Org Design
Summit 2026

Alexey and Roland will give you a warm welcome. They will share highlights of the 10X ORG book and how the book’s storyline is the inspiration for this summit.

What can practitioners learn from academic research? In this talk, Professor Nicolay Worren will distill 50 years of research on organization design and discuss how it relates to current challenges, such as how organizations address sustainability and artificial intelligence. He will focus on historically important theories (such as contingency theory, agency theory, and the information-processing approach) as well as more recent development (such as Axiomatic Design theory). More broadly, he will discuss how theories and empirical findings from academia can be turned into tools and principles, and how practical experience can be reflected in academic theories (a key concern of so-called Design Science).

Denis will focus on organizational readiness for Agentic Development — engineers orchestrating AI agents instead of writing code.

Most companies treat the agentic shift as a tooling problem. In reality, the org design is often the biggest impediment.

Drawing from the journey in a real product company navigating this transition, Denis will share the organizational conditions that enabled the change, the assumptions that broke under pressure, and how organizational antibodies quietly undermined the transition.

What if anyone in your organization — from intern to CEO — could launch a change initiative, and everyone followed the same process to honor it?

Olga and Alena are doing exactly that. And yes, it gets messy. In their talk, they’ll share how an initiative-driven organization actually works in practice: how ideas self-organize, how groups form around them, and how leadership learns to trust the process — even when it’s uncomfortable.

Because the real question isn’t whether your people have good ideas. They do. The question is whether your org design lets those ideas breathe. Come hear the struggles, the objections, and what happens when you genuinely unleash the people.

We will introduce the context and challenges of “World Chefs”, a fictional company you will study during the workshops.

Tim Wiegel, author of Leading with Obeya (LWO), will introduce the key concepts behind this method to get us going working on the company’s challenges.

Quinton Quartel will provide a focused introduction of the FAST principles, so participants will self-organize in groups.

Participants will work and share their findings in two rounds and conclusions on the main stage. Participants will get the opportunity to regroup as new work will be pulled to continue working on elevating the fictitious company.

With AI coding agents becoming ever more powerful, Spec Driven Development (SDD) is emerging as a way to provide direction and control. Major software companies are promoting SDD as the next step in software — Microsoft released Spec Kit, Amazon released Kiro, and many smaller players are emerging with SDD tools.

Will SDD actually improve our performance, or is this just another fad trying to replace developers? Is it an evolution of Specification by Example and BDD, or the revenge of Waterfall project management? This talk looks into the current state of SDD tools and perspectives for the future.

Wartsilla is a company that has set on a journey toward high adaptability. Emily will share the implications of this journey through the HR lens.

Bas is going to surprise us with a talk about something completely different from AI. But very relevant and, of course, releated to LeSS.

Most discussions about the future of organizations focus on AI-native companies built around AI from day one, or AI-first models that push AI to the center and reduce the role of people.

In this talk, Jürgen explores a different path: the design of AI-augmented organizations.

Drawing on recent work at Infrabel and Softnet, he will show how AI can be introduced as a structural layer that enhances human capability across the value loop of discovery, delivery, and operations, and what this means in practice for strategy, finance, and HR.

Panel discussion with keynote speakers.

Alexey and Roland will close the day.