Align Your Operating Model With Your Strategy

Creating Agile organizations

Evolve your agile operating model.

Is your organization strugling to adapt to market changes, hindering your strategy execution?

Align strategy and organization design with a proven, systemic, and context driven approach.

What is CAO?

CAO | Creating Agile Organizations Logo

CAO is a systemic approach to organization design that uses guides, axioms, and principles to build agile capabilities for strategy execution.

Design for Strategic Agility 

Break Free from rigid frameworks that don’t reflect your organization’s unique dynamics.

Move from team agility to full-scale adaptability to empower your teams to efficiently achieve your goals

Evolve your tailored operating model with a clear, effective pathway to your strategic objectives.

Empower your teams to take ownership and accountability, reducing dependence on external guidance. 

Drive outcomes by aligning the organizational model directly with your strategic goals.

The CAO guide

Navigating agile organization design with the free CAO guide.

Transform your organization today: Dive into the cao guide and master the art of agile organization design! Learn the foundational elements, principles, and axioms to navigate the complexities of today’s business world. Download the CAO guide now and begin your journey towards organizational agility and success!

To access your free CAO Guide and keep updated on the latest CAO developments, please enter your details below.

Mockup CAO guide

The CAO approach

Evolve Your Agile Operating Model

It’s time to stop trying to scale agile with frameworks, and start evolving our operating model to fit our strategies and empower our teams. This shift leads to a dynamic organization that continually evolves and improves.

Watch the 3 min video of the CAO approach by Cesario Ramos CAO co-creator.

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#1

Align with Your Strategic Focus: Discover the essential capabilities required to effectively execute your strategy. Understanding these capabilities allows you to create a robust foundation for organizational success.

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#2

Identify Capability Gaps: Learn how to recognize and address the weaknesses in your organization. This knowledge is crucial in strengthening your operational effectiveness and strategic execution.

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#3

Start with the Product Definition: Optimize your organization for success by clearly defining your products, services and groups. Then design to close the capability gap.

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#4

Utilize DAO Design Guides: Make informed decisions with our DAO Organization Design Guides. These guides are instrumental in helping you close capability gaps over time, ensuring that your organization remains agile and responsive.

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#5

Prepare & Launch Your Product Groups in Phases: Gradually transition to your new operational model through phased launches of your product groups. This approach enhances your capabilities step by step, ensuring a smoother integration and more effective execution.

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#6

Measure Progress: Track how well your organization closes capability gaps. This ongoing assessment helps maintain your focus on continuous improvement and strategic alignment.

#7
#7

Evolve Continuously: Adapt your organization to changes in strategy for continuous improvement. It’s about creating an agile organization that not only implements strategies but evolves with them.

This approach is not just about implementing agile frameworks; it’s about evolving your organizational design to develop the capabilities needed for better strategy execution. Join us in redefining agility for business success.

Learn more

Discover more about the CAO approach! Explore key CAO concepts and see how they are applied in practice.

Experience reports

Explore real-world experience reports that showcase the practical application of the Creating Agile Organizations approach.

Incremental Change in E-Commerce Product Development

Incremental Change in E-Commerce Product Development By Konstantin Ribel – Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. Preface This experience report provides an insightful look into the gradual transformation of an e-commerce platform's product development...

FiloGrant’s Agile Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

FiloGrant's Agile Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic By Jeroen Valkier – Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. Business Adaptability to Face Covid-19 Lockdown and Social Distancing FiloGrant provides and fulfills custom made financial services for...

Applying CAO Guidelines at a Big German Insurance Company 

Applying CAO Guidelines at a Big German Insurance Company  By Wolfgang Steffens – Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. This experience report describes in hindsight the beginning of the Agile journey of the IT department Terra. This IT department was part...

Designing organizational structures, inside-out? Outside-in? Mixed?

Designing organizational structures, inside-out? Outside-in? Mixed? by Jurgen de Smet - Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. When one designs an organization's structures, one can decide to do this either with an outside-in view from the end user...

