The Agile Cargo Cult: All the Rituals, None of the Results

The Agile Cargo Cult: All the Rituals, None of the Results

When ceremony overshadows substance, innovation takes flight without us.

The Perpetual Stand-Up

The clock on the wall reads 9:44 AM. We’ve been standing for 44 minutes. My coffee is cold, and my knees are starting to lock. Fourteen faces stare into the void of their webcams, some pixelated, some artificially blurred, all of them wearing the same mask of patient exhaustion. This is the daily stand-up. It is neither daily-it’s the fourth one this week that has ballooned past its 14-minute timebox-nor is it a stand-up, as most of us are slouched in chairs thousands of miles apart. It is a slow, methodical march through a Jira board.

14

Timebox

44

Actual Minutes

Someone is grilling a junior developer about ticket #AX-834. “The acceptance criteria clearly state the button should be fuschia, but the hex code in the PR is for magenta. Why the discrepancy?” The developer, a kid barely 24, stammers something about design hand-offs and color profiles. No one is talking about being blocked. No one is offering help. This isn’t a sync. It’s a status report, a public performance of productivity for an audience of one: the project manager who believes Agile is a synonym for ‘knowing what everyone is doing at all times’.

This is the cargo cult. And if this scene feels even remotely familiar, you’re already a member.

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Melanesia to Meeting Rooms: A Parallel

During World War II, islanders in Melanesia saw something incredible. Giant metal birds would descend from the sky, bearing unimaginable riches: canned food, steel tools, medicine, clothing. They called it “cargo.” When the war ended and the planes stopped coming, some islanders tried to lure them back. They carved runways into the jungle, built bamboo control towers, and wore coconut shells carved to look like headphones. They performed the rituals they had observed, perfectly mimicking the form, but they had missed the underlying principle. They didn’t have a global manufacturing and logistics network, an industrial-military complex, or a war. They just had the empty ceremony. The planes never returned.

We do the same thing. We build the bamboo runways (Jira boards), wear the coconut headphones (attend daily stand-ups), and perform the rituals of sprints and retrospectives. We do it all with religious fervor, hoping the giant metal birds will land and deliver the promised cargo of speed, innovation, and happy, productive teams. But they don’t. Instead, we’re just slower. More miserable. We’re left with all the ceremony and none of the results, because we’ve fundamentally misunderstood what we’re trying to build.

I say this as a recovering high priest of the cult. I once managed a team where I believed my primary function was to ensure every ticket was estimated in story points, every stand-up finished on time, and every retro produced “actionable items.” I was obsessed with the artifacts. I remember hounding a developer about why he hadn’t updated a ticket for two days, only to find out he’d spent those 48 hours silently fixing a catastrophic security flaw that wasn’t on the board. He saved the company from a potential breach, and I was worried about his Jira hygiene. The shame of that moment still stings. I was policing the ritual, completely blind to the actual value being created right in front of me. I was measuring the wrong thing, celebrating the ceremony instead of the substance.

True agility is not a framework.It is a condition of trust.

That’s it. That’s the secret nobody wants to talk about because you can’t certify it or buy a software license for it. The ceremonies-stand-ups, sprints, retros-are not the system. They are merely containers. They are supposed to be vessels that hold the messy, unpredictable, human work of collaboration. When trust exists, a stand-up is a 4-minute huddle where a developer says, “I’m buried in the database layer, can someone help?” and two people immediately jump in. When there is no trust, that same stand-up is a 44-minute interrogation. The container remains, but the content has turned toxic.

With Trust

4-minute huddle, immediate help, collaboration.

🤝

Without Trust

44-minute interrogation, public performance, toxicity.

🚫

It’s a bizarre contradiction that I still fight within myself. I rail against the pointless ceremony, but I have to admit there’s a strange comfort in a perfectly organized sprint board, the same way finding an old $24 bill in a jacket pocket brings a fleeting sense of order to a chaotic world. The danger is when we start believing the board is the work, that the found money is the same as earned wealth. We mistake the map for the territory.

