The stereotype of technical professionals as inarticulate, socially inept geniuses inventing problems to solve is unkind and inaccurate. Yet the Dilbert image persists. So do jokes like the one about the engineer sentenced to death on the guillotine, who watches the instrument of death malfunction, then tells the operators how to fix it.

Why do people make fun of engineers? Do people wired and trained to analyze and solve problems and focus on the mechanics of a situation frustrate those whose brains are wired differently? And how does the engineer’s way of dealing with individuals and interactions - that first value of the Agile Manifesto - sometimes get in the way of team collaboration and productivity?

In this interactive session, we'll show a little empathy for engineers and other analytical folk whose neurological wiring makes them seem different from the rest of humanity. We'll also explore how those with the engineering mindset can develop their own empathy and consciously adopt behaviours that amplify their value to their teams and organizations, make them more effective leaders - and make their own lives easier by positioning themselves for understanding.
Join Sue in a lively exploration of what can happen when engineers and technical professionals shift their mindset from solving problems to creating impact.

You will leave this session with an appreciation of

• How to make your ideas meaningful to others by taking their perspective
• How shifting your language from "What?" to "So What?" helps people connect the dots
• Why giving up the need to be smart may be the smartest thing you ever do
• Techniques you can use to take someone else's perspective.

Everyone agrees that technical debt is a burden on software innovation that we would rather avoid, and certainly clean up whenever possible. However, in most organizations, people don't prevent technical debt nearly as much as they should, and they don't ever get the time to clean it up. Why, then, if there are clear incentives to deal with technical debt, is it a rampant problem?

In this session, we will focus on how to deal with technical debt on several levels, including the individual developer, the team, the software value stream, and the larger organization. While technical debt may manifest itself in a developer's IDE, the problem starts long before the developer decides to copy and paste some code, or creates an overly-complex and under-documented class. The pressures on teams and individuals to take on more debt than they should come from many sources. Therefore, the solutions to the technical debt problem must extend beyond the team.

Agile transitions fail to provide adequate guidance on how a manager at any level fits into an Agile organization. What do you do now? What do managers do when teams are supposed to be empowered, self-managing, and self-organizing? Is there a place for managers in an Agile organization?

YES! There is a lot for managers to do, though they might be different than what you did before. Agile is a whole new way of work for most managers, as it requires a particular style of leadership. Your role and responsibilities need to evolve to support the growth and success of the team. You must learn to coach, remove obstacles and model new styles of communication. 

In this interactive session, Selena guides you on how you can thrive as an agile manager as you nurture and support your teams in transformational success. You leave with insights, techniques, and approaches you can readily apply when you return to work. Ready?! Come learn how to inspire, influence, and have an expansive impact in your organization .

What if your team could share new ideas and make unanimous decisions in minutes?

Agile teams need to create and agree on many things such as a definition of done, a sprint plan, and what changes they’ll try in the next sprint based on the most recent retrospective.

How often have you participated in a meetings where few decisions were made? Or where the the loudest person in the room made most of the suggestions and dominated your team’s decision making?

In this interactive workshop, we will practice coming up with new ideas using everybody’s suggestions and making decisions that the whole team agrees on.

Learn and practice techniques such as Fist-of-Five, Decider Protocol and Resolution Protocol and Shared Visioning with Lego.

Make group decisions faster, more aligned with the whole team, and more likely to result in follow-through.

Are you as powerful as you need to be? Do you over power the room and rub people the wrong way?

Why is that? What if there was something you could do about it?

In improvisation, in order to create realistic and compelling characters we study status. That is, how does how we carry ourselves impact our relationship status with other people and how does it change in relation to others?

In this session, we'll explore status, and play with making ourselves more or less powerful. We'll then examine how this plays out in our work environments and how we need to adjust our status depending on which groups or individuals we're interacting with.

You'll also learn the one status trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting hired in your next interview.

3.5 years ago Seedbox Technologies decided to embrace agile methodologies as its way to develop web based products, get them out faster, survive and thrive competition.

It's all started in a traditional fashion:  external consultants were hired to teach employees the agile mindset and how to use agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban when developing web based products. Project Managers got trained and became Product Owners, experienced Scrum Masters were hired to get development teams to their highest level of performance as fast as they could, developers got trained and developed experience around their team development processes, engineering managers supported agility across the company, and stakeholders directly involved in product development got invited to collaborate with software development teams through agile processes, once they got fully implemented.

That's right, Engineering got agile quite right but by doing so:

• What happen with the rest of the organization?
• What about peoples mindset?
• Is them vs Us or vice versa? 
• Are they able to collaborate, inspect and adapt like the engineering teams and people related to agile projects do?
• How do we get everyone in the organization to communicate when we don't share the same vocabulary?
• How do we fill the gap and avoid old management treats get in the way of the companies transition to something bigger than just the teams?
• Shall we wait until they realize that we all need to change or shall we help them get there?
• How do we use are know-how to turn this mess into a big opportunity for the organization to grow?
• Do we need help?

Well, if this experience report gets accepted, I will share what I've learned about:

• The challenges & flaws that we faced when transitioning from team based agility to organizational agility
• Some of my reflections as an inside observer
• How to use the lessons learned as a wake up call
• What can be done to help the organization to thrive

Let's walk together through a nurturing experience report that might ignite your sens and get you inspired to give the extra mille! 

In order for teams to step into high performance. it's critical that they develop the practice of having effective conversations about what is and isn't working. Yet in practice, the retrospective meeting is often the least-valued of the agile events: team members feel that their retros are boring, repetitive, and superficial.

