Obeya Summit 2026: Full Schedule

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10:55am CEST

Making Decisions Visible: Transforming Risk into a Performance Enabler

Friday June 26, 2026 10:55am - 11:40am CEST

3. Meelzolder

In many professional services organizations, risk and compliance functions are experienced as slow, opaque, and misaligned with business needs. This session presents a real-world transformation of a 50-person Risk & Compliance team in a global law firm, responsible for AML/KYC approvals required before client work could begin.

The firm faced growing tension: lawyers experienced delays of up to two weeks, trust in the risk function was low, and workarounds were becoming common - creating both commercial and regulatory risk. At the same time, the risk team felt overloaded, undervalued, and disconnected from the firm’s strategy.
Rather than replacing people or introducing a new methodology, the transformation focused on redesigning the decision system itself. Over 90% of the team remained unchanged. Performance shifted through clarity of direction, visible work and flow, domain-based specialization, clear ownership, and daily leadership support. A shared performance dashboard created a single, transparent view of reality for the team and firm leadership, aligning speed with compliance.

Within four months, the team improved its core performance KPI by 85%, achieved same-day decisions, stabilized attrition, and rebuilt trust across the organization.

This case demonstrates how Obeya-aligned principles unlock performance, strengthen human engagement, and deliver clear, measurable results.

Speakers

Tomáš Böhm

AI Transformation Expert, Raiffeisenbank Czech Republic

I am a transformation leader with nearly 20 years of experience delivering complex change across Europe, spanning technology, finance, legal services, and consulting. I have led large-scale transformations, PMOs, and cross-functional programs in organisations such as Booking.com... Read More →

Friday June 26, 2026 10:55am - 11:40am CEST
3. Meelzolder

SESSION (45/60 mins)

1:50pm CEST

From Conversations to Collective Decisions: Building Human-Centered AI as a Socio-Technical Decision System

Friday June 26, 2026 1:50pm - 2:35pm CEST

5. Douchelokaal

Public and social support systems are often fragmented, making it difficult for citizens, especially those with limited literacy, to find appropriate help, while organizations lack visibility into how people move through the system.
This session presents Met Mij, a human-centered AI initiative that supports citizens in navigating local social services while creating a continuous feedback loop between users, social organizations, and technical teams. Rather than positioning AI as an autonomous solution, Met Mij is designed as a socio-technical decision system: AI assists with navigation and matching, while humans remain central in defining criteria, validating outcomes, and steering system evolution.
The talk shares practical lessons from building this system in real-world conditions, including how user interactions are translated into learning signals, how cross-organizational alignment is supported without formal Obeya structures, and how decision-making emerges through visible feedback loops.
By framing Met Mij through an Obeya lens, this case illustrates how human judgment and AI can be integrated to improve system-level learning, alignment, and service delivery offering insights for organizations exploring how Obeya principles can extend into AI-enabled environments.

Speakers

Jessica Goss

Project Lead - Met Mij | Mijke the Matchbot, Eindhoven Engine

Jessica Goss is Project Lead of Met Mij | Mijke the Matchbot at Eindhoven Engine, where she leads the development of a human-centered AI system supporting citizens with limited literacy in navigating fragmented social support services. Her work focuses on building socio-technical... Read More →

Friday June 26, 2026 1:50pm - 2:35pm CEST
5. Douchelokaal

SESSION (45/60 mins)

2:15pm CEST

From visual boards to governing systems: how Obeya restores decision quality in complex organizations

Friday June 26, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm CEST

3. Meelzolder

Many organisations adopt Obeya to improve alignment and collaboration, yet struggle to translate visual management into sustained performance and sound governance. Too often, Obeya remains a facilitation practice rather than a governing system.

This session explores how Obeya can be designed and used as an integrated decision-making system in complex organisations, where ambiguity, competing priorities, and cross-functional dependencies challenge traditional management models. Drawing on experience across sectors and knowledge-intensive organisations, the presentation demonstrates how Obeya strengthens decision quality by clarifying responsibilities, making trade-offs explicit, and connecting human judgment to operational and strategic performance.

