Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

* people,
* process, and
* follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's very difficult for the retrospective to be a success.

Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.

For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.

When the people of an organization embark on their quest for increased agility, they are essentially begin working on the opposite side of a paradox that has been ignored. Often times, though as they take their journey, they begin experiencing the downside of now ignoring the the traditional, control-based approach and there is an outcry to revert. A dilemma is created.

What are these paradoxes? Well, the first four you encounter are described in the Agile Manifesto’s values. If one could have both sides of the “over” statements easily, we’d take them. Successfully maximizing the appropriate upsides of each side of these values while minimizing the downsides becomes a swinging pendulum to manage. This becomes key to leading others in your organization. If you are a manager, team leader, or executive trying help your organization get traction, then this session will provide some new insights into how to balance change with stability.

These four values are just the start of the paradoxes that will emerge as you take your journey. This workshop will help you use a technique called Polarity Management to help manage the upsides and downsides of this balancing act so that you can lead people effectively. Once out in the open, dilemmas created with a swing one way or another become easier to handle and perhaps can even be avoided.

Do you want people to feel part of a group/team or part of an activity? Then ensure that they are included and engaged. Do you find facilitating a large group of people unmanageable, people disengage? Try Liberating Structures with your teams and organization.

Liberating Structures, created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, covers a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team. It makes it possible to build the kind of meeting that everybody looks forward to attending and participating. Liberating Structures encompass microstructures that promotes collaboration and trust. It is known to foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.

Participants learn how to use these microstructures to simplify scrum meeting outcomes, help teams collaborate and become more productive.

What is design thinking? Is it only for designers? Can I benefit from it?

Design Thinking in its simplest form, is an approach to solving problems. Once you understand the core principles and framework, you can apply it to just about anything. In the enterprise, it asks for cross-functional teams to come together to co-ideate and co-create products and experiences that are centred around the end-user.

Join the Rogers digital team for an immersive workshop as we use design thinking, to explore and create the ideal smart city with 5G technology. By the end of the session, you will have observed, defined, created, and tested your new city. Then, we will reflect on how you can use the principles in your day-to day work supporting and advancing agile practices and adoption.

Are your retrospectives more ranting session than anything else? Are the outcomes seldom actionable? Are people quiet and it feels like only a select few always speak? Sounds familiar...if yes, this session will equip you to truly get measurable results from retros. This session will give you tips and tricks on how you can meet people on their journey and coach them to become a better team player. It will also provide guidance on how a team can continuously improve, and still keep it interesting sprint after sprint after sprint. Let's coach to make retros more "doing" sessions, and help teams truly embrace the spirit of continuous improvement. Make retro your friend and not foe!

From the diary of a fat coach comes the story of how Agile transformation is like reducing weight. She is sure that you have been on some diet at some point of your life, may be you are on one as you are reading it. Are you curious about how it links? During the session we will go through various similarities and shifts which are needed to gain success in both. We will also explore how the common pitfalls are also similar. Coaching both is an ART and calls for humanizing continuous improvement and transformation.

Once upon a time, in the not so faraway land of Corporatedale, was an organization called WeWin. The King of WeWin had an impeccable strategy to conquer the world, until he stumbled upon a mighty challenge of soldiers whose heart did not align to King's vision. The soldiers enjoyed the merit of the present and did not believe in a change. The culture of the army was eating the strategy.

The misalignment was cancelling out the efforts. Everyone was busy, but nothing was happening. The kingdom looked upon the King of WeWin to perform a miracle. One fine day, a switch flipped and they realized that the magic lay in each one of them, and it was up to them to create the environment they craved. This led to strategy and culture joining hands with the power of self-organized autonomous teams. From that day forward, the army of soldiers marched on and went on to conquer their world.

If the story sounds similar to your own, come join the session to discover the story of how to Flip the SWITCH!

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.

NOTE: Scrum asks us to have courage. The Agile Manifesto asks us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I hope the organizing committee will consider this proposal despite the risk that it might offend some tool vendors. If we can't speak freely about our experiences with tools, we will fail as a community.

In today’s challenging workplaces, organizations need to continuously focus on delivering value to the customers. Challenged by competition from all over the world, changing technology, increased diversity of the workplace and customers, organizations need to adapt their practices and behaviours. In this session, we will focus on Product Owners and the ownership impact on the business. Also, we will discuss the shift to a product oriented organization and the specifics this approach introduces.This will be done using real life examples and applied, simple yet captivating exercises to find the owner inside you.

