What tells you a team holds the Agile Manifesto's values rather than only running its ceremonies?

## Why the distinction gets asked Adopting the visible parts of an agile way of working is easy. The sessions go on the calendar, the work appears on a wall, and the vocabulary spreads within a fortnight. Adopting the values is hard, because they change who decides things and how quickly the organisation is allowed to change its mind. So a great many teams end up performing the practices faithfully while none of the four values is actually operating. 'Doing agile versus being agile' is the shorthand for that gap, and interviewers ask about it to find out whether a candidate can spot it in a team they have really worked in — including, uncomfortably, their own. ## Signals you can check, and what each one means Vocabulary proves nothing. Latency and authority prove a lot. | Signal | Practices only | Values held | | --- | --- | --- | | Time from the customer changing their mind to the work changing | weeks or months, through an approval queue | days, through a conversation | | Who may change the team's own working agreements | a function outside the team | the team itself, at intervals, with evidence | | What is shown when a period ends | a status document or a slide | the running product, actually used | | Access to the person who will use the thing | routed through intermediaries | direct and regular | | The standing of the plan | a promise that must be met | a forecast revised as facts arrive | | What happens to improvement actions | recorded and carried forward indefinitely | a small number land and are visible | Three of these carry most of the weight. **Change latency** tests responding to change. **Who owns the process** tests individuals and interactions over processes and tools, because a team that cannot alter its own working agreements is following a process someone else chose. **What gets shown** tests working software over comprehensive documentation, since the artefact a team reaches for when it is under scrutiny is the one it genuinely trusts. ## A worked diagnosis A team builds a forklift-routing product. Its quarter holds 118 planned items; by week 9, 41 are closed and every scheduled session has run to time. On paper the adoption is exemplary. Now the rest of the numbers. A change to the aisle-direction rules, raised by a warehouse supervisor in week 2, is still sitting in an approval queue in week 13 — eleven weeks of latency. Nobody on the team has watched a supervisor use the product in four months; feedback arrives as tickets written by an intermediary. When the team proposed dropping a weekly report that nobody read, it was told the report is mandated elsewhere. The quarter's item list is treated as a commitment that must be met rather than a forecast, so the supervisor's change could not have gone in even if it had cleared the queue. That team is doing, not being. Notice that no part of the diagnosis is about whether the meetings are well run — they are. Every finding concerns where authority sits and how long information takes to change behaviour. ## What the distinction does not mean - It does not mean practices are theatre by nature. A practice that serves a principle is not a compromise; the values rank processes below people, they do not condemn processes. - It does not mean a team with no explicit way of working is more agile. An implicit process cannot be inspected, so it cannot be improved, which fails the principle asking teams to tune their behaviour at regular intervals. - It does not mean the team is at fault. Theatre is usually a rational response to how an organisation funds, measures and protects itself; people perform what they are measured on. - It does not license contempt. A candidate whose answer is mostly scorn for a previous employer reads as someone who diagnosed the problem and then did nothing about it. ## How the split shows up in the interview itself The answer format gives the candidate away. Someone who was only doing describes mechanics: how long the sessions run, which tool holds the work, what the cadence is. Someone who was being describes a decision — a time the team changed direction after work had started, who made the call, what it cost and what was given up. The strongest version includes a case where they deliberately chose a right-hand item, wrote the specification or honoured the plan, and can explain why that was consistent with the values rather than a lapse from them. If you are the interviewer, ask for the story rather than the definition: 'tell me about a time your team changed direction after work had started', then 'what practice did your team drop, and why?'. The second question is the sharper one. A team that has never removed anything has never genuinely inspected anything.