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.

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.

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.

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.