LeSS Newsletter - May 2026
2026-05-31Hi 👋
This month is all about one thing: stop optimising the parts, start seeing the whole.
What’s inside this month?
- 📖 Stop Guessing. Start Seeing the System by Wolfgang Steffens
- 🇯🇵 LeSS2026 Tokyo - Venue is there!
- ☕ CafeTalk: AI Won’t Fix Your Organization. It Will Expose It. - with Jurgen de Smet
- 🤫 Maximizing Dependencies with Interdependent Teams by Bas Vodde
- 📚 LeSS Case Study: Large Server Hardware Company by James Carpenter
Enjoy, and keep learning!
— Bastiaan van Hamersveld
CEO at less.works, email: bastiaan@less.works
Stop Guessing. Start Seeing the System
🔍 Most organisational problems are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a system.
Many improvement efforts start with symptoms: missed dates, overloaded teams, too many meetings, too much work in progress, or endless fire-fighting. But the real causes often sit deeper in the system.
In this article, Wolfgang Steffens introduces Sisko, a Systems Thinking AI agent designed to help teams and organisations uncover hidden variables, spot feedback loops, and create better starting points for change. A useful experiment for anyone applying LeSS, organisational design, or product development improvement.
LeSS2026 Tokyo - Venue is there!
🏯 Venue announced: Global LeSS Conference Tokyo 2026 🇯🇵✨
📍 BIPROGY Inc., Toyosu area
🗓️ October 8–9, 2026
🌅 Theme: A Dawn for Adaptive Organisations
AI is accelerating everything 🤖⚡
But can your organisation learn, adapt, and create value faster as a whole?
👉 Join us in Tokyo for two days of serious learning, deep exchange, and a memorable corner of the city to explore around it.
And while you’re there: visit teamLab Planets in Toyosu, an immersive digital art experience just around the corner. 🌊🎨
🇯🇵 Visit the official website ➔
Video: CafeTalk - AI Won't fix your organisation, but expose it
🤖 Is your organisation transforming with AI, or just adding new tools?
In this new LeSS video, we talkswith Jurgen de Smet about AI, organisational design, and product development companies.
Jurgen argues that AI does not magically fix organisations. It often exposes the existing problems faster: slow decisions, silos, fragmented ownership, and weak feedback loops.
You will learn:
- Why AI tooling alone does not create transformation
- Why faster coding does not automatically mean faster value
- Why organisational design determines whether AI creates real benefit
The real question is not just: “How do we use AI?” It is: “Is our organisation designed to benefit from it?”
Maximizing Dependencies
✨ What if teams should not try to avoid dependencies, but actively create the right kind?
This story challenges one of the most repeated ideas in agile: that teams should become as independent as possible.
Bas Vodde turns that idea upside down.
Through a playful Lego-based story, he shows how LeSS teams can work with interdependence, shared work, and whole-product focus, without creating blocking dependencies.
Inside the story:
- Why “independent teams” can be misleading
- How shared work creates shared learning
- What changes when teams stop thinking like programmers and start acting as product developers
- Why collaboration across teams is not a problem to solve, but a capability to grow
A bright, provocative story for anyone working with multiple teams on one product.
LeSS Case Study: Large Server Hardware Company
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🔍 What happens when “agile” meets real hardware, firmware, and organisational complexity?
This LeSS case study takes you inside a large server hardware company working on a modular compute system, with thousands of people involved across hardware, firmware, software, and support.
It shows how a LeSS-oriented adoption started with a meaningful multi-component area, created stronger customer collaboration, improved technical practices, and exposed the deeper organisational impediments that stood in the way of lasting change.
What you’ll learn:
- Why broad product boundaries matter
- How feature teams can improve adaptability, even in complex hardware and firmware environments
- Why technical excellence and organisational design cannot be separated
- How early success can still unravel when reporting lines, incentives, and management structures remain unchanged
A rich and honest case study, full of practical lessons for anyone serious about product development at scale.