WA State Lean Conf. 2019

Over the past two days I attended the Washington State Lean Transformation Conference in Tacoma, WA. The conference is fantastic, featuring speakers from across the country on lean topics, as expected, but also leadership, story telling, human-centered leadership, and culture. 

One of the things I love to do is learn, and conferences are a fantastic opportunity to do so. Here are some takeaways from the past two days:

Day One Keynote speaker August de los Reyes is a designer with great renown, pioneering design interfaces for Microsoft, Pinterest, and Google to name a few. His talk was about how design and play drive continuous improvement. My big takeaway was in a new way of perceiving disability.

August is in a wheelchair, and has great interest in the topic. He looks at disability not as a problem with the disabled person; that is, not in a medical model, but in a cultural model: disability as a mis-match between the abilities of the person, and the environment the person is in. We can use good design to innovate and improve to overcome these mismatches. In fact, he cited many major inventions that were actually born out of a way to design around a disability: the keyboard as a way for a blind countess to communicate with her sighted, secret lover. Email as a way for a deaf father to communicate with his family. 

I reminds me of the old adage: necessity is the mother of invention. We can innovate and improve when we focus on our desire to achieve something, especially when what we are trying to achieve really matters.

Day two I was inspired by my friend and colleague, Jennifer Haury, CEO and Organizational Anthropologist at All Angles Consulting. Jennifer spoke about how storytelling supports getting results. When we structure things in the form of a story, we can teach, inspire, and embed learning in a lasting way. We were inspired to create a story using the acronym SOAR: describe the Situation, the Obstacle(s), the Actions taken, and the Results achieved. I also like to add the Learnings (SOAR-L). 

I'm so grateful for the State of Washington and Results Washington for hosting this fabulous conference every year. (Look for me as a speaker at future conferences!)

What conferences do you find inspiring?