Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

* people,
* process, and
* follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's very difficult for the retrospective to be a success.

Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.

For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.

Your team has hit a plateau in their performance and is no longer improving at the pace you are used to. You, as their leader, are racking your brain to determine what the issue might be. What would cause such a team to stall out. Have you considered that the cause might be you?

The level of consciousness of an organization cannot exceed that of its leader. (Frederic Laloux). Enabling your team to reach ever higher levels of performance requires that you do so first. In this workshop, we will guide leaders through the Immunity to Change framework developed by Robert Keagan and Lisa Lahey and demonstrate how the Immunity Map can be used to catalyze change in your leadership. Participants will practice using the Immunity Map to identify areas of improvement, limiting beliefs, assumptions and behaviors that are holding you and your team back from higher performance. You know that you need to change. Now’s the time. Start here!

We enjoy having conversations. Who doesn't? We are social animals after all. We like to know more about each other's stories. It is a feature built-in by default. As coaches, it is vital to use this basic instinct to our advantage. The easiest way to influence people is to have a conversation with them. You can use it coaching, mentoring, transformation, or just building a relationship with them. Can you imagine any of the above not to start with a conversation? I can't!

Conversations are two-way streets. The easiest way to have a two-way communication is to ask questions. Questions can be dumb, unrelated, out of ordinary, crazy, or even beautiful. Can they be efficacious too? They can! An excellent communicator knows how and when to use Powerful Questions to make any conversation a mighty one.

Powerful Questions generate curiosity in the listener and stimulate thoughtful conversation. They are usually thought-provoking and challenges the underlying assumptions. Powerful Questions, if asked in the right tone and body language, generates creativity and new possibilities.

Is it hard to ask Powerful questions? It might be. It is not that easy, and indeed not natural for everyone. The good news is that it is something that can be learned, and relatively very easily.

I invite you to join me for a workshop on Powerful Questions. In this workshop, I am going to help you build your muscle to ask more Powerful Questions. I will give you an easy tool to make your questions more powerful, and conversations more enriched. Asking powerful questions will help you build bridges with people, you would become more empathetic with them, and do not be surprised you are going to listen more. Some of the characteristics of a great coach, one might say! Don't you agree?

There seems to be some confusion (not to mention strong opinions!) about when to use Scrum vs. when to use Kanban. At times purists on either side have drawn the lines and set up camp in an almost warlike approach, making it difficult to wade across the middle battlefield of information without stepping on metaphorical land mines or getting peppered with judgmental opinions, rhetorical quips or social media blasts.

In this session we will explore a case study of a department within a financial institution that is currently experiencing a transformation to Agility using both Scrum and Kanban. By the end of the session I will provide evidence of meaningful actions the department has taken and outcomes they have achieved to help move their team and organization ahead on a path to greater Agility.

Interest in Functional Programming has exploded in recent years. If you are an experienced OO developer, your design techniques and coding practices can easily get in the way of FP success. It certainly did for us! Fortunately, there are ways to leverage what you already know, to allow you to take advantage of the powerful tools FP can provide.

Join Declan and Shawn in this interactive session. Experience how FP can improve your existing code and simplify your design. Explore the joys and challenges of improving your Object Oriented skills with Functional Programming.

Do you want people to feel part of a group/team or part of an activity? Then ensure that they are included and engaged. Do you find facilitating a large group of people unmanageable, people disengage? Try Liberating Structures with your teams and organization.

Liberating Structures, created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, covers a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team. It makes it possible to build the kind of meeting that everybody looks forward to attending and participating. Liberating Structures encompass microstructures that promotes collaboration and trust. It is known to foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.

Participants learn how to use these microstructures to simplify scrum meeting outcomes, help teams collaborate and become more productive.

The traditional approach to organizational design is a barrier if you want to grow an organization where smart people make amazing decisions that delight customers and enrich their careers.

This session aims to provides leaders at all levels of the organization with an introduction to a set of design tools that can help them create organizational structures that promote agility rather than interfere with it.

Using a game I call Full Stack Poker, I’ll facilitate a highly interactive dialogue where attendees will play the role of various organizational stake holders tasked with getting the right skills into teams responsible for delivering value.

