We’re proud to announce that the Agile Tour Zurich 2019 will be held on 22 Nov 2019 in Baden ABB Power Tower Auditorium.
Agile Tour is a series of non-profit events aimed at communicating Agile practices at large scale. The mission is to create leaderships and leaders on Agile in all regions of the world in order to do a mass communication on Agile and impact the professional world. Since 2008, this event series has been successfully broadcasting Agile values for the last 11 years. This year, I’m honored to co-organize this event in Zurich region.
As we’re ramping up the organization of the Agile Tour 2019, here I’m jotting down some moments in the last 6 months of my path becoming one of the tour organizers.
April 2019, one month after arriving in Switzerland, I was introduced to Leo at Liip. I was aware of Liip for some time as one of my agile coach friend had his thumb up and commented on Liip as “a really cool place”. I became very curious about this 180 people organization which is growing self-organized for 3 years. My meeting with Leo was rather casual. It didn’t take much for us to find similar qualities in each other. I enjoyed his “everything is possible, let’s test it” mentality. And before long we found something to collaborate on. At that point I wanted to bring the Agile community closer to ABB, but I was worried that I didn’t have much network or influence to pull it off. His start-up mentality really touched me, he said “let’s test it, then you’ll know more and you’ll learn”. Indeed, from all the experience I had with prototyping and self-organization, it had always been the “safe enough to try” mentality that got us further. And out of that conversation, we also agreed to see if there is a possibility to bring the Agile Tour closer to ABB. And no matter what outcome, I committed to co-organize this years’ Agile Tour with the organizing team. The Agile Baden community is also taking shape with Sept being the 3rd meetups. Through this “let’s test it” motto, I was able to connect with my ABB L&D colleagues who supported such an experiment. I was also able to learn from the experience of other organizations, big or small who’re on this journey of transformation and collaboration. This effort already gave me the reward of new learning and expriences.
Soon after our first meeting, the team had the first “kick-off”- A nice dinner at Leo’s place with home-made pizza. It is just great for several people to connect immediately. This also convinced me that no matter what ethnic, cultural background or experiences, our common passion for Agile connect us immediately. If I just count how many languages we could speak in that room, its like a little UN (we had English, German, French, Spanish, Russian Chinese and Catalan… perhaps some more). I have to honestly say, spending time with people at the same wavelength is pure enjoyment. Of course we don’t always agree on things, nonetheless, the spirit of dancing in a self-organized way really created a lot of flow states in this experience.
Back at work, I started inquiring sponsorship within ABB. Really appreciate @Thomas Lienhardt for your foresight and openness to encourage such an effort. This a quality that need to be cherished in the HR profession. Through our internal digital community builder @Janina I connected with @Manuel Oriol and @Tim Scanlon two business leaders in various business space. My discussion with Manuel was insightful and inspiring, as Manuel is an IOT expert, his work is very much embodied with agile practices. The discussion with Tim sparked many insightful ideas as well. As we’re promoting customer experience with digital solutions, often cases, leaders are focused on the technology aspect of digital transformation. Encouragingly both Manuel and Tim as leaders understand the importance of how people can collaborate together to make this transformation a success. I’m thrilled to get the support from such business leaders. And look forward to connecting with them closely as we’re ramping up the organization.
Now the journey has started, I’m excited to contribute and to learn from this community building effort. If you’re curious, follow us on https://agiletourzurich.com/ and keep posted for new updates leading up to Nov 22 Agile Tour Zurich!
