Learn about the latest developments in brain research, and the practical exercises they’ve produced for facilitating conversations (even the most-difficult ones) and turning them into concrete action plans.

Have you experienced any of the following?

• Witnessed two people arguing the same side of an issue, at each other?
• Reached the end of a meeting with no decisions made?
• Been told, “That’s not what I thought I was getting.”?
• Had a great idea, but couldn’t get anyone to listen?
• Had anyone shout in your meetings?

Even if your teams aren’t necessarily in conflict, the techniques discussed in this session will deliver an repeatable way to discuss complex, multi-sided issues, in an organized way that respects all participants, makes sure everyone feels heard, and produces tangible results that everyone can be proud of.

Change is hard (duh!) but the book Switch changed my life. While there are lots of change management models out there, Directing the Rider, Motivating the Elephant and Shaping the Path is the one I follow.

Scaling is hard too. But if we think about Change and Scaling together in the right way, maybe they don’t have to be quite so hard.

Recent polling of thousands of Scrum practitioners in the U.S. and Europe indicate that 66% of organizations are at the beginning stage of scaling Scrum. The State of Scrum report says 52% say their "organizational design and culture made it difficult to adopt and further scale Scrum". The State of Agile report says 63% say their "Company philosophy or culture [are] at odds with core agile values"

Think about your organization. Are executives disengaged? Are the agile teams executing independently like feral cats?

Come and learn three actionable things to make your scaling more successful, three things you can implement tomorrow to Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant and Shape the Path.

Our roadmaps and backlogs are usually littered with pet projects, squeaky wheels, and recent ad hoc items that gain priority simply because they are the latest shot across our bow. Impact mapping is a powerful practice that helps us identify and align our work to the most valuable business goals and mission objectives and avoid many of the common challenges that arise from an unfocused set of work priorities.

Impact maps help us visualize quantifiable benefits that deliverables should produce towards our business objectives. They allow us to focus our work on those deliverables that move the needle the most, not just deliver features. The practice is a great way to communicate assumptions, create plans, and align stakeholders as well as aid in strategic planning, roadmap management, and defining measures of success and quality.

This workshop will provide an appreciation for the power of impact mapping by walking you through building your own impact maps and the facilitation process for doing so in your own organization. You will leave the workshop having participated in a tangible example of the technique, and having gained an understanding of best-practices for facilitation with a focus on an impact map’s outputs and how they lead into the creation of actionable user stories when completed. Hands-on collaboration with your fellow attendees will help encourage your own application of this technique in your real world road-mapping and backlog refinement activities.

Agile delivers a huge jump in team productivity. Explaining this in words to someone who’s never seen it in action is often hugely difficult, if not impossible. This 10-minute simulation allows participants to experience Agile and immediately see the benefits. You’ll also be able to immediately take this exercise back to your teams. All you need is a deck of cards. (Cards will be provided for this session!)

Innovation Labs often don’t create the impact they’ve promised and many eventually fail. Capital One’s Innovation Lab, founded in 2011, has evolved to stay relevant throughout the years. In this session, Amber King, Senior Manager of Accelerator Operations talks about how the Labs' operating model has changed over the years, the details of how the Lab's new accelerator model works, how we incorporate Lean Start-up, Design Thinking, Google Design Sprints, Scrum, and Kanban techniques on our teams and what has triggered the need to reinvent the Labs' model in order to continue to push for disruptive innovation.

Why do we talk? How useful is it?
Let's work together in small teams to make products in complete silence, experiencing how talking both benefits and stifles collaboration.
What does collaboration really mean? How can this experience improve your collaboration?

In this experience, which is modeled after experiments run by Dr. Sallyann Freudenberg and Katherine Kirk, participants will experience a
* 90 minute period of complete silence while working together to build prosthetic hands for charity, noting down each time they have the urge to speak
* 45 minute review period where our facilitators will help us look at what we wanted to say and what happened instead, along with summarizing the outcomes we experienced through silent collaboration so that participants can take back with them these enlightenments.

We will pay particular attention to re-evaluating our model of collaboration and deep diving on the things people still felt like they wanted to say -- Did they really need to? What happened when they couldn't? How did that affect the outcome? We were moved by this experience when we participated in it at Agile2017, and are excited to provide the same experiential learning and awareness of silent collaboration to our community back in DC.

Probably few topics in Agile generate more philosophical polarization, strength of opinion, and catch phrases than how to scale Agile, and nothing represents that fact better than comparisons of LeSS and SAFe. But if we step back and take a dispassionate look - or try to - what do we find at the next level of specifics? If you sift the data, what are key differences in terms of practice and structure, and the two or three key differences in principles or philosophy that drive them? What shakes out. And - what we rarely or ever dwell on - what is the same or similar about them, and what if anything can we learn from that? These are the questions we look at and results we share in this presentation.

Once upon a time, there was a product owner who just knew their product was exactly what their customer wanted, but they couldn't get anyone to buy in. Their friend the business analyst had all the best research...but nobody cared. It's a common story with a tragic ending when product owners and analysts cast themselves as the main characters in the product's story instead of their customers. In this session Ali Oliver-Krueger, director of InterAct Story Theatre, will lead you down a different path: borrowing story structure elements and theatre-making strategies to craft compelling user stories that connect with customers and communicate value.

HOW you introduce a new practice to your organization is ten times more important than WHICH new practice you introduce. When is the right time for SAFe, DevOps, Lean Startup, or Usability Testing? Using learning from the “Teal” playbook, learn how to assess the current state of your organization and build a roadmap for introducing the right initiatives at the right time.

Any kind of planning is an exercise in uncertainty. Especially so in large enterprises where delivering value to the customer involves multiple teams within and across organizational silos. Although made popular by SAFe’s PI planning event, Big Room Planning has been used successfully by many organizations to connect the work of their agile teams to the overarching business strategy and to what they can deliver.

In this session, we will share our recent story on how Big Room Planning ideas were used in a large Fortune 100 company to align teams, stakeholders, leadership on desired business capabilities, surface uncertainties, dependencies, and reach shared understanding and consensus on achievable outcomes in the near-term.

It is our hope that some of the ideas discussed and resources shared in this session will help you and your teams with your near-term planning horizons, especially those attempting to drive agility in large, complex organizations.