What it takes for an organization to keep adapting: the growth mindset underneath it, the culture that sustains it, the structures that carry it beyond software, and the questions that move it forward.
By Martin-Patrick Larouche
Most organizations adopt the ceremonies first. The harder, more valuable shift is the one underneath them.
Business agility is the capacity to sense change and respond to it before it disrupts you. It shows up as speed, customer focus, and resilience, and it is earned through how people work rather than which framework they run.
Read market shifts and act on them quickly. Agile organizations responded faster to the COVID-19 crisis, and slower ones forfeited the speed the next normal rewarded.
Decisions trace back to customer and employee experience, rather than to internal hierarchy or last year's plan.
Hundreds of small, self-steering teams on a stable backbone outlast one large machine that only runs in a straight line.
At enterprise scale, agility means moving strategy, structure, process, people, and technology toward a new operating model. The framework is the easy part.
The word does double duty, and the confusion behind most stalled transformations starts right here.
Scrum, Kanban, sprints, stand-ups. A specific set of software practices with a capital A. Concrete, teachable, and only part of the story.
The organizational ability to sense and respond to change quickly, across the whole business. The methods serve it. The capability is the goal.
A team can run flawless Scrum inside a rigid company and produce no agility at all. This deck is about the capability, and treats the methods as means.
Leadership and talent gaps trail at 42 percent, vision and planning at 34 percent. Culture sits in a category of its own.
Structure, process, and tools can be redrawn on a slide. Mindsets and habits change at the pace of trust.
This is the through-line of the whole talk. An organization can install agile in a quarter. Being agile takes longer, because it grows.
The distinction that separates a stalled transformation from a living one. Both columns can describe the same company on paper. Only one of them actually adapts.
Doing agile is visible in a week. Being agile shows up in how the organization behaves when something unexpected hits.
Markets, tools, and customer expectations move faster every cycle. A plan written for last quarter is already aging.
Organizations that adapt quickly absorbed recent shocks. Those waiting for certainty paid for the delay.
Agility is a set of habits and structures, well within reach. The rest of this deck is how it gets built.
Four ingredients carry the rest of the talk: a growth mindset, an agile culture, structures that reach beyond software, and the questions that keep teams thinking.
Carol Dweck's idea sits underneath everything agile. Before culture or structure can shift, the beliefs people hold about their own ability have to.
Psychologist Carol Dweck drew the line between two beliefs about ability. One treats talent as fixed at birth. The other treats it as something you build. In a business, that belief decides whether change feels like a threat or an opening.
Whole organizations carry a mindset, not just individuals. The fixed version quietly resists every transformation you try to run on top of it.
Kodak held the patents and the lead. A fixed mindset could not picture a future beyond film, so the lead went unused.
The same instinct that protects a profitable present blinds an organization to the shift already underway.
Kodak had the capability. What it lacked was the belief that the capability could be pointed somewhere new, which is exactly what a growth mindset supplies.
Treat a hard problem as a chance to expand, rather than a threat to dodge.
Read a setback as part of learning, and keep going.
Accept that mastery comes from deliberate work, not from waiting for talent to show up.
Use feedback as direction instead of insult.
Let other people's success be a map rather than a grievance.
These are the same behaviors an agile team needs every sprint. The growth mindset is the personal root system of organizational agility.
Four companies that treated change as an opening rather than a threat.
| Company | The move | Mindset signal |
|---|---|---|
| Airbnb | Pushed through a wall of early rejections, refining the pitch each time | Setbacks read as feedback, not verdicts |
| Adobe | Left packaged software for a subscription model, absorbing the revenue dip | Short-term loss accepted for long-term capability |
| Amazon | Runs on a permanent "Day 1" stance, from AWS to every new bet | Hunger maintained on purpose, never settled |
| Spotify | Cross-functional squads with autonomy to ship and adjust | Structure built so the org itself learns fast |
Different industries, one pattern. Each company built the belief that capability grows into the way it makes decisions.
Making it organizational means rewarding the behavior, not just admiring it. Four levers move a company from fixed to growth.
Treat failure as part of innovation, so people will try the thing that might not work.
Recognize the work and the method, rather than only the result that happened to land.
Keep development available and ongoing, so growth becomes a habit rather than an event.
Build a culture where honest, constructive criticism flows in every direction.
A growth mindset turns a personal trait into a strategic asset. Next, how that belief gets hardwired into a culture.
McKinsey studied four organizations that changed their culture on purpose. Their work distills into four lessons, drawn from Spark, Roche, Magyar Telekom, and ING.
