Why 84% of Companies Are Still Faking Agile (And What Actually Works)
Introduction
Is your organization prepared for Agile in 2026? In this new 4-part blog series, we’re diving deep into the next wave of Agile transformation and why many companies are still faking Agile. We’ll unpack the common problems teams will face, provide actionable ‘how-to’ guides, and explore the evolving landscape. If you’re looking to future-proof your processes, this series is for you.
I would like to tell you about a conversation I had last month with a CTO of a major financial services company. She looked exhausted. “We’ve been doing Agile for three years,” she said. “We have the stand-ups, the retrospectives, the Jira boards. Everything looks perfect on paper. But somehow, we’re slower than before we started.”
Sound familiar?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to talk about: By 2026, nearly 95% of organizations claim they’re using Agile practices. They’ve got the daily stand-ups. They’ve got the sprint planning sessions. They’ve even got the fancy collaborative workspaces with whiteboards covered in colorful sticky notes.
But here’s what keeps me up at night: According to consistent industry surveys over the past few years, including data from the State of Agile reports, roughly 84% of these companies are still stuck below what we’d call a high level of proficiency. They’re going through the motions, but they’re not seeing the results. The promised 30-50% improvements in time-to-market? The dramatic boosts in quality and customer satisfaction? They’re not materializing.
Welcome to what I call the Agile Illusion.
The Performance vs. Being Problem
The root issue is deceptively simple but devastatingly common: companies are performing Agile instead of being Agile. There’s a massive difference.
Think about it this way. You can memorize the steps to tango. You can practice the movements until they’re perfect. But if you don’t feel the rhythm, if you don’t understand the connection between you and your partner, you’re just moving through positions. The moment the music changes or your partner does something unexpected, you fall apart.
That’s what’s happening in most organizations. They’ve implemented what I call “Cargo Cult Agile.” The term comes from a fascinating anthropological phenomenon: during World War II, indigenous people in the Pacific islands saw cargo planes bringing supplies. After the war, they built bamboo control towers and carved wooden headphones, thinking these objects would bring the planes back. They had the form but missed the substance entirely.
Companies do the same thing. They build the runway of Agile processes, expecting planes full of business value to land automatically. They focus obsessively on process compliance. Are we doing our stand-ups? Check. Are we running two-week sprints? Check. Are we using story points? Check.
But the value never materializes because they’ve skipped the fundamental transformation that makes Agile actually work. The research backs this up consistently: when organizations focus solely on mechanical compliance with Agile ceremonies, they get limited benefits despite massive activity. Teams end up feeling like they’re running on a hamster wheel, generating motion but not progress.
Why This Happens (And Why It’s Not Your Fault)
Here’s something most consultants won’t tell you: the way Agile is typically sold to organizations practically guarantees superficial adoption.
The pitch usually goes like this: “Implement these practices, follow these ceremonies, and you’ll see dramatic improvements.” It sounds simple. It sounds achievable. Leadership approves the budget, brings in some trainers, and expects magic to happen.
But nobody warns you that you’re essentially trying to rewire your organization’s entire operating system while it’s still running. Nobody mentions that the practices only work if they’re supported by a completely different set of assumptions about how work flows, how decisions get made, and how value is defined.
I’ve seen this pattern dozens of times. A company sends their teams to a two-day Scrum certification course. Everyone comes back excited and energized. They start doing stand-ups and sprints. But when the Product Owner needs stakeholder approval for a simple user story change and it takes three weeks of meetings, the whole system grinds to a halt. When the team identifies a critical impediment but there’s no one with authority to remove it, frustration builds. When leadership still demands detailed six-month roadmaps and Gantt charts because “we need predictability,” the cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable.
The ceremonies become theater. Empty rituals that everyone performs because they’re supposed to, not because they’re driving real value.
The Real Solution is to Start With Brutal Honesty
Here’s what actually works, and it’s less exciting than most people want to hear: you have to fix the foundation before you build anything else.
Before you write a single user story, before you form a single team, before you buy any tools or send anyone to training, you need to conduct what I call a “readiness reality check.” This isn’t a feel-good exercise. It’s a brutally honest assessment of whether your organization can actually support Agile ways of working.
You need to ask hard questions, and you need to be prepared for uncomfortable answers:
- Leadership commitment: Are your executives truly committed to this transformation, or did they just approve a budget line because everyone else is doing Agile? Will they actively remove organizational impediments, or will they delegate that to middle management and hope for the best?
- Decision-making authority: Can teams actually make decisions, or does everything still need to flow through five layers of approval? If a team needs to change direction based on customer feedback, can they do it in days instead of weeks?
- Organizational flexibility: Are you structurally capable of forming cross-functional teams, or are people locked into rigid departmental silos with no possibility of movement? Can you actually dedicate people full-time to teams, or will everyone remain part-time on three different initiatives?
- Resource allocation: Are you willing to fund persistent product teams instead of temporary project teams? This is a massive mental shift that most finance departments actively resist.
- Cultural readiness: Do you have a culture that treats failure as learning, or do you still punish people for mistakes? Will teams feel safe experimenting and potentially falling short, or will every miss be used against them in performance reviews?
You can structure this assessment in different ways. Some organizations use a simple questionnaire approach, asking seven to ten critical questions about leadership support, cultural norms, and structural flexibility. Others prefer a more comprehensive maturity assessment that examines five key areas: your people and their skills, your strategic alignment, your cultural dynamics, your team structures, and your operational processes. The specific approach matters less than your willingness to be honest about what you find.
I worked with one organization that did this assessment and discovered they had 12 major organizational blockers that would kill any Agile transformation before it started. The decision-making process alone required seven approval gates for even minor changes. Instead of pretending these barriers didn’t exist and pushing forward with Agile ceremonies anyway, they spent six months systematically removing those impediments first. That faking Agile. When they actually launched their Agile pilot, it succeeded because the environment could support it.
Set Real Goals, Not Platitudes
The other critical piece of the foundation is getting specific about what success looks like. I cannot emphasize this enough: “being more Agile” is not a goal. It’s a platitude that means nothing and measures nothing.
You need concrete, measurable targets: “Reduce our time-to-market for new features from six months to eight weeks within 18 months.” Or “Improve our customer satisfaction scores from 6.2 to 8.5 within one year.” Or “Decrease production defects by 40% within two quarters.”
These specific targets do something magical: they force you to actually think about what problems you’re trying to solve instead of just implementing practices because they’re trendy. They give you a way to know if this transformation is working or if you’re just creating expensive theater.
This foundation work takes time. It’s not glamorous. You can’t post pictures of it on LinkedIn. But it’s the difference between transformation that sticks and transformation that becomes another failed initiative that everyone cynically dismisses two years later.
By investing in this foundational work, by being honest about your readiness and clear about your goals, you’re setting yourself up to be in that successful 16% instead of the frustrated 84%.
But here’s the thing: even with a rock-solid foundation, you’re going to hit a wall and start faking Agile. That wall is people. Human beings with real fears about what this change means for them. How do you manage the inevitable resistance that comes when you start actually changing how work gets done?
That’s exactly what we’ll dig into tomorrow. In our next post, we’ll tackle the psychology of resistance and the proven approaches that turn skeptics into champions.
Dejan Majkic
www.whatisscrum.org
