Cihangir Deniz Özdemir: Illusion to Resonance - People First as Design for Trust

Many organizations grabbed “agile” for speed and adaptability, yet too often ended up with practices that lost substance, fragmented knowledge, and eroded legitimacy. This talk introduces Communicative Agile as an antidote, where Nonaka’s Ba and Habermas’s deliberation are tuned into living architectures of trust. Inspired by Mike Beedle, who warned that without deliberation agility collapses into performance without meaning, this approach is less about fixing and more about creating the conditions where tacit experience can enter deliberation as shared validity. With the Deliberative Permeability Metric (DPM*) and the Communicative Rationality Cycle (CRC**), Deniz shows how organizations can capture tacit signals and inject them directly into decision-making, not as theory, but as direct proof of how invisible knowledge transforms the system.

Participants will leave with applied ways to restore autonomy, strengthen competence, and build trustful connections in their teams. This is not about new manifestos or frameworks, but about making the Agile Manifesto finally actionable. From the Livelo case in Brazil, he demonstrates how deliberation breathes meaning into speed and reveals collaboration as systemic intelligence.

If your “Agile” feels like routine, instead of transformation, this talk will show how to restore its harmony, turning practices into spaces of trust and intelligence.

*The Deliberative Permeability Metric (DPM) is a way of checking how much tacit input actually flows into decisions. For example, at Livelo we compared how long it took between an someone raising a point and that point showing up in the system, that cycle time is one element of the DPM in practice.

**The Communicative Rationality Cycle (CRC) builds on that: once you’ve measured permeability, you close the loop by making feedback explicit, so people see their signals matter. In Livelo this meant linking conrete change back to the conversation or concern that triggered it.

Nothing mystical, but structured ways to make deliberation visible and measurable.

About our speaker:

Cihangir Deniz Özdemir is a researcher and co-founder of OZCO, acting across Brazil, Germany, and beyond. Together with Marina Özdemir, he developed Communicative Agile, blending Nonaka’s Ba and Habermas’s deliberation to shape architectures of trust. Cihangir reframes agility as systemic intelligence, not found in control, but in what seemed "hollow", which can become the basis for genuine trust. He invites organizations to move beyond surface routines and rediscover deliberation as design, trust, and systemic intelligence.

About our hosts:

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Thoralf J Klatt
Thoralf serves as a Product and Agile Coach. His motto is: be at the center of value. He started his career developing medical devices like CT scanners and became a Certified Scrum Master in 2007. Based on many years of experience in diverse domains, Thoralf qualified as SPC in 2016, as Scrum@Scale and Scrum Inc. Trainer with Jeff Sutherland in 2019, and as Mobius Navigator Coach with Gabrielle Benefield in 2020. He has been translating her new book on Mobius Loop to German. Thoralf has been organizing several charity fundraiser training during pandemic and Ukraine crisis (giving to MSF). He has been a Neural Network & AI geek since studying at MIT. Reach out for speakerships.