From 2012, this post was written by co-founder of LAST Conferences, Ed.

LAST Day Melbourne is a one day, low cost, grassroots mini-conference for Lean, Agile, and Systems Thinking practitioners. The day will be structured to allow participation and interaction via workshops and activities, rather than death by projector.

Regular readers will remember my writeup about Agile Tour Sydney. That article had a call to action, regarding doing something along the same lines, here in Melbourne.

When I got back, I was able to enthuse Craig Brown, a fellow co-organiser in the Melbourne Meetup scene and we’ve been working on the idea for the last couple of months.

Originally, we wanted to do something really rapidly, holding the event in March, or even February. The Agile Tour is held between October and December, and I just couldn’t wait that long for Melbourne to have its turn.

Reality stepped in though, as we realised that we probably needed a little time to clear the New...

Updated 15 August with 10 Year Reflections sessions info.

Happy birthday to us!

Ten years ago, today…150 adventurous folks gathered at Swinburne for the first, LAST Conf. The collage above has some of only a few decent photos I could find from 27 July 2012. To see a bunch of photos from LAST Conferences over the years, go look at this Flickr Group and this Google Photos album.

There have been thousands of participants, hundreds of session leaders, dozens of volunteers and helpers, plus numerous companies that have sustained the events. Thanks to all of them, even if we haven't managed to name you all below.

The origins of LAST and some other notes

2012-2016

Prior to the 2012 first edition, one of the co-founders did a writeup about why LAST Conference was started. It took inspiration from the burgeoning meetup community, founded by Martin Kearns, in Melbourne and also the first edition in 2011 of Agile Tour Sydney, organised by Jeremie Benazra....

Sometimes it feels like it's all Snakes and no Ladders, but one thing we've all learned in the last 16 months is that things can change…fast. 

Due to what has happened in the past couple of days, we have made the decision to postpone the Mini-LAST Conference scheduled for next Friday (23/7).

The advice is that this lockdown may be lifted from Wednesday morning, however even if things went great for the next couple of days,there will most likely be a gradual relaxation. We couldn’t see how we could achieve what we were setting out to do.

We have to keep on trucking though, and on the bright side, we had a decent response for the event, so with more time and improvement in the general situation…the postponed event should be great!

Rescheduled date

We have been talking with the Abbotsford Convent and have a rescheduled date for this event as follows:

Friday 3 September 2021
9:00am - 4:45pm

We anticipate that...

LAST in 2020

Since March 2020, we have delivered a programme of over 50 talks, 90-min workshops, longer courses and mini-conferences…all online. These were presented by over 70 people from Australia, Asia, Canada, the USA and Europe.

Presenters included Barry O'Reilly, Diana Larsen, Prof. Mike Steger, Hugh Mackay AO, John Cutler, Nigel Dalton, Dr Elise Bialylew, Jeff Patton, Kazuyoshi Hisano, Norman Bodek, Dr Zach Mercurio and many more.

Free Members were able to join many of the live sessions, with many of the recordings being available in the free library for a limited time. You can view a Preview of the sessions and also join for free, to access what is in the Free Library. We also have a Slack group that has over 2000 members. Come and find your people.

If you're not at least a free member of the LAST Club, you're missing out!

JOIN FOR FREE

Full Members were those who chose to go more in-depth for one or both of the "seasons" of the LAST Club. Some...

We all know that predicting the future is difficult, and the events of the last year has reinforced this even more. Despite this, we still have to make plans for the future and that's what we have been thinking about, lately.

It would be easy to say that because we are doing relatively well here in Australia that we can go back to how we ran things in 2019, in 2021. We aren't going to rush things though, so here's where the current thinking from me is.

We need the community's support

If you have been to and enjoyed LAST/1st and Spark the Change in the past, or one of the 2020 LAST Anywhere or Clubhouse sessions, we really need your support in the next few months…particularly if you are able to become a Full Member.

Please consider joining as a Full Member, and just as importantly please get involved. The enthusiasm and involvement to make the LAST Club something more than just a series of webinars, is really important and it also matches the ethos of...

If you're a free member of the LAST Clubhouse, you will get access to the most recent recordings of sessions that we've had in the Clubhouse. At the time of writing, these include:

• "Measuring Enterprise Agility",
• "Design Thinking for Leaders"
• "Tech Career Conversations that don't suck"
• A chat with the Founder of Mindful in May
• "Delivering Value to Our Customers"
• Software Remodelling - Resisting the Rewrite Temptation

There's also a rotating selection of Bonus Content. Currently, "Lean Change Hacks for Wellbeing", "The Gold Vision Method" and "Returning to Business as usual post COVID"

Log in and take a look.

Become a FULL MEMBER

For a limited time, you can get 15% Discount on Full Membership of Season 2 of the Clubhouse, which runs until the end of April.

Just use this 15% discount code when joining:

FULLBLOG

Full Members access:

• included registration to mini-events (normally $44)
• included registration to longer-form workshops (usually 90 minutes, $44)
• ...

At previous Spark the Change events, we've sent people a letter 4-6 weeks after the day to remind them of what went on and prompt them to keep using what they learned. A couple of times, we have had people write out to their future selves and we have posted them their note.

For the recent mini-Spark, we decided to do this in the form of this article.

We have also made Hugh's session available on this page. Natasha and Rob's sessions are available in the Full Member Archive (free in December 2020). this archive has over 40 hours of content from our sessions in 2020, as well as bonus material from previous events.

If you registered for the mini-Spark, we also sent you an email that links you to a page where all three videos are exclusively available to you until Australia Day, as well as details of a 10% discount on Clubhouse Full Membership.

We will be scheduling more great events in 2021, so we think it's worth your while to consider joining the LAST...

By Ed Wong
11 December 2020.

Steve Mitchell introduced us to Norman after having travelled to the USA to do a course with him and also going to Japan to take part in one of his legendary Lean Study Tours.

Known as the “Godfather of Lean”, Norman Bodek was an educator, consultant and a publisher of more than 250 books. 

We were very lucky to have him talk at LAST Conference Melbourne 2017. He also did versions of this talk for Canberra and Brisbane, but he particularly brought the house down with this version in Melbourne. 

In his book, A Miraculous Life, he mentions us specifically:

I gave a workshop to a conference in Melbourne, Australia, over Zoom…I probably gave the best speech of my life, for I received many letters of praise.
Bodek, Norman. A Miraculous Life: An Unending Search for Freedom . 

We have just uploaded a recording of this talk on the Free Member Library of the Clubhouse (a short clip is at the top of this...