Releasing Agility
Agility cannot be installed or bought. This essay introduces Releasing Agility — the idea that lasting change begins with meaning, leadership, and human systems, not frameworks.
Editor’s note: This essay introduces one of the central ideas behind Cultivated’s work — that lasting change begins not with frameworks, but with meaning.
Releasing Agility
A CIO once leaned across the table, shook her head, and said:
“We’ve spent £20 million on agile training, frameworks, tooling — the whole circus. And do you know what? We’re no more agile than before. Honestly, I think we’ve gone backwards.”
She wasn’t angry.
She was weary — the kind of tired that comes from fighting the same battle year after year.
That moment stayed with me.
Because she was right.
Agility isn’t installed.
It isn’t bought.
It isn’t rolled out in neat, branded playbooks.
Agility is released.
The full, current articulation of the model now lives here → Releasing Agility (Sensemaking Tool).
When I Got It Wrong
I wasn’t immune to the same mistake.
Earlier in my career, I believed that if I put the right framework in place — the right ceremonies, dashboards, and rituals — performance would follow.
I tried it in HR. We went all in.
What followed wasn’t momentum.
It was six months of friction, awkwardness, and frustration.
Until something shifted.
The framework wasn’t the answer.
The team was.
When people began shaping the work around the real problems in front of them — problems connected to a future they actually cared about — progress returned.
That’s when it landed for me:
Agility is not a framework problem.
It is a management problem.
When I shared that thought with the CIO later, she nodded.
“Exactly. We were never short on smart people. We were short on leaders willing to change how they managed.”
What “Releasing Agility” Really Means
To release is to unlock what is already there.
Releasing agility is not about importing practices from the outside.
It is about creating the conditions in which adaptability, learning, and momentum can emerge from within — in service of a future people believe in.
Most organisations are not short on intelligence.
They are short on alignment.
They have energy, but it is trapped inside misdirected effort, unclear purpose, and exhausted systems.
Agility already exists inside the organisation.
The work is to remove what is constraining it.
Why Frameworks Often Fail
Frameworks promise certainty.
They offer structure, terminology, and reassurance.
But they quietly treat people as components to be rearranged rather than agents to be engaged.
When meaning is absent, practices become rituals.
When care is absent, metrics replace judgement.
When leadership does not change, nothing else truly does.
You cannot mechanise your way to movement.
Releasing Before Optimising
Releasing agility begins further upstream than most change programmes are willing to look.
Before processes.
Before tools.
Before operating models.
It begins with:
- leadership behaviour
- clarity of purpose
- trust and psychological safety
- permission to learn and adapt
These are not soft concerns.
They are the infrastructure of movement.
Without them, no system can stay adaptive for long.
The Origin of the Model
This insight eventually became the foundation of what I now call Releasing Agility.
Not as another framework.
But as a lens for sense-making.
A way of understanding why so many transformation efforts stall — and where real momentum actually comes from.
The Living Model
Editor’s note: This essay captures the origins of the Releasing Agility idea. The current, complete articulation of the model now lives here:
Releasing Agility: A Sensemaking Tool for Meaningful Change
That page represents the latest edition of the work and the best place to begin if you are exploring business agility today.
Closing
Agility is not something you buy.
It is not a silver bullet.
It is leadership, behaviour, clarity — and the ongoing work of solving the right problems together.
Everything else is packaging.
