The "Death of Agile" and Why It's Really the Death of Empowerment That Should Frighten Us | Nigel Baker

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The 'Death of Agile' and Why It's Really the Death of Empowerment That Should Frighten Us"

Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Nigel Baker
Date: March 4, 2026

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Episode Theme Overview

In this engaging episode, Vasco Duarte and guest Nigel Baker—an experienced Agile coach—delve into claims about the “death of Agile.” Rather than simply debating whether Agile or Scrum are truly dying, they probe deeper, analyzing what’s actually being lost in modern organizations: not just Agile itself, but core values like empowerment and empiricism. The episode surfaces practical advice for Scrum Masters seeking to help teams navigate a shifting landscape, retain meaningful improvement practices, and handle both the backlash and superficial adoption of Agile frameworks.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Defining the “Death of Agile” Argument

• Nigel’s Challenge: Nigel frames his central challenge as confronting the so-called “death of Agile,” but quickly reframes the issue away from Agile as brand or buzzword, focusing instead on the loss of key Agile values in organizations. (02:14)
  • “There is a contraction on the popularity of Agile values, principles, frameworks and methods. Now why that's happening is interesting, I think.” — Nigel (02:14)

Popularity: Practice vs. Perception

• The duo distinguishes between two types of popularity:
  • “Popularity of Use” – How many teams are actually using Agile or Scrum practices (not just in name).
  • “Popularity of Views” – The social media discourse, public sentiment, and perception of Agile.
• Nigel’s analogy: Many tools and methods (like Jira or SAFe) are technically popular, but not actually liked by practitioners. (03:00)
  • “Jira, right. Which is incredibly popular in terms of subscriber numbers… But in terms of actual people saying, do you know what I really like? This Jira tool is much, much lower.” — Nigel (03:00)

The Real Threat: Decline of Empowerment

• Nigel identifies the true danger as “the death of things like empowerment, the death of things like empiricism” (06:34), not merely a change in frameworks.
• He observes a regression beyond “waterfall” into “feudalism”—a workplace culture of following “great men” and visionaries without questioning, learning, or improvement. (05:58)
  • “It's not so much the death of Agile… it's the death of things like empowerment, the death of things like empiricism…” — Nigel (06:34)

The “Nigel Scale” of Scrum Practices

• Originating as a tongue-in-cheek online post, the “Nigel Scale” became an unexpectedly useful lens:
  • Scale 1: Core Scrum (essentials—if you don’t do, things break)
    • e.g., Hygiene factors like “surgeon disinfecting hands before surgery.”
    • “This isn't an option… you disinfect your hands or you kill your patients.”
  • Scale 2: Good but contextual practices (optional, evolve, decay)
    • e.g., Story points, velocity, standing up in daily scrums.
  • Scale 3: Anti-patterns (never work, but keep being tried)
    • e.g., Normalizing team measurements, removing Scrum Masters.
  • “Most of what people complain about in Scrum is Nigel Scale 2…” — Nigel (09:56)
  • “An example… is dropping Scrum Masters… they die with a whimper. And they never know why…” — Nigel (10:49)

Evolving Beyond “Scrum by the Book”

• Vasco reflects on instances where Scrum was “forbidden” in name, but its principles were practiced more effectively:
  • “First of all, it brought Scrum to become a rebel thing to do, which we were all doing… it allowed us to customize it...” — Vasco (04:51)
• Both agree that successful Scrum is built through continuous evolution and adaptation—not rigid rule-following.

Scrum, Kanban, and Installation Pitfalls

• Nigel argues that Scrum provides a “container to evolve your own process” but lacks concrete installation guidance.
  • “If Scrum was software, it'd be a real pain to install… it's got no instruction manual. It's just like, here's the code base, compile it yourself.” — Nigel (13:43)
• Over time, distinctions between Scrum and Kanban fade as both evolve toward similar patterns in mature organizations. (14:30)

Practical Advice: Continuous Improvement & Pull, Not Push

• Scrum or Agile must not be imposed; successful change hinges on pull and clear rationale.
  • “What problem? What's the sense of urgency… What's the attractor for the team to change its practices…” — Nigel (15:25)
• Start with a backlog of changes, iteratively introduced and reprioritized based on team feedback and business need. (15:21)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Real Loss at Stake:
  • “It's not so much the death of Agile… it's the death of things like empowerment, the death of things like empiricism…”
    — Nigel Baker (06:34)
• On Popularity vs. Liking:
  • “Jira...incredibly popular...but...in terms of actual people saying, do you know what I really like? This Jira tool is much, much lower.”
    — Nigel Baker (03:00)
• On Anti-patterns:
  • “An example… is dropping Scrum Masters...they die with a whimper. And they never know why...”
    — Nigel Baker (10:49)
• On Practicing Agile Without the Name:
  • “First of all, it brought Scrum to become a rebel thing to do...and that made it even more interesting to do...”
    — Vasco Duarte (04:51)
• On How to Approach Change:
  • “Change has to be pull...What problem? What's the sense of urgency… What's the attractor for the team to change its practices…”
    — Nigel Baker (15:25)

