Open Letter to Stoos Community – What is impact of Stoos at business.

It has happened 2 years, and 7 months ago. It was when 21 people (initiators – Stoos Network), senior executives, business strategists, managers, academics, lean/agile development practitioners or opinion makers, met in Stoos to discuss problems of the organizations. The process of selection of those 21 was interesting, hundreds people were contacted, and only few were finally selected.

The output of their discussions were already discussed in Stoos discussion forum. Organization do have problems. And basic root causes can be tracked, as they were in part, but accurately described in this diagram.

And what has been changed?

Since 2011 we organize in Brno Agilia conference about agile techniques and performance improvements in organizations. Every year we try to bring examples of organizations, who do something radically differently, and which could inspire others to follow. It is not easy to find such examples and we do not have them enough to fill up the whole conference. During screening process prior the event we often find differences between presented state and reality on site, where intentions are to present rather wishful thinking than achievements.

From 2015 we will introduce change. We would like to separate business track of the event into platform of its own – Agile Management Congress. We wants to bring business leaders to real discussions about adoption of changes, which could improve performance of companies and well-being of people, who works there. We want to start from Stoos Network. We want to see, what impact on industry have had ideas behind Stoos and activity of stoos group.

Invitiation – Agile Management Congress

With this letter I address you, 21 initiators – Catherine Louis – Deborah Hartmann Preuss – Esther Derby – Franz Röösli – Jay Cross – John Styffe – Jonas Vonlanthen – Julian Birkinshaw – Jurgen Appelo – Kati Vilkki – Klaus Leopold – Melina McKim – Michael Spayd – Peter Hundermark – Peter Stevens – Rod Collins – Roy Osherove – Sanjiv Augustine – Simon Roberts – Steve Denning – Uli Loth. I call you to Brno to continue in discussion, which has started in Stoos. We would like to discuss, what consequences brings implementing of agile principles or radical management in organizations. Is there any progress in removing identified root causes in organizations today? Do we have examples of agile organizations? What has improved and what has deteriorated in industry since Stoos? How people around Stoos group supported the change? And what is the trend?

During meeting we would like to present stories of organizations, which achieved extraordinary outcomes in some way, be it unique vision or use of human creative potential.

I invite also those, who wanted to attend first Stoos meeting, but were unable to participate or were not selected. Come to Brno and get engaged in discussion.

We want to enable open discussion with tens of leaders and top managers from industry, who are interested, how to improve performance of their companies.

Michal Vallo

Chair

Agile Management Congress