Reclaiming meaning in software development
I. The Word We Emptied
We’ve talked a lot about “agility.”
Too much, probably.
Today, everything is agile: companies, project managers, organizations, teams, ambitions.
We don’t think anymore, we iterate.
We don’t design anymore, we sprint.
We don’t work anymore, we collaborate in agile mode.
But this word, hammered relentlessly, has lost its meaning.
Agility has become a moral label, a refuge-word to avoid thinking about complexity.
Modern Agile is a method of obedience presented as a method of adaptation.
It doesn’t liberate: it reassures those who fear losing control.
In most organizations, “doing agile” means following rituals: daily meetings, sprint reviews, backlog grooming.
The verb has disappeared; only the liturgy remains.
And like any religion, it punishes doubt and rewards conformity.
Being agile today means knowing how to bend quickly and smile in meetings.
But in this performance of movement, where is the real action?
Where is the thinking?
II. When Agility Replaces Thought
Agility, as practiced today, no longer serves to think:
it serves to avoid thinking.
It’s an Orwellian system disguised as a modern method.
We don’t reflect anymore, we apply.
We repeat ceremonies, rituals, keywords.
And nobody asks anymore whether what we’re doing is right, useful, coherent — or even sensible.
Projects no longer have foundations, only sprints.
Ideas no longer have logic, only Jira tickets.
Specifications — functional or technical — have disappeared.
They were the expression of structured thought, of a will toward coherence.
We replaced them with colored post-its and hollow user stories,
as if color could substitute for concept.
We no longer structure thought, we chop it into tasks.
And nobody remembers the original question anymore.
Managerial agility has become the most formidable of intellectual tranquilizers:
it gives the illusion of movement while neutralizing critical thinking.
III. The Forces That Killed Agility
Agility didn’t die by accident.
It was killed.
Not all at once, not through malice.
But through progressive capture, by those who had an interest in it becoming something else:
a product, a certification, a method to sell.
Here’s how.
The Merchants of the Temple
Consulting firms turned Agile into a revenue machine.
The equation is simple:
More roles = more consultants to place.
More ceremonies = more billable days.
More complexity = more dependency.
The Scrum Master, the Product Owner, the Agile Coach, the Release Train Engineer…
So many roles that didn’t exist before.
So many profiles to sell to clients.
Agility promised team autonomy.
We made it an industry of permanent mediation.
Where there used to be developers talking to customers,
we inserted certified intermediaries.
And we called it progress.
The Diploma Sellers
Certification bodies transformed an open practice into a closed club.
Scrum Alliance, Scaled Agile Inc., ICAgile…
Thousands of dollars to learn to recite a manual.
Two days of training, an MCQ, a laminated card.
And there you are: certified agile.
But certified in what, exactly?
In conformity. In orthodoxy. In the ability to repeat dogma.
“You’re not a Certified Scrum Master? Then you can’t possibly understand.”
Response: “Yes, and I’m proud of it.”
Certification isn’t a guarantee of competence.
It’s an economic filter that excludes those who think differently,
and a guarantee of docility that reassures those who hire.
We no longer train practitioners.
We produce reciters.
The Hierarchies That Fear
Pyramidal structures adopted agile vocabulary without changing structure.
Agility supposes autonomy, trust, distributed decision-making.
But organizations never really let go of power.
So they pretend.
We organize dailies, but the VP validates.
We do sprints, but the steering committee decides.
We talk about self-organizing teams, but every decision goes up three levels.
Agile became managerial doublespeak:
we say “empowerment” to avoid saying “obedience,“
we say “iteration” to avoid saying “we don’t know,“
we say “pivot” to avoid saying “we were wrong.”
The vocabulary changed.
The structure remained.
And everyone pretends not to notice.
The Tools That Replace Thinking
Jira, Trello, Monday: the tool dictates the method, the method dictates thought.
Or rather: it replaces it.
We no longer think in terms of problem to solve.
We think in terms of tickets to close.
The question is no longer “what are we building and why?”.
The question is: “how many story points in this sprint?”.
Projects no longer have architecture.
They have infinite backlogs, fragmented epics, sprints that succeed each other without ever converging toward a vision.
The tool convinced us that chopping up was enough to understand.
That the sum of tickets equaled a coherent product.
It’s false.
A project without foundation is just a permanent construction site.
And a backlog isn’t thought: it’s a shopping list.
Jargon as Smokescreen
Sprint. Backlog. Daily. PO. SM. Epic. User story. Refinement. Velocity. Burndown.
Nobody really knows what we’re doing anymore,
but everyone speaks the same hollow language.
Jargon allows us to stop understanding each other while appearing to communicate.
It creates an illusion of mastery where confusion reigns.
And above all, it excludes.
Those who don’t speak the language can’t participate.
Those who ask “what does that mean, concretely?” appear backward.
Jargon isn’t a tool of precision.
It’s a tool of symbolic domination.
Regional Variations
The disease is international, but takes different forms:
In command-and-control cultures:
Agile vocabulary adopted, hierarchical structure maintained.
We have ceremonies, but decisions still flow top-down.
In certification-obsessed markets:
Gatekeeping through credentials becomes the norm.
No certificate? No legitimacy.
In staff augmentation economies:
Agile becomes a way to maximize billable hours.
More roles, more consultants, more revenue.
