Simon Powers

I grow organisations with strategic purpose, technical innovation, and commercial success.

​

With a career that spans coding the early web, architecting stock markets, and building one of the world’s most respected organisational change consultancies, I bring a rare combination of technical depth, strategic vision, and transformative leadership.

​

What drives me is the fine art of aligning people with technology in a commercial context to grow profitable business. I thrive in complexity, translating business needs into elegant systems, building cultures that deliver, and now exploring how AI and emerging technologies can transform the way we work, collaborate,  think, and create.

 

I am passionate about achieving what most other people think can't be done.

I bring a sense of grounded optimism, coupled with a powerful purpose-driven narrative that inspires others to be the best that they can be. With professional coaching skills and deep technical and organisational structure knowledge, and board experience, I make sure it can be done. 

​

​​

What I am Looking For

​

I'm seeking an advisory role in a commercially ambitious organisation, where innovation, people, and technology are core to growth.

​

I am happiest at the intersection where people meet tech with a clear purpose and change mandate. Especially redefining what it means to work now that AI is changing the face of our organisations, workflows and job roles.

 

I’m particularly drawn to companies in finance or product-based organisations where technology isn’t just a support function but a driving force for something exceptional. ​

​

I want to work alongside bright, curious minds who understand that lasting success comes from a strong culture, clear purpose, and the ability to collaborate across functions to build remarkable things.

​​

​​

What I Bring to the Table

​

I bring a rare combination of deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, and people-first leadership. I have a genuine passion for building a work culture that inspires people, encourages whole product ownership, and technical excellence. 

​

I offer a voice of calm while we navigate uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, and turbulence. My superpower is to surface the unspoken to unlock progress and growth.

​

I’ve built systems at enterprise scale, led global transformations, and advised senior leaders across finance, tech, and public sectors. I’m just as comfortable architecting AI-driven solutions as I am shaping cultures that deliver. Whether I’m articulating complexity so it's understandable in simple terms, scaling teams, or aligning product, tech, and vision, I connect with authenticity and presence.

 

There is nothing more fulfilling than seeing a team of people, or an entire organisation, reach its full potential and grow through the challenges it faces.​ ​

​​​

My Story​

​

From an eight-year-old entrepreneur to a lifetime of building technology, organisations and human capability.

I was eight years old when I wrote my first contract.

A friend and I had decided to wash cars in our local neighbourhood. Before we started, I wrote out an agreement that we would share the profits equally, 50/50.

I didn't know anything about business law, organisational design or leadership. I just had an idea, believed we could make it happen, and wanted us both to benefit.

Looking back, I can see the beginnings of something that has followed me throughout my life.

I've always been a big-picture thinker. I see patterns, connections and possibilities that other people sometimes miss. Where someone else might see a collection of separate problems, I tend to see the system that connects them. And I've always carried a strong sense that almost anything is possible if we can understand it well enough, bring the right people together and find a way forward.

That confidence has taken me into technology, international business, organisational transformation, leadership, professional coaching and, more recently, artificial intelligence.

But the most important part of my development has been learning that being able to see what is possible is only half the story. The other half is understanding people, how we experience the world, what motivates us, what holds us back, and how we create the conditions for extraordinary things to happen together.

​

The early years: A fascination with what technology made possible

​

My professional career began in 1997, in the early days of the commercial internet.

It was an extraordinary time. The rules were still being written, and nobody really knew what this technology would eventually make possible.

I loved it.

I worked on projects ranging from putting a webcam into a racing car to developing an early electronic trading platform that allowed retail investors to trade over satellite. I helped major organisations and charities develop their online presence, including work with Oxfam as its online retail operation expanded dramatically.

What fascinated me wasn't just the technology itself. It was the opportunity to do things that had previously been impossible.

As the internet matured, I moved into increasingly complex technology environments, particularly banking, financial markets and large-scale retail.

I worked at Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis, helping build the regulatory and Know Your Customer systems needed to respond to major changes in financial regulation. I architected a new derivatives trading platform for NYSE Euronext, worked on the high-volume clearing and reporting systems at BNP Paribas, and designed critical retail infrastructure for Tesco's Clubcard and Price Promise systems.

These were complex, business-critical environments where performance, security, regulation and commercial outcomes all mattered.

I learned to build sophisticated systems, lead technical teams, manage complex stakeholders and make difficult architectural decisions.

But I also began noticing something that troubled me.

The biggest problems were rarely technical.

Again and again, I encountered talented, intelligent and committed people working inside organisations that seemed almost designed to prevent them from doing their best work.

Teams were disconnected. Leaders struggled to see what was really happening. Decisions were made too far away from the people who understood the problems. People protected themselves rather than collaborating. Organisations invested enormous amounts in technology and transformation programmes, only to recreate the same difficulties in a slightly different form.

I found myself asking a different question.

What if we could change the organisation itself?

