LeSS Newsletter - January 2025
31.01.2026Hi 👋
And just like that, the first month of the year is a wrap!
AI will again dominate the conversation in 2026, even more than before. The real work lies in maturing organizational design, leadership, and systems of work. Humans remain the decisive factor in value creation.
On that note Craig Larman, Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm will be launching their new 10X Org book later this month.
What’s inside this month?
- 🇯🇵 Global LeSS Conference Tokyo 2026
- 🎥 LeSS Stories from Wärtsilä: Flow of Teams – Part 1
- ✍️ "Three Metrics of Adaptiveness: Comparing LeSS and SAFe" by Illia Pavlichenko
- 📖 A LeSS Story: Episode 2 "Development Flow in LeSS" by Robert Briese
- ☕ "From Zombie Scrum to Evidence-Based Change" video with Bas Vodde and Christiaan Verwijs
- 📚 LeSSons in the picture: Systems Thinking in Action
Enjoy, and keep learning!
— Bastiaan van Hamersveld
CEO at less.works
email: bastiaan@less.works
Global LeSS Conference Tokyo 2026
We are excited to announce the 11th Global LeSS Conference, taking place on 8+9 October 2026 in Tokyo, Japan 🇯🇵, in a unique joint edition with LeSS’ Yoaké Asia!
For the first time, the long-standing global LeSS community and the growing Asian LeSS movement come together in one shared event! Bringing world-class insights and deeply rooted regional practice into the same conversation.
Japan offers a powerful setting for this edition: a place where craftsmanship, learning, and continuous improvement run deep, making it an ideal environment to reflect on what it really means to scale product development with purpose and becoming AI-ready.
LeSS Stories from Wärtsilä: Flow of Teams – Part 1
🚢 What does LeSS look like inside a global technology leader?
Take a glimpse into Wärtsilä’s WHALE product development. Wärtsilä is global leader in innovative technologies and lifecycle solutions for the Marine and Energy markets.
The WHALE product development adopted LeSS four years ago.
This is an insider view into their real sprint planning events, demonstrating their adoption of LeSS in day-to-day work. Recommended to watch!
Three Metrics of Adaptiveness: Comparing LeSS and SAFe
Adaptiveness at product level can be reduced to three very concrete metrics:
- how much started but not finished work (WIP) you carry at the product level at the end of the iteration,
- how fast the product turns ideas into potential value (Lead Time),
- and how easily any item from the Product Backlog can be handed over to any team (% of product items available to ≥80% of teams) in order to ensure work on the most valuable things at the product level.
1. WIP at the end of the iteration: how often the system “resets”
The first key metric of adaptiveness is WIP at the product level (or train level in SAFe) at the end of the iteration. It does not matter how agile an individual team is if the product as a whole is overloaded with started but not finished work. This unfinished work at the product level directly takes away your ability to sharply change the direction of the product when the context or priorities change.
In a good LeSS implementation...
A LeSS Story: Episode 2 "Development Flow in LeSS
🤝 One Product. Multiple Teams. Real Alignment.
When multiple teams work on one product, alignment can’t wait until the end of the Sprint. This episode, by Robert Briese, shows how LeSS enables fast feedback, early dependency discovery, and system-wide learning through continuous integration and lightweight coordination.
🔍 See how it works in practice: shared retrospectives, scout visits, and code-first communication create transparency and trust, every day. Alignment doesn’t come from extra meetings, but from how the work actually flows.
Video: CafeTalk 7 - From Zombie Scrum to Evidence-Based Change
🧟♂️ From Zombie Scrum to Evidence-Based Improvement
In this CaféTalk episode, Bas Vodde talks with Christiaan Verwijs — co-author of The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide and co-creator of Columinity.
💡 What’s inside:
Why many Scrum implementations lose their beating heart, how Liberating Structures help teams reclaim ownership and energy, and what data and research really tell us about team effectiveness. A thoughtful conversation on diagnosing reality, improving systems, and why frameworks matter far less than how people actually work—together.
Click to play!
LeSSons: Systems Thinking in Action
Systems Thinking is a powerful way to have better conversations, because it creates a shared language between roles such as management and developers. It builds a common understanding of the real problem, the system’s optimization goal, and the key “levers” that influence outcomes, what Peter Senge famously called the fifth discipline of a learning organization.
Participants make mental models visible and explore how system behavior emerges over time. An AI agent is used to support model creation, challenge assumptions, and explore alternative system dynamics.
Within a LeSS context, Systems Thinking is essential to avoid local optimization and to design organizations that truly optimize for the whole product and long-term learning.
