March sessions
Our Hosts
Welcome, open and close
Andy De Vale
Business Visualisation
Andy will be providing expert facilitation, visual thinking and engagement for all of our speakers in the Auditorium.
What if there were some universal truths about how to make a great team? What if those universal truths could be replicated in any team AND what if we had rock solid proof that these truths really do work?
Today, because of neuroscience and psychology, we can answer those ‘what if’ questions with confidence.
This talk will share the seven most important insights we’ve gleaned in the last 15 years from social cognitive neuroscience, informatics, social physics and positive psychology into what makes a team truly thrive and why so many teams struggle with low engagement and motivation.
So, if you lead a team, or if you’re a team member wondering how you could make things better for everyone, this talk is for you. Our time together will be focused on practical, actionable tactics, rather than scientific chest beating.
You will walk away with at least two simple interventions that are proven to
significantly impact you, or your team in a short space of time. They will improve collaboration, morale, quality of productivity and more.
Intrigued? See you at the talk.
Alan Furlong
Talk - '7 Lessons From Science To Create High Performing Teams'
Armakuni Team
Workshop - Team Thermometer
We want to give away our trade secrets, and teach you have to spot problems in your teams early and learn to address them.
Backed up by scientific research, we will talk about a few of the techniques we use to assess teams and how they are functioning.
We will trial a couple of the techniques, show you how we visualise the results of our assessments, and ultimately how you can use these to start conversations and optimise your team's performance.
Chris Bexon and Stephen McAinsh
Workshop - 'The Surprising Power of Facilitation'
Facilitation is all about creating minimal boundaries within which groups can work together towards a shared purpose. Traditionally, there are five ways in which we collaborate as groups and they are not very effective: Presentations, Status Reports, Managed Discussions, Brainstorming – much liked by the extroverted and highly opinionated - and Open discussion - same issues as Brainstorming, sometimes much worse.
These traditional approaches frequently result in only the outspoken shaping the future actions for the group. As a result, the wisdom and experience of many people is lost.
In this workshop we’ll learn about coaching stances, Liberating Structures, and behaviours, to unleash the creativity, skills and experience of everyone.
Dan Connors
Talk - 'Influence Mapping'
Understanding where influence lies for a particular situation allows you and your team to focus your efforts in the most effective and efficient way.
Dan will introduce you to the Applied Influence Group way of mapping influence which has been used in everything from understanding Taliban networks of influence to helping clients win high value deal.
Debbie Murphy
Talk - 'The Magic 3 - The Frontline'
How do medical retrieval teams work? How do we in the Agile world compare?
Jem D'jelal
Talk - 'What Will You Do When Your Agile Transformation Fails?'
What do you do when your 'Agile Transformation' begins to fall to pieces? The once inspiring vision that was set by your CEO now buzzwords painted on to walls next to other 'inspirational' quotes on team work. The promise that teams will get to work at a sustainable pace where quality and mental health is treated as a first class citizen to then find out that you've just been signed up to another death march.
What will you do? Will you wait for permission to share your opinion and challenge the status quo? Will you ask the same status quo to make you feel 'safe' before you decide to take any action? Join me in a hands on talk inspired by the concept of Brave Space, where I'll be sharing trialled and tested insights of the teams who were able to make impact - from the bottom up, through finding their voice.
Joe Macleod
Talk - 'How to…End. Best Practice at the End of the Consumer Lifecycle'
The mindless trajectory of projects, that adhered to a pre-determined narrative failed in the software world. It laid the ground for Agile. The narrative of projects then became adaptable, real and proactive.
A similar narrative of blind assumptions has become normalised in the world of consumerism. We design rich, emotional and meaningful experiences to on-board the consumer through advertising and marketing. In contrast the off-boarding of a consumer experience is barren of emotion and meaning. This sacrifices consumer action, holding back engagement, limiting reflection and responsibility. Long term side effects of this can be seen across sectors. Consequences include climate change, industries fined billions for mis-selling and individuals eroding their online reputations.
We have metaphorical technical debt in consumerism. We load the beginning and forget the end.
Hypothesis-driven development is thinking about the development of new ideas, products and services - even organisational change - as a series of experiments to determine whether an expected outcome will be achieved, so we need to know how to design and run experiments properly.
This session helps participants understand the importance of using experiments to help teams and organisations learn and improve, while giving hands-on practice in designing experiments to yield measurable evidence for that learning.
Workshop - 'No (Lab) Jacket Required: Designing Experiments for Learning'
Karl Scotland
Kathy Thomson
Talk - 'Diving into Courage'
Courage is recognised as a key quality present in innovative and successful organisations, and is even cited as a core value of some Agile frameworks. But what is at the root of courage, and how can we become more courageous as individuals and organisations?
Kathy will take us on a personal journey and draw from her own influences to show us that we have the power to lead with courage, no matter what our role.
Lauren Cahill
Talk - 'Chaos In A Can'
In this talk, Lauren will show you how to use an agile mindset to control chaos and empower your teams.
Melissa Pickering
Talk - 'Adopting a digital strategy without reinventing your product'
In today’s world of technology and the ease at which we can interact digitally, children have different opportunities to learn and play than previous generations. How do companies stay relevant to kids with evolving technology, without completely changing their core product value proposition of play?
Discover how LEGO designers are engaging kids in new experiences by safe-guarding the core creative principles of the original brick and using technology in a fun, playful, and relevant way.
Natal Dank
Workshop - 'Agile HR Taster'
Begin the Agile mindset shift with an interactive learning session and explore what Agile means for HR.
Core content:
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Agile HR - Why now? Global workplace trends and the implications for HR
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Core elements of Agile and how these can be applied within HR
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Interactive group exercise applying discovery and design thinking techniques to a real life scenario and employee experience
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Group retrospective to explore what Agile means within own organisation and HR team
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Discuss HR's role in Agile organisational transformation
Per Hammer
Talk - 'Creating the Right Conditions for Large Scale Organisational Change'
Changing the culture of an organisation is never easy, and gets progressively more difficult as the organisation scales up along the axes of employee numbers and geographical spread. As the transformation programmes (agile- or otherwise) multiply and break against the existing institutions like waves, it becomes increasingly difficult for colleagues to relate to, and feel part of, the change.
In this talk, Per will introduce some key concepts and techniques used at J.P. Morgan to create a grass-roots change program by creating the right conditions for staff to engage and participate in a wide range of communities of practice, and aligning those to strategic change initiatives.
Sheree Atcheson
Talk - 'How to Embed Inclusion in Your Tech Business'
In this session, Sheree will talk about the business benefits of diversity and inclusion, why they're crucial to technology and different ways you can embed inclusion at the heart of everything you do - from how you form your teams, develop your solutions, test your ideas and more.
Talk - 'Agile HR'
In this talk, we will discuss what is agile HR, how the people function (human resources) can help your (business) transformation, and what we have learned in our own agile HR transformation. After all, agile is about people first.
Steph South and Tanya Spencer
Community Space
Valerie and Gary return to our March conference to run our community track.
Our community track will be made up of four sessions:
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Community Collider
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Drop In Question Time: Agile 101
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Drop In Guided Conversation: The Future of Agile
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Liberating Structures - networking
Valerie McLean and Gary Fleming
You can buy tickets for our March event on Eventbrite.