The Reformation That Became the Church

TL, DR: The Reformation That Became the Church

The Agile Manifesto followed Luther’s Reformation arc: radical simplicity hardened into scaling frameworks, transformation programs, and debates about what counts as “real Agile.” Learn to recognize when you’re inside the orthodoxy and how to practice the principles without the apparatus.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series; check out Part 1: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Agility.

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How Every Disruptive Movement Hardens Into the Orthodoxy It Opposed

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door to protest the sale of salvation. The Catholic Church had turned faith into a transaction: Pay for indulgences, reduce your time in purgatory. Luther’s message was plain: You could be saved through faith alone, you didn’t need the church to interpret scripture for you, and every believer could approach God directly.

By 1555, Lutheranism had its own hierarchy, orthodoxy, and ways of deciding who was in and who was out. In other words, the reformation became a church.

Every disruptive movement tends to follow the same arc, and the Agile Manifesto is no exception.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

This pattern isn’t limited to religion or software. Look at how often rebellions become establishments:

• The Scientific Revolution pushed back on authority: Don’t trust Aristotle; trust observation and experiment. By the 20th century, peer review became its own gatekeeping system, with careers dependent on publication in approved journals.
• The Communist Manifesto of 1848 promised liberation of the working class and the end of class hierarchy. By the 1930s, the revolution it inspired had produced the Politburo, show trials, and an ideological orthodoxy enforced at gunpoint.
• Democracy promised rule by the people, not hereditary aristocrats. By the 21st century, it had produced political dynasties, party bureaucracies that control who gets to run, and career politicians who had never held a “real” job outside government. The new aristocracy just runs for election.

Each started as a rebellion and ended as an establishment. Not because the founders sold out, but because success creates careers, and people protect their careers.

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The Agile Arc

Let us recap how we got here and map the pattern onto what we do:

2001: Seventeen practitioners meet at a ski lodge and produce one page: Four values, twelve principles. The Manifesto pushed back against heavyweight processes and the idea that more documentation and more planning would create better software. The message was simple: People, working software, collaboration, and responding to change need to become the first principles of solving problems in complex environments.

2010s: Enterprises want Agile at scale. Scaling frameworks come with process diagrams, hundreds of pages of manuals, certification levels, and organizational change consultancies. What began as “we don’t need all this process” has become a new process industry.

2020s: The transformation industry is vast. “Agile coaches” who have never built software themselves advise teams on how to ship software. Transformation programs run for years without achieving any results. (Check the Scrum and Agile subreddits if you want to see how practitioners feel about this.)

The Manifesto warned against the inversion: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” The industry flipped it. Processes and tools became the product. Some say they came to do good and did well.

I’m part of this system. I teach Scrum classes, a node in the network that sustains the structure. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably somewhere in that network too.

That’s not an accusation. It’s an observation. We’re all inside the church now.

Why This Happens

A one-page manifesto doesn’t support an industry. You can’t build a consulting practice around “talk to each other and figure it out.” You can’t create certification hierarchies for “respond to change.” You can’t sell transformation programs for “individuals and interactions.”

But you can build all of that around frameworks, roles, artifacts, and events. You can create levels: beginner, advanced, and expert. You can define competencies, assessments, and continuing education requirements. You can make the simple complicated enough to require professional guidance. (Complicated, yet structured systems with a delivery promise are also easier to sell, budget, and measure than “trust your people that they will figure out how to do this.”)

Simplicity is bad for business. I know, nobody wants to hear that.

This apparent conflict reminds me of a hallway conversation at the Agile Camp Berlin back in 2019. A fellow agile practitioner asked, genuinely puzzled, whether a particular practice was “really Scrum.” The Manifesto authors would have laughed. Who cares? Does it help the team solve customer problems? Let me start the record again: We are not paid to practice [insert your agile practice of choice], but to solve our customers’ problems within the given constraints while contributing to the organization’s sustainability.

But that approach doesn’t sustain an industry. Orthodoxy does.

The transformation industry employs many people whose livelihoods depend on Agile remaining complex enough to require their services. That includes people I deeply respect. That includes, more than I want to admit, me. Noting this doesn’t make us villains. It makes us human, responding to incentives like everyone else.

Luther ran into the same problem. His movement needed priests, churches, and seminaries. The idea required infrastructure, and infrastructure required people whose jobs depended on maintaining it.

Can the Pattern Be Reversed?

History isn’t encouraging. Counter-reformations sometimes succeed. Vatican II, or the Second Vatican Council, simplified some Catholic practices. But counter-reformations rarely restore the original simplicity. More often, they spawn new movements that eventually calcify, too. (Speaking of which: What about the product operating model movement?)

At the industry level, this probably won’t be fixed. The incentives are entrenched. But at the team level? At the organization level? You can choose differently.

You can practice the principles without the apparatus. You can ask, “Does this help us solve customer problems?” instead of “Is this proper Scrum?” You can treat frameworks as tools, not religions.

Can you refuse to become a priest while working inside the church? I want to think so. I try to, and some days I do better than others.

The Reformation That Became the Church — Conclusion

Luther didn’t nail those theses because he wanted to start a new denomination. He tried to refocus on what mattered: Faith, not ritual.

The Manifesto signatories didn’t want to start a certification industry. They wanted to refocus on what mattered: Solving customer problems, not following a predefined process to the letter.

The reformation gets captured. Your job isn’t to save the reformation. It’s to remember what it was for.

Ask yourself the only question that matters: If you stripped away every framework, every certification, every role title, and simply asked: “How do we solve this customer’s problem this week?”

What would remain?

That remainder is the reformation. Everything else is the church.

Where do you see the church creeping into your practice? What orthodoxies have you caught yourself defending? I’m curious.

📖 The Reformation That Became the Church — Related Posts

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Why Leaders Believe the Product Operating Model Will Succeed Where Agile Initiatives Failed

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👆 Stefan Wolpers: The Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide (Amazon advertisement.)

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Tags: Agile, Agile transformation, Anti-Patterns