Team-based Conference - Iteration 2

by Bas Vodde
1 October 2017

Team-based Conference - Iteration 2

It is already two weeks ago now… the 2017 LeSS Conference in London. I’m still missing the discussion, my team, the wine, the people, the weather. Well… not the weather. It was wonderful, I enjoyed it thoroughly and hope and think the other people did too!

One thing I considered very successful this time was the team-based conference idea. This idea started in the previous 2016 Amsterdam conference. In that conference we experimented with this. The origin is in a discussion the organizing group had, which is that in LeSS we focus on teams… but most conferences are done individually. That felt like not following our own principles… so we thought about how we can make the conference experience more of a team experience. In Amsterdam we tried the first iteration, which was rough but good enough to keep trying. The second iteration was much better.

How does it work?

The essence is to make the conference experience a team experience where you learn together with your team, have a place to return to, people you got to know better, and can create a shared output.

The structure is like this:

In the beginning of the conference, we hold a self-designing team workshop so that the people can form their teams.
The teams find a space, which is their team space for the rest of the conference.
The team has a round of introductions where they share their expectations and create a name
After each session, there is team reflection time where the teams share the learning of their session or discuss about the session when they went to the same one.
Lunch is naturally also done within your team
Near the end of the conference, the team has one hour to create a “representation of their shared conference experience” together.
The conference ends with a Conference Review Bazaar where each team share their creations with the other teams

In this blog post, I’d like to share the teams that were creates, in a future post we’ll share the outcome from each of the teams.

The Teams

If you were in one of the team and want to share something about your team or experience, drop me an email and we’ll put it in this blog post which we’ll keep updating regularly.

If your team is missing, lemme know and I’ll add them.