Beyond the Spark — Intersection 26, the 12th Global Conference on Enterprise Design. Montreal, 7–9 October 2026.

Daniel Simon, Helgi Björgvinsson & Milan Guenther

Designing Shared Understanding Across Complex Change

Most organisations already use many ways to describe and navigate change: diagrams, journeys, roadmaps, sticky notes, spreadsheets, architecture maps in ArchiMate® or BPMN, service blueprints and more. Yet teams still struggle to create shared understanding across disciplines, silos and levels of complexity.

In this session, Daniel Simon (Across & Ahead) presents new survey findings on how enterprise professionals actually work in practice. The results challenge the idea that one method, framework or language can solve everything. Instead, they reveal a more hybrid reality: successful teams combine multiple tools and approaches depending on the people, context and challenge.

The session also explores why many modelling approaches fail to gain traction outside specialist groups, and what can make enterprise design more collaborative, accessible and useful for real transformation work.

Following the presentation, Daniel is joined by Milan Guenther and Helgi Mar Björgvinsson to discuss what these insights mean for the future of enterprise design and the evolving role of EDGY: helping people across architecture, design, product and transformation create a shared understanding of complex enterprises together.

Daniel Simon — Founder, ACROSS & AHEAD. Daniel Simon is the Founder and Man­aging Director of ACROSS & AHEAD. His passion is to guide enter­prises on their business design and trans­for­mation journeys. He has extensive experience in estab­lishing archi­tecture practices, developing archi­tecture blueprints, and facilitating business design and transformation activities. Daniel is also a long-time trainer in the field. Among others, he has been running courses on business architecture for many years. Daniel holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cologne. He is the (co-)author of various publications on business architecture and enterprise architecture and regularly speaks at confer­ences and events.

Helgi Björgvinsson — Managing Director, Intersection Group. Helgi Björgvinsson is a senior Enterprise Architect with more than 15 years of experience working with architecture, strategy, leadership, and change in complex organisational environments across both the public and private sectors.

Milan Guenther — President, Intersection Group. Milan is president of Intersection Group, and a co-founder of the consultancy Enterprise Design Associates and Teamenu, a digital workplace SAAS business.

Keynote

Henry Mintzberg

A Conversation with Henry Mintzberg

Innovation begins with a spark, but sparks need people and serendipity to build the better enterprises we urgently need today. This session brings together two powerful lenses on that challenge: Henry Mintzberg’s lifelong inquiry into how organisations are structured, how strategy actually forms, and what communityship really means — alongside the Enterprise Design methodology, which gives practitioners concrete tools to shape enterprises as coherent wholes with intent.

Mintzberg has argued that healthy societies require a balance between government, business, and the plural sector of communities. Enterprises bear responsibility for more than shareholder returns. His recent work on rebalancing society and on the role of serendipity in organisational life raises urgent questions for anyone designing enterprises today: What does it mean to create better enterprises in an imbalanced world? How do you create the conditions for ideas to survive, scale, and deliver genuine impact without reducing everything to a plan?

In this interactive Q&A, we put these topics and your questions directly to Henry Mintzberg, connecting his thinking to Enterprise Design practice and to the central challenge of Intersection 26: going beyond the spark to turn ideas into enterprises that matter.

I am a writer and educator, mostly about managing originations, developing managers, and rebalancing societies (where my attention is currently focused), also an outdoorsman and collector of beaver sculptures.

Keynote

Cynthia Savard Saucier

UX Design

Annika Klyver & Fredrik Flodmark

Imaging, Designing and Enabling a Giant in the Transportation Business

As TRATON Group, Scania, MAN and International transforms its business towards a strong group and a strong modularization ambition the ability to meet new customer demands increases, Annika Klyver & Fredrik Flodmark in the Enablement team, helps building the foundations needed to make innovation sustainable across multiple brands.

The presentation will share how Enterprise Design tools like the Milky Way capability map, EDGY framework, GSDE Main Enterprise Concepts, and Roadmap Areas were used to image, sense making and understand the new business set up, aligning stakeholders around a target state, and guiding the large-scale transformation from brand-centric to a group-wide business set up.

Attendees will gain practical insights into balancing common capabilities, brand identity, and customer values while reducing complexity and accelerating time-to-market as well as hands on examples of how we went from imaging to guiding the actual building of the new Group way of working.

