It's the classic leader's lament. Driving organizational performance in a way that delivers on business outcomes while engaging employees. A year after presenting this at TAC 2018 it is more relevant than ever.

Organizations have been deploying Scrum, SAFe, DAD, and a host of other practices in the hope of achieving better business outcomes. We all know that practices alone don't generate the kind of powerful results you need to succeed. The missing ingredient? We hear the word culture a lot. But it is really about operating norms, or habits and behaviors. What I've observed through dozens of transformations within my company and clients are 5 habits that the leading organizations all possess. When these 5 habits are ingrained, the practices fall into place, and performance starts to rocket.

In this session you'll learn the habits, and why they drive performance. You' also learn about the key questions you can start asking to encourage the habits to take hold in your team, or more broadly, in your organization. The path to performance is paved by changes in behaviors that are reinforced daily. Asking the right questions at the right time can be a powerful way to nudge behaviors in the right direction.

Having said that, it's not enough to create the conditions for new habits to form. Countless studies, including famous ones by Wolfram Schultz, neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, have shown that a cue and reward on their own aren't enough to create a lasting habit. Only when your brain starts to anticipate a reward will the habit become automatic.

The traditional approach to organizational design is a barrier if you want to grow an organization where smart people make amazing decisions that delight customers and enrich their careers.

This session aims to provides leaders at all levels of the organization with an introduction to a set of design tools that can help them create organizational structures that promote agility rather than interfere with it.

Using a game I call Full Stack Poker, I’ll facilitate a highly interactive dialogue where attendees will play the role of various organizational stake holders tasked with getting the right skills into teams responsible for delivering value.

Loosely based on the planning poker game, attendees will collaboratively select from a number of Team Engagement Patterns, collectively agreeing on an engagement model that lays out how teams can engage with support functions and other teams. Participants will also be able to estimate the amount of organizational complexity their teams will incur based on the Team Engagement Patterns chosen.

The session is aimed at teaching attendees basic concepts behind defining agile organizational structure through a highly engaging / hands on session.

High-maturity DevOps teams are 10-20X more responsive to customer demands and 2X better in capturing business value. Additionally, their teams show lower rates of burnout and are 2.2X more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work.[1] They also deploy 46X times more frequently and are 7X less likely to deploy defective changes.[2]

These are incredible findings... but undertaking a journey towards higher levels of DevOps maturity is NOT as straightforward as some consultants/literature/bloggers would lead you to believe.

It presents challenges for leadership, business, enginering and operations teams. It means changing nearly everything about how you build, test, deploy and operate software... It means taking risks.

In this session you will hear about how we supported a large (very familiar, yet unnamed) organization in taking this calculated risk, helping it realize superior business results from an investment in a DevOps enablement team.

We’ll cover how the team was built, what worked (and what didn’t), and how it unlocked a new level of business agility for the organization.

1 - Accelerate, Jez Humble

2 – 2018 State of DevOps Report

The purpose of this talk is to share the transformation journey that my team and I have embarked on for the last two years at Scotiabank within the Canadian Banking Technology group and to share our hypothesis around the transformation and our learnings so far and how we are aiming to become a full stack organization. I want to share what has worked well and what has not.

CBT is about 4000 employees which services all of Canadian banking businesses which is composed of:

-Branches and it's technologies that serve all Canadian customers

-Insurance business

-Credit card business

-All the underlying infrastructure and systems that enable these capabilities

While retrospectives are amazing, imagine if you could make continuous improvement happen every single day. Imagine being able to drive meaningful improvements in your organization that not only improve performance, but also transforms your culture.

In this workshop, you'll learn techniques for running continuous improvement micro-experiments. These are short, fast test and learn loops that give you feedback in hours or days. You can use these techniques for personal improvement, and you can use them at the team and organizational level. These techniques are universally applicable. We've been using them with executives at Fortune 100 companies as well as teams and individuals at every level in those organizations. We've also been using them also with public sector organizations with the same positive impact.

As performance expectations in organizations rise, people need better ways to get things done. This is my preferred way of achieving that. It works for me and I hope it will work for you.

This is not your average retrospective. It's akin to compound interest. A little improvement every day that at first feels invisible, but over weeks and months, the improvements you implement begin to multiply into visible, tangible outcomes that help you propel yourself and your team into a state of high performance.