Consumers, like never before, have real choice about where they purchase products and services. Organisations large and small need to adapt quickly, or die.

Leading to a number of Australia's largest organisations deciding to 'go agile', in an attempt to tackle this VUCA world head on.

But is putting a nice, customer-centric, wrapper around a whole organisation transformation what agile is actually about?

During the 30 minute discussion Simon will discuss and provide a perspective on:

• Some of the key design principles that need to be considered when undergoing an agile transformation

• Balancing empowerment and control in search of alignment

• Where change like this works; and where and why it doesn't!

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.

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!

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.

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.

There are some awesome prioritisation methods out there.

However, which one do you choose and use?

Often they can be so unwieldy and time consuming that at best all you can do is practically just use one.

In this session, we'll explore how you can quickly utilise multiple prioiritisation methods against each other in order to facilitate healthy discussions.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.

Lean has become a decorated (*cough* bullshit *cough*) prefixed buzzword plastered on to every latest (and not necessarily greatest) industry trend. Steve Mitchell will strip back the fluff and guff to what Lean really means.

Leadership is challenging, but what if it could be as easy as walking? Or is walking really that easy?

Drawing upon almost a decade of experience in improvisational theatre and two decades in the knowledge sector, this interactive workshop will provide novel insights to common domains. It will make you think and feel differently about leadership in the workplace.

What does an ordinary communication look like from sender and receiver’s perspective? How much is and isn't being said when you are having a conversation? How do you recognise the unspoken and understand a complete perspective?

Agile folks know that communication is the backbone of a Agile culture. A team’s ability to work through adversity and navigate healthy conflict is what separates high-performing teams from mediocrity. Aside from that, learning to trust your intuition is important to learn at any point of your career.

This workshop will introduce one of the techniques from Integral facilitation that aids navigating conversations and improve common understanding in between participants.

The technique embeds four integral quadrants into conversation, thus making it easier to explore different perspectives.

Drawing on a core teaching of theatrical Impro, in this learning-by-doing workshop we will delve into the fundamentals of status, status transactions, and explore how recognising and hacking status can enhance coaching, facilitation, and collaboration.