Vimes vs The Machine: What Terry Pratchett Can Teach Us About Agile Cultural Transformation

"No sense us tryin’ to force our culture on ’em, is there? That’s speciesist."— Sergeant Colon, Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

Preface: On the Couch with Vimes

I’ve delivered Agile training to thousands over the last two decades. Along the way, my voice has shifted—less serious consultant, more foul-mouthed stand-up comic with a systems thinking addiction. Agile wasn’t meant to become a bureaucratic pantomime, yet here we are. So I turn, as I often do, to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Like comfort food for the culturally disillusioned.

Reading Men at Arms, I was struck again by how Sergeant Colon’s clueless attempt at politically correct species-relations says more about modern Agile transformations than most conference keynotes. That one line, delivered with miserable sincerity, exposes the cultural conflict that derails most attempts at change.

Two Cultures in Conflict: Industrial vs Agile

The Industrial Legacy:

Built on principles of scale, predictability, and control
Shaped by the manufacturing floor: Taylorism, standardisation, hierarchy
Treats people as interchangeable resources

The Agile Counterculture:

Emerged from craftsmanship, creativity, and chaos
Respects autonomy, feedback, and emergence
Treats people as collaborative agents, not cogs

When Agile is introduced into a legacy industrial context, it’s often treated as a new tool, not a new culture. This leads to what I call Agile Theatre—the rituals without the revolution. Stand-ups. Boards. Ceremonies. But the same old command-and-control beneath it all.

Enter Vimes: The Watchman Archetype

Commander Sam Vimes isn’t a visionary. He doesn’t lead with jargon or frameworks. He walks the streets. He smells the grime. He knows the understructure. Like the best Agile coaches, he doesn’t push transformation—he uncovers what was already there but hidden under layers of dysfunction, fear, and legacy politics.

He sees that real change is resisted not by ignorance, but by the deep-seated incentives to maintain the status quo.

"There's no justice. Just us." — Vimes

Agile transformations often fail because they pretend cultural change is just another deliverable. But culture is a power structure. It resists. It adapts. It absorbs. Like Ankh-Morpork itself.

JIRA: The Bureaucratic Hydra

No post about Agile disillusionment is complete without naming the beast.

JIRA.

I installed it in my first job as a project manager. I’ve hated it ever since. Like some eldritch admin demon, it follows me from engagement to engagement, reeking of workflow gates and over-engineered dashboards.

If there were ever an actual Agile revolution, JIRA’s head would be first to roll.

It takes the language of agility and turns it into a form of compliance-driven cargo cultism:

“User stories” with no users
“Epics" that mean “projects”
“Velocity” weaponised into micro-management

We gave the revolution to the machine.

The Hartmann Doctrine: Profanity as Integrity

Sergeant Colon, doing his best Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann impression, isn’t just comedy—it’s a glimpse into the absurdity of trying to inject soul into a system designed to strip it away. It echoes my own instinct to weaponise profanity in my training sessions. Why?

Because sometimes the only honest language in a broken system is the vulgar one.

Richard Pryor knew this. Eddie Murphy knew this. And you know it too, when you’re stuck in a retrospective, wondering why your sprint velocity report is more important to leadership than the team’s emotional health.

So What Can We Learn from Discworld?

Culture eats frameworks for breakfast. And snacks on your burndown chart after.
Power protects itself. Agile threatens entrenched control systems. Expect resistance.
Satire is subversion. Use humour, metaphor, and storytelling to challenge orthodoxy. Narrative is how we make sense of the world, and it is a powerful tool when deployed consciously.
Be the Watchman. Walk the beat. Smell the street. Know the politics behind the post-its.

Final Thought

Some talks are meant for applause. This post is intended for that slow exhale you do when you realise: Oh shit, it’s not just me.

So next time you’re in a boardroom explaining why your team doesn’t need a Gantt chart in the sprint plan, channel Vimes. Light a cigar. Swear softly. And remember:

"The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication." — Pratchett

Sometimes, the only way to fix the machine is to mock it first.

Dedicated to Terry Pratchett, Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann, and every burnt-out Scrum Master who still believes in people over process.