The idea of change scares a lot of people! The thought of being uncomfortable in a new environment freaks us out and results in us being unable to adapt. Like IQ and EQ, we need to understand the Adaptability Quotient, or AQ, to succeed in our life. Be it a new relationship, a new role in life or a new workplace, we all need to adapt. If Charles Darwin was with us today, he would have said it’s “survival of the most adaptable“. In this session we will explore what AQ is and how it’s tied to our personal mental model. Our shared activities will help you learn how to identify your mental model and make it more adaptable.

Around the world there is a global network of people who, with little fanfare and deep dedication, incubate ideas that change our world.

They are the ‘agilists’ — those who adhere to the Agile Manifesto published in 2001. They meet in small and big rooms, around tables and on stages. They help each other to make good ideas great.

If you want to be part of the agile community, this session will open the door to this global movement. With candour and generosity, the speaker invites you to join and shows you how. He reveals why you’ll love it. And he illuminates the path he took to becoming a leader in the global agile community.

You can join the agile community, too. If you are willing, you are welcome.

In this session, you’ll discover how to:

• benefit from being part of the agile community
• plan and win a speaking gig
• lead an in-house agile community of practice
• be seen as a leader within your corporation and your community

When agilists get together, they change the world. You can be part of that change.

We’ve all been there… having to sit through painful meetings and workshops that leads to more confusion, lack of clarity and frustration with a poor use of everyone’s time.

But, we’ve also been to those sessions that have been well facilitated where you think and say, “wow, I can’t believe the day has gone by so fast” and “that was a fantastic session, it really helped..!”

I want to help people and organisations have more of the latter by sharing my principles and practical tips on how to improve yourself to becoming a master facilitator – this is based on taking a human-centred approach by valuing every individual, including yourself. I’ll be using my “facilitation tree” to help everyone visualise what’s needed to always produce fruitful outcomes where value is created and people are valued.

Having good metrics to guide change is important, whether it is an Agile transformation or any kind of change within your organisation. Who is it that should decide which metrics are important? Enduring change is co-created by leaders at all levels in an organisation, and unless the vision and metrics are also co-created, the efficacy and sustainability of the change can be undermined.

This talk will offer insights around the importance of collectively understanding why something is being measured in the context of transformational change, and also the importance of creating a change community that aligns around the metrics for that change – making the change more evolutionary in nature rather than prescribed. Having a vision and metrics that are built by the change community generates greater momentum and allows the change community and leaders at all levels to leverage collective intelligence on which metrics are important to guide the change.

In this session you will learn about:

• What a change community is, why you should have one, and steps you can take to start one
• The importance of a change vision and aligning on it to enable co-creation of change metrics, as well as some useful techniques to co-create one
• Some steps, techniques and tools that you can use to co-create metrics that will guide you towards the change vision and allow your community to collectively sense and respond
• The feedback loops that ensure your change metrics keep working for you
• Ways that you can start to practice this in your organisation

This session aligns with your 'Practices' track the most. It also relates to the 'Culture and Leadership' and 'Agile Everywhere' tracks.

Have you ever struggled with creating alignment between the members of a team? What does our approach of coaching individuals leave on the table? What if we focus on interaction between the individuals instead of the individuals themselves? In this workshop, we will demonstrate coaching the interactions between the individuals to create alignment. We will use LandsWork, a group coaching activity from Organisational and Relationship System Coaching, to simulate the coaching technique - a must-have for all coaches.

Does your product owner write all the stories? Does your team complain that stories lack detail? Are you finding it difficult to move things to done? Is your done work leaving lots of gaps your customers might find? Do you struggle to break down work into small deliverable slices? Example Mapping can help!

Example Mapping is a process designed by Matt Wynne ( https://cucumber.io/blog/bdd/example-mapping-introduction/ ) and is a great way to elaborate your features in a collaborative way. Bring together your business people, developers and even your customers to build out detailed stories, acceptance criteria and examples you can run as tests. It is collaborative because everyone can work on their area of knowledge simultaneously. There is no pre-defined order so you can work with the knowledge you have rather than the knowledge you wish you had. It's detailed enough to flush out edge conditions and error states. It's high level enough to engage with customers and business stakeholders. It's fast enough to get outcomes even if your team is time poor. 

