The challenges companies face today in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world call for Agile throughout the company. There are two challenges: companies in general are trying to survive intense disruption and companies with successful software departments are trying to expand Agile methods to the whole company, including the board and the legal structure of the enterprise. Both the VUCA challenge and the pressure to implement Agile beyond IT, demand guidelines for implementing company-wide Agility.

We discovered these needed guidelines in Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile. Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Human Systems Dynamics, and Cynefin provide additional insights.

However, in talking with various experts about how to address the challenges companies face , we got answers from within that expert’s framework. For example,

• A Beyond Budgeting expert said, “Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won't have the flexibility to react to frequent market changes.”
• An Open Space expert said, “You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people can follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked.”
• A Sociocracy expert said, “You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile.”
• An Agile expert said, “You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company.”

All of these perspectives are true, but each perspective was always from within the discipline. We synthesized the approach into a wider perspective dubbed BOSSA nova: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, A = Agile.

The synthesis leads to a new organigram that reflects all the sources of guidance to a value center. The new organigram focuses board/CEO, inspiration, and resource and legal considerations on the value center. The value center is thereby free to focus on the customer.

We discuss how to use Cynefin-type probes that enable everyone to apply this new strategy for implementing company-wide Agility in their own organization.

Business Agility is not just the new thing, or a way to increase efficiency. It is a very good response to the challenge of complexity and dynamics (or VUCA, if you like). But while Agile is mostly about transforming the operating system of an organisation, there is little about the changes of individual understanding and competence, apart from "learning how to operate the operating system". No wonder is there an ongoing complaint about people doing Agile, not being Agile, or about the lack of the Agile mindset.

In this talk, Bernhard presents the Complexity Compass, an effective starting point for anyone who wants to navigate complexity. This brand new approach includes a mental framework, a set of principles, activities and tools that encompass the essential basics that help you rise up competently to the challenge of complexity, both within an Agile operating system, and without.

Running a small business is no small task. Financial management, sales, hiring, managing people, and supporting existing clients are just a handful of activities a small business might address in a single day. So what happens when you use the Kanban Method to manage your business?

I’ll share my experiences while training, coaching, and evolving a small business using the Kanban Method. You’ll see how the Method quickly surfaced issues, revealed hidden opportunities for innovation, and how the business is using the Method to mature the services they offer.

In the rush towards business agility, let's make sure we don't create unsustainable change via Prescriptive Mandates. What's the problem with Prescriptive Mandates? People tend to ignore them or do the minimum required to wait until the storm passes. And the prescription might not work in the specific context we're applying it to. This is especially dangerous when leaving the relative comfort zone of Agile Development into new Business Agility areas.

So what's the alternative? Invitation and pull-based change. Manage change as an internal market - Don't force people to buy into it but sell it to them and help them consume it at their pace. In other words - Figure out and optimize the "customer journey" for your internal change.

Also make sure that you don't apply a "one size fits all" and you aren't religious about methodology and practices. Emphasize values and principles and experiment with what practices work in each context and allow some variability at least initially.

Prato, an HR Tech scaleup with over 100 people, organises its strategy in a number of “value streams”. Examples of value streams are: attracting new customers for existing products, building and selling new products, improving customer satisfaction, phasing out legacy software, opening up existing products for integration with 3rd parties, etc.

A dedicated budget (capacity) and strategic goal is allocated to each value stream. All work items on the end-to-end kanban board belong to one of the value streams and the flow is managed in accordance with the policy of that specific stream. Moreover value streams with a focus on innovation (changing the business) and operations (running the business) run in parallel; their work items are pulled by the same teams and each of those teams self-organizes around the different types of work.

Recently a new value stream was introduced, which involves the creation of a new innovative payroll engine system. For a scaleup like Prato this is a large-scale project (10k-20k person days) with dependencies in the entire organisation. From the beginning it was clear that the existing structures alone weren’t sufficient to tackle this challenge: the sheer complicatedness of the payroll engine development requires a coordinated effort of multiple teams and experts. Hence some people advised Prato to form a dedicated project team, separated from the people supporting the existing HR systems - this comes down to Gartner's Bimodal IT approach. However Prato believed that Bimodal IT is an outdated approach that creates conflict and fails to unlock the potential in the entire organisation.

