CALMalpha (2)

A few days ago I posted on the meeting that five of us organised to talk about the links between Cynefin, Agile and Lean. We ended up calling it CALM, which adds Mashup to the three elements, although you can replace Cynefin with Complexity if you want. We had concerns about the use of complexity language to rebrand old practice, but we also wanted to respect that practice as well as creating the new. We were also very concerned to make this open as possible, so a lot of our time was spent in discussing the first event (hence the alpha) which would be open to all. Either way bookings are now open and we have a lot of flexibility on numbers, we can keep it small or allow it to grow. We do need to firm up on numbers by the end of January so you will see there is a heavy penalty for late booking. If you have a look at the faculty you will see we all come from different backgrounds and different organisations. When we started talking about this many months ago that diversity was key, but we also wanted people who were talking and working around a reasonably common understanding of complexity, and a deep understanding not just a quick pick up on the language.

The event will be focused on the Agile/Lean communities, but one of the areas we want to address is tighter integration with functional aspects of an organisation such as HR. As part of that I’ll be talking about some of our planned work (for which we need partners) to create new approaches to requirements capture which seamless become project management and management awareness systems. The event will have a range of inputs as well as lots of time and space for interaction. Hopefully it will be one of those events where in future years we can all say I was there. Its first come first served, yes its short notice but we want to move things forwards.

The venue is a great place. When I was Director of the EPSRC Complexity Programme we held the main event here and its well suited to open discussion. Lots of good places to walk, or just sit and talk. The location is under half an hour from Heathrow Airport or Reading Rail station so its easy to get to and we’ll sort shared taxis etc nearer the time. We’ll do all the normal tweet stream stuff for people who can’t make it but want to be involved.

I’ll be blogging about LEAN (which I think suffers from being linked to Six Sigma in several sectors) and complexity shortly as well as some of the other areas. So will the rest of the faculty.

At the very least you get a very low cost conference! At the best you become a part of creating something which could last.