The term “Agile” is a nominalisation. If you want to claim it is not a “thing” you’d also need to agree that Depression, Anxiety, Misery, Happiness, Mindfulness and Enlightenment (to name a few) are also not “things”. And yet these non-things are packaged and sold to us by doctors, therapists, consultants, gurus, spiritualists, and so on.

We nominalise exactly for the purpose of packaging and selling. Agile is a thing if people buy the thing we say it is. And they do. It doesn’t matter if what we sell is not what they think they are buying. That’s just good marketing.

And be aware, the more we write about what Agile is not, the more the term “Agile” becomes embedded in our collective conscious as a thing. If it is really not a thing, let’s not acknowledge it, and maybe it will go away.