The ubiquitous lack of trust

As an Agile Coach I see a lot of efforts to make the transition into the Agile paradigm. A lot of energy is put into figuring out how to do it and how they are going te get the job done - they because it is almost never the people planning the transition who is going to get the work done.
Weeks turn into months turn into years of writing detailed process descriptions on how to deal with defects, when to abort sprints and who is responsible for what and drawing unintelligible process charts with two billion arrows, boxes and toll gates. All done with hope of getting it right the first time...

The lack of trust between management and developer seems to be as strong as ever and comments like "we need to make sure that they do things the right way" and "you know how developers are, if you dont pressure them nothing will get done" or "developers just want to work with cutting edge technology" seem to float around in every management meeting I participate in.

So, with this attitude the Agile transition is planned for a couple of years and no one bothers to build in continuous improvement and no one seems to get that the most important accelerator is the empowered and self organizing team - this is 2009 and we are closer to 1984 than ever!