A practitioner’s meditation on the convergence of Agile and the contemplative traditions, written from inside the territory.
This essay became Chapter 11 of Come Prepared to Die.
The recognition
I received a coaching session from my Alētheia teacher Steve March yesterday, in the middle of a confluence of several crises at once: serious family illness, work loss, partnership strain. It was the kind of week that some contemplative practitioners might call a Dark Night of the Soul. I was narrating it all to Steve, somewhat clinically, telling him I was saying yes to it.
Steve offered a different frame. There might not be a yes or a no at all, he suggested. There might just be a this: whatever is actually facing me. Neither chosen nor refused. Just this as the source of action. I face this. What action arises? I act. Then I face the next this. And the next.
It took me a while to feel the difference between just this and the other moves I had been making. Just this is not “this is what is happening”, which is description. It is not “I accept what is”, which is a stance taken against what is. It is not even “I am in contact with what is”, which still has an I and a what is set against each other. Just this is the move that drops the gap. The action arises from the contact rather than being chosen by a self standing some distance from the contact. That distinction is small on the page and load-bearing in the body.
I spent much of yesterday evening integrating what had opened. It was only this morning that I wondered how any of this applied to what I do for a living when the connection arrived. There’s a silver lining in the insight: just this is integral to our Agile and Adaptive work.
The Manifesto put it most directly: responding to change over following a plan.
My sense is that the contemplative traditions and the Lean / Agile / systems-thinking traditions converge on a single epistemic claim. Contact with reality is more reliable than abstraction about reality. Plans, frameworks, models, doctrines, identities, narratives are all useful. None of them are the thing. The thing is what is actually happening, in this moment, between actual people, with actual constraints, in an actual body or system.
Who this is for
I can think of at least three audiences for “spirituality and tech” content. The first is the productivity audience: meditation made me thirty percent more focussed, here is your morning routine, please subscribe. That genre is well served and I have nothing to add to it. The second is the philosophical-tourism audience: Stoic memes, Bhagavad Gītā quotes on LinkedIn, an annual Esalen retreat, a Joe Rogan podcast about psychedelics. That genre is also well served, and is mostly harmless aesthetic.
The third audience (the one I’m writing for) is the practitioner who has been doing the professional work for fifteen or twenty years, writing software, leading teams, running companies, coaching humans, AND has done enough contemplative practice to know it’s a discipline rather than a hobby. They’ve sat retreats. They’ve done Internal Family Systems (IFS) work or its equivalent. They’ve had a real moment on a cushion or in a therapy session that changed something structurally. They aren’t tourists. They’re inside the work, in both rooms, and they sense the rooms are connected without being able to say how.
If that’s you, thank you for being here. The rest of this is for us.
The contemplative version
The same teaching shows up across traditions in different vocabularies. The examples below are Buddhist because Buddhism is where my direct study lies. Equivalent moves exist across Sufi, Daoist, Advaita, and Christian mystical lineages, but I trust myself to summon it from Buddhist sources and less so from the others. A few examples.
The Buddha to Bahiya, in the Pali Canon’s Bahiya Sutta:
“In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there is only the seen in reference to the seen, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then there is no ‘you’ in connection with that. When there is no ‘you’ in connection with that, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress.” ―Bahiya Sutta (Udāna 1.10), Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation
Bahiya awakened on the spot. The Pali commentaries tell us he was killed by a cow shortly after. (Just this includes the cow.)
The thirteenth-century Zen master Dōgen, founder of the Sōtō school, in the Genjōkōan:
“To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.” ―Dōgen, Genjōkōan, Tanahashi translation (Enlightenment Unfolds, 2000)
The Tibetan Dzogchen masters speak of rigpa, the recognition of awareness aware of itself, with all phenomena arising and self-liberating in it. Self-arising wisdom isn’t a special clairvoyance. It’s what arises when you stop running every moment through the part of you that decides.
And Steve, in our session, in plain English:
Just this.
Different vocabularies, same teaching. Action arises from contact. Activity is parts trying to manage what they’ve abstracted. The distinction is operational, not poetic, and I trust it because I’ve watched it play out in my own life often enough to stop arguing with it.
