Co-creating drawings helps teams enhance their systems thinking abilities by really seeing the big picture. A group of people talking around a whiteboard is an effective way to share ideas across a team. Imagine how much richer the conversation is when everyone on the team has a marker in their hand and is actively contributing! Graphic visualization is an important tool for talking about new ideas, generating insights and developing shared understanding. In a team context, drawing is a thinking tool rather than an artistic endeavour. When everyone participates in creating drawings, all team members can see how things fit together and what mental models are at play in defining the situation. And, by drawing together, the team is collaboratively creating meaningful records that are being validated and updated.

Come along on a visual adventure into how teams can collaboratively visualize ideas and make sure that everyone at the table has a voice. In this workshop, we will warm up with some basic doodling skills practice. No drawing experience is required to take part in this session: if you can hold a marker, we can teach you the skills needed to put your ideas on paper. Together we'll consider the ways that collaborative drawing can be used to enhance group work, and we will share practical activities that you can take back to use with your team for setting the stage, gathering information, and sharing stories.

Abstract (280 chars)

What if you could organize and motivate people to double their highest-expected productivity goals? Lessons from a large, distributed, volunteer group of online video gamers offer practical 21^st-century guidance for your workplace. Even if you aren't a gamer. Or a space pirate.

Abstract (full)

What if you could gather and motivate people to double even their highest-expected productivity goal? What if you had no authority over those people -- if they were all volunteers?

The future of leadership is emerging to guide 21st-century organizations beyond the small, cross-functional, green-field software development teams of the 1990s. Agile enterprises must respond to emerging markets, provide unity of purpose to workers with conflicting motivations, and foster order when change is the only constant. Agile leadership must cope with distributed teams, "gig economy," diverse skill-sets, and the impact to morale of unexpected changes. But the measure of success is still delivery to the market: volume, quality, reliability.

Early in 2017, a group of several hundred independent players of the online futuristic video game Elite:Dangerous faced all the above organizational challenges yet still managed unprecedented delivery to their market. And they did it despite the "me first" culture of online games.We'll explore the structural, social, and cognitive factors which enabled this large distributed team of casual volunteers to deliver twice as much as their nearest competition. And we'll uncover how to amplify those factors in your own workplace.

You'll learn the powerful effects of making individual contributions visible, expanding the scope of your regular team synchronizations, having a loose leadership hierarchy, and encouraging diffusion of innovation. And you'll see how community engagement is an essential quality of a servant leadership culture. This is a compelling story about leadership that's relatable to anyone regardless of their interest in or experience with Agile, online gaming, or space pirates.

In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Brene Brown shares her 10 Guideposts of Wholehearted Living. Number 7 on that list is “Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth”. This resonates strongly with the 8th agile principle about sustainable pace.

In the world of Scrum software development, it is all too easy to get caught up in pumping out user stories and increasing velocity sprint after sprint, but what does that type of hamster wheel mentality do to us physically, mentally, and spiritually? For that matter, what impact does it have on our products? Are we building fast things, or the right things? Are we making time to dream up big, new ideas and/or to build a cohesive team around our mission?

Work-life balance is a buzzword that we throw around, but how often does the culture of an organization support exactly the opposite? Hero culture is rewarded, and our output viewed as a measure of our worth on performance reviews. We set out to transform the world of work with agile and with Scrum, yet I’ve heard the Scrum sprint cycle described as a “hamster wheel”, an endless conveyor belt of backlog and sprint reviews that the developers cannot escape. This is not congruent with what we read in the agile values and principles.

I’m interested in inspiring a discussion about the pitfalls of a competitive exhausted culture, and how we in the Scrum community, even with the best of intentions, could be “accidentally responsible” for continuing to spin the hamster wheel. Hero culture has been discussed before, but have we addressed our own potential culpability in creating it? We need to make sure that the principles and practices of Scrum are being used for good, not for evil. It all starts with a conversation.

In this discussion, we will explore the dangers of exhaustion as a status symbol -- for our organizational culture, our teams, and ourselves. We will discuss the specific risks of inadvertently creating a competitive exhausted culture within an agile transformation, and the ways in which we can leverage the agile values and principles in order to mitigate those risks. Lastly, we will take a look inward to assess our own attitudes and views about work life balance.

“Are we Agile yet?”, “Of course we are agile, we stand up every day”, “We have a hybrid Waterfall/Agile technique”. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

After several years at multiple organizations it is interesting to find the same mistakes being made over and over again. This talk will discuss the various ways that your company can fail at agile and what you can do about it.

Gam'Inception is a game made of games to learn how to create games... Sounds funnier than dreams in dreams in dreams, don't you think Mr. Nolan?

