Larman’s Laws Meet the Manager’s Vise, with Dan Estby
Details
Summary:
When a LeSS adoption (or any transformation) stalls, the easy explanation is “lack of buy-in.” This talk makes the case that the easy explanation is often wrong. It looks at why capable middle managers resist the very changes they support, traces that resistance to structure rather than character, and suggests ways to design the manager’s transition instead of blaming it. Leading the session is Coach Dan.
Daniel Estby, known across his coaching work as Coach Dan, has spent more than thirty years helping organizations in financial services, telecom, and retail change how they actually work. He is a LeSS Practitioner, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, PMP, and Certified ScrumMaster, but the throughline of his career has less to do with frameworks than with the people inside them. His academic background in psychology, sociology, and counseling shapes a coaching style that is practitioner-grounded and deliberately non-dogmatic, more interested in what makes a change actually stick than in defending any one method.
He is the author of Effective. Efficient. Engaged.: Measuring What AI Can’t, which argues that as AI absorbs the work of being effective and efficient, the human side of an organization becomes the part leaders still have to design rather than assume. That idea runs straight into this talk and its look at why capable managers resist the very changes they support. He writes at coachdanblog.com and on LinkedIn, under a banner he keeps simple: we all win together.
Bio:
Servant Leader with over 20 years of experience driving meaningful transformations for teams, lines of business, and enterprises.
- Skilled in change management, culture building, and facilitating continuous improvement.
- 17+ years in project, program, and portfolio management, delivering business and technology outcomes.
- Proficient in strategic planning, transformation planning, portfolio management, and stakeholder engagement.
- Certified Lean Black Belt, Coach, Scrum Master, Agilist, LeSS Practitioner, Value Stream Mapper and PMP.