The Agile, Lean, and systems version
I first read the Agile Manifesto sometime in the mid-2000s. I read its four pairs as pragmatic preferences. What I was reading, without recognising it, was a contemplative document. Each of those four pairs is the same teaching: contact over abstraction. Show me what is, not what’s been described. Be in real-time relationship with the human, not the document about the human. Contact the future as it arrives, not in advance.
The “while there is value in the items on the right” qualifier preserves the same care Steve gave me in our session. Plans aren’t worthless. Frameworks aren’t worthless. They’re held loosely, ready to dissolve back into the next moment of contact.
The lineage runs deeper than the Manifesto, and this is the part I find most beautiful when I sit with it.
I came to Scrum in the mid ’00s. I started to appreciate Lean in business school as theory, then through Mary Poppendieck’s talk The Tyranny of the Plan, then through colleagues at Gorilla Nation between 2008 and 2011 who practised Lean as a stance rather than a methodology. The This American Life episode about NUMMI did more for my understanding of cultural transformation than any book had up to that point.
There is a striking resonance between Mahāyāna Buddhist epistemology and the practices of the Toyota Production System (TPS), though evidence is thin for a direct lineage. Genchi genbutsu (go and see for yourself) reads, in that resonance, as the doctrinal claim that you cannot lead from an abstraction of the floor; you have to stand on the floor.
There’s a specific practice I want to touch on, because it’s where the contemplative and the Lean traditions touch most explicitly. Taiichi Ohno, the architect of TPS, used to draw a chalk circle on the factory floor and instruct a manager or engineer to stand inside it. His direction was a single word: Watch. Hours later (sometimes a full shift, sometimes longer, in some accounts an entire day), Ohno would return and ask: What do you see? The question functions almost as a koan. The wrong sort of answer was the same as no answer; the practice was to keep watching until the right sort of answer arrived unbidden. If the answer wasn’t yet what Ohno had seen, his response was: Watch some more. The practice continued until the manager had perceived what could only be perceived through sustained, undefended observation: the awkward reach for a misplaced tool, the three-minute micro-stoppage, the operator’s exhausted improvisation around a bad layout, the bandage on the third operator’s hand that means this layout has been hurting people for longer than anyone wants to admit, the hidden factory beneath the visible one. This is not analogy. This is shikantaza in safety boots. The point of the chalk circle is the same as the point of the cushion: to break the cognitive filters that protect you from seeing what is actually there, and to sustain attention long enough for what is there to disclose itself.
W. Edwards Deming’s PDSA cycle (Plan, Do, Study, Act) is a feedback loop with reality. The Study step is the contemplative move: what actually happened? Most organisations skip Study, because parts want to move “efficiently” to the next plan before reality has finished arriving. Deming’s insistence on profound knowledge (appreciation for system, theory of variation, theory of knowledge, psychology) is an insistence on contact-based learning across four dimensions.
Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework is the one that startled me most when I first encountered it. (I learned it from Dave’s writings and from a workshop Pat Reed taught around 2017.) In the complex domain, his prescription is probe, sense, respond. Not analyse, plan, execute. The act of probing creates the data; you can’t know the right move before contact. Just this formalised for organisational decision-making.
Two thinkers from outside both the contemplative and the Agile lineages sharpen the point further. James C. Scott, the Yale political scientist, in his 1998 Seeing Like a State, gives the most precise account I’ve encountered of how administrative abstraction destroys the thing it tries to govern. Scott’s central concept is legibility: the way states (and increasingly corporations and platforms) reshape the world to make it readable from the centre, by simplifying it. The cadastral map. The standard surname. The plantation forest planted in straight rows for ease of harvest. Legibility makes the world manageable. It also kills the mētis, the local, situated, practical knowledge that the world actually runs on. The plantation forest looks like a forest from the air. From the soil, it’s a desert.
Eugene Gendlin, the philosopher and psychotherapist, developed Focusing in the 1960s. Gendlin’s claim is that the body holds an “implicit knowing” he called the felt sense, which is not an emotion and not a thought, but a bodily awareness of a situation that is initially unclear and yet unmistakably there. The therapeutic move is to attend to it without forcing it into language, until it discloses what it has been holding. When it does, there is a felt shift, and the situation reorganises.
