Agile Theater: The 45-Minute Stand-Up and The Illusion of Speed
The meeting clock clicked past the 45-minute mark, feeling less like a sprint and more like an endurance test. My eyes, still stinging slightly from a recent, ill-advised shampoo experiment, made the fluorescent lights in the conference room seem even harsher, blurring the lines between genuine progress and performative work. Each person, one by one, delivered their status report – not to their peers, not as a quick update for collective problem-solving, but directly to a manager who, with the precision of a watchmaker examining a faulty gear, dissected their timelines and commitments right there, in front of everyone. It was a daily ritual, a modern inquisition disguised as collaboration.
This isn’t agile. This is ‘Agile Theater.’
We’ve all seen it. The stand-ups stretch to 45 minutes, sometimes even 55. The sprint reviews become executive presentations rather than team retrospectives. The backlog grooming turns into a laundry list of demands, dictated from on high. We go through the motions, we tick the boxes, we use the jargon – “scrum master,” “product owner,” “daily scrum” – but the spirit, the very essence of agility, is often missing, replaced by a new, more insidious form of micromanagement. It’s like buying a five-star chef’s knife set and using it only to spread butter. The tools are there, polished and sharp, but the application is entirely wrong. We’re performing agility, not embodying it.
The Illusion of Control
The frustration is palpable, a dull ache
