Lindy Effect

Long-lasting practices tend to endure longer.

"The longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live." 1

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Lindy Effect originated in the world of entertainment and publishing, where comedians, conducting post-mortems on recent shows at Lindy's Delicatessen in the 1960s, observed that the future career span of a performer was proportional to how long they had already been performing. This heuristic was later formalized by Benoit Mandelbrot and popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who extended it to ideas, technologies, and practices that do not have an expiration date. In essence, the longer something non-perishable has lasted, the longer it is likely to last. For Agile teams and product organizations, this introduces a nuanced tension between innovation and longevity. Agile thrives on change and adaptation, yet the Lindy Effect reminds us that some things persist not by accident but by evolutionary fitness. Recognizing what endures, and why, can help teams navigate decisions around legacy systems, long-standing customer habits, or established processes that resist disruption.

Impact on Agile Organizations

The Lindy Effect highlights the underestimated resilience of mature systems, practices, or user behaviors. Agile teams risk ignoring this endurance in favor of novelty, often discarding time-tested components or patterns before understanding their function.

  1. Risks of overlooking Lindy-stable elements:
    • Technical:
      • Replacing battle-tested infrastructure with unproven tools may increase failure modes.
      • Decommissioning legacy code that customers rely on can unintentionally remove key value.
    • Organizational:
      • Overhauling rituals like Retrospectives or Daily Scrums in the name of "modern Agile" may erode team cohesion.
      • Neglecting durable customer habits can lead to misguided pivots or misaligned features.
  2. Benefits of recognizing Lindy-resilient features:
    • Strengthens user trust in the product by maintaining continuity in essential functions.
    • Provides scaffolding for innovation by preserving stable interfaces and practices.
    • Encourages reflective agility: changing where it's needed, not where it's easiest.

Scenario

A product team at a fintech startup decides to sunset their legacy reporting dashboard in favor of a modern analytics tool. The legacy dashboard had been a staple for their early adopters for over five years and was tightly integrated into clients' business operations.

  • The new tool is objectively superior but lacks some familiar affordances.
  • Longtime users begin to churn, citing friction and mistrust in the company's direction.
  • The team realizes too late that they had undervalued the Lindy Effect, users interpreted longevity as reliability, and the replacement violated that trust.

In retrospect, the dashboard's longevity was a signal of deep user entrenchment. By treating it as obsolete rather than foundational, the team lost goodwill and disrupted established workflows that had become part of users' muscle memory.

Ways to Mitigate:

Agile teams can remain responsive to change while respecting what persists. This requires intentional framing of legacy not as "old equals bad", but as "long-lived equals worth re-examining".

  1. Product Discovery:
    • Ask: What features have survived multiple redesigns or market shifts?
    • Identify: Which workflows are part of the customer's core job-to-be-done?
  2. Change Management:
    • Segment Changes: Maintain continuity for Lindy-stable components while innovating at the edges.
    • Co-evolve with Users: Layer improvements without forcing abrupt transitions.
  3. Technical Architecture:
    • Preserve stable APIs or interfaces even as internal components evolve.
    • Create migration paths that respect legacy workflows before full deprecation.
  4. Team Culture:
    • Educate team members on evolutionary thinking: survival over time is not inertia, it is often evidence of fitness.
    • Use Retrospectives to reflect on what should not change as much as what should.
Conclusion:

The Lindy Effect invites Agile teams to reconsider their default assumptions about novelty. Change is central to Agile, but not all change is improvement. Longevity can signal robustness, customer trust, and hidden dependencies.

  • Not all legacy is technical debt.
  • Disruption must be balanced with respect for user continuity.
  • Innovation without Lindy-awareness may lead to avoidable churn and rework.

Key Takeaways

  • The longer a practice or feature has lasted, the more likely it is to endure.
  • Agile teams should differentiate between outdated and Lindy-resilient systems.
  • Innovation should preserve user trust by respecting stable affordances.
  • Longevity often signals product-market fit, not just inertia.
  • Change should be layered, not abrupt, especially for long-lived elements.

Summary

Agile organizations succeed not only by embracing change, but also by respecting the elements that endure. The Lindy Effect reminds teams to look at the age of a practice, product, or behavior as a signal of its evolutionary fitness. By recognizing what has withstood time, teams can make smarter decisions about what to improve, preserve, or retire. This perspective fosters product stability, customer trust, and a more thoughtful path to innovation.