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.

For anyone willing to take some risk and create a success on your own terms.

-This Agile Business presentation best represents: Experience, Exploration and Adaptation.

"This talk is centered Agile being all about People and Business - on what’s in it for you and what’s in it for your clients.

I initiated the McCafé concept at McDonald's and will share both the development stages and collaborative drivers. It’s about understanding where the real levers of power lie – with YOU.

I will step beyond Agile for IT – and show how Agile Values bring the Business and People together – I open the Kimono with the client, build the relationship and I will share with the audience:

How and What real life experiences were discovered with the McCafé launch. The presentation has useful lessons about Agile Business techniques to help participants gain insight and develop important skills with Executives and Clients. It’s a fundamental shift in mindset.

Instead of focusing on what you can sell, the focus is shifted to what your unique talents are. Discover more fulfillment in the process of uniting and practicing with your client.

Can't wait to share!!

Pressured by results, overwhelmed by schedules to meet and expectations to live up to we so often lack to recognize the power of meaningful human connections around us. Still, when we recall some of the leaders that created the most lasting change in our professional and personal lives, there are a few common traits that seem to be part of their behavior.

I have lived and practiced various roles in my life and career, and derived a simple way of reminding myself on how to create more meaningful connections for more powerful impact on the human level. In this talk I will present for the first time what has driven my teaching, coaching and leading along these years.

CARE stands for curiosity, authenticity, respect and empathy. And it represents care, genuine and uninterested, for people around us- colleagues, relatives, managers and reports. In an illustrated way I will tell stories about how this simple framework can change the impact of your leadership and foster a stronger engagement for anything you stand for.

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

We like to say that agile teams own their own process by choosing their way of working, their “WoW.” This of course is easier said than done because there are several aspects to WoW. First, our team needs to know how to choose the appropriate lifecycle for the situation that we face. Should we take a Scrum-based approach, a lean/Kanban-based approach, a continuous delivery approach, or an exploratory/lean startup approach? Second, what practices should the team adopt? How do they fit together? When should we apply them? Third, what artifacts should the team create? When should they be created? To what level of detail? Finally, how do we evolve our WoW as we experiment and learn?

There are several strategies that we could choose to follow when we tailor and evolve our WoW. One approach is to bootstrap our WoW, to figure it out on our own. This works, but it is a very slow and expensive strategy in practice. Another approach is to hire an agile coach, but sadly in practice the majority of coaches seem to be like professors who are only a chapter or two ahead of their students. Or we could take a more disciplined, streamlined approach and leverage the experiences of the thousands of teams who have already struggled through the very issues that our team currently faces. In this talk you’ll discover how to develop your WoW without starting from scratch and without having to rely on the limited experience and knowledge of “agile coaches.”

A supported Product Owner has the power to prioritize. An empowered Product Owner has the power to say 'No'!

The Product Owner is the most underutilized and unsupported role in large organizations that are trying to increase their speed to market. Product Owners are only business people playing a 'weekend dad' to the team or they are merely only writing requirements for the team.

Companies that are successful in delivering products to market empower the Product Owner. The Product Owner has one leg in Product Management and the other leg with the Scrum Team. The empowered Product Owner engages the business, customers, engineering, design, sales groups as stakeholders. They are empowered to optimize value by creating vision and context to enable teams to deliver products people want to buy and are technically sound to maintain and scale.

In this workshop, we will help you unleash this opportunity and guide you in understanding the role of an empowered Product Owner.

CFOs in today's digital economy are looking to invest significant capital on data driven initiatives to deliver strategic analysis to business partners. However this is often reprioritized due to regulatory requirements.

This session is about how a large European Bank successfully delivered a large regulatory transformation program in 2017 using an agile approach. Driven by Finance & Risk groups and enabled by technology, incremental business value was delivered to Finance and Risk stakeholders.

The key challenges faced required an approach to handle evolving regulatory requirements, lack of trust and collaboration between Business and Technology, lack of knowledge and experience in the solution domain, integration of new technology assets to automate business requirements and an aggressive timeline enforced by the regulator.

As an Agile Coach on the project, my role was to help the Finance & Risk groups with the value stream mapping, formation of cross functional teams, developing an agile delivery approach, and provide training and coaching for the teams and leadership on adoption of agile principles and practices.

The successful delivery was largely due to business foresight to maneuver around typical IT challenges and instead adopt an approach using agile principles that put delivering business value over fixed scope. Through this approach, the clients were able to deliver the solution that addressed the immediate needs but this also position them to leverage for future regulations.

This talk will elucidate the backdrop, challenges that posed the business, the agile approach, culture and mindset that was adopted, and the resulting outcomes.

If you have thought of or thinking of adopting Agile mindset in a non-IT environment, this is the session for you. In this session we will share some techniques we developed and hiccups that we managed along the way.

By the end of this session, you will likely have gained some valuable insights that you can take back to your Organization and adopt agile principles and practices in areas outside of IT.

Agile has been pervasive and proven to be successful for technology product development for more than two decades. Today more organizations are taking agile principles and practices and applying them outside of IT to their business as usual (BAU) activities such as marketing or strategy development. But how easy is this next generational aspect of Business Agility? Can an approach that was rooted in technology product development be successfully applied as an accelerator to achieve overall business efficiency and effectiveness?

