The State of Agile: Cults, Darkness, and a few rays of light.

I've been an Agile aficionado since I first started working as a programmer in 2006.

At that point in time everything was still pretty new, the Agile Manifesto was just 5 years old and Waterfall ruled the project world.

Things have changed quite a bit since then, I became a Certified Scrum Master, I spoke about the world of Agile at developer conference around the world, helped countless of teams get organized in a more Agile way, and I grew as a person and a leader. I've eventually gone into different direction with my career but always with the agile principles in mind as a guiding force.

This year I finally attended 2 true Agile events (Agile '23 in Orlando and The Global Scrum Gathering '23 in Amsterdam).

And to be frank: those events have made me worried about the current state of Agile. Even more than I already was.

First off: the people I met were all amazing and wonderful people, all with a passion for helping others grow and succeed.

But the content of the conversations, the sessions, the workshops, the keynotes, all very much felt like a cult to me.

This might sound blunt but let me explain: everything was always about how it should be, never how it could be.

Scrum and Kanban are the holy commandments of this cult.

There was no room to explore new ways of working, if it wasn't Scrum or Kanban it was banished as not 'true agile'.

There was so much focus on getting certified that people introduced themselves using their certification acronyms. Where did it ever say you need to get certified to be agile?

It was almost all talk about processes and tools, but nothing about the people or relationships (even though the first line of the Agile Manifesto specifically mentions the need to put people and relationships first).

There was plenty of chest bumping, high-fiving, and backslapping about how great we all are and how we're change makers.

But there was little to no talk off change, of how we could continuous improve the way we do agile, train agile, grow agile.

And like a cult: it needs constant new members to stay alive, which explains why over 70% of attendees were first timers.

I'm sure that to insiders, this felt like the reinvigorating injection they needed to face the world for another year.

But for me as an outsider it felt very, very weird and disturbing.

For me personally the key principle of Agile is continuous improvement through everlasting learning.? It's to try, experiment, measure, fail, try again and keep pushing myself and others to learn.

Like I said many years ago already: "Failure is simply a lesson you haven't learned yet" .

I feel that the part of the Agile world I saw on display at these 2 events is very much afraid of failure and thus of opportunities to change, adapt, and improve.

Luckily, like always there are rays of light in the darkness that is hanging over the world of Agile. I was fortune enough to talk to some amazing people who, like me, see those darks clouds brooding over the world and are trying to make a change. Through focussing on getting people to re-engage with the core agile principles, creating smaller more community focussed events, and maybe creating a new more inclusive Agile Manifesto all together. I very much hope that 2024 will be their year and that they will move the world of Agile through it's next retrospective and into a new and brighter future.

Because otherwise the future of Agile looks dark.

My 2 cents: People joining the workforce today are Agile native, so let's stop focussing on teaching processes and tools. Instead let's start focussing on coaching people and teams on the challenges and opportunities of building strong, healthy, and mutual beneficial professional relationships.