Better than yesterday

Business agility is a set of cultural and behavioral characteristics that span all aspects and interactions of an organizational system. It refers to the capabilities and willingness with which an entire organization is instinctively able to seize emerging and unforeseen opportunities for its customer’s benefit. The intention of which is to find ways to create an organization best able to fulfill its purpose, no matter what the future brings.

However, defining business agility is not simple. It is a continuum, where the question is not whether you have it, but rather how much you have and is it enough. There is no silver bullet or single framework, method, or system that can implement business agility – and, by definition, because an organization is a complex adaptive system, there can never be one. In most cases, even different business units need different approaches. Yet, while no two organizations follow the same journey, common patterns emerge.

In this talk, together we will explore these patterns to better understand the characteristics of an agile organisation and those financial services firms who are doing it well.

About Evan

Evan is the Founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute; an international membership body to both champion and support the next-generation of organisations. Companies that are agile, innovative and dynamic – perfectly designed to thrive in today’s unpredictable markets. As well as leading the Business Agility Institute, Evan is also the author of Directing the Agile Organisation (2012) and #noprojects; a culture of continuous value (2018).

Business Leadership Agility: Integrating Bold Visions and Harsh Realities

The times they are a changing. The great American songwriter Bob Dylan is no business analyst, but his iconic song The Times They Are A-Changin’ has something very pertinent to say about the economy and the global landscapes we live in.

As businesses our goal is to make our organisations resilient to change, the idea being to weather the ups and downs of the market and geopolitical conditions to achieve long-term profitability and growth. In this view of the world, changes are seen as exterior events, things that happen to a business outside of the normal run of affairs. This risks taking a negative view of change: Change is something to be mitigated against, avoided or at best, managed.

Is there a different way to view change, and is there a different way for a business to approach how it reacts to change? Do we need a different type of leadership?, even new organisational designs? The answer my friend is, Yes. And it begins with the recognition that change is the norm, not the exception with Agility and Adaptiveness the business of doing business has changed.

About Stephen

Multi-award winning transformation leader, strategist, and author of Sense and Respond: The Journey to Customer Purpose. Stephen Parry has an outstanding global reputation for organizational transformation and building customer and employee centric businesses.

Stephen is recognised as world-class expert in creating strategic differentiation for medium to global organizations, including change program design, competitive and operational strategy, Sense-and-Adapt business models, lean and agility enterprises.
Stephen’s strategic success has been featured on the BBC, in the Harvard Business Review with Professors Womack and Jones and secured his place on the judging panel for the National Business Awards.

Cited as one of the Top 25 CX influencers of 2019/2020 by the Customer Experience Magazine, Stephen was a pioneer in applying Lean and Agile to Service Operations especially to large Scale IT infrastructure business and outsourcing.

He is also the founder of the Sense and Adapt Academy: Creating Lean and Agility enterprises through long-term high performing change teams, customer centricity, leading to profitability, differentiation and superior work-climates.

Habits of mind to navigate uncertainty

The relentless uncertainty that 2020 has brought has left decision-makers across all levels in organisations feeling unmoored.  For many, the ways of and being in the world, as well as the tools and methods that brought success in the past, are no longer sufficient.  We constantly find ourselves on the uncomfortable edge of unknowing, and for many this can be paralysing.

The field of complexity offer insights that are invaluable in these times.  Also known as the science of uncertainty, a practical understanding of complexity can help us navigate this uncharted territory we find ourselves in.  In this talk, we will explore briefly what complexity is, what the implications are for us, and the habits of mind that can help us make sense of, and act in uncertainty.

About Sonja

Sonja is a thinking and sense-making partner for leaders and change-makers who need to better navigate uncertainty.  She is based in South Africa and has a background in the natural sciences.  She is a sought after speaker and recognised authority in Complexity and Sense-making.  She has almost two decades consulting experience and is certified in various individual and systemic coaching methods. She looks after the commercial business of Cognitive Edge and is also founder and Managing Director of More Beyond in South Africa.

