Awesome talk goes here.

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.

In traditional project management we are all taught to toss up as many barriers to change as we can. Change is something to be feared and avoided; it is the killer of projects. Whereas in agile adapting and responding to change is at the root of each framework. In today’s modern agile environments, conditions, requirements, tools and even the overall goals can change overnight. Fear of change is often at root resistance to change. This game helps teams practice embracing change in a fun, safe space.

Fluxx is the card game with ever changing rules that often leave the game teetering on the edge of chaos, which makes it the perfect fun analog for an agile project.

Have you ever heard a customer say “That’s what I asked for, but not what I wanted / needed.”? Do you wish your teams, your stakeholders or your clients tangibly grasped the impact of collaboration and direct engagement? Would you like to be able to demonstrate those benefits with evidence?

This hands on workshop will focus on the impact of Collaboration over Contracts to business outcomes. Through 3 sprints of producing simple products, participants will get a feel for the difference between what customers say they want, and what they truly wanted. They’ll see what it really can mean to Welcome Changing Requirements. And we’ll explore how easily and often we might encounter tendencies that distract us from Collaboration. We’ll wrap up with data collected through prior workshops that can be used to demonstrate the bottom line improvements that can come when we focus on collaboration and communication with customers.

This workshop is targeted at early stage product owners, product managers and delivery teams. Coaches, Managers and Executives may benefit from the data demonstrating the positive impacts to business outcomes, especially when encountering stakeholders and customers skeptical of or resistant to interacting directly or regularly with delivery teams.

Want to deliver what customers truly want? Come experience and see first hand the impact on business outcomes of a focus on Collaboration over Contracts.

As trainers, team leaders and OD practitioners, we know that organizations with low trust pay a high price - in the form of high turnover, plunging productivity, and overall employee disengagement. 

In this interactive, experiential session, we're going on a treasure hunt for the source of team trust. 

Much like the great quests of yore - the Camelot knights' hunt for the Holy Grail, Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece, or the Goonies' search for One-Eyed Willy's treasure - we'll solve insidious and devilish puzzles and clues together, with an eye on the real prize: camaraderie, familiarity, and rapport.  

You'll come away with a treasure trove of new ideas for team-building and gamifying your work.

So grab your magnifying glass and your deerstalker hat, your Indiana Jones whip and your weather-worn fedora. The hunt for team trust is on!

Movie making is a costly affair involves risks and uncertainties. An Agile approach of incremental moviemaking makes it more predictable and risk resilience.
Up to 20% of the overall Budget of the movie can be saved by effective use of Agile & Lean techniques.
Using Agile Practices in Movie making can take you to your destination in a systematic way.
Experimenting, Prototyping, Shared Learning & Using Effective Tools makes Movie making process fast, more predictable and cost effective. Prioritize scenes using “MoSCoW” technique to arrive at “Which scene to shoot Where & When”.

Wondering what NoEstimates means in practice, or why you would want to use NoEstimates? Perhaps you’ve heard the buzz, read Vasco Duarte’s excellent book or simply want to understand how to plan better and reduce risk. If so, you should attend this workshop session for a multi-team game that will help you:

• Find out through experimentation what — and how much — different factors influence delivery time
• Learn how to create a probabilistic forecast that provides a less risky way to plan
• Understand how to reduce variation that affects — and creates risk in — delivery

This game is highly interactive and fun and enables people to build trust and share knowledge within 15 minutes.

The Agility LeaderShift game is based on the book Transforming Your Leadership Character: The Lean Think and Agility Way.  Participants use two deck of cards to discuss lean thinking and agility tenets that are formed into a question or scenario about leadership.  Attendees will form teams and use the card decks to engage in friendly competition while testing knowledge and experience in leadership through the lens of lean thinking and agility tenets.  

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 !!!

When my girlfriend first saw me do a jigsaw puzzle she said "Now I understand you as a programmer better". 

I agreed; So I video taped myself doing a 500 piece puzzle from start to first. Then recorded metrics and broke down strategies using Lean and Agile techniques and methods.

In this talk I share lean maps and techniques to eliminate waste, avoid local optimizations, use tools, refactoring and clean code to complete a complicated project.

Stop slogging through sterile and boring training!

There is a place for humor. There is scientific proof that humor moves information from short term to long term memory - a fact useful in converting training and presentations into engaging, memorable and retainable experiences. With an agile practice, we must constantly learn -- let’s make it fun!

This session won’t turn you into John Stewart or Amy Schumer, nor is it intended to advocate that your presentations should be a stand up routine. This session will introduce accessible techniques you can use to bring any training or presentation to life. These techniques have a basis in cognitive neuroscience and academic research.

This workshop introduces and reviews the The 6 Trumps ® - six learning principles based on scientific prinicples that can be used in any type of training.

It explores how the brain learns and how information converts from short to long term memory.

Finally, it synthesizes these foundations and builds a new common thread: Humor Trumps All!

Participants will acquire a strong understanding of the importance of humor and fun in training, and how, even if they don’t think they are funny, they can introduce these attributes to develop improved content and engagement techniques. Ultimately leading the attendees towards making more memorable and impactful agile learning.

“The Human Race only has 1 truly effective weapon, and that is Laughter” - Mark Twain

The agile manifesto challenges us to favor customer collaboration more than contract negotiation, but what does that really mean and how do you actually do that?  Join us to experience a “fun” ideation framework that teams can use to engage in dialogue with their customers to determine what needs of the team / customer relationship are most important at the present time and then as a group decide on practices to support the highest priority needs.  As the ideation framework is completed, teams and their customers will be challenged to work together and achieve consensus on a limited number of priorities since we all know what happens when we try to make EVERYTHING a priority.  “Let’s Be Awesome” concludes with teams establishing and agreeing upon working agreements to build an “awesome” relationship between customer and team.  In this hands-on and highly interactive workshop, participants will have a chance to learn how to use the “Let’s Be Awesome” framework and cards to facilitate a team / customer ideation session focused on establishing the foundation for a strong relationship; an opportunity to learn, review and discuss many agile practices supportive of effective team / customer collaboration; and a chance to experience a “MarketPlace of Ideas” where they can exchange recommended patterns and practices for customer collaboration from others also attending the workshop.

This session will discuss 'Active Listening' using a 10 - 15 minute active listening game followed by an open discussion on how Agile practitioners can benefit from using and teaching active listening. The session will end with a brief retrospective to discuss how the game / session can be improved.

This is simulation game helps teams and managers identify and practice the different "leadership moves" that help us get to great decisions.  Teams will experience different perspectives on Agile leadership, self organization, cross team communication, and the fun of solving a challenging problem.

Based on the work of Don Grey and his "Leadership in Self-Organizing Teams" workshop from Agile2013

You will learn several quick and simple ways to integrate games into your everyday meetings. Add a 2 minute warm-up that radically changes the outcome of a retrospective. Or add a 30 sec game to stand-up. In the end the team will be more successful and communicative. Learn how to build trust. 

I love being down in the trenches with the team. I am constantly in a personal struggle to reduce my negative judgements. I find that when I work with a team is that if we appreciate each other and focus on what-is-working that the team does better than when we focus on fixing problems. So for the last few years, it has been my mission to break down the barriers of giving and receiving acknowledgement.

The key is consistency and starting off simple then progressing. For about 6 months I focused on new ways to acknowledge my teammates. We will practice how to make the instructions super simple and how create more complex games. This will be an experiential class where you both learn the new techniques and experience what the team will experience while going thru the process of building trust.