Beyond Budgeting: 25 Years of Management Innovation Episode #1

Welcome to a new season of Our Agile Tales. 

We have brought back Bjarte Bogsnes, Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Round Table, and is a popular international business speaker and Beyond Budgeting coach. He is an award-winning author and long-time champion of more adaptive human organizations. In this series of episodes, Bjarte reflects on 25 years of management innovation and the evolution of Beyond Budgeting far beyond its financial origins.

Our episode starts with a refresher on what Beyond Budgeting is, and why it is so often misunderstood as "just a finance thing." From there, we explore how deeply traditional management assumptions shape behavior, trust, and decision-making inside organizations. Bjarte uses metaphors, real-world examples, and decades of experience to explain why many well-intended Agile and Lean transformations stall or fail if they don't address and rethink the management processes. We dive into Theory X and Theory Y, the hidden damage caused by fixed targets and calendar-driven planning, and how separating targets, forecasts, and resource allocation can fundamentally change behavior. Throughout the episode, Bjarte makes the case that true business agility requires coherence and alignment between leadership principles and management systems. Without this alignment, successful long-term transformations will not be achieved.

Key topics and approximate timestamps

• 00:00 – Introduction to Our Agile Tales
• 01:52 – Why Beyond Budgeting is not about finance—and why the name still matters
• 04:30 – Challenging traditional management assumptions: trust and predictability
• 07:10 – Leadership principles vs. management processes: where companies break coherence
• 10:00 – Why Agile and Lean need Beyond Budgeting to scale at the enterprise level
• 13:21 – Theory X and Theory Y: how beliefs about people shape management models
• 16:40 – The problem with combining targets, forecasts, and resource allocation
• 18:30 – Gaming, sandbagging, and unintended consequences of budgeting systems
• 20:24 – What's wrong with traditional targets—and how relative targets change behavior
• 23:10 – Moving from calendar-driven planning to business- and event-driven rhythms
• 26:00 – Continuous decision-making as a Beyond Budgeting version of continuous delivery
• 28:29 – Closing reflections and broader implications for adaptive organizations

About Bjarte Bogsnes

Bjarte Bogsnes is the Chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, a former global finance executive, and a leading thinker in management innovation. He is the author of Implementing Beyond Budgeting and This Is Beyond Budgeting, where he distills nearly three decades of real-world experience challenging traditional budgeting, targets, and control-based management.

Bjarte's work demonstrates how organizations can replace rigid, calendar-driven systems with models built on trust, transparency, and adaptability. The result is creating companies that are not only more responsive but also more human.

You can follow Bjarte Bogsnes at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjarte-bogsnes-41557910/

Our music is from https://www.purple-planet.com.

Visit us at https://www.ouragiletales.com/about