Dan Levenson

Before Agile Six, I spent nearly eight years in government, including as a contracting officer at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. When I left CMS, I had a question I couldn't shake: what did the public actually get for what we spent, and who did we help? The answer was harder to find than it should have been. The system had much better ways to measure hours and process than to measure whether anything got better, and when we couldn't measure value, we fell back on what we could measure: activity.

I joined Agile Six in 2018 because I saw a company trying to solve that problem without treating good outcomes and good conditions for the people doing the work as competing goals. Since then, I've worked to make that belief concrete in how we operate: small teams, tight feedback loops, decisions made close to the work, and a willingness to say clearly what's working and what isn't. But giving people more room to make decisions only works if leaders have enough visibility to remain accountable for the results.

Government didn't accumulate reporting, approvals, and management layers for no reason. Leaders responsible for public money need to know what is happening and when to step in, and for a long time, adding oversight was a practical way to create that assurance. Technology gives us a chance to change that equation. When we can verify what a team delivered and connect it to the work itself, leaders don't have to choose between autonomy and accountability. That's the idea behind what we call governed autonomy: leadership keeps responsibility for the outcomes, boundaries, and evidence, while teams have room to determine how the work gets done. Better evidence should buy capable people more autonomy.

AI makes that idea even more consequential. As AI makes routine work cheaper and faster, it also creates choices about how to use the time and value it frees up. Those choices require judgment, especially the choice of who should benefit. Our answer is the people the work serves and the people who do it. Time saved on reports and repetitive setup can be redirected toward improving the services Veterans, beneficiaries, and families rely on. The same principle applies within Agile Six: if technology helps us create more value, the people creating that value should share in it. That's one reason we're working toward full employee ownership.

The question I've carried since CMS is still the same: who did we help? What's different now is that I believe we can operate in ways that answer that question with evidence instead of hope. As we take this work into other regulated environments, I want us to bring what we learn back to the agencies we've worked alongside for years. I can't think of work I'd rather be doing, or people I'd rather be doing it with.