Why Agile Fatigue Means We Need to Change Our Approach | Steve Martin

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Why Agile Fatigue Means We Need to Change Our Approach

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast | Host: Vasco Duarte | Guest: Steve Martin

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

---

Episode Overview

In this coaching-focused episode, Vasco Duarte and Steve Martin discuss the growing sense of "agile fatigue" in the industry, exploring whether the current approaches to agile transformation are still fit for purpose. Together, they reflect on root causes—like the failure to “meet people where they are”—and consider whether it's time to rethink how agile practitioners support organizations. The conversation is candid, practical, and laden with personal reflections on the evolving landscape of agile.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Is Agile in Retreat? Reflecting on Industry Fatigue

• Steve Martin expresses concern over a perceived regression or stagnation in the agile space, describing a “fatigue” both he and his mentees have observed.
  • “Agile as a whole... I feel like we're on the back foot a little bit and have been perhaps regressing a little bit for a while. There seems to be a lot of fatigue in the industry.” (02:02)
• He suggests it’s time for agile professionals to critically reflect on whether their contributions have truly moved the industry forward.

2. Historical Context: The Inevitable Evolution of Software

• Vasco Duarte provides context, reminding listeners that the software industry has always moved through cycles of crisis and advancement.
  • He mentions the first software crisis at the Garmish conference, noting ongoing industry shifts and cautioning agilists not to shoulder undue blame for not changing everything at once.
  • “It's quite clear for me at least that Agile did have a very positive contribution to our industry. But... one single movement can't change the whole perspective of an entire population.” (04:36)
• He suggests that perhaps the agile community is being overly hard on itself when change is, in fact, incremental and collective.

3. Meeting People Where They Are vs. Dragging Them Along

• Vasco brings back a theme from a previous episode: the necessity of meeting teams and organizations "where they are" instead of demanding change on outsiders’ terms.
  • “Could the fatigue that we are all collectively experiencing be a little bit of hey, I've been preaching for so long and they're still not listening to me kind of reaction?” (08:14)
• Steve agrees and points out that transformation efforts often fail because there is insufficient understanding or empathy for what teams are changing from.
  • “We teach transformation... but we don't really understand what they're changing from.” (08:47)

4. The Trap of Forcing Change

• Vasco shares a personal tip: when joining a new team, he starts by asking where they want to go—not by prescribing solutions.
  • "Maybe we need to start stepping back from helping people that don't want to be helped... Why would we want to help teams that really just they wish to be left alone?" (10:00)
• He recounts real experiences with teams resistant to more frequent releases and advocates for focusing energy where there is real desire to change.

5. The Need to Adapt as Coaches and Practitioners

• Both speakers agree the classic “Big Bang” approach to agile transformation is no longer effective—if it ever truly was.
  • Steve: “The age of Big Bang transformation... should never have been a thing, but it's something that has become a big thing and... it hasn't been a great success.” (13:18)
• Instead, they advocate for smaller experiments, pilots, and “test and learn,” mirroring the agile mindset.
  • “Do it more of a... test and learn, being innovative, trying out small pilots and then scaling when ready.” (13:45)

6. Humility, Reflection, and Responsiveness

• The conversation closes with a powerful reminder that context is key and agile practitioners must continually reflect and adjust tactics accordingly.
  • “If we try to do something and it fails often, maybe it's time to get that as input, as information and kind of change direction.” (13:08)
  • Steve: “Organizations need to be working in a state of agility with, with, you know, rapid decision making with, you know, with aligned teams with value being delivered at pace... That hasn't gone away.” (06:32)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” – Steve Martin (11:34)
• “Transformation used to work. Maybe now that’s not the vehicle. Maybe the vehicle is different and it might be different in every context.” – Vasco Duarte (12:24)
• “The age of Big Bang transformation... it hasn't been a great success... I think the age of that has gone.” – Steve Martin (13:18)
• “We need to adapt to the reality of the moment.” – Vasco Duarte (14:16)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:58 – Steve introduces the topic of industry-wide agile fatigue
• 03:11 – Vasco offers historical perspective and questions community-level expectations
• 05:56 – Steve reflects on the need for collective retrospection and relevance of agile
• 08:31 – Steve expands on the importance of truly understanding where teams are starting from
• 10:00 – Vasco advocates for not forcing change on unwilling teams
• 13:17 – Steve critiques the “Big Bang” transformation approach and recommends smaller pilots
• 14:16 – Final reflections on adapting to present contexts

---

Takeaway Messages

• Agile fatigue is real—practitioners must reflect honestly on industry progress and their own approaches.
• Empathy and contextual awareness are vital: successful change requires meeting people where they are.
• The era of mass, top-down transformations is over; small, context-driven experiments are preferable.
• Agile practitioners must continue to adapt and adjust—both their expectations and their methods—to avoid burnout and remain effective.
• Humility and learning are ongoing: Each context is unique, and practitioners should draw lessons from missteps as readily as from successes.