When you sub optimize, it’ll bite you in the ass.

When you sub-optimize, it’ll bite you in the ass. by Jurgen de Smet - Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. A Hard Team Setup Constraint A client of mine came to me with a problem. They wanted to improve transparency in their product development...

Shared Services Internal Product At BMW / Autonomous Driving

Shared Services Internal Product At BMW / Autonomous Driving by Denis Sunny - Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. Introduction In the modern world, many consider Agile as a critical success factor at least for product-centric and customer-centric...

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CAO book

The CAO book

By Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

Creating agile organizations helps you to move from agility with individual teams to agility at a large scale.

Why You Need This Book:

Foundational Concepts:

  • Master organizational design, & systems thinking
  • Learn proven guidelines for driving productive change.

Practical Applications:

  • Equip yourself with tools for large-scale agile adoption.
  • Defining and launching products, groups and teams.

Get Your Copy Today:

Revolutionize your processes and start your journey towards excellence.

Watch the two-minute overview of the book:

Learn more with Our Webinar Series

Discover how CAO can transform your organization and help you create the future you envision. Don’t miss this opportunity—reserve your spot today!

certified training

Are you ready to take your organizational skills to the next level?

Our curriculum covers all aspects of agile transformation and how it impacts the structure, roles, and responsibilities within your organization. You’ll learn how to define your products, streamline your processes, and unleash the full potential of your talented workforce. Plus, we’ll show you how to align rewards and incentives, to maximize productivity and create a culture of excellence.

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Designing Agile Organizations

Who Should Attend?

Leaders that design for strategic agility.

By taking this 2-day course, you’ll gain a deep understanding of how to design an agile organization that supports your business strategy. Participants explore how to make informed decisions about their transformation that will be most beneficial to their organization.

Guiding Agile Organizations course

Guiding Agile Organizations

 Who Should Attend?

Change leads that support an agile transformation effort.

This 3-day workshop offers practical tools for supporting agile transformations. Participants explore how to guide an agile transformation and how to guide organization re-design, from product definition, structure and roles and responsibilities to people.

Register here for one of our workshops and courses!

Looking for an in-company course?

We offer DAO and CAO courses in most parts of the world. Contact us without obligation if you would like to organise a professional workshop in your company, either in-person or online.

Conference talks & interviews

Dive into real-world applications of creating agile organizations. Learn from the challenges and triumphs of experts. Access engaging insights on-the-go.

Evolving Agile Organizations For the Future | Keynote Scrum Gathering 2024

Evolving Agile Organizations For the Future In this thought-provoking session from the Regional Scrum Gathering Belgrade 2024, Cesario Ramos, a global leader in large-scale transformations, dives into the challenges and opportunities of evolving agile organizations....

Product Definition Explained in 10 min

Product Definition!  By Cesario Ramos. The world of Agile product development A critical yet often overlooked aspect is defining your product effectively. A robust product definition goes beyond what’s listed in the catalog—it's the foundation of your organization's...
Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) Circle overview

Creating Agile Organizations Explained in 5 min

Cesario Ramos explains the Creating Agile Organizations approach in this short video.Creating Agile Organizations is a systemic approach to designing and coaching agile organizations. It’s based on principles, guidelines, and axioms. Cesario Ramos, founder of CAO and...

Creating Agile Organizations For LeSS Coaches

Usefull Differences Between CAO and LeSS To Understand The Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) approach is about creating agile organizations that can easily be adapted, it is not about (de)scaling Agile and it is not the same as LeSS. I love LeSS, it is a great...

A Discussion about Agile Organizational Design

Host Dave West of Scrum.org interviews the authors of the book, Creating Agile Organizations, A Systemic Approach, Cesario Ramos and Ilia Pavlichenko. They chat about their motivation behind the book, problems with traditional organizational...

