There's a way to do it better, find it

This famous Thomas Edison quote was on the wall yesterday as we held two group meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland.

At one of the meetings our member Stratos Filalithis, Head of Website & Communication Technologies at the University of Edinburgh shared their progress with making AI useful and usable, including how to improve search and to power virtual assistants.

AI is a regular topic at our group meetings and conferences, including all the confusion and overwhelming hype that comes with it. It makes me happy that during the past months, the conversation seems to have shifted from sheer, almost blind excitement, to using AI to doing things better and actually delivering value.

Getting things done has always been a popular topic…..

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What did we learn in 2024?

At this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, a few selected speakers and created a curated packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.

Attending this year was a bigger crowd than past years — a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.

Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.

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The dark side of agile

Going agile at scale has been both buzz and reality in many large and complex organisations all over the world during the past decade. Whether you’re talking big or small scale, agile comes with many glorious promises.

We both recognise and advocate the benefits of agile. But in this post, we’ll also voice deep concern about what agile has become, and raise a few flags to be aware of, if you want to gain from the hard-earned learnings.

In our peer group meetings and conferences, we’ve heard about the agile reality several times. In a recent member conference call, Christina took a less travelled road within the topic of agile transformations: What's the dark side of our new organisational models, structures and ways of working? Specifically, she talked about how the industry maintains the “perpetual fantasies of the ivory towers and consultancy houses.”

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