Martin Kearns: From Empowerment to Ritual—Agile’s Unintended Consequences

On the Subject of Leadership · Mar 28, 2026 · 1h 5m

Agile promised empowered teams and faster learning. In many organisations, it has delivered something closer to ritual—stand-ups, sprints, and dashboards—often without the autonomy those practices were meant to enable.

Martin Kearns has observed this shift from the inside. An early Scrum practitioner and now an enterprise agility advisor, he has spent two decades helping organisations rethink how work is structured and decisions are made. That experience gives him a clear view of where Agile has travelled—and where it has lost its way.

In this conversation, we examine the gap between the…