- 20 May
- 21 May
- All Rooms
- Max Nasatyr Room
- South Bank Room 1
- South Bank Room 2
- Neighbourhood Room
We’ve been helping our clients to build their digital products for 20 years already. So what have we learned throughout all that time? If you expect to hear, “We got it all wrong,” then yes, we got it all wrong, indeed. There. I said it.
And it’s not for lack of knowledge. Lean Startup was published in 2011. The lingo it proposed is a staple among product people. And yet, so much work is being done as if it were still living in the 1990s or 2000s.
Let’s get practical, then. Let’s explore why, despite everything we learned in the past decade, we still believe we can get our products right at the first attempt. And even when we say we know better, we still act as if we could.
We scope out products and features. We ask for estimates. We pick so-called “cost-effective” tech partners. Ultimately, we get what we pay for—lackluster results for a premium price.
Can we do better? Sure! Let’s explore how. After all, there’s no shortage of knowledge. It’s changing our product development routine, which stops us from upping our game.
In a world of uncertainty isn’t it time you embraced the power of not knowing?
During this interactive session, I will disclose my insights about practising vulnerability and how being your authentic self can foster enhanced collaboration paving the way to successful outcomes.
By introducing a selection of models and concepts, this session will help you better understand how your personal characteristics and attributes can unlock innovation, creativity and collaboration in any situation.
Learning Outcomes
– Participants will practice embracing vulnerability, the art of not knowing and leveraging the power of authenticity.
– Participants will gain the skills to cultivate a culture of inclusivity, where everyone has a voice, and feels safe to fail.
– Participants will explore the value of neurodiversity in its ability to enhance interconnectivity and collaboration
This talk is all about why estimating matters and how to manage it, especially in the B2B context. Think of it as a reality check on why we bother estimating when we can’t predict the future. From a practitioner’s standpoint, we’ll break down how estimation isn’t about fortune-telling but about smart planning, setting expectations, and dependency management. We will question if estimating is outdated or relevant in an agile setup. No beating around the bush, just a frank discussion on the why, when, and how to estimate software development. I offer my insights, practical experience, and anecdotes. Come along to see me demystifying this hot topic whether you love (anyone?) or loathe estimating.
In this talk, Sheetal explores the essential elements of effective leadership in today’s fast-paced business world. Agility in organisations is not only important but essential to surviving today’s dynamic business environments.
Starting with team unity, she discusses the ways in which you can foster collaboration and communication among team members. Highlighting how united teams are better equipped to navigate challenges and solve them faster.
Moving then to understanding why a culture of trust, transparency, and continuous learning is essential for embracing change, fostering innovation, and sustaining agility.
Finally, imagine having a powerful set of data that not only reveals the effectiveness of your current ways of working but also reveals hidden opportunities for improvement. Sheetal shares key metrics that can pinpoint areas where your teams may need further development, in addition to showing you where your people are high-performing.
Predicting Teams at Risk: Team Dashboarding @ Scale – From Excel to MVP
When there’s only so much coaching and mentoring support to go round, where do you focus your efforts? And given the variety of challenges, what kind of support is best suited? How can you help teams spot risks, highlight their wins and communicate them effectively, so that their customers know they are in hands of a team that really cares about business outcomes?
At a global services company, in just one of our practice areas, core development, we have around 200 team engagements running at any one time. We never know what ALM, CI/CD, static analysis or other tools we’ll be encountering or how well they’ve been set up. Plus the majority of the time, direct access and visibility to them is limited.
During this experience report, you’ll no doubt identify with some of the challenges that we’ve faced as we develop an internal dashboarding product, that evolves from more traditional governance to one that is influenced by key concepts from “Accelerate” and Troy Magennis “Six Dimensions of Team Performance”. Why we have done it, using a real lean business case (examples of which seem to be few and far between), including the benefits and struggles of finding funding to develop and test an idea. And finally, some early signs from our MVP to indicate we might be on the right track. But how to know if we are going down an evil path!?
This is very much an ongoing learning experience so your feedback will be very much appreciated into some fundamental questions along the way.
Gaining clarity is a challenge that we all face! In this session Marcus from WorkVisible Studios will walk you through a few simple visual tools that can help you see through the fog, understand what’s going on and communicate it effectively.
Our purposeful reflection in our echo chambers is not enough, we reflect, we emerge, we play our part, and it’s not enough. We need to scale, we need to mobilise ourselves in mass and with that facilitate the masses. We have a duty of care as facilitators, accelerators, guides of purposeful change. In this session, we’ll reflect, engage, mobilise, we’ll help each other team around causes close to our hearts and close to our proximity, commitment will rest with you.
Explore with us the application of Agile methodologies in
established automotive giants and investigate how Agile frameworks
are tailored to accommodate the diverse production processes and
innovation cycles of these two categories of automotive
enterprises. So how to handle the VUCA extreme in automotive?
Through case studies and industry insights, we will talk about the
strategies, hurdles and outcome of Agile integration in these
disparate automotive landscapes.
The increasing number of topics and their complexity that companies need to coordinate pose significant challenges. Pure technology and/or innovation advantages no longer make the difference here. Rather, what decides is who can build collaboration for implementing relevant topics or new opportunities within the company, and how quickly they can do so. When we look at successful companies that have developed this capability, we notice that they did not rely on specific organizational structures or frameworks. Both approaches are simply too rigid and slow. Instead, for them, collaboration design is a core competency that these companies have autonomously established to their advantage. But how do these companies manage to develop this crucial capability? The answer is simple: They rely on what’s already there and will remain – the people in the company. Based on real challenges, their experiences and skills are activated for the benefit of the company through empowerment. Thus, lively work systems emerge through joint co-creation, which actually fit the company’s current and future challenges. They are fast, flexible, lightweight, and cost-effective. The experts are already there. Take a seat in the front row of this interactive session. Together, let’s take a look at a company that we examine from the perspective of the people involved using the Flight Levels thought model. Experience how, based on their challenges, they quickly and purposefully discover their suitable collaboration through Flight Level systems, shape them together, and Take-Off.
