Business Led Agile
James Chapman
Founder
Well it is now 2026 and this month Agile is 25 years old. But for all its successes in those 25 years, many of us feel that Agile has lost its way. A lot of people even like to say that Agile is dead.
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I don't agree with them. I don't believe that Agile is dead, but I do think it is time for Agile to seriously step up and fulfil its potential as a strategic partner for business effectiveness, rather than simply a better delivery framework
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The promise of Agile was never about ceremonies, sprints, or story points. It was about making businesses more effective, more competitive, and more resilient—businesses that know how to turn the right work into measurable economic impact.​
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I see Agile2026 as the moment to reclaim that promise. Not by adding more process, but by restoring strategic accountability, accelerating learning, and and creating commercial clarity where it matters most: revenue, cost, margin, risk reduction, and market position.
Kristin Niemeir
Head of Agility
We always knew that James would bring a huge amount experience to Hilti, as well as proven Agile patterns, but what distinguished him from other Agile Coaches and Consultants was the language he used. He talks and he thinks as much as a business leader, as he does an Agile practitioner.
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This was a big difference for us. From the moment he started working with us, James helped us to position Agile not simply as a delivery model, but as a strategic driver for business effectiveness, and especially in the digital domain. He taught us how to talk about Agile in a way that made sense to the business itself and not just to the the delivery teams.
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With James's help, we have been able to develop a disparate group of Scrum Masters into a serious cohort of Agile coaches who the business listens to. As a result, we are finding the business taking us more seriously and starting to exhibit a willingness to embrace the degree of change in our operating models that we need for Agile to be truly effective.
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And if I may say on a personal note, not only has James been a trusted advisor and confidant, but he has also become a close and valued personal friend. I’m truly appreciative of all he has helped me accomplish.
Daniel Manero
Global Lean Manager
I worked with James at Hilti in the Global Agile Team for over two years. In short, he is the most experienced and impactful (agile) coach I have worked with.
What distinguishes James is not only his depth of expertise, but his mindset. He is a true sparring partner—challenging others while being fully open to challenge himself. That combination of confidence, humility and intellectual honesty is rare, especially at his level of experience.
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James operates effortlessly across all layers of an organization. He helps leaders truly understand their role in transformation while staying close to teams and earning their trust rather than assuming it. His work consistently connects business agility to real business outcomes—OKRs, focus, impact mapping and rollout strategies—combining strategic clarity with hands-on, operable implementation.
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A core driver in James’s work is developing his peers: helping them grow, widen their perspectives, and find ways to take their thinking and impact to the next level while promoting the interaction within the agile team. He is neither yes-sayer nor framework evangelist, but a mentor and partner for people who are serious about learning and change.
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I am looking forward to working with James again, anytime, without hesitation.
Patrick Greer
Agile Coach
My pride won't let me say that we were lost neophytes when James joined our team, but I also couldn't say we didn't need some guidance. When James joined, we were in a time of transition. We were a bigger team, for one, and in that bigger team we had a lot of difference of opinion, a lot of differences of belief, and that diverse set of experiences and beliefs didn't always harmonise.
We were also beginning to transition to other parts of the organisation, getting exposure to different environments and different business contexts that, if we were honest with ourselves, we didn't quite understand. And the business itself was changing. We were no longer just scrum masters in our e-commerce silo, but we were part of a global marketing organisation with a lot of different moving parts that we didn't quite get.
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So yeah, we needed some guidance and mentorship to figure out how we fit into all of this to figure out, in this changing environment, what is the value we bring. And I'm really glad that mentorship came from James. James has a rigour of thought combined with some beliefs that really sharpened our ability as an agile cohort.
He lifted us up to kind of meet the moment. We've come a long way in the years that James was part of our team, and there's still a lot of work left to do, but with James's contribution to what we are, and what we can do, we are more equipped than ever to do it. Thanks to James.
About James Chapman and Business Led Agile
Why, How, What—My purpose and personal philosophy
Why
​In the 25 years since its inception, as a simple two-page manifesto, Agile has grown into a vast industry, and one that is utterly exhausted by its own extravagance. As a long-time Agile advocate, I have found myself sadly watching something that once had enormous potential, inexorably lose its way.
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What began as a revolution—a movement born from courage, clarity, and a belief that people working together could change the way business works—has over time become theatre. Ceremonies without conviction, frameworks without thought, and consultants who are out for themselves and not for the businesses they are supposed to serve.
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I created Business Led Agile seven years ago, during what was arguably the lowest point in my career as an Agile Coach. I could see that for all the improvements we were making to team delivery (and they were very real improvements) there was simply no business agility in either the wider organisation or the external supplier who was promoting Agile. Everything was about delivery, and nothing was about business effectiveness.
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It became clear to me that there can be no true Agile delivery without a corresponding Agile ask from the business. That realisation led me to create the DemandAgile! portfolio management pattern. Turning ideas I had helped evolve in earlier engagements, into a coherent working model.
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My subsequent work gave me the chance to build on those foundations and prove that a genuinely business-led approach to Agile could restore the connection between purpose, product, and performance. And somewhere along that journey, I realised something crucial: it wasn’t Agile itself that had died, but what we had allowed it to become.
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After twenty years, I think I’ve earned the right—and perhaps the responsibility—to speak openly about what has gone wrong and how more importantly how to put it right. My purpose now is simple: to restore integrity, intelligence, and humanity to the way organisztions work. To help them find again what made Agile powerful in the first place: not process but principles, not frameworks but freedom, not speed, but substance.
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That is why I do this work. Not to lead a new movement, but to help the original one finally live up to its promise.
How
​I don’t teach frameworks. I teach language and I teach thinking. Agile isn’t a process to be installed, it is a capability to be grown. I work with leaders and teams to rebuild that capability from the inside out, using a discipline of Socratic inquiry—asking the questions that reveal the unspoken logic beneath decisions, assumptions, and patterns of behaviour.
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At the core of my work are five non-negotiable principles that shape every engagement:
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Product—a focus on creating measurable outcomes that matter, not just completing outputs
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Learning—treating uncertainty as fuel, not friction, through disciplined experimentation
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Flow—optimising the movement of work and value across the system
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Autonomy—trusting small, motivated teams to decide and act within clear intent
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Alignment—ensuring that autonomy serves shared goals, and doesn’t descend into chaos
These are not simply theories. They are the operating logic of modern business—a way of thinking that turns Agile from a delivery method into a strategic advantage—and they form a lens through which coherent action is focused on achieving strategic goals.
What
​​In practice, the work that I do takes many forms—from strategic resets to executive coaching and Agile business language training–but the intent is always the same. To help people and organisations rediscover Agile as the driver of business effectiveness.
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I typically work with companies that are three to five years into their transformation—those who have done all the ceremonies, bought all the tools, and still feel stuck and often a little lost. Together, we diagnose what’s blocking true agility and start to evolve a simpler, smarter operating model that links purpose, through outcome, to impact.
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I may bring with me proven, field-tested patterns, developed and evolved through real work with real teams. But the real value isn’t in the patterns themselves—it’s in how we use them to think, decide, and act. Because agility is not a destination. It’s a discipline. A discipline built on clarity, curiosity, and courage. And that is my passion.