I’m going to have a busy Autumn because I’m going to speak at four different conferences. The Autumn tour will start in Edinburgh with Lean Agile Scotland 2013 that I’m very much excited about. It was great last year, and based on the tweets it is going to be even greater this year. If you don’t want miss the best speakers from Europe and especially from Scotland, join us. As a little encouragement for a 10% discount, send me a private message.
In my session I’m going to talk about transformation and why the are not successful in most of the cases. It goes by the title “Bermuda Triangle of Transformations”, and here is its abstract:
The Bermuda Triangle is a mythical place in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, where - according to the legends - a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared, but no one has been able to come up with an explanation why these unusual disappearances have been happening. During the last couple of years I observed a metaphorical similarity between the disappearance of the aircrafts and ships in the Bermuda Triangle and the false positive results of the organisational transformations I was observing. It is extremely difficult to determine why a transformation provides false positive results, but maybe the three vertices of the Bermuda Triangle of the organisational transformation can provide a quite good explanation. The three vertices aren’t locations, they are concepts: how decisions about ideas are made (Parkinson’s Law of Triviality), how ideas are implemented (Cargo Cults), and how ideas scale in an organisation (Nuclear Chain Reaction).
This talk will explain the three vertices - for example, why an organisation needs a critical mass and proper environment to expand the effect of an idea -, and how they are related to each other - for example, how the setup of a committee can create a cargo cult inside an organisation, which eventually provides false positive results. If you attend this talk you’ll know more about how organisations are working and what the important details are that require you attention if you would like avoid false positive results of any kind of transformation.%
After Edinburgh, I’m talking at various events of the Lean Kanban Europe Autumn Series by the Lean Kanban University. The first stop is Paris with Lean Kanban France. I don’t know the program yet, but it was excellent last year, and the organisers promised to have an even better event this year. The next stop is in Maarsen, which is a small town next to Utrecht in the Netherlands, with Lean Kanban Netherlands. The program looks fantastic, there is a lot of content with great speakers. The last stop is in London with Lean Kanban UK. This is the first LKU event in the UK that goes by the theme “Modern Management Methods – be more responsive to what your customers demand”. I don’t know the program yet, but it sounds great.
It seems this year the organisers were interested only in my “I Broke the WIP Limit Twice, and I’m Still on the Team!” talk because I’m going to give this talk at all the LKU events:
Hi, my name is Zsolt, I broke the WIP limit several times, I’m still on the team and I’m happy about it. Most probably you’ve had a similar experience (except maybe you weren’t happy at all) when you first started to work in a team that got hit by the Kanban method introduced by one of your fellow teammates. At first, it is hard to follow and understand all the principles and practices, especially when they “hit” us, and therefore we make mistakes. This is good and natural because this is how we live our lives: we fail, we recover and start over.
Starting over requires us to do at least two things: re-learn the principles and practices, and look for examples on how others recovered. I believe that understanding the pull system, the WIP limits, and the difference between manufacturing and software development will give us enough to recover faster from failures and accelerate the learning process. Moreover, I assume that I did more wrong than right during my journey in Kanban land, and it cost me a lot. I believe that if I share these stories with you, it will save you a great deal of trouble for yourself, and if not, at least you’ll have some ideas on how to recover.
Clearly, this talk is not for advanced practitioners, but I think they are as rare as unicorns anyway. So, if you have doubts, or want to know why we do things in the Kanban method as we do now, and you are also interested in some practical ideas, this talk is the right place for you.
See you there!