The session challenges the common assumption that a better culture alone leads to better outcomes. Instead, it shows how governance structures, management systems, and decision architecture shape behaviour, learning, and results. Obeya is presented not as a visual tool, but as a mechanism for restoring coherence between strategy, execution, and accountability.

Participants will gain insight into how mature Obeya implementations support portfolio governance, strategic execution, and leadership decision-making in high-complexity environments. The session is aimed at leaders, decision makers, and experienced Obeya practitioners seeking to move beyond boards and rituals toward system-level impact.

Speakers

Sidsel Winther Storaas

Consultant and speaker, Storaas Quality Consulting AS

About the speakerSidsel Winther Storaas is a quality management professional, educator, and advisor specialising in system-level governance, decision-making, and organisational performance. She has close to three decades of experience working with complex organisations across sectors such as public... Read More →

Friday June 26, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm CEST
3. Meelzolder

SESSION (45/60 mins)

global Y

2:40pm CEST

False Rivals: Digital versus Physical Obeya Boards

Friday June 26, 2026 2:40pm - 3:25pm CEST

5. Douchelokaal

Digital and physical Obeya boards are routinely treated as competitors. One is scalable, modern, and data-rich. The other is tactile, social, and anchored in the work itself. Leaders are told they must choose.

This is a false binary.

Physical boards do something the brain is exquisitely designed for. Digital boards do something entirely different—something no wall can do. Most organizations sense this distinction, but few articulate it clearly, and fewer still design, deploy, and resource both with that distinction in mind.

When digital boards come to dominate the informational environment, subtle failures emerge. Interaction shifts into observation. Engagement thins into explanation. Alignment appears stronger than it is. Results plateau—not because visuality fails, but because information is made visible without regard for human use.

In this session, Gwendolyn Galsworth reframes digital and physical boards not as alternatives, but as distinct and complementary forms of visuality. The real question then becomes not which board is better, but what kind of thinking, alignment, and commitment each one makes possible—and what is lost when one is overlooked.

Join us to explore how recognizing and restoring this balance renews Obeya clarity, momentum, and impact—making a mission-critical human difference.

Speakers

Gwendolyn Galsworth

President/Founder, VIsual Thinking Inc.

Gwendolyn Galsworth, PhD, is a widely-recognized visual workplace/visual management expert, credited with codifying visual workplace concepts, principles, and technologies into a single, coherent framework of knowledge and know-how. Founder/president of Visual Thinking Inc. and Visual... Read More →

Friday June 26, 2026 2:40pm - 3:25pm CEST
5. Douchelokaal

SESSION (45/60 mins)

3:30pm CEST

From Task Delivery to Decision Leadership: How Human-Centred Clarity Drives Performance in Complex Organisations

Friday June 26, 2026 3:30pm - 4:15pm CEST

5. Douchelokaal

Across many organisations, work moves quickly but decisions do not. Teams deliver tasks, artefacts, and dashboards at pace, yet performance stalls due to unclear ownership, unresolved trade-offs, and repeated escalation. This session explores why that gap exists and how mature Obeya environments close it.
Drawing on real transformation and governance engagements, the session introduces a shift from task delivery to decision leadership as a core Obeya capability. It demonstrates how performance improves not through additional metrics or visuals, but through human-centred clarity: the ability to frame decisions, surface constraints, and enable collective judgment under uncertainty.
The session examines how Obeya strengthens governance by making accountability explicit without creating fear, and how it reduces decision latency in complex, cross-functional environments. Particular attention is given to leadership behaviour, language, and decision design in contexts shaped by digital transformation, automation, and AI augmentation.
Participants will gain practical insight into how Obeya enables better human judgment and measurable performance outcomes, and how organisations can move beyond activity and reporting toward decisions that genuinely drive strategic and operational results.

