Agile Rituals Without Impact: How to Spot Cargo Cult

Agile rituals have no impact when meetings take place but no decision and no change follows from them. Cargo cult describes exactly this pattern: the outer form of Scrum is fully in place, and the purpose of each meeting has been lost.

This article goes through the events of the 2020 Scrum Guide one by one, names the purpose, the warning signs and a metric for each, and gives you a test grid with which you can establish within an hour whether the rituals in your company achieve anything. It is written for managing directors and department heads who have introduced agile teams and cannot see why delivery is not getting faster.

What does cargo cult mean in agile methods?

Cargo cult means adopting the visible forms of a method and leaving out the mechanics behind it. The term comes from anthropology and became widely known through the physicist Richard Feynman, who used it in a 1974 address at Caltech under the title “Cargo Cult Science” for research without testing. In his image, islanders in the South Pacific built replica runways after the Second World War in the hope that aircraft with cargo would land again. The form was right, and the effect failed to appear.

Applied to Scrum this means: the team holds a daily every morning, plans sprints on a two-week rhythm and meets for a retrospective, and yet nothing changes in delivery. The 2020 Scrum Guide describes the events as opportunities for inspection and adaptation. Without adaptation the ritual loses its point. What typically remains after a first year is described in the article Scrum in mid-sized companies.

What is each ritual for?

Each Scrum event has a purpose against which its impact can be measured. The 2020 Scrum Guide sets them out as follows:

• The Daily Scrum, limited to 15 minutes, serves to inspect progress towards the Sprint Goal and to adapt the Sprint Backlog as needed.
• Sprint Planning establishes what work is possible in the sprint and which goal the sprint pursues.
• The Sprint Review serves to inspect the outcome with the stakeholders and to determine adaptations to the Product Backlog.
• The Sprint Retrospective serves to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness.

Each of these purposes demands a result that shows outside the meeting: a changed plan, a reordered backlog, an agreed improvement. If that result is missing over several sprints, the ritual has lost its purpose.

How do you recognise rituals without impact?

You recognise them by warning signs that can be observed for each event and backed with a metric. The following table is the test grid.

Two observations often suffice for a first diagnosis. Ask each team which decision was taken in the last review and which measure from the last retrospective was carried out. If the participants can name neither, cargo cult is present. The role on which this usually depends is described in the article Product owner in mid-sized companies.

What do rituals without impact cost?

Rituals without impact cost the working time of everyone involved without producing anything. The calculation is simple: participants times duration times frequency times fully loaded hourly rate. Here is an example with assumed values that you should replace with your own. A team of eight holds ten dailies of 15 minutes in a two-week sprint, which makes 20 person-hours. Planning, review and retrospective add about 6 hours per person together, so 48 person-hours. In total that is 68 person-hours per sprint. At an assumed fully loaded rate of EUR 70 per hour this comes to around EUR 4,760 per sprint, or a little over EUR 120,000 a year with 26 sprints.

The sum makes visible that every meeting is an investment that deserves an effect. A daily that resolves an impediment pays back within minutes, while a daily that serves as a status round never does.

Why does cargo cult arise?

Cargo cult arises when the introduction starts with the forms and leaves accountability for impact open. Four causes recur.

The first is introduction by training course: teams learn the terms while the decision paths of the organisation stay unchanged. The second is a product owner without authority, whose backlog may not be adjusted after the review. The third is control by reports: managers use the daily as a status round and shape its behaviour that way. The fourth is the absence of metrics that evidence the purpose of the rituals, so that nobody notices when the impact fails to appear.

The same lever works against all four: give one person accountability for the impact of the rituals and tie it to the metrics of the table. Whether that person is appointed internally or support comes from outside is covered in the article Agile coaches.

How do you restore the impact of the rituals?

You restore it in four steps that can be completed within one quarter.

1. Clarify the purpose: each team states in one sentence per ritual which decision is made there and compares it with the 2020 Scrum Guide.
2. Measure: the metrics in the table are collected over four sprints. The effort is a few minutes per sprint.
3. Cut or change: a ritual whose purpose cannot be evidenced is shortened, rebuilt or paused. The Scrum Guide gives time boxes as upper limits, and shorter meetings are permitted.
4. Clarify decision authority: where decisions from review and retrospective may not be implemented, the decision path is adjusted. This is organisational work and falls to management.

Looking at the flow of work is especially effective. Anyone who measures lead time and waiting times can see whether the rituals speed up delivery. How that works is shown in the article on flow metrics.

Agile rituals with Niehues Consulting

Niehues Consulting is a consultancy for AI management and organisational design from a delivery perspective, based in Düsseldorf. Founder Marin Niehues builds organisations that deliver, in projects from VC-funded scale-ups to DAX 40 groups and in more than 20 countries on six continents. In the service areas of delivery management and organisational design, Niehues Consulting works on the roles, decision paths and interfaces that decide whether agile work has an effect.

The approach follows the Niehues Delivery Model with the phases of understanding, building and rolling out. Two test questions matter for agile rituals: who decides, who delivers, who uses? Which roles, decision paths and interfaces does operations need? Scope and terms of an engagement are discussed in the free initial consultation, which you can arrange in 30 minutes through the contact form.