"You can motivate by fear, and you can motivate by reward. But both those methods are only temporary. The only lasting thing is self-motivation." ~ Homer Rice

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have been well known for decades now, and John Doerr's book on Measuring What Matters became a hit immediately after it was published. However, while OKRs as a concept seems logical and straightforward, many companies struggle with implementing this concept in an aligned and inspirational way. As an Agile coach implementing OKRs in multiple large organizations, I experience three major anti-patterns:

1. OKRs are implemented top-down. OKRs are not KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which are top-down arbitrary numbers provided by management to each employee at the beginning of a long-term period (usually a year). OKRs are set by teams, not individuals, and aligned with organizational objectives. In that, OKRs are inspirational and encourage teams to set up the objectives that motivate them and inspire self-organizing teams to make a difference.
2. OKRs are used to measure performance and define compensation. Unlike KPIs which are used to measure performance and this influences compensation and promotions, OKRs are not related to performance in any way. Numbers are easy to game, and connecting OKRs to performance would negate the purpose of those. OKRs need to be aspirational and hard to achieve, and by doing that, the teams challenge them to continuously grow and become high-performing. This is the reason OKRs are self-graded, not measured by the managers.
3. OKRs are focused on activities, not results. Frequently, OKRs are focused on activities or tasks, e.g. provide 100 training sessions, hire 300 employees, create a Playbook covering 50 topics. While sometimes there is a reason for task-based key results, in most cases, the objective is either customer-related (e.g. customer satisfaction), business objective (e.g. revenue growth), employee-related (e.g. retention data), or a related goal. In either case, it forces teams to pivot if the initial set of activities does not bring the intended result and fail forward to pursue the goal. (OKR example)

During the workshop, we will be playing two OKR-setting games. The goal of these games is to experience in practice how to avoid common mistakes and set up cascading OKRs bottom-up by empowering teams, aligning divisions, and keeping the organizational objectives in focus - all of this while keeping employees motivated and inspired. Finally, we will discuss how OKRs empower teams to self-organize while achieving shared goals within a scaled agile environment.

Did you recently try to buy a paper atlas in a bookstore? A few years ago you would prefer a GPS to a paper map. Today, smartphones replaced GPSs with their navigation functionality providing more convenience at a fraction of the cost. Does it mean that the business is disrupting itself over and over again? What does it mean for large well-established enterprises? What is the right way for established businesses to use technological advancements to their advantage, and how to integrate innovation in business success?

Lean Startup is a popular concept because it provides a way for large established enterprises to survive disruption in a modern fast pacing world. Lean Enterprise is a popular topic that needs to be demystified and translated into action. In the talk, we will uncover how agile, lean, lean startup, and design thinking create a new framework for large enterprises to avoid disruption and delight their customers.

The talk aims at demystifying the way of market disruption to large businesses to allow for their survival in a modern economy. This practical advice comes from years of experience, containing both success and major failures.

This is a fast but super powerful game. It can be played in the end of any Agile ceremony or any business meeting/event in general. The goal is to make this world a better place by encouraging participants to commit to an improvement of their choice.

It starts with any activity. It can be a retrospective, a backlog grooming session, or a non-Agile meeting. In our simulation, we will use a volunteer to come up with a trigger. The trigger is a surprise for participants.

Once we come up with a trigger, we will use information radiators for immediate feedback. I will share an effective way of receiving immediate feedback from your audience in a positive and non-intrusive manner. We will be using four information radiators: pace, value, level of detail, and happiness metrics.

Once we identify improvement opportunities, we will do brainstorming on action items and play the Commitment Game. In the Commitment Game, each of the participants will commit to one action item they will own to implement one improvement, and collaborate with their peers who will support them in meeting with commitment.

This game can be used universally and it presents a powerful set of tools for any Agile ceremony and beyond.

As psychology advises, an action becomes a habit when it is backed up by principles. This is equally applicable to Agile. We all know well Agile by being, not Agile by doing is a sustainable and lasting way of transforming groups and organizations. Then, the question is: how do we teach Agile values and principles? Would it help memorizing them? Most likely it won’t because it will be “doing” Agile without believing in them and making them our own.

So the goal is to internalize Agile values and principles, make them memorable. Share and elicit examples that resonate with the audience and help them answer the question “what’s in it for me?”

This exercise is being done in teams. I am going to share several games that help participants internalize agile values and principles.

1. One is a matching game with several cases specific to Agile and Agile Games conference. Then, participants will come up with their own examples. In the third iteration, we will have participants will “build on what is happening”, i.e. do matching based on cases created by other teams.
2. The second one is the lean “five why’s” game applied to Agile values. After sharing technique of conducting root cause analysis using five “why’s”, I will ask the participants to continue working in terms to come up with the underlying reason for each of the values and share with others. This is a competition with the prizes (laminated copies of Agile Manifesto with values and principles).
3. Finally, the teams will re-write Agile values and principles as they apply to non-software teams (human resources: hiring and onboarding teams), executive teams, finance, and others, and share their Business Agility Manifesto’s with each other.
4. In the workshop retro, we will brainstorm on other creative ways of teaching agile values and principles. Results will be shared with all participants, so that they can immediately use these ideas with their companies and clients.

I also have a 30-minute of this workshop which can be used as a tutorial to teach Agile Manifesto.

World is imperfect but we have a chance of making it better by innovating and using our creativity.

