Agile2015

Abstract:
The book Tribal Leadership introduces five stages that represent a range of behaviors that tribes (ie.: groups of 20 or more people) act and think together. These stages range from Stage 1 where "Life Sucks!" to Stage 5 where "Life is Great!". Most software development teams (and most workplaces) live in the three stages in between.
This talk takes group development model presented in Tribal Leadership and helps coaches, scrum masters, team leaders and managers better understand some of the behaviors they may see every day in their agile software development teams. Participants will experience and explore the stages in various ways such as through music and an interactive game called "Guess that Tribal Stage".
"Steffan's work really brings together the worlds of Tribal Leadership and Agile software development in an interesting way. I think highly of him and how he brings these worlds together in a clear and simple way."
Dave Logan, co-author of the NY Times best-selling book Tribal Leadership
Learning Outcomes:

• At the end of this talk, the participants will be able to:
• * Identify the five cultural stages through language and relationship structures
• * Recognize the dominant cultural stage in their teams
• * Use a basic tool set to help team members evolve through the stages

Attachments:

• Surdek-TL-AgileTeams-Handout.pdf

Abstract:
The industry holds that both Mentoring skill and Professional Coaching skill are useful for ScrumMasters, agile coaches, and managers. Yet, the differences between these approaches is not crystal clear for most people. It's time to show more than tell. In this session, Lyssa Adkins, author of Coaching Agile Teams and a certified professional coach will Coach an audience member and Mentor another audience member on their real-life agile problems. Real people, real mentoring and coaching sessions. You will witness conversations that usually happen only behind closed doors. Along the way, you will learn the anatomy of powerful Coaching conversations and Mentoring conversations, see how these skill sets address problems in radically different ways and become clearer on when to use which.
Learning Outcomes:

• - people see professional coaching skills demonstrated live and learn that the discipline is not about coaching the problem, but rather coaching the person.
• - people see mentoring skills demonstrated live and learn how to keep the empowerment "over there" with the mentee, even when offering advice.
• - people get a clear cut idea of the difference between the skill sets.
• - people start to see when to use which skill set.
• - people see the gap for themselves between what was demonstrated and what they are currently capable of doing.

Attachments:

• 2015-08_Agile_2015_upload_Coaching_vs_Mentoring.pdf

Abstract:
Strategy is about change and your Agile strategy is no exception. Your Agile strategy needs to describe what changes will be made, what will bring about the changes, and what the resulting value will be for the organization.
A Strategy Map – a diagram used to capture and communicate an organization’s strategy invented by Robert Kaplan and David Norton – illustrates the cause-and-effect relationships of actions and outcomes that will drive change and achieve the strategic goals of an organization. Whether you are about to embark on an Agile transformation journey or you’re currently using Agile methodologies and looking for ways to drive improvement, the process of strategy mapping is an absolute prerequisite.
Strategy mapping helps create much needed clarity around the critical and interconnected concepts of goals, objectives, and activities. Each plays an important and specific role in a well executed strategy including an Agile strategy. Thus, aligning and communicating goals, objectives, and actions you will take to arrive at the future state is critical for engagement and execution of the strategy.
Participants will walk away from this session with the ability to use strategy mapping as a tool in leading transformation and continuous improvement initiatives in their organizations. Participants will be given an overview of the strategy mapping process and will co-create a strategy map with other participants through a facilitated workshop. Participants will also see how the strategy map can be used beyond strategy development and support continuous improvement and action planning at an organizational level.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will understand the structure and design of a Kaplan- & Norton-style strategy map
• Participants will co-create an Agile strategy map through a collaborative workshop
• Participants will learn how a strategy map can be used as a continuous improvement tool at an organizational level
• Participants will walk away with a tool and process to facilitate engagement and understanding of an Agile strategy

