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.

If we are truly seeking agile organization and genuine agility in software development, we must embrace a twofold shift. Niels Pflaeging argues that this twofold shift starts with a profound rethinking of how organizations should function. Just as importantly, it requires a radical re-orientation in how we approach transformation, or developing our organizations. This includes moving away from the familiar—yet repeatedly failing—recipes of “change management,” coaching, and training, and turning toward fast, collective transformation instead, together with those who are willing to take part.

For over twenty years, Niels has dedicated himself to answering the question of how organizations can break free from command-and-control for good — through research, practice, consulting, and community building. His insights challenge conventional thinking while offering a practical path forward.

In this highly engaging keynote, Niels will explore how organizations can become sustainably more successful and genuinely fit for human beings—by moving beyond centralized steering. Expect to be surprised, inspired, and invited to reflect deeply on the theory and practice of agile work, organizational design, and transformation.

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

Tired of preaching about tools, frameworks and scaling models, and endless PowerPoint decks? This workshop is different. In a high-energy, brains-on, no-slides session, Niels Pflaeging will challenge us to look beyond Scrum, beyond agile scaling, and beyond the well-known agile patterns that all too often keep organizations stuck.

Together, we’ll explore how to free software development and organizations from the grip of bureaucracy and command-and-control, once and for all. But this isn’t just theory: we’ll dive into how real meaningful change can happen quickly and effectively, within teams, across clusters of teams, and throughout entire organizations. This is a no-nonsense, practical session about breaking down the barriers that have blocked agility, that have crushed great software development and more democratic ways of working. Join this workshop to question, experiment, and discover what it truly takes to move beyond the limits of “business as usual.”