Often in agile working environments, people aim for failing fast. Yet failure is not the goal - learning is. Failure can lead to learning and so can other approaches. It can lead beyond continuous improvement to transformative learning: seeing your situation from a whole new framework in a way that lets you learn by leaps of insight.

In this workshop we present specific ways to probe, using hypothesis, and experiments will help you and your team to learn fast. This approach provides a way to get into the mindset of learning and thus always developing.

Usually a failure is to do nothing… or to do anything (blindly). The key even for big issues is to make small bets (hypothesis) and learn through experiments what's the impact. So, gain insights by (in)validating the bet. In summary it's about thinking big but acting small (and safely). Note, that every great idea, every innovation is at first a guess or rather a hypothesis and only experiments allow us to find out if our idea is really as great as we thought at first.

Too often innovative people in medium to large organizations have the feeling of being in a box - with startling new ideas - and no one really listens. In essence, these innovators are trying to “measure performance upwards.” This upward voice intrinsically measures strategies and customer impact, and applying the concept can significantly improve the overall performance without relying on top down OKRs and KPIs. Moreover, “measuring from above,” tends to measure the output of production rather than the truly important outcome: what is really making a difference for our customers and therefore for our company.

Adding “measurement from below” to a company can create a mindset that empowers everyone to follow their passion and interest and nourish the company’s effectiveness. Implementing a “from below” approach to measurement involves a fundamental shift that asks the company to synthesize a variety of new approaches. One such synthesis is Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile (BOSSA nova). This synthesis enables a company to “measure upwards” without jeopardizing the strengths of “leading downwards.” Fortunately, the implementation can be done in small steps that probe and demonstrate new measurement ideas on a small scale such that the proof cascades beyond the demonstration. This session will enable you to get started on your journey to spreading the idea of upwards measurement company-wide.

This workshop asks participants to start where they are, explains what it means to probe, and helps them develop strategies and experiments they can use in their own situation to create an environment for high performance that goes beyond what OKRs and KPIs can offer.

There are many suggestions dealing with Agile-friendly performance appraisals, which promise to rely on trust, honesty, respect, safety, and servant leadership. The Agile Manifesto does not address performance appraisal although it does generally mention regular and frequent feedback, which can also be applied to performance evaluation. Two related methods, Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy, offer interesting approaches to agile performance review. In this session we want to present these two different performance appraisal approaches, how they're are supported by the values of BOSSA nova (short for Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agile) and want to invite the participants of this workshop to discuss the synthesis of the two approaches.

This session looks at several real-world examples from actual companies including Accenture, Equinor, and Google.

The first principle of Beyond Budgeting asks to “engage and inspire people around bold and noble causes; not around short-term financial targets,” the eleventh principle advocates: “Evaluate performance holistically and with peer feedback for learning and development; not based on measurement only and not for rewards only.” Thus, the main strategy of Beyond Budgeting is to separate (financial) bonuses from performance evaluation and to use relative and not fixed targets as a foundation for the evaluation.

Sociocracy suggests holding 360 degree in-person meetings. The person being reviewed should request it when needed, not just on a rigid annual basis, and perhaps not just once in the year. In the 360 degree meeting, the organization itself can be critiqued in the review - “the way we organize is causing performance problems.” Similar to Beyond Budgeting there is a focus on the vision and mission of the specific department as well as the overall company as a source of inspiration and motivation. The output of the performance review meeting should be a development plan that the immediate group of supervision, peers, and subordinates consent to.

Based on BOSSA nova, we invite participants to dive into what Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy combined offer for performance appraisals. Participants will take away insights that they can use in their organizations.

Agile beyond IT and beyond just doing it, but rather being it requires experimenting continuously in order to learn continuously. Thus more important than failing fast is learning fast.

In this workshop we will learn what learning fast means for every individual and the organization as a whole and we will define experiments for you to use in your company for becoming agile truly. This will allow you to create an environment for continuous innovations.

In this workshop we will also make use of examples that make:

• the organizational structure (hierarchy?) more agile
• the organizational processes faster so that they enable innovation
• the organizational strategy better aligned with current needs so that your organization is able to drive the market instead of being driven by the market

DevOps and continuous delivery is typically elaborated technically - what kind of tools, technologies, or skills are necessary for being able to deliver continuously. Often it is forgotten that continuous delivery requires also a culture change - in development, operations, marketing, sales, and not least for the customer.

