Business Agility in Crisis: 2025 Trends with Evan Leybourn
The Meridian Point Podcast
Episode Air Date: March 24,2026
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Guest: Evan Leybourn, Founder & CEO, Business Agility Institute
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KUMAR DATTATREYAN: Hi everyone, Kumar Dattatreyan here with the Meridian Point. And I am so pleased to welcome to the stage, in just thirty seconds, Evan Leybourn, the founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute. He'll be calling in from Melbourne, Australia—I think that's where he is. And the Institute, with over 7,000 members across 85 countries, Evan has built a global movement focused on helping organizations thrive in unpredictability. He's the author of "Directing the Agile Organization" and the controversial "#noprojects: A Culture of Continuous Value." Today, we're diving into the newly released Business Agility Report to explore global trends, what organizations are investing in, where they're struggling, and how business agility is evolving in this era of political and economic uncertainty. So without further ado, let me pull Evan to the stage. Thank you so much for joining us, Evan. Good morning.
EVAN LEYBOURN: Good morning, Kumar. Absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.
KUMAR: So the latest Business Agility Report—was that from 2024 or 2025?
EVAN: 2025. We launched it in December, so two and a half months ago.
KUMAR: Okay. And what were some of the trends you think that stood out for you from that report from last year?
EVAN: Yeah, no, absolutely. So the biggest shifts we saw in terms of business agility—and let me take a step back. So the Business Agility Report is an industry trend analysis. What we are looking at are the patterns and the behaviors that are being expressed by individuals and organizations who are undertaking some form of business agility transformation or change program, as well as those organizations who may not have a formal transformation but who have made progress towards developing these behaviors. And in fact, of interest, that was something that we only started measuring two years ago. And we actually have a fairly decent percentage of organizations who have what we call "no formal sponsor," which means it's an organic change, which is fantastic to see.
KUMAR: Before you answer the rest of the questions, maybe your instinct is probably better than mine. End of my long day—it's actually 5:00 PM, not morning—so I'm not thinking straight. Maybe it's useful to the audience to take a step back and sort of define what is business agility, how this term sort of came into existence, and what companies are learning from, you know, sort of this change movement to become more business agile, whatever that means.
EVAN: That is a very good question. So we founded the Business Agility Institute in 2017, so nearly ten years ago. Our mission at the time was—in fact, still is—to promote and create an environment where organizations can look at how they work, not just within the agile product or agile software environment, but certainly across the entire organizational ecosystem.
And I often talk about, with apologies to Eli Goldratt, Evan's Theory of Agile Constraints. So if anyone doesn't know Theory of Constraints, coming from the book "The Goal," it says that in any process, in any system, there is a constraining factor. If you've got a car production line and it takes you four minutes to install the wheels and five minutes to install the engines, no amount of transformation on the wheel team is going to increase the throughput of those cars being produced. They're still always going to roll off once every five minutes because of the constraint on the engine team.
The corollary of Theory of Constraints is there's always a constraint. If you do transform the engine team and you get that down to, say, three minutes, then cars are rolling off the production line once every four minutes because the constraint has moved from the engine to the wheel team.
KUMAR: Yeah.
EVAN: With apologies to Eli Goldratt, Evan's Theory of Agile Constraints is that an organization can only be as agile as its least agile function. And that's not technology anymore for most organizations. Most organizations have been doing agile in product and software for ten-plus years. They've got iterative product delivery. They're working in short releases with rapid customer feedback. Are they doing agile well? Probably not. Doesn't matter. The point is that the limitation to agility in the system has moved from the technology function to the rest of the organization.
It doesn't matter if you can create a potentially shippable product increment in two weeks and a DevOps release pipeline in 33 seconds if it takes you nine months to get a budget change approved, or four months to get a hiring ticket, or two months to go through change advisory board or the project control board. Your agility is constrained by the system, the organization that it operates within.
I'll stop this rant in one second, but let me just finish and actually answer the question that you asked. The definition of business agility—it is not a framework, it is not practices, it is rather behaviors, how you act. We define business agility very specifically as a set of behaviors and capabilities that affords an organization—your organization—the freedom, the flexibility, and the resilience to achieve its purpose, no matter what the future brings.
