Badass Agile

Where did agile go? For years there was an Agile is dead controversy, and it was a sore spot for a lot of practitioners. My feeling was it wasn’t dead, but it was definitely changing shape. So here are the agile trends I’m watching right now, and what they mean for you. The agile trends started with blown trust Agile was a wonderful idea largely because it was simple. It was anti-bloat. It was a great way to make a living…until it wasn’t. When people started lifting the veil to see where all the money was going, they didn’t see anything that screamed value. They saw a lot of people doing stuff, and it was hard to tell why it mattered. When times are tight, you cut what isn’t delivering clear, measurable value. And to a large extent, away it went. The core principles haven’t changed. Process for process’s sake is still no good. And technology can’t go faster unless we as humans go faster. There are no Agile problems, only human problems. We have technology that didn’t exist 25 years ago, and we’re not going faster. Agile trend #1: coaching roles are coming back (a little) For about two years, if you searched Indeed or LinkedIn for agile coach roles, you got Scrum Master roles. That’s starting to change. I’ve been a developer, a project manager and a business analyst, and all of those went in waves. When companies need to make cuts, contractors go first, because it shows up immediately in the results. Agile itself never went away. Big room planning, design sprints, iterations, continuous improvement are still embedded in how we build things. What companies need now is someone senior to get people unstuck when things aren’t working. The heyday isn’t coming back. But for senior people with the wisdom and the people skills, there’s room out there if you look. Agile trend #2: AI has divided human labour There are things only people can do, and things automation can replace or heavily augment. I use AI every day. For content, marketing, strategy and business ideas, it generally fails somewhere unless I inject my own supervision and instinct. It doesn’t matter how well I prompt it. Where it does well is anything that’s data processing and directable. Research, parsing data, updating spreadsheets. Code too, but if you’re not great at testing it and making it hang together (also known as architecture), you’re going to have problems. Big businesses are struggling with that just as much as I am. Influence, empathy, insight, creativity, herding cats…that still takes a person. Which is exactly why some of those coaching roles are coming back. Agile trend #3: we’re putting ourselves in the removable category Our value always came from taking something new and landing it inside a company. So naturally we’re looking at how agile and AI fit together. The problem is where a lot of us are pointing it. If you’re automating the stuff that made your role necessary, you’re helping yourself get replaced. Focus instead on what companies need most right now, which is staying competitive and generating shareholder value. If you can make money, save money, save time or reduce risk, you’re valuable. That’s always in style. Agile trend #4: companies need a return on AI, and fast Companies are spending the money and not getting the return. At least not yet. This happens every time. New technology is risky, there are no case studies, so we do it badly. Isn’t that agile at heart? Try something, measure it, get better until we get it right. The problem is it makes CEOs sweat. They want the impact on earnings per share tomorrow, and this can’t wait 8 quarters. If the last investment doesn’t pay soon, that’s an extinction-level event for an executive’s career. That’s where your agile skill comes in…structuring effort to deliver a testable outcome in weeks instead of months. Agile trends don’t come with a job title So what title do you go look for? There isn’t one. When I tell folks they’ll have to knock on doors and offer a service HR doesn’t have a bucket for, I usually hear “nah man, I just want that next contract.” But you can’t serve without risk. Take the path that’s already been worn flat and you won’t grow, and neither will your customers. Agile people are impact people. In Forge Genesis I’m showing the current cohort these agile trends, where I got the data, and how I used AI to figure out what’s coming next. Details below. FORGE GENESIS IS HERE All the skills you need to stop relying on job postings and start enjoying the freedom of an Agile career on YOUR terms. First cohort starts in Q1 2026 https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-genesis THE ALL NEW FORGE LIGHTNING 12 Weeks to elite leadership! https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-lightning CHECK OUT ALL MY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES HERE: https://learning.fusechamber.com We’re also on YouTube! Follow the podcast, enjoy some panel/guest commentary, and get some quick tips and guidance from me: https://www.youtube.com/c/BadassAgilea Follow The LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/badass-agile Our mission is to create an elite tribe of leaders who focus on who they need to become in order to lead and inspire, and to be the best agile podcast and resource for effective mindset and leadership game. Contact us ([email protected]) for elite-level performance and agile coaching, speaking engagements, team-level and executive mindset/agile training, and licensing options for modern, high-impact, bite-sized learning and educational content. If you liked this episode, you might also like: Agile In 2026 – The 4 Pillars of Leadership

