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.

We all dream of that utopian sprint goal. You know the one that is focussed on customer impact, shippable at the end of the increment, and created collaboratively with the team?

In this workshop, I'll share with you my approach to collaboratively crafting killer sprint goals with your teams, and provide you with my canvas to facilitate it.

No matter where your team is on the maturity scale, this workshop will show you how to continuously improve your sprint goals, keep your team focussed on the customer, and measure that improvement over time.

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. 

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!

Leading transformation in your team requires more advanced "people and process" skills. It is often messy and chaotic. When what you are trying to create is radically different from the status quo, you will often get resistance.

As a change leader, you will need to find a balance between challenging and supporting your team. This requires greater listening skills and the ability to facilitate a dialogue.

The Lewis Method of Deep Democracy provides practical tools that will empower you to

It's a cautionary tale of fear and lust and pride
Based on actual events where people died (no one died)

- Mean Girls (the Musical)

Many of our industry leaders talk and write about the "passion" of product, from Jeff Patton to Marty Cagan, but how much is too much?

In this presentation we'll learn about the challenges of passionate people in work, and life, and how Product Owners can (and should!) harness that energy for good with product evangelism.

Traversing theory with story-telling & memes, the session will then culminate with an exercise to bring out your inner evangelist.

The covid pandemic has arguably been the most significant global crisis of our time, and continues to affect lives and livelihoods all around the world today.

Through this we hired teams, we learnt how to work remotely, we lost loved ones, and we struggled with those early phases of team bonding that we had in person before. For those of us working with customers who were acutely impacted, we built products like never before.

We ran marathons, like sprints.

Under this pressure and out of necessity, we had to change. Then something magical happened.

With a mix of theory and story-telling, and a healthy smattering of memes, in this session you’ll discover how through the Scrum framework you can:

• move from ‘creating certainty’ to ‘creating comfort with uncertainty’ as a PO
• design a product without a designer
• enable your team to prioritise and manage priorities, in the absence of a PO
• get right back to basics in a complex, enterprise environment for the good of the team
• reduce feedback loops with customers
• build awesome products with the team, and the customer, front and centre