Co-creating drawings helps teams enhance their systems thinking abilities by really seeing the big picture. A group of people talking around a whiteboard is an effective way to share ideas across a team. Imagine how much richer the conversation is when everyone on the team has a marker in their hand and is actively contributing! Graphic visualization is an important tool for talking about new ideas, generating insights and developing shared understanding. In a team context, drawing is a thinking tool rather than an artistic endeavour. When everyone participates in creating drawings, all team members can see how things fit together and what mental models are at play in defining the situation. And, by drawing together, the team is collaboratively creating meaningful records that are being validated and updated.

Come along on a visual adventure into how teams can collaboratively visualize ideas and make sure that everyone at the table has a voice. In this workshop, we will warm up with some basic doodling skills practice. No drawing experience is required to take part in this session: if you can hold a marker, we can teach you the skills needed to put your ideas on paper. Together we'll consider the ways that collaborative drawing can be used to enhance group work, and we will share practical activities that you can take back to use with your team for setting the stage, gathering information, and sharing stories.

“Are we Agile yet?”, “Of course we are agile, we stand up every day”, “We have a hybrid Waterfall/Agile technique”. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

After several years at multiple organizations it is interesting to find the same mistakes being made over and over again. This talk will discuss the various ways that your company can fail at agile and what you can do about it.

A supported Product Owner has the power to prioritize. An empowered Product Owner has the power to say 'No'!

The Product Owner is the most underutilized and unsupported role in large organizations that are trying to increase their speed to market. Product Owners are only business people playing a 'weekend dad' to the team or they are merely only writing requirements for the team.

Companies that are successful in delivering products to market empower the Product Owner. The Product Owner has one leg in Product Management and the other leg with the Scrum Team. The empowered Product Owner engages the business, customers, engineering, design, sales groups as stakeholders. They are empowered to optimize value by creating vision and context to enable teams to deliver products people want to buy and are technically sound to maintain and scale.

In this workshop, we will help you unleash this opportunity and guide you in understanding the role of an empowered Product Owner.

Shared understanding is a pre-requisite to success for any agile teams. Many Agile teams rely on User Stories to help them get consensus on what to deliver, and what done looks like. Stories are a great practice for agile teams, but as the complexity of the problem or solution they are building increases, they often need more. Agile teams can face serious churn in the story writing process as complexity increase. Different team members can have completely different understandings of the meaning of key business and solution concepts. Often the same concepts end up being discussed over and over again, significantly slowing down story exploration. Even worse, different stakeholders end up having ambiguous and even conflicting understanding of the solution.

During this session, we will discuss how we have integrated story exploration practices such as Story Mapping, Story Grooming, and Spec by Example, with the Domain Driven Design method, with the goal to promote the creation of a ubiquitous language and share understanding of both the solution and business domain. We will show how various teams have leveraged light weight, informal tools to enable both technical and non technical stakeholders to execute in a highly aligned way, and dramatically decrease churn and rework as a result.

A key part of this session will be taking the audience through an integrated example that show cases how one can elaborate on an idea through progressive refinement of Stories and CRC Card based domain driven models in parallel. We will showcase how Story Maps can be refined through creation of an initial Domain Driven Model expressed through Class Responsibility Cards. We will illustrate how to connect story grooming and refinement of domain models in order to create a precise business and solution language. We will illustrate how domain model walkthroughs can be used to battle test your stories against your domain model, validating key assumptions before coding starts. We will also showcase how both story grooming and domain driven design can be done directly in code, and how this approach dovetails perfectly into test driven development.

Agile has been pervasive and proven to be successful for technology product development for more than two decades. Today more organizations are taking agile principles and practices and applying them outside of IT to their business as usual (BAU) activities such as marketing or strategy development. But how easy is this next generational aspect of Business Agility? Can an approach that was rooted in technology product development be successfully applied as an accelerator to achieve overall business efficiency and effectiveness?

In this session, different case studies, including a large Canadian insurance provider, will demonstrate lessons learned from organizations that have taken agile principles and practices to help them drive commercial impacts, build people and their capabilities, adoption of the right mindset and behaviors, and improve performance. Some of the questions that will be addressed:

• What does business agility mean and why does it matter?
• How can Corporate Functions such as HR, Finance, Risk and Marketing, which are often entrenched in traditional ways of working, become agile delivery centers?
• Do agile practitioners need to “stay true” to the principles and practices they originally learned for technology in order to be effective in the business?
• How should agile business teams be optimally structured to align with an enterprise agile COE?
• What can leaders learn from others’ journeys so we can determine whether agile can truly thrive outside IT and be scaled across the organization?

