If we were to ask most any person what they desire, I’m quite certain that community and connection would be among the most-answered responses. (That and winning the lottery.) But how do we get to genuine connection? One answer? Better questions.

As a coach, powerful questions are a foundational skill, one that I use every day, in service of every relationship. If we consider what questions are, the flippant, easy answer is that questions are how we seek information, seek knowledge. Yes, questions are those things, but in truth, they are so much more than that. A good question shows that someone is paying attention, they’re thinking about you, that they’re honoring your space in their circle. A good question shows care, interest, our dedication to maintaining that relationship. Good questions are the care and feeding of human connection.

This interactive talk (meaning that yes, you're going to practice what we talk about in this session) will help you to understand what a good question is, how they connect us to others, and how to use them. You'll leave knowing how to be a better servant-leader in your own relationships.

The ability to ask questions and to listen for the response is to be in service of a relationship. I created this talk to share this skill, to help you create the kind of community and connections that you desire in life.

Agile mixed with Waterfall exists in every product development organization globally, yet current thinking teaches us to crusade for one approach at the expense of the other - an approach that creates unnecessary resistance and alienates people with different perspectives. The question is: How can we manage the reality of a mixed-methods environment while still receiving the intended benefits of both approaches? In this talk, Brock Argue and Erkan Kadir will introduce Integrated Agile, a groundbreaking and practical approach that leverages Polarity Thinking to manage the predictable dynamics between Agile and Waterfall while maximizing the upsides of both approaches.

Are your retros running a bit flat? Need something to spice them up and make them more effective and also more interesting for your team? Join us as we walk through a collection of techniques from psychology and applied neuroscience to give your retros that edge you need. 

You’ll walk away from this session with immediately applicable techniques that you can use right away.

With so many changes coming to organizations - agile, devops, products, etc - how do you learn these new practices and apply them in your context with your constraint? Enter the dojo - an immersive, team based learning environment where teams come together to learn and apply new skills to their work.

We are in the Experience economy today. The key differentiator in business success is the user experience ‘Wow factor’. However, such innovations won’t succeed unless we get the people behind it. The surest route to win their people is to involve them in the process of generating ideas. The danger is that the involvement of many people with different perspectives will create chaos and incoherence.

Organized innovative processes embrace focus and instill confidence. Most humans are driven by a fear of mistakes, so they focus more on preventing errors than on seizing opportunities. They opt for inaction rather than action when a choice risks failure. But there is no innovation without action—so psychological safety is essential. That’s what the application of “Design Sprints” does for us, each step of the Design sprint generates a clear output that the next activity converts to another output until the organization arrives at an implementable innovation. 

Design Sprint creates an environment where an innovator lives the customer’s experience. This immersion in customer experience emerges thoughts for deeper insights. Design sprints connect immersion to the emergence in an amazing framework giving rise to an innovative solution build with employee engagement to meet customer expectations.

The CFD is growing in popularity in the agile community and has been called a successor to the Scrum burn-down chart. It’s a  very effective tool as it  provides a better visualization and typical information for critical decision making.  Furthermore, CFD can help you improve your process by providing insights into issues and by identifying potential bottlenecks.

In this session, we’ll look at the different patterns, behaviors and examples of CFD, reviewing what each represents, and how can they be used in both a Kanban and Scrum context.

The Agile Manifesto came out in 2001. It’s all about teams. And yet, HR processes still focus on individuals. A few years ago, companies in Europe started to ask questions on how Agile affects HR, specifically in performance management and reward & recognition. In the US, this exercise only started recently, even though there were a few voices raising and answering these questions early on. In this interactive talk, we dare you to open the HR pandora’s box and go on a tour with us as we share with you how we navigate the HR waters to increase your business agility. We hope you would be courageous enough to join us in driving this transition in your organisations.

Yup, you read that correctly - colonoscopies. A hallmark study by experts in the fields of psychology and economics has strangely strong links to the themes that underpin the Agile Manifesto. In this short talk, I present how basic human psychology - the tendency to obfuscate the initial and distill the terminal - aligns perfectly with a world of work that is based on iteration.

The Agile Mindset is elusive - and gets a bad reputation for being so. Through evidence based research this talk will allow participants to grasp onto the concept of iteration in an innately 'human' way.

Psychological safety has been identified by many researchers as one of the main ingredients of a high performing team. As leaders, we play an important role in nurturing and growing psychological safety within our teams, but with virtual teaming, the stakes are higher and it is harder to achieve. 

As an external agile coach consultant, for many years I was able to maintain a solid stance of neutrality and objectivity toward client challenges. Now, as an embedded, full-time agile coach, I play by a different set of rules.  I strive to be a catalyst for change and challenge the status quo, but I still need to be mindful of internal politics in the interest of self-preservation. Having experienced agile coaching engagements as both an external consultant and an internal employee, I will share some of my insights. I will also explain how an internal coaching capability is vital to achieving enterprise agility. 

Do you wonder how Big Tech companies build and deliver Digital products? What framework, if any do companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Uber use to build highly scalable products? Do they have the same challenges with Product Owner role, Scrum Master vs Project Manager role, Kanban vs Scrum debate, user story slicing and infamous story point estimates? Or they have figured it all out and that is why they are at an advanced stage of their agility journey? If you are interested to know more about their flavour of agile SDLC, please join me in this learning journey on what we can extract from their core practices.

The Core theme of their framework is built on 3 disciplines

1. Software Engineering
2. Product Management
3. Technical Program Management

We will deep dive on each discipline and highlight some of the principles and differentiating factors so that we can understand and apply them for our businesses.

Whilst the shift from project to product intrigues many agile practitioners and leaders, broader acceptance of this concept into practice is challenged with various constraints. The higher adoption barrier to this shift is due to the complexity and magnitude of changes required to the organizational dynamics. Let us explore together a structured framework that can help accelerate your project to product journey. 

Burnout is a popular topic, even before the COVID-19 impacts to our lives. There is confusion because people use the word to describe everything from being tired after a tough week to a condition so severe that you need to leave your job, at least for a while. 

A shared understanding of what burnout is, how to prevent it and how to recover lets us work together to make our workplaces safer and keep people healthier.

This talk will briefly explain the environments where burnout happens and the personal traits that may make you more susceptible, to set context, then talk about the impacts of burnout and how to recover or support someone who's recovering. Focus will be on topics that don't get talked about as much:  cognitive and physical impacts, rehab (how to get your brain back in shape), what help you may need.

I diagnosed my own burnout while watching a DevOps conference talk. This is a "Yes, and..." continuation of the topic, to inform people of what to expect during recovery. Most advice stops after advising rest and possibly leaving your job. That may not be enough to get you ready to go back to work. Burnout can affect your brain like an injury and understanding this will equip you to seek the help you need.

You’ve been working with a team for a while now and you’ve noticed that planning meetings always go overtime, we can never seem to agree on an estimate, design discussions always go down a technical rabbit hole, and the requirements are always too sparse.

On the other hand, the end of the sprint feels like a giant rush, there’s always unfinished work that bumps to the next sprint, and the customer is still complaining about not having their product yet.  What is going on?  Where are all these issues coming from?

It could be that your team has trouble starting, and trouble stopping.  Join this session to learn about what happens in our minds as we think about our work and how to get started, and stopped - with some fun along the way.