One of the first actions organizations follow after deciding to jump into an agile transformation is assembling an agile team. To come with the "team" a hiring process begins. The hiring managers rush to pick the people following a generic profile of the ideal members.

After some time the selected candidate decides to leave you earlier than expected, generating high levels of stress across the project to was he/she was allocated. In other cases the organization is “forced” to keep the person as part of the team even though the performance of the employee is not the desired because of the person’s replacement process can be very complex.

In this workshop, we will share some tips to find the “perfect fit” for your organization. Furthermore, we will learn the power of asking the right questions at the right time so that your organization can get the right fit for your team.

Join us and learn how to improve your hiring process and start enjoying the benefits of finding the right people in your organization.

How much of what we do requires courage to ask for what we need? How many times are you asked to make a team agile and the team or leadership is not ready? What stops teams from speaking up about what is upsetting them? Who has the courage in the room to speak up what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done?

Having the courage can be made easier once you have tools and are willing to be vulnerable to take that first step. Teams that can step into this courage are more successful and more productive.

In this talk, Joanne will explore what is needed in our teams and ourselves to bring the elephant onto the table and into the light for all to see. Once we make the elephant visible it can be addressed.

Using a variety of techniques such as team happiness, team agreement, safety checks, assumptions, clean language, retrospectives and self awareness (conscious leadership) you are able to take that step more courageously.

Courage will start with you and can make a difference to our lives and our teams. Do you want to explore more? Join Joanne.

A fundamental philosophy from the early days of Agile, and particularly of XP, is that teams should own their process. Today we would say that they should be allowed, and better yet, enabled, to choose their own way of working (WoW).

This was a powerful vision, but it was quickly abandoned to make way for the Agile certification gold rush. Why do the hard work of learning your craft, of improving your WoW via experimentation and learning, when you can instead become a certified master of an agile method in two days or a program consultant of a scaling framework in four? It sounds great, and certainly is great for anyone collecting the money, but 18 years after the signing of the Agile Manifesto as an industry we’re nowhere near reaching Agile’s promise. Nowhere near it.

We had it right in the very beginning, and the lean community had it right all along – teams need to own their process, they must be enabled to choose their WoW. To do this we need to stop looking for easy answers, we must reject the simplistic solutions that the agile industrial complex wants to sell us, and most importantly recognize that we need #NoFrameworks.

If you are a coach, your job is to facilitate change in your client’s thinking (beliefs and attitudes), emotions (more mindfulness and resilience) and behavior (creating new habits). Using brain based coaching which is an approach rooted in neuro science, in this talk you will learn the latest insights into how our brains works, and how you can use this knowledge to complement and amplify the principles and practices of Agile coaching to create more effective, powerful, and positive transformational changes for your client.

You may have heard about the #NoEstimates movement, and even #NoProjects. Both of those concepts challenge the assumptions behind two key aspects of delivering software. But what about the process itself? Do we even need approaches like Scrum, Kanban or XP - let alone SAFe, LESS, NEXUS, DAD - in order to be successful? Is following a pre-defined process helpful at all? Is there a simpler way to be effective?

This session examines the two key principles common to all successful software delivery approaches and builds out based on the experience of the participants. Like #NoEstimates and #NoProjects, the name doesn’t really mean to eliminate process altogether, but rather to build a process that works for your team, in your business domain, with your technology stack.

Small, cross-functional teams have become a staple in Agile environments. However, for a variety of reasons, those teams usually find themselves needing to interact with other teams in the organization, which creates the problem of "dependency management". Suddenly, making individual teams "agile" is not enough: the whole web of dependencies needs to increase its agility.

This talk will explore the problem of intra-team dependencies, its impact in Customer flow, and practical strategies team-level leaders (as well as system-level leaders) can apply to help make the whole system more responsive, fit-for-purpose, and agile.

"Design Sprint as an Innovation Tool" is a workshop that aims to provide participants with a framework for action and experimentation in solving complex problems. During the workshop, the Design Sprint methodology is explored through practical exercises to teach participants the importance of collective intelligence in the search for user-centric solutions that consistently generate value and mitigate the risk of innovation projects.

