In complex, knowledge-driven environments, collaboration is essential—but not through enforced consensus. This session will explore how inviting dissent can unlock better decisions, greater resilience, and more meaningful collaboration. Drawing on L. David Marquet’s Leadership is Language, we’ll examine how language shapes leadership, how dissent can be reframed as data, and how psychological safety enables adaptive learning. We’ll connect Marquet’s principles to key BVSSH principles—Invite over Inflict, Foster Psychological Safety, Leaders Go First, Leverage Emergence, and One Size Does Not Fit All—to show how collaborative leadership and intentional language can lead to Better Value, delivered Sooner, in Safer and Happier ways. Participants will explore how to lead with curiosity, empower diverse voices, and make it safe and easy for people to dissent. Speaker: Anne Gambles Event: 25 November 2025 References L. David Marquet (2020). Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What you Don’t; ISBN-10. 0241373662 Asana Lab Report (2023?). An Executives Guide to High Value Collaboration: https://assets.asana.biz/m/3e6ca14edf7849ea/original/the-lab-report-High-value-Collaboration_Final_V4.pdf

Join us for an engaging discussion where you'll hear from Suncorp, an Australian insurance company, about their ongoing transformation journey. Learn how they are evolving their ways of working to deliver better outcomes through a new enterprise delivery model called Momentum. This model has been designed and gradually implemented over the past year, beginning in New Zealand and expanding across Suncorp’s Banking, Insurance, and technology teams in Australia. Mark Payne interviews Lauren Lance, EGM for Enterprise Delivery, and Will Carey-Hill, the Momentum delivery lead. The presentation covers: - What was their why - How did they approach the change - What has been learned thus far - What are the next steps Don't miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights into Suncorp's innovative approach to enterprise delivery and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. Join the movement to achieve better ways of working in your organisation: https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/community

In 2017 a large Western Australian bank embarked on a transformation to become a customer-obsessed, agile and responsive organisation. They called it Blaze. This resulted in better value delivered sooner, safer and with happier customers and employees. In 2017 a 125 year old Western Australian bank, with approximately 3000 staff and 1.1m national customers base, defined their 2020 strategy to become the best regional banking by delivering what matters to their customers. An internal review identified opportunities to improve their operating model, capabilities and speed of delivery to enable the execution of the strategy. Join the movement to achieve better ways of working in your organisation: https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/community

Jon is co-founder and CEO of SSH. Jon is a business agility practitioner, thought leader, and coach. Jon has been an agile and lean practitioner since the early 1990s. Jon helps large organisations deliver better value sooner, safer and happier through better ways of working. He is the lead author of the award winning and bestselling 'Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Business Agility'. Facilitated by SSH's Americas Leader - Marcus Braszell. Join the movement to achieve better ways of working in your organisation: https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/community

Is your organisation on an agility journey? Are you bringing in lots of consultants and coaches to help? From experience, we have found that having a central ways of working enablement team working in a hub and spoke, federated model to support outcomes to be delivered by the business is a pattern that has proven to work. Through a panel discussion with experienced practitioners, we will explore: - What is a WoW Centre of Enablement? How should they be set-up and organised? - Example WoW CoE OKRs and what value can be delivered? - How should we hold our coaches to account? What role should they play? - What lessons have we learned? Facilitated by Maria Muir, an experienced enterprise agility advisor, we will hear lessons from front line from leaders who are working within WoW CoEs. This panel group includes: - Anne Madden, Asia-Pacific Agility Discipline Lead from WoW CoE at BP - Chris Chan, Enterprise Leader, Leadership and Organisational Coach - Niall McShane, Agile Coach Capability builder at Source Agility Join the movement to achieve better ways of working in your organisation: https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/community

DOES19 London — Do you want to increase organizational agility and flow across your large, old, bureaucratic, regulated, traditional enterprise? Do you want to or are you doing an Agile or DevOps Transformation? In this talk, Jon will share anti-patterns and then success patterns in adopting better ways of working, sharing lessons learnt the hard way, previously leading Ways of Working across a large, old, traditional, organization (80,000 people, 40 countries, 329 years old) and now working with many horses, not unicorns, on this topic. "Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility" By Jon Smart (with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer) —Learn more about the book here: https://soonersaferhappier.com/ Better Value Sooner Safer Happier Jonathan Smart, Partner, Enterprise Agility, Deloitte Jon leads Deloitte’s Enterprise Agility practice in the UK, helping organisations to deliver Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, through the application of agile, lean and DevOps principles and practices, organisation-wide. Previously, Jon was leading on Ways of Working globally across Barclays Bank, which is 328 years old, with 80,000 colleagues in 40 countries. After three years, teams are on average delivering three times as much in a third of the time with 23x fewer production incidents and the highest ever employee engagement scores. Jon has 25 years’ experience of taking and leading an agile approach to change. He and his team is the winner in the category of “Best Internal Agile Team” at the Agile Awards 2016. Jon is the founder of the Enterprise Agility Leaders Network, is a member of the Disciplined Agile advisory council, a member of the Business Agility Institute advisory council, a member of the Programming Committee for the DevOps Enterprise Summit, a guest speaker at London Business School and talks at 6-7 conferences a year. DOES19 London DOES 2019 EUR DevOps Enterprise Summit https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/

