Speaking Engagements

Learning Faster Than Change: Leadership for the AI Era
Keynote · Technology Leader of Tomorrow 2026, Main Stage · Gdynia, Poland · June 2026 · Event link

As frontier AI becomes a commodity any rival can rent for cents, the advantage shifts to what machines can't replicate: judgment, accountability, and how fast leaders learn. Using the Wright Brothers' win over the far better-funded Langley, Shupack shows why "decision latency" now separates leaders from laggards.

How Leadership Is Evolving: Operating Models & Agentic AI in Practice
Video Podcast · Euvic Talks ("The human side of technology") · recorded June 2026, published July 16, 2026 · Watch

As agentic AI makes generating options nearly free, the bottleneck shifts from doing the work to deciding about it, making judgment, accountability, and ownership the scarce resources. Shupack distinguishes between AI as a capability and AI as a use case, and urges leaders to stop piloting AI and start piloting their operating model. Recorded with host Bartosz Śliwa in Euvic's mobile studio at the Technology Leader of Tomorrow conference in Gdynia.

Applying AI Beyond Automation
Moderated panel · Lean-Agile Auto Day 2026 · Munich, Germany · June 10, 2026 · Capgemini Invent, with Scaled Agile, and Project & Team · Event Link

How automotive organizations move past AI-as-automation toward AI that strengthens decision-making across complex cyber-physical systems. As cheap execution shifts the constraint to judgment, Shupack argued that accountability stays human, decision latency is the real bottleneck, and winners build AI as a reusable capability backed by provable governance.

Scaling Agile to the Extreme: Building Really Big Solutions with SAFe
Specialized track · Lean-Agile Auto Day 2026 · Munich, Germany · June 10, 2026 · Capgemini Invent, with Scaled Agile, and Project & Team · Event Link

Where the framework meets its own upper limit: solutions too large for a single Agile Release Train, assembled from suppliers who don't share your backlog, under regulators who want evidence rather than intent. Shupack, Wolfgang Brandhuber and Harry Koehnemann worked the Large Solution end of SAFe — where coordination cost, architectural runway and compliance evidence all climb at once, and the practices that comfortably carry one train quietly stop working.

When the User Is a Citizen or Warfighter: Rethinking AI for Government
Keynote · SAFe Government Insider · Scaled Agile · Virtual · February 2026

A government project can hit every success metric and still cause irreversible harm. Drawing on the Dutch childcare-benefits scandal and the FBI's tipline triage, Jeffrey Shupack and Stosh Misiaszek separate "word work," where LLMs excel, from "world work," where they fail. And leave leaders three ownership questions for Monday.

Agile Leadership in the Age of AI: Learning Faster Than Change
Keynote · Government Insider Series · Scaled Agile · Virtual · October 2025

The winners of the AI era aren't the best-funded; they're the fastest learners. Using the Wright Brothers' win over the better-funded Langley, Shupack names the "acceleration trap" and the 95% of GenAI investments that return nothing measurable, then lays out leadership behaviors across three levels: model, multiply, measure— with practical "Monday Moves."

Agile Leadership in the Age of AI: Learning Faster Than Change
Keynote · STC (Saudi Telecom Company) Agile Day 2025 · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia · October 2025 · with Prolink Arabia

With the race to first powered flight as its through-line, Shupack maps six leadership behaviors across three levels — model, multiply, measure — each paired with concrete "Monday Moves" for building enterprise cultures that learn faster than change.

From Hardware to AI: Scaling Lean-Agile in Automotive Ecosystems
Moderated Panel · Lean-Agile Auto Day 2025 · Scaled Agile, Project & Team & Capgemini · Wolfsburg, Germany · June 25, 2025 · Event Link

Cyber-physical development is where AI promises get tested against physical constraints. Shupack joined Robin Yeman, Dalibor Siroky and Markus Vogg, under Wiebke Neuhaus's moderation, to discuss how Lean-Agile scales across software-hardware ecosystems: where AI genuinely shortens decision cycles, how mechanical and digital integration is actually managed, and what collaboration across OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers and innovation partners demands in practice. The panel spent as much time on the failure modes as on the patterns that worked.

SAFe for Government Around the World: Agile Practices for a Modern Public Sector
Panel · Lean-Agile Public Day 2025 · Capgemini Invent, Scaled Agile & Project & Team · Berlin, Germany · April 3, 2025 · Event Link

Public institutions modernize under constraints private companies never face: procurement rules, political cycles, and citizens who cannot take their business elsewhere. Before a group of senior leaders in Berlin, Shupack joined Robin Yeman, Wolfgang Brandhuber, and Markus Vogg, moderated by Wiebke Neuhaus, to discuss cross-border cases of Lean-Agile within government — what iterative change looks like in a bureaucracy, and which leadership moves help it survive beyond the pilot.