The chasm between the ‘Why’—the intrinsic business or customer value—and the ‘What’—the tangible Product Backlog items or deliverables—represents a critical gap in product development. Bridging this divide requires a robust strategy, and the Vision to Value Mapping emerges as a compelling solution. This innovative approach fosters a seamless connection between business objectives, their impacts, stakeholders, and the benefits realized by users. By integrating user outcomes, exploratory experiments, and potential solutions into a coherent framework, Vision to Value Mapping not only clarifies the path from concept to execution but also enhances collaborative efforts. It’s an indispensable tool for Product Owners, Developers, Scrum Masters, Project Managers, Product Managers, and anyone involved in the process of uncovering or delivering value, ensuring that every step taken is aligned with both immediate tasks and overarching goals.
Many managers struggle in their role within a newly beginning agile transformation.
Agile Leadership is not a role.
It is an activity and a stance, something everyone in an organisation can engage in.
Are you a Senior Manager, a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, a team member… – who is wondering how to solve leadership issues that arise in transforming organisations?
Which approaches to choose – how to act differently now than before?
And, as a manager, a leader of any kind in such an org, how to handle the growing self-management of agile teams…?
In this interactive peer workshop you will experience a string of activities to let your own path as Agile Leader emerge.
With some input on which principles may guide you, you will find that you already have all you need – and can let it unfold now.
When you order a recipe box and check what’s included – there are always these magical ingredients listed on the recipe that are not in the box such as a knob of butter, a splash of milk, a tablespoon of olive oil to name a few.
When we choose a framework we have something to start with, but so much is not included that in the long run becomes the most important ‘ingredients’ to run a sustainable business.
In my talk I will be looking at the process of opening a restaurant and how that relates to building our teams and culture.
As a leader your team’s environment and experience is in your hands. Thinking beyond free snacks and ping pong tables, how do you make sure those deeper team needs are not overlooked? Under looming deadlines and stress, common mistakes can be death to motivation. Join Rebecca on a journey through her experience of different environments to talk about what creates each and observations on how we as leaders can keep our team (and plants) strong and thriving.
In the fast-paced world of product development, the pressure to deliver the perfect product on the first try can be overwhelming. However, what if we approached product development as a series of incremental steps rather than a single monumental leap? Drawing inspiration from the popular game Wordle, this talk delves into the concept of iterative product development. By embracing the iterative process, teams can gather valuable insights, adjust their strategies, and ultimately deliver more impactful products. Join us as we explore how Wordle’s simple yet effective mechanics can teach us valuable lessons about navigating the complexities of product development in an ever-changing landscape.
Agility is usually connected to flexible and innovative organisations and environments. But that doesn’t mean it is not applicable, and much needed, in traditinal and heavily regulated organisations. The only question is: how do we introduce and apply Agile in such an
environment? Book driven approach will fail us the moment we try to plan first increment of business value.
Join me in this talk to explore situations and approaches that worked and didn’t work. All of them are contextual, but I started seeing some repeating patterns in few organisations and would like to discuss them with you.
Do you ever feel stuck with your Agile coaching style? Expand your coaching range, and amplify effectiveness by sprinkling some playfulness into your Agile Coaching Growth Wheel. Already using cards, games or Lego in your coaching? This mini-workshop will offer you playful coaching tools that require no packing! Drawing inspiration from Co-Active coaching and Liberating Structures, this hands-on interactive session will guide you through perspective shifting – a powerful and playful way to unblock your teams, enable optionality, and even help the team effectively navigate conflict. Experience it, debrief it, and learn to introduce playfulness in your organizations, dialling it up (or down) based on the context you are in.
Over the last four years, the world has experienced an unprecedented shift to remote and hybrid work environments. This poses questions for those interested in high-performing teams, because physical distance from our teammates has created challenges to fostering and increasing psychological safety.
With collaboration from Amy Edmondson and Mark Mortensen, this talk presents original research on and explores the relationship of remote environments and psychological safety. Participants will learn about factors that impact safety in a remote environment and ways to promote safety in remote and hybrid teams, as well as implications for leadership, teamwork and generative work across all environments, in-person, hybrid and remote.
As individuals, we strive to ensure that our teams are always delivering value, but how do we know if we’re delivering value in our own roles? Join Joanna as she talks through different ways of tracking and communicating your value to stakeholders to give you the edge on contract negotiations, performance reviews and just proof that you are pretty awesome!
As Agile practitioners product & organisation sustainability is our responsibility. In this session we will delve from the business case for Sustainability (& debunking top excuses) right into the responsibility in shaping efficient, modular and natural-capital aware products and systems. Not just by the mantra of “less is more” (simplifying & optimizing), we’ll explore the concept of Circular Economy and how can be applied to our daily practices. Skill up for what’s on-demand and what we ought to achieve within the next 6 years: The legally binding Paris Agreement. Not long!
We’ve been helping our clients to build their digital products for 20 years already. So what have we learned throughout all that time? If you expect to hear, “We got it all wrong,” then yes, we got it all wrong, indeed. There. I said it.
And it’s not for lack of knowledge. Lean Startup was published in 2011. The lingo it proposed is a staple among product people. And yet, so much work is being done as if it were still living in the 1990s or 2000s.
Let’s get practical, then. Let’s explore why, despite everything we learned in the past decade, we still believe we can get our products right at the first attempt. And even when we say we know better, we still act as if we could.
