Baking bread requires many hard and soft skills, from knowing exactly how to knead and proof dough to envisioning how different flavors come together to create these mouth-watering crumbly morsels. Much more than the act of measuring, mixing, kneading and baking, great bread takes a good recipe and experience. It’s kind of like creating high-performing teams.

In this session, Agile Master Bakers Kerri Sutey and Trey Henderson share their recipe for creating organic high-performing teams. Key ingredients include vision, trust, technical environment, respect, and a culture that supports growth and collaboration. Learn practical tips for baking up a batch of high-performing teams, including how to fold in empathy and compassion and remove toxic ingredients like gossip and micro-managment that can prevent teams from rising (pun intended!) to the occasion.

Effective facilitation is the WD-40 of the agile practitioner’s toolbox. Without effective facilitation, meetings squeak along, skip a gear, or worst of all, grind to a complete halt. But with good facilitation, teams find deep democracy, working collaboratively towards team-defined goals.

In this talk, Erin, Yogita, and Trey will discuss and model effective facilitation techniques that facilitators can use to ensure that all voices are heard. We will lead everyone through a point-by-point understanding of what a good facilitator is, the role the facilitator plays within a group, and why teams need to hear all voices. We talk about building and supporting psychological safety, facilitation methods to acknowledge dominant participants while encouraging quieter voices, and how to deliver impact feedback in a way that supports deep democracy. Lastly, we talk about what to do with teams that have achieved a deeper democracy and how to follow up with participants once they have left the room. This is a learning session, but we also leave room to practice new skills so that everyone leaves with something new for their toolbox.