André Baken, a digital transformation expert, recently published a LinkedIn post declaring that Agility is dead, sparking a heated debate on the social network. Kai Hansen, a Product expert and Partner at Thiga, and a former Google employee, responds point by point to Baken’s arguments and addresses the tensions undermining Agility within organizations.
Is Agile dead once and for all ? According to André Baken’s LinkedIn post, which I have read with great interest, it is! And seeing the nearly 80 000 reactions, he’s clearly not the only one to think that.
But why so much outrage? The debate around Agile has persisted for years, growing ever more intense. I believe this is because it’s a deeply emotional subject. Everyone had high hopes for Agile’s potential, but it has largely failed to meet the (inflated) expectations. Those who supported it are now disillusioned, while the supposed beneficiaries remain unsatisfied.
On one side, engineering often feels undervalued in organizations. The Agile Manifesto, to some extent, argued that engineering should be recognized as a true value creator. Yet today’s Agile practices rarely reflect this ideal. Technical teams are upset that business teams and leaders never switched to an Agile (Product) mindset or significantly improved their work lives.
On the other side, Agile was marketed to businesses as a magic solution—a way to sell more, release faster, and do more with fewer resources. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t lived up to those expectations either. And that’s because it was never designed to do this.
Let us now revisit together the 6 reasons that lead André Baken to declare the death of Agility.
1️⃣ It became a checklist
"What started as a mindset turned into a rigid process. Standups, sprints, and backlogs became meaningless rituals, with teams focusing on going through the motions instead of embracing Agile’s core values."
Too often, this statement rings true. The manifesto emphasizes “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Yet in many cases, Agile implementations today prioritize processes above all else. The truth is, it doesn’t matter if your team holds a daily standup. It’s absurd to think success depends on meeting every morning at 9:15! Agile’s essence does not demand any specific set of rituals.
Coming out of Google, we had no defined process. None! The principle was “we should deliver in small increments, we should adapt to change and we should decentralize decision-making and involve everybody.” For that you need a mindset change, not a fixed set of rituals. I’ve had teams who had a standup once a week, some three times a week, others who didn’t have standups at all. We didn’t use fancy tools, we iterated and communicated using docs, spreadsheets and personal conversations. It worked at Google because it was actually people over processes.. And that’s the essence of Agile.
2️⃣ Scaling without culture
"Organizations scaled Agile frameworks like SAFe without addressing cultural issues, creating more bureaucracy instead of the flexibility Agile was meant to foster."
Agile fundamentally demands a change in mindset. Without it, success is impossible. Imagine a Jose Mourinho football team, which is always built on strong defense. Bringing in a coach who insists on playing attacking football with the same defensive players would fail spectacularly. Whatever you try to do, you’ll have 11 players with a defensive mindset - these players are not going to score 4 goals a game. Similarly, organisations that cling to control and predictability will never align with Agile’s principles. Trying to implement Agile in such an environment is like building on unstable ground; failure is inevitable.
To truly align culture with Agile principles, leadership must embody the mindset and related values. The first key piece is for senior leaders to be clear on why they’re adopting Agile, how it will benefit the organization, and, crucially, how it will improve the lives of their people. The second one is to expect and allow the organization to make mistakes on the journey towards culture shift. Lastly, leaders must be willing to change personnel, because there’s always some central defenders that are not suited for attacking football and that will fundamentally resist that change.
3️⃣ Speed over value
"Teams rushed to deliver “something” quickly, but often it wasn’t what mattered. Activity replaced impact, and Agile became busywork."
I agree with this point - but I see it as a broader societal issue rather than Agile’s failure. The demand for speed has increased with technological advancements, putting immense pressure on companies. However, success lies not in building things quickly but in building the right things.
Many companies fall into this trap—focusing on speed without considering purpose. The real key is not to deliver faster - it is to deliver the highest value. By identifying and addressing real needs, organizations can create value faster because they won’t spend 80% of their time building functionality nobody really needs. The thing is - Agile was never about deciding what to build or why; its purpose is delivering effectively. The real shortcoming lies in how companies approach Product Strategy and Product Discovery today.
I’m not sure it’s possible to turn “Agile” around at this point.
