Simon Hayward is an honorary professor at Alliance Manchester Business School in the UK and author of The Agile Leader and Connected Leadership. He is also Global Lead for Leadership and Culture at Accenture’s Talent & Organization/Human Potential practice. In this episode, Hayward outlines challenges before leaders who seek to engage people in radical change – often the case in large-scale agile transformation. COVID has undoubtedly had a hand in worker expectations, and it offers...

Julian Mancia is interested in helping humans get out of their own way, specifically when it comes to business innovation. As a Director of "What If! Innovation," part of Accenture, Mancia is excited by nebulous projects that might terrify others. For example, helping companies break into the competitive snack market or doubling growth in five years. How does he do it? With adaptive strategies. Accenture’s Allia DeAngelis hosts.

Lisette Zounon is passionate about building quality into everything she does. A quality engineering leader with over 15 years of experience, Zounon is agile at work and at home, whether she’s planning her wedding or helping teams deliver excellent products. Her stories inspire the person in each of us that wants to make the world a better place in big ways (e.g., bringing breast cancer care to rural West Africa) and small (e.g., mentoring a young female professional on the verge of quitting...

The world of work has irreversibly changed. As the CEO for Institute Agility, Neville Poole is actively making space for people-centric work experiences. Physical workplaces now serve to bring people together to do what they cannot do remotely: connect, align on values and be creative. What’s more, people want their work to be meaningful, especially the next generation of workers. Neville shares her experiences both as an executive in Tech as well as a mother of two teenage girls with big...

Agile began in software but has evolved to impact every part of the business. Now business agility is seen as a way for organizations not just to create better products but also to run more effectively overall — regardless of what comes their way. Our guests discuss the evolution to business agility as we see it today. Jason Novack is the global lead of the Accenture Business Agility practice (formerly Accenture | SolutionsIQ), and Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of the Business Agility...

Who do you turn to to celebrate or to commiserate? When Apriel Biggs started her career 15 years ago, she didn’t have a community of agilists who shared her experiences, other Black and Brown people to share her highs and lows with. So Biggs started Blagile, an organization dedicated to elevating Black and Brown voices in agile. In this episode, she shares her journey and the help she got along the way in hopes of inspiring young agilists today. Accenture’s Alalia Lundy hosts. Learn more: ...

Abiodun “Abby” Osoba has tirelessly been creating a community of agilists based primarily out of Lagos, Nigeria, through her commercial and non-profit efforts. Osoba is the founder of the Agile Advisor Africa, co-founder of the Remote Agile Workspace (RAW) as well as one of the creators of the Agile Contracts Manifesto. She shares her journey, her experiences and her vision for business agility in Nigeria and beyond to Africa and the world.

There isn’t a single playbook or recipe for success, but one thing is certain: while scaled agile done well can turn into business agility, they aren’t the same thing. In his new book "The 6 Enablers of Business Agility," Karim Harbott shares his experience helping getting people and clients to think beyond just (software/team-level) agile to business agility. Harbott’s six enablers highlight the multifaceted, holistic approach required for business agility. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Allia...

Self-identified “agile unicorn” Jackie Chambers de Freitas rarely sees others like her in her work as a VP of technology transformation and executive coach. In this episode, she shares how her uniqueness as a Black woman working in agile can be both a boon and a burden. Mixed in with her own challenges are the general challenges involved with bringing business agility to organizations. De Freitas mentions the “dirty little secret in agile”: agilists are champions of change – but change is...

Facilitation involves “removing obstacles to contribution, connection and equity.” This is at the center of our guest Adam Kahane’s book “Facilitating Breakthrough.” Kahane argues that facilitating isn’t just trying to get people to do things. He discusses what he calls “transformative facilitation” – facilitating in ways that brings in both individual and collective perspectives to move forward together without leading to fragmentation or rigidity. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Allia DeAngelis...

Accenture | SolutionsIQ alumna and former Agile Amped host Leslie Morse is our guest in this episode. Serving as Product Owner for the Professional Scrum Community with Scrum.org has put Morse on a journey to help agilists “drink their own prosecco.” She is finding new ways to improve integrity, empiricism, and what she calls “change fluency” in the agile community. The goal is sense of personal agility that makes us all better able to serve others. “If we can become fluent in change the...

In his book “Agility: How to Navigate the Unknown and Seize Opportunity in a World of Disruption,” Leo Tilman offers a comprehensive definition of the word “agility.” According to Tilman and co-author former NORAD commander General Charles Jacoby, agility is “the organizational capacity to detect, assess and respond to environmental changes in ways that are purposeful, decisive and grounded in a will to win.” In this episode we unpack the loaded definition and discuss how (tactical) agile...

