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

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

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

 

"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. Those are the things that frighten me in work." - Nigel Baker

 

Nigel brings a challenge that resonates across the entire Agile community: the so-called "death of Agile." But he quickly reframes the conversation in a way that cuts much deeper. The real issue isn't whether teams call what they do Scrum or Agile—it's that the industry is decaying back past waterfall to what Nigel calls feudalism, where a single "great man" dictates and everyone else follows. 

He distinguishes between two kinds of popularity: the number of people saying they're doing Agile versus the number of people actually liking what they're doing—a gap he compares to Jira's massive subscriber base versus its actual user satisfaction. Through this lens, Nigel introduces his famous "Nigel Scale"—a joke he made on a Scrum Alliance forum 20 years ago that people took entirely seriously. The scale separates Scrum into three levels: core practices that break things if you skip them (like a surgeon disinfecting hands), contextual good practices that may or may not apply (like story points), and persistent anti-patterns that never work no matter how many times people try (like normalizing team measurements across teams). 

Vasco and Nigel converge on an experiment: treat Scrum adoption itself as a backlog of changes, introducing practices incrementally based on feedback—but always with a compelling vision of why the change matters.

 

Self-reflection Question: When you hear "Agile is dead," are you defending a framework, or are you advocating for the underlying principles of empowerment and empiricism that teams genuinely need?

 

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About Nigel Baker

 

Nigel Baker is a seasoned agile coach with a keen intellect, warm creativity, and thoughtful humour. With a career spanning software engineering, consultancy and global training, he inspires teams to thrive, not just perform. Outside work, he loves bold ideas, good conversation and a life well lived.

 

You can link with Nigel Baker on LinkedIn. You can also find Nigel at AgileBear.com.