Ever wondered what on earth is going in your company? Your team? The system of work? Are people acting crae-crae? Is there conflict? Are there pockets of super awesomeness & pockets of unhappiness? Are people pulling in different directions?

In this talk, I will run through my systems thinking approach and experiences to unpacking and diagnosing a company, it’s context, it’s practices and it’s people.

If nothing else, this talk may help you with making the invisible more visible and may lead you to be even more situationally aware of the context you have found yourself in!

We've all heard that digital Accessibility is the right thing to do. We probably all know it's a legal requirement. But does it really make business sense to put in the effort to become compliant? In this presentation Rick will explore and challenge some of the common justifications for avoiding the requirement - and look at how we can in fact make a very compelling case for building products with Inclusive Design and Accessibility in mind.

I wrote this blog a short while ago: https://medium.com/@justin.holland/cultivating-quiet-38cec9466feb

I feel like there are other continuous improvement addicts, or perennial impostor syndrome sufferers that feel the compulsive need to be more than they are, and do more in order to reach that unattainable perfect state of being...

And I know that a bunch of us find ourselves in a state of constant information processing & overload... thanks to the infinite information we are exposed to every day.

I have also come to believe this can be super unhealthy, and that there is something fundamental that we are losing, thanks to our perpetual busyness.

Some come and have a little chat, and reflect, about the role of not doing... and instead... being... (quietly)

The easy case for coaching looks something like this: a prospective coachee wants to change, can articulate their goals, and is matched up with a suitably experienced and competent coach, the two are a good fit, and they quickly get down to the challenging yet rewarding business of growth and change.

But what if a person (or team) doesn't want to change and would rather not be coached? And despite this an external power deems that change is needed and that coaching will bring this change about. What's a coach to do? What about the coachee(s)? What about the role of the client who's engaged the coach?

This situation is not uncommon, and bears more that a passing resemblance to what often goes on in addiction treatment. A person with a drug addiction (and often other problems) doesn't necessarily welcome therapeutic intervention at the outset. But an external authority has ordered it.

In this session we will explore the parallels between the two modalities of addiction therapy and coaching, including the applicability of the Transtheoretical Model of Change and the related technique of Motivational Interviewing.

These approaches offer insights into how to flex and adapt your coaching approach in the face of some of the most common human impediments to change.

Agile is now all grown up and is pretty much the de facto way of working for most teams, but it's proven to be a challenge for adoption at scale. Over the last ten years or so there has been a lot of trial and error figuring out how to break through the cultural barriers, political resistance and technical hurdles that large organisations present. This panel of luminaries (!) brings a wealth of experience helping many different types of organisations transform themselves to be fit for purpose in the 21st century. Come along to hear their stories, some good, some bad and probably a few ugly ones!

PLEASE NOTE: this session will be recorded live by The Weekly Reboot podcast and made available for public consumption. Your attendance will be taken as acceptance to being recorded and publicly broadcast.

A couple of years ago Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau coined the term ‘Zombie-Scrum’. What's it all about?

Well, at first sight Zombie Scrum seems to be normal Scrum. But it lacks a beating heart. The Scrum teams do all the Scrum events but a potential releasable increment is rarely the result of a Sprint. Zombie Scrum teams have a very unambitious definition of what ‘done’ means, and no drive to extend it. They see themselves as a cog in the wheel, unable and unwilling to change anything and have a real impact: I’m only here to code! Zombie Scrum teams show no response to a failed or successful Sprint and also don’t have any intention to improve their situation. Actually nobody cares about this team. The stakeholders have forgotten the existence of this team long time ago.

Zombie Scrum is Scrum, but without the beating heart of working software and its on the rise. This workshop will help you understand how to recognise the symptoms and cuases of Zombie Scrum and what you can do to get started to combat and treat Zombie-Scrum. Knowing what causes Zombie Scrum might help prevent a further outbreak and prevent the apocalypse

Using Origami, attendees will see how flow can work in a "pull system" and compare that to the way it responds to a "push system". From this simple simulation, attendees will experience how increased WiP actually slows down our ability to deliver something to a customer.

Come along and experience flow and how you can start to improve your customer outcomes, not by doing more but by doing less!

This is a practical workshop where the participants will work in two sprints to build a city using the material given to them.

The intention of this workshop is for people to understand all the ceremonies better and it also helps teams understand that collaboration and working together as a team is the best way to achieve the results.

This is going to be a very interactive workshop while teams get to learn Agile while having fun.

Value is often used when designing and deciding on what work to do next. It’s central to both Agile and Lean principles. Together we will explore the question of value and challenge each other on what it is and how we use it?

