Agile ways of working are central to contemporary organizing, but little is known about how agility is accomplished in practice. This paper draws on a twelve-month ethnographic study of a software development team to examine how Scrum teams use organizational routines to accomplish agility. We find that relentlessly enacting the typical patterns of organizational routines in different ways creates and recreates ‘provisional directionality’—a tentative realm of possible actions. Provisional directionality is what enables Scrum teams to accomplish agility. The findings contribute to research (a) by unpacking how agility is accomplished in practice, (b) by emphasizing the prospective dimension of patterning in organizational routines, and (c) by outlining provisional directionality as a tool for empirical research. Moreover, our findings yield implications for managing Scrum teams.
