The crisis in agile with Jurgen Appelo
Resources
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson as they chat with Jurgen Appelo about the crisis in the agile community.
We explore how the agile job market has changed with diminishing roles for agile coaches and scrum masters. And we discuss what people can do now that the agile consulting and training gold rush is over. We talk about the poor quality of agile practices in organizations claiming to have done agile. And the need to improve further, to get the benefits available. And we talk about the evolution and rebranding of agile practices and the impact of AI on the industry.
Gain valuable insights into the future of agile, the importance of adapting to change and strategies for sustaining relevance in a shifting market.
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Shanes Summary
Agile is dead, long live agility. Embrace your wow, embrace your authenticity because that’s what makes you different from the machine. And AI will be the next step change for society. Change with it and change fast cause that’s what agility is all about.
Podcast Transcript
Read along you will
Shane: Welcome to the No Nonsense Agile podcast. I’m Shane Gibson.
Murray: And I’m Murray Robinson.
Jurgen: And I am Jurgen Apello
Murray: hi Jurgen thanks for coming on today.
Jurgen: Thanks for inviting me.
## Meet Jurgen Apello
Murray: We’re going to talk about the crisis in the Agile community. Before we do, can you give us a brief intro about who you are and what you’re up to?
Jurgen: Absolutely. I originally started out as a software engineer, but was too bad at programming to keep doing that. Got promoted into management. Wrote a book called Management 3.0, made me famous in the agile community. My most recent work is the UNFIX model, which is a pattern library of good practices to consider if you want your organization to scale out rather than scale up.
## The crisis in the agile community
Murray: You said there’s a crisis in the Agile community. What is going on?
Jurgen: My observation is that I see my LinkedIn stream full of people moaning and complaining about the state of the Agile community. Whether it is Agile is dead memes, or it is so difficult to find a job as an Agile coach or scrum master these days. Some people literally say, I don’t use the word Agile anymore because it doesn’t get me hired.
Then there are people who are responding to that saying, no, Agile is not dead. It is now everywhere. We won. I saw exactly that kind of post this morning, as an example, Gojko Adjic posted that but also Jim Highsmith and Scott Ambler have posted similar articles. And I agree with everyone, but at least there is something going on.
## Challenges in Agile Roles and Transformations
Murray: Yeah, I know from people I talk to in the community that it has got really hard to find a job as an Agile coach. And a lot of people have taken jobs as delivery managers or project managers. People who used to be project managers are going back to it. A lot of people, can’t find a job as a scrum master or everyone’s insisting on having a combined job, scrum master slash dev lead or scrum master slash BA/
Shane: Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of Agile delivery leads. So instead of Agilists being behind the team, helping the team do better work and adopt change quicker and easier and less risk. They’re now being put in front of the team or between the team and everybody else to manage the delivery or be accountable for the delivery.
Jurgen: Yeah, it makes sense that agile becomes a part of other jobs that need to be more agile but you don’t have this separate role anymore of someone specializing in the agile thing. We’ve had agile transformations, we’ve also had digital transformations, but I don’t see any digital coaches or digital consultants going around. No, everyone needs to be digital these days. We learn it on the job or people help each other out or we might do a course on how to adopt.
We don’t hire a digital consultant to help with digital transformation, as much as we did a long time ago. So yeah, I think it’s a healthy change that we see, but it does mean that anyone who focused on agile aspects of the way of working, whether it is coaches or conference organizers or whatever, they have a hard time finding work.
Shane: If we look at digital transformation, We didn’t have digital coaches. We had big, ugly consulting companies, flooding organizations with people to help with transformation. I was listening to a podcast today and they reckon that 40% of McKinsey’s income is now advising on AI transformation. They jumped from digital to AI and missed agile because there was this role of an agile coach where independent people were actually helping organizations and therefore it’s hard for them to compete whereas right now you don’t see a lot of independents doing AI coaching.