Loosely based on the planning poker game, attendees will collaboratively select from a number of Team Engagement Patterns, collectively agreeing on an engagement model that lays out how teams can engage with support functions and other teams. Participants will also be able to estimate the amount of organizational complexity their teams will incur based on the Team Engagement Patterns chosen.

The session is aimed at teaching attendees basic concepts behind defining agile organizational structure through a highly engaging / hands on session.

What is design thinking? Is it only for designers? Can I benefit from it?

Design Thinking in its simplest form, is an approach to solving problems. Once you understand the core principles and framework, you can apply it to just about anything. In the enterprise, it asks for cross-functional teams to come together to co-ideate and co-create products and experiences that are centred around the end-user.

Join the Rogers digital team for an immersive workshop as we use design thinking, to explore and create the ideal smart city with 5G technology. By the end of the session, you will have observed, defined, created, and tested your new city. Then, we will reflect on how you can use the principles in your day-to day work supporting and advancing agile practices and adoption.

Challenge: how can we transform the economy of Alberta as an organization of just over 5,500 team members and 770,000 customers?

Join Todd Hirsch, Vice President and Chief Economist of ATB Financial as we explore the ATB Story and how we believe 94 words are about more than Agile transformation. We believe we can and are changing the traditional assumption that Alberta’s economy is all about oil and gas.

A dōjō (道場) is a hall or space for immersive learning or meditation. This is traditionally in the field of martial arts, but has been seen increasingly in other fields, such as meditation and software development (and now also Agile Coaching!).

It will be a space for the immersive practice of coaching. Imagine a place where you can come and try out new coaching techniques, get feedback, give feedback and learn from your successes and failures? This is what coaching dōjō is about!

Coaching is one of the four main skills of every Agile Coach (along mentoring, teaching and facilitating) and for many of us coaching is the hardest skill to master. Way too often we go back to the mentoring mode, giving pieces of advice and sharing our points of view. Guess what, asking questions and giving space to reflect and come up with actions is hard, it's extremely hard! That's why we want to create a space for deliberate practice of coaching.

The coaching dōjō will be very to the Code Katas exercises knows from the software development world. We will come together, work in groups of 3s, one person will be a coach, one will be a coachee and one will be an observer. We will run 3 rounds of 10-15 minutes coaching so everyone will get a chance to be a coach. At the end of the round, the coach will hear feedback from the coachee and from the observer. In every session (this will be the 1st one) we will work with different challenges and/or different coaching techniques.

ELEVATOR SPEECH:
“We can’t make decisions or agree on priorities. So, we have the same meeting over and over. Literally, the same meeting.” If that could be said about your workplace, this interactive session is for you. Learn simple strategies and ideas for meetings that matter - those you run or those you attend.

SUMMARY:
Too many bad meetings. That's one of the most common sources of workplace whining. Today, especially in software development and delivery, our work is too complex for one person to make all the decisions or know all the answers. Everyone's contribution is needed. So, we have meetings. And some are a painful mix of frustration and boredom. When we can’t make decisions or agree on priorities, we have the same meeting over and over.

When we're the one hosting the meeting, there are lots of facilitation techniques we can employ to keep the discussion on track, on topic and on time so we can reach good decisions and plan effectively. But what if it's not our meeting? What can we do when we're not in charge?

Join Sue in exploring some simple techniques you can use at your next meeting to make the experience better for you - and for others who attend.

INFO FOR REVIEWERS:
This new talk is inspired by several years of leading the workshop, Facilitation for the Agile Workplace, accredited by ICAgile. Learners often wonder, "What about the meetings where I don't have control?" It draws on communication and facilitation techniques I've used in a long career in business and tech. Sources will include "Mining Group Gold," "Facilitating with Ease," "Liberating Structures," and "Leading Geeks."

It's an interactive session with an element of play - a simple board game with dice and cards.

By the time of TAC, I will have presented this session at PRDC Deliver and will have had an opportunity to tweak it, based on that experience.

Forming, or Launching, a new Agile Team is a critical step that is very often skipped due to lack of knowledge, time pressure or just eagerness to get on with work as soon as possible. This workshop discusses and demonstrates the importance of taking the time to launch teams and provides hand-on knowledge on how to Form a Team. This technique has been used by several organizations in the US and Australia. The last being the 2nd largest bank in Australia launching teams in an organization of 4500 people.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to set the stage to improve participation in workshops and other team events - in less than 2 minutes you can energize and focus participants to help them succeed at the work they will be doing together. In the same amount of time at the end of an event you can also deploy simple activities to help increase alignment and commitment to follow-up.

