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.

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.

It's the classic leader's lament. Driving organizational performance in a way that delivers on business outcomes while engaging employees. Two years after presenting this at TAC 2018 it is more relevant than ever. New updates and experiences.

Organizations have been deploying Scrum, SAFe, DAD, and a host of other practices in the hope of achieving better business outcomes. We all know that practices alone don't generate the kind of powerful results you need to succeed. The missing ingredient? We hear the word culture a lot. But it is really about operating norms, or habits and behaviors. What I've observed through dozens of transformations within my company and clients are 5 habits that the leading organizations all possess. When these 5 habits are ingrained, the practices fall into place, and performance starts to rocket.

In this session you'll learn the habits, and why they drive performance. You' also learn about the key questions you can start asking to encourage the habits to take hold in your team, or more broadly, in your organization. The path to performance is paved by changes in behaviors that are reinforced daily. Asking the right questions at the right time can be a powerful way to nudge behaviors in the right direction.

Having said that, it's not enough to create the conditions for new habits to form. Countless studies, including famous ones by Wolfram Schultz, neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, have shown that a cue and reward on their own aren't enough to create a lasting habit. Only when your brain starts to anticipate a reward will the habit become automatic.

We are living in an unprecedented time. Volatality in the stock market, record-high unemployment, unimaginable impact on small & large businesses, a complete shift to remote teams… the list is endless.

Leaders might feel helpless and without tools to deal with these seismic shifts. In this talk, I present a practical point of view that asks the leaders to be bold. It is not just about surviving the crisis but thriving. 

In 2009, after the 2008 financial crisis, EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) of resilient companies had risen by 10% while industry peers lost 15%.

• Do you want your organization to be one of those resilient companies?
• What are some of the concrete steps that you as a leader can take today to emerge stronger and better from the current COVID-19 crisis?
• How can you adapt to these seismic shifts happening in the market?
• How can your organization emerge stronger and better from this unprecedented situation?

The answer lies in creating an agile organization that can adapt seamlessly to the current as well as any future crises that may arise. Though agile principles have always been valuable they are even more pertinent in challenging times such as these.

In this talk, I discuss the principles and a practical approach that leaders can use to create a thriving organization.

Many organizations we admire around us today have embarked on a journey to productize their org structure - by assembling people around a common mission, getting them to own their "product", and setting realistic objectives / outcomes to work towards. But what about when your customer is a miner, who is risking their life every single day, in the middle of a global pandemic, to drive value for their organization? How do you productize that?

This story is about how one of the world's largest Mining and Metals organizations, sparked a shift to a product oriented way of working to:

• Move from agile projects to products
• Deepen customer centricity and user insights
• Boost end-to-end ownership over problems & solutions
• Enhance speed to market and quality of delivery
• Integrate Business and Technology stakeholders

Working alongside our client team, we were tasked with transforming two strategic investment areas for their organization:

1. Digital Geotechnical Program – “Leveraging technology to improve the safety and efficiency of our key assets”
2. Railroad Production Management – “Building the railroad of the future to deliver goods and services to the world”

For the two areas outlined above, this task became immensely challenging, as we aimed to take a fairly technology-focused concept (i.e. product-based teams) and take it out of the office and into the real world. Within each program we sought to validate a key hypothesis for each of the areas we explored:

1. Within the Digital Geotechnical Program, we sought to understand "how do we build a product team that can effectively inspect/measure/analyze the health of our assets, to improve safety?"
2. Within the Railroad Production Management Program, we looked to understand "how do we build a product team who can manage one of the most complex industrial railroads in the world, to boost efficiency and safety?"

As we embarked on this journey, we were faced with a number of key challenges, including:

• How do you productize an offering that delivers value to both business and technical users?
• How do you strategically rollout such a wide impacting change to the org in a middle of a pandemic, across languages, time zones and differing levels of maturity?
• How do we influence the business to see the value in shifting to this new way of working?
• How do you shift to this new way of working in a heavily vendor supplied environment?

If any of the above challenges resonate with you or your organization, join us for an engaging talk on some on our lessons learned from our adventure in embarking on a journey to productize the world of mining!