Key Takeaways
- Most Agile transformations fail. Steve estimates 75-80% of Agile initiatives either outright fail or fall well short of their intended value—not because of the methodology, but because organizations focus on process compliance over outcomes.
- Process became the new bureaucracy. The Agile Manifesto emphasized "people over process," but many organizations flipped this, using frameworks and certifications as control mechanisms rather than value enablers.
- Leadership was left behind. While teams received extensive Agile training, executives often weren't brought along. Leaders don't need to master Scrum—they need to keep people connected to purpose, aligned on priorities, and energized about possibilities.
- Taxonomy matters more than you think. One Fortune 500 company spent over a year just aligning on common definitions. When "epic" means a year-long initiative to one team and a two-week effort to another, meaningful collaboration becomes nearly impossible.
- Value should be measured in money. Whether it's making money, saving money, or staying out of jail (compliance), tying work to concrete outcomes cuts through ambiguity and keeps teams focused on what matters.
- Replace "fail fast" with "learn fast." Failing fast without learning is just failing. The most adaptive professionals and teams build continuous learning into their work—they learn, apply, reflect, and adapt.
- Psychological safety enables challenge, not comfort. True psychological safety means team members can vigorously debate ideas and then go to lunch together. It's not about avoiding conflict—it's about separating ideas from identities.
- AI amplifies the need for human skills. Rather than replacing people, AI should free up time for the distinctly human work: connecting with others, imagining possibilities, and aligning teams around what matters.
- You have more agency than you think. If your environment doesn't support growth and adaptation, you can create that culture within your sphere of influence—or find organizations that embrace this mindset.
- It's about people, not process. The organizations that succeed with Agile focus on connecting people to purpose, aligning them around value, and energizing them about what's possible.
Full Transcript
Introduction
David Mantica: We're going to be practical. We're going to be very people-focused. We're going to be very outcome-driven. This is not a theory session. We're not going to get into the theory of this or that. We're going to talk about real life, real practical situations. Steve, give us your intro—tell us a little bit about yourself.
Steve Davis: I got introduced to Agile when I was part of an organization that wasn't delivering very well for our customers in the retail space. Retailers would come to us about September or October and say, "For this holiday season coming up, we need X, Y, and Z," and we'd say, "Too bad." We'd say those requirements were defined a year ago, we've been working on them all year, and you're gonna get the release that we put out in September. And we thought, that's just not good service.
So we started figuring out how to take those late-breaking requests and deliver them. This was in 2001, when the Agile Manifesto was signed and lots of new, emerging things were happening. There were no classes—we just tried some things, had some failures, but kept picking ourselves back up. We made it pragmatic because our goal wasn't implementation of any framework or certification. We just wanted to get more responsive to our customer.
A few years down the road, I went to Ancestry.com, and surprisingly, Ancestry was a very waterfall shop, even though it was web-native. The CTO there said we need to make this an Agile organization. That's where I learned a lot about Agile—not just in software development, but in finance, operations, and marketing. We transformed the whole company to be an Agile company.
I left there and started my own company, Davis-based Consulting. We were blessed to work with some really great organizations—FedEx, Wells Fargo, and DoubleClick, which got acquired by Google. We combined that company, sold it to Solutions IQ, and then sold Solutions IQ to Accenture. Accenture used Solutions IQ as the beginning of their Agile practice, and I took that practice global. We grew that practice to be a $1.4 billion contribution to Accenture's top-line revenue with a team of 750-plus people around the world.
Why Agile Transformations Fail
David Mantica: Agile really hasn't delivered the value expected, or at least at this point in time. So what's happening?
Steve Davis: I actually was diagnosed with cancer, and I am two and a half years cancer-free now. That gave me an opportunity to step away and not be in the throes of it all—to evaluate what is different about those that take off and those that don't.
When I added up the customer successes and those that failed—and I call failure anything from outright failed and canceled everything to fell well short of the value they were after—I would say three out of four, if not four out of five, were failures. So that gave me an opportunity to think about what was different about the 20 to 30 percent that were succeeding versus those that weren't.
David Mantica: You talk about disconnection, misalignments?
Steve Davis: With certifications and frameworks, the value piece got lost. Success criteria I was seeing—even frameworks for measuring Agile success—were all focused on "are you doing all the Agile things?"
