The Agile version of Cards Against Humanity. You may have seen versions of this on the internet, but rest assured this version has been enhanced to yield a minimum of 156% more awesomeness. Relatively fresh from its stellar debut at the 2017 Xero Unconference!

Imagine you are a Mad Agile Scientist and have a diabolical experiment to conduct - what would happen if you exchanged the brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master? Mwuhahahaha!!! How would the body of a Product Owner with the brain of a Scrum Master act? And vice versa?

Perhaps the Scrum Master would now treat the team like a backlog? This Scrum Master would be focused on value and maintaining a coaching backlog of team and person improvements. This Scrum Master is refining the team, crafting a group that delivers value.

And perhaps the Product Owner might treat the backlog like a team? Rather than backlog refining, they coach the backlog. They would be focused on nurturing, protecting, and empowering the backlog. The backlog might transform from an irritation into a labor of love.

Although this experiment sounds terrible, this change of perspective might be what you need to reanimate your dead team or backlog.

Join the fun and come learn what horrifying results await!

Autonomous and empowered teams are a key building block of agile organisations but require a great deal of trust to work. Management and leadership must trust people and teams to do the right thing, and teams need to trust that management will support them when needed.

Transparency is a low-cost means of building trust. Transparency gained through the open sharing of information, particularly visual information, has played a large part in agile and lean thinking - from lean's visual controls, to XP's "big visible charts" and beyond.

We will explore how transparency, and the radiation of information, can build trust and cultures where "safe to fail" is more than a theoretical concept.

How do we make an impact to the starters in our field regardless of your position in the industry? Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a newcomer and explore mentoring from a different perspective.

Coming from being a part of an 18 month Graduate Program position at REA Group, my peers and I have been fortunate enough to find ourselves in an environment where mentoring and pairing is a big part of the culture. This talk is designed to give the attendees an insight on what a diverse range of mentees actually wish and crave for, to empower people to mentor and help shape the future of tech.

Most organisations now understand why they need insights on customers’ needs and behaviours to drive customer-centred outcomes within agile teams. But many organisations struggle to convert insights from their quantitative and qualitative research into value that actually gets delivered to customers.

And whilst many organisations are employing researchers, and building agile teams, organisational behaviours—at a team level, and also at a leadership level—often get in the way of those teams converting insights into value, leaving teams feeling lost at sea.

But there are behaviours and principles that teams and leaders can put into practice to create an culture of effective experimentation based on insights. By being more human, we can enable our teams to deliver efficient value to customers, and even within the organisation itself.

Come on a swashbuckling journey with us, as we show you how to navigate the oft-treacherous waters of organisational culture, to help your teams reach the mystical location we call Value Atoll.

This interactive session will explore connections and how personal mapping can be scaled to kick-start a platform to build better communications, trust and psychological safety to underpin your agility journey.

Is your team or organisation in a funk? Seeking some fun ways to shake things up, or change behaviours?

Put simply, a culture hack is an intentional action to affect positive change within a team or organisation.

This session will take you through 10 easy to implement hacks to create an Agile culture within your team or organisation.

Come away with:

• A deeper understanding of how culture hacks work
• The excitement to try one of the ready-made culture hacks
• The confidence to create your own culture hack!

I've been on a journey, and I've come to know that apathy and ambivalence are an awful place to be.

I want to talk about big life changes and the uncertainty that comes with them.

We will look at navigating this kind of journey in your own life. How curiosity and self-awareness can lead to meaningful change that will better equip you for new and exciting things in your life.

We will also discuss the importance of healthy company culture as the undercurrent that enables all of this.

Scrum is a great framework but there are many ways to do it poorly. The average IT worker is interrupted every 15 minutes, which equates to 2000+ interruptions for a Scrum team every sprint. Unthinkable on a production line, yet too often the norm in offices.

I conducted original research with Scrum teams in Australia last year as part of my Master of Management thesis (and achieved an A), to understand the causes, patterns and impacts of these interruptions on the team's effectiveness and their happiness. And, how mature teams control interruptions rather than let themselves be controlled by interruptions.

Attendees will play a short game to demonstrate how destructive the context switching from handling frequent interruptions is.

My talks are always highly practical and I provide 3 takeaway actions for teams to improve their 'flow' and reduce interruptions.

