Are you sick of boring meetings or training sessions where your audience isn’t absorbing the information?

Effective and efficient learning is often a big challenge for teams and organizations. Why did the training not stick? Why do people dread the same old boring meetings? In an agile environment, learning is (*almost*) everything!

In this session, participants (not attendees), we will apply Agile learning and BRAIN Science utilizing Sharon Bowman’s Training from the BACK of the Room to facilitate meeting the DIMWiTS or The Six Trumps. This is your opportunity to have FUN and improve your Agile events.

Have you ever gotten to the end of the day and thought ‘Gee I’ve been busy all day but didn’t check anything off my list. Come to think of it, 2 more were added to my plate.’ Or have you ever attended a remote meeting and try to quickly reply to an email only to be caught off guard with a question. If you said yes to any of those questions, then you’re not alone. In the agile world that we live in with open space environments, working in teams with frequent collaboration and gadgets galore, there are tons of opportunities for distraction. In this session, attendees will learn 10 different techniques that they can apply today to help them stay focused and therefore more productive. Don’t miss this fun discussion about common distractions and tips on how to handle them!

We make decisions every day driven by cognitive biases designed to save time and energy. These mental shortcuts serve us well. But, is it possible this knowledge could help build better backlogs and by extension better products? How many stories in your backlog are designed to change behaviors? Let’s fix that!

The best design solutions today change human behavior. Yet despite decades of research, challenges remain. Behavior design aims to fix this. It’s a method for shaping your users/customer’s behavior. Designing a user experience is about convincing users to behave a certain way to reach a specific outcome. Behavior design gives us a model to define and foster behavioral change. This design method helps identify critical user stories often missed using conventional methods. Identifying these types of stories are a must to building lasting products. They link core user needs with business outcomes.

In this talk, we’ll explore how behavioral design can help you improve your backlogs. I’ll share how we’ve integrated this thinking into our Agile process. You’ll leave with a framework and practicable steps you can apply to your projects.

Scaling agility, de-scaling, growing agility - which is it? What impact could a scaling framework have? If we use a scaling framework, which one should we go for? What tools can help us with these questions? Are these even the right questions?

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, interdependent, and unpredictable, business organizations experience unprecedented levels of turbulence and disruption. Amidst the chaos, opportunities emerge from threats and strengths emerge from weaknesses.

While confronting chaos is challenging for people, teams, and organizations, the current age of business demands we not only confront chaos but even embrace it. We must navigate an increasingly unpredictable world to thrive and benefit from risk, stress and disorder --- going beyond agility to antifragility, a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “the hottest thinker in the world” (The Sunday Times, London), in his book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder”: “the fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.”

Using various case experiences, we'll explore how to put antifragility into practice to achieve business outcomes. Participants will gain insights and explore skills and practices that they can immediately use with their teams and organizations to go beyond agility to antifragility.

What does coaching have to do with the brain? One word…EVERYTHING. Don’t be fooled by the optical illusion of the human body you are coaching and fail to coach the brain. Let’s start to understand and work with the benefits of coaching the brain and not against working it. Findings suggest that the different ways people communicate are the result of the different ways our brains are “wired” to think, speak, listen, and act. This interactive session allows you to discover ways to coach your trainee’s mind. It focuses on the brain and its influence on behavior: How we think, make decisions and relate to other people. Are you ready to rewire your brain? Launch into an open space scavenger hunt where you’ll discover breakthrough tools and techniques to make meaningful connections. Exercise your subconscious mind and remove the internal blocks from your parietal lobe that may be impeding you from achieving effective communication. Discover emergent behaviors and learn how to build trust and respect needed to create brain-friendly environments.

Nexus+ is based on Nexus, the exoskeleton of Scrum, from Scrum.org. John will talk about one of his experience reports at www.scrumcasestudies.com (European Bank) on Nexus+, why he used it, and how he used it for Scrum and Kanban.

