While retrospectives are amazing, imagine if you could make continuous improvement happen every single day. Imagine being able to drive meaningful improvements in your organization that not only improve performance, but also transforms your culture.

In this workshop, you'll learn techniques for running continuous improvement micro-experiments. These are short, fast test and learn loops that give you feedback in hours or days. You can use these techniques for personal improvement, and you can use them at the team and organizational level. These techniques are universally applicable. We've been using them with executives at Fortune 100 companies, in the public sector as well as with teams and individuals at every level in those organizations. We've also been using them also with public sector organizations with the same positive impact.

This is not your average retrospective. It's akin to compound interest. A little improvement every day that at first feels invisible, but over weeks and months, the improvements you implement begin to multiply into visible, tangible outcomes that help you propel yourself and your team into a state of high performance.

Ever notice how you feel when you enter a company's doors? Is there excitement in the air? A buzz? Does it feel like innovation is oozing from the walls? Or does it feel as exciting as a tax man's trousers? What makes you feel these things? And how can you start creating a better cultural experience for your employees and customers?

Culture is hard to change. And every time I hear there is a "mindset problem" or, "we need to change our culture", it becomes painfully clear that focusing on process and tooling changes alone won't cut it. Thankfully, there are effective techniques to help you hack your culture.

In this workshop, you will learn how to identify the attributes of your existing culture. You will build a culture map, starting with the visible signs of culture and then delve into norms, values, and finally, the core of culture--the underlying assumptions we don't even think about. Understanding where you are, culturally, is the first step.

From there, you will run through facilitated activities to build a culture hack. Simply put, a hack allows you to test a culture change and if it works, you can stabilize that change and start adding new hacks. Each hack moves you down that all important path to a new, vibrant culture, step by step.

My team has been experimenting with these techniques with several organizations. You'll hear about some real-world hacks and how they helped organizations improve. Our approach is not built on a single culture framework or a change management system. It is built on the work of many; the Cynefin framework, complex adaptive systems thinking, lean change, supported by culture walks, interviewing, and impact mapping to name a few of the tools you'll learn to use.

As a leader in your organization, one of your most important roles is as the steward and curator of your culture. This workshop will help you make culture change real, practical, and measurable. With these tools, you can have a positive impact on your people and customers.

Here are some common cultural challenges:

• Excessive command and control
• A belief that employees need detailed processes because they are incapable of making decisions on their own
• Fear of making a mistake
• Long and excessive approval processes - again, because employees cannot make good decisions
• No or little focus on customers
• Value statements like "We value our people" but with no supporting evidence
• Lack of employee engagement

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.

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!