A team runs a fifteen-minute standup every morning, moves cards left to right, closes the sprint on schedule, and demos to itself on Friday. Velocity is stable. The board is tidy. And the product barely changes for the people who use it. The ceremonies are all present; the outcome they were invented to produce is missing. This is agile as theater, and it is more common than the framework's advocates like to admit.
The gap matters because the ritual is easy to copy and the intent is not. A daily standup can be photographed. A working agreement about who decides, what "done" means, and when to abandon a plan cannot. Organizations tend to install the visible layer and skip the invisible one, then wonder why the transformation produced meetings instead of results.
The cargo cult problem
The term researchers now use for this is precise. An ethnographic study of daily scrums by Havstorm, Karlsson and Gao (2025) operationalized "cargo cult" agile, imitating the rituals without understanding the principles beneath them, and catalogued twelve distinct cargo-cult behaviors grouped into seven categories of deviation. The standup that has become a status report to a manager, the retrospective that produces no change, the board maintained for the tool rather than the work: each is a documented pattern, not a caricature.
The larger evidence base points the same way. Dikert, Paasivaara and Lassenius (2016) reviewed 52 publications covering 42 industrial agile transformations and found that the most salient success factors were management support, customizing the model to context, training and coaching, and, above all, mindset and alignment. Transformations failed when agile was adopted as ceremony without the cultural change and executive backing to make it real. Tellingly, almost 90 percent of the papers they reviewed were practitioner experience reports rather than rigorous studies, a sign that the field runs on anecdote and imitation, exactly the soil in which cargo cults grow.
Principles over practices
If the ceremonies are not the active ingredient, what is? A survey of 298 agile practitioners by Palopak and Huang (2024) tested the perceived impact of the twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto on project success, deliberately looking past tools and events. The signal was that adherence to principles, not the mechanical performance of practices, tracked with better outcomes. The rituals are scaffolding. Remove the thing being built and the scaffolding is just a structure people climb every morning for no reason.
The most instructive failure is the one the industry copied most. The famous Spotify model of squads and tribes was, according to Jeremiah Lee (2020) and the coaches who wrote it up, aspirational from the start. Joakim Sundén, an agile coach there, put it plainly: even as they wrote the whitepaper, they were not doing what it described; it was "part aspiration, part approximation." Companies then adopted a model that its own authors say never fully existed, complete with the vocabulary and the org chart, and skipped the culture the vocabulary was meant to point at.
The systematic evidence points at the same underlying ingredient. Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025), reviewing how agile teams actually reach effectiveness, locate it in self-management principles, autonomy, shared leadership, coordination, and the emergent states of a team, rather than in the ceremonies teams perform. That reframes the whole exercise. The standup is not the thing that makes a team agile; the distribution of authority the standup is supposed to reflect is. Where that distribution is absent, no amount of well-run ceremony supplies it, and the ritual becomes what remains once the substance has been left out.
Ricardo Semler ran into the same distinction decades earlier, from the other direction. As he has told it, after collapsing in a factory at twenty-five and being diagnosed as "the healthiest sick person" a doctor had ever seen, he stopped measuring people by the hours they logged and started measuring whether the pump was actually delivered. Absenteeism fell. The ritual of the time clock had been standing in for the outcome; once the outcome was measured directly, the ritual lost its reason to exist.
That is the test any agile practice should have to pass. A ceremony earns its place only by improving what reaches the user or what the team learns. If a standup, a story-point session, or a sprint review cannot be tied to either, it is not agility. It is choreography, and choreography ships nothing.
Sources
- Dikert, Paasivaara & Lassenius (2016). Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations (SLR, 42 cases). Success hinges on management support, customization, and mindset, not on rituals; ~90% of the evidence was practitioner experience reports. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2016.06.013
- Havstorm, Karlsson & Gao (2025). Agile software development method cargo cult. An ethnography of daily scrums identifies 12 cargo-cult behaviors in 7 categories, imitating rituals without the principles. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2025.107851
- Palopak & Huang (2024). Perceived impact of agile principles (survey, n=298). Adherence to the Manifesto's principles, not to ceremonies, associates with project success. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107552
- Lee, J. (2020). Spotify's Failed #SquadGoals. Insiders confirm the copied squad model was aspirational and never fully implemented. https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/failed-squad-goals/
- Steegh, Van De Voorde & Paauwe (2025). Understanding how agile teams reach effectiveness (SLR). Agile effectiveness rests on self-management principles (autonomy, shared leadership, coordination), not on rituals. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2024.101056