---

Tone: Candid, reflective, and empathetic; the speakers acknowledge both their frustrations and ongoing hope for agile’s evolution.

---

Transcript

[A]

Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership and it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast. Hello everybody. Welcome to our Wednesday, our coaching episode this week with Steve Martin. Hey Steve, welcome back.

[B]

Let's go. Well, it's great to be back and yeah, thank you for having me back.

[A]

Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you back. And today is coaching day here on the podcast. And in the coaching day we want to explore a topic, a particular challenge that you might be facing and then we'll have a coaching conversation where we explore the topic, try to take on different perspectives on the topic and then come up with potential ideas on experiments so that we may learn what might resolve or what might help us move forward regarding that topic. So Steve, share with us, what's the topic you have for us this week?

[B]

Well, Vasco, it's, it's been a while since I've been a Scrum Master. It's, I don't, I don't really do so much coaching nowadays. It's more, I do, I do more training and mentoring and, and also facilitating, you know, in working with clients in that regard. But I wanted to focus the, the big challenge, I think that comes up a lot for, for me and for my mentees as well is that I think agile as a whole. So I wanted it to become more of a broader topic. Is that agile as a whole, I feel like we're on the back foot a little bit and have been perhaps regressing a little bit for a while that there seems to be a lot of fatigue in the industry. Transformation is probably in its current form, very, very, it doesn't seem to have been a success and we need to really reflect that And I think as agilists, agile professionals, coaches, scrum masters, I think we have a, perhaps a responsibility to really take stock and reflect on how things are at the moment and how can we.

[A]

I think that's a very good point and I agree with you. As participants in the industry, we definitely have the responsibility to evaluate our contribution and if it has moved the industry forward or not. But let me put another idea forward. So I agree with what you said, but there's also this other perspective that I want to look into together with you, which is the idea that our industry, software industry specifically here I'm talking about is moving forward. It is inevitable because time moves forward. Now we may from our perspective say that it has stagnated. There was kind of an improvement boom when Agile came about, but now it's stagnated. But on the other hand, I was just talking to a friend the other day about the Garmish conference in the, I think it was the end of the 50s if I remember correctly. Either that or early 60s where the software industry got together, declared the first software crisis. And at that time the topics of the time were, among others, should we use assembly language or high level programming languages? And when I look at that historical context, I can't help but think that maybe we are at that level right now. Right? Like this Agile did or didn't do something for the industry is a little bit like should we use assembly languages or high level programming languages? It's quite clear for me at least that Agile did have a very positive contribution to our industry. But it is also very clear that one single movement can't change the whole perspective of an entire population. Right? Like Agile brings a lot of things that are counterintuitive to people who were born and trained in the predictive linear planning school, like project management mostly is. So what I'm considering taking on your trigger of okay, how do we take stock? How do we analyze our contribution? I'm considering if we are being a little bit too hard on ourselves and wanting to change too many things at the same time and having such a deep impact that it would be obvious that we had a deep impact instead of acknowledging that actually everything we do, even all the small things we do, are kind of moving the industry forward. And Agile is one, but there will be others. Agile is not the first and it's not the last big change in the software industry. How do you look at it like taking that perspective now as an Agile practitioner? How do you look at the whole industry evolution and our role as AGILISTS in it.

[B]

Yeah, well, I mean, it's a great way that you framed it there and I totally agree. I think it's, I think we're at a, I don't think we're at a complete crossroads. I think, I feel that it's, that we have reached a point where, I mean, look, we preach that we should be reflective and retrospecting continuously, right? And I think that's possibly where we're at with agile as a whole is that we're in a place where we need to be looking at, well, what's working for us and what is, and how can we help our teams, our leaders, our organizations to, to improve or to, you know, it's still relevant, it's still hugely vital and essential to, you know, organization like never before. Organizations need to have a, need to be working in a state of agility with, with, you know, rapid decision making with, you know, with the aligned teams with value being delivered at pace that, that hasn't gone away. What we're facing with is still a big challenge of having to work with organizations who perhaps have maybe feeling a little bit fatigued by the way that we've implemented it or tried to implement it.

[A]

Let me take you back to the Monday episode. You remember the Monday episode where you were talking about the idea of meeting people where they are versus wanting them to come towards you. And I'm thinking if that's not where we are collectively as an agile practitioners community, that we are still very much in that point of not meeting the industry where it is, but rather wanting it to come towards us. I mean, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of spiking debate and trying to contrast things like I do that with no estimates. I don't think that's wrong in any way. But I'm not trying to convince everybody to use no estimates. I'm just trying to explain why no estimates is a good approach, whether it's the best or not. I'm not trying to sell it as the best. I don't think I've learned everything I need to learn about software development. I think it will take a long time before that happens, but I can already say it's much better in certain conditions. So could the fatigue that we are all collectively experiencing be a little bit of hey, I've been preaching for so long and they're still not listening to me kind of reaction?

