Solutions, solutions, solutions! Get your solutions here! We have technical solutions, DevOps solutions, automations, and metrics! ...The Agile community is caught in the middle of the Framework Wars — SAFe vs Scrum@Scale vs Modern Delivery vs Kanban and XP — and following the rules has become more important than solving the problems that led us to Agile in the first place!

The Design Thinking Double Diamond teaches us to research and understand problems, separately from solutions. When was the last time you stopped to really think about your problems, separately from how you are solving them?

We also need to face the hard truth that yes, our teams are working hard, but sometimes they are creating more problems than they solve.

In this session we’ll walk through one technique for shifting people’s attention back to problems. It's called the “PEP Talk”. It has been used in fortune 50 companies, government institutions, and individual Release Trains to help refocus people on the right things at the right time, promote cross-team collaboration, and inspire them to design win-win solutions that solve multiple problems at once, while also unlocking intrinsic motivation. It works great as a part of a Lean Portfolio Management approach, in an Agile VMO, with a Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), or a Scrum of Scrum of Scrums because it is solution-agnostic. (Plus it helps you win at Buzzword Bingo!)

Language is powerful and can paint a picture, lift people to happiness or dive us into despair.  Transforming our language can be an amazing way to shift our own mindset and that of others. What can you do to change your own internal dialog to embrace a new mindset? Why not extend the same language to help teams and others transform?

In this talk, we’ll cover a variety of language topics that can be incorporated immediately, including:

• Language of a Fixed Mindset, Growth Mindset, and Agile Mindset to enhance Agile Transformations
• Clean Language to help teams uncover root cause issues instead of focusing on symptoms
• David Marquet’s (author of Turn the Ship Around) focus on Leadership Language to help management transform into leaders
• Power Questions to help people see the future and the advantages of Agile transformations

Many agile journeys end prematurely because they exhaust the organizations 'capacity for change.' As we define and actively manage capacity setasides for architecture or technical debt, I propose that we should actively manage change capacity and explicitly design our change plans around the availability - and intermittent absence - of change capacity. 

This remarkably suggests that our agile change journey should be agile, incremental, and adaptive - and provides a framework for structuring, negotiating, and planning agile change.

I suggest an alternative SAFe implementation journey based on these principles. 

Slides from an earlier presentation on this topic are attached.

What would it look like if you ran an entire organization using Agile? Agile in the executive suites, Agile prioritization, Agile teams, Agile funding, …Agile everything. The LibraryOfAgile.org is a community-led project that has been collecting, evaluating, comparing, and testing Agile techniques. Our goal is to explore together a scientific analysis of Agile techniques to test for causation and interrelation. In plain English: Does is work? Does it work everywhere? And does it mess anything else up?

In this case study, we will talk about some of the insights we have discovered in our research and lay out one design for an “Agile Utopia”. Each of the pieces of this Agile operating model are legitimate techniques that are being used in real-world organizations, though using them all together at once is (so far) theoretical.

The current name for this theoretical model is the “Pentacameral Governance Model”.  There are no managers, no budgets, democratic decision making, and lots of science, automation, and metrics. It is filled with psychology, checks and balances, and even a blockchain and a cryptocurrency.

If you could design the future that you want to live in, what would you include?

Have you walked into a store and seen empty shelves lately? You might have heard in the news that it could be related to a supply chain issue. Factors such as bottlenecks or constraints can impact product delivery and cause these issues. This workshop is for Scrum Masters, Agile Project Managers, and leaders who want to learn how to handle bottlenecks and/or constraints in their product delivery with a better Kanban board flow. The workshop will explore the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Little’s Law theory to help participants manage the Kanban flow. Participants will examine the primary value stream and Kanban flow, identify the constraints or bottlenecks of product delivery, and apply the theory of rules with a better flow to deal with bottlenecks and/or constraints in their projects. We intend participants to use the same methods to deal with supply chain issues in manufacturing, services, IT, or any product industry and deliver products to their customers on time. 

The Five Love Languages proposes that there are five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love, but these desires are not unique to romantic relationships.  Scrum masters can consider these same mindsets to support their team's happiness and success.

In Agile and Lean transformation, one of the great barriers is leadership style. The typical teaching is proposing 'servant leadership' - but for many, the notion of servant leadership is hard to connect to.

An alternative is emerging, but isn't well-known yet - 'Host leadership.'

This intended as an introduction to the concept of Host Leadership, it's compliment - Guest Followership - and a discussion of the advantages it may have over Servant Leadership in many contexts.