We scope out products and features. We ask for estimates. We pick so-called “cost-effective” tech partners. Ultimately, we get what we pay for—lackluster results for a premium price.
Can we do better? Sure! Let’s explore how. After all, there’s no shortage of knowledge. It’s changing our product development routine, which stops us from upping our game.
In a world of uncertainty isn’t it time you embraced the power of not knowing?
During this interactive session, I will disclose my insights about practising vulnerability and how being your authentic self can foster enhanced collaboration paving the way to successful outcomes.
By introducing a selection of models and concepts, this session will help you better understand how your personal characteristics and attributes can unlock innovation, creativity and collaboration in any situation.
Learning Outcomes
– Participants will practice embracing vulnerability, the art of not knowing and leveraging the power of authenticity.
– Participants will gain the skills to cultivate a culture of inclusivity, where everyone has a voice, and feels safe to fail.
– Participants will explore the value of neurodiversity in its ability to enhance interconnectivity and collaboration
In this talk, Sheetal explores the essential elements of effective leadership in today’s fast-paced business world. Agility in organisations is not only important but essential to surviving today’s dynamic business environments.
Starting with team unity, she discusses the ways in which you can foster collaboration and communication among team members. Highlighting how united teams are better equipped to navigate challenges and solve them faster.
Moving then to understanding why a culture of trust, transparency, and continuous learning is essential for embracing change, fostering innovation, and sustaining agility.
Finally, imagine having a powerful set of data that not only reveals the effectiveness of your current ways of working but also reveals hidden opportunities for improvement. Sheetal shares key metrics that can pinpoint areas where your teams may need further development, in addition to showing you where your people are high-performing.
Our purposeful reflection in our echo chambers is not enough, we reflect, we emerge, we play our part, and it’s not enough. We need to scale, we need to mobilise ourselves in mass and with that facilitate the masses. We have a duty of care as facilitators, accelerators, guides of purposeful change. In this session, we’ll reflect, engage, mobilise, we’ll help each other team around causes close to our hearts and close to our proximity, commitment will rest with you.
The increasing number of topics and their complexity that companies need to coordinate pose significant challenges. Pure technology and/or innovation advantages no longer make the difference here. Rather, what decides is who can build collaboration for implementing relevant topics or new opportunities within the company, and how quickly they can do so. When we look at successful companies that have developed this capability, we notice that they did not rely on specific organizational structures or frameworks. Both approaches are simply too rigid and slow. Instead, for them, collaboration design is a core competency that these companies have autonomously established to their advantage. But how do these companies manage to develop this crucial capability? The answer is simple: They rely on what’s already there and will remain – the people in the company. Based on real challenges, their experiences and skills are activated for the benefit of the company through empowerment. Thus, lively work systems emerge through joint co-creation, which actually fit the company’s current and future challenges. They are fast, flexible, lightweight, and cost-effective. The experts are already there. Take a seat in the front row of this interactive session. Together, let’s take a look at a company that we examine from the perspective of the people involved using the Flight Levels thought model. Experience how, based on their challenges, they quickly and purposefully discover their suitable collaboration through Flight Level systems, shape them together, and Take-Off.
When you order a recipe box and check what’s included – there are always these magical ingredients listed on the recipe that are not in the box such as a knob of butter, a splash of milk, a tablespoon of olive oil to name a few.
When we choose a framework we have something to start with, but so much is not included that in the long run becomes the most important ‘ingredients’ to run a sustainable business.
In my talk I will be looking at the process of opening a restaurant and how that relates to building our teams and culture.
In the fast-paced world of product development, the pressure to deliver the perfect product on the first try can be overwhelming. However, what if we approached product development as a series of incremental steps rather than a single monumental leap? Drawing inspiration from the popular game Wordle, this talk delves into the concept of iterative product development. By embracing the iterative process, teams can gather valuable insights, adjust their strategies, and ultimately deliver more impactful products. Join us as we explore how Wordle’s simple yet effective mechanics can teach us valuable lessons about navigating the complexities of product development in an ever-changing landscape.
Over the last four years, the world has experienced an unprecedented shift to remote and hybrid work environments. This poses questions for those interested in high-performing teams, because physical distance from our teammates has created challenges to fostering and increasing psychological safety.
With collaboration from Amy Edmondson and Mark Mortensen, this talk presents original research on and explores the relationship of remote environments and psychological safety. Participants will learn about factors that impact safety in a remote environment and ways to promote safety in remote and hybrid teams, as well as implications for leadership, teamwork and generative work across all environments, in-person, hybrid and remote.
As Agile practitioners product & organisation sustainability is our responsibility. In this session we will delve from the business case for Sustainability (& debunking top excuses) right into the responsibility in shaping efficient, modular and natural-capital aware products and systems. Not just by the mantra of “less is more” (simplifying & optimizing), we’ll explore the concept of Circular Economy and how can be applied to our daily practices. Skill up for what’s on-demand and what we ought to achieve within the next 6 years: The legally binding Paris Agreement. Not long!
This talk is all about why estimating matters and how to manage it, especially in the B2B context. Think of it as a reality check on why we bother estimating when we can’t predict the future. From a practitioner’s standpoint, we’ll break down how estimation isn’t about fortune-telling but about smart planning, setting expectations, and dependency management. We will question if estimating is outdated or relevant in an agile setup. No beating around the bush, just a frank discussion on the why, when, and how to estimate software development. I offer my insights, practical experience, and anecdotes. Come along to see me demystifying this hot topic whether you love (anyone?) or loathe estimating.
Predicting Teams at Risk: Team Dashboarding @ Scale – From Excel to MVP
When there’s only so much coaching and mentoring support to go round, where do you focus your efforts? And given the variety of challenges, what kind of support is best suited? How can you help teams spot risks, highlight their wins and communicate them effectively, so that their customers know they are in hands of a team that really cares about business outcomes?