Annika Klyver. Annika Klyver’s work is about making transformations in large organisations happen. She has worked with Enterprise and Information Architecture for over 15 years. She has experience from numerous change and architecture programs in several business lines. Her background is in controlling, business development and within project portfolio management. She has also been a highly appreciated teacher in EA since 2011. Annika is a thought leader in Business Architecture, the ways of working, the visualization of business architecture and she is constantly looking for better ways to create great Enterprises. She is a speaker at international conferences.

Fredrik Flodmark. Fredrik Flodmark is a business architect with a deep knowledge in Scania’s proprietary modularisation methodology. Over the last 10 years he has ‘connected the dots’ between the business model, the way of thinking and dimensioning requirements on IT solutions. With a background in mechanical engineering Fredrik found his way into business development where he applies systems thinking and visualization skills to create insights about complex topics. He takes an active role in the transformation triggered both by the shift in technology and forming a strong global TRATON group.

Maxime Blackburn-Boulianne

From Buzzword to Results: Building an Innovation Engine for Organizations and Professionals

Over the last 12 years, I have developed a practical framework to move innovation from buzzwords to measurable results. It operates at two levels.

12-module online program with the Conseil de l’innovation du Québec that will support thousands of public sector innovators.

I developed a 6-pillar innovation framework currently used to structure innovation capability across 16,000 employees at Hydro-Québec, from ideas to implementation.

This session explores how professional competencies and organizational capability reinforce each other to create an innovation engine that delivers results reliably.

- I have worked as an innovation advisor for the last 12 years (in start-ups, at VIA Rail Canada and at Hydro-Québec)

Jean-Pierre Gauvin

Transformation, Intrapreneurship and Change Resistance: Understanding the Corporate Immune System

Every organization is born, grows, matures, and transforms. Like a living organism, it develops mechanisms of protection and preservation. Yet the very system that protects the organization can also become an obstacle. Such is the corporate immune system.

In this brief overview, we will explore what triggers it. As an intrapreneur, change agent or business exec, you will leave with practical ways to work with it so innovation can thrive and last.

Jean-Pierre Lévesque Gauvin is an intrapreneur turned entrepreneur and fractional COO with 25 years spent driving transformation across every stage of the organizational life cycle.

Adil Mansouri

Design Archaeology: Excavating the Past Before We Redesign the Future

Every system we redesign carries an invisible history — decisions made by people who aren't in the room, assumptions baked in decades ago, populations never considered from the start. Before we map the current state, before we talk to users, before we introduce AI — we need to excavate how we got here.

Design Archaeology treats every system as a historical artifact: shaped by choices, absences, and power dynamics that most design processes inherit without examining. The Inventory — the first move of equity-forward design — asks: whose decisions built this? Who was missing? What got locked in?

This matters more urgently as organizations rush to redesign with AI. AI doesn't neutralize inequity — it amplifies what already exists. If we don't excavate historical bias before we automate systems, we don't transform organizations. We just make inequity faster.

This talk introduces Design Archaeology as a practical, equity-forward methodology.

Adil Mansouri is VP of Design & Innovation at Talsom, where he leads organizational transformation through human-centered design and systems thinking. Over 12+ years across Canada, Malaysia, and beyond, he has worked on equity and social innovation projects with organizations including UNICEF, Ville de Montreal, and the Institut du nouveau monde. He is currently developing Design Archaeology — a methodology for excavating historical bias before redesigning systems.

To be announced

Conference talk — speaker announcement coming soon.

Workshop

Marloes Sikkema

Zenith Purpose Anatomy: How to Stay True to Your Corporate Identity in Times of Innovation and Transition

As you might recognize, major transitions within companies can lead to feelings of uncertainty, disconnection, and unease. Innovation and transformation mean that a company is moving in a new direction. However, in the process, there is a risk of losing sight of the reason why the company exists or was founded in the first place.

Any meaningful change should be rooted in a solid, unchangeable core—whether that is a set of values, unique strengths, or a distinctive culture. This enables people within the organization to continue using their strengths and to feel connected to the company. It also helps people outside the organization recognize the company as the natural and credible source of a new product, service, or way of interacting.

