My claim is that if a project that uses Agile fails, the participants still have an incentive in dysfunctional cultures to blame each other, it's just that the structure of Agile makes it harder to blame individuals. So I am not claiming that A is better than W or W is better than A at shipping software, I am claiming that W is better than A at blaming people for failures.
I might have confused the issue by trying to draw a distinction between blaming the process from the inside and from the outside. My claim is that it is much easier to blame a process if you aren't a participant in a failing process. For this reason, it is easier to evangelize a new process of any type as a consultant or as a new face than it is if you are an old hand who may be accused of having been a cause of previous failures.
Perhaps we could pick a methodology and then imagine a project that "fails." Given this scenario, the challenge would be to find a way to blame the participants for the failure.
What promises do developers and stakeholders make to each other in the methodology? How do you define "failure" and given that definition, how do you establish a causal relationship between an individual and the result?
I might have confused the issue by trying to draw a distinction between blaming the process from the inside and from the outside. My claim is that it is much easier to blame a process if you aren't a participant in a failing process. For this reason, it is easier to evangelize a new process of any type as a consultant or as a new face than it is if you are an old hand who may be accused of having been a cause of previous failures.
I think this second point is true of any process.