Impressions from ALE2011—Day 2

Bjarte Bogsnes

The second day of ALE2011 started with an amazing keynote by Bjarte Bogsnes on Beyond Budgeting. I had seen a video of his talk at LESS2010 in Helsinki, bought his book… And invited him to come to our unconference. Which he did!

[amazon asin=”0470405163″ template=”simpleimage”] Beyond Budgeting is a topic that deserves its own post, which I will probably write once the video of his keynote is edited and ready to be published. The basic idea is to stop joining targets, forecasts and resource allocation into fixed budgets and to instead use dynamic processes and Theory Y leadership to move forward. Bjarte was as inspiring as expected—I especially liked his example of traffic lights and roundabouts… Giving the people with up-to-date information the means of control.

Wikispeed

Thorsten Kalnin

Thorsten Kalnin already contributed immensely to the ALE network by his awesome StrategicPlay facilitation of our vision creation session in Madrid. But he not only plays with Lego… He brought car design and manufacturing to ALE2011. His inspiring talk about Wikispeed gave a special touch to the unconference. Nobody could have guessed when he volunteered for the Alien sofa that he would join such an amazing team and be able to tell us about how to use Scrum, Kanban, OO, XP… to build a 100mpg racing car!

Birthday Injection

Chris Matts gave us a whirlwind of Feature Injection, which was surprisingly injected with a birthday party:

Oana's birthday party crashing Chris' talk

He loved it, now being able to join the hall of fame of “worst things that can happen in your presentation”! His talk was awesome, which did not surprise me. Feature Injection and Real Options were the topics I talked about most at this conference, as they greatly improved my understanding of the event’s organisation. Being a central part of it, I didn’t reflect our processes on a meta level, but injecting features into the unconference just before our Real Options expired was exactly what we did. Never commit early unless you know why.

Lean Procrastination

In the afternoon, I was interviewed by Rini van Solingen about LeanProcrastination, which I’ve been co-developing with Marc Bless for about a year. In addition to catalysing a lot of thoughts I had on my mind, he challenged my statement that our method was only for personal work organisation… Connecting my ideas about Real Options and Distributed Cognition to the Beyond Budgeting topic of Bjarte’s keynote, he said it might be a way to help enterprises get rid of their backlogs… Never commit early unless you know why. I’m still thinking about it. This is the video:

In the open space, Ivana Gancheva hosted a session about alternative formats for future conferences. I butterflied in and out though the discussion was amazing, as my daughter came to visit the unconference and I showed her around. Good to have a chance to let your family know what you’re actually doing!

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