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.

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.

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.

Everything we do carries some amount of risk, from getting out of the bed in the morning to skydiving. Even writing software is risky! How do we handle those risks? Are common approaches to risk management still applicable in the Agile world?

If you've ever struggled with how to handle risk on an Agile program then come join us to see why our brains make is react in a mostly risk adverse way, what we can do about it, and how Agile specifically addresses many aspects of software risk. Also, we will look at how an Agile program can live in harmony with enterprise risk departments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you the one who is aspiring to achieve success in your career? Are you the one who is trying to change the role or want to have a promotion? Are you too busy to be a successful professional? So, you have two options in life: strive to achieve your dreams, or keep dreaming. This session is for those people who strive to achieve their dreams.

For a while, Industry is improving as per market standards so as the employees working in those corporates. People focus a lot on their technical skills and assume this is the means for further development and growth. That is true but not the only way to achieve success.

Personal development is not only about improving technical skills but also soft skills. At the same time become a better person, team player, and a leader. You can achieve great success if you have self-awareness of how you are performing.

Self-awareness works at different levels: emotional, tactical and edge behaviors. Let’s explore together different techniques that will help you to achieve your goals.

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’re a project manager and you’ve just been given an Agile project to look after. You ask for reports and you get burndown charts, velocity graphs, and cumulative flow diagrams. What in the world are these, and why do you suddenly have a migraine headache?
Metrics are different in Agile, but the questions remain the same. Come and see what your brain needs to understand the tracking of products built in an Agile way. We’ll build an Agile dashboard that you can take into your next meeting.

Playing games is one of the most effective tools for teaching. It is hand on, active participation, engaging and fun for the audience to name some characteristics. However, it could go wrong very easily. Let's explore it together as a game!

What are the factors you need to consider when running a game? How about even before that and when picking a game to run? What elements do you need to consider running a game? How would you make it about teaching and not getting lost only playing? How would you capture the ROI for the game? How would you sell the idea of playing games to leadership?

If those are what boggles your mind, please join me for a session on Game. I will be sharing my experiences, successes, and failures on what to do with games. I will share with you tips on what to look for when picking, running and finishing up a game. How to embed a game within your training, and which part of it to use. I will share some examples that I used (and others created) on how to use already designed games for your goal. If you can’t find any, I can share some tips on how to design a game. This talk is focused to deliver value for the coaches, team leads, enterprise leaders and whomever that want to teach others from a very simple message to a very complex concept.

Learn how to co-create with your customers using modern collaboration techniques

To be successful at innovating for your customer, teams need a solid understanding of how to engage and collaborate with their customers and users. It is only then that teams can deliver high impact projects/products that are important to their user base. Embark on a journey and with the latest set of techniques that help teams discover insights sooner and delight their customers faster. Take part in our latest workshop and learn everything you need to know at succeeding in collaborating with your customers. After all, innovation is best served when co-discovered with customers.

Our interactive and fast-paced workshop is based on design thinking, lean startup, and lean UX principles. It is designed to help you uncover better ways of working with your customers and boosting collaboration and creativity on your team. After many iterations and essential feedback, we’ve developed a fun and thought-provoking workshop where you will learn by doing and engaging with real people, working on challenges that will enrich your learning experience.

Description:

As ATB continues its Digital transformation, the skills we need to achieve our goals become harder and harder to find. Instead of searching further and further away for scarcer and scarcer skills how can we build the skills and culture that we need internally?

The Digital Strategy team at ATB focuses heavily on this question and our first major initiative related to this was hosting an internal Hackday that created an immersive learning experience for team members while contributing towards our engineering culture. Learn from our experience planning a Hackday from scratch and discover how impactful immersive learning can be.