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.

A couple of years ago Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau coined the term ‘Zombie-Scrum’. What's it all about?

Well, at first sight Zombie Scrum seems to be normal Scrum. But it lacks a beating heart. The Scrum teams do all the Scrum events but a potential releasable increment is rarely the result of a Sprint. Zombie Scrum teams have a very unambitious definition of what ‘done’ means, and no drive to extend it. They see themselves as a cog in the wheel, unable and unwilling to change anything and have a real impact: I’m only here to code! Zombie Scrum teams show no response to a failed or successful Sprint and also don’t have any intention to improve their situation. Actually nobody cares about this team. The stakeholders have forgotten the existence of this team long time ago.

Zombie Scrum is Scrum, but without the beating heart of working software and its on the rise. This workshop will help you understand how to recognise the symptoms and cuases of Zombie Scrum and what you can do to get started to combat and treat Zombie-Scrum.Knowing what causes Zombie Scrum might help prevent a further outbreak and prevent the apocalypse

Do packaged frameworks for organising the system of work help or limit performance, outcome and relationships at work? Do frameworks give you an edge or take it away?

Where is the balance between mandating a framework to get started as compared to allowing for a model of work to emerge within the local context of a social system?

We define serious realism as being a cynical optimist with a dash of science and open mind, compassion and open heart, activism and open will and a sense of fun and play.

We take a "relatively" scientific approach to create "almost" comparable outcomes in order to find "less" biased questions to help you find your edge. The participants will also sharpen their tools and techniques that help them on their real life problems at work. This will give confidence to find and apply their edge.

In this immersive social experiment, participants will experience different approaches to social systems change and their effect on the outcome, performance and people in teams or organisations. Participant will also experience different possibilities to organise the work, build relationships and achieve outcomes.

Together, we will find our edge by asking better questions that open new possibilities for work, community and our relationship to those.

Come and experience sciencing, arting and funning in a bundle

Its increasingly common that teams are distributed across multiple offices, in different countries, all working on the same product or project. But how do you make this work well? There seem to be a number of readily accepted tenants of conventional wisdom to help deal with leading distributed teams, from seeming good ideas “teams must be co-located” to ones that are purely economic “offshore teams can be run at a far lower cost”.

This talk will challenge the conventional wisdom around leading distributed teams. I will explore how I have structured distributed teams at finder.com, and explain where and why I deviate from conventional practices (teams are not co-located or bounded by geography for instance). I will show how ignoring or modifying these can produce much better outcomes, happier, more productive teams, and a great culture of distributed work.

I have over 10 years experience leading geographically dispersed teams (in the US, Australia, Manila, and Europe) and growing successful high performing tech teams. I recently set up teams in the Philippines and Poland and will be drawing on that experience for this talk.

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!

"Everyone is already doing their best; the problems are with the system … only management can change the system." —W. Edwards Deming

Everybody is talking about Systems thinking these days. But what is "systems thinking" really? And how can we practically use it to get tangible benefits in solving complex organisational problems? Value stream mapping is a very powerful systems thinking tool used to give us a bird's eye view and help us identify key components of the system/organisation that need to be changed in order to optimise the whole.

In this session, we will run a simulation of an actual value stream mapping workshop to solving complex organisational problems such as DevOps transformation. After a short presentation, the facilitator will help each table to identify a value stream, then the teams will work together and map their value streams on wall pads.

You will take away practical tools that you can use the next day in your organisation that will impress everyone and provide tangible benefits for your team/company.

In this session we will explore the following concepts:

- Lead time

- Process time

- Percent complete and accurate

- Activity ratio

- DevOps

- Systems Thinking

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.

Lousy meetings.

We have ALL been there.

It's like being stuck in a torturous, seemingly inescapable hell.

This session will help participants to learn some short sharp 'ice breaker' games to liven up and brighten even the worst of meetings.

Find your meeting facilitation edge by coming to our session, we promise it won't be hell.

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

Collaboration over Contracts we say. But... how many times our contracts weren't designed to promote true collaboration? and, how many times our contracts are not linked to any specific constrain or achievement so we cannot confirm if we are succeeding by any tangible means? In my years of experience, most of them.

So Yes, Collaboration over Contracts. But... Contracts before Collaboration!

Normally we use to work on a fixed salary or daily rate basis but, is this the way to leverage best possible collaboration? In my context the answer is a clear NO. That's why I've been experimenting with different approaches since I became an Agile Lean coach back in 2010.

Applying to myself what I advice to my clients is one of my key principles so here I came up with different new formats of Win-Win-Lose-Lose contracts, designed to make sure I’m always putting the collaboration with my clients before the contract itself. Those are normally pretty simple 1-page contracts based on the principles of Full transparency, Short cycles, Results driven approach, Autonomy and Freedom.

In this session I will share these models with the audience, together with their key mechanisms to succeed and the constrains that we have to consider before taking these leap of faith and trust in ourselves.

I wish you enjoy this session and get some good take-aways from it. Meanwhile, I´ll appreciate your comments to my proposal to be able to tweak and improve it if required. Thanks

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.

I had been sitting in a few team retrospectives and hearing the same old tired pattern of "what went well, what didn't, what can we improve". The teams were bored, I was bored, they were just doing mechanical Scrum. Retrospectives are such a powerful tool to drive continuous improvement, but what i was seeing was a stagnation and the true value of this event was being lost.

End of the Sprint was coming up so as the enterprise agile coach, I thought I'd provide some of my favourite patterns and ended up providing my 20 Scrum Masters with a playbook to accelerate and reinvigorate learning and improvement, retrospectives and ideas as well as links to where to find more.

Would love to share these patterns with you, discuss the pain points we were experiencing and how we were able to reinvigorate this event and improve overall quality of our delivery. It will be a workshop so would also love to hear your favourite patterns so we can share them with the group in this workshop and help inspire our teams to strive for activating real improvements.

How can an Agile Coach figure out when an Agile “Transformation” is going wrong? Are there signs that they might see, heed, and take action upon? Of course, there are!

Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, these warning signs can be hard to see. Let’s explore some of the more common, and frightening, warning signs that your Agile “Transformation” might be exhibiting. We will discuss transformation provider types, frameworks, keywords, and other anti-patterns that might be signs that THE END IS NIGH.

This session will review common themes and help familiarize you with the warning signs. Armed with this new knowledge, you will be able to plan as appropriate, to help navigate your organization through potential impending doom.

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.

Who among you have that uneasy feeling during each and every scheduled performance appraisal? Supervisors tend to dislike it, employees are repelled by it. And yet it is still practiced. We Agile practitioners do not lack the values and principles to drive ourselves to excellent performance. And yet get de-motivated by company policies and practices that operate under false assumptions. Performance appraisals try (and fail) to provide solutions to specific areas in the world of work. Worse, it risks driving a culture of disenfranchisement and direct towards individualism over collaboration. What do we do instead?

Less time waste, more USEFUL meetings!

The Liberating microstructures (K. McCandless & H. Lipmanowicz) are a repertory of workshop formats that enable collective intelligence and enhance trust among the participants.

Inclusivity, collective intelligence, collaboration, innovation; these words resonate a lot in today's business world where companies struggle to keep up with growing complexity.
And that's why every change agent, leader or facilitator needs to know about Liberating structures.

This 90-minute workshop will be an interactive overview of the liberating microstructures, making every participant aware of the diversity of Liberating formats available.
After a quick introduction to the subject, the participants will investigate the framework to finish with the key principles behind the liberating structures.

Successfully tested in the past (ROTI of 4 at LAST Adelaide)