What Sooner Safer Happier LIVE 2026 taught us about improving value and efficiency across public and private sector organisations
What a day! From the moment the doors opened to the last roundtable conversation still buzzing over coffee, Sooner Safer Happier LIVE 2026 felt like a room of people who've been working on similar challenges and at last got to compare notes. As one attendee put it: “This is the only event like this I've been to EVER.”
We heard from a 15,000-person US financial services firm founded in 1948, a national tax authority collecting almost £1 trillion a year, a mobile network born from a 20-year joint venture, a 125-year-old energy company leading the way in completely phasing out all coal-fired power, a global agricultural giant with 73,000 employees, one of the world's largest banks, a Belgian telco scaling AI across 150 teams, and the world’s largest health service. Different industries. Different scales.
If there was a single “aha” from the day, it was: “Learning how similar our challenges are!”
Across public, private and charitable sectors, with speakers and attendees from 9 high-income countries, the organisational obstacles are strikingly the same: misalignment from strategy to execution, incentivisation within functional (job family) silos, ambiguous accountabilities for value and AI increasing the urgency for cultural changes to happen.
This article provides an accessible summary of cross-cutting learnings from the day, along with the culture hacks and ninja moves that are successfully enabling better outcomes, for you to share with others.
Key Learnings
1. Leadership and incentives: Make the desired behaviour possible.
Make the value of improvement work understandable in terms of current leadership accountabilities, and refresh that connection when priorities change. Fund the change, build attention and recognition around evidence of improvement. Courage includes exposing what has not worked and changing course.
2. Evolution and evidence: Change the organisation, with feedback loops. Learn by doing.
Small experiments, visible evidence and regular review are more useful than treating an operating model as a finished installation. Respect the reasons a cautious organisation works as it does and design experiments to be safe-to-learn.
3. Value and ownership: Give multidisciplinary teams meaningful outcomes to own.
Take time to ensure purpose, boundaries, decision rights and dependencies are explicit. End-to-end responsibilities cannot be created simply by deploying new job titles (e.g. ‘Product Manager’).
4. Agency and coherence: Local freedom needs attention to the whole.
Some dependencies will always be inherent in value creation. Keep negotiating how teams fit together and distinguish necessary coordination from avoidable friction. Wherever you can - break the dependencies - don’t just manage them.
5. Measurement and trust: How measures are used affects what people do.
Use data to support better conversations. Measure realised outcomes - and include qualitative staff experience. Measures of adoption, activity or output are not sufficient. The purpose of measurement is to help learning, rather than driving target-driven behaviour. In the context of ways of working metrics - beware of simplistic use (‘weaponising’) which, whilst well-intended, is nearly always counterproductive.
6. Participation: Build willingness and the capacity to act on it.
Sharing stories, co-creating approaches, peer-to-peer learning, and recognition - all create pull. Participation can be supported by providing protected time, giving organisational permission and maintaining a continual leadership focus. Create FOMO (fear of missing out!). Participation needs to be incentivised, explicitly and implicitly.
7. AI foundations: Faster implementation magnifies existing weaknesses.
The arrival of AI means legacy challenges are much more consequential. The business case just got sharper for clarity of purpose, clean accountabilities, an organisational design aligned to value, curated knowledge, product discipline, trustworthy outputs. Your AI investments make it easier to deliver work - whether misaligned or not.
8. Autonomy must be feasible in practice.
Platform enablement, architectural decoupling, automation and telemetry are important contributors to autonomous teams. Team redesign must happen in parallel with technical redesign (Conway’s Law). It all evolves together.
9. Scale and context:
Scale useful patterns where evidence supports it. Descale the service where the evidence supports it - sometimes a narrower service does more valuable work. It is not always helpful or necessary to enforce standardisation. Within guardrails, allow patterns to be locally adapted where evidence supports it.
10. Learning habits: Improvement needs repetition.
Training, feedback, peer learning and review continue after the first rollout. Early adopters and the majority may need different support. Invest in relationships and communities over time, with common principles and locally useful practices.
Recommended Culture hacks & Ninja moves
1. Experiment!
Learn through real-world tests. Create clear outcomes, minimise administration and provide explicit guardrails; learn before standardising. Give busy teams time and practical support, and establish the permission their context requires.
2. Create pull.
Use stories and peer-to-peer sharing. Tailor the message by audience, support advocates and work openly. Connect willing practitioners and offer community, contributor and champion roles.
3. Build improvement habits.
Consider gamification such as UBS blue hearts and streaks, other recognition or light learning challenges once trust and context support them.
4. Clarify cross-functional ownership.
Use a design canvas to make cross-functional scope, accountabilities and dependencies explicit. Scope may include: value & outcomes, consumers, colleagues, process, technology, financials.
5. The chain of ‘why change’.
Make clear the enterprise need, with connection from strategy to team outcomes. Understand decision-makers’ incentives. Be able to explain the value of your work in under a minute and refresh the connection as priorities change.
6. Make data useful to teams.
Co-design measures, teach with real data and respond without blame. Use balanced progress views and distinguish achieved benefits from scale-up estimates.
7. Make learning small and repeatable.
Practical daily exercises create an enduring improvement. JohnDeere’s “AI experiments for five minutes a day, five days a week for five weeks”. RWE reuse of practical learning snippets, support for peer teaching and keeping community formats responsive to need.
8. Enable flow.
HMRC observed “desire lines” colleagues using to get work done; all investing in enablement platforms to make new behaviours easier to adopt than to avoid.
9. Spread useful practice: Connect leadership advocacy with local adaptation.
‘Dragon’s den’ style techniques to connect senior ownership with local champions, and handbooks supported by common principles.
With deepest thanks to our speakers who gave up their time to share with vulnerability and empathy, in order to help others avoid the pitfalls and to apply learnings in their own contexts.
Recording from Sooner Safer Happier LIVE available here:
Telenet (Barbara Arnst & Benjamin Geens) - Coming soon
UBS (Adrian Smith and Allan Southward) - Coming soon
SAXO Bank (Simon Rohrer) - Coming soon
Tesco Mobile (Matt McBride & Pardeep Randhawa) - Coming soon
RWE (Marielle Mooijekind & Dennis Hoofe) - Coming soon
The Citco Group (Cezmi Yarimkaya, Tony Caink & Chris Orson) - Coming soon
Strategy to Execution: The Golden Thread (Leah Stockley) - Coming soon
NHS (Duncan Brown) - Coming soon
John Deere (Matt Ring) - Coming soon
Additional materials
1. The AI Enabled Enterprise
AI-Enabled Enterprise Report: A report to help inform how to approach shifting towards becoming an AI-enabled enterprise Access The AI-enabled Enterprise Report | Sooner Safer Happier
AI Hackathon: We built a prototype of an AI Outcome Coach. If you’d like to see a demo and/or collaborate with us on its build, reach out to Maria Muir at maria@soonersaferhappier.com
2. Strategy to Execution
Strategy to Execution: Analysis of the insights gathered from across different organisations, sectors and geographies
Strategy to execution: A pattern to leverage to optimise for delivery of the most value, in the shortest time with the least effort, with quality, safety and happiness Quick Learn Strategy to Execution | Sooner Safer Happier
3. Lean Portfolio Game & other learning resources from Sooner Safer Happier
Further learning resources from Sooner Safer Happier can be accessed here https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/training
