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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Software development has embraced techniques like TDD (Test Driven Development) to help reduce the cycle time between developing code and validating it works.

As application development practice evolved, we needed to respond to change faster while still maintaining our quality - the way we developed our solutions needed to change - and so did our tools.

Now that we have Infrastructure as Code (IaC) a whole new range of cycle time challenges have emerged. No longer are we building simple proof of concept systems using IaC, many of todays cloud deployments are multiple complex servers composed of tens or hundreds of servers.

In this session we take a look at the tools and practices available to Infrastructure developers to reduce the cycle time of change while maintaining a high level of quality and confidence.

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

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.

We naturally crave learning. It is an innate ability that has allowed us to survive, evolve and thrive. Science has also shown us that our brain is quite flexible and can allow us to continue to learn at any point in our lives. Moreover, the Agile community keeps spreading the mindset of continuous improvement and continuous learning. It should therefore be logical to see most organisations using this to their competitive advantage.

However, are we putting enough emphasis on growing people's ability to learn? Do we really understand how learning works? And if we don't how can we possibly tailor our organizations to foster learning?

To explore these questions, I want to look at what scientific research tells us about learning but also explore the concept of having a fixed / growth mindset and help you reflect on how you can use these concepts to create the learning organisations of tomorrow.

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.

Change is the only Constant. From CEO to your industry aspirant, those unprepared are washed away in the wave of emerging trends and technologies. Industry has witnessed multiple process and technological changes. Out of all the process and technological transformations the industry has gone through Agile has been extremely unique. With greatly increased delivery speed, quality and reliability Agile has been the go to stop for many companies, yet it also has been the most misunderstood concept.

With greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality, speed to market Agile has been the go to stop for many companies. But why do they fail in its implementation or rather Transformation? The answer is simple. Even today Agile is still considered as a process and called Agile Transformation. But Leadership should look at it as Organizational Transformation.

An organization transformation involves Leadership, Vision Strategy, Process, Tools and People transformation. In such a huge make shift leadership is the key piece driving the change, supporting and motivating entire chain below. A vision leader has like a virus. Resilient, Highly contagious. It can grow to define or destroy an organization; the stakes are extremely high. To ensure smooth transformation Leadership needs

• “I” – Insights
• “A” - Awareness
• “M” Maturity

This presentation is focused on providing real-time examples leadership can relate to and generate insights, create awareness and test their maturity to take up the challenge. Moving them from AM I Transformed to I AM transformed.

“Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.” ― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

While this quote is probably an exaggeration, it holds true for all of us at some point or another. Indeed there is something about videogames and gaming that just draws people in and keeps them enticed and addicted.

It is no surprise that concepts of gamification in many industries continue to proliferate. But what really is gamification? Where did it all begin? Is it just a buzzword or is there real scientific proof behind it? And perhaps most importantly, how can you leverage it in improving your teams?

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).
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