Stelian ROMANProject Manager| MicroSafetyCarlingford, New South Wales, Australia
As teams and organizations gain experience with Agile, they feel the need to scale Agile beyond a team of 5-9 software developers. Sometimes, especially when in their desire to scale fast, they ask for external help, it becomes tempting to adopt complex frameworks and borrow tools from other methodologies like Lean Six Sigma. While learning from diverse approaches can add value, ethical concerns arise when Lean Six Sigma practices, like kanban and kaizen, or flow metrics, are disguised as new Agile innovations and when scaled frameworks drift away from the core values of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Yes, I have seen this tension in several large-scale Agile transformations.
In my experience, the issue is not that organizations borrow ideas from Lean, Kanban, Kaizen, flow thinking, Project Management, or quality management. Management knowledge has always evolved through adaptation, integration, and recombination.
The real ethical concern begins when those practices are relabelled as “Agile” without enough transparency about where they came from, why they are being adopted, and what trade-offs they introduce.
I also think it is important to distinguish carefully between Lean, Lean Six Sigma, traditional management approaches, and Agile. These traditions have different origins and purposes, even if they later influenced one another significantly.
The dilution of Agile principles often happens less through the adoption of tools themselves and more through the way they are implemented.
Kanban, flow metrics, governance, or structure can support agility when they improve visibility, learning, customer value, and adaptive decision-making. But they can also weaken agility when they become instruments of compliance, control, or metric optimization.
That is usually where teams begin to disengage. They are not necessarily resisting Agile. They are reacting to environments where the language of Agile remains, but the underlying management behaviours have not changed.
Perhaps the deeper challenge is this: How can organizations scale coordination and complexity without losing empowerment, transparency, customer feedback, and the adaptive capacity that made Agile valuable in the first place?
An important and valuable discussion for the profession. Saving Changes...
Program Manager| HARPER SRLSanto Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
I don’t think the problem is borrowing practices from other approaches. Most teams naturally adapt and combine things over time. The issue starts when the process becomes heavier than the mindset behind it. I’ve seen organizations scale Agile structurally while becoming less adaptive in practice. More layers, more approvals, more reporting, but less autonomy and less openness from the teams. At that point, the framework is still there, but a lot of the original intent starts fading. Saving Changes...
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