Are you born as an Agile leader or can you develop or pivot your leadership style to be one? This talk will uncover ten Agile leadership attributes in a fun and engaging way, gives participants an opportunity to reflect on their own capabilities and then self focus areas for further development of their leadership capability

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...

Agile Coaching is currently hit and miss – there are no guidelines and standards around what good coaching is and active harm is being done by some unethical coaches. Having a voluntary Code of Conduct will not prevent this from happening but it could raise visibility around what behaviors should be expected of a professional, ethical agile coach.

In this interactive session Shane presents some ideas around what a Code of Conduct for Agile Coaching could be and draws from the participants areas they feel should be included in such a code.

A dōjō (道場) is a hall or space for immersive learning or meditation. This is traditionally in the field of martial arts, but has been seen increasingly in other fields, such as meditation and software development (and now also Agile Coaching!).

It will be a space for the immersive practice of coaching. Imagine a place where you can come and try out new coaching techniques, get feedback, give feedback and learn from your successes and failures? This is what coaching dōjō is about!

Coaching is one of the four main skills of every Agile Coach (along mentoring, teaching and facilitating) and for many of us coaching is the hardest skill to master. Way too often we go back to the mentoring mode, giving pieces of advice and sharing our points of view. Guess what, asking questions and giving space to reflect and come up with actions is hard, it's extremely hard! That's why we want to create a space for deliberate practice of coaching.

The coaching dōjō will be very to the Code Katas exercises knows from the software development world. We will come together, work in groups of 3s, one person will be a coach, one will be a coachee and one will be an observer. We will run 3 rounds of 10-15 minutes coaching so everyone will get a chance to be a coach. At the end of the round, the coach will hear feedback from the coachee and from the observer. In every session (this will be the 1st one) we will work with different challenges and/or different coaching techniques.

This Workshop will help you understand why emotional culture matters to building a more high performing and connected team in a more human and empathetic way.

One of the lesser known and least discussed parts of organisational culture is the emotional culture of an organisation. Research shows the way people feel at work (or the way they don’t feel) has a significant impact on the way they behave, motivation, commitment, creativity, satisfaction, decision making and collaboration.

In this highly interactive workshop, we will provide you with a way to bring your teams together to talk about the emotional culture of your organisation. We will learn how we explore both those emotions that your employees want to feel to be successful and those that they don't want to feel. From here, you, as a leader but also as a team, can decide what behaviours you want to support and cultivate and what you need to avoid and manage to create the culture you want.

So far we have run tens of emotional culture workshops, and the results have been stunning. We provide you with a facilitation framework, which can be used with leaders, teams and individuals to talk about emotions and culture in the workplace. It gives people the freedom to participate, be vulnerable and share what they feel and how they want to feel, allowing your people and leaders to take actions and genuinely start to shape the culture.

Unfortunately, most companies pay little attention to how their people are or should be feeling at work. Many organisations don't support the expression and discussion of emotions at work. Showing emotion at work can be seen as "unprofessional". But emotion drives human behaviour. So come and learn about why emotion matters to your teams and how you can have conversations about emotions and their impact on your teams in a new, fun and engaging way.

The rules of the game have changed! Studies indicate that by the year 2030, half of jobs will be ones that do no exist today and half the jobs of today will no longer exist. The volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity ushered in by this age of accelerations extends not just to our environment, politics, and communities, but our organizations as well. In response, organizations are undergoing a massive transformation in technology, structure, culture, and values - fundamentally changing not only what we work on, but how we work, and who we work with.

Where does this leave our careers? If answering the question ‘Where do you see yourself five years from now?’ leaves you stuck, uncertain, confused and/or anxious, you are not alone.

Join me for “Careers in the Age of Accelerations”. During this workshop, we will look back at your career and look ahead at organizational and cultural trends, and understand the skills and capabilities for new and emerging roles. Build the awareness and confidence to take control and navigate a career aligned to the future of work and guided by your Ikigai (reason for being).

Traditional accounting methods measure and manage innovation efforts but this can in fact be one of its biggest disablers. Internal funding systems and the way performance and progress get measured, demand us to make up facts that can not possibly be predicted far into the future. In return, it all too often makes us build the wrong thing. How can Return on Investment (ROI) calculations, for example even be close to true when the product and even the market doesn't yet exist?