Scott and Gendlin are pointing at the same fact from opposite ends of the scale. A complex system, whether a body or a state or a value stream, is unknowable to any individual in any explicit, propositional way. The only access available is through sustained, undefended contact. The instruments differ; the access discipline doesn’t. Even then, “there is always more than can be said.”
Practitioners who get this in either domain develop a quality their colleagues find hard to name: steady without being detached, decisive without being rushed, confident without being certain. They aren’t running every moment through a planning function; they’re in contact, and the appropriate response is arising. Self-arising wisdom in dharma vocabulary, emergence in Agile, mētis in Scott, felt sense in Gendlin: same phenomenon, different teachers, different terms.
The same false form in both domains
Both traditions have a near-identical failure mode, and it’s worth naming because it’s where most practitioners get stuck (myself included, repeatedly).
In Agile, the failure mode is ceremony cargo-culting. Standups that are status reports to a manager. Retros that produce action items no one does. Story points debated to four decimals. Sprints that generate sprint-shaped deliverables. The form is preserved. The contact is gone. The team is performing agility without doing the practice. (Most SAFe rollouts I’ve seen end up here, and I won’t pretend that’s a controversial observation among coaches who work in those environments.)
In contemplation, the failure mode shows up under at least two names. John Welwood coined spiritual bypassing in 1984 (the noun form spiritual bypass has since won out, but the 1984 original was the gerund). Chögyam Trungpa, earlier in the 1970s, named the same dynamic spiritual materialism and wrote a whole book around the cure (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973). Meditation as identity. Equanimity as armour. I’m sitting with it as a way to not feel it. The practitioner is performing presence without being present.
Both failure modes have the same engine. Protector Parts (to use IFS terminology) have taken over the practice and are using it as armour against reality, instead of contact with it. The Fixer running the standup. The Inner Critic grading the meditation. The Practice Protector keeping things light enough to never land. The Optimiser turning the retro into a dashboard. (I am, for what it’s worth, intimately familiar with all four of those parts. They are helping to write this paragraph.)
For leaders, the most common variant is a Manager Protector that projects knowledge and expertise in the face of an ultimately unknowable system, in order to keep an exiled Hurt part beneath it from making contact with the experience of not knowing. In that Hurt part’s economy, the bearer isn’t a good leader unless they can personally know and solve the problems themselves. Not knowing is intolerable, so the Protector covers it with a confident answer. The system, of course, doesn’t care about the answer. It is going to do what it is going to do.
Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness (2019) describes the shape this takes when a contemplative tradition gets stripped down: of its ethics (right action, right speech, right livelihood), of its lineage (a teacher, a sangha, transmission), of its renunciate edge (the explicit recognition that ego-comfort is the obstacle), of its inconvenient implications (you may discover your work is harmful, your ambition is a defence, your achievements are armour). What’s left is a relaxation technique. Relaxation techniques have value. They are not what the traditions are. Steve has given me the language to put it more sharply. Working from Heidegger’s poiesis (poetic bringing-forth) and Gestell (technological enframing), Steve reframes it as the contrast between poetic-attunement and technological-attunement: a poetic-attunement practice has been pressed into a technological-attunement frame, and the frame swallows the practice.
It also fools people. I spent over a decade practising meditation as a technology in order to get somewhere that wasn’t here. I can attest from having been inside that experience that the technology framing doesn’t deliver what the traditions offer. Anyone selling that proposition is, I suspect, ignorant of what they are selling. The deeper damage is what happens when strawberry-flavoured candy gets sold as strawberry: pretty soon the definition of strawberry gets lost. The same has happened to Agile in most of the corporate spaces I have worked in. McMindfulness calms the egoic mind, temporarily, at best. The genuine traditions are working in the opposite direction: they begin to dissolve conditioning, the root of the anxious activity.
The same strip-down applies, almost word for word, to Agile transformations that fail. Strip Agile of its ethics (people over process, sustainable pace, real customer contact) and you get a velocity tracker. Strip it of its lineage (Lean, the TPS, the original Agile Manifesto signatories’ principles) and you get ceremony cargo-culting. Strip it of its renunciate edge (kill projects that aren’t delivering value, retire the methodology when it stops serving) and you get the waste you’re supposedly trying to avoid. Strip it of its inconvenient implications (your roadmap is fiction, your estimates are theatre, the customer will probably tell you you built the wrong thing) and you get SAFe.
