As I’ve gotten older, it’s hard to fight the cynicism I feel anytime someone touts a new process or technology whose main feature is empowerment. I now always think “Who will centralize this? How will they do it? What are their motives?”
Nothing but the opposites of AM are being implemented, as taught by consultants. Interesting to note as fake agility gained traction, budgets and power concentrated to top leadership only.
To be fair though, not sure how to turn a tanker without centralized controls.
Yup. You've put your finger on what I think is one of the big mistakes of the Agile movement. I wrote about it some a decade ago. [1] Early on it was a lot of well-meaning idealists. I'm not sure if people failed to imagine it becoming the dominant paradigm or if they weren't sufficiently cynical about what would happen once it did.
I'm honestly not sure if they could have avoided the current outcome. It was always a pretty loose coalition. But I think trademarking Agile and setting down some strong minimum standards could have helped. But even that might have been washed away by Scrum's "certifying" anybody who could fog a mirror and the attendant revenue for people whose personal interest was in watering things down.
