How will organizations keep agility alive after their initial agile transformation? The question of what happens if agile becomes daily business is even more intriguing in this post-pandemic COVID era. Will AGILE survive these unparalleled insecure times? Participants in this workshop will explore what is needed to sustainably ‘safeguard’ an enterprise agile delivery culture after the initial ‘agile transformation’. The workshop hosts will share their observations of working in a big financial organization and will invite participants to share theirs so that collectively, we can gain insight and define potential countermeasures.

Target Audience: Anyone interested in transformational agility challenges, e.g. Change Lead, Coach, BusArchitect
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract
Participants in this workshop will explore what is needed to move forward after the initial ‘agile transformation’, to sustainably ‘safeguard’ an enterprise agile delivery culture. The question of what happens if agile becomes daily business is even more intriguing in this post-pandemic COVID era. How will organizations keep agility alive after their initial agile transformation? When organizational systems come under too much pressure; how ‘VUCA’* resistant are our agile enterprise cultures?
Lieke Jansen and Eric Abelen are senior Agile Enterprise Coaches at ING in the Netherlands. They both contributed to ING's Spotify inspired, big-scale transformation towards an agile way of working, some seven years ago. As of then, they have successfully coached a wide variety of departments and organizations within ING to adopt and sustain an effective healthy agile delivery culture. Being key players of a massive enterprise agile transformation, they also observe some challenges related to upkeep of the resulting way of working. Because people come and go, and in our VUCA world business and process change is frequent. What options do we have in this reality of ongoing change to keep the ‘agile enterprise culture’ strong and resilient?
Also, in the Covid pandemic we learned that people and organizations can respond to change quickly, especially those organizations that adopted a culture of agility. But after a period of unparalleled social restrictions, how does this affect our agile corporate cultures? Has the trauma of the pandemic infected us with a renewed urge to feel ‘in control’ of the future and has this irrevocably injured our appetite for organic growth and agility?
In this workshop we will explore this interesting and urgent question together with you. We will share key observations from experience working with a wide variety of delivery and leadership teams and their related organizational structures. We hope that workshop participants are willing to add their observations and experiences to ours. In interactive dialogue sessions we hope to collectively engage in sense-making and to define basic anti-patterns and growth-paths.
( * VUCA = Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)