“Agility is something very, very individual.” - Richard Seidl
Frustration is spreading. Agile today generates more eye rolls and groans than enthusiasm or motivation. We don’t really notice, because we’re all busy tinkering with our prompts and agents. But behind that, something is simmering. And has been for a while.
Why? We humans want simple solutions to complex challenges. And one of the biggest challenges in software development has always been: How do we work together with joy, motivation, and real productivity? How do we get autonomy, belonging, and a sense of self-efficacy to coexist well enough to create something as a group?
And simple solutions, the consulting and tooling industry is happy to provide: Buy this tool, it solves your problems! Use this framework! Implement this model! So we’ve thrown things like test automation, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, DevOps, New Work, etc. at our challenges, hoping they’d disappear. They didn’t. And now we’ve got AI on top: let’s throw something technical and shiny at our very human “problems.”
To be clear: there’s genuinely good stuff in all of that, and each piece has its place. But when I look at the Agile Manifesto, I don’t think that’s what they had in mind.
For me, it’s about communication and the human dimension. How do we build shared understanding? How do we work in a way that respects each other? And above all: How do we become a self-learning system that develops its own processes, rituals, and strategies? I believe agility is something deeply individual for every team. It’s a goal. It’s a process that keeps changing and adapting to what the team needs. Rigid prescriptions don’t fit into that, things like: you must do a 15-minute Daily, you need these exact sprint lengths, and you need to throw story points around. Those can be inspiration. A buffet of best practices that worked well somewhere else. But that doesn’t mean they’ll work for us.
Why does this matter particularly right now?
For the past few years, AI has been part of the picture. We’re currently very focused on something highly technical, and leaving something else out: ourselves. And that’s dangerous, because in the end, the human side matters a lot more than the technical one.
All the love for Claude Coding and prompt engineering aside: we need to pay attention to ourselves and to the people around us.
And that’s exactly where Agile comes in. I don’t believe Agile is dead. Quite the opposite. It’s time we do it “properly.” And properly means something different for every team. Maybe we can’t even call it Agile anymore. Fine. We’ll find another name. But we won’t get out of actually living the ideas and the attitude behind it, not if we want to work well together in the future.