Agile was always at its best in small places. Startups, disruptors, the five person team in the corner nobody was watching. Somewhere along the way we dragged it into the office tower. We forgot where it came from, and what it was good at. When I met Eric Wu and Andrew Don of Catalyst Impact Studio, I wanted to know what it looks like when you take Agile back home. They work with nonprofits in Chicago, which means small teams, small budgets and a world that’s turned upside down every other week. Andrew was an engineer in enterprise SaaS when his whole team got Scrum certified back in 2012. He was also sitting on the board of a youth nonprofit at the time, and he couldn’t unsee the gap between those wrolds. Eric spent 15 years in consulting and corporate strategy before he got fed up with chasing profit for its own sake. They met through Chicago’s AAPI philanthropy community and kept having the same conversation for years until they finally did something about it. Why Catalyst Impact Studio works with nonprofits Eric and Andrew know why the resistance hits harder in a nonprofit. Funding gets pulled or tied up in court, inflation and tariffs raise the cost of every service, and nobody knows what AI is going to do next. A big company can eat a failed project and move on, but a nonprofit with that kind of margin can’t. How Catalyst Impact Studio makes Agile stick Here’s what surprised Andrew. The people who fought him hardest were the most overwhelmed and burned out people in the room. They had nothing left in the tank for one more change, even when the way they were working was grinding them into the ground. So he doesn’t lead with the framework. He sits down, listens and figures out what their day actually looks like. Then he shows them something useful right away. You’ll hear the story of the first daily scrum he ran with a nonprofit team, and how in ten minutes you could see eyes go wide because for the first time everybody knew what everybody else was working on. After that they wanted more. We talk about active listening all the time in our world, but most of us think it means taking good notes when someone hands us a requirement. Andrew’s version starts way earlier, with making people feel seen and heard before you ask them to change a thing. What Catalyst Impact Studio removed from Scrum Andrew tried story points and velocity with one of his first nonprofit teams and it went nowhere. When one person’s doing finance, another’s fundraising and someone else is running programs, nobody can agree on what a “3 point task” even is. So he tossed it. What’s left is sprint planning, the daily scrum, retros and a board everyone can see. If something doesn’t pay for itself, it’s gone. Where to start on Monday I asked them what someone coming out of a big bank (with a rulebook and a center of excellence propping them up) should do on day one in a small shop with no guardrails. Both said the same thing. Work in short cycles. Eric is an endurance runner and he calls it sprinting a marathon. Worry about the first mile, because you have no clue what mile 18 is going to throw at you. Andrew adds a question almost no team asks in planning, which is how much capacity they really have. The work didn’t go anywhere For years you could say “I’m an agile coach” and people knew what you brought to the table. That’s over. A lot of good people are shrinking into jobs they hate or leaving the field altogether. Eric and Andrew are living proof of what I teach in Forge Genesis. Companies still need agility, they just stopped calling it that. Pick a sector you actually care about, go talk to people and ask them what they’re struggling with. Most of them already know something’s broken. Lead with focus, clarity and better habits, and leave the jargon at home. Find Eric and Andrew at catalystimpactstudio.com or on LinkedIn. If you like this episode, you might also like: Agile Coach Jobs Aren’t Coming Back (Here’s What To Do) **FORGE GENESIS IS HERE** All the skills you need to stop relying on job postings and start enjoying the freedom of an Agile career on YOUR terms. First cohort starts in Q1 2026 https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-genesis **THE ALL NEW FORGE LIGHTNING** 12 Weeks to elite leadership! https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-lightning **CHECK OUT ALL MY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES HERE:** https://learning.fusechamber.com We’re also on YouTube! Follow the podcast, enjoy some panel/guest commentary, and get some quick tips and guidance from me: https://www.youtube.com/c/BadassAgilea ****** Follow The LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/badass-agile ****** Our mission is to create an elite tribe of leaders who focus on who they need to become in order to lead and inspire, and to be the best agile podcast and resource for effective mindset and leadership game. Contact us ([email protected]) for elite-level performance and agile coaching, speaking engagements, team-level and executive mindset/agile training, and licensing options for modern, high-impact, bite-sized learning and educational content.

