Nadia Tokerud
Lightning Talk
At some point, we started treating methodology like religion. Agile became dogma. Design Thinking turned into ritual. Double Diamond became an icon people worship without fully understanding what it means. Everyone talks about “doing it right”, but very few remember why we are doing any of it in the first place.
People fill out canvases like they are sitting an exam, and panic when reality refuses to fit the template. Teams get stuck in ceremonies they actively dislike, but keep doing them because “it says so in the book”. And when someone finally asks, “Does this actually make sense?”, they are labelled difficult.
We don’t need to burn all the methodologies to the ground. Most of them were created for good reasons. We need to remember who the methods are supposed to serve, and stop pretending reality should bend to fit the process. Use what works, drop the rest, think for yourself.
Let’s be honest here. None of us is doing pure Agile, real Double Diamond, textbook Design Thinking, or whatever methodology happens to be in vogue this month. And that is the whole point.
The emperor is naked. And sometimes, that is perfectly fine.