At a global services company, in just one of our practice areas, core development, we have around 200 team engagements running at any one time. We never know what ALM, CI/CD, static analysis or other tools we’ll be encountering or how well they’ve been set up. Plus the majority of the time, direct access and visibility to them is limited.
During this experience report, you’ll no doubt identify with some of the challenges that we’ve faced as we develop an internal dashboarding product, that evolves from more traditional governance to one that is influenced by key concepts from “Accelerate” and Troy Magennis “Six Dimensions of Team Performance”. Why we have done it, using a real lean business case (examples of which seem to be few and far between), including the benefits and struggles of finding funding to develop and test an idea. And finally, some early signs from our MVP to indicate we might be on the right track. But how to know if we are going down an evil path!?
This is very much an ongoing learning experience so your feedback will be very much appreciated into some fundamental questions along the way.
Explore with us the application of Agile methodologies in
established automotive giants and investigate how Agile frameworks
are tailored to accommodate the diverse production processes and
innovation cycles of these two categories of automotive
enterprises. So how to handle the VUCA extreme in automotive?
Through case studies and industry insights, we will talk about the
strategies, hurdles and outcome of Agile integration in these
disparate automotive landscapes.
The chasm between the ‘Why’—the intrinsic business or customer value—and the ‘What’—the tangible Product Backlog items or deliverables—represents a critical gap in product development. Bridging this divide requires a robust strategy, and the Vision to Value Mapping emerges as a compelling solution. This innovative approach fosters a seamless connection between business objectives, their impacts, stakeholders, and the benefits realized by users. By integrating user outcomes, exploratory experiments, and potential solutions into a coherent framework, Vision to Value Mapping not only clarifies the path from concept to execution but also enhances collaborative efforts. It’s an indispensable tool for Product Owners, Developers, Scrum Masters, Project Managers, Product Managers, and anyone involved in the process of uncovering or delivering value, ensuring that every step taken is aligned with both immediate tasks and overarching goals.
As a leader your team’s environment and experience is in your hands. Thinking beyond free snacks and ping pong tables, how do you make sure those deeper team needs are not overlooked? Under looming deadlines and stress, common mistakes can be death to motivation. Join Rebecca on a journey through her experience of different environments to talk about what creates each and observations on how we as leaders can keep our team (and plants) strong and thriving.
Agility is usually connected to flexible and innovative organisations and environments. But that doesn’t mean it is not applicable, and much needed, in traditinal and heavily regulated organisations. The only question is: how do we introduce and apply Agile in such an
environment? Book driven approach will fail us the moment we try to plan first increment of business value.
Join me in this talk to explore situations and approaches that worked and didn’t work. All of them are contextual, but I started seeing some repeating patterns in few organisations and would like to discuss them with you.
As individuals, we strive to ensure that our teams are always delivering value, but how do we know if we’re delivering value in our own roles? Join Joanna as she talks through different ways of tracking and communicating your value to stakeholders to give you the edge on contract negotiations, performance reviews and just proof that you are pretty awesome!
Gaining clarity is a challenge that we all face! In this session Marcus from WorkVisible Studios will walk you through a few simple visual tools that can help you see through the fog, understand what’s going on and communicate it effectively.
Many managers struggle in their role within a newly beginning agile transformation.
Agile Leadership is not a role.
It is an activity and a stance, something everyone in an organisation can engage in.
Are you a Senior Manager, a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, a team member… – who is wondering how to solve leadership issues that arise in transforming organisations?
Which approaches to choose – how to act differently now than before?
And, as a manager, a leader of any kind in such an org, how to handle the growing self-management of agile teams…?
In this interactive peer workshop you will experience a string of activities to let your own path as Agile Leader emerge.
With some input on which principles may guide you, you will find that you already have all you need – and can let it unfold now.
Do you ever feel stuck with your Agile coaching style? Expand your coaching range, and amplify effectiveness by sprinkling some playfulness into your Agile Coaching Growth Wheel. Already using cards, games or Lego in your coaching? This mini-workshop will offer you playful coaching tools that require no packing! Drawing inspiration from Co-Active coaching and Liberating Structures, this hands-on interactive session will guide you through perspective shifting – a powerful and playful way to unblock your teams, enable optionality, and even help the team effectively navigate conflict. Experience it, debrief it, and learn to introduce playfulness in your organizations, dialling it up (or down) based on the context you are in.
- All Rooms
- Max Nasatyr Room
- South Bank Room 1
- South Bank Room 2
- Neighbourhood Room
The Agile Manifesto is over 20 years old now, and the roots of Agile have been around for even longer than that. In fact, if you read social media, you might think that Agile needs revitalising – if it’s not already dead. However, the need for Agile is as great as ever as organisations struggle with increasingly complex and rapidly changing landscapes. This talk will suggest a framework with which to examine different Agile perspectives (TASTE), introduce a tool by which they can all be coherent (the X-Matrix), and describe an approach where Agile really can have a positive impact (Strategy Deployment). With these ideas, you will be able to discover and declare “That’s my Agile!”.
The agile market in the UK is really tough right now. Agile coaches and agile functions are being downsized or entirely made redundant. When companies face financial struggles, they may act impulsively, leading them to remove roles that are often perceived as “advisory only”. But what if there’s a more intentional way to show how agile coaching is positively impacting the organisation’s strategy and the delivery of products?
In this talk, Elaine will show how to ensure that agile coaching efforts are closely aligned with the company’s strategy, all while delivering tangible and measurable outcomes.
Join me for this interactive session, ‘Fostering Happiness in Agile Teams,’ where we dive into the neurochemistry of (un)happiness through insights and research on happiness chemicals.