4️⃣ Leadership resistance
"Agile demands trust and autonomy, but many managers aren’t ready to give up control. Without their buy-in, teams struggled to make it work."
It’s true that leaders tend not to like Agile, because it removes control from them. They can’t go and jank teams around if they are not doing what they’re supposed to do; because they shouldn’t dictate what they are supposed to do in the first place. I don’t think that “true” Agile can ever succeed in organizations where leadership refuses to give trust and autonomy to teams. If leadership doesn't believe that teams should be given problems and not just instructions, Agile is doomed to fail.
If your only option is to apply Agile with leaders that really don't like it, I think the best way to do so is to apply the “boiling frog principle”. You introduce small changes over time without them even realizing it. So they never feel like they need to relinquish control. They don’t feel the water getting increasingly warmer. And after some time, they realise they're asking their teams a lot less, because they already know what they are doing and that it’s reliable. But in my experience, it’s much easier if leadership is bought into it.
5️⃣ Consulting overkill
"Consultants saw the business and turned Agile into a product, overselling it as a miracle cure and a sort of also failing Change Management, which it isn't."
I absolutely agree with that statement. As mentioned before, Agile requires a cultural change, which cannot be done overnight. Most companies hate that. Culture change represents an enormous amount of risks: it’s unpredictable; they don’t know how much money they're going to spend on it and all that for a very uncertain outcome.
It’s very different if someone comes and says “Hey, 5-days course for all your people, and you’re doing Agile”. As a leader, I know how much that costs and how long that takes. And I am told Agile is supposed to make everything faster and is the future of software development. That's worth 5 days! “Sure, take my money!” Everyone gets a certification. “Yeah! Done it! Transformation complete.”
The reality is that it doesn’t work that way. First, Agile is not the solution to all known problems. Second, certifications don’t change cultures. I know companies that invested millions to certify thousands of employees and implement SAFe. The outcome? Minimal impact. Consultants should focus on guiding cultural change, teaching principles, and tailoring Agile to specific organizational contexts rather than selling one-size-fits-all solutions.
6️⃣ Ignoring the human factor
"Agile pushed teams to deliver at breakneck speed without addressing well-being or trust. Burnout followed, and engagement plummeted."
I agree with the observation about well-being but once again I don’t believe it's Agile's fault. Agile per se doesn’t particularly address employees' well-being.
Companies push teams to deliver at breakneck speed, whatever their industry. If you have good managers, your teams will probably be happier whether they’re Agile or not. And with bad managers, even the most utopian Agile team will be unhappy. And again, the key to gain speed is to think harder about the what and why, not the how and the how much.
There are bits and pieces in the Agile manifesto that, if applied well, contribute to having healthy teams. For example, both “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” or “customer collaboration over contract negotiation” generally foster human connection. But to be fair, it’s also a harder environment to excel in, because there are more free-flowing parameters that you have to take into account. It gives more freedom on the one hand but asks more responsibility on the other.
💡 The lesson?
"Agile didn’t fail on its own—it was sabotaged by poor leadership, misinterpretation, and an obsession with process over people."
In a way, I don’t think Agile has failed as a concept. Many of the most successful companies of the last 20 years have used it well and still do today. For Google, agile principles were the operating heartbeat that the company ran on between 2005 and 2015, arguably its most formative years. However it often fails in how it is being executed, especially in companies that are trying to transform from another system into it. There, I agree that the concept is being sabotaged.
To be honest, I’m not sure it’s possible to turn “Agile” around at this point. Maybe the term Agile needs to be killed at last, so it can be reborn. We need to go back to first principles: "What user problems are we solving, what do we want to achieve, and what are the core elements we truly believe will get us there?" Then, we can refine it to start afresh. That way we don’t have all that legacy to carry around, for nowadays you cannot say Agile without people starting a fist fight. The term has become too emotionally charged.
There is one thing I always come back to when it comes to building great products: Principles over rules. And, at heart, Agile aligns with that. If you start with rules and processes, you’re creating a rigid structure, which is exactly what you don’t want in 2025, 2027 or 2030. AI is going to go through the global economy like a tsunami over the next 5 years and change it into something that’ll look very different from what we have today. If you think having a rigid command-and-control organization is going to make your company successful in that environment, I believe you’re in for a really rude awakening.
