"You can motivate by fear, and you can motivate by reward. But both those methods are only temporary. The only lasting thing is self-motivation." ~ Homer Rice

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have been well known for decades now, and John Doerr's book on Measuring What Matters became a hit immediately after it was published. However, while OKRs as a concept seems logical and straightforward, many companies struggle with implementing this concept in an aligned and inspirational way. As an Agile coach implementing OKRs in multiple large organizations, I experience three major anti-patterns:

1. OKRs are implemented top-down. OKRs are not KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which are top-down arbitrary numbers provided by management to each employee at the beginning of a long-term period (usually a year). OKRs are set by teams, not individuals, and aligned with organizational objectives. In that, OKRs are inspirational and encourage teams to set up the objectives that motivate them and inspire self-organizing teams to make a difference.
2. OKRs are used to measure performance and define compensation. Unlike KPIs which are used to measure performance and this influences compensation and promotions, OKRs are not related to performance in any way. Numbers are easy to game, and connecting OKRs to performance would negate the purpose of those. OKRs need to be aspirational and hard to achieve, and by doing that, the teams challenge them to continuously grow and become high-performing. This is the reason OKRs are self-graded, not measured by the managers.
3. OKRs are focused on activities, not results. Frequently, OKRs are focused on activities or tasks, e.g. provide 100 training sessions, hire 300 employees, create a Playbook covering 50 topics. While sometimes there is a reason for task-based key results, in most cases, the objective is either customer-related (e.g. customer satisfaction), business objective (e.g. revenue growth), employee-related (e.g. retention data), or a related goal. In either case, it forces teams to pivot if the initial set of activities does not bring the intended result and fail forward to pursue the goal. (OKR example)

During the workshop, we will be playing two OKR-setting games. The goal of these games is to experience in practice how to avoid common mistakes and set up cascading OKRs bottom-up by empowering teams, aligning divisions, and keeping the organizational objectives in focus - all of this while keeping employees motivated and inspired. Finally, we will discuss how OKRs empower teams to self-organize while achieving shared goals within a scaled agile environment.

• Tribes and Constellations
• Rotating Flip Charts
• Speedboat from Innovation Games
• Collaborative agenda creation
• ROTI: Return on Time Invested
• Journey Lines
• Circles and Soup (circles of influence)

Too often we find ourselves at the cusp of exploring something new, something greenfield. This could be a brand-new app, a large digital product, or just a shiny new module in an existing product. But before your organization commits time and resources, wouldn't you want to be able to understand the risks, get your entire team (POs, UX, Engineer and so on) on board, evaluate if the product idea is even worth pursuing, and finally get a high-level backlog ready? That is where a Design Sprint can help!

Come and join us as we take an in-depth and hands on look at the Design Sprint framework, and how we can go from an exciting idea to a product backlog in a week, or even better; in 180 minutes!

Software engineers get feedback from their development environment and automated test suites in real-time. Errors can be fixed and verified in minutes. However, when organizations extend Agile beyond technology, feedback from stakeholders takes days and the “feedback frenzies” can drag on for weeks or even months. Completing a story within a sprint seems impossible. It is time for “the business” to dramatically reduce lead time and stop getting blamed for delays.

This workshop will teach you how to run a value stream mapping activity. This immersive group activity will expose needless delays and help find ways to to shorten cycle time to minutes, reducing overall lead time by 80% or more. It will include a way to overlay feedback loops on the value stream map, which can help you find the source of significant delays.

You will also hear how creative teams are adapting mob programming techniques into their work in ways that build feedback into their processes in order to accelerate delivery from business teams.

What's your take on conflict? Is it harmful and needs to be prevented? Does it have a positive aspect to it; and to be encouraged? Can you imagine relying on conflict to improve a team's performance? Join me to get you to know the Conflict, make friend with it and even co-lead your dreams! Are you personally aware of situations where you or your team members get into conflict? What shall you do about it? Shall all conflicts be treated the same? Are all conflicts resolvable? Are all of them needed to be? What benefits a team can have of being in conflict? What about the organization, conflict at the organization level, can it be helpful at all?