Discover practical strategies to unleash endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin in your team, enhancing collaboration, satisfaction, and performance. This will be an interactive session on how these chemical drivers can helo you create a thriving Agile environment, empowering your team and make them happier.
In navigating the journey of business agility, effective training isn’t just beneficial—it’s essential. It equips employees with the vital skills required for the anticipated agile environment. However, the success of the journey towards Agility relies on the quality of training provided. When thoughtfully prepared and rooted in neuroscience, training doesn’t just inform—it transforms, acting as a powerful catalyst for enduring change.
Join me in this interactive conference as we explore the brain mechanics that underpin successful change. Together, we’ll delve into how leading successful companies have harnessed the power of neuroscience to boost their business agility. Discover the secrets behind their achievements and how you can apply these insights to empower your own agile transformation.
Gitte has been working with tech teams, leaders and managers for more than a decade, and in this session, she will share a bit of what is needed to be a great leader and advice about how to do this.
She will talk about her strongest opinions on dos and don’ts for leaders, and how psychological safety plays a big part in modern leadership as well as give concrete examples of what has worked for her and the people she helped.
Take aways
After the talk, you will know more about why it is tough to be a leader, why management is necessary, and that a good manager is an enabler and not as much a decider
Synopsis: the importance of psychological safety in nurturing environments where people are at their creative best has been gaining prominence in organisational literature for decades.
A worker in today’s knowledge economy requires a mix of social and technical expertise to thrive and a person’s emotional intelligence is the primary enabling skill that contributes to the level of psychological safety on the team. This talk will look at the role of the role of psychological safety in maximising the Power of our Creative Imagination and explore the link between emotional intelligence and psychological safety. In particular it will explore how we can all play a part in creating great places to work.
For every three people who feel they are flourishing or getting by in life, there are two who are languishing or struggling. It is very likely that we all know at least one person that is affected or that we are one of the two ourselves.
People today face a range of issues affecting their mental wellbeing, such as rising inflation, cost-of-living crisis, concerns over climate change, geopolitical tensions, stress at work, struggling with uninspiring managers and leaders. How should we cope with all of these if we are feeling anxious, unhappy or tired?
Azra and Maren have both been there. They will be telling their personal stories and what helped them to flourish again. They will reveal the tools they use for their own sanity and what helps the leaders, the teams and the organizations they work with to thrive again!
The session will be highly interactive. Both women are TBR (Training from the back of the room) evangelists, so be prepared to talk, think, experience yourself – because people learn best when they are actively engaged.
Let’s make the world a happier place! Come to the session and let’s start it. Right here. Right now. Together.
Whether it is the execution of an ambitious strategy, the adoption of new approaches to developing products or services, or the creation of a new business function, organisational stability is no longer feasible and organisational change is becoming a continuous challenge. And yet, in the majority of cases, such attempts routinely fall far behind the stated expectations and successes are rarely reproducible at scale.
Here are some challenges that matter in such a venture:
⁃ Goals with long timespans and hence long feedback loops
⁃ Necessary conditions are difficult to anticipate and reveal themselves often late in the process
⁃ Attaining situational awareness and finding feasible Adjacent Possible options requires (inter-)acting in the context (via multiple parallel experiments)
The other aspect that makes change hard is encapsulated in the myth that “people resist change”. The problem change initiatives encounter is that people resist change when it comes along as a grand plan from above and is imposed on them, because, by its nature, such grand plans are ignorant of the context in which people find themselves and, more often than not, that they experience constraints that invalidate crucial assumptions that are built into the change model.
What if there is a lens that could complement the perspectives we already have (e.g. Lean, Agile, ToC, Wardley Maps, DDD, etc.) through which we could better understand our context, the various entanglements of how the work happens, and that would allow us to both co-create change plans with the people who are impacted, as well as finding better options to pursue the desired outcomes? We believe there is such a lens and we will share our experiences with working with that lens.
Defining and delivering value is the focus of our teams, though what if we’ve been thinking about this in the wrong way? What if our sources of insight are wrong and we’re creating fragile teams and structures? This talk will help you to reframe how you understand and look for customer value.
By now, it’s clear to most of us that leveraging data is crucial for making smarter decisions swiftly and effortlessly. It’s becoming increasingly common for folks to look back at their historical data to determine when projects, releases, or other ventures will likely reach completion. Yet, when the moment comes to jump into our shiny new tools and churn out those eagerly awaited forecasts, the outcome is often less than thrilling. In fact, it can be downright disheartening.
Let’s be real… no matter how top-notch your tools are, they’re not going to churn out forecasts you’re thrilled with if the data itself isn’t up to snuff. Have you ever stopped to think about what it takes to get your data in tip-top shape for easy, continuous forecasting? That’s precisely what we’re going to dive into during this session. Join us to minimize future unwelcome forecasting surprises!
What’s at the heart of successful delivery? It is not just the iterative processes or the focus on deliverables but a foundational element that binds all aspects of Agile delivery – empathy. This presentation will explore the transformative power of empathy in Agile delivery, demonstrating its far-reaching benefits. Empathy, often underutilised and misunderstood, is the key to unlocking profound levels of collaboration, innovation, and effectiveness within teams.
What’s in it for you?
👉🏼 Gain a new lens for decision-making that marries data with empathy to help teams achieve successful outcomes for customers
👉🏿 Explore methods to strengthen team unity for a clearer, shared vision of what needs to be achieved
👉 Discover how empathy can be your secret weapon in stakeholder engagement
👉🏾 Experience real-world scenarios through live interaction & storytelling, making theory come alive
You, (yes, you, reading this right now), are endlessly creative.
Especially when you’re in a tight spot.
Do you frequently feel that you don’t have enough people / money / time? That you’ve no idea how to do that one thing you need to do?