If you are a Business Leader who is considering next steps on enterprise agility, organizational resilience, and a culture of adaptability, attend this session to learn valuable and pragmatic insights as you begin your own agile journey.

What coaching is really about? Is it a skill or is it a technique? Is it what you were born with or something you learn? Is it a framework or is it a mindset? Is everyone coachable? How can coaching help you with your leadership style? How can you embed a coaching conversation while leading people? Would you be able to lead, coach and motivate others at the same time?

If those are your questions, come and join me for this session. I won’t be lecturing you about coaching, but rather we will engage in an interactive session to define what coaching is for you. In this session, you will get your hands dirty with coaching, and get familiar with it. You will even be given the tools needed to elevate your coaching skill to the next levels if you want.

Coaching is not a skill or a tool, it is a mindset. It is great to have a coaching mindset, everyone agrees on that. However, It is not easy to learn or obtain. It needs dedication, right foundation, direction and practice to master. In the Your Inner Leader & Coaching! session, I am going to help you with the most important of all, the foundation of coaching. You will learn a very effective method to start coaching.

Coaches are not helping people with their situation in hand, but they help them to become a better one to address a challenge in hand. You can be a coach, it needs dedication and practice. Once coaching gets embedded in your leadership style, you can easily use it to lead people and motivate them.

The session is an interactive session. I am getting you through The Simple Coaching Model (http://www.simplecoachingmodel.com), in which you are going to practice coaching first hand. This model will help you to get your feet wet with coaching. The Simple Coaching Model will give you the foundation for having coaching conversation in a very simple way; one that you can practice it on and on. When you become mature in coaching, this model will give you the freedom to build on top of it. You can get to the next level of coaching by expanding your skills no matter what that might be, active listening, asking powerful questions, get deep into feelings, be comfortable being silent etc.

Is it too much of a stretch to ask managers in an emerging Agile environment to become "Servant Leaders"?

According to both VersionOne's State of Agile Report and the Harvard Business Review, "Culture" is the #1 challenge for organizations adopting and scaling Agile. But what's feeding that challenge? The people at the very top are dazzled by the potential of Agile for both top-line and bottom-line improvements. The people at the grassroots of Agile are excited by growth in both autonomy and personal mastery. But where does this leave the people in the middle - the managers who proudly guided the day-to-day operation of the business? What's in it for them? The last three annual VersionOne State of Agile Reports identified "Management support" as one of the top 3 challenges to the success of Agile. Why is that? Could it be that whenever managers ask what their role becomes in an Agile environment, our rote answer as Agile practitioners typically includes the words "Servant Leader"? And how often has our answer been met with a quizzical look from managers as they anchor on the word "servant"? This talk will:

• Explore the obstacles to introducing servant leadership in a traditionally managed organization
• Introduce a way forward for both managers and staff to adapt to a servant leadership paradigm
• Identify the role HR can take to support management on their journey of change

Moving from traditional leadership to servant leadership will require managers and staff alike to change. In the words of a senior manager: "I've come to realize that the organization's Agile transformation needs to start with my own personal transformation". To bridge the gap, managers and staff will need empathy and practical guidance. The intent of this talk will be to start building that bridge leveraging the Arbinger Institute's Pyramid of Influence.

Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters are change agents in their organizations. To be successful, they need a strong understanding of the principles and practices of “agile,” and a robust toolbox to help teams onboard and move through their agile journey. You can gain those by attending certification courses, conferences, reading books, and by working with experienced Agile Coaches. The XP game has always been a fun and effective way to learn agile skills. XP game originated in 1999 and is rooted in teaching agile values through active and live usage. This game not only teaches agile values, but it help participants experience those values for themselves, in an environment that closely reflects ones own. Participation in the XP game changes both your understanding of agile, and will enhance your approach toward teaching it. It will become one of your most important tools!

Join Shahin and Carlos and take part in a modern twist on the classical “XP Game” – a learning simulation for agile teams first outlined in Extreme Programming Explained (1999). Using the foundational principles of the original XP Game, Modern XP opens the simulation so participants, including non-technical leaders and team members, can gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be part of a high-performing agile team in a variety of frameworks and orientations, and what to expect (and measure) along the agile learning curve. Through hands-on learning, participants will acquire agile capabilities as well as learn tangible tips to overcome barriers and challenges along the agile adoption journey.

After many iterations to many different groups, Shahin and Carlos have refined the exercise, ensuring its accessibility and use for experienced agilists, those new to the field, and anyone in between. The activity not only provides a necessary educational frame, but participants are encouraged to draw from their experience, and implement the simulation (or elements of it) within their own training program, team lift-off or retrospective activity.

