agile = more meetings? (wtf!)

My heart sank today at work -- but first some background.  We are a large organization with teams spanning technologies from the mainframe to mainstream Java and .NET frameworks; not to mention a deep investment in C/C++.  With that, it is not hard to image we have a variety of software development maturity levels across all of our teams.  Additionally, our big push (some here call it an experiment!) to agile has taken many different paths due to our very decentralized/autonomous model.

I realized today that one of those paths has surely taken a wrong turn when one of our senior architects said, "as an agile team we have a lot of meetings" when another technology leader was trying to schedule some time with him for a discovery effort.  Wow!  It doesn't seem this gentleman gets it.  More upsetting is that his whole team just might not get it either.  I'm starting to wonder what that high-priced "agile coach" has been telling them!

Hopefully, I'm not as clueless at the boss above, but obviously, this statement is a warning sign and I need to get more engaged to make sure this team hasn't gone too far astray.  The first thing I'm going to say is Stop "Doing Agile" and Start "Being Agile" (stole the line from the following ThoughtWorks video).

First thing on the plate is to make sure this team sees agile as the ability to create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment and not as a rigorous & immutable process that has to be followed to the letter.  The second thing is to help them get out of the meeting room and to get them at their workstation and collaborating in small teams as needed.

Anyone else have any "Agile Is _______" horror stories to tell?