“The Agile market will eventually recover from the current situation”
This is a statement I have heard frequently while discussing the difficult market conditions the Agile market is going through.
Frankly, I don’t think the Agile market is going to recover.
The heydays of significant levels of investment in Agile are over and they are not coming back.
Rethinking the gold rush years of Agile
If you are wondering why Agile is not going to recover, then we must first reflect on what was happening before the current crisis in the Agile market started.
When we consider why Agile transformations happened, we often think that they were there mainly to achieve a change in the organisation. However, I will argue that this was (often) not the actual purpose for the transformation and that we may be missing the actual driving motive.
To be able to evaluate this, we first need to flip our perspective and look at this from the point of view of a CxO. In particular, a CIO or a CTO.
When you consider their needs and motivations, one thing a CIO/CTO must do is to look strategic and modern. This is key for their professional standing and career prospects. It is part of what is expected of those roles.
A common way of achieving this is by sponsoring a large-scale initiative that people will identify as being both modern and strategic in nature.
Cue in: An Agile Transformation.
I would argue that most of the people involved in Agile coaching and consulting in the past 10-15 years has experience many Agile Transformations where the organisation did not want to change and there was very little buy in. Perhaps, we managed to achieve some (temporary and unsustainable) agility at team level. But, achieving business-level agility was a distant unfeasible dream.
As a side note: I called this Seeking Nirvana, which became the title of one of my most popular conference talks, the core of our Business Agility training and the title of the book I am hoping/pretending to write.
The purpose of those wasteful and expensive Agile transformations was not to achieve agility, but to help the leadership make a claim on being strategic and leading at the edge of our knowledge space.
So, during the heydays of the Agile Transformation gold rush, the Agile coaching space experienced a huge amount of demand for capacity and provided lots of opportunities for people to enter the Agile Coaching space.
The new reality: AI
Then, came 2022 and, in particular, 2023.
First, we had all the delayed consequences of the pandemic with bloated organisations, challenges in global supply systems, the invasion of Ukraine and the changes in the political cycle. These factors contributed to a negative change in the job market.
But the biggest change was the emergence and availability of advanced AI systems.
This is the most significant change in my career together with the introduction of the Web in the 1990s. It is already changing our careers, professions, business models, etc. - It impacts everything at a systemic level.
So, what happened to those CIO/CTOs needing to be modern and strategic?
They are still investing, but they are doing it in (often pointless) AI initiatives.
Even if agility in business is even more crucial than it has ever been, Agile Transformations are no longer looked at as “edgy”. So, those market conditions are never going to come back to the levels of investment we saw until 2022.
What does this mean for careers in Agility?
Agility is not going to disappear. It is needed. It is essential for business survival.
But the type of Agility that is needed has firmly changed. We need to grow beyond team-level agility and start delivering observable outcomes at business level.
If you are stuck on team-level thinking, I suggest you really up your game and skills. Scrum, Kanban, SAFe and all the other team/scaled approaches won’t cut it.
The game is systems and flow thinking, flow-based business management, flow-based organisational design, etc.
This may be difficult to swallow and it can be controversial.
I love to hear your opinions, but I think this reflects what's happening in the market now and what might happen in the future.
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