We are social animals. We like to have conversations. We like to know more about each other's stories. It is in our nature. As coaches, and change agents it is very important to use this basic instinct to our advantage. The easiest way to influence people, coach them, mentor them, transform them, build relationship with is to have a conversation. I can't even imagine any of the above not to start with a conversation.

Conversations are two way streets. And the easiest way to have a two way communication is to ask questions. Questions can be dumb, unrelated, out of ordinary, crazy, or even beautiful. The main differentiating factor of good communicators is their ability to ask powerful questions. Powerful questions are the ones that generate curiosity in the listener, and stimulates reflective conversation. They are usually thought provoking, and challenges the underlying assumptions. Powerful questions if asked in the right tone, and body language, generates creativity and new possibilities.

You might think it's hard to ask Powerful questions. You are absolutely right. It is not that easy, and certainly not natural for everyone. The good news is that it is something that can be learned, and relatively very easily.

I invite you to join me for a workshop on asking Powerful questions. In this workshop, I am going to help you build the muscle to ask more powerful questions. I will give you easy tool that each time you want to ask a question, make it more powerful. This technique will provide you with an easy tool that can be applied in any conversation. Asking powerful questions will help you build bridges with people, you would become more empathetic with them, and do not be surprised you are going to listen more. Some of the characteristics of a great coach, one might say.

You’re a project manager and you’ve just been given an Agile project to look after. You ask for reports and you get burndown charts, velocity graphs, and cumulative flow diagrams. What in the world are these, and why do you suddenly have a migraine headache?

Metrics are different in Agile, but the questions remain the same. Come and see what your brain needs to understand the tracking of products built in an Agile way. We’ll build an Agile dashboard that you can take into your next meeting.

The wheel of life, not a song from a Disney movie, not an invention of prehistoric man. It is a coaching tool used by professional business, career, and personal coaches to help people do a self-assessment and find ways to move forward.

The wheel of agile? What could this be, and how could you use it to move your people and teams forward?

Agile is about keeping pace with change. Inclusion ensures we bring everyone along with us.

Agile initially brought a bunch of individuals cross-functional specialists together to work as a team. This cross-functional team was able to deliver complex products more quickly. The concept of diverse teammates looking at a problem and sharing their perspective from their skill background proved to be the ideal way in creating solutions that meet the needs of domestic customers.

As companies execute on their digital strategy, products are now global. Having cross-functional teams are no longer sufficient. Agile teams need to be cross-functional AND diverse to meet the needs of global customers.

In our talk, Dave and Dave will discuss the importance and competitive need to make your teams diverse. They will also share their experiences of integrating diverse members into the team.

We’ve all heard that old adage about assumptions and how they make you, and me look. Yet how often do we still take for granted the underlaying perspectives with which we approach our world and our work? In today’s workplace, so much can be left unsaid. And, over time, these unspoken realities we keep inside can lead to breakdowns in team communication and performance.

Uncovering and transmuting assumptions can serve as a powerful doorway into team transparency, trust, and cohesion. Discover tools to how to create spaces for open and vulnerable conversations, a necessary prerequisite for any assumptions work. Then build on that foundation to disrupt insidious assumptions that arise within the team dynamic and transform them to create conscious alignment that bolsters innovation, engagement, and creative problem-solving, particularly in high stress environments.

You’ll gain powerful new tools to bypass reactive and destructive behaviors, engage in new levels of relationship with colleagues, and find new resourcefulness to amplify your productivity and fulfilment.

Join Joanne and Barton as they uncover the cracks that undermine team cohesion, and leverage these assumptions to turn unconsciousness on its head and create powerful alignment at all levels of the workplace.

Too often, enterprises approach Agile Transformation as a series of tactical measures rather than focusing on the necessary mindset shift.

During WWII, Pacific islanders welcomed the Allies who bestowed precious cargo on them when they set up bases on their remote islands. When the war ended and the bases were left behind, the islanders established "Cargo Cults" in an effort to lure the cargo back by building imitation planes on the abandoned airstrips.

Decision-makers who believe that hiring a few Scrum Masters and implementing a Scrum cadence without tackling the underlying organizational debt can lead tham to the Agile promised land have fallen prey to a similar delusion.

This talk aims to articulate some of the pitfalls, and to identify some of the strategic changes that are necessary ingredients in a successful Agile transformation.

Most of us know ‘how’ to prescribe an Agile framework, but can you tell me ‘why’ we do it?

Kanban and Scrum have their own set of values, principles, and practices. Being able to drill into ‘the why’ behind the practices has been our most powerful tool to break down resistance and make organizational change compelling at all levels.

Using the Engineering team at Index Exchange as a case study, we will reveal our successes, failures, and how I used ‘the why’ behind Kanban and Scrum practices to build strength in numbers.