By playing three serious games, attendees will learn why serious games are a very efficient way to discover new concepts, mechanisms or tools and that everyone is able to build her/his own ones:

• Attendees will have to face me in a drawing duel. Be prepared, I'm almost as good with pens than with ASCII art:
  _██_
  ( • ̮ •)
  ( . • . )
  (... • .. )
• Then, they will travel in time, to Venice, the city of Doges, for a mix of Game of the Goose, a game book and an escape game
• Finally, they will participate to Top Chef (at least my version of the show...) and will find their own recipes to cook their own games

The workshop is almost entirely interactive and requires no prior knowledge about serious games (you don't even need to know what a serious game is). At the end of the session, attendees will have learned:

• how a serious game is structured
• which steps are essential to building a serious game
• which steps are 'nice to have' when they build a serious game
• that they are way more qualified to build their own serious games than they thought
• how efficient a serious game is to learn new things
• how highly corruptible I am

Note that I always try to co-present with Leonardo DiCaprio but, sometimes, he is too busy to come ;-)
I hosted it successfully several times in Europe (Agile France, Agile Tour Paris, Xebicon and smaller events) last year so the structure is solid.

Slides, in French, are available here. The workshop (and its slides) will, of course, be in English with the possibility for attendees to ask me anything in French if they are more comfortable with this language

Have you ever been part of a great team? A team where you loved to come to work every day, a team that encouraged to accomplish goals that you felt were nearly impossible?

Have you ever been on a team from hell? A team with constant conflict, disagreements and fear of speaking the truth?

In his book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, Peter Lencioni refers to trust as a foundational and key ingredient to high performing teams. Exercises in this workshop will allow individuals to become more self aware and increase their vulnerability to build a stronger bond of trust.

Many principles that actors live by are the same principles that a high performing agile team should live by as well. The session is all about focusing and strengthening those key skills needed by agile teams.

Many of us think we can’t do improv. We get stuck in our head and panic, afraid we might not know what to do or say. This workshop involves highly interactive group activities that are fun and fast paced designed to help communicate effectively and think on your feet. Games are intentionally ordered to focus first on creating safety for the groups before advancing to more complex topics as collaboration and risk taking.

Improv will make you think about your team, your organisation and yourself differently, in the context of your agile environment.

“When will it be done?” is a question asked in just about every business I’ve encountered, Agile or otherwise. In this metrics-focused session we will explore why that question is so hard to answer and whether it is even the right question to ask.

We will explore current thinking about measurement in knowledge work fields. How every business needs to identify their own appropriate metrics to measure for their own business challenges and goals. While metrics are always unique for each individual business context, we will identify 4 metric categories identified from the Fit for Purpose framework.

To connect these concepts to your Agile organization we explore going past looking at measurement as a team phenomena and connect this to the level of services or value streams.

Digging further we continue to examine questions around measuring and predicting delivery times. We contrast prediction approaches using deterministic methods vs probabilistic methods. And consider multiple sources of variability that make predictions challenging and often impossible.

We conclude by considering more appropriate questions to replace “When will it be done?” Rather asking “When do we need it” followed by “and so, when should start?”

Developers are always wanting extra time to refactor their code. But we have deadlines and commitments to make - and really, what is refactoring anyway?This session aims to help non-technical team members to understand refactoring, why it's important, and why you don't have enough time not to refactor. Using Lean 5S, we're going to go through a non-technical example of what refactoring is and the types of things your teams may be doing during refactoring and the language they use.

To increase the speed of delivery, your team needs test automation! Eric walks through scenarios to help increase your test automation. Scenarion 1 - Helping your team jump start unit testing a legacy application, Eric shows how to start introducing test automation into your release pipeline. Scenario 2 – We hate TDD - Eric walks through a strategy to help a team resistant to Test Drive Development/Design that helps introduce this practice. Eric then takes questions on increasing test automation to improve pipeline quality

1. Have an already successful company
2. Read “Agile At Scale” article in latest HBR
3. "Go Agile" (Pay large sums of $ to a large consultancy)
4. ????
5. Profit

Self Organizing teams are the heart of agile software development. The Agile Manifesto practically reads as if it was written by a Team who were sick of being told how to do their job… “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it…”

As in “We will figure this out, if you’d just LET US!”

But for all the leadership training and blogs about how important an ‘agile mindset’ is, most teams are simply never allowed to sufficiently self organize.

In this brief interactive session, we’ll uncover what it means to be part of a self-organized team, the boundaries of self-organization, and how Managers and Scrum Masters can exercise servant leadership by enabling teams to self-organize.

Wave 2 of Agile is a way to understand the high-performance results that come from Being Agile. We know many in our industry have fallen into the trap or “Doing Agile” – where people lose sight of the objectives and lasting results.

Wave 2 is about Living Agile. It is how we show up. It is how we work with people and organizations to shape the Culture. It is living Mahatma Gandhi's truth:

“Be the change that you want to see in the world”.

When we focus on our own behaviour, we model Being Agile. This is the only way to invite the Agile Mindset. This is Wave 2 Agile. We stop creating conflict and resistance. We become the effective leaders and influencers of lasting change in our organizations.

“To be or not to be? That is the question.”