This special episode celebrates the Pride month of June and features the hosts and producer of Agile Amped as the guests. Alalia Lundy (she/her/hers) is a Business Agility Enablement Manager; William Rowden (he/him/his) is a Business Agility Practice Development Associate Director, and Ryan Keawekāne (he/him/his) is a Marketing Associate Manager. We all work at Accenture and also happen to belong to the LGBTQ+ community. We share our stories of being LGBTQ+ in a business environment, some of...

Kayton Bhatia is a Senior Leader in Digital Product Management at Kaiser Permanente. For Pride Month, he is sharing his story about bringing his whole self to work. As a gay, Indian man, Bhatia’s path to leadership is anything but typical. Despite changes to laws in both the US (where he lives and works) and India (where he was born and raised), there’s more to do. He offers advice to leaders and LGBTQ professionals and is an example to those who happen to be both of how to live and lead...

Sandy Beky is the founder of two companies whose work, at first blush, seems unrelated. The first is HeHop, a nonprofit that uses blockchain technology to empower victims and witnesses of domestic violence to capture and store tamper-resistant evidence for use in court. The second is Kyosei Solutions Lab, through which Beky helps leaders of France’s biggest companies evolve their mindset and approach to leading organizations. In this episode, we learn how Beky sees her work through both...

Colleen Kirtland is on a learning journey, and in this episode, she shares her passion for and commitment to learning as much as possible from nature. Pointing to many resources and examples of biomimicry, economics, and above all systems thinking, Kirtland invites us to think about creating systems that not just grow linearly but thrive. She argues that “resiliency is built over a very long time,” and the same can be said for agile. “As I’m unpeeling life itself, I’m learning to be a better...

Adam Burden is Accenture’s Chief Software Engineer and a senior managing director leading Technology services for Accenture in North America. In this episode, Burden shares how Cloud helps break barriers to agility. One barrier is legacy systems. While package solutions have become popular in the last few years, Burden says that the “renaissance of custom” today may make it more practical for businesses to customize their legacy systems. The result often is greater agility. “If I want to get...

What happens if you put $1 billion dollars in the hands of students to invest collaboratively? Luke Hohmann is Founder and CEO of FirstRoot, which wants “to get $1,000 into a million schools so that children are in control of $1 billion or more of capital by 2030.” Hohmann shares stories of how real school students have invested in their schools and communities – with surprising results. It’s all in an effort to help cultivate civic responsibility in youth and grow the next generation of...

What does it mean to put customers at the center of everything you do? For Riot Games, the brand behind League of Legends, it means “making it better to be a player.” Our guest Michael Robillard is the Principal of Enterprise Agility for Riot Games, and he shares how business agility unlocks their ability to make good on that promise. One outstanding example of what Robillard calls “customer-centric business agility” happened at the 2018 League of Legends World Championship in South Korea,...

Johanna Rothman, a.k.a. the Pragmatic Manager, is author of 18 books and frequent blogger on the topic of product management and more. Rothman shares with us insights about her latest three-book bundle on “Modern Management Made Easy.” These books are full of “the kinds of questions I keep hearing from my clients.” Each chapter begins with a question followed by a popular myth and then many different options for managing oneself, others, and one’s system to be more effective at work. “We are...

Diversifying Equity with Agile for Humanity Self-defined Soul Craftswoman April Jefferson applies her experience in coaching, crafting experiences, and conference speaking to help “bring up new voices.” Jefferson shares her story of striving to increase equity of the Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) community in Agile. One way is the Agile for Humanity group and conference – or, should we say, “unconference.” Jefferson is aware that much of how conferences operate create obstacles...

Rajesh Nerlikar is chief product advisor at Prodify and the co-author of the book “Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management” with Ben Foster. Nerlikar highlights a few of the ten dysfunctions that the co-authors had seen in their experience advising product management teams. The book focuses on the four core tenets of vision-led product management that strikes a balance between “iterate your way to success” and “game-changing innovation.” Accenture |...

Nick Horney is an organizational psychologist and founder of Agility Consulting. He spent 23 years in Special Operations in the U.S. Navy, before building a career in the agile space. Horney joins us to discuss his ideas and experience in leadership agility and anticipating change, focusing on 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. He uses the concepts of “After Action Agility” and the “Leadership Agility Profile 360 Assessment” to gauge how well organizations anticipate and respond to change. “The...