​

Building a business to change the world of work

​

By 2013, I had become increasingly frustrated with conventional corporate culture.

I was tired of seeing people leave so much of themselves at home when they went to work. People who were creative, capable, curious and full of ideas outside the office often became cautious, constrained and disconnected inside it.

I recognised the same frustration in myself.

Rather than accept it, I decided to do something about it.

I organised a meetup to explore how we might make organisations better places to work.

About 80 people turned up.

That evening was a revelation. I had thought perhaps this frustration was largely my own. Instead, I discovered a community of people who shared a belief that organisations could be profoundly different.

That meetup became the beginning of Adventures with Agile, later AWA Global.

What started as a small community grew into an internationally recognised consultancy, professional education business and network of people working to change how organisations lead, learn and operate.

We eventually ran more than 300 community events, published hundreds of educational videos and built an international network of practitioners, coaches and trainers.

Over the following decade, more than 40 trainers worked with our educational material across multiple countries, and our training programmes reached more than 10,000 delegate places.

We developed operations and partnerships across the UK, Europe, Norway, the United States, Southeast Asia, South Africa and Australia.

But the numbers only tell part of the story.

Some of the people who attended our earliest events and courses went on to establish their own consultancies, training organisations and professional communities. Others became influential coaches, change leaders and executives, taking what they had learned into organisations around the world.

I had the privilege of helping bring people such as Craig Larman, Lyssa Adkins, Michael Spayd and Sharon Bowman to new audiences in the UK, introducing and expanding approaches that would go on to influence an entire generation of practitioners.

I also helped develop and popularise professional approaches such as Large-Scale Scrum, Disciplined Agile and Training from the BACK of the Room, and contributed to ICAgile's professional learning standards.

This was never something I achieved alone. It was an extraordinary collective effort involving people who cared deeply about making work better.

But I am proud of the part I played in bringing those people together, creating opportunities for them, and helping ideas spread far beyond anything I could have achieved by myself.

I discovered that building a successful business could be about much more than commercial success.

It could create an entire ecosystem of opportunity for other people.

​

Learning that people are the real transformation

​

As AWA grew, so did my understanding of leadership.

I began my career believing that if I could understand a problem deeply enough, I could probably find a solution.

I still believe that.

But I gradually learned something more important: just because I can see a solution doesn't mean I should be the person providing it.

People don't usually change because someone tells them what to do. Real, sustainable change happens when people develop their own understanding, make their own decisions and discover what becomes possible when they work differently together.

This took me on a substantial personal development journey.

I trained in professional coaching, organisational and relationship systems coaching, transformational leadership, adult learning, complexity and Internal Family Systems. I became increasingly interested in self-awareness, human psychology, the nature of relationships and the invisible dynamics that shape how people experience organisations.

My work moved beyond delivering new processes, frameworks or structures.

I learned to listen more deeply, to notice what wasn't being said, to understand how fear and uncertainty affect behaviour, and to help people have the conversations they had been avoiding.

I also came to appreciate that leadership isn't about having all the answers.

It is about creating the conditions in which other people can become more capable, more confident and more willing to take responsibility for what matters.

That understanding changed the way I led my own company, and it transformed the work I did with clients.

​

Helping large organisations become better versions of themselves

​

Over the years, I have worked with executives, boards, technology leaders, managers and teams across some of the world's largest and most complex organisations.

The work has taken me into international banks, financial institutions, government departments, technology businesses, retailers and organisations delivering essential public services.

At Íslandsbanki in Iceland, I worked with senior leadership and the wider organisation on the shift from project-based delivery towards a product operating model. The work involved organisational diagnostics, leadership coaching, governance, team structures and changes in how decisions were made. Delivery lead times improved from around 16 weeks to four, but what interested me just as much was the developing confidence and autonomy of the people involved.

At Sky, I led a substantial reorganisation of customer technology, helping create a more effective product organisation, unlock stalled development and improve the relationship between technology, leadership and commercial outcomes.

Elsewhere, my work with organisations including Bloomberg, BNY, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Ministry of Justice has involved developing people, improving leadership capability, coaching teams and helping organisations understand the systems in which they operate.

At Goldman Sachs, my career has encompassed both major regulatory technology programmes and helping bring the Marcus consumer banking proposition to market.

Across these engagements, I have worked as a strategist, architect, adviser, transformation leader, facilitator, coach and teacher.

The role changes depending on what an organisation needs. The underlying purpose remains remarkably consistent.

I want to help people and organisations do things they previously believed were too difficult, too complicated or simply impossible.

Sometimes that involves designing a completely new operating model. Sometimes it means helping executives confront difficult truths. Sometimes it means working with a team that has lost confidence in itself. And sometimes it means sitting with an individual leader and helping them discover something they have been unable to see.

The most rewarding outcomes are not always the ones that appear on a financial report.