Abstract:
Do you want to be able to “trust the wisdom of the group” but find it difficult? Do you ever feel like you’re having the same conversation over and over again with no real progress? Do you ever feel like you are stuck in a disagreement and not sure how to move forward?
If any of these issues are standing in the way of your work with groups and teams ‐ ‘how’ you are having (or not having) the conversation is likely contributing to your challenges. Research consistently demonstrates that team effectiveness is highly dependent upon the quality of the communication between team members. Yet it’s easy to get into the flow of daily work and be really focused on the ‘what’ in our conversations without much attention to the quality of ‘how’ we’re communicating.
As an agile coach one of the most important ways you can serve your team is to help them unlock the wisdom that exists within the team itself and have the conversations they need to have. We’ll explore a framework for learning to ‘read the room’ using four elements for all face-to-face communication. We’ll do some live practice to apply the framework to a conversation and then identify some typical patterns of “stuck” communications that can lead to “breakdowns” in teams.
Learning Outcomes:

• Learn a language for how to ‘read the room’ and describe the structure of what’s happening in conversations
• Explore the four elements of all face-to-face communications
• Discuss the benefits of each element and the traps of ‘stuck patterns’
• Discuss techniques that can be used by facilitators to create more effective conversations

Attachments:

• Diagnosing_and_Changing_Stuck_Patterns_in_Teams_FINAL.pdf

Abstract:
Want Jedi like leadership?
Come grasp why Agile teams communicate 5x+ more effectively and the underlying principles you can use to
Create Influence, On Demand
From addressing resistance to change to instilling self-direction in teams, Agile relies on Influence rather than Authority. Agile practices like co-location and standups actually amplify influence by leveraging behavior patterns built in to humans through biology and social conditions. This workshop teases apart those patterns, turning them into conscious tools for leadership through influence. Exercises take participants through the application and practice of techniques to lower resistance to communication, whether face to face or over a phone. This session is ideal for anyone seeking to tap the latent genius present in the people, teams and businesses with whom they work in order to accelerate the arrival of high performance.
Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will
• • Grasp the full power of practices like standups, co-location and task boards, and how each leverages communication programming built-in to human beings
• • Amplify their ability to influence by quickly establishing Rapport
• • Understand How to build Rapport with both Voice and Physiology
• • Understand How to use Rapport to Pace and Lead Teams and Individuals
• • Practice building Rapport, as well as breaking it (helpful when pulling discussions out of ratholes)
• • Be able to immediately apply these techniques, even when constrained to no more than a telephone call

Attachments:

• CreateInflenceAgile2015.pdf

Abstract:
We all talk about conflict. We all experience it. But do we really understand what causes it and how we deal with it? Do we have any idea what to do about it? Much research and study has been done, but that doesn't help when you're in the middle of conflict. You don't have time to pull out the reference book or go to a website. You need simple, clear understanding.
Learn the categories of conflict and how to recognize them, which means having an understanding of what generates them. Learn the different strategies of dealing with conflict, recognize your own preferred strategies, and understand where you may choose to change your strategy. Discover specific tools you can use in any situation to comfortably and confidently deal with conflict. Doc List introduces some ideas to enhance your learning after you leave the session, so you can continue to expand your love affair with conflict.

Learning Outcomes:

• List two or more tools/techniques for addressing and dealing with conflict in a team
• Demonstrate one conflict mediation technique
• Define "conflict"

Abstract:
As agile coaches, we use strategies to empower our teams. But how can we teach our teams to be brave and innovative when we ourselves have brains that are wired to be fearful and judgmental? That is the opposite of bravery and innovation!
During this workshop we will learn and practice how we can consciously rewire our brains to become the coaches our teams need. How can we alter our thoughts to keep us calm when catastrophe strikes? How can we learn to accept reality and practice empathy?
Using research from the works of Dr. Rebecca Bailey, an expert in developmental psychology, and Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor, Sarah will take attendees on a journey through basic brain structure and brain plasticity. Attendees will learn how to rewire their brains and will practice exercises that they can continue at home to truly change the way their brains think. These skills take years to master, but learning to consciously change the way we think will be a great start on this journey.
Sarah has been practicing and coaching these skills with parents, children, scrum teams, and scrum masters for over ten years. She is passionate about the improvements that we can bring into our lives, teams, and companies when we make the time to consciously wire our brains for success.

