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!

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!

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. For a beginner friendly version of this session see Agile Dev Immersion - Fundamentals

Get ready to level up at refactoring at LAST Conference's first Refactoring Developer workshop. Inspired by Code Retreat, we have run a similar session, for the basics of agile development, 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.

Too many Agile and DevOps initiatives are stymied by code bases that are hard to change and understand.

While disciplined teams who rigorously practice pair programming, test-driven design (TDD) and other technical Agile practices avoid producing new legacy code in the first place, cleaning up a pre-existing mess is notoriously difficult and dangerous. Without the safety net of excellent automated test coverage, the risk of breaking something else as you refactor is extremely high. Also, code that wasn't designed and written with testability in mind makes it really difficult to get started. So most don't even try ...

In the Refactoring workshop developers learn how to build an initial safety net before applying multiple refactorings, and have lots of fun along the way!

What's it all about?

We will be following a variation of the Legacy Code Retreat format. Working with legacy code (provided!) participants first learn how to build an overarching electronic safety net using the Golden Master Testing technique, before applying a range of refactorings too dangerous to otherwise attempt (but totally worth it).

As with regular code retreat, we will practice pair-programming, rotate pairs, and continue to practice rigorous unit test automation, and share our learnings.

Unlike regular code retreat you do not have to delete your code at the end of each sprint, and the TDD cycle is a bit more relaxed.

Following the opening session, Refactoring 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!

What is Legacy Code?

Legacy code has beed defined "as code without tests" and equivalently "code you are afraid to change". Unfortunately far too much "professional" code is legacy code.

Why should you come?

• We need developers and architects with the skill to continuously refactor and redesign, and managers and leaders who understand the value in doing so
• Come and practice and share some of the fundamental technical skills needed to safely refactor
• Lift developer engagement and work satisfaction by investing in technical quality rather than drowning in technical debt

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.

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.

Agile Mindset is highly talked about and prized amongst agilists. Claims for its benefits range from 10x improvement, can’t be agile without it and requires organisational and cultural change to achieve.

Social psychology presnets a different view where mindset is a cognittive toolkit used to understand and taking action in a complex world. This defintion implies everyone posesses an agile mindset.

Is agile mindset a nirvana state which will enable you to levitate and be at peace with the world? Is it what is constraining everyone from achieving life, love and happiness. Or is it something more practical, humanistic and useful.

Looking through the lenses of behavioural and social psychology we will understand what mindset is, how it works and how you can become more aware of how yours and others mindset are operating within the agile domain.

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.

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

Visualisation is at the heart of Agile, Lean and many great ways of working.

However, without discipline your visualisation and respective delivery becomes a freakin’ mess!

In this session I share some of my learnings over the years since my presentation on this topic at LAST 2013.

You’ll learn how to take your visuals to the next level and drive higher motivation, fun and delivery performance in the process.

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.

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?