It's the classic leader's lament. Driving organizational performance in a way that delivers on business outcomes while engaging employees. A year after presenting this at TAC 2018 it is more relevant than ever.

Organizations have been deploying Scrum, SAFe, DAD, and a host of other practices in the hope of achieving better business outcomes. We all know that practices alone don't generate the kind of powerful results you need to succeed. The missing ingredient? We hear the word culture a lot. But it is really about operating norms, or habits and behaviors. What I've observed through dozens of transformations within my company and clients are 5 habits that the leading organizations all possess. When these 5 habits are ingrained, the practices fall into place, and performance starts to rocket.

In this session you'll learn the habits, and why they drive performance. You' also learn about the key questions you can start asking to encourage the habits to take hold in your team, or more broadly, in your organization. The path to performance is paved by changes in behaviors that are reinforced daily. Asking the right questions at the right time can be a powerful way to nudge behaviors in the right direction.

Having said that, it's not enough to create the conditions for new habits to form. Countless studies, including famous ones by Wolfram Schultz, neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, have shown that a cue and reward on their own aren't enough to create a lasting habit. Only when your brain starts to anticipate a reward will the habit become automatic.

While retrospectives are amazing, imagine if you could make continuous improvement happen every single day. Imagine being able to drive meaningful improvements in your organization that not only improve performance, but also transforms your culture.

In this workshop, you'll learn techniques for running continuous improvement micro-experiments. These are short, fast test and learn loops that give you feedback in hours or days. You can use these techniques for personal improvement, and you can use them at the team and organizational level. These techniques are universally applicable. We've been using them with executives at Fortune 100 companies as well as teams and individuals at every level in those organizations. We've also been using them also with public sector organizations with the same positive impact.

As performance expectations in organizations rise, people need better ways to get things done. This is my preferred way of achieving that. It works for me and I hope it will work for you.

This is not your average retrospective. It's akin to compound interest. A little improvement every day that at first feels invisible, but over weeks and months, the improvements you implement begin to multiply into visible, tangible outcomes that help you propel yourself and your team into a state of high performance.

It's the classic leader's lament. Driving organizational performance in a way that delivers on business outcomes while engaging employees.

Organizations have been deploying Scrum, SAFe, DAD, and a host of other practices in the hope of achieving better business outcomes. We all know that practices alone don't generate the kind of powerful results you need to succeed. The missing ingredient? We hear the word culture a lot. But it is really about operating norms, or habits and behaviors. What I've observed through dozens of transformations within my company and clients are 5 habits that the leading organizations all possess. When these 5 habits are ingrained, the practices fall into place, and performance starts to rocket.

In this session you'll learn the habits, and why they drive performance. You' also learn about the key questions you can start asking to encourage the habits to take hold in your team, or more broadly, in your organization. The path to performance is paved by changes in behaviors that are reinforced daily. Asking the right questions at the right time can be a powerful way to nudge behaviors in the right direction.

Having said that, it's not enough to create the conditions for new habits to form. Countless studies, including famous ones by Wolfram Schultz, neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, have shown that a cue and reward on their own aren't enough to create a lasting habit. Only when your brain starts to anticipate a reward will the habit become automatic.

Many organizations are trying to adopt Agile as a methodology across their enterprises through standing up Agile Centre of Excellence (CoE). This entity is often revered as the governing body for “all things agile” across the organization and if you don’t play nice, you’re often greeted with a “sorry, you’re not allowed to be agile”. Sound familiar?

If not, maybe some of these attributes might ring a bell:

• Enable change Force change on the organization, tomorrow
• Provide training and coaching Sorry teams, fend for yourselves
• Enable process creation Nope, its our way or the highway
• Remove impediments Let’s create some new problems
• Create awareness Shhh don’t tell anyone

So we’re going to fail. Great. Now what do we do?

Having run CoE’s that have made their hair go grey and having set up several CoEs for fortune 500 companies in healthcare, banking, insurance and telecommunications, we’ve seen and made a lot of mistakes when it comes to Agile CoEs. And in the process, developed a backlog of war stories for “What to do if you want your Agile CoE to fail”, or more importantly “Things you might want to consider if you want your CoE to have a shot at success”.