They are the moments when people begin to believe in themselves again, when a team starts working together, or when an organisation stops fighting its own people and starts benefiting from everything they can contribute.

​

From building a global business to CEO of the Year

​

Building and leading AWA was one of the most significant experiences of my life.

I had to learn not only how to grow a business, but how to create a culture that genuinely reflected what we were teaching others.

That meant learning about strategy, governance, commercial decision-making, developing leaders, navigating conflict, managing uncertainty and building trust across countries and cultures.

It also meant learning how to respond when things went wrong.

The pandemic was a particularly demanding test. Almost overnight, the market for in-person training disappeared. We adapted rapidly, redesigning our programmes for virtual delivery and getting our public courses online within approximately six weeks.

It was a practical demonstration of something we had spent years teaching: organisations become resilient not because they can predict every challenge, but because their people can respond intelligently when circumstances change.

In 2022, I was named CEO of the Year for the United Kingdom, London, by CEO Monthly.

It was wonderful to receive that recognition. But what mattered most to me was that the work we had spent so many years developing was being recognised beyond the agile and coaching communities.

We had demonstrated that a commercially successful international business could be built around a deep respect for people, meaningful relationships, professional development and the belief that organisations could be fundamentally better.

Our Norwegian business subsequently completed a successful management buyout in December 2024, continuing its work under the Distilled name.

I am proud of what we built, but even more proud of the people who helped build it, the careers that developed around it, and the work that continued beyond my direct involvement.

​

Creating ideas that outlive the person who created them

​

Alongside my commercial work, I have always loved researching, writing, teaching and creating new ways of understanding complex problems.

Some of that work has taken on a life of its own.

I created the Agile Onion to help people understand that genuine agility goes much deeper than tools and processes. I developed the Enterprise Change Pattern as an approach to coaching change across entire organisations, and created models for team culture, psychological safety, leadership and organisational development.

These ideas have travelled further than I originally imagined.

They have appeared in professional books, academic research, industry guidance and education programmes, including references in PRINCE2 Agile and other established professional publications.

In 2022, I published Change: A Practitioner's Guide to Enterprise Agile Coaching, bringing together years of practical experience and research into how organisations can transform themselves.

What I find satisfying about this isn't simply having my name attached to a model or publication.

It is knowing that something I created might help somebody on the other side of the world understand a difficult situation, have a better conversation, or make a change in an organisation I will never visit.

That is another form of impact that matters deeply to me.

​

Returning to technology, with a very different perspective

​

In recent years, artificial intelligence has brought my professional journey back towards where it began.

Once again, we are living through a technological shift that makes previously impossible things possible.

And once again, I find myself fascinated by the opportunities.

But this time I approach technology with something I didn't have in 1997: decades of experience understanding people, organisations, leadership, governance and the complexity of change.

I founded The Deeper Change Academy in 2024 to explore the next evolution of organisational development, bringing together technology, organisational design, leadership, learning and human development.

I have returned to hands-on software development, experimenting with AI, knowledge systems, organisational intelligence and new ways for people and technology to collaborate.

I have also continued writing, including Deeper Change: From Individual Capability to AI-Enabled Organisational Intelligence, published in 2026.

My current work explores how AI can contribute at every level of an organisation: helping individuals, supporting teams, redesigning workflows and roles, improving governance, and enabling organisations to learn from their own collective knowledge and experience.

One of the projects emerging from this is Hyphoria, an organisational intelligence platform intended to help organisations make better use of the knowledge, relationships and signals that already exist within them.

What excites me is not the prospect of replacing people with technology.

It is the possibility of helping people achieve more, understand more and contribute more meaningfully than ever before.

I am also very aware that technology can amplify the problems organisations already have. Without appropriate leadership, trust, governance and human understanding, AI may simply allow organisations to repeat their old mistakes at extraordinary speed.

That is why I believe the future of organisational change must bring technology and human development together.

​

Looking back, and looking forward

​

When I look back over my career, I can see what might appear to be several different professional lives.

I have been a developer, an architect, a technologist, an entrepreneur, a CEO, a board member, a strategist, an adviser, a researcher, a writer, a teacher and a professional coach.

But to me, they have always been different expressions of the same underlying curiosity.

What becomes possible when we understand the whole system, bring the right people together, and create the conditions for something extraordinary to emerge?

I still have that eight-year-old's belief that almost anything is possible.

The difference is that I now understand that achieving something worthwhile is rarely about one person's intelligence, determination or vision.

It is about relationships. It is about trust. It is about people having the confidence to challenge what exists, the freedom to experiment, and the opportunity to become more than they thought they could be.

My professional life has taught me that commercial success and human development are not competing ambitions. When we get the conditions right, they can reinforce each other.

And perhaps that brings me back to the contract I wrote when I was eight.

Two people, an idea, an agreement to share the rewards, and the belief that together we could create something worthwhile.

More than four decades later, I am still doing much the same thing.

Just on a slightly larger scale.