The Iroquois Confederacy is the world's most successful tribal society, Never mind Spotify, these guys ran an agile civilization of up to a million people with no command and control – no managers, no owners, no masters – an international confederacy of tribes working and living together sustainably for over five hundred years.

Including two hundred years of peaceful interoperation with the European powers. And what do they have to show for it today? Well, their ideas directly generated the American, French and Russian revolutions, as well as Female Suffrage and Feminism too. Yet no modern society possesses the rich social weave and deep learning flows of the original #Haudenosaunee culture.

In this workshop we'll see how these time-honoured patterns apply in modern #BusinessAgility and #DevOps contexts to generate autonomy and alignment over command and control. Self-directing portfolios of self-managing streams of self-organizing teams ... that's the Game Without Thrones!

Check out a detailed description of the game mechanics here ... but since we're not certain how many folk we'll have playing this, we're going to use something different to Lego: construction paper! We've already been experimenting with this stuff for teaching games in XSCALE Alliance and it works great - see https://twitter.com/masakmaeda/status/624442251599441920 for Masa Maeda's "Papyrus City". Adapting that to the GWoT gives us a way to play at any scale.

Plus ... we're going to add a couple of twists for this one from the upcoming Hackathon Without Thrones ... consider it a sneak peek!

Agile delivery is like a hill-climbing program. It's perfectly capable of delivering a foothill of value when there's an Everest right next door. It's simply not designed to find Everest.

Pirate Canvas is a simple way to fix that. It combines Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics, Eli Goldratt's Throughput Accounting, and Gojko Adzic's Impact Mapping to quantify the broadest possible frame of a business case. It answers three critical questions:

* How do you boil constraints and drivers down to a formal Epic Landscape?

* How do you break your business out of a bad business case?

* How do you identify and quantify your unquestioned business, design and technical assumptions?

In this session we'll examine two real world examples of the use of a Pirate Canvas - the growth of a new business ecosystem for India's largest retail tea franchise, and the definition of a transformation program at America's largest pharmaceutical retail services corporation. And we'll play with the technique hands-on by combining it with Leadership as a Service.

In 2011 Commbank committed to pilot agile on an experimental payments program that would fail fast. Its first release delivered neither advertised customer experience nor internal business commitments. Business and tech execs were ropeable and disagreed hard on what to do about it.

We'd promoted this program called "Kaching" as the flagship of Agile in the bank. If we did as the business wanted and returned it to Waterfall, the agile transformation would be set back years. And as CBA's first Enterprise-Agile Coach I'd trained Kaching's delivery team myself. If this ball was dropped, I'd wear it, and deservedly so.

So I wound up seconded to the program for the next year and a half. I assembled case-study data on every release and until now I've sat on that data. With most of the Aussie banks wandering in the agile wilderness however, this stuff is all too timely. It's a classic study of how agile goes wrong in an Aussie bank, and how to set it right again.

Most of the challenges we faced on Kaching had less to do with Agile delivery than Agile Product Management. The contract with external Design consultancies left no room for collaboration with the bank's internal delivery streams. The product management hierarchy saw no reason the program should deviate from specs. A dozen layers of legacy made an immovable tech bottleneck. And everyone was blaming everyone else. CBA's Program Steering Group had Kaching marked dripping-red.

Yet within three months this same program went green across the board in PSG - the first in the bank to ever do so. It stayed that way for the next year too. After twelve months it won a dozen external product awards and the CBA Group CIO award for best program in the bank. The next year the AFR reported Kaching as a digital channel worth $9 Billion.

In 2013 this commercial success influenced Group CIO Michael Harte to declare, "Agile has become one of the five pillars of this bank's future". And a few months later Kaching was renamed "The CBA Mobile App" and remains the bank's principal digital channel today.

Meanwhile Agile Product Management has become a burning platform around the world. The breadth-first product management pattern language we pioneered on Kaching has found its way into Deutsche, RBS, ING, ESI, Bank of America, and large and small agile programs around the world.

Pirate Canvas, Behavior Mapping, Business Bingo, Release Refactoring, Leadership as a Service, 3D Kanban and Product Squads aren't agile mainstream yet. But they're well on the way because they're easy, effective and really reliable. So this session isn't just war stories, but a how-to you can apply in any agile value stream.

Scaling is an anti-pattern. Big meetings, long loops, slow cadence, tight coupling, and deep hierarchies represent bottlenecks no matter how Agile your individual teams may be. But de-scaling refactors an organisation into self-directing streams of self-organizing teams working together like pods of dolphins.

How do human organizations de-scale? How can we balance autonomy of teams against alignment to business realities? This session presents principles, metrics and practice patterns for de-scaling based on a long running historical precedent, the Iroquois Confederacy, which sustained a de-scaled society of hundreds of thousands for over five centuries. And the Spotify tribal model. And Steve Jobs' NeXT/Apple culture.

A complete working simulation of an Agile Organization - in Lego. No pre-made backlogs, no command and control, pure self-organization across multiple teams and streams driven directly by business constraints and numeric metrics.

Teal? Business Agility? Holarchy? Iroquois Treaties? Spotify Chapters? Sure, we got 'em all. Also dragons, walkers, a working small council and the greatest castle in Westeros - built entirely by Wildlings!

Check out a detailed description here and the slides here. Also there's a description of learnings from a Game we ran at the 2016 CukeUp conference here.

A complete working simulation of an Agile Organization - in clay. No pre-made backlogs, no command and control, pure self-organization across multiple teams and streams driven directly by business constraints and numeric metrics.

Teal? Business Agility? Holarchy? Iroquois Treaties? Spotify Chapters? Sure, we got 'em all. Also dragons, walkers, a working small council and the greatest castle in Westeros - built entirely by Wildlings! 

Check out a detailed description here and the slides here. Also there's a description of learnings from the Game we ran at the 2016 CukeUp conference here.

Scaling is an anti-pattern. Big meetings, long loops, slow cadence, tight coupling, and deep hierarchies represent bottlenecks no matter how Agile your individual teams may be. But de-scaling refactors an organisation into self-directing streams of self-organizing teams working together like pods of dolphins.

How do human organizations de-scale? How can we balance autonomy of teams against alignment to business realities? This session presents principles, metrics and practice patterns for de-scaling based on a long running historical precedent, the Iroquois Confederacy, which sustained a de-scaled society of hundreds of thousands for over five centuries. And the Spotify tribal model. And Steve Jobs' NeXT/Apple culture.

A complete working simulation of an Agile Organization - in clay. No pre-made backlogs, no command and control, pure self-organization across multiple teams and streams driven directly by business constraints and numeric metrics.

Teal? Business Agility? Holarchy? Iroquois Treaties? Spotify Chapters? Sure, we got 'em all. Also dragons, walkers, a working small council and the greatest castle in Westeros - built entirely by Wildlings! 

Check out a detailed description here and the slides here. Also there's a description of learnings from the Game we ran at the 2016 CukeUp conference here.

Scaling is an anti-pattern. Big meetings, long loops, slow cadence, tight coupling, and deep hierarchies represent bottlenecks no matter how Agile your individual teams may be. But de-scaling refactors an organisation into self-directing streams of self-organizing teams working together like pods of dolphins.

How do human organizations de-scale? How can we balance autonomy of teams against alignment to business realities? This session presents principles, metrics and practice patterns for de-scaling based on a long running historical precedent, the Iroquois Confederacy, which sustained a de-scaled society of hundreds of thousands for over five centuries. And the Spotify tribal model. And Steve Jobs' NeXT/Apple culture.