Arlette Vercammen

Arlette is passionate about “going upstream”. In the early 90’s, not long after graduating from university, she founded MediaGenix to use Smalltalk and object-oriented technology to develop complex software for broadcasters. Back in those days, this was certainly not “going with the flow”. During the 10+ years at the helm of MediaGenix, she gained quite some hands-on experience with agile ways of working. In 2012 she started, together with Patrick Steyaert, Okaloa to help organisations become successful with lean agile. Since the inception of Okaloa, both Patrick and Arlette got immersed in the fascinating world of the functioning of the brain, especially in the context of learning. Their enthusiasm for helping people, teams, and organisations in adopting new ways of working led to the co-creation of Okaloa Flowlab, a constraint-enabled learning platform. Rather than going with the flow of teaching methods, Patrick and Arlette take people upstream inspiring curiosity to thinking about new ways of working.

Patrick Steyaert

Patrick Steyaert is founder of Okaloa. As a creator of Okaloa Flowlab, he teaches and coaches agile thinking (before methods) by making use of business simulations. With his work on upstream, customer and discovery kanban he helps organizations to look at the end-to-end flow (from suspected to satisfied need). He is the author of the Essential Upstream Kanban guide, a regular speaker at international conferences, and recipient of the 2015 Brickell Key award for outstanding contribution to the Kanban community.

Agile practice clinic

In this agile practice clinic you will experience a new way of creating change. It is inspired on the format of sports clinics where practitioners are immersed in short intense sessions guided by an expert to focus on a particular aspect of their performance. Rather than focusing on changing behaviour and mindset of people, we concentrate on 1) practices (i.e. habitual actions); 2) the interaction between practices; and 3) how to intervene when practices are entangled. Through the Okaloa Flow – Collaboration – Learning framework we offer a pair of glasses to look differently at lean agile practices and their interconnectivity. The purpose is to develop an understanding that:

• agility emerges out of the interaction between practices
• resistance to change often finds its origin in the interaction between existing and newly introduced practices
• how to create change in a network of entangled practices

By understanding how practices interact we can make more successful interventions. It is about seeing the connections between flow, collaboration, and learning practices.

This session is aimed at both novices as well as experienced practitioners; it also offers a good opportunity to get a taste of the philosophy behind Okaloa Flowlab.