According to neuroscience - human Mind Power system consists of easily learned techniques that help you focus and direct your thoughts, and the first technique you’ll learn is visualization.

‘Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity.’ Using visualization techniques in any gathering help to inspire creativity, focus and shared vision.

During our day to day working environment - especially in Agile WoW (irrespective of the frameworks we use) we have lot of opportunities to plan, strategize, brainstorm, innovate and generate ideas. These will always be incomplete without the application of Visualization techniques. Visualization techniques can be successfully applied to identify common goals, understand customer expectations, collaborate with individuals (multiple teams), and identify areas for continuous improvement.

Many a times, key events in our workplace are conducted in vaccum where people feel they are not engaged or disconnected or feel there is no value out of these. We can turn the table around completely by giving the dimension of Visualization using Visual Metaphors.

Agile methods have provided a framework for improving innovation, but there has been a missing piece - Visual metaphors (influenced by Innovation Games ideas) offer ideas, tools & practices to aid the innovation process at its most critical point - product management, particularly visioning & roadmaps identification. Key to innovation is creating collaborative, interactive, visually-oriented, fun, business-driven-environment for people.

In this interactive workshop participants would be experiencing some of the popular & widely used Visual Metaphors that can assist in their Agile journey through which they can experience the power of these tools to generate better visibility, collaboration opportunities, sense making and continuous improvement opportunities.

Where can it be applied?
• Business Review Meetings
• As a tool for prioritization
• Planning, Backlog refinement and Retrospective meetings
It is time for some ‘hands-on’ and ‘minds-on’ to know more about innovation through visualization.

We all know that #Facilitation is a key buzz word. A difference in understanding facilitation begins with an awareness of the difference between facilitating and leading. It has been said that leadership is something you do to a group, while facilitation is something you do with a group.

Facilitator assist group[s] as they work together toward achieving group goals, and in most instances do not interject their own personal opinions or agenda. By expressing their opinions to the group, facilitators risk discouraging others with differing opinions from speaking.

They remain alert to group dynamics and encourage challenging reflection while maintaining respect and safety within the group. Although facilitators may help guide a discussion, they also recognize and foster the groups' own ability to lead itself. Thus unlike authoritative leaders, good facilitators relinquish control to the group and promote open, democratic dialogue among group members.

In our workplace - at some point of time, we have all experienced the elephant in the room—a situation probably no one wants to discuss/admit openly or obvious truths that are unaddressed.

When these issues are not addressed, it can create uneasiness, not trustworthy environment there by leading psychologically not safe workplace. More importantly a toxic work culture settles in that can wreak havoc throughout the organization thus limiting the ability as a team to grow and create a learning and innovative organisation.

In this session (more of engaged workshop) , we will be using Liberating structures for people to share their experiences and learn from others, while also providing them a safe environment to discuss the elephant in the room (their version) they might have experienced in their workplace.

By the end of session participants may probably come up with some ideas to address and tame their elephant.

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland founders of Scrum mentions that Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products through (as mentioned in Scrum guide).

In my experience when people who are newly introduced to Scrum they always had challenges in having better understanding of Scrum which is most of the time due to in-adequate training, support or guidance received during their transition path.

Most of the times I found that people are engaged and carry better understanding when new concepts are taught/explained/experienced through 'fun' & interactive learning.

Through this simulation activity we will cover below aspects through interactive,fun, engaged & collaboration based exercise

• Sprint
• Timebox
• Business value in product delivery
• Sprint Goal
• Definition of Done
• Product Vision
• Scrum Events
• Scrum Values (Openness, Courage, Respect, Focus, Commitment)
• Sprint Backlog
• Empiricism

The activity consists of 3-4 rounds (all of equal duration) where team would be going through the journey of product development & execution in Sprint fashion.

Any change fails predominantly because of 2 reasons – because it tries to change the way WE work; and because it tries to change the way I work.

WE denote an organization – with all its culture and structures. And if any change interferes with the organization’s existing belief system itself, it treats that new change as a virus – as a threat to its existence and way of living – and kills it. Much like a bad organ transplant.

But, there is also an equally, if not more, important “I” part… “How I work”. This is purely an individual decision. And these individuals, who are the most complex system within an organization. How people will respond to change is difficult to predict. It’s all about understanding the perspective of the people affected by the change.

We need to transform how our brain thinks in order to transform how our organization works.

We all live in a VUCA world. Organisations have realised that to thrive and navigate through this VUCA world, they have to create a culture of learning and innovation.

As per research a mere 1 per cent, feel “extremely confident” voicing their concerns in the workplace in crucial instances. In another study, 93% of people say their organization is at risk of an accident waiting to happen because people are either unwilling or unable to speak up.

As much as we talk of creating a speak up culture, it is equally imperative we have a culture of listen up for people to feel psychologically safe.

Leaders in an organisation play a very important and critical role in creating this environment where people feel free to innovate, think out of box, share ideas, experiments without any fear of repercussions. Leaders need to agile, be the catalyst and exhibit the core competency of being empathetic, being curious and more importantly being self-aware and have the right intent.

In this interactive session we will explore on how leaders/to be leaders can become the catalyst in creating the culture of innovation and learning and provide a safe environment.

"Keep your Spouse Happy"

Are you wondering if this is at all possible??? Yes this is!!! Personal Agility helps us to manage our relationship better, it helps us to collaborate with our spouse effectively thus making our life happy, peaceful and celebrating.

My talk will involve participants with lots of tips and tricks along with activities. It is a light-weight session dealing with the most important aspect of our life. This is a practical aspect of Being Agile rather than Doing Agile.

Let's explore many more interesting side of Agile.