Jurgen: Yeah, these things come and go. I remember the 90s when everyone was transitioning from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word and Lotus 1, 2, 3 to Excel that was big business. I was in that business. I wrote courses. I did two day classes on programming in Excel and making macros in Word because people needed that. But now nobody does that. There’s nobody organizing or attending a two day class on how to use Excel. Sometimes I wish though that people did, because if I see them using the spreadsheet, I think, Oh my God you should attend the course. But there’s no demand for that. It’s behind us. And we see that same with agile and digital
## The Future of Agile and Digital Transformations
Murray: Yeah, there does seem to be a reduced demand for agile and scrum roles, but I would argue that it’s not because we’ve done it and now we’re agile. Agile in these organizations is terrible. They’re doing a whole lot of anti patterns and mean that they just don’t get the benefit of it. The state of agile in these companies that say they are agile and they don’t need agile coaches anymore is half of scrum done badly using JIRA to micromanage people working in a silo within a phased, project outsourced offshore to a low cost country. They have all the same problems that we were trying to solve before Agile came along. They are going over time, over budget, cutting scope, getting bad quality, delivering few benefits. Yet they’re saying, we’re Agile.
So Agile has got a bad name with a lot of people now because they think Agile is heavy processes and a lot of stupid meetings that they don’t get any value out of.
Jurgen: True. Yes. But I’m an optimist at heart. So I see the glass is half full, not half empty, at least as realization that organization needs to be agile. There’s not a discussion anymore. They realize that they need to respond faster to changing markets. And I think AI is making this pressure more obvious for everyone. But as you said companies, are still struggling with how to do agile.
## Adapting to New Realities
Jurgen: What they’re not doing anymore is sending people to two day classes on how to be a Scrum Master or Product Owner. That business model is behind us but organizations still need help improving, adapting faster and so on. It’s just that we need to reach them in different ways. And I have that same realization with my company.
I did two day classes with the Unfix model for two years. And there was certainly interest and some demand, but I see a dwindling, not because there’s less interest in the model. The interest in two day classes is going down. So we need other ways of reaching people. That’s the challenge the community is now struggling with. How do we keep helping them if they’re not going to attend classes, if they’re not going to attend conferences, but they still need help. What do we do?
Murray: The big companies, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, all got quite heavily into Agile transformations about eight years ago, applying the Spotify model and Safe everywhere. But I was speaking to an Agile coach who has friends in the management consulting community and his management consulting friends are now saying, Agile’s over, Agile’s dead. There’s no money in Agile anymore. I think they’ve probably burnt a lot of leaders out. They’ve made big promises and haven’t delivered on them.
Jurgen: You said agile is dead. There’s no money in it anymore. For the people who are making money with agile, agile is dead. And Scott Ambler said, agile is not dead. The agile gold rush is dead.
Shane: If we look at an adoption curve, do we feel that Agile has got a late majority now, and that’s why it seems to be dead?
Jurgen: Just look at what Gojko said this morning on LinkedIn, Gojko Adzic , he said just look around you how often companies release software and how many of them are still writing requirements studies. We made a huge progress there in terms of deployment delivery continuous delivery and breaking requirements up into user story. That is a win. So don’t see that as we have failed. Everyone is basically doing that. They do it badly. Most of them. But at least most are not doing that silly old stuff anymore. Now we have to help them with doing the right thing, instead of doing it badly. So there’s still plenty of work, but in terms of the adoption curve yeah I’d say we are now with the late majority in terms of agile adoption. It’s obvious that you need to be agile. It’s just many suck at it.
Murray: Yeah. So where are we on the Gartner hype cycle? It seems like we’re in the trough of despair at the moment. What do you think Jurgen?
Jurgen: We’re in the trough of despair, for sure. People going around disillusioned about what Agile has achieved for them. It has a bad name in part of the world. So that’s disillusionment. And then the cycle says that it will go up again because it will be part of the new normal.
We have tempered our expectations of what agile can do for us in the short term. Now we have to find our way back up. Make it part of everything we do in a way that everyone understands. That is perhaps even a lot more work.
Shane: I’ve spent a lot more time in the product domain over the last couple of years and what’s interesting is when I see a high performing product team, I see agility. Lots of change quickly, low risk, lots of experimentation, lots of change of practices when it’s not working. But I never hear the word agile. In fact, a lot of the people in the product domain slag agile off and I sit there thinking, but actually you’re showing high levels of agility. I think some of the certifications are definitely dead. Big methodology, hopefully is dead. But this idea of incremental change, I don’t think it is.