The current Millennial narrative is getting pretty old and whilst some are still complaining that Millennials are lazy, selfish and entitled most people have started to realise they are shaping the world around us. It’s time to reframe the dialogue and meet the new Millennial and based on a recent study Millennials are not who we think they are. The new Millennial characteristics according to research include Disruptors, Changemakers, Demanding, Ethically and Socially Minded, Progressive thinkers & Entrepreneurial just to name a few. Furthermore, there are plenty of Millennial Rainmakers shining a light on how they are disrupting industries and changing the business world as we know it. Think Ruslan Kogan, 36-year-old Founder of Kogan.com, Nicholas Molner 28-year-old Founder of Afterpay & Kayla Instines 28-year-old Fitness Mogul who is reportedly worth a cool $486M just to name just a few Aussies. It’s time to move over and get out of the way, the new wave of Millennial Entrepreneurs has arrived.

Teams are self-organizing. That is not a statement of preference or intention; rather, it is a statement of objective fact.

Agile practices, like Scrum, XP, OpenSpace Agility, and liberating structures are among a very small number of management frameworks which acknowledge that self-organization is natural. The Manifesto for Software Development asserts that the quality of decisions and the value of outcomes increase when stakeholders collaborate with and trust the wisdom of their teams.

The opposite is also true: the manifesto implies that the common misbehaviours of managers (intervention, command & control) have costly consequences.

We will examine self-organization in teams and explore examples of self-organization in the workplace. Strong opinions are welcome.

The Agile manifesto tells us to value individuals and interactions. Given we are talking about human interaction, conflict is going to be a normal part of the interactions.

It is often the absence, not the existence of conflict which prevents teams from improving. Plenty of companies pride themselves in their harmonious culture. However, harmony comes at a price and can often be a sign people don’t trust each other. High-performing teams and organizations embrace conflict for the sake of improving, growing and doing great things.

In this session, we will explore how conflict is a normal and healthy part of any team environment. We will explore what causes conflict, and how to work with the conflict for the sake of better outcomes. You will learn what to do when teams cross the line into unhealthy conflict. You will leave with several simple tools to make it safe and easy to talk and increase conflict on your team.

About the session: -

Finding the new “YOU” - through reflective coaching

Have you discovered your true self yet?

Despite our diverse backgrounds, we all have one thing in common and that is our life journey map. The intensity of our experiences on this map may differ to some extent, however the similarities of characteristics of the map might surprise us. We all have our high and low points. These points leave impressions in our mind that largely define our identity and our reactions to any event around us.

We tend to view the world from the lenses of these deep impressions. Therefore, we unconsciously allow judgement, biases to overtake our pure intelligence. We suffer a world of chaos, stressful, negative and become suspicious of every events or may be we are just holding a mirror projecting ourselves :).

This leads to self-introspection and emergence of below questions:

• “Why do I feel disturb sometimes for no specific reason?”
• “Does the workplace have to be always stressful and noisy?”
• “Is there no simple approach to solve complex problems or big change?”
• “Why I love to go to some meetings but hate other meetings?”
• “Do I have to create lot of noise to be heard and get promoted?”
• “Why do we always have to get into conflict, how can we avoid?

Do you wish someone can answer your questions?

We invite you to join our workshop "Finding the new YOU" where we prepare you for the most awaited (much needed) journey. You will find your answers experientially. The bigger question is "Are you ready?"

Structure of the session:

The speakers will highlight how the transformations program face resistance at all levels (Organization, Team and Individual). Then, speakers will demonstrate how answers to above questions are critical and play key role in enabling any kind of transformation including agile and digital.

The last part of the session will go deeper into carefully connecting how individual transformation is essential before we try to tackle an organizational transformation. Also, how can we create a revolution of individual transformations within the organization that will accelerate organizational transformations.

This 45 minutes require the participants 100% presence and participations. We encourage participants to challenge some thoughts as we are experimenting these methods as well and would like to share and continue to sharpen our approach.

Who should attend:

Are you curious? Are you facing a lot of resistance and challenges as you are trying to bring a change in your organization? Do you want to focus on your new “YOU”? Do you want to sharpen your coaching skills? Do you want to increase your self awareness?

If your answer to any of the above question is YES, then you will find this workshop extremely useful. We will provide you proven tools/techniques to help you in finding these answers.

What’s in for YOU as change leaders:

• A key to unleash your true potential within
• A key to maintain your balance and composure in conflicting situations
• Getting Self-awareness for balance and composure (I think we have addressed this in WHO Should Attend place? What do you think)
• Being Creative rather being reactive

About Us:

Deb and Saurabh are coaches by passion and in IT world for around 20 years. We have written many success stories while working leading businesses such as Bank of America, American Express, Aetna, UHG, NCR, General Electric, TD Bank, Bank of Montreal, Johnson & Johnson, Bombardier and few more.

Our Mantra – Life lessons are the best learnings and coaching is not only about talking.