Thanks. It was hard won. I spent maybe a decade naively thinking that if we just made software methods that worked in service of stated business goals and values, they'd get adopted and we'd all live happily ever after.

It took me a long time to come to grips with the POSIWID [1] version of the purpose of planning and estimates. One of the things that really blew my mind is Mary Poppendieck's story about how they built the Empire State Building on time and under budget even though they didn't have it fully designed when they started. [2] Different, more effective approaches are not only possible, they exist. But they can no longer win out, and I think it's because of the rise of managerialism, the current dominant ideology and culture of big business. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[2] Talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/ And transcript: https://web.archive.org/web/20140311004931/https://chrisgagn...

[3] See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

> it is fundamentally human in nature. The egos are invested in the existing thing

That is one thing that can happen, because it is part of human nature. But it is not the whole of human nature. if you have a culture of experimentation and two-way doors, people learn to invest not in one particular experiment, but the process of experimentation. They invest their egos not in one particular outcome, but in the team and their long-term success.

I get that the dominant culture in American business is managerialism [1], where we all have to pretend that people currently holding power are brilliant, while they have pissing contests over their place in the corporate dominance hierarchy. But that's not the only way things can possibly work. I've lived different approaches, as has the author of the piece.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

Hi! I was involved in the Agile movement before the term existed. I came up through the "Extreme Programming (XP)" school of thought, and later on the "Lean" one (in the Poppendieck sense of the term). Here's my take.

The "sprint" is an artifact of the transition away from waterfall. Getting people to go from an 18-month planning cycle to a 30-day planning cycle was an actual advance. But as you are seeing, it has its problems.

If you keep turning up the dials, as the XP folks tend to do, you get to weekly cycles. Those are about the smallest effective "sprints". I like them a lot better than monthly sprints, which are much more likely to be mini-waterfall in orientation.

At a weekly cadence, you can start to see what might be beyond that. For me that generally involves a weekly meeting schedule, but otherwise a Kanban-ish flow of work with strong WIP limits and aggressive effort to keep work unit size to be well under a week.

So yes, I think you're correct that continuous delivery (which was invented well later than the original Agile methods) means that sprints no longer have a release-related reason for existing, especially when you have a good feature flag practice.

In practice, I think humans do need some regular rituals and that some planning work is better off batched, so I'm ok with keeping some sprint-like rituals, like a weekly planning meeting and a weekly retro. But I think high-functioning teams treat those as convenient sync points with flexible adaptation of plans as new learning happens over the course of the week.

And yes, I think the Agile community broadly got stuck in a mini-waterfall space rather than what I think of as actual agility, so your read there is correct too. I think the main driver of this is managerialist ideology [1], which centers managers as the vital actors in business. In contrast, flow-based processes like you describe make managers mostly irrelevant. Unfortunately for those of us who like to actually get things done, managerialism is the dominant ideology in American business, so much so that its tenets are not only mostly unspoken, but that alternatives can be unthinkable to many. So I expect things like "scrummerfall" and SAFe to continue to dominate large-company software development for the forseeable future.

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism and https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

Only to the extent that a) there is direct competition sufficient for this to make a difference, and b) bad management isn't an endemic problem across wide swathes of American business. But there are widespread concerns about declining competition. [1] And some, me included, see American business culture as captured by managerialism. [2]

By your theory, all companies should be pretty efficient and managers pretty effective. But how many people would say that about their companies? If that's how most of your friends talk about their bosses, let me know where they live and I'll move there.

One good example to look at here is the notion of bullshit jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

[1] E.g.: https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th...

[2] This is a good book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

On the same topic, I absolutely recommend reading "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance" by Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender.

https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

Excellent points.

> whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic

I now see this as a piece of a self-justifying ideology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism

A while back I read an eye-opening book called "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance". [1] They see US-style management as a primarily a caste system.

One of the odd things about business in the US is that most people can't even conceive that there are other approaches to business beyond the standard US MBA dogmas. Even when those other approaches clearly are successful, and even when one's ass is getting kicked by somebody using them.

E.g, Amazon, which has been crushing competitors for nearly 20 years by ignoring short-term numbers and focusing on creating long-term customer value. Or Toyota, which went from a nearly-bankrupt company in war-ravaged Japan to the world's dominant car maker using a totally different philosophy of business. Toyota even took one of GM's worst plants as part of a joint venture and made it one of the best ones, but GM couldn't absorb the lessons. This American Life did a very moving piece about that plant. [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

[2] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561