## The Role of AI in Agile Practices
Shane: And it’s AI. It’s going to trigger organizations to increase their agility to survive.
Jurgen: Yeah. Some might even say, Yay for that. Certain large scaling frameworks should be dead. And now we can focus on what’s really important.
Murray: If we look back into what happened with Lean, I think we can get quite a lot of lessons. What happened was that companies started to adopt lean in America and did a bad job of it because they didn’t really change their thinking. Toyota and some of the other Japanese companies were so much better that they just kept getting more and more market share, and more profit. So the people who were really good at lean did get a lot of advantage from it. And the people who did a shit job of copying it couldn’t rest because they were being out competed in the marketplace. And I wonder if we’re saying the same thing here, where organizations that have adopted a new business model with agile and other innovative ways of working find it gives them a strong competitive advantage. And so they’re just going to keep getting more successful. And all of the companies that said, Oh, we’ve done it. It’s implemented now. They’re just going to slowly wither away. And , every now and then their management are going to realize, this is actually working for some people so we’ve got to reinvest in it.
Jurgen: I read this super interesting book, Co Intelligence, by Ethan Mollick about everything that’s happening in the world of AI. And one interesting thing that he’s observed is that the current technologies with Gen AI and so on, help those who are worst at their job. So if you’re really bad writer, you gain a lot from using Gen AI and bring it up to a level that is not too bad. If you’re good at writing, it doesn’t help you much because AI hasn’t reached your level yet. So you can ask it for feedback perhaps, and it’ll give you some pointers and you can get a little bit better, but the difference is negligible compared to the difference for those who are bad at it. Jeff Sutherland wrote about how they experiment with ChatGPT in the agile process and it seems to help those who have wasted quite a bit of time on ceremonies. So those who are worst at agile practices and ceremonies have most to gain from inviting ChatGPT or other AI tools into their team and help them out so that the difference between the really good people can actually get smaller.
Murray: If you get 10 percent of the benefit of agile and say, we’re done because you don’t want to change your authoritarian siloed management structure. And you’re competing with another company that’s got 80 percent of the benefit of agile, then that company is going to do better than you over the long run, because their operating model is just superior, just like companies that do lean really well. Organizations that are doing well at a new operating model will grow and the others will either die or have to change.
Shane: What happens is the companies that are really good, the companies that have agility, they don’t go out talking about it. Cause why would they? They’re successful companies. And the Haier example, they don’t go out and talk about it and teach it. They just do it because it’s their competitive advantage. So I agree with you Murray that there are organizations that will just keep increasing their agility and dominate their market segments. And then the rest of the organizations will jump on the next bandwagon, which will be AI and try and adopt it because they’re trying to copy everybody else rather than optimizing their business to be a profitable business.
Jurgen: I think the companies that suck most at being lean and being agile have most to gain from using AI, while the others are already so good that for them the difference is negligible in what they can get out of such technology.
Part of the success of Substack is that we are now prepared to pay for authentic writing from people that we trust. I’ve never imagined five, 10, 15 years ago that we would pay for newsletters and blog posts. That was social media marketing. We did that for free, but now there’s so much crap out there on the Internet that we’re willing to pay for that, which is authentically unique.
Murray: I want to come back to the crisis. Cause I see at least two crises: one is the crisis in making money. So it’s got harder to get consulting gigs. It’s got harder to sell training. It’s got harder to get a job using this agile brand name.
The other crisis is that there’s an awful lot of very bad practices out there being called agile and people getting little benefit out of it. And as a result of that agile getting a bad name and lots of people saying, I don’t want to do it. Developers complaining agile is terrible. I hate it. It’s all JIRA tickets and meetings.
