Looking Ahead—Common Challenges to Scaling Agility in 2025

Scaling any business has been a challenge since the Industrial Revolution, whether it is about scaling the size of the factory, scaling the output of the machines, or producing more at a lower cost. 

This need to scale led to the concept of "economies of scale." Adam Smith floated this concept in the 1700s, and it took strong roots in mass production assembly lines in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

Doing or achieving more from what we have without squeezing it dry is what "scaling" has meant for centuries. However, quite often we tend to squeeze things dry when we try to scale. Machines break down, airplanes crash, people are treated like machines, people burn out, people quit, creativity dies… Someone in a leadership role changes the definition of scaling and squeezes things dry. We have all experienced this in one form or another. 

So scaling has to be done right—increasing throughput while ensuring good health, happiness and motivation of all those involved. 

Scaling the agile mindset

For some organizations, the key to scaling size, output, or productivity, is to scale agile ways of working.

The agile mindset is based on the principles of building sustainability, retaining creativity, and taking time for required improvements so that we can continue to be better at what we do.

Scaling agility in an organization ensures higher motivation and productivity without the fear of self-demolition or losing the edge or throughput. While many organizations have tried to adopt the agile mindset and scale agility, the few who have done it right have reaped tremendous benefits. 

There are many challenges to agile mindset and to scaling agility. Some of these challenges have existed since the onset of agile momentum. 

The coming year of 2025, however, poses multiple unique challenges in scaling agility. These challenges may become even more common in next few years. Let's reflect on some of these challenges.

1. Microcosm-ism

Since the onset of this century, the world has been gradually moving towards microcosms. In this context, a microcosm is bringing organizations down to teams and teams down to individuals. 

While agile momentum contributed to this change—encouraging team autonomy, smaller teams, and smaller deliverables more frequently, we are at a point where the pendulum has swung too far on the other side. 

Teams have become more individualistic. Individuals pursue their own interests. Teams have started becoming a temporary conglomeration of skill-based members who have simply come together to accomplish a task. They do not have much in common, don't interact much with each other, and are very dedicated to their own area of expertise and piece of work which is not well understood by others on the team.

This trend in recent years has been very detrimental to agile and scaling agility because you'll never be able to scale agile capabilities when the teams themselves misunderstand what it is to be an agile, cross-functional team. We need to come up with innovative ways of working with these highly skilled individuals to sustain the agile mindset. Once we have done that, we need to help these expertise-based individualistic teams work with each other to deliver large products.

2. Scattered teams

I am not using the word "distributed teams" as a heading for this section, for a reason. Till the year 2020, the term "distributed team" meant that the teams were concentrated in one or two locations and one or two team members were remote. 

With the pandemic, that changed. Suddenly, the term "distributed team" meant that everyone was working from the comfort of their homes. However, these teams continued to function as teams as they already had a sense of belongingness and team spirit built in.

The real challenge came when pre-pandemic teams completed their work, were adjourned, and new teams were formed. These new teams formed in the post-pandemic era and did not have any traces of even the modified distributed teams. Over the past couple of years, I have started calling these teams "scattered teams." 

Scattered teams and Microcosm-ism are two challenges that have essentially fed on each other and become very strong and prominent. It is like the Agile Manifesto on steroids.

I was working with a group of expert individuals and in order to bring these scattered experts together as a team, I suggested to a team member to give a talk about his expertise area to others and the question I got was, "What's the need? They are good at what they do and I am good at what I do. We are working on this product because of our expertise. Why should we spend time educating each other?"

We need to help these scattered team members see the value of knowledge sharing, teamwork, and being there for each other. And here is the challenge for the agilists—we need to do it all over again in a new way. And once we have done that, we have to find new ways for these "Scattered Agile Teams" to work with each other to deliver large products—there in lies the challenge to scaling agile in 2025 and beyond.

3. Too many avenues

Earlier this month, I was talking to a graduate student about what she is doing. Her answer was very interesting: "I am learning Python. Taking a course on Business Analytics. And I am pursuing a course on Machine Learning." That was an interesting choice of subjects. I asked her what was the thinking behind picking these subjects. Her answer was, "I want to build AI models for business analytics quickly." There are too many avenues to explore and gain expertise in, in today's world. Each of these avenues go very deep. 

The good thing is that it gives every individual a way to build expertise in their very specific area of interest. However, the challenge it poses is that all these cherry-picked expertise areas do not bring in the human factor. The need to work with others, the need to collaborate and communicate, the need to leverage other people's expertise to accomplish a big task is completely overlooked.

This poses a challenge to scaling agility as the emphasis on collaborative effort is dwindling. Inter-team collaboration has become extremely challenging in the light of deep-running siloed knowledge pillars. These are not organizational hierarchical pillars that we dealt with in the past. These are very specific expertise silo pillars. We need to come up with innovative ways to deal with these silos. Organizations need to devise ways to find common expertise areas and foster knowledge groups within the organization.

4. Artificial intelligence

AI is the name of the game these days. All of a sudden in the last couple of years everyone has started talking about AI. The other day I was talking to someone about "AI Latte." Intelligent baristas determine a customer's choice from past orders and create a completely new latte specific to the taste of a customer. Yes. The possibilities are endless. But how many can we realize? That is another conversation. Read my article on AI and scrum if you want to learn about the state of scrum and AI.

I have started hearing comments like we do not need scrum masters or scrum coaches anymore. We do not need so many product owners as a lot of their work will be replaced by AI. While I strongly believe AI is a friend for agile teams and for scaling agile, I have seen it have a negative impact in the recent past. 

Misconceptions about what and how much can AI achieve and do should be eliminated by the agilists. What is the value add of an agile and scrum coach outside of mundane tasks that can be done by AI? One big challenge to scaling agility is teams moving away from inter-team collaboration thinking AI will take care of dependency management and communication. While there is some element of truth in that, AI has not progressed enough to scale agility on its own. We are far from that future. Agile coaches have the responsibility of spreading the right knowledge on what can and cannot be achieved by AI. So our task as agilists is to determine what is involved in scaling, what can be done by AI, and what cannot be done by AI. 

Old challenges, new frontiers

Scaling has had its challenges for centuries. Agile mindset has had its challenges for decades. Scaling agility has had its own challenges for past couple of decades. While some of the challenges have been overcome, some still exist. But with elimination of challenges, we also get new challenges to deal with. The above are the four big challenges for scaling agility in the years ahead.

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