Increasingly I’m coming across the fallout from “failed agile” in complex organisations. What strikes me is how well-intentioned people have defaulted to a Newtonian approach for the adoption itself, invariably driving and measuring the change through levels of best practice adherence. As a parting gesture, they often leave the organisation with the enduring belief that the adoption failed because they didn’t adopt the practices in their entirety.

The irony is that this presumed predictability is at odds with the Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) roots of the Agile world view that they were looking to help the organisation adopt.