I've been using Example Mapping as a very quick and effective way to start with a rough outline of the goals I want the team to achieve and come out with a detailed backlog of Stories and key Acceptance Tests. I've been using this over 5 years now both in-person and online. I love how easy it is to engage people at the level their comfortable with. We can walk through example by example or we can start by outlining high level outcomes.

In this workshop we will learn about Example Mapping, how to apply it to your backlog to create some great stories the team can execute. We will practice applying it together to see how we can turn a few simple ideas into a detailed plan.

When growing an organisation it is easy to follow established patterns for the organisational structure and end up with a situation with line managers, middle managers and executives.

But when we did a comprehensive review of our organisation and culture, we found that most of our line managers loved mentoring and growing people, but struggled balancing that with the more administrative and managerial tasks like leave, reviews, recruiting and assigning work.

And so we set out to overhaul our organisational structure into one where we have people dedicated to growing team members through mentoring and coaching and people solely responsible for organising and delivering work.

This session is about sharing insights in why, what and how we did this change.

The New Zealand Ministry of Health was operating in mainly waterfall ways prior to the outbreak of CoVID-19. As the agency responsible for most of the government response to CoVID-19 in New Zealand, they were forced to adapt quickly (using agile practices including scrum) in order to literally save lives. As a consultant, I have helped what was the Ministry of Health, and is now Te Whatu Ora, to deliver various outcomes both before and during (cause we're not out of the woods yet) CoVID-19, so have been in a unique position to observe the changes to how they have worked and what they're doing to leverage the changes made through CoVID to create a more resilient organisation for the future. 

In this talk, I would like to bring a few nuances that makes the frameworks like SaFE or Spotify attractive for the organisations to implement compared to Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS).

I would touch upon areas like:

1. Structural change - Team org
2. Change in HR policies
3. Leadership education
4. Product Perspective 
5. Decentralisation 

A fundamental and critical skill for any agile coach or leader is the pursuit of the fine art of "Zero F***s Given" ZFG. In contrast to how ZFG is often described on the interwebs, ZFG does not mean "I don't care"! ZFG is a mindset that embraces a myriad of concepts: fear, empathy, objectivity, neutrality, bias, drama, emotional intelligence, and more! Understanding the philosophy of ZFG will empower you to embrace this powerful skill so that you can become a more effective agile coach and leader. 

"You better bring it!

Oh, it's already been broughten!"

The purpose of cheerleading is to support and encourage their team to achieve peak performance – they give the team the extra oomph to carry them over the goal line! The cheerleaders not only support and celebrate the wins, they also encourage the team when they need to push through their trials and tribulations. Cheerleaders build the hype of the team’s fans by creating infectious energy – just imagine your stakeholders hyped up because of your awesome team!

In this session, an enterprise agile coach and an award-winning former professional cheerleader will take lessons from professional cheerleading and apply them in an agile team context.

They will cover the 4 pillars of agile cheerleading – synchrony, chants, formations, and emotions and explore the fundamentals and benefits of an agile cheer so that you can super-charge your teams.

BE! AGILE! BE! BE AGILE!

Metrics defined outside the Scrum team often put unnecessary pressure on the team, causing dysfunction. And yet, metrics can be  both safe and useful. When metrics are co-created by the team and the business, the process of measurement provides clarity and focus for the team. It also makes improvement visible to everyone.

Over the last few years, I have used measurement as a way of coaching teams to generate and foster genuine and lasting cultures of continuous improvement. I call this approach Leading with Measurement because it can be used by leaders in any role - coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, managers and developers - to foster real positive change and better agile.

I have distilled the approach down to some basic principles and simple methods that I'll share in the session. Come along and find out:

• What really happens when we measure a team - the good, the bad and the ugly
• Practical ways to shift attention away from harmful metrics and towards good metrics for the benefit of everyone (the business, the team and the end users of the products we make)
• How to co-create good metrics that provide insight and create opportunities for genuine (measurable!) improvement

In the workshop, we will put the methods into practice. We will co-create some safe and effective metrics for generating real improvement in our teams. Along the way, I'll be  sharing real stories and results.

