When it comes to agile, in some way, we are at a pretty good spot. And what I mean by that is that almost every large organization that I work with, they'll have a must-win battle that's related to agility or speed or we need to get more bold. In reality, a realization that we need to change the way we work in order to get us to where we want to go. And also, I think most organizations are doing experiments or doing initiatives to back that. And some organizations are doing something out here where they're doing corporate garage work and others are doing incubator work or collaborations with startups and stuff like that. A little bit on the side of the real organization. But we're also doing cool stuff in here. Most organizations are experimenting with SAFE scrum and sprints and hackathons and so forth. So, you could argue we're doing pretty well. My own experience, though, talking to leaders and working with organizations is that when it comes to creating adaptable, responsive organizations that are entrepreneurial at its core, I think we still have some way to go. And I'll try to open that theme up a little bit. We actually did a survey last month where we surveyed, I think, a little more than 300 leaders. And a couple of interesting facts out of that survey. First one being, despite the fact that we have these initiatives and must-win battles, it's still only 70% of leaders that see their own organization as proactive and adaptable. And maybe even more interestingly, 41% of leaders in mid-sized companies are actually feeling that their organization is becoming more bureaucratic. So, I think there is a good reason for us to look at agility as more than a buzzword. And to open that theme up, instead of coming with just another cool definition of what is agility, I'd like to share with you how it feels sometimes to visit an organization that is agile. And maybe also how it feels to come visit an organization that is not so much. So, sometimes you come in to an organization and already in the reception area, you feel a welcome. And you feel that there is vibrant energy. You feel that people are interacting in a cross-functional way. Maybe the workplace looks a little bit like a family place or a home. The language is very friendly and family-like. But a couple of things is very interesting in those organizations. It's not the beanbags and the sneaks and the MacBooks. It's actually a couple of other things. One is that people seem to be on the issue cross -functionally just fixing problems, moving the ball forward. And the second thing is, in those organizations, very rarely can you sense who is the leader. So, you go to a workshop or a meeting and it's not visible who is the leader. They just interact. And people just naturally bring their creativity and their passion to work. And then you can come to other organizations where things feel a little bit different. There's a formal vibe already in the reception. People look more serious. The offices look a little more boring. The language is more sterile. And PowerPoint is kind of the favorite language they speak. And a couple of things that characterize that kind of organization. First one being, it's very clearly who is the boss. Normally, they sit on the top floor with a better view. But besides that, even in meetings and in interactions, you sense that there's a formal hierarchy at place. That's really a thing. And in those organizations, sometimes it actually feels as if people are having two jobs. One doing their normal job. And the second job is navigating everything. Figuring out what your boss wants you to do. Navigating people in other functions. Stakeholder management taking more or less half of their time. And I think what I experience right now is that when I have conversations with leaders, sometimes behind the curtains, I start sensing that a lot of people are beginning to ask new questions. Like, are we really working at our best? Is this the way we should do it? And are there other ways of doing it? And could I potentially give more? And I had a couple of concrete conversations that illustrates that. First one was with Bettina. She used to be the CFO of a big finance organization in Zurich. And we were talking about her next move because she quit. And before we even got to discussing what she could do, she interrupted me and said, whatever I choose to do, no more corporate theater. I've had it. I need to do something where I don't spend my life doing that. That was kind of one conversation. And then I had another conversation, which was actually not a conversation. It was a text conversation. Monday morning, Monday morning, 7.30, with Martin, a good friend and CCO. And we were texting while he was in a conference call about how we needed half an hour to meet up this week. And after four or five attempts, couldn't meet up, he sent me a screen dump of his week. And it was literally plastered with meetings, governance, risk assessment, all kinds of meetings. And he couldn't find that half an hour. And he accompanied that screen dump with three letters. Those three. WTF. And that was kind of funny. And I was laughing. But also a side of me wasn't laughing in the sense that Martin is part of creating that monster. If it looks like that for Martin, it probably looks like that for a lot of people in his organization. And I think that's one of the things we need to deal with. And then you could, of course, you could ask, okay, isn't that just Martin and Bettina and a couple of other people you spoke to? Well, I think that we are looking at a systemic thing. And we actually have a little bit of data to back this. If we look to the survey that Gallup does every year, and you ask people to which extent are you fully engaged in your work, 13% of people consider themselves by their own standards fully engaged in their work. And you can probably debate whether it's 17%. And you can probably debate whether it's 17%. It doesn't really matter. And it's the same number for white -collar workers and blue-collar workers. So what does that actually