Jurgen: Indeed, we could call them the agile gold rush crisis and the agile mindset crisis. I’m not sure if there are more. Not everything is a gold rush. There’s a lot of time, effort and energy spent by volunteers, such as the ones organizing conferences and so on. And there’s a crisis there too, because there are fewer events, fewer people showing up . And I would not want to call that gold rush because these are people with the best intentions trying to do a good job for the community. I know many of them and they’re in a crisis as well. So maybe that’s a third one, which is intimately related to the other two. I feel it myself that there’s less demand for two day workshops.
But fine, Never waste a good crisis. I move on and I offer other things that will hopefully be successful. That’s a good thing. Let’s practice what we preach and adapt to changing environments. We’ve been telling people that for 20 years now we have to do that ourselves. Nothing wrong with that.
But the agile mindset issue will continue. People will always suck at what they do. Just look at people running marathons. Most of them suck at running marathons, but they do it because they want to participate and a few learn how to do it well. But if we look at people running marathons now versus 50 years ago, then everyone is doing it better. It’s all going up, but you will always see that exponential curve of 10 percent doing well, 90 percent is crap. Sturgeon’s law. 90 percent of everything is crap and this always applies to everything, whether it’s writing, running, doing agile, whatever. It’s a universal law.
Shane: I’ve just got on Google Trends and Agile, it’s been consistent from 2016 onwards, and it hasn’t actually dropped. So the term is still very popular in terms of searching.
Murray: I think that there’s some rebranding going on of Agile.
## Rebranding Agile and New Business Models
Murray: This is possibly a way out of the trap. I see Marty Kagan’s product model as just being modern Agile that the Agile community has been really talking about for the last 10 years. And people seem to have got enthusiastic about that. And it just seems to be another name for good agile, focused more on product.
Jurgen: I agree. I heard it last week that Agile is becoming product management. It’s just a rebranding, but same ideas modernized and improved. I don’t care about that. I’m not married to the Agile term. I hope it survives, but if it doesn’t, fine with me. I’m not sure what that means in terms of how the brand is perceived. But indeed, at some point, we might see it give way to something else that becomes more popular. I don’t know what it is. Could be product management.
Murray: What’s the answer for those of us who, spend a lot of time and effort learning about all this Agile stuff and still think it’s really good. What should we be doing?
Jurgen: We need to figure out how to reach people. I heard very often in agile communities, the comment, where are the managers? The managers are not here. We should get more managers to these conferences. The managers aren’t coming to these events. If you want to teach them something, you have to go where they already are and bring the agile mindset to them, rather than asking them to come to a conference where people wear sandals and spend their time hugging trees. I love my friends but the managers and leaders who really need it will not come. It’s the same with the classes that I have organized I got a lot of fans and enthusiasts but the ones who really needed it, were not at my workshops. So I should re invent myself and my approach to getting the message to the people who need it in the first place.
For example, I make sure my books are on Amazon, on Apple, on Google, etc. I don’t sell them on my own website. Because it is ridiculously difficult to get people to your own website to purchase your book there. People are not on my website. They are on Amazon. That’s where they purchase books. So I have to make sure my books are there. It’s the same principle. So we have to go where leaders and managers already are, whether it is Davos or whatever. That’s where we had to spread the message and then also figure out what is the business model on the revenue stream behind this, because otherwise it’s not sustainable for ourselves, but they’re not coming to scrum. org or Agile in Europe. That’s for sure.
Shane: Yeah, I agree. with you on that one. Things move on. The question is, what’s the new business model? What are organizations looking for when they want to make change? What is the thing they’re looking for help with? And then how do you monetize your effort to help them with that?
Murray: I would say what leaders want is more output. They want to know what changes can we make to the team to drive faster, to get them more predictable, to deliver more output. How can we make them more like a factory? Help me use story points to work out individual developer productivity so I can fire the bottom 30%.
Shane: I think the new wave will be around visualizing the flow of knowledge work across the organization and then figuring out where the choke points are. And then what can we change via technology or team design to remove that choke point to optimize that flow of work.
Jurgen: Murray is right. Companies still have money to spend on helping their organization be more productive. That is perhaps the thing that managers and leaders are looking for. How do I get my people to do more in less time? And we need to figure out as business people, how are they spending money on that problem, and then feed them the message in that way.