In this session, different case studies, including a large Canadian insurance provider, will demonstrate lessons learned from organizations that have taken agile principles and practices to help them drive commercial impacts, build people and their capabilities, adoption of the right mindset and behaviors, and improve performance. Some of the questions that will be addressed:

• What does business agility mean and why does it matter?
• How can Corporate Functions such as HR, Finance, Risk and Marketing, which are often entrenched in traditional ways of working, become agile delivery centers?
• Do agile practitioners need to “stay true” to the principles and practices they originally learned for technology in order to be effective in the business?
• How should agile business teams be optimally structured to align with an enterprise agile COE?
• What can leaders learn from others’ journeys so we can determine whether agile can truly thrive outside IT and be scaled across the organization?

If you are a Business Leader who is considering next steps on enterprise agility, organizational resilience, and a culture of adaptability, attend this session to learn valuable and pragmatic insights as you begin your own agile journey.

Collaboration is generally considered a net positive, and everyone knows it’s a key principle of Agile. Yet most Agile teams -- even those that seem to work well together -- don’t collaborate nearly enough, and thus don’t reach their full potential. It takes attention and work to make collaboration possible, let alone appealing and practical! In this interactive talk, the author of “The Human Side of Agile” explains the not-so-short list of not-so-simple factors that get in the way of real collaboration, and provides a process for determining actions that will make collaboration possible.

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.

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!

'Talk to our Scrum Master if you want to discuss something with me', 'Sorry, the team has already started their Sprint, you will need to wait for another couple of weeks', 'If only these middle managers understood what Scrum is all about!', 'Lets place this impediment in the 'blocked' column and assign it to the Scrum Master'....

I could continue citing these quotes for quite a while. Do they sound familiar ?

If so no worries, that's how the Scrum Master role is being understood after assisting to a 1, 2 or 3-days Scrum class (followed by a certification, or not). While sometimes some of these may be options that bring the most value to the team and to the organization as a whole - on a short term, far too often it becomes a 'recipe' on how to act as a 'good Scrum Master'.

Digging into my own 10 years of experience (mistakes, failures, and, some successes here and there), complemented with powerful insights from experienced practitioners, this talk aims to help the profession of Scrum Masters (and Agile Coaches of course) in stepping up their game and contribute to sustainable, long term organizational benefits while still continuing their service to the team.

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.

Are you currently a Product Owner or would you like to understand more about the Product Owner role? In this talk I will delve into the importance of the role as a business representative in a Agile engineering team and explain what we expect out of the Product Owner. It is an important leadership role in an organization. As such the Product Owner must develop or already exhibit a specific skillset. I will also explain differences between the PM and PO role as well as how they collaborate.

Have you ever been asked, “Are we agile yet?”

That’s a daunting question to answer as there is no single best way to measure adoption. Chris and Lee, experienced Agile veterans, believe that measuring adoption is not one-size-fits-all, but rather requires strategic planning tailored to the needs of that team.

Over their careers, Chris and Lee have worked with upwards of 70 agile teams. After learning and improving over several years, they have successfully developed a simple yet collaborative approach to measuring agile adoption - all while maneuvering the minefield of executives looking for performance metrics.

Join Chris and Lee as they let you in on their approach to developing an agile adoption strategy, starting with a simple survey. The pair will also share some of the challenges they encountered and how they were able to mitigate them to improve team performance.

Recently, I faced a new challenge.
As an Agile coach, I audited an organization. Everyone was happy with my observations so I started to begin my intervention by picking my first actions among the ones I recommended. Then the management asked me why these things first. I simply stated that according to my observations that was the most urgent things to do. But they had a different opinion... Was my opinion better than theirs?
I needed something... Visual management? Co-built roadmap? That would still have been duels of opinions... And then came the idea of a battle map. Something than could help everyone understand why one move is the best to do first given our situation, why one action is more pertinent than another and the criteria that lead to the best decisions.

In this presentation, I'll explain the origins of the map, how it works and how to use it, as well as how to build it efficiently

It’s hard to coach those who are highly stressed or anxious and it’s even harder to help others when you are personally stressed or anxious. In this session, we’ll be learning about some of the neuroscience behind these and will learn a variety of practical techniques that we can do to drop that sense of anxiety in less than a minute.

Anxiety and stress is prevalent within our field and affects everything we do. If you experience this or you would like to help other people who do, then this session is for you.

Bonus: The techniques we’ll be discussing are also applicable with Impostor Syndrome.

When coaches encounter resistance to agile transformations, we often treat it as a phenomenon to be overcome, confronted, or combated. But resistance is a natural reaction to change, and that reaction can't be alleviated by violent opposition. Rather than meeting resistance head on, the clever coach will work around it by helping people recognize and resolve the negative emotions that drive it. Once those negative emotions are resolved, people are more likely to let down their guard and embrace change.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to identify common "faces" of resistance--behaviors that might indicate that a person is experiencing an emotional reaction to change. Participants will then work in table groups to identify strategies for helping clients recognize the emotional underpinning of their resistance. Finally, a role-playing experience will give participants the chance to practice coaching resisters to resolve their reluctance to embrace agile transformation.

Is there a better way to learn about Agility than through Play?

I believe that I have discovered a totally new and exciting game to play to unlock principles of Agility through play. While watching by husband and grandsons play with Hot Wheels, they actually started to spontaneously create hypotheses about cars and track performance and apply the Plan/Do/Check/Act cycle as they built tracks, tested and crashed cars, adjusted, learned and laughed hysterically.

When I began using this game in my Agile for Operations training classes, it became clear that building a vast array of track without thorough and ongoing testing did not make for the successful creation of a multi-featured track.

Successful teams focused on a minimum viable product and continuous testing.

Participants will learn the value of open, honest, and transparent communication through this fun gameplay. . . and of course child’s play is a judgement free zone!

No two tracks are the same.