Requisite Agility UnSymposium is an intense 2-day inaugural meeting aimed at exploring and comparing antecedent organizational and management systems, co-creating the conceptual foundations of Requisite Agility (RA), and establishing a community of contributors and practitioners to take the proceedings forward. The resulting body of knowledge, created by the RA Community, will be licensed under Creative Commons, attributing all contributors and provided as open access to the public.

We bring together system thinkers, holistic organizational anatomists, enterprise pathologists and engineers, agile coaches, and other practitioners to share their experiences, expertise and insights and to learn from each other. The meeting will take place February 9–10, 2019 in a premier location in New York City.

We aim at:

• bringing together a cordial, cross-disciplinary community of agile organization practitioners;
• sharing cutting-edge information, insights, and ideas of fellow professionals;
• establishing a vibrant community of practice that will continue exploring the conceptual foundations and practice of Requisite Agility;
• co-creating content and material that is useful and valuable for the RA Community and beyond.

The event is capped at 50 people and is by invitation and application only. With this, we want to ensure active participation and tenable contributions. Precedence is given to people with accepted session proposals (see below).

The unsymposium is priced at USD 750, inclusive of participation, food, and the first year of community membership. The event fee is payable upon acceptance of the application.

One of the main hallmarks of RA UnSymposium is that it is designed by the using the format of Open Space Technology (OST). Everyone at the UnSymposiumwho shares your interests will meet for a conversation. Some will come with stories to share, or ideas. Some will come to explore the topic and learn more. Some will come just to listen. But everyone will be there because they, too, are interested in the same topic or in solving the same problem that you are.

Today’s business environment is increasingly dynamic and complex. The unprecedented frequency and magnitude of change calls for business agility: constant innovation, repositioning of the value proposition, alignment of the product and service mix with the market, adoption of new technologies, well-timed strategic investments, and timely development of requisite capabilities.

Agile software development has been a testbed for more responsive and adaptive organizational practices and brought considerable advantages in terms of market relevance, speed to market, predictability, resource efficiency, and quality. However, organizations that have attempted to scale their agile development practice have soon realized that they need to revamp the very logic of the organization as a whole. Agile methods such as Scrum or Kanban, while effective, address only a fraction of the concerns. Even frameworks aimed at “scaling agile” – such as SAFe, DAD, or LeSS fall short in scope.

Until now, there has been no established management science to account for business agility. On the other hand, fundamental management systems such as Requisite Organization (RO) have been developed in and applied to contexts that are considerably less dynamic and complex than the turbulent business environment of today. While the tenets of RO and other established management theories are well-founded, field-tested, and evidence-based, they need to be recast to the agile circumstances of today.

Requisite Agility™ (RA) is put forward as a coherent set of organization design principles, patterns and practices that enable the organization to effectively adapt, responsively or pre-emptively, to changes in its environment. Drawing on the timeless systems and complexity theories, it entails theoretically informed and organization-specific diagnosis, analysis, design and implementation of organizational structures, processes and practices that are adaptive in their context. RA is agnostic to any specific agile methodology, best practice, or framework, it is intended to provide a constructive scaffolding that helps the organization sense these changes, make sense of them, and act accordingly.