Fair enough. After posting my message, I did think that I have something of a bee in my bonnet (try modelling that in bricks) on the general subject of quality, credibility and competence, as you may well have detected.
I didn’t intend to question any one person or group of people in particular. It’s rather the concern that word-of-mouth has its limits. As I am currently in the same situation as James, selecting speakers and trainers for an international congress, these issues have been quite some concern for me too. If James or I were to select someone to speak at our event, who was unable to do their subject justice, participants risk being misguided or disappointed. So it is our responsibility to do due diligence. As you say, James can contact the people you have recommended and make up his own mind and I’m sure he will. But this discussion is not just a bilateral discussion, it is on a public forum and therefore I try to generalise my comments, even if I use specific examples, so that a wider audience can relate what is being said to their own context.
I hope this clarifies what may have otherwise seemed quite an aggressive attack on a certain community of Agile LSP practitioners. In the past, I have also questioned the credibility of work done at the University of Lugano, where I run an annual session on Identity. In the same faculty of Communications Science, there is a lab that has developed a technique based on LSP for developing User Requirements for Web Applications. The research was initially done with the collaboration of some facilitators from Trivio Quadrivio in Milan, but to my knowledge the current method recommends the role of a facilitator, but does not explain what a facilitator does. So its relationship to official LSP is tenuous at best…. There you go, I’m at it again ;-)
Apologies!
Good luck James!
Eli