Why Agile became meaningless

Uncle Bob recently wrote a post about The True Corruption of Agile. I think it will be a defining post for me because, as I’ll explain in my next post, I’m ready to give up on Agile. It has become meaningless due to the corruption Uncle Bob describes, and trying to reclaim Agile isn’t possible.

Imagine the Lean movement without Toyota. Toyota is the guiding force in Lean because it grew out the The Toyota Way.* When Lean goes awry, Toyota- the company and its principles, practices, and culture- is there to set things straight.

Toyota can guide Lean because the company has been successful for decades and Toyota attributes its success to the principles and practices known as The Toyota Way. But for many years, Toyota’s success was explained away by anything except the Toyota principles. Finally, all that was left was The Toyota Way. Toyota is the Lean reference implementation.

Agile has no such entity. Instead, we have hundreds of “Agile” shops who attribute success to some (non-)Agile practices. Then, once they’ve evangelized their (non-)Agile stories, reality catches up with them and the success disappears.** But no one hears anything about that failure. The corruption and perversion here is inevitable.

Without a company like Toyota giving birth to Agile and showing others how to do it right, Agile was destined to become what it is now: meaningless and corrupt.

*: The Toyota Way started out as the Toyota Production System. They aren’t technically the same but for the purposes of this post there’s no reason to distinguish.

**: For example, maybe InnoTech decides to use Scrum on a global scale to ship an ambitious product, and talks a lot about how they pulled this off and what benefits it yielded. Years later, velocity is in the toilet because the endless mountains of technical debt created, and maybe the company has had layoffs. The Scrum transformation will be in a book or on a stage. The layoffs or technical debt will not.