Along with shared goals, tools, and boundaries, psychological safety is a pre-requisite for a truly self-organizing team. Research shows that if you can create psychological safety for your teams, they will be more creative, willing to take risks, and speak their mind — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs and reduce project risk.

But how do you cultivate psychological safety on a team? Is conflict ever ok? This workshop will give participants the chance to practice exercises for building safety in a fun setting. We'll focus on what safety is and isn’t, how agile leaders can support it using a learning mindset, and learn several team exercises for cultivating safety. We’ll also introduce one method for measuring psychological safety over time.

Strong cultures help people support one another, share their passions, and achieve big goals. And such communities aren’t just happy accidents - they can be purposefully cultivated, whether they’re in a company, a faith institution, or among friends and enthusiasts.

But what makes a belonging culture? How is community changing in America? Author and executive consultant Charles Vogl discusses these questions and introduces fundamental ideas from his book, “The Art of Community”. With wisdom distilled from 3,000 years of spiritual tradition, Vogl will help leaders build loyalty, strengthen identity, and create meaning within their culture.

We will discuss

• 7 elements to create belonging
• How to make culture meaningful
• How to attract the right members

It's inevitable, and almost unavoidable, that Professionals of all skill-sets and experience will encounter "coaching up" situations. In this session, I will review three coaching techniques that can be used in Sr Leader and "coaching up" scenarios. These techniques will provide participants with new/alternative ways to prepare for, engage, follow up, and reflect with Sr Leaders. These techniques are heavily based in the core values of openness, courage, and respect and rooted in the fundamentals of cultural and human interaction.

Implementing a product roadmap in an Agile way can be tough. Roadmaps are often written as a document that isn’t easily accessible. This leads to a variety of issues. A good agile roadmap should allow for agile practices such as daily standups and planning. They should create high visibility and transparency, operate with low overhead, and provide the right information to the right people at the right time.

In this talk, Chris will share how he’s implemented a Roadmap Wall. He’ll show how to incorporate the roadmap components into a highly visible and actionable format. The roadmap wall has multiple benefits and will:

• give leadership and executives visibility into how their business objectives influence features, story backlogs, and priorities
• leverage delivery teams to understand technical feasibility tradeoffs
• show the options available to satisfy competing customer needs
• demonstrate a clear picture of how business objectives link to customer needs
• provide near real-time information for decision making

To realize these benefits, we’ll leverage a variety of familiar tools. Chris will show you how to use a kanban system to manage business objectives and OKRs. You’ll learn how using an opportunity solution tree clarifies the customer’s need when roadmapping. He’ll show you a new way to use story maps when detailing features, improving communication and planning.

In the end, you’ll walk away with a new method for visualizing your product roadmap, giving your team better decision-making information.

This session is not only for current and aspiring Scrum Masters but also for People Managers, Development Team Members, Product Owners, Project Managers, and Leaders.

The Scrum Guide defines what is expected of a Scrum Master. When you read it, I bet you react like "that's a piece of cake!" But when you actually do it, many of us come to a realization that it's really, really hard. (That's what happened to me!) The Scrum Master job is hard because much of it has to do with humans, one of the most complex beings in the universe. Humans are intelligent; humans have emotions; and humans are unpredictable. Just going through the motions does not cut it. Even if you approach with the best of your intention, matters could backfire on you anytime. Borrowing "You might be a redneck if..." from a comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, Tomo will present behaviors of a great Scrum Master and those of a "not so good" Scrum Master. Then, he will take you through why the great Scrum Master's behaviors make her great and how they contribute to building a high performing team and helping the organization be more effective and productive. Finally, he will share tips and tricks that help Scrum Masters grow into greatness (for example, powerful questions, 3 levels of listening, facilitation tools & techniques, etc.)!

This session will give current and aspiring Scrum Masters what to focus on for career development and people in other roles a concrete idea on what qualities to look for in a Scrum Master.

There will be a handout for participants to take home with.

A common question - "How do we even begin to change our traditional waterfall approach to Agile?" – may invoke responses such as, "we just need training", "create self-organizing teams", "setup a transition team", “SAFe”, etc. But those don’t get to the heart of the question. We need to get leaders to understand the “Why” and the "How" in order to help insure a successful transition and provide the proper support for their teams.

This session directly answers both the “Why?” and "How?" questions, by focusing on 2 key concepts and concrete practices, that leaders/managers need to learn and apply.

To do this, we start by helping them understand the context for agility and equipping them with new "agile glasses" that change the way they see and think about Agile. We equip them with 2 new "lenses" through which they can:

1. Visualize the problem domain(s) that exist in their environment and understand the relative level of complexity and uncertainty represented in their projects or product delivery efforts, using the Cynefin framework and VUCA modeling. Understanding these can help to provide better context for decision-making and mitigate the risk of taking a "one size fits all" approach to product or project delivery.
2. Visualize a multi-dimensional planning model, often referred to as the "5 Levels of Planning", that breaks the pattern of big up-front planning and wasteful change control processes, common to waterfall, by reinforcing the practice of continuous planning. This centers on getting them comfortable with key techniques associated with an adaptive approach, rather than a predictive approach to planning.

Many leaders view Agile as simply something that their teams need to learn and/or something that training alone will solve. The reality is that most agile initiatives fail due to a lack of leadership engagement (connection) because leaders aren't given the knowledge or tools to help them adapt.

If this describes you or your managers/leaders, then this session will help answer the question of “how do we get started…?”

Most organizations want to build cohesive, aligned teams who remain engaged over time and in turn, deliver excellent results for the organization. Unfortunately, many are still buying ping pong tables and beer coolers as an attempt to develop cohesion among their workforce. What science tells us is that true team cohesion is derived from alignment, shared values and the right blend of personalities and skills.

As experts in psychology and organizational culture, we use scientifically validated tools to assess culture, personality and team dynamics. Assessment is the first step. Taking action to (re)build your team is next and unfortunately, often mishandled. Join us to learn how teams can align and define themselves, as well as select for fit.