Agile coach jobs aren’t coming back, and most of us already know it. What we haven’t done is accept what that means. Agile coach jobs went away (so we hid from the change) The irony of this profession is that agile is an approach to change, and we practitioners are as frightened of change as anyone we’ve ever coached. So when the roles went away, a lot of capable people did the predictable thing. They shrunk themselves. Back to project manager, program manager, product owner. Work that uses a fraction of what they know. I understand it. There’s a job description for those. But there isn’t yet one for what we actually do. No new job title is coming to replace agile coach jobs Don’t wait for it. If it does show up, it will have been written by someone who had nothing to do with the rebellion. That’s the part people forget. Agile was a rebellion, and rebellions are loosely organized and risky. With the economy and the geopolitics doing what they’re doing, nobody is volunteering for more risk. So nobody is going to stand up, announce the new category, and hand you a good rate for it. There are two kinds of change One is patching the bridge. I drove past a thirty-year-old overpass recently and you can see the repairs in the concrete. We know this kind well. Inspect, improve, carry the learning forward. The other is the forest fire. The forest gets too old, too dry, too crowded, too untenable, and the whole thing has to go. Some species of tree only drop their seeds in a fire. Vinyl got better for forty years. Better pressings, better styluses, better amplifiers. Then the CD arrived and none of it mattered. We had the BlackBerry with half its face given over to a keyboard. Then the iPhone. Show me a BlackBerry now. Notice what didn’t change. People still wanted to listen to music. People still wanted to reach each other. The problem stayed exactly where it was, and the thing built to solve it burned. Delivery will always have problems. What we built to solve them is what has to go. What to do instead of chasing agile coach jobs Stop waiting and start listening. Once or twice a year I export my LinkedIn connections, go through the spreadsheet, and highlight the people I enjoyed working with. Then I reach out. How are you doing, what have you been up to, here’s what I’m seeing, what are you seeing? They’ve changed jobs since we last spoke. Their companies have changed strategy. They know things. Have ten of those conversations in the next two weeks and patterns start showing up. Check them against Reddit, Quora, Substack, wherever people complain out loud. When you stop asking someone to hand you a solution, they describe their pain instead. Then propose something. This is where the iteration belongs, and it’s the part people get backwards. You don’t iterate on the bridge. You iterate on the offer. Maybe the price is wrong. Maybe a CEO doesn’t care and a VP does. Tweak it and go again. Eventually somebody says let’s get together and talk about what you’ve been up to. That’s your signal. This takes real courage and it isn’t for everybody. But the rate on an agile coach job is a cap, and you won’t raise it using that title. Forge Genesis is where I teach this. Link below, cohort starting soon. **FORGE GENESIS IS HERE** All the skills you need to stop relying on job postings and start enjoying the freedom of an Agile career on YOUR terms. First cohort starts in Q1 2026 https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-genesis **THE ALL NEW FORGE LIGHTNING** 12 Weeks to elite leadership! https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-lightning **CHECK OUT ALL MY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES HERE:** https://learning.fusechamber.com We’re also on YouTube! Follow the podcast, enjoy some panel/guest commentary, and get some quick tips and guidance from me: https://www.youtube.com/c/BadassAgilea ****** Follow The LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/badass-agile ****** Our mission is to create an elite tribe of leaders who focus on who they need to become in order to lead and inspire, and to be the best agile podcast and resource for effective mindset and leadership game. Contact us ([email protected]) for elite-level performance and agile coaching, speaking engagements, team-level and executive mindset/agile training, and licensing options for modern, high-impact, bite-sized learning and educational content.

Why AI Isn’t Making Companies Faster Why AI isn’t making companies faster? Common question I get these days, and the answer isn’t that mysterious. Everybody bought the tools, and ran the pilots, but nothing sped up. That doesn’t mean the money was wasted, and it doesn’t mean AI is a fraud. AI is an amplifier. What it amplified is a problem we had ten years ago and still haven’t addressed. The gap between a decision and a customer There’s a lag between the moment an executive team decides something and the moment a customer actually feels it…the moment it converts to revenue, or to something valuable. So ask yourself this question – “When did your company last make a real decision? And how long before anyone outside the building noticed?” Most leaders can’t answer that. That’s the whole problem, and it’s the reason AI isn’t making companies faster no matter how much they’re investing right now. It was never the technology Agile is supposedly finished. Has been for a few years now. And yet…lack of agility still shows up in the top five concerns CEOs report every year. They don’t call it agile. They call it speed-to-market, nimbleness, adaptability…the ability to respond when the market moves. Meanwhile every organization I know is being asked to do the impossible. Extract more value from fewer people. Make cuts where no cuts remain. Faster and cheaper while somehow getting better. That runs straight into what I learned in my project management