Sometimes, you need to play a little to win the game in the end.
A good chance that his may happen is when everybody in your organisation has been mind-washed and suddenly wants to go agile. Silly, of course. But they may still be asking you to do the same.
So, what do you do?
You take your team and comply, of course. At least officially. And in order to hide your true intentions you do it as perfectly as it gets. Which means: deliver the maximum business value at the end of the sprint. This is where your focus is: the next sprint. And this is precisely where you put your focus. The next sprint. And only the next sprint. Naturally, you control your team. Thus, they all do the very same: concentrate on the next sprint. That’s what they want you to go for, that’s what you do. The next sprint. The very next sprint. All for the next sprint. Who cares about anything with a more broad horizon than your one-sprint-timeframe? Nobody, right. Just build what you have been asked for over the next few weeks. But build it as fragile as it gets.
Eventually, your hidden beast comes out. Suddenly, the whole building magically implodes. Everybody realises that the time you need for implementing any new feature will exceed the whole sprint’s length. By magnitudes. Even adding a second button to your login screen doesn’t fit into a single sprint any more. That’s how fragile you got your whole system over time by following the mantra of a one-sprint-only focus for so long. If you now start to talk about refactorings, the whole team will just stare at you blatantly for hours and then suddenly cry out loud and scream and run away like mad.
As soon as your upper management does the same, you’ve succeeded at full length.
You know how it is: those who make everybody scream the last, makes them scream the loudest. And wins the game.