As leaders at any level of the organization, we sometimes make mistakes that break the trust we’re trying to build, especially when trying to introduce changes. In this interactive session, we’ll explore the kinds of behaviours that build or break trust and introduce a model for rebuilding relationships when trust is broken. We’ll use LEGO Serious Play to examine some real scenarios and consider how trust can be rebuilt (or further undermined!). You’ll leave with insights into how to foster trust in your organization and practical ideas about how you can grow as a leader.

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?

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.

What is the goal of an agile transformation? How do we define success? What changes? What stays the same? What assumptions have we made about why we need to transform and how we go about it? What if, in our consideration of these questions, we discover that agility isn’t the point, but something deeper? What if we’re focused on changing the wrong things first?

For the past several years, respondents to the State of Agile Survey have consistently identified their respective organizational culture as a major impediment to the adoption of agile practices. Accordingly, if we accept the well-established observation that culture follows structure, transformation efforts need to begin with re-examining our thinking about how we lead and manage organizations.

In this session, participants will engage in an idealized redesign exercise to examine the thinking and theory that shape transformations while revealing the changes that can be made by senior leadership in cooperation with their people that will encourage agile-like behaviours to emerge at all levels of the organization and improve the quality of their transformation efforts.

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.

Doodling is a powerful way of making thinking visible. Including graphical elements in our conversations and note-taking helps us to quickly share ideas, see patterns and connections, stimulate creative thinking and have fun all the while. Getting together with markers in hand increases presence and focus because multiple senses are engaged in playing with the ideas at hand. And doodling enables us to share complex ideas quickly and effectively, which leads to new insights and better problem-solving.

If you can hold a marker, you can quickly learn to doodle simple graphics that will add creativity and depth to your meeting artifacts and personal notes. You do not need to be an artist to use drawing to enrich how you communicate with others - it's about communication over artistry. In this hands-on workshop we'll practice skills that will enable you to confidently pick up a marker to share your thinking. And we'll put your new superpowers to work through some friendly drawing games that will help you build your personal visual vocabulary.

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.

In our current business climate, organizations increasingly need to deal with a volatile and changing market. Changing needs, require rapidly shifting skills needs - in short high skill liquidity. Various techniques have been used to address skill liquidity challenges including specialization, multi-skilled individuals and cross-functional teams. This session will classify and introduce new approaches to deal with skill liquidity. It will also suggest which approaches are most appropriate to your organization, based on your organization's culture and process maturity. This model is called the Skill Liquidity Maturity Model or SLiMM.

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.

Are you noticing any resistance to Agile within your organization? Adopting Agile, or Scrum, or SAFe has become the new goal - so why aren't we experiencing all the outcomes that Agile has promised? This session will help you to communicate, clarify your reasons for, and set a laser-focus on the specific outcomes you want to achieve. Once your teams is motivated by outcomes instead of goals, they'll astound you with their creativity and problem solving skills.

Let’s travel to the Forbidden Island to learn how teams work together. On this island, a team of 3-4 people will be working together to collect valuable artifacts and then try to escape while the island sinks beneath them. Egad!

Successful cross-functional teams will learn to work together. Less successful ones will sink beneath the waves. Success is harder than you think as a bit of time pressure gets mixed in. What will you demystify as you execute and debrief this mission?

As Alistair Cockburn has said, software development is a cooperative game. By using a simple game simulation with cross-functional roles, we can see how various team dynamics play out. After running through this simulation, we’ll discuss what went well and didn’t and ways to set teams up for more success. The Forbidden Island serves as a perfect petri dish to see what team dynamics grow.

Whether you are a team member or manager, you will get valuable insights from this session.

Ride along with Express Scripts Canada on their agile transformation journey. This discussion will highlight the transformation with a focus on strategy, key learnings and successes. Maximizing business outcomes, working on the right things and delivering quickly, requires your entire organization to change. We will share our experience and leave you with some ideas to take back to your organization.

Raise awareness of how memories form, demonstrate these through examples and exercises
Discuss practical examples that can aid the memory formation of the message that we want to get stick.