# What Happened to Agile? *Part 1 of 3: The market that vanished* ![[agile-market-that-vanished.png]] --- ## A market that vanished In January 2023, Capital One eliminated its entire Agile coach job family: over a thousand Scrum Masters, coaches, and delivery leads, removed in a single decision. Within months, Royal London had made 90% of their agile coaches redundant (Lawrence and Green, 2023). Other organisations followed quietly. These weren't struggling companies trimming fat. These were household names concluding, apparently simultaneously, that agile coaching was no longer worth paying for. The job boards told the same story. IT Jobs Watch data showed contract coaching roles in the UK falling from 127 in mid-2023 to 44 by mid-2025, a 65% drop. Permanent roles became almost mythical: five postings in a six-month window. Daily contract rates dropped from around £625 to £435, a 30% cut for the work that remained. The PMI's 2023 Pulse of the Profession report recorded the first decline in organisations using Agile methodologies. The #PostAgile hashtag gained traction. A friend who is a Professional Scrum Trainer reported that entry-level Scrum Master enrolment in his classes fell from 49% to under 5% between 2020 and 2024; and by 2025, he had stopped offering public Scrum Master classes entirely. This wasn't a dip. The market had vanished. I'd spent the best part of two decades inside this market. Developing leadership, coaching teams through uncertainty, facilitating difficult conversations, building the conditions for people to do their best work under pressure. It was meaningful work, and there was plenty of it. I was so focussed on my work I was oblivious to all of this, until mid-2024, when I went looking for my next contract. The market had gone. Not contracted. Not shifted. Gone. ## How did we get here? It was tempting to "blame the economy", and yes, post-pandemic cost-cutting played its part. Coaches were categorised as support, not revenue-generating, and support gets cut first. But economics alone doesn't explain the speed or completeness of the collapse. One deeper answer was an uncomfortable one: Agile coaching succeeded itself out of existence. When Agile was novel, coaches were essential translators. They helped organisations understand a fundamentally different way of working: the shift from command-and-control to collaboration, from big-bang delivery to iterative learning, from fixed plans to adaptive responses. That translation work was genuinely valuable. But two decades in, Agile stopped being novel. It became business-as-usual. Or at least, organisations *believed* it had. The assumption took hold that everyone should inherently know how to work this way. The coach became redundant. Or so the logic went. The reality is more complicated, but follows a pattern I'd been studying and later codified into a diagnostic instrument. What most organisations actually achieved was the *performance* of agility: the ceremonies, the boards, the vocabulary. The visible work got done. But the underlying shift in how people think, relate, and make decisions under pressure never happened. That shift is invisible. It doesn't appear on a dashboard or in a sprint report. Alvesson and Spicer (2012) named this pattern *functional stupidity*: the organisation adopted Agile without ever critically examining whether it was truly working, because asking that question felt inconvenient. The ceremonies were measured. The cognitive and relational change was not. And because the hidden work went unmeasured, the organisation assumed it had been completed. ## The oversupply problem There's another dimension that practitioners prefer not to discuss. This is uncomfortable to name because I was part of this ecosystem and had benefited from its growth. Like many colleagues whose coaching I respected, I was often working alongside others whose certificates were doing most of the heavy lifting. But it needs saying: the Agile coaching market had become saturated with people whose credentials outstripped their capability. By the mid-2020s, nearly two million Scrum Alliance certificates had been issued and over two million SAFe certifications were in circulation. The 17th State of Agile report found that roughly a third of respondents identified as agile coaches. Yet at Scrum.org, fewer than 1% of Professional Scrum Master holders had achieved the highest certification level. The gap between certification and competence was enormous. ## Another uncomfortable truth The Dunning-Kruger effect, the tendency for people with limited competence to overestimate their own ability, operated at both individual and organisational levels. Leaders with shallow understanding of Agile overestimated their organisations' maturity. Teams who'd attended a two-day