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Key Timestamps

• [02:14] – Nigel defines the “death of Agile” as a decline of values, not just frameworks.
• [03:00] – Explains the difference between popularity of use and popularity of views.
• [05:58] – Nigel laments not just the death of Agile, but the regression to “feudalism.”
• [08:50] – Introduction of the “Nigel Scale” (three levels of Scrum practices).
• [10:49] – Example anti-pattern: dropping Scrum Masters.
• [13:43] – On Scrum’s lack of installability and missed opportunity in introducing techniques.
• [14:30] – How Scrum and Kanban converge in practice.
• [15:21] – Emphasizes evolutionary, feedback-driven process improvement.

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Concluding Insights

This episode emphasizes that the “death of Agile” is truly about the erosion of empowerment, empiricism, and the ability to evolve work practices. Both host and guest suggest that survival—and long-term relevance—boils down to continuous, meaningful improvement, not clinging to names or rigidly enforcing frameworks. Scrum Masters are encouraged to foster genuine team ownership and learning, focusing on solving real problems and letting process improvements grow organically from within the team.

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For Listeners

This episode is a must-listen for Scrum Masters and Agile coaches seeking perspective on current industry debates, practical ways to support their teams, and honest reflections on what really matters when striving for effective Agile practice.

Transcript

[Vasco]

Hey there, Agile adventurer, just a quick question.

[Host]

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[Vasco]

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[Host]

Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Wednesday the coaching and challenge conversation this week with Nigel Baker. Hey, Nigel, welcome back.

[Nigel Baker]

Thanks for having me again.

[Host]

Absolutely. So yesterday we were talking a lot about coaching and I think it serves us well to actually model it, practice it live here on, on the show so that people can hear how it feels like and potentially learn from it as well. For that we need the challenge. So Nigel, what might be a big challenge that you're facing right now that we could explore together?

[Nigel Baker]

Oh, a big challenge to explore together. That's an interesting one. I've got the biggest challenge to explore together, but it's the phrase itself is a challenge and loaded. So I need to pull out. And again, if you're listening, I'm pulling out the famous air quotes, you know, of two fingers, which is the death of Agile.

[Host]

Very good.

[Nigel Baker]

Air quotes. Air quotes.

[Host]

So what does the death of Agile mean in your context, Nigel?

[Nigel Baker]

This is fascinating because already if we listen to people in agile social media, Agile is dead, Agile's alive, Agile's dying, Agile's a zombie between life and death, depending on what they're selling. Right, but what is happening is there is a contraction on the popularity of Agile values, principles, frameworks and methods. Now why that's happening is interesting, I think.

[Host]

Okay, so the first thing that jumps to me is that you focused on the decline in popularity. So I want to first try to define that and I have an idea of what popularity would mean. But what does it mean for you, Nigel?

[Nigel Baker]

Yeah, because this has been, I think, a big mistake made in the Agile space, which has confused popularity. That is the amount of people saying they're doing agile with popularity, the amount of people liking what they're doing. Okay. And those two have been disconnected. So the great example for me in the world of work is Jira, the Atlassian tool. Jira, right. Which is incredibly popular in terms of subscriber numbers. Incredibly popular, multi billion dollar business. But in terms of actual people saying, do you know what I really like? This Jira tool is much, much lower. Okay. And of course Jira is just a tool, so it's only a side conversation here, but that's been happening, I feel a lot with things like the scaled Agile framework, a method that is no offense to safe. It's neither scaled nor agile nor framework. It's like the Holy Roman Empire wasn't holy, wasn't Roman, it wasn't an empire. But happening in Scrum as well. And that's been the big fear for me. I've been a huge fan of Scrum for so long and seeing people just hate Scrum or be disinterested in Scrum is a real concern for me.

[Host]

Yeah. So I really like how you differentiated the popularity of use. So how often and what's the percentage of teams using that particular approach versus the popularity in terms of social media. And I would like to, if you're okay with it, that's a proposal. I would like to focus on the popularity of views rather than the popularity in social media. Not because it's not important, of course it is, but rather because we have limited time and I would rather focus on something that actually will help me tomorrow when I go back to work. So do you agree with that? Should we focus on the popularity of views?

