Agile teaching as the ability to act under pressure: How business lecturers navigate the rigidity of higher education

Business lecturers face a paradox: they are expected to foster agile mindsets while operating within rigid higher education structures. Based on qualitative interviews with seven early adopters at German universities (information power sampling), this study reconstructs how lecturers navigate this tension. We identify "constructive subversion" as a key mechanism: formal module compliance combined with internal disruption of the learning process through failure tolerance and ownership transfer. Agile teaching emerges as an expression of adaptive professionalism and situated agency—contingent on the active protection of psychological safety against performative assessment logics.