MLC Life was spun out of NAB in 2016 and purchased by a Japanese insurance business with a dream to create the best standalone digital life insurance business in Australia. One year in the CEO realised Agile approaches could help the business deliver on its purpose, however he recognised a fundamental culture change was needed to make it happen.

How would we enable the culture change? Why by changing the system of course! A quarterly based operating rhythm won't change the culture itself, but it creates regular reflection and improvement cycle that drives change in itself.

In this talk, we'll cover two key elements: How Lani and Tim worked with the CEO to initiate the journey to agility, and how the new rhythm sparked change across the organisation.

Initiating the change

Building a relationship with the CEO and his executive leadership team, Lani & Tim portrayed the art of the possible – sharing what a healthy, aligned adaptive and agile organisation looks and feels like as well as expressing the risks if they continued with the current operating methods and practices. We reflected on past and present to understand constraints and pain points, co-designed a new operating rhythm to enable the leadership team to think and work differently and executed a safe experiment to test and learn from.

How a healthy rhythm sparks change

The change began at the top with a new operating rhythm that established quarterly goals which cascaded though the organisation. This new operating rhythm was not imposed, however high performing teams quickly identified the new pattern and adapted their operating cadence to match. This created a different way of thinking across the business, where people focused on the vision, purpose and strategy, but optimised for adaptability and value creation.

Do we know our stuff?
OKR Quickstart coaches and consults businesses on how to create strategic clarity, achieve audacious goals and build high performing teams. We've helped hundreds of people and businesses introduce OKR so that everyone finds crazy value out of them (not just the exec team). We've made every mistake in the book and this session summarises some of our biggest learnings!

I'm regularly asked by male peers and colleagues what specific actions they can take to help make our Technology community a safer and more inclusive place for women and minorities.

And with the rise of the #metoo movement, the conversation around gender discrimination has reached a new level of openess and transparency around what is and what is not acceptable workplace behaviour.

In this talk we will unpack some real-life horror stories from within our own community. From this we will interactively discuss ways in which all of us can combat inappropriate behaviour and stigmatise it when and where we see it. The intent of this session is to help foster a more progressive, inclusive, diverse and thriving ecosystem that we all enjoy being a part of.

The standard we walk past is the standard we accept after all.