days — the holy triangle of budget, time and scope. You don’t get all three. And you certainly don’t cut one and keep quality where it was. The practical maximum Here’s where it actually stops. Here’s why AI isn’t making companies faster. Resistance to change. Risk aversion. No autonomy. Nobody is allowed to make the call. Fear. Those human factors combine into a practical maximum, and no amount of technology can help you move past it. Give someone a goal tied to their job, their pay and their longevity, and then deny them the authority to make trade-offs, to negotiate, to prioritize. They disengage. They learn to be helpless. Losing control over your own destiny is what makes folks check out, and it’s happening everywhere right now. And…nobody is doing a good job of addressing it, and it’s costing companies. Pushing harder doesn’t shrink the lag. The people side of what we do was never ready for the speed of the technology we already had five years ago, and it’s no more ready today, because we haven’t changed anything. That’s the honest answer to why AI isn’t making companies faster. What leaders actually control A large part of this has nothing to do with the teams. It’s the voice of the leader. The answer is not making things sound more urgent. Pressing harder won’t help. Communicating what’s being built, why it’s being built, and who it’s for directly to the crews responsible for doing it, rather than from a board deck or a shareholder report. Creating a better tolerance for small failures, and giving people the tools to minize risk…that’s how teams can claim the autonomy, the authority and the courage to move. Speed comes from putting the important things at the top of the pile and letting the rest wait. Not from sweating harder. Not outsized consequences. Because if teams don’t feel authorized to do what’s necessary, they won’t do it. And we’ll keep covering the failures with dashboards and nonsense metrics, which serves nobody. If the honest answer to how long before a customer felt it is embarrassingly long, then the change begins with you. Want to learn more about how you can capitalize on this trend and help companies deal with the disarray and fallout of unsupported AI investment? It might be time to start something of your own. Check out Forge Genesis – newest cohort starting September 2026. **FORGE GENESIS IS HERE** All the skills you need to stop relying on job postings and start enjoying the freedom of an Agile career on YOUR terms. First cohort starts in Q1 2026 https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-genesis **THE ALL NEW FORGE LIGHTNING** 12 Weeks to elite leadership! https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-lightning **CHECK OUT ALL MY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES HERE:** https://learning.fusechamber.com We’re also on YouTube! Follow the podcast, enjoy some panel/guest commentary, and get some quick tips and guidance from me: https://www.youtube.com/c/BadassAgilea ****** Follow The LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/badass-agile ****** Our mission is to create an elite tribe of leaders who focus on who they need to become in order to lead and inspire, and to be the best agile podcast and resource for effective mindset and leadership game. Contact us ([email protected]) for elite-level performance and agile coaching, speaking engagements, team-level and executive mindset/agile training, and licensing options for modern, high-impact, bite-sized learning and educational content. If you liked this episode, you might also like… The Real AI Opportunity AI Agile Hype Creates a Leadership Trap

Ever work on a team where there was one, maybe two people who could be counted on to drag a project across the finish line just before the stroke of 12:00? That’s what happens when you work at scale. People work hard, but the last thing they have time for is proper orchestration to help them land safely under pressure. Cutting people with an appropriate dialing back of scope makes the problem even worse. Dave Borzillo is a graduate of my Forge Genesis program. In the time we spent together, he advanced a business idea (or two), but he also conceived and wrote his latest book – “Sanity At Scale – How Engineering Leaders Move from Heroic Firefighting to Systemic Excellence”, now available on amazon.com or from his website, betterwaysofworking.com. Dave joins me for this one-on-one interview, where he reveals the dangers of heroic firefighting, why it can’t work at scale, and some of the strategies for ensuring your team doesn’t entrench these patterns. Make sure you grab this book – its no nonsense, crisp and useful for any team leader or agile practitioner! **FORGE GENESIS IS HERE** All the skills you need to stop relying on job postings and start enjoying the freedom of an Agile career on YOUR terms. First cohort starts in Q1 2026 https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-genesis **THE ALL NEW FORGE LIGHTNING** 12 Weeks to elite leadership! https://learning.fusechamber.com/forge-lightning **CHECK OUT ALL MY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES HERE:** https://learning.fusechamber.com We’re also on YouTube! Follow the podcast, enjoy some panel/guest commentary, and get some quick tips and guidance from me: https://www.youtube.com/c/BadassAgilea ****** Follow The LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/badass-agile ****** Our mission is to create an elite tribe of leaders who focus on who they need to become in order to lead and inspire, and to be the best agile podcast and resource for effective mindset and leadership game. Contact us ([email protected]) for elite-level performance and agile coaching, speaking engagements, team-level and executive mindset/agile training, and licensing options for modern, high-impact, bite-sized learning and educational content.