Adopting “agile” in large organisations is notoriously difficult. I’ve seen (and sometimes worked for) plenty of large companies that fail to reap the reward of business agility which should result from adopting agile engineering practices.

A few years back, a lot of companies adopted “agile” in the following manner: they brought a consultancy firm in to work out a strategy, they hired some scrummasters, they delivered a few days training to their project managers and developers.

Hopefully we’ve all realised that this doesn’t work. Agile adoption is not just learning and applying scrum. It’s much, much more.

Firms like Leading Agile and Thoughtworks specialise in helping large organisations handle the process of transforming an organisation from one shape into another.

Richard Durnall wrote about a pattern of adoption he’d observed when working through agile transformations, and Dan North expanded on it in his 2014 talk on the subject. They both suggest that the process of agile transformation often seems to have six stages: the first two being people and tools. It’s these that the Agile Manifesto set out to deal with, and consequently, it’s these two that modern Scrum handles best. At it’s core, Scrum is a set of tools that help people to apply the agile values and principles.

In organisations that don’t have the benefit of a senior agile thinker (I can’t think of a better term), this is pretty much where agile adoption stops.

That’s partly because we’re still unsure how to traverse the last four levels. There is no best practice, and instead we’re faced with a bewildering array of complex frameworks (LeSS and SAFe being two) which promise to solve our problems.

Just like by-the-book scrum is rarely the best solution for a mature team who truly understand the philosophy of agile, these frameworks are rarely the best solution for large-scale agile transformation.

Here are the six stages of agile adoption, as imagined by Dan North, plotted against the resistance he’s experienced in getting through each one…