This can be recognized for example, that although it is technically possible for a team to deliver continuously, but it seems that this delivery isn't welcomed. This means the actual system will not be directly used.

Therefore, in this session by taking into account the necessary cultural change, I want to answer the question how to implement continuous delivery successfully and what kind of pitfalls you need to be aware of when doing so.

Today companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, to both survive but also to thrive on disruptions. These challenges call for company-wide agility. Yet, doing Agile (the mechanics) is different from being Agile (the mindset). For example, substituting management meetings with daily Scrums or using a backlog for the board of directors doesn’t make a company agile.

In order to become truly agile (meaning flexible, responsive, adaptive, fast, and nimble), you need to think outside the (agile) box. Company-wide agility requires a holistic approach, a combination of different principles: First and foremost the principles of

• Beyond Budgeting (flexible budgeting & relative targets),
• Open Space (leveraging the innovative power of all employees),
• Sociocracy (flexible organizational structures and decentralized decision making), and –of course–
• Agile (inspecting & adapting).

We synthesized these proven principles into a wider perspective dubbed BOSSA nova: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, A = Agile. Jutta will reveal a path toward company-wide Agility by showing the synthesis of BOSSA nova.

A true agile business transformation can’t result from simply “trying harder” in using known agile methods only because agile has no answer to such questions as legal organizational structure strategy, inspiration, or the role of support departments such as finance or HR.

For this reason, necessary key components for a successful enterprise agile transformation must be found outside of agile in other streams of development. These other streams can more readily guide us in developing:

• Continuous improvement strategies necessary to enable self-sufficiency and adaptation in every department - not just the software department.
• The executive and board roles in driving organizational agility.
• Processes, strategies, and structures that enable the current culture to self-organize for company-wide agility.

We suggest “BOSSA nova” as a composite of four streams of development that, together, can lead us toward a broad enterprise agile transformation. The acronym stands for: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, and A = Agile. Bossa nova, the style of music, is a synthesis of samba and jazz. Similarly BOSSA nova, the enterprise strategy, is a synthesis of different streams of development. Bossa nova is also an intricate dance, where dancers adapt their steps to the music, and their movements and their spirit in turn influences the musicians. In the same way, BOSSA nova helps your company adapt to its complex context and also influence that context. And finally, Bossa nova in Portuguese means new trend, new wave - which is how we envision a true business agility transformation.

In this session, I will focus on the OSS in BOSSA nova and how those two streams of development (Open Space and Sociocracy) can be leveraged for a successful agile business transformation. These two components focus on answering the questions about the strategy for the legal organizational structure and the incorporation of the inspiration.

Agile beyond IT and beyond just doing it, but rather being it requires experimenting continuously in order to learn continuously. Thus more important than failing fast is learning fast.

In this workshop we will learn what learning fast means for every individual and the organization as a whole and we will define experiments for you to use in your company for becoming agile truely. This will allow you to create an enviornment for continuous innovations.

In this workshop we will also make use of examples that make:

• the organizational structure (hierarchy?) more agile
• the organizational processes faster so that they enable innovation
• the organizational strategy better aligned with current needs so that your organization is able to drive the market instead of being driven by the market

The necessity of rapid change is the topic number one nowadays. This regards on the one hand organizational change that we need to create and promote in order to stay in business, to respond to market pressures, and to be innovative. On the other hand this respects change that we face as organizations and individuals.

During this workshop I want to provide answers –using both theory and practice– to the following questions:

• What’s happening with affected persons during a change?
• According to complexity theory there is no resistance to change. So why is change still hard and how can we introduce change smoothly?
• What is fundamental to every change?
• What needs to be considered for implementing change successfully?
• What kinds of change can help making the organizational structure more agile and the organizational strategy better aligned with current needs so that your organization is able to drive the market instead of being driven by the market?

In order to answer these questions we will make use from the insights from different change models, Human Systems Dynamics (HSD), and Fearless Change.

Science has finally approved it: Forecasting complex projects is a deception. Moreover, forecasts hinder innovations. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize Winner in Economic Sciences and psychologist verified in many cases, that forecasting of complex projects is impossible. Yet still, we keep losing time trying to do exactly that. Beyond Budgeting (see e.g. http://www.bbrt.org/) came empirically to the same findings and offers a concept for controlling corporations without budgets. Additionally Beyond Budgeting provides advice for controlling even long-term complex projects. Agile methodologies generally recommend developing a long-term plan on a coarse-grained level only and coming up with detailed short-term plans iteratively. I'm working on large and complex agile projects for 20 years. However, learning about the work from Kahneman and Beyond Budgeting helped me a great deal in better understanding how planning, estimating, and budgeting relate and why the traditional approaches don't work.

