Agile Is Undead … A Synthesis
Author: Jurgen Appelo
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." - Eric Hoffer *)
It’s been a few years since I felt genuinely inspired at an Agile event, despite everyone’s best attempts. My keynote at the flagship Agile conference in Atlanta in 2016 was both a career highlight and, in retrospect, seemed to have occurred at the peak of the Agile movement itself. The first “Agile is dead” posts began circulating two years earlier. After that, it was a steady slide downhill.
“The word ‘agile’ has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.” - Dave Thomas, “Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)”
Fast-forward eight years: Agile conferences have shrunk to half their pre-COVID size. Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches are being laid off en masse while social media overflows with bitter testimonials about failed Agile transformations. I was at an XP event recently. The atmosphere seemed (to me) like a funeral, not a conference. My keynote talks at Agile events now feel more like eulogies than rallying cries.
So, what are we to make of this apparent decline? Has the Agile movement matured, or has it withered? Has the revolutionary promise of flexibility and productivity finally succeeded, or has it lost its soul?
The Symptoms
I remember when Agile was the darling of forward-thinking software development and product management. It promised adaptability, collaboration, and speed. But like a pop song played to death, Agile has grown stale, crushed under the weight of rituals, buzzwords, and dubious certifications. In some organizations, it has morphed into a bureaucratic behemoth—ironically resembling the waterfall approach it was meant to replace. Conference attendance has plummeted. Workshops either attract unmotivated stragglers or get canceled outright. Even prominent Agile thinkers publicly lament that the original spirit has vanished.
“Agile isn’t dead, but the agile gold rush is, and it isn’t coming back.” - Scott Ambler, “The Agile Community Shat The Bed”
In many organizations, Agile has devolved into a mere checkbox exercise. Companies brandish their adherence to agile practices like a merit badge while missing the Agile essence entirely. Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, once considered vital, are increasingly seen as redundant overhead. Meanwhile, teams spend more time performing Agile “ceremonies” and being very “busy” than delivering actual value.
“Teams rushed to deliver ‘something’ quickly, but often it wasn’t what mattered. Activity replaced impact, and Agile became busywork.” - André Baken, “Agile is dead. There, I said it.”
The Diagnosis
The causes of Agile’s decline are manifold and described in many earlier articles. Here are ten key factors identified by Scott Ambler, Al Shalloway, André Baken, and others:
Certification Proliferation The market is drowning in “certified” professionals. Anyone can become a Scrum Master after a two-day course, turning Agile certifications into participation trophies. This credential inflation has cheapened the skillset, with certification bodies profiting from the Agile gold rush while failing to instill genuine competence.
Framework Overload Agile began as a set of values and principles, not a prescriptive playbook. Yet the community has spawned an alphabet soup of frameworks: Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, Scrum@Scale, the “Spotify Model”—an endless parade. While these tools might work in specific contexts, they’ve become exercises in compliance rather than improvement.
Shallow Learning The Agile movement’s emphasis on “soft” skills—prioritizing people over technical and operational expertise—has left teams ill-equipped to deliver value despite feeling good about themselves. Many coaches lack deep backgrounds, leading to fluff-focused coaching and failed transformations. Organizations abandoned Agile when they saw their investments didn’t yield tangible results. Technical depth, operational expertise, and deep learning still matter.
Agile Dogmatism I cannot count the number of times people told me that a single book launch “is not Agile.” The agile community’s obsession with purity promoted dogma over pragmatism. Myths like “co-location is essential” and “teams must stick together” ignored real-world needs. Most organizations need hybrid strategies, blending Agile, Lean, and traditional methods and rejecting purist rhetoric. The more successful organizations prioritize contextual solutions over rigid adherence to doctrine.
Fads and Fashions Agile fads—easily explained, trendy, and widely promoted—often overshadowed substance. While some ideas like “sprints,” “story points,” and “celebrate failure” made sense and worked in context, they caused harm when misapplied or exaggerated. Collectively, the endless parade of Agile practices fueled skepticism about Agile’s value, reinforcing perceptions that Agile itself was just another passing trend, undermining its credibility.
Masters and Owners Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Agile Coaches were meant to guide teams toward value creation. Instead, in many organizations, these new roles have become ill-defined, with a questionable return on investment. Companies are phasing them out, recognizing that promised improvements rarely materialize. They’ve become Agile’s horizontal middle management—trapped between ideals and reality.
Velocity over Outcome Many organizations misunderstood agility, equating it with faster outputs, boosted by slogans like “twice the work in half the time.” This misguided focus on output and speed ignored agility’s core: delivering value. Chasing velocity without alignment to real outcomes led to wasted effort, fragmented priorities, and teams burning out while increasing output that didn’t matter.
Messy Management The Agile movement sidelined management, often portraying it as the enemy rather than offering a clear path for managers to evolve. Agile created a leadership vacuum by focusing on team autonomy while dismissing well-established management practices. The result was disengaged managers and organizations struggling to align teams, priorities, and outcomes in a sustainable way.
