How we build a trustful, inclusive culture while planning for the future

Preface: This blog post is co-authored by Jens Keld Trinskj?r and Herluf Helt M?lgaard , both working at Danske Bank and jointly leading the Credit Journey development tribe as Tribe Lead and IT Lead.

We have had a great start to 2025 in the Credit Journey Tribe. We have managed to hit the ground running and are already moving ahead at full speed towards new exciting outcomes in 2025. This is clearly a result of how we ended 2024, and we now reap the benefits of good planning. However, the real game changer is our OPEN approach to the yearly budget planning ?process which has reinforced our already strong culture of openness, collaboration, and ownership. We see three key results:

• Much better outcomes
• No need for implementation
• And not least an even stronger, collaborative culture!

Here are some reflections on what we did and why it worked well.

How we work in tribes

As Eisenhower once said, “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. In our daily work we find that very much to be true. Banks operate in a competitive environment with constant changes. As tribe leaders in a bank, we therefore need to enable adaptability, but we also need a clear direction to steer by – otherwise, we will never get far.

A tribe is a self-contained development unit with cross-functional teams of IT and business professionals working together towards common goals. In our case, the Credit Journey tribe consists of 250 people with very diverse backgrounds: ?Software engineers, architects, business analysts, UX designers, products owners – and many more profiles. In addition, our teams span both India, Lithuania, and Denmark with virtual collaboration being the norm rather than the exception.

Coordination and collaboration are key in such an environment. We need to ensure that all teams contribute to the same goals, and – not least - everyone needs to have a shared understanding of the bigger picture and purpose of our work. One thing is planning, but we have found that culture is crucial in achieving coordination and a shared purpose in an organisation of that size and complexity.

The Annual Business Review and what it means for a tribe

Every year, the outcome of the bank’s yearly budget planning process (the “Annual Business Review” or just ABR) is anticipated with equal amounts of excitement and worry across the tribes. This is where the main priorities of the coming year are set, and – not least – where budgets are allocated. The ABR can make or break big ambitions, and it can have a huge impact on roles, responsibilities, and even people’s jobs. In the early days of the tribes in Danske Bank, the ABR was surrounded by a great deal of mystery and secrecy. We have learned, however, that openness and transparency (also) in this process lead to much better results.

We leverage and strengthen our culture when we evolve our plans and our organisation

During the ABR we had to choose between two fundamentally different options: The simple and easy approach or the complicated and demanding approach. We naturally chose the complicated and demanding approach – for good reasons!

The simple and easy approach would be the “classic” top-down approach where plans are made by a small exclusive group of leaders. We could probably have finished our plans quite quickly, yet at the expense of the feedback and learnings that are gained from a more open process. On the flipside, the complicated and demanding approach included several iterations with the rest of the tribe where – as we gradually involved more people – we gained new learnings that we could use to strengthen our plans even more.

As we have now entered 2025, we are very happy to have gone by the complicated and demanding approach. This gave us exactly the benefits we hoped; and it also gave us an extra, very valuable outcome – an even stronger, more open, and trustful culture.

In our experience, it is much more value-adding to do organisational planning in an agile fashion: Launch a minimum viable product (MVP) as quickly as you can to gain feedback and then start iterating. Our first step was therefore to draw up our future roadmap and organisation very quickly and with very broad strokes just the two of us: Tribe lead and IT lead. We then quickly started iterating with more and more people in the tribe, starting with our immediate reports, and eventually allowing everyone in the tribe to share their feedback and suggestions before we launched. The process yielded three key learnings:

1.????? The final outcome was much better: Every new iteration gave us new learnings. We were able to make adjustments to our plans and organisation that we did not anticipate. We initially expected this year’s ABR to be a small, incremental change, yet in the end we had made several significant changes. That enabled us to address key risks and bottlenecks, but also to deliver more: We were simply able to include more projects on our roadmap than we had initially thought, typically due to bottom-up learnings.

2.????? No need for implementation: As a tribe leader, the presentation of the ABR outcome is always a daunting moment: How will everyone react – did we overlook important details? Will we need to re-do parts later, and how will this impact productivity? Often, you do not know how well you have done until after a few weeks or months. This year, when we presented the ABR outcome, we did not get a single question. Zero. None! It turned out everyone already understood everything, knew what to do, and felt the change was theirs too.

3.????? The culture was strengthened even more: Some would argue the most important aspect of an agile transformation is the culture. What good is the agile ceremonies and practices, if everyone is still waiting for someone to tell them what to do? A large part of the agile transformation in Danske Bank has therefore focused on the bank’s three cultural commitments: TEAM UP, OWN IT, and BE OPEN. We have received very positive feedback from our employees on the open process we have run, and we now experience a culture of trust, openness, and empowerment which is even stronger than before.

To sum up, agile ways of working and culture go hand in hand, and the agile principles seem to be relevant in all aspects of leadership, not just the daily interactions in individual teams. We will continue to evolve our agile maturity and culture in the Credit Journey Tribe, and we will continue to share our reflections as we go along. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, if you have had similar experiences, or have questions/comments about our learnings, please reach out or comment to discuss.