Reflections on leadership, strategy, organization and technology. Some pieces are written in English, others in Danish.
40 articles
Learning22 October 2026
AI is making it increasingly easy to build software quickly. But that does not necessarily mean we are getting better at building the right things. A Family Hub, a Post-it and a new app for our sailing boat reminded me how important it still is to understand different users’ needs before falling in love with the solution.
AI Strategy27 May 2026
One of the things I keep thinking about lately is whether AI is quietly breaking some of the assumptions modern software development has been built around for decades.
AI Strategy5 May 2026
AI is not one change with a beginning, middle, and end. It is a continuous disturbance. It changes how we write, search, analyze, code, decide, communicate, learn, and create. It changes what good looks like.
Learning23 April 2026
What has become clearer to me through these modules is that the value of the MBA is not just in confirming what I already know, or in collecting new frameworks. It lies in the alternation between the known and the unknown: between modules where experience helps, and modules where I have to build understanding from first principles.
AI Strategy15 April 2026
The real question is where it creates meaningful business value, under what conditions, and with what trade-offs. That is where this course helped me most. It gave me a much sharper lens for separating signal from noise.
AI Strategy9 April 2026
One of the more important strategic questions facing SaaS leadership teams right now, is not just how AI changes the product, but how it changes the layers of value around the product and, with them, the future economics of the business.
AI Strategy6 April 2026AI-translated
A more direct path from intention to a working solution. A sense that the digital no longer has to be translated through a series of technical intermediaries before it can become reality.
AI Strategy29 March 2026AI-translated
An MIT study suggests that personality matching between humans and AI can influence the quality of collaboration. If that holds, AI becomes not just a tool, but something leaders need to factor into team design and composition.
AI Strategy22 March 2026
When I look at the companies that seem to be learning fastest with AI, I do not see a waterfall mindset winning. I see many of the underlying principles that made Agile valuable in the first place.
Leadership14 March 2026
I’m currently studying Deploying AI for Strategic Impact at MIT, and one of the modules has made me reflect on something that feels very familiar. AI may improve access to answers, but it does not remove an old leadership challenge: making good deci...
Leadership7 March 2026AI-translated
What stands out most to me is not just a story about women who have found their way into executive roles, leadership positions, and boardrooms. It is a story about leaders who are expanding our understanding of what leadership can be. And perhaps also what it should be.
Leadership17 February 2026
Many large IT initiatives fail for a remarkably simple reason: they do not fit how people actually behave. Over the years, I have seen ambitious systems with strong business cases, solid architecture, and executive backing quietly die after launch....
Leadership15 February 2026
Before generative AI entered the mainstream, I led transformations across several insurance companies where automation of the claims process was a central element. What became clear early on was not a limitation of technology, but a leadership realit...
Leadership29 January 2026AI-translated
Conway’s Law is often quoted, but rarely taken fully seriously. It describes how organisations tend to design systems that mirror their communication structures. In other words, architecture becomes a reflection of how we organise ourselves and work together.
Leadership7 January 2026AI-translated
Seen over the past 100 years, developments in leadership have followed a fairly clear pattern. A pendulum swinging back and forth in an attempt to make consciousness and complexity fit together. New leadership movements emerge when the way we understand leadership and the world can no longer contain the reality we are facing.
Strategy11 December 2025AI-translated
This week, I had a wonderful coffee conversation with two seasoned consultants, and it did not take long before we landed right in the middle of a familiar phenomenon: strategies that never become anything. Strategies that live in beautiful presentations, but not in the reality employees face every single day.
Personal22 November 2025AI-translated
Leadership6 November 2025AI-translated
Leadership is about balancing time and attention between what is urgent and what is important. Operations are often more urgent than development, but in the longer run development is often more important than operations.
Leadership9 October 2025AI-translated
The effect varies considerably depending on the context, and there is limited knowledge about harder bottom-line and customer-related metrics. In other words, Agile Leadership is not a miracle cure, but it can create significant value under the right conditions.
Strategy30 September 2025AI-translated
When plans are always adjusted anyway, when stories create more energy than spreadsheets, when success can become a trap, when values reveal themselves through actions, and when the biggest goals are often best reached at an angle, then the role of the strategist changes too.
Leadership24 September 2025AI-translated
Leadership in the 21st century is no longer about managing resources. It is about creating the conditions for value creation.
Podcast15 June 2025AI-translated
Season 2 of Ledelse i Bevægelse offered ten deeply inspiring conversations with leaders who, each in their own way, place movement, reflection and humanity at the centre.
