Thursday,February 5, 2026 Virtual Conference

Peter Palmér, LPPDE and Juha Tammi, Lean Association of Finland - Welcome and Instructions

Peter and Juha represent the two organization who organize these virtual online events and will moderate the Virtual Summit.

Morten Elvang, Managing Partner at Thinking Twice Works – Lead With Strategy: Reducing Delay-of-Surprise in the Liquid Organization

Most organizations don’t suffer from a lack of strategy - but from truth starvation caused by unnecessarily closed and over-rigid structures. Signals surface too late, known tensions remain unspoken, and conversational debt quietly turns viable options into wasted opportunity.

When complexity dominates, cadence-driven Agile and portfolio rituals become expensive ways of delaying surprise. AI now offers new capabilities and raises a simple question: What would Agile - and the organization itself - look like if AI absorbed most work management and coordination, and leadership focused on strategic judgment and orchestration instead?

Using Cynefin’s solid-liquid-gas lens, I introduce the Liquid Organization and show how selected Cynefin frameworks can be used as a practical test of strategy - stress-testing risk balance, coherence, and challenge-intervention fit.

AI marks a structural shift in how work is coordinated. Some talk of an entire new post-industrial era of work - something that cannot be ignored by any organization. Lean and agile principles still apply, but the organizational context is changing. For large organizations, this is about competitiveness. For smaller ones, relevance. In both cases, benefiting from AI depends on changing the operating model - not just the tools. Ultimately, it comes down to reducing delay-of-surprise and learning how to navigate tensions in real time. That is what it means to lead with strategy - and the core practice behind liquid agility.

Morten Elvang is an expert in agile and lean for strategy, product, service, and technology delivery. He has worked with platform, product, and service teams of all sizes to gain better results with less hassle - both as a consultant and as an employee. Morten holds an MSc and PhD in Software Engineering and is the author of two contemporary books UNMESS and UNFILTER about Collaborative Lean Portfolio Management and the role it plays in open and adaptable organizations.

Jörgen Furuhjelm, Senior Project Manager at Saab Aeronautics – Transforming the Development of a Fighter Plane from Scrum-teams to a more Complex and Efficient Way of Working

For 17 years Jörgen has introduced a more efficient way of working applying scrum-teams and a lean-agile way of working when developing the Swedish fighter plane Saab Gripen E to the most competitive product on the market. Now they have taken the next step to an even more efficient way of working.

Dr Jörgen Furuhjelm is a senior project manager for R&D of Saab Gripen in the last 17 years. Before he had the same position at Toyota Material Handling. Jörgen has a PhD in product development from the university of Linköping.

Marcel Aartsen, Organizational learning architect at Thales Group – Eliminate to Design – Making Architecture Decisions that Survive Contact with Reality

Architecture decisions have a way of going wrong in the same way. A team debates options, picks a winner, starts building – and months later discovers the chosen approach cannot meet a requirement that was always going to matter. Then comes the emergency replanning, the strained relationships, the missed deadlines. Everyone learns something, but it is an expensive way to learn.

There is an approach that avoids this. Instead of committing early and hoping for the best, you systematically map out what is possible, identify where the boundaries lie, and let constraints eliminate options until the right choice becomes obvious. It is called Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE), and it has been used in hardware development for decades.

Marcel Aartsen is a mathematician who has spent more than twenty-five years at the intersection of lean thinking and software development. As a Lean Six Sigma master black belt at ABN AMRO, he led large-scale process improvement programs. He introduced Scrum and Agile practices at ING Bank, then spent fourteen years at the Lean Management Institute helping organizations, training practitioners, and editing Dutch translations of foundational lean texts including Learning to see and Managing to learn. He has guest lectured lean product and process development at Barcelona Tech, and he currently leads lean practices at Thales Netherlands.

Final reflections and remarks

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By Juha Tammi & Peter Palmér

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