Lean Agile Open – April 15, 2016.

[Ed. Note: This was written 4/16/2016.  We have had many Open Space events since 2016.]

We had a great event in Charlotte yesterday, and I hope you did not miss it.

Self-organizing people did the best they could (which is actually a lot) to learn as much as they could with other smart people about Lean and Agile topics with, I think, the goals of (a) becoming more effective, and (b) making their own lives, making the lives of their team members and making the lives of their customers better.

I don’t want the event to sound too goody-goody. We all had fun too, but what I want to emphasize first is: We self-organized, and then it was good.

Thanks to many people! Let me name at least these people: Cassandra Wagner, Riddhi Gupta, Murali Varadarajan and Bob Petruska, but many others also contributed.

What was the value?

1. Senior people at ‘waterfall’ companies could see that regular people could self-organize.
2. We all saw that we all can help each other.
3. Each of us learned some important things to use back at the ranch to make Lean or Agile work better at our real work. Each person got to focus his learning where he or she wanted.
4. Most or maybe all of us were ‘enlivened.’ We felt more hope, more belief that things can change, less alone, more hopeful. We had a sense of a brighter future. This is something that you can never ‘buy.’

We did we learn?

As I said, we each learned some specific things about specific areas of Lean and Agile. All good, but not my focus for right now.

For some who were new to open space, we learned to trust ‘open space.’ So, I hope we learned to be more courageous next time. As your parents always told you, it is important to trust people. Of course, not to trust too much, but to have some trust and to be trustworthy.

Because more people will have more trust next time, the event will be bigger and better. More people now know how to ‘use’ open space effectively.

If we use these events well, this will start to change the community. No man is an island. We are all inter-connected, and we all influence each other. These events, repeated regularly, will change the community, and they can, perhaps more slowly than you may want, change the culture of your company.

We will use these events to continue to… well, the mundane way to say it is: To get better and better results from Lean and Agile, but I hope in your heart or stomach (those of you who were there) you feel a stronger energy, an energy you cannot ignore, and that it draws you much more strongly than those simple, mundane words.

 

 

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