About Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups. Invented by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, Liberating Structures are a set of microstructures (33 at the moment) that use a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone - no matter the size of the group.

About the CASE:

In this CASE study, I will demonstrate the power of Liberating Structures in 90-mins quick Immersion using Strings (I will string 5 LS together to solve a problem to demonstrate participants how we used them in one of the Organizations that I worked to enable Organizational Agility. We used a string of LS and involved 3 in a box leaders to unleash collaboration among the 3 in a box leaders ( Program, Product & Engineering) and enabled the leaders to build consensus and unleashed collaboration.

PS:

There won't be any slides for this workshop. The entire activity will be demonstrated using number of LS.(Strings) and the participants will be able to easily apply them at their work.

You could find some pictures of LS workshop from the website of mine. I am happy to provide more information if you want. I have been running the same as part of my meetups.

Format of Running:

Participants will be engaged throughout the session using the Structures mentioned below. For the detailed session, Please refer the Structure of the presentation.

When can we use them?

1. We can use LS to engage and achieve 100% participation from a Larger Crowd

2. Build Consensus from different groups

3. A Facilitation Technique that unleashes the power and intelligence of people.

Where I used them?

I used LS when i was working with one of the Financial Product Companies on their Agile Transformations journey. We brought the 3-in-a box leaders together using the LS Structures and we are going to demonstrate them with a simulation of the same during this 90 mins hands on session.

In 2003, I started my first internship at a small company. It was simple and yet amazing to integrate different open source products into a working solution to provide customer value.

It was not a picture cut into the puzzle pieces and ready to assemble again, however, it required some code understanding and interface tweaks to make the user application flow smoother and easier.

But what does it have to do with Agile Coaching journey? Yes, it does!

In this talk, I will share my experience from developing software as a nerd to developing people. It is a reflection of my past 10 years. It further discusses the importance of self-awareness, continuous learning, patience, facilitation, experiments, team dynamics, powerful questions, and "patience" again.

I will further share the leadership and coaching models, books and workshops which had a huge impact on me and helped me to stay motivated on this course. I will share what worked for me and what didn’t.

What I realize now is that I am combining different personalities to build teams and organizations to deliver value by understanding them and help adjust behaviors as per values. It is important to have empathy to build high-performing teams.

Toxic behaviours in a Team cause damage to the Team. Affecting their performance, causing high levels of stress and demotivation. Conflict Navigation is one of the biggest challenges within the Teams. Can you help them to overcome this challenge? Are there any antidotes?

When a Team member shows a toxic behaviour, how the Team reacts to it? Can we educate the team and help them as a System to overcome these challenges? As a Scrum Master or a Coach, our main mission is to help out teams to be their better selves. By the end of this workshop, you should be able to help your team to be better prepared to deal with conflict.

This is a tale of a scrum master who wishes to ascend the pinnacle of master level in scrum master role. But owing to numerous challenges, this dream is not taking place . After several years of soul searching, he reaches to an agile baba for enlightenment advice expecting something miracle will take place. Agile Baba took several Gyan session to establish wisdom in scrum master’s mind. Once Scrum master back to the war field with rejuvenated wisdom and start his course for the mastery level, he realizes that it is a mirage. How long it took? Is it possible to fasten the process? Let us deep dive into the life of an enlightened scrum master and learn from this story.

Coaching leaders is an art and a science. While attempting to coach leaders (especially the CXOs and senior leaders), it is very important to assess the coachability aspects of the leaders before proceeding.

In this hands-on workshop, I would be sharing a few tips on assessing coachability aspects. I would also demonstrate LIVE, a few coaching conversations with leaders (participants need to volunteer to be coached).

In addition, participants can practice what they learn through coaching simulations with peer participants.

Human beings are creatures of habit. However, embracing new habits and making them stick are not as trivial as they may first sound. It takes discipline and courage to adopt new practices instead of old ones and turn them into a routine of behavior which is repeated regularly. Yet how can we achieve that? And how can we break some previous learnt habits which persist in organizations for years? Join us in this interactive hands-on session and explore a simple yet powerful tool which you can bring back to your workplace and serve your colleagues and you well.

The Agile Manifesto begins with a declaration that there are better ways of developing things that were found by "doing it and help others do it". Later on, many experts decided that the better ways required "being agile": having the right mindset, a compatible culture, and scaling appropriately were the pathways to creating value.

