Much of this describes some of my past experience at a Fortune 100. That company is now undergoing much discussion at a senior level about agile delivery. Senior executives are walking around talking about tribes and chapters and have no idea what that really means or of the day to day work of teams. It’s unfortunate what will come out of it in the end is some people doing stuff now that will have new titles and maybe more ceremonies but not a substantive change from what they do now or the way work gets done.
Middle management thinks they work in a factory and treat people like numbers. If you trust the same group of people to implement the change then you can bet their sole goal is to make it look good. Unless you change the middle then not much will change.
In principle agile is supposed to be guided by higher level processes accounting for this kind of strategic problem. In practice, yeah, I do sometimes see agile teams get away with writing "objective: ship my features, KR: 5 features are shipped".
I'm waiting for the inevitable open office plan that has a conveyor along it's primary axis for moving white boards along the production path, like in a modern factory. There can be a sub-team that programs robotic arms to sketch things on the white boards as they pass each stage.
Middle management thinks they work in a factory and treat people like numbers. If you trust the same group of people to implement the change then you can bet their sole goal is to make it look good. Unless you change the middle then not much will change.