"Customers don’t buy products, they hire products to do a job” – Clayton Christensen

• Are your customers ready to buy your product even before you release it?
• Are your customers inspired by your product?
• Is your product vision aligned with your customers’ needs?
• Does your product vision motivate your team?

Join us to experience a new way of creating an empathy-driven product vision, a powerful tool to start your journey of creating the right products or services. Experience the power of Emotions inspired by Human-Centered Design concepts, iterative feedback loops, and Visual creativity.

With this approach, customers and team are involved and convinced with your product or service right from the start.

A few benefits of empathy-driven product vision are:

1) Seeing Is Believing: visualization has a better impact on the mind

2) Easy to understand and getting feedback from the customers

3) Helpful for marketing and sales to think of their product strategy

4) Empower team to be focused for the product goal in their whole development cycle

5) Helpful for start-ups to pitch a new product idea or invention to a potential investor

6) The team understands better, the vision of the new product initiatives by the company

In today's agile, scaling of any framework comes with its own ... framework! Not so with Real Kanban as the scaling approach is to simply do more of it.

The Real Kanban approach from Steve Tendon supports all flows - Operational, Financial, Informational & Psychological - by proposing the exact same models at the team, project, portfolio and enterprise level. Talk about robustness !

Operational Flow (How well are we delivering?) deals with reducing cycle time so that work in progress does not stall in the system accumulating costs. By reducing cycle time - the time an item spends in the system - Operational expenses are trimmed leading the way to more productivity.

Financial Flow (How much wealth are we creating?) recognizes throughput - the number of unit coming out of the system per unit of time - as the ultimate economic indicator for sales. Having a healthy beat is key to financial health.

Informational Flow (How well are we communicating?) uses visualization and metrics from the Theory of Constraints and Throughput Accounting to ensures system thinking behavior and alignment.

Psychological Flow (How happy are out people?) - The Real Kanban approach also allows employees to increase their skills and capabilities with WIP control, so that they can tame by themselves the boundaries of boredom and anxiety to always find a way to better themselves at their pace with the ever present slack existing in a Kanban system. The benefits - psychological flow - resulting from this system thinking's approach is to leverage the consciousness level and lead to continuous improvement by supplying metrics that guide each decision.

Teachings from Queuing Theory, Tameflow, Real Options and other fascinating Kanban and Lean tools will be presented.

A scrum master's exhibits leadership style described in McGregor's theory X or Theory Y. The Scrum guide describes a Scrum Master as "responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide and they do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values"- A servant- Leader. Servant-leadership focuses on collaboration, trust, empathy and the usage of power ethically.

Servant-leadership is something lots of Scrum Masters struggle to balance. For some, they take that literarily and will often run after their team, while some still have the command-and-control mindset.

Does you Scrum Master encourages collaboration among the teams or act as a gate keeper? Or perhaps your scrum master is the type that usually brings round the coffee and biscuits. Which is your scrum master? A postman, Seagull or Scrum Mum?

A walkthrough of my experience as a portfolio coach leading teams of agile coaches supporting large (60million+, 120person+) regulatory programs in the financial services industry.

Comparing the similarities during my time leading a team of transformation coaches and scrummasters delivering customer-facing new technology at Bell, in the regulated telecom space.

Your team’s been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You’re estimating work using abstractions like “story points”. The predictability and quality of delivery has improved. However, every December you’re still asked to estimate large initiatives for annual budgeting. Something doesn’t make sense and you’re having a hard time explaining it to senior leadership.

Those funding projects are trying to invest wisely and mitigate risk. They need to understand what to fund and what to avoid while looking at scary numbers. However, they’re still using conventional methods of mitigating risk with big plans and committed dates.

How agile can your organization be when budgets are designed for large fixed cost, scope, and time projects? In this session we’ll talk about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches. Join us and learn how you can start forecasting!

Agile is a set of values and a mindset. As such, it can be hard to answer questions that leadership often asks. These questions include: How agile are we? Are we getting more agile? What are the growth opportunities for our team? To address this customer desire, there are now many assessment frameworks available in the Agile space.

Many organizations use assessments to determine their level of agility. This session will introduce several assessment approaches and tools. Like medicine, when used incorrectly, the results can be toxic. We will explore the merits, potential uses, and possible downsides of each approach.

You will leave this session understanding more about your options, as well as insights for framing an assessment that fit your needs best when trying to measure your organization's culture and teams.

Myth: "Agile teams don't document."
Truth: Some of the best documentation we've ever seen comes from Agile teams.

Agile Engineering practices have revolutionized the ways in which documentation is treated and produced. In high-stakes environments with heavy compliance and audit requirements, a tendency toward exhaustive documentation is dangerously common. This workshop provides direct guidance and simple tools to help a document-heavy workplace think differently about documentation.

I have developed this workshop to help an organization reframe their understanding of documentation with respect to knowledge work in complex environments so that they may eliminate unnecessary artifacts and simplify/automate others.