mean? Well, one way of looking at it is this. It basically means that 87% of people in organizations are saying, I have more to give. I have more to give. And when it comes to imagination, inspiration, creativity, passion, and mastery, those are gifts that you choose to bring as a human to work or you choose not to. Nobody can command you to bring them. You can choose to bring them. And I think to get to Agile for real, to get to an adaptable organization that is responsive and entrepreneurial at its core, we need to unleash that potential. And we need to create a management model that naturally makes people, humans, bring those gifts to work. And therefore, a year ago, we decided, okay, let's take a crack at this. Let's figure out how do we address this. And therefore, we put up this big question. How do we create organizations that are fit for humans and fit for the future? We need to do that. And the only way we can do that. And the only way we can do that. The only way we can be relevant in the future is by making our organizations fit for humans so they bring these creative entrepreneurial skills to work. And a cool thing about this question, in my view, is that it opens up a lens for us as leaders to look at all the principles, the processes, and the practices that we're running. And we can ask ourselves, and we can ask ourselves, to which extent are they fit for this specific question. So as an example, we were doing some work with a strategy function in a big corporation. And that question led us to open up things like, why is it that we strategize every three or five years, 2025 strategy, when the world out there is changing so fast that we actually need to strategize on a continuous basis? And why is it that we outsource these strategic questions and answers to a chosen few in the top of the organization, top management, when the reality is that when complexity grows and turbulent grows, we need more people to think and we need more people to act? So what if we saw our role as, instead of making strategy, we saw our role as building capabilities and equipping people for everywhere in the organization to make great choices? How would we work differently with strategy? That's just one example. But you can also ask yourself, what about your budget processes? What about your performance management processes? Are they fit for humans and do they make you fit for the future? Or you can look at your meetings, to which extent, are they are they doing what they intended to do? I had the opportunity of working with a company for three months where I was following the executive leadership team in all their management meetings for three months, which was interesting. And the purpose was to figure out, could we redesign that meeting so it was more fit for humans and more fit for the future? And a couple of interesting realizations in that, when I was watching what was going on, they spent most of their time talking about what happened last month and talking about what happened last month and last quarter and very little about the future. They talked much more about running the business than changing the business. They talked much more about internal stuff and alignment than they talked about the external stuff. But maybe most important, the way they interacted with each other, they didn't come across as a team that was united around a common purpose, where there was a vulnerability in the room where people dared to put up the areas where they were mostly in doubt, for them to really debate it and play to each other's strength. Everybody was sharing a PowerPoint deck, hoping for the others to nod and say, yeah, go ahead with that. So it wasn't a curious conversation happening. And obviously, they need to ask themselves, is this fit for humans? Is it fit for the future? So I think all of this actually points to a new notion that we believe we need to put on the agenda, and it's this one. I think most organizations have worked with business model innovation for the last five, ten years, for good reasons. I think we need to start looking at a new theme also, which is management model innovation. Meaning, we need to have a closer look at the principles on which we build our management model, and we need to ask ourselves, are they fit for the future, and are they fit for humans? We need to look at the architecture, and we need to look at the ideology of our organization, and really figure out, does something need to change here? And a few facts on that, if you ask MBA graduates where they want to work, they either 65% say, I want to work in a startup, or I want to work in a digital unicorn kind of company. And why do people say that? I've been wondering. Why do people want that, instead of working in a corporation? Why do you want to work in Google, for instance, as one of those? I think it's not because Google have a cool search engine. It's not their product. I think it's because you have an image of a culture and a management model that is innovative, empowering, and where you can get things done. And that's why you have a bias towards that, for good reasons. So I think all corporates, all of us, need to have a closer look at our respective management models. Not to turn them around radically, but to figure out where is it that we need more agility, and then we need to do low-cost, low-risk experiments, where we're testing out new stuff. We don't want to do stuff where we bet the company, but we need to be more explorative, more innovative, also with our management model. And if we go down that path, there are actually companies out there that are doing bleeding-edge new management models that are not built on bureaucracy at scale. And some of them are mentioned here. And they are doing radical stuff. And when you look into the cases, at least personally, they do things that are so advanced and so different from the classic bureaucratic-based organization. I can give you a few examples. Michelang as an example. They're taking middle management, they're repurposing middle management in all their factories, taking