Phil Gadzinski

As a global leader in governance and enterprise transformation, I help organisations evolve how they work—so they can thrive in complexity, deliver with purpose, and adapt at speed. With deep expertise in organisational design, Agile ways of working, and enterprise transformation, I partner with leaders to shift mindsets, shape strategy, and scale meaningful change.I am the co-author of “Govern Agility” as well as a co-author and co-creator of “The Remote Agility Framework” and one of the first global Heart of Agile guides, having worked extensively with Alistair Cockburn to bring this into the world. I’ve been in the agile domain as an early adopter since 2005, and I’m even one of the signatories on the agile manifesto website before they ran out of space! A recognized contributor to the Australian and international agile communities, my experience extends to helping organisations all over the world to implement a culture of collaboration, delivery, reflection, and improvement, with the end goal of being able to respond to and initiate change, survive, and remain relevant in a complex world.

Keynote—Govern with Agility

Having been at the forefront of agility adoption at scale over nearly 40 years combined effort, we see the same patterns playing out in most organisations. All start with best intent and inspirational visions, and then get bogged down as their current systems and ways of working exert pressure and draw the change agents back to the core before benefits are realised and the change can sustain. Data from the 2024 Global Business Agility Institute Report shows that it's often 5 years into a Transformation journey that organisations realise their governance is derailing their objectives and act to change.

This plays out almost universally in the way we govern the work. People are people, and organisations are about people and their interactions. The world is always changing so we need a system of governance that transcends the variety of problems we solve, and that flexes with emergence. With the emergence and accelerating large-scale adoption of Gen Ai and agentic workers, this problem remains just as important. It's now becoming a socio-technical mix of humans and machines who need to work together to achieve business outcomes.

Agile Governance is the forgotten element of those organisations adopting new operating models that are based on a goal of enabling agility and more adaptable systems of work. Only 29% of organisations report that they have Modern Governance practices that enable business agility. We aim in this session to provide support and learning to those on this journey, showing the way you can approach governance and assurance differently- and truly achieve the goal of agility.

In this session you will learn:
– Understanding of Governance affects the entire work system
– Awareness of how Governance needs to change to enable organisations to thrive
– Defining what Modern governance means and and the outcome of change from injecting agility
– Learning about the Five Stanchions of Agile Governance, a set of lenses for implementing and understanding governance that Phil and Tony have developed over many years of working with businesses worldwide