At last year's Agile Games, I shared my Agile Creativity game which enables problem solving, and the feedback from the audience was super positive. I've heard from several of participants that they are using this game to solve complex problems enabling agility in their enterprises throughout the year.

This year, I want to share an innovation game called "Bust the Mold" that has never been applied to Agile before. 

In this highly participatory workshop, we will co-create a new view on common Agile beliefs and challenge familiar concepts using the "Bust the Mold" technique. This innovative crowd-sourcing tool was first introduced by a pioneer in creative learning, Rob Cordova, and has not been applied in an Agile environment outside of Dun & Bradstreet where I work.

The workshop is facilitated in small groups without any limit of participants. It generates a lot of laughter, new ideas, and practical concepts that can be immediately used. Everyone has a chance to actively participate. Participants move around the room, constantly contribute new ideas, challenge stereotypes, and engage in building the shared vision.

During the workshop, participants will come up with experiments and new ideas to validate. Everyone leaves the workshop with a positive feeling of contributing to old concepts in a new, highly innovative way.

The workshop is relevant to any level of Agile experience - from beginners to most experienced participants because it is all about collaboration and innovation!

To give a creative answer, you need an unusual question, the question that encourages you to think differently, answer the question that is not expected, or not framed the way you are used to. This is what my Creativity Game is all about: framing expected environment in an unexpected way. The principle is: "When you want the results you never had, you have to do something you've never done." (Thomas Jefferson) This is exactly what we do in this game: first, we co-create an unusual and unexpected environment using a crowd-sourcing technique, and then, we frame and resolve the challenges of this environment by coming up with unexpected and innovative solutions to the issues presented. In doing so, we exhibit creativity, innovative thinking, ability to resolve obstacles, and have a ton of fun. I've never heard so much laugh in a professional environment as with people who are playing this game. It's based on an old kids' game and promotes solution-based approach to problem solving, presenting it in a new and unexpected way.

The way the problem is crowd-sourced is fun, and the problems that it uncovers are unexpected and not trivial. Framing and solving them within this game is an unexpected process which always brings great advice that the participants can take back to their organizations and teams, as well as use the game itself in their organizations to bring out the creativity we all naturally have.

Feedback is vital to our personal and professional growth. It helps create self awareness, identify areas of strength, and areas of opportunities. However, in our everyday life we do not find enough time to provide or ask for feedback. We frequently do not know how to respond to feedback and start explaining our motives or take it personally, while the only correct answer to feedback is "thank you". This game provides an opportunity to give and receive feedback in a positive and non-confrontational way. It can be used for alignment and team building, or as a format for retrospectives. This is my original game that I practices with multiple teams in several organizations, and everywhere we found a lot of value (and fun) in it.

We will be playing two games during the session: a collaboration game (which is a learning experience by itself), and then will use my original feedback game to give each other feedback as a retrospective. What is most fascinating, both are silent games. The power of silent communication is yet to be understood and quantified, and these two games will show how powerful silent communication may be and how it can create thoughtful and respectful atmosphere on the team.

Leo Tolstoy’s book Anna Karenina begins: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We can refer to it as “Anna Karenina principle” which is fully applicable to implementing Agile at scale. Imagine, you rolled out Agile in your organization successfully and your energized teams are delivering software on cadence and with high quality. What do you hear next from the management? Let’s scale. Let’s have more of those. So you coach more, establish repeatable practices, coach the teams, and all of a sudden, it all falls apart. Unmanaged dependencies, overlapping product backlogs, conflicting roadmaps bring quality issues, delays in delivery, frustrated teams, and unhappy stakeholders.

In this attempt to apply the "Anna Karenina Principle" to Agile, we will explore relationship between Scrum and DevOps, ATDD and Waterfall, value and cost, "happy" Scrum and Scrumfall. This conversation will make you think and laugh, agree and disagree, talk and listen, but most importantly, it will introduce some patterns in Agile and Scrum that will help you assess what all "happy" Agile implementations have in common from technical and non-technical perspective.

The presentation includes a group exercise to validate the principle.

For years, Scrum/Agile coaching has been an attractive career for many. It is frequently viewed as a continuation of a career for an experienced Scrum Master who understands the intricacies of the cultural change that makes Scrum teams successful, knows nuts and bolts of a Scrum engine, and has natural aptitude for knowledge sharing and growing others. A leader who is unselfish and acutely self-aware, who has experience, and ability to influence others.  Many Scrum practitioners saw this role as their next step in professional development. The 2010 book, Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins’ and her Agile Coaching Institute made Agile Coaching a discipline rather than a buzzword. Now, five years later, Agile Coaching is rapidly losing its attractiveness as a professional career. In her open-space style talk based on a retrospective with the session participants, Mariya Breyter will explore why this is happening and what a natural career progression for an Agile coach is. Agile Coaches and Scrum practitioners will exchange their experience and discuss their paths for professional development.

The term retrospective is well established in the Scrum community. In 2011, Anders Laestadius introduced a term “future-spective,” when you imagine being in the future and performing a retrospective for an iteration that has been completed. The agenda of a future-spective is similar to an ordinary retrospective, the only difference being that it is imaginary and performed at a specific point in the future. In this interactive presentation, participants will conduct a future-spective of Scrum 2025 and create a “time capsule” they will send to Scrum Alliance to open in 2025.