I agree that Scrum was sold to organizations to monetize Agile, and I also believe that Scrum almost destroyed the Agile movement as a result, because injecting Scrum into big companies does not work.

I also agree that “the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle”. But I don’t believe that the answer is merely to loosen up and let informal power within the organization take over. In most organizations, people do not know what an effective Agile/DevOps system looks like: they will not create what they have never seen.

That is why leadership — at the top — is essential, to drive it. Not to create a big plan, but to have an informed vision and relentless push it forward. Otherwise, as you said, it will fizzle out.

For that to be possible, the person at the top (e.g., CIO) must understand Agile and DevOps at scale; otherwise, there is a huge risk that they will make key tragic decisions that cause the transformation to fail. But some autocratic decisions are necessary, to create a mandate. Otherwise, people will dig in and use each day’s crisis as an excuse to prioritize other things.