Since 2001 Agile has been reshaping the software development and business world. The word chosen at the gathering in Snowbird, Utah in 2001 is now probably the most used and misrepresented word in our industry. Everybody is talking about "doing agile," "following agile," "being the most agile" and changing the world using "agile methodologies." We all make huge claims in the name of “agile” as if it could magically increase our customer satisfaction, improve the quality of our code, processes, products, make our people smarter, highly engaged and passionate about their work, and speed up our delivery. At this stage there are no reasons not to "do Agile," the claims and promises are large enough to jump in, without really considering what Agile stands for.

We often presume that Agile is the solution to every problem we have, Agile doesn't fix our problems it shines a light on them and exposes all previously unseen issues.

This movement of following Agile blindly, without thinking, context consideration, and direction lead to claims that Agile is dead, famously mentioned by Dave Thomas in one of his talks. Everybody "do Agile" by hiring certified Scrum Masters, bringing Agile coaches, doing standups, retrospectives and expecting great results and a badge of honor in return. My view is that those organizations are just scratching the surface in "doing Agile," not really "being Agile" and for me, there is a considerable difference between “being” and “doing”. I see Agile organizations still following 12 months predefined plans, having QA departments as a separate function and having all decisions driven by Project Managers and their giant charts. There is very little room for incremental improvements, self-reflection, team, and people orientation and culture first approach. Everybody still feels afraid to be themselves, speak out or suggest a new idea.

In my view its time to claim "Agile" back and reconsider what it means and how it can help us achieve our personal, team and organization goals. The talk will focus on strategies, conversations, and examples of what "being Agile" really means. Together we will consider “agile” current situation, why "doing Agile" does not deliver the expected results and what you can do about it when you go back to your office on Monday morning.

Retrospectives are hard. It’s hard to run a valuable retrospective and it’s hard for all team members to feel that the value has been delivered for themselves, the team and organisation. While facilitating retrospectives many of us has faced a problem of team lacking interest and engagement. Why is that some people embrace retrospectives as a way of getting better and some just feel alienated by it? Even with extremely capable scrum masters and facilitators we often end up with very few actionable team items and we feel not satisfied with team results.

In my experience in retrospective facilitation one of the main reasons is that, we focus on solving the problems that are being discussed between team members and we only give attention to loudest, outspoken team members who can explain their issues very well. We forget about the whole layer of unseen communication. We forget about “what is not being said.” In my opinion that’s the big problem and challenge worth considering.

This session will focus on discovery into non-verbal communication, active listening and enabling team members to share more openly and without hesitation. We will consider techniques for increasing team ability to listen and respect others opinions. We will discuss team and individual biases including some practical experiments that everyone can use with teams during next retrospectives.

I will share with you a few techniques to dig deeper, to try to discover real reasons behind people's opinions and views. We will play the 5 why’s game and see how scrum masters can increase their own empathy.

Together we will consider other aspects of communications including.

• Body language
• Individual and team psychological safety
• “No problem” problems

I will share with you different activities, games and experiments you can run to learn more about yourself and explain those issues to your teams. My talk is designed for people who work with teams on continuous improvements and it does apply to much wider applications than just retrospectives, standups and agile practices.

At the end of the session you will learn practical knowledge how to run a better retrospective, have your team members learn more about themselves and how that knowledge can impact the team deliveries.

We will consider ways to grow individual team members, as well as whole teams. We will also focus on helping scrum masters understand their current failures and learn from them and us. Trust me, we all have been there! At ucreate we failed more times that we can count but no matter what, we never stopped and we are still learning new and better ways to hear “what has not been said”

As you probably realised there are no silver bullets to sort out all your communication issues. But there are practical ways to help team members share more and there are ways to learn more from them even when they don't speak. It will enable you you to focus on unheard voice of retro, to be an active listener, to hear what people want to share or simply “to hear what is not being said”.