Agile hasn't jumped the shark, it has just escaped the pond.

Boy, Agile Enterprise didn't take long to leap over the hype curve into the trough of disillusionment. Agile software has been hammered for some time, and now it's organisational Agile's turn.

Ironically most of the flak is coming from Agile software purists upset that the holy writ is being used outside the existing priesthood. Oh the irony of people who preach humanity and inclusiveness then expressing contempt for the clumsy first steps of new domains of Agile. Humans are imperfect and Agile is supposed to embrace that. It follows that we should embrace imperfect Agile. Everyone's on a journey, nobody's there yet. There is no "there", so let's be a bit less judgemental.

Another source of incoming attack is the business theorists explaining how there is nothing new in agile enterprise, Adam Smith knew it all. This is entirely reminiscent of all the attacks on ITIL from people who obviously knew no more about it than what they read in a few web articles. There are entirely novel concepts underpinning what we now call "Agile", including chaos/complexity theory which didn't exist in human understanding until the 1990s; and the reunification of the transcendentals - truth, beauty, and goodness - which we've lost for centuries thanks to precisely those business thinkers who drove total objectivity at the expense of humanity. (Note that this is not a religious concept just a philosophical one. I'm an atheist. Religion is not required to recognise the damage that "truthiness" has done, from Friedmanism to Taylorism.)

We (Teal Unicorn) don't like the word "Agile" as a noun. It is being asked to carry too much now. We use it as a small-a adjective/adverb, and prefer Human Systems Agility to encompass the broader movement, or "Open" which might become the packaging word in future.

Human: people, humanity, wholeness, culture, sharing, empathy, diversity, inclusiveness, egality, trust, integrity, authenticity, open, transparency, curiosity, learning, mastery, pride, empowerment, freedom, authorisation, servant manager, safety, wellbeing, health. [states]
Systems: customer, value, flow, feedback, quality, lean, streams, iteration, networks, complexity, chaos, emergence, antifragile, shift left, teams, organisation, collaboration, ritual, sharing, resilience, human error, holistic, data, science. [artefacts]
Agility: ambiguous, uncertain, iterate, increment, experiment, explore, observe, adjust, fluid, organic, improve, curious, embrace failure, fail fast, small, granular, simplify, flexible, pragmatic. [actions/adjectives]
from our book

But it is what it is, and Agile is the word, for now. I'd like to see a bit less purist high-horse knocking and a bit more embrace of a renaissance in social thinking and work thinking, the like of which we haven't seen in generations.