Agile Metrics at Scale: Navigating the Unknown & Proving ROI
Meetup · Agile بالعربي in Riyadh Meetup · 2025 Speaking Series · February 11, 2025

Scaling Agile changes the metrics conversation. Velocity, story points, and burndown charts incentivize the wrong behavior at enterprise scale and rarely connect to anything a business cares about. Jeffrey Shupack and Neil Hays cover measuring in the dark, where legacy systems and silos make real-time data impossible — proxy metrics, qualitative feedback loops, manual sampling — then the shift from output measures to outcome measures, and how to build an ROI case that survives a CFO.

How Leaders Create a Learning Culture to Deliver Better Products Faster
Featured presentation · DevSecOps Days Tokyo 2024 · Tokyo, Japan · November 29, 2024 · sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University CyLab, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), the U.S. Embassy, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) · Event Link

Asia's largest DevSecOps gathering, and the argument was that the biggest lever on innovation isn't technology— it's the culture leaders build. Shupack traced why psychological safety has to be engineered rather than hoped for, and why secure, high-velocity delivery depends on leaders who reward learning over conformance to plan. The session addressed the growing urgency of cybersecurity amid escalating global geopolitical tensions and demonstrated how agile, security-integrated organizations outperform through faster feedback loops, stronger cross-functional collaboration, and more resilient innovation.

Fostering a Learning Culture: 7 Leadership Patterns for Agile Success
Session · Chevron Agile Chapter Day · Chevron Corporation · November 5, 2024

Drawing on his IT Revolution research, Shupack presents seven leadership patterns for building a learning culture inside regulated, high-consequence organizations, such as Embrace the Inspector, which turns audits, regulatory reviews, and IV&V into learning accelerators rather than overhead—and pairs each pattern with the specific actions a leader can take on Monday.

AI Enhancements for Portfolio Management
Session · Chevron Agile Chapter Day · Chevron Corporation · November 5, 2024

Framed curiosity as the operative stance toward AI — encouraging teams to think beyond present constraints, empowering strategic thinkers, and treating clear communication of AI insight as the precondition for confident decision-making in portfolio management.

Driving Innovation: How Leaders Create a Learning Culture to Deliver Better Products Faster
Two-part talk · Kaiser Permanente · Oakland, CA · October 21 and November 19, 2024

A healthcare-contextualized treatment of the learning-culture thesis: innovation thrives in cultures that embrace learning and experimentation, and dies in cultures that punish failure. Shupack argues that leaders must shift from managing for short-term results to building psychological safety, rewarding experimentation, and enabling cross-functional learning — while working within the real constraints of patient care, operational limits, and emerging technology.

Agile Adoption: Winning Hearts and Minds — Change Management for Successful Agile Adoption
Meetup · Gulf Region Agile Meetup · September 18, 2024

Most Agile adoptions don't fail because of practices — they stall because of the people nobody brought along. Jeffrey Shupack and Neil Hays work the half that gets skipped: mapping who actually holds influence and what drives them, starting with why, building the psychological safety that makes change survivable, and getting across the chasm from early adopters to the majority who need to see their own pains addressed first. Then proving it with metrics executives already trust.

Develop a Scalable Winning Learning Culture: 7 Leader Patterns with Actions
Meetup · Agile Scale in Middle East Meetup · with Capgemini · May 31, 2024

In complex, regulated organizations the binding constraint is rarely capability — it is whether leaders reward conformance to a plan or demonstrated learning, and whether the organization can still tell the difference. Shupack presents seven leader patterns for scaling a learning culture, each with concrete actions: valuing learning milestones over fixed early requirements, protecting real time and space for exploration, modeling vulnerability, and decentralizing decisions through clearly given and received intent.

Develop a Scalable Winning Learning Culture: 7 Leader Patterns with Actions
Meetup · Exxon Mobil · Houston, TX · April 24, 2024

Well-funded programs lose to better-learning ones — the pattern Langley set against the Wright brothers, and one that has repeated across five technological revolutions as each new age outgrew the management method built for the last. Shupack and Koehnemann present seven leader patterns for building a learning culture at scale, drawn from their IT Revolution research and translated into the specific actions that make each one real.

Navigating the Highway of Developing Cyber-Physical and Hardware-Inclusive Products at Scale
Specialized track · Lean-Agile Auto Day 2024 · Scaled Agile, Project & Team & Capgemini · Stuttgart, Germany · April 12, 2024 · Event Link

The hard version of the problem: products where a wrong decision is expensive in metal as well as in code. Shupack, Koehnemann and Yasar worked through what it takes to run agile development on hardware-inclusive systems at scale — where the obstacles actually originate, which are technical and which are organizational, and how to keep mechanical, electrical and software teams working from one plan instead of three.

