Banking and Financial Services
Three client scenarios, three different routes to the same failure: a program passes every gate it was built to pass, and nobody ever asked whether passing those gates meant the thing actually fit. First application series built on AFS, and the pattern held across all three even though each bank got there differently.
- The program that worked — a regulatory program hit every milestone, passed every audit, and changed nothing about how anyone in the business actually made a decision; fitness presumed by paperwork.
- The Flag That Got Overruled — someone named exactly why a lifted operating model wouldn’t fit this bank’s funding and product structure, before a single team was even formed, and got overruled because the model already had board sign-off.
- The Program That Fixed What It Was Asked to Fix — closed the one gap it was built to close, and closing it broke trust and effectiveness that nobody had been asked to check.
Insurance Edition
Second application series on AFS, after banking looked at composite scenarios. Same pattern — organizations presuming a method was fit without ever checking — but three insurance clients that got the presumption wrong in three genuinely different ways, none resembling the others.
- The Consultants Had a Slide for That — an external firm installed Scrum into a multi-value-stream business the way you’d install a printer driver, without asking whether a method built for one team fit a business built from several; fitness presumed by import.
- Nobody Brought In a Consultant This Time — no imported method, no ceremonies to point at; a dense political environment presumed its current setup was fit because friction was never named, since naming it meant naming who caused it.
- When the Practices Are the Point — Scrum at scale, run correctly, by people who could recite the guide from memory, still not yielding results; the questions had been answered once, correctly, for a context that no longer existed, then the answers calcified into practice.