Come learn more about all the things not to do when setting up an Agile CoE…and hey, we guarantee you’ll find some nuggets to enable your CoE to succeed and deliver value as part of your transformational journey.

Imagine a truly agile workplace. What operating norms, habits, or behaviours permeate the workplace? What do people say and do that is different? We hear terms like collaboration and self-organization, but do your colleagues truly understand what that looks like in action? Do they know how to change their stance and behavior to make these skills a part of how they work?

What if we could enumerate the behaviours we want to see - the organizational habits? And then, what if we could use nudges to make these behaviours come alive in the workplace? And further, what if you could arm every employee with the tools to apply nudges themselves, as part of a new meta-skill that reinforces continuous improvement and evolution of your organizational norms?

In this workshop, we will walk you through the tools and techniques you can use to start shaping your organization of the future. Whether you are a seasoned executive, or a team member, the tools and techniques are universal and can be applied at all levels.

Ever notice how you feel when you enter a company's doors? Is there excitement in the air? A buzz? Does it feel like innovation is oozing from the walls? Or does it feel as exciting as a tax man's trousers? What makes you feel these things? And how can you start creating a better cultural experience for your employees and customers?

Culture is hard to change. And every time I hear there is a "mindset problem" or, "we need to change our culture", it becomes painfully clear that focusing on process and tooling changes alone won't cut it. Thankfully, there are effective techniques to help you hack your culture.

In this workshop, you will learn how to identify the attributes of your existing culture. You will build a culture map, starting with the visible signs of culture and then delve into norms, values, and finally, the core of culture--the underlying assumptions we don't even think about. Understanding where you are, culturally, is the first step.

From there, you will run through facilitated activities to build a culture hack. Simply put, a hack allows you to test a culture change and if it works, you can stabilize that change and start adding new hacks. Each hack moves you down that all important path to a new, vibrant culture, step by step.

My team has been experimenting with these techniques with several organizations. You'll hear about some real-world hacks and how they helped organizations improve. Our approach is not built on a single culture framework or a change management system. It is built on the work of many; the Cynefin framework, complex adaptive systems thinking, lean change, supported by culture walks, interviewing, and impact mapping to name a few of the tools you'll learn to use.

As a leader in your organization, one of your most important roles is as the steward and curator of your culture. This workshop will help you make culture change real, practical, and measurable. With these tools, you can have a positive impact on your people and customers.

Here are some common cultural challenges:

• Excessive command and control
• A belief that employees need detailed processes because they are incapable of making decisions on their own
• Fear of making a mistake
• Long and excessive approval processes - again, because employees cannot make good decisions
• No or little focus on customers
• Value statements like "We value our people" but with no supporting evidence
• Lack of employee engagement

Two years ago I presented the story of a client in the US who underwent a very fast and aggressive transformation. Although it was ultimately successful, along the way, we nearly destroyed it all. The saving grace was a small group of courageous leaders who made some tough decisions to get things back on track, and continued to drive the progress needed to succeed. The success story was presented at TAC in 2014 and the near colossal failure story was presented at Agile 2015. We bring this amazing story together into a single talk with many important lessons.

As more and more organizations adopt agile software development practices in large and complex environments, IT and corporate Finance teams are struggling to appropriately capitalize agile projects and agile product-based development. Existing organizational models and government regulations are based on traditional methodologies, which track capital and operating expenses of discrete project phases, with clear delineations. How do you decide, measure and track these in an agile environment with delivery phases intertwined within time-boxed cycles? There are opinions, but at Deloitte, we have looked into this challenge and collaborated with our agile and finance experts to develop, test and implement solutions with clients.

In this talk, we'll share our point of view on the important considerations for accurate and appropriate capitalization in product-based organizations using process frameworks like Scrum.

Drop in to hear about what we've done and get some ideas on how to move forward with your own capitalization challenges.

The approach is simple, but more importantly, has been tested in the real world.