HMRC is modernising a live, safety-critical system while collecting £875 billion a year and supporting millions of people and businesses. There is no pause button.
Tom shares how HMRC is creating space inside a live system to experiment, learn and deliver faster, without compromising security, resilience or public trust. A case study in how to move fast responsibly, improve time to value, and make change stick in a high-accountability environment.

We built ACE Ventura to learn agentic coding. What it actually taught us were the organisational prerequisites for AI to work at all.

This session brings together two perspectives on the same problem at very different scales: an eight-week AI build by a team of five, and enterprise rollout across 150 teams. The insight connecting both is simple: the governance problems are the same. Scale changes the blast radius, not the nature of the problem.

Barbara and Benjamin share what they built, what broke, and what still doesn’t have clear answers.

This is the story of a department-wide effort to stop low-value activity and refocus teams on what drives impact.

Instead of a top-down transformation, teams are running small, low-risk experiments in their day-to-day work. From approvals and recruitment to meetings and tooling, improvements are tested in context and shared across the system.

Emily shares what worked, what didn’t, and how change is spreading across a complex, high-accountability environment.

Autonomous teams are an article of faith in modern software development. Give cross-functional full-stack full-lifecycle teams autonomy and they will deliver value and flow – or better value, sooner, safer, happier. But where are the boundaries of autonomy? Where does governance and policy fit in? Can a team decide their own HR practices, interactions with regulators & funding model? What about architecture, design, or organisational decisions that – by the nature of the product, not a poorly chosen architecture – must span multiple teams, or even multiple teams-of-teams? How are they made? How are autonomy and coherence balanced in a fractal way? Who decides what, when and how? And who decides who decides? Simon will provide a combination of theory – the Viable Systems Model, the Platform model ("preventing unnecessary creativity"), Socio-Technical design principles – and practical experience, as a preview to his contribution to Jon Smart's forthcoming book Organising for Outcomes.

RWE is an energy company where grassroots agile ways of working have taken root and gathered momentum. What sets this transformation apart is that it is community-led.
A group of volunteers has spent over a year building momentum from within creating a shared playbook, running training sessions, and helping teams change the way they work in practice.

Marielle and Dennis share what it takes to grow change through community, and how to evolutionary evolve building on existing strengths.

Over the past two years, UBS has rethought how metrics are used, shifting from reporting for control to supporting teams to learn and improve.
Adrian shares how a small team rebuilt their approach after a large transformation, focusing on trends, usability and trust. By treating data as a product, they reduced duplicate reporting and improved how teams and coaches use data in practice.

What it actually takes to change how a leadership team works.
This is the story of a 14-month transformation inside a Mongolian conglomerate.

Three perspectives show what it took to shift leadership teams from working in isolation to focusing on shared outcomes. The results were real, meeting hours reduced from 720 to 223 per week, profitability increased, and availability improved. But the results are not the story.

This session is about what actually changed, what went wrong, and what it takes to make change stick inside leadership teams.

Large organisations often try to solve big problems with even bigger systems, platforms, standards, and governance structures. The result is frequently complexity, slow decision-making, fragmentation, and years of architectural paralysis.

In this talk, Duncan shares why starting small is often the only way to create systems that genuinely scale. Drawing on lessons from national NHS services, he explores how teams can evolve effective systems through iteration, adoption, and learning rather than attempting to design perfect solutions upfront.

Through real stories from NHS teams working across bookings, screening results, and national platforms, Duncan explores what it means to create governance that enables progress rather than blocks it, and why relationship-building and product thinking matter more than centralised control.

Matt shares how Tesco Mobile moves from strategy to execution through outcomes, multidisciplinary teams and continuous learning.

He will walk through how teams are structured, how operating rhythm supports delivery, and the practical adjustments made along the way, from learning and development to guilds and capability design.

Like many fast-growing organisations, Citco has been evolving its ways of working to improve delivery and create clearer client value without compromising accuracy, control, or regulatory confidence.

This session shares practical lessons from that journey, including some of the specific “ninja moves” that helped drive progress. Cezmi explores topics including organisational diagnostics, aligning around a clear “why”, building internal playbooks and maturity models, and integrating closely with operations teams.

Rather than presenting transformation as a linear rollout, this talk focuses on the importance of experimentation, responsiveness, and adapting approaches as organisations learn and evolve.