Misalignment with Strategy Agile transformations often focused on method over impact, neglecting the critical alignment of strategy and execution. Without clear priorities and leadership direction and without understanding the “Why?” of the transformation, teams drift endlessly in meaningless directions. Instead, organizations must integrate strategy and execution, emphasizing goals over process adherence.
Fundamental Issues Finally—and there are some who refuse to admit this—the very paradigm underlying the Agile Manifesto has become outdated. What was groundbreaking 23 years ago no longer meets today’s business demands. From “working software” to “face-to-face collaboration,” the original four values and twelve principles fall short in addressing the challenges of today.
“Agile failed, in short, because the problem was never about the methodology. The real issue lies much deeper within the organization as a failure to align strategy with execution from the start.” - Laura Barnard, “5 reasons why agile transformation fails”
The Shifting Paradigm
What’s wrong with the original Agile values?
Nothing!
However, emphasizing individuals and interactions over processes and tools ignores a fundamental truth: trust doesn’t scale beyond small tribes. When individuals’ actions lead to events like the storming of the Capitol, we should all be grateful for the processes and tools we have in place to fend off mob rule. Any product organization beyond a certain size needs governance, not merely leadership and self-organization.
The fixation on working software over comprehensive documentation misses today’s reality: customers care about their experiences, not about your product. When your software works, but customers hate it, you lose. When software fails but customers remain engaged elsewhere in their journey, you win. Software quality is just one piece of a larger puzzle called the customer experience.
The Manifesto’s authors were brilliant engineers who worked directly with their clients. However, the bespoke products addressed with customer collaboration over contract negotiation represent only a slice of reality. Many teams these days develop for millions of users—good luck implementing “customer on-site” at that scale! And what about suppliers, shareholders, and society? Delighting customers at the expense of other stakeholders is a recipe for disaster.
Finally, the principle of responding to change over following a plan feels quaint in the age of big data, AI, quantum computing, and IoT. Why wait for customer requests when you can act on behavioral patterns detected in usage data? True innovation means causing change, not just responding to it. Let your competitors react to the disruption you create because you were the first to detect and seize an opportunity.
I could go on to critique some of the Agile principles—like continuous delivery to customers (which can harm some experiences, like in game development, for example) or face-to-face conversations (obsolete in the era of remote work)—but you get the point.
“I think Agile is dead in those companies that saw Agile as a new vehicle, without trying to understand the underlying paradigm.” - Markus Gärtner, “Agile is dead”
The Agile Manifesto was an incredibly influential breakthrough achievement. But it was written in the age of the Third Industrial Revolution. And it’s true that many companies are still struggling to grasp its basic ideas. However, in the meantime, the underlying paradigm has shifted. To survive after the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we must rewrite the core values and principles that once made Agile revolutionary. We should stop migrating organizations to an outdated operating system.
A New Age, New Values, New Principles
Some readers object to the above, saying, “You are wrong! Delivering value is what true agility is all about.” However, I see those very same critics using outdated language such as “value streams,” “customer requests,” and “responding to change,” while tomorrow’s product managers talk about “value networks,” “customer signals,” and “disrupting the market.” If you claim to know what agility “truly” means in the context of today, it should reflect in the language you use. Only laggards describe workflows as “the set of actions between order and delivery.” Real innovators describe them as “all the work between signal and impact.”
Paradoxically, the need for agility is greater than ever. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is causing hyper-acceleration—innovation at breakneck speeds. The world is now so complex that not even VUCA can cover it anymore. The entire planet is one giant web of wicked problems.
“We can confidently say that volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are increasing. So, the need for business agility is very much alive.” - Andy Spence and Alex Crosby, “Agile Is Dead? Complexity Isn’t!”
For example, when reading about Tesla and SpaceX in Elon Musk’s biography, I couldn’t help noticing certain themes: disruptive change, accelerated innovation, and relentless optimization. LEGO’s story of reinventing itself showcases self-organizing teams, rapid experimentation, and close user observation. The famous example of Haier demonstrates decentralized, autonomous units, zero distance to customers, and a shift from products to experiences.
These companies achieved remarkable growth in recent decades. They’re highly agile, but none wave the “Agile” banner. More importantly, no one follows Scrum, SAFe, or any other framework. They’ve transcended what the Agile movement has preached for decades. It’s time we all helped other organizations do the same.
“It’s tempting to get stuck in your Agile bubble, claiming Agile is dead or alive. A whole world outside your bubble doesn’t care one bit. Most likely, they could use your help.” - Barry Overeem, “Agile Is Dead!”
The Remedy
Is Agile truly dead? Well, none of our customers care! Perhaps the Agile of old is dead, but paths forward exist—though none will resurrect its glory days. It pains me to say it, but the Agile brand looks to me like a zombie that can’t be revived. It might be better to put it down permanently and grow something new from its corpse. Our challenge now is to reimagine and reinvent the spirit of Agile without calling the new thing Agile.