Both failures have the same shape. The framework was adopted as identity rather than held as tool. The certifications replace the work. The cure, in both domains, is identical. Notice when you’ve slipped from contact into framework, and come back. It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t certifiable. It’s the whole job.
Nothing wasted
If you’ve been in either room for any length of time, the diagnosis above probably stings a little. The certifications you collected. The methodologies you championed. The mindfulness app on the home screen. The retreat circuit. The frameworks you wore like coats that didn’t quite fit. None of that effort was wasted, even though almost all of it was wrong about the thing it claimed to be doing.
Steve put this to me directly during our session, and I want to pass it on without dressing it up. We almost have to go through the phase of practising as parts, in his vocabulary. We almost have to follow frameworks blindly, take certifications seriously, believe the next methodology will be the one. (I once told a team, as a young Agile Coach, that they had to follow Scrum by the book at the start. I meant it.) McMindfulness might have been your first contact with contemplative practices, even if it never delivered what was advertised on the tin. SAFe was probably how you noticed something was wrong, even if it took a few rollouts to be sure. You almost have to go through SAFe to learn that SAFe isn’t the answer, the same way you almost have to go through McMindfulness to find out what mindfulness was actually pointing at.
What changes things is having encountered enough of these, over enough years, in enough contexts, that you become convinced the simple cure promised by each was, in every instance, the Inquisitor again. Until that conviction lands in the body rather than the intellect, the framework keeps holding the seat. The question that finally arrives, late and unwelcome, is something like: Is this framework leading the company, or is the leader? If you can sit with that question without flinching, you are probably done with the certifications. If it lands as a threat, the certification is still doing the leading.
None of which is permission to stop. The work in front of you doesn’t get easier when the framework loses its glamour. It gets sharper. You just have less protection.
Why this matters
Your inner work and your outer work share a doctrine, and the discipline becomes portable. The capacity to notice when you’ve left contact is one capacity, deployed in different rooms. The Fixer that runs your standup is the same one that runs your sit. Once you see this, you stop trying to bring meditation to work or make work part of practice. It was always one work; you just didn’t have the language.
The frameworks become tools rather than identities. Most Agile transformations stall because the framework gets adopted as identity instead of held as tool. The same with most contemplative traditions: the practitioner becomes a Buddhist or an Alētheia practitioner and the identity replaces the practice. When you see that the framework’s only value is in serving contact, the question becomes uncomfortable. Is this practice (the standup, the sit, the kanban board, the retro) actually putting me in contact, or am I doing it because I’m a person who does it? The honest answer is often the curriculum.
Beatrice Bruteau gave this its sharpest contemplative form in her 1979 book The Psychic Grid. Drawing on Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and Walter Kaufmann’s notion of the decidophobe, she argues that human consciousness both craves and dreads the kind of autonomy that requires us to make our own important decisions. The Inquisitor is the figure who lifts that burden. He tells us how it is, what we must do, which side we are on, and we thank him for it. This is what Robert Kegan’s research describes structurally: drawing on the stages laid out in In Over Our Heads (1994), the broader literature suggests fewer than a third of adults reach what he calls the self-authoring mind (Stage 4), the developmental stage at which a person can hold a framework as a tool rather than be held by it as identity. A much smaller fraction reach Stage 5. For everyone below Stage 4, the framework is the self, and the question of whether the framework is in service of contact does not quite compute. Any framework can become that Inquisitor when we agree to obey it rather than use it: the methodology, the certification, the lineage we cannot question, the app on the home screen that scores our day. The relief we feel when a framework arrives and settles our doubt is the same relief Bruteau is naming, and it is precisely the relief that disqualifies the framework from doing its real work, which is to put us in contact with what is rather than to spare us from it.
Probe, sense, respond
For Agile teams, the move is to let contact precede framework. One way I do this is a Snowden-style narrative survey before the retrospective; the practice deserves its own post and I’ll write it elsewhere. The shape that matters here is that the team meets reality before it meets the structure that’s going to make sense of reality, not after.
