The lukewarm coffee sloshes against the side of the paper cup as I shift my weight from one foot to the other. It’s the third time I’ve done this particular dance today, in the third ‘daily stand-up’ of the day. A different team, a different project code, but the same ritual. The same fluorescent lights humming a tune of quiet desperation. My manager, armed with a digital notepad, is going around the circle, his voice a metronome of forced enthusiasm. “Sarah, update?”

He’s not asking for blockers. He’s not asking how he can help. He’s asking for a status report, a verbal timesheet to justify our existence for the last 24 hours. This isn’t a huddle to align and adapt; it’s a public accounting. It’s the old weekly status meeting, just chopped into smaller, more frequent pieces of dread.

I started writing a furious email about this earlier. A manifesto, really. I got about 48 lines in, a torrent of frustration about JIRA tickets being treated as sacred texts and ‘velocity’ being a metric for compliance, not progress. Then I deleted it. What’s the point? Yelling at the system is like yelling at the tide. It doesn’t listen, and you just end up looking foolish and wet.

The Wisdom of River J.

Instead, my mind drifts to something else. To River J. River is an origami instructor I took a class with about 18 months ago, on a whim. River didn’t start the class with a 38-slide presentation on the history of paper folding. They didn’t hand out a six-month roadmap for achieving a paper crane. They gave us each a single square of crisp, colored paper.

For three hours, we folded. We made mistakes. A mountain fold where a valley fold should have been. A crease not quite sharp enough. At one point, my paper looked less like a bird and more like a crumpled receipt. I felt a surge of familiar frustration.

The Office vs. The Origami

What we do in our office is the opposite. We take a rigid, multi-year plan, chop it into two-week ‘sprints’, and pretend we’re being adaptive. We aren’t listening to the paper. We’re yelling at it, trying to force it into the shape we drew up 8 months ago, back when we had a fraction of the information we have now. When the paper tears, we blame the paper. Or we blame the folder. We never, ever blame the plan.

Cargo Cult Agile

This is Cargo Cult Agile. A term for organizations that mimic the superficial rituals of successful agile teams (the stand-ups, the retros) but miss the underlying principles. They see the landing strips and the bamboo control towers, so they build their own, hoping the planes full of cargo will land. But the planes never come, because they don’t grasp the principles of aerodynamics that make flight possible. They are performing a ceremony of speed, hoping it will magically grant them actual velocity.

I made this mistake myself years ago at a different company. I was the champion for ‘going agile’. I pushed for the certifications, the new software, the rebranded meeting rooms. I felt we were on the cutting edge. It took me a year to realize I had just helped management build a more efficient surveillance system. I had given them a new vocabulary to demand daily status reports instead of weekly ones. I focused on the artifacts, not the mindset. It’s a humbling thing to admit you were the chief architect of a prettier cage.

The Personal Reroute

So, what is one to do? The angry email remains deleted. A rebellion seems pointless. But perhaps the lesson from River J. isn’t about transforming the entire company at once. Maybe it’s smaller. It’s about my own work. It’s about taking the next task, the next ‘ticket’, and treating it like that square of paper. It’s about making the first fold cleanly. It’s about listening to the feedback from the code or the design. It’s about showing my immediate collaborators the crumpled paper and saying, “This fold wanted to be something else. Let’s reroute,” instead of pretending it’s a perfect swan.