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.

Agile coaching is not easy and if you're a coach, you'll hopefully know this already. And if you've ever been coached before, you might recognise some of the habits that are explored in this interactive workshop.

In our experience, there are some coaching habits that do not reflect true coaching. There are coaching habits that are detrimental to the person being coached.

As agile coaching becomes more and more popular, there is a tendency for 'coaches' to jump on the bandwagon without the understanding of what a coach truly is. 

This is not a lecture on what coaching is. We intend to explore the topic in this workshop through interactive activities to help you feel and reflect on what coaching is and is not.

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.

Many scrum masters will use metrics to help guide their teams. Measures such as velocity, burn downs, burn ups, cumulative flow can provide useful for planning and feedback on how a team is progressing. However metrics can do so much more, they can help the team tell their story, influence decisions beyond their immediate reach and provide creative insights on how the team works and what makes them unique.

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. 

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.

Facilitation is both an Art and a Science. The Science is the logical preparation and delivery, with the Art being how you navigate and adapt that delivery to the participants in the moment.  Sam will share his ten simple steps from his 20 years of facilitation experience on how to prepare for and deliver a memorable facilitation experience. Expect an interactive, fun session that we set you up for success working both virtually and face to face

'Smart people learn from their own mistakes; Wise people learn from others.'

Having worked as a Business Analyst in Scrum teams for a while and obtained my shinny Scrum Master certificate, I was trusted to play the role of the Scrum Master, to lead, guide, and support a new Scrum through their Agile journey. 

Did I enjoy it? Yes. 

Did I make mistakes? You bet I did.

Did I learn from my mistakes? I hope I did, at least from some of them :)

The talk is a lighthearted look back on my time when leading a new and inexperienced Scrum team, the mistakes I made, and the lessons learned. 

Are you worried about the latest change? No, I will get by with a little help from my friends..

Could you embrace the change? Mmm, I'm gonna try with a little help from my friends

"Could you embrace the change? Mm, I'm gonna try with a little help from my friends" looks at social networks, how they can be leveraged to assist change and communications, and lessen the anxiety caused by the upheaval of change.

When considering any change initiative within an organisation, people and how information flows need to be front of mind. Too many leaders inflict change onto their people, leading to increased anxiety within their employees. By dismantling the social networks that have existed for decades, they remove the anchor that has been the lifeblood of communication and collaboration. Social networks are how the work actually gets done and the support mechanism for their people during periods of change. 

How many times have you experienced software or services that add little value? They might be usable, but do they actually serve a purpose and create value for you?

In this session we will explore what Human Centred Design (HCD) is, and how it can enhance Agile Product Development. We will bust some common myths by showcasing practical case studies of how HCD and Agile blend together like a fine wine.  We will look at how HCD and Scrum has been scaled in highly structured Banking Environments to exploring how Agile & HCD was used to rapidly adapt and deliver new technology and models of healthcare at the peak of the Covid pandemic.