Better Value Sooner Safer Happier

In this talk Jon shares the top eight antipatterns and patterns for Business Agility, lessons learnt the hard way, having led on Ways of Working at Barclays Bank and now working with organisations across industry sectors on the topic.

About Jon

Jon Smart leads Business Agility at Deloitte, helping organizations to deliver “Better Value Sooner Safer Happier” and is the author of ‘Sooner Safer Happier’, a collection of antipatterns and patterns for Business Agility, published on 10th Nov and a #1 Bestseller in its category on Amazon.

Prior to this, Jon was Head of Ways of Working across Barclays Bank globally, which is 328 years old, with 80,000 colleagues. Over a three year time period, on average teams were delivering 3x as much in 1/3rd of the time with 20x fewer incidents and with the highest ever colleague engagement and with consistently high customer Net Promoter Scores.

Jon has more than 25 years of experience of taking teams and organisations on the journey from traditional to agile and lean ways of working, starting out as a developer on an investment banking trading floor in the early 90’s. He and his team is the winner in the category of “Best Internal Agile Team” and runner up for “Most Valued Agile Professional (UK) “ at the Agile Awards 2016. Jon shares learnings through sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding at 6 to 7 conferences a year, is the founder of the Enterprise Agility Transformation Leaders Network, is a member of the Programming Committee for the DevOps Enterprise Summit, a member of the Business Agility Institute advisory council and is an occasional guest speaker at London Business School

How do teams collaborate best?

What makes a great team? How do we get them to communicate and collaborate? And how can they best coordinate their work to maximize output, outcome, and impact?

About Jurgen

As a serial founder, successful entrepreneur, author, and speaker, Jurgen is pioneering management to help creative organizations survive and thrive in the 21st century. He offers concrete games, tools, and practices, so you can introduce better management, with fewer managers. He also offers a platform for you to share your practices and stories with the rest of the world.

Jurgen calls himself a creative networker. But sometimes he’s a writer, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, illustrator, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader, freethinker, or… Dutch guy. Inc.com has called him a Top 50 Leadership Expert and a Top 100 Leadership Speaker. Since 2008, Jurgen writes a popular blog at NOOP.NL, offering ideas on the creative economy, agile management, organizational change, and personal development. He is the author of the book Management 3.0, which describes the role of the manager in agile organizations; How to Change the World, which describes a supermodel for change management; Managing for Happiness, which offers you practical ideas to engage workers, improve work, and delight clients; and most recently, Startup, Scaleup, Screwup, which contains 50% inspiring stories and 50% practices to follow and dives into the major topics that business leaders and entrepreneurs are confronted with throughout the business lifecycle.

Outcomes for impact – at scale

We all know the drill, pivot faster and embrace innovation in these turbulent times. But how do you ensure your process reaches outcomes that matter?

Gabrielle will give an introduction to Mobius, a navigator that allows you to create a customized innovation model connecting strategy to delivery.

Rather than prescribe one set of practices or one framework, this next-generation approach allows you to combine models in new and novel ways. Alistair Cockburn describes it as the ‘first real post-agile framework’, allowing people the structure and freedom to innovate effectively.

Gabrielle will show you some examples from social transformation in a war zone, pivoting a restaurant business model in 5 hours, to enterprise transformation at Red Hat.

About Gabrielle

Gabrielle Benefield is an author, speaker, innovator, and founder of Mobius (Mobiusloop.com). Gabrielle is an advocate for purposeful innovation and believes the relentless pursuit of ‘more, more, more’ gets in the way of success. Since developing the earliest inception of Mobius in 2009 she has helped individuals and organizations all over the globe, including Google and Red Hat solve complex problems in a transformational way.

She used Agile and Lean techniques in the early 2000s in Silicon Valley to successfully lead teams, including taking a startup to a robust Initial Public Offering, and spearheading one of the largest Agile enterprise transformations – scaling up to 250+ teams across three continents. She founded the Scrum Foundation in 2009 together with key Agile thought leaders, including Jeff Sutherland (the inventor of Scrum), and is an author of the Scrum Primer, one of the most downloaded guides to Scrum.

