Walk into most companies that call themselves agile and you will find the rituals in perfect order. The standup starts at nine. The board has its columns. The retrospective has its sticky notes and its timer. What you often will not find is any change in how decisions get made or how quickly good work reaches a customer. The ceremonies are running. The reason for running them has gone missing.
That gap has a name, borrowed from anthropology, and it has become one of the more honest ideas in the study of how organizations work. A cargo cult imitates the visible form of a practice in the hope of summoning its results, while missing the mechanism that produced them. In software, the form is the meeting. The mechanism is the principle underneath it.
Imitating the form, losing the function
The most direct evidence that this is a real and observable pattern, not a consultant's insult, comes from an ethnographic study of Daily Scrums. Havstorm, Karlsson and Gao (2025) watched teams perform the meeting faithfully while stripping it of its purpose, and from their observations, interviews and documents they built an analytical tool that identifies twelve cargo cult behaviors organized into seven categories of deviation. The behaviors are familiar to anyone who has sat through a bad standup. People recite status to a manager, which turns a coordination event into a report. They answer the three ritual questions and skip the part where the team actually re-plans the day. The circle stands, the words are spoken, and nothing is decided.
What makes their work useful is that it refuses to treat agility as a checklist. A team can hold every prescribed meeting and still be doing the opposite of agile, because the meetings are the easiest element to copy and the least important element to get right. The value was never in the standup. It was in the fast, local, self-correcting decisions the standup was supposed to enable.
Principles do the work that rituals only signal
If ceremonies are not the active ingredient, what is? Palopak and Huang (2024) put the question to 298 agile practitioners in a survey of software projects and tested how the perceived impact of the twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto related to project success. Their contribution is to move the conversation past practices and tools to the principles those practices are meant to serve: working software over documentation, responding to change over following a plan, motivated individuals given the environment and trust they need. The signal in their data is that adherence to principles, not the mechanical performance of practices, is what associates with better project outcomes.
This is the uncomfortable part for any leader who bought agility as a set of routines to install. Routines are legible. You can put a standup on a calendar and a burndown chart on a wall, and report upward that the transformation is on track. Principles are not legible in the same way. You cannot audit whether a team genuinely responds to change by counting its meetings.
Why organizations settle for the costume
Organizations keep choosing the costume because the costume is cheap and the substance is hard. The largest synthesis of what actually determines success here makes the point without meaning to. Dikert, Paasivaara and Lassenius (2016) reviewed 52 publications describing 42 industrial cases of large-scale agile adoption and distilled them into 35 challenges and 29 success factors. The factors that recur are not new ceremonies. They are management support, customizing the model to the context rather than copying a framework wholesale, investment in training and coaching, and, above all, a genuine shift in mindset and alignment across the organization.
Notice that none of those are things you can install on a Tuesday. Mindset is not a meeting. Customization is the opposite of adopting a template. The same review carries a caution that should chasten anyone quoting scaling frameworks as settled science: roughly 90 percent of the studies it drew on were practitioner experience reports rather than rigorous research. The field is long on confident recipes and short on proof that any particular ceremony is the thing that works.
The contemporary version of this problem is agile adoption meeting AI-assisted development and another round of tech layoffs. When headcount falls and coding assistants change the shape of the work, the ceremonies are the first thing a stressed organization performs to feel in control and the last thing that helps. A team that lost a third of its members does not need a more punctual standup. It needs the authority to re-scope its own commitments, which is a principle, not a rite.
The practical read
The test for whether your agility is real is simple and it has nothing to do with attendance. Cancel a ceremony for a sprint and watch what happens. If coordination collapses, the meeting was carrying real load and the team was using it to make decisions. If nothing changes, you were staffing a ritual. Havstorm, Karlsson and Gao (2025) give you the vocabulary to name the failure, Palopak and Huang (2024) tell you where the value actually sits, and Dikert, Paasivaara and Lassenius (2016) remind you that the fix is cultural and managerial rather than procedural. The standup is not the problem. Mistaking the standup for the point is.
Sources
- Havstorm, Karlsson and Gao (2025). Agile software development method cargo cult - Devising an analytical tool. Ethnographic study of Daily Scrums identifying twelve cargo cult behaviors in seven categories, giving direct evidence that teams can perform ceremonies while abandoning their purpose. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2025.107851
- Palopak and Huang (2024). Perceived impact of agile principles: Insights from a survey-based study on agile software development project success. Survey of 298 practitioners showing that adherence to the twelve Manifesto principles, not mere practices, associates with project success. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107552
- Dikert, Paasivaara and Lassenius (2016). Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations: A systematic literature review. Review of 42 industrial cases finding success rests on management support, customization, coaching and mindset, and warning that most evidence is experience reports. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2016.06.013