Essence is getting increased attention in all circuits, such as academics, thought leaders and of course in the target circuit the industry.
Therefore we have designed an Essence Exploration Day (see presentation of the day further down) to which we invite people who have expressed clear interest from knowing more about Essence. Thus we usually invite two people from a selected company:
- The ideal person we want to invite is a champion, who is an expert, trusted by others, who deeply understands how development teams work and interested in making that work better in all possible dimensions. We are not looking for a process engineer, since they just love what we have. We think the ideal champion is someone with long implementation experience.
- We also welcome a sponsor someone with decision power to join to better understand how Essence will dramatically change her/his organization in many different positive ways. The two participants will together form a champion-sponsor pair, effective for taking further steps.
Moreover to really “get under the skin” of Essence we need not just presentations and demos, but participants need to play some instructive games and get hands on experience. You will love it.
After the Day, participants will get access to tools and cards to be able to further explore the values of Essence in Practice™.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the contents of the course, please use the form at the bottom of this page to submit an enquiry so we can start organizing this for you.
Training Information
| Implementing SAFe with SPC Certification, Remote, Jul 2025 | 2025-07-21 | Remote Course (BST) | |
| Advanced SAFe Practice Consultant with ASPC Certification, Remote, Aug 2025 | 2025-08-04 | Remote Course (BST) |
We guarantee a game changing, once in a lifetime experience for participants in this Exploration Day. Don’t take our word for it but look at what some participants from our April 7 event say:
This is a tip for my fellow agilists out there.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend an exploration session of Essence by IJI.
I really liked how Essence gives a comprehensive view of how we as a development organization are doing. And the other way around too; to give us crisp and clear pointers as to what we could do differently, and what could be improved.
Organizations and teams adopt and pick up behaviors, methods and practices in unique ways and with their own unique flavors. The explicitly stated “rules” and structures of any method or framework - like Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, SAFe, TDD, User Story writing, etc - are never (cannot and should not be) comprehensive and detailed enough to not allow for wiggle-room and result in differences between adopting teams.
When taking a holistic look at a development machinery (individual teams and large sets of teams and organizations alike) I have always struggled with really grasping “where we are at”. There is always a huge amount of disorder, craziness and chaos, and it often boils down to what can be described as a method war; where people just have different opinions and what is right and not. I have been implementing Agile and particularly Scrum since 2006, and consequently spent a lot of time and effort trying to grasp that holistic view. Now, with Essence, I think I finally have the tool for exactly that: a structured approach (complete with a digital tool, even) to map out what has been adopted, what has not, what behaviors are there and what is not, and to what extent the organization is capturing/adopting/behaving “enough”.
I also very much liked the idea of Minimum Viable Governance, where we can figure out and apply just the minimum set of common behaviors, and then let the teams/org fill in the rest - while at the same time be able to use Essence to regularly evaluate the full picture.
Richard Kronfält, Full Stack Agilist & Software Development Manager, Tetrapak, Sweden (Source)
It’s a honor to receive Ivar Jacobson’s call and join the “Essence Exploration Day” with Pfizer, Swedbank and MunichRe etc., to deep dive how to harvest the potential of Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, Scrum at scale, Nexus, by putting teams at the center, apply Essence to learn, understand, adapt and improve ways of working, ensuring alignment and minimum viable governance at scale. My journey with Essence started in 2018 with scrum, later the combination between essence and scrum was officially endorsed by Jeff Sutherland, now with extension to Spotifymodel, agile at scale, and digital tools Essence Team space, we are one step closer to improve quality of adapting agile frameworks, to deliver better working software.
Hào Lǐ, Guide Scalable Digital Evolution, Allianz, Germany (Source)
I think that Essence is a very interesting tool to implement and improve the wide variety of agile frameworks. It really looks at the basics you need to have in place to make any process or project work, not just software development, and make it work for you specifically. I especially liked the checklist approach, which is a quick tool to assess where you are and what is needed next when it comes to making your organization work in your specific circumstances. As the situation evolves this is something that can be done quickly and repeatedly and as such helps with the vuca world we live in these days.
Pascal Bierhuizen, CTO, TBA, The Netherlands