Technical agile practices like Test Driven Development and Pair Programming come from Extreme Programming and can make a good team into an amazing team.  But, especially in large organisations, software teams often have little opportunity to learn these skills. Coding Dojos are a fun, safe way to develop technical agile skills and also the culture of trust that is so critical for high performing teams.

Many Scrum Masters and coaches don't come from a technical background - or maybe it's been a while since we did any coding - so it can be daunting to even suggest that software teams should practice TDD, pair programming, mob programming etc. However, we don't need to be brilliant coders to run a Dojo. We can learn just enough and provide the context for the team to learn together.

Can you remember the last time you were courageous? Was it at work?

How are you as a servant leader, helping your teams to have conversations that matters, promote the flow of ideas and spark innovation?

In this workshop we will:
- Explore what courage is all about and why it's a core value in the Scrum Guide
- Learn pro tips that you can use straight away in your teams and conversations
- Get a chance to practice using Celebration Grid (https://management30.com/practice/celebration-grids/) to facilitate a courageous conversation

The Scrum Master and Product Owner roles (along with the developers) are well understood and described in the Scrum Guide. As organisations begin to mature and scale, a lot of anti patterns start to emerge with these roles, as well as adding traditional roles (such as change, release and project management) and additional agile roles (such as Agile Coach and Release Train Engineer). Given the simplicity of the three roles in the Scrum Guide for a single team versus the challenges of scaling, do we need to take another look at the key roles to help solve the confusion that so many organisations continue to face?

Join us as we ponder the question of whether we have outgrown the roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner or whether we just need more clarity on what these roles actually mean in the context of true business agility. 

Do you start initiatives in a complex domain by attempting to answer “what are we going to deliver and when”? Do internal stakeholders negotiate a scope and date agreement with development and then expected teams to keep “on track” to deliver the agreed deliverables by the agreed date? Do developers cut corners in order to achieve this?

In this session we will explore how the scope and date-based “Contract Game” is misaligned with Agile as well as Scrum. Also how game theory can help us raise awareness how this competitive game results in many negative outcomes – most of which are opaque to stakeholders – when reality does not go to plan (inevitable in a complex domain).

We will also outline how to lead your organisation to the co-operative game aligned with Agile methods. This includes short experience summaries on organisations who have done this.

You can expect to walk away with new language and a practical Scrum-based approach for eliminating the Contract Game so that empiricism and agility can thrive.

Have you ever walked into a meeting and wished it won’t be boring and people will talk to each other? If your answer is “yes”, then maybe you could be the person who lightens up the environment with some appropriate and impromptu jokes. In this session we are going to learn what a sense of humor is, the benefits, the similarities between a stand-up comedian and an Agile coach, how stand-up comedy teaches us to be socially aware, and develop better EQ. Can a good sense of humor be the x-factor to build a resilient culture? Are you curious now? Come and explore the answer!

What does dial up Modems, Nokia 5110's and bad hair cuts have to do with Agile? Well for me, that's where alot of my inspiration and passion comes from.

Growing up in the Western Suburbs of Sydney in the 90's taught me a thing or 2 about being resourceful, experimentation and building an Agile mindset.

This talk will be a fun and engaging talk exploring how you can start/continue your Agile journey with loads of 90's references. 

I don't know about you but I have always found it ironic working in IT where everything we do is about enabling a business to change, yet our natural skillsets mean that we are often poor change agents. We're good at using our left-brain, analytical, logic-based thinking to analyse, design, deliver and maintain systems and technology, but generally poor at the right-brain, creative, emotion-based thinking required for helping people through the change. 

We need to be excellent at helping the business transition through the changes that tech enables. I will explore a range of approaches, sourced from Agile, Lean, Neuroscience, Organisational Development and Change Management practices to give you new tools to become a 'human-centered' change agent.