Similar thing happened to Agile. Agile is a practice of speeding up improvement. Idea being that organisations that improve faster will, over time, overtake or

Similar thing happened to Agile. Agile is a practice of speeding up improvement. Idea being that organisations that improve faster will, over time, overtake organisations that improve slower. If so, it makes sense to focus on the improvement loop itself. You remove management from the loop (because management takes too long and slows down improvement) and you empower and encourage individual contributors within their teams to improve the process because they can do it faster, have hands on knowledge of the process and can observe results faster. Additional benefit of Agile is that you now have a tightly knit team that tends to be more engaged with their work and more focused on thinking through what they are doing -- this tends to cause people to be more satisfied with their jobs because satisfaction of being able to affect the process positively is a great motivator. Yet, the management thinks they can come with a book and institute "Agile process" by telling everybody what they have to do, exactly. Usually, improvement within team structure is then actively discouraged with many explanations like "that's not what the book says" or "I was doing scrum at a company where it worked and so we must do the same" or "we need to standardise processes" or some other variation of it. I have observed this time and time again at various stages -- always with the same miserable outcome. At my last company they additionally decided we are introducing Scaled Agile Framework meaning, according to them, we will now plan not at team structure but at a department level. This innovation means all planning and retrospective are combined for about 400 people. Because this was too time consuming to do every two weeks, they decided we will do this every 5 sprints (10 weeks). Just to be clear -- every 5 sprints we were supposed to select and plan tickets for the next 10 weeks of development. This was presented as an efficiency improvement.