Hey there, digital warriors! ⚔️

Last month, the Italian Agile Movement delivered a whirlwind of inspiration, challenges, and breakthroughs within the #IAD24 conference. It was a privilege to share the stage with so many brilliant minds and to immerse myself in their ideas.

Some talks were truly profound, leaving a lasting impact. These are the kinds of sessions that demand to be shared more widely, but here’s the challenge: the videos on Vimeo can be hard to find, and most of them are in Italian. To make things even trickier, subtitles or transcripts in English aren’t enabled yet.

ℹ I’ve already asked the Italian Agile Movement to enhance the videos with English subtitles, opening the door for these powerful talks to reach a global audience. They are doing it right now 🙏🏻!

But in the meantime, let’s roll up our sleeves and make these gorgeous pieces a bit more accessible.

This post is my way of creating a space where these talks are celebrated, referenced, and shared beyond linguistic and platform barriers. But there’s another reason we’re here. After Episode 35, I teased a deep dive into behavioral engineering, promising something juicier. Then the #IAD24 videos dropped, and I received an overwhelming number of questions: “Where can I find your talk?” So, I decided to make a twist. Instead of diving into behavioral engineering this week, I’m dedicating this episode to highlighting #IAD24 and the brilliance that unfolded. We’ll get back on track with behavioral engineering in Episode 37. For now, let’s focus on celebrating the minds and ideas that made #IAD24 unforgettable.

🎫 Andrea Provaglio, Anna Di Girolamo, Paolo Sammicheli, and Roberto Bettazzoni—this is also an invitation to co-author articles together, expanding your brilliant insights for a global community. Let’s make these talks resonate far and wide.

Grab your popcorn, digital warriors! 🍿⚔️ Sit back 💺, relax (maybe with a beer 🍺 in hand), and let’s dive into #IAD24!

🎬 Behind the Scenes of My IAD24 Talk: A Revelation Years in the Making

Presenting “Stop Transforming, Start Evolving” at #IAD24 was a defining moment for me. After 14 years of relentless research and countless experiments, I finally managed to distill the holistic vision of Digital Evolution 🌱 into a 30-minute talk. This wasn’t just a summary of my journey—it was a call to action, challenging how we think about digital transformation and redefining it as a socio-technical evolution.

The essence of the talk lies in socio-technical evolution, where people and technology coalesce into a single, adaptable system. Disengaged teams transform into high-performing units by fostering environments of psychological safety and autonomy. With the right OKRs (Objective and Key Results) and KBIs (Key Behavior Indicators), this newfound delivery power is steered toward strategic goals, creating a cascade of benefits:

1. improved productivity 💪 and enjoyment 🥰
2. increased financial returns 💰
3. and higher customer satisfaction 💝

What sets the Unicorns’ Ecosystem apart is its data-driven behavioral engineering framework. This approach uses behavioral markers to precisely identify and rewire organizational inefficiencies and incongruences, aligning tactical behaviors with strategic goals. The result? Teams evolve naturally, without top-down enforcement, while financial decision-makers—Private Equity/Venture Capital leaders, CXOs, and board members—gain the clarity they need to govern effectively.

This isn’t just theory, dear digital warriors in the boardrooms. The Unicorns’ Ecosystem is a proven system, tested and continuously refined for over a decade. From startups to global giants, it has delivered measurable results across industries. And this is just the beginning. In the coming months, this newsletter will dive deeper into the experiments and case studies that brought this vision to life. You’ll see ROI-focused examples that demonstrate how socio-technical evolution turns organizations into ecosystems of sustained excellence.

But for now, let’s immerse ourselves in the session that brought all of this to the #IAD24 stage. Without further ado, here’s the recording of “Stop Transforming, Start Evolving.”

🎥 Unpacking the Manifesto - Deep Dive into Its True Essence

Andrea Provaglio’s talk, “Unpacking the Manifesto,” was a profound exploration of the manifesto’s origins, principles, and the unintended consequences of its commercialization. Through a mix of narrative, interviews with original signers, and critical analysis, Andrea laid bare how Agile’s foundational values have often been misunderstood or misapplied.

