About

Who are we?

xekin.org is a peer-to-peer (P2P) Lean & Agile Community of Practice (CoP), a non-profit organization dedicated to openly exchange ideas, knowledge, and experiences on social systems, innovation, and management topics.

We are entrepreneurs, teachers, professors, coaches, creatives, authors, engineers, designers, psychologists, managers, executives…

 

What do we do?

In a nutshell, we enable people’s autonomy, mastery, and purpose in organizations. This is our “meaning”.

In short:

  • Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed.
  • Mastery is our urge to get better at stuff.
  • Purpose is the real reason why we do what we do.

 

Why do we do it?

Why does our “meaning” exist? Because our “mantra” is to make work meaningful.

And why?

Because all of us have this deep desire to do something meaningful and significant with our lives while being into this world:

 

How do we do it?

We collaboratively build and share ideas, experiences, and knowledge about leadership and innovation topics, like:

  • Agile, Lean, Scrum, and Kanban development.
  • eXtreme Programming (XP) and Manufacturing (XM).
  • Lean Manufacturing, Lean Thinking, and Kaizen.
  • Customer Development and Design Thinking.
  • Product Development and Product Management.
  • Systems Thinking, Complexity Thinking, and Learning Organizations.
  • Contextual Leadership, Systems Management, and Organizational Culture.

Why do we do this?

Because we want to enable people’s autonomy, mastery, and purpose in organizations, and because we deeply believe that only through the right mixture of Leadership, Innovation, Collaboration and Sharing an organization is able to foster a genuine transformation, able to unlock its full potential and make work meaningful again.

 

What is Leadership?

By Captain David Marquet, leadership is embedding the capacity for greatness in the people and practices of an organization, and decoupling it from the personality of the leader:

 

What is Innovation?

Innovation is “connecting the dots” you see and others miss, in such a way that generates value for the world:

 

What is Collaboration?

Collaboration is working jointly with others to build something useful towards a common goal.

But it is much more than that; collaboration enables us to mimic nature at its best and to connect to each other in a fulfilling way:

 

What is Sharing?

Benjamin Franklin once said:

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

Sharing is hardwired into our genes, is a natural social behavior, and, undoubtedly, one of the most powerful driving forces behind human evolution.

Sharing is also intrinsically connected with collaboration, and together they fuel the collaborative economy:

 

Our Values

Our values act as our belief system that shape who we are and behave, in other words, our culture:

  • Integrity, the quality of being honest, and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
  • Empathy, the capacity to understand other people’s motivations, needs, and emotions more deeply.
  • Courage, the tenacity to work through issues and disagreements without compromising one’s own principles.
  • Resilience, the capacity to bounce back after a disturbance or interruption, adapting to changing conditions.
  • Pragmatism, the capacity to deal with multiple choices or unknowns in a sensible and realistic way, based on practical considerations.
  • Self-awareness, the capacity to have conscious knowledge of one’s own personality, and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual entity.
  • Vulnerability, the catalyst for courage, compassion, and connection, aka, the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experience.

 

Our Rules of Engagement

How do we interact? We believe that everyone in the community has a voice, hence we enforce:

  • Mutual trust;
  • Mutual respect;
  • Mutual influence.

How do we think? We are naturally curious and love to explore the possibilities, therefore we nurture:

  • Open questions;
  • Speak with data;
  • “See the whole”.