Ching delivered a keynote at lean-agile-scotland in 2018, his second keynote at the conference (he also keynoted in 2015). The 2018 appearance came at the close of his most productive publishing period and coincided with the publication of the-bottleneck-rules — making it a natural platform for presenting the distilled version of his toc-for-software-development framework.
Context
By 2018, Ching had published rolling-rocks-downhill (2014) and six-lessons-with-eli-goldratt (2017), and was completing the-bottleneck-rules. The keynote represented both a capstone to the writing-and-consulting-period and a public articulation of the focccus-formula — the distilled methodology that the rules book would formalize.
Lean Agile Scotland brings together practitioners from Lean, Agile, Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking, and adjacent communities — precisely the cross-community audience that Ching's TOC-for-Agile synthesis was designed for. A keynote slot at this conference is recognition from the community that the work is significant enough to warrant the full audience's attention.
The 2015 keynote
The earlier 2015 keynote, delivered a year after rolling-rocks-downhill, would have introduced Ching's magnum opus to the Scottish Agile community. The repeat invitation in 2018 indicates the 2015 appearance was well received. Two keynotes at the same conference over a three-year span is meaningful recognition within a practitioner community; it established Ching as one of the leading Scottish voices on Lean-Agile practice.
Relationship to david-anderson
The same conference featured david-anderson as a speaker at various points. The fact that two of the most prominent TOC-to-software translators shared a conference community without direct collaboration is notable: their parallel work was recognized by the same audience, validating both approaches to the same underlying problem.