[Nigel Baker]

Yeah, very much so.

[Host]

My own observation is that the popularity of views, specifically of Scrum, has had challenges for many years. In fact, for more than a decade. I remember working in a German company where we were explicitly forbidden to say that we were doing Scrum, even though we were doing Scrum for whatever reason. I have no idea. Looking back in retrospect, I think it was actually a good thing that they forbid us to use Scrum because first of all, it brought Scrum to become a rebel thing to do, which we were all doing. And that made it even more interesting to do. And then also because it allowed us to customize it to our reality without any shame of not doing Scrum. There were like two aspects that were very positive. And as I look to the teams that I interact with on a regular basis, I think Scrum is still the default that everybody uses now. You Know, you might call it Scrum, but, or whatever. But I still see the popularity of views being quite high. Even though in some cases they might not be allowed to use the word Scrum to describe what they're doing.

[Nigel Baker]

Yeah, very much so, yeah. But it's what, this is where things get really, really interesting for me, right. In terms of what we're talking about here, right. Which is like when we talk about something like Scrum, right. So Agile is dead, Scrum is dead. Right. But the, and that could be fine, that can happen. The world is moving constantly, we're learning new things, right. But people aren't coming up with alternatives. Right. What's happening in the world of work is there is a lot of, I would say decay back and I'm not talking about back to waterfall, past that, back further to, I would call feudalism. Like the, the idea that, you know, I'm a great man. And by the way, it's always a man, isn't it? I'm a great man, I have a great vision. All you need to do is do what I say and we'll be greatly successful. You know, I, I have, I, I am, I am. And this sort of, this sort of tech bro esque, you know, like Aaron Ra of like, we need a few great people to follow and then the developers just do what they say, you know, so the, so it's not so much the death of Agile that's killing me or death of Scrum, it's the death of things like empowerment, the death of things like empiricism to a certain extent, actually learning what people want. Those are the things that frighten me in work because the consequences are not the, oh no, I can't be an Agile coach anymore. It's like companies are going to car crash. Okay? But just coming back one step so many years ago, I realized that, and again the people who know me will know exactly what I'm going to say, right? And they'll now be laughing because I talk about this all the time, right? But about 20 years ago we were having a discussion about Scrum in the Scrum alliance. Okay. We're having a big discussion about Scrum, about effectively. What is it? This is before the Scrum guide. This is before when each book that came out was slightly different and what happened was a lot of people had different interpretations of what Scrum actually was. And what I said was, look, we actually, I made a joke, which is the worst that you can do online is make a joke in text format because I made a little sarcastic Little post on our forum and people took it 100% seriously because I came up with a joke which has killed me for the last 20 years called the Nigel Scale. Well, I said, okay, right, you need to use the Nigel Scale. I've been using it for decades. I hadn't. I made it up on the spot. But I said the night Nigel scales this, it's a lens to look at Scrum. There are three aspects to Scrum. There is NIGEL scale one. This is things that are actually Scrum. These are core practices, things that, and this is the key thing, things that if you don't do them, things break. So these like high, what they were calling Cynefin, like, like a scaffold or something, like the hygiene stuff to make stuff happen. So the example I've used for decades is a surgeon disinfecting affects their hands before surgery. This isn't an option. This isn't like a nice to have. This isn't like, oh, context is king. Sometimes I'll wash, sometimes I won't. It's like, no, shut up. Like you disinfect your hands or you kill your patients. There is that. And that's what Scrum is trying to be. Scrum is trying to be the absolute, irreducible, fundamental core of what needs to happen in product development. Most of what people complain about in Scrum is Nigel Scale 2, which is good practices you could do in Scrum, but they're not scrub. So story points. Everyone's cursing story points at the moment. You know, velocity, standing up in a daily scrub, even, like, these are all things that you could do, but they're not, they're not part of Scrum because they're contextual. You know, you may do them, you may not. They have a life cycle. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they decay, sometimes they evolve. That's really interesting as a coach, right? These are things that are. You've got to use your mind on, analyze, evolve, experiment. Then you've got Nigel Scale 3, which is just bad ideas. And these are like anti patterns that all of us have tried again and again and again and again and it never works. And we keep trying. It never works. Yeah, well, in your word, the world of estimation, but I'll give you a great one which is normalizing team measurements.

[Host]

Oh, yeah.

[Nigel Baker]

So hey, we're all doing story points and this is a one. It's like this is just. The juice is not worth the squeeze. Like, this doesn't work.

[Host]

And if it didn't work, we're doing math with Story points. Story points shouldn't be numbers in the first place. They're just like abc. They're categories of size or whatever.

