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.

Your team has hit a plateau in their performance and is no longer improving at the pace you are used to. You, as their leader, are racking your brain to determine what the issue might be. What would cause such a team to stall out. Have you considered that the cause might be you?

The level of consciousness of an organization cannot exceed that of its leader. (Frederic Laloux). Enabling your team to reach ever higher levels of performance requires that you do so first. In this workshop, we will guide leaders through the Immunity to Change framework developed by Robert Keagan and Lisa Lahey and demonstrate how the Immunity Map can be used to catalyze change in your leadership. Participants will practice using the Immunity Map to identify areas of improvement, limiting beliefs, assumptions and behaviors that are holding you and your team back from higher performance. You know that you need to change. Now’s the time. Start here!

We enjoy having conversations. Who doesn't? We are social animals after all. We like to know more about each other's stories. It is a feature built-in by default. As coaches, it is vital to use this basic instinct to our advantage. The easiest way to influence people is to have a conversation with them. You can use it coaching, mentoring, transformation, or just building a relationship with them. Can you imagine any of the above not to start with a conversation? I can't!

Conversations are two-way streets. 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. Can they be efficacious too? They can! An excellent communicator knows how and when to use Powerful Questions to make any conversation a mighty one.

Powerful Questions generate curiosity in the listener and stimulate thoughtful 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.

Is it hard to ask Powerful questions? It might be. It is not that easy, and indeed 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 Powerful Questions. In this workshop, I am going to help you build your muscle to ask more Powerful Questions. I will give you an easy tool to make your questions more powerful, and conversations more enriched. 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! Don't you agree?

There seems to be some confusion (not to mention strong opinions!) about when to use Scrum vs. when to use Kanban. At times purists on either side have drawn the lines and set up camp in an almost warlike approach, making it difficult to wade across the middle battlefield of information without stepping on metaphorical land mines or getting peppered with judgmental opinions, rhetorical quips or social media blasts.

In this session we will explore a case study of a department within a financial institution that is currently experiencing a transformation to Agility using both Scrum and Kanban. By the end of the session I will provide evidence of meaningful actions the department has taken and outcomes they have achieved to help move their team and organization ahead on a path to greater Agility.

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.

Today, product teams are under pressure to be more creative, innovative and delight customers sooner, but lack the knowledge and skills to know where to start. Agile product teams have frameworks and methods for rapid feedback, but generally lack real data from real users to make good business decisions. As product release cycles run long, team members lose enthusiasm and their focus on the customer.

As a tool, design sprints offer Agile teams an effective and transformative formula for testing ideas with real people, whether you're on a small team at a startup, or inside a large portfolio of projects at an enterprise organization. Within five days, teams move from idea to prototyping to better business decisions, ultimately saving time, effort, and energy over the long-run. Join Carlos Oliveira as he introduces design sprints for product teams, a process for rapid experimentation and learning that helps teams solve big problems and test new ideas in less than five days.

Originally created by three partners at Google Ventures, the process has been proven at hundreds of companies. Carlos has run dozens of design sprints for the Fortune 500 and firmly believes that product teams can benefit and harness the power of design sprints to focus their efforts and deliver more appropriate solutions to market sooner.

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.

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.

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!

Challenge: how can we transform the economy of Alberta as an organization of just over 5,500 team members and 770,000 customers?

Join Todd Hirsch, Vice President and Chief Economist of ATB Financial as we explore the ATB Story and how we believe 94 words are about more than Agile transformation. We believe we can and are changing the traditional assumption that Alberta’s economy is all about oil and gas.

A dōjō (道場) is a hall or space for immersive learning or meditation. This is traditionally in the field of martial arts, but has been seen increasingly in other fields, such as meditation and software development (and now also Agile Coaching!).

It will be a space for the immersive practice of coaching. Imagine a place where you can come and try out new coaching techniques, get feedback, give feedback and learn from your successes and failures? This is what coaching dōjō is about!

Coaching is one of the four main skills of every Agile Coach (along mentoring, teaching and facilitating) and for many of us coaching is the hardest skill to master. Way too often we go back to the mentoring mode, giving pieces of advice and sharing our points of view. Guess what, asking questions and giving space to reflect and come up with actions is hard, it's extremely hard! That's why we want to create a space for deliberate practice of coaching.

The coaching dōjō will be very to the Code Katas exercises knows from the software development world. We will come together, work in groups of 3s, one person will be a coach, one will be a coachee and one will be an observer. We will run 3 rounds of 10-15 minutes coaching so everyone will get a chance to be a coach. At the end of the round, the coach will hear feedback from the coachee and from the observer. In every session (this will be the 1st one) we will work with different challenges and/or different coaching techniques.

ELEVATOR SPEECH:
“We can’t make decisions or agree on priorities. So, we have the same meeting over and over. Literally, the same meeting.” If that could be said about your workplace, this interactive session is for you. Learn simple strategies and ideas for meetings that matter - those you run or those you attend.

SUMMARY:
Too many bad meetings. That's one of the most common sources of workplace whining. Today, especially in software development and delivery, our work is too complex for one person to make all the decisions or know all the answers. Everyone's contribution is needed. So, we have meetings. And some are a painful mix of frustration and boredom. When we can’t make decisions or agree on priorities, we have the same meeting over and over.

When we're the one hosting the meeting, there are lots of facilitation techniques we can employ to keep the discussion on track, on topic and on time so we can reach good decisions and plan effectively. But what if it's not our meeting? What can we do when we're not in charge?

Join Sue in exploring some simple techniques you can use at your next meeting to make the experience better for you - and for others who attend.

INFO FOR REVIEWERS:
This new talk is inspired by several years of leading the workshop, Facilitation for the Agile Workplace, accredited by ICAgile. Learners often wonder, "What about the meetings where I don't have control?" It draws on communication and facilitation techniques I've used in a long career in business and tech. Sources will include "Mining Group Gold," "Facilitating with Ease," "Liberating Structures," and "Leading Geeks."

It's an interactive session with an element of play - a simple board game with dice and cards.

By the time of TAC, I will have presented this session at PRDC Deliver and will have had an opportunity to tweak it, based on that experience.

Have you ever struggled to gain buy-in from your boss, a stakeholder or an executive for a key direction or product decision? Do you have good ideas, but find that no one is listening? In this 90-minute workshop, you'll learn how to meet executives on their level, build rapport by using their language, and create an elevator pitch to gain buy-in for your ideas. You'll leave this workshop with a strategy to analyze stakeholder needs, a formula that lays out information in a way that grabs and keeps executive attention, an elevator pitch you can use in your work and an action plan for delivering your pitch successfully.

Every organization is struggling with the issue of how to reconcile project management and agility. This is a serious challenge for the project management community who often doesn't understand what agility is, particularly within the context of an established organization. This can also be a serious challenge for agile practitioners who may not appreciate the potential value of management. We need to work together.

Project managers have a lot of important skills and knowledge to bring to an agile team if we help them to do so. At the same time they also have some mindset and cultural issues to overcome, something that they may also need help with. In this workshop we will identify the real value that an existing PM can bring to an agile team and explore how they can move into new agile roles to do so.

Forming, or Launching, a new Agile Team is a critical step that is very often skipped due to lack of knowledge, time pressure or just eagerness to get on with work as soon as possible. This workshop discusses and demonstrates the importance of taking the time to launch teams and provides hand-on knowledge on how to Form a Team. This technique has been used by several organizations in the US and Australia. The last being the 2nd largest bank in Australia launching teams in an organization of 4500 people.

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.