There’s an old parable called The Appointment in Samarra that perfectly captures the illusion of control. A servant in Baghdad sees Death in the marketplace and, terrified, flees to Samarra to escape his fate – only to discover that his desperate escape delivered him exactly where Death was expecting to meet him.
It’s a chilling tale, but it also serves as the perfect metaphor for traditional project management and why Agile exists in the first place. The harder we try to outrun uncertainty with rigid plans, the more we run straight toward failure.
The Illusion of Control in Project Management
For decades, organizations believed that if they just planned hard enough, they could predict the future. Detailed Gantt charts, five-year roadmaps, and exhaustive requirement documents were created to provide certainty. But reality doesn’t care about our plans.
- Market conditions change
- Customer needs evolve
- Technology shifts
- Teams uncover new challenges mid-project
Despite this, many leaders still treat predictive planning as a shield against failure. The irony? Just like the servant in Samarra, their obsession with avoiding risk often ensures that failure happens exactly as scheduled.
The Samarra Effect: How Rigid Plans Create Their Own Failures
Ever been on a project where the deadline was sacred, even when the original assumptions no longer made sense? Where teams burned weekends trying to hit an artificial milestone instead of adapting to new information? That’s the Samarra Effect in action.
Rigid plans don’t just fail to prevent risk. They create risk.
- Fixating on scope over real value leads to teams delivering features no one needs.
- Overcommitting to deadlines leads to burnout, low morale, and high turnover.
- Ignoring reality in favor of “the plan” leads to products that miss the mark entirely.
Predictability feels safe. But in complex work like software development, it’s often an illusion.
Why Agile is the Answer
The Agile Manifesto explicitly rejects the idea of fixed plans. It values:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
The last point is key. Agile recognizes that uncertainty isn’t a failure of planning. It’s a reality of doing meaningful work.
Great Agile teams don’t waste time trying to predict every turn in the road. Instead, they:
- Work in short, iterative cycles to learn and adjust quickly.
- Use feedback loops to course-correct before small issues become massive failures.
- Embrace uncertainty as part of the process instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
Final Thoughts: Stop Running to Samarra
If you find yourself on a team clinging to an outdated plan despite clear signals that it needs to change, ask yourself: Are we actually avoiding failure, or are we running toward it?
The servant in the story thought that speed would save him. Many teams think the same way – if they just work harder, move faster, and push through, they can “beat” uncertainty. But success in Agile isn’t about running faster. It’s about making better decisions with the information you have.
The best teams don’t try to escape uncertainty. They embrace it, adapt to it, and use it as a competitive advantage.
What’s your experience? Have you seen teams try to outrun their own Samarra? Let’s discuss.