Many of us dream of creating Agile Organizations. Where Agile practices and Agile mindset are reflected in the results across the whole organization. Yet the approaches that are currently used are not yielding the results we hope for. Instead there are culture challenges, resistance, leadership misalignment and mixed levels of engagement. A new approach is needed.

Learn a proven path to high-performance organizations that places culture and leadership at the centre stage. You will see how to look beyond process and scaling to understand a reliable way to introduce the Agile Mindset. Discover the common traps and blocks that prevent success and how to avoid them. Learn the “Consciously Approaching Agile” approach so that you are equipped to get deep and lasting results with Agile. Discover the new behaviours that you can demonstrate to foster organizational coherence and engagement that result in high performance.

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.

On Agile teams, collaboration is the way of life. Our leaders want their team members to work closely with each other, have shared goals and even think as one entity. Why? Because we believe that collaboration leads to happier, more productive teams that can build innovative products/services.

It's strange that companies use the word collaboration very tightly with innovation. Collaboration is based on consensus building, which rarely leads to visionary or revolutionary products/services. Innovative/disruptive concepts require people to independently test out divergent ideas without getting caught up in collaborative boardroom meetings.

In this presentation, Naresh Jain explores the scary, unspoken side of collaboration and explains in what context, collaboration can be extremely important; and when it can get in the way or be a total waste of time.

Abstract (280 chars)

What if you could organize and motivate people to double their highest-expected productivity goals? Lessons from a large, distributed, volunteer group of online video gamers offer practical 21^st-century guidance for your workplace. Even if you aren't a gamer. Or a space pirate.

Abstract (full)

What if you could gather and motivate people to double even their highest-expected productivity goal? What if you had no authority over those people -- if they were all volunteers?

The future of leadership is emerging to guide 21st-century organizations beyond the small, cross-functional, green-field software development teams of the 1990s. Agile enterprises must respond to emerging markets, provide unity of purpose to workers with conflicting motivations, and foster order when change is the only constant. Agile leadership must cope with distributed teams, "gig economy," diverse skill-sets, and the impact to morale of unexpected changes. But the measure of success is still delivery to the market: volume, quality, reliability.

Early in 2017, a group of several hundred independent players of the online futuristic video game Elite:Dangerous faced all the above organizational challenges yet still managed unprecedented delivery to their market. And they did it despite the "me first" culture of online games.We'll explore the structural, social, and cognitive factors which enabled this large distributed team of casual volunteers to deliver twice as much as their nearest competition. And we'll uncover how to amplify those factors in your own workplace.

You'll learn the powerful effects of making individual contributions visible, expanding the scope of your regular team synchronizations, having a loose leadership hierarchy, and encouraging diffusion of innovation. And you'll see how community engagement is an essential quality of a servant leadership culture. This is a compelling story about leadership that's relatable to anyone regardless of their interest in or experience with Agile, online gaming, or space pirates.

In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Brene Brown shares her 10 Guideposts of Wholehearted Living. Number 7 on that list is “Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth”. This resonates strongly with the 8th agile principle about sustainable pace.

In the world of Scrum software development, it is all too easy to get caught up in pumping out user stories and increasing velocity sprint after sprint, but what does that type of hamster wheel mentality do to us physically, mentally, and spiritually? For that matter, what impact does it have on our products? Are we building fast things, or the right things? Are we making time to dream up big, new ideas and/or to build a cohesive team around our mission?

Work-life balance is a buzzword that we throw around, but how often does the culture of an organization support exactly the opposite? Hero culture is rewarded, and our output viewed as a measure of our worth on performance reviews. We set out to transform the world of work with agile and with Scrum, yet I’ve heard the Scrum sprint cycle described as a “hamster wheel”, an endless conveyor belt of backlog and sprint reviews that the developers cannot escape. This is not congruent with what we read in the agile values and principles.

I’m interested in inspiring a discussion about the pitfalls of a competitive exhausted culture, and how we in the Scrum community, even with the best of intentions, could be “accidentally responsible” for continuing to spin the hamster wheel. Hero culture has been discussed before, but have we addressed our own potential culpability in creating it? We need to make sure that the principles and practices of Scrum are being used for good, not for evil. It all starts with a conversation.

In this discussion, we will explore the dangers of exhaustion as a status symbol -- for our organizational culture, our teams, and ourselves. We will discuss the specific risks of inadvertently creating a competitive exhausted culture within an agile transformation, and the ways in which we can leverage the agile values and principles in order to mitigate those risks. Lastly, we will take a look inward to assess our own attitudes and views about work life balance.

“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.

Anyone who doesn't agree with me is wrong and not just wrong, but morally repugnant and evil.

What do you think? Is it really likely that everyone that disagrees with you is somehow a monster? Or perhaps it's something else...

