Why Agility Matters

And How to Break the Cycle When It Doesn’t

Nov 13, 2025

Hello everyone!

What if your organization’s “Agility” dysfunction isn’t an implementation problem but a missing-conditions problem that switching to, say, a product operating model cannot solve?

This article identifies the success factors for agility that are absent in your organization. It gives you concrete Monday-morning actions to test what’s actually possible within your sphere of influence to drive change, because agility matters.

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Does Agility in Your Organization Feel Like This?

Let me guess: You have sat through the training. You know the “ceremonies.” Your organization proudly calls itself “agile,” while every meaningful decision gets made three levels above you. Your Retrospectives generate action items that vanish into management theater. Your Daily Scrums are status reports for people who never show up. The product roadmap was decided before your team existed.

Now someone’s excited about adopting a “product operating model.” Different label, same playbook.

Sound familiar?

Have you noticed that you’re practicing agile rituals without the conditions that make them useful? That’s not your problem; that’s a system design problem. Your organization extracted the rituals from your agile framework of choice while, at best, ignoring and, more likely, rejecting the fundamental purpose those events serve.

Let’s figure out what’s broken, why it matters, and what you can actually do about it without waiting for executive enlightenment or switching to the next cool kid on the agile block: the product operating model.

Why Agility Matters and What It Is Actually For

Strip away the frameworks and the hourly billing. Agile practices solve one problem: How do you deliver value when you can’t know everything your customers need upfront?

That’s it. Not “how do we have better meetings,” or “how do we feel more empowered,” or “how do we democratize decision-making.” The question is: How do we work effectively when uncertainty is baked into the work itself?

Users don’t know what they need until they see it working. Technical solutions reveal constraints during implementation. Requirements change while you’re building. Integration breaks things that looked fine in isolation. These phenomena aren’t a planning failure, but the nature of complex product development.

Agile practices are risk-mitigation tools for uncertain environments. The goal isn’t eliminating uncertainty (impossible) or building faster (nice but secondary). The goal is to discover and respond to uncertainty before you spend months building the wrong thing.

The Three Questions That Actually Matter

Limited budget. Unlimited requests. Every choice is a trade-off with an opportunity cost: the resources we spend here can’t be spent there.

Agile practices exist to answer three questions quickly and cheaply:

Are we solving the right problem?
Are we solving it the right way?
Is this the most valuable thing we could be working on right now?

Traditional approaches try to answer these after six months, during the big reveal. Agile practices answer them every Sprint, every release, sometimes every day.

If the answers to all three were decided before the team started, what gets built, when it ships, and how success is measured, then these questions are irrelevant to your daily work.

You’re not practicing Agile, which is fine, as we are not paid to practice Scrum but to solve our customers’ problems within the given constraints while contributing to the organization’s sustainability. What you practice is much worse: You’re performing agile theater in a feature factory. That’s a system design choice, not a personal failure.

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Why Your “Ceremonies” Feel Like Theater

Retrospectives feel like a stage play when you can’t act on what you learn. Sprint Planning becomes theater when the product roadmap and the Product Goal are decided elsewhere. Daily Scrums become status reports when nobody trusts the team to make decisions.

This effect isn’t because you’re doing, for example, Scrum “wrong.” It’s because the conditions that make Scrum valuable don’t exist.

What Actual Agility Requires

Agility, or the ability to learn faster than the competition and turn this advantage into superior products and services, requires capabilities alignment at three levels:

Organizational Level:

Teams with absolute decision authority (not “empowerment theater”).
Leadership that provides context and constraints, not predetermined solutions.
Budgets allocated to outcomes, not feature lists.
Tolerance for learning through failures.
Access to actual customers or end users.

Team Level:

Clear purpose and boundaries (the “why” and the constraints).
Autonomy on the “how.”
Information and resources to make decisions.
Psychological safety to surface problems.
Shared understanding of “done” and quality.

Individual Level:

Accountability for outcomes, not task completion.
Focus on value creation, not looking busy.
Willingness to learn and adapt.
Team success over personal heroics.
Comfort with uncertainty.

Count how many of these exist in your organization. Be honest, as agility matters.

Now notice the connections: When organizational autonomy is absent, Sprint Planning becomes theater because decisions are made elsewhere. When psychological safety is missing, Retrospectives produce safe, yet meaningless action items. When success metrics reward activity over outcomes, people optimize for looking busy.

This dysfunction isn’t random. It’s the predictable result of missing success factors. The “ceremonies” can’t work because the soil conditions don’t exist; they never become meaningful events in the first place.

The Product Operating Model Trap

If the conditions for agility don’t exist, renaming roles and reorganizing teams won’t create them. You’re paid to solve customer problems within organizational constraints. Whether you use Scrum, SAFe, a “product operating model,” or sticky notes on a wall doesn’t matter.

What matters: Can teams learn what customers need? Can they make decisions based on that learning? Can they prioritize value over predetermined feature lists? Can they access the resources and information needed to deliver?

If those conditions don’t exist under your current “agile transformation,” they won’t appear because project managers are rebranded as “product managers” or teams are relabeled as “product teams.” That’s product washing; new business cards, same dysfunction.

A product operating model becomes real only when the organization changes decision rights, budget allocation, success metrics, and leadership behaviors together. Without those changes, it’s just another theatrical performance. And we have had our fair share of those in the past already.

How to Start When Agility Matters

You’re not powerless. You can act within your sphere of influence. That’s often enough to start something. The vicious cycle runs on learned helplessness. Breaking it doesn’t require a transformation program; it just takes one move you can make without asking permission:

If You’re a Team Member:

Monday: Choose between two technical approaches without asking permission. Document your reasoning. See what happens.
What you’re testing: Do you actually need approval for technical decisions, or have you just been conditioned to ask?

If You’re a Scrum Master or Agile Coach:

This week: Cancel one event that consistently produces no decisions or learning. Don’t replace it. Tell your team why.
What you’re testing: Does the event serve the work, or just the performance, or the need to be visibly busy?

If You’re a Manager:

Tomorrow: Pick one approval you’re gatekeeping. Give the decision criteria to the team instead of making the decision yourself. Let them run with it.
What you’re testing: Do clear constraints enable autonomy? (They usually do.)

Do this consistently, and you create evidence. Evidence that autonomy doesn’t produce chaos, that people closer to the work make better decisions, and that trust, when given, gets earned. Now, let’s repeat what agility is: building the organization’s capacity to learn faster than constraints change. Discover what’s worth building before you spend six months on the wrong thing.

If you create small spaces where people make real decisions, test actual assumptions, and learn from reality, you have started something useful. It might not spread beyond your team. Your organization might not be ready. But you’ll be solving real problems rather than just performing an “agile methodology.”

When the next framework arrives (and it will), ask: What conditions does this require to work? Do those conditions exist here? Can we create them? If not, what are we pretending to accomplish?

That clarity is more valuable than any certification.

Conclusion

Agile practices fail when the organizational conditions for learning don’t exist. You can’t fix that with better events or by transitioning this dysfunction to a product operating model, hoping for better results.

But you can act within your sphere of influence, create evidence that autonomy works, and stop performing someone else’s methodology. Pick one action from this article and run the experiment this week. If it works, repeat it. If it doesn’t, you’ve learned something valuable about your constraints. Either way, you’ll have solved a real problem instead of waiting for the next transformation program to save you.

Thanks for reading Hands-on Agile by Stefan Wolpers! This post is public so feel free to share it.