Seeking New Agile Manifesto — Evolving Beyond Process-Heavy Governance to a Mindset-Driven Approach

“Agile is Dead.”

It’s not uncommon to hear whispers that Agile might be faltering. Critics argue that Agile, as implemented in many organizations, has lost sight of its original mandate and become overly focused on processes and frameworks. While this viewpoint is certainly understandable give the current state of affairs across tech companies large and small, It is also clear that people in the tech industries still striving towards business agility. While influencers and experts hear? “Bring out your dead” and try to give their nine pence to the plague cart,? Agile is telling us “I’m not dead…I feel happy.”

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The Overemphasis on Process

The Agile Manifesto, born in 2001, revolutionized the software development world with its focus on individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change. As Agile practices matured, they were embraced across industries, evolving beyond their software roots into areas like product development, project management, and even organizational transformation.

As Agile concepts became more popular and organizations began to scale Agile beyond the projects and teams, they inevitably sought ways to standardize practices across teams and departments. Frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe provided structured approaches that promised predictability, scalability, and alignment. However, in the pursuit of consistency, many organizations began to emphasize the mechanics of Agile—ceremonies, roles, and artifacts—over the spirit of Agile.

Consider the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which many see as the gold standard for Agile adoption in large organizations. While SAFe does integrate Agile principles like sprints and CI/CD pipelines, it often devolves into cumbersome processes with complex Program Increment (PI) planning and management procedures that overshadow the core Agile values of simplicity and flexibility. As a result, many organizations end up practicing Agile in name only, missing the essence of what it truly means to be Agile.

Unfortunately, this overemphasis on process is not unique to SAFe. Across the board, companies implementing Agile often become bogged down in rigid structures, detailed metrics, and exhaustive documentation. These elements, while potentially useful, can easily become distractions from the primary goal: delivering value to the customer quickly and efficiently.?

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The Power of Agile Mindset

In contrast to “following the letter but not the spirit of Agile,” organizations that truly embody Agile principles empower their teams by fostering a strong Agile mindset. In these environments, product owners (POs) have substantial decision-making authority and collaborate closely with business stakeholders and customers to ensure the team delivers maximum value by meeting the customer’s needs. Scrum Masters, meanwhile, protect the team from external interference, clear roadblocks, foster internal collaboration, and promote agility. The PO and Scrum Master work in tandem to align the team’s efforts with the product vision, ensuring that sprint goals are both realistic and impactful. While the PO focuses on prioritizing the backlog and communicating business needs, the Scrum Master facilitates Agile processes and drives continuous improvement. The success of these organizations is built on the strength of relationships between POs, Scrum Masters, and stakeholders, and their ability to support the team in achieving its goals.

When these relationships are healthy and communication is clear, the product cycle thrives. This success demonstrates that the heart of Agile lies not in rigid processes but in the quality of interactions and the trust placed in teams to make the right decisions. Agile, at its best, is about adaptability, creativity, and responsiveness to change.

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Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools

?A cornerstone of the Agile Manifesto is the idea that "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" is key to successfully delivering products with value. ?Unfortunately, many organizations have lost sight of this principle, becoming overly reliant on standardized processes and complex tools. Likewise, metrics and KPIs like velocity, counting lines of code, and any that center on the individual rather than the team dehumanize the team members and limit agility. ?While these can provide structure and guidance, they often come at the expense of the human element that drives innovation and collaboration. True agility arises from empowering teams to communicate openly, share ideas freely, and work together to solve problems. Tools, processes, and metrics should serve to facilitate these interactions, not replace them. When teams are allowed to focus on collaboration and problem-solving, rather than navigating cumbersome procedures with detailed, complex metrics and KPIs, they are far more likely to deliver meaningful results.

