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Agile Mindset: The Cartoon That Explains Why Agile Really Fails

Black-and-white New Yorker-style cartoon showing an interviewer holding a résumé and telling a candidate, “Impressive. You’re the first candidate to claim they out-earned their own company,” illustrating humor around exaggerated achievements and agile-mindset contradictions.

Agile doesn’t fail because of process flaws—it fails because people still think in a waterfall mindset. Today’s agile mindset cartoon exposes that gap with painful accuracy and humor.


Agile Mindset: The Thing Everyone Mentions but Nobody Has Time For


If you’ve ever sat through an agile transformation meeting, you already know: Everyone loves the idea of agile. It’s the mindset they struggle with.


Today’s agile mindset cartoon captures this perfectly — because in most companies, the only thing that’s truly agile is … how fast the plan changes before anyone understands it.


But beneath the humor, there’s a real insight worth talking about.


The Core Issue: Agile Isn’t a Process Problem. It’s a People Problem.


Whenever an agile transformation fails, leaders start blaming:

  • the scrum master

  • the tool

  • the sprint velocity

  • the backlog

  • the Jira board

  • the CFO who approved only 2 licenses for a team of 14


But the truth is painfully simple:


Agile collapses when the team still thinks in a waterfall mindset.


You cannot “daily-standup” your way out of:

  • fear of ownership

  • fear of experimentation

  • fear of being wrong

  • fear of talking to the customer

  • or the especially deadly:“Let’s wait for approvals from all 14 stakeholders.”


Agile isn’t about speed. It’s about shrinking the fear around change.


The Mindset Gap This Cartoon Nails


This cartoon lands because it reveals a universal contradiction in most organizations:


Everyone loves agile ceremonies - Nobody wants agile accountability.


At its core, this cartoon highlights an uncomfortable truth:


Most teams don’t have an agile mindset - They have an agile vocabulary.


They know the terminology.They don’t live the principles.


Agile doesn’t fail because:

  • the sprint was too short

  • the backlog wasn’t groomed

  • the burndown chart looked sad


Agile fails because teams still behave like this:

  • “Let’s finish everything by end of quarter, but also be agile.”

  • “We want flexibility, but also no surprises, ever.”

  • “We want innovation… as long as nothing changes.”


You don’t need more agile coaches.You need fewer agile contradictions. What’s the funniest (or most painful) agile moment you’ve lived through? Drop it in the comments — someone in another company has definitely suffered the same thing.


If you enjoyed this cartoon, explore more Kaapi With Ravi corporate humor across our categories:



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