Boundaryless Conversations Podcast

What do we think about Agile beyond frameworks - and how organisations actually learn, adapt, and continuously improve?
Håkan Forss, a lean and agile coach and speaker who has become legendary for his iconic Lego figures-based presentations, joins us to unpack the hidden purpose of Agile and why its true power lies not in methods but in how organisations design for flow and fast customer feedback.
Speaking on concepts like lean thinking, Kanban, and theory of constraints, Håkan explores why visualising work is a radical act in knowledge organisations, how limiting work in process exposes real constraints, and why optimising for customer feedback - not busyness - is essential in complex systems.
This episode offers a long-term perspective on Agile, beyond fads.
Håkan takes us inside his long-standing practice of working with organisations as living systems, discussing how traditional, project-based organisations struggle to operate in flow, how autonomy and coherence are often imbalanced, and how to address this in modern organisations.
As the conversation widens to autonomy, AI, and decentralised teams, we explore deeper questions: what does it mean to organise when individuals can act faster alone, yet outcomes still depend on collective coherence?

Key Highlights
👉 The purpose of Lean and Agile is to achieve real business results for customers; methods and frameworks are only a means to that end.
👉 Knowledge work is mostly invisible - it lives in people’s heads and inside computers, which makes visualisation a critical enabler of understanding and improvement.
👉 Making work visible in a physical space helps people grasp the bigger context, react emotionally, and recognise how much work is actually happening in parallel.
👉 Once waiting time and bottlenecks are visible, it becomes difficult to ignore the need for change - “once you see it, you cannot unsee it.”
👉 Flow efficiency focuses on how much time customers' needs are actively being worked on versus how much time work is waiting.
👉 Most organisations are structured around projects, systems, or silos, while actual customer needs cut across those boundaries and create delays.
👉 Limiting work in process - not “work in progress” - exposes where work is standing still and forces problems to surface.
👉 Faster customer feedback is more valuable than maximising utilisation, especially when organisations do not yet know what customers really need.
👉 Increasing autonomy can improve flow, but without shared purpose and strategy, teams risk pulling in different directions and cancelling each other out.
👉 Radical transparency around goals and key metrics enables people to self-organise around what matters most.
👉 As power shifts to the edges with AI and decentralisation, the challenge for organisations moves from enabling flow to achieving coherence across signals.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Agile in First Principles: Visualisation, Flow and Constraints - INTRO
(01:25) Introducing Håkan Forss
(03:24) The Hidden Purpose of Agile: Beyond Methods to Business Results
(08:44) Visualising as a Radical Tool for Impact
(13:26) How do traditional organisations operating in flow
(16:12) Visualization beyond the tools
(18:45) What’s the Value of Limiting Work in Progress
(26:23) Theory of Constraints at a Portfolio Level
(30:46) What’s the edge of collaborative work in the age of AI?
(42:54) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/Forss-Hakan

Episode recorded on Jan 09, 26
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music

One of the leading voices in transition design for sustainability and societal change, Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, joins us for a deep conversation on what design must become in an era of systemic collapse.
In this episode, he speaks on why the logic that drives most businesses - efficiency, growth, and value capture- is often fundamentally at odds with what people actually want and need, and how this tension is giving rise to alternative value systems that challenge dominant capitalist structures.
We also explore the evolving role of universities as critical spaces for experimentation and sense-making, and why their ability to shape imagination, culture, and future practitioners may be more important now than ever.

As A long-time observer of how design, education, and economic systems co-evolve, Cameron brings a rare ability to connect theory with lived societal consequences.
He explores how design is both an ontological and political practice, shaping how people live, relate, and care for one another.
Drawing on decades of experience in social innovation and design education, he shows why transition is about co-creating shared visions, not delivering pre-defined solutions.
Whether you’re a designer, an educator, or someone curious about how our systems and values could evolve, this conversation is for you.

