Are you dark agile?

Interesting new presentation on "dark agile". As someone who has seen truly agile teams thrive, yet also worked in "agile" environments that were offensively infuriating, I'm feeling vindicated to have this new label that seems so well-fitting for so many companies who claim to be agile but are nothing of the sort.

That said, there's a few things about this talk that I take immediate issue with, with the first being Allen's assertion that Jeff Sutherland's take on Scrum is not agile, and that his book Doing twice the work in half the time "flies in the face of what Agile is about". It's not always so black and white.

Yes, Scruminc is a for-profit company making money off of Agile, but it's a far cry from SAFe and the "agile industrial complex", which is real and harmful.

My read on this is that Allen is a little more idealistic than Jeff in his approach to behaviour. Jeff's book is designed to sell. It's business-oriented, it has a catchy title and it's marketed to companies that are looking to profit off of more effective software delivery.

But it's unfair to present this book as harmful. Jeff specifically states that his book establishes what Scrum is (not what Agile is, as agile is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools") and that the ideal intention is for a team to onboard into Scrum and use it as a launching point for agile. Like training wheels. Personally, I've found this approach practical and even subversive in its effectiveness.