DOES19 Las Vegas — Is your organisation learning fast enough to stay safe as the pace of change accelerates? Is your Risk & Control leadership fostering the right climate for learning about new risks, new mitigations and adaptable controls? Or are Risk & Control holding back speed?Are your product teams learning how to be risk aware? Is there safety within safety? In this talk, Jon will share Antipatterns and Patterns, from implementing Speed AND Control at large, traditional, old, horses not unicorns. This talk includes interviews with Compliance professionals, played by actors, giving the private, inside view of what it’s like for them prior to after change, which you would not normally hear spoken about. "Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility" By Jon Smart (with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer) —Learn more about the book here: https://soonersaferhappier.com/ Risk & Control is Dead, Long Live Risk & Control Jonathan Smart, Partner, Business Agility Lead, Deloitte DOES19 Las Vegas DOES 2019 US DevOps Enterprise Summit https://events.itrevolution.com/us/

Welcome to the Training! Playbook for you [ DevOps | Agile | Digital | Cloud ] Transformation! (No prior experience necessary!) "Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility" By Jon Smart (with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer) —Learn more about the book here: https://soonersaferhappier.com/ Lightning Talk: Certified Really Agile Practitioner (CRAP) - Jon Smart DOES19 Las Vegas DOES 2019 US DevOps Enterprise Summit https://events.itrevolution.com/us/

SEACON 2023 takes place on Thursday 19th October in-person (The Oval, London) and live-streamed. Join 30+ amazing speakers and 400+ like-minded attendees by getting your ticket via https://www.seacom.online/seacon-2023 Video from SEACON: UK 2019 Conference 𝗦𝗘𝗔𝗖𝗢𝗠: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗔𝗴𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 We help enterprises succeed by maintaining the ability to rapidly adapt to their environment and customer needs, whilst staying true to an authentic purpose. The speed at which we can adapt to changing economic, social and environmental climates determines success or failure, survival or extinction Like our content? Subscribe to our channel www.seacom.online What are you optimising for? Today, what is your organisation optimised for? Is it optimised for deadlines determined at the time of knowing the least? Is it optimised for assuming the future is fixed and that change is knowable? Is it locally optimised for people grouped by job role? Is it optimised to withhold learning in order to be promoted and paid more? Is it optimised for distance from the customer? Is it optimised for employee engagement? Is it optimised for under-promising? Is it optimised to a one size fits all risk appetite of the lowest common denominator? Is it optimised to be better to say no and to follow the outdated policy rather than try something new which might have more control, sooner and add more value? Is it optimised for needing to run every decision up the chain of command? Is it optimised for late learning? Is it optimised to not act on others learning? Is it optimised for order givers and order takers? Is it optimised for not asking questions, for nor experimenting? Is it optimised for a person who OWNs the damn product? Is it optimised for Water-Agile-Fall? Is it optimised for Masters of framework who are responsible for “promoting and supporting the framework” over better end-to-end outcomes? Is it optimised for the Age of Oil and Mass Production in the 1900s or is it optimised for the Age of Digital today and for the next 50 years? Is it optimised for capital ‘A’ Agile in IT only or is it optimised for Better Value Sooner Safer Happier outcomes end to end? Is it optimised to compete with disruptors who are eating your lunch? Is it optimised to retain and attract people? Is it optimised for society and for the climate? Is it optimised for survival? Does it need to be? Is survival mandatory? Is it better that organisations reinvent themselves, re-training colleagues, to remain a going concern, rather than societal upheaval of collapses Is the talk going to be a never ending list of questions? You’ll have to come along to find out. In this talk Jon is going to share lessons learnt and experiences on the pivot from project to product, from milestones to outcomes, from role tribes to value tribes, from learn slow to learn fast, from old ways of working to new ways of working across organisations, from survival anxiety to survive & thrive. Bio Jon assists organisations to deliver Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, leading on enterprise agility at Deloitte. Prior to this, Jon was leading on better ways of working across Barclays, with 80,000 colleagues in 40 countries. Jon has 25 years experience of taking and leading an agile approach to change, starting out as a developer on the trading floor in the early 90’s. He and his team is the winner in the category of ''Best Internal Agile Team'' and runner up for ''Most Valued Agile Professional (UK)'' at the Agile Awards 2016.

