Throw a purpose in a middle of a crowd, it will start to self-organize. Many self-organised entities like ... villages or cities have an "embedded purpose", not voluntarily shared out-loud or displayed in common places. Villages and cities have growth aligned to their embedded purpose. Acting in a purpose driven way is less obvious for organisations. More a company grows, more dissolved into the Process the original business purpose becomes. This talk presents the 3 stages of Agile Experience Awareness I've seen unfolded and reveals how aligning to a clear shared purpose triggers growth, Agile culture propagation, and scaling becomes a side effect. 

We are drawn to people who share the same beliefs and have had similar relevant experiences. These groups give us strength and a sense of belonging. However, this creates a “self-sealing logic” that can lock out learning, because we state our beliefs as proven evidence. Every missed opportunity of collaboration, may it be at enterprise, organisation, or team level, is a symptom of our inability, as a group, to observe and learn from other group experience and set of values. We are here at the most important Agile Conference, seeking to meet people who have similar experiences, and eventually share same conclusions. What if we were about to create another bubble of "Self-Sealing-Logic" ? 
The hands-on exercices used in the workshop use "Liminal Thinking", the latest fabulous work of Dave Gray, combined with examples of "Third Culture Kids" profiles. The approach aims to support organisations become continuous learning entities, that reinforce leadership and trigger cultural shift. 
Session's main goals are :

• create a space of opportunity to "unlock" our own bubble of beliefs through a set of hands-on exercices, 
• experience , through the open discussion during the exercices, how learning enhances leadership, 
• allow the audience to discover Dave Gray's "liminal thinking". We will learn to unveil the impact of our beliefs and start understanding why we have needed them. What were the relevant needs that lead to our assumptions? On the other hand, during the session, we will pick some other "self-sealing logic" group and try to understand without judgement their own process that led them from their own relevant experiences to different beliefs.

Don Reinertsen says that if you only quantify one thing, quantify the Cost of Delay. As we’ve talked about before, quantifying Cost of Delay not only helps improve prioritisation, it also help with making trade-off decisions, creates a sense of urgency, and changes the focus of the conversation. Maybe this has got you interested in experimenting with it, but you’re not sure how to get started? If so, this workshop is specifically for you!

When people hear about Cost of Delay they sometimes doubt whether their organisation is ready for it. They say things like, “We don’t have the maturity for it”, or “We couldn’t do that because our stakeholders wouldn’t support it”. We’ve heard people say this too. And yet, in hindsight, people find it much easier than they thought! We will show you how to get started with using Cost of Delay, despite these doubts.

Building blocks

The first essential building block is to understand the value. To help structure the conversation we will use a simple economic framework to surface the assumptions and drive to the economic impacts. The second essential building block is to understand the urgency. For this, we will look at different urgency curves to help us understand how value is likely to decay over time. Combining these two gives us the Cost of Delay helping us to question and better understand what our gut tells us about value and urgency.

Practice makes perfect!

To get going, we will start by looking at some simplified scenarios that help you put what you’ve learned about Cost of Delay into practice. You’ll work at your own pace through some simple exercises that test different aspects of your understanding. To really embed it, once you’re done you’ll get a chance to help others around you – you become the teacher. We will then quickly reflect on what we’ve learned so far.

Then, we’re all going to work on quickly estimating the Cost of Delay for a real life example for a real company. You’ll do this in pairs making assumptions you need to get to a cost of delay for the feature in dollars per week. To help us learn about what the key assumptions were we will compare results across the group to help us understand what the value might be and the areas of greatest uncertainty.

To wrap up we’re going to ask you to do a mini-retrospective about what you’ve learned and what your puzzles are. If we have any time left, we’re happy to help you have a go with a feature or project you are working with.

“If you only quantify one thing, quantify the Cost of Delay” – Don Reinertsen

Everyone seems to talk about Cost of Delay, but few are actually quantifying it. And yet doing so helps us to better manage stakeholders, improve prioritisation and change the focus of the conversation away from cost and dates onto delivering value quickly.

In this talk you will hear about how quantifying Cost of Delay of our ideas helps with:

– Improving prioritisation

– Managing multiple customers

– Trade off decisions across the whole portfolio

This is not a theoretical session, we’ve actually done this in lots of organisations: public and private sector, in large, medium and small organisations as well as using Cost of Delay across a $100m portfolio at a Fortune 500 company.

When people hear about Cost of Delay they sometimes doubt whether their organisation is ready for it. They say things like, “We don’t have the maturity for it”, or “We couldn’t do that because our stakeholders wouldn’t support it”. We’ve heard people say this too. And yet, in hindsight, people find it much easier than they thought!

From this session you will walk away with all the necessary knowledge and practical tips to get started with Cost of Delay and you will have seen lots of actual examples of Cost of Delay calculations from other organisations who have done this. You’ll also hear some interesting before and after results that might help you to make the case in your organisation. In our experience, quantifying Cost of Delay really helps to discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value.