[B]

Yeah, I think you, you definitely have something there for sure. I, I had a conversation with a colleague of mine recently and he, he talked about and to your point about meeting them where they are, he talked about what we don't tend to do is we teach transformation, we support transformation, we help change, but we don't really understand what they're changing from. And really kind of getting into the understanding the mindset of where are they coming from so that we can actually empathize and meet them where they are right there and then, so that we can then help them along rather than, as you say, kind of bring, force them over.

[A]

So I, there's one tip that I use all the time. Like when, when I join a team, I have a good idea of what might help, but I never start with that, right? Like I always start with where do you want to go? And, and it's perfectly okay to say, hey, you want to continue to do things in a way that keeps you stuck where you are, that's fine, I'm just not part of it. Right? Like you can continue to work. Because the first thing that kind of strikes me when working with a team is if they think they have nothing to improve, yet they still complain about many things and those two things are never together, right? Like if you can complain about something, there's something to improve. If you are not complaining, then you might have an argument that everything is fine. So what I'm saying is maybe we need to start stepping back from helping people that don't want to be helped. I know this sounds so obvious when you say it like this, but why would we want to help teams that really just they wish to be left alone, they wish to continue to work in the same good, quote, unquote old ways that they've always worked? I've seen many clients where some of the teams didn't really want to do predictable regular releases to market. They wanted to work alone and release once a year. Of course the company didn't want them to do that, but the team wanted to do that and I wasn't going to be the one telling them, oh yeah, no, we can't do that, no, that's up to them and their manager to handle it. Because there's so many other teams that already want to move to this incremental, adaptable way of delivering software. So I'm thinking, are we, meaning as an agile community, actually pushing ourselves to that depressed state of trying to change everything against their will?

[B]

Yeah, that's a good point. And we're talking about sort of beyond the team as well. But there's a great quote a wise person once said, I can't remember who, but someone said that when, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Right. And it's, I mean it's relevant in any, any walk of life really. But for me, I think, I think you're right. I think, I think there's an element of, you know, force feeding. You know, I talked in the previous episode about my learnings around being, trying to be purist and things. But I, I also feel that the messaging initially as to, you know, and the lack of sponsorship, lack of buy in has been a problem and we're trying to, we're almost on the back foot before we started. So when we're working with, with an organization, it's time to change the plan.

[A]

Right. I'm just thinking, right, like we've been saying this to teams so often that, you know, when you can't deliver, maybe it's the plan that needs to change, not what you're doing. And maybe that's for us as well. Like transformation used to work. Maybe there's an argument out there that maybe says it didn't. But in any case, let's just take that as a potential positive that it did work. Transformation did work at some point. I've seen it working, at least in some cases. But maybe now that's not the vehicle. Maybe the vehicle is different and it might be different in every context. I can't predict what it might be in your context or the context of the listeners. But if we try to do something and it fails often, maybe it's time to get that as input, as information and kind of change direction. Do you have an idea of what direction that could be?

[B]

Well, yeah, I think, I think the age, the age of Big Bang transformation, I mean that should never have been a thing, but it's something that has become a big thing and in my eyes, my experience, it hasn't been a great success. There has been some small wins for sure, no doubt. But in terms of Big Bang transformation, 10, 15, 20 agile coaches being brought into save the world, I think the age of that has gone. I think organizations are now looking at it and going, well, what, how has it really helped us? They've spent an awful lot of money and they haven't really seen the results. So we need to look a little bit differently and do it more of a. Again, what we preach in that we should be looking at doing test and learn, being innovative, trying out small pilots and then scaling when ready. But it doesn't seem to be like that.

[A]

I think that's a very important point. Right. Like we need to adapt to the reality of the moment. And I think that's the key message now. What that means only you, dear listener, can say, because you are the one that is there in context, seeing what is happening. Steve, thank you very much for that shared reflection.

[B]

Thank you, Vasco.

[A]

All right, I hope you like this episode, but before you hit next episode, here's the deal. This podcast is powered by people like you, the members who wanted more than just inspiration. They wanted real tools and real connection to people who are practicing Agile. Every day we're talking access to over 700 hours of agile Gold, CTO level strategy talks, Summit keynotes, live workshops, E courses, Deep Dive interviews, books, and if you're into no Estimates, we got the pioneers of no Estimates in those Deep Dive interviews as well. Agile Business Intelligence, creating Product visions, coaching your product owner courses, you name it. You'll get invites to monthly live Q&As with agile pioneers and practitioners, plus a private Slack community which is free of all of that AI slop you see everywhere. And of course without the flame wars. It's a community of practitioners that want to learn and thrive together. It's the best place to connect with, with community and learn together. So if this podcast has helped you before, imagine what you will get from this podcast membership. So head on over to scrummastertoolbox.org membership and join the community that's shaping the future of Agile. We have so much for you, so check out all the details at Scrum Master Toolbox because listening is great, it's important. But doing it together, that's next level. I'll see you in the community. Slack we really hope you liked our show. And if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes? Share this podcast and let other Scrum Masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that sharing is caring.