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.

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

What's winemaking got to do with an Agile mindset I hear you ask. Do keep reading!

I've been fortunate enough to work with and learn from Agile teams and organisations since 2012. And since 2017, I'm proud to say that I've also jumped into the winemaking industry.

In this talk, I'd love to share my learnings from working in these two diverse fields and draw some parallels between my two passions - Agile and winemaking.

Practices change across different complex domains (like software engineering, medicine, agriculture etc.) but the principles are universal. In this experiment, we take the guiding principles from an eclectic range of practices, including permaculture, Buddhism, medicine and science, and then apply them to our own work with Lean-Agile teams and organisations.

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.

Everyone thinks they are a good at communication, but... how many times have you been at an event talking to someone you really didn’t want to talk to? Been sold to by someone who didn’t get that you weren’t interested?

These are examples of bad communication and they all have a few things in common, they weren’t efficient and they weren’t effective

.They didn’t go into the communication with the right mindset and the right preparation

Also, sorry to say it, but your own communications probably suck too. But after this talk you’ll have a leg up on your competition: you’ll know your communication sucks... and you know how to fix it.