One of the big problems the ‘Agile sector’ faces is scaling – what happens when either you try to use Agile approaches with multiple teams on say large mission critical engineering design projects, or where you try to bolt Agile approaches that work well at a team level to a large organisation run on traditional lines? The tensions both these scenarios create are painful for teams, their team members and the wider organisation and typically the tension can lead to the collapse of initiatives. This talk walks through how a well tried model from Systems Thinking – the Viable System Model (VSM) can be used to scale Agile. Applying VSM to the problem of scaling Agile showed up the systemic factors that commonly undermine initiatives and some ways those can be addressed. The approach developed forms the basis of a white paper published by the Agile Business Consortium.