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

Find Your Edge with a fun quiz

You hear lots of big words at conferences but can you use them in a sentence?

"Are you taking Holacracy and the Dark Arts this term, Hermione?

"We need to talk about CYNEFIN"

"Does your partner like the Monte Carlo method?"

This light-hearted talk tests your knowledge of tricky vocabulary words and concepts.

Lean and Agile come with their own languages. Learn these words quickly. Once politicians start using them it's too late to impress anybody.

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!

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.

The best storytelling might be the one that you experienced yourself.

Let me tell you the story of how a 500-employee company completely changed its structure, lead by the employees' impulse.
After 10 years and an average of 20% organic growth every year, it was time to change, for the organisation to keep growing.

Originally, the teams were composed of senior & highly skilled consultants, divided into 3 industry-focused departments.
But over time, consultants started feeling frustrated being stuck in one department, working in 1 industry, on the same types of missions.
The company turnover reached a peak and in 2014 the executive team decided to address the problem.
More than half of the employees gathered to answer the question: how should the organisation be organised, in order to fulfil both business and consultants needs?

This talk will be about how the company organised a bottom-up conversation to invent and to collectively design their very own great place to work.

More than the organisation model itself, the talk will emphasis on the collective design process of the organisation based on a clearly stated problem, on the core principles on which the Tribes lie on and on the benefits that have been observed after 3 years of operation.
Greatly inspired by the book "Tribal Leadership" by David Logan, the employees ended up organising themselves as Tribes of expertise.

Agile adoptions involve a huge number of change decisions that are made based on mental models. Unfortunately such mental models are usually invisible and many of them are them are flawed.

"More software projects have gone awry from management’s taking action based on incorrect system models than for all other causes combined." - Jerry Weinberg

Drawing Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) interactively as we have conversations is a powerful way to share mental models for better informed decisions about change interventions.

In this hands-on workshop we use a richly interdependent world imagined by Dr Seuss as the source material for practising causal loop diagramming. Credit goes to Don Gray for this idea (Phoenix AZ, 2010).

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." - Dr Seuss

Stories are an amazingly powerful communication tool. They sidestep our rational brain before crash tackling our limbic system and putting our amygdala in a headlock (see what I did there? I just told a story).

Humans have used stories for thousands of years to communicate. From the earliest creation myths to modern podcasting. Stories grab you, drag you in and implant their message deep in your brain.

The only place we don't use stories to communicate is in business where we are told to "stick with the facts", "take emotion out" and "keep it professional".

Let's change that. Let's put the emotion back in and give ourselves a communications edge through the amazing power of stories.

"I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths." - Martin Seligman.

In this session we explore the merits of the psychological construct of strengths, and how they influence the growth and performance of individuals and teams.

Financial Industry in Australia is facing its biggest challenge from a regulatory and compliance perspective. According to Boston Consulting Group, the average bank spend approximately 40% to 60% of its change budget on regulatory and compliance programs, to this point,one of the major banks in Australia announced in Feb 2019 to its institutional investors that a whopping 64% of their investment was now “put against regulatory and compliance (amounting to about $700 million).”

Agile approaches are known for being evidence base and feedback driven vs assumption based, their relentless prioritisation enables focus on 20% of the change that delivers 80% of benefits. Agile focus on outcome vs output and fosters innovation culture.However, Traditionally, the perception for regulatory programs is that using agile approaches for such programs are risky, ineffective and will result in noncompliance.

This might mean that 60% - 70% of delivery spend in the coming years in Australian Financial Industry will revert back to traditional project management approaches and away from Agile approaches!

In this talk, we will bust some myths about using agile approaches to effectively deliver regulatory programs, explore two case studies from two different financial institutions and discuss how using agile principles and a tailored scaled methodology have delivered better regulatory outcomes, improved customer experience and reduced change and run costs of regulatory programs in these financial institutions.

At the end we will equip the audience with some take-aways including principles, methods and practical advice on how to tap into this major opportunity to deliver better regulatory, customer and commercial outcomes in running regulatory programs.

We will also share some tips for the agile practitioners to build the desire and the awareness at the senior level and the hot buttons that are effective with leaders to consider Agile as being appropriate for these types of projects.