Niels Pflaeging is a passionate advocate for a new breed of leadership and profound change in organizations. He is founder and associate of the BetaCodex Network, as well as co-founder of Red42 and managing director at qomenius, with headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany. Prior to the BetaCodex Network, Niels was for five years a director with the prestigious Beyond Budgeting Round Table. Niels authored 11 books on organizational leadership and change, including the best-seller Organize for Complexity, which was published in several languages. Together with Silke Hermann, Niels Pflaeging is co-creator of several influential concepts, such as Change-as-Flipping and Org Physics, as well as the open source approaches Cell Structure Design, Relative Targets,  OpenSpace Beta and OpenSpace DEV.

Since 2006, Niels has been strongly involved in transformational change projects for organizations across Europe and the Americas. The Financial Times Germany wrote: “When Pflaeging shakes the dogmas of management, they crumble in his hands.” Niels recently announced that he believes software development needs to become time-oriented, arguing for rhythm and structure well beyond today’s scrum and kanban. Expect news on this topic from Niels during his keynote at Scrum Day Belgrade!

Keynote session at RSG Belgrade 2025

Title: What if… we hadn’t really tried Agile yet? Make software development and organizations federative and time-oriented.

Niels argues that if we want to bring about agile organizations, and true agility in software development, then a twofold shift is needed: First, a profound shift in our conception of how organizations should function. Secondly, a re-orientation in our approach to change or transformation: Away from forever-failing notions of change management, coaching and training – and towards fast transformation, undertaken together with all the willing.

In this highly energetic keynote, Niels will discuss with us how our organizations can become sustainably more successful and also fit for human beings, by moving beyond centralized steering. Expect to be surprised, inspired, and invited to reflect both practice and theory of agile work, ways of organizing software development, organizational design and change!

Workshop at RSG Belgrade 2025

Title: Powerful and practical approaches to decentralization and time-orientation: How to break the barriers to agility in software development & beyond

In this highly interactive, PowerPoint-free, high-energy session, Niels will discuss with us how organizations of all kinds can move beyond Scrum, beyond agile scaling and well-known agile patterns, in order to liberate software development from bureaucracy and command-and-control, for good. This no-nonsense session with Niels will not just cover agile tools or patterns, though. We will also discuss how to make change happen, fast and effectively, within teams and beyond: Within larger structures like clusters of teams, and across entire organizations. In effect, this session will be about how to break through the barriers that have stood in the way of agility, of great software development and democratic ways of working.