course believed they'd mastered something that takes years to embody. And to the untrained buyer, coaches who could facilitate a retrospective but couldn't diagnose a systemic dysfunction were indistinguishable from those who could. When organisations eventually noticed that their Agile investment wasn't delivering the promised returns, they didn't ask whether they'd implemented it properly. They concluded that Agile itself was the problem, and that the coaches were an expensive reminder of a failed experiment. ## The fashion cycle Another deeper pattern here that goes beyond Agile is worth naming precisely because it will happen again. Management ideas follow what I call the *management fashion cycle*: four phases that repeat with remarkable consistency. The novelty phase generates excitement and investment. The implementation phase generates consultants and coaches. The disillusionment phase generates blame. And the post-fashion phase generates the quiet conclusion that it was all a fad. Lean, Six Sigma, Business Process Re-engineering, Digital Transformation: the same cycle, the same arc, the same institutional amnesia about why the previous initiative "failed." Agile took roughly ten years to move through this cycle. The warning signs were there much earlier than most of us, myself included, cared to examine. The annual State of Agile reports showed declining measurement rigour, erosion of coaching into other roles, and weakening impact claims. But the narrative around those reports remained relentlessly optimistic, and most of us chose to read the narrative rather than interrogate the data. I'll be honest about that. The data was there. I didn't look hard enough. ## What this isn't This isn't a eulogy for Agile. The principles (iterative delivery, team autonomy, continuous learning, adaptive planning) remain sound. The evidence for their effectiveness, properly applied, is solid. What died wasn't the methodology. What died was a particular *market configuration*: one where organisations would pay for dedicated coaching roles to sustain a way of working that many of those organisations never truly committed to in the first place. The coaches who remain, and many excellent practitioners do, are operating differently now. Fractional. Embedded. Often under different titles entirely. The wisdom hasn't disappeared; the institutional container for it has. ## What the data actually shows The management fashion cycle explains the pattern, but it doesn't excuse it. Buried inside the same reports that practitioners used to justify the status quo, there were signals that the market was structurally unsound, signals that pointed not just to decline but to a specific, diagnosable failure. The data was there. It told a story about hidden work accumulating invisibly inside organisations that believed they had already changed. Part 2 examines those signals, and what they reveal about the gap between what organisations *say* they've transformed and what they've actually done. --- *Part 2: "The Data Was There All Along". Examining the signals we missed and what they tell us about how organisations actually change.* *Andrew Kidd is the founder of Daring Futures and an MSc Business Psychology researcher at the Open University.* ## References Alvesson, M. and Spicer, A. (2012) 'A stupidity-based theory of organizations', *Journal of Management Studies*, 49(7), pp. 1194-1220. Carey, R. (2023) 'Capital One cuts 1,100 tech jobs in agile engineering roles', *Banking Dive*, 19 January. Available at: https://www.bankingdive.com/news/capital-one-cuts-1100-tech-jobs-agile/640861/ (Accessed: 15 March 2026). Digital.ai (2023) *17th annual state of agile report*. Available at: https://digital.ai/resource/state-of-agile-report/ (Accessed: 15 March 2026). IT Jobs Watch (2025) *Agile Coach contract job trends, contractor rates and skill sets*. Available at: https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/agile%20coach.do (Accessed: 3 April 2026). IT Jobs Watch (2025) *Scrum Master contract job trends, contractor rates and skill sets*. Available at: https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/scrummaster.do (Accessed: 3 April 2026). Kruger, J. and Dunning, D. (1999) 'Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments', *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 77(6), pp. 1121-1134. Lawrence, R. and Green, P. (2023) 'Making sense of the ScrumMaster and Agile Coach layoffs', *Humanizing Work*, 21 November. Available at: https://www.humanizingwork.com/making-sense-of-the-scrummaster-agile-coach-layoffs/ (Accessed: 3 April 2026). Lawrence, R. and Green, P. 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Available at: https://age-of-product.com/scrum-master-era-coming-to-an-end/ (Accessed: 15 March 2026).