This year’s Seattle Kaizen Camp was awesome.
I loved the range and diversity of the attendees, with people from health care, education, government, software development, and a host of other occupations. We had attendees from college students to C-Level management. We were once again very close to gender parity. And we had people from across the US, as well as Europe and Asia.
All this to discuss our experiences with continuous improvement, Personal Kanban, and lean.
The weather co-operated, so most of our 75+ sessions were held outdoors in the beautiful Seattle summer. Just warm enough to be comfortable.
Sessions included:
- Kanban at Home
- Failing Well
- Lean Contracts
- The Cynefin Framework
- Accelerating Innovation
- Metaphors to Convince Others of Lean Principles
- Resilience with Kanban
- Extreme Self-Organization
- Personal Kanban Experiences
and more .. about 70 more.
What was most important for Tonianne and me as organizers was the speed at which people created topics and the depth of conversations.
All the topics and conversations were conceived of, led, and participated in by the attendees themselves. There were no official speakers, no lengthy powerpoint presentations, no middle-of-the-day sugar crashes in dark rooms. Kaizen Camp: Seattle was people practicing Lean, Personal Kanban, and Continuous Improvement talking about what they did and how they did it.
We are looking forward to Seattle’s event next year, but in the interim we have several planning across the US.
Coming up later this year (announcements for each will be made soon):
- Kaizen Camp: Boulder
- Kaizen Camp: SoCal
- Kaizen Camp: NYC
Please come to one near you!
Several of the Photos and notes have been posted here.
Related posts:
- Kaizen Camp: Personal Kanban Conversations Happening Worldwide The Kaizen Camp in Seattle was such a success that...
- Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2012 Following last year’s excellent “Seattle Lean Camp,” we are now...
- Why I’m Excited About Lean Camp JUST LET ME LEARN! Hallway conversations are almost always what...
- Democratize Meetings with Personal Kanban Agendas are so 20th Century. Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills are...
- Lean Meetings 2: Semper Gumby! Point of Order! I make a motion to rescind Roberts...
Hello,
I was reading this post, and noticed that you’re planning a Kaizen Camp: NYC. I’ve been organizing a “Lean Coffee” in New York City (although in practice we eschew coffee in favor of beer) for the past few months. We’re a small group (usually 8-16) and was wondering if there was some way we could partner up/assist with the NYC camp. Understood that this appears to be a relatively loosely organized group, but interested in assisting/promoting this.
Thanks,
Jonathan Hansen