When senior agile practitioners gather to share hard-won insights, magic happens. Here’s what we learned when seven industry leaders took the stage at our inaugural Agile Assembly event.
The room at Hiscox was buzzing. Seven speakers, each bringing their unique perspective on building high-performing teams and navigating the AI revolution. From CIOs to agile coaches, delivery leads to transformation specialists, the wisdom shared was both practical and profound.
Giles Lindsay – CIO: Beyond Framework Thinking
“We talk about high performing teams like they’re a formula, but performance isn’t built by frameworks alone. It’s built by trust, feedback and focus, and AI is now changing the very fabric of how we define performance.”
Giles opened with a challenge that resonated throughout the evening. Rather than forcing one-size-fits-all frameworks, the smartest teams contextualise their approach based on what they’re actually building.
His insight? Support teams handling reactive work often benefit more from flow-based methods like Kanban than from time-boxed sprints. Sometimes Kanban’s pull-based approach makes more sense. Sometimes even ITIL works better because it measures responsiveness to need.
The breakthrough came when teams started having “non-threatening conversations” with stakeholders about measuring outcomes, not just outputs. Instead of celebrating delivery dates, they began asking: “How do we measure when this creates real value?” The result: better focus, improved predictability, and higher quality metrics.
Sophie Johnson – Enterprise Delivery Coach: The Blended Scorecard Approach
“When I think about high performing teams, the first things that come to mind are they’re efficient and they’re effective.”
Sophie brought a holistic view from the enterprise transformation trenches. Her secret weapon? A blended metric scorecard that breaks down performance into four key areas: value, process and flow efficiency, quality, and people metrics.
“If you optimise in any one of those spaces at the detriment of the other, it means you don’t have a high performing team or organisation.”
Her approach tackles the common divide between business and technology by ensuring teams remain both efficient and effective across all dimensions. It’s not about picking one metric to rule them all – it’s about balance.
Patricia Manley – Head of Project Delivery: Embracing the Chaos
“I really, really thrive in a mess and I love working in teams that are in this forming/storming phase.”
Patricia brought refreshing honesty about the reality of delivery leadership. Working with project managers and delivery teams across everything from data centres to digital products, she’s learned that high performance isn’t about perfect processes.
Her approach focuses on helping teams define who they want to be, then walking with them every step of the way until they believe in themselves. When teams have vision, framework, and understand what success looks like, they create “that sense of ownership, purpose and empowerment” that drives real performance.
Her Net Promoter Score of 77 speaks volumes – teams actively request to work with her delivery unit because of this people-first approach.
Nathan Davies – Agile Transformation Lead: The BlackRock Scale
“When we agree on a common idea and we work towards it, we create something very special.”
Leading agile transformation for a 3,400-person team at BlackRock, Nathan knows what good looks like at scale. With 18 Scrum Masters and coaches managing approximately 70 squads, he’s learned that simplicity beats complexity every time.
His philosophy draws inspiration from Jürgen Klopp (whose autographed picture features in every video call): success comes from shared understanding and common purpose, not from JIRA boards or Azure DevOps configurations.
Nathan’s experience spans from the early days at Egg, where they were described as “the world’s best online development team,” to current enterprise transformation. His key insight: establish discipline, governance, and nurture positive team culture while maintaining that safe space for trust.
Matthew Carr – CTO Consultant: The Agility Detective
“So as it says on there, I’m an agility consultant. And I’m also known as the Gordon Ramsay of the technology world.”
Matthew’s approach is refreshingly direct. Called in when something feels “a little bit off” despite good metrics, he digs beneath the surface to find what’s really happening.
His recent case study involved a team with perfect JIRA boards, beautiful burn-down charts, and hitting velocity targets – but something wasn’t right. His detective work revealed the human element that metrics can’t capture.
His philosophy: “Deliver the most valuable thing to obtain feedback fast while keeping waste to a minimum.” It’s not about the delivery method – whether Scrum, XP, or Kanban – it’s about getting that critical customer feedback that tells you whether you’re building the right thing.
Pardeep Dhanda – Agile Practice Director: The Community Builder
“Harvard have run a study which has been going on for over 100 years. They wanted to answer this question of what does make us more successful and live longer… What they found was the people that have the most and the deepest human connections between the ages of 45 to 50 typically go on to live beyond 80 and be happier and be more successful.”
Pardeep’s insights went beyond work teams to explore the power of community building. His Visual Jam community, started during lockdown, grew from a few local people to over 4,000 global members.
The impact was profound: a furloughed community member learned visual skills through the sessions, hand-drew her presentation visuals for a job interview, and got hired. For Pardeep, it was “a real tearful moment” that demonstrated community’s transformative power.
His research-backed insight: face-to-face interaction generates 20% more ideas and greater creativity than virtual collaboration. Human connection isn’t just nice to have – it’s a competitive advantage.
Nisha Joshi – Agile Delivery Consultant: The Psychological Safety Champion
“If psychological safety is a predictor for high team performance, if it’s a predictor of togetherness in a community, if it’s a predictor of harmony in a marriage. Then I would ask you to consider are you a safe space?”
Nisha brought the evening together with her interactive exploration of psychological safety. Starting with a £20 note experiment that demonstrated how we hesitate when we feel exposed, she revealed the neurological truth: social rejection activates the same brain regions as physical pain.
Her personal story of her parents’ marriage illustrated psychological safety in action. When shift work threatened their decision-making time, her father recognised their “safe space was disappearing” and created Saturday as their dedicated day for walking, talking, and connecting.
“You need to design for psychological safety. You need to design for it at leadership level and also at team level.”
Her framework, based on Timothy R Clark’s four stages of psychological safety, shows how teams progress from inclusion safety through learner safety, contributor safety, and finally challenger safety.
The AI Conversation: Fishbowl Insights
The evening’s AI discussion sparked passionate debate. The consensus? We’re not doomed, but we need to adapt quickly.
“We’re not going to fear AI. We have to fully embrace it.”
One speaker compared our moment to 19th-century industrial transformation – disruptive but ultimately creating new opportunities. AI is becoming the ultimate agility enabler, shrinking the cycle from idea to market feedback from months to minutes.
Practical applications are already emerging: tools like Lovable are revolutionising product discovery, allowing teams to create clickable prototypes from simple descriptions within minutes. But the human element remains crucial – “always keep a human in the chain” for validation, safety, and creative problem-solving.
The Bottom Line
Seven speakers, one powerful message: high-performing teams aren’t built by frameworks, tools, or metrics alone. They’re built by trust, psychological safety, shared purpose, and genuine human connection.
Whether you’re contextualising agile approaches, building community, or embracing AI transformation, the fundamentals remain constant: create safe spaces for people to do their best work, focus relentlessly on value creation, and never forget that behind every metric is a human being trying to make something better.
As we plan our next Agile Assembly, one thing is certain: the conversation is just getting started.
Want to join the next Agile Assembly? Keep an eye on our events calendar. Because the future of agile leadership isn’t just about what we build – it’s about how we build it together.