At the core of Agile was the attempt to strip away the traditional hierarchical structures in order to empower people and help teams to succeed. However, just because some job titles and line management lines may have gone: power, rank and privilege can still stalk these organisations in many guises causing confusion, conflict and potentially toxic environments. Some might argue, that even with all the best intentions in the world, what we have actually created is a "Lord of the Flies" situation where that flat heirarchy and "empowerment" has actually stripped the support structures away from people who needed them most (such as minority groups, gender, race). Has "better ways of working" actually propelled us backwards? Have we forgotten to support and nurture the "people and interactions" piece with our focus on stripped down process? Or has helped shine a light on issues long covered up by making them more visible but we now have to find out new ways to approach power, rank and privilege in our modern environment. 

In this workshop we will explore this usually avoided topic in the modern Australian Workplace (and within the Agile community) using an organisation and relationship systems coaching (ORSC) approach where we can start to reveal a system to itself and then start to use the natural intelligence and creativity within the group to help address this difficult but fundamental issue.

This is a very interactive workshop, with no slides and those that will be attending will be expected to do most of the work(!) while guided by the experienced ORSC facilitator.  Therefore each session of these workshops can be profoundly different depending on the system of people who attend. However, all participants should leave with a deeper understanding (or at the very least a whole new set of questions) on the meaning of "power" within a working environment and also an experience of how a systems inspired approach can help address such "edgy" topics.