Key Highlights
👉 Design is not neutral problem-solving; it actively shapes how people live, relate, and understand what is possible.
👉 Most business models are structurally optimised for efficiency and value capture - not for meeting human or societal needs.
👉 Systemic transitions cannot be engineered, scaled, or optimised without losing their democratic and participatory core.
👉Capitalism maintains dominance by presenting itself as the only viable system, while alternative value systems and economies already exist beneath the surface.
👉 What counts as “value” is not fixed; it is produced by institutions, infrastructures, and cultural norms - and can be redesigned.
👉 Universities play a critical role as spaces where future practitioners, imaginaries, and societal norms are formed - their decline risks narrowing the futures we can collectively imagine.
👉 Designers’ unique contribution to transition lies in making change livable at the human scale, not in accelerating adoption or efficiency.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Is Another World Possible? Transition Design - INTRO
(01:34) Introducing Cameron Tonkinwise
(03:33) Designing Transitions: From Small Interventions to Systems Change
(10:40) Technology, and the Politics of Design
(22:07) What does good design now look like?
(29:05) The Designer’s Role in Interdisciplinary Systems
(34:20) Creating new contexts for care
(49:56) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/tonkinwise-cameron

Episode recorded on Dec 18, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music

Gregor Hohpe - one of the world’s leading voices in enterprise architecture and platform thinking, and author of ‘The Software Architect Elevator’, ‘Enterprise Integration Patterns’ and ‘Platform Strategy’- joins us to dive into how enterprise architecture is about navigating the tradeoffs needed to enable future optionality in the organization.
He reframes the architecture problem from a technical one to a practice of selling options, and unpacks why shared language and domain understanding along with strategic clarity matter more than ever now with GenAI.
In this fast approaching future GenAI no longer makes it possible to hide organisational dysfunctions, it exposes them relentlessly: the question then is what leaders and architects can do about this.

In this episode, we succeeded to bring in Gregor’s perspective on architecture as a strategic, systems-level discipline not as a technical practice.
Drawing on his experience as a long-time advisor to large organisations navigating platform transitions, we explore how to bridge strategy and implementation, and how to create coherence across silos, enabling teams to make better decisions together.
Join us as we discuss how architecture guides strategic choices and helps you build optionality.

Key Highlights
👉 Architecture can also be seen as a practice of selling options - enabling organisations to defer decisions and adapt as strategy and context evolve.
👉 Optionality always comes with a cost: more flexibility introduces greater complexity, so architects must continually balance benefits against trade-offs.
👉 Good architecture cannot be designed inside IT alone - it must be grounded in business intent, market direction, and strategic positioning.
👉 Domain understanding shouldn’t live only with data teams - it requires joint meaning-making across business, tech, and architecture.
👉 GenAI amplifies organisational dysfunction rather than fixing it - faster code and automation expose weak strategy, unclear domains, and siloed thinking.
👉 Those who work only within narrow silos are the most replaceable; future-relevant capability lies in boundary-spanning, systems thinking, and cross-domain judgment.
👉 As technology accelerates delivery, organisations must strengthen reflection, modelling, and decision-making - because the bottleneck shifts from building software to understanding what to build.
👉 Shared ontologies and domain modeling are essential for collaboration and extensibility - without them, organisations struggle to integrate partners, ecosystems, and platforms.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Enterprise Architecture: selling Options for the Future, at a Cost - INTRO
(01:32) Introducing Gregor
(03:06) Beyond Business vs Tech
(07:35) How does organization attitude connect to its architecture?
(16:12) Designing Architecture for Strategic Coherence
(23:30) Creating Shared Ontologies
(30:22) Changing the Narrative from Transactional to Conversational
(43:47) How can organisations remain context-conscious?
(50:53) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/hohpe-gregor

Episode recorded on Dec 01, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music

What happens when work no longer guarantees reward and time itself feels unanchored?
In this episode, Jasmine Bina - brand strategist, cultural futurist, and CEO of Concept Bureau - joins us to explore how meaning, culture, and value creation are being reshaped in societies and affecting our organisations.
Drawing on her latest work, Age of Potency, Jasmine unpacks how cultural resets have now created “vacuums” that are being filled through new forms of identity, experimentation, spirituality, and community, among others.
We discuss what this shift means for organisations and brands, why optimisation and expertise are giving way to experimentation, and how brands can play a role in helping people form new meaning systems.
This episode offers a powerful lens for understanding cultural change and why the next era of value creation will belong to those willing to engage with uncertainty.
Jasmine takes us inside her work of tracking emerging signals at the edges of society, sharing how “Exposure Therapy” - her practice and community - deliberately immerses strategic minds in unfamiliar and often overlooked cultural spaces where new forms of meaning, and the future itself, first take shape.
Together, these reflections offer a powerful perspective on brand-building as a disciplined practice - less of a formula that needs to be applied, and more of a form of training that strengthens perception, resilience, and judgment in times of deep cultural change.

