Is It Agile, Or Is It Management That’s In Crisis? — Miro’s Study On Agile Divide
Miro’s Agile study reveals a growing divide between practitioners and leaders.
Is Agile falling short of its values, or is something else at play?
A recent study by Miro and an independent research agency “Exploring the Agile Divide,” surveyed over 1,200 Agile practitioners and leaders worldwide.
The authors of the study asked themselves a question:
The results uncovered a surprising tension — not in Agile itself, but in how it’s perceived and practiced across organizational levels.
The findings raise an important question: is Agile misunderstood, or is it not Agile that should come under fire?
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The Perception Divide
The study identifies two key groups among respondents: “Agile Practitioners” and “Agile Leaders.”
When surveyed about their organization’s Agile practices, the two groups often viewed the same reality through very different lenses:
These survey questions directly reflect two core Agile Manifesto values:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Practitioners, as the ones navigating day-to-day realities, often experience Agile differently from leaders, who typically define and enforce the rules.
Now, that’s a disconnect.
The Rigid Frameworks
That’s not all, more than two-thirds of Agile practitioners consider the frameworks they work with are “set in stone”:
I can’t help but wonder, can a framework do anything to anyone? Can a framework hurt your feelings? Can a framework itself be the problem?
Frameworks don’t enforce themselves; people do. If a framework feels rigid or burdensome, isn’t that an issue of how it’s applied by the management?
The disconnect is glaring: while 69% of team members find frameworks overly complex, only 44% of leaders share this view. This points to a fundamental issue not with Agile but with how it is perceived and enforced.
Agile or the Management?
Agile got corrupted, you’ll say. Just like the Catholic Church got corrupted and needed a reformation in the 1500s.
Perhaps that’s true. But do we reform Agile or shall we rather reform the people enforcing rigid and controlling processes while calling them The Agile Frameworks?
There seems to be a big disconnect between what the teams and practitioners live and see and what the leaders live and see.
Can this qualify as an Agile problem? Or is this a Management problem?
Agile was always meant to represent lightweight frameworks — this was how the Agile Manifesto signatories called it before coming up with the term Agile.
It’s essential to remember that Agile isn’t a methodology. It’s a mindset — a way of working that champions adaptability, collaboration, and iterative progress.
Frameworks like Scrum, XP, and Crystal, which predate the Agile Manifesto, embody these values. The Manifesto itself served to formalize the principles that define and guide these frameworks.
I’m having a hard time blaming Agile for the faulty applications of agile frameworks. It’s like blaming a map for getting lost or scolding the paintbrush for an ugly painting. The tools aren’t at fault.
Reading the findings described in the survey, it seems that the push for inflexible and overly complex processes doesn’t stem from Agile itself. Instead, it seems rooted in management decisions.
Leaders, not frameworks, are often responsible for turning what should be lightweight and empowering practices into heavyweight, restrictive systems.
Control
It’s hard to let go of control and trust in the process. It’s easier to rule by fear and authority, demand constant updates, and highlight their flaws. Many parents and freshly-baked managers can relate to this. The fear of “What if they don’t respect me?” often triggers a defensive instinct to tighten control and project seriousness.
It can be an autopilot response. In such situations, we follow what we have experienced first-hand from our parents, managers, or even what we saw in the movies.
The Devil Wears Prada movie
Trust
Yet, research consistently shows that high-performing teams are built on trust and psychological safety:
Psychological safety: This was the most important dynamic in an effective team. Psychological safety is about risk-taking and being comfortable with vulnerability. People who don’t feel psychologically safe worry that taking risks will mean they’re seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. Psychological safety means feeling confident about admitting mistakes, asking questions, or offering new ideas.
As Think with Google explains in “Team dynamics: Five keys to building effective teams” psychological safety emerged as the most critical factor in team success.
The Miro survey echoes this insight, revealing that psychological safety and autonomy are precisely what the respondents feel is missing.
It’s almost comical how the responses differ depending on who you ask:
I say comical, because it sounds like this:
-As a leader, do you trust teams to get the job done?
-Sure, in the end, I’m not doing the job myself, right?
-How do you know the job gets done?
- We have reporting in place, syncs a couple of times per week, and I also I ask for daily updates just to stay informed.
It would be fascinating to see a study on managers’ self-awareness — how many micromanagers recognize their own tendencies?
Better yet, we could create a quiz: “Are You a Micromanager or a Control Freak? Take This Quiz to Find Out!”
It could be both fun and eye-opening tool, helping leaders reflect on their behavior and identify areas where they might inadvertently stifle autonomy or trust within their teams.
Gemba walk
Jokes aside, the disconnect is real. One effective way to bridge the gap between managers and practitioners is by adopting the Gemba walk approach — management by wandering around.
Go and see what is going on in the place where the value is created. Observe how people work and what challenges they face.
The managers are progressively distancing themselves from the practitioners. It doesn’t have to be intentional. They have many calls and meetings during the day, so they go to an office. Later, they get another promotion and move to the upper floor. By then, they lose the connection to the daily work of their reports.
Waves of change
History has a way of repeating itself, often cycling back in waves. For example, fashion trends like bell-bottom trousers and oversized sunglasses from the ’90s have made a comeback. Also, baggy, oversized clothing is replacing form-fitting mini skirts and tight leggings.
This pattern isn’t exclusive to fashion — it appears in processes and systems as well with a trend to go into extremes. We follow a super rigid framework, feel constrained and overburdened by bureaucracy and then we move to the other extreme a no-framework, touching on chaos.
Agile brought a lot of these lightweight frameworks, tools and practices and its culmination was Sociocracy and teal organizations. Flat structures with a network of domains.
Sociocracy 3.0 — a.k.a. “S3” — is social technology for evolving agile and resilient organizations at any size, from small start-ups to large international networks and multi-agency collaboration.
Teal organizations emphasize decentralized power, self-management and self-discipline, natural hierarchies, and a high degree of employee responsibility. Frederic Laloux, a former McKinsey & Company executive, introduced the concept of a Teal organization in his book “Reinventing Organizations”.
Then a change of management comes and they bring their changes with them. They start by putting a structure in place, and restoring the hierarchy and management layers. And we start all over again.
The Future of Agile
When we talk about the future of anything these days it usually is “the future of X and AI”.
The same goes for the Miro study — you can read how AI will impact Agile and only 18% of respondents don’t think it will affect Agile.
The outlook is positive:
How might AI affect Agile and what positive changes might it bring?
What I see here is that people believe in Agile and its values. Agile has become a standard and it is a go-to mindset for companies that work in software and other domains that employ a knowledge worker. A highly specialized individual whose work is creative and innovative.
It’s a positive outlook on a future with Agile and AI. The problem at hand is the disconnect between the manager and the team member. And that’s where we should focus our efforts and help bridge the gap!
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
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