The winds of Agile change are blowing – occasionally a tornado bringing dramatic, sometimes unexpected change, and other times a gentle breeze that changes little.  While you can’t control the weather, you can shape the climate around your team.  A team’s climate profoundly impacts engagement, collaboration and results.  AND it is something a team can co-create for itself – irrespective of the organization’s core culture.

In this interactive session, we will explore what an Agile climate is, how Agilists anywhere can influence it and the role that Agile games can play in fostering an awesome Agile climate, no matter what culture storms may be brewing beyond the team.

We are going to play a matching game aimed at teaching you intuition. The same kind of games used to teach people to identify chickens when they are young, or teach actually pigeons to detect cancer from MRI slides.

Come learn how to learn taste and see the patterns only your subconscious can detect.

Have you heard about Design Thinking but unsure about where it all fits in with all these other buzzwords like Lean UX and Agile? Get your learn on with this creative journey through the lens of a dinner party. 

Move beyond the labels!

Do you have a Team Charter? Do you use it?

Fact is - many teams have had a team charter-like activity or discussion - however it mostly stays as a generic declaration of terms rather than an operative tool.

Without exception - all the teams I've worked with, declared in their charters that they want to have trust between team members as well as help one another, and manage conflict effectively.

What would your team say???

In this session we'll learn how to move beyond the label in the team charter and create Conduct Objectives - a highly effective tool for a high performance team

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? This exercise illustrates the language (verbal and non-verbal) and perspectives present when being an optimist or a pessimist.

One the most significant ceremony of any Agile Team is Daily Standup where the team members get together and plan for their day. But quite often the daily standup turns into a zombie status update meeting where team members come together to blurt out their updates and walk away to their desk without ever maximizing the benefit of that meet up.

In this session I will share a case study of how we created a simple experiment that turned into Standup Poker and revolutionized our Daily Standup. This technique helped us uncover true insights of teams progress and got the team talking about strategic planning and plan to remove any impediments as a "team" on daily basis to accomplish their sprint goal and commitments.

We learnt that when team members started using this technique, hidden impediments and dependencies started to emerge and team members organically started to re-plan and prioritize their work to accomplish the Sprint Goal. Product Owner also found great value in this technique as this helped them see the teams true progress and engage with the team to re-prioritize user stories and even take a story out of the sprint if required. Scrum Masters started to observe a trend in the confidence level over the span of the sprint and brought that information to Sprint Retrospective to discuss and brainstorm ways to improve and keep the confidence levels high throughout the sprint. The discussions and observations due to Standup poker resulted in teams committing better and more confidently during Sprint Planning and got into the rhythm of always accomplishing their sprint goal, but more importantly they started improving everyday and got into "continuous improvement" mode.

The content, exercise and message of this session highlight the agile principles of individuals and interactions over process and tools and fostering the mindset of continuous improvement.

In this session we will share examples, stories and experiences from trying the Standup Poker and how this simple technique converted a bunch of individuals into a TEAM !!!

Let's experiment with several creativity tools (a Ball of Whacks, X-Ball & Y-
Ball, etc. https://creativewhack.com) and brain storm some ways to relate Agile concepts to this very abstract tool for creativity exploration.

We will create new never before seen games - using well known processes and new toys to the Agile community.

I have the creativity tools - you have the brain.  Let's put them together and invent a new use for an existing tool, and a new game for Agile teams to learn old concepts.  We will use several play frameworks; LEGO Serious Play framework will be overviewed and incorporated into our play.  Also we will incorporate "Agile Game Incubator" workshop outline by McGreal & McCullough.

As psychology advises, an action becomes a habit when it is backed up by principles. This is equally applicable to Agile. We all know well Agile by being, not Agile by doing is a sustainable and lasting way of transforming groups and organizations. Then, the question is: how do we teach Agile values and principles? Would it help memorizing them? Most likely it won’t because it will be “doing” Agile without believing in them and making them our own.

So the goal is to internalize Agile values and principles, make them memorable. Share and elicit examples that resonate with the audience and help them answer the question “what’s in it for me?”

This exercise is being done in teams. I am going to share several games that help participants internalize agile values and principles.

1. One is a matching game with several cases specific to Agile and Agile Games conference. Then, participants will come up with their own examples. In the third iteration, we will have participants will “build on what is happening”, i.e. do matching based on cases created by other teams.
2. The second one is the lean “five why’s” game applied to Agile values. After sharing technique of conducting root cause analysis using five “why’s”, I will ask the participants to continue working in terms to come up with the underlying reason for each of the values and share with others. This is a competition with the prizes (laminated copies of Agile Manifesto with values and principles).
3. Finally, the teams will re-write Agile values and principles as they apply to non-software teams (human resources: hiring and onboarding teams), executive teams, finance, and others, and share their Business Agility Manifesto’s with each other.
4. In the workshop retro, we will brainstorm on other creative ways of teaching agile values and principles. Results will be shared with all participants, so that they can immediately use these ideas with their companies and clients.

I also have a 30-minute of this workshop which can be used as a tutorial to teach Agile Manifesto.