Why do we still talk about Agility?
- Victor Hugo Germano
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
This post is translated from Brazilian Portuguese
This week I attended the Reimagining Agility Workshop by the Agile Alliance and PMI. This event also encompasses international activities and the work that began with Heidi Musser, Jim Highsmith, Sanjiv Augustine, and John Kern, with the aim of discussing the current state of agile practices, principles, and values, but above all, their continuity and future.
The event was great, organized in conjunction with another PMI event, and I had the opportunity to reconnect with friends and discuss my perspectives during the meeting, exploring the gap between the original promises of agility and the contemporary challenges that remain unresolved. I was happy to participate and see so many friends again <3.
The event followed a voting model based on several perceived challenges (called "Wicked Problems") within the community, to be discussed and considered by the group, in a very cool facilitation scheme. My disappointment stemmed from some of the themes, which are so old they've become canonical within the community:
Integration between Traditional and Agile Projects
Governance and Culture
Agility at scale
There were other topics, such as "The current positioning of Agile in the market ," that caught my attention. But I decided to propose a different topic: Why are we still talking about agility? And what is post-agile?
If the event hopes to reimagine Agility, we first need to answer whether we really still need it .
Personally, I can't wrap my head around the fact that we're still discussing the possibility of integrating traditional and Agile projects, talking about culture as a mechanism for organizational transformation, or how to scale Agility. By 2025, the body of knowledge on these topics will be so extensive that they should have been superseded by now – not because they've been resolved, but because nobody can stand it anymore . This only demonstrates how Agile has failed to expand and transform the market. When we accept this reality, we will probably be ready to think about real transformations.
To my "surprise," it was one of the most voted topics.
I'm not declaring that Agile is dead , as so many of my colleagues in the market do for entertainment purposes. What I'm saying is that an event that aims to reimagine Agile as a discipline needs to be truly committed to the fact that we, as professionals, haven't adequately addressed traditional management and organizational design problems, and that it's possible to imagine a reality where the practices/methodologies/principles no longer apply.
I have always argued that Agile is a set of principles and values that originated in the technical software community to solve management problems in software development, and that despite having parallels with the entire world of management, we shouldn't have tried to embrace the whole world. During my time on the Agile Alliance board, or organizing dozens of events, I always believed that we first needed to keep the technical community close, and that there are industries, topics, and problems that Agile simply cannot solve.
The reality that allowed Agile to emerge as a movement in the late 1990s was still a response to the software crisis of the 1970s . The collapse of large-scale projects that characterized that period generated a series of standardization movements and management processes. However, if we reflect on the two subsequent decades that mark the waves of Agile, it is evident that the fundamental problems that motivated its emergence remain largely unresolved.
Prioritizing work, ensuring system reliability, and the ability to respond quickly to the market remain critical challenges, even in organizations that have rigorously adopted agile practices. We won't truly address this problem by "focusing on people," "changing mindsets," or "attacking the culture"—we've been doing that for decades, and we remain unhealthy, with strained work environments, delayed deliveries, and a lack of continuous integration, unlike the widely adopted practices in the market. It's impossible to think about agile transformation when every single person in the company, including executives, is replaced within three years.
Everything's fine... you can let go of Agile Industry now.
The problems remain largely the same; the principles and practices have effectively become outdated and no longer fit our current reality.
There is a structural aspect that we haven't resolved and won't resolve, and which has always jeopardized any initiative: the incentives that dictate behavior in organizations have remained practically the same for the last 50 years... and there's no possibility of change.
Decades of methodological evolution have not fundamentally altered the incentive structure that truly drives behavior in organizations. Executive interests haven't changed since the 1970s; they're simply preparing to seek answers elsewhere...
An executive still wants:
Respond quickly to the market.
Prioritize work that generates observable value.
To guarantee operational and financial efficiency.
Organizing teams to maximize productivity.
There's also the fact that, in many respects, he wants to achieve his individual goal to secure his own financial return – whether or not this aligns with delivering something to the market/company. If, by some miracle, these two points are aligned with objectives of a sustainable environment, quality deliverables, and flexibility, perhaps the organization has a chance... but the common reality is different. When a manager is evaluated by metrics that encourage behaviors contrary to agile principles, no ceremony, practice, or artifact will be able to produce the desired results.
The methodological changes remained superficial, while the deep incentive structures remained unchanged for decades.
Remember: we are not in a flawed or broken environment - this system works exactly as it was designed to work , as Stafford Beer reminded us.
Despite this structural issue, since the emergence of agility in the early 2000s, the work context in technology has undergone transformations:
Reduced organizational tenure: Executives change positions every three years, managers change frequently, and professionals move between companies at breakneck speed. The decisions made are disconnected from the reality of the teams because they were made by those who have already left.
Transformed delivery model: The way we develop software has changed profoundly, especially with the integration of tools that have accelerated the process.
Dynamics of talent retention: People no longer spend the majority of their careers in a single organization.
In this context, how can we discuss medium-term planning when key decision-makers will change before the cycle is complete? How can we maintain strategic consistency when leadership is volatile?
Agile practices were built on assumptions that simply no longer exist. We can say that they are a solution for a different world.
