Jan de Vries
DevOps Advocate
Zwolle, The Netherlands
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Jan de Vries is a senior trainer, business IT consultant, coach, researcher and public speaker in the fields of Agile, DevOps, Business Information Management, Service Management, Antifragility and Strategy Development.
He founded:
- BlueOceanRecon.com to facilitate the development of Blue Oceans and Lean Startups.
- Antifragility.works to conduct research on the practical application of antifragility in organisations.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Last Reorganisation: Distilling the First Principles of Future-Proof Design
In an era of exponential change, most organisations are trapped in a cycle of countless reorganisations. As Business Analysts, we see the symptoms every day: increasing complexity, misaligned requirements, and teams that suffer more from organisational friction than technical debt. We often try to optimize processes, but if the underlying structure is flawed, we are simply "paving the cow path."
Jan de Vries challenges the BA community to look deeper. Is it possible to stop the endless cycle of restructuring and move directly to a future-proof state? What if we could design one final transition that builds adaptability into the organisation’s DNA?
In this highly interactive session, Jan moves beyond standard process modelling to apply two powerful analytical lenses:
Appreciative Inquiry: We will use a "strengths-based" analysis to identify peak performance moments. Instead of just gap analysis, we will distill the elements of your "ultimate organisation" from existing success stories.
First Principle Thinking: We will strip away legacy assumptions and "best practices" to identify the fundamental truths of an organisation. By boiling the system down to its core components, we can reason upward to build a more resilient structure.
Predicting the future without a crystal ball
This workshop explains how the Anticipate technique works and participants will experience hands-on what future priming means. It sensitises your brain to future developments that are important to you or your organisation.
What comes closest to predicting the future is to see things early.
And to see things early you need to prepare your mind.
The best way to prepare your mind is future priming (based on Harvard research) which takes place by formulating so-called future facts. You may think of them as newspaper headlines which include the following requirements:
- 3 to 7 years in the future
- not mentioning your own company but certainly affecting your own company
- unconventional but not absurd
- not describing a trend, but an event (which prompted the newspaper article)
These facts are plotted on a canvas with the axes uncertainty and impact. We then conduct a scenario analysis with the most uncertain, most impactful ones.
Resilience is the new fragile
Why do some DevOps transformations stall while others accelerate? We spend our careers implementing technical stuff like CI/CD, microservices, canary releases, and chaos engineering. And organisational stuff like decentralisation of decision making, t-shaped profiles, reducing organisational debt, and skin in the game. But these are often treated as a checklist rather than a cohesive strategy. The missing link between all these concepts and many more is Antifragility - the property of systems and organisations that do not just survive stress, but actually improve because of it.
In this session Jan de Vries translates the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb to the modern IT world, revealing how Antifragility powers the world’s most successful high-velocity teams. In a world of ever-growing threats, "resilient" is the new "fragile." This session is your guide to building organisation and systems that don't just weather the storm. They sail faster because of it.
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