Today was my last day on a very good project.
I spent there 1 year and 10 months, and only now I realize how emotionally connected I became to my team and to the work we did together.

I was lucky to have the chance to say goodbye to everyone and to hear many warm words in return.

One colleague wrote to me:

These changes in my life , those “new adventures waiting” ahead, and the philosophical books I have been reading recently made me reflect on Agile again — on what it really is, and on the kind of people it truly works for.

A philosophical note

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote about the transition from what he calls the disciplinary society to the achievement society.

In a disciplinary society, authority structures dominate. People follow rules, and work is organized through hierarchy and control. Factories, bureaucracies, and military systems are classic examples.

In the achievement society the logic changes. And people are no longer told “You must.” Instead they are told “You can.”

And this message sounds especially attractive for people who were born and raised in a disciplinary environment, and who dreamed about freedom. Freedom as ability to work without micromanaging, hyper-control and pressure. “Just let me do my job…”

Anyway, “You can” at first it feels liberating. But there is a twist: the individual becomes both boss and worker at the same time. People begin to push themselves, optimize themselves, measure themselves. Han calls this the rise of the self-entrepreneur.

…We are self-entrepreneurs now.

Agile — in theory and in practice

Agile appeared at a moment when companies realized that external pressure is often less effective than internal motivation. And software development especially requires initiative, learning, curiosity, and experimentation and the “you can”-idea works there excelent and effeciency increases significantly.

So Agile replaced strict command structures with ideas like:

• self-organizing teams
• autonomy
• trust
• ownership
• continuous improvement

In theory, Agile assumes people behave like responsible professionals, not like factory workers. And I think this fact is often missed by companies that want to “implement Agile”.

My observation is simple:

Agile works best with people who actually don’t need Agile.

Agile works beautifully when people already possess internal discipline. These are the rare professionals who:

• care about the product
• feel responsibility without supervision
• organize their own work
• collaborate naturally

personal observation

Based on my experience, Agile is especially powerful for people who grew up in disciplinary societies, for those individuals who do not understand freedom as an invitation to relax. Freedom means the opportunity to work without micromanagement and constant pressure — something many of them once dreamed about.

These people carry their own internal supervisor, critic, and judge. They do their work carefully and responsibly even without external control. They treat freedom not as an opportunity to do less, but as an opportunity to do the job well.

And in such teams, excessive metrics and KPIs often become unnecessary — and sometimes even harmful. Not because measurement itself is bad, but because too much measurement signals lack of trust. And trust is the oxygen of Agile environments.

When Agile becomes a strange hybrid

It’s funny that I have never seriously tried to join local projects. For a long time I couldn’t clearly explain why. I used to think that maybe I wasn’t good enough, not skilled or professional enough. But that turned out not to be true. Working on international projects showed me that my work and my contribution were valued.

Now I think the reason was different.

Agile in a disciplinary society (and many Eastern countries still remain quite disciplinary in their structure) often looks like a caricature. In Russian there is a funny expression: “to stretch an owl over a globe.” The image is very vivid. It means trying to force something unnatural to fit where it simply does not belong. And in many local companies Agile sometimes feels exactly like that owl stretched over the globe: all the attributes, ceremonies, and terminology are in place — but the system itself feels artificial and somehow broken.

Agile was originally meant to liberate teams from rigid management systems. And if we are honest, it was also a very efficient way to work with self-driven professionals — people who act like entrepreneurs inside their work. The worker is no longer pushed by a boss. Instead, the worker internalizes pressure and begins measuring themselves endlessly. In the achievement society this is considered normal.

But in practice Agile often becomes a strange hybrid: a framework that promises autonomy while quietly surrounding people with surveillance.

Many organizations try to control Agile using the same instruments that belonged to the disciplinary era. They introduce velocity targets, KPI dashboards, productivity metrics, and performance scoring.

These tools create a sense of calmness and an illusion of control. That is why they are so attractive — sometimes even to government institutions whose work is far from Agile or entrepreneurial thinking.

Self-Discipline vs self-exploitation

Agile began as a philosophy of trust and professional autonomy. Perhaps, it was also influenced by the growing popularity of positive psychology and modern economic thinking, where motivation and internal drive became more important than external control.

But in many organizations Agile slowly transforms into something else: a system of constant self-optimization and subtle pressure. (And, by the way, this is exactly the point where people begin to burn out).

Let’s return for a moment to the kind of people I had the chance to work with — people who truly impressed and inspired me.

Many of them grew up in disciplinary societies and understand freedom not as an absence of work, but as the opportunity to work without micromanagement and constant pressure. For them, freedom at work was something they had once dreamed about.

And here it is important to distinguish self–discipline from self-exploitation. A self-disciplined professional is different from a self-exploiting one.

A self-disciplined person has inner standards. They work well even when nobody watches.

A self-exploiting person constantly pushes themselves harder because the system quietly demands more output, more performance, more metrics.

From the outside these two types may look similar — they both work hard. But psychologically they are very different. The self-disciplined professional is stable and responsible. The self-exploiting worker eventually becomes exhausted.

My conclusion

So Agile works best — or perhaps I should say really works — with people who do not actually need Agile.

The ideal Agile environment assumes maturity, responsibility, and internal discipline (of course we all read about it, but who really meet it in people…i guess not much).

When those qualities exist, Agile becomes powerful. When they don’t, organizations try to compensate with metrics, controls, and performance dashboards. And at that moment the spirit of Agile quietly disappears .