Culture has a huge part to play in moving a team to high performance and the leader of the team plays a critical role in creating that culture. Sam uses the voices of the diverse scaled agile team he led for 2 years from their entries in his leaving card, and shared how the key themes of their feedback, energy, caring and fun came together to create a culture where team members feel valued, trusted and able to do their best every day regardless of their cultural background or which team or company they work for.

The craft of Agile Coaching fundamentally requires deep, insightful, meaningful communication. In everyday execution, this typically involves a coach and the coachees having a conversation, or dialog. However, there are other ways that an Agile Coach and their coachees can connect – nonverbal communication.

Explore the different aspects of nonverbal communication in the domain of the Agile Coach! This workshop overviews nonverbal communication in Agile Coaching and provides a starting point for developing this critical skill.

What is that magic that makes some teams bubble and fizz whilst others just fizzle out?

Why do some truly soar when others stumble and fail?

In Agile, we talk about nurturing high performing teams, but what is the formula for high performance?

In this session we’ll explore the traits of success and learn some inspiring lessons from a real life Champagne team to help you and your teams find their winning edge!

Agile has become all the rage with corporate leaders. Agile transitioned in the last two decades from something mainly of interest to software developers (and, initially, only a small number of those) to a major concern for CEOs and senior executive teams. Who these days doesn't want their business to be agile?

The Agile mindset is now seen as important for almost every aspect of modern-day business "best practices". Management gurus, strategy journals and every big transformation program all extol user-centric design, rapid iterations for great product management, the importance of omnichannel customer experience and the ability to easily pivot versus multi-year plans and 500-page business cases. Not least, everyone proclaims the virtues of less "top down" hierarchy in structure, diversity and behaviour.

But in that process, have the goals of the Agile movement been co-opted by corporate leaders to align with their traditional agendas? These include maximising shareholder returns, increasing profit margins, reducing headcounts and relentless cost-cutting.

Is any of that a problem for Agile practitioners?

And, if so, what to do about it? What is your "One Metric That Matters"?

Equal Experts works with failing projects and more often than not, it is agile that is blamed as the reason for failure rather than the execution. Although many teams understand the principles of agile, some struggle to see "what good looks like" when they haven't experienced it before.

The Ball Point Game by Boris Gloger is an excellent game to demonstrate the basics of scrum; this session is a twisted version of that game that allows you to show problems that you are facing and the impact on the team and delivering value.

An interactive session which will get you all moving about but will hopefully leave you feeling energised and ready to solve those issues

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!

Forming, or Launching, a new Agile Team is a critical step that is very often skipped due to lack of knowledge, time pressure or just eagerness to get on with work as soon as possible. This workshop discusses and demonstrates the importance of taking the time to launch teams and provides hand-on knowledge on how to Form a Team. This technique has been used by several organizations in the US and Australia. The last being the 2nd largest bank in Australia launching teams in an organization of 4500 people.

Do you like green eggs and ham?

As I read these bed time stories to my son, I can't help but notice the many lessons that Dr Seuss could be teaching Agilists.

We can get inspiration from our everyday activities, such as reading bed time stories and this presentation will explore 6 lessons to grow your agile mindset.

From the experimentation mindset to making people awesome, come and explore how these stories relate to growing our Agile mindset

Cumulative flow diagrams (CFDs) can seem complicated and theoretical - something we should put off until our teams are more mature. There's a lot of mythology around them too, like how they're all about heuristics and terrifying maths (Queuing Theory anyone?). To top it off, tools like Jira, that have CFDs as part of automated reporting, actually obscure the real benefits.

Over 9 months I kept CFDs for a couple of new teams. I learned a huge amount about the teams and quite a bit about CFDs. In this session, we'll make a CFD with Post-It notes for one imaginary sprint by an imaginary team. As we make it, and when we inspect the result, we'll see that:

• Cumulative flow is just your Kanban board plus time
• Starting and maintaining a CFD is simple
• A CFD can spark conversations (AKA "coaching opportunities") within the team and with other teams

Credits: This workshop has been evolving out of some of comics I drew earlier this year that led to discussions at Agile Coach Camp, and the Lean Coffee meet-up. Thanks to Nina for your support and ideas, and to Alex for tolerating my "obsession" with CFDs.