FFC NL 2025 TALKS

Many organizations struggle to scale nimble ways of working as the organization or department grows, stifling innovation and delivery effectiveness. What worked at a small scale appears expensive at larger scales, where drive for deduplication and efficiency begins to couple together previously separate initiatives, slowing them down. The traditional management approach of “Economies of Scale” - taken from manufacturing - does not work well for knowledge work and continuously evolving digital services that are the foundation of many organizations today because digital services are not the mass-production of identical widgets. However, “Economies of Speed” - where time-to-market is the overriding factor - are often not sustainable beyond a funding round, deadline, or acquisition. Instead of a back and forth ‘flip-flop’ between organizing for scale and organizing for speed, organizations can get the best of both approaches by organizing for empowerment. Using “Economies of Empowerment” as the organizing principle drives clarity of mission, purposeful boundaries that work for flow, continuous adaptation to new technologies, and rapid innovation via cross-team learning & sharing. In this talk, Matthew Skelton - co-author of the groundbreaking book Team Topologies and CEO/CTO at Conflux - shares insights from helping hundreds of organizations to apply principles and practices from Team Topologies, Adapt Together™, and related approaches in order to scale nimble value delivery via empowered teams and “Economies of Empowerment”.