The problem with innovation of course is that we have little to no historical data these approaches heavily rely on. Further, current systems don’t account and adjust for all the new learnings a team gathers. They simply don’t enable honest conversations between those that build products and those that make investment decisions. It leads many people to make up fiction and hide risky assumptions in order to get funding. Many times the best storytellers and politicians get funded, not necessarily those with the best ideas. As a result, organisations fall into the trap of not making corrections early enough before, all too often, the budget is used up before reaching success or ends up with a zombie product on life support.

Innovation Accounting fundamentally ties learning and money together. It bridges the gap between product and finance. It allows for an honest and effective approach to creating, delivering and capturing value.

Agile Leadership has its unique flavour of natural leadership, when power is not given with a title but taken by a person based on his/her inner abilities. We use Servant Leadership or Powerless Leader to emphasise this difference. If we look deeper into the biology and neuroscience of leadership we might find really unexpected things – that Agile leaders are the ones that are recognised by nature and we unconsciously can select these people from the crowd. How to become this type of person?

To be an effective Agile leader we need to understand:

• What makes a leader: Leader-Leader Agile Model

• The difference between a leader and dominant behaviour, why leaders look younger and more active (on hormonal level)

• Hormones and neuroscience of a natural leader (with some cases and practice)

• Leadership differences and similarities of Scrum Master and Product Owner

• Simple (4 words) yet powerful mindset change to become a natural leader that people will follow

Agile coaching is big business - there are probably more agile coaches in the world than business coaches, but we're only just starting to scratch the surface of what agile coaches really do.

Geof has been researching the moment-by-moment lived experience of agile coaches for the last 12 months to explore what makes us tick, and what gets in our way.

Come to this highly interactive workshop to find out what Geof learned from his research and what it means for the training, support and supervision of agile coaches - and then to use a new developmental model of agile coaching to share your own experience and practice the skills you need to move from working with your teams as if they were machines to coaching with curiosity.

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.

Collaboration is at the heart of healthy agile teams. Teams that collaborate well are better enabled to deliver innovative solutions that not only meet customer and business expectations, but exceed them. However, collaboration is much more than just communication and coordination. Highly collaborative teams are inclusive and open to new concepts, where individuals feel valued not only for the contributions they make, but also for bringing their different ideas and perspectives to the table.

Mindful agile is the perfect combination of the agile mindset with mindfulness that enables teams and organisations to build an agile culture that truly embodies the agile values and principles. It allows teams to work together with greater cooperation to truly collaborate, overcome difficulties, share ideas, and challenge each other without falling into chaos and conflict.

This workshop will help you deeply understand the agile mindset and how mindfulness enables you to truly embody the agile principles. Mindfulness enhances interactive communications to allow you collaborate more effectively. Through mindfulness, you will better understand your customers’ needs to produce solutions that they love. Mindfulness enables you to think more clearly resulting in better decision making and creativity that drive innovation. You will gain a practical understanding of why mindfulness is the essential ingredient for creating an effective agile culture.

An interactive and engaging session where we will prioritise a backlog of agile stories and dive deeper into the tales that matter to you, then and there...we may even create some in real time!

As a practitioner and someone passionate about bringing the best out of myself and those around me, these experiences will share knowledge, learning and concepts from real life practice with a number of organisations and teams adopting and maturing agile ways of working.

Initial product backlog:

- Anarchy, Scrum and Kanban.

- Go on then, just change your mindset!

- Aye, it's just commonsense.

- Now that was a great agile team!

- The Super Retrospective

- Here is your 'pizza', now self manage

- Key lessons from the transformation trenches

- WaterScrumBanFall - really!

- I'm a project manager, get me outta here

and a little bit of improv from me and you will go a long way to a rewarding shared experience.

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.

Many software engineers are lead into the false assumption that we are hired to write code. This talk challenges that perception and discusses the real reason we are paid to turn up to work every day.

Coding is fun, but we are paid to solve problems.

I will try and convince you that you can add more value, and have more fun, by concentrating on the problem, not the code.

A critical lever for a successful agile professional is the Mind. The ability for an individual to bring awareness to their ‘mindtraps’ and deal with failure by picking on the lessons and moving fast is the single most attractive talent for the future. Find out what’s in store inside the mind and use tools to self-organise and look forward to change – every time!

Everyone thinks they are a good at communication, but... how many times have you been at an event talking to someone you really didn’t want to talk to? Been sold to by someone who didn’t get that you weren’t interested?

These are examples of bad communication and they all have a few things in common, they weren’t efficient and they weren’t effective

.They didn’t go into the communication with the right mindset and the right preparation

Also, sorry to say it, but your own communications probably suck too. But after this talk you’ll have a leg up on your competition: you’ll know your communication sucks... and you know how to fix it.