A standup that says nothing. A status report that says everything is on track when nothing is. A transformation that's been running for two years and has produced a vocabulary, a calendar, and almost no change. If any of that sounds familiar, you've already met what this book calls the Drift, the slow, structural gap between what an engineering organisation says it does and what it does.
This is a book for engineering leaders who have done the framework training, run the planning events, and watched the gap widen anyway. Across twenty-two chapters, it works through the patterns that produce that gap and the leadership practice that lets you read it: the standups that go hollow, the metrics that lie, the protections that erode, the conversations that change everything.
It won't tell you which framework to adopt. It will help you see the forces around the framework you're already using, and lead inside them with steadier judgement.
A working account, written for the engineering leaders living in the same gap.