If you are interested about these or is in conflict about the answers to the above questions, please join me for a session on conflict and how to harvest it for the benefit of your team and your organization. In this interactive session, we will go over different types of conflict with you. You will experience a real conflict, and how you respond to it. Would you be compromising, accommodating, competing, collaborating or avoiding? You will then identify your default conflict handling mode. This self-awareness will help you in future conflicts to actively choose to use a conflict handling mode more suited for the situation on hand.

"Can you save humanity? You and your team are the only things standing in the way of deadly diseases that threaten the world. The fate of humanity is in your hands." - description of "Pandemic" from Z-Man Games

Game on! But can a game really teach me something about being Agile? How can a board game save my team?

In this interactive workshop, we'll explore how cooperative board gaming relates to the work of Agile teams. We'll dive head-first into the Agile nature of "Pandemic" through gameplay in small groups and then retrospect to identify similarities and differences between cooperative board gaming and Agile team behaviors. We'll discover how the patterns observed during gameplay can be used to help identify possible dysfunction within your team. You will leave this session with the ability to use cooperative board gaming with your own teams to inspire new ways of thinking, shift mindsets, and increase team engagement.

Want to experience games, methods, and practices used to accelerate iterative delivery of working and tested products? Join us in this fully immersive and highly interactive session that simulates what we do at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs' 6-12 week Residencies.

This activity is great for providing more senior level executives what their teams experience when they look to adopt a new way of working that transforms their organization to be more open and more Agile.

This session uses a non-technical scenario and Lego to allow anybody to participate regardless of knowledge of software delivery process, technical coding, or history of playing with Lego.

This session is an immersive, fun and energetic activity to get hands-on experience of building products using lean, agile and continuous delivery practices simulating many of the tools and techniques we use in Red Hat Open Innovation Labs.

There are too many to list, so here are a few games/practices played:

• Agile Faces
• Social Contract
• How Might We
• Value Slicing
• Fruit Salad Estimation
• 3 different Retrospective Types

Think full end-to-end projects from team forming games, goal setting and ideation through implementation all within this session, with a base from Lego4Scrum by Alexey Krivitsky.

Security, security, security. Everywhere we look there seems to be a new security breach, poorly developed architecture, and honest mistakes which cost companies millions of dollars. Agile teams often struggle on how and when to do security assessments, how to spend their limited security budget, or understand how to work with non-agile security teams. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to teach agile teams with little to no security expertise how to understand threats and prevent costly development oversight?

In this workshop, I will introduce Microsoft's open source card game called "Elevation of Privilege". The game is played by software developers, architects, and security engineers as a fun exercise which helps expose security threats and critical design flaws in the software your teams develop. We'll play though a couple of rounds, showing how effortless teaching people core security design concepts is, all while having some fun with your co-workers.

Considering how much more security fixes cost after features have been deployed to production, it makes a lot of sense to shift-left and build security in. We'll show how this game can help engineers adopt security well before it turns into an expensive bug that'll sit in the backlog, causing risk to your users. Let's have some fun!

To get a Casual Loop Diagram up, and to get the data of the model usable, you will need some basic understanding of the concepts of System Dynamics Modelling. When doing it right, it can generate discoveries which in turn can give you some really strong insights. You might get challenged in your beliefs.

We will go through a simple example showing the technique of Casual Loop Diagram and explaining how to use it. Given a set of variables in the context of a software team, we will explore how these variables affect the teams ability to deliver.

Do you like pizza? Are you interested in Kanban? Do you want to focus more on delivering value quickly and effectively If so, there's no excuse for skipping this game!

