From promise to pretence: when agile stops working.
Thinking formed in practice, published as part of the Bearing & Course Points of View library.
Agile was supposed to change how organisations deliver. In most of them, it has not. That is worth saying plainly, because the official version of events is considerably more flattering.
There are genuine pockets of agile delivery working as intended: teams that embrace change, stay close to the people they are building for, and adjust based on what is real. But across the majority of organisations, in every sector, what has taken hold is not agile. It is the language of agile wrapped around the habits it was designed to replace. Sprints without adaptation. Backlogs without prioritisation discipline. Stand-ups that report status rather than surface blockers. The rituals without the reasoning.
The Agile Manifesto placed individuals and interactions above processes and tools, working products above comprehensive documentation, collaboration above contract negotiation, and responding to change above following a plan. The intent was not speed. It was intelligence: learning as you go, staying close to users, delivering in small validated steps, and changing course based on what is real rather than what was assumed months earlier.
That intent is what most organisations have quietly abandoned. What remains might be called Wagile: waterfall planning with agile language applied over the top. It delivers neither the discipline of one nor the adaptability of the other. Nobody admits to doing it. It is whispered about in retrospectives and quietly blamed when things go wrong. It keeps showing up because it is the path of least resistance when the surrounding conditions have not changed: when funding is locked upfront, when scope is fixed before discovery, when success is measured by delivery of outputs rather than improvement of outcomes.
The pattern is recognisable across sectors. A programme is announced. Investment is committed. Procurement begins, heavy on paperwork and compliance, often disconnected from the problem being solved. By the time work starts, months have passed. The delivery window has shrunk. Teams are told to catch up, not slow down and think. Discovery gets compressed. User research gets dropped. What was described as agile delivery becomes a race against a timeline that was fixed before the work was understood.
Fixing this requires more than training delivery teams in better practices. Funding needs to be staged rather than committed in full upfront. Procurement and contracting need to buy ways of working rather than predefined solutions. Governance needs to shorten its feedback loops. Delivery should prove value early and often. The era of building in isolation for eighteen months and launching everything at once should be behind us.
The waste at the end of all this is real. Organisations spending heavily on delivery models that produce the appearance of progress while the actual problem remains unsolved. Teams exhausted by the gap between what they were told they were doing and what they were actually able to do. People who care about the mission but stop believing it is achievable.
Agile holds the potential to fix this. Not through better ceremonies, but by creating genuine space to listen, learn and adjust: to move at the pace of trust, to value what is learned over what was planned, and to shift from promising change to actually delivering it.
Style that overtakes substance is not a delivery model. It is a liability.