Sustainable Pace is a core tenet of agile working. Team Health is a necessary ingredient in creative teamwork.

Come hear Brendan explain the principles and ideas here, and learn how to recognise when you need to take action and what you can do to improve things for your team.

In late 2017 as part of efforts by Geoscience Austrlia's Cultural Reference Group chaired by the CEO, Cognitive Edge's sensemaker software was deployed to explore the cultural landscape of the organisation. The survey was extraordinary easy to get up and running and resulted in the anonymous collection of some 200 stories about "what it's like to work here" within a two month period. This talk introduces the methods we used in the survey, the results and actions that immediately followed it, as well as the base it has become to further map and improve our organisational culture.

Communication is a core skill. It is at the heart of all our interpersonal relationships with family, friends and work. It is something we instinctively learn from birth, and continue for the rest of out lives. Effective communication unlocks better relationships, and dramatically improves effectiveness, adaptability, innovation, competitiveness and profitability.

We are inherently bad at communication.

This talk explores the various ways in which we fail to communication effectively, including:

• Unconscious assumptions and cognitive biases
• Mismatches between individual and group goals (the Unilateral Control Model)
• Hiding information due preserve control or minimise losses

It's not all lost, though! There are a number of techniques and skills we can use to communicate more effectively, including the Mutual Learning Model and Non-Violent Communication (NVC).

At the end of this talk, you will understand the causes of ineffective communication, along with different models for better and more effective communication. The practice is up to you!

A couple of years ago Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau coined the term ‘Zombie-Scrum’. What's it all about?

Well, at first sight Zombie Scrum seems to be normal Scrum. But it lacks a beating heart. The Scrum teams do all the Scrum events but a potential releasable increment is rarely the result of a Sprint. Zombie Scrum teams have a very unambitious definition of what ‘done’ means, and no drive to extend it. They see themselves as a cog in the wheel, unable and unwilling to change anything and have a real impact: I’m only here to code! Zombie Scrum teams show no response to a failed or successful Sprint and also don’t have any intention to improve their situation. Actually nobody cares about this team. The stakeholders have forgotten the existence of this team long time ago.

Zombie Scrum is Scrum, but without the beating heart of working software and its on the rise. This workshop will help you understand how to recognise the symptoms and cuases of Zombie Scrum and what you can do to get started to combat and treat Zombie-Scrum.Knowing what causes Zombie Scrum might help prevent a further outbreak and prevent the apocalypse

Oh sure, there's plenty of speakers and sources spruiking how to build "psychological safety" in your organisation - but maybe you're looking to find your edge through wreaking havoc, setting your organisation against itself, and rising through the resulting chaos! MWA HA HA HA HA HA

This presentation will walk you through how to maximise damage at entry-level, how to set toxic examples as a senior, and how to project terror once you work your way into management. Along the way there will be references to a variety of sources and frameworks used for inspecting organisational alignment and the needs of teams and individuals; we shall be subverting these techniques to serve your nefarious plots!

Reflecting back on my career, I have thought a lot about the managers I have had including the impacts they have had on their organisation, team, and myself personally. In this talk I will discuss typical management behaviours I have encountered, why not all managers are necessarily suited to agile leadership, however all managers can teach you something valuable about leadership.

Kanban isn’t just for work. How I reluctantly learned to use Kanban to get my personal life in order and why I’ve never been happier.

As agile coaches we are often asked by companies to give them what they believe are shortcuts to success. They are scared or unwilling to put in the hard work and want a playbook from someone who was successful to be laid out for them to follow in their footsteps. Explaining why this is not something that will work is often seen as a reason to mistrust coaches. They think we aren’t giving them the quick path because we are just in it for the money. I found a way to help me describe this in a way that makes my clients feel more at ease. Everyone can relate to cooking shows about starting off as a home cook (non-agile organization) and what it involves to become a master chef (an agile organization).

You’ve probably heard about “blameless post-mortems”. If you’ve tried to do it, you’ll likely have found that keeping an analysis blameless is harder than it sounds. Tensions and emotions after an incident can run high, and we can easily fall into traps that allow blame to infect the analysis. If we can avoid those traps, an incident can be a great opportunity for learning.

Keeping blame out of incident analysis is more than just learning a few techniques. It takes a philosophy of incidents that allows blamelessness to even exist. We’ll discuss both the philosophy and practice analysis techniques with that philosophy in mind.

Bring the details of your most recent outage, incident, or failure and we’ll practice:

- Telling a story of the incident
- Analysing the story to learn how it differs from expectations
- Examining the story and those differences to identify causes
- Evaluating causes to identify possible improvements
- Whittling down the improvements to the ones that would really matter