What does it actually take to make a large-scale transformation work — not in theory, but documented, step by step, with the missteps left in? This case study follows the road to agile inside RWE: how a large, established organization began to change the way it makes decisions, collaborates, and learns, and what we learned in the process about doing it well.
Agile, in a context like this, is badly served by the usual clichés. It is not about adopting a framework or holding stand-up meetings. It is about shifting where decisions are made, how quickly the organization can sense and respond, and how much ownership teams genuinely carry. The hard part is never the ceremonies; it is the redistribution of authority and trust that real agility requires — and that is a leadership question first.
The case is honest about the road being uneven. Early enthusiasm met old structures; new team autonomy collided with established control mechanisms; and progress was rarely linear. What made the difference was treating these collisions not as failures but as information — each one revealed exactly where the system still pulled toward the old pattern, and therefore where the next piece of work lay.
I find documented cases like this more useful than abstract models, because they show the texture of real change: the sequencing, the trade-offs, the moments where leadership had to choose between comfort and progress. The point is not to copy the steps, but to recognise the underlying dynamics in your own context.
The full chapter is available to download below. Citation: Brandenberg, A., Stoppelenburg, P. (2018). The Road to Agile: Case Study, in: Stoppelenburg, P. (2018), The Essence of an Agile Organisation, Amsterdam, pp. 139–160. If you are early on your own road to agile, read it as a map of the terrain — including the parts most accounts leave out.
A transformation made to work — step by step.
If you take one principle from the case, let it be this: agility is the means, not the goal. The point was never to become agile for its own sake, but to help a large organization sense and respond faster to a changing world. Keeping that purpose in view stopped the effort from collapsing into ritual.
It also gave teams a way to judge, for themselves, whether a given practice was actually helping or merely adding ceremony. That self-correcting instinct — keep what serves the purpose, drop what does not — turned out to matter far more than any particular method we introduced.
Download the chapter (DOCX)