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!

In today's world, if businesses aren’t more agile in the way they execute on their strategies, they risk over investing on initiatives that won’t result in the future growth they seek.

In this talk, we will discuss and share stories from organisations driving towards holistic business agility, and present a simple framework that can help organisations better check the performance of future growth strategies, and act earlier when it looks like those strategies are not going to turn up.

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)

Given that Kanban is more than just "Post-its on wall", getting started is often misunderstood and leads to shallow implementations that don't give you much bang for your buck. In this talk, I will give you a brief introduction of how to get a Kanban implementation underway effectively using a technique that has been tried and tested worldwide. We will look at STATIK - the "Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban". As we unpack it, you'll see that it can be very helpful in getting your Kanban system started in the right way and will help guide the conversations that you need to have to get started.

Agile was coined in 2001, building on techniques and methods from the prior 10 or more years. We know that (smaller) software projects are more successful with agile delivery methods than with staged approaches like the SDLC. So why is it that 18 years after a better was was identified that managers struggle to adopt agile in a meaningful way.

This is a facilitated discussion - there are as many answers as there are people! So with the late afternoon timeslot - let's get together and have an interactive chat - with the intent that we all leave with some useful ideas, tools and techniques that we can apply when we get back to the office ...

Mindfulness is such a buzz word at the moment. I will talk about what it really is and explore practical techniques that help to make us more proactive and better at responding rather than simply reacting to our experiences in everyday life. It is a simple way of becoming ‘present in every moment’ to face circumstances openly and directly. This presentation can help you with:

• Understanding your stress triggers.

• Making plans and organising ahead to cope with daily pressure effectively.

• Learning 3 mindfulness techniques you can walk away with.

In this talk Ruma and Jay will share seven habits of highly effective teams, based on their work at Envato. They'll also share some tips to help build the habits.

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.

Everyone thinks they are a good at communication, but... how many times have you been at an event talking to someone you really didn’t want to talk to? Been sold to by someone who didn’t get that you weren’t interested?

These are examples of bad communication and they all have a few things in common, they weren’t efficient and they weren’t effective

.They didn’t go into the communication with the right mindset and the right preparation

Also, sorry to say it, but your own communications probably suck too. But after this talk you’ll have a leg up on your competition: you’ll know your communication sucks... and you know how to fix it.