And so those final six words, which are—I think kind of the—that's the magic six words. Can you, do you have the ability to achieve your purpose no matter what the future brings, whether it's pandemic or technological innovation? And if the answer is yes, then you have sufficient business agility for where you are as an organization. But for most organizations, the answer is no. So hence the reason why we promote and support and study organizations.
KUMAR: That was a beautiful rant. No, that was a beautiful rant. And I love the way you brought in a prop to explain Theory of Constraints. And that was very effective, in my view. I'm thinking about how I can use that in the organization I support right now.
So going back to my original question, which was: What did the report from 2025 report? What were the sort of things that were a surprise, or maybe just sort of a continuation of prior trends?
EVAN: No, absolutely. So the Business Agility Report—and I assume people can download this from the comments or the show notes—the Business Agility Report highlights those industry trends for organizations on the journey, or on some sort of journey, towards business agility.
Now, some of the key highlights. So number one, at the top level, we have seen consistent improvements in business agility year after year after year. Now, we started this report in 2018. So we have, what, seven years worth of data: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. We have this nice, clean, linear trend. 2023, we start to see a bit of a spike, and then 2024 drops. 2025, it rose again, not as high as the 2023 spike. And so the last three years have had more volatility than previous—than pre-during and pre-pandemic years.
KUMAR: It's almost like the stock market.
EVAN: I mean, funny that, because realistically, the trends here are following the trends of organizational focus as well as the trends of how employees are feeling engaged. Because a big part of business agility is to create these human-centric organizations. And so we see this growth at the end—during the pandemic, we see companies trying to be more collaborative. Yes, there were layoffs. Yes, it was a difficult time. But even if you got laid off, which is unfortunate, obviously, for that individual, you knew why. It was nobody's fault. It was the fault of the environment that you were in—this global pandemic.
When we start to see the massive layoffs at the end of 2023 into 2024—like Microsoft and Google laying off tens of thousands of people and so forth—you see this massive betrayal of trust. You've got the return-to-office trends as well, where companies were saying, "This work-from-home thing is amazing," and then all of a sudden they're like, "Come back to the office."
And so you see these organizations who, on the one hand, they've said, "We trust you, we want to build collaboration, we want to build empowerment," but then their actions betrayed that. And so we see this, the report, reflecting the sentiment within organizations. So that's at the high level. I can go deeper into the six domains if you want, or we can—
KUMAR: Yeah, let's go deeper. I think that would be really helpful for the audience to understand the domains.
EVAN: Sure. So we have a model which we call the Six Domains of Business Agility. And these are the six areas that an organization needs to focus on if they want to become more agile. So the six domains are: Leadership, Strategy, Structure, People, Governance, and Ways of Working.
Now, Leadership is how people think, how they behave, how they interact. And the types of behaviors we're looking at—are they collaborative? Are they empowering? Are they supportive? Or are they command-and-control? Are they authoritarian? Are they hierarchical?
Strategy is about how you plan for the future. Are you doing hypothesis-driven, emergent strategy where you're constantly adapting and learning? Or are you doing predict-and-control where you create a five-year strategic plan and then you execute against that plan regardless of what changes in the environment?
Structure is about organizational design. How are you structured? Are you organized around value streams? Are you organized around customers? Or are you organized around functional silos? And what are your decision rights? Who can make what decisions?
People is about your HR practices. Are you creating psychological safety? Are you creating autonomy? Are you creating mastery and purpose? Or are you creating fear-based, compliance-based environments?
Governance is about how you fund things, how you measure performance, how you do compliance. Are you doing rolling budgets? Are you doing lean accounting? Are you doing throughput accounting? Or are you doing traditional project-based funding with stage gates and approval boards?
And then Ways of Working is the actual practices—are you doing agile? Are you doing DevOps? Are you doing continuous improvement?
Now, what we see in the data is that organizations are doing reasonably well on Leadership and Ways of Working. Most organizations have got some form of agile practices in place. Most organizations have leaders who at least intellectually understand the need for collaboration and empowerment.
Where organizations are struggling the most is Governance. And this is where we see the biggest constraint for most organizations. Because if you've got project-based funding, if you've got annual budgets, if you've got stage-gate approval processes, if you've got performance management that's based on individual goals and not team outcomes—all of that creates constraints that prevent the organization from being agile, regardless of how good your agile practices are or how collaborative your leaders want to be.
