Next time you are in a conversation with your peers, you could ask them, what is the role of the manager in an Agile environment?  They may say, the role of manager should transition into that of a servant leader.  You may end up being none the wiser with that reply.

One of the best responses to that question we recall is, the role of the manager in an Agile environment is similar to that of a captain of an aircraft or ship, they support the performance of their crew and deal with emergencies if they arise.

Successful Agile needs an accumulation of many things.  One building block is the establishment of leadership at multiple levels, managers are an essential part of this.  In order to achieve this, the Agile manager must be aware of the various stances they could assume at the appropriate time, to provide the best support for their teams.  This session introduces several stances and principle's aligned to each stance to help get you started in an interactive way and hands on approach.

We expect leadership teams to find innovative solutions to business challenges, and yet rarely give any consideration to how to solve these challenges. Current thinking is leading us to understand that different types of problems lie in different complexity domains, and require different ways of solving them. And the mix of solution types is shifting, meaning our traditional approaches to problem solving are not always suited to the new problems we encounter.

The Cynefin framework, introduced by Dave Snowdon, provides a simple model to understand the types of problems and how to solve them. Using Cynefin and complexity thinking can accelerate organizational learning by recognizing the problem domain for a particular situation and knowing what class of solution is appropriate. Recognizing the complexity of a problem is a behavior that will enhance learning, and failing to recognize it may restrict learning within the community.

As managers and leaders, we need to understand what types of problems we encounter, and which tools and approaches are best in each case. Using a series of Lego exercises, participants will experience each problem domain, from simple to complicated to complex to chaotic, and emerge different approaches to problem solving in each domain. Some will work, some won't. You will experience the importance of choosing the right approach for each problem domain, and what happens when we use the wrong approach to solve a problem.

Expect to understand what type of system you are dealing with by recognizing when practices stop working, and learn to decode what is happening in terms of organizational structures and communication in that specific system.

Your mind is like this water my friend, when it is agitated it becomes difficult to see. But if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear.

Master Oogway (Kung-Fu Panda)

When should you coach? When should you teach? And when should you mentor? It’s not always easy to recognize that you probably play different roles with your teams, let alone knowing when and how to switch between them purposefully.

In this session, we will help you consciously recognize the various coaching stances and which stance is appropriate for a given situation. You will practice stepping into the stances and moving between them using coaching katas that model situations you probably see all the time in your companies.

Attendees will leave this session with greater self-awareness of their coaching style, practice working within the various stances, and techniques they can practice to further enhance the agility of their coaching. This focus on understanding our internal thinking leads perfectly into the next session that focuses further outwards on making observations, separating out what we see versus how we interpret what we see.

Building the right thing and building it quickly! How about building it the right way?

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” – Dan Salomon

Is your delivery team delivering Spaghetti code, all complex and tangled up? Want them out of bed on a Monday and working on Lasagna code, all structured, well defined and layered?

Starting out introducing Agile engineering practices is difficult. What is it? Where do you go? How do you start?

In this session Agile Engineering practices, concepts and philosophies will be introduced. Through structured exercises, attendees will demonstrate the following agile engineering practices:

• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Pair Programming
• Continuous Integration
• Refactoring

Through this highly interactive hand on workshop, you will learn the concepts and develop an understanding of Agile engineering practices in a playful way without touching a single piece of code.

Target Audience: Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Executives, Managers, Agile Leaders and Scrum Teams.

Building the right thing and building it quickly! How about building it the right way?

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” – Dan Salomon

Is your delivery team delivering Spaghetti code, all complex and tangled up? Want them out of bed on a Monday and working on Lasagna code, all structured, well defined and layered?

Starting out introducing Agile engineering practices is difficult. What is it? Where do you go? How do you start?

In this session Agile Engineering practices, concepts and philosophies will be introduced. Through structured exercises, attendees will demonstrate the following agile engineering practices:

• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Pair Programming
• Continuous Integration
• Refactoring

Through this highly interactive hand on workshop, you will learn the concepts and develop an understanding of Agile engineering practices in a playful way without touching a single piece of code.

Target Audience: Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Executives, Managers, Agile Leaders and Scrum Teams.

Have you ever been part of a great team? A team where you loved to come to work every day, a team that encouraged to accomplish goals that you felt were nearly impossible?

Have you ever been on a team from hell? A team with constant conflict, disagreements and fear of speaking the truth?

In his book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, Peter Lencioni refers to trust as a foundational and key ingredient to high performing teams. Exercises in this workshop will allow individuals to become more self aware and increase their vulnerability to build a stronger bond of trust.

Many principles that actors live by are the same principles that a high performing agile team should live by as well. The session is all about focusing and strengthening those key skills needed by agile teams.

Many of us think we can’t do improv. We get stuck in our head and panic, afraid we might not know what to do or say. This workshop involves highly interactive group activities that are fun and fast paced designed to help communicate effectively and think on your feet. Games are intentionally ordered to focus first on creating safety for the groups before advancing to more complex topics as collaboration and risk taking.

Improv will make you think about your team, your organisation and yourself differently, in the context of your agile environment.

Starting out as a new agile coach is difficult. Where do you go? How do you start? Learn to leverage a coaching approach that focuses on observations and to form insights and goals.

You will uncover a structured approach to coaching which aims at improving team performance by providing clear guidance and structure to the coaches and scrum masters. Through a structured approach, coaches and scrum masters will be able to better target their efforts and create demonstrable improvement in teams.

A structured coaching approach can be applied to, but is not limited to:

• Agile, Lean, Scrum project practices: planning, tracking, improving.
• Agile technical practices testing
• Product management, business analysis, and Product Owner role
• Scrum Master role (team leadership and project management)
• Management and Leadership principles, skills, and practices
• Effective agile process mechanics: iteration planning, reviews, retrospectives, daily stand-up
• Building effective self-organized and empowered product teams
• Evaluation of tools to assist in Agile Lean practices

After an introduction to effective observation techniques, groups will be asked to collect observations from various scenarios drawn from real-life experience with teams and organizations.. Groups will then collaborate with others and draw insights from common behaviors and trends. From this, we will leverage the Coaching Card technique to plan possible coaching paths forward and identify ways that progress could be validated and demonstrated in practice.

Attendees will leave this session with a structured approach to guide their ongoing coaching efforts and share those experiences with others in the organization.

Have you ever been part of a great team? A team where you loved to come to work every day, a team that encouraged to accomplish goals that you felt were nearly impossible?

Have you ever been on a team from hell? A team with constant conflict, disagreements and fear of speaking the truth?

In his book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, Peter Lencioni refers to trust as a foundational and key ingredient to high performing teams. Exercises in this workshop will allow individuals to become more self aware and increase their vulnerability to build a stronger bond of trust.

Many principles that actors live by are the same principles that a high performing agile team should live by as well. The session is all about focusing and strengthening those key skills needed by agile teams.

Many of us think we can’t do improv. We get stuck in our head and panic, afraid we might not know what to do or say. This workshop involves highly interactive group activities that are fun and fast paced designed to help communicate effectively and think on your feet. Games are intentionally ordered to focus first on creating safety for the groups before advancing to more complex topics as collaboration and risk taking.

Improv will make you think about your team, your organisation and yourself differently, in the context of your agile environment.