What happens when a movement built on autonomy becomes a system of rituals?
In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Martin Kearns—one of the earliest Scrum practitioners globally and an advisor to organisations navigating complex change—about the evolution of Agile from philosophy to practice, and where it has quietly lost its way.
This is not a technical discussion of frameworks. It is a conversation about leadership: how organisations attempt to balance autonomy with control, why well-intentioned practices harden into procedure, and what is required to restore professional judgement without sacrificing coherence.
Martin brings two decades of experience working inside large institutions attempting “Agile transformation.” His perspective is neither evangelical nor dismissive. Instead, it is diagnostic—concerned less with defending or attacking Agile, and more with understanding what actually happens when its ideas meet organisational reality.
Leadership has a habit of adopting the language of change faster than it adopts the discipline required to sustain it. The history of management is littered with such moments: Total Quality Management, Business Process Re-engineering, Lean, and now Agile. Each begins as a principled response to a genuine problem. Each is gradually codified, scaled, and—too often—emptied of the very judgement it sought to restore.
Agile is no exception.
What began as a rejection of rigid, plan-driven development in favour of small teams, rapid feedback, and professional discretion has, in many organisations, settled into something more procedural. The ceremonies remain. The dashboards multiply. The language of empowerment endures. Yet the experience of work often feels more constrained, not less. It is this dissonance that sits at the centre of my recent conversation with Martin Kearns.
From Principle to Procedure
Martin Kearns is not an external critic of Agile; he is part of its original architecture. As one of the earliest Scrum practitioners globally and now an enterprise agility advisor and executive coach, he has spent more than two decades working with organisations attempting to redesign how work is coordinated and how decisions are made.
That vantage point matters. It allows him to distinguish between Agile as it was conceived and Agile as it is now commonly practised.
The early promise of Agile was not, at its core, methodological. It was philosophical. It rested on a simple but demanding proposition: that those closest to the work are best placed to make decisions about it. This implied a redistribution of authority away from central planning functions and towards teams. It required trust, tolerance for variability, and a willingness to accept that not all outcomes could be specified in advance.
Those are not trivial concessions for large organisations.
As Agile has scaled, many institutions have attempted to retain its surface features—iteration cycles, stand-ups, retrospectives—while quietly reasserting traditional control mechanisms. The result is what might be called procedural agility: a system that looks adaptive but behaves predictably, in the bureaucratic sense.
When Empowerment Becomes Ritual
Kearns' critique is not that Agile has failed, but that it has been absorbed into organisational systems that were never designed to sustain the level of autonomy it presupposes.
In this environment, ritual begins to substitute for judgement. The daily stand-up, originally intended as a lightweight coordination mechanism, becomes a reporting forum. Sprint commitments, once a tool for learning, become performance contracts. Velocity metrics, introduced to help teams understand their capacity, become artefacts for managerial comparison.
None of these shifts are formally mandated. They emerge gradually, often with the best of intentions. Leaders seek visibility. Teams seek clarity. Over time, however, the cumulative effect is to narrow discretion.
Chris Argyris' distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use is instructive here. Organisations may espouse empowerment while operating systems that reward compliance. The language of self-organisation persists, but the conditions required for it are absent. Teams learn, quickly, what is truly expected.
The irony is difficult to miss. A movement designed to liberate professional judgement can, in practice, standardise it.
The Organisational Reality: Control, Risk, and Scale
It would be convenient to attribute this outcome to poor leadership or bad faith. The reality is more complex.
Large organisations are accountable to multiple stakeholders—boards, regulators, investors—who demand predictability. They must manage risk, allocate capital, and coordinate activities across functions and geographies. The tolerance for variance is necessarily limited.
From this perspective, the appeal of frameworks such as Scrum at scale or SAFe becomes clearer. They offer structure. They promise alignment. They provide artefacts—plans, metrics, cadences—that can be presented upwards as evidence of control.
In other words, they reconcile Agile with the institutional need for legibility.
James C. Scott's notion of "seeing like a state" is relevant. Systems are redesigned not merely to function, but to be observable and reportable. In the process, local knowledge and discretion can be subordinated to standardised forms.