For contemplative practitioners, start asking, after a sit, was that a part going through the motions of what it thinks presence is, or did the mind settle enough to let presence reveal itself? Did I meet what was here, or did I run a technique on a problem? The honest answer is the curriculum.
For coaches and consultants, the move that matters most is in noticing when your client has slipped from contact to frameworks (or, worse, never had contact to slip from), and naming it. That’s the whole job. Everything else (methods, models, certifications) serves that one move. This is slow work. It rarely looks like the case studies anyone publishes. But when leaders stop managing numbers and parameters and start sitting with the system (or, in Ohno’s case, standing with it), the answers begin to emerge from the system itself, rather than being imposed on it from above.
For leaders, plans matter, vision matters, the strategic frame matters, AND none of those replace contact with what is actually happening in the building, in the code, with the customer, in the body. The capacity to hold a plan loosely, ready to update when reality demands it, isn’t a weakness. It’s the meta-skill of operating in any complex domain, which is now most domains.
For everyone, consider standing in your own chalk circle once in a while. Pick a system you are responsible for: a team, a product, your own life. Spend an unreasonable amount of unstructured time in contact with it, with no agenda, no notebook, no plan to extract insights. Watch. Then watch some more. Ohno’s bet was that what you cannot see in fifteen minutes you will see in four hours, and what you cannot see in four hours you may see in eight. My own bet, hedged because I know how this lands in the calendars of people who run organisations, is that this is the single most undervalued practice available to a senior leader, especially now. The conditions that allow sustained contact (silence, slow time, undefended observation) are being eroded by the very technologies many of you are building, and the chalk-circle capacity has to be defended on purpose.
A personal example
A week ago, I was running my life on a complicated abstraction about my relationship, my work, my parents, my practice, my body. I had a plan for how the next month would go. The plan included a timeline for various pieces, a strategy for hard conversations, an account I was building of what’s wrong that included evidence, dates, and counter-arguments. I spent hours planning it with Claude.
The plan didn’t survive the week.
What I’m finding underneath the dissolution in the midst of it is something simpler than I expected. The next moment arrives, I’m in contact with it, and what to do is obvious. Not always comfortable. Not always pleasant. But obvious.
The Agile name for this is emergence. The Buddhist name is appropriate response. The Tibetan name is self-arising wisdom. Scott’s name (oblique but real) is mētis. Gendlin’s name is the felt shift. Steve’s name, on a Friday afternoon in early May, was just this.
If you’ve read this far, you probably already know what I’m pointing at. You’ve been running standups that felt mechanical, and you’ve been sitting meditations that felt mechanical, and you’ve vaguely sensed that the same thing was wrong in both rooms without being able to name it. The thing that’s wrong is: you weren’t in contact, you were in framework. Once you see that, you can’t un-see it. And once you can’t un-see it, the question that arrives is uncomfortable. If the same discipline is required in both rooms, what am I avoiding by keeping them separate?
I don’t have a clean answer for you. I’m in my own version of that question right now. What I can offer is this. The contemplative traditions are not selling you a feature. They’re training the same capacity you’ve been trying to build into your teams: humans who can stay in real contact with what is actually happening, and act from that contact, even when it would be more comfortable to retreat into the abstraction. The training is hard, decades-long, and dissolves things you’d rather keep. It doesn’t make you more productive. It makes you more here.
There’s no app for this, no certification, no productivity multiplier. There is only the practice, in the meeting, on the cushion, in the chalk circle, with your kid, with your dying mother, with your customer, with your code, of noticing when you’ve slipped from contact into framework, and coming back.
Just this.
Gratitude
I am grateful to the teachers whose work appears in this essay or in my standing to write it: Steven March, my Alētheia teacher; my late first Buddhist teacher, whose lineage I no longer practise in; Mary Poppendieck; David Denton; Christophe Louvion; Frank Langfitt for their This American Life episode about NUMMI; Pat Reed; Dave Snowden; W. Edwards Deming; Ronald Purser; James C. Scott; Eugene Gendlin; Beatrice Bruteau; Chögyam Trungpa; John Welwood; Robert Kegan; the Buddha; Dōgen; and Taiichi Ohno.
The success of any insight in this essay belongs to my teachers. The errors are mine.
