> Agile is about eliminating management in favour of self-organizing teams.
Yeah . . . no. The biggest mistake the Agile movement ever made was sidelining management and claiming they were irrelevant. You can't do any kind of work at scale without some layer of management and coordination. OK, sure, there's the pie-in-the-sky dream that every company will be able to swarm on problems and self-organize at every level. But that's not feasible in the majority of cases.
The correct answer is to manage correctly by recognizing the professional expertise of people doing the work and giving them latitude to come up with creative solutions as opposed to dictating everything. But companies have CEOs and boards to set the overall direction of the organization, and that's reality as opposed to some anarcho-capitalistic pie in the sky.
Was it supposed to be? The Twelve Principles makes it very clear that you need extra special people to have any chance. It was clearly never meant for everyone. It literally says so.
Perhaps our biggest mistake was thinking that we are special?
> The Twelve Principles makes it very clear that you need extra special people to have any chance.
Nonsense. If anything, the failure is on leadership for not adapting and growing their people. There are three kinds of people in any organization: the rockstars who will naturally excel, the incompetent who should be fired, and the vast middle whose success is a factor of leadership and seniors putting effort into their growth and development.
Again, Agile has no specific leadership. It is a model, for lack of a better word, for self-organizing teams where all participants are the same as all others. It is lead by the shared collective of all taking part. That's its while deal.
That very well may be an unrealistic deal[1], sure. There is probably good reason why Agile never happened, instead seeing management cherry-picking from a a bastardized version of its idea to lighten their workload. But you cannot meaningly remove what it is as it seems you are trying to do. If you do, it no longer exists.
[1] In fact, I posit that it was written under "Agile Manifesto" to purposely draw parallels with the "Communist Manifesto". Communism isn't meant to be realistic either. It is a sci-fi look into what life could be like if we achieve post-scarcity. Agile is similar in vein – a look into what life could be like if everyone became excessively driven high achievers; not meant to be a reflection of this world.
Yeah . . . no. The biggest mistake the Agile movement ever made was sidelining management and claiming they were irrelevant. You can't do any kind of work at scale without some layer of management and coordination. OK, sure, there's the pie-in-the-sky dream that every company will be able to swarm on problems and self-organize at every level. But that's not feasible in the majority of cases.
The correct answer is to manage correctly by recognizing the professional expertise of people doing the work and giving them latitude to come up with creative solutions as opposed to dictating everything. But companies have CEOs and boards to set the overall direction of the organization, and that's reality as opposed to some anarcho-capitalistic pie in the sky.