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.

I will tell you some of the secrets you need to know to become a great ScrumMaster. Create a high-performing collaborative environment at your organization, which makes your organization more than competitive in the current complex globalized world.

This session is targeted to all leaders of Agile transformation, Agile Coaches, and ScrumMasters who understand the Agile basics but have the dream of achieving significantly better results with Agile/Scrum.

The session is based on my book The Great ScrumMaster, published by Addison-Wesley, Signature Series (Cohn) on Jan 2017.  The Great ScrumMaster - #ScrumMasterWay.

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.

How can executive management build customer-driven product teams?

Agile product development practices provide a pathway to realize the co-creation of desired product outcomes between customers and development teams. Quickly and frequently obtaining feedback on real products directly from customers give them a direct voice into their own value stream. However, orienting your teams and leadership to build and react to quick feedback iteratively is a significant challenge to any organization taking this on. This presentation will provide an overview of core fundamental techniques that bring customers and teams together. 

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.

How do I understand an organization’s culture? I draw a line.

The ‘Above and Below the line’ model. Above the line is about open and positive behaviours, below the line are behaviours that are closed and negative.

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.

Dynamic roles instead of standard job descriptions, fully cross-functional Scrum teams instead of departments, personal and professional check-ins with coaching support instead of performance reviews, personal bio pages with strengths and developmental areas, talking partners, consent-based decision making and many more practices, you name it we tried them all to create an ecosystem around our Scrum teams.

It all started with learning about team topologies and Conway’s law when we realised why we have failed to continue grow as a scale-up like the previous years. We hit a wall and that was a great time to start company wide small incremental changes that helped us enter into US market and continue serving Australian market with new products.

When we scaled up from 50 to 160 employees in matter of a year, we could see how our organisational design was hindering our collaboration, resulting in bad customer and end user experience. Our organisational silos created disconnected solutions. We were lucky to sense this early enough and get leadership support. In early 2022 we decided to run some experiments with a new product strategy and a new way of working. The experiments were somewhat successful and we decided to double down on them. And Now we are transforming our ways of working to fully cross-functional value streams from pre-sales, product design and development to customer support. We are using Scrum values, principle and practices to enable all of our previous departments and break down our silos. 

In this presentation we plan to share some of our learnings and also failures, in the hope to inspire change for your teams.

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. 

The aim of this interactive session will be to challenge participants’ thinking about diversity, accessibility and inclusion and provide some practical tools and approaches to help address barriers and biases and make their teams truly inclusive. While Catherine and Brady have a particular interest in disability inclusion, the approach we will be taking you through will be equally applicable to all types of diverse teams.

Catherine and Brady are both active members of Telstra's Employee Representative Group, Telstrability, as well as having experience as coaches and in the accessibility field.  

I want to present to the audience the product ownership, entrepreneurship and innovator lessons that we can learn from the movie "The Founder". There are so many key takeaways (pun intended) from McDonald's speedy service system, solving customers' problems innovatively, applying to work context and thus knowing how to build high performing teams. The session also covers traits to learn from Ray Croc (the protagonist) of the movie and apply as product owners at work.

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.

Walt Disney’s vision started as a 20 year old in the early 1920s. It began with Mickey Mouse and cartoons and moved into theme parks and movies before his passing in 1966.

Have you ever wondered how Disney became so successful all around the world? You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that the same model that worked in the USA was replicated across the world.

But Walt didn’t use the same model. He experimented and adapted based on the customer response and feedback from every project. He scaled Disney in a way that speaks to his visionary leadership and desire to make life fun for everyone.

In this talk you will hear the stories of Disney including their failures and how Walt Disney led and fostered an experimental and learning culture that empowered his Disney team members to deliver to the vision he had as a 20 year old.

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. 

The number of organisations adopting agile continues to accelerate - with agile being the 'default delivery method' for teams in many organisations. However what is less clear is why so few organisations have managed to scale beyond agile delivery into agile organisations. Unfortunately scaling beyond 'delivery' is critical to realise the benefits from scaling agile. Through this interactive conversation, hear some of the key lessons learned as we took agile from a teams through to thousands of people and teams. Join us as we explore the constraints, challenges and ideas that inhibit us moving agile beyond the teams of teams to organisations.

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.