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.

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.

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!

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

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.

Have you experienced your light bulb moment? Diana has.

She will share how to take it slowly, re-framing this scary, confusing time from fearsome and inhibiting to an opportunity to learn, to inquire, to improve conventional wisdom to include new realities.

As trusted advisors and leaders, we all must find ways to learn and plan incrementally, with opportunities and threats, aspirations and mitigations, in mind.

Let’s talk about staying curious and moving through to the path forward, even in turbulent times – through pandemics, social unrest, wildfires, job insecurities, and more.

Come ready to take notes!

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.

I absolutely love the theme for this year’s Women in Agile Europe Online Conference.

Think about it? Supporting Women, Diversity, and People through Change.
There is no better moment to have this discussion.

Why, you may ask? The shock and awe for many of us were the urgencies to quickly transition our entire way of working and living.
The realization that a vast majority of the world population didn’t know had absolutely no idea of what a worldwide global pandemic was when it started.

Understandable right? The last comparable one to what we are experiencing was the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, where approximately 500 million people worldwide became infected with the virus. I’m interested in sharing with you how I believe the Pandemic changed so many of us forever.

My presentation will talk about:· The Good· The Bad· The Ugly· What’s Changed?And why Supporting Women, Diversity, and People are the fundamental elements for Change!

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!

· In 2017, the Swedish government abandoned new initiatives of quotas for women in higher professional positions. This decision was a result of the growing numbers of women in leader positions.

· The growing focus on skills rather than personality when hiring has changed how we view a perfect co-worker and has in turn been explained as a positive effect on equality.

So why is the idea of supporting a woman just because she is a woman outdated, and in most cases even harmful? How can we in a more sustainable way make sure we have the right woman for the right position? Let´s explore how we can help ourselves and each other to be the best versions of ourselves and in turn give the right support and push to ourselves and other women.

https://womeninagile.org/launching-new-voices/

I started as an agile coach in a coaching community of 78 men and 3 women, in an infrastructure tribe of 102 men and 3 women. Yes, it looked like a man’s world, full of testosterone. And to feel accepted, I started by behaving myself like a man. Until I discovered, thanks to wonderful colleagues, women and men, I could include in my coaching other aspects of my personality, often considered as more “feminine” ones. But can we really make the distinction between male and female ways of coaching ? Is mindset coaching reserved to women while organizational coaching is better done by men ? And do we need to apply different coaching approaches when we talk to male or female coachees ? Should the energizers be about football for men and about feelings for women ? What are the clichés we have to overcome when we discuss gender in a coaching context ? What can we learn from each other ? As agile coaches, male and female, how can we simply become more whole and integrate all the aspects of what we truly are as human beings in our coaching ?
With the help of real-life and often funny examples, these are some of the questions I would like to explore with you.

What are the pitfalls that you might encounter after implementing agile ways of working at scale? How can women prepare and equip themselves to drive this change? In this talk, you will hear personal experiences of a Tribe Lead after designing and implementing an agile organization of Tribes, Squads and Chapters.

We’re in the process of contacting new voices right now.
When we know the speaker, we’ll add a description of the talk here.