“I’m not willing to start something new & have it take another 10 yrs to cross the chasm. My efforts are to build off what people have done while adding what’s missing.” - Al Shalloway, “Agile Is Not Dead. Just Not Kept Up With the Times”
Start with New Values and Principles
The Agile Manifesto was revolutionary in its time but looks dated after the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Today’s business environment demands fresh values and principles: balancing leadership with governance, prioritizing experience over product, addressing the needs of all stakeholders, being the disruptor rather than the disrupted, and leveraging modern technologies.
Encourage Pragmatic, Hybrid Approaches
Agile purists may object, but embracing pragmatic, hybrid approaches could salvage what’s valuable. Whether incorporating Experience Engineering, Human-Centered Design, Data Analytics, or, yes, even traditional Project Management, teams should adopt what works rather than mindlessly following the Agile doctrine.
Take Advantage of New Technologies
Teams must evolve with modern tools. AI can streamline routine tasks and support data-driven decisions, freeing teams for creative problem-solving. Advanced analytics enable more dynamic approaches, while digital agents evaluating work-in-progress could dramatically reduce validation time.
“AI can significantly empower Scrum teams, making them not just faster but smarter and more adaptable in facing modern challenges.” - Jeff Sutherland, “Is Agile Dead in the AI Era? Think Again!”
Stop Calling The Thing Agile
The Agile brand has lost its power. Organizations need more agility than ever, but they won’t pay for anything called “Agile.” As my CEO, JC Conticello, said last week, “Agile has become a commodity.” Nobody can charge premium coaching or consultancy fees for commodities, which is also why I’m rather skeptical about any initiatives called “Heart of Agile,” “Modern Agile,” “Agile 2,” “Reimaging Agile,” “Extreme Agile,” “Voodoo Agile” or whatever people come up with to revitalize the corpse, no matter how well intended. I would even consider the people involved heroic. They make valiant attempts against all odds.
“We’re essentially rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic in the face of an onrushing technological tsunami.” - Jim Highsmith, “Reimagining Agile: How Agile Lost Its Soul and is Seeking to Get It Back”
But I’m not interested in joining. A debate about what is or what is not “true agile” is just as compelling as a discussion about what is “true liberalism” or “true humanism.” It is a nice philosophical exercise over a large cup of coffee, but I won’t enjoy that drink on a sinking ship. I prefer to jump first and find myself a quieter coffee bar later.
The Transcendence
Agile is undead—halfway between dead and alive. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Agile is dissolving.
When medicine dissolves in water, it doesn’t vanish; it becomes invisible yet potent. Like the psyllium powder over my morning cereal, you might still taste or smell it. Why organize events about something ubiquitous? Why hire coaches to teach people to “be agile, not do agile?” Why label it at all?
Maybe it’s better to say that Agile is becoming ambient. We might not see it, but we feel its presence. Like computing itself, not being agile isn’t an option anymore. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has raised the stakes for everyone. We need to be more agile than ever but without using the term. People will swim in agility—some may drown. And we continue to have conferences and workshops because many organizations still suffer, maybe more than ever. We just won’t sell them the Agile brand anymore.
“We will eventually stop talking about agile teams, agile development, agile frameworks and more. We’ll just talk about teams, development, and frameworks, and we’ll assume they are, of course, agile.” - Mike Cohn, “Are Agile and Scrum Dead?”
Everyone Is Right
In summary, yes, it’s true that the industrial agile complex has killed Agile and that the Agile community shat the bed. We are all responsible for that—me included. It’s also true that organizations need agility more than ever. And yes, the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto are not as timeless as some people claim them to be. They were an excellent snapshot of what it meant to create value in 2001, and I will forever be thankful to the seventeen people who started a global movement. It’s also true that the brand doesn’t work anymore, but nobody wants to start all over.
Everyone has a good point. Can we agree on that?
At this point, I choose to look forward. I am more interested in how to create value in 2025 and beyond because AI causes team sizes to shrink, turns static teams into dynamic teams, leaves juniors and interns scrambling for work, turns T-skilled people into M-skilled workers, and swaps middle manager layers for algorithmic management. Believe it or not, quite a few things are going on that are much more important than a debate about “what Agile really is.”
“One or two people with strong prompt engineering skills and access to a top-notch GenAI model will outperform a traditional agile cross-functional team - in both speed and quality.” - Henrik Kniberg, “Agile in the Age of AI”
To keep up with these changing times and be Agile without calling it Agile, I expect that in the decade ahead, we will see countless new tools, patterns, and practices. If you also care about that, I invite you to contact me. We have work to do.
Let’s celebrate twenty-five years of Agile and ten years of “Agile Is Dead” articles. Now, I won’t be one of those heroes trying to keep the brand alive. It’s time to move on.
Jurgen
P.S. This article will be a chapter in my new book, Humans, Robots, Agents: New Fundamentals for AI-Driven Leadership with Algorithmic Management. Sign up for our newsletter if you want to receive a free preview!
*) The Eric Hoffer quote is a misquotation. What he actually said was, “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”