Over the last few years we've seen a lot of viewpoint polarization. But why does this happen? And what does this tell us about our approaches to Agile?

In this session we'll look at Moral Foundations Theory and how what we value and hold dear can influence our views on an issue.

We'll also play a game developed at the Agile Games conference based on this framework that will challenge you to take yourself out of your normal comfort zone and see the world from another perspective.

For anyone willing to take some risk and create a success on your own terms.

-This Agile Business presentation best represents: Experience, Exploration and Adaptation.

"This talk is centered Agile being all about People and Business - on what’s in it for you and what’s in it for your clients.

I initiated the McCafé concept at McDonald's and will share both the development stages and collaborative drivers. It’s about understanding where the real levers of power lie – with YOU.

I will step beyond Agile for IT – and show how Agile Values bring the Business and People together – I open the Kimono with the client, build the relationship and I will share with the audience:

How and What real life experiences were discovered with the McCafé launch. The presentation has useful lessons about Agile Business techniques to help participants gain insight and develop important skills with Executives and Clients. It’s a fundamental shift in mindset.

Instead of focusing on what you can sell, the focus is shifted to what your unique talents are. Discover more fulfillment in the process of uniting and practicing with your client.

Can't wait to share!!

Are you - or worse, your bosses - starting to doubt this Agile thing? Are your software teams proficiently delivering every two weeks and yet it just doesn't seem to make much of a difference to the bottom line?

Most organizations begin their foray into Agile with software development and that makes sense - after all, the Agile Manifesto focuses on “working software.” Unfortunately, though, this is often also where the Agile journey comes to a grinding halt. Management confines Agile to a small box labeled “Delivery,” puts a lid on it, and everything else continues as usual. Development teams in such an environment may produce more software, faster and with better quality, but the expected impact on the organization often fails to materialize because the business value of the produced software doesn’t increase correspondingly.

In this session, we’ll take a closer look at why Agile shouldn’t end with “working software.” The most commonly used Agile frameworks don’t provide much guidance on how to manage risk and ensure the creation of organizational value, so we will draw on insights, tools and techniques from other domains to identify crucial high risk assumptions, test our hypotheses, and measure outcomes. We’ll explore how we can get past the “feature factory” focus and apply the Agile mindset beyond delivery to produce better business outcomes and organizational impact.

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.

Pressured by results, overwhelmed by schedules to meet and expectations to live up to we so often lack to recognize the power of meaningful human connections around us. Still, when we recall some of the leaders that created the most lasting change in our professional and personal lives, there are a few common traits that seem to be part of their behavior.

I have lived and practiced various roles in my life and career, and derived a simple way of reminding myself on how to create more meaningful connections for more powerful impact on the human level. In this talk I will present for the first time what has driven my teaching, coaching and leading along these years.

CARE stands for curiosity, authenticity, respect and empathy. And it represents care, genuine and uninterested, for people around us- colleagues, relatives, managers and reports. In an illustrated way I will tell stories about how this simple framework can change the impact of your leadership and foster a stronger engagement for anything you stand for.

“When will it be done?” is a question asked in just about every business I’ve encountered, Agile or otherwise. In this metrics-focused session we will explore why that question is so hard to answer and whether it is even the right question to ask.

We will explore current thinking about measurement in knowledge work fields. How every business needs to identify their own appropriate metrics to measure for their own business challenges and goals. While metrics are always unique for each individual business context, we will identify 4 metric categories identified from the Fit for Purpose framework.

To connect these concepts to your Agile organization we explore going past looking at measurement as a team phenomena and connect this to the level of services or value streams.

Digging further we continue to examine questions around measuring and predicting delivery times. We contrast prediction approaches using deterministic methods vs probabilistic methods. And consider multiple sources of variability that make predictions challenging and often impossible.

We conclude by considering more appropriate questions to replace “When will it be done?” Rather asking “When do we need it” followed by “and so, when should start?”

Unlike a factory, where we can see work literally moving around, piling up waiting, being worked on, or even deteriorating with time, knowledge workers have to deal with abstract constructs that are largely invisible. Suddenly, answering questions like "what are we working on?" or "how does work get done here" can become tricky.

The basic premise that the first step towards effectively managing knowledge work is to make it visible will not come as a surprise for anyone with some familiarity with Agile. That said, there's more to effective work visualization than a 3-column board showing "To Do | In Progress | Done" columns, and visualizing work items is only the first step.

This session will explore approaches for visualizing otherwise invisible aspects of work, such as commitments, process, rules and, of course, work items, and using them to enable more effective management and collaboration.

Gam'Inception is a game made of games to learn how to create games... Sounds funnier than dreams in dreams in dreams, don't you think Mr. Nolan?