Learning Outcomes:

• Familiarity with Dr. Bailey's Brain State Model
• Exercises to form the neural pathways to maintain composure during times of stress
• Exercises to help attendees move from the "fight or flight" part of the brain into the problem-solving part of the brain
• Exercises to develop and practice empathy
• Tools to begin transforming team culture by using intrinsic motivation

Abstract:
Story maps are great tools for visualizing story relationships and promoting richer product design discussions. They are also great tools for fostering collaboration across skills and roles. UX people mapping with developers and testers can share skills around user centered thinking and other design concepts. If you would like to get quickly into story mapping, example driven mapping is simple, powerful and quick to learn.
You need to show up ready to work. You’ll quickly see that driving a mapping session with examples is a great way to get started but also a great tool for connecting people with different perspectives. Examples being another form of speaking in testable language draws in testers and more quickly surface deeper challenges that arise from testing that cuts across stories (regression testing). Examples also challenge us to keep a user context that spans stories which is of interest to UX people. Last, but not least, example provide a vehicle for the cross cutting thinking needed to create an architectural road map that is product focused and frame customer journeys that replace getting things done iteratively with customer experience validations.
If you are sick of backlogs that are merely to do list, or you want to cast a wider net for your product thinking, show up with one or more examples to explore. If you are not sure what I mean by example, think about someone trying to do something specific with your product (or system) and you’ll be on your way.

Learning Outcomes:

• - Introduction to story mapping
• - Using examples to create maps adds context and helps write fewer of the wrong stories
• - Examples cut across stories and connect regression testing that also spans stories / iterations
• - Example help infuse user context into story mapping
• - Examples ask for value up front, promoting sort of a test driven product value
• - Attendees will leave with maps they can take back to their team / company

Abstract:
“They are resisting the changes I am trying to implement!” It’s a common refrain when people don’t embrace a change with the speed or enthusiasm desired. Do you keep pushing, give up or call in the big guns? How you respond to resistance can doom the change to failure, or boost the chance of success.
As coaches, we introduce new ideas in many different contexts. Relying on positional authority (our role as coach), or calling on outside authority (the managers who hired us) isn't likely to get those ideas a fair hearing.
In this talk, Mike and Esther will help you see resistance from a new perspective. By understanding how much influence you have, what forces are interacting around you and seeing different ways to re-frame your issues you can still get your message across without “inflicting help” on others.
Learning Outcomes:

• 1. Re-framing coaching problems by focusing on your relationships and sources of power other than positional power.
• 2. Understand the sources of power and their appropriate contexts
• 3. Real connections that make a real difference take time and real effort
• 4. The key factors that help us to connect to others
• 5. How to map and understand the relationships around you

Attachments:

• CoachingFlow.pdf

Abstract:
As a ScrumMaster, Team Facilitator, Agile Coach or Enterprise Agile Coach you’ll be assisting people, either on the team, executive or individual level, to identify and remove the different impediments that prevent them from achieving their goals. Facilitating the impediments removal is not the same as removing the impediments by your own. The latter might be easier at first, but the former is the one that will help people improve their skills and self-organizing abilities.
In this workshop we’ll be going through a series of stages and powerful questions that can help you have great coaching conversations with the individuals or teams in order to facilitate those impediments removal and, at the same time, improve their abilities and skills.
Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will be able to identify the 4 main areas of a coaching conversation design:
• 1) goal setting,
• 2) impediments identification,
• 3) facilitators discovery and
• 4) action plan design.
• Each of the main areas have different sub-areas and each of them also have different powerful questions that will help a coach assist their coachee in the process of self-discovery.
• You will learn something in this session that you can put to use next Monday: You will be able to have great coaching conversations with your coachees and the members of the teams that you facilitate.

