“Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.”
— Dr. Alistair Cockburn, co-author of the Agile Manifesto.

“When encouraging getting back to the center of agile, I found I kept emphasizing four things:

– Collaborate
– Deliver
– Reflect
– Improve

The nice thing about these four words is that they don’t need much explanation. They don’t need much teaching. With the exception of “Reflect”, which is done all too little in our times, the other three are known by most people. You know if you’re doing them or not.”

Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.”
— Dr. Alistair Cockburn, co-author of the Agile Manifesto.

“When encouraging getting back to the center of agile, I found I kept emphasizing four things:

– Collaborate
– Deliver
– Reflect
– Improve

The nice thing about these four words is that they don’t need much explanation. They don’t need much teaching. With the exception of “Reflect”, which is done all too little in our times, the other three are known by most people. You know if you’re doing them or not.”

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.

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.

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.

This is essentially the same session that I did at the recent Scrum meetup. The presentation material is here:

https://www.slideshare.net/DanielPloeg/scrum-and-kanban-92219317

I will need to go through the material a little more rapidly for the timebox and perhaps restrict questions.

One of the Larman's law of Organisational behaviour is "Culture follows Structure".

"Culture/behavior/mindset follows system & organizational design. i.e., If you want to really change culture, you have to start with changing structure, because culture does not really change otherwise. By the way, this is an observation in large-scale;

Structural change involves not only changing the groups, roles, hierarchy, and policies but also includes changing the physical structure. In this presentation, I will share the real life case study of an organisation, where I saw changing slight physical layout of the organisation, brought a huge cultural change.

This presentation is filled with real life pictures taken during the transformation process so that the attendees can go back and try some of these simple layout changes bringing the change.

Many of these pictures were taken as part of Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS) experimentation process.

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!

Agile Mindset is highly talked about and prized amongst agilists. Claims for its benefits range from 10x improvement, can’t be agile without it and requires organisational and cultural change to achieve.

Social psychology presnets a different view where mindset is a cognittive toolkit used to understand and taking action in a complex world. This defintion implies everyone posesses an agile mindset.

Is agile mindset a nirvana state which will enable you to levitate and be at peace with the world? Is it what is constraining everyone from achieving life, love and happiness. Or is it something more practical, humanistic and useful.

Looking through the lenses of behavioural and social psychology we will understand what mindset is, how it works and how you can become more aware of how yours and others mindset are operating within the agile domain.

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.

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.

The communication tools of Liberating Structures will teach you how to facilitate the discussions your org needs. I am going to demonstrate how to use these techniques in the workshop. And all the attendees are going to be fully immersed and ready to wield their new knowledge the very next day at work.

If you are a recent convert to LS, come learn a new set of techniques to continue the journey. If you are new to LS, this will start you on your path of facilitation mastery.

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?

Do you wish you were doing your best work but find that somehow you can't make it happen? Ever wondered why you keep repeating the same conflicts at different workplaces and with different teams? This session will delve into the specific areas of your life that, when unblocked, will allow the best version of yourself to operate more frequently. You’ll come away with a combination of mindset and action points to put into practice.

Despite progress in our agile processes at work, the people piece remains the pacesetter of change. How do we help people move flexibly through complexity? How do we work generously with our colleagues and tap into our collective intelligence? What control over the pace of change can you personally have by learning more about yourself? Dr Amy Silver shares her expertise in creating the psychological safety, trust and effective communication necessary for us to achieve elevated outcomes, despite the discomfort of our VUCA workplaces (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous).
Proposed

In many organisations, ScrumMaster is seen as just a team facilitator and played part-time by an already busy team member. If there are full-time ScrumMasters, in many organisations they are rendered ineffective as change agents and capability builders. Their capacity is filled by a heavy load of co-ordination, stakeholder meetings, progress tracking and other project management tasks have been left to ScrumMasters in the absence of a project manager or the implementation of effective Scrum alternatives.

Many organisations continue to creating conflicts of interest by combining ScrumMaster and Project Manager into the one role. Or undermine the Development Team and Product Owner roles by attempting to blend ScrumMaster with a Delivery Manager role. Or they just get rid of ScrumMasters altogether have a sparse scattering of seagull “Agile Coaches”. Why? …well Spotify!

Are any of these wise moves?

At the heart of this appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what the ScrumMaster role is all about. Also a failure for ScrumMasters to explain their role in the context of the new mindset and demonstrate its worth to teams, Product Owners, management and other stakeholders.

Agile is now considered as a "must-have methodology" to be successful in developing software. Even, it starts extending to non-software businesses and its practices and principles are spreading out to many teams and organizations.

But beyond the buzz-words, we often race to apply solutions and miss the true values beyond naming, frameworks or tools provided by Agility.

This session is an Lightning talk to foundation ideas that underpin Agility. It revisits some basic fundamentals that have dropped out of the modern agile discourse when leading the change toward better ways of working. Beyond the buzz-word that Agile became, let remind us what be Agile truly is.

It will be particularly useful to agile consultants, scrum masters, iteration managers and change agents driving the agile agenda.

This session can be adapted to a longer Agile 101 format mixing introduction of fundamentals and debat/experience feedback.