Empowerment by Design: HDI Agile Family’s Approach to Agile Ecosystems

„The world is changing rapidly, and as a consequence the traditional hierarchical structures of organizations are no longer sufficient in order to keep up with the pace of innovation.

You are probably already familiar with the classic start of an agile transformation: The selection of a framework (e.g. Scrum or SAFe), the training process for said framework, and the expectation from everybody - especially management - that they will be “agile” in a short period of time.

The reality, however, is that it is much more difficult. The result of the aforementioned process results in everybody working as usual, with the only difference being that there are a few new terms adopted for use in addition to additional overhead.

Based on this result, it can be concluded that the issue no longer is about selecting the correct framework and training everybody to follow it, but rather to focus on creating a system where individuals are empowered to learn and grow.

An environment where teams can self-organize to deliver value. This style of management, although not new in theory, is the heart of the agile principles; the management of the system.



In this context, we would like to share our experience of a real agile transformation in the insurance industry.

We started with the typical approach of selecting a framework, but we soon realized that this approach wasn’t going to be satisfactory for our process.

We needed a fundamental shift in our mindset as well as our culture.

As such, we changed course and embraced a new direction: the management of the system and empowering people.

We focused on developing and investing into our colleagues, managing factors that would allow for creative and productive freedom, which created a self-organizing team of agilists in the process.

We moved away from a hierarchical organization towards a motivated, organized, and focused group ecosystem.



In our talk, we'll describe the challenges we faced during this transformative journey, how we overcame them, and the results we have achieved.

We will also highlight the self-organized formats that emerged, enabling our teams to work collaboratively and deliver value efficiently, e.g. our Agile Marketplace.

Join us to learn how we transformed our organization from classical hierarchies to a modern productive working ecosystem and how you can do the same.“