In this session I want to analyze the latest scientific research and explore possibilities of combining Beyond Budgeting and Agile principles so that even complex projects remain controllable.

The digitalization calls for rapid organizational flexibility and adaptability. This has an impact on all dimensions of a company: its strategy, structure, and the processes. Agile will help implementing some of this flexibility and adaptability yet mainly in terms of processes. Thus, the digital transformation needs companies to change beyond Agile. Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy provide the missing links for a company to fully embrace digitalization. The combination of these concepts enables a company not only to survive but also to thrive (digital) disruptions.

The challenges companies face today in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world call for Agile throughout the company. There are two challenges: companies in general are trying to survive intense disruption and companies with successful software departments are trying to expand Agile methods to the whole company, including the board and the legal structure of the enterprise. Both the VUCA challenge and the pressure to implement Agile beyond IT, demand guidelines for implementing company-wide Agility.

We discovered these needed guidelines in Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile. Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Human Systems Dynamics, and Cynefin provide additional insights.

However, in talking with various experts about how to address the challenges companies face , we got answers from within that expert’s framework. For example,

• A Beyond Budgeting expert said, “Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won't have the flexibility to react to frequent market changes.”
• An Open Space expert said, “You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people can follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked.”
• A Sociocracy expert said, “You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile.”
• An Agile expert said, “You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company.”

All of these perspectives are true, but each perspective was always from within the discipline. We synthesized the approach into a wider perspective dubbed BOSSA nova: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, A = Agile.

The synthesis leads to a new organigram that reflects all the sources of guidance to a value center. The new organigram focuses board/CEO, inspiration, and resource and legal considerations on the value center. The value center is thereby free to focus on the customer.

We discuss how to use Cynefin-type probes that enable everyone to apply this new strategy for implementing company-wide Agility in their own organization.

Over the last few years, as agile has gained traction inside the enterprises, we've seen many scaling frameworks have sprung up. These scaling frameworks claim to retain the core agile values & principles and aim to provide a simple yet comprehensive way to scale agility across the organisation. There have been several success case-studies that have been published. We also hear and see many horror stories of failed scaling attempts. 

In this panel, let's have a critical view of the entire scaling framework eco-system.

Today companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be Agile. Yet, doing Agile (the mechanics) is different from being Agile (the mindset). The mindset lets you apply flexible Agile patterns not only for software development teams but for whole company. In this workshop, we will examine what being Agile really means and how it can be implemented by combining principles from the Agile Manifesto, Sociocracy, Beyond Budgeting, and Open Space. We’ll draw on everyone’s experiences to show the path to transforming our companies into agile enterprises - from Board to janitor, offering concrete tools and methods that participants can apply right away.

At the core of lean product delivery is -of course- the continuous delivery of a product. Yet, how does this impact the architecture, especially when welcoming changing requirements (even late in development)? Basically, the architecture should be enabled to incorporate these changes and therefore to emerge over time. This implies not to finalize the architecture upfront.

For a small team being jointly responsible for the product delivery AND the architecture this is often already a challenge yet even more so for a large team. But, also for large-scale agile development the requirement for an emergent architecture holds true. However, it is difficult if not unrealistic to expect e.g. 300 team members to decide jointly on the architecture.

Moreover, the role of and support for the architecture depends not only on the degree of the size of your development effort but as well on the degree of complexity of the system. 

In this session I report on my experiences using different models for supporting an emergent architecture in different (mainly large-scale) environments that take the degree of complexity into account.

Sociocracy is a way for groups and organizations to self-organize. Based on four principles only (self-organizing teams, shared decision making based on consent, double-linking, and electing people to functions and tasks), sociocracy provides a path for existing organizations toward empowerment and self-responsibility on all levels. It enables managers to become agile leaders. Different to comparable models, sociocracy allows companies to start where they are – with their existing organizational structures and the like. It seems to be a perfect fit for organizations which are in the need to be agile truly (due to market pressure), beyond their IT departments and software teams.

Moreover, on the team level - sociocracy provides a means for the Scrum Master and/or coach to enable self-organization.