them out. Whole layer of, several layers of middle management. You can take higher in the bottom there. There are 120,000 people, 4,000 loosely coupled networks in three layers. So not 11 or 12 layers, three layers. So they're doing really mind-stretching things that when you look at it, a part of you says they've got to be lying. It can't be true. It's just a case study. Or you conclude, that's a cool thing, but it doesn't work here. But I think we need to be more curious and look at these. And maybe we spend a little bit of time, we need to look at, so what are the principles on which they built their management model? And we just try to pull out a few principles that kind of characterize these companies. First one being, they believe in networks, they don't believe in hierarchy. Because a network is just faster acting than a hierarchy. They believe in followership more than formal power. You need to be able to get things done without a title, without a budget, and without formal authority. And onwards. They believe in experimentation as a way forward, not the detailed plan. But deeply, you could say that they built their organization and their management model on a deeply human foundation. They are treating everybody in the organization as adults. And that's not necessarily the case in a classic bureaucracy. So we need to work with that. We actually surveyed with the same audience, so where are we today and where do we want to go? And this is the result we saw. A very distinct, we asked people, where are you on your management model today? And where do you think you need to move to be fit for the future? By your own standards. And as you can see, there's a very, very clear direction. It tells a very, very clear picture, you could say. It paints a clear picture. More autonomy, more self-management, decentralization, more activism, a lot more purpose, and a lot more bottom-up that we see today. So I think that's interesting that there is a realization that we actually have to work with our management model. But that journey might look easy. But that journey might look easy. But it actually, in some areas, we actually have to revisit some fundamental assumptions on which we build most of our management practices. And I'd like to share with you a couple of those that are puzzling a lot of leaders, including myself. The first one being, if you look at the way we think about change in most organizations, we think about change as something we roll out, not something we roll up. We tend to think about change as something that we can engineer and manage in different phases and steps. And I think we need to look at change as a more organic, emerging thing, something that can also be rolled up. And I think unless we get to that realization, we're going to have a toxic side effect, that is, we're creating an organization where too many people are waiting. Waiting for instructions, waiting for details, waiting for must-win battles, waiting for my new leader to come and tell me where we're going, waiting for the new reorg. And that's simply not agile. So we need to change that. And we need to come to a situation where change feels more like a social movement, and the organization feels more like an ecosystem. And I think that's an area where we have to do some work. There's one more area where it's a little bit challenging for most of us, and that is how we think about innovation. And in most organizations, innovation is something that they do out here in one department or maybe sometimes even out of the organization. But I think we need to somehow make innovation part of everybody's job every day. And what I mean by that is, we need to syndicate the responsibility for initiating change to the people closest to the problem. And we need to make more people feel like co-owners or co-creators of the company. Because only through that can we get to the level of innovation we need. Because most organizations need operational innovation, commercial innovation, product innovation, service innovation, business model innovation, digital innovation. It's endless. So the need for building innovative or entrepreneurial capabilities across are immense. And I think we need to get closer to a situation where that's the case. And I think that's actually one of the big challenges. To get there, it's not necessarily the easiest thing. Because there's a lot of things in the way we run a company today that kind of works against this notion. And I think if you're to conclude what we're going to do, it's about me, it's about Martin, it's about Bettina, it's about you, I think we need to look at ourselves in this context as activists. I don't think this is going to happen top down, where you turn the management models over radically. I think it's going to happen with low-cost, low-risk experiments taking place. And I believe it only happens if we as individuals choose to play that role and challenge some of these fundamental assumptions and run those experiments. And we actually surveyed. And we actually surveyed. So what's in the way for us here? And what is it that leads me to conclude that we need to be activists? And it's kind of three things. The one is, the biggest blogger for this journey is short-term thinking. The second one that is mentioned is bureaucratic mindsets in leaders. And the third one that is mentioned is courage. Courage to basically do things that are not going to be able to do. And the third one that is to do things that are different from how we do them today. So I think we need to look at ourselves as activists in this field. And it actually means that I'd like to maybe challenge you or end this with a question that I'd like you to sit with. And that is, so within what we're talking today, what is so important to you that you can kind of connect to your own activist energy, an energy that means, I won't stop, I want to test this. What is it that's so important for you as a leader to your legacy, to what you want to bring to the company that has that importance? And I think we all need to find that.