Perhaps you think that coming up with creative solutions to problems (technical or otherwise) couldn’t possibly be enhanced by the very problems and restrictions that caused the problem in the first place?
We know differently. We know that inside your head you have not just an answer to that problem, but the coolest, most elegant solution imaginable!
Perhaps you don’t believe us. Perhaps you feel that creativity is
fine for ‘creative’ types, but not for techies. Or managers. Or
[insert another label here]. Perhaps you believe stories can’t
possibly unlock better thinking mechanisms in our brains… after all, they are just stories.
We will show you, in ninety shiny minutes, how you could write an outline for your very own novel. You won’t need to bring anything beforehand or do any prior thinking. We will do this by supplying you with constraints on your novel plot. We will even give you the pen and paper to create upon.
It’ll be tight, we’re not going to lie, but you will discover how
leaning into the restrictions we give you makes this creation not only possible but a great deal better because of those restrictions.
We both believe that once you have experienced this approach to creativity in action (and marvelled at the sheer brilliance of your story outline that didn’t even exist two hours ago, and that you absolutely did not care about just one hour ago), you’ll be wondering if applying this to other things could become addictive. You might even start looking for those constraints.
With the rate of change accelerating in our external world, our organisations can only keep up, if we are willing to let go of centralized management control as a default and look into distributed, transparent governance alternatives. In order to accelerate our innovation capabilities as a business unit / organisation, we need to be able to dynamically choose our collaboration structures depending on what the situation requires. In this talk, we will share some concrete challenges and examples from organisational case studies. We will examine:
What are successful individual behaviors to practice in order to become a key contributor in our organisations quest to create value?
What are collective collaboration patterns we should nurture to discover and to deliver on business opportunities?
Organisations are obsessed with churning out new products and growing monetary value, which results in burnt-out people. I am on a mission to convince organisations to give their people the time to get bored. Through that boredom comes creativity, innovation, and adept problem-solving.
Let’s move away from rushing and introduce one hour of boredom. This talk gives examples of how, as an Agile Coach, I help teams get bored to solve problems.
After this session, people will feel…
Inspired to be bold and have better conversations with their teams, management and leadership on slowing down to speed up. I will also share how boredom is part of our ability to grow and share three tools and techniques to introduce boredom to teams without them going to sleep!
We can’t be certain about the future! In this talk we’ll explore ways in which you can stack the odds in your favour when delivering work and prevent falling victim to the illusion of certainty. We’ll dive into techniques and metrics we can use to manage expectations and make decisions at the earliest possible opportunity.
The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001, and while many organisations are still trying to embrace Agile, many more are renouncing it altogether as ‘just another fad’ whose time is up.
Join us as we extend the perspective of how agility has influenced people since at least the time of the Spartans, the Athenians and the Trojans, to draw parallels between your teams’ contexts and how their successes have always depended on agility.
From this exploration, learn key lean-agile perspectives that may become your greatest performance enablers as well as metaphors to (re)spark interest for your teams to further their continuous improvement journey.
We believe that while the industry is moving away from Capital-A Agile, the need for agility is not only here to stay, but that its principles and practices are actually timeless.
Come see how it is really done with Jose and JP’s PMO-tastic simulation using Okoloa Flowlab’s Cross-team Simulation.
Participant in Progress Limit of 24.
Ever feel like your product vision needs a pair of glasses? Join Ben for a lively session where we’ll turn the blurry mess of traditional Product Visions into something clear, actionable and focused. Think of it as laser eye surgery for your product strategy!
Hold up, though, it’s not just a case of re-writing a canvas. To fundamentally fix the problem we will need to dive into the murky waters of organisational complexity and dredge up the common culprits that lead to cloudy product visions and bog down brilliance. With real-world tales and a dash of humour, Ben will explore how too many cooks in the kitchen (or stakeholders in the spreadsheet) can spoil both broth and bandwidth.
Armed with Radical Product Thinking, Systems Thinking and OKR superpowers, you’ll learn to trim the fat and tighten the focus, making your product vision sharp enough to cut through even the thickest red tape.
Expect practical tools, snappy strategies, and a few “Aha!” moments as we showcase how companies just like yours have gone from chaotic to charismatic. Wrap up the session with a Q&A to grill. So, dust off your binoculars and prepare to zoom in on a product vision that’s not just good, but brilliant!
Stories and narratives are essential to sensemaking about the pasts, the presents, and the futures of organisations. Drawing on Boje’s model of the dynamics of narrative and story sensemaking, I show how we can talk about time and space in organisations, the role of scale, and the incorporation of diverse and opposing perspectives in how we understand and shape change.
At the end of this session, you will be able to:
Distinguish between narratives and stories.
Describe different forms of narrative and story, and how they can be used when storying to to retrospectively to understand pasts, prospectively to understand possible futures, and contemporaspectively (in-the-now) to understand emergence in the presents.
Define and identify the roles of dialogisms and dialectics in permitting, exploring, and transcending diverse perspectives.
Apply these ways of storying to challenges we face in facilitating change.
This panel conversation will explore the Future of Agility.
Moderated by Stuart Young and with Chris McDermott, Gitte Klitgaard, Henriette Wienges & Pawel Brodzinski as panelists.
The Agile Manifesto is over 20 years old now, and the roots of Agile have been around for even longer than that. In fact, if you read social media, you might think that Agile needs revitalising – if it’s not already dead. However, the need for Agile is as great as ever as organisations struggle with increasingly complex and rapidly changing landscapes. This talk will suggest a framework with which to examine different Agile perspectives (TASTE), introduce a tool by which they can all be coherent (the X-Matrix), and describe an approach where Agile really can have a positive impact (Strategy Deployment). With these ideas, you will be able to discover and declare “That’s my Agile!”.
