Leadership 2025: Obeya at the heart of the Leadership System

A Cry Out for Obeya in Leadership Research 2025

Eraneos carried out research regarding key leadership behaviors during 2024-2025 called ‘Leadership Survey 2025’*. The results give strong indications of where leaders must improve their capabilities. This leadership survey shows that organizations are realizing that leadership practices need to evolve to meet the challenges of today’s marketplaces. However, progress is slow, with leaders apparently still holding on to traditional ways of working.

Niels Loader, a leading expert in Lean IT, Agile and DevOps and author of The Lean IT Expert, already warned about this in his keynote during the 2024 Obeya Summit: “With the increasing importance of agility and flexibility in organizations, leaders must adopt a new approach to leadership. The ways that were successful in the 20th Century no longer suffice. Unfortunately, most of the management and leadership practices that are propagated even to this day are primarily based on ideas from decades ago.”

An important element of the leadership system of today is Obeya. It creates transparency into the status of an organization through oversight and insight. The philosophy puts focus on the customer, results and priorities. In addition, it enables continuous improvement and impediment management. The concept of one visual room, one meeting cadence and one truth shortens communication lines and saves time. Lastly, it also enlarges ownership and can be a powerful source of leadership and team development.

In this article we visit the key findings on leadership as of 2025. In addition, we investigate the key improvement areas for leaders to improve the leadership system. We conclude this article with an explanation on how Obeya can be at the heart of this leadership system and reinforce the key improvements required for the leadership of today.

*Click here to get a copy of the Leadership survey 2025

Key Findings: A Broad Survey of Leadership Activities

The response gives an overall view of the state of the adoption of leadership practices in which we see that there are areas that appear to be strong, such as the definition of the purpose of the organization (75% agrees that the organizational purpose is clear and that employees act according to it) and the use of problem solving within organizations (69% scores leadership positively when it comes to identifying problems and enabling employees to find structured solutions to problems).

However, the accompanying meeting structures are assessed as being a weak spot, according to the respondents (49% do not recognize the existence of a formal structure for information flow within the organization). Improvement is also definitely needed in the area of story-telling. The creation and delivery of Change Stories is seen to be weak (52% feels that leadership storytelling is either lacking or infrequent).

Lastly, one of the weaker areas is Value Stream Management (40% does not agree that leaders fully understand value streams within the organization). This is an area of particular importance for modern organizations. Understanding the way work flows through the organization and how its journey can be as short as possible, leading to quick and high quality delivery of value to customers, is an absolute must for leaders in today’s organizations.

Based on further exploration of these findings the following conclusions were drawn:

• The move to a more modern leadership system is patchy.

• Visibility on purpose and KPIs remains a challenge.

• Storytelling is an untapped leadership tool.

• Strategic planning lacks engagement.

• Continuous improvement requires stronger leadership commitment.

Key Improvement Areas: Next Steps for Leadership

Leadership in today’s organizations is and has been at a crossroads for the past few years. We are slowly seeing that a choice is being made to adopt modern leadership practices, although there are examples of organizations that are choosing a more conservative path.

Overall, the focus of improvement needs to be on the following areas:

• Change Story: Leaders must improve their capabilities when it comes to storytelling. In all organizations, people require inspiring stories from their leaders about the future, direction and the way the purpose of the organization will be achieved. It is up to the leaders to create and tell these stories, such that each individual knows the purpose of the organization and can identify their position in helping to achieve the purpose.

• Communication Structures: Leaders must build more effective communication mechanisms in their organizations. This means identifying and implementing better ways to share information – primarily through visual management, rather than reports and meetings – and revisiting the purpose and effectiveness of every meeting within the organization. Also, the connection between meetings must be clear; how does information flow from one level to another? How does information flow through processes?

• Impediment Management: Leaders need to take their responsibility when it comes to resolving impediments in the organizational system. Impediments in the system cause delays, errors and other performance problems on the work floor. Leaders must ensure that the organizational system is continuously updated and improved, because only they can create and implement improvements at a structural level.

• Continuous Improvement: Leaders are encouraged to focus on truly embedding improvement activities into the daily work of both the work floor and the leadership teams. Leaders must focus on identifying the problems in the organizational system and finding structural solutions to these problems. In doing so, leaders will automatically solve many of the problems currently experienced in the operational side of the organization.

• Value Stream Management: The greatest challenge for all leadership teams is to take a holistic view of the organization and its challenges, since this means transcending the functional boundaries that exist in most organizations. Working as a team, leadership must fully understand how work flows through the organization and where this flow is blocked or reduced. By having a full view of the key value streams, leadership can ensure that the right decisions are made to improve the flow of value to customers.

Building a Leadership System with Obeya at its Heart

According to a 2023 Prosci study called ‘Best Practices in Change Management’*, evolving the leadership system along with the operational system is crucial: “The key problem for leaders is that they spend huge amounts of money and effort changing the operational way of working. However, if a change in the leadership way of working does not accompany this operational change, eventually the organization will revert to where it started. Most of the benefits will be lost and the organization will react skeptically to the next change initiated by management.”

The key improvement areas from the leadership report can help focus on the right things to build the right leadership system. Building more effective communication structures is a direct cry for help towards the concept of Obeya: visual management of information flows and a proper cascade with synchronized meetings. When doing it right, the starting point of the Obeya is the purpose of the organization and how that translates to all organizational activities. The best way to visualize and manage these activities is by focusing on the key value streams, to improve the flow of value to customers.

The power of Obeya is that it covers the full PDCA-cycle. While storytelling and value stream management focus more on planning and doing, impediment management and continuous improvement focus on checking and acting. With the help of Obeya leaders can ensure that the organizational system is continuously updated and improved, which is something only leaders are able to do.

We are in a period in which operational models are changing to more flexible and agile systems. We are clearly in the transitional period in which the leadership systems are adjusting to the changing reality on the work floor. There is still work to be done in this area, but putting Obeya at its heart will give you a head start.

*Click here for a management summary of Best Practices in Change Management