Good food and good company

With KM Asia over for another year I went out for dinner with Patrick Lambe and Graham Durant-Law. Both old friends from the knowledge management world. We went to the Liang Kee Teochew Restaurant on Robertson Quay. Now this is one of favorite places to eat in a city that must rank in the top three food capitols of the world. Its an unpretentious place, formica tables and ordinary chairs with an outside area facing the river. The dish pictured is their signature dish, ribs that you take from the bone and wrap into the dough balls show (they are light).

Good food needs good company and the conversation was wide ranging. Graham after a period as an independent consultant is currently back in the Australian Army as a Colonel in the Medical Corps and was fresh back from Afghanistan. He has been working with the Cynefin framework, looking at different types of complexity that take place in the boundary transitions. His interest there is in large project management, and that got me on to the work with the AGILE and SCRUM communities on using Cynefin as a framework for understanding different approaches to management based on the level of constraint needed. I argued for an modular approach to project management, linking to Graham’s view that projects should always be seen as a portfolio. The implications of a dynamic view of projects, focusing on the interdependencies between modules rather than content took us through a few Tigers. Patrick as ever commented, guided, interpreted and questioned (a skill I freely confess I do not possess) and even paid for the meal at the end! I am now back in the hotel and have a free bottle of wine that I cannot take on the plane tomorrow; duty calls ….