Is Agile Dying?
Agile’s been around for about 25 years now—officially kicking off in 2001 with the Agile Manifesto. Since then, it’s evolved into all sorts of frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and others. We've seen some teams knock it out of the park, and others... not so much. So the big question is: is Agile on its way out?
Personally, I don’t think so.
Over the years, I’ve worked with a range of organizations using different flavors of Agile. I’ve seen it succeed in some places and completely fail in others. And when things do fail, the blame game begins—some say Agile just doesn’t work, others point fingers at the person leading the transformation, and some say it’s the company culture itself.
Here’s what I’ve seen: it’s usually a mix of both the individual and the organization. You can have a great company with the wrong person trying to drive Agile, or the right person stuck in a company that just isn’t ready for it.
But before we get into the “why,” let’s take a quick look back at the foundation—the Agile Manifesto:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
And the five core values behind it all: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage.
These aren’t just nice ideas—they’re critical to understanding why Agile works in some places and fails in others.
Let’s start with the organization.
If leaders at all levels don’t understand what it means to truly support openness, respect, and courage, Agile isn’t going to succeed. Teams need to feel safe calling out issues and raising concerns without fearing backlash. That sense of psychological safety is everything. People need to know their leaders have their backs—especially when things get uncomfortable, and they will.
Without that, teams shut down. They stop speaking up. And soon, Agile starts getting blamed for problems that are really cultural. It’s not an Agile issue—it’s an organizational one.
I’ve said this a lot: Agile won’t solve your problems—it’ll reveal them. But it also gives you the tools to start addressing them. Once that organizational support is in place, that’s when teams can start thriving and actually delivering the kind of value customers want.
Now, let’s talk about the individual.
That first line from the manifesto—“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”—is key.
To me, that means there’s no one-size-fits-all version of Agile. Every company is different. Every team is at a different point in their journey. As Agile coaches or practitioners, we can’t just copy-paste a framework from one org to another and expect it to work.
The real work is in understanding the company—how it operates, what the teams need, where they’re at. And then building from there. If we can’t be flexible in our implementation of Agile, it will fail.
So, is Agile dying?
No, it’s evolving. What is dying—or at least fading fast—is the idea that Agile is just a checklist or a plug-and-play solution. The days of “just install Scrum and wait for the magic to happen” are over. And that’s a good thing.
Agile isn’t about rituals or fancy charts. It’s about people. Teams. Real conversations. Honest feedback. Flexibility. It's about building the right thing—not just building things right.
But when Agile gets reduced to sprints, standups, and ticket boards, we lose the heart of it. We lose the mindset. And that’s where things fall apart.
It’s easy to say Agile doesn’t work when what’s really broken is how we’re approaching it. When we treat it like a process to follow instead of a mindset to adopt, we miss the point entirely. Agile isn't a destination—it’s a lens we use to look at our work, our teams, and our goals.
So back to the original question: is Agile dying?
Not in my experience. What we’re seeing is more of a shakeout. The surface-level, checkbox-driven versions of Agile? Those are fading. What’s sticking around—and growing—is the deeper understanding that success with Agile takes real effort. Real trust. Real change.
The agile mindset is alive and well and allows organizations and teams to flourish and succeed at new levels.
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