The Hospice Musician: Agility in its Purest Form

I once met a man named Alex T.-M., whose job title was hospice musician. His work was the definition of agility, but he didn’t have a backlog or a burndown chart. He would enter a patient’s room with just a guitar. His “sprint goal” was to ease a person’s final hours. He had no pre-planned setlist. He would sit, observe, and listen. He’d feel the rhythm of the room-the beeping machines, the labored breathing, the quiet weeping of a family member-and he would start to play. Sometimes it was a hymn, sometimes a forgotten folk song, sometimes just a simple, resonant chord that matched the frequency of the space. He responded, in real time, to profound human need. He couldn’t plan his day, let alone a two-week sprint. His work was an exercise in pure, unadulterated presence and trust-trusting himself to find the right note, trusting the patient and family to receive it. That is the soul of what agile is supposed to be: a deep, responsive connection to the problem you are trying to solve.

Responsive Connection

We, in our air-conditioned offices, are so far removed from that reality. Our work is often abstract, a series of logical puzzles disconnected from immediate human feedback. And that abstraction scares us. It scares managers who need to justify their team’s existence through reports and charts. So we build frameworks to create an illusion of control. We get so lost in the machinery of it all. I remember one afternoon, my focus was split. Half my brain was trying to untangle a recursive loop that had been crashing the server every 4 hours, a genuinely complex problem. The other half was idly browsing a website trying to find a specific type of Baby girl clothes my sister had insisted on for her newborn. The disconnect was jarring. I was wrestling with digital ghosts while a real-world, tangible need existed just a few clicks away. We fill our days with process not because it helps, but because it feels safer than confronting the terrifying ambiguity of creating something new.

The Illusion of Control

That fear is why the cargo cult persists. True autonomy is terrifying to a command-and-control organization. The idea that a team could self-organize, pull its own work, and deliver value without constant oversight feels like an abdication of responsibility. So instead of granting trust, we adopt the language of empowerment. We call people “squads” and rooms “scrum alleys.” We replace managers with “scrum masters.” But we don’t change the underlying power dynamic. It’s a paint job on a crumbling structure. The micromanagement continues, it just uses a different vocabulary. The sprint becomes a deadline. The retrospective becomes a post-mortem. The daily stand-up becomes the daily judgment.

Language

Squads, Scrum Masters, Empowerment

Reality

Micromanagement, Deadlines, Judgment

I don’t think Agile is broken. I think our understanding of it is. We treat it like a machine, an instruction manual to be followed. If we assemble the pieces correctly-Part A (stand-up) connects to Part B (sprint planning)-we expect a predictable output. But developing software, or designing a product, or solving any complex problem, isn’t mechanical. It’s a creative act. It’s more like gardening than manufacturing. You can’t force a plant to grow by yelling at it or measuring it every four minutes. You can only create the right conditions-good soil, enough water, sunlight-and then trust it to grow. The ceremonies of agile are supposed to be about creating those conditions: clearing rocks (removing impediments), ensuring sunlight (maintaining clear goals), and watering (providing support and resources). The cultists are the ones who show up every day to measure the plant with a ruler and then wonder why it isn’t growing faster.

Cultivating Trust: The Path Forward

There is no 4-step plan to fix this. There is no framework to dismantle the cargo cult, because adding another framework is just building a new, shinier bamboo airplane. The only way out is to start with the one thing the cult cannot replicate: trust. It starts when a manager stops asking “Is the ticket updated?” and starts asking “What do you need?” It starts when a team is given a problem to solve, not a list of features to build. It starts when we stop performing agility and start living it, by focusing on the people doing the work, not the rituals they are forced to perform.

Focus on People, Not Rituals. Start with Trust.

🌱

Reflect, reconnect, and build with purpose.