Driving the Journey Towards Product-Centric Network Organizations — How Can Automotive Companies Tackle That Challenge?
Panelist · Lean-Agile Auto Day 2024 · Scaled Agile, Project & Team & Capgemini · Stuttgart, Germany and virtual · April 12, 2024 · Event Link

Automotive companies keep announcing product-centric operating models and keep organizing by project anyway. The panel worked that gap: what has to change structurally rather than rhetorically, what agile practice does and does not solve on its own, and where the transformations that held differed from the ones that quietly reverted.

7 Leader Actions to Develop a Scalable Winning Learning Culture
Talk · Global SAFe Summit Berlin 2024 · Scaled Agile · Berlin, Germany · April 10, 2024 · Event Link

"Your ability to learn faster than your competition is your only sustainable competitive advantage." Arie de Geus wrote that decades before anyone had to think about AI, and it has aged into a literal job description. Shupack lays out seven leadership patterns from his IT Revolution research — experimentation, protected time and space, OKRs built for learning, modeled vulnerability, embracing the inspector, small-batch risk, decentralized intent — each attached to actions rather than aspirations. The closing slide asks the only question that matters: what are you going to do on Monday?

Finding the Unicorn: Achieving Better Time-to-Market with Agility
Meetup · Unlocking Agility Riyadh Meetup · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia · March 3, 2024

One organization built innovation centers stocked with design-thinking tools and collaboration space — then made using them career-limiting, because time spent there wasn't "real work." Shupack and Hays use failures like that to show why time-to-market is a learning problem before it is a process problem: development depends more on what must be learned than on what tasks must be completed to exit a gate, and batch size, focus, and validating assumptions before deciding are what actually move the number.

Leading Disruption & Overcoming Cognitive Dissonance قيادة الإرباك والتغلب على التعارض الذهني
Closing keynote · Royal Commission for Makkah City (RCMC) executive offsite · al-Ula, Saudi Arabia · December 9, 2023 · delivered in English and Arabic

An organization behaves like an immune system: it identifies disruption and rebuffs it. Shupack's closing keynote for the Royal Commission for Makkah City took up what happens when the disrupter is you. Festinger named the discomfort in 1957: cognitive dissonance, the gap between what people believe and what they actually do— and it resolves only three ways: change the mental model, justify the contradiction, or go looking for new information. Delivered in English and translated into Arabic, the talk moved from that diagnosis to the four levers that leaders genuinely control: mindsets, supporting structures, technical competency, and role modeling. And closed on MIT Sloan's Eroding, Enduring, and Emerging behaviors, asking a room of Saudi government leaders whether what worked in the 1980s is what Saudi Arabia needs now.

A Monday Morning Guide to Fostering a Culture of Continuous Learning
Talk · SAFe Summit 2023 · Scaled Agile · Nashville, Tennessee · August 15–18, 2023 · Event Link

Being wrong feels exactly like being right. The bad feeling only arrives when you find out — and that asymmetry is why learning cultures never form on their own. Most talks on culture tell leaders to change it. This one tells them what to do on Monday morning. Give OKRs two learning loops instead of one: how well did we execute, and how sound was the target we set? Create learning moments instead of punishing failure. Embrace the inspector rather than game the inspection. And model it — a new CTO whose first story to the division is about the outage his own code caused does more for candor than any values statement.

Collaborate with Your Competi-mates to Strengthen the Customer Relationship
Facilitated Q&A · SAFe Summit 2023, EMEA Partner Day · Scaled Agile · Prague, Czech Republic · May 15, 2023 · Event Link

Capgemini and Project & Team compete for the same work. They also ran joint engagements for years. Scaled Agile put Jeffrey Shupack and Markus Vogg on stage in Prague to explain how that actually functions. What made the arrangement hold beyond the first project; how you identify a competitor worth partnering with and open the conversation; how you keep two firms committed to one outcome when the incentives don't naturally align; and what changes when one partner is a global consultancy, and the other is a boutique.

How Do Traditional Automotive Companies Manage to Move Towards a Mindset of Continuous Learning and Integration?
Panel · Lean-Agile Auto Day 2023 · Scaled Agile, Project & Team & Capgemini · Stuttgart, Germany · May 11, 2023 · Event Link

Jeffrey Shupack, Bedrettin Yildiz, Harry Koehnemann, Markus Vogg, and Robin Yeman address the question that traditional automakers keep failing to answer: how do you move an organization built for stage gates toward continuous learning and integration? The useful part was the resistance: where it comes from, what it costs, and which transformations survived contact with an existing engineering culture.

