Session “How Agile and Lean Changed My Organization” at Lean Kanban Central Europe

Using Agile and Lean on an organizational level kicks ass!

At Lean Kanban Central Europe conference 2011 in Munich, Germany I spoke about How Agile and Lean Changed My Organization. Here’s a short summary of this session.

The session had one message:

Using Agile and Lean on an organizational level kicks ass!


Session Kanban Board with Topics

That’s it, basically. I didn’t use slides, but a Kanban board to visualize the topics I spoke about.

The story goes like this: Intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation, because it’s the key to flow, the centre section between burnout and boreout where you are most productive. Flow is what you can achieve by considering three principles, i.e. autonomy, mastery and purpose. You need autonomy to adjust yourself between burnout and boreout to achieve flow. Mastery is the desire to improve yourself, and it’s essential to flow. Purpose is in what direction you should steer when you master stuff. On an organizational level, management innovations should address autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In the session, I gave plenty of examples from Semco, Whole Foods, and my own company, it-agile. Also, I addressed potential resistance when it comes to management innovations, and I made clear that managment innovation is the best kind of the different types of innovation (operational, product, strategic, management innovations).

Here’s a video from this talk:

If you want to read more about those topics, I highly recommend the following books. I was mentioning them a lot in my session. They always reminded me of our own management innovations at it-agile. I recommend to read them in the following order:

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace
Success story of Semco, a Brazilian company, with it’s very unusual management innovations.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Reason, why Semco’s management innovations are actually working.

The Future of Management
Why management innovations kick ass and are the future. Also case studies of Whole Foods, Gore, and Google.



This was the first version of this talk. I got a lot of feedback, which I will use to improve the session. Next chance to see it will be at OOP 2012 in Munich and Goto 2012 in Copenhagen.

[Update: The official feedback from the audience was great. They rated this session as one of the best on this conference. Thank you very much!]


.

This entry was posted in General and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

About Bernd Schiffer

Bernd Schiffer is consultant, trainer and coach for Agile Software Development in Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about him on his personal homepage, have a look at his company Bold Mover, or contact him on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, XING or LinkedIn.

3 Responses to Session “How Agile and Lean Changed My Organization” at Lean Kanban Central Europe

  1. Pingback: it-agile: State of Play « Stefan Roock

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.