Everyone’s talking shite. I’m just breathing it in.

I love the word Agile. I use it like a charm, like a secret handshake, like a key to some mythical boardroom utopia where projects flow smoothly and people pivot effortlessly. I sprinkle it in emails, whisper it in meetings, even mutter it under my breath while making coffee: Agile team, Agile mindset, Agile transformation. It feels powerful. It feels true. It feels like hope in Helvetica Neue.

Then reality happened.

We were “adopting Agile” for a project that should have taken a week. Instead, it took three meetings, two whiteboards, a Gantt chart that doubled as modern art, and a near-riot in the office kitchen over sticky notes. Every stand-up became a philosophical debate about what done really means. Every backlog refinement threatened to collapse under the weight of our own definitions. Agile, I realized, had become a polite chaos, a veneer of control hiding the fact that none of us actually knew where we were going.

And the clients? Oh, the clients. They had all been on a course. Some had the official badge of Scrum Master. They had read the books. They could recite ceremonies like poetry. They could talk Agile like it was gospel. And yet, they had zero control over stakeholders. Zero. None. Their supposedly Agile methodology crumbled the second someone disagreed, a requirement shifted, or the printer refused to print something innocuous. They leaned on process like a life jacket in a tsunami. I watched them try to corral executives who didn’t give a damn, juggling meetings like fireballs while chanting sprints and retrospectives. It was… spectacular.

And then it clicked: oil tankers are more agile than project teams. They turn faster. They adjust more efficiently. They don’t hold retrospective meetings to argue about whether the sprint delivered value. They don’t produce burndown charts that read like existential poetry. And yet here we were — professionals, Agile-certified, pivoting in circles, spinning dashboards, pretending nimbleness while reality cheerfully ignored us.

I still love the word. I still whisper it like a mantra when no one is looking. I still write it in bold, confident letters on decks, imagining it will somehow infuse the team with the speed and grace it promises. But now, when I say Agile, I hear it laughing. It is a trickster, promising efficiency while delivering polite chaos. It is the mirror in which we see our own delusions of control — ours, and our clients’.

Agile is not the oil tanker of efficiency. It is the rubber band of aspiration, stretched and stretched until it snaps, leaving us staring at empty dashboards, sticky notes fluttering like flags of surrender, and clients nodding solemnly, imagining mastery while chaos quietly eats the project alive.

– Tom Kite.