The problem with "Agile in spirit" is that if adopt it and don't get the desired results, Agile aficionados will quickly remind you that you weren't actually doing Agile.
This is a common refrain, but I don’t think it’s true. “Agile in spirit” people will recognize the failure and look for ways to adapt so similar failures are less likely to occur. Rejecting that opportunity to reflect and adjust is where “not actually doing agile” comes into the discussion, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with “agile” at that point.
If you applied the same reasoning to any other iterative self-adjusting process, you’ll find they all tend to fail before the iterative aspect has been applied. Because that’s their nature, they’re iterative processes as a mechanism to respond to failure.
