The ability to navigate cultural dynamics is more than just a skill, it’s a crucial asset for leaders, teams, and organisations aiming to thrive internationally. My passion lies in fostering cross-cultural intelligence (CQ) as a developmental tool that empowers people to adapt, collaborate, and succeed globally. Drawing from personal experience and insights from companies like Netflix, where adaptability and a strong People & Culture (P&C) function are embedded into their DNA, I’ve seen firsthand how cultural awareness can shape success. 

Have you noticed more job specs that combine multiple roles, like Data Analyst, Digital Strategist, and Agile Coach, all into one? Do you think this trend is driven by cost-cutting measures, or is it a sign that businesses are seeking agile, multi-skilled talent to thrive in a fast-evolving market?

John Deere was facing some significant challenges in 2019, and so decided to launch an agile transformation initiative.  Implementing Agile IT Manufacturing with Scrum@Scale, Scrum, DevOps and a modernised Tech stack. Results far exceeded targets.

In this series of articles we explore how global businesses have adopted Agile Manufacturing to embrace an Industry 4.0 world. In this article we look at Novo Nordisk and explore how an agile transformation helped meet demand surges in a rapidly shifting pharma industry, to reach a market value of $500bn.

Novo Nordisk needed to shift their approach to business operations to tackle some of their greatest business challenges including…

Rebecca, Enterprise Agile Coach, ICAgile Agile in HR certified, reflects on her experience of the importance of People & Culture to support teams and leaders in navigating cultural dimensions, when working globally.

We're diving into a series of Q&A sessions featuring our esteemed colleagues and friends from the region. Here Rebecca Hudson, Enterprise Agile Coach, kicks off our inaugural Q&A series. Join us as we ignite a spirit of knowledge sharing within our agile community in 2024!

The idea for this Q&A session came from a number of organic conversations with colleagues and friends around challenges we were facing in our day-to-day roles. At the heart of so many of these challenges seemed to be issues with agile adoption and maturity. Each challenge had its own flavour.

There are some key reasons why high EI is important for leaders. These may seem obvious however, I’ve seen too many times individuals promoted quickly up the ladder who have excellent professional acumen, but poor emotional agility and little self-awareness.

A highly capable leader who feels they are doing their job to the highest level of excellence can still fail themselves, their company and their team if they lack the essential skills of high emotional intelligence.

We’re at an exciting time of evolution in the Middle East economy. A time when businesses & governments must look to future-proof themselves and their people. Transforming a ‘workforce’ into a future-proofed talent-base fuelled by ongoing investment in upskilling and cross-skilling, can evolve businesses into learning organisations. This creates the right environment for innovation to future-proof companies.

I am part of the ‘Agile Industrial Complex’. However, I’ve always had the same frustration - knowing that what works will only be determined by listening to teams, and frequently seeing this not happen.

In this article I explore what is meant by ‘The Agile Industrial Complex’, and how we can shift the needle back towards the true principles of agile, and away from off-the-shelf models.

Why would teams buy-in to something that they haven’t helped shape? Especially when the benefits have not been made clear or worse, there are no clear benefits to them. In the context of agile adoption at a team level, or agile transformation at a department or company level, a culture shift is involved. This can be hard to define.

In this article I’ll look at some tools and approaches to support agile adoption through sensitive change management.

Agile is gaining increasing adoption throughout organisations. Agile methods have moved beyond just software development. However, there’s ongoing confusing as to what is meant by Agile Adoption vs. Agile Transformation and Digital Transformation vs. Agile Adoption or Transformation. In this post I’ll try highlight the differences and interrelationships between them, in simple terms.

Rebecca provides her tactics for shifting the needle. She recommends not to simply ‘do’ Agile but encode Agile into the DNA of your team. Companies in the UAE are hungry for transformation across their digital ecosystems. There is a significant point of failure which is about the perception that an organisation is Agile, when the reality is that they are ‘doing’ Agile but not truly being Agile.