July Meetup

Join us in July for two excellent and thought provoking talks -

• Ramsay Ashby - The mindset & practicality of trustworthy tests
• Chris Preece & Matt Chave - Agility is not enough when complexity is ubiquitous

Our event hosts are CreateFuture who are kindly providing pizza and drinks.

Agenda
5:45pm - Arrivals & networking
6:20pm - Welcome & Kick-Off

• Ramsay Ashby
• Speed Networking
• Chris Preece & Matt Chave

8:30pm - Wrap-up
Networking
9pm - Close

All our events abide by our Code of Conduct - https://bit.ly/laecodeofconduct

Talk Descriptions

Ramsay Ashby - The mindset & practicality of trustworthy tests

How we test our software has a massive impact both on the quality of the product itself, but also on a team’s ability to work effectively day-to-day.

Flaky tests, failing pipelines, frequent production incidents, and customer complaints. You probably relate to at least one of those pain points.

And soon, AI agents will be making sweeping changes and breaking core functionality whilst attempting to fix a minor bug! So good test coverage is arguably becoming more important than ever!

In this case-study presentation, Ramsay will bring to life the concepts, architecture, and corresponding culture that your team can easily develop, to help make end-to-end testing faster, easier, and infinitely more trustworthy than the industry norm.

We’ll explore how you can build maintain a test suite where any failure is a sign of a legitimate problem that warrants somebody’s attention, without necessitating dedicated test engineers.

Whilst we will talk about some engineering approaches, this talk will be accessible to everyone regardless of your background or engineering knowledge. So regardless of the role you play, you’re both encouraged & welcome to join

Chris Preece & Matt Chave - Agility is not enough when complexity is ubiquitous

Agile transformed how we deliver. Scrum and Kanban helped us respond faster, iterate smarter, and deliver more value in less time. But what happens when the real challenges, the ones keeping teams stuck or leaders up at night, aren’t delivery issues at all?

What happens when the problem can’t even be agreed on?

This session introduces Omnicomplexity, a strategic evolution of Agile thinking that meets complexity head-on. While Scrum and Kanban excel at operational adaptation, Omnicomplexity extends that adaptability across leadership, strategy, transformation, product management, design thinking, and organisational life as a whole.

Because when complexity is ubiquitous, not an edge case but the everyday condition, agility is not enough.

Where traditional approaches chase clarity through problem definition, Omnicomplexity begins with tension. It invites you to work with contradiction, not erase it. It replaces rigid plans with living hypotheses. And it trades alignment for coherence, achieved through collective sensing, reflection, and learning.

We’ll explore:
How tensions between control and trust, speed and inclusion, clarity and care can become fuel for strategic action
How to apply Omnicomplex heuristics to your real-world challenges
What it looks like to move from “doing agile” to “being agile” to thinking and leading in complexity
Expect a mix of stories, visuals, provocations, and practical tools. This is not theory for the bookshelf. It’s for product managers facing impossible roadmaps, agile coaches facing wider organisational impediments, transformation leads navigating cultural inertia, Scrum Masters trying to protect space for learning, and leaders trying to steer systems that push back.

If you’ve worked with Agile methods but still feel there’s something deeper shaping the work, this session will help make sense of that and offer practical ways to respond.

Speaker Bios

Ramsay Ashby
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramsayashby/

Ramsay is a senior engineering leader with 15 years experience, the last 7 of which have been largely focussed on helping teams and organisations to work more effectively and perform at their best

A thought-leader in applying observability within the SDLC itself, Ramsay helps teams focus their continuous improvement efforts towards the places that bring the biggest sustainable impact, and in turn helping them better serve their customers.

Chris Preece and Matt Chave
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispreece/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mchave/

Chris Preece and Matt Chave are Agile Coaches and consultants with extensive experience helping organisations in the public and private sectors navigate complex delivery and leadership challenges. Frustrated by the limitations of conventional Agile in addressing deep-seated and organisation-wide issues, they developed Omnicomplexity, a synthesis of their work in Agile, leadership, systems thinking, and complexity management.

Chris and Matt currently work at a very senior level in the UK civil service as Agile Digital Leadership Consultants where they coach leaders and multidisciplinary teams to foster adaptive change and build resilient organisations. This different orientation to agile and organisational complexity bonds the practice of Agile delivery with the strategic challenges faced by an organisation's leadership. It helps create coherence between the work of delivery teams and high-level business objectives, enabling the entire organisation to navigate complexity more effectively.