KUMAR: That makes a lot of sense. And I think that's consistent with what I'm seeing in the organization I support as well. The governance piece is really the hardest nut to crack.
EVAN: Absolutely. And the reason for that is because governance is about power. It's about who has authority to make decisions. It's about who controls the money. And those are the hardest things to change in any organization because they're tied to people's sense of identity and their sense of control.
KUMAR: Right. So let's talk a little bit about the authoritarian leadership piece. You mentioned that there's this sort of rise of authoritarian leadership, not just politically but also within organizations. Can you unpack that a little bit?
EVAN: Yeah, absolutely. So what we're seeing is—and this is both in the data and anecdotally from conversations with people—is that we have CEOs who, throughout the pandemic, built trust and built collaboration and built empowerment. And then the market changed, the economy changed, and they flipped straight back to command-and-control. And that is the broken trust that we are seeing.
Now, why does that happen? And I think there's a couple of reasons. Number one, those leaders were trained in a very different model of leadership. They were trained in the heroic, individualist model of leadership where the CEO is the superhero who has all the answers and makes all the decisions and saves the day. And that's a very seductive model because it gives you a sense of control. It gives you a sense of power.
But the reality is that in a complex adaptive system—which is what a modern organization is—no one person can have all the answers. No one person can make all the decisions. You need distributed decision-making. You need collective intelligence. You need collaboration. But when things get tough, when the environment gets uncertain, when the pressure is on, it's very easy for leaders to revert back to that heroic model because it gives them a sense of control, even if it's an illusion.
KUMAR: That makes sense. And I think that's something that's probably true for all of us, not just CEOs. When things get tough, we revert back to what we know, what feels comfortable, even if intellectually we know that's not the right approach.
EVAN: Exactly. And the problem is that when you do that, you break trust. Because you've told people, "We trust you, we want you to be empowered, we want you to make decisions," and then all of a sudden you're like, "No, actually, I'm going to make all the decisions. You just do what I tell you." And that creates cynicism. That creates disengagement. That creates people updating their resumes and looking for other jobs.
KUMAR: Right. So let's shift gears a little bit. I want to talk about the historical context of this. You mentioned in our prep call that there's this sort of legacy of scientific management that still haunts us today. Can you talk a little bit about that?
EVAN: Yeah, absolutely. So scientific management was developed at the turn of the last century—so we're talking 1890s, early 1900s—by people like Frederick Winslow Taylor. And the idea was that you could apply scientific methods to management. You could study workers and figure out the most efficient way to do things. And so you had people with stopwatches literally counting how many tons of pig iron can a worker load into a minecart? What is the average? What is the standard deviation? So that we know what an average, in inverted quotes, worker can do.
KUMAR: Yeah.
EVAN: Great. Fantastic. Now, scientific management has long since been superseded by modern management methods—sorry, more modern management methods. But something else was happening at the turn of last century, which was the rise of workers' rights. It was the rise of unionism. And there was massive class tension between workers and factory owners and employers.
And so the management methods developed at the turn of last century were very much in that cultural context of class conflict. I'm having trouble saying those words. You get what I'm trying to say. So now, even though scientific management and other management theories of its time have been more or less long since superseded in most organizations, that fundamental principle of "we don't trust our workers" has still been a fundamental principle in everything that has been built upon those original management models.
And that has cascaded its way through the last 120, 130 years, leading to the environment in which we currently see ourselves. So that's—one of the other—that's more of a historic lens as to why things are the way they are.
KUMAR: Very, very interesting. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. It sort of puts things in context as to where we are today and the struggles that companies face in moving to more modern ways of measuring performance, measuring people, rewarding people for behavior and performance and things like that.
We're running a little long, but this is such an interesting conversation. I didn't realize 45 minutes had already passed. So I'm going to end with a couple of questions here that I'm really interested in learning more about from you.
So your book, "#noprojects," argues that if we need to run a project, we've already failed. Does your data show that high-performing organizations actually operate this way and not in a project mindset, but really organizing around continuous value delivery?
EVAN: So yes. Now, that tagline there in that book is a little—it is hyperbole. Let's be absolutely clear. There is a place for projects.
KUMAR: Yeah.
