Agility involves delivering and adapting in short iterations. In Scrum the iterations are called “sprints.” Sprints are generally scheduled right after each other without much or any recovery time. In races, sprints imply exhausting every bit of energy to be first at the finish line. This raises an often asked question “Why don’t Scrum team members get burned out?”
The answer to healthy agility is to value “Sustainable Pace Over Faster Sprinting.”
Think about the long distance competitive swimmer. 
The swimmer must swim as fast as possible each lap (the sprint). But the goal is to complete all laps. The swimmer must train to get better at swimming each lap quickly while still have enough energy to finish the race. The same is true of working in iterations to make it to the end of the Agile project.
If we think of the software project as a race made up of laps (iterations), the key is to find the sustainable pace. For this we must have good and well understood project goals. The goals give us a marker for the end of the project (the finish line). We use iterations to make progress towards these goals. The iterations give us steps along the way. Agile encourages us to adjust as we go along based upon feedback and experiences, but we must always have our sights on the project goals.
Iterations also allow us to measure our progress using actual work completed. In swimming, we calculate the average lap times and can estimate completion time by knowing how many more laps are left. With iterations in Agile projects, we use velocity metrics to make similar estimated calculations.
When team members regularly become exhausted and feel burned out at the end of each sprint, there can be several reasons which need to be addressed.
Management wants to report success so meeting the goals for a sprint become elevated in importance. Team members strive to get work accepted to increase velocity metrics which are often visibly displayed. Because sprints are time boxed, the goals must be met by a fixed deadline which adds to the stress.
Pressure to work harder and longer may be fine in critical circumstances. But unrelenting pressure is damaging to the long term success of the project. When team members become exhausted from pressure and long working hours, bad behaviors begin to creep in such as taking short cuts, delivering less quality or accepting incomplete work. These are warning signs of potential problems ahead for the project.
Values in the Agile Manifesto are listed as one value over another. Although both values are important, the left side, which in our case “sustainable pace”, should be valued more for healthy agility. In some instances it may be necessary to work extra hard to meet a critical need, but management and teams must make every effort to return to a sustainable pace.
Adding more resources may help with burnout if that is an option. If team members are getting burned out, also think about doing less to achieve more. Work smarter. This is described in an earlier posting Doing a Few Things Insanely Great . The wrong thing to do is to let quality suffer. Talk about reasons for burnout and possible solutions in your retrospectives. Empower your teams. Figure out the sustainable pace which allows you to finish all the laps of the entire race!
Visit our web site at www.agile2success.com for more tips on creating effective Agile teams.
Great article. Good to understand for everyone.