Key Highlights
👉 Culture is not collapsing but reorganising, as traditional sources of meaning around work, trust, and time lose their power and create cultural “vacuums.”
👉 When work no longer guarantees reward, people begin experimenting with new identities, values, and meaning systems beyond professional success.
👉 Trust does not disappear in times of crisis - it relocates to spaces where people willingly embrace vulnerability, often outside mainstream institutions.
👉 Brands and organisations can no longer rely on optimisation and expertise; experimentation is becoming the primary way to generate new insight and value.
👉 The future of culture is already visible in people’s private lives, where latent identities and unmet desires take shape long before markets recognise them.
👉 Exposure to unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and marginal cultural spaces is essential for sensing emerging signals.
👉 Optimism is not wishful thinking but a strategic posture that enables better pattern recognition and more meaningful connections across signals.
👉 Technology does not determine the future on its own - culture bends technologies to human needs, values, and belief systems.
👉 Brands that matter in the next decade will help people navigate uncertainty by offering new narratives about what it means to live well, belong, and contribute.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) The Age of Potency: How Meaning, Work, and Trust Are Being Rewritten - Intro
(01:23) Introducing Jasmine Bina
(08:44) Organisational and Consumer Responsibilities in the Age of Potency
(12:39) Are companies prepared for the cultural shifts?
(16:10) Are organisations looking into brand textures?
(19:41) What’s the culture one can hold onto?
(22:36) The Culture of Limits
(30:30) What should we be thinking about as brands?
(34:21) How do you avoid self-fulfilling prophecies?
(43:15) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/bina-jasmine

Episode recorded on Nov 13, 25

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music

Dave Gray, acclaimed author and designer, joins us in this episode to explore how organisations can navigate profound technological and societal shifts by thinking outside their traditional theories.
With his decades of helping organisations rethink their value architectures, and his work on liminal thinking and visual frameworks, he reflects on how AI, and other fast-moving cultural changes are reshaping the very assumptions businesses operate on.
We also discuss why the biggest opportunities emerge outside a company’s existing theory, how architectural innovation differs from component optimisation, and why loosening organisational structures can create more space for play, experimentation, and discovery.
Tune in as we learn to embrace ambiguity, enable play, and help design companies that evolve with the liminal times we’re all living through.

Throughout his career, Dave has been a leading voice in helping organisations make sense of complexity. He has co-authored Gamestorming, a foundational playbook for collaborative problem-solving, and written several other seminal books that pioneered reframing organisations as adaptive, networked systems and embracing change.
In this episode, he shares his experiences from his newer ventures like the “School of the Possible”, and “Visual Frameworks”, helping us reframe our mental models and being able to “see differently,”.

Key Highlights
👉 Organisations struggle to see signals outside their existing theory, categories and mental models: ones that make them efficient but also make them blind during liminal times.
👉 Customers are constantly evolving - which means they often see shifts in value long before organisations do. Paying attention to customers is one of the most reliable ways to notice what’s changing outside your existing theory.
👉 Innovation requires the ability to visualise and hold ambiguity - letting go of familiarity to notice what doesn’t fit the current map.
👉 Architectural innovation means breaking the system into pieces and reassembling it from first principles - not just optimising components.
👉 Failure is essential - most experiments will fail, but a few (like AWS for Amazon) can redefine the complete business.
👉 Paying attention to anomalies and accidents can unlock entirely new markets.
👉 You can’t think your way into a new worldview, but you act your way into one through play, prototyping, and exploration.
👉 Looseness, redundancy, and play at the edges enable organisations to notice weak signals and adapt faster than tightly optimised systems.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Thinking Beyond the Existing Theories: Evolution in Liminal Times
(01:30) Introducing Dave Gray
(03:57) At the Inflection Point: AI, Media, and the End of Business as Usual
(21:04) Building Constraints in Innovation
(24:38) The Outside-In Perspective for Organisation Building
(31:21) Building businesses with new theories of value
(42:48) What’s the future of customer co-creation?
(48:18) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/gray-dave

Episode recorded on Nov 13, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music