TL; DR: Dr. Lynn Kelley, Peter Merel, and Jurgen Appelo speaking at Hands-on Agile 2025
The first videos of Hands-On Agile 2025 sessions are in, and you don’t want to miss them: Dr. Lynn Kelley reveals her “Change Questions” framework with its remarkable 90% success rate for sustainable organizational transformation, while Peter Merel challenges conventional agile thinking with “The Agile Way,” connecting ancient wisdom to modern AI-agile alignment through six essential themes. Also, Jurgen Appelo explores how AI is revolutionizing leadership in “Humans Robots Agents,” offering practical strategies for thriving amid technological disruption.
These industry veterans bring decades of enterprise transformation experience, providing actionable insights you can implement immediately. Watch the session recordings to transform how you approach agility.
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Hands-On Agile 2025: Change Questions, The Agile Way, Humans Robots Agents
Dr. Lynn Kelley: Change Questions: The Keys to Implementing Organizational Change that Sustains
Learn how to develop your own customized plan for successful organizational change through the Change Questions, which represent a new way of thinking and acting characterized by an investigative process that creates a tailored approach to each change. The presentation offers practical examples and describes what to do in tough, real world situations. Attendees are given access to the free Change Questions Digital Workbook.
Studies have shown that organizational change initiatives fail to either sustain or fail to deliver anticipated results 56-70 percent of the time. The Change Questions have a strong track record of beating the failure odds, with upwards of 90% sustainment rates of many types of changes in many types of areas. Whether the change initiative is large, small, complex or straightforward, the challenges are real and the Change Questions can help take your change to new heights!
Meet Dr. Lynn Kelley
Dr. Lynn Kelley has carved a path marked by leadership roles in manufacturing, engineering, supply chain, and continuous improvement across diverse industries at a global scale. She has served on the executive leadership teams at Union Pacific Railroad and Textron—two Fortune 200 companies. She is currently a Senior Advisor at Brown Brothers Harriman. Armed with a PhD in evaluation and research, Lynn also taught undergraduate and graduate statistics courses.
Throughout her career, Lynn has expertly guided organizations through Change Management initiatives. Lynn’s practical methodologies have consistently delivered operational excellence that engages employees and surpasses customer expectations.
Lynn Kelley’s Website: Change Questions
Peter Merel: The Agile Way
Peter Merel says agility doesn’t come from a manifesto, a framework, or a mindset. That it comes by connecting people for their mutual benefit. To empower them to trust each other to collaborate on improving throughput across their organization.
Peter is translator of the oldest, deepest, and shortest book on agility in existence, the agile way, a language of simple interlocking patterns that prove just as essential to organizations coping with today’s intelligence revolution as they were for those of the agricultural revolution where it began.
Peter first spoke on this book at XP-2000, the world’s first agile conference, and that talk went on to become the first chapter in XP Examined (2001). Some years later, Peter’s translation morphed into “The Dude De Ching”, the bible of Big Lebowski fandom. But his new translation of Lao Tzu in its ultimate form is timeless.
If you think you have a good grasp of agility as a way of life, this book will challenge you hard. If you’re in a leadership role, there’s no better way to get deep in leadership agility quickly. In this talk Peter will cover the book’s six themes – connection, change, adaptation, leadership, simplicity and flow – explain how and why the book came to be, and explore its implications for aligning AI and Agile forms for organizations struggling with the extreme pace of change.
Who Is Peter Merel
Peter was credited in the first XP book and as one of Ward Cunnigham’s c2 stewards he helped spark the agile and wiki movements in the 90s. He created the first agile training games and ran them as an interactive keynote at the first Agile conference, XP2K. He has coached whole-enterprise transformations at GMAC and Websense in the US, and IAG, CBA and Ray White in Australia.
In 2015 Peter created XSCALE, a descaling AI & Agile alignment toolkit. Gartner recognized XSCALE in its Enterprise Agility Market Guide 2015-2021, and XSCALE Alliance coaches in a dozen world capitals have applied it to banks, insurers, health corps, and telcos.
Peter has served as architect, manager, and director for multi-billion dollar products over more than four decades. He’s authored patents in scheduling, e-currency, pattern recognition and social networks, led multiple startups, and pioneered open source projects including the original Wikipedia wiki engine.
Jurgen Appelo: Humans Robots Agents: Redesigning Leadership and Organizations in the Age of AI
Embrace the transformative power of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its sweeping impact on the workplace, leadership, and organizational design. This keynote unpacks highlights from the new book Humans Robots Agents, exploring practical strategies to embrace innovation, navigate complexity, and harness AI to thrive in an era of unprecedented change.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand AI’s Role in New Ways of Working: Identify how technology reshapes traditional business structures and decision-making processes.
- Embrace Disruptive Innovation: Learn actionable approaches to lead change and be the disruptor rather than embracing change and be the disrupted.
- Cultivate New Skills and Mindsets: Explore the shift towards multi-skilled (M-skilled) workers and leadership adaptability in AI-driven ecosystems.
- Design for a Dynamic Future: Discover patterns and practices for building vital, dynamic, versatile, and ethically conscious organizations.
About Jurgen Appelo
As an author, speaker, and entrepreneur, Jurgen Appelo helps innovative organizations survive and thrive in the 21st century. He gladly shares stories, games, tools, and practices so you can create your own way of working as a network organization. Most importantly, he offers the unFIX model for organization design, continuous innovation, and a better human experience.
Jurgen calls himself a creative networker. But sometimes he’s a writer, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, designer, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, runner, freethinker, or … Dutch guy. Inc.com has called him a Top 50 Leadership Expert and a Top 100 Leadership Speaker.
From 2008, Jurgen wrote a popular blog at NOOP.NL with ideas on agile management and organizational change. He is the author of the best-selling book Management 3.0, which describes the role of the manager in agile organizations; How to Change the World, which describes a supermodel for change management; Managing for Happiness, which offers you practical ideas to engage workers, improve work, and delight clients; and Startup, Scaleup, Screwup, which dives into the major topics that business leaders and entrepreneurs are confronted with throughout the business lifecycle. And the fifth book he is working will be Glitches of Gods … a sci-fi novel!
Jurgen can help you upgrade your organizational structure with more engagement and faster results; He can show you how to increase your business agility with faster product development; He shows you how to creatively manage your company; And he can inspire creative professionals with a purpose, helping them integrate work and more joyful living.
Jurgen is CEO of The unFIX Company and co-founder of the Agile Lean Europe network.
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