Nobody Knows Where We're Going: Management, AI and the Social Life of Software Delivery

Wednesday 4th November 2026, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Marc Burgauer

Venue: Skyscanner Limited, Quartermile One, 15 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3 9EN

Please use Lauriston Place entrance. Note that Skyscanner will require you to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) for entry to their offices. Please read the terms here).

Refreshments and networking from 6:00 pm.

This event is free of charge and open to all, though registration is required - you may not get past venue security if you do not register in advance.

Registration link coming soon.

Synopsis

Nobody predicted where object orientation, SaaS or the cloud would take us, and nobody knows what AI will do to software development, never mind organisations. Every re-org, every product transformation and every new tool changes how people make sense of their work, what they can do, and who is accountable when things go wrong, often in ways the decision-makers never intended or even notice.

Agile’s early excitement came from a confidence in getting the best results when we let the people doing the work organise themselves around it, through short feedback loops, shared ownership and direct contact with the people who know what's needed. AI calls for that same self-organisation and at the same time can be key in facilitating it: no roadmap can predict which new ways of working will stick, so we have to discover them in practice.

The talk offers ways to make that discovery effective by revealing the practices your team actually has, not the process it thinks it follows, and where AI could strengthen them. It also looks at how the social realities are changing and how to make these changes visible.

About the speaker

Steeped in complexity theories as a Biology student, Marc was an early adopter of Agile, and has consistently pushed the boundaries in applying these principles to knowledge work. Marc was a co-organiser of the Lean Agile Scotland conference through which he contributed to the Agile community. His journey, having co-founded a successful software startup during the nascent days of the internet and then gone on to first lead and then coach in large scale digital transformations, allows him to speak from experience about management and executive decision making in rapidly changing environments.