My own guess is that more money is spent on online learning these days, than in the past. There are budgets for personal development. People can spend that to some extent in any way they want, just show me the metrics improving. And here is a budget to get some courses on Udemy or Skillshare to get that done. There you have a potential business model. I am investing right now in more online learning, which is something I did very little in the past.
Murray: I think the reality is that people are just starting to take agile off their titles and incorporating it into what they do. I’m not a scrum master. I’m a team lead who knows all about scrum. I’m not a agile coach. I’m a project manager who’s going to help you with your agile transformation. I’m not a agile trainer. I am a leadership trainer or I’m a software development trainer, or I’m a productivity consultant.
Shane: Some of the most agile people that I’ve ever worked with never had the word agile in their title but they had massive amount of agility.
Jurgen: Perhaps it’s a good thing that the word agile disappears from titles. One person said to me I’m not an agile coach anymore. I advise on ways of working. Okay. I like that. I like the term ways of working. So maybe that could take over from agile. Another good development is that frameworks are a thing of the past as far as I can see. Pattern libraries are a thing these days not just with my UNFIX model, but also team topologies and liberating structures and others out there that have a more common sense approach to to deconstructing the static frameworks into individual patterns that you have to apply and recombine in your own context. That makes sense. I think overall we’re further than we were in 2001 when agile was this new thing and needed a manifesto to get started with this global movement. But overall, I’m an optimist. The glass is half full, not half empty. I’m glad we got as far as we are now.
Yes, Murray 90 percent of everything is crap. That will always be true, whether it is Agile or whatever way we’re going to rebrand the whole thing, even if we don’t use it anymore in Agile titles.
## Personal Reflections and Future Directions
Murray: You’re going to focus more on online training content, are you?
Jurgen: Yeah, we did quite a few experiments as the Unfix company . We did two day classes. We did a bit of coaching. consultancy, ignition programs, online learning various other things. And the e learning stuff is going well compared to the others. So we’re going to double down on online learning. And then the question is, how do we do that? I want stuff to be available on Udemy, because that’s where people look for career advancing courses that cost only $10, but help them out with their next job interview. But then if they want to really advance stuff, they will have to come to our website to get the full courses.
I think we’re going to do more of that and leave the two day classes behind. I still have a few scheduled in the next couple of months, but that is more of an experiment to see how other topics would be doing if that would sell better. But overall, I think we’re going to schedule far fewer of those than I did in the past.
And I’m having fun learning how to edit videos, record videos, write scripts, use special effects and so on. A whole new box of talents is being developed. We all need to be continuous learners and I actually look forward to that new part of my professional life.
Murray: You could perhaps pivot out of unfix and say that’s good, but it’s, Not as popular as it used to be. So now I’m going to come up with some different model or knowledge domain. Like we’re going to see Jurgen Apello’s AI patterns.
Jurgen: Yeah. I was on a two month trip in the Caribbean this summer, and I can tell you Murray that really enables you to look at yourself from a distance when you’re floating in the water, snorkeling among the fish, and then you think what the hell am I doing on this planet? Nobody here cares one bit about what I am doing with the Unfix model. It is not on their minds. It will never be on their minds. But they do have concerns, which is better jobs better management of their teams. I think that is the thing that I will still be working on for the next 15 years, helping people do better work, better ways of working, whether we call it Agile or Unfix or whatever brands we currently have.
I have focused on organization design the last two years because I thought that was done badly by the frameworks out there. I thought I could make a difference there with the crew types patterns and a few others, but that is too narrow. There’s nobody in the wider world out there interested in coming to the Unfix company for patterns for organizational structure. That’s a very niche topic. So I have to extend that and come back to management and leadership and organizational change and so on. That is a thing that will always be important. 90 percent of everything people do will always suck. So there will be a demand for how do we make things better? People will not be looking for agile, but they will be looking for how do I make my teams more productive and how can I get a better job with online learning as a business model and also I’m experimenting with substack, with authentic human writing that people will pay for. That is a new thing. With all that A. I. mediocrity that is coming out these days, there are more people willing to pay for what is authentically made by a human. So there are opportunities to make money where we couldn’t in the past. So I’m not sure which direction everything goes, Murray, but I am definitely changing direction, but the domain will still be management and leadership as I have been working on for the last few years.
