No Title – No Problem

No Title, No Problem

How a Leadership Obeya connected strategy, transformation, and operational execution in a fast-growing engineering organisation

Growth creates complexity.

Complexity creates fragmentation.

And fragmentation makes it increasingly difficult for leaders to keep strategy, transformation, and daily operations aligned.

In this case study, Berrie Duijx shares how a leadership Obeya helped a rapidly growing engineering organisation create focus, ownership, and alignment during a large-scale SAFe transformation.

What started as a simple visual management experiment evolved into the primary mechanism for governing strategy, transformation, and operational execution.

The case offers a candid look at both the successes and setbacks of implementing Obeya in an engineering-driven environment where leadership attention is scarce and operational demands are constant.

What you’ll learn

• How Leadership Obeya creates alignment across strategy, transformation, and operations
• Why leadership teams often revert to reactive management
• How ownership and prioritisation become visible through Obeya
• Why cadence matters more than the board itself
• How leadership conversations drive organisational change

The challenge

The organisation had nearly doubled in size in five years while simultaneously implementing a large-scale SAFe operating model. Strategic priorities, transformation initiatives, and operational execution were becoming increasingly disconnected.

Leaders faced:

• rapid growth
• competing improvement initiatives
• leadership overload
• lack of strategic alignment
• increasing operational complexity

The question became:

How do you govern transformation while keeping the shop open?

One Leadership Team. One Leadership Agenda. One Working Rhythm.

The solution was a digital Leadership Obeya designed around a simple idea:

Bring strategy, transformation, execution, and leadership conversations into one shared environment.

The weekly cadence helped leaders:

• create visibility
• establish ownership
• align priorities
• manage escalations
• continuously improve how they worked together

The biggest lesson

The most important insight was not about the board.

It was about behaviour.

When business escalations increased, leaders abandoned the Obeya cadence and returned to reactive management. The experiment demonstrated how quickly focus and discipline disappear when leadership routines are not sustained.

As Berrie notes:

The value of the Obeya was not created by the board itself, but by the leadership behaviours and routines it enabled.

Results

The Leadership Obeya helped create measurable improvements:

• Active initiatives reduced from 29 to 8
• Clear ownership of strategic initiatives
• Faster escalation resolution
• Improved resource focus and prioritisation
• Increased leadership alignment
• More strategic leadership conversations
• Greater transparency and trust across departments

One executive captured the impact perfectly:

“We covered far more important topics in less time than during traditional staff meetings.”

From Change Manager to Trusted Advisor

Perhaps the most interesting outcome was personal rather than organisational.

The recurring conversations, transparency, and shared problem-solving created the trust needed for the Organizational Change Manager to become a trusted advisor within an engineering-driven leadership team.

As the article concludes:

The board created transparency. The conversations created change.

Download the full case study and discover how Leadership Obeya helped connect strategy, transformation, and execution in one of the world’s most complex engineering environments.

Berrie Duijx will be speaking at the Obeya Summit on June 25–26, 2026.

Join Felice, Jelger and Sanya at the Obeya Summit 2026 and learn how a Leadership Obeya helped align strategy, transformation, and operational execution in a rapidly growing engineering organisation, reducing active initiatives from 29 to 8 while improving leadership focus and decision-making.