Kearns does not dismiss these pressures. Rather, he questions whether the current equilibrium—ritualised agility layered onto traditional governance—actually satisfies either objective. It neither delivers genuine autonomy nor provides the level of certainty executives seek. Instead, it produces a hybrid that is administratively heavy and operationally brittle.
Complexity, Debt, and the Limits of Planning
A recurring theme in our discussion is the tendency of organisations to underestimate complexity.
Technical debt is a familiar concept in software development, but its organisational analogue is less often acknowledged. Decisions deferred, trade-offs obscured, and systems layered over time create a form of structural debt that constrains future action. Agile practices, when applied superficially, can mask rather than resolve this accumulation.
Similarly, strategic planning often proceeds as if uncertainty were reducible to better forecasting. In reality, much of the work undertaken by modern organisations is irreducibly complex. It involves interdependencies, feedback loops, and emergent properties that resist linear planning.
Here, the tension between autonomy and control becomes particularly acute. Greater autonomy allows teams to respond to local conditions and emergent information. Greater control provides coherence and alignment. The challenge is not to eliminate this tension, but to manage it deliberately.
Too often, organisations attempt to resolve it through process—more detailed frameworks, more granular metrics—rather than through judgement.
Technology as Amplifier, Not Solution
The current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence introduces a further layer of complexity. There is a tendency to view new technology as a means of overcoming organisational limitations: better data, better insights, better decisions.
Kearns is sceptical of this framing.
Technology, he argues, does not resolve organisational confusion; it amplifies it. Systems that lack clarity of purpose, coherent governance, or well-calibrated decision rights will not be redeemed by more powerful tools. Instead, those tools may accelerate existing dysfunction—producing faster feedback loops around poorly framed problems.
This is not a rejection of AI, but a caution against technological determinism. The limiting factor in most organisations is not computational capacity, but conceptual clarity.
The Discipline of Leadership
If Agile's trajectory reveals anything, it is that method cannot substitute for mindset.
To lead in complex environments is not to impose certainty, but to create the conditions in which better decisions can emerge. This requires a form of disciplined humility: an acceptance of the limits of planning, the partiality of information, and the inevitability of trade-offs.
It also requires clarity about where authority resides.
One of the more uncomfortable implications of Agile, properly understood, is that leaders must relinquish certain forms of control. Not all decisions can be escalated. Not all outcomes can be specified. This introduces variability, and with it, risk.
The temptation is to reintroduce control through process. Yet, as Kearns suggests, this often undermines the very adaptability organisations seek.
Richard Hackman's work on teams is instructive here. Effective teams require clear direction, enabling structure, and supportive context—but not constant oversight. The distinction between enabling and constraining is subtle, and frequently misunderstood.
What Is Worth Retaining?
It would be a mistake to conclude that Agile should be abandoned. Its core insights remain sound: that work should be organised around outcomes rather than tasks; that learning is iterative; that those closest to the work possess critical knowledge.
The question is how those insights can be retained without the accretion of ritual that has accompanied their diffusion.
Kearns' answer is not prescriptive. He does not advocate a new framework to replace the old. Instead, he calls for a more discriminating approach: to separate principle from practice, to examine which elements genuinely support better work, and to discard those that have become performative.
This is, in essence, a return to first principles.
It also places a greater burden on leadership. Without the scaffolding of rigid frameworks, leaders must exercise judgement. They must decide where autonomy is appropriate, where coordination is essential, and how to balance the two in a way that reflects the organisation's context.
There is no universal template for this. That is precisely the point.
A More Difficult Question
If Agile once promised liberation, its current discontents invite a more difficult question: not whether Agile works, but whether organisations are willing to accommodate the conditions under which it can work.
Autonomy is not simply granted; it is sustained through trust, clarity of purpose, and a tolerance for variation. These are demanding requirements. They run counter to many established practices of management and governance.
It may be that the "trough of disillusionment" is less a verdict on Agile than a recognition of these constraints. The ideas were always more radical than their institutional adoption suggested.
If you are responsible for leading teams, designing organisations, or overseeing transformation programmes, this is a conversation worth engaging with in full.
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Good night, and good luck.