Driving passion for ownership, easing transparency and applying creative solutions during organizational transition are Stacy’s passions. As a national leader in organizational agility, Stacy Martin is excited to share emergent ideas, experiences, tools and references that will ignite your passion to drive thoughtful transformation at all levels. Stacy’s career started in lean manufacturing and evolved to IT solution sales and delivery, leveraging integrative thinking and business agility. She can now be found using the synergy between disciplines to successfully deliver high-value solutions for Fortune 500 companies nationally. Reach out to Stacy at Scrum.org and CardinalSolutions.com to explore the next new idea.

Have you ever seen what a clear compelling vision looks like in action? How do you take 66 people and turn them into a high performing team in a week?

If you have ever attended an Agile Alliance conference, and especially Agile2017, you have seen it all! This high performing team is a renowned, all volunteer team known as the Purple Shirts. They come together from all over the world, for one week of all out volunteerism and then disband never to be the same team again!

Come hear Becky share her experience as a Volunteer Coordinator for the largest agile conference in the world. She will share her learnings on leading this high performing group and discuss how you can apply the same qualities to your leadership of programs and teams.

This Simulation, punctuated with short bursts of Impactful Narrative from surviving crew, promises to deliver the G-Forces encountered with major tasks, techniques, and risks of leaving behind the familiar world of “business as usual” to intrepidly discover unchartered realms. Beyond the void lies your organization's hyper-performing agile environment.

Anyone experienced in gliding regressions back to mean, appreciates the challenge of breaking free of an entire organization’s collective constraints. All questions, concerns and skepticism have a valued place in the Experience. Your answers await.

What’s the most confusing thing about Kanban? Using a Kanban board and “doing Kanban” are not the same. Accredited trainer and coach Brendan Wovchko will dispel common myths and demonstrate the two factors that must exist for any team to master flow efficiency with Kanban. This session will conclude with a participant-driven simulation that will illuminate the benefits of Kanban practices applied.

Agile is a mindset, not a methodology. Scrum is a framework to enable agility, not a set of steps to follow that will guarantee success. People have to do the hard work of solving complex problems, of coming up with innovative solutions, of experimenting and adjusting to deliver amazing products. There is no silver bullet. But I can tell you the secret to Scrum success.

The Scrum values are the life blood of the Scrum framework. The creators of Scrum believe the five Scrum values are so important and so often misunderstood that they updated the Scrum Guide in July of 2016 to include them. The Scrum values are focus, openness, courage, commitment, and respect. They are easy to remember, but it can be difficult to actually understand what they mean, how to apply them, and how to recognize them in teams and individuals. Without the Scrum values, we are just going through the motions and will not maximize the benefits of Scrum.

In this talk, Stephanie will illuminate the Scrum values through real-world stories. Participants will walk away with increased awareness of their team’s embodiment of the Scrum values and techniques for coaching with the Scrum values.

This Simulation, punctuated with short bursts of Impactful Narrative from surviving crew, promises to deliver the G-Forces encountered with major tasks, techniques, and risks of leaving behind the familiar world of “business as usual” to intrepidly discover unchartered realms. Beyond the void lies your organization's hyper-performing agile environment.

Anyone experienced in gliding regressions back to mean, appreciates the challenge of breaking free of an entire organization’s collective constraints. All questions, concerns and skepticism have a valued place in the Experience. Your answers await.

What’s the most confusing thing about Kanban? Using a Kanban board and “doing Kanban” are not the same. Accredited trainer and coach Brendan Wovchko will dispel common myths and demonstrate the two factors that must exist for any team to master flow efficiency with Kanban. This session will conclude with a participant-driven simulation that will illuminate the benefits of Kanban practices applied.

Learn how the gingerbread men are taking over the daily Stand Up and forever changing the mornings of teams everywhere.

Have your Daily Stand-Ups become stale? We’ll talk through the evolution of an idea that ended up demolishing monotony, obliterating anti-patterns and spawning smiles… and to think, it all came to life after a game of Candy Land with my daughter!

We’ll talk through the implementation of a game board during one team’s stand up through the infectious adoption and evolution of its existence. You’ll hear how teams tackled some of their greatest impediments and helped build a zone of psychological safety all while having fun.

By the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to bring this back to your team and create your own success stories.