The agile market in the UK is really tough right now. Agile coaches and agile functions are being downsized or entirely made redundant. When companies face financial struggles, they may act impulsively, leading them to remove roles that are often perceived as “advisory only”. But what if there’s a more intentional way to show how agile coaching is positively impacting the organisation’s strategy and the delivery of products?
In this talk, Elaine will show how to ensure that agile coaching efforts are closely aligned with the company’s strategy, all while delivering tangible and measurable outcomes.
Gitte has been working with tech teams, leaders and managers for more than a decade, and in this session, she will share a bit of what is needed to be a great leader and advice about how to do this.
She will talk about her strongest opinions on dos and don’ts for leaders, and how psychological safety plays a big part in modern leadership as well as give concrete examples of what has worked for her and the people she helped.
Take aways
After the talk, you will know more about why it is tough to be a leader, why management is necessary, and that a good manager is an enabler and not as much a decider
Whether it is the execution of an ambitious strategy, the adoption of new approaches to developing products or services, or the creation of a new business function, organisational stability is no longer feasible and organisational change is becoming a continuous challenge. And yet, in the majority of cases, such attempts routinely fall far behind the stated expectations and successes are rarely reproducible at scale.
Here are some challenges that matter in such a venture:
⁃ Goals with long timespans and hence long feedback loops
⁃ Necessary conditions are difficult to anticipate and reveal themselves often late in the process
⁃ Attaining situational awareness and finding feasible Adjacent Possible options requires (inter-)acting in the context (via multiple parallel experiments)
The other aspect that makes change hard is encapsulated in the myth that “people resist change”. The problem change initiatives encounter is that people resist change when it comes along as a grand plan from above and is imposed on them, because, by its nature, such grand plans are ignorant of the context in which people find themselves and, more often than not, that they experience constraints that invalidate crucial assumptions that are built into the change model.
What if there is a lens that could complement the perspectives we already have (e.g. Lean, Agile, ToC, Wardley Maps, DDD, etc.) through which we could better understand our context, the various entanglements of how the work happens, and that would allow us to both co-create change plans with the people who are impacted, as well as finding better options to pursue the desired outcomes? We believe there is such a lens and we will share our experiences with working with that lens.
By now, it’s clear to most of us that leveraging data is crucial for making smarter decisions swiftly and effortlessly. It’s becoming increasingly common for folks to look back at their historical data to determine when projects, releases, or other ventures will likely reach completion. Yet, when the moment comes to jump into our shiny new tools and churn out those eagerly awaited forecasts, the outcome is often less than thrilling. In fact, it can be downright disheartening.
Let’s be real… no matter how top-notch your tools are, they’re not going to churn out forecasts you’re thrilled with if the data itself isn’t up to snuff. Have you ever stopped to think about what it takes to get your data in tip-top shape for easy, continuous forecasting? That’s precisely what we’re going to dive into during this session. Join us to minimize future unwelcome forecasting surprises!
With the rate of change accelerating in our external world, our organisations can only keep up, if we are willing to let go of centralized management control as a default and look into distributed, transparent governance alternatives. In order to accelerate our innovation capabilities as a business unit / organisation, we need to be able to dynamically choose our collaboration structures depending on what the situation requires. In this talk, we will share some concrete challenges and examples from organisational case studies. We will examine:
What are successful individual behaviors to practice in order to become a key contributor in our organisations quest to create value?
What are collective collaboration patterns we should nurture to discover and to deliver on business opportunities?
We can’t be certain about the future! In this talk we’ll explore ways in which you can stack the odds in your favour when delivering work and prevent falling victim to the illusion of certainty. We’ll dive into techniques and metrics we can use to manage expectations and make decisions at the earliest possible opportunity.
Ever feel like your product vision needs a pair of glasses? Join Ben for a lively session where we’ll turn the blurry mess of traditional Product Visions into something clear, actionable and focused. Think of it as laser eye surgery for your product strategy!
Hold up, though, it’s not just a case of re-writing a canvas. To fundamentally fix the problem we will need to dive into the murky waters of organisational complexity and dredge up the common culprits that lead to cloudy product visions and bog down brilliance. With real-world tales and a dash of humour, Ben will explore how too many cooks in the kitchen (or stakeholders in the spreadsheet) can spoil both broth and bandwidth.
Armed with Radical Product Thinking, Systems Thinking and OKR superpowers, you’ll learn to trim the fat and tighten the focus, making your product vision sharp enough to cut through even the thickest red tape.
Expect practical tools, snappy strategies, and a few “Aha!” moments as we showcase how companies just like yours have gone from chaotic to charismatic. Wrap up the session with a Q&A to grill. So, dust off your binoculars and prepare to zoom in on a product vision that’s not just good, but brilliant!
This panel conversation will explore the Future of Agility.
Moderated by Stuart Young and with Chris McDermott, Gitte Klitgaard, Henriette Wienges & Pawel Brodzinski as panelists.
Join me for this interactive session, ‘Fostering Happiness in Agile Teams,’ where we dive into the neurochemistry of (un)happiness through insights and research on happiness chemicals.
Discover practical strategies to unleash endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin in your team, enhancing collaboration, satisfaction, and performance. This will be an interactive session on how these chemical drivers can helo you create a thriving Agile environment, empowering your team and make them happier.
Synopsis: the importance of psychological safety in nurturing environments where people are at their creative best has been gaining prominence in organisational literature for decades.
A worker in today’s knowledge economy requires a mix of social and technical expertise to thrive and a person’s emotional intelligence is the primary enabling skill that contributes to the level of psychological safety on the team. This talk will look at the role of the role of psychological safety in maximising the Power of our Creative Imagination and explore the link between emotional intelligence and psychological safety. In particular it will explore how we can all play a part in creating great places to work.
