Two Speeds, One Organization | Definitely Maybe Agile

Something is shifting inside organizations right now. AI is compressing the time it takes to generate, validate, and prototype ideas. Some people inside your org are moving at a completely different speed than the systems built to support them. Peter and Dave are calling it the great decoupling, and it's already happening whether you've noticed it or not. When you map the end-to-end journey from idea to live product, you often find 30 to 40 distinct steps. AI is handling a handful of them. The rest? Still waiting on decisions, reviews, and handoffs that haven't changed in years. Development isn't the main blocker anymore. Decision latency is. In this episode, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock dig into why acceleration in one part of a system creates pressure everywhere else. They talk through what it looks like when product managers are running parallel experiments and validating ideas in hours, then slamming into unchanged processes for security sign-off, change control, and release management. And why the smartest people on your team are quietly finding workarounds rather than waiting in line, which creates more risk, not less. This isn't a conversation about AI hype. It's about the real organizational friction that shows up when the pace of work outgrows the systems designed to manage it. And what you can actually do about it. Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:19 - What is the great decoupling? 1:53 - AI is making experimentation faster. But only inside your workspace 2:53 - Where it slows down in regulated organizations 3:45 - Why even mature tech organizations still have a weeks-long lag 5:18 - Theory of constraints: why speeding up one part breaks the rest 6:30 - Operations is feeling it too 8:10 - Mapping 40 steps from idea to live product 9:12 - Alignment and decisions are still human work 10:10 - The cultural disconnect is getting wider 11:31 - Why escalating faster triggers the organizational immune system 12:46 - When two-week sprints start feeling like a relic 13:34 - The startup dynamic is now happening inside established orgs 15:01 - Why smart people find workarounds instead of waiting in line 15:51 - What incremental delivery was always supposed to solve 17:03 - Key takeaways 18:44 - Where to find us This Week's Takeaways: Acceleration in one part of the system creates stress everywhere else Map the end-to-end flow before you optimize any single part If it's happening inside your organization, you need to deal with it internally Connect with us: Website: definitelymaybeagile.com Email: [email protected] If this episode was useful, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And if you know someone sitting at one of those 40 steps wondering why everything feels stuck, share this with them. A like or comment goes a long way in helping more people find the show. #Agile #DevOps #ProductManagement #DigitalTransformation #ValueStreamMapping #AI #LeanThinking #BusinessAgility #SoftwareDelivery #SystemsThinking