Details
Date: Thursday 29th September
Time: 7:15pm start to a 9:15pm (doors open at 6:30pm and close when the games have finished).
Location: http://www.pieandale.com
Theme: Systems Thinking
Systems Thinking
Following the excellent talks from Kevin Rutherford and Harriet Shannon in June we’re continuing to think about how teams and environments can be improved by considering how things influence one another as part of a whole. The practice concentrates on viewing complex problems as larger systems rather than focussing on the individual components out of context. It’s all about relationships, philosophy and common sense – much like the topics we’ve covered already at Agile Staffs. The topic is vast and is best discovered over time, rather than via my bumbling summary here. There are plenty of online resources and even a user group in Sheffield. We’ve covered some aspects before (Theory of Constraints, Lean) so this meeting should give us all a good understanding of the basics, giving us the opportunity to go away and learn more.
Playing Games with Ash
Our speaker for the evening will be Ash Moran, a software developer, agile coach and user group regular from Stoke-on-Trent. He provides advice and training on these matters too through his company Patch Space. He is an ex-colleague of a few group members and we’ve been planning on having him pay us a visit for some time. I’m not entirely sure what his plans for the meeting are but I know they are going to involve some games. These will likely be in the form of interactive exercises to illustrate the various concepts, much like the dice game exercise we did with Kevin. I’ll update this when I know more, or I might just leave it as a surprise…
Bring Your Friends
As the meeting will have a less technical theme than recently it is a great opportunity to bring new members, bring your boss, or even your non-computery friends as Systems Thinking has been widely used in all manner of contexts. By the sounds of some of the games (Ash asked me how much room we’d have!) we could do with as many people as possible too. Information for new members can be found on the New Members page.
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