Leadership12 June 2025AI-translated
Predictability and productivity are among the most common reasons why leadership teams want to introduce agile ways of working. When teams depend on one another, even small delays can have major consequences. Of course, dependencies can be reduced through thoughtful organisational design, but that will have to be the subject of another post.
Leadership11 June 2025
Where the 2020 guide was held to a minimum, the new pack stretches across roles, artefacts, events, theory, scaling, AI and an appendix on adaptive strategy. It’s declared community-driven, meaning updates will be released much like software patches - small, frequent, and based on real-world feedback.
Personal23 January 2025
Let’s be honest – most people don’t enjoy receiving feedback. Many of us feel like the person in the picture when the boss asks if we’d like feedback… We know we should say yes, all while our internal alarm system is screaming at us to brace for impa...
Leadership12 January 2025AI-translated
Delegation is a core discipline for leaders, but also one of the most challenging. Many leaders fall into the trap of “drive-by delegation”, rushing to hand over a task without clarifying the frame around it. It may feel efficient in the moment, but it often results in the leader having to spend time later cleaning up misunderstandings and mistakes. That is both frustrating and time-consuming for both parties.
Leadership9 January 2025AI-translated
Over the past two years, I have worked with an organisation that wanted to find a better balance between freedom and structure in its agile ways of working. The challenge was to create a framework that ensured cross-organisational coherence without suffocating team autonomy.
Leadership7 November 2024
This post is here because some topics are simply too important to keep to one language. My recent conversation with Maria Anker Andersen on the Leadership in Motion (Ledelse i bevægelse) podcast explored diversity, inclusion, and purpose in leadershi...
Leadership6 June 2024
Disclaimer:This post might ruffle some feathers, but the conversation is raging, and I want to share my perspective on it. As a long-time advocate for Agile, it's disheartening to see Agile getting a bad rap for reasons that entirely miss the po...
Leadership7 April 2024
When Walt Disney envisioned Disneyland, he waited to observe where visitors naturally walked before laying down sidewalks, allowing natural behaviors to dictate design. This approach, mirrored by Michigan State University (main image), emphasizes ada...
Leadership29 January 2024
In the ever-evolving complex landscape of modern leadership, the importance of effective communication cannot be overstated. It was therefore no surprise that effective communication was one of five themes ChatGPT identified when I tasked it with ana...
Leadership1 January 2024
On workdays, I get an email from Harvard Business Review with their Management Tip of the Day. As we embark on a new year, I got curious to see what we can learn from the approximately 250 tips I received in 2023. To help me with the analysis, I exp...
Leadership5 December 2023
A friend recently pointed me to a [very insightful 2018 post](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/un-safe-any-speed-rethinking-scale-agility-sam-mcafee/) by [Sam McAfee](https://www.linkedin.com/in/smcafee/) where he critically examines the trend of scali...
Leadership15 November 2023
In the dynamic landscape of leadership, there lies a fundamental question often overlooked: Why should anyone be led by you? This question isn't just a mere curiosity but a profound exploration into the heart of effective leadership. Based on an exte...
Leadership6 February 2023
I just facilitated my 20th [Scrum.org Professional Agile Leadership – Essentials](https://21leadership.com/training/professional-agile-leadership-training/) training, making me the 9th most experienced Agile Leadership trainer worldwide – go figure f...
Leadership25 January 2023
I was recently involved in discussion with a group of leaders on project review gates and how to help a product team move forward. Part of the discussion centered on using the word gate and what that means. The more interesting debate, IMHO, is on ho...
Leadership2 January 2023
“You are definitely not a finisher,” responded my wife over lunch after I had explained the Working Geniuses model to her. To make her point clear, she followed up by giving me a couple of examples of projects I have enthusiastically started but have...
Leadership14 December 2022
The newly published 2022 Business Agility Report contains insight from 296 organizations worldwide. According to the report published by Business Agility Institute, understanding your value streams and structuring your workforce and processes around...
Leadership3 December 2022
Two months ago, I finally crossed the finish line at a 100-mile Ultramarathon after dropping out on my first two attempts. Running for almost 24 hours gives you plenty of time to reflect on life in general and who in their right mind runs for nearly...
Leadership22 May 2022
As a longtime fan of Brooks running shoes, I was looking forward to reading Brooks Running CEO [Jim Weber](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ACoAAAGQ3n0BrIcwYEnWSKR0rnHSHxokE1XDqw8)'s new book Running with Purpose, where he reflects on his career and the s...