By defining your purpose in terms of both what you deeply value and what you have traditionally excelled at, you create a shared understanding of the company’s unchangeable heart. This can become a widely shared foundation throughout the organization, providing stability for people during times of change while also serving as a compass against which new ideas and initiatives can be tested to ensure they remain true to the company’s raison d’être.

In this workshop, you will first use Zenith to discover your own personal purpose, giving you a hands-on introduction to the tool. Next, we will take a deep dive into several projects in which Zenith has been used as an anchor to help organizations evolve and innovate—without changing so much that they become unrecognizable, disconnected from their people, or detached from their core values and strengths.

You will leave the workshop with a deeper understanding of your own purpose. And who knows—you might even meet someone who shares your values, helping to explain that seemingly unexplainable connection we sometimes feel with certain people.

Marloes is the founder of AMICA Innovation and an innovation advisor with almost two decades of experience helping entrepreneurs and organizations realize ambitious innovations and adopt new knowledge and technology. Having worked with companies developing solutions ranging from sustainable technologies to digital products, she discovered that the strongest innovations are not driven by technology alone, but by a clear sense of purpose. Combining her background in innovation management, innovation financing and adoption of innovation, Marloes helps leaders uncover the “why” behind their ideas and translate it into meaningful innovation, stronger positioning, and sustainable growth. Her workshops challenge participants to connect innovation with purpose, enabling them to create products, services, and organizations that are both commercially successful and deeply authentic.

Workshop

Jennifer Cassidy & Marlene Estabrooks

Complex Systems, Quantum and Kinship

The focus of this workshop will be to explore how, as organizations continue to automate and modernize, the risk of designing systems that outperform or constrain human capacity grows.

In complex socio-technical environments, performance of an organization behaves less like a machine you can optimize part-by-part and more like a quantum system: outcomes emerge from interdependence, context and observation. We intend to explore the thesis that sustainable organizations arise not from maximizing technology alone, but from cultivating a culture and practice of kinship between humans, their processes and their technological systems. That organizations need to focus on optimization that is not additive, but relational - changing one element of an organization changes the whole, and what we choose to measure and automate shapes what is possible.

Jennifer Cassidy. She is a senior human centered design professional with over 20 years’ experience working in large, complex organizations such as provincial and municipal governments and post-secondary institutions.

Marlene Estabrooks. A sociotechnical designer that works in the messy middle between people, technology, and the systems we build to hold them together. I spend my time in complex environments where performance can’t be engineered piece by piece, because the moment you change one part, the whole system behaves differently.

Keynote

Richard Chénier

Quebec vs. International Markets: Scaling Tech Adoption Without Losing Your Organizational DNA

Quebec vs. International Markets: Scaling Tech Adoption Without Losing Your Organizational DNA

Keynote

Ren Pope

Ren Pope serves as the Chief Enterprise Architect for the State of California, leading the Office of Enterprise Architecture within the California Department of Technology. In this executive role, he is responsible for overseeing and shaping the State's architectural framework that integrates technology, business processes, and technology strategies to improve service delivery and heighten efficiency.

Sophie Henry

Extreme Design: Building Resilient Organizations by Planning for Extremes

In this presentation, we introduce a set of powerful techniques for building resilience: crafting extreme personas, imagining radical futures, and using narrative fiction as a strategic tool to expose hidden vulnerabilities and unlock unexpected opportunities.

We will draw on real-world examples, including recent client projects, to explore how leading organisations have used these methods to pressure-test strategies, plans, and structures for the long term before a crisis forced their hand.

An expert in Design Thinking, Sophie helps organizations develop innovation capabilities, architectures, strategies, products and services that place humans at the center. As a facilitator, she is recognized for her ability to promptly identify consensus opportunities within interdisciplinary dialogues. She has a keen interest in AI and its adoption in the workplace.

Kevin Brennan

The Future of Enterprise Design: Four Scenarios for the Agentic Enterprise

Agentic AI may fundamentally change the role of Enterprise Design. As agents become more capable, enterprises may depend more heavily on explicit enterprise representations—or increasingly rely on inference to reconstruct them on demand. This session explores what those two futures could mean for the discipline.

Agents acting on behalf of an enterprise require exactly the things enterprise design is intended to provide: shared meaning, organizational direction, authority, constraints, and accountability. At the same time, they are becoming increasingly capable of generating many of enterprise design’s traditional outputs—current-state models, process maps, inventories, and documentation—from operational systems and telemetry rather than maintained repositories.