In this workshop, we will teach participants how to design and deliver a really useful retrospective using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. We'll cover the basics of this powerful facilitation technique, and give advice about how to build your own SERIOUS PLAY kit using pieces easily available at the local toy store. We'll also offer practical suggestions for how to design a retro that gets everyone talking (and building), and results in the team agreeing on action.

The participants will leave with a powerful retrospective technique that they can immediately use with their teams.

Why do so many organizations get stuck in fixing local problems without solving organizational ones? How does a leader or team member see and understand the big picture? Do you struggle with helping your company or clients to understand the entire workflow to be able to make better decisions that can make huge improvements? Would you like a powerful visual tool to express the entire workstream to a large audience so that it is clear what areas need improvement?

If so, then this is the workshop for you.

Each participant will actively participate in learning about, designing your own, and consulting with others to learn the skill of creating effective and meaningful Value Stream Maps. This technique, which comes from Lean manufacturing and is closely connected to Agile, aids leaders and teams in seeing the big picture make meaningful and impactful changes that are both quantitative and qualitative. Let's learn a new skill within 60 minutes.

Paul Heidema and Junbin Huang have worked in the Agile space for more than 10 years (combined) with a focus on helping teams and organizations to support and lead impactful change at the level of the organization and system.

We employ powerful agile techniques to inspect the value stream as we build it. Then we improve and adjust to make it more clear. This will enable short cycles of execution and reflection to quickly improve the quality of the value stream map.

Do you ever think you have your career figured out, you're on the right career path, and suddenly along comes something like Agile and nothing seems right anymore? Yup, we went through that too! We were both excelling as Project/Program Managers, trying to help our companies do things better than ever. That's when we came across Agile, and our journeys have been forever altered. Join us to hear how our quest for helping the organisations we work for took us from a traditional PM role, to change agent, to Agile Coach and way beyond. Your journey can be a conscious choice rather than the series of accidents ours has been, even if your goal is not to become an Agile Coach, there is so many options available to you in your future which can help organizations thrive into a bright future. Hurry ... the world needs you!

Large organization have been eager to implement agile framework quickly. At what cost and who pay the most? In this session we will covert some basics to increase the chance of success of agile transformation. 

Thinking and preparing the transformation is key. Having the right leadership and support and what does that mean is question that we will answer. 

You have a brand new team.  You inherit a pre-existing team, but one person seems a little unproductive.  Your team is in shambles.   You're a newly-hired manager and walk in on day one and want to impress your new underlings.  You're a Product Owner and just came back from a great session with the customer, ready to tell the team.

What do all of the above scenarios have in common?  You are looking for ways to inspire and motivate your team members into action.  You want to drive them towards a vision you have.  Or you need to find a way to "deal with" that one "bad apple" in the team, so the whole team can be that much more productive and effective. 

But how do you do this??   Come and listen, and experience first hand, some simple experiments that will help you figure out how to inspire and motivate your team members.

Are you stuck?  Have a problem you just don’t know how to resolve? Need to find some clarity?  We all go through the same process when beset by problems.  Most of us just aren’t aware of it and so don’t know how to get out of it.  Let’s have a conversation about taking ownership of your problem and finding real solutions. Come learn about the built-in process going on in your head and how you can leverage that to owning what you want, living with freedom, power and choice.

As a bonus, you'll walk away with one small but powerful gift, guaranteed to work!

This interactive workshop will delve into the core aspects of High Performing Teams working in an Agile environment. We will explore current research into what makes a team high performing and popular models that exist for assessing a team’s performance. We will also discuss how creating a High Performing Team model that is custom to your organization can add value by serving as a focusing tool for teams and a north star for leaders and coaches. We will then guide participants through an exercise to create their own customized High Performing Team model.

The High Performing Team model workshop will give participants a deeper understanding of what high performance truly means and how to create a model that is in line with the values and goals of their organization.

Agile failure is most felt by Scrum Masters. Why do so many fail to properly support their teams? Why do so many fail to inspire meaningful change in the level of leadership? Why do so many fail to guide transformation in their organisations?

In this workshop, we will harness the knowledge and experience of the participants! 

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

Many people are taking on the mantle of Scrum Masters across agile teams around the world. Unfortunately, many of them have come from more traditional work structures that don't develop effective Scrum Masters. There is a misconception about the purpose of a Scrum Master. Often the Scrum Master becomes the facilitator or the project manager. This has to stop. Effective leaders, agile coaches, and Scrum Masters take advantage of vital behaviours in supporting scrum masters or by building mastery within these behaviours.

During this workshop, participants will go through a series of exercises to identify the purpose of a Scrum Master, how we can measure success, identify potential vital behaviours, learn from others to determine the vital behaviours, and then create a sound influence strategy to enable effective Scrum Masters and the work that they do. This workshop will use concepts and the model from the book "Influencer" (by Joseph Grenny et all) which details the three (3) keys to a successful change initiative and uses the six (6)  sources of influence.

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

So your organisation is shifting to use Agile. The teams get lots of support, and the executives really want product to be delivered faster, better and cheaper. You get why the benefits would be good if only you can figure out how to lead the teams in the right way. You're still getting pressures to deliver from above, and your teams are telling you to leave them alone given their coach is telling them to be self organising. It's called being in the frozen middle layer. Join us and start to learn the new set of leaders arising from this chaos. We will be sharing how Leadership is an important component of a successful Agile Transformation, how your behaviour will impact the outcome, and learn some tactics for leading Agile Teams.