True agility is rare
If true agility is rare, it’s because it runs into an invisible wall – the weight of our organizational culture. Not the official culture, but the one that’s shaped by inherited practices, deeply ingrained habits and reassuring plans, validation committees and cascading approvals. What I bluntly call cultural legacy.
We think we have time
It all starts here. The feeling that we haven’t reached the limit. So, we stall. We plan extensively. We increase validations, consultations and versions of documents. We think we’re doing the right thing. But while we think, the market shifts, expectations evolve, and frustration builds. It’s a silent but constant lag – while we fine-tune, the world moves on.
This is where Parkinson’s Law comes in, formulated in 1955 by British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. And ironically, the more time we have, the more we fill it with pointless complexity.
Overload, or the art of trying to fix everything at once
By the time we finally launch the project, the accumulated delay creates pressure. To speed things up, we try to handle everything. All teams. All challenges. All features. We strive to deliver full transformation from the first phase.
This reflex is often fuelled by fear: fear of doing too little, or of being criticized for an incomplete or insufficient deliverable. Yet trying to deliver everything often means delivering nothing at all.
This temptation to cover everything creates a second trap: overload. It generates complexity. It clouds priorities. It dilutes value in effort. And it prompts a classic but ineffective response: add more people.
More hands, less impact
Fred Brooks, an IBM engineer and author of The Mythical Man Month, wrote in 1975: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
More people means more coordination, more interfaces and more dependencies. Each new person must be trained, integrated and aligned. It means more meetings and lengthier status updates. And everyone ends up chasing a vision that gets lost in the shuffle. Energy scatters. The project gets heavier, and the initial momentum weakens.
When everyone’s responsible, no one really is
Then comes a third shift that’s often subtle but with serious consequences: the dilution of accountability. When roles are unclear, objectives shift and priorities multiply. It becomes difficult to chart a clear direction. Everyone does their part, but without knowing how it fits into the whole.
In this haze, the transformation loses steam. Not due to bad intentions, but because it lacks coherence, clarity and continuity.
The result reflects our structure, not our vision
In the end, something may be delivered, but it carries the mark of our silos, our delays and our compromises. Melvin Conway, an American computer scientist, wrote in 1967: “Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”
In clear terms, if we work in silos, we code in silos. If decisions are slow, the product will be also. And if priorities shift along the way, the result will reflect this instability.
The good news is that all this can change
This portrait is not a condemnation, but a call to action. A call to see transformation projects not as plans to execute, but as dynamics to adjust. To recognize that agility isn’t something you declare – it’s something you build. And it starts with our willingness to question how we operate.
Yes, we can reduce overload by focusing on what holds the most value, here and now.
Yes, we can improve coordination by stabilizing teams and giving them back autonomy.
Yes, we can clarify accountability by acknowledging that some roles must decide, take charge and lead.
It’s less about method than about mindset. It’s not so much a process as a posture.
Transforming also means unlearning
Transformation doesn’t so much demand new tools – it requires letting go of old reflexes. It means refusing to believe that bigger means more important. It means admitting that planning isn’t delivering and that collaboration doesn’t mean consulting everyone all the time to reach consensus.
This takes courage. The courage to not control everything. The courage to say no to unrealistic ambitions. The courage to make choices and to simplify. The courage to adopt a different approach to delivery.
Agility cannot be improvised – it must be embodied
If true agility is rare, it’s because it clashes with decades of ingrained habits. But it’s not out of reach. It’s simply demanding. It requires us to rethink how we decide, prioritize and structure. And above all, it forces us to look honestly at our blind spots. At its core, agility is not a method. It’s a collective discipline of learning.
Digital transformation will never be a linear process. It’s a collective adventure, imperfect by nature, but full of potential. But we must accept that sometimes, the first step towards moving ahead is to let go.
When we choose to act on cultural heritage
At Cofomo, we’ve had the privilege of supporting various organizations, both public and private, in sectors as diverse as financial services, transportation, healthcare and technology. All of these organizations face the same invisible barrier, specifically their inherited organizational culture. In these contexts, our role has never been just to implement agile methods, but to guide real cultural evolution.
Concretely, this has meant working hand in hand with leadership teams to examine decision-making processes, clarify roles and responsibilities, create stable environments that foster autonomy and embrace a new way of approaching projects that is more iterative, more clear-sighted and more focused on real, everyday value delivery.
In many cases, this shift in mindset has helped not only to prioritize efforts more effectively but also to reduce the typical risks of traditional projects: delays, overload, misaligned products. These support initiatives have helped our clients reduce complexity, improve delivery capacity and, most importantly, reclaim ownership of their transformation.
Author:
Mélanie Labbé, Senior Vice-President, COFOMO
