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.

"Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name"

As coaches and practitioners of Agile we see role anti-patterns everywhere lurking, sometimes quietly sleeping and waiting to kill (the momentum!) of our teams.

Have you met the Mr.Frost a.ka. the Frozen Middle Manager? The "Busy Bee-ast" so deep in her hero culture she has become a bottleneck and a crutch for the team. What about Hydra, the 9-headed PO, who can't make up his mind on his 10000 requirements. He comes with an extra technical head that takes joy on the fact he still has code access. The head occasionally makes code changes to "help" the team with the backlog without their permission.

This talk is about these monsters. The monsters around us and potentially within us.

We will know them, discuss them and identify how we can equip ourselves and the teams we work with to battle their evil rather questionable forces. More importantly in this talk, whether living around us or living within us, we will uncover how we can help guide the monsters to the right path.

‘Industrial Revolution 4.0’ and ‘exponential change’ are two concepts that are creating a lot of buzz lately, and for good reason. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and Internet of Things are being adopted at a staggering pace. Platforms companies such AWS have lowered the barrier to entry, and are enthusiastically supporting organisations to experiment and propel forwards into a new way of doing business.

At DiUS we are fortunate to have a front row seat as this wave of change arrives. With our in-house specialists in areas such as AI and IoT, we have formed broad cross functional teams - including engineers, experience designers and agile delivery leads - to help our customers solve their business problems using emerging technologies.

Through this talk I will provide insights based on case studies of DiUS's recent project experiences. We'll contrast the dynamics with the digital software world that many of us are accustomed to working within, and highlight the constraints introduced by factors such as hardware manufacturing, acquiring training sets for machine learning, and navigating the complex systemic challenges associated with entering immature markets. Finally, we will discuss what we as a community need consider as to how we apply the agile practices and mindset in this new context going forward.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Does the question "Can I give you some feedback?" strike fear into you? You're not alone! We've probably all been on the receiving end of what someone has called feedback but which we know is anything but. We may well have also been given the proverbial "sh*t sandwich", which most certainly is not palatable! This sessions aims to remedy the situation by examining what feedback is truly meant to be and how to apply it appropriately.

Feedback is all the rave with both management and Agile, yet it is so poorly understood and, unfortunately, so badly practiced. We know for organisations and individuals to grow that feedback is essential, but we rarely stop to reflect on how to do this effectively and in a considerate way.

This session will explore the fundamentals of what is genuine feedback, why it is valuable, and where, when and how to provide it in a way that creates desirable outcomes.

Using a simple model of feedback, we will share personal experiences where feedback has and hasn’t worked, and the learning obtained from these situations. With some light role playing, we’ll also experiment with the delivery of feedback, exploring the patterns and anti-patterns of common scenarios you may encounter in the workplace.

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

Is your organisation formally embracing the agile way of working with the same existing organisational structure and it is creating a lot of frustration?

Agile organisations need effective structures to support the value creation from an idea to the value delivered to customers. How people, resources and assets are coordinated within the organisation are fundamental for an Agile transformation and designing Agile organisations will require managing trade-offs due to the inefficiencies that can be created in each model and by following these 5 tips (Think Systemically, Get Inspiration, Create Maps, Improve Continuously, Be Adaptive) you will be able to succeed in your Agile Transformation.

Cutting through the crap and providing the essence of what it means to be Lean. This presentation was inspired and reviewed by the "Godfather of Lean" Norman Bodek.

Yes, I have to admit that I am a "Lazy Trainer" because you will be the active creators of your own learning experience to learn how to teach, instead of the outdated approach "Trainers talk - Learners Listen".

Have you ever participated in a training or workshop and after few days you don't remember too much of it, you don't know how to apply what you learned or you feel that it wasn't effective?

The answer is because usually learners are passively sitting watching Powerpoint slides, listening the trainer to talk but they aren't learning too much due to the outdated approach.

This session is an introduction to the famous "Training from the Back of the Room" from Sharon Bowman. This approach encourages people to be active creators of their own learning experience through a four-step model for engaging learners called the 4Cs:

• Connections: Connect the learners to what they already know
• Concepts: Share new information in multisensory ways. hearing, seeing, writing, etc
• Concrete Practice: Learners actively practice the new skills
• Conclusions: Learners summarise what they have learned

Using the Training from the Back of the Room I can guarantee that you will have highly engaged learners that will do most of the talking, allowing them to learn by doing.