The DNA of Organisations - Why Most Change Starts in the Wrong Place

About the session
Every organisation you join is the result of something deeper than what you can see.
It is built on an inherited system of structures, beliefs, and knowledge — a kind of organisational DNA that defines how people think, how work gets done, and what change is actually possible.
Yet many newly appointed leaders or change agents arrive with the intent to transform. They remove practices, introduce new frameworks, and push for speed — often without fully understanding the system they are stepping into. The result is predictable: resistance, confusion, and a quiet return to old habits.
In this talk, I explore organisational change through a lens of inheritance rather than control.
Drawing on a personal story tracing 16 generations of ancestry across England, Scotland, and France, I’ll show how it took over 100,000 people — and their decisions, beliefs, and lived realities — for me to stand here today. None of that can be erased. It defines my starting point.
Organisations are no different.
We’ll connect this perspective to the Kanban Maturity Model and explore a critical constraint for leaders and change agents: your ability to change a system is limited by the maturity, beliefs, and knowledge embedded within it.
Through practical approaches and reflection, you’ll learn how to:
· Recognise the “DNA” of your organisation — its structures, beliefs, and capabilities
· Understand the hidden intent behind existing practices before removing them
· Identify how far you can realistically evolve a system without triggering rejection
· Lead change as a process of guided evolution, not forced transformation
This session challenges the way change is often approached — as something to accelerate and scale quickly — and instead reframes it as the responsibility to understand deeply, act deliberately, and evolve systems within their context.

About the Speaker
Pierre LeBlanc is an expert trainer and agile coach, having trained hundreds of agile practitioners and teams across Canada and Europe. Pierre has 25+ years experience in the IT industry, starting in web development in the late 1990s. After a 5-years entrepreneurship endeavour, he became a senior software developer in a Scrum Team working on the Jobboom.com job search website. Pierre joined Morgan Stanley in 2011 where he became a Scrum Master in a team distributed across the globe. In 2015, he became an Agile Coach and Trainer, leaving his development career behind, for the benefit of the people. His life’s mission, shared by many: reinventing organizations.