Introduction & check-in In this session we dive deeper into the 7 types of Agile Coaches. You will learn how to recognize them immediately, value the differences and get a better understanding of their drivers, powers and pitfalls. It’s fun to plot yourself, but also very useful when you are going to form an Agile Coach team or want to make your Agile Coach team more effective. With the 7 types of Agile Coaches in your backpack you facilitate your team to “practice what they preach”, improve the team dynamics, become a High-Performing Coach team and deliver more value to the organization.

The 7 types of Agile coaches – An introduction in the 7 different types. – How can you recognize them? What are their personal interests, style, powers, pitfalls?

Exercise 1: Role playing with the 7 types (groups of 5) – Each table get a deck of cards with the 7 types of Agile Coaches – Each group member select a card from the same deck and play that role. Maximum diversity! – As a group solve a case, every member plays his role, how to get agreement? fun!

Forming an agile coach teams – Explains Agile Coach teams and team dynamics, team stages tuckman. – Give some examples from effective and non-effective teams from your own practice.

Excercise 2: Form an Agile Coach team (groups of 5) – Each table get 5 decks of cards, for each group member a deck – Each group member draws blindly a card from the set from the person right to her and put it in front of you so everyone can see the type. – Assignment is to form a team of 5 coaches with the types you just selected. – Discuss: Which challenges do you see? What kind of storming examples do you expect? – What actions do you want to take to let the team grow fast from storming to norming?

Learn from each other – Present the results to the other groups

Wrap-up: – What have you learned? Feedback? – Take away: 7 types of Agile Coach card-deck.

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.

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!

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!

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.

It has been proven through various studies* that happy people spark joy towards the workplace and can positively affect your creativity, your productivity and your health.

Pump Up The Jam @ Work is inspired by the 90’s song from Technotronic. Listening to this song alone will create a spark of joy within you to reset and re-energize everywhere, even at the workplace.

The essential ingredients for Pump Up The Jam @ Work are air, water, nutrition, sound, light, nature, movement, mind, community, the human factor.

Agile is about getting out of our silos, working together to create value for the customer. However, most organisations consist of many not that well aligned parts. We attempt to cooperate but more often than not we end up frustrated, wondering why they don’t get it. What we need is a way to talk about how the parts are connected and what this means for the whole. Ergo systems thinking.

This workshop will give you a chance to explore what systems thinking can bring to your team or organisation. The language of systems thinking focuses on interdependencies, on wholes rather than parts. The tools of a system thinker such as causal loop diagrams, behavior-over-time diagrams and systems archetypes help to make these interdependencies visual. We start the workshop by getting acquainted with systems thinking through some of the system archetypes. Next you will draw a causal loop diagram of an issue of your group’s choice. Once complete you will ‘walk through the loops’ of the diagram and ‘tell the story’ to be sure the loops capture the correct behavior. You will experience how causal loop diagrams can be used to create shared stories about complex problems. And how these stories, by capturing the interdependenties of the systems involved, can help dissolve the ‘us versus them’ mentality often seen in organisations.

The journey to an agile organisation
Scaling and transformation: Return on Experience

How to keep the dynamism of your business and respond quickly to changing business contexts? How to do a sustainable change? Agility at Zalando help us to keep scaling our product vision, our platform vision, the scope of our business, and the extent to which we deliver value, impact, and satisfaction to our customers. Let’s share our successful and unsuccessful practices.

Topics

Agile at scale, Agility at team and organization level (scaling and transformation)

Goal

A better understanding about what needs to happen so that your organisation never slow down innovation and good delivery.

Agenda

• Our story, now and then: context, first steps, our challenges
• How to deliver value, impact, and satisfaction to our customers
• Our teams in action, successful and unsuccessful practices and outcomes
• Take away: our Try's and avoid

Learning Outcomes
By the end of this talk, you will be able to:

• identify a variety of frameworks that guide and inspire your organisation to work with agility
• identify key measurement and draw appropriate conclusions about how successful is your organisation

Diversity and Inclusion, does it affect us, as being Women in Agile? Let’s explore this during a workshop on this topic. What would we like to adress, what are our experiences, how did you handle in certain situations that might be helpful for you peers? Although it might look like everything is allright on the outside, many of of might experience of have experienced situations that made them feel less happy! What can we do to create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, let’s take some first steps together!! Everybody is welcome to join the workshop, hopefully it will be divers and everybody will feel included.