McKinsey drew these from four organizations that changed culture deliberately. Each lesson maps to a company we will follow.
| Lesson | The move | Studied at |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Define the from-tos | Name the specific mindset shifts that matter most | Spark |
| 2. Make it personal | Start the change inside each leader | Roche |
| 3. Engineer the architecture | Hardwire culture into process and space | Magyar Telekom |
| 4. Monitor and learn | Measure culture and tie it to performance | ING |
The same loop runs through all four. We take them one at a time, starting with the foundation every other lesson rests on.
Each organization needs its own culture, so it starts by naming the specific shifts that matter most. Spark, a New Zealand telecom, went all in on agile across the whole company in 2017 and began with culture.
Name three to five mindset shifts that would make the biggest difference, grounded in real behavioral pain points.
Spark gathered 70 opinion leaders from across the org, the water-cooler influencers, to design the shifts and build buy-in.
Each shift had to be practical, achievable, and particular to Spark, rather than lifted from generic agile theory.
A clear, purposeful cultural aspiration is the foundation. Spark wrote each shift as a from and a to, so the change was concrete.
| From | To |
|---|---|
| Being cautious | Owning it: doing what is right, safe to experiment |
| Loudest voices winning | Valuing every voice: actively seeking diverse perspectives |
| Managing and directing | Empowering and coaching: trusting others to deliver |
| My tasks | Team success: making others shine, generous with time |
Spark kept these from-tos separate from its values on purpose. Values are enduring. The from-tos are a targeted gym program for where the culture is right now.
Roche, a 122-year-old biotech with 94,000 people, took the change to the personal frontier. Leaders defined what an agile mindset meant for them before asking anyone else to change.
A four-day immersive program moved more than 1,000 leaders from a reactive mindset toward a creative, enabling one.
Leaders were invited to apply the lessons rather than ordered to. The voluntary framing is what drove the 95 percent.
People shape the organizations they lead. When the change starts inside the leader, it spreads on its own. Roche engaged tens of thousands this way.
Even a great culture program fails if the surroundings fight it. Magyar Telekom, a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary, hardwired its values into structure, process, and space starting in 2018.
Recruitment, onboarding, and career progression were rebuilt so every signal an employee receives matches the culture.
A quarterly business review set company-wide priorities and ran retrospectives, making focus a visible, structural habit.
Squads were seated together with writeable walls and shared tools like JIRA and Confluence, so the space itself drove collaboration.
Culture has to be hardwired into the everyday organization rather than bolted on beside it. Structure, process, and environment either carry the new behavior or quietly kill it.
Continuous learning applies to culture too. ING, a longtime leader in agile banking, measured culture change and tied it to performance.
ING ran a 40-question survey five times across 2015–2017, linking culture questions to its objectives and results.
The data showed which cultural factors actually moved performance, like the product-owner role and trust in tribe leads.
Findings ran through QBRs, leadership dialogues, and improvement cycles, even shared with universities to sharpen the method.
As ING's culture metrics rose, belonging, motivation, and empowerment among them, employee engagement rose with them. Measurement turned culture into a managed system.
An organization can do agile by changing its structure, processes, and technology. It can only be agile by changing how people work and interact every day.
Define the shifts, make them personal, engineer the surroundings, then measure and learn. Each company ran the same loop in its own language.
It counts in every transformation and becomes decisive in an agile one. The structure is necessary, and the culture is what makes it move.
That covers the human side inside a software-shaped org. The next question is whether agility travels to functions that never wrote a line of code.
HR, finance, legal, procurement. McKinsey's work on corporate functions shows agility reaches well past engineering teams.
General and administrative functions spent years optimizing for cost and efficiency. That left them slow to respond when demands changed, and trapped behind their own walls.
Work stays inside HR, IT, finance, or legal, so coordination is hard and decisions stall.
Staff aligned to one part of the business cannot move to the most pressing problem elsewhere.
Digital and analytics raised expectations faster than a cost-cut function could meet.
The fix borrows the same agile move that reshaped software teams: break the silos, and let people flow to the work that matters most.
Instead of locking specialists to a single business unit, agile G&A organizes them into shared pools that deploy wherever priority work appears.
Specialists across functions sit in a common pool, ready to be deployed individually or as a team.
For complex, high-priority work, teams assemble from the pools with exactly the mix of skills the project needs.
Routine, well-defined work still runs on small self-managing teams and digital self-service, freeing the pool for what is genuinely new.
Repeatable work with clear outcomes suits self-managing teams. Complex, ad hoc work is where the flow-to-work model earns its keep.
Not every task belongs in an agile pool. The model works when scope is clear and priorities are set on a regular cadence.
Standard process work, governance, and large ad hoc projects each need a different home. Agile pools excel at the third.
A European telco used a quarterly business review to rank projects by impact, criticality, and resources, then matched them to capacity.