Murray: Shane, what about you? How are you responding to this crisis? Is it affecting you and your consulting work?
Shane: I was quite lucky because I went into a startup with product and decided to go into a world of hurt doing that and ignore the world when agile coaching died. I still love coaching. I still love working with teams helping teams enjoy their work and do better work. I still think it’s valuable but the roles got commoditized. You can’t differentiate yourself from everybody else unless you know the people.
I’m not convinced online learning is the answer. I think we’ll see more one on one mentoring and being paid for that. You can’t scale that work. But then those people won’t pay $600 an hour. Will they pay $200? Don’t know. Interesting question. We’re going through a step change, ask me in five years what the answer was and I’ll tell you.
Murray: My response has been to effectively retire. I’m 60 now and I’ve got enough money in the bank where I don’t have to work anymore. I’ve been doing consulting gigs when people ask me to. So I did agile coaching for AI machine learning company a couple of years ago, which was interesting and difficult and challenging. I also went and helped a traditional pharmaceutical company doing straight project management on the condition that it be, agile and it got so awful that I just walked away even though they’re paying me bucket loads of money. If people want me to help them do good effective ways of working, I will. If they want me to run their big project and do it using all of the stuff we talk about I’ll help them out. I just can’t be bothered running around applying for a thousand jobs and, spamming everybody because I don’t need to anymore.
I think there are quite a lot of people retiring or semi retiring. That’s another approach.
Jurgen: It’s definitely approach if you can afford it, Murray, but there are quite a few people out there who can’t. They’re younger than we are. And they have to find something else. I will never retire. I’m pretty sure I will just steadily focus more of my time on the things that I love doing rather than the things that I need to be doing to earn a living. But whether I’m 78 or 90, I will always be working. I’m pretty sure of that.
Murray: I used to say that, Jürgen, but I enjoy doing this. I put quite a bit of time into this podcast and that’s what I enjoy doing. I’m happy with that at the moment. Maybe you’d be happy swimming in the Seychelles and writing science fiction books.
Jurgen: I would very much enjoy that for sure.
## Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Murray: All right, Shane, do we want to summarize this conversation?
Shane: So I got some takeaways. Agile is dead, long live agility. Embrace your wow, embrace your authenticity because that’s what makes you different from the machine. And AI will be the next step change for society. Change with it and change fast cause that’s what agility is all about. So that’s me, Murray. What about you?
Murray: It’s interesting for us, people who talk about agility and innovation, experimentation and change, when you’ve got to go and change yourself, you don’t want to. You’re committed to what you’re doing before. You thought what you’re doing was good you don’t want to give it up.
Fundamentally, I think that there is a lot of value in Agile, Lean and empowered teams. So I think that the people who are doing it well are getting a lot of benefit out of it and they’re going to continue doing it. They might not call it agile anymore. It might get dissolved into other roles. Ten percent will get a lot of benefit and the other 90 percent will say they’re doing it and not really do it, not really get much benefit from it, and they’ll just be out competed. So we’re going to get more change in the market. I think AI is, the new gold rush and the new hype train. It’s been a lot faster than some of the other ones. And I think that there’s a enormous amount of exaggeration, but Maybe I should release my Agile AI coach that I’ve been working on, Shane.
Jurgen: My own two cents are let’s practice what we preach. As Agile coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, and so on, we’ve told people for years that they should adapt to changing environments. Now we have to do that ourselves. Eat our own dog food. Don’t waste a good crisis. In a way we should be happy that some of the silly stuff, the Agile gold Rush with frameworks and certification is going to be behind us. Goodbye and good riddance. Now we can focus on what is truly valuable, but that requires figuring out how to make it sustainable for yourself in terms of a business model, because some of us have families and households to pay for. That is the challenge. How can we make this a job? It’s a challenge that I love embracing myself.
Murray: Thanks for coming on Jürgen. That’s been fun.
Jurgen: It was a pleasure. Thanks for the conversation. You too, Shane.
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