David Mantica: Are you "Agilicious," is what I used to call it.
Steve Davis: There was a lot of focus on the teams, and at its heart, that's a good thing. But leaders were left behind. I knew a lot of coaches who wanted to say "I'm an executive coach," but the reality I was seeing was we weren't actually bringing executives along with what they needed to do.
I often said to executives, "I don't need you to be a master in the Agile arts. I don't need you to know Scrum. I don't need you to know SAFe in all of its detail. Your teams will know that." What I needed leaders to do was keep their people connected to a common purpose, aligned around what we do and how we do it, and energized about what's possible.
David Mantica: You talk about scale—we scaled process over purpose. Framework wars against value. Confusion instead of clarity. Bureaucracy and friction. It became what it was going against.
Steve Davis: If we looked at the Agile Manifesto—people over process—I think it did flip. It really flipped to be process-focused.
David Mantica: Is it because of human nature?
Steve Davis: In my layman's observations of human behavior, it became "what can I control?" And I can control a process.
David Mantica: While that's so right—I can control a process—but when it came to the people, instead of working with people, I want the process to govern.
Getting Back to Value
David Mantica: How do you rekindle this thing, Steve?
Steve Davis: Let's talk about what can be. I think we need to put the focus back on people. We need them to be connected to a common purpose. We talk about vision and sharing that vision of what's possible—connected to each other.
We look for simple things. Are you hearing a lot of the words "we" and "us"? Then you know it's a connected team. If you're hearing a lot of the words "they" and "them," or "me" and "I," then you might have some issues, because they're not connected as a unit. We win together, we lose together.
David Mantica: You talk about purpose, people, and value. No silos. Shared reality. What type of alignment are you looking for when you start to think about rekindling?
Steve Davis: When I talk about alignment, I talk about alignment on what we do—and that has a lot to do with focus. We can't do everything, and we shouldn't try to do everything. There's been a big movement in the Agile space around portfolio management and limiting WIP. These are all good things.
It should be about aligning on what is most important and what order we're going to do it in. And then how we work. I worked with one Fortune 500 organization over many years. We spent more than a year aligning the organization on taxonomy—just what are the words we're using to describe the things that we are doing?
Everyone in the organization was using a common framework, but they were using the words differently enough that it was causing noise. The word "epic"—one group said an epic takes a year. Another group said an epic takes two weeks or more. Those are very different definitions.
Measuring Value
David Mantica: Value is a very difficult thing for people to get their hands wrapped around. How have you helped some organizations come up with value measurements?
Steve Davis: Whenever possible, we put money on it, because businesses are in business to make money. Even for nonprofits, we can't lose money.
David Mantica: Make money, save money, or stay out of jail—compliance. You may put a compliancy trigger on it: no jail or jail time, no fine or fines.
Steve Davis: That puts something measurable on what we're delivering. Then you start to put other values on it—is it keeping people engaged? Is it motivating people?
David Mantica: Those will turn back into revenue. You inspire someone, they're gonna buy more. You make something easy for someone to work with, they're gonna buy more.
Steve Davis: Wherever possible, I like to talk about the upside versus cost savings. Cost savings has a danger of getting people depressed.
David Mantica: You can't cost-save your way to life. You cost-save your way to death.
Steve Davis: It tends to put people in a scarcity mentality when all of our focus is on cost savings. Whereas we could say we need to be more effective so that we can spend more of our budget on expanding our capabilities, our skills, our product offerings, our services.
Decision Discipline
Steve Davis: On decision discipline, I learned a lot about that with my business partner as I grew our business. I was somebody who makes decisions very quickly, and my business partner was somebody who made decisions very deliberately and wanted to analyze the data more.
It actually led to a really good partnership. What we learned was to balance that. We talked about the five levels of planning—from vision, like "I'm going on a trip to Orlando," to how I get there with the twists and turns and closed roads or delayed flights. Those details might emerge as we go.
Make decisions at the last responsible moment to give yourself optionality. You've got to see the long view and understand the horizons along the way. But some decisions need to be made early. I would use the metaphor of building a house—I can't decide halfway through building the house that I want a basement.
David Mantica: The last responsible moment—we can't predict the future. That's why I love iterative work structure so much. It gets me one step closer to the future to stand up like a meerkat, look around and see what's going on, then go back down and try to go based on the best knowledge I've got available.