[Nigel Baker]

Yeah, we'll talk about this later. But for me, story points are a doorway to counting. So they're basically micro counting if you think about them. So counting stories like, oh, we've got five stories, five to do, all story points are. Is a way to get there by saying, okay, we're micro counting. That's like two values, that's two bits, that's three bits, that's five bits, that's four bits until you can get them even sized. Right. So it's a doorway technique. It's not bad, it's not good. It's a way to transition to something. Right. But again, that's all Nigel Scale 2. Nigel Scale 3 is just stuff that just never works. Never works. And people keep thinking it's going to work and it never works. And so like, an example of this is, by the way for me, is dropping Scrum Masters. So everyone thinks, oh, we don't need a Scrum Master. They're superfluous, they cost money. And then gradually, over time, they die with a whimper. And they never know why they've. No, they don't even. Because it doesn't burn up on day one. They just don't understand. They're on their way, but it's a wimp away.

[Host]

Let me put an idea here for your consideration. So first of all, I can understand why such a coherent Nigel Scale would be understood as a real post instead of sarcastic post.

[Nigel Baker]

Yeah.

[Host]

Because there's a lot of truth into that. Yeah, but, but what I'm thinking is, wait a minute, but Scrum emerged, not just Scrum xp, my favorite approach, but you know, Scrum is the most popular. Scru Drum emerged because our software industry was not competent, reliable enough for the economic and social pressures it was facing. It still isn't, I would argue, but let's leave that aside. So there's still the problem of, okay, even if a software company can be successful with, let's call it for just shortening here, crappy practices, there's still a case to, to say, hey, what if we just continue on improving the practices, no matter where we start, and eventually develop something better? If we can't do that reliably, Scrum offers a very quick and easy to understand shortcut towards improving how we develop software in multiple teams, one team and then multiple teams. And that's something that I don't see the offers out there. I mean, you said we're going back to feudalism. I appreciate that, in fact, it is happening. But I would say that we are going back to cowboy coding, which is even worse, which is how at least I got started in the industry and appalled by it. Because there was no coherence of action, there was no repeatability of process, it was chaos.

[Nigel Baker]

So, oh God, where do we go with this? Like, for me, like, so Scrum is a container to evolve your own process. It's not the process, it's the method to get to your process. Right? But interestingly for me, there's a downside with Scrum, but it isn't what you think, which is Scrum doesn't come with an installation package. So Scrum was software. It'll be a real pain to install, right? Because it's got no instruction manual. It's just like, here's the code base, compile it yourself.

[Host]

Right?

[Nigel Baker]

And I do feel what Scrum has missed out on, what the Scrum community has missed out on, the agile community is thinking about how to introduce techniques. Now there's lots of good practices out there. Like a lot of us back in the day, we wouldn't just introduce Scrum. What we would do is build a backlog of all the changes and gradually introduce Scrum, change by change, evolving the process. So whatever your process was, it'd evolve up. And that got a bit forgotten when Kanban turned up. But that's how Scrum was introduced. It actually was an evolutionary process, but it was never written down really. No one ever. It was part of the knowledge of the community, not necessarily part of Scrum. Right. And so this what gets interesting, like if you remember, there used to be real wars between Scrum and Kanban, right? And they completely disappeared because what happens is over sufficiently long period of time, Kanban looks like Scrum and Scrum looks like Kanban because they just both, like a lot of Kanbanas are evolving, using minimizing work in progress to a very Scrum esque shape. And a lot of Scrum people are using Scrum to evolve and minimize working process, to get into sort of a continuous flow shape. So they cut their two different ways to get to the same point. So a lot of that adversarialness in the industry's faded, right?

[Host]

I think we're getting close to that experiment. Maybe for those of us exploring how to perhaps make Scrum more solid and its implementation more reliable, maybe that idea that you just shared might be good, right? Like just start with your backlog of changes and go through them. One by one always keeping that backlog up to date based on the feedback you get from your customers who are the team? The teams and of course the stakeholders.

[Nigel Baker]

Yeah, yeah, that's what I would do. But make sure you have a vision. Why? Because a lot of people have been in Scrum's been imposed that you will do Scrum, why? Some some boss went on a training course and so if you always change has to be pull and so what I always do with any like if I was to introducing anything to a team I would say okay, why do we want this? Like I don't mean Scrum, like what problem? What's the sense of urgency we have that we need to be doing this? Is it because we have no idea where we're going or we're completely unreliable, or we are reliable but just overworked? Like what is the attractor for the team to change its practices and how can we use these tools and techniques to get them to that better space? That's a real key thing for me.

[Host]

Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing that with us, Nigel.

[Nigel Baker]

Thank you. Cheers.

[Vasco]

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[Host]

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