Do you dread going to work? Are interruptions from outside making progress difficult? Is improvement almost nil? Sprint Retrospectives are the tool to help with all of these issues, but what if they elicit frustrated groans and reluctance or, worse, resentment within your team? Mark will share tips on how to change all that. Sadly, the retrospective is often the most misunderstood and abused element of Scrum even though it's the perfect opportunity to get the results you want by improving team communication, collaboration, and morale, which eventually leads to building better products that, in turn, make customers happier.  Attendees will leave with a better understanding of the power (and fun!) of retrospectives, with activities and practical ideas of how to get out a boring rut and use them effectively.

Creativity is traditionally though of as a solo activity, but many human endeavors leverage the creative power of groups. Agile uses group creativity to produce better products in shorter times. How do we support, enable and enhance the creative abilities of our teams? There are many ways to redefine the work environment for greater creativity. Many of them have been discovered through experience, experimentation and accident. Modern neuroscience suggests to us some guidelines for deliberately designing conditions to enhance creativity by explaining how our brains work, learn, integrate and create.

Creativity can manifest in several ways: creation of something new, refinement of something that exists and problem solving. We will present a summary of the literature that describes and demonstrates how creativity can be enhanced by providing a safe, nurturing environment, enhancing group interactions, pacing activities that utilize different sensory modes and trusting in the power of subconscious integration.

Culture is frequently cited as the #1 Barrier to Organizational Change in Agile Adoption Surveys. Yet we do little to address it, we mostly just hope it will change.

Before taking on a Large Agile Improvement or Transformation - you need to assess your current culture then see where your people want to go. Change won't work if its incompatible with the desires of the people.

I will teach the attendees how to use the Competing Values Framework (a widely used/referenced research backed Culture Assessment tool) to understand what their current culture is. They will also see what culture they're trying to create. The differences between the two fuel the vision for the Agile Change (or if prefer transformation). If time permits we will also see how Competing Values Framework - can help leaders understand their own behaviour.

You're a Manager or Executive not a ScrumMaster - what is the role of Leadership in an Agile Organization? You've seen the Dan Pink video on Motivation and are mystified as to how to help.

Congratulations. Last year you played the High-Performance Team Game and helped create a high-performing Team in your Organization. You were so successful that the Organization has grown around you and your peers. Unfortunately, while growing, some of the magic that you had created before as a single Team has gotten lost.

Last year’s game focused on building high-performance Teams and the tradeoffs between delivering value and improving productivity. This year’s game will focus on building high-performance Organizations. Experience and knowledge of last year’s game is not necessary. 

The game will explore options for an Organization to understand itself and the current state of the work, and then bring about real, ongoing change.

 Style: Board Game with a simple Portfolio Kanban board as our playing surface. The playing cards will be Kanban cards that represent our Product Backlog.

As a Coach and a Team Member, I sometimes come across teams that don't seem to be able to achieve high performance, and the reasons why aren't apparent. This can be frustrating for everyone when this happens, so I wanted to explore this deeper and understand the science of what happens inside Agile/Scrum Teams.

Some of the leading research[1] suggests that a key requirement for high performance teams is Cohesion. Cohesion is a measure of the strengths of the relationships between individual team members.

In this session we will use this research to discover:

• Simple communication patterns we can monitor to spot the health of the team.
• Simple tools we can use to measure and track those patterns.
• What effect the location of the Watercooler has? What effect Lunch Tables play?
• Can Cohesive Teams get you into trouble? .....
• The importance of Dissent and Diversity within teams.
• Bonuses - The negative effects of individual bonuses are well understood by the Agile Community. However we’re left with the question - are there good bonuses?

[1] Sandy Pentland - The New Science of Building Great Teams - http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams Ben Waber - People Analytics: http://www.amazon.ca/People-Analytics-Technology-Transform-Business/dp/0133158314

The core of the session will a be a game that we play successive round of. After each round I will reveal the factors that affected play in that round. Perhaps making easier to decide what to do in the next round.

In addition to the game the details of the research will be part of the session handout so attendees can focus on the play and not the details.