Over the next month, I’m turning attention to three patterns that consistently appear when agile transformations plateau. These aren’t failures of implementation—your teams are running sprints, holding retrospectives, using the tools. The ceremonies are in place. Yet somehow, the business value that justified the initial investment has stopped materializing.
According to the State of Agile Coaching Report (1), leadership and management consistently emerge as barriers to agility. I don’t think this is because leadership and management oppose the agile principles, but because their behaviors haven’t shifted alongside team practices. Teams report doing everything “by the book” while leadership continues asking questions that undermine the entire philosophy: “Can’t you just commit to a date?” “Why does this take so long?” “Can’t we add more people to speed this up?”
I work primarily with what I call second-generation agile organisations—companies that completed their transformations years ago and now “this is what we do,” whatever that actually means after years of adaptations, workarounds, and compromises layered into the process. A financial services company I coached illustrates this perfectly. They had quarterly planning at the top, sprint execution at the team level, and a collision zone at middle management. Top-level plans didn’t accommodate changes in scope or variation of the technical estimates. Development teams absorbed the gap between strategic promises and operational capacity, leading to quality issues as pressure to meet committed scope overrode accepting the teams’ actual velocity.
The pattern repeats across industries and company sizes. Agile practices get adopted, early wins happen, then progress stalls quietly. This aligns with Kotter’s stages 7 and 8 in organizational change (2), where transformations typically falter—not in adoption, but in consolidating gains and anchoring new approaches into culture.
Three Lags That Signal Your Transformation Has Plateaued
Behavioral Lag emerges when practices change but behaviors don’t. Your teams restructured into squads, adopted two-week sprints, and eliminated status meetings. Meanwhile, leadership still operates from command-and-control instincts—asking for commitments disguised as estimates, escalating when teams push back on scope, treating agile ceremonies as unnecessary overhead that slows “real work.” The practices are present but the supporting behaviors aren’t, creating constant friction that erodes both team effectiveness and organizational trust. Week 2 explores how this lag manifests and what interventions actually shift behavior rather than just generating more training attendance.
Value Lag appears when focus shifts from delivering business outcomes to conforming to process. Retrospectives discuss standup timing instead of customer impact. Teams measure velocity while leadership asks where the ROI went. Energy concentrates on “doing Scrum correctly” rather than adapting practices to your specific context. I find this particularly common in organisations where internal coaches were trained in specific frameworks and now lack permission—or capability—to help teams question those frameworks when context demands it. Week 3 examines how to refocus on value delivery over process orthodoxy.
Momentum Lag surfaces when early wins don’t translate into sustained transformation. The first few months generated enthusiasm—problems got solved, delivery improved, stakeholders felt optimistic. Then somewhere down the line, progress slows. Each new challenge feels like starting over rather than building on established capability. Gains feel fragile, easily lost when pressure increases. The energy that carried the initial adoption has depleted faster than the transformation generates new momentum. Week 4 addresses how to consolidate improvements into systematic capability rather than isolated wins.
These lags don’t indicate that agile is wrong for your organization. They signal that your transformation has reached the point where methodology implementation alone won’t carry you further. What worked to adopt practices won’t work to embed them into how your organization actually operates under pressure.
The State of Agile Coaching Report found that 9-14% of coaches reported being unsure of their impact, with team-level coaches particularly struggling to articulate their value compared to business coaches working at organizational level. This uncertainty reflects a deeper issue: when transformation stalls, neither teams nor their internal coaches can see the systemic patterns causing the plateau. They’re inside the system, subject to the same forces creating the lags.
External coaching provides a perspective that internal people can’t access—not because they lack skill, but because they lack a position outside the system to name patterns without political consequence. Someone needs to facilitate the uncomfortable conversation about why adopted practices aren’t delivering expected results. That conversation requires credibility, experience with similar patterns, and immunity from the organizational dynamics that keep internal people from speaking directly about behavioral and structural barriers.
Understanding which lag is affecting your organization changes what interventions will actually help versus which will simply generate activity without impact.
While the principles discussed here are straightforward, their effective implementation requires understanding which specific lag is blocking your transformation and why. That’s where evidence-based coaching makes the difference, accelerating your journey from adopted practices to sustainable business results. Explore how to diagnose which lag is stalling your agile ROI. Reach out today for a diagnostic conversation that identifies your specific barriers and the interventions most likely to generate movement.
References
- https://resources.scrumalliance.org/Article/state-agile-coaching-report
- https://www.kotterinc.com/methodology/8-steps/
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