The Most Challenging Value In Agile Manifesto
The beauty of agile manifestos for all these 24 years is that they are still so valid. In February 2001, seventeen frustrated software experts gathered at snowbird Ski resort in Utah to discuss the problems with the “document-driven, heavyweight” development process that often led software projects failure and caused companies to “ lose sight of what really matters-delighting customer”.
Just to recap, here are four core values of Agile Software Development:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and last not least
Responding to change over following a plan
Which they are followed by twelve principles, to support the core values.
Over the years in the software industry, I’ve observed that the last value—“Responding to change over following a plan”—is consistently the most challenging for teams to embody. But why is this so difficult?
Cultural Resistance
This is arguably the hardest challenge. Many organizations, especially traditional or heavily regulated ones, are tightly attached to long-term, detailed planning practices.
Teams and leaders may resist abandoning detailed plans that they’ve invested significant time and effort into creating.
As a result, Agile is often treated as another “process” applied only at the development team level, without being fully embraced by upper management, product teams, or leadership layers.
This creates a disconnect. Development teams are expected to remain flexible and adaptive, yet still held accountable to fixed milestones and delivery dates set by others (sales, product, or leadership). As a result, the pressure to meet those deadlines falls on the development team, leading to work overtime, resource shuffling, and ultimately, a breaks teams’ motivation and agility.
Stakeholder Expectations
External stakeholders, such as clients, investors, or regulatory bodies, often demand predictability and detailed roadmaps. Agile iterative nature, and “welcoming to changes even late in development”, can be perceived as a lack of clarity or commitment.
Legacy Systems and Processes
Organizations with legacy system or mindset usually follow waterfall methodologies. This causes some struggle to shift the whole organization to an Agile mindset. Legacy systems, tools, and processes often emphasize upfront planning and control, making it difficult to adapt to changes quickly.
Fear of Uncertainty
Both teams and leadership may fear that constant change threatens productivity, stability, or the ability to meet deadlines. Adapting to new requirements mid-sprint or mid-project can feel chaotic, especially without a strong foundation in Agile principles and disciplined practices such as backlog grooming, sprint planning, and continuous retrospectives.
Coordination in Large Organizations
In larger organizations, adapting to change across multiple teams or departments is complex. Synchronizing any adjustment while maintaining alignment with business objectives is a logistical challenge.
Lack of Trust and Collaboration
Agile thrives in environments built on trust, transparency, and shared ownership to delivering what brings value for the customers. Without true transparency, strong collaboration and communication, responding to change can lead to confusion or misalignment.
How to Welcome Changes
From my own experience, Agile’s core values operate as an interconnected system. While you might start by focusing on one value (which is a great first step), you will soon realize that the others cannot be ignored.
For instance, to maintain an adaptive backlog, you need a truly empowered team. Teams, in turn, cannot be empowered if they lack visibility into today’s customer needs and pain points. Similarly, customers won’t be convinced to pay for your product unless you have a working solution that consistently delivers value. On the other hand, cultural adaptation and implementing true value-driven product delivery is not a one night, even one year job. So how to start to make sure we are doing the right things right?
Find allies
No cultural shift can succeed without top-level support. Is the CEO, or the head of product, truly committed to this transformation? Why is embracing change—especially late-stage change—important for your company?
It’s crucial to ensure that welcoming change is aligned with your company’s mission and business strategy. Sometimes, a business model might not require late-stage flexibility; in certain industries, even team with mature product, a waterfall approach with predictable outcomes is the right fit. Understanding this alignment is the first step.
Think Big, Start Small, iterate
Transforming a business to be fully product and customer centric, and welcoming changes is a hard and long journey. According to Evan Leybourn, the founder of Business Agility Institute, it typically takes around 8 years that a business agility transformation to be sustainable.
This is not about discouraging for change. As soon as the journey truly starts in a company, your team under transformation would taste the sweetness of more motivated engineers, more transparency, more customer feedback and less waste.
All big achievements require patient, learning and to perseverance. It’s easier said than done. That is why the best way for such transformation is by starting with a small team that are motivated and willing to try. This team becomes the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the transformation. It has failure and learn a lot at beginning.
And remember: in a software team, you often have some of the smartest, most creative people in the room. Empower them. If you’re an Agile coach or leader, support them throughout the journey and celebrate their achievements—no matter how small at first. You might be surprised at how quickly they’ll amaze you.
It is OK to fail
One of the big fear in command and control-based leadership is people are so afraid to be wrong. You are not daring to talk in a meeting due to the lack of psychological safety. You afraid to try new way of working because it requires lots of learning and failure. That is the main reason all plan and checkpoints are added. Sure, we shall fatal mistakes. But here’s the reality: no one becomes a marathon champion at the age of one. Growth, whether in individuals or organizations, requires a willingness to stumble, learn, and improve over time. If you want to welcome to changes in product, you have to welcome to changes in habits of organization and individual as well.
Does Your Team Have the Right Knowledge?
As discusses earlier, the transformation in true agile mindset is hard. A professional business agile coach plays a critical role, not just in mentoring but in actively observing and supporting the team's growth. Make sure you hire an agile coach that has a very good communication and negotiation skill, she has the good eye on catching what I call “Do-not ignore ignorable”, those small, familiar patterns that teams are often blind to, which subtly undermine value delivery.
A true Agile coach pays attention to everything—from body language in meetings to decision-making dynamics under stress. They help teams reflect:
Are decisions made in line with company principles, especially when under pressure?
Do team members understand why they are prioritizing backlog item X over Y?
Is the team genuinely customer-centric? What does that even mean in practice?
Is continuous delivery truly continuous, or just another quarter delivery plan?
A skilled coach helps uncover and resolve these hidden blockers, making the Agile journey smoother and more tailor-made for your own product and team.
Agile is not about Tools and process
Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Less, XP : When methodology becomes the religion and rigid process itself, we fall to the trap of processes and tools Over individuals and Interaction (the very opposite of Agile core value).
Frameworks should serve you—not the other way around. If a tool or process becomes a blocker rather than an enabler of delivering value early and often, something needs to be re-evaluated.
Be Honest, Transparent and Ethical
Every journey have its ups and down. If you feel there are some waste happening, some delivery may impact because an unforeseen event happened, raise is as soon as you sense them.
Psychological safety is the foundation of any truly Agile team. If team members feel afraid to voice concerns for fear of judgment, agile principles will fail. Transparency, honesty, and a culture of openness are non-negotiable for success.
All For One and One for All
You must have all core values executing at the same time. You cannot welcoming to changes when your team are not empowered. You cannot have an adaptable backlog if you don’t have continuous working software and to be able to catch build failure or bugs as fast as the code is pushed. You are not having a working software if your delivery is more than two weeks. And you cannot dismiss customer’s insight and deliver value.
At first, this might sound overwhelming—almost like a mission impossible. But the hardest part is simply getting started. With the right coach, a strong learning loop, and mutual trust within the team, progress compounds, and the rewards are continuous.
The success stories of trillion-dollar companies serve as proof: adopting a true Agile mindset is not just worthwhile—it’s rewarding.
