Stop Running in Circles: Waste Reduction as the Forgotten Heart of Agile

Agile is everywhere. From tech startups to financial institutions, nearly every organization today claims to "do Agile." Sprint backlogs, daily stand-ups, two-week delivery cycles. They do speak the lingo of the rituals. Yet despite this widespread adoption, many teams find themselves stuck in an exhausting loop of delivering feature after feature, sprint after sprint, but without real improvement. Without progress. Without learning.

Back in the early 2000s, this is not the Agile that was envisioned. Nor is it the approach to improvement that built the foundations of Lean thinking in Japanese manufacturing decades before Agile became a buzzword. In truth, what many teams practice today is Agile in name, but not in spirit. A mere relentless cycle of delivery that ignores the crucial principles of waste reduction and continuous improvement.

To truly understand how we got here, and more importantly, how to get out, we need to look back to the Toyota Way—and rediscover what Agile was always meant to be.

The Toyota Way: A Philosophy of Waste Elimination and Continuous Improvement

Long before Agile was born, Toyota revolutionized the world of manufacturing by introducing principles that would later inspire Lean thinking. Central to the Toyota Production System (TPS) are two concepts:

1. The identification and elimination of waste: muda, mura, muri
2. The practice of continuous, incremental improvement: Kaizen

Toyota understood that productivity wasn't about doing more faster; it was about doing the right things better. Waste, whether in the form of unnecessary steps, overproduction, defects, or underutilized talent, was the enemy. Every worker, every leader, was responsible for spotting waste and finding ways to remove it.

This relentless pursuit of efficiency, quality, and improvement made Toyota one of the most respected and resilient companies in the world.

The True Essence of Agile

Agile, when born through the Agile Manifesto, wasn't just about faster delivery. It was about flexibility, responsiveness, and continuous learning. The twelve principles behind Agile emphasize frequent reflection, adaptation, and sustainable pace. This had a correlation with doing the right things better.

Key to this is the retrospective. A built-in mechanism to pause, reflect, and improve. Yet in many organizations today, retrospectives have become meaningless checkboxes. An empty ceremony. Decisions are not followed through, and teams revert to old patterns: deliver, deliver, deliver.

Agile was never meant to be a high-speed conveyor belt. It was meant to be iterative learning in action.

Where Agile Goes Wrong: The Treadmill Effect

Too often, Agile transformations prioritize the visible mechanics (sprints, boards, stand-ups) while neglecting the mindset of improvement. The result?

Teams get obsess over velocity metrics that have no direct link to value. Teams accumulate technical debt with no time set aside to pay it down. Teams ship features that users never asked for or barely use. Teams conduct superficial retrospectives with no concrete outcomes.

They are "playing" the Agile playbook, they do all the ceremonies and indeed it has the full appearance of Agile. But with zero impact. Teams are running in circles.

Learning from Toyota: Bringing Waste Reduction to Agile

To break the cycle, Agile teams must reintegrate the principles of waste reduction and continuous improvement. And that playbook is quite easy to understand:

• Make Retrospectives Actionable

Stop treating retrospectives as a ritual and start using them to identify and eliminate waste (unnecessary meetings, unclear requirements, inefficient tooling or handoffs, ...) AND most importantly: act on those findings.

• Focus on Outcomes, Not Outputs

Velocity is not the goal. Value is. Shift conversations from "how many points did we deliver" to "what impact did we create?"

• Address Technical and Process Waste

Just like Toyota engineers stop the assembly line to fix defects, Agile teams must have the courage to stop and fix foundational problems (fefactor fragile code, feduce process complexity, eliminate low-value work).

• Empower Teams to Say "No"

Teams must have the authority to reject work that adds no value or creates unsustainable load. In Lean terms, overproduction is waste. In Agile, it’s often unnecessary features.

Agile without improvement is not Agile. It's an illusion of progress, all motion, no direction. Teams need to rediscover what Continuous Improvement mean.

The heart of both The Toyota Way and Agile lies in learning, adapting, and getting better every cycle. Not every sprint should end with more code. Sometimes the greatest progress comes from doing less but doing it right.

Slow down. Reflect. Remove waste. Improve. That is the way forward.

Yours truly,

Ricardo Castelhano