Which future emerges depends on two strategic questions. Does agentic work become fundamental to enterprise operation, or remain incremental? And does reliable agentic work require governed enterprise representations, or can agents reconstruct sufficient context on demand? Together, these questions define four plausible futures, each with profoundly different implications for enterprise design.

Using a concrete EDGY model of an agentic product, this session explores those four scenarios, identifies the indicators that suggest which future may be emerging, and tests how well EDGY can represent an enterprise in which agents increasingly act on the organization’s behalf. The discussion then considers what those findings imply for enterprise design, how enterprise designers might recognize which future is unfolding, and whether EDGY’s current design ontology provides the concepts needed to model authority, constraints, and legitimate action in the agentic enterprise.

Kevin Brennan leads Business Architecture at CAAT Pension Plan, where his work spans capability modelling, business process architecture, user experience, enterprise data strategy, and defining how AI solutions move from concept to delivery. He is a member of the Intersection Group core team.

Anthony Régent

Beyond the Spark: What AI-Readiness Really Means

AI-readiness has become a buzzword — usually data pipelines, GPU budgets, and a Copilot license per seat. We argue most enterprises measure the wrong thing: AI on a poorly designed organisation amplifies silos, accelerates local optimisations, inherits implicit ontologies and reproduces them as its own.

We propose a working definition: an organisation is AI-ready when its form is legible enough that AI can operate on it without amplifying noise. The Living Organizational Twin — a continuously updated graph that operationalises the EDGY framework as a navigable substrate — is what makes this legibility possible.

Anthony is an experience strategist and ecosystem/platform designer, with a university background in biology (neurosciences) and marketing. He has worked for more than 12 years in digital, marketing, communication, and experience design to improve the interrelationship that individuals have with products, services, brands/companies, or ecosystems within the same total experience.

Scott Ambler

How to Pick the Right F***ing AI Algorithm

The fundamental promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is to enable innovation. You have identified how you want to apply AI, you’re eager to execute, but how do you know which AI strategy is right for your context? Are you capable of picking the right AI tool for the job, or are you merely following the herd over the large language model (LLM) cliff?

The appropriate application of AI is a critical goal of all modern enterprises. In machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) models are created by training an AI algorithm on data. Due to the overwhelming market hype, most organizations equate AI to LLMs such as Claude, GPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek. But LLMs are just one of many AI options available to you. There are dozens more; how do you pick the right one(s)?

Explore how predictive AI and generative AI are required for most business solutions

Scott is Consulting Methodologist at Ambysoft and Advisory Board Member at Intersection Group. Scott led the evolution of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit up to its integration into the Project Management Institute, and is an international keynote speaker. Scott is the (co)-creator of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit as well as the Agile Modeling (AM) and Agile Data (AD) methodologies. He is the (co-)author of several books, including Choose Your WoW!, An Executive’s Guide to the Disciplined Agile Framework, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, and The Object Primer 3rd Edition.

Julie Pichette

The Hidden Role of Ambition: Are your leaders building the same future — or different versions of it?

Organizations rarely fail because they lack technology, talented people or well-managed projects. Often, transformation stalls because the sponsor and the organization are pursuing different visions of the future or simply cannot picture a future beyond what they know.

Leveraging 20 years (each gray hair is well deserved) imagining and leading large-scale enterprise transformations—including McKesson Canada’s Supply Chain of the Future program—Julie Pichette shares why automation, robotics, AI, network redesign, and digital initiatives often struggle despite clear business cases.

Participants will leave with ACCT, a practical framework built around four questions. What future are we building? What promise are we making to customers? Which capabilities need to change? What should we stop doing now that we know better?

Julie Pichette is an enterprise transformation executive driven by one question: How do we make the future operational?

Français

David Beauchemin

Vibecoder son propre ERP : coup de génie ou time trap ?

Un ERP n'est pas un simple logiciel : c'est l'architecture même d'une entreprise. Il fige vos processus, dicte votre comptabilité, impose vos règles d'affaires et structure votre gouvernance.

En vibecodant le sien, cette fondatrice n'a pas seulement créé un outil, elle a redéfini le fonctionnement entier de sa boîte.

