This article is based on a report originally published on devops.com, covering an event hosted by Transavia and organised by CIO Platform Nederland and the DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA).
The Challenge: Becoming Fit for the Future
Many organisations have already embarked—or are about to embark—on Agile and DevOps transformation initiatives, driven by growing competitive and business demands. An event co-organised by CIO Platform Nederland and the DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA), hosted by Dutch airline Transavia, brought together leaders to share practical experiences from two major Dutch organisations: Transavia and ABN AMRO.
The core question was straightforward but hard to answer: Is your organisation truly fit for the future? The discussion made clear that technical tooling and process frameworks alone will not get you there. The real work lies in culture, leadership behaviour, and sustainable mindset change.
The late Robert Stroud, former analyst at Forrester, framed the urgency well: “To unlock the promise of DevOps, CIOs must lead and support a cultural change within their technology management organisation, but as any leader knows, changing institutionalized behavior is the toughest of all management challenges. CIOs must recognize when a trend becomes an imperative for survival. DevOps has become this imperative.”
Lessons from Transavia: People First, Behaviours Second
Rik Farenhorst, CIO of Transavia and chairman of the DASA Leadership Forum, shared lessons from Transavia’s transformation journey. His central argument: organisations place too much faith in structure, processes, and automation, hoping that the right culture will simply emerge. It does not.
Farenhorst’s three key messages were:
- People first — transformation is a human endeavour before it is a technical one.
- Live your values — stated values must be translated into observable, day-to-day behaviours.
- Lead by example — leadership credibility depends on visible, consistent behaviour, not communications.
A concrete example of leading by example was the leadership team’s adoption of daily standups combined with visual management of strategic priorities. This practice built situational awareness, shared understanding, and genuine commitment across the organisation.
Farenhorst also acknowledged a reality that many transformation programmes ignore: not all teams mature at the same speed. Accepting this and adjusting coaching and leadership styles accordingly is critical to sustainable progress.
Lessons from ABN AMRO: From Agile to BizDevOps
Matthijs Dee and Ivo Carton from ABN AMRO described their journey from Agile to DevOps. Two themes echoed Transavia’s experience: teams mature at different speeds, and inter-team knowledge sharing is essential.
ABN AMRO developed a DevOps playbook—a practical toolkit that teams could use to assess and improve their own capabilities. Rather than mandating a single transformation path, the playbook gave teams a structured set of options to draw from at their own pace.
One of ABN AMRO’s most significant challenges was moving away from command-and-control and traditional hierarchical management models toward new leadership styles. Their conclusion was that the scope of change needed to go beyond IT: it had to encompass the business. This gave rise to their focus on BizDevOps—the recognition that DevOps is not only about writing and deploying code, but about delivering measurable business value end-to-end.
Three Key Takeaways: DevOps Will Fail Unless…
A presentation drawing on findings from more than 400 global teams who had participated in Phoenix Project DevOps simulations identified three practical takeaways for organisations attempting transformation.
1. Shift from Features to Outcomes (BizDevOps)
The first priority is reframing the flow of work. Organisations must move from a “code-to-commit” mindset to an “idea-to-value” mindset—measuring success not by features shipped but by business outcomes delivered. This shift was identified as one of the top challenges at the most recent DevOps Enterprise Summit at the time of the event.
2. Define and Commit to Desired Behaviours
Both Transavia and ABN AMRO pointed to the same challenge: articulating values or principles is not enough. Organisations must translate those values into specific, agreed-upon behaviours—for teams and for leaders. What does effective collaboration actually look like in practice? What does psychological safety look like when a deployment fails at 2am? These questions need explicit answers, not implicit assumptions.
3. Embed Continual Learning as a Core Behaviour
DevOps transformation is not a project with a defined end state—it is an ongoing journey of iterative improvement. Mike Orzen, author of Lean IT, put it clearly: “Improving your work is just as important as doing your work.” This means improvement work must be made visible in team backlogs, and leaders must protect time for it. Improvement should not be squeezed out by delivery pressure.
