This workshop encourages the participants to take the role of a stakeholder in small group priority discussions. We will sample three online games to prioritize items and compare and contrast them.

Learning Organizations is a way to boost business outcomes. People learn new skills and contribute to products that are competitive and attract users.

To provide continuous learning, organizations try to improve employees' performance and contribute to the upskilling. That's not enough. It's like treating the symptom, not the root cause. 

Can you do learning if you are in stress, frustrated with the work environment or not having a good sleep? Are you trying to force yourself to remain motivated to grow in your career further? Now is the time to understand and learn human behaviour as defined by neuroscientists and help yourself and your colleagues.

At Agile 2019 Jeff Sutherland introduced a metric to measure efficiency for agile stories.  A cross-team comparable metric connected to efficiency would be an amazing achievement.  But is this wonderful concept a myth or reality?  Join Neil as we look at the results of tracking this metric for some agile teams over a year.  Come with an open mind and let's review this experience!

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.

We can't choose the game. We can't choose the rules. We can only choose how we play.

In finite games, like football or chess, the players are known, the rules are fixed, and the endpoint is clear. The winners and losers are easily identified.

In infinite games, like business or politics or life itself, the players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers in an infinite game; there is only ahead and behind.

The more we begin to understand the difference between finite and infinite games, the more we can see that infinite games are all around us. We will realize that many of the struggles that organizations face exist simply because their leaders are playing with a finite mindset in an infinite game. These organizations tend to lag behind in innovation, discretionary effort, morale and ultimately performance.

The leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, in stark contrast, build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations. Their people trust each other and their leaders. They have the resilience to thrive in an ever-changing world, while their competitors fall by the wayside. Ultimately, they are the ones who lead the rest of us into the future.

The ability to adopt an infinite mindset is a prerequisite for any leader who aspires to leave their organization in better shape than they found it.

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.

Scrum Masters rely on observational skills, but does that mean we only use vision?  What happens when we are all remote?  Can we leverage other senses to “observe” how teams are surviving (or thriving)?  We may not be able to sit together with our team for a long time and it may never be the same due to the long-term effects of the coronavirus.  What skills might we adapt or create for virtual teams? And, how can we still reflect back on the observations so the team can decide how to improve?

First, listening becomes a primary observation skill with online teams.  Understanding the words used, tone of voice, and what may not be spoken can tell the skillful Scrum Master other ways to assist their team. Reflective coaching questions help to mirror back the observation. For eg: 

• At what point did you notice…..??
• Describe what happened when….??
• Tell me more about...

Second, we may need to make observations about the context surrounding a change to determine how team members are processing the change.  Do they have a good balance when they live at work and work at home?  Are they in a place to accept help when a change has been forced upon them (e.g., coronavirus forced many out of the office with little warning.)  This is where a tool like the Satir Change Model is helpful to explain to the team and then ask each team member to anonymously indicate where they are on the change curve.  Rarely will everyone be at the same point on the curve during the change process? It becomes important for the team to be aware of where individuals are with the last change when proposing other changes.

Third, when people learn to reflect back, they may use this new tool too often. Scrum Masters should learn when and how they can create the space for self-learning for the team. Sometimes a Scrum Master consciously taking a step back helps the team to take their own actions in the improvement journey. An observation log becomes another tool for the Scrum Master to notice observations about the team and share it with the team at an appropriate time.

Amplifying our listening, using frameworks like the Satir Change Model, and capturing and sharing observations in a log help remote Scrum Master use the superpower of observation in building high performing team.

Silo, as they say, must be eliminated. But how long does it take, What is the talk? What is the walk? All approaches fail. The remedy is at the system's logical level. Science is involved.

At the logical level, there is only one solution: TameFlow with Throughput Accounting.

Why ? It needs to go straight to the CxO level. 

Culture is a reflection of a company's system, which are a reflection of top management's mental models. Accounting is the most pervasive system of any company. If a culture change is contemplated, the prevailing cost accounting systems have to go.

Do your clients struggle with meetings? Do you find that groups and teams within your organization lack focus, cannot arrive at action items, and fail to really get anything done in meetings? Now that many of us in many more remote meetings, that misery is only amplified. There is a better way - earn engagement with good meeting design and proper facilitation! We will explore my proven “5 Ways of Distributed Meeting Design” and discuss key principles of facilitation that will help you design and execute your next meeting in the virtual space with ease.  This conversation will equip you with ideas to tackle the way your organization meets, address the way it works, and start to change the culture toward one that is more collaborative and engaged.

As a Scrum Master,  Coach or Leader have you found yourself overwhelmed by how to secure a nice start and continuity of your engagements?

And talking about engagements... What about situations where you get involved in critical and sometimes awkward conversations? You wondered what you thought or understood was required from an engagement apparently was not the same as people were expecting from you.

In this session, learn from two experienced coaches how they used the power of Coaching Agreement with their clients, and how this living artifact can help you set the expectations upfront. Furthermore, you will discover that an up to date Coaching Agreement, can become your best friend by helping you to reduce the chance to be exposed to misunderstandings while going through the coaching process.

This session will not be just theory, you will learn through a live demo and also get a chance to practice! Join us !!

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. 

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. 

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.