Retour d'expérience sur ce que signifie vraiment reprendre le contrôle de ses outils, entre liberté technique et réalité du terrain.

Le design d'entreprise : quand le développement est confronté à la réalité des processus.

Le rôle des experts : comment guider un client qui choisit de bâtir sa propre infrastructure.

Cofondateur et directeur général de Baseline, il a lancé la coopérative avec cinq collègues universitaires pour rendre l’intelligence artificielle plus accessible pour les PME. En parallèle, il a cofondé Meetup Machine Learning Québec, pour encourager le partage des connaissances, ainsi que .Layer, un OBNL qu’il préside et qui vise à promouvoir la science des données. Il est aussi formateur chez IVADO, qui est un consortium montréalais de recherche, de formation et de transfert en IA, science des données et recherche opérationnelle, depuis maintenant plus d’un an.

Français

Robert Zuili

Le bon casting : concevoir l'équipe capable de porter une ambition

Nous avons longtemps constitué les équipes à partir des compétences visibles et d’une intuition sur l’alchimie humaine.

L’innovation consiste aujourd’hui à objectiver cette alchimie, afin de concevoir des équipes cohérentes avec leur ambition, plus performantes et plus durables.

La performance d’un projet dépend de ce que chacun sait faire. Mais elle dépend surtout de ce que les personnes deviennent capables de faire ensemble. C’est la chimie relationnelle qui pour la première fois devient objectivable.

Robert Zuili est psychologue clinicien, auteur d’une dizaine d’ouvrages, conférencier et cofondateur de Be Well Together (Canada). Diplômé de la Sorbonne, il a enseigné pendant près de vingt ans en Executive MBA à l’EM Lyon Business School.

Depuis plus de vingt ans, il étudie les mécanismes émotionnels qui influencent la santé mentale, le leadership et la qualité des relations au travail. Il développe avec ses associés une solution technologique innovante qui permet de mesurer et de comprendre l’impact des émotions sur les dynamiques relationnelles et la performance collective. Il est notamment l’auteur de Le pouvoir des liens.

Français

Bertrand Lirette

Pouvoir d'influence : repenser le rôle stratégique des designers

Après vingt ans d'évolution de l'expérience utilisateur - de l'UX au CX en passant par le design de service - notre discipline traverse une période difficile. Licenciements massifs, marginalisation dans les organisations, remise en question de notre valeur : le marché actuel nous force à repenser notre posture professionnelle.

Fort de mes expériences dans le privé et le milieu académique depuis 2006, et d'échanges avec des expert·e·s aux quatre coins de la planète, je propose un constat sans concession mais porteur d'espoir : nous devons pivoter d'une posture d'exécution à une posture d'influence stratégique.

Vous découvrirez comment sortir du modèle de conception contraignant qui nous cantonne au rôle d'exécutant·e·s. Je partagerai comment utiliser concrètement les « aspects vivants » en périphérie du design pour en tirer des avantages concrets. Je conclurai avec ma vision du rôle de l'IA dans cette transformation : non pas comme une menace, mais comme un catalyseur nous libérant pour mieux exercer notre influence stratégique.

Bertrand œuvre dans le domaine du numérique depuis le début des années 2000. Il occupe présentement le rôle de gestionnaire de produit, stratégie. Auparavant, il a occupé les postes de responsable de produits numérique dans le milieu de l’assurance et de la finance, de développeur « full-stack », de chargé de projets, de directeur et a travaillé en recherche et en enseignement à l’École de design de l’Université Laval à Québec.

Diplômé en intégration multimédia et en sciences humaines profil psychologie et sociologie, il tente de combiner ses intérêts et d’évangéliser le design sous toutes ses formes en créant et en s’impliquant dans des communautés telles que Design Québec, le (feu) Web à Québec, Service Design Network et anciennement Interface - Québec. Il a récemment lancé son premier livre « Périphérie du design » ainsi qu’un balado du même nom.

Français

Lorena García Girón

De la curiosité à la capacité : apprivoiser l'IA dans le système de santé

L’intelligence artificielle générative se déploie rapidement au sein des organisations, mais de nombreux professionnels de la santé demeurent hésitants face à son utilisation. Les préoccupations liées à la confidentialité, à la fiabilité et à l’usage responsable peuvent freiner l’expérimentation et créer un écart entre l’enthousiasme suscité par la technologie et son adoption concrète dans les pratiques.