Culture Breakout: The Hardest Conversations
Three breakout sessions followed the presentations: “Value Creation and Management,” “Organisational Design – Agile/DevOps at Scale,” and “Sustainable Culture Change.” The culture session surfaced some of the most honest and practically useful discussions of the day. The key themes are summarised below.
Empowerment Across Management Layers
A recurring concern was how a CIO’s vision gets diluted as it passes through management layers before reaching teams on the ground. Suggested approaches included management by walking around—leaders being physically visible on the shop floor, listening to concerns rather than broadcasting direction, and entering into genuine dialogue about goals and what they mean for individuals.
Addressing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)
Teams facing new ways of working frequently experience FUD: What will this mean for my job? My responsibilities? Can I actually do this? Leaders must actively remove FUD by creating a genuinely safe environment—safe to experiment, safe to fail, and safe to speak up. A no-blame culture is not a slogan; it requires consistent, visible behaviour from leadership over time.
Psychological Safety: The “It” Factor
Google’s internal research project known as Project Aristotle (2012) investigated why some teams consistently outperform others. The most significant finding was that psychological safety—a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—was the single most important factor in team effectiveness. Specifically: a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.
This finding directly validates the emphasis on no-blame culture and safe experimentation that both Transavia and ABN AMRO identified in their own transformations.
Team Training, Not Just Individual Training
Individual skills training is necessary but not sufficient. Teams need to learn how to work together—which means investing in team-level training that addresses soft skills: communication, giving and receiving feedback, and effective collaboration. Technical capability without these skills produces capable individuals working at cross-purposes.
The “Why” Must Connect to “What’s in It for Me?”
Organisations often adopt Agile, DevOps, or Lean as goals in themselves. The breakout discussion challenged this directly: Are these approaches a destination, or a means of solving specific problems and delivering specific results? And how do those results connect to the strategic goals of the business?
Crucially, the “why” must be translated into a personal answer for every stakeholder group—business leaders, IT managers, team members, and customers. Without that connection, commitment to the journey is shallow and vulnerable to the first setback.
Dealing with Silent Killers and Heroes
Not everyone wants to change, and some individuals actively—if quietly—work against transformation. Leaders need the skills to identify these “silent killers”: behaviours that sit below the waterline and undermine team progress.
The discussion also addressed the “hero” problem: individuals whose indispensability masks a dependency that prevents team maturity. Two approaches were discussed—either removing the dependency (metaphorically or literally) or redirecting the hero’s energy toward coaching and knowledge sharing to build broader T-shaped capabilities across the team.
Change Champions and Authentic Leadership
Identifying and empowering “change champions” within teams—individuals with peer-level respect who believe in the transformation—can be more effective than top-down mandates. Giving these individuals a platform, recognising their contributions, and celebrating team successes that result from new behaviours helps shift cultural norms organically.
Authenticity was also raised as non-negotiable. Leaders who want to build trust must demonstrate empathy that is real, listen to concerns and act on them, admit when they do not have all the answers, and show their own vulnerability. If behaviour is perceived as performative, trust evaporates faster than it was built.
What C-Level Leaders, Managers, and Teams Each Need
The event’s clearest conclusion was that different levels of the organisation require different capability investments:
- C-level leaders must develop new skills and demonstrate new behaviours—particularly around empowerment, vulnerability, and systemic thinking.
- Middle management layers must invest in organisational behaviour management: understanding what drives team behaviour and how to create sustainable change, not just compliance.
- Teams must develop not only DevOps technical skills but also team-building and soft skills—and must be given the time and safety to do so.
Summary
The event made one thing clear: the technical aspects of DevOps and Agile transformation are the easier part. The harder, more consequential work is cultural—and it requires deliberate investment in leadership behaviour, psychological safety, inter-team learning, and a shared understanding of why the transformation matters to every stakeholder involved.
CIO Platform Nederland and DASA committed to organising follow-up events and sharing experiences from member organisations to continue addressing these challenges.