Enterprise Agile Cathedrals Don’t Solve Problems
Tear Down the Cathedrals, Build the Bazaars - Part 1
Agile promised us freedom. What we got instead was another cage.
During the summertime, I transitioned into a new role after spending more than seven years as an Agile consultant and, even before that, dedicating much of my career to fostering greater agility in teams and organizations. Over the past decade, I’ve been deeply immersed in the Agile movement—championing its principles, navigating its frameworks, and witnessing its impact firsthand. But with this change has come a new perspective. Stepping back from the day-to-day of Agile coaching, I’ve found myself reflecting on what this movement has become, where it has gone astray, and why my own views have shifted so dramatically over the years.
This series is an honest attempt to unpack those reflections, challenge the status quo, and explore my view what agility really means today.
The Revolution That Once Was Agile
When Agile first emerged, it felt like a revolution. It was a powerful, developer-driven rebellion against the rigidity of waterfall processes. The promise was clear:
Deliver value faster.
Adapt to change.
Put the customer at the center of everything.
Empower the people doing the work.
It wasn’t about endless planning or heavyweight processes. It was about creativity, collaboration, and the freedom to build great things in a way that made sense for the team.
I still remember the early days when I was first drawn to Agile, back before 2010. What appealed to me most was its pragmatism - the way it cut through unnecessary complexity and focused on getting things done. At the time, I was the first Scrum Master at a company that desperately needed structure in its development process. Adopting Agile was transformative for us, but not in the way I initially expected.
It wasn’t that we immediately started developing better software - our code didn’t magically become perfect overnight. What changed was our alignment with what actually mattered. Suddenly, the team wasn’t just building features for the sake of building them. We were solving real problems, creating solutions that the business and our users genuinely needed.
Agile helped us strip away the layers of overhead that had bogged us down. Weekly status meetings turned into quick, focused stand-ups. Lengthy project roadmaps were replaced by living backlogs that evolved with our priorities. And, for the first time, developers felt like they had a seat at the table - directly influencing decisions and driving meaningful outcomes.
For me, those early experiences embodied the true spirit of Agile. It wasn’t about certifications, frameworks, or process perfection. It was about trust, focus, and the empowerment of the people doing the work. In that environment, our team thrived, and it felt like anything was possible.
But as Agile grew and spread, something began to shift - and not always for the better. What started as a revolution grounded in pragmatism and empowerment began to morph into something unrecognizable. The freedom and focus I had come to love were slowly replaced by rigid processes and endless layers of ceremony. Agile became less about solving real problems and more about checking boxes.
That disconnect - between the Agile I fell in love with and what it has become in many organizations - is at the heart of why I’m writing this series. I believe we can reclaim the essence of Agile, but only if we’re willing to challenge the status quo and focus on what truly matters.
Where Agile Lost Its Way
As Agile grew in popularity, it became a victim of its own success. What began as a grassroots movement to empower teams and streamline work became an industry in itself - an Agile Industrial Complex driven by frameworks, certifications, and consulting engagements. The question shifted from “How do we empower teams to deliver value?” to “How can we scale this across hundreds or thousands of people?”
To answer that question, organizations turned to big frameworks like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), and others. These frameworks promised to bring order to large, complex environments by creating detailed guidelines, rigid processes, and layers of coordination. On paper, they looked like the answer to every enterprise’s problems -a way to align massive teams, synchronize deliveries, and maintain predictability.
But in practice, these frameworks often produced the opposite effect. Instead of streamlining work, they added new layers of bureaucracy. Instead of empowering teams, they created rigid hierarchies that stifled creativity. The original spirit of Agile - flexibility, collaboration, and focusing on real customer needs - was buried under an avalanche of ceremonies, reports, and certifications.
Agile had become a cathedral
Grand, complex systems that dazzled executives but failed to address the actual needs of teams.
Rigid frameworks that demanded adherence over adaptability.
Endless ceremonies (aka meetings) that prioritized process over outcomes.
These enterprise cathedrals were supposed to solve problems, but in reality, they often created new ones. Teams found themselves stuck in endless alignment meetings, disconnected from their customers, and frustrated by the very frameworks that promised to make their work easier. Agile, once a tool for liberation, had become just another cage.
The Problems with Enterprise Cathedrals
1. Beautiful on Paper, Broken in Practice
Frameworks like SAFe and LeSS sell a seductive vision: alignment, predictability, and scalable agility. Their diagrams and flowcharts look polished, their training sessions promise quick results, and their certifications imply mastery. But reality rarely aligns with the theory.
Real-world work is messy, unpredictable, and full of surprises. Frameworks that look perfect in presentations often fail to accommodate the nuances of individual teams or projects. Instead, they impose one-size-fits-all solutions that ignore the unique challenges of each organization. What works for a tech startup doesn’t work for a global conglomerate, and forcing both into the same framework leads to frustration and inefficiency.
2. Rigid Frameworks, Stifled Creativity
At their core, frameworks like SAFe emphasize control over creativity. By prescribing specific roles, ceremonies, and processes, they strip teams of the flexibility to adapt their workflows to their context. Agile, which was supposed to thrive on experimentation, becomes a paint-by-numbers exercise.
Imagine being told you must hold a PI Planning session every quarter, even when your work cycles don’t align with it. Or that you must adhere to a rigid backlog refinement schedule, regardless of whether it adds value. These rigid structures suffocate innovation, leaving teams feeling like cogs in a machine rather than empowered problem-solvers.
3. A Mountain of Overhead
Scaling frameworks bring with them a staggering amount of overhead. Teams find themselves drowning in ceremonies: stand-ups, backlog refinements, sprint planning, sprint reviews, retrospectives, PI planning, scrum-of-scrums; the list goes on.
Meanwhile, managers and coordinators are tasked with generating endless reports to track alignment, progress, and adherence to the framework. The result? Teams spend more time justifying their work than doing it. The very agility these frameworks claim to foster is bogged down by layers of process, robbing teams of the speed and adaptability they need to succeed.
The Agile Industrial Complex: Certifications for Sale
Driving much of this dysfunction is the booming Agile certification industry. Organizations pay thousands of dollars for employees to attend certification courses, often not to deepen their understanding of agility, but to check a box. Certifications like “SAFe Program Consultant” or “Certified Scrum Master” are increasingly seen as tickets to job security, even when they don’t reflect meaningful expertise.
This commodification of Agile has created a vicious cycle:
Companies adopt frameworks like SAFe to signal they’re “doing Agile.”
Employees scramble to get certified, investing time and money in credentials that prioritize buzzwords over real-world problem-solving.
Consultants profit by selling ever more expensive training sessions, while teams on the ground remain stuck in the same old dysfunction.
What’s worse, this focus on certifications and frameworks often distracts from the real goal of Agile: delivering value to customers. Teams lose sight of outcomes in their rush to adhere to processes, and organizations spend more energy debating their framework than solving real problems.
Breaking Free
Through building lush, grand and complex Cathedrals of Enterprise Agility the old status-quo resurfaced. Instead of revolutionizing the way we develop software, uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it, we ended up with the same problems we started with.
To reclaim agility, we need to acknowledge where it has gone wrong. The promise of Agile was never about grand frameworks or certifications. It was about empowering teams to adapt, collaborate, and focus on delivering value.
Enterprise cathedrals may look impressive, but they often fail where it matters most: solving real problems for real people. It’s time to stop worshipping at their altar and start building systems that embrace the messiness of real work. Let’s dismantle the cathedrals and return to what made Agile powerful in the first place: simplicity, pragmatism, and trust in the people doing the work.
Let's build emergent and interwoven bazaars instead of pristine and grand cathedrals.