The clock on the wall – or more accurately, the digital timer counting down to someone else’s 11:45 AM meeting – was already at 45 minutes. Not 5, not 15, but 45. And the project manager, a man whose eyes held the weary glint of a thousand backlog grooming sessions, was still going. “What did you *really* accomplish yesterday, Sarah? And tell us, in excruciating detail, what percentage of story 235 you anticipate completing by sprint review on Friday.” Sarah, blessed with the patience of a saint, detailed her progress, turning what should have been a quick, collaborative alignment into a granular, public status report for an audience of 15 people, none of whom truly needed to know the specific decimal point of her completion metric.
42%
Success Rate
The air was thick not just with project updates, but with a palpable sense of resignation. Sarah’s shoulders seemed to slump a fraction of an inch more with each forced syllable. You could almost hear the collective sigh in the Zoom squares, a silent agreement that this wasn’t productive, but it *was* expected. We’d signed up for agility, for empowerment, for a chance to make a real difference. Instead, we found ourselves trapped in a performative loop, where the ceremony trumped the substance. The very meetings designed to foster collaboration had become individual performance audits, breeding cynicism faster than any bug report could be filed.
Performative Bureaucracy
This isn’t Agile. This is performative bureaucracy


