Unlock the system and let people shine

“We already work Agile in our organization.” I often hear this and mostly it is true. When we elaborate a bit more on the topic then we mostly realize that we work partly Agile in some departments or we implemented some Agile rituals and methods. So, what are we really doing differently after we have implemented this new way of working? Did we really change our approach to our customers? Are we adding value in this agile transformation and to whom? What has agility to do with Finance, HR, Business and IT. If we look in the mirror, can we honestly say that we really know what the people in the organization need? Do we have the right conversations and check our assumptions? Do we really involve our employees so they are able to shine? If the answer is not a convincing YES! What should we do more or different to become truly agile from the heart of the organisation?

About Alize

As a passionate People & Change Executive, Alize Hofmeester helps organizations to stay relevant to their customers, by reshaping their future way of working and facilitating a fresh mindset that leads to companywide flow and business agility.

Alize is considered a true visionary and thought-leader in the field of business agile transformations. By unlocking the infinite human potential within an organization, she is able to ignite new ways of working and thinking in large and complex organizations.

After a successful career in banking, management consulting, healthcare and recruitment Alize started a new chapter as founder of Twinxter and creator of the People Journey Circle©. She now actively advises and coaches boardroom leaders and transformation teams on mindset, leadership and the people side of change. She is widely renowned for her inspirational keynote speeches and coach- and training sessions for people on forthcoming changes in mindset and related business agile transformations.

HR & The Revolution of Work

COVID-19 has not caused the revolution of work. HR was under pressure long before. But the global pandemic has accelerated the need for a fundamental change and puts us into complete disruption. The future of HR depends on its ability to utilize this unique opportunity to shape a new world of work. Can HR be adaptive fast enough, and is Agile the answer?

About Fabiola

Fabiola is a thought-leader in contemporary HR and the Co-Founder of Just Leading Solutions, a New York based transformation consultancy for HR and Business Agility.

Her work with key players across the private, corporate, and social sector take her across the globe as she helps them build stronger, more responsive, and innovative businesses through Agile HR.

Fabiola is a Switzerland native. She lives in New York City and Louisville (Colorado) and is an avid New York Rangers fan.

People Agility and the Future role for HR and Leaders

This talk will cover what Leaders and HR professionals need to be aware of when adjusting Ways of Working to the new paradigm of employee-driven organizations (self-management) and how to inspire people to perform in a common direction without using formal power. Leadership practices need to be adjusted to the new paradigm of employee-driven organizations and it will be more about creating prerequisites for innovation in infrastructure, culture, processes and systems, than providing strict rules & policies and ticking off compliance with the same. Motivating employees becomes possible with less control, transparent visualization, trust, and continuous improvement, together with a deep knowledge of what makes each and every employee tick. What are the changes that HR and Leaders need to make in their own role and behavior to accomplish People and Business Agility?

About Pia-Maria

Pia-Maria is the founder of the global community Agile People and the author of 3 books about Agile People, where the last one, Agile People Principles – Your Call to Action for the Future of Work was co-authored by 35 Agile People Coaches from the whole world. She is a people-centered speaker, author, and consultant with a true agile mindset and a belief that people are performing at their best when they are trusted, supported, and listened to.

3 Enemies of Marketing Agility – And why communication is the core of success

Pam Ashby will address 3 common challenges to marketing agility – silos, stakeholder interactions and the lure of sophistication. These are the hidden enemies that fall outside the Agile process, the cross functional teams, the willingness to pivot and adapt, to fail fast, to learn, and to deliver early and often. All these great things can be daily undermined when there is insufficient focus on communication. And marketers are great communicators!

Marketers are naturally agile. Pam will explore the compelling relationship between marketing skills and those needed for business agility. She’ll talk about what’s changed for marketers that now means building on natural agility is an imperative. She will discuss what ‘marketing agility’ really means and where its value lies.