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Responding to Change Over Following a Plan

?Another fundamental principle of the Agile Manifesto is "Responding to change over following a plan." This concept is at the heart of what makes Agile unique—its ability to adapt to evolving circumstances. However, in many organizations, the emphasis on planning and adherence to predetermined roadmaps has stifled the flexibility that Agile is supposed to champion. While planning is important, the ability to pivot in response to new information, market shifts, or customer feedback is what truly drives success in an Agile environment. Teams that are encouraged to respond to change, rather than rigidly following a plan, can deliver solutions that are more aligned with customer needs and business goals. Agile’s true power lies in its ability to turn challenges into opportunities by staying responsive and adaptable.

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The Real Problem: "Doing Agile" vs. "Being Agile"

?Despite the lamentations that “Agile is dead,” these critics are not entirely wrong. The root issue is that many organizations are more focused on "doing Agile" rather than "being Agile." This distinction is crucial. "Doing Agile" often means adhering to a set of prescribed processes and ticking off boxes on a checklist. "Being Agile," on the other hand, requires embracing a mindset of continuous improvement, collaboration, and customer focus.

Unfortunately, many organizations are stuck in the former mode. Leaders introduce Agile frameworks and expect immediate results but fail to invest in the cultural shift required for true Agile transformation. This leads to a proliferation of processes and metrics that, instead of facilitating agility, end up stifling it.

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A Path Forward: Mindset Over Management

To move beyond this impasse, Agile must evolve. After all, “The Manifesto for Agile Software Development” and its twelve Principles behind haven’t been updated since 2001, a lifetime in the tech industry. If we truly believe in “responding to change over following a plan,” its time we took a hard look at where we started versus where we ended up. If we value “working software over comprehensive documentation” then the thousands of books, articles, training courses, and documented roadmaps Agile experts sell to promote their flavor of an “Agile Transformation” should be relegated to the reference shelf to be reviewed when we are designing our own ways of working. ?

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Trust over Oversight

This evolution will require leaders who genuinely understand and embrace the Agile mindset. Rather than clinging to rigid process governance, these leaders should empower teams to forge their own paths, focusing on outcomes rather than methods.

Leadership should center around two key questions: Are we delivering valuable products to our customers in a timely manner? Are the teams meeting their commit-to-complete goals? Beyond these focal points, the specifics of how work is accomplished should be left to those who are doing the work.

Meanwhile, Scrum Masters and Product Owners should only use metrics to gage the health of the team and indicate areas where they are facing challenges or have room for improvement. They look for symptoms like large amounts of technical debt in the codebase, code churn, cycle time, the defect escape ratio, and the amount of code that is covered by automated tests. These five metrics help the team identify areas where developers are spending their time and suggest ways to improve the codebase, increase quality, and deliver value to the customer quickly and safely.

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Conclusion: Reviving the True Spirit of Agile

The first Kamban system created by Taiichi Ohno in 1940 (History of Kanban , Shore Labs, 2009-2024) showed manufacturing organizations that visualizing work and resources at every stage of production helped avoid bottlenecks and increase efficiencies.? The Machine That Changed the World (Womack, Jones, & Roos, 1990) introduced Lean Manufacturing and revolutionized manufacturing processes around the world. Soon after the Agile Manifesto was published in 2001 by leaders from Extreme Programming, Scrum, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, feature-driven development, and pragmatic programming it was a proclamation against the inefficiency of traditional software development. In 2011 Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo wrote a framework that brings every part of an organization into the planning and development process software and system development (The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) ).

This brings us to the current state of Agile where experts, thought leaders, and pundits are asking “Is Agile Dead?” Even reading the mission statement of The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) takes us from the core value of? “Better software and systems make the world a better place” to a mission “to enable business agility via the continuous flow of customer value required for enterprises to compete and thrive in the digital age” to a focus on helping “enterprises achieve business agility through the research and thought leadership reflected in the SAFe website and our world-class courseware, training, community resources, and certification programs.”

We’ve gone from striving to “Be Agile” to selling ways to “Do Agile.”

?Agile is far from dead. However, it is at a critical juncture where a return to its foundational principles is essential. By fostering a culture that values mindset over management and trust over oversight, organizations can revive Agile’s true spirit and adapt it to meet the evolving demands of modern business systems. Agile’s potential is immense, but only if we stop viewing it as a set of rules and start seeing it as a way of thinking.