Cette conférence explore la conception d’une expérience d’apprentissage fondée sur la curiosité, pensée pour permettre aux professionnels de la santé d’expérimenter l’IA générative dans un cadre sécuritaire. En misant sur l’apprentissage entre pairs, le partage de connaissances et l’intelligence collective, cette approche a contribué à renforcer la confiance, à favoriser l’engagement et à amorcer le développement des capacités nécessaires à une utilisation réfléchie et responsable de l’IA.

Design & Innovation Consultant, speaker, and facilitator with 20 years of interdisciplinary experience across design, communication, and strategy. Contributes to innovation initiatives at a healthcare innovation hub in Montreal. Combining human-centered design, multicultural perspective, and strategic facilitation, Lorena helps organizations turn missions into meaningful services. She regularly speaks at international conferences, advocating design-led approaches for sustainable innovation.

Phédia Gottot

Design Change Together Before it Happens: The Superpower of Participative Leadership

What if resistance to change was not an inevitable human reaction, but simply the signal that people were left out of the process?

Most organizations still design change at the top and deliver it to the rest. The result is familiar: pushback, disengagement, and initiatives that never quite land. But what if the problem was never the people, and always the approach?

This session challenges one of the most persistent myths in organizational life. Through the lens of participative leadership, we will look at how designing change with stakeholders, rather than for them, fundamentally shifts the dynamics.

We will explore concrete ways to bring teams into the process from the start, foster co-creation, and build change that is better understood, more deeply rooted in ground-level realities, and carried collectively rather than imposed from above.

A perspective-shifting session for leaders ready to rethink how change gets made.

Consultant, coach, trainer and facilitator, Phédia supports organizations in their innovation and transformation initiatives, drawing on participative leadership, collaborative design and stakeholder engagement. As an Innovation Advisor, she designed and coordinated Montreal’s candidacy process for the Smart Cities Challenge, earning the city the $50 million first prize.

Her mission: guiding organizations toward more engaging and collaborative environments by unlocking collective wisdom.

Français

Véronique Tremblay

Les défis du développement, de l'implantation et de l'évolution d'un cadre de gouvernance IA dans les organisations

Véronique Tremblay cumule près de vingt ans d’expérience en sciences de données et en intelligence artificielle, acquise principalement dans les secteurs des finances et de l’assurance. Détentrice d’une maîtrise en statistique, elle a également enseigné les statistiques, l’analyse de données et l’apprentissage statistique à de futurs ingénieurs, actuaires, informaticiens et scientifiques de données, contribuant ainsi à former des professionnels appelés à jouer un rôle clé dans l’écosystème de l’IA.

Au fil de sa carrière, elle a orienté son expertise vers les enjeux éthiques de l’intelligence artificielle. Elle poursuit aujourd’hui un doctorat à la Chaire de recherche en éthique organisationnelle et gouvernance de l’intelligence artificielle de HEC Montréal, où elle s’intéresse particulièrement à l’intégration des valeurs sociétales dans les projets d’IA et au rôle concret des professionnels dans leur mise en œuvre responsable.

Français

Marie-Ève Cyr

Repreneuriat : Ce qu’Excel ne vous dira jamais

Trente minutes dans la vraie vie d’une business flipper (repreneure) : des coups de circuit, de nombreux échecs lamentables et beaucoup de leçons apprises entre les deux.

Je vous ouvre les coulisses : les vrais deals, les bons calls, les franchement moins bons et tout ce qu’on apprend sur le terrain, mais qu’on raconte rarement sur une scène.

J’aurais probablement intérêt à vous parler seulement de mes bons coups. Mais ça ferait une conférence plate, et surtout, pas très utile. Alors on va parler des vraies affaires.

Venez apprendre de mes erreurs. Tant qu’à les avoir payées, aussi bien les rentabiliser.

Workshop

Chloé Feret & Mathieu Jolly

From Landscape to Design: How Wardley Maps Inform Enterprise Design Decisions

Wardley Maps answer the question of “where and when to act” (situational awareness, market analysis). That “where” may concern your organization. This is where EDGY helps you answer the question of “how” to act on your organization (identity, architecture, experience and intersections).

