Peter Zylka-Greger

Hi, I’m Peter!

For years I have been fortunate enough to work with teams all over the world. It is something that I thoroughly enjoy and that helped me to see what a great team is capable of achieving.

But it also showed me that it is not just done by putting individuals into a group and mixing them with others. Having a variety of techniques, emotional intelligence and a good toolkit at hand are very helpful.

I currently spend my working time working as a Lead Enablement Coach at a fintech company in Switzerland and also do spend some time working on our fun project called “LetPeopleWork” with my colleague Benjamin Huser-Berta.

I do like the combination as it allows me to experiment a lot and see what actually works in the “real life” and what does not.
At my fintech company we are framework agnostic and this proved to be the best thing that could have happened to us and therefore can focus a lot on the things that matter, hence also the inspiration for the talk which combines the experience with the knowledge from the stuff we do at LetPeopleWork.

The Plan Was a Lie (and Everyone Knew)

Every quarter, teams produce beautiful Gantt charts. Status dashboards stay green. PI Plannings end with confident commitments. Then reality shows up, and the plan quietly falls apart. The worst part isn't that the plan was wrong. It's that most people in the room already knew it would be.

We have all probably been that person at some point. The one who sat in the planning session, looked at the dates, felt something was off, and still gave a 3 in the confidence vote. Because ""I don't think this is realistic"" isn't something you say when the room has already committed.

This talk is about why that keeps happening. We'll walk through the cognitive traps that turn planning into theater (planning fallacy, optimism bias, base rate neglect, narrative fallacy), not as academic concepts, but as the things we've watched play out in real rooms with real teams.

Then we'll show what we did instead: stopped hand-painting Gantt charts and let forecasts build them, stopped trusting watermelon status reports and started acting on real signals, stopped treating PI Planning as a commitment ceremony and started reprioritising continuously.

The anchor is a delivery team that more than halved its 85th-percentile cycle time inside an enterprise programme that didn't change around them. They found a way to work differently inside a system that stayed the same. That's the story we want to tell, because most of us don't get to transform the whole organisation. We get a pocket of air and need to make the most of it. And one team is a good starting point to build trust within the organization that a different way might work.

Peter will speak together with Benjamin Huser-Berta.