Delivering software can sometimes feel like a battle against the organisation around you, rather than an exercise in working with it. Looking at how runs can be helpful, but it can also simply make you jealous. Not all of us get to work for one of those companies, nor be empowered to make the changes required at our own companies. Adaptive is a software consultancy focused on financial services and capital markets, and we deliver projects, large and small, into some of the most hostile engineering cultures known in software development. In this talk I'll discuss how we manage to get things done in the face of huge cultural resistance while maintaining our own engineering culture and leaving our clients’ development teams in a better place than when we arrived.