Chloé Feret. Chloé Feret is a transformation designer & orchestrator with over 10 years of experience in business transformation, design, and managing strategic projects. Her passion for people, tech, and innovation has shaped her multidisciplinary expertise, allowing her to bridge the gap between executives, IT, and business teams. Enthusiastic and curious, Chloé guides organizations through change by fostering collaboration among leaders and experts. Her holistic approach and diverse perspective make her an asset for companies aiming to innovate and adapt, while empowering talent development and amplifying operational efficiency.

Mathieu Jolly. Mathieu Jolly has been a Wardley Mapper for about six years. He translated Simon Wardley’s book into French and maintains the French open source Wardley Maps wiki. While new to EDGY, this exploration took a new dimension when he recently joined the Enterprise Design team at Onepoint.

Philippe Telio & Florence Barbeau

The Festivalization of Business: Where Innovation Meets Entertainment

Philippe Telio. Phil may have an engineering background, but this seasoned entrepreneur got a taste of the startup world fresh out of university. His journey started in the early 90s pre-internet era when he joined Public Technologies Multimedia—a startup that grew from a handful of people, to hundreds of people in just a few short years. Although he launched his career as a programmer, Phil was quickly drawn into the business side of startups and has pursued this vocation ever since. From PTM he joined Locus Dialogue, who was eventually bought by InfoSpace (another startup that grew quickly).

In 2003 Phil decided to start his own chapter with Embrase, a business-consulting firm centered on bringing innovation to the enterprise market. Despite his 20+ years of executive experience driving strategic business development, his heart was always in startups so he created a series of events that have now come to be the largest events in Canada for entrepreneurs.

Phil is also a board member of the Osmo Foundation and is the President and Chairman of the Montreal Startup Foundation. As the Founder of Startupfest, and the Elevator World Tour, Phil has invested in every one of the investment prizes — including Paris, and Tel Aviv.

Florence Barbeau. Strategic matchmaker and creator of opportunities, Florence Barbeau is an experienced project manager focused on value creation, with a wealth of experience in innovation, communications, tourism and customer experience.

She has been working for over 8 years at MT Lab, an incubator-accelerator of innovation in tourism, culture and entertainment, as Director of Partnerships, after managing several programs supporting entrepreneurs and hosting government and international delegations. Her strategic vision and collaborative leadership enable her to achieve concrete results in accelerating the capacity for innovation of large-scale Quebec tourism organizations.

Helgi Björgvinsson

I Have No Visual Imagination. EDGY Doesn't Care!

Some of us are not visual thinkers. Faced with a blank page, we blank. We default to text, because precision feels safer than a diagram we are not sure how to draw.

This session is a confession and a case study. I have almost no visual imagination and close to zero artistic talent. EDGY fixed exactly one of those problems.

What EDGY gives me is a scaffold to start from. A structure that makes my assumptions visible, to myself and to others: about how things work, how things relate, what things are for. Assumptions that would otherwise risk staying buried in paragraphs of text.

The diagram becomes something to point at. Something for the room to probe, question, and build on. It doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't even have to survive the meeting.

Through real examples from my current work, I'll show how I, despite my lack of visual imagination, use EDGY for structuring thoughts, surfacing assumptions, and enabling more constructive collaboration.

Helgi Björgvinsson is a senior Enterprise Architect with more than 15 years of experience working with architecture, strategy, leadership, and change in complex organisational environments across both the public and private sectors.

Paulo Tonin

From Spark to Funded: Using EDGY to Sequence Early-Stage Enterprise Design

Most startups fail not from lack of effort, but from pursuing outcomes in the wrong order — leaving fundable uncertainties unresolved. This session shows how EDGY was applied to make this sequencing problem visible and correctable.

The Early-Stage Code uses the EDGY formula (People perform Activities, using Objects, to achieve Outcomes) to map 19 Founder Outcomes across all three facets and three intersections into a dependency graph. The order of resolution — not the volume of activity — determines whether an enterprise becomes fundable.

The session reveals how EDGY's facet structure exposed dependency chains that startup advice misses: why Deep Understanding (Experience) must feed Purpose (Identity) before Architecture outcomes are credible, and why facet interplay is what investors evaluate. Attendees will see the Founder's Outcome Map, the five-layer instrument architecture, and real cases (Superhuman, Notion) analysed through EDGY.

