From Diagnosis to Direction: What Comes After Recognising the Lags

In a recent article, I wrote about three patterns I see repeatedly in organisations that have adopted agile practices but are not seeing the results they expected. 

• Behavioural lag — when methods change, but culture does not. 
• Value lag — when methods change but the visibility of ROI disappears. 
• Momentum lag — when teams celebrate the adoption of new practices and mistake the beginning of the journey for the destination.

If that article resonated with you, this one is its natural continuation. Because naming the problem is only ever the first step. The harder question — and the more interesting one — is what to actually do about it.

The Moment of Recognition

The moment of recognition often comes quietly: a sprint board that looks healthy but feels wrong. Metrics that tick along as expected while something underneath shifts in a direction you can’t quite name. A retrospective that ends with action items nobody truly believes will change anything.

That dissonance — between what the data says and what experience tells you — is not a signal that you are failing. It is a signal that you are paying attention. The organisations that never feel that tension are usually the ones that have stopped looking.

What matters is what happens next.

Behavioural Lag: The Culture That Didn’t Follow

Behavioural lag is perhaps the most insidious of the three, because it is invisible in your process documentation. Your ceremonies are in place. Your roles are defined. On paper, the transformation is complete.

What you are actually observing is the distance between adopted practices and unchanged instincts. Teams that have learned to speak the language of agile while still operating on the assumptions of the world they came from. The practical path forward here is not more training. It is creating the conditions for different behaviour to be safe, visible, and rewarded. That is slower than a workshop. It is also more durable.

Value Lag: Making Improvement Visible Again

Value lag tends to frustrate technical leaders most, because the problem is not that value isn’t being delivered — it is that the people who need to see it can’t find it in the metrics they’ve always used.

The bridge between what your team produces and what your organisation can observe is built from deliberate choices about measurement. Not more metrics. Different ones. Metrics that speak to outcomes rather than activity — and that connect the rhythm of your development work to the decisions being made at the level above it.

I find that when teams start to make their own improvement visible — even imperfectly, even provisionally — something shifts in how they are perceived and how they perceive themselves. The value was always there. The narrative around it simply needed to catch up.

Momentum Lag: Keeping Moving After the Celebration

Momentum lag is the one most teams will recognise the moment it is named. The energy of a transformation is highest at the start. There is novelty, there is intent, there is often external support driving things forward. Then the consultants leave, the initial energy dissipates, and the new practices settle into routine.

Routine is not the enemy. But routine without reflection becomes stagnation. The teams and organisations that sustain improvement over time are the ones that treat their current practices not as the answer but as the current best guess — always open to revision in the light of new experience.

That disposition is harder to install than a process. It is essentially a cultural shift: from ‘we now do agile’ to ‘we are always learning how to work better.’ The distinction sounds subtle. In practice, it changes everything.

What This Series Will Cover

Over the coming weeks, I will be exploring the practical dimension of each of these challenges in more depth. We will look at: 

1. Retrospectives — why so many of them produce action items that go nowhere, and what a genuinely improvement-driven retrospective actually looks like in practice.
2. Velocity and what it is actually measuring — because velocity that looks stable can be concealing serious dysfunction, and velocity that fluctuates wildly is often telling you something important if you know how to listen.
3. The signals that suggest a team may benefit from an external perspective — not as a failure, but as a deliberate investment in momentum.

Each piece will be practical. Each will be grounded in the kind of situations I actually encounter. And none of them will ask you to adopt a new methodology — because I have never found that methodology that you can adapt out-of-the-box without ant changes.

While the principles discussed here are straightforward, their effective implementation often requires a nuanced understanding of your team’s unique context. That’s where evidence-based coaching makes the difference, accelerating your journey to sustainable productivity. Let’s explore howmoving from diagnosis to sustained improvement can work for your organisation. Reach out today, and let’s turn recognition into results.