The LASE is a Lean Agile Supporter of Excellence community of practice where everyone with time and a deep interest in Lean and Agile are welcome. With time i mean time to work actively and not just listening. Here is the big challenge with this approach as it is often populated by people with better things to do. The core idea behind the LASE it is to leverage Agile and Lean within the company regardless of methods and frameworks and get people involved.
The antipattern of this is the more common LACE where C stands for Center. A center of excellence implies there is a fixed team with power and knowledge what is best for all of us. By me called the Ivory tower. Often populated by junior agile coaches, change managers and ex project managers. I have been a member of the LACE on several big companies and always i have had a bad conscience about being there and not where our decisions were executed. The point here is the distance this C creates for us instead of letting people from different backgrounds be a part of the movement. Maybe it is only semantics, but I doubt. This is how we build hierarchy’s today and creates the culture of fear and isolation where we don’t challenge the status quo and trust the big brains. Recent statistics tell us only 32% of are engaged in our company, the LACE is reducing this and the LASE is increasing engagement.Thanks Luca Minudel for the feedback on this post mentioning that the letter E also is a challenge:
I sense the problem with LACE already starts with E-Excellence, which is often connected to an idea of the elitism of those at the top instead of a collective effort to constantly learn and improve. Indeed, see the Agile community and the open-source movement.
But then the problem fully comes home with the C-Centre part.
I cannot disagree with that – sorry 🙂 – but I can add some references that may be interesting for your post;
– https://tcagley.wordpress.com/