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!

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.

Every organisation has legacy systems, and people who know "where the bodies are buried" -- hidden aspects of dependency, communication, process flow and whatnot which every system relies on to function. These are the dirty secrets swept beneath the rug of "business as usual", and they represent risk and friction alike.

As Peter Drucker is famously quoted, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it", and the first step towards measuring it is to be able to describe it. How can you do this with gigantic, complex, intertwined systems whose origins are buried in mystery and legend, whose very operation and continued existence is dependent, frequently, on specific people, high priests who may not want to share their arcane knowledge?

This session provides evidence-based techniques for uncovering this complexity, visualising it in a machine-friendly but fundamentally human-centric manner, and using the results to drive real organisational awareness that facilitates conversations and change.

The Medici Effect was a coined term by Frans Johansson to describe innovation that happens when disciplines and ideas intersect. Take for example the idea of using something very technically challenging such as blockchain, and an internet favourite such as cats and you have the CryptoCats and the Crypto Kitties! Indeed the most interesting ideas are borne out of collaboration & diverse thinking.

This hands-on workshop will provide an introduction to the Medici effect using the Mashup ideation method by IDEO.

The workshop aims to guide the participants on the steps detailed on the Mashup ideation method of IDEO.

Participants will work in groups and will be guided on IDEO's 4 step Mashup process and will end with a Cereal Box design activity and sharing of the created ideas.

IMPORTANT - As places are limited, please register specifically for this session. Also, please register for day 2 of LAST Conf, if you wish to attend the 2nd day.

You can also read more about the sessions in this blog post. If you are a developer with more experience, you might like to consider Agile Dev Immersion - Refactoring.

Get ready to Level Up your agile developer skills. Inspired by Code Retreat, we have run a similar session at LAST Conference for the past few years. We have felt that it's Important to support learning in technical disciplines that are extremely important in agile software development.

This is an intensive practice event for developers, inspired by the Code retreat movement. It focuses on the fundamentals of software development and design, including pair programming, test-driven development, OO and functional programming techniques, and new languages. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of 'getting things done', the format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.

This event is beginner friendly. However it is also suitable for those who have already attended similar sessions as we will be creating a tenpin bowling scorer rather than solving Game Of Life again. There is also a concurrent workshop for Refactoring legacy code that is aimed at more experienced devs.

Following the opening session, The Agile Developer Immersion workshop will take the remainder of the day, with breaks synchronised with the main conference. You will also be welcome to attend the end of day drinks!

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.

Design Council's 'Double Diamond' model requires teams to shift between divergent thinking and convergent thinking with regular cadence. But what does that actually feel like and how do we do it?

In this session we'll play some Improv games together that prime divergent thinking (creating options), convergent thinking (making decisions) and the pivot point between the two.

This is a participatory session with a pinch of theory and whole lot of game playing.

In this session we will cover a brief introduction to the research by Kegan and Lahey where they discovered that behind each of our habits is a strongly held belief that not only keeps us in our groove, but also fights any change that threatens the status quo.

We will discuss why personal growth and increasing our mental complexity is so important for agile and business transformations in today's VUCA world to succeed.

We will create your Immunity To Change Map which is a simple way to bring to light the your personal barriers to change. We will start by outlining your commitment to an improvement goal. Then we will sketche out the things that you are either doing or not doing that prevent progress towards the achievement goal. The Map then identifies competing commitments, as well as the big underlying assumptions behind those competing commitments.

The objective is to pinpoint and address whatever beliefs and assumptions are blocking you from the changes you want to make.

You will leave this workshop with a better understanding and tools to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

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.

It’s 2018 and Agile working has become the new Way of Working. Once considered the territory of the reckless and sloppy, now most of the free world is considering how they can implement these better ways of working into their teams and orgs.

We've spent many years helping teams move with agility and learn to adapt, to lose low value processes and amplify their performance through these ways of working.

