What we’re about
WEBINARS, PANEL DISCUSSIONS, CASE STUDIES, TRAINING ABOUT:
• Organizational Design, System Optimization and Organizational Agility.
• Scaling Large-Scale, Multi-Site Product Development
• Reduction of "Agile Theater" and Fads
• Waste Management. Lean Thinking. Efficiency. Productivity.
• Technical Excellence. Engineering Practices. Continuous Improvement.
• Product Coaching, Management & Ownership (without false dichotomies)
• Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) of Roles, Responsibilities, Career Path
Upcoming events
8
•OnlineOKR Summit: LeSS Layers Between "O" and "KR" Make OKRs More Meaningful
OnlineSummary:
In many traditional organizations, OKRs lose their potency as they cascade down through layers of hierarchy. Objectives often drift into abstract statements at the top, while Key Results become distorted metrics at the bottom—sometimes even manipulated for “success.” This widening gap between vision (“O”) and execution (“KR”) is a natural byproduct of organizational silos, role fragmentation, and the “us vs. them” mentality that grows out of traditional structures.
By contrast, the Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) product group design eliminates much of this distortion and produces OKRs that are significantly more meaningful and value-driven. Why?- Simplified, Flatter Structure
- With fewer layers, OKRs remain tightly connected to customer outcomes. Requests from clients flow directly to cross-functional teams, shortening the cycle time, accelerating time-to-market, and making the organization more competitive.
- One Product, One Backlog
- Multiple teams collaborate on the same backlog under a single Product Owner, ensuring that OKRs align with the organization’s true strategic mission, rather than splintering into local or departmental goals.
- Fewer Roles, More Responsibility
- With less bureaucracy and fewer managerial hand-offs, teams take real ownership of Key Results. Workers are multi-skilled generalists rather than siloed specialists, reducing system gaming, local optimization, and internal rivalry.
- Better Culture by Design
- The structural simplicity of LeSS fosters cultural improvements: healthier HR norms, role security instead of title-chasing, fairer recognition and compensation, and a genuine reduction in “us vs. them” politics. This not only enhances accountability but also increases employee satisfaction and retention.
The Result
In LeSS, OKRs become authentic reflections of customer value and strategic intent. Instead of being watered down or distorted through hierarchy, they connect directly to the work of empowered teams. The organizational design itself acts as the safeguard, narrowing (and in many cases closing) the gap between ambition (O) and execution (KR), making OKRs in LeSS not only more meaningful, but also more impactful.# This is even is cross-posted here for additional visibility. REGISTRATION FROM HERE.
60 attendees
•OnlineReclaiming Human Sense-Making in an Age of AI Worship, w/ Dave Snowden
OnlineSummary:
"In “A New Animism”, Dr. Dave Snowden warns that society is slipping back into a kind of digital animism—treating AI as if it were a sentient being rather than a human-made tool. He argues that people increasingly speak of “what the AI decides” as though it holds independent agency, allowing us to escape responsibility for its outputs and errors. This fetishization of AI dulls critical thinking, replacing understanding with reverence.Dr. Snowden urges a deliberate return to craftsmanship and scrutiny. Instead of worshipping algorithms, we should expose their workings, question their assumptions, and acknowledge their limitations. He calls for practices that preserve human judgment—demanding transparency about models and data, designing systems that anticipate failure, and slowing the rush to automation. The essay ultimately challenges readers to reclaim agency: to stop treating machines as oracles and start treating them as tools that serve human purpose, not define it."
Related read from Dr. Snowden: "A new animism"
Bio:
Dave is the creator of the Cynefin Framework and originated the design of SenseMaker®, the world’s first distributed ethnography tool. He is the lead author of Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis: A field guide for decision-makers, a shared effort between the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, and the Cynefin Centre.
He divides his time between two roles: founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Company and the founder and Director of the Cynefin Centre. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organisational decision-making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. Using natural science as a constraint on the understanding of social systems avoids many of the issues associated with inductive or case-based approaches to research. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.
Dave holds positions as an extraordinary Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch as well as visiting Professor at the University of Hull. He has held similar positions at Bangor University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Canberra University, the University of Warwick and The University of Surrey. He held the position of senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore during a sabbatical period in Nanyang.
His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He has previously won a special award from the Academy for originality in his work on knowledge management. He is an editorial board member of several academic and practitioner journals in the field of knowledge management and is an Editor in Chief of E:CO. In 2006 he was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence and in 2007 was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research.
He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity; during that period, he was selected by IBM as one of six on-demand thinkers for a worldwide advertising campaign. Prior to that, he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector.104 attendees
•OnlineStrobbo: From Startup to Scaling Slowdown and Returning to Business Agility
OnlineDescription
This talk takes you inside the real-life struggles, surprises, and successes of Strobbo’s journey—from a fast-moving startup, through the slowdown that came with rapid scaling, and onto the road back to business agility. Without the means for a full LeSS flip, we applied a Lean Improvement Kata and many of the principles behind LeSS to find our way back, while developing our own roadmap approach that drives focus for the team, keeps us centered on real results, and helps us control our clock. Expect honest lessons, concrete experiments, and plenty of real-life pictures from the path between startup speed and sustainable agility.
Bio
Michael Voorhaen is a Product Manager at Protime, responsible for the Protime Planning solution and the product Strobbo. He works with multiple cross-functional teams in a LeSS-inspired setup, using a single shared backlog and aligning around common goals to maximize learning and impact across a team-of-teams structure.With a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Antwerp, Michael’s career has evolved from hands-on development to strategic product leadership. This background enables him to bridge deep technical understanding with a strong focus on enabling agility at scale.
He holds certifications in Professional Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Facilitation, Designing Agile Organizations, and is both a LeSS Practitioner and Org Topologies Champion. He uses these frameworks to guide teams and organizations toward greater adaptability, reduced dependencies, and improved customer outcomes.
Michael’s current focus is on growing organizational agility by fostering self-managing teams, creating transparency, and building the structural foundations that support continuous improvement.
27 attendees
•OnlineAristotle Meets Agile: Philosophy On How To Be Better At Our Job
OnlineSummary:
AI can code, summarize, and even coach — but it can’t reflect, care, or choose wisely. That’s still our job. Philosophy is a great way to strengthen those uniquely human skills: critical thinking, creativity, and purposeful action.In this session, I’ll introduce Aristotle’s framework of virtue and show how it can guide your day-to-day coaching and leadership. Together, we’ll translate ancient wisdom into practical tools: powerful questions, reflective practices, and small habits that help you and your teams grow.
Join to explore how “being good” can actually make you better at what you do.
Bio:
Tom Jans is a freelance agile coach and certified LeSS Scrum Master since 2019. He has supported several LeSS transformations in the Belgian public sector and has spoken at multiple global LeSS conferences.A generalist and natural systems thinker, Tom connects diverse areas of expertise and perspective. With degrees in both Engineering and Philosophy, he approaches organizational change with a rare blend of analytical rigor and human insight.
36 attendees
Past events
200
