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.

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.

While we talk about rapid change and disruptions, to which we expect todays organisations shall be equipped to respond and adapt to sustain, to me there shouldn't be a second thought in applying the same principles in our professions. As an agility coach, you know there is no one approach that fits for all..

In this talk, I would like to share some of the insights on the coaching moments and how I applied the non purist approach to embed the learnings of the new ways of working. Whilst it is very contextual, I believe it is applicable to many, and share my perspective to adaptive coaching based on the context and dynamics to make it stick.

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 talk is given by an introvert and extrovert; we have discovered that we experience our working lives very differently.

The world we live and work in is biased towards extroverts. We work in open space offices, with Agile ceremonies where people need to assert themselves publicly, vocally, and repeatedly. How does this impact people who don’t display extroverted behaviour? Equally important, how does this impact our ability to harness everyone’s potential?

What can we do to make our workplaces more comfortable for introverted behaviour? How can we give people the chance to contribute and be recognised equally? Explore options to take back to your workplace and level up!

Whatever language or framework your team prefers to develop with there is no escaping requests for estimates. Estimates are needed for planning, budgeting and prioritization.

However there is a problem - our estimates tend to be wrong and sometimes very wrong indeed..

Which leads us to the obvious question: Why are we building plans on something that's probably incorrect?

In this session we'll look at why we are so bad at estimating and alternative approaches.

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.

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.

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.

“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?

* Many Agile practitioners don't have 100% free rein at work to practise Agile.

* After "failing" at Ironman with a Waterfall approach (multiple times), I experimented with Agile principles over several years, where I had 100% free rein to iterate, continuously improve and adapt. Ultimately, cutting 4 hours off my time and finishing 3rd in Ironman Australia 2017 in my age group.

* This is significant because at 5'2" and without any physical advantages, it was Agile principles (working smarter, not harder) that made the difference.

* You'll learn which principles had the biggest effects, and how you can apply these at work (or in other areas of your life).

Have you ever learnt something that, at the time, you thought would be life-changing, only to look back at yourself a year or so later and realise that you hadn't changed in the slightest? Why is that? Why is change so hard?

In this workshop which was presented at 1st Conference, we will show some of the neuroscience behind learning and change and explain why change is so hard, and provide some concrete techniques about how to learn more effectively and change your behaviours to put those learnings into practice.

Many organisations have benefited from the transformational practices of Lean and Agile at the team level, but how do we apply the learnings within larger enterprises that are tasked with building complex solutions that potentially require hundreds of people to develop?

The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles and practices for Lean, Agile, and DevOps that helps large organisations with this challenge. SAFe was released in 2011 and is currently the most popular method for scaling Lean-Agile.

If you’re considering whether SAFe is right for your context, then there are four things you should know about SAFe.

Organisational structures are an important part of any agile transformation and their design implies managing trade-offs due to the inefficiencies that can be created in each model.

In this session we will explore organisation structure designs for large organisation and the compromises or inefficiencies when organisational design patterns are applied to certain existing circumstances and the most common workarounds and solutions.

Some of the inefficiencies that are going to be explored in this talk are linked to dependency management, performance management and prescriptive approaches.

We will understand the importance of the Value Stream Mapping for effective organisational design and common workarounds to solve the issues created by the designs such as Bear Hug, Pre and Post PI Planning, Pop-up squads among others.