Interview with Cesario Ramos by John Coleman

Cesario Ramos on Creating Agile Organizations What is a Product? Where do former Product Owners go? And Dealing With Dependencies. https://youtu.be/tjYJaNyM4bk

Adaptivity Podcast with Cesario Ramos: Creating Agile Organizations

Adaptivity Podcast with Cesario Ramos: Creating Agile Organizations We talked about the following topics key impediments to adaptivity defining product groups dependencies between groups commodity platforms launching product groups...

Agile Uprising Podcast with Cesario Ramos organizational design

Agile Uprising Podcast with Cesario Ramos organizational design Podcast about the importance of organizational design and how it directly impacts the odds of success when trying to perform any type of large-scale organizational change, especially an agile...

LeSS Conference Talk – The 3 critical Agile Organization Design Guidelines

LeSS Conference Talks - The 3 critical Agile Organization Design Guidelines Cesario talks about the 3 critical Agile Organization Design Guidelines at the LeSS conference. https://youtu.be/eLky6gryje0

Video – How to Create an Agile Organization

Video - How to Create an Agile Organization Creating agile organizations is hard work, requires patience, humour, and long-term commitment. It can take many years to simplify your organization and discover how to make agility work in your organization. But once you...

The creating agile organizations BLOG

Mastering Agile Evolution | Strategic Agility Ahead

Mastering Agile Evolution In this session, Jurgen de Smet, dives into the challenges and opportunities of designing organizations for strategic agility..

Evolving Agile Organizations For the Future | Keynote Scrum Gathering 2024

Evolving Agile Organizations For the Future In this thought-provoking session from the Regional Scrum Gathering Belgrade 2024, Cesario Ramos, a global leader in large-scale transformations, dives into the challenges and opportunities of evolving agile organizations....

Capability-Driven Transformation: The Key to Sustainable Agility

Capability-Driven Transformation: The Key to Sustainable Agility By Cesario Ramos. A key difference between Toyota and many other companies is how they develop their organizational capabilities over time. As the graph shows, Toyota's approach leads to steady, ongoing...

The Real Question We Should Be Asking About Agile Transformation

The Real Question We Should Be Asking About Agile Transformation By Cesario Ramos. The Real Question We Should Be Asking About Agile Transformation From 2022 to 2024, Digital Transformation (DT) spending in Western markets is projected to reach a staggering $6.3...

How Frequency and Type of Dependencies Shape Your Team Structure

How Frequency and Type of Dependencies Shape Your Team Structure By Cesario Ramos.   The way work flows through your teams—especially when it comes to dependencies—plays a important role in determining whether product-focused teams or specialist teams will work...
Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) Circle overview

Agile Organization Design: Moving Beyond Size Logic

Agile Organization Design: Moving Beyond Size Logic by Cesario Ramos. Historically, many companies adhered to the 150-person rule for organizational units, a concept based on "Dunbar's number." This rule suggested that 150 is the cognitive limit to maintain stable...
Designing Agile Organizations (DAO) approach

Redefining Agility: Evolving Our Operating Model as a Scrum Master

Redefining Agility: Evolving Our Operating Model as a Scrum Master By Cesario Ramos.  In our relentless pursuit of excellence and efficiency, Scrum Masters play an important role in guiding organizations through the adoption of agile frameworks. However, it's time to...

Don’t confuse Product-Level and Organizational Adaptability in Agile Organizations

Don’t confuse Product-Level and Organizational Adaptability in Agile Organizations By Cesario Ramos.   Adaptability is a key component of any successful organization. It's important not to confuse product-level adaptability with organizational adaptability. While...

Measure Transformation, Not Conformation

Measure Transformation, Not Conformation By Cesario Ramos. The core of agile isn’t conforming to some framework but the ability to adapt, respond, and deliver value efficiently. Hence, when measuring agile transformation, focus on the newly developed capabilities of...

Evolving Your Own Framework

Evolving Your Agile Organizational Framework By Cesario Oliveira Ramos Meet Sara, a driven product director who's always up for a challenge. But with ambitious targets to attract 10,000 new clients, increase customer satisfaction by 35%, and keep top talents on board,...
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