Achieving Speed at Scale, Safely and Sustainably at Conflux — 2025 reflection

As 2025 draws to a close, I wanted to take a moment for a candid, personal reflection on what this year has meant for Conflux.

A momentous year of significant achievements, with a focused effort on scaling Conflux, and refining our core mission: enabling organizations to achieve Speed at Scale, Safely & Sustainably via Empowered Excellence (S4E2™).

By Matthew Skelton, CEO/CTO of Conflux, co-author of Team Topologies

When organizations try to scale, they often face an impossible choice: optimize for speed and sacrifice scale, or optimize for scale and lose agility. The good news is that Conflux offers a third way: ‘empowered excellence’, achieving both speed and scale. Our mission is founded on the belief that empowering teams to be excellent, trusting groups of people to make decisions quickly, safely, and compliantly within clear boundaries, is the key to achieving speed at scale safely and sustainably. This approach helps organizations overcome the staggering costs associated with poor productivity and worker disengagement.

The year of impact and validation

In 2025, our focus has been on tangible, measurable impact. Our S4E2™ approach unites people and technology, treating them as a unified system to enable continuous innovation, safe operations, and humane work environments that avoid cognitive overload and burnout.

We’ve seen many organizations achieve remarkable results through the strategic implementation of Team Topologies and fast flow practices, together with cross-boundary techniques like Active Knowledge Diffusion. Here are a few examples of the proven outcomes we have published in 2025:

• EBSCO: Re-architecting for Flow. EBSCO achieved $9.1M in recurring annual cost reduction with a 62% ROI in less than 18 months. By empowering teams with clearer ownership boundaries, they saw a 76% reduction in critical incidents and a 52% overall reduction in blockers. As Nicole Casellini, VP Lean Enterprise Office, noted, they now have the "playbook" to reorganize or redesign into new enterprise capabilities.

• ABC Glofox: Shifting to Customer-Centricity. ABC Glofox transitioned from a 'feature factory' model to one that empowers teams to focus on solving customer problems. The results included zero customer churns attributed to quality in the first month and teams consistently exceeding quarterly OKRs. This shift meant teams focused more on driving business impact and customer outcomes, rather than just roadmap delivery.

• Telenet: Eliminating the Divide. Telenet successfully eliminated the traditional business-IT divide by empowering customer-focused tribes to deliver value independently. This led to significantly fewer dependencies and enhanced organizational adaptability. Their teams are now "equipped to keep sensing the health" of their boundaries and adapt fluidly.

• LHV Bank: Nimble scaling. LHV Bank resolved structural complexity by aligning product and engineering functions with value streams to accelerate delivery and enable continuous organizational evolution, enabling LHV to become a thriving organization, delivering at speed™.

These examples demonstrate that focusing on fast flow delivers measurable impact. For instance, highly aligned organizations are shown to grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable.

Expanding our reach and refining our core

2025 also saw significant activity around expanding the intellectual foundation of our work:

• The Second Edition of Team Topologies: The launch of the second edition in September, co-authored with Manuel Pais, was a major event. This book, which includes 10 new case studies, continues to drive tremendous interest in our methodologies. The overwhelming demand and success of the book, which has now sold more than 200,000 copies, has truly fuelled Conflux’s growth, albeit presenting scaling challenges that we have been actively working through.

• Global Networking: I had the privilege of running a roundtable workshop with the incredible Renee Hawkins at the CTO Craft conference in London in March. The workshop, which focused on the capabilities organizations need to adapt to rapid changes like AI, was so well-received that we were asked to create a guidebook. This collaboration was pivotal and has cemented our partnership for a major book project coming in 2026.

• International Connection: I travelled to Singapore, meeting amazing people from Singapore GovTech, whose story is featured in the Team Topologies book, and later visited Australia/New Zealand, where I planned future collaboration with Alex Stokes from Reboot. Strengthening these partner relationships is crucial as we expand our support globally.

Personal growth and gratitude

Running Conflux and navigating the demand surrounding Team Topologies has been a continuous challenge, requiring me to learn everything from global tax laws to building the right team across multiple geographies. In previous years, I hit my limits, and honestly, was behaving in ways that were often unhelpful.

I’m incredibly grateful for the leadership and ways of working coaching I’ve undertaken since early 2023. It gave me the courage to admit my gaps in experience and skills. I strongly recommend that any leader seeking to scale their impact find the courage to admit where they have gaps, be curious and kind about addressing them, and seek help. The result, increased self-awareness and behavioral change, genuinely looks like a superpower and makes you a far better leader and person.

This journey has allowed me to reconnect with my core drive: empowering people to be excellent and creating humane and effective organizations. It also taught me the real value of learning to trust brilliant people to ‘get on with things’, which is, after all, exactly what the Team Topologies book preaches.

I want to extend my deepest gratitude to the Conflux team, our partners, and suppliers. The thoughtful gifts for my birthday, the trumpet silhouette and the bag of pick-n-mix, were small but meaningful examples of people listening and caring, which makes all the difference. Working out how to be a better colleague in 2025 has been rewarding, and seeing the results emerge when you trust people has been beautiful.

2026 Sneak preview: Accelerating enterprise success

As we move into 2026, Conflux is focusing squarely on providing solutions for enterprise success. We are committed to accelerating the journey for medium and large organizations seeking true, lasting transformation.

1. The Enterprise Transformation Package

We are launching the Enterprise Transformation Package. This is designed to accelerate the adoption of better, more nimble ways of working. It includes a substantial set of tried-and-tested workshops, training courses, reports, and other materials that have been used successfully with multiple organizations around the world. We are making this available to enterprises in an easy-to-consume format, complete with flexible support options, allowing organizations to either be self-directed or leverage our expert support.

2. The Empowered Excellence Book

I am incredibly excited about the book I am co-authoring with Renee Hawkins. This book is focused on the concept of ‘Empowered Excellence’. It challenges the typical focus on economies of scale or speed, instead centering on how to empower people across the entire organization to be successful. Crucially, this includes acknowledging that often, executives and managers themselves are not sufficiently empowered with the right context and metrics.

This work pulls together refined approaches I’ve been using since 2011. It will include practical tools like Multi-team Capability Assessments, Safe-To-Optimize metrics, and guidance on Active Knowledge Diffusion. The goal is to bring real alignment, build trust and engagement, and drive the kind of continuous innovation necessary to thrive in a fast-changing market.

We believe this package, combining foundational principles, practical tools, and deep transformation support, will enable organizations to achieve the goal of Thriving organizations, delivering at speed™.

We invite you to start your journey to empowered excellence today by taking our 10-minute benchmark to pinpoint where your significant opportunities lie, or by booking a discovery call with our experts.

Onwards to an impactful 2026!