In this very interactive workshop we will explore why and how to start and close all kinds of meetings effectively. We’ll experiment with a number of activities that will accelerate learning and engagement. You will leave this workshop with several easy-to-try ideas that you can use to jumpstart meetings and improve closings in order to reinforce alignment and commitment to action.

One of the first actions organizations follow after deciding to jump into an agile transformation is assembling an agile team. To come with the "team" a hiring process begins. The hiring managers rush to pick the people following a generic profile of the ideal members.

After some time the selected candidate decides to leave you earlier than expected, generating high levels of stress across the project to was he/she was allocated. In other cases the organization is “forced” to keep the person as part of the team even though the performance of the employee is not the desired because of the person’s replacement process can be very complex.

In this workshop, we will share some tips to find the “perfect fit” for your organization. Furthermore, we will learn the power of asking the right questions at the right time so that your organization can get the right fit for your team.

Join us and learn how to improve your hiring process and start enjoying the benefits of finding the right people in your organization.

How much of what we do requires courage to ask for what we need? How many times are you asked to make a team agile and the team or leadership is not ready? What stops teams from speaking up about what is upsetting them? Who has the courage in the room to speak up what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done?

Having the courage can be made easier once you have tools and are willing to be vulnerable to take that first step. Teams that can step into this courage are more successful and more productive.

In this talk, Joanne will explore what is needed in our teams and ourselves to bring the elephant onto the table and into the light for all to see. Once we make the elephant visible it can be addressed.

Using a variety of techniques such as team happiness, team agreement, safety checks, assumptions, clean language, retrospectives and self awareness (conscious leadership) you are able to take that step more courageously.

Courage will start with you and can make a difference to our lives and our teams. Do you want to explore more? Join Joanne.

Project delivery is complex and subject to numerous sources of delay and risks. In this talk we explore why software delivery struggles due to technical constraints between a web of teams. Most importantly, what techniques can be applied to simplify delivery and improve time to market. This includes a real world case study where System Thinking techniques are utilized to achieve amazing customer outcomes.

If you are a coach, your job is to facilitate change in your client’s thinking (beliefs and attitudes), emotions (more mindfulness and resilience) and behavior (creating new habits). Using brain based coaching which is an approach rooted in neuro science, in this talk you will learn the latest insights into how our brains works, and how you can use this knowledge to complement and amplify the principles and practices of Agile coaching to create more effective, powerful, and positive transformational changes for your client.

Playing games is one of the most effective tools for teaching. It is hand on, active participation, engaging and fun for the audience to name some characteristics. However, it could go wrong very easily. Let's explore it together as a game!

What are the factors you need to consider when running a game? How about even before that and when picking a game to run? What elements do you need to consider running a game? How would you make it about teaching and not getting lost only playing? How would you capture the ROI for the game? How would you sell the idea of playing games to leadership?

If those are what boggles your mind, please join me for a session on Game. I will be sharing my experiences, successes, and failures on what to do with games. I will share with you tips on what to look for when picking, running and finishing up a game. How to embed a game within your training, and which part of it to use. I will share some examples that I used (and others created) on how to use already designed games for your goal. If you can’t find any, I can share some tips on how to design a game. This talk is focused to deliver value for the coaches, team leads, enterprise leaders and whomever that want to teach others from a very simple message to a very complex concept.

With accountability comes transparency and visualisation of work items. When you manage the work items instead of the individuals, you are encouraging and empowering your team to take ownership of their work.

Featureban is a simple, fun, and highly customisable kanban simulation game. Created by Mike Burrows in 2014, Featureban teaches the participants the Kanban practices and principles. You will try out some basic visual management (visualisation + feedback loops), and then experience the dramatic effect of adding work-in-progress limits to create working kanban systems.

Whether you are a novice seeking to learn Kanban in a memorable way or a seasoned practitioner looking for a great simulation to teach Kanban to others, this is the session for you. This session will be hands-on with a short introduction to the concepts - we will learn as we do!