Silos, stakeholder interactions and the lure of sophistication. Understand these and you have a springboard for success.

About Pam

Pam Ashby works with individuals and organisations, supporting them to take an integrated and Agile approach to marketing, improving value and results. She has worked in-house and agency-side, as a journalist and in PR, led international marketing teams and provided coaching for marketing professionals. Her experience spans large multinationals and startups, and her conclusion is solid across all perspectives – an Agile approach is powerful (and necessary) for marketers.

Pam is an AgilePM® Practitioner, a Certified Scrum Master, and an ICAgile authorised instructor for Agile Marketing and Agile Marketing Leadership with AgileSherpas, the world leading Agile Marketing organisation. She is a certified coach, and holds diplomas in NLP, Marketing, and Digital Marketing. In early 2020, Pam founded the fast growing Marketing Agility Community meetup.

Probe your Organization – How you can implement a Learning Organization with BOSSAnova

The pandemic is one stark example of the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (short VUCA) world we currently live in and this world asks for company-wide agility. Yet, agility in the literal sense that means companies need to be adaptive, responsive, fast, and nimble. Thus, although already created in the 90ies, the original idea of a learning organization, that is a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself, is more relevant than ever. Yet, how can such a learning organization come to life? BOSSA nova is one approach to company-wide agility by synthesizing Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agility. The key to its success is the concept called probes – small, safe-to-fail experiments based on hypotheses derived from reflection on the current situation as well as on theory. In this session, I will share various probes implemented by different companies that can guide the probing in your company to establish a learning organization.

About Jutta

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. Jutta has recently pair-written with John Buck a book entitled Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy (dubbed BOSSA nova). Besides that, she has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.

Jutta is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian, and European conferences, where she has also presented her work. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. in Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education. Jutta can be reached @JuttaEckstein | https://www.linkedin.com/in/juttaeckstein/ | https://www.jeckstein.com/ And you’ll find more information about BOSSA nova: https://www.agilebossanova.com/

An introduction to Beyond Budgeting – Business Agility in practice

Beyond Budgeting is a set of concepts that can help transform organisations to make them healthier and more productive workplaces. It is also a set of methods that will help improve financial steering processes to make them less bureaucratic, more flexible and less prone to dysfunctional gaming behaviour​. Beyond Budgeting is most powerful when it is both, particularly if BB is invoked as part of a broader change project, perhaps one seeking to spread Agile or Lean methods or create a more empowering culture.

About Bjarte

Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, both in Finance and HR. He is a pioneer in the Beyond Budgeting movement, and has been heading up the implementation of Beyond Budgeting at Equinor (formerly Statoil), Scandinavia’s largest company. He led a similar initiative in Borealis in the mid-nineties, one of the companies that inspired the Beyond Budgeting model.

Bjarte is Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Roundtable (BBRT). He is a popular international business speaker and is the winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award. Bjarte is also author of “”Implementing Beyond Budgeting – Unlocking the Performance Potential””, where he writes about his almost twenty-five years long Beyond Budgeting journey. His employer has opened up for Bjarte to undertake select consulting work.

Leadership Agility in the New World of Work

Participants will have an opportunity to review and discuss a research-based framework (elements) for Leadership Agility. Since 2001, this framework has been used globally by organizations (companies, government agencies, universities, etc.) as a core element of their leadership development initiatives.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has become a defining disruption impacting leaders in organizations across the globe. Leaders will be confronted with future disruptions as well as ongoing VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) characterizing a turbulent business environment. How can you prepare the leaders in your organization for this New World of Work characterized by VUCA events? This interactive session will enable you to quickly self assess your leadership agility and begin developing your individual development plan for Leadership Agility Fitness.