Attachments:

• GreatCoachingConversations.pdf

Abstract:
Are you a Product Owner that would like to become more value-driven? Are you struggling with helping Product Owners to become more value-driven? Are you looking for tools that can help the Product Owner be the best they can be?
Come play the Product Owner game with us, and experience what value-driven backlog refinement means.
We are out on a journey, mission if you will, to provide Product Owners with resources that enable them to be the best they can be. We feel it's the next frontier, and we feel that the next decade in agile will be about what it means to be value-driven.
This journey has taken us places, from the Agile Holland meetups, to Scrum Day Europe, to XP Days, to interesting clients. We received inputs from the agile community, and had fun playing and designing games that aid in the mission.
We will share this journey with you, and play the latest and greatest incarnation of the Product Owner Game with you.
The game is a turn-based card game, with the objective of delivering as much value as possible. Scarcity and chance play an interesting role.
The team that delivers most value wins the grand prize!!!
Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will play the game and learn about backlog ordering, refinement and value-driven development
• Participants will receive the game to play it with others, and will have the knowledge to facilitate it

Attachments:

• Agile2015POValuegame2.pdf

Abstract:
At a critical moment in history the world pivoted because people began to look at things from a different perspective. They stopped asking themselves, “How do we make our product large enough for people to see?” and started asking themselves, “How can I make my product more visible to the public?”
When we change our questions we get entirely different outcomes. Questions are powerful tools in the hands of agile teams that can help people discover innovative solutions that have been locked inside waiting to be released into our products!
Join us for a high-energy workshop that teaches how questions can be used to help a team learn, grow, and break through thought barriers. Learn what makes certain questions provoke more thought than others and how to make your questions more impactful.
Participants in this session will discover how to change the way they currently communicate to incorporate powerful questions that will unlock new thinking patterns in their teams. They will also interactively learn how to identify if the way questions are being asked are actually impacting others in the manner intended.
Learning Outcomes:

• How questions can be used to help a team learn, grow, and break through thought barriers.
• Learn what makes certain questions provoke more thought than others and how to make your questions more impactful.
• Participants in this session will discover how to change the way they currently communicate to incorporate powerful questions that will unlock new thinking patterns in their teams. (Interactive activity to learn how to convert a list of sample questions into different formats making them more powerful and to discover how the deviations in the question can provoke different responses and shifts to new understanding.)
• They will also interactively learn how to identify if the way questions are being asked are actually impacting others in the manner intended. (An interactive activity to discover how questions feel and impact listener from different mental perspectives - curious, angry, etc..)

Attachments:

• Change_Your_Questions_Change_Your_World-3.pdf

Abstract:
What I see in the hundreds of Agile coaches and leaders I teach each year is an urge to resist the circumstances they are in, followed by attempts to overpower their situations through skill, cunning, or worse. Many coaches are frustrated, bewildered, and at times despondent, mixed with a hope that surely if they just persist long enough, they will eventually be rewarded. In stark contrast, I have found a world that constantly provides direction, support, resources, and wisdom. It is there for the taking if only I will give up my preconceived ideas of what I think is right, and surrender to the crazy wisdom of the world as it is, rather than how my ego wants it to be. It requires surrendering my own desire to look good, to be in control, and mostly, to be right.
From an early age, I felt an odd calling to work with organizations as a 'healer.' For many years, I did not know quite what that might mean. Over the past 14 years, I have achieved a lot of success as an enterprise Agile coach and teacher of coaches and leaders; during that period, some clear ideas have taken shape. Many wonderful teachers have shown me how to work directly with the 'trend lines of reality', rather than, for instance, trying to manipulate or overpower forces and events beyond my control. This letting go process has led to what others experience as a quiet calm, and what some refer to as me acting like Yoda :-) . At first I thought they were being ridiculous, but as I surrendered to the reality of people's repeated feedback, I started looking closely at what's going on. What I discovered is that whatever coaching mastery I may have is fundamentally not "mine", but instead is the natural power of the world passing through me, giving me guidance, providing direction and help, at least when I get my own ego out of the way. I hope to give participants some insight into how that process works.
This will be a deeply personal talk, spanning the range of my spiritual training in meditation and shamanic practices, long struggles with personal demons, and eventual coming into my deepest purpose and alignment with my inner guidance systems. My intent is to reveal how I have worked with my self, how I have grown into a more mature understanding of the nature of service within the human transformation process, and how aligning with what is trying to happen has made me much more successful and happy. I will illustrate the talk with references to various methods that form the basis of an emerging organizational shamanic tradition: systemic constellations, process-oriented psychology, relationship systems coaching, and others.
(I realize the risk of coming across as terribly egotistical in this, but my intent is precisely the reverse: to provide personal transparency into my own growth process, warts and all, and how confronting our ego can lead to greater ability to be of real service to others.)