In the Kanban Pizza Game, you will experience firsthand the benefits of a Kanban System, by simulating the frantic pace of ordering pizza. The Kanban Pizza Game demonstrates the path from an existing process to a Kanban System and starts right where you are unlike other Kanban games that usually focus only on the flow of an existing Kanban System.

You will learn to use the five basic practices of Kanban which are, visualize the workflow, limit Work-In-Progress, manage flow, make process policies explicit & minimize waste, and keep up with customer demand and at the end understand how Kanban and its evolutionary approach to change can be applied to software development. The game is fun, the activity level stays high and it offers a complex simulation that includes changes in flow, while the difficulty progresses.

Whether you are a novice seeking to learn Kanban in a memorable way or a seasoned practitioner looking for a great simulation to teach Kanban to others, this is the session for you.

Giving and receiving feedback are essential skills for both Agile managers and practitioners. The Perfection Game, part of the Core Protocols, provides a painless framework for having difficult conversations. Come play the Perfection Game to practice this skill and get feedback from other players who will also use the Perfection Game.

Regardless of the number of teams working on a product, or the size of a product, working software and its value starts with and continues to grow one story at a time. Having exquisitely written, small user stories maximizes the speed of that growth and the coordination of work between teams, especially when there are many teams cooperating together. In our experience, a major impediment to writing good user stories in the real word is a lack of example stories. Learn how to write exquisite user stories across a wide variety of domain types using games! This session will introduce advanced user story writing and splitting through a combination of a short presentation and ten unique games which each provide a different insight into user story writing. Some are geared to the who/what/why of stories, others to the different aspects of INVEST, and still others to creating vertical slices and story splitting. There are more than 100 examples of “good” and “bad” tasks, stories, epics, products, and projects. The games are easy to learn, play, and teach so that you can experience good user stories in just a few minutes. Come play the games and then download them and share them with your friends and co-workers!

Want to help your teams learn about mob and pair programming in less than 20 minutes? I do.

Do you like to Draw? Neither do I, but it is something that levels the playing field and we have all done to varying levels of success.

This game has you drawing Steven Tyler a handful of different times to show knowledge communication and team forming.

Using the game "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes", we'll explore and highlight teamwork, communication, developing shared language, creating a shared understanding, and much more. This session will be an interactive session for a small group, with other observing, however with multiple rounds, anyone and everyone who wants to participate will be able to! This is a very practical team activity, which easily scales beyond the team, and while it works well in-person, it's even better with distributed teams as we explore the ways we interact and communicate when not co-located.

Get to understand the motivations of your team quickly through the Moving Motivators game! This card game includes 10 intrinsic motivators (e.g. Mastery, Curiosity, Order) that each person puts in ranks order, then briefly describes why.

We will debrief the game and talk about how useful this will be with teams in your own organization.

https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/

In Scrum, the Product Owner is responsible for articulating and maintaining a compelling vision of the product to be developed, and helping to translate that vision into discrete backlog items that teams can turn into finished product increments. In this context, we usually think of constraints as a bad thing...something that limits our range of options. But well-articulated constraints can actually help us build better products faster. This session will share and discuss a quick hands-on illustration of the value of thoughtful design constraints.

Do you think concepts such as psychological safety, teamwork, and emotional assertiveness are luxuries? Do you believe teams can produce the same results regardless of their psychological safety? Do you suppose that these concepts are overrated and managers shouldn't worry about these concepts because employees will have relatively same level of productivity anyway? Then you should attend this workshop.

We will play two rounds of wireframe development game and you will see how the presence and absence of psychological safety can alter the end results and bottom lines. Depending on cultural values, how the teams are set up and the way senior managers treat and rewards people, they feel psychologically safe, not safe, or even worse, threatened. They behave differently, express their opinions differently, and collaborate differently. The teams function differently and the product they make will look like significantly differently.

Join the workshop and experience it first hand. This workshop will help Agilists, coaches, and managers to experience the cause and effect relationship between psychological safety and productivity of teams.P