45–60 minutes · English or German · on-site or virtual
Keynote talks and topics
For leadership events, company gatherings and technical conferences. We’ll shape the emphasis around your audience and the purpose of your event.
Leadership
For: Leadership gatherings, management teams and people stepping into leadership roles.
People can be capable and committed, yet hesitate to make a decision or raise a concern. I focus on how leaders build trust, encourage initiative and sometimes unintentionally hold people back.
Example
What happens when someone admits a mistake?
Asking people to speak openly is one thing. Responding when they do is another. This talk examines why bad news stays hidden and how a leader’s response can help people address a problem or make them less likely to speak up next time.
Questions we explore
- What does your response to a mistake tell people about speaking up next time?
- What helps a team learn from a mistake rather than hide it?
Innovation
For: Innovation events, product organizations and leaders exploring new business opportunities.
How do you turn promising ideas into products customers want to buy? During my work in Silicon Valley, I collaborated with startups and researchers at Stanford and Berkeley to discover technologies and future markets for clients. I draw on that work and on building businesses to show how understanding what customers need and testing assumptions can guide investment in new ideas.
Questions we explore
- What would you need to learn before investing more in an idea?
- How can customer feedback and small experiments inform the next decision?
Agility
For: Company gatherings, agile events and organizations introducing new ways of working.
Agility becomes easier to understand when we step outside the familiar language of roles, meetings and frameworks. Drawing on my work with agile teams, I make the principles behind those practices tangible. Music & Agility is one example of this approach, bringing the world of a touring band into the conversation.
Example
Music & Agility
A touring band on stage is a remarkable microcosm of a high-performing team. In Music & Agility, I bring insights from that world into the conversation about how organizations work. It offers an entertaining way into a subject that can otherwise feel abstract or overloaded with jargon.
Watch Music & AgilityQuestions we explore
- What does agility mean beyond its roles and rituals?
- What can a touring band reveal about high-performing teams?
Transformation
For: Executive gatherings, transformation programs and organizations reviewing the results of a major change.
The organization has new roles, new tools and new meetings. Yet decisions still take too long and work still gets stuck. I explore why changing the visible process can leave the original problems untouched, and what else needs attention.
Example
Why the old problems survive a transformation
When a transformation disappoints, another framework is not necessarily the answer. This talk looks beyond the rollout to how decisions are made, what gets rewarded and how leaders act. The starting point is the organization’s actual situation, including what already works.
Questions we explore
- Which changes affect how work gets done, and which mainly change its appearance?
- Where might decision-making, incentives or leadership behavior be keeping the old problems in place?
Technical excellence
For: Technical conferences, engineering teams and leaders responsible for software delivery.
Frequent releases and rapid feedback depend on more than how a team organizes its meetings. They also depend on how its software is built and changed. I connect agile ways of working with engineering practices such as test-driven development, continuous integration and maintainable software.
Questions we explore
- What makes software easier to change and safer to release?
- How do engineering practices make short feedback cycles possible?
What would you like your audience to take away?
Tell me a little about your event. We can work out the topic and emphasis together.