There is an aphorism claiming that „There are no atheists in foxholes“. It implies that there are no „real“ atheists, but that anyone will turn into a believer when facing near-certain death.
I am not planning to argue whether or not this statement makes any sense. However, I do wonder whether it could be applied to many self-professed agilists. I have dealt with many people who claimed to have an agile mindset (including scrum masters and agile coaches). However, as soon as they had to deal with a stressful situation, with customer and/or deadline pressure or with results that appeared to be subpar, they transformed into waterfallish management 1.0 manage-by-fear-and-pressure micromanagers who tried to motivate their team members by using some version of: „Succeed, or else!“
I believe that being agile is easy when everything is going fine. But there are many fair-weather agilists. The real test of how much your agile mindset is worth comes when you have to deal with a truly tough situation. The weird thing is that many people seem to think it is normal to give up whatever positive principles they claimed to have as soon as the project goes downhill. So sometimes it seems like there are indeed very few agilists in foxholes.
AgileEvangelist 