Jan De Visch
Connect & Transform
Biography
Jan De Visch is a seasoned consultant and executive coach with decades of experience facilitating complex organizational development processes. As Managing Director of Connect & Transform, he helps organizations make visible where cIvo Velitchkovollaboration, decision-making and ownership block strategic progress, and supports leadership teams in redesigning the governance, roles and structures needed to deal with complexity. His work connects diagnosis, design and transformation: from sensing where responsibilities and boundaries are unclear, to co-creating adaptive structures, leadership practices and ecosystemic forms of collaboration that can sustain future value creation. As a professor at Flanders Business School, he explores one essential question: What drives organizations toward sustainable growth? His approach blends strategic insight with an in-depth understanding of development, enabling leadership teams to align their structures, cultures, and purposes. Jan is the author of 14 books, including the recent Opening the Box: Systems Thinking for Transformational Conversations (2024), Humanizing the Corporation: A Regenerative Leadership Playbook (2025), and The Developmental Practitioner (2025). His work translates cutting-edge developmental research into practical tools for CEOs, change leaders, and facilitators eager to unlock their organization’s full potential. With Jan, transformation is not just a goal — it’s a guided process of becoming.
Sessions
The Art of Boundary-Making: Deepening the VSM through Cognitive-Developmental Science
The Art of Boundary-Making deepens the practical value of the Viable System Model by showing that organizational viability is not only a matter of structure, governance, or recursion but also of the developmental capacity of the people who apply and inhabit those structures. The essay argues that VSM practitioners draw different system boundaries because they differ in cognitive depth and breadth of thought, as well as in social-emotional maturity. These developmental differences shape what they perceive, how they interpret tensions, and whether they treat boundaries as fixed design choices or as living distinctions to be explored through dialogue. Its added value lies in making this invisible dimension explicit. By integrating Otto Laske’s Constructive Developmental Framework, the essay offers a richer way to diagnose why organizations struggle with coordination, ownership, strategic alignment, and change. It introduces the concept of “requisite development”: the capacity leaders and practitioners need to process the complexity of their roles. In doing so, it reframes the VSM as more than a diagnostic model. It becomes a developmental and dialogical practice that helps organizations redesign structures, strengthen leadership capacity, and foster more adaptive forms of collaboration across boundaries.