CALMalpha – the first (alpha) Cynefin, Agile & Lean Mashup – was interesting in ways both intended and unintended. Too much of the latter for some, and I did struggle with it myself at times. But after letting things settle for a while, a couple of valuable takeaways:
Lesson 1: sometimes we jump too quickly into model-building when we’d be better off spending time listening to what the data might want to say to us.
There’s some actionable advice hidden there for practitioners engaged in process work such as the building of kanban systems: depending on the context, consider not reaching for the process mapping tool right away, instead start with the simple thing of making the work visible.
This lesson might apply also to the process of community-building and I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on the event organisers 
Lesson 2: designing for resilience means accepting a degree of redundancy or waste.
Nothing startlingly new there, but it’s a lesson that risks being forgotten by two groups, namely those driven by the elimination of waste and those with a narrow focus on value. And it helps me to crystallise something:
My proposition is that systems resilient to variety (in the type and urgency of request) and variation (in size, for example) are not only more effective but easier to deal with, aligning the interests of the organisation with those of the customer, worker and manager. Not only do we have the tools to help achieve this effectively and repeatably for many types of knowledge work, the apparent waste of non-urgent and even speculative work is key to both short-term predictability and long-term success.
