This is part 1, the workshop continues after the break.

Agile is deeply rooted in certain basic values, beliefs, and principles, and therefore largely a matter of mindset rather than methodology.

Thus, “Speaking Agile” is not only about being fluent in technical terms related to agile methods and practices. The language we choose in speaking (and thinking!) about our observations, opinions, needs, aims and intentions is strongly shaped by – and, reversely, shapes – our mindset.

In this workshop, we will have a look at Agile vs. Waterfall “vocabulary”, experiment with ways of (re)phrasing everyday conversations in a way that effectively reflects an Agile mindset, and explore how individual backgrounds (e.g., role experience, gender, …) may have an effect on how easily we become “fluent” in speaking Agile.

Note: Some workshop exercises will also be available in German.

This is part 2, the workshop starts before the break.

Agile is deeply rooted in certain basic values, beliefs, and principles, and therefore largely a matter of mindset rather than methodology.

Thus, “Speaking Agile” is not only about being fluent in technical terms related to agile methods and practices. The language we choose in speaking (and thinking!) about our observations, opinions, needs, aims and intentions is strongly shaped by – and, reversely, shapes – our mindset.

In this workshop, we will have a look at Agile vs. Waterfall “vocabulary”, experiment with ways of (re)phrasing everyday conversations in a way that effectively reflects an Agile mindset, and explore how individual backgrounds (e.g., role experience, gender, …) may have an effect on how easily we become “fluent” in speaking Agile.

Note: Some workshop exercises will also be available in German.

Sponsor session description

Our mental and emotional well-being should always be of paramount concern. During this pandemic, it's even more important to have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive.
Agile workplaces need employees and leaders who are also emotionally agile, able to rebound quickly from stressful situations in ways which are healthy and contribute to growth. This is, in essence, the definition of resilience.

This interactive and self-reflective session will focus on developing resiliency strategies to enable you to recover quickly, with confidence.

What you will take away is a greater understanding of what personal resiliency is, as well as why and how you can develop it with simple but effective tools.
Don't expect a tech presentation. However, you can expect a science based approach to this topic. It's all about you: as an individual and as a team member.

During the last year, most businesses have undergone changes that we have never seen in the past. Some companies have thrived while others have ceased to exist.

The industry aspects on who survives and who will struggle are obvious; restaurants and airlines are under tremendous pressure, while online businesses have never experienced better times.

But regardless of that, some companies have survived despite having mainly a face-to-face business before Covid.
They have done the pivot to adapt to what’s possible when everything changes.

What can we learn from them in terms of the new people challenges that we are facing and how will work look in the future, when Covid is no longer a threat? Will we go back to business as usual, or will the way we work look entirely different post-Covid? What about office spaces, remote work, and how we manage people?
In this talk, Pia-Maria will take you on a journey towards a new future, where she paints a picture of how leaders and organizations need to change completely to attract the modern workforce after the pandemic.

Meena was mentored by Lizzy Morris

We are conditioned culturally from an early age, each of us developing a set of values and behaviours that differ from those in other parts of the world. When adopting Agile, do cultural behaviours and values prevail, or is there a universal ‘Agile culture’? How have different cultures adopted Agile to suit them? Are some cultures naturally more suited to adopting Agile than others?

Together with a fellow Scrum Master, I have been travelling around the world in 2018, visiting local companies, interacting with teams and interviewing Agile practitioners to study these questions.

Aside from sharing our findings and case studies from our all parts of the world , I talk about the many layers of culture e.g.: national, regional, gender, profession. Developing cultural awareness is key to establishing strong, innovative teams. I focus on how you can leverage the power of diversity in your company and teams, using techniques such as Bridge, Map, Integrate (BMI), cultural communication patterns and cultural models.

Looking at the news, listening to conversations in the coffee kitchen or even participating in a Retrospective: how much space do the positive things take up? In my experience, our focus goes somewhere else: We are conditioned to take in all the bad that happens, all the problems we have, all the hardships we have to take on. That makes it easy to loose faith in improvements. In change that is really meaningful. And the thought of working together in a way that everyone is happy, including not only the teams, but also budget holders and the customers and users? Yeah, real life is not a Disney movie, right? There are tons of negative factors that we would have to eliminate before this could ever happen. Right? But what if not? What if we could create exactly this Disney reality everyday? In this session you will not only get some examples of how appreciation can change the reality of working together. We will also do some activities that let you experience the effect of a positive mindset first hand and that you can use for yourself or with your colleagues at work – and together we will create new ideas of how appreciation can make a difference!

When you think about Agile ways of working, it has never been more relevant than right now. Agility means finding ways to increase the value you bring to your clients and how you train your technical teams. Before Covid-19, enterprise organizations were already confronted with the need for speed to transition to all things digital—COVID-19 only escalated that requirement.

Discover for yourself the power of learning-by-doing in this hands-on workshop!

You don’t want to miss it if you are in Learning and Development, Customer Success, Sales Enablement, Product Development, or a Trainer of Technical tools.

We look forward to seeing you there! By the way the winner’s will be enrolled in a raffle to receive a really cool prize! So, Are you up for the Origami Challenge?