Therefore the Prato leaders decided to involve everyone in the organisation in forming a small but focused “pacemaker team” for the new payroll system. That pacemaker team should give focus to the payroll engine value stream and should set the rhythm for the new product development by the existing teams. So by installing a pacemaker process Prato assumed that it could involve expertise in the entire organisation and could scale the development to multiple teams, without falling in the trap of prescriptive "agile scaling" frameworks. In essence, this approach should ensure that the existing kanban system can be used as a lever to manage the flow of a large-scale project: the pacemaker team plays both the role of splitter (upstream) and integrator (downstream) of work and the existing teams can pull work in parallel with work coming from the other value streams.

Did Prato succeed so far? This and more will be covered in this case study.

Business agility is more than the sum of different organizational units that each implement their own chosen agile method on their own little island, constrained by 20^th century management. Nor is it a one-size-fits all model that is imposed from the top down. Business agility requires the engagement of the entire organization in a fundamentally new type of thinking. Especially when the (deep) divide between organizational silos risks being reinforced by the islands of agility formed by the, sometimes dogmatic, implementation of different agile methods in different parts of the organization. It also requires creativity and insight to overcome the relics of a 20^th century management system. Especially when the thinking that underlies division of labour, capacity utilization, and predictive control still runs very deep. Finally, it requires a new type of change that is resilient to setback.

This presentation reports on our experience with teaching and coaching business agility to a wide range of audiences without digressing into specific agile methods. On a tactical level, we discuss how we developed and use business simulations that engage and mobilize all levels of the organization (including higher level management) across all functions (not just IT, but also HR, Marketing and communications, Finance, Legal, Product management, …). We discuss simulations that allow participants to experience the basic concepts of flow, self-organization and active learning; not just simulations at the team level but also at a cross-team level and across the entire value stream (upstream and downstream). Simulations that are generic enough in order to speak to different parts of the organization, but specific enough as to realistically represent real-life work situations.

On a more strategic level, we discuss how to challenge the traditional linear, reductionist, local optimization thinking (“either-or” thinking) about agile and how to teach integrative, applied systems thinking (“and” thinking) as a new foundation for agile business. Using integrative thinking we will explain how the foundational concepts of flow, self-organization and active learning can be shown to build on each other in order to create a whole that is bigger than the sum of the parts. By setting aside any dogmatic discussions, it builds a common, deeper, understanding between practitioners of the different strands of agility. By using simulation, it allows to overcome the habitual 20^th century thinking and prepare for 21^st century business agility.

People are their most creative when they feel safe to bring their whole self forward. In our agile environments, we are looking for that level of investment so that individuals can flourish and our customers can benefit from what comes forth. How do we make space for courageous creativity in our workplaces? What does it take to really be a place that values individuals and interactions over processes and tools?

This session will cover how we move to a mindset that fully embraces people and gives them room to explore their full potential. We’ll discuss the fears and mental models that are holding companies back from this. Using the Relationship Bill of Rights we’ll investigate a possibility of what our day to day lives could be like.

Learn how the gingerbread men are taking over the daily Stand Up and forever changing the mornings of teams everywhere.

Have your Daily Stand-Ups become stale? We’ll talk through the evolution of an idea that ended up demolishing monotony, obliterating anti-patterns and spawning smiles… and to think, it all started when my daughter and I were playing Candy Land!

We’ll talk through the implementation of a game board during one team’s stand up through the infectious adoption and evolution of its existence. You’ll hear how teams tackled some of their greatest impediments and helped build a zone of psychological safety all while having fun.

By the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to bring this back to your team and create your own success stories.

- And we could all note down, visualize and tackle day-to-day frustrations, ideas and challenges -

The advantages of using agile techniques inside and outside IT are clear and well-known, provided the agile processes have been defined for the right reasons.

Apart from using those techniques in business projects, we have implemented a way of tackling the non-work related issues based on techniques and ideas such as scrum, kanban, kaizen and sociocracy.
“People aren't happy because they're successful. They're successful because they're happy” – Jeff Sutherland
Following the above quote, we defined a framework, where all frustrations, questions, ideas and anything that was team-related but not work-related could be tackled.
Examples: working from home, flex desks, non core tasks that are too time consuming, dog-sitting, meeting rules, air-co usage... Everything that is keeping you from a happy workday should be as important as the work itself.
In this session, I want to explain how we do this, and how we keep the balance between what has to be done and the time needed to tackle those non-work related issues that are so critical for the happiness of the team members.