Is this the best way to lead people to learn better ways of creating value? The answer to that question goes deeper than learning a slew of frameworks and methods offered through training courses.

India is the great fertile ground for agility on Earth. By drawing on the strengths of its own civilization, owning its own future, and mastering the fundamentals, India can help the world improve through agility on a global basis. This talk will bring us back to the Agile Manifesto and reveal how learning through making opens access to deeper levels of being, which in turn push and move our capacity to create vast amounts of value for all.

Throughout this talk will be a challenge to attendees to identify something to make in their world, and to use that to transform how they learn and teach and influence others to do the same.

Are you interested in learning how development team members can change their working style to be agile? Are you looking to learn how to improve developer engagement? Do you want to watch the benefits of agile technical practices in action? If yes, this hands-on demo is for you.

This interactive demo is designed as a role-play by the facilitators and the members of the audience. The facilitators will engage in a dramatized demo of common technical agility practices, sometimes involving the audience, so that the audience can themselves see their benefits in action.

Join this demo for living through the phases of attaining technical agility.

There are moments in life when we feel overwhelmed, scared, or stuck in a dead-end situation. Some of that is due to external circumstances, some is self-inflicted.

But it doesn't have to be that way. We can get out of the quagmire to become who we really want to be. All starts with having the courage to acknowledge that we need to change.

My talk is about a true story: How I started my journey into Agility and Personal Agility, how I discovered about the force of powerful questions, and how what I discovered allowed me to help someone else. We have in ourselves everything we need to take our lives back into our hands. Sometimes we just need a helping hand!

How can we transform the way we look at things? Where do we start to change the aspects of our life we are not happy with? What questions help us discover what we really want for ourselves?

I will reference the powerful questions presented by the Coaches Training Institute. I'll give examples of powerful questions compared to closed questions, and I will show how different the outcome of the two types of questions may be.

I will discuss how powerful questions help us recognize our role in what happens to us, and help us change our attitude in how we respond to the events of life. By looking for answers to powerful questions, we begin to accept responsibility for our life, and that responsibility process is very empowering. I will use my story of a casual encounter with a stranger to show how, even if we can't always control the events in our life, we always have a choice of how we respond to them.

The famous quote from H.E. Luccock - “No one can whistle a symphony. It takes an orchestra to play it" strongly resonates in our mind advocating the need of building strong effective teams. Similarly, Michael Jordan once said: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships”. Whether its a basketball ground, F1 racing pit or the battleground of infantry battalion of our army men, what are some of the common attributes of these ultra performing teams ? Going straight to the Individual and Interactions manifesto, this talk takes a deep dive on both these very important sauce ingredients of teams recipe. An Individual is a complex dynamic entity reflecting its needs, core values, belief systems and cognitive biases. Similarly, interactions represents an individual's expressions to the outer world and reinforced feedback message back to the inner self. Maslow's 5 stage model defines the 5 levels of an Individual needs and they all need to be well addressed to forum strong teams. This talk connects the Maslow's model with Patrick lencioni's 5 dysfunctions of Teams to uncover some core attributes of Team Behaviour. The cohesiveness of a team also depends on its members bonding and hence, the need of understanding the basic personality type before applying the common vanilla norming. We will be leveraging and exploring the Myers-Briggs Dichotomies to uncover 16 types of personalities and sharing some Agile games on ice breaking and reflecting. More to come with this Talk..

Management is cake walk, Leadership is not and Servant Leadership is definitely not. Becoming a great Servant Leader and creating legacy is beyond any of the certifications. I will unpack some useful aspects of servant leadership which delegates can start implementing in their life and working environment from the very next day

Many companies are quite keen on adopting agile practices. As of now a lot of companies had successfully achieved it, but still there are companies which had failed. Adapting to the change is not very easy, if it is not planned properly. This change has to be absorbed by the top management, before it gets to the rest of the company.

One of the important things in agile transformation is that, it is not just a process change but a culture change and the mindset of people, which requires a lot of change including the role of the management.

This presentation is to share the experience of an agile transformation of a company that was following strict waterfall methodology and how the role of the management changed in order to support the transformation, to get the best results out of it.