A staffing role identifies the skills each priority needs and assigns the closest talent from the pool.
Careers progress by deepening and widening skills rather than climbing a hierarchy, which suits a flat, pooled org.
The QBR shows up again here, the same cadence Magyar Telekom used for culture, now routing capacity to the highest-value work.
Companies that deployed agile in G&A point to the same conditions for success.
The executive team, the CEO included, has to be genuinely aligned. Siloed sponsorship stalls the change.
A state-of-the-art structure fails if leaders push hierarchical decisions instead of serving the teams.
Launching a new model is rarely enough on its own. Benefits come from executing across all three layers.
Clear communication plus a group of change ambassadors below the C-suite smooths the skepticism.
One more point matters for anyone whose org is not fully agile yet, and it is the most encouraging of all.
G&A functions do not need the rest of the organization to go agile first. Even a single function, or a small team, can experiment profitably with a few simple guidelines.
Name who owns resource allocation, and how priorities get set when capacity runs short.
Put lightweight agile governance in place before scaling, so flow-to-work stays orderly.
Set clear strategic goals first. Without them, fast execution just reaches the wrong place sooner.
Agile reaches well past software when the structure supports it. What carries it day to day, in every team, is the quality of the conversation.
The everyday tool of an agile leader. The questions we ask either build a culture of compliance or one of innovation.
Traditional workplace questions tend to produce routine answers. Powerful questions open up thinking, invite exploration, and lead somewhere worth going.
A closed, judging question gets a defensive answer. An open, curious one gets an honest answer.
A team can only think as expansively as the questions put to it allow.
Better questions are a habit any leader or coach can build, and they cost nothing to deploy.
Five dimensions separate a draining question from a generative one. They stack, and a powerful question usually lands on the right side of all five.
| Dimension | Traditional | Powerful |
|---|---|---|
| Form | Closed: "Are you okay?" | Open: "How are you feeling?" |
| Stance | Leading: "Wouldn't it be better to…?" | Curious: "What are your options?" |
| Shape | Complex and multi-part | Simple: "What matters most right now?" |
| Depth | Informational: "What happened?" | Reflective: "What did you learn from it?" |
| Framing | Why: "Why did you do that?" | What and How: "What are you trying to achieve?" |
"Why" tends to put people on the defensive and narrows the answer. "What" and "How" open a spectrum of responses without the accusation.
The same intent, asked two ways. The version on the right invites a real answer.
Notice the last pair. Asking one thing at a time, instead of two, lets a person answer fully before you move to the next point.
A few moments where switching from telling to asking changes the outcome.
"What did we learn?" surfaces more than "Did we hit the sprint goal?" The reflective question is where improvement comes from.
A curious question about an unusual approach validates the person and uncovers how they actually think.
For a business analyst, an open "What are you trying to achieve?" beats a leading "Don't you want feature X?" every time.
"What are your options?" hands the problem back to the people closest to it, which is the whole point of agile.
The pattern holds across all four. Ask one open, curious, simple question, then get out of the way and listen.
Four pillars, one capability. A short recap, a working mental model, and where the sources point.
A growth mindset is the personal root. People who believe ability grows will take on the change instead of resisting it.
Define the shifts, make them personal, engineer the surroundings, measure and learn. That is how a culture becomes agile on purpose.
Flow-to-work pools and cross-functional teams carry agility beyond software into every corporate function.
Powerful questions keep teams thinking and adapting, one conversation at a time.
Each pillar holds up the next. A growth mindset makes culture change possible, culture makes structure work, and good questions keep all three honest.
The same four mistakes show up again and again. Each is the shadow of a lesson in this deck.
Running stand-ups and sprints while decisions and ownership never actually move. Doing agile with none of the being.
Treating culture as a poster campaign instead of hardwiring it into process, space, and progression.
Never checking whether behavior actually changed, so the transformation drifts and quietly reverts.
A culture of "why did you" puts people on the defensive and shuts down the honesty agility needs.
Each trap has an antidote earlier in this deck: real ownership, hardwired culture, ING-style measurement, and powerful questions.
Agility is a capability you grow into, rather than a process you install. The ceremonies are the easy 20 percent. The mindset, culture, and conversations are the 80 percent that decide whether any of it holds.
If people think ability is fixed, every transformation runs uphill. Grow the mindset first.
Name the shifts, live them in process and space, and measure whether they are taking hold.
The right question, asked at the right moment, is the cheapest agility tool you own.
None of this is exotic. It is steady, deliberate work on the human parts of an organization, the parts that take the longest and matter the most.
The ceremonies you can adopt this week. The mindset, the culture, the structure, and the questions are the slow work underneath, and they are what actually lets an organization keep adapting. Start with the belief that it can.