Scaled Agile Concerns: Ethical Use of Knowledge
From the The Agile Enterprise Blog
by Stelian ROMAN
This blog will explore agility at the enterprise level, examining how agile principles can be implemented throughout the organization—and in departments other than IT.
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Date
Scaled Agile Frameworks, the Agile Manifesto, and Lean Six Sigma
Ethical Concerns: Ethical Use of Knowledge
In a very competitive certification market and as organisations seek to scale agile practices, many turn to structured frameworks and borrow from established methodologies like Lean Six Sigma. While using traditional practices and tools from traditional Project, Portfolio, Program Management and Lean Six Sigma, ethical issues arise when Lean Six Sigma concepts are copied, misrepresented as new Agile practices, or used without proper attribution. These concerns become more acute when such practices diverge from the values of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Unknown to many Agile practitioners, Agile emerged as an American response to the success of Lean Six Sigma in Japan, and whilst there is value in improving quality and reducing cost, standardisation is against the Agile core value of responding to change.
Intellectual Property Concerns
Adopting Lean Six Sigma tools for Agile frameworks or projects can be valuable, but appropriating these concepts without proper acknowledgment raises ethical questions around intellectual property and originality. Methodologies like Lean Six Sigma are the result of years of development and collective expertise. Using their elements without credit not only ignores this lineage but also undermines respect for the source and the broader professional community.
Transparency and Honesty
Organisations have an ethical duty to be transparent about the origins of their frameworks, metrics, and tools. Presenting repurposed Lean Six Sigma practices as original Agile innovations is misleading and can be perceived as dishonest. This lack of honesty can erode trust and damage the organisation’s reputation, especially if exposed by those familiar with the methodologies.
Risks of Misalignment with the Agile Manifesto
When organisations implement scaled Agile frameworks that deviate from the core values of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, especially through uncredited borrowing from Lean Six Sigma, they risk replacing transparency, collaboration, and adaptability with rigid processes and metrics. This can:
- Foster a culture of compliance rather than empowerment
- Diminish team engagement and innovation
- Blur the line between Agile and other process-driven methodologies, causing confusion and scepticism
Best Practices for Ethical Adoption
To uphold ethical standards, organisations should:
- Clearly acknowledge the origins of any methodologies or tools they incorporate
- Align all practices with the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development
- Foster a culture of transparency and intellectual honesty
- Educate teams about both the benefits and the sources of their agile practices
Conclusion
Respecting intellectual property and being transparent about the origins of agile practices is essential for maintaining credibility and trust. Ethical adoption not only honours the contributions of others but also strengthens the integrity of Agile transformations.
Have you encountered issues of transparency or intellectual property in your organisation’s Agile journey? How were they addressed?
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Posted on: May 19, 2026 02:25 AM |
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Comments (3)
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Luis Branco
CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª
Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Yes, I have seen this tension emerge in several organizational transformations, especially when frameworks begin scaling across large structures and certification ecosystems.
At the same time, I believe it is important to distinguish more carefully between Lean, Lean Six Sigma, and Agile, because these traditions emerged from different historical, operational, and philosophical contexts, even if they later influenced one another significantly.
Management knowledge has always evolved through integration, adaptation, and recombination of ideas. In that sense, the reuse of concepts is not necessarily the central ethical issue.
The deeper challenge usually begins when organizations lose transparency about:
• The origins of those ideas,
• The trade-offs introduced by scaling,
• The degree to which structure gradually starts replacing adaptability.
In practice, I have also seen situations where teams initially adopted Agile to increase responsiveness and empowerment, but over time accumulated layers of governance, metrics, coordination mechanisms, and process standardization that slowly shifted the system toward compliance-oriented behavior.
And perhaps this is where an important nuance is required.
Standardization itself is not necessarily opposed to Agile.
Healthy adaptive systems generally require both:
Enough structure to sustain coordination and coherence at scale,
and enough flexibility to preserve learning, contextual judgment, and responsiveness to change.
The real risk usually emerges when structure stops enabling adaptation and starts constraining it.
Perhaps the deeper reflection behind your article is this:
what happens when adaptive movements become institutionalized systems?
That tension is increasingly visible not only in Agile environments, but across modern organizations trying to simultaneously scale transformation, governance, AI, and operational complexity.
An important and valuable discussion for the profession.
A very thoughtful perspective on an often overlooked aspect of Agile adoption. I particularly appreciate the emphasis on transparency and intellectual honesty. Frameworks evolve by learning from existing practices, but acknowledging those foundations is what preserves professional integrity and trust.
The point about balancing standardisation with adaptability is especially important, because true agility can easily be lost when process compliance becomes the primary focus instead of customer value and responsiveness to change.
SANTOSH BADGUJAR
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER| Accumax Lab Devices
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Intellectual honesty in knowledge sharing is foundational to the PM profession. When frameworks borrow heavily from existing methodologies without attribution, it creates confusion and erodes trust in the community. As practitioners, we have a responsibility under the PMI Code of Ethics to accurately represent the origins of the tools and methods we promote. This is especially important in Scaled Agile, where heavy commercialization can sometimes incentivize misrepresentation of borrowed concepts.
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