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.

IMPORTANT - As places are limited, please register specifically for this session. Also, please register for day 2 of LAST Conf, if you wish to attend the 2nd day.

You can also read more about the sessions in this blog post. If you are a developer with more experience, you might like to consider Agile Dev Immersion - Refactoring.

Get ready to Level Up your agile developer skills. Inspired by Code Retreat, we have run a similar session at LAST Conference for the past few years. We have felt that it's Important to support learning in technical disciplines that are extremely important in agile software development.

This is an intensive practice event for developers, inspired by the Code retreat movement. It focuses on the fundamentals of software development and design, including pair programming, test-driven development, OO and functional programming techniques, and new languages. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of 'getting things done', the format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.

This event is beginner friendly. However it is also suitable for those who have already attended similar sessions as we will be creating a tenpin bowling scorer rather than solving Game Of Life again. There is also a concurrent workshop for Refactoring legacy code that is aimed at more experienced devs.

Following the opening session, The Agile Developer Immersion workshop will take the remainder of the day, with breaks synchronised with the main conference. You will also be welcome to attend the end of day drinks!

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.

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.

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!

Active listening, as the name suggests, focuses on how we listen as humans in a workplace setting and how we can use these skills to our advantage. Anne-Maree has been facilitating in-house sessions for Xero AU examining how the practice of active listening can help teams and individuals to openly communicate, enhance working relationships and ultimately save time.

Posing the question "can you find your voice, by being a better listener" Anne-Maree has been investigating how the outdated ideas of active listening can be enhanced using techniques from the arts industry to be used as a tool to help strengthen our tech teams. Anne-Maree will share her discoveries from working with over 200 participants over two years at Xero AU - what worked, what failed and where to next and what can you do right now to embrace this technique.

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.

“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.

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.

Are you a leader? Are you a change agent ? or are you the one who makes the final call?

All of this is somewhat how leadership was defined and introduced to the world. The times are changing and leaders are challenged to be vulnerable and take on roles of facilitation and foster collaboration. How do you transform yourself from being the person who was making the final call to the person who makes the final call possible?

- Demystifying leadership

- Challenges leaders are facing in fast-moving environments.

- How you frame your thoughts and come up with a strategy to help others grow and by doing that be a better leader.

- Some tools to take away.

This presentation will have a close look at what makes high performing software development teams, as well as what hinders them. It will cover each level of the organisational hierarchy starting at individual software developer, then group of engineers, full cross-functional product-engineering team, wider product-engineering department, and finish at the entire company. At each level, we will see multiple examples of teams to see what factors contribute to high performing software teams, as well as less performant teams

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.

Research into employee engagement asserts that what we want is "autonomy, mastery and purpose" not necessarily a corner office, a ping pong table, or a fancy job title.

Anecdotally though I have seen a different story where particularly those closer to the start of their career are very focused on job titles as evidence of progress.

Super-flat structures such Holacracy (where you perform a collection of roles rather than having a job title) only exacerbate this... there's really no concept of "promotion".

As managers/employers how do we attract, support, grow and retain our staff - is the answer more likely to be a giant skills matrix allowing progress through a level system than flat circles of autonomy?

Like the Vogon Guard in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, Do you sometimes want to stomp around, shout, throw colleagues, staff, or clients out of their spaceships? Is it when they are resisting all the good change that's coming along?

In the Death of Resistance (1979) Steve de Shazer decided on some conceptual violence. He murdered resistance. Resistance is just a concept and a strange one. It means the change agents and some clients are having a fight and when the change agent wins and the resistance is overcome, the loser of the fight gets to go home changed...mmm....Clearly then it is an idea that handicaps change agents.

We will explore how Solutions Focus can help you work without resistance. smoothing the path of change, with ideas and practices to take away. Let's start now by asking a question: If resistance didn't exist, what would you do differently?