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.

The freedom to flow

Transformation is defined by the Oxford dictionary as ‘a marked change in form, nature, or appearance’. When applied to a business, it means a significant change or a shift in culture and mindset – a shift that still seems to be the biggest challenge in lean and agile transformation In his keynote speech, Patrick Steyaert uses practice theory to explain why it is so difficult to accomplish a marked change and formulates the hypothesis on how the freedom to flow enables true transformation.

• Understand the role of complex networks of interacting practices as a source of friction to change
• Observe the inability to succinctly formulate change outcomes and required capabilities
• Explain flow thinking in its broadest sense by expanding the notion of flow from flow of work into flow of ideas and information
• Learn about the role of constraints (e.g. WIP limits, time-boxes, collaboration policies) that enable the different forms of flow and how they form a closed loop (freedom to flow)
• Search for key-stone practices to bootstrap a closed loop of constraints

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.