“Build projects around motivated people. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

Most of you will recognize this fifth agile principle. Did you ever ask yourself how to motivate those individuals?
Spoiler: this is unfortunately not possible!

But there are ways to “unlock” motivation to support finding motivated people and help them stay motivated and continuously grow.
In this talk, we will provide you with an introduction to motivational psychology. We will do a deeper dive into the example of Joyn's growth framework, which is based on more than hierarchical and professional growth.

Call for new voices and mentors for the BERLIN Women in Agile 2021 event.
Looking for three new (European?) voices

5 Outcomes for the audience: – Why should someone do at least one, if not all, of these three things. – The benefits of having a personal brand. – How much time and effort does it take to build a personal brand. – How to start small and grow big. – How to be consistent over time.

If you play Monopoly it’s clear, that you only win, if someone else loses. That’s how the game works and that’s what the rules say. Compared to organizations we might have Monopoly Rules in place – especially in established organizations. If we want real change we not only need to change the system but to change the whole game. That means establish new rules in order to achieve different behaviour and more diversity.

This talk will start with an impulse to give insights in existing rules from a systemic point of view, how these rules influence the culture, and the rules of systems, what needs to change in order to achieve more diversity and new rules

In an interactive part we together will find ways to act as game changers and create new rules.

Come in early, to check stuff is working from your site.

Say Hi to other early birds and organisers.

You may use the chat and say something like “Good morning, Harry from Holland here” 😉

It is a space to be, to transform, to blend, and to further differentiate as possible solutions are uncovered.

An Open Space is a session format with just enough structure (five principles and one law) to engage the wisdom of the crowd and transform itself into new knowledge, new solutions, deeper understanding of one another.

And there are important pre-requisites for a session like this to deliver that magic, we’ll talk about these.

The workshop follows a systemic coaching approach and unfolds in 3 exploring stages and a denouement one. Exploring stages: Individual : what is our relation to fear as an individual. This stage is meant to create a safe space to build a positive approach on “fear”. Pair : explore and acquire awareness on how preservation scenarios influence our behaviour to others : pairs, teams, hierarchy, coaches. We might use the dramatic triangle to illustrate this stage. Group (team and organisation) : reflect, on a scale of time, what type of activities you are performing in your organisation and how are these related to creating value. This stage is aimed to highlight the activities that don’t contribute to an outcome and identify their “cost” ( time, energy, talent)…

Denoument stage Finding the tipping point: Define the impact of these activities on the value of the outcome and organisation’s performance (whatever performance means). Why do we continue to invest in activities with low value? Explore the future possibilities : “What if?”… we drop activities with high investment/low value. What is the impact on stakeholders needs? What is the impact on the outcome?  Frugal design for a “Cost of Fear Free” Organisation : How we can address organisational system’s needs aligned with people’s needs? We will use an original “Cost of Fear Free Shift” Canvas, among other tools.

More details on the “Cost of Fear” approach (but not in the tools used to design a sfhifted organisation) are in a related post.

There was a time in your life where you stopped playing. Or you didn’t. What’s up with the idea that playing is childish? Why do we ignore all the great scientific proof that playing is the best way to learn? This is a personal story about finding out what I need to do, combined with evidence based knowledge.

The take aways of this presentation are: – 7 most important scientific reasons why you should encourage playing in a professional setting. – The difference between playing and gaming. – 3 tips to start tomorrow. – A game which we will play and you can use yourself 🙂

I rediscovered playing and I would love to take you on a journey with an inspirational and pragmatic session to do so too!

Agile is undeniably entering the world outside of IT.
To my great pleasure, this is not only true for hardware engineering and business in general, but also for areas and professions, which are more associated with the female qualities inside of us.

In this talk I use the concrete example of eduScrum – Scrum in learning environments, especially schools – which has been invented in the Netherlands by Willy Wijnands, a chemistry teacher. Data clearly shows that being a teacher in Germany is a female thing. eduScrum in fact gives access to agile practices to comparatively more women than other work environments or open Scrum trainings. And eduScrum doesn’t only help current teachers to use their soft skills and facilitating qualities, but does also equip future leaders with teamworking and communication skills as well as a growth mindset. Working in self organized teams with their teacher as a coach helps everyone on that team bring in their existing talents and develop new ones in a safe environment. For the team to succeed everybody needs to contribute with his or her qualities. This is especially important in Germany, where we still experience a quite visible gap between socialization of boys and girls in their homes as well as in school. As subtle as this is happening, it is being measured and confirmed by research and it gives the women in our county a disadvantage in self confidence which is noticeable in their workplaces and in their teams. eduScrum for me is the perfect example of using the mechanics of Scrum in an extremely value-centered way in an environment, where women are at work. The iterations of course are fix and there will always be a learning product. This learning product is what teachers, parents and government still need of their students in today’s schools. But within eduScrum, the meetings, iterations and goals are serving the even higher purpose of developing students, developing people to be more self aware, self confident and strong for their future to come.

In this session you will learn about a very special series of Scrum implementations which succeed to really put people first and bring agile practices to a rather female group of practitioners compared to other environments. Come in if you are curious to see a glimpse of the future of education!