About Nick

Dr. Horney is an Organizational Psychologist who founded Agility Consulting and Training in 2001 and has been recognized for innovations in organizational and leadership agility, including the global standard for leadership agility — The AGILE Model®. He has written several books on the topics of Change Management and Agility and is often quoted in journals, books and professional associations such as the American Management Association, Project Management Institute (PMI), IBN International and Human Resource People and Strategy.

Prior to forming Agility Consulting, Dr. Horney served on the Executive Committee of the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). His coaching, leadership development and organizational agility management consulting experience spans over 30 years and includes the start-up and management of the Coopers & Lybrand (now Price Waterhouse Coopers) Change Management Practice. Representative clients include Turner Broadcasting, Coca-Cola, Navy SEALs, Hanesbrands, Lenovo, CIA, ARAMARK, REI, Celanese, United Launch Alliance and R.R. Donnelley. Prior to consulting, Nick held senior leadership roles in the consumer products industry (Divisions of Nestle and Pepsi).

Dr. Horney’s first-hand knowledge of coaching and leadership agility was developed during his 23 years as a Navy Special Operations Officer where leadership and team agility were defining characteristics of success. Nick retired from the U.S. Navy reserves at the rank of Captain. He serves as a coach for The Honor Foundation which focuses on the successful transition of Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders and other Special Operations Forces to the business world. Dr. Horney previously served on the Board of Examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and now currently serves on the Editorial Boards of The Business Agility Institute and the Organizational Dynamics Journal.

Responding to Uncertainty with People Oriented Leadership

Leader of the financial services affiliate of the largest industrial conglomerate in Turkey, listed on Fortune Global 500, shares experience on overcoming hard times and staying on the growth path. The speech unfolds around purpose, putting people first and leaders’ role in managing uncertainty and change.

Content :

• Sharing Koc Holding’s purpose driven culture and people first approach
• Examples on how agile was the response in the pandemic and how the effect spread over to broader community
• Change management and digital transformation as priorities for all group companies, how all started with the leaders.
• Putting leadership cultural transformation as priority for driving change and business agility
• Company level experience at agile transformation (agile leaders team as lighthouse to business teams)
• How actions/changes across all people/management/business areas reinforce each other to achieve business agility

About Yesim Pinar KITAPCI

Yesim Pinar KITAPCI started her business life in the automotive sector at Tofas, a Fiat Chrysler Automotive JV in Turkey. She moved to financial services with various management roles in Koc Holding affiliated finance companies. She held the position of general manager and board member at Koc Fiat Kredi A.S. between 2010-2012. She is the CEO and Board Member of Koc Finansman A.S., a pioneering financial services company specialised in consumer and SME lending, since 2013.

Yesim Pinar KITAPCI is also a board member of the Association of Financial Institutions in Turkey and a board member of Turkish Family Health and Planning Foundation. She is an alumni of Harvard Business School, completed Advanced Management Program in 2016.

Agile Leader

Organizations are constantly evolving, they change their structures, processes, and rules. Last decade they’ve been changing into Agile, and surprisingly despite all the effort and money they put into transformation, they’ve been often failing. The same way as culture follows an organization, the culture follows leaders. Companies were trying to break that rule for years and change the culture without changing leadership style. Nowadays this rule seems to win and organizations are moving towards different leadership styles and surprisingly becoming successful. In order to change organization, leaders have to change first. Be one of them and turn your organization into a successful Agile organization.

About Zuzi

Zuzana “Zuzi” Šochová is an independent Agile coach and trainer and a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) with more than fifteen years of experience in the IT industry. She started with agile and Scrum back in 2005, when she was implementing agile methods in the USA. From that time, she has been credited with agile transformation and implementation for many companies and teams around the world. By creating and sustaining agile leadership, Zuzi believes the worlds of work and life can be made happier and more successful.

Zuzi is a founder of the Czech Agile Association, and the world famous AgilePrague conference.

Zuzi was elected to the Scrum Alliance Board of Directors in 2017. She is an author of The Great Scrum Master: #ScrumMasterWay and Agile Leadder: Leveraging the Power of Influence books.