On the surface, the problem appears to be an execution issue. Teams adopt Agile practices, but the benefits don’t translate into business outcomes. Dig deeper, and the issue is systemic. Governance, planning, and prioritisation — the core management controls of the enterprise — are still wired for a different era. They’re optimised for certainty and prediction, not adaptability.
Until those controls are reframed, Agile remains stuck in pockets of the organisation, never fully connected to strategy or outcomes.
At Radically, we’ve seen this pattern across organisations of every size. The ones that finally crack it aren’t those that double down on ceremonies or tooling. They’re the ones that reimagine governance as a bridge between the executive table and delivery teams.
Research confirms this as one of the key reasons why Agile fails at scale. In a BCG study, 86% of “truly agile” companies made significant changes in governance, compared to only 38% of those that stalled in “illusory agility.” In other words, structure and process changes aren’t enough — governance is the differentiator.
Why Agile Fails at the Enterprise Level
Agile almost always starts at the delivery layer. Teams adopt new ways of working, leaders run pilot projects, and early wins are celebrated. However, when it's time to scale, friction sets in.
Executives still expect certainty in annual plans. Governance forums still reward compliance over outcomes. Prioritisation occurs through negotiation and politics, rather than through strategic clarity. The result is misalignment: delivery runs fast, but it isn’t connected to where the organisation is really trying to go.
We saw this at a large New Zealand bank. Six years after implementing a new Agile operating model, they were struggling to execute their strategy effectively. Half of the bank worked on Agile projects, while the other half worked on traditional projects. Governance evolved into a patchwork of fixes to address immediate problems, resulting in unnecessary complexity and friction. The core issue wasn’t whether Agile worked — it was that the system of governance couldn’t translate strategy into coordinated action.
Reframing Agile as Strategy, Not Delivery
Enterprise Agile isn’t a methodology – it is an operating model.
That shift in perspective is crucial. When leaders see Agile as “just delivery,” it gets siloed at the bottom of the organisation. But when it’s treated as a way to operationalise strategy, it becomes the connective tissue between intent and outcomes.
This is how Mercury approached their integration with Trustpower. Instead of layering Agile on top of existing structures, we redesigned the operating model itself. That meant aligning governance forums, planning cadences, and leadership behaviours so that strategy could flow seamlessly into delivery. The result? The programme was judged NZ Business Transformation of the Year, with one judge calling it “a masterclass in laying the right foundations for success”.
The Missing Middle: Where Scaling Models Go Wrong
Here’s why Agile fails at scale: scaling frameworks try to standardise the enterprise to fit the model. Business units are redesigned to map neatly against value streams, or governance is rebuilt around a predefined cadence. It looks neat on paper, but rarely sticks in practice.
Why? Because organisations resist being forced into someone else’s structure. People know when controls have been imported rather than designed for context. The “missing middle” — the layer between executive intent and team delivery — becomes a battleground of resistance.
Recent research comparing SAFe, LeSS, and other scaling models found little difference in outcomes once team maturity and organisational size were controlled. In other words, no model guarantees success. What matters is how governance and organisational design are tailored to the context.
What works instead is using organisational design and governance as the careful stitching that connects strategy to execution. Fit-for-purpose controls respect context: they flex with the nature of the business, the regulatory environment, and the culture. Instead of forcing delivery teams to bend to the model, they create connective tissue that allows executives and teams to operate as one system.
Fit-for-Purpose Controls: Governance, Planning, Prioritisation
For Agile to work at scale, management controls must evolve.
Governance
Traditional governance is designed to eliminate variance. It locks in plans, tracks deviations, and escalates exceptions. In adaptive organisations, governance shifts to alignment. The question isn’t “are we on plan?” but “are we on strategy?”
This means governance forums that focus on outcomes, not outputs. It means a regular cadence of alignment where executives and teams can course-correct based on new information, not just report against last year’s assumptions. Without clarity in governance channels, strategy fulfilment suffers.
Planning
Annual planning cycles are too blunt an instrument for today’s pace of change. By the time budgets are locked, the context has shifted. We help organisations move to rolling, adaptive planning. This enables executives to establish strategic intent and empowers teams to adapt delivery as conditions change.
At Origin Energy, this shift was transformative. By redesigning governance and planning, they reduced internal friction, increased cross-team alignment, and built the ability to respond faster than competitors.
Prioritisation
Most organisations don’t have a prioritisation problem; they have a clarity problem. Without a clear definition of value, decisions default to politics, personalities, or pet projects.
Modern operating models solve this by linking prioritisation directly to strategy. Work is continuously assessed against outcomes, not effort.
At a large bank we are working with, one breakthrough moment occurred when we simplified their model, allowing 95% of work to be prioritised within defined value streams. This created both speed and confidence in decision-making.
Together, governance, planning, and prioritisation form the real backbone of agility. They are the management controls that keep organisations both adaptive and accountable.
The Leadership Reframe
Agile fails when leaders see governance as control. It succeeds when leaders see governance as clarity.
The real challenge isn’t getting teams to run Sprints or adopt stand-ups. It’s creating a system where executives, managers, and teams are aligned around outcomes, with the freedom and discipline to adjust course.
That takes courage. It means letting go of old rituals of certainty and replacing them with practices that feel less familiar, but far more effective. It means designing governance not to protect the past, but to accelerate the future.
The organisations that have done this — Mercury, Origin, ASB — are now delivering strategy faster, with lower cost, and higher engagement. They’re proof that Agile does work at scale, but only when leaders are willing to reframe the controls that shape how work gets done.
Ready to Reframe?
If you’re a manager responsible for your organisation’s system of work, the opportunity is clear. Reframing governance, planning, and prioritisation isn’t just about fixing delivery. It’s about building a modern operating model that finally connects strategy with outcomes.
If this resonates with what you’re seeing in your business, I’d love to hear from you. At Radically, we help leaders reframe governance, planning, and prioritisation so strategy flows seamlessly into outcomes.
Contact me directly to explore how we can bridge the gap between your executive table and delivery teams — and make Agile work at scale.