Our eighth Lean Summit Africa took place between the 19th and the 21st of October 2016. Thank you to all of those who participated, especially our sponsors:
- The Western Cape Government’s Department of Economic Development and Tourism
Automotive Industry Development Centre- The Graduate School of Business
- Trilogiq
- Investec
- Organisation Development International
- Thinking People
- Training Leadership Consulting
- The Kartal
The speakers, workshop presenters and of course the participants were fantastic and contributed to one of our best Summits yet.
Once again the day of workshops on the 19th proved to be extremely popular with many people participating in one or two workshops or gemba walks at nearby organisations implementing Lean management.
Mike Rother was the keynote speaker and gave the Summit an overview of the research that led to his book “Toyota Kata”. Mike also ran a workshop to teach the Kata, and then involved others in running subsequent iterations of the workshop. There were numerous other speakers, telling the story of their Lean successes and challenges from a variety of sectors. One of the highlights was Cliff Hazel from Spotify giving us an insight into their improvement work. 
You can access the full programme here.
The Summit also included a social event and award ceremony, where the MEC for Health in Gauteng Province accepted the De Beers Award from the LIA Chairman for the departments work in adopting Lean principles. In addition to this event, at the end of the Summit, once the delegates had left, Mike ran an additional Kata in the Classroom workshop for roughly 50 school teachers, school principals and people working in education focused NGOs. It was fantastic to see the enthusiasm with which an uncommon audience for the Lean Institute Africa embraced the Kata.