My name is John Smart, and I am the Global Business Agility Lead at Deloitte. I have been at Deloitte for two years. Prior to that, I had a career in financial services, leading ways of working across Barclays Bank globally for four years, from 2015 to the end of 2018. I have about 30 years of experience in agile and lean ways of working. I started out on the trading floor in investment banking in the early 1990s, where we were naturally agile—though we called it "lightweight processes" at the time. For me, this is a little bit like Back to the Future.
Today, I’m going to talk about the why and the how of business agility. Let’s start with the why.
The Why: A Changing World
June 26, 2018, was an important day in history. It was the day General Electric was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. GE had been the last original remaining constituent, having been in the index for 122 years, from 1896. Just two years earlier, it was still in the top ten firms by market valuation.
Today, 50% of the members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average have been in the index for less than 15 years. Only one company in the index predates the invention of the microprocessor. In September 2015, seven of the top ten firms by market valuation were not IT firms. Fast forward less than two years to June 2017, and seven of the top ten firms were IT firms. Something very significant happened. By 2023, eight of the top ten firms by market valuation were IT firms.
The world of work has fundamentally changed. We have shifted from the age of oil and mass production to the age of digital. In Henry Ford’s Model T factory in Detroit, workers performed repetitive, knowable tasks—assembling wheels, petrol tanks, and gas tanks. These tasks were predictable, and efficiency was measured by physical output. The Gantt chart, developed by Henry Gantt, originated from this era, tracking manual labor in factories with a simple question: "Have you shoveled enough today?"
Today, work is no longer predictable or repetitive. Instead, it is unique and unknowable. It requires collaboration and conversation. In the Detroit factory, over 50 languages were spoken, but it didn’t matter because workers weren’t required to communicate. Now, in the digital age, effective teamwork and collaboration are essential. Everything we do is unique, and customers often don’t know what they want until they have it. Similarly, teams don’t always know how they’re going to build something until they start doing it.
In software development, you don’t write the same code 100,000 times. You write it once, realize how it could have been written better, and improve it before running it thousands of times. This is an emergent domain of work. Like the transition from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, we now have new tools, new expectations, and a new means of production.
Optimizing for Value
Douglas Hubbard, author of How to Measure Anything, identified the two most valuable pieces of information for making investment decisions:
- Will it be used?
- How quickly will it be used?
These factors trump all others, including team composition, cost-benefit analysis, and projected return on investment. Most organizations, however, have a flow efficiency of 10% or less, meaning that work is waiting 90% of the time. This waiting time is often caused by impediments such as annual budgeting, steering committees, governance reviews, and excessive approval processes.
Many IT teams claim to be agile, but without addressing end-to-end time to value, agility within IT alone does little to improve the overall flow of value. Impediments are not in the path—they are the path. The key to true business agility is identifying and removing these impediments, leading to shorter time-to-value, faster learning, reduced risk, and higher satisfaction for both employees and customers.
From Productivity to Valuativity
Traditionally, productivity is defined as the number of units of output per unit of input. However, in the digital age, we don’t want feature factories that churn out widgets with questionable value. Instead, we should optimize for the most value in the shortest time with the least effort. It’s about outcomes over output. Increasing velocity without ensuring value just means doing the wrong thing faster.
The How: Eight Patterns and Anti-Patterns
Now, let’s explore how to achieve business agility through eight key patterns and their corresponding anti-patterns.
1. Focus on Outcomes, Not an "Agile Transformation"
The anti-pattern is launching an "Agile Transformation" with a capital "A" and "T"—forcing teams to "do agile" whether they like it or not. Instead, focus on outcomes: better (quality), value (measured through OKRs), sooner (time to value), safer (continuous compliance), and happier (engaged employees and customers).
2. Achieve Big Through Small
Don't try to achieve big through big. Instead, think big, start small, and learn fast. Keep the gradient of change low at first—people have a limited velocity to unlearn and relearn.
3. Invite Over Inflict
Inflicting change from the top down leads to resistance. Instead, invite participation, starting with the innovators and early adopters.
4. Leadership Behavior Will Make or Break It
Psychological safety is critical. If people fear failure, they won’t experiment, and without experimentation, there is no improvement.
5. Build the Right Thing
Shift from project-based to product-based thinking. Organize long-lived teams around long-lived products and value streams.
6. Build the Thing Right
Adopt minimum viable compliance—avoid one-size-fits-all governance. Tailor controls to risk levels.
7. Continuous Attention to Technical Excellence
Go slower to go faster. Ignoring technical excellence leads to growing technical debt, brittle systems, and eventual failure.
8. Create a Learning Organization
Continuous improvement must be embedded into the organization’s culture. Impediments aren’t obstacles; they are opportunities for learning.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, business agility is about optimizing for fast value flow. The best organizations focus on outcomes, not output. They remove impediments, embrace learning, and build resilient, customer-focused systems.
Thank you very much.