02 Aug 2026

Bouncy Balls and Agile Orgs

Go and watch Steve Mould's video about bouncing balls and trampolines. I'll summarise the bits I care about here, but the video's really good. And I guess the rest of this post contains spoilers for it?

Anyway I think that Steve Mould's bouncy balls are a really good metaphor for Agile Software Engineering in large organisations.

Bouncy Balls

So here's what I took away from that video. It's all about bouncing a ball on a surface, and seeing what happens when you vary the bounciness of the ball and the surface.

Bouncy ball, rigid surface ⟶ big bounce
Rigid ball, bouncy surface ⟶ big bounce
Bouncy ball, bouncy surface ⟶ weird unpredictable mess.

<digression> Ok, not really that much of a mess, and not really that unpredictable once you've spotted the patterns. But definitely way more complicated than the first two cases.

My understanding was that the weird unpredictable mess was governed by a kind of resonance relationship between the bounciness of the ball and the bounciness of the surface. Each of them has a kind of natural frequency of bounce, and there can be either constructive or destructive interference between those frequencies. In the best case, they bounce together, and you get a big bounce. In the worst case, one is constantly acting as suspension for the other and they cancel out. This leads to a really tiny bounce. </digression>

Ok so where was I…

Bouncy ball, rigid surface ⟶ big bounce
Rigid ball, bouncy surface ⟶ big bounce
Bouncy ball, bouncy surface ⟶ ~~weird unpredictable mess~~ either constructive or destructive interference
The worst case of bouncy-ball-bouncy-surface was way worse than either of the first two cases
The best case of bouncy-ball-bouncy-surface was only as good as either of the first two cases

So you can make a rigid ball bounce higher by bouncing it on a trampoline. But you can't really make a bouncy ball bounce higher by bouncing it on a trampoline – even a perfectly calibrated one. And you can utterly ruin the bounce of a really bouncy ball by bouncing it on a poorly-calibrated trampoline.

If this makes no sense, that's only because I'm way worse at this than Steve Mould. Go watch his video.

Agile Orgs

I think "agility" in the software industry is like the bounciness of the ball. I think the ball is like a small 2-pizza XP team. I think the surface is like the organisation the team is working in.

Bouncy Ball, Rigid Surface

This is what you get when you do bottom-up XP consulting in a big enterprise org.

The big enterprise organisation is like the rigid surface, and the bouncy ball is the lean 2-pizza XP team half-filled with expensive consultants. This new bouncy-ball-team doesn't always blindly follow the same old processes that the org never changed since the 1970s. Instead it reacts to the changing needs of the outside world. In our metaphor, it bounces way higher than the org is used to having things bounce.

When the ~~ball~~ team is ~~bouncy~~ agile and the ~~surface~~ org is rigid, the ~~bounce~~ agility comes from the ~~ball~~ team.

Rigid Ball, Bouncy Surface

This is one of the things that can happen when dynamic new leadership genuinely shake things up from the top-down in rigid root-and-branch organisation.

The organisation becomes like a trampoline, and the rigid ball-bearings (existing less-agile teams within the org) suddenly find themselves bouncing way higher than they're used to. Which is to say: they carry on following procedures and doing precisely what they're told, but what they're told now changes more often than it used to. So the organisation as a whole is able to adapt to the changing world around it.

When the ~~ball~~ team is rigid and the ~~surface~~ org is ~~bouncy~~ agile, the ~~bounce~~ comes from the ~~surface~~ org.

Bouncy Ball, Bouncy Surface

I think this is one of the things that can happen when genuinely wonderful small XP organisations get big.

Every team in the org is an agile XP 2-pizza team. As are the leadership team. And the middle management. Absolutely everyone in the org is sickeningly bouncy. In isolation, every single slice of the company is working highly-reactive outcome-focused miracles every single day.

But when leadership are being agile, and making changes every day and the teams are being agile and making changes every day, those changes seem to cancel each other out as often as they add-up constructively. Just like the destructive interference in Steve Mould's trampoline and bouncy-ball.

And just like with trampolines and bouncy balls, the bouncier the ball and trampoline, the worse things can get if they get out of sync, and the harder it is to calibrate them against each other.

You can fix this with more-agileness, but I think it's really hard. The way to use agility to fix it, is to make everyone in the company aware of all the things all the time. To perfectly calibrate every bouncy ball against the trampoline they're all bouncing on… And possibly against each other if they ever interact.

However, after a certain scale, I think this becomes impractical. I think if everyone is trying to react in an agile way to everyone else, you're probably wasting a bunch of effort on internal dampening effects.

You might be better off letting the org calcify into a rigid surface, so your agile XP bouncy-balls can bounce off it with confidence.