Getting new teams to work together is hard. Really. Hard.

Is it because there is so much hype around new Agile teams? Or is it because there is such a focus on “doing things right” (or “doing” Agile right), that we forget about the people actually doing the work? Regardless of the reason, before we can change the way people work... we need to focus on the things that are important for teamwork to work!

We believe that the key to high-performance teams is creating an intentional culture that respects and embraces diversity - whether it be race, gender, class, culture, age, beliefs, language, skills or background. So join us as we explore the Team Canvas – sort of like a Business Model Canvas for teamwork - covering nine essential teamwork elements:

• Purpose - Why we are doing what we are doing?
• People & Roles - What are our names, roles, and responsibilities?
• Common goals - What do we as a group want to achieve together?
• Personal goals - What do I as an individual want to achieve?
• Team values - What do we really stand for and believe in?
• Needs and expectations - What do each of us need to be successful in a diverse team?
• Rules & Activities - How do we communicate and keep everyone up to date?
• Strengths & Assets - What skills do we have in the team?
• Weaknesses & Risks - What are the weaknesses we have, as an individual and as a team?

During this session, we walk through our agenda for team lift-offs, facilitation posters and preparation work required, materials needed, and facilitation tips and tricks. All packaged in a handy pocket guide, that you can use to explore tried and tested techniques for each essential element. You also have an opportunity to practice some of these techniques during the session.

Get ready to lift-off your team in T-minus 3... 2... 1...

• Are your strategy workshops held in a boredroom, instead of a boardroom?
• Does your workshop format inject new techniques to keep things interesting?
• Have you considered that you might be introducing too many new concepts? Rather than meeting your attendees where they are?

We see something interesting happening in the world of Agile facilitation. Techniques created many years ago are deemed to be “old-fashioned” or "traditional”! And unfortunately, this way of thinking could be alienating people that have relied on these techniques for many years. The same people who we so badly need to adopt a different way of thinking - Executives!

It’s time to re-think the way we look at “old-fashioned” techniques – and find a way to reconnect with why they were created in the first place.

In this session, we take you through how we help Executives make SMART goals smart, by playing a board game. The outcome of the game is a clearly stated goal that can be converted into metrics against which a team can track their success. We also provide you with all the resource to run your own SMARTER boardgame back at the office.

Join us as we create SMARTER team metrics, by asking the rights questions – and having some fun along the way.

In this talk, the speaker will present a brand new retrospective format quickly becoming popular in Japan. This method is heavily influenced by Japanese culture, but it may work great in other cultural contexts. We are looking for your feedback.

Someone said Agile is not work in Asian Culture ( https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/06/agile-asia/ ).
One of the difficulties is from retrospectives.

We found a positive retrospective format better fit for our culture: Fun! Done! Learn!
After we published the method in a blog in Japanese, many teams in Japan started using the method. We've not taught or facilitated directly; people just accepted and started using it.
We'd like to share the method as well as how the teams accepted the technique in Japan.
We are eager to hear from you whether this works for your team or not and why.

Imagine you are a Mad Agile Scientist and have a diabolical experiment to conduct - what would happen if you exchanged the brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master? Mwuhahahaha!!! How would the body of a Product Owner with the brain of a Scrum Master act? And vice versa?

Perhaps the Scrum Master would now treat the team like a backlog? This Scrum Master would be focused on value and maintaining a coaching backlog of team and person improvements. This Scrum Master is refining the team, crafting a group that delivers value.

And perhaps the Product Owner might treat the backlog like a team? Rather than backlog refining, they coach the backlog. They would be focused on nurturing, protecting, and empowering the backlog. The backlog might transform from an irritation into a labor of love.

Although this experiment sounds terrible, this change of perspective might be what you need to reanimate your dead team or backlog.

Join the fun and come learn what horrifying results await!

Recruitment and selection for coaches requires finding people with a combination of the right mindset/attitude AND competencies (skillset).

This talk will take the audience through a real life case study on how Telstra sourced candidates for a recent recruitment drive for 60 ways of working coaches. Hiring processes had a strong focus on mindset using new ways of selection processes.

Once candidates had been selected they were enrolled into a micro-credential capability uplift program that recognised competency as it is achieved throughout a learning journey.

This presentation will proved practical insights from a real initiative that executed a bold experiment in prioritising mindset over experience during recruitment, selection and induction.

Just what exactly does an Agile Coach do? Coaches may vary in their response to this question. I would like to think that most Agile Coaches, with some variation, would be fairly consistent in how we perceive our role. However, some companies or orgs or people probably interpret the role of the Agile Coach in ways that coaches never intended.

Let’s explore some of the things that Agile Coaches have been asked to do! Are these antipatterns? Doing what needs to be done? This session will delve into the topic of the role of the Agile Coach and highlight potential challenges and possible solutions.

The craft of Agile Coaching fundamentally requires deep, insightful, meaningful communication. In everyday execution, this typically involves a coach and the coachees having a conversation, or dialog. However, there are other ways that an Agile Coach and their coachees can connect – nonverbal communication.

Explore the different aspects of nonverbal communication in the domain of the Agile Coach! This workshop overviews nonverbal communication in Agile Coaching and provides a starting point for developing this critical skill.

You are a Scrum Master, but you find yourself in between jobs. You begin your search. How do you choose the home that will be a great fit for you? How do you know which company you want to be adopted by? This talk is a fresh way to look at the companies that may be trying to hire for a role they don’t understand and don’t want to pay for.

As agile coaches we are often asked by companies to give them what they believe are shortcuts to success. They are scared or unwilling to put in the hard work and want a playbook from someone who was successful to be laid out for them to follow in their footsteps. Explaining why this is not something that will work is often seen as a reason to mistrust coaches. They think we aren’t giving them the quick path because we are just in it for the money. I found a way to help me describe this in a way that makes my clients feel more at ease. Everyone can relate to cooking shows about starting off as a home cook (non-agile organization) and what it involves to become a master chef (an agile organization).

• Are you struggling to “prove” that your work as a Consultant/Coach/Change Agent/Leader/Manager is working?
• Are you in search of that elusive metric(s) that can show that your Agile transformation is working?
• Are you having a hard time explaining the “real” change that is happening on the ground that are not tracked by metrics?
• Are you frustrated that your targets don’t capture the richness of what is actually happening?
• Are you sad that interesting things which are emerging are being ignored/squashed in the quest to meet some predetermined goals?
• Are you having a hard time explaining why certain things are not working?
• Do you have a feeling that you are only addressing things at a surface level while the real problems are much deeper?

This talk explores what we can learn from other mature fields, like the 40+ year old field of evaluations and the social sector which regularly deals with very complex issues, to help us evaluate actions in a complex context.

One of the fundamental things an organization does is deliver decisions. Almost every deliverable an organization makes (be it a product or service) boils down to a decision that someone or a group of people made.

Combine that with the idea that one of the most engaging things that employees can do at work is to be involved in decision making, it becomes one of the most important things you do in an organization. Yet we put very little thought into how we make decisions, especially in groups.

Most people/groups don’t think about the decision making process they use and usually fall back to a few common ones at random or do what they are comfortable with, without much thought to the tradeoffs they entail.

This talk explores a better approach to decision-making that is fast and results in better decisions with more buy-in from everyone involved.