The first Kanban Leadership Retreat, held in Reykjavik, Iceland in June 2011, established a format for community governance and method evolution that would shape the Kanban community's development through the community-building-era and into the maturity-and-enterprise-era. The retreat brought together core practitioners and community leaders in a deliberative format separate from the conference circuit, allowing focused discussion of the method's evolution, community standards, and emerging practices.
The retreat format
The Kanban Leadership Retreat format was modeled on the "unconference" or open space technology approach — a participant-driven agenda in which the most important discussions emerge from the community rather than from pre-set presentations. This format was well-suited to the Kanban community's practitioner culture and its emphasis on empirical learning over prescriptive doctrine.
Reykjavik, Iceland was chosen as a symbolically neutral, geographically peripheral location — a place where participants could focus on deliberation without the distractions of a major city conference environment.
Significance
The retreats that followed the 2011 inaugural event became an important venue for evolving the method: new concepts, refinements to existing practices, and community standards were often discussed and shaped at retreats before being published or formally adopted. The kanban-university-founding at Utrecht in February 2012 was a direct outgrowth of the community relationships and deliberation that the retreat format enabled.
The Leadership Retreat series also served a community cohesion function: by gathering the most committed practitioners in a focused setting, it maintained a shared intellectual culture in a community that was increasingly distributed across geographies and organizations.