So, what can we take away from this eye-opening session? Let’s break it down.

1. Returning to the Roots: The Agile Manifesto was never intended as a rigid framework or a product to sell. Andrea’s research emphasises that its foundation lies in values and principles, which serve as guidelines for behavior rather than prescriptions for process. Agility isn’t about the rules we follow—it’s about how we adapt, collaborate, comunicate, and behave in the face of uncertainty. By focusing too much on frameworks and certifications, we risk losing sight of the manifesto’s original intent.
2. Critical Reflection: Andrea’s research delved into the let’s say commercialization of Agile, highlighting how the need to scale and productize it has often led to a dilution of its core values. This reflection wasn’t just criticism—it was a reminder to reassess our practices and ensure they align with the true spirit of agility.
3. Insights from the Founders: Through interviews with the manifesto’s original signers, Andrea brought fresh perspectives to the discussion. Hearing their reflections underscored the importance of agility as a mindset—one that thrives when values guide behaviors, not when processes dictate actions.

Andrea’s talk was an invitation to step back, reconnect with the essence of the Agile Manifesto, and question how we’ve let commercialization shape its application. For those in the PE/VC world considering Agile as a framework to boost the profitability of their IT portfolio, Andrea’s research and insights from some of the original signers are crucial. Agility isn’t about adopting rigid templates or certifications—it’s about fostering behaviors that drive adaptability, collaboration, and true value creation. Agility, at its core, is a living, breathing practice rooted in actions and decisions, not in predefined processes or mandated tools. It’s about enabling teams to thrive by aligning their work with principles that prioritize and optimise communication, understanding, and adaptability. This means looking beyond cookie-cutter frameworks and focusing on cultivating environments where teams can deliver exceptional results, guided by authentic agility.

This talk wasn’t just for Agile practitioners—it was a wake-up call for anyone seeking to lead or invest with authenticity in today’s fast-evolving, complex world. Another powerful demonstration of the paramount importance of applying behavioral engineering to the Digital Transformation landscape, avoiding cookie-cutter anti-patterns and unlocking true agility.

🎥 Curious to see these insights unfold? Watch Andrea’s talk!

🎥 The Transformation of the Food Sector: Agile Bread

Anna Di Girolamo’s talk, “The Transformation of the Food Sector: Agile Bread,” delivered a powerful message about the impact of shared ethical values on transformation. Unlike Andrea Provaglio’s session, which included segments in English, this talk is entirely in Italian. However, its universal lessons on purpose-driven agility resonate far beyond language barriers. Anna shared the inspiring story of the “Mercato del Pane (🇬🇧 Bread Marketplace)” and how a deep commitment to shared ethical values, passion, and openness transformed their local craft into something much greater. Let’s explore the key takeaways from this heartfelt session:

1. Purpose and Partnership as a Foundation: Before their transformation, the team behind the Mercato del Pane centered their efforts on partnerships built on shared ethical values. Purpose wasn’t just a guiding principle—it was the cornerstone of their journey.
2. Agility Without Frameworks: Their DNA, driven by purpose and authenticity, naturally led them to behave in an agile way. They didn’t need to follow Agile “by the book” or adopt a rigid framework. Instead, they embodied agility through their behaviors—and the wisdom of their transformation coach, Anna. Her guidance helped channel their passion and openness into a cohesive, values-driven journey that exemplified true agility.
3. Ethical Behaviors as Catalysts: The team shared their passion, love for excellence of their local resources, and openness to collaborate and share their secrets (recipes the most important secret in the gastronomy!) By making their craft public and accessible beyond their local reach, they created opportunities for others to engage with their values, success, secrets and approach.
4. Scaling Through Ethical Partnership: By partnering with others bread makers who shared the same mindset of openness and ethical business, the “Mercato del Pane” team scaled their efforts. What started in the small city of Pescara, nestled in the Apennines, grew into the “Fratelli del Pane (🇬🇧Bread Brothers)” partnership—a network of like-minded bread makers. This scaling wouldn’t have been possible without their shared purpose, ethical values and commitment.
5. From Local to Global Mindset: Through these partnerships, they reached an audience far beyond what a single group could achieve on its own. This journey demonstrates how shared purpose and collaboration can overcome geographic and operational limitations.

