Past Events: 2026 | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022
Upcoming Event: November 12, 2026
Who is the “most dangerous leader”? Every room can name the tyrant, the micromanager, the blamer, the one who shouts. Almost nobody names the leader who is always available, always willing to weigh in, always ready with a suggestion. And as Brian Link explains, that’s the one quietly doing the most damage, because it doesn’t look like damage to anyone, least of all the leader doing it.
You can make the teams awesome, and you even get top-down executive support. But if leader behavior doesn’t change, everything you fixed in strategy, discovery, flow, and structure tends to revert within a year.
Takeaways:
Brian will open with the best leadership move he’s ever watched: a brand new CIO standing in a rented hotel ballroom in front of three hundred middle managers, telling them all to stop pretending they know everything.
Then we’ll look at the four ordinary, well-intentioned behaviors that leaders often think are helpful but are not:
- Leaders can accidentally provide instructions or commands to the team if they aren’t careful with their language and respect the team’s processes
- Leaders can break trust and psychological safety by filling the silence and answering their own questions
- Leaders unknowingly introduce waste and delays by trying to be helpful, offering to have teams “run something by them”
- Leaders who say thank you to feedback but fail to follow through do damage to relationships and further break trust with the team
Our Speaker:
Brian is an Enterprise Agile Coach whose path to agility was forged in the trenches — from software engineer to CTO of internet startups, including Digg.Inc, to leading large-scale Agile transformations at some of the country’s largest financial institutions. He currently leads the team of coaches in the Transformation Management Office at Huntington Bank.
A practitioner first, Brian brings hard-won experience helping individuals, teams, and entire organizations build genuine Business Agility — not just adopt frameworks. He is the author of The Practical Agilist Guidebook and the recently published Assembled. Aligned. Adaptive: The integrated operating model every leader must build, a field manual for leaders navigating organizational transformation.
Brian is also an Adjunct Professor teaching Agile courses at Columbus State Community College, where he works to shape the next generation of practitioners.
Outside of work, he is a word nerd, a competitive Scrabble player, a juggler, and deeply obsessed with dystopian science fiction.
We have never had more powerful tools for building products and services. Cloud computing, AI, real-time data, simulation, and collaboration technologies have transformed what is possible. Yet projects still slip, dependencies multiply, priorities compete, and decisions slow.
The future arrived. Management didn’t.
What if these aren’t isolated problems to solve, but familiar appearances produced by recurring structural patterns?
This session explores how inherited management assumptions propagate across organizational levels, why faster feedback changed the nature of building software, and how practices intended as means can quietly become targets themselves. We’ll examine why successful rescue missions can preserve the conditions that create crises, why culture carries survivorship bias, and why copying successful organizations cannot reproduce their fitness.
Rather than searching for another model to adopt, we’ll turn the mirror around and examine the organization as a system we design. The challenge is not to finally get that design right, but to create the conditions for people to exercise judgment, encounter reality sooner, and progressively get less wrong as circumstances change.
There is no happily ever after. Progress means becoming capable of solving a better class of problems.
There is no happily ever after. Progress means becoming capable of solving a better class of problems.
Takeaways:
- Watch the work, not just the worker: Recognize how recurring structural patterns can produce familiar behaviors and problems across organizational levels.
- Distinguish means from targets: Examine when frameworks, practices, metrics, and transformations stop enabling capability and become objectives themselves.
- Design for fitness, not imitation: Understand why fitness cannot be copied—and why adaptive organizations must continually discover what works under today’s conditions.
Our Speaker:
Dhaval Panchal, NACD.DC is the Founder and President of Evolve Agility Inc. For over two decades, he has guided executives and senior leaders through complex enterprise transformations across global industries, including Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance, and Gaming. His experience spans from the basement to the boardroom, with a focus on the systems, structures, governance, and leadership dynamics that shape organizational behavior. Rather than treating agility as an initiative, process rollout, or framework adoption, Dhaval helps leadership teams evolve their enterprise socio-technical habitats to develop adaptive capability that holds under pressure. He is the author of Evolve Agility: Evolving Culture, Structure, and Systems to Enable Adaptive Growth.
Past Events:
Can Scrum really work for hardware development? This presentation answers that question through a case study of an Agile transformation at Thermo Fisher Scientific involving the development of a new mass spectrometer. The engagement provided an opportunity to test predictions from my eighteen-month research project on Agile methods for hardware development. The presentation summarizes eleven practical lessons about what translates directly from Scrum, what had to be changed, and why.
Takeaways:
- Scrum itself translates surprisingly well to hardware development.
- Many software-oriented Scrum practices must be replaced with hardware-appropriate alternatives.
- Hardware work can be decomposed into Sprint-sized, testable deliverables.
- Cross-functional teams remain a key ingredient for successful Agile development.
Our Speaker:
Dr. Kevin Thompson holds a Ph.D. in Physics and has worked as a scientific researcher, software developer, project manager, Scrum Master, Agile consultant, and trainer. He has led Agile transformations across more than 100 engineering organizations, with a particular focus on hardware and embedded-systems development. He is the author of the book Solutions for Agile Governance in the Enterprise, and specializes in helping engineering organizations adapt Agile methods to complex hardware environments.
