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.

Tired of struggling to get approval and buy-in for agile improvement ideas you know are good? Action forms are the answer. Turn every "no" into a "sure, why not?" Using the Cynefin action form will gets your idea across the line.

In this hands-on session we'll use the action form and design safe-to-fail experiments that leaders and teams will feel fine about trying. You'll wonder how you ever got permission to try anything without it.

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. 

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.

When it comes to Agility, finance is late to the party and often seen as the enemy. After all, finance is all about numbers and rules, while agile and business agility is all about flexibility and adaptability.

However, if agility is supposed to deliver better customer outcomes, greater ROI and improved value, then shouldn't finance be expected to be leading from the front. Why is this not the case?

I sought answers to this question by speaking with many of our customers' finance departments. What I found was that there is a lack of understanding of what financial agility entails, how it can benefit both the department and the company and importantly, why it is that Agility practitioners and finance teams need to work together more closely in order to bridge this gap to realise the full potential of agility within an enterprise.

Do you think an executive playing the Product Owner role, remote self-designing team workshops and a multi-team Product Backlog Refinement session is fictional? Do you think that LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) is non-existent in Australia? Think again. It is currently happening locally in a 3,000 person financial services organisation.

You are invited to a candid "fireside chat" with Findex Digital Scrum Master Sam Peacock and independent consultant Rowan Bunning. This is an interactive session during which you can submit and upvote questions for Sam and Rowan to respond to.

Moderator Alistair Thomas will start with some questions aimed to clarify:

• how to get leaders to saying “let’s go” on a radical change in an informed way,
• the advantages of feature teams over component teams,
• the advantages of a broad product definition and whole product focus,
• how a single Product Owner can work with several teams without becoming a bottleneck,
• a more agile alternative to analysts gathering and handing off requirements and
• how Sprint-to-Sprint agility can be sustained and leveraged with many teams.

Come prepared with curiosity. The insights you gain may help you to navigate how your organisation can optimise for product agility and highest customer value at multi-team scale by leveraging good Scrum.

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.

Ever had that problem where leaders in your organisation have different views on what dynamics create great agile teams?

We often talk about the transformational leadership skills required to enable agile transformations, but what about the frontline agile leaders leading teams and shipping products?
As Agile becomes commonplace, a new breed of leaders is required that embrace the modern 21st Century leadership practices that sit behind great Agile teams.

This talk pulls together a range of key leadership models and concepts from traditional leadership models, lean Toyota practices and Management 3.0 to provide a set of practical tools and techniques to help you create frontline leaders that can help you build that leader-leader environment you thirst for.

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.

Whole Foods Market adopted agile and changed the way groceries were delivered/ bought and processed.  With my journey as a development team member, the first scrummaster, team coach, agile coach, Enterprise Coach and Executive Enterprise Coach at Whole Foods, join me in reviewing the story, the wins, the losses and the learning from an 8 year agile journey. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

"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!