Louise Higgins joins Mark and Eric to explore what it really takes to lead large-scale transformation. From tech-finance partnerships to cultural integration, she shares candid lessons on empathy, pace, and executive presence. Whether navigating M&A or shaping the future of banking, Lou reminds us: it’s not just what you change—it’s how you lead through it.

“Just as delegation is a skill that can get taught to leaders and often is, the ability to take ownership is a skill that needs to be developed in people, and organizations often do not invest in training that.” - Evan Leybourn In this episode, we are joined by Evan Leybourn, the founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute. Evan has been a thought leader in the realm of Business Agility since 2008, advocating for organizations to rethink how they operate, lead, and govern to becom...

“Often, there’s a real lack of clarity about where we are now. And it can be a very uncomfortable, painful set of truths that people don’t want to face. But to create progress, you need to face uncomfortable truths and understand where you’re starting from." - Natalie Field In this episode, we’re joined by Natalie Field. Nat recently commenced as CEO of Informed Decisions and has accrued a wealth of portfolio leadership experience over the course of her career. Highlights include serving as t...

"Real strategy deployment empowers teams to act on strategic intent with ownership and clarity." - Karl Scotland We’re joined by Strategy Deployment expert Karl Scotland in this episode. Karl helps businesses become Learning Organisations through outcome-oriented, continuous transformation, engaging everyone, everywhere. Over the last 20+ years, he has been an advocate of Lean and Agile approaches to achieve this, working with companies including the BBC, Yahoo!, EMC Consulting, Rally S...

"So on any given day, I’m just managing those planes and flight patterns and trying to make sense and create that sequencing of road maps. Or at least highlight, hey, you’re not going to achieve that, because this strategy over here in this portfolio isn’t even thinking that way” - Christine Babowicz When we decided to start inviting guests to join us, we were passionate about finding people with real lived experience to share their hard-won insights and wisdom. We were very grate...

“The right collective organization tends to have fewer blind spots, because, by definition, a team is a transactional memory system of sufficient predictive power that we can know how to work together” - Luke Hohmann When we decided to start inviting interesting guests to join our portfolio conversations, Luke Hohmann was an obvious first choice. Luke is a four time author, three time founder, SAFe® Fellow, keynote speaker, and internationally recognized expert in Agile Software Develo...

"The journey to get there isn’t easy. The outcomes, when it works, are pretty amazing and unbelievable, but you’ll find a whole new set of problems you never imagined could go wrong" Eric Willeke With the initial arc complete, this episode adopts a new perspective triggered by our conversations at the SAFe Summit in Berlin. We step into the shoes of portfolio members, embarking on a lean journey. The conversation begins by exploring how their first steps into lean portfolio management will lo...

"You get a mad underspend in Q1; then you spend Q2 and Q3 trying to catch up on the questions about your Q1 underspend. This is variation waste, and causes massive issues in terms of the ability of the system to absorb the work" - Mark Richards In this episode, we turn our attention to the application of lean to Portfolio Operations and Governance. Eric focuses on improving flow, while Mark wants to reduce waste. We start by looking at aggregating and analyzing patterns from portfolio members...

"In most cases, the portfolio itself is under a fog of war. You can't actually see what's going on unless you take your telescope and really zoom in on an area" - Eric Willeke This episode concludes the initial six-part arc laying the foundations of lean portfolio management. The first five episodes were devoted to building a clear picture of your portfolio ecosystem. Picture in hand, we explore the insights it might yield and the ensuing interventions they should trigger. The conversation dw...

"It's common for people to say they have a platform strategy that doesn't necessarily resemble a platform strategy so much as a center of dependency hell" - Mark Richards In Episode 3, we explored the influence of Moore's Zone to Win model on understanding the portfolio ecosystem. Episode 4 explored the role of purpose, context, and structure in modeling the ecosystem you have and starting to look at it through Lean eyes. In this episode, we combine these ideas with the portfolio examples def...

"Create the visualizations that are going to be useful, do some cleanup work to create the space for people to think a little more deeply, and then make sure you don't waste their time so they can put some wins on the board" - Eric Willeke With our love of strategy off the leash in Episode 3, we continue down the path this episode. We explore why strategy matters so much to portfolio design. This provides a bridge to understanding how portfolios evolve and change over time, the critical chara...

"I don't want to have a minnow next to a minotaur because the minnow is never going to feature in the conversation" - Mark Richards This is the first episode where we deep-dive into strategy. Whether your portfolio is shaping a strategy or deploying one shaped elsewhere, you need tools to contextualize it in the overall enterprise. We take horizon-based investment and Geoffrey Moore's Zone to Win model and explore what happens when you use it as a conceptual model for your portfolio ecosystem...

"In nearly half of the cases I can think of, the things that the teams most hate providing to governance are the same things the governance team doesn't actually want and doesn't know how to tell the teams to stop providing" - Eric Willeke This episode dives into the 'Lean' aspect of lean portfolio management. It begins with a brief exploration of lean and systems thinking and their focus on optimizing the whole, improving flow, and reducing waste. We then 'put our lean ha...

"Start with questions that paint a picture of today before you try painting a picture of tomorrow" - Mark Richards In this podcast's first episode, we lay the foundations for exploring Lean Portfolio Management. We start with a high-level overview of portfolios and their uses and share our stories of first encountering them. From there, we dig into the few key definitions and elements we feel are critical to setting the stage for the show's arc before diving into the tension...