Do you spend a lot of your time trying to solve people’s problems? What if you could learn a simple tool that you could use to help them learn to solve these problems for themselves? A tool that would enable team members to think more creatively and take more ownership of their work. By using coaching conversations to provide support and feedback, you can help individuals or teams to make sustainable changes and improve their effectiveness.

This workshop is based on the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stainer. You will learn and practice his seven essential questions to help you coach people to find their own solutions to their problems.

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.

DevOps engineers fly from job to job doing the same things - the systems differ, but the problems (technical and otherwise) remain the same. Eventually, we ask questions not about implementation or technology, but meaning: what am I doing all of this for?

In this talk, we'll cover how we provided a converged solution (Docker cluster, monitoring, alerting, and security) from 0 to 70% of the company in three months. We'll cover how we did it - the approaches, the workflows, and the rules - but more importantly, the why: to provide an environment where the things that we produce change whole organizations and make people's lives a little better.

But most of all, how it made us a little bit kinder.

Being a member of a cross-functional team – such as Front End, Back End, API, UX, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, BA – comes with problems. In this workshop we will gather our problems relating to cross functional teams and form groups to complete simplified A3 Improvement Themes (lean improvement canvas). Our purpose is to clearly identify our problems and the steps which will assist us in tackling these problems.

We will share our experiences and walk away with a set of A3 Improvement Themes complete with the first steps ready to implement at your own workplace the very next day. Personally, I will walk away with a whole lot of Improvement Themes. It’s a win-win

Each of us is a member of complex relationship systems - at work, at home and in our communities. Just as emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage our own emotions and social intelligence is the ability to empathise and communicate with another individual, relationship systems intelligence is the ability to view a team or group as a unified whole and to work directly with that whole system rather than with a group of individuals.

In this session, we will use a relationship systems coaching technique called constellations to listen to the ‘voice of the system’ which is created by everyone who attends the session, so we can explore together how comfortable we are in working with conflict.

In this session, I’ll explain how a truly awesome team embarked on an Agile transformation using Compliance Driven Development which increased throughput, reduced code and systems complexity, introduced continuous verification using continuous delivery, dramatically reduced failed changes and production incidents, introduced DevSecOps before it became a buzzword and created highly engaged cross-functional performant teams.

Diagramming and mapping our thoughts changes the way we think. It makes our thoughts and ideas broader and helps us to see patterns. These approaches are great for both individual problem-solving and team collaboration and co-creation.

By learning and applying these visual techniques we follow in the foot-steps of great thinkers such as Leonardo, Edison, and Feynman who used visualisation as a major guide, more so than language and equations, which came later.

Many of us have tried our hand at mind-mapping, which is an excellent tool for expanding our ideas and solving problems by breaking away from linear thinking. In this talk, I will demonstrate other powerful ways we can map our ideas and thoughts to solve problems, both as individuals and as teams.

Techniques include:

- Lotus blossom technique

- Systems mapping

My objective is to offer you options so that you can choose the technique that best suits you.

Working on a software product team can be quite a terrifying experience for new employees, especially when you are a round peg in the square holes.

A year go, I landed in the biggest tech company in town as a non-technical person on a technical team. Looking back on a year full of adventures and scary challenges, I’m here to share with you:

• What to expect in the world of code, API, kanban, MVP and DevOps
• The candid (sometimes, painful) lessons on how individuals can prepare for, survive and thrive in this kind of environment

You were created for a specific and unique purpose - there is a special mix of gifts and talents in you that need to be shared with the world. In today's workplaces, it's critical to have the skills to continually self-evaluate, evolve and inspire others to change. We apply continuous improvement to our products, but not often enough to ourselves and our cultures. So how do we access the greatness within ourselves and call it out from those we’re leading? This session will look at 4 principles that promote growth and foster transformative collaboration. You’ll come away with a combination of mindset and action points to put into practice.

As more organisations are introducing agile practices, the pressure is on change and project leaders and practitioners to deliver solutions faster, and apply more iterative approaches. This is taking place in an environment of complexity and relentless, continuous change.

At the same time, the pressure is on all businesses to be not only nimble and responsive to what the customer wants, but to also be sufficiently innovative to create a positive employee experience and carefully consider the people who are impacted.

We can look to other human-centred disciplines to help us put our people back to the heart of how we deliver change.

Human Centred Design (also known as Design Thinking) enables us to take a deeper user-centred approach to developing products and services for our customers and employees.

Find out how to integrate the principles of Human Centred Design into your change plans and interventions, for optimal co-creation and more meaningful engagement.