Everywhere:
Passive resistance and performance theater.
5-minute dailies where nobody speaks.
Sprint reviews showing slides instead of products.
Retrospectives where we write post-its we’ll never read again.
Notable Examples
Capital One laid off over 1,000 Agile roles in recent years, deeming them unnecessary.
Dave Thomas, one of the original Agile Manifesto signatories, declared “Agile is Dead” — killed by the certification and consulting industry.
Ron Jeffries, co-creator of Extreme Programming, coined the term “Dark Scrum” to describe what agility has become: a tool of control rather than liberation.
The evidence is everywhere. The diagnosis is clear.
And Us, In All This?
We could point fingers at consultants, certifiers, managers.
But let’s be honest:
we let it happen.
We accepted the jargon to avoid appearing outdated.
We followed the rituals to avoid being excluded.
We closed our eyes to the absurdity to keep our jobs.
Agility wasn’t killed by villains.
It was killed by our collective consent to the theater.
IV. What the Word Used to Mean
Before being a method, agile is a word.
An old word, from Latin agilis, itself derived from agere: to act, to set in motion.
But agere in Latin has nothing frantic about it: it’s right action, controlled act.
Agere means making what should move, move — not stirring everything up to prove you exist.
The agile, in its original sense, isn’t one who moves a lot.
It’s one who moves well.
In nature, it’s crystal clear:
- The cat doesn’t pounce without observing.
- The bird doesn’t beat its wings without reading the wind.
- The tree bends in the storm but doesn’t break.
- Water always finds its way, not through force, but through discernment.
Nothing is fixed, nothing is frantic.
Living things act with economy.
They seek right movement, not visible performance.
That’s true agility:
that of instinct, of measure, of intelligent relationship with the world.
Humans thought they could industrialize it.
So they made it a method.
And, as often happens, they killed what they claimed to understand.
V. What We Should Become Again
Being agile, in the true sense, isn’t conforming to a framework,
it’s understanding the dynamics of reality and responding with discernment.
That’s what artisans, researchers, navigators, gardeners do:
they observe, adapt, correct.
They know that nature doesn’t read manuals.
True agility is the alchemy of reality.
Observe, understand, adjust — and only then, act.
We traded freedom of action for security of protocol.
We preferred speed to rightness.
And we call that progress.
But progress without consciousness is just runaway momentum.
And a world that can’t stop always ends up falling.
VI. What We Should Ask Ourselves
We don’t propose a method.
We don’t prescribe a practice.
We ask questions.
Those we should ask ourselves before each sprint, each meeting, each decision.
Not to slow down. To move rightly.
About Direction
- Before chopping this project into sprints, do we know where we’re going?
- If we had to explain this project to someone in six months, would we have anything other than a list of tickets?
- What is the central question this project answers? Can we formulate it in one sentence?
- What, in this project, must not change? What must remain stable?
- Are we building something, or are we reacting to something?
About Rituals
- Will this meeting produce a decision or a report?
- If we canceled this daily for a week, what would break?
- How many people in this room are truly necessary for this conversation?
- Are we doing this sprint review to understand what happened or to reassure management?
- Does this ceremony exist because it’s useful, or because we’re afraid of what would happen if we didn’t do it?
About Action
- Are we moving forward because we’ve understood, or because we’re afraid of not moving forward?
- Does this ticket respond to a real problem or a need for movement?
- If we took three days to think this through properly, would we save three weeks?
- What do we lose by going fast? What do we gain by going right?
- Are we solving or working around?
About Language
- When we say “iterate,” do we mean “correct” or “avoid deciding”?
- Does this word (“agile,” “sprint,” “POC,” “MVP”…) still mean something, or do we say it out of habit?
- If we replaced all our method words with plain English, would we understand better what we’re doing?
- Does this jargon help us think together, or does it allow us to stop talking to each other?
About Thinking
- Have we spent as much time designing as executing?
- Who, in this team, has the right to slow down to think without being accused of blocking the project?
- Does this project have an architecture, or only a backlog?
- Can we explain why we’re doing what we’re doing, or only how?
- Is there still someone who remembers the original question?
About Reality
- Are we observing reality, or are we observing our Jira board?
- Did users really ask for this, or did we imagine they asked for it?
- Are we testing our hypotheses, or validating them after the fact to reassure ourselves?
- Who, in this team, talked to a real user this week?
About Freedom
- If someone proposed doing everything differently, would we listen?
- Are we following this method because it’s the best for this project, or because it’s the only one we know?
- Do we have the right to say “no”? To say “wait”? To say “I don’t know”?
- Do we trust people’s intelligence, or only their obedience?
About Meaning
- Why are we doing this project?
- No, really. Why?
- Are we doing something useful, or something measurable?
- If this project disappeared tomorrow, who would notice?
- In six months, will we be proud of what we’ve done, or simply relieved that it’s finished?
🜃
These questions don’t have universal right answers.
They have situated answers, tied to context, project, people.
But they all have one thing in common:
they force us to think before acting.
And that’s true agility.
Not a method.
A vigilance.
🜍 The Day When
The day we stop teaching methods to relearn how to look, listen, understand,
the day we prefer intelligence to conformity,
the day we trust those who think rather than those who recite,
then, perhaps,
we’ll become agile again —
not according to a manual,
but according to life.
Efficient Laziness — Think once, well, and move forward.
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