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!

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.

Every organisation has legacy systems, and people who know "where the bodies are buried" -- hidden aspects of dependency, communication, process flow and whatnot which every system relies on to function. These are the dirty secrets swept beneath the rug of "business as usual", and they represent risk and friction alike.

As Peter Drucker is famously quoted, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it", and the first step towards measuring it is to be able to describe it. How can you do this with gigantic, complex, intertwined systems whose origins are buried in mystery and legend, whose very operation and continued existence is dependent, frequently, on specific people, high priests who may not want to share their arcane knowledge?

This session provides evidence-based techniques for uncovering this complexity, visualising it in a machine-friendly but fundamentally human-centric manner, and using the results to drive real organisational awareness that facilitates conversations and change.

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.

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.

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 2018 and Agile working has become the new Way of Working. Once considered the territory of the reckless and sloppy, now most of the free world is considering how they can implement these better ways of working into their teams and orgs.

We've spent many years helping teams move with agility and learn to adapt, to lose low value processes and amplify their performance through these ways of working.

A constant thorn in the side of teams transitioning to these ways of working, is the baggage of OLD ways of working, in particular in Traditional HR processes that plague many teams. Through frustration, we started blogging about the Future of Work where we could ditch concepts like Performance Management Reviews and boxing people into rigid Job Descriptions. We wanted to see if we could spark some interest in trying different approaches that were more aligned to our 'Agile mindset'. For organisational agility can only really be achieved if we truly value individuals and interactions over HR processes and tools.

Our blogs garnered much interest and had companies like REA Group and MYOB reaching out to get involved in How Might We reinvent traditional HR approaches for a workplace of the Future. We even inspired the formation of a Meet-Up in the Netherlands!

Join with us at LAST conf where together we will design a new experiment to Unbox people from the Job Descriptions, and to Free People from the inhumanity of Performance Management reviews.

As more organisations are introducing agile practices, the pressure is on change and project leaders and practitioners to deliver solutions faster, and apply more iterative approaches. This is taking place in an environment of complexity and relentless, continuous change.

At the same time, the pressure is on all businesses to be not only nimble and responsive to what the customer wants, but to also be sufficiently innovative to create a positive employee experience and carefully consider the people who are impacted.

We can look to other human-centred disciplines to help us put our people back to the heart of how we deliver change.

Human Centred Design (also known as Design Thinking) enables us to take a deeper user-centred approach to developing products and services for our customers and employees.

Find out how to integrate the principles of Human Centred Design into your change plans and interventions, for optimal co-creation and more meaningful engagement.

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.

The communication tools of Liberating Structures will teach you how to facilitate the discussions your org needs. I am going to demonstrate how to use these techniques in the workshop. And all the attendees are going to be fully immersed and ready to wield their new knowledge the very next day at work.

If you are a recent convert to LS, come learn a new set of techniques to continue the journey. If you are new to LS, this will start you on your path of facilitation mastery.

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

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?