every passing year. I’m not talking about facts or statistics here, but about how it feels to live in it. The general mood, the background noise in our heads, what we see in our feeds.

Of course there are people whose lives remain fairly stable. There always are. But the shared ground has moved. The future feels foggy. Even though Covid is no longer the headline, new crises keep appearing seemingly every day. And how do most humans deal with this level of uncertainty in everyday life? They certainly don’t embrace it.

What we start craving instead is control.

Here’s where things get interesting. Instead of focusing on what we actually can control, our own actions and behaviour, we try to control everything around us. We start telling other people what they are allowed to say, do, or even think. We demand structure, order, rules, and compliance. Anything that promises to tame the chaos.

There’s often an unspoken belief underneath this. That the world somehow owes us the conditions we planned for. That if we did the “right things”, the environment should cooperate. Well it doesn’t. And never really has. What we see playing out globally shows up inside organisations too. They are, after all, social constructions made of people, not machines.

This pattern is everywhere. The belief that if we can just make things predictable, everything will be fine. The results we want are often vaguely defined, but the process is locked down with impressive precision. Surely, if the process is controlled tightly enough, the outcome will be excellent.

Our brains help us along. When there are gaps, we fill them in. When there are unknowns, we invent answers. Suddenly things look clear enough. Order seems restored. We get the comforting illusion of control, even when nothing meaningful has actually become more certain.

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The discomfort you choose, or the one you deny

I know what you might be expecting at this point. That after saying how little predictability we actually have, I would now do the same thing myself. Close the loop and offer a neat explanation of what will happen next and how to deal with it, so it doesn’t feel quite so uncomfortable.

That’s not what I’m going to do.

I don’t own a crystal ball. But human behaviour is human behaviour, and that does come with a certain grim predictability.

As long as the world keeps feeling more unstable, many organisations will choose artificial control. Not because they are stupid, but because they have a lot to lose. Jobs, status, credibility, funding, legitimacy. Protective behaviour follows naturally.

If the environment becomes more stable, we will likely see more experimenting again. Not because organisations suddenly become brave, but because it starts to feel less threatening and more necessary. Start-ups with little to lose and everything to gain already live in that reality.

And for some, Agility might still have a role. Not as a solution, but as a mirror.

When that mirror starts to reveal where the real problems are, unclear ownership, fear of mistakes, brittle leadership, performative certainty, the organisation will feel exposed. At that point there are usually two options. You either start dealing with what surfaced, or you get rid of the mirror.

There are always multiple futures available. The choice is rarely about methods. It’s about what kind of discomfort you are willing to tolerate.