If I had a rupee for every time, I heard a CEO, product owner, scrum master or a manager complaining about their teams not caring enough about projects, other team members and users ...

If I had a rupee for every time, I heard a leader asking for advice on how to stop "blaming games" and "political bureaucracy" in his/her organisation...

We learn a lot about an organisation, its culture, and real values not during the times of enormous profits, successful product deliveries or CEO monthly motivational speeches but during the times of greatest struggles. We learn and find out who the real leaders are in moments when everything goes wrong, and everyone is making excuses and finger-pointing at other members or external factors. No one is to blame, and no one knows whose fault was the latest issue? The horror stories of firing employees on the spot, tearing down teams, bullying and threats are familiar to all of us.

I genuinely believe that it does not have to be this way. I believe that there is a more effective way of leading the organisation, teams, and individuals. We have the most extraordinary opportunity to improve, make an impact and improve when things go wrong.

We just have to change our approach to blame and ownership. Together we will learn how to reconsider your leadership skills and how to use them to accomplish team mission effectively. I want the audience to experience what extreme ownership means for them and what it means to be entirely responsible for all possible outputs. Participate in a challenge to create a team with a #noBlame approach to their mistakes. At the same time develop teams where psychological safety establishes an environment where uncomfortable conversations and creative conflict solutions can thrive.

I want to share impactful lessons learned from building teams and company that tries to behave differently in moments of failure. How we started to appreciate opportunities created by accidentally removing production database, what we learned by forgetting to communicate with each other or follow agreed processes, and what happened when we declined to do a very profitable project. How we are seeing signs of people owning their projects entirely, taking responsibility and changing others around them. How we train leaders on all level of organisation and how we share more and more responsibilities with them. Experience our approach to blame concept and #noBlame culture we champion and value.

A perfect introduction to the Theory of Constraints in 3 acts. Three compelling stories that represent crucial aspects of ToC including bottlenecks, introducing change in organisations and resolving conflicts to create win-win solutions.

Let us start with ToC premise that at least one constraint limits the achievement of the goal by any system. For the system to improve, the bottleneck has to be identified and exploited.

Experience the pressure felt by ToC experts dealing with "largest marine oil spill in the history" and how creatively and orderly they approached that challenge. I want to share their story and my experiences finding bottlenecks, exploiting them and achieving a higher throughput of value in projects.

ToC has a fascinating way of looking at introducing change into teams and organisations. Participate in considering some uncomfortable "facts" that we all know and believe about our failures. With the help of Eliyahu Goldratt, we will reconsider why some of our attempts at changing the situation around us failed or deliver limited benefits in comparison to initial promises. We will learn what to do next time we face the same dilemma.

Finally, I want to recognise conflicts and ToC way of approaching disagreement resolutions. With the help of the audience, we will build pragmatic Evaporating Cloud to show how to create win-win solutions, forget about compromise and increase understanding between parties. The audience will experience and learn how to stay calm, tips and tricks on how to tackle conflict and how to grow empathy and their conflict solving abilities.

Summary:
Three stories are bringing essential concepts of the Theory of Constraints to life. We will consider the WHY behind the ideas, HOW to practically implement them and WHAT they can do for you, your team and organisation. Fundamentally we will try to answer three crucial questions:

• What to change?
• What to change to?
• How to change it?
  by helping you, find bottlenecks, control the introduction of change and its outcomes and create an environment where conflict is a potential source of interesting conversations.

Everything we do we believe in our startup founders and their new vision of the world. The way we show this belief is by joining them on the journey of challenging every assumption we know, making a difference for one individual person and always being focused on user, no matter the cost. Let me share with you my stories of how to build products by shifting the focus from scalable, technical solutions to addressing single user needs and challenges first. How to impact culture and inspire a distributed, rapidly growing company and how to collaborate and treat your customers and your colleagues like “you believe in what they believe”.

Everything we do starts with WHY and a single user need.

The session is for anyone who in their daily job needs a helping hand, a bit of inspiration and a useful set of practical experiments to challenge status quo, move the needle in their organisation and build delightful products that people really want. I also want to show they they are not alone in their failures and defeats. The lessons will apply to executives changing organisations, scrum masters coaching the teams and product owners wanting to build delightful products

For me this new talk is about constantly evolving set of ideas, thoughts and values that always puts the user first and allows our employees and founders to have the time of our life.

I had a great pleasure to speak at SUGSA 2017, the biggest Scrum Gathering in Africa, where i presented this talk and I want to share our story and challenge “we have always done it that way!” point of view.

My objective is to shift the way you think about your current situation, your team, your organisation and your customers by refocusing you on user needs and always starting with “WHY?”. I am going to show you how to apply design thinking, theory of constraints and cynefin framework to situations in your daily job and see how they could be improved. This talk is about sharing what worked in our context and what made all the difference to our products delivery.

At uCreate we try to build successful "startups" - companies that operates in the space of huge business, technology and market uncertainty - but are the dream of every VC and entrepreneur. Companies that are not sure about their market fit, their product vision, their value or if there are any real customers willing to use and pay for their products. 

Our customers, include early startup owners who usually have just THE IDEA in their head and a big vision for the future. They strongly believe in the vision and purpose. We love their charisma, passion and look at the world where anything is possible. They don't like what they currently experience in the world and they want to change it. We share their big dreams and we share every step of their journey. We take a view that there are "no bad" ideas, but there are plenty that are never going to see the light of the day due to all issues facing new business owners. We are here to remove those constraints, issues and bottlenecks.

To do that we follow two very simple rules. We believe that "every situation can be substantially improved; even the sky is not the limit" and that transparency in bringing bad news early is crucial to business growth and survival

We would like to share our journey that took uCreate from tiny team in London and Chandigarh working on simple Wordpress websites using large documentation documents to company driven by Theory of Constraints, building lean startups, search daily for project bottlenecks and use modern management methodologies including Kanban, lean and socrates thinking to help our customers and our team members. We will also share our progress in dance and guitar lessons taken by our team members, we will show how we work hard and still achieve full life. We want to persuade you to fall in love with conflicts and how to find creative solutions to fix them. We will share our transformation in our technical abilities, understanding of business process and view of the world. We will present how we use Theory of Constraints to find bottlenecks in our projects and what we do about them. We will prove that simplicity can be found in any situation. You just need to ask the right questions to explore it and deliver an Eureka moment! 

We hope to prove that any situation can be substantially improved no matter what is your starting position and circumstances.