Anna’s story correlates deeply with our vision for ethical, holistic digital transformation. Just as the “Mercato del Pane” expanded through ethical partnerships, we are thrilled to announce our new collaborations with wise, transformational coaches who share our holistic, data-driven mindset for driving sustainable, purpose-driven digital evolutions.

🎥 Watch Anna’s talk!

🎥 Transforming Technical Debt: Eye-Opening Analogy

Roberto Bettazzoni’s talk, “Transforming Technical Debt into Competitive Advantage,” was a masterclass in bridging the gap between technical teams and business leaders. His analogy—treating technical debt as a real financial debt—was nothing short of transformative. By reframing technical debt in terms of repayment, interest, and long-term consequences, Roberto illuminated a concept that often gets lost in translation. His message was clear:

technical debt isn’t just an engineering problem—it’s a financial liability.

Left unmanaged, it silently erodes a company’s potential, growing into an expense that no board can ignore. Here’s why this should matters to you my digital warrior:

1. The Debt We Can’t Ignore: Roberto described technical debt not as an abstract technical problem but as a real debt to repay. Just as financial debt accumulates interest if left unmanaged, technical debt grows silently, compounding its impact over time. This analogy illuminated how tech debt manifests throughout the software lifecycle and why deliberate neglect can lead to catastrophic consequences.
2. A Call to Leadership: The most profound insight was how poorly technical debt is communicated to leadership and boards. Roberto highlighted a crucial gap: the language barrier. Tech debt’s consequences are rarely framed in a way that resonates with financial decision-makers, leading to its consistent dismissal—until it’s too late.
3. The High Cost of Neglect: Roberto’s examples painted a stark picture of what happens when tech debt is swept under the rug. The lifecycle of unmanaged debt often ends with product sunsetting and requests for massive budgets to rebuild from scratch. How many products could have been saved if the implications of tech debt were communicated effectively to those holding the purse strings?

Roberto’s talk was a revelation, sparking new ideas about how to address tech debt at the boardroom level. For PE/VC stakeholders and CXOs, the lesson is clear: technical debt must be reported and managed in a way that aligns with the language of leadership. Treating it as a financial liability makes it actionable and prevents the unnecessary loss of valuable products.

This talk wasn’t just a wake-up call for engineers—it was a plea for leaders to rethink how they approach the sustainability of their software investments.

🎥 Watch Roberto’s talk!

🎬 What’s Next? A Revolutionary Take on Refactoring and DDD

Before wrapping up, I want to give you a sneak peek into what’s coming. Two of our partners, Marco Consolaro and Attila Fejér , delivered two exceptional talks at #IAD24, which deserve their own dedicated spotlight. They don’t know this yet 😅, but we’ll soon collaborate to write an in-depth article at six hands!

The article will dive into connascence in code refactoring and the transformative power of extending DDD (Domain-Driven Design) from pure technical and product discussions to our holistic framework. This approach bridges the gap between developers, product teams, boards, and investors—a revolutionary concept fully aligned with our vision for holistic digital evolution.

We hope to showcase this groundbreaking work at Craft Conference 2025 in Budapest, where we’ve applied with a talk that brings these ideas to life. Stay tuned—it’s going to be a game-changer.

If you’re interested in all the other talks, here you can found them all: https://vimeo.com/italianagileday

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Thank you, digital warriors, for joining me on this journey through some of the brilliance of #IAD24. These talks weren’t just sessions; they were a reminder of the power of shared knowledge, purpose, and passion to enhance digital transformation to a new height.

Until next time, let’s

stop transforming—and start evolving 🌱.

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