I remember the year when I received two massive compliments the first was getting my advanced agile accreditation with Alistair Cockburn, which really stripped a layer from my soul through raw and honest feedback, my redemption from the depths of despair was the recognition of an agile signatory. The second was when Alistair called be a black belt in agile and one of his classes.

So where do you go from there, I felt I needed to go back to the very beginning and walk in the beginner mind again and receive the type of humility that truely grows your. This came to see when I started to learning the gentle art of Brazilian Jui Jitsu. There are so many parallels we can talk back into our community. Some of the areas of want to focus on are

1. Learning how to learn

2. What true failure looks like

3. The mindset of entering into a test knowing you are going to fail and why do it

4. The conditioning of both mind and body to support learning

5 Learning techniques is not enough

6 The road from white to blue belt

In this interactive session Shane discuss his experience working in a distributed, virtual organization which is founded on an Agile Mindset. The challenges of maintaining agility when remote, the ways the ICAgile team have consciously designed their team and organization culture and provide actionable advice based on real experience on how to maintain collaboration, teamwork and live the agile values in a remote only organization.

ICAgile is a global, virtual organisation working with partners across over 100 countries spanning almost every timezone. There is no single corporate office and the ICAgile team is spread across seven locations in three countries. We have managed to build a strong collaborative culture and a truly safe working environment focused on outcomes rather than activities, holding each other to account and being really effective and productive while having a joyful workplace.

Do you find your efforts and enthusiasm being ignored?

Would you like others to understand and see the value you provide?

You have tried every possible way to communicate the contribution you make.

When others appreciate your professional set of skills it encourages you to go the extra mile which allows your team to achieve goals and commitments.

There are always different abilities and skills that an individual brings to a team and these differences can cause friction within the team dynamic which impacts on focus, direction and timings.

When we understand the multiple drivers it creates the capacity for a team to achieve effortless results.

Learn how to apply an experimentation approach (Lean Startup) to move from delivering outputs to achieving outcomes.

Outcomes such as “subscriptions increased by 20%” or “complaints regarding the upload feature reduced to zero” are what makes a real difference in our customers lives and hence to the company’s bottom line. When a team is delivering outcomes like that, there is no denying their performance and hence their value to the company.

Delivering outcomes comes from understanding our customers, producing an output that may result in an outcome and then validating if we have achieved the desired outcome. At the very least one of these cycles produces knowledge. The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries, clearly explained this cycle unfortunately it did not explain clearly how we should design, set up, run or analyse our experiments. I have met many people who agree we should follow the Lean Start-up approach; however, there is rarely any consensus on the experimentation approach that will make it a reality.

In 2017 Australia’s largest independent game studio, Halfbrick Studios, embarked upon a mission to better understand their customer and experiment their way to renewed success. Fruit Ninja Fight is one of the results of that approach. In 2018 Australia’s largest Telco, Telstra, focused on “co-creation” with their customers through a series of experiments; delivering improved customer satisfaction and faster results than ever before. This presentation shares with you my experiences of working with those two organisations as they sought to improve their outcomes through Experimentation.