By playing three serious games, attendees will learn why serious games are a very efficient way to discover new concepts, mechanisms or tools and that everyone is able to build her/his own ones:

• Attendees will have to face me in a drawing duel. Be prepared, I'm almost as good with pens than with ASCII art:
  _██_
  ( • ̮ •)
  ( . • . )
  (... • .. )
• Then, they will travel in time, to Venice, the city of Doges, for a mix of Game of the Goose, a game book and an escape game
• Finally, they will participate to Top Chef (at least my version of the show...) and will find their own recipes to cook their own games

The workshop is almost entirely interactive and requires no prior knowledge about serious games (you don't even need to know what a serious game is). At the end of the session, attendees will have learned:

• how a serious game is structured
• which steps are essential to building a serious game
• which steps are 'nice to have' when they build a serious game
• that they are way more qualified to build their own serious games than they thought
• how efficient a serious game is to learn new things
• how highly corruptible I am

Note that I always try to co-present with Leonardo DiCaprio but, sometimes, he is too busy to come ;-)
I hosted it successfully several times in Europe (Agile France, Agile Tour Paris, Xebicon and smaller events) last year so the structure is solid.

Slides, in French, are available here. The workshop (and its slides) will, of course, be in English with the possibility for attendees to ask me anything in French if they are more comfortable with this language

We like to say that agile teams own their own process by choosing their way of working, their “WoW.” This of course is easier said than done because there are several aspects to WoW. First, our team needs to know how to choose the appropriate lifecycle for the situation that we face. Should we take a Scrum-based approach, a lean/Kanban-based approach, a continuous delivery approach, or an exploratory/lean startup approach? Second, what practices should the team adopt? How do they fit together? When should we apply them? Third, what artifacts should the team create? When should they be created? To what level of detail? Finally, how do we evolve our WoW as we experiment and learn?

There are several strategies that we could choose to follow when we tailor and evolve our WoW. One approach is to bootstrap our WoW, to figure it out on our own. This works, but it is a very slow and expensive strategy in practice. Another approach is to hire an agile coach, but sadly in practice the majority of coaches seem to be like professors who are only a chapter or two ahead of their students. Or we could take a more disciplined, streamlined approach and leverage the experiences of the thousands of teams who have already struggled through the very issues that our team currently faces. In this talk you’ll discover how to develop your WoW without starting from scratch and without having to rely on the limited experience and knowledge of “agile coaches.”

Have you ever been part of a great team? A team where you loved to come to work every day, a team that encouraged to accomplish goals that you felt were nearly impossible?

Have you ever been on a team from hell? A team with constant conflict, disagreements and fear of speaking the truth?

In his book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, Peter Lencioni refers to trust as a foundational and key ingredient to high performing teams. Exercises in this workshop will allow individuals to become more self aware and increase their vulnerability to build a stronger bond of trust.

Many principles that actors live by are the same principles that a high performing agile team should live by as well. The session is all about focusing and strengthening those key skills needed by agile teams.

Many of us think we can’t do improv. We get stuck in our head and panic, afraid we might not know what to do or say. This workshop involves highly interactive group activities that are fun and fast paced designed to help communicate effectively and think on your feet. Games are intentionally ordered to focus first on creating safety for the groups before advancing to more complex topics as collaboration and risk taking.

Improv will make you think about your team, your organisation and yourself differently, in the context of your agile environment.

Clean language is an easy to use technique for getting deeper and more effective conversations. It leverages our understanding of how the brain actually stores and accesses information to get past superficial conversations quickly so that we can get into the core of the problem faster.

In this workshop, you will learn some theory and then will get hands-on practice with the techniques that you can immediately take away and start using.

Useful for anyone facilitating retrospectives or understanding product needs or collecting feedback from others, all things that agile leaders have to do.

Do you want to write great User Stories (a.k.a. small features that are part of a product) that provide the vehicle for conversation and confirmation that we build the right thing? Do you struggle with completing stories (of business value) that are potentially shippable within a fraction of an iteration/sprint? During this session we will do a quick refresher on User Story formatting to include Acceptance Criteria. The reason for the refresher is that over the last few years, despite people using User Stories, I have experienced their usage far from the intended purpose.

After the refresher, we will learn at least 3 techniques for splitting stories in this interactive workshop.

Traditionally on agile teams, the "Definition of Done" has centred around the completion of feature development: coding it up and maybe adding some unit tests to prove it works. What happens to our code after that is often a mystery as we rely on Operations teams to work their magic. The advent of DevOps has seriously challenged this traditional view. Teams that embrace DevOps tools and methodologies now consider a feature Done when it is in production, serving its customers - and developers, QA, and other non-Operations people now have starring roles in getting it there. Come find out what DevOps is from both a technological and a cultural perspective, how it allows companies to deliver value even faster to their customers, and how it is the logical evolution and extension of Agile.