After defining some language around value and looking at some possible models on how it can be used, we will jump into a group exercise to dig deeper to uncover gaps in our mental models and gain new insights into what this value thing is and how we can use it more effectively.

Story (or, more accurately, capability) slicing is such a core and necessary practice for creating agility at team, portfolio and even organisational level. Yet it is not explicitly included in any of the popular methods and frameworks teams use such as XP, Scrum and Kanban.

Slicing heuristics are collaborative, contextual, evolving techniques for creating focus on value-generating activities, leading to delivering value sooner and with more predictability. They incorporate all of the 4 core agile values from the manifesto, and many of the 12 principles, particularly:

• continuous improvement (inspect and adapt),
• maximising the amount of work not done (simplicity and focus)
• face-to-face conversations
• continuous delivery of value

Best results are obtained if heuristics are applied for all types of work, by all of the folks collaboratively across the value chain, but they can be used as safe-to-fail experiments by individuals and groups wherever they sit in the product delivery pipeline.

From a practical perspective, they involve:

• slicing deliverables at all levels, not only "story"
• flow metrics (cycle times and variation)
• specific inspect and adapt / continuous improvement activities to improve speed-to-market and predictability
• big visible boards (ideally)

Come and learn about this powerful, practical approach to improving agility in your team or organisation from wherever you sit right now.

Hearing a lot about Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), but still a little unclear what they're about? Maybe you're hearing all the chatter and it's tweaking your interest! Well, join me for a farside chat and all will be revealed.

In this session we'll get under the hood of OKRs to understand the history, the core concepts and cut our teeth in a manner which allows us to take them back to our teams for further exploration.

At minimum, you'll walk out of the session with some clear goals for the coming quarter!

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!

Skilled facilitators help groups to collaborate effectively, generate and explore ideas, make better decisions, innovate, challenge each other constructively, and more.

In this workshop we explore three relational exercises that will help you to begin or continue to develop as a facilitator:

1. Facilitator power and presence
2. Listening as a super-power
3. Exploring perspectives without getting triggered

Practicing and refining these skills will help you not just in facilitation, but also in leadership and coaching.

The Agile Coaching Hats is a lean approach to contract with your teams and have a shared alignment that will help you to kick off the conversations with your teams on the right foot.

Usually the coach’s experience or gut feel tells which hat (Also called coaching stance) to wear for a specific situation or context. The Agile Coaching Hats leverage on that through a collaboration game that enables great conversations to meet the expectations of the team and avoid any surprises around the coach’s approach to support the coachee’s.

For many Agilist the idea of having a project manager attracts scorn and derision. The idea of having one at is laden with bad memories, mental baggage and principled objections.

So, is there a role for a project manager in an Agile organisation? There is, but it requires a different style of project manager and a project manager that thinks differently.

My company’s ongoing transition from project-based delivery to product-led Agile delivery runs in parallels to my own personal transition leading a team of project managers into this world.

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.

Due to requests and feedback, this is a repeat of last year's session for those who missed it.

How do you develop an agile mindset? You can't teach it, but you can grow it by changing your beliefs.

In this session we will cover a brief introduction to the research by Kegan and Lahey where they discovered that behind each of our habits is a strongly held belief that not only keeps us in our groove, but also fights any change that threatens the status quo.

We will discuss why personal growth and increasing our mental complexity is so important for agile and business transformations in today's VUCA world to succeed.

We will create your Immunity To Change Map which is a simple way to bring to light the your personal barriers to change. We will start by outlining your commitment to an improvement goal. Then we will sketch out the things that you are either doing or not doing that prevent progress towards the achievement goal. The Map then identifies competing commitments, as well as the big underlying assumptions behind those competing commitments.

The objective is to pinpoint and address whatever beliefs and assumptions are blocking you from the changes you want to make.

You will leave this workshop with a better understanding and tools to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

Seeking to understand how you can be a change agent in your organisation beyond Agile Team Coaching?

At this interactive session we’ll explore the world of Enterprise Agile Coaching.

Learn how to:

1. Radically interrogate your organisation’s reality
2. Diagnose the reinforcing behaviours affecting change in your organisation
3. Uncover the stories folks tell themselves that limit change
4. Implement a lean change model to fuel Agile adoption

An interactive session where we’ll play a short version of the Kanban pizza game to demo how you can supercharge your team to see great flow of work.

We’ll explore classic limiters to flow and how you can overcome these.

Expect to:

• Delve into the world of Kanban in a non-scary way
• Understand how to become a waste removal superhero
• Learn three easy metrics to fuel your team’s continual improvement