Embracing Agile to Drive Innovation in Automotive
Live Discussion · Lean-Agile Auto Day 2023 · Scaled Agile · Stuttgart, Germany and virtual · May 11, 2023 · Event Link

A discussion following Joe Justice's interview on what legacy OEMs can learn from disruptive EV manufacturers. Shupack, Harry Koehnemann, and Markus Vogg, moderated by Michael Clarkin, took up the practical half: what agile actually changes about automotive product development, which traditional barriers are real constraints and which are only habit, and how an established manufacturer responds to a market shift without pretending it's a startup.

Continuous Learning: A Management Approach for the Digital Age
Presentation · DevOps Enterprise Summit 2022 · IT Revolution · Las Vegas, Nevada · October 18, 2022 · with Dean Leffingwell & Harry Koehnemann · Event Link

Every technological age eventually outgrows the management method built for the last one. Taylorism and Fordism optimized processes that were already understood; nobody designed them for work whose main output is knowledge. With Dean Leffingwell and Harry Koehnemann, Shupack argued continuous learning is the successor method, and grounded it in six patterns taken from organizations already practicing it: give intent and decentralize decisions, the way GM compressed new-vehicle development from five-to-seven years toward three; decide only after validating assumptions, per Allan Ward's line that development depends more on what must be learned than on what tasks close out a gate; embed telemetry so the system teaches you something; treat the factory as the product; design for change; and shrink the learning batch with MVPs and small experiments.

Leveraging Knowledge to Stay Competitive (Creating a Continuous Learning Culture)
Talk, Leading the Change track · SAFe Summit 2022 · Scaled Agile · Denver, Colorado · August 22–25, 2022

Does your corporate culture embrace continuous learning? If not, your market position may slip — even if your products themselves are excellent. In continuous learning cultures, organizations collectively work to increase their knowledge and integrate it to improve performance: innovation and competency scrutinized in short, quick cycles, with findings put immediately into practice. Products in demand today may fall out of favor tomorrow; if a competitor adjusts to changing market conditions faster, product lines stagnate.

Building Really Big Systems with Lean-Agile Practices
Tutorial · INCOSE 32nd Annual International Symposium 2022 · Detroit, Michigan · June 25–30, 2022 · Event Link

Gone are the days when companies had the luxury of long delivery cycles. Engineers now have to specify, build and deliver fast enough to learn from customers and evolve the product — in environments that keep getting more complex, more connected and less predictable. Lean-Agile practices earned their reputation on small software systems. Automotive, aerospace, and defense are now applying them to some of the world's most critical and complex problems. Shupack ran the workshop with Harry Koehnemann and Robin Yeman, covering what that takes: moving from stage-gated development to flow, refining specifications continuously instead of fixing them up front, organizing around value, planning at large scale, and architecting for change — hardware included — while building the delivery pipeline alongside the system itself.

SAFe Business Agility Podcast: Continuous Learning Culture
Podcast · SAFe Business Agility Podcast, Episode 74 · Scaled Agile · February 1, 2022 · Listen

Melissa Reeve asks what a continuous learning culture actually is, why it moves performance, innovation and competitive position, and what it looks like inside an organization that has one — as distinct from one that merely has a training budget.

How to Tackle the "Impossible": Converting a Mid-Flight Program to SAFe
Presentation · Global SAFe Summit 2021 · Scaled Agile · Virtual · September 27 – October 1, 2021

"No one wants 80% of a paycheck." A century-old company was two years behind on a payroll conversion covering 150,000+ employees globally and 30+ union collective bargaining agreements, carrying 60 significant performance gaps, on a waterfall plan that had stopped working. Shupack and Sperring show how the program moved predictability from 56% to 95% in three quarters — and what transparency, alignment, built-in quality and program execution actually demand when you are changing the wheels on a plane mid-flight. The program shipped and took a Finance Functional Excellence award.

Three Ways To Accelerate Your Digital Transformation
Interview · Forbes · May 17, 2021 · with Chris James · Read

Chris James's Forbes column from his interview with Jeffrey Shupack and Harry Koehnemann. Drawn from a year of fieldwork across hard-hit automotive and aerospace programs and some of the largest commercial and government transformations of the period. On what leaders do when disruption compresses every timeline — why a culture of rapid learning becomes the differentiator, and why integrating knowledge across an organization beats accumulating it in pockets.

Experts Say Auto Industry's Software Strategy Needs To Get Agile To Compete
Interview · Forbes · March 8, 2021 · by Ed Garsten · Read

Ed Garsten on why the auto industry's software strategy had become its competitive problem — a car, as Shupack puts it in the piece, is now a computer. Asked where a software transformation ends, his answer is the line the article turns on: "When do you want to stop innovating? It's relentless improvement."

Selected public engagements.
Client-internal workshops, executive sessions, and private training are not listed.