EVAN: The issue is that in a lot of the product development that is being done in organizations today, the line between when a project is done and when the product is done—those are completely different concepts. A bridge needs a project because when a bridge-building project is done, you can't add features to a bridge. When it's done, it's done. The delineation between build and maintain makes total sense.
But with a piece of software, for example, the delineation between build and maintain doesn't make sense. It is a product. A digital technological product has a lifespan, as does a bridge, but you can continue to create value or improve the total value of that product over that entire life, not just during the build phase. And so that's the point.
And so with a lot of organizations, yes, they have moved towards more of that. But this is where, when we talk about business agility, things like the capability "funds work dynamically" and funding models comes into play. Because a lot of funding models are built around projects. And so a product, from a funding standpoint, is just project after project after project after project, because that's how they allocate funds to enhance that product. And the problem is that is highly bureaucratic. It is slow. It is un-agile.
And there are better ways of doing it. And those organizations that have shifted away from project-based funding towards product or platform-based funding, or rolling budgets, or lean accounting, or throughput accounting—and I mean, there's a hundred different ways that you can do this. There's no one agile finance framework. But those organizations tend to be the most mature organizations out there when it comes to business agility.
KUMAR: Yeah, good to know. We—I don't know if this is something you want to talk about—the merger, merging Business Agility Institute?
EVAN: Here's the big news. As of today when we're recording this, this isn't public knowledge, but as of tomorrow—and this will be released after tomorrow—this will become public knowledge. And that is the Business Agility Institute and ICAgile are forming a new entity together called XtoA, taking your X factor—your human X factor—and using that to help you achieve your goals, the X factor to achievement.
And this idea of using the independence and the research of the Business Agility Institute—and the Business Agility Institute remains. We're not going away. We're the same great research organization, and we still study organizations. That's all happening. ICAgile doesn't go away. It remains that independent, credible education—what's the word I'm looking for?—certification, credentialing body, helping individuals and organizations with that educational pathway.
We remain as is, but this new entity that we are forming together gives us much more of an ability to support organizations on their journey, to give organizations greater clarity around "What is the DNA of a modern agile organization? And how can organizations strive towards that?"
So that's probably really the most exciting thing. And there's a lot—I know we're out of time. So I would just encourage people to go to xtoa.com, which will be live tomorrow—so live when this goes out—and learn more about what it is that is the newest, latest, and greatest work that we're doing.
KUMAR: That's wonderful. Yeah, I'm definitely going to check that out. And, you know, there's a podcast. You can always come back. We can talk more about it, and I look forward to more details on XtoA and how they can help—that can help individuals and organizations. Right. This is really geared to organizations that you mentioned—organizational DNA and how to sort of change that over time, evolve over time to be more business agile.
Amazing. I have one last question.
EVAN: Yes.
KUMAR: So at the top of this call, you mentioned sort of the results of the survey and 2025 being—bringing sort of uncertainty and volatility into the results. The data shows organizations pulling back on empowerment, trust, authoritarian leadership rising, not just politically but also within companies. For leaders who want to build genuine business agility despite the environment that we find ourselves in, where should they start? Which of the capabilities matter most right now?
EVAN: I wish we had another hour because we could go deep into that rise of authoritarianism and everything in business and so forth. But I have a very simple answer to your question, and that is to go back to the very first thing I was talking about: Theory of Constraints.
Every system, every organization has a constraining factor to their agility, and it's probably not technology anymore. The area, the capability that you need to focus on is, in your organization, the point of greatest constraint right now. That is going to be slightly different. For some organizations, it's the funding models. For some organizations, it's the performance management processes. For some organizations, it might be the agile processes are still outdated and they haven't caught up. Maybe delivery is the constraint, right? Maybe you're still at that point.
The truth of the matter is that the next place for you, as a listener, to focus is at the point of biggest constraint for you in this moment in time, noting that in six months it'll be somewhere else.
KUMAR: Wonderful. That's a great way to end the show and maybe an invite for you to come back on in the future, and we can talk—
EVAN: I hope so. I look forward to it.
KUMAR: All right. Thank you so much, Evan. Thanks for joining.
EVAN: No worries. Yeah, of course. Have a great day. I know it's the beginning of your day and the end of mine, so have a great rest of your day.
KUMAR: Thank you.
EVAN: Thank you.
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