Paulo Tonin is Community Lead for Intersection Group in Florianópolis, Brazil, and author of The Early-Stage Code — a systems-based methodology for early-stage founders built on EDGY. His work bridges enterprise design and startup practice, applying the EDGY language to the 0-to-1 journey where most structural failure originates. Paulo works with founders and accelerators to replace intuition-based progress with outcome-driven systems that align what founders pursue with what investors fund.

Jean-Sébastien Daigle

How to re-invent an event with EDGY?

Most people think reinventing an event means changing the venue or hiring flashier speakers. The real issue is deeper: most events run on legacy habits that no longer match economic reality or strategic ambition. They optimize the parts while the system drifts.

To change the outcome, you have to break the model. This session is a case study in systemic redesign. I will share how we used EDGY to rethink an event from the ground up, mapping the tensions between our aspirations and financial constraints to make hard choices about what to keep and what to kill.

We will look at the specific EDGY tools used to bridge the gap between strategy and operational reality, focusing on how the economic model drives the ecosystem.

This is a practical guide to structural coherence. You will leave with a clear approach to navigating ambiguity and an open-source EDGY event template to audit, design, or reinvent your own events, large or small.

Jean-Sébastien's path from a graphic designer to UX designer to enterprise designer is filled with diverse and enriching experiences. With his skills in workshop facilitation, he helped his client to better understand the situation and choose a path forward. Since 2019, he has been an integral part of the Intersection Group, where he leads the development of workshops for the organization. Jean-Sébastien frequently shares his insights on the essential qualities of a designer in various conferences and mentoring sessions. His expertise in enterprise design and commitment to many design communities are evident in his role as a partner at &friends, a consulting firm in Canada.

Workshop

Curtis Michelson

Play the Enterprise: AI-Boosted Innovation Games for Enterprise Design

Jedi on the Fly designs and facilitates mixed digital/physical innovation game experiences using a purpose-built stack called Ludor. These aren't icebreakers or workshop warm-ups. They're structured game environments where leaders wrestle with real organizational challenges.

Ludor is our custom tool, but we will share the principles behind its creation and by end of session, give people the capacity and clarity to build their own Ludor stack for themselves.

The way we approach enterprise design and change initiatives, AI provides just the right level of boost at exactly the right moment, and nothing more. This is a real design challenge.

We will demonstrate synthetic ai coach personas, that have been co-created with real life coaches and authors from our ED field. The game format makes it possible to compress weeks of alignment work into a single session because play creates conditions for honesty, movement, and decision that conventional formats suppress.

Curtis Michelson is co-founder of Jedi on the Fly and a practitioner at the intersection of enterprise design, innovation facilitation, and AI-augmented intelligence. He has spent three decades working as a strategic facilitator and innovation coach. He is a former speaker at Intersection Group conferences, and a journalist for InnoLead.com where he covers enterprise AI topics. He is currently a participant in the EDGY+AI working group. (www.curtismichelson.com)

Workshop

Nate Gerber

Road-testing EDGY: Building a Community-Of-Practice for Whole-Enterprise Change

We are a small collective of practitioners helping organisations with the tsunami of change being thrust upon them across every scope and scale. We wanted to try out EDGY to help us grow a community of like-minded practitioners to manage that rising global need.

Our methods encompass the full enterprise scope, but are built for use by architects and designers. EDGY provided us with a friendlier, more accessible means to draw people into the conversations about structure, story and change.

How to use EDGY fractally to address whole-enterprise scopes on all levels of the organisation;

⁠How to avoid 'blind-spots' when focussing on single EDGY facets or intersections;

How to link EDGY to whole-enterprise methods to guide strategy, architecture, design, implementation, effectiveness and shared-learning;

This presentation documents our step-by-step process and progress on this journey, how we used EDGY, and now plan to use it in future collaborations.

Nate Gerber is an artist, strategic design, enterprise architecture, and organizational change practitioner. Through Interplxy and as a core member of the Tetradian Collective, he helps organizations clarify purpose, make sense of messy systems, and build strategy into services, operating models, tools, and action. His work spans arts, culture, government, healthcare, software, and social innovation.