Take the Stabilisers Off, or Get Off the BikE
Why half-hearted agile ways of working cost you the full price and return almost nothing.
Agile ways of working have essentially won the argument for delivery of change in complex environments. Short cycles. Small tests before big bets. Decisions made by the people closest to the problem. Real feedback before the money is spent rather than after. Say any of that in a workshop and the room nods. Almost nobody stands up any more to defend the eighteen-month plan with a single go-live at the end and a lessons-learned log nobody reads.
Winning the argument and changing the work, however, turn out to be entirely different things.
Somewhere this morning, in an organisation that has gone agile, fifteen people are standing in a circle. One by one, they report to the manager, who is standing in the circle but is unmistakably the point of the circle, the way the sun is the point of the solar system. It takes twenty five minutes. Someone says “I’m blocked on procurement,” and everyone nods sympathetically, and nothing whatsoever happens about procurement. Then they all sit down and carry on exactly as they did before.
It is a stand up. It is also a status report wearing a lanyard.
This is not a story about bad people, or cynical people, or people who didn’t read the book. It is a story about something far more common and far more interesting: organisations that sincerely like agile, say so with genuine enthusiasm, book the training, buy the licences, rename the meetings, and then do it about thirty percent.
Thirty percent, it turns out, is roughly the worst amount.
Agile is a change strategy, not a silver bullet
Start with what agile actually is. It’s a change strategy, one deliberate choice among several about how delivery will happen, made to suit a particular context. It is not a destination, not an identity, and emphatically not a silver bullet. Plenty of good work is routine, well understood and entirely appropriate to run in a straight line. Payroll does not need a retrospective.
The trouble starts when agile gets adopted as a label rather than chosen as a strategy, when nobody has asked the harder question underneath it, which is whether this organisation, with this culture and this governance, is actually ready to work that way. That question belongs at the front. It almost never gets asked at all.
The thing nobody says out loud
Ask people whether they would like to work in short cycles, show their work early, and let the team nearest the problem make the call. Almost everyone says yes. It sounds obviously sensible. It sounds like how good work ought to feel.
Then watch what happens when the moment actually arrives.
The moment arrives when someone has to show a half finished thing to a director. It arrives when a team wants to stop a workstream that was announced in a board paper eight months ago. It arrives when the honest answer to “when will it be done?” is “we will know a great deal more in three weeks.” It arrives when a manager has to sit in a room and, for once, not be the person who decides.
None of those things are technically difficult. All of them are culturally expensive. They ask people to spend the currency they have spent an entire career accumulating: looking certain, looking in control, looking like the one who knows. Agile asks senior people to be vulnerable and junior people to be visibly in charge in public, and both feel really uncomfortable.
Which is to say that agile does not run on ceremonies. It runs on change readiness, on psychological safety and enabling leadership, the conditions that make it survivable to say “this isn’t working” out loud. Install the ceremonies without those conditions and you have built a beautiful engine with no fuel in it.
So what happens next is entirely rational. People keep the vocabulary and quietly discard the discomfort. They keep the ceremonies and lose the principles. Nobody decides this. It simply settles, the way water finds the level it was always going to find.
Hypotheses, not promises
There is one shift that does most of the work, and it is the one organisations find hardest to make: treating the roadmap as a set of hypotheses rather than a set of promises.
A promise, once made in a board paper, must be defended. Evidence that it was the wrong promise becomes a threat rather than a finding, and the people who spot it earliest learn to keep quiet. A hypothesis, by contrast, is allowed to be wrong. Being wrong early is the whole return on the investment, it is how shaping becomes reshaping rather than rework.
Half-hearted agile keeps the promise language and bolts sprints onto the side of it. Teams are asked to iterate towards an outcome that has already been guaranteed, on a date that has already been announced, with a scope that has already been signed off. That isn’t iteration. That is a straight line with ceremonies in it, and everyone involved can feel the difference even if nobody names it.
