Getting agility working beyond tech and product is one of the biggest opportunities facing organisations right now. At Agile Assembly, we are building the community to make it happen.
That belief brought a room full of practitioners together at Zopa Bank’s offices in Canary Wharf for the second Agile Assembly event.
Hosted by La Fosse’s agile practice lead Sanches Clarke, the evening centred on one of the most exciting opportunities in the field: how do we get agility working across the whole organisation, not just in tech and product?
The tools, the evidence and the success stories are all there. HR, finance, marketing and operations are ready to move. And the practitioners in that room are already making it happen.
Meet the panel
Giles Lindsay CITP FIAP FBCS FCMI is the author of bestsellers Clearly Agile and The Adaptive Leader, Non-Executive Director at the Agile Business Consortium, and President and Chair of the Business Agility Institute. He has been in the agility world for 30 years, starting with Scrum before there was even a manifesto. He also sits as an associate with the all-party parliamentary group on AI, attending the House of Lords and House of Commons to follow developments in that space. By day he works as an interim CIO and CTO and runs his own consultancy.
Vinnie Gill FCIPD co-founded Outcome Over Output to provide hands-on business agility expertise to leaders in complex environments. She chairs the Product Management Initiative with the Agile Alliance and brings a human systems lens to every conversation about organisational change, drawing on deep experience in HR, people strategy and the conditions that make-or-break agile adoption.
Stuart Munton is CIO for Group Operations and Technology at AND Digital. He has spent years applying agile principles in operational and finance contexts, including successfully changing the funding model in two medium-to-large organisations. His work sits at the intersection of delivery and commercial reality.
The opportunity: agility across the whole organisation
The evening opened with a clarifying idea from Giles. The goal is not agile teams. It is an agile organisation.
Many businesses have invested heavily in agile delivery and seen real results at the team level. The opportunity now is to take that further: into the funding model, the governance structures, the performance frameworks and the leadership behaviours that shape how the whole organisation moves.
“They don’t want to be agile. They want agility in their organisation. And that distinction matters more than you might think.”
Stuart brought this to life from an operational perspective. The single biggest unlock, in his experience, is connecting agile ways of working to real business outcomes.
“Making sure that being agile is actually connected to the business is what we need. You get recognition for outcomes. That is the thing that drives everything else.”
When teams understand the business goal they are working towards, and when the organisation is structured to support them in reaching it, agility stops being a methodology and starts being a competitive advantage.
Scaling the right things
Vinnie reframed the scaling conversation in a way that resonated strongly with the room.
“We always tend to scale processes, practices and tools. But what we don’t think about is that we all live in complex adaptive systems. We forget about finding the real problem. Because most of the time, retrospectives are surfacing symptoms when we should be finding the root cause.”
The invitation was to think bigger about what scaling actually means. Scaling tools and ceremonies delivers incremental improvement. Scaling trust, psychological safety and leadership behaviour transforms how an organisation works.
She pointed to three specific areas where the biggest gains are available.
The first is performance management. There is a real opportunity to redesign how teams are evaluated so that it matches how they actually work, with check-ins that allow teams to adapt their goals as priorities shift.
“Are you allowed, in your check-ins, to take in or take out things that are no longer serving you strategically? You should be removing waste from the system.”
The second is incentivisation. When leaders are rewarded for whole-organisation outcomes rather than departmental results, the conditions for genuine agility follow naturally.
“Humans will behave around the structures and constructs that are around them.”
The third is transparency. When people understand how decisions are being made, particularly as AI plays a growing role in performance and hiring, trust grows and so does engagement.
“You need to have clarity in communication. You need to be consistent and available. That is how you build the trust that makes everything else possible.”
Leadership as an accelerator
The panel was clear that leadership is the single biggest accelerator of business agility when it is genuinely engaged.
Giles described the shift he has seen over 30 years: leaders who have grown up through agile organisations now sitting at the top table, with both the appetite and the credibility to drive change across the business.
“We are all leaders and we need to share the language. Leadership happens at all levels. It’s not just sat at the very top. Do things like reverse mentoring. Get people from your junior levels involved in your work. Make it transparent.”
