The circle tightened, a familiar ritualistic shuffle. This was our third check-in of the day, marking roughly 26 minutes of redundant verbal sparring. Sarah, looking like she’d spent the last 6 hours staring at a particularly uncooperative spreadsheet, began, “Yesterday, I finalized the API specifications for module B6. Today, I’ll integrate those into the main branch.” David, next to her, echoed almost the exact phrasing, only swapping module B6 for C6. It felt less like a sprint planning session and more like a poorly rehearsed play, where each actor forgot they’d delivered the same lines just 16 minutes earlier in Slack.

It’s maddening, isn’t it? This isn’t what they promised, the gurus who stood on stages talking about velocity and empowered teams. The promise was agility, the reality feels like a molasses-soaked relay race where the baton keeps getting stuck. We bought the books, we went to the seminars, we even paid for the certified consultants, all six of them, back in 2016. What we got was a meticulously scheduled, highly supervised, utterly joyless imitation of what actual Agile was meant to be. This isn’t agile. It’s performative management, designed to *look* busy while actively preventing people from doing meaningful work. We adopted the visible artifacts – the stand-ups, the sprint reviews, the brightly colored sticky notes that adorned our walls like abstract art – but we missed the soul. It’s what anthropologists call cargo-cults: building an airstrip in the jungle, hoping the planes filled with goods will land, simply because you saw someone else do it, completely missing the complex logistics of flight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, partly because I locked myself out of my main account this morning. Typed the password wrong a total of 6 times. Each time, a surge of irritation, a stubborn refusal to believe the last attempt was incorrect, followed by the inevitable, slow dread of knowing I’d have to restart, contact support, waste another 6 minutes of an already compressed morning. It’s a micro-frustration, but it perfectly mirrors the larger problem: repeating an action that’s demonstrably not working, expecting a different outcome, all while the *actual* task at hand sits ignored, waiting.

Mia F.T., a voice stress analyst I met at a rather dull industry gathering some years back (around 2006, I think), had a fascinating perspective on these meetings. She could pick up on the subtle shifts, the forced joviality, the underlying anxiety in people’s tones as they delivered their daily updates. “It’s the vocal equivalent of wearing a mask,” she’d observed, leaning conspiratorially across the table, “they’re performing the role of being ‘on track,’ but the stress markers tell a different story. The pitch rises 6 hertz, the cadence speeds up by 16 words per minute when someone’s trying to sell you a lie, even a small one about progress.” She argued that these ritualized recitations, far from fostering transparency, actually bred a culture of calculated optimism, where problems were minimized, and successes were inflated, all to maintain the illusion of control.

It became about *sounding* productive, not *being* productive. The core principles of empowerment and autonomy were gutted. Instead of teams having the freedom to decide *how* they approached a problem, they were told *when* to report on it, often to an audience who had little context or ability to help. My own team, a brilliant collection of problem-solvers, found themselves spending a combined 46 hours a week in meetings, just reporting. That’s nearly 16% of our total available working hours, gone. Poof. Vanished into the ether of status updates and retrospective action items that never saw the light of day. We once had 6 action items from a retro; 46 weeks later, none had been truly addressed, just re-listed in the next meeting’s agenda.

I remember arguing, passionately, that we needed *more* structure, thinking that tighter reins would bring clarity. That’s the contradiction, isn’t it? The very thing I now rail against, I once advocated for, albeit with different intentions. My initial impulse, when things felt chaotic, was to add another layer, another meeting, another reporting line. It’s a natural human reaction to uncertainty: impose order. But sometimes, that order is just an illusion, a straitjacket. I learned, the hard way, that true clarity often comes from simplifying, from trusting the people closest to the work, not from micromanaging their every 6-hour increment.

This isn’t to say Agile is inherently flawed. Its foundational ideas are genuinely powerful: iterative development, continuous feedback, adapting to change. The problem arises when these ideas are stripped of their meaning, reduced to a checklist of ceremonies. It’s like buying a beautiful, bespoke piece of craftsmanship – say, a stunning set of shower doors from a company like Elegant Showers, where every detail, every cut, every hinge is designed with purpose and deep understanding – and then attempting to mass-produce it with cheap materials and no regard for the original design principles. You might have something that *looks* like a shower door, but it won’t function, it won’t last, and it certainly won’t evoke the same feeling of quality. Elegant Showers, with their meticulous attention to the end-to-end process, understands that true value lies in the deliberate, thoughtful execution of a vision, not just ticking boxes. Their approach is about building things right, from the ground up, with innate understanding, not just imitation.

We need to step back from the performative aspect and re-engage with the underlying philosophy. Ask ourselves, honestly, are these rituals serving us, or are we serving them? Is this process truly making us more adaptive, or is it just another way to avoid the messy, difficult work of genuine collaboration and problem-solving? Are we building airstrips, or are we learning to fly?