Steve Davis: That's where some Agile teams fall, especially when leadership's not involved—it's just iterate, iterate, iterate. You end up driving 300 miles when you could have driven 50.
When I make the note of decision discipline, it's that you've got to embrace that there are planning horizons. You need to embrace all of the planning horizons, not only the shortest one in front of you.
Psychological Safety and Accountability
Steve Davis: Let's call out very specifically that psychological safety does not mean we have an environment where nobody gets challenged. In fact, the teams that have the highest psychological safety challenge each other every day.
I learned that at my first job out of MBA school at Intel. There were two Israeli gentlemen that worked on this team, and they yelled at each other across the table making their points about how we should do something. At the end of the meeting, they looked at each other and said, "Where should we go to lunch?"
That was the most psychologically safe environment I had ever experienced, because you were free to share different perspectives and then go to lunch together.
David Mantica: This is one of the biggest problems that occurred—we didn't teach the teams individually how to exercise their autonomy and do so in a confident way. I think we forgot how deeply ingrained this fear of losing our jobs is to us, especially in big systems.
Steve Davis: Today, with AI, that fear is manifesting itself in a whole new way. "I don't need as many people. AI's gonna be able to do what I used to do."
David Mantica: How does AI fit within the manifesto? AI should augment your ability to work more closely with people.
Steve Davis: People over processing tools. I love what somebody put out there on LinkedIn—the Human Amplification Index. What is the human amplification of AI?
Learn Fast, Not Fail Fast
Steve Davis: One of the more popular two-word phrases in Agile is "fail fast." I never liked those words. What I replace it with is "learn fast." Because if I just fail fast and I'm not learning from it, then I truly have failed fast.
Learn fast becomes the beginning of being more adaptive. That's the number one skill. People come to me now and say, "What's the number one skill I can have in the AI world?" Learn fast.
You learn most not only by reading something, going to a class, watching a podcast interview—whatever your method is. But then you have to apply it, and you have to creatively apply it to your situation. Continue the learning cycle through experience.
When you say we didn't really teach people the skills needed for Agile success, I think that's really at the core of one of them: learn, apply, reflect, adapt.
David Mantica: There's a great book called "Unlearning." Unlearning gets into the idea of how to teach yourself how to unlearn. Look at me—I made a ton of money in direct mail. Direct mail's useless right now.
If I look at myself as a work product, I've got to realize that I have to create new value in myself. I have to learn new things, or else I'm not gonna be able to provide value. But that means I have to teach myself how to unlearn.
The Adaptive Quotient
Steve Davis: We're in a perfect storm situation right now for becoming more adaptive. For me, it starts with that learning. When we really started to define what adaptive meant for us—taxonomy matters—we said adaptive to us breaks down into five sub-quotients if we call it your adaptive quotient:
- Your learning quotient
- Your creative quotient
- Your spiritual quotient—which is seeing what's possible and connecting other people to that vision
- Then the physical quotient—putting it to work
Closing Thoughts
Steve Davis: The challenge to everyone on the call today is be one of the people who learns how to use AI, or whatever tools are available to you. AI is just one of those tools—to learn, to unlearn, to create, to imagine, and to align people around what's possible. Because then you're one of the people who's doing for the majority of people who are just saying, "Do it for me."
David Mantica: If you're in an environment that you're not feeling this, you have the agency to move. You don't think you can, but you do. And if you have that self-esteem to have the agency to move, you can move into and find one of these cultures. If you're struggling, create your own culture like this within your own sphere of influence initially, to build the muscle.
Steve Davis: You can do that within your team. You can be one of the people who, hey, they've become one of our go-to people because they produce value for us.
The company I'm part of now, at Typhoom, our mantra is helping individuals and organizations become more, because we believe we can become more. Not that we're stuck today, and not that we don't accept what we are today—we celebrate that—but we can do more.
You joined a webinar that said let's talk about Agile success and reigniting that. I hope what you've taken away from it is: it's about the people. It's about inside-out change. It's about focusing on value, not on process and not on rules.
David Mantica: Outcomes, value, people, and learnings. Hopefully people get excited about the reclamation—the rekindling aspect. Steve, I really appreciate your time.
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