A constant thorn in the side of teams transitioning to these ways of working, is the baggage of OLD ways of working, in particular in Traditional HR processes that plague many teams. Through frustration, we started blogging about the Future of Work where we could ditch concepts like Performance Management Reviews and boxing people into rigid Job Descriptions. We wanted to see if we could spark some interest in trying different approaches that were more aligned to our 'Agile mindset'. For organisational agility can only really be achieved if we truly value individuals and interactions over HR processes and tools.

Our blogs garnered much interest and had companies like REA Group and MYOB reaching out to get involved in How Might We reinvent traditional HR approaches for a workplace of the Future. We even inspired the formation of a Meet-Up in the Netherlands!

Join with us at LAST conf where together we will design a new experiment to Unbox people from the Job Descriptions, and to Free People from the inhumanity of Performance Management reviews.

It's never been easier to work and collaborate with people anywhere in the world. That's really important as ways of working evolve, because not all of the best talent is located in the one place.

In this session I'll share some insights into how our hybrid remote friendly way of working works at Envato as well as share some of the challenges we have had and lessons learnt.

Management and managers have not gone away with the advent of Agile.

Old-fashioned carrot and stick management may have worked wonders back in the early days of industrialisation, but is woefully inadequate for undertaking complex knowledge work in an uncertain and volatile world.

At the other extreme, dropping all structure in favour of radical self-management — mocked as "everyone gathering around a campfire singing kumbaya" — doesn't instantly lead to effective coördination, let alone organisational success.

In this workshop we explore the state of the art of management with a mix of design thinking and facilitated discussion to uncover rich insights and perspectives into the nature of management, and what a re-boot could look like.

Let's level-up management!

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.

We seem to try to foster a mindset of continuously and relentlessly striving for improvement with mainly one practice: retrospectives have been our default and often only continuous improvement tool for years. I certainly used to think that retrospectives were the most important ceremony and as a coach I used to consider them as my main tool to drive improvement.

However, retrospectives are often disjointed from each other. The insights of one retrospective might be lost right after the end of it or until they are rediscovered in a future one. In addition, if we need to wait for the end of an iteration to look at improving, then can we really talk about continuous improvement?

In this talk, I want to look beyond retrospectives and explore which other tools (Toyota Kata, Improvement Boards, etc.) and other concepts we can inject and explore to foster a continuous improvement mindset. I will present my own journey by sharing experiments I conducted and am planning to carry out, what has worked for me but more importantly what hasn't and where I failed.

Language sets the tone for change, but we continue to use the same tired language that we have been for years. You know the language, that dialog, those words that fill the pages of Linked In, airline magazines, and 'modern' management speak. Meaningful change continues to eludes us; and in the end, if we don't change our language, our dialog, our words, we're just waiting to fail (and not the good kind of fail!).

Join me for an interactive discussion of my top ~five words / phrases that I believe cause more harm than good. We'll discuss why they're an issue, and I'll suggest alternatives that may help guide you onto a better path.

Active listening, as the name suggests, focuses on how we listen as humans in a workplace setting and how we can use these skills to our advantage. Anne-Maree has been facilitating in-house sessions for Xero AU examining how the practice of active listening can help teams and individuals to openly communicate, enhance working relationships and ultimately save time.

Posing the question "can you find your voice, by being a better listener" Anne-Maree has been investigating how the outdated ideas of active listening can be enhanced using techniques from the arts industry to be used as a tool to help strengthen our tech teams. Anne-Maree will share her discoveries from working with over 200 participants over two years at Xero AU - what worked, what failed and where to next and what can you do right now to embrace this technique.

As organisations have become more agile and try to build “high-performing” teams, they have started to hire for cultural and team fit. As a result they search for people who can collaborate and are team players; who are willing to develop a deep trust in each other and in the team’s purpose; who freely express feelings and ideas; who engage in extensive discussion; who are adaptable and embrace change and who are comfortable managing constructive conflict towards a better outcome.

There are however, many people who do not meet that criteria, and for various reasons, may struggle to meet that criteria in the future.

Everyone brain is wired slightly differently and not everyone’s wiring fits the mould described above.

Does the exclusivity of the above criteria result in certain people missing out who could have significant positive value.