It is worth adding that iteration will not rescue an organisation from a fuzzy destination. A desirable vision, one that genuinely energises people at every level, is what gives short cycles something to steer by. Without it, all that fast feedback does is tell you more quickly that nobody agrees where you are going.
The stabilisers
Here is the analogy that tends to land with clients.
Teaching a child to ride a bike involves one genuinely horrible moment, and everybody knows which one it is. It isn’t the pedalling, pedalling is easy. It is the moment the stabilisers come off, the bike starts to fall, and the child has to discover, in their body rather than in their head, that the way to stay upright is to keep moving and steer into the wobble. Every instinct says brake, plant a foot, grab something solid. Every instinct is wrong.
A child on stabilisers looks like a child cycling. Same bike, same helmet, same pedalling, same pleased expression. They can do this for years. They will never learn to balance, because stabilisers exist precisely to prevent the experience that teaches balance.
And here is the sting. After enough years, that child will tell you with total sincerity that they can ride a bike, that cycling is a bit overrated actually, and that it is slower than walking.
That is half-hearted agile. The governance stays on. The annual plan stays on. The approval gates stay on. The “we’ll review it properly at year end” stays on. The organisation carefully retains every mechanism whose entire function is to prevent the wobble, and then concludes, honestly and from direct personal experience, that agile doesn’t work here.
What half-commitment actually buys
The most damning evidence on this comes from healthcare improvement, where the small-cycle test has been doctrine for decades. One review looked at 73 published improvement projects, the ones teams were proud enough of to write up, and asked a simple question: did they actually do the method they said they were doing? Fourteen showed genuine, learning from each other cycles. But only two met all five principles of the approach they were claiming to use.
Two out of seventy three. The method isn’t failing. It is barely being attempted, in its own heartland, by its own enthusiasts.
The second finding is more awkward still for anyone selling a transformation. A 2024 study covering more than four thousand teams compared the major scaled agile frameworks against each other and against teams using no framework at all. The differences were too small to matter in practice. What predicted whether teams actually worked well was how long they had genuinely been working in that way, the depth of the habit, not the brand on the lanyard. No silver bullets, then, and certainly none available by purchase order.
And the third should be pinned above every transformation programme board. Research into public sector agile adoption found that shallow adoption produced real benefits for individuals, people felt more empowered, learned new things, enjoyed the work more.
Organisational benefits, the ones on the business case, appeared only where agile implementation was genuinely deep. Do it lightly and you get happier staff and an unchanged organisation, which, depending on the size of the invoice, makes for a slightly uncomfortable conversation.
So: where are you now, honestly?
Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone in the change business, ourselves firmly included.
“Don’t bother” is a perfectly respectable answer. If an organisation looks honestly at where it is now, at its culture, its governance, its appetite for uncertainty, and concludes that it is not going to take the stabilisers off, that is a legitimate, defensible, money saving decision. Say it out loud. Choose a different change strategy, run it properly, and spend the training budget on something that will actually land.
What is not defensible is the middle. The middle costs the full disruption, the full licence fee, the full vocabulary change and the full day rate, and returns approximately none of the benefit. Worse, it burns the option. Once an organisation has “tried agile,” it has antibodies. The next person who suggests working in short cycles with real feedback will be met with a weary look and a war story, and will find themselves arguing against something that was never genuinely attempted.
Half a change is not half a result. It is usually a full cost and a closed door.
So the question to put to a leadership team is not “shall we adopt agile?” It is smaller, and very much harder: are you willing to show unfinished work to people who outrank you, stop something you have already announced, and let a team overrule you in public? Three honest yeses are the green flags here. Three polite maybes are a warning.
If the answer is no, that is fine. Keep the stabilisers on, and stop calling it cycling.
If the answer is yes, then take them off properly and expect to wobble. The wobble isn’t the failure. The wobble is the entire lesson because how change happens matters.
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