Mike walks us through the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a new digital and AI-age rendition of a classic organisational model. Not so much a process framework or org structure as a timeless way of looking at your team or programme, expect actionable takeaways! Beginning in the “here and now” of our everyday work, we’ll get a fresh (less process-centric) perspective on the fascinating relationship between improvement and self-organisation. Then, stepping back from the work to the strategising space, we’ll see just how constrained it is, and what that means for us all.

Many organizations struggle to scale nimble ways of working as the organization or department grows, stifling innovation and delivery effectiveness. What worked at a small scale appears expensive at larger scales, where drive for deduplication and efficiency begins to couple together previously separate initiatives, slowing them down. Instead of a back and forth ‘flip-flop’ between organizing for scale and organizing for speed, organizations can get the best of both approaches by organizing for empowerment. Using “Economies of Empowerment” as the organizing principle drives clarity of mission, purposeful boundaries that work for flow, continuous adaptation to new technologies, and rapid innovation via cross-team learning & sharing. In this talk, Matthew Skelton - co-author of the groundbreaking book Team Topologies and CEO/CTO at Conflux - shares insights from helping hundreds of organizations to apply principles and practices from Team Topologies, Adapt Together™, and related approaches in order to scale nimble value delivery via empowered teams and “Economies of Empowerment”.