Stuart’s experience bears this out. He has spent years learning to speak the language of the boardroom, and has found that the appetite for genuine agility at senior level is stronger than it might appear.
“How many CEOs have opinions on failed agile transitions? I’ve learned to change my language. Once you frame it in terms of outcomes, speed to market and commercial impact, the conversation changes completely.”
The message from the panel: meet leaders where they are. The goal they want is the same goal. The route in is through business outcomes, not agile terminology.
Finance and the funding model: it can be done
One of the most energising parts of the evening was Stuart’s account of changing the funding model inside real organisations.
The quarterly investment cycle is straightforward in practice. Agree the outcomes you are working towards. Agree what success and failure look like. Go to the CFO with a specific funding ask. Report back at the end of the quarter with honest results.
“In two organisations I’ve been in, the funding model changed to this quarterly cycle. It is possible to change hearts and minds.”
The results speak for themselves. Delivery and budget cycles aligned. Waste reduced. A culture of experimentation took hold. And crucially, the finance team became a genuine partner in the work rather than a constraint on it.
Vinnie shared a similar experience, where a weekly investment committee gave product teams a regular forum to apply for funding and report back on outcomes.
“Teams would go once a month and say, this is what I’m going to do, this is the experiment I’m going to run, this is the metric I’m going to move. Will you fund this? There was no waste. The delivery and the budget cycle matched. It created such a great culture of experimentation.”
Giles noted that the framework for this, Beyond Budgeting, has existed since 1996. The concept is proven and the tools are there. What makes the difference is the practitioner who takes it into a real organisation and makes it work.
Using experimentation to create pull
One of the most practical insights of the evening came from Vinnie, and it reframes how business agility can be spread across an organisation.
Rather than waiting for a top-down mandate, run experiments in the functions that feel furthest from agile ways of working. Let the results create demand.
“If you actually do experimentations like what we have been sharing, it really does create an element of pull in the rest of the business. Go and do it somewhere mainstream like finance or legal or marketing. I promise you, it starts creating true business agility happening around the organisation. And when you’ve got people coming to you asking for it, you know you’re winning.”
This is one of the most powerful tools available to the agile community. Proof in unexpected places travels fast. It changes the conversation from persuasion to invitation.
The scrum master role: evolving, not disappearing
A question from the audience touched on something many practitioners are thinking about: are scrum master roles under threat?
Sanches put it simply: the role is not going extinct. It is evolving
“The scrum master role is not going extinct. In practice, no. I still hire and place scrum masters every single month. What is changing is the expectation. Businesses are moving away from scrum masters whose sole responsibility is facilitating ceremonies. There is more expectation than just the fundamentals. If you cannot demonstrate your commercial impact, the fundamentals are no longer enough.”
This is good news for practitioners who have always known their role was about more than running the ceremonies. The opportunity is to step into that broader expectation, connect the work to business outcomes, and demonstrate value in the language the organisation actually responds to.
Three things the community can do right now
As the evening closed, each panellist shared the one thing they would prioritise tomorrow.
Stuart would focus on closing the decision gap.
“Teams are moving fast. Capabilities are moving fast. Feedback moves fast. Learning is fast. Everything else with agility is fast. The decision gap between what we’re actually trying to do and what leadership is doing always seems to take forever. That is where the leverage is.”
Vinnie pointed to the three conditions that research consistently shows improve collective intelligence: psychological safety with equal voice rather than just permission to speak, deliberate cultivation of social perception and empathy, and diverse hiring.
Giles brought it back to language and shared responsibility.
“We are all leaders and we need to share the language. Leadership happens at all levels. It’s not just sat at the very top. Do things like reverse mentoring. Get people from your junior levels involved in your work. Make it transparent.”
The conversation continues
The energy in the room at Zopa Bank was the best evidence that business agility is not a fading idea. It is a growing one.
Agile Assembly exists to keep that momentum going. To give practitioners a space to share what is working, build on each other’s experience, and take practical insights back into their organisations.
If you work in agile, product or delivery and want to be part of the community, get in touch with Sanches Clarke.