Speakers

Precious Omon Akaighe

Senior Business Analyst & Decision Leadership Consultant, TechEdu Solution Ltd

Precious Akaighe is a Senior Business Analyst and Decision Leadership Consultant working with complex organisations to improve performance through clearer governance, decision-making, and human-centred transformation.Her work focuses on the space where strategy, delivery, and accountability... Read More →

Friday June 26, 2026 3:30pm - 4:15pm CEST
5. Douchelokaal

SESSION (45/60 mins)

4:05pm CEST

Obeya maturity & success factors: data driven research insights

Friday June 26, 2026 4:05pm - 5:05pm CEST

3. Meelzolder

Built on insights from 80+ completed Obeya Maturity scans across industries and geographies, this session delivers the clearest picture yet of how organizations use Obeya to drive performance.

It will reveal where organizations sit on the maturity curve, which routines and behaviors consistently separate top performers from lower performers and what the common pitfalls are that slow progress.

Feiko, Eric, and Yoram will provide insight how maturity relates to impact (e.g., faster decision making and improved predictability to targets).

And they will share their experience from real implementations, along with practical tools and stories that you can apply immediately.

Speakers

Feiko van der Kolk

Consultant/Coach, Rabobank & Self-Owned

Feiko Van der Kolk is an Obeya Sensei at the Obeya Association and a highly-experienced change management consultant and management coach in the Netherlands. Currently working as an internal consultant and obeya lead at Rabobank, Mr. Van der Kolk gives back by helping NGOs grow... Read More →

Yoram Meijer

Obeya Mentor

Yoram is an Obeya Mentor at the Obeya Association and an experienced change management consultant and leadership coach in the Netherlands. Currently he works with leadership teams to build focus, alignment, and faster decision-making. With a pragmatic approach, he creates Obeya rooms... Read More →

Eric Rozemeijer

Senior Manager, Eraneos

Eric Rozemeijer is a Senior Manager at Eraneos and has over 25 years of experience transforming organizations to higher performance. In 2016, he pioneered the implementation of Obeya at the Director level in the Netherlands and, since then, has helped numerous organizations... Read More →

Friday June 26, 2026 4:05pm - 5:05pm CEST
3. Meelzolder

SESSION (45/60 mins)

4:20pm CEST

When metrics stop guiding decisions

Friday June 26, 2026 4:20pm - 5:05pm CEST

5. Douchelokaal

Mature portfolio Obeya and the hidden cost of metrics.

Portfolio Obeya rooms are often presented as evidence of mature governance. With increasingly sophisticated metrics, dashboards, and analytics, executives expect stronger alignment, clearer oversight, and better portfolio control.
Across mature portfolio Obeya environments, however, a recurring pattern can be observed: portfolios become overloaded and initiatives are rarely stopped. Capacity constraints are visible, but do not translate into decisive stop or reallocation decisions. Instead, portfolio conversations focus on optimizing ongoing work, while the question of whether initiatives should continue quietly disappears.
This session examines how widely used metric practices contribute to that dynamic. Metrics do not merely inform decisions; they shape portfolio conversations by defining what is discussed, and what is not. As a result, portfolio Obeya increasingly functions as a forum for managing existing commitments, rather than for making deliberate choices under scarcity.
Participants will learn how this shift occurs, how to recognize early signals of decision drift, and how to intervene before default continuation sets in. The session equips executives and portfolio leaders to restore stopping and reprioritization as legitimate governance acts, creating space for work that truly matters and strengthening the organization’s ability to translate strategy into results.
Portfolios rarely fail loudly; they drift.

Speakers

Gerard Berends

Strategy Execution Advisor, gerardberends.nl

Gerard Berends has spent nearly twenty years watching organizations report progress on work that quietly stopped moving their strategy forward. Goals were set, metrics were tracked, and initiatives continued, while the harder question of whether to stop or reprioritize disappeared... Read More →

Friday June 26, 2026 4:20pm - 5:05pm CEST
5. Douchelokaal

SESSION (45/60 mins)