This Tuesday Àngel Garrido and I gave a talk At the Business agility Conference in Vienna. This is the first edition of the conference in Europe. The truth is that I liked the format very much. 20-minute sessions, like the already popular TED talks. Each block of three talks ended with the three speakers on the stage, for 20 minutes giving the audience a chance to ask questions. Then there was table discussions for 40 minutes. A very good way encourage participation, solidify knowledge and network all at once.
The level of the talks was high. The first day, Bjarte Bogsnes gave a talk, summarising his 25 years of experience in Beyond Budgeting. Huub Hopman gave a talk about his Application of SAFe, which led perfectly into our talk, as we didn’t have to explain how we at Voxel implemented Big Room Planning. Phil Abernathy gave a spectacular talk, he’s a great orator. He knew how to condense his 12 years of experience in transformations, into concrete concepts, easy to understand and apply. Marina Alex explained her Agile application model on the commercial team.
Sandy Mamoli talked about how to assemble multidisciplinary teams through self-selection, (which I have also experienced with differing results). Carlo Bucciarelli gave to us a case of a transformation leader who did not know how to delegate enough, becoming the bottleneck. Finally, Gerard Claassen explained how he manages one of the biggest musical festivals in Europe.
The second day Àngel Garrido and I spoke about our experience transforming Voxel Group, using Agile, sociocracy and Scaling Up. After our talk Uta-Maria Ohndorf explained how they introduced experimentation at Roche Diagnostics, where everything has to come out perfect. Later in the day came a group of epic sessions. Doug Kirkpatrick shared his experience in Morning Star, one of the benchmarks in self-organisation to scale. John Buck explained the bases of the model BOSSA Nova: Beyond budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy and Agile. Finally Stephen Parry delighted us with his decades of transformation experience (even before Agile) and the evolution of his research in “Sense and Response.”
We were fortunate to be able to connect with all these champions of the Business agility world and we’re in talks to bring them to Barcelona…..