Dojo Labs is an Agile product development framework built on the concept of hyper sprints. Dojo Labs as a process framework is built on the fundamentals of SCRUM, XP, and Agile Dojo. It enables teams to build “E-shaped” skills with high technical agility. This talk is about our experiences with respect to our experiments with dojo as a product development framework across different domains. Our experiences include mostly learning from failures and successes and hence the session would be driven by case studies. We will also be discussing our studies on teams that adopted dojo as a way of working which showcased substantial improvement in predictability, productivity, and technical agility. We will also touch upon how dojo acted as a constructive constrain to triggers change for good. Last but not the least we will also discuss our SENSEI program which helped us scale our dojo capability of practitioners

Organizations across the globe are embracing agility using different methodologies and frameworks to meet customer demands and improve time to market. Scrum is one of the most popular frameworks within which people can solve complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of highest possible value. Scrum was developed to work best within a team size of 5 to 10 members and has to be cross functional to be effective and efficient. It becomes easy for the Scrum team to achieve synergy and resonate with each other if the team is collocated further. The Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development team work in tandem with fewer problems to deal with however and can release most valuable features quickly. The challenges and impediments increases with the addition of every Scrum team. There is also a general myth that Scrum may not be suitable for large scale projects or programs.

Can Scrum be used for large programs (involving more than 5-6+ scrum teams) and still address top priorities like fulfilling customer needs, improving time to market and reducing cycle time? The answer is "YES"

Nevertheless, some of the questions that comes to our mind quickly when we think of scaling delivery using Scrum are below,

What if the spirit of Agile was one of exploration ? To explore is to be curious. Explorers relish stepping out of their comfort zone and finding new ways to do old and new things. Its about living with change and relishing finding our how to sustain exceptional performance – and isn’t that exactly what Agile promises ? If we look at Agile from the eyes of an explorer or in my case, the view of my Guinness World Record Journey to become the Deepest woman on Scuba, then what would we learn and how could that change how we use agile ? What are the anti-patterns to be aware of and what are the skills and practices to strengthen ?

Mindset and Culture change is at the core of agile adoption. While we all know it’s importance, there is no single approach or process to make this change happen.

We have embarked on a mindset transformation Journey at our workplace.

In my session I will cover pragmatic approach of bringing in mindset and culture change. An approach which we are adopting in our workplace and seeing the change resulting in multifold benefits.

You will learn Echo system of Mindset, Culture and Behaviors and leave the session with multiple ideas and an insights on how to make cultural and mindset shift in your organization.

There are many retrospective techniques available and its a widely discussed topic too. But every sprint and release is different with respect to outcomes and learnings. The Scrum Master need to have the expertise to chose what technique or Agile game for Retrospective event so that it opens up healthy discussion and best learnings from the time boxed event. Example, Speed Boat is a great Retrospective technique, but may not be the best during the first or second sprint. Similarly, in case of release retrospective, where relatively large number of audience are present, there are multiple things to consider while chosing the format of Retrospective, like do you have a distributed audience, the number of audience, to what extent was their work co-ordination needed during the release, etc.

Hence, chosing the right Retrospective Technique is an art, and in this session we will discuss practical situations and what retrospective technique works best in those situations. I will discuss the tried and proven techniques based on my experience. I will share what retrospective technique worked when the team was newly formed, when the Scrum Master was new to an old team, when the team was continuously unable to meet sprint commitment, and a few practical ways of effectively facilitating the event for large audience.

The talk, ‘Agile for All – Transformation Journey of a Telco', shall cover the Agile Transformation journey in a Telecommunication Operator with 500+ employees. It shall explain why transformation was important in achieving the best ROI, identifying the 'Fit for Purpose', and achieving Happy Customers and Happy Employees. The talk focuses on the real time experiences, stating what challenges were faced during the transformation, how they were mitigated, how the transformation was structured and what worked and what not.

The talk is designed with real time experiences in the telecom industry, and co- relates the practices into an Agile framework.

It is really hard to communicate in a good way, but we all think “we” do it, it’s just the other people who struggle. Effective communication is a fundamental requirement for agile modeling. There are various modes of communication that people may choose to apply when working together. What are the Communication Technologies? When is communication most effective? How to set up good, solid communication mechanisms that will allow teams to grow their communication, and ultimately their collaboration skills. We will have some insights on all those questions and a taste of games with a focus on experiential learning.