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.

Scrum is a great framework but there are many ways to do it poorly. For example, the average IT worker is interrupted every 15 minutes, which equates to 2000+ interruptions for a Scrum team every sprint. This severely impacts 'flow', team productivity and often reduces happiness and increases stress. It's unthinkable on a production line, yet too often the norm in offices.

I conducted original research with Scrum teams in Australia as part of my Master of Management thesis (and achieved an A), to understand the causes, patterns and impacts of these interruptions on the team's effectiveness and their happiness. And, how mature teams control interruptions rather than let themselves be controlled by interruptions.

Attendees will play a short game to demonstrate how destructive the context switching from handling frequent interruptions is.

My talks are always highly practical and I provide 3 takeaway actions for teams to improve their 'flow' and reduce interruptions.

I delivered this talk at LAST Melbourne in 2018 and based on strong attendance, would like to deliver it in Sydney this year.

AI as a technology is being adopted by more and more organisations to solve interesting and challenging problems recently thought unfathomable. However, our experiences are that while the principles we have used over the last 20 years in Agile and Lean still apply, the practices might not. While sharing some of the opportunities AI provides, I will share some of those experiences and learnings with you.

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"?

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.

Why did the iPad make it but Google Glass cost google $900million?

In this new world of unicorns, upstarts and silicon roundabouts, it's easy to get caught up it making it, but how do we effectively and responsibly innovate?

In this interactive session, we will look at case studies over the last 80 years of some of the biggest product flops; what went wrong and which companies went on to recover. The intention is to explore what not to do; the untold stories of success and leave with a refreshed understanding of why failure is critical in the pursuit of innovation.

Join me to create you own innovation equation to take into your work, own ideas and everyday life.

This is a test of conf engine