Pierre E. Neis is a practitioner renowned for driving large-scale agile transformations and evolving agile methodologies beyond the IT realm. A French-German agile coach, Neis has spent over a decade leading agile change in roughly 200 organisations worldwide, in roles ranging from Scrum Master and Product Owner to executive adviser. His expertise lies in fostering agile cultures and structures that allow organisations to be more flexible, collaborative, and responsive. Neis is a strong advocate of synergy between people and strategy – he frequently partners with major strategy consulting firms to integrate agile practices with digital transformation initiatives.

Neis’s primary methodological contributions include the development of the “AO” (Agile Organisation) model and promotion of agile sense-making. He authored The New Normal: AO Concepts and Patterns of 21st-Century Agile Organizations (2020) to articulate patterns for agile enterprises, and co-authored Swarming X4 (a work on swarming and team-of-teams patterns). These publications lay out practical frameworks for achieving agility at scale – for example, how to align management, customers, and operations in a mutually reinforcing network. In Neis’s view, “Agile isn’t the goal, it is the way to reach a goal”. This reflects a thematic focus on continuous organisational learning and adaptation. He encourages constant reconfiguration (“continuous re-org”) as conditions change, and sees Agile as fundamentally a sense-making approach that creates shared understanding across teams (as he has written on Medium). Rather than applying Agile by rote, Neis emphasises understanding the unique context (“the new game”) of each organisation and designing agility accordingly.

In practice, Neis often employs gamification and experiential learning, exemplified by his co-creation of #play14, an initiative for using serious games to teach and spread agile mindsets. He has contributed to multiple books on agile management, social science, and gamification, reflecting an interdisciplinary bent. A case in point is Neis’s work with a 600-person banking group in Eastern Europe, where he not only architected the agile transformation but also empowered every employee to engage with the new ways of working. This hands-on, inclusive style – “putting myself in the system and not as an outside observer,” as Neis says of his coaching philosophy – typifies his approach. Overall, Pierre Neis is most known for practical agile transformation tactics (e.g., his “12 steps of an Agile Transformation” framework from talks) combined with a vision of organisations as evolving, self-organising systems.

Pierre's books: https://payhip.com/menschgeist

and https://www.amazon.com/New-Normal-concepts-patterns-organizations-ebook/dp/B08HJHB4B1