While it is true to say that people’s attitudes and beliefs are key to implementing an agile project, or Agile in itself, much of the use of the term ‘mindset’ implies a mental model that can be defined and engineered. In this presentation, we will look at how we can measure attitudes within an organization and use multiple small actions to trigger the rapid evolution of organizational culture, so that it can sustain agile developments. Mindset and the alignment-based ideas of some on the Agile movement too often imply creating homogeneous beliefs and values that will lead to full alignment. In practice, this damages resilience and can be dangerous. This presentation will introduce the idea of coherence instead of alignment - the celebration of cognitive and behavioral differences that can align if needed to support the delivery of sustainable solutions.

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

* people,
* process, and
* follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's very difficult for the retrospective to be a success.

Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.

For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.

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.

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.

We like to believe that we make conscious and fair decisions, we trust our intuition, we follow logical thinking and common sense. But what if our choices could be easily influenced, what if our intuition was nothing more than an effect of the laziness of our brain and what if logical thinking was harder than we expect? Our minds, which drive all of these processes, are complex and despite vast scientific research we still don't understand how they work.

Anchoring, halo effect, availability heuristic, attribute substitution, negativity bias, the law of small numbers, Dunning–Kruger effect are just a few of the phenomena that create traps for our minds. Are we defenceless when we face these traps? Fortunately not! It turns out that agility brings some tools and techniques to help us.

In this talk, we will explore various types of biases and heuristics that our minds use every day. We will perform experiments and learn from the research of the last 60 years. We will also look at some tools and techniques that agility brings and we will see how we can use to help ourselves, our teams and organisations.

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.

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.