Defining and delivering value is the focus of our teams, though what if we’ve been thinking about this in the wrong way? What if our sources of insight are wrong and we’re creating fragile teams and structures? This talk will help you to reframe how you understand and look for customer value.
What’s at the heart of successful delivery? It is not just the iterative processes or the focus on deliverables but a foundational element that binds all aspects of Agile delivery – empathy. This presentation will explore the transformative power of empathy in Agile delivery, demonstrating its far-reaching benefits. Empathy, often underutilised and misunderstood, is the key to unlocking profound levels of collaboration, innovation, and effectiveness within teams.
What’s in it for you?
👉🏼 Gain a new lens for decision-making that marries data with empathy to help teams achieve successful outcomes for customers
👉🏿 Explore methods to strengthen team unity for a clearer, shared vision of what needs to be achieved
👉 Discover how empathy can be your secret weapon in stakeholder engagement
👉🏾 Experience real-world scenarios through live interaction & storytelling, making theory come alive
Organisations are obsessed with churning out new products and growing monetary value, which results in burnt-out people. I am on a mission to convince organisations to give their people the time to get bored. Through that boredom comes creativity, innovation, and adept problem-solving.
Let’s move away from rushing and introduce one hour of boredom. This talk gives examples of how, as an Agile Coach, I help teams get bored to solve problems.
After this session, people will feel…
Inspired to be bold and have better conversations with their teams, management and leadership on slowing down to speed up. I will also share how boredom is part of our ability to grow and share three tools and techniques to introduce boredom to teams without them going to sleep!
The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001, and while many organisations are still trying to embrace Agile, many more are renouncing it altogether as ‘just another fad’ whose time is up.
Join us as we extend the perspective of how agility has influenced people since at least the time of the Spartans, the Athenians and the Trojans, to draw parallels between your teams’ contexts and how their successes have always depended on agility.
From this exploration, learn key lean-agile perspectives that may become your greatest performance enablers as well as metaphors to (re)spark interest for your teams to further their continuous improvement journey.
We believe that while the industry is moving away from Capital-A Agile, the need for agility is not only here to stay, but that its principles and practices are actually timeless.
Stories and narratives are essential to sensemaking about the pasts, the presents, and the futures of organisations. Drawing on Boje’s model of the dynamics of narrative and story sensemaking, I show how we can talk about time and space in organisations, the role of scale, and the incorporation of diverse and opposing perspectives in how we understand and shape change.
At the end of this session, you will be able to:
Distinguish between narratives and stories.
Describe different forms of narrative and story, and how they can be used when storying to to retrospectively to understand pasts, prospectively to understand possible futures, and contemporaspectively (in-the-now) to understand emergence in the presents.
Define and identify the roles of dialogisms and dialectics in permitting, exploring, and transcending diverse perspectives.
Apply these ways of storying to challenges we face in facilitating change.
In navigating the journey of business agility, effective training isn’t just beneficial—it’s essential. It equips employees with the vital skills required for the anticipated agile environment. However, the success of the journey towards Agility relies on the quality of training provided. When thoughtfully prepared and rooted in neuroscience, training doesn’t just inform—it transforms, acting as a powerful catalyst for enduring change.
Join me in this interactive conference as we explore the brain mechanics that underpin successful change. Together, we’ll delve into how leading successful companies have harnessed the power of neuroscience to boost their business agility. Discover the secrets behind their achievements and how you can apply these insights to empower your own agile transformation.
For every three people who feel they are flourishing or getting by in life, there are two who are languishing or struggling. It is very likely that we all know at least one person that is affected or that we are one of the two ourselves.
People today face a range of issues affecting their mental wellbeing, such as rising inflation, cost-of-living crisis, concerns over climate change, geopolitical tensions, stress at work, struggling with uninspiring managers and leaders. How should we cope with all of these if we are feeling anxious, unhappy or tired?
Azra and Maren have both been there. They will be telling their personal stories and what helped them to flourish again. They will reveal the tools they use for their own sanity and what helps the leaders, the teams and the organizations they work with to thrive again!
The session will be highly interactive. Both women are TBR (Training from the back of the room) evangelists, so be prepared to talk, think, experience yourself – because people learn best when they are actively engaged.
Let’s make the world a happier place! Come to the session and let’s start it. Right here. Right now. Together.
You, (yes, you, reading this right now), are endlessly creative.
Especially when you’re in a tight spot.
Do you frequently feel that you don’t have enough people / money / time? That you’ve no idea how to do that one thing you need to do?
Perhaps you think that coming up with creative solutions to problems (technical or otherwise) couldn’t possibly be enhanced by the very problems and restrictions that caused the problem in the first place?
We know differently. We know that inside your head you have not just an answer to that problem, but the coolest, most elegant solution imaginable!
Perhaps you don’t believe us. Perhaps you feel that creativity is
fine for ‘creative’ types, but not for techies. Or managers. Or
[insert another label here]. Perhaps you believe stories can’t
possibly unlock better thinking mechanisms in our brains… after all, they are just stories.
We will show you, in ninety shiny minutes, how you could write an outline for your very own novel. You won’t need to bring anything beforehand or do any prior thinking. We will do this by supplying you with constraints on your novel plot. We will even give you the pen and paper to create upon.
It’ll be tight, we’re not going to lie, but you will discover how
leaning into the restrictions we give you makes this creation not only possible but a great deal better because of those restrictions.
We both believe that once you have experienced this approach to creativity in action (and marvelled at the sheer brilliance of your story outline that didn’t even exist two hours ago, and that you absolutely did not care about just one hour ago), you’ll be wondering if applying this to other things could become addictive. You might even start looking for those constraints.
Come see how it is really done with Jose and JP’s PMO-tastic simulation using Okoloa Flowlab’s Cross-team Simulation.
Participant in Progress Limit of 24.
