The Agile version of Cards Against Humanity. You may have seen versions of this on the internet, but rest assured this version has been enhanced to yield a minimum of 156% more awesomeness. Relatively fresh from its stellar debut at the 2017 Xero Unconference!

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!

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.

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.

Most organisations now understand why they need insights on customers’ needs and behaviours to drive customer-centred outcomes within agile teams. But many organisations struggle to convert insights from their quantitative and qualitative research into value that actually gets delivered to customers.

And whilst many organisations are employing researchers, and building agile teams, organisational behaviours—at a team level, and also at a leadership level—often get in the way of those teams converting insights into value, leaving teams feeling lost at sea.

But there are behaviours and principles that teams and leaders can put into practice to create an culture of effective experimentation based on insights. By being more human, we can enable our teams to deliver efficient value to customers, and even within the organisation itself.

Come on a swashbuckling journey with us, as we show you how to navigate the oft-treacherous waters of organisational culture, to help your teams reach the mystical location we call Value Atoll.

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.

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!

I've been on a journey, and I've come to know that apathy and ambivalence are an awful place to be.

I want to talk about big life changes and the uncertainty that comes with them.

We will look at navigating this kind of journey in your own life. How curiosity and self-awareness can lead to meaningful change that will better equip you for new and exciting things in your life.

We will also discuss the importance of healthy company culture as the undercurrent that enables all of this.

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.

It's never been easier to work and collaborate with people anywhere in the world. That's really important as ways of working evolve, because not all of the best talent is located in the one place.

In this session I'll share some insights into how our hybrid remote friendly way of working works at Envato as well as share some of the challenges we have had and lessons learnt.

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.

Over the years REA has mastered the art of delivering products following the lean startup principles, however, working with a bank to create a home loans product was a different ballgame. Functioning in the Build-Measure-Learn cycles requires a fundamental change in the way people (or organizations) think and work.

In spring of 2017, REA made a big leap from being purely a media organization to venturing into financial services. As a result, there is now an innovative product offering in the Australian home loans market that allows consumers to sort out their home finance needs while they are still in the market looking for their dream home, all from the comfort of their living room couch.

This talk is about how to shape up your products with decisions based on data, metrics, and evidence over personal opinion.

We spend a lot of time talking about our delivery team mix and structure, we put time into reviewing their progress looking for room to improve and we scrutinize their backlog and metrics. But what about the other team. The one regularly forgotten. In most places the team that doesn’t practice what they preach.

The leadership team.

In this session we look at the function of IT leadership and how it can benefit from the processes and approaches we strive to achieve in our delivery teams.

DevOps engineers fly from job to job doing the same things - the systems differ, but the problems (technical and otherwise) remain the same. Eventually, we ask questions not about implementation or technology, but meaning: what am I doing all of this for?

In this talk, we'll cover how we provided a converged solution (Docker cluster, monitoring, alerting, and security) from 0 to 70% of the company in three months. We'll cover how we did it - the approaches, the workflows, and the rules - but more importantly, the why: to provide an environment where the things that we produce change whole organizations and make people's lives a little better.

But most of all, how it made us a little bit kinder.

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.

Being a member of a cross-functional team – such as Front End, Back End, API, UX, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, BA – comes with problems. In this workshop we will gather our problems relating to cross functional teams and form groups to complete simplified A3 Improvement Themes (lean improvement canvas). Our purpose is to clearly identify our problems and the steps which will assist us in tackling these problems.

We will share our experiences and walk away with a set of A3 Improvement Themes complete with the first steps ready to implement at your own workplace the very next day. Personally, I will walk away with a whole lot of Improvement Themes. It’s a win-win