The Responsibility of the Agile Community
It must be honestly acknowledged that we, the agile community and its various actors—consultants, certifiers, communities, companies, and trainers—share responsibility for where we have arrived. The pursuit of expanding access, maximizing value generation from consulting sales, and commercializing certifications and training has led agility to a point where it has tried to solve too many problems.
Agile emerged to solve software problems. It failed, and the software community drifted away from agility, with few remaining around. But the community expanded its scope to address "people," "organizational change," "digital transformation," "neuroscience," "self-care," "strategy," etc. Issues that exceed its original competence and that we have been discussing for two decades without concrete progress.
When Agile became a product that generates money, it became very difficult to objectively examine what was happening, because survival became more important: an Agile practitioner will never act against themselves and eventually lose their job, so they need to invent work to remain useful to the organization . The same applies to certification bodies, trainers, and consultants.
As Manoel Pimentel said: There is something healthy in recognizing these limitations and in admitting that this virtue of solving an "imaginary and generic problem" is not the moral patrimony of the agile community. Other communities have reached similar conclusions and do a much better job than Scrum for Agriculture, or Creating an Agile School.
The Agility Industrial Complex , however, is truly on borrowed time. When only sociopaths remain at the party, it means we're nearing the end .
Although we can point to various successful cases and attempts (which I believe are part of the list), we are very far from any dream of scalable results: the most innovative companies, the fastest growing, the ones that accelerate the market, are not "Agile" in how they organize themselves, nor in how they deliver software .
Agile will become a niche space – like that musical genre that only your slightly odd friends coldly defend, but that almost nobody listens to anymore.
Positive Signs
Despite my criticism, the discussion I had revealed hopeful perspectives. As always, Mari Zaparolli , whom I greatly respect, countered several of my points with important arguments, and I admit they are truly relevant.
The fact that we can look back and say "we learned" represents real progress. More significantly, concepts considered radical—team building, incentive discussions, the importance of multidisciplinary leadership, the importance of rapid reaction—have become common language. Concepts pushed by us, and in many respects, they ended up being the evolutionary answer to current management.
This opened up space to question organizational and management models that were previously considered inviolable. This perspective, born from technology, being present in organizational design discussions is also a victory for this movement – and I agree. I'm not sure how much we can credit Agile in this process, or the technological advancement and digitalization of business, but it's certainly a positive point.
There's still the fact that the vast majority of events today attract people at the beginning of their careers who are looking to learn about effective management and explore different perspectives. A lot of new talent is emerging, and spaces for experimentation and learning in this emerging reality are essential – in this regard, the extreme programming lab at USP is an oasis.
So, does it have a future?
I believe that management needs to reflect the contemporary nature of work, without being attached to outdated practices.
We live in an extremely customizable and individualized market: everything you want, when you want it, the way you want it. But we continue to talk about methodology in terms of best practices and large, homogenizing maturity models. Management continues to follow this universalizing, pasteurized, reproducible, and simplistic logic.
This needs to change.
The speed of change, the complexity of problems, and market volatility demand context-sensitive, non-homogenizing management. Practices that work in one scenario may be counterproductive in another (this has always been true, it's just worse now).
The impact of AI in this context is undeniable: and regardless of whether LLMs work or not , this tool is already an integral part of the solution-building process and dictates the material priority of any leadership.
The integration of AI tools into the hands of ordinary users within organizations is fundamentally changing how we design, build, and maintain products.
Consider this scenario: an executive no longer asks you to deliver a project yesterday. He writes a prompt, generates an application, and delegates its maintenance to you. This process changes radically:
How we think about software problems
How we build products
How do we maintain systems in production?
In this new context, technology teams take a backseat . They cease to be the protagonists. The emphasis shifts to the problem area—design, defining results, understanding the context. The time invested in understanding what to build, not how to build it, becomes increasingly critical.
For this emerging reality, we need a new management model. A model that accommodates speed, that does not assume knowledge of specific contexts, that recognizes that the same practice will produce different results in different contexts.
If this shift in principles raises some questions: do we need to keep organizations alive? Are these hierarchical organizations still relevant and necessary?
Following this provocative line of thought, do we still need the PMI, Agile Alliance, and so many others? Are we ready for this conversation, or are there still certifications waiting to be issued?
When is she arriving?
In a more complex and volatile context, organizations crave methodology, trust, and "the right way to do things." Offering solutions with a name, method, and proven track record provides a false sense of security necessary for adoption, but reduces the impact of change.
It may sound pessimistic, but I'll adopt the term Raphael Albino gave me: this is Suassuna's hopeful realism . Agility has completed a cycle, this retrospective is important, but it's also important to stop using what no longer works.
It's time to acknowledge that the assumptions have changed. The market has changed. Organizations have changed. People have changed.
What needs to change once and for all is how we think about management: from homogenizing to contextual, from universal to specific, from a single methodology to orchestrating multiple approaches. And perhaps we need to question what skills, principles, and structures are necessary to thrive in this new reality. Not as a mere evolution of agility, but as a deliberate and acknowledged break with its paradigm.
The Agile Alliance and communities of practice have an opportunity to lead this transformation. But this requires the courage to challenge what has been built and an openness to discuss problems that agility has never solved, and even its own existence.
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