Institutions

Many critiques of Agile assume something went wrong. The story is usually told as a fall from grace: a practical response to software uncertainty that then disappeared beneath ceremonies, certifications, frameworks, and consultants. There is another way to read the same history. Perhaps Agile did not fail. Perhaps it succeeded, and what happened next is simply what institutions do to successful ideas. On that reading the interesting question is not why Agile became institutionalised. It is why successful ideas so reliably do. ...

Few movements in software have been as successful as Agile. What began as a reaction against heavyweight process, exhaustive documentation, and centralised planning became the dominant way organisations talk about building software. And somewhere in that success it acquired certifications, prescribed ceremonies, maturity models, governance structures, a consulting industry, and dedicated management hierarchies, which is to say it acquired most of the things it was a reaction against. The question worth asking is narrow. Not whether Agile succeeded, and not the broad point that institutions reshape ideas, but the specific mechanism. By what steps does a critique of bureaucracy turn into a bureaucracy, when nobody involved wanted that outcome? ...