Learning Outcomes:

• *Understanding the critical importance of working on your self to be effective at transformation work
• *A personal understanding of how the development process unfolds in an individual

Abstract:
I have given several presentations about the use of powerful stories instead of science in our industry, so I thought I should try to be more helpful and give a session on how to conduct an experiment. No, this is not too rigorous! We are not going to talk about statistics! We are going to talk about cheap, easy experiments, what to do, what to be aware of, including our cognitive biases. I will share some of my experiences with teams who are really doing it. The goal is to encourage everyone to be a bit more methodical in decision-making and to replace "that won't work" with "how can we test it."
Learning Outcomes:

• I hope that participants will walk out the door with a plan in hand for one or more experiments to run in their workplace. I hope to improve the scientific vocabulary a bit and introduce some of our cognitive biases that get in the way of decision-making.

Attachments:

• Experiments_final.pdf

Abstract:
When we have our most successful coaching moments, they often come from a deep groove: where we seem to anticipate the team's needs; know when the breakthroughs are coming; know how to dance between mentoring the team and letting them innovate (or struggle) on their own. But, it rarely starts that way. Coaching new teams can be awkward -- and especially so if you're new to coaching. I will show you some ways of approaching these coaching engagements that can break down the awkwardness, reveal things about the team, and get on a track of improvement and discovery.
I will share some attitudes I think can benefit coaches who find these situations awkward, as well as practical tools and tips you can exercise tomorrow to get teams talking and making progress. We will also engage as small groups, for further practice on these tools and to create space for coaching one-another.
Learning Outcomes:

• 1. Ways of approaching teams you are coaching for the first time, including how to start those first conversations and pitfalls to avoid
• 2. Practical exercises to help teams align, communicate, and teach you about their dynamics
• 3. Tools to use for teams who need to re-set their basic agile practices

Attachments:

• awkward_coaching_-_keynote_-_PDF_30July.pdf

Abstract:
From the perspective of the professional coach, coaching executive leaders is different than most other coaching situations. With executives, you are not only a facilitator of their inner process of discovery, as is true with any other professional coaching process: you are also their disorienting partner, provoking them into new ways of thinking. You are their thinking partner, sharing models, frameworks, concepts and ideas that inform them and expand their repertoire of ideas. You’re their truth-teller, giving them feedback that no one else will, reminding them of what they are committed to even as they want to run away. Finally, you are their mentor: teaching them about and guiding them through the nuances of enterprise and leadership agility.
In this session, you will learn—through presentation, demo and practice—the basics of executive coaching, how it’s different than other types of coaching, and the specific ways executive coaching can help senior leaders become transformational agile leaders.
Learning Outcomes:

• You will understand how coaching executive leaders is not like other kinds of coaching you may be doing
• You will have a couple of feathers in your quiver in terms of working with executives.
• This session is particularly targeted to the enterprise coach who is looking for ways to more effectively approach executive leaders.

Attachments:

• executive_coaching_preso_Agile2015_FINAL.pptx.pdf