Focus on building the right products & services with Leslie Barry! We live in a fast-changing world where all organisations need to continually innovate. Customer needs are constantly evolving. The ability to sense & respond to changing conditions is critical and being able to rapidly experiment is a fundamental enabler. 80% of new products fail in the marketplace, even if competently executed. What is the cost of this? The wasted time, money, energy & passion of your people... and the opportunity cost! What if we could find out quickly & cheaply if new ideas are likely to be successful before building anything, even a prototype? Is it something your customers will value? Exponential innovators like MAGNA (Meta, Facebook, Apple, Google, Netflix, Amazon) run hundreds of experiments continuously to be able to discover & launch new products & services that customers love and value. They answer the question: Should we do this? At this session, we will be guided by leading experimentation expert Leslie Barry. We will discuss and explore: - What is the pretotyping method and how to design a good experiment - How failure is a key step in the innovation process and how that leads you to the outcomes you need to deliver upon - How to get started with practical tips and tricks from case study examples Join the movement to achieve better ways of working in your organisation: https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/community

The Spotify model is not a model. So, how do you organise your people and the work? Is your organisation organised in functional silos? Or has your organisation adopted 'Tribes, Crews, Fleets, Squads, Practices, Chapters, etc.' How people are organised is a key component of how organisations need to re-architect themselves in order to deliver better value and outcomes. Through a panel discussion with senior leaders, we will explore: - Why should we care about how people are organised? - How should people be organised? What is a value stream? - How do you get started? What do you need to consider as part of the transition? - What lessons have we learned? As every organisation is a complex adaptive system, there is no one-size-fits-all way to organise teams. There are patterns, and anti-patterns, that you can learn from that will help guide you. The panel: Facilitated by Maria Muir, an experienced enterprise agility advisor, we will hear lessons from the front line from: - Brodie Macdonald - value stream leader, who has led the PACE operating model and is now a Tribe Leader at Auckland Savings Banks. - Mark Payne - an experienced enterprise operating model and platform advisor who has embedded value streams at Bankwest, CBA and other clients. - BMK Lakshminarayanan - value stream architect who has worked within technology to enable technology/digital product teams to improve flow. Meet-up Inspiration For some inspiration, check out Jon Smart's ~30 min talk on Value Streams - How to organise for outcomes. Join the movement to achieve better ways of working in your organisation: https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/community

HR's role is going through a tremendous change in an exponentially changing world and the old HR-processes and policies are today outdated for a modern organization that wants to remain competitive. Why is continuous learning so important and how can HR help and support to create the conditions necessary to succeed, instead of hindering people with too many stifling structures? Why do HR need to go first, leading the change towards greater people and business agility and why do we need to abolish the old, outdated performance management process? In this talk you get the answers to these questions and also a deeper understanding for how recruitment, compensation and benefits, learning and development and succession and career planning changes during an agile transformation. You learn how can HR create the necessary conditions for everybody to change, unlearning and relearning new skills for an organization that is fit for the future and for people. Join the movement to achieve better ways of working in your organisation: https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/community

Come along to this hour to hear about the ways of working journey at Nationwide Building Society and how they are delivering better value sooner safer happier. The focus will be on: Flow, Value and Culture. Through a series of lightning talks, we will hear from a few different perspectives: - Kimberley Wilson and Tony Caink - Value Realisation Office - Iain Keiller and Abhishek Darbari - Data & Analytics WoW Enablement Team - Sarah Sambidge and Ellie Carter - Communications - Zsolt Berend - Ways of Working Metrics - Richard James - Ways of Working Enablement Leader - Peter Lear - Chief Product Owner To get an understanding as to the journey that the team have been on, check out what they learned and outcomes they achieved a year ago. BVSSH youtube channel: https://youtu.be/-nqCmAgIF_M Join the movement to achieve better ways of working in your organisation: https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/community

Jonathan Smart, Head of Working Ways, Barclays Morag McCall Barclays started focusing on continuous improvement in enterprise-wide agility and DevOps in 2015. As per the Theory of Constraints, focusing on the biggest constraint to flow, we have been shifting left in the end to end value stream, into Portfolio Management and the PMO teams. In this talk, Jon and Morag will share experiences and lessons learnt on 'Lean Portfolio Management' and agility in the PMO. "Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility" By Jon Smart (with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer) —Learn more about the book here: https://soonersaferhappier.com/ DOES18 London DevOps Enterprise Summit https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/