Meet interesting people, share experiences, make plans.

All in a Zoom meeting, talking with the whole group or with specific people in one of the available breakout rooms.

What does mindfulness have to do with performance in the workplace? Research shows that when individual employees train in mindfulness, they are more effective at work due to reduced stress and anxiety, greater capacity for creativity and problem-solving, and improved focus. Mindful individual employees are also generally more satisfied with their jobs and suffer less burnouts.

However, the real win for organizations is when entire teams engage in “team mindfulness” or “collective awareness”. Mindful teams, which have practices based on high levels of trust, empathy, and self-awareness, are also high performing. This is because these teams are able to build strong relationships, communicate more effectively, strive for continuous improvement, and prove highly resilient and adaptive in a changing business environment.

This talk “breaks boundaries” by creating the bridge between team health/well-being and team performance. These two concepts are not likely to be associated, however, this talk highlights the scientifically proven link between mindfulness and high-performing teams. In addition to the theory, participants will experience practical tools how agile practitioners & team leads can -integrate more mindful practices into their own teams.

In this interactive talk, participants will learn about Team Mindfulness & how this contributes to team performance. In addition, participants will try out together three mindful practices/ tools (team exercises & retrospectives):

Practice #1: Awareness: Mindful teams are present and have a deeper understanding of their own needs/ tasks in the team but also other’s perspectives.

• Check-in (how to do check-ins to create rapport & psychological safety within a team with “safety check-in”)

Practice #2: Effective communication: Mindful teams communicate in a way that is direct but non-judgmental; the team addresses conflict as it arises instead of letting it fester.

• Active Listening

Practice #3: Resilience: Mindful teams are able to change and adapt.

• CIA – Control, Influence & Accept

What does mindfulness have to do with performance in the workplace? Research shows that when individual employees train in mindfulness, they are more effective at work due to reduced stress and anxiety, greater capacity for creativity and problem-solving, and improved focus. Mindful individual employees are also generally more satisfied with their jobs and suffer less burnouts.

However, the real win for organizations is when entire teams engage in “team mindfulness” or “collective awareness”. Mindful teams, which have practices based on high levels of trust, empathy, and self-awareness, are also high performing. This is because these teams are able to build strong relationships, communicate more effectively, strive for continuous improvement, and prove highly resilient and adaptive in a changing business environment.

This talk “breaks boundaries” by creating the bridge between team health/well-being and team performance. These two concepts are not likely to be associated, however, this talk highlights the scientifically proven link between mindfulness and high-performing teams. In addition to the theory, participants will experience practical tools how agile practitioners & team leads can -integrate more mindful practices into their own teams.

In this interactive talk, participants will learn about Team Mindfulness & how this contributes to team performance. In addition, participants will try out together three mindful practices/ tools (team exercises & retrospectives):

Practice #1: Awareness: Mindful teams are present and have a deeper understanding of their own needs/ tasks in the team but also other’s perspectives.

• Check-in (how to do check-ins to create rapport & psychological safety within a team with “safety check-in”)

Practice #2: Effective communication: Mindful teams communicate in a way that is direct but non-judgmental; the team addresses conflict as it arises instead of letting it fester.

• Active Listening

Practice #3: Resilience: Mindful teams are able to change and adapt.

• CIA – Control, Influence & Accept

Diversity and Inclusion as a means to build bridges.

Do you sometimes wonder, “Who are we doing this for?” or “Why are we speaking the same spoken language, but we are not connecting for some reason or other?” We experienced the same and are sharing the journey that led us to take a different approach to build bridges in closing the gaps between experiences, culture, and background which got in the way.

This workshop aims to inspire Agilists and leaders to apply themselves to break down cultural barriers within their organisations by maximising diversity and inclusion to build bridges. If you are looking for ways to recognise the tell-tale signs in your organisation that diversity and inclusion could help improve, then sign up for this interactive session!

In this session, you will be equipped with the necessary language to help you have the right conversations about inclusion. In addition, you will practice with us how to conduct a dialogue to increase your ability to influence and promote diversity and inclusion in your organisation.

Disclaimer: be prepared to be disappointed.

During this interactive session, we will share how applying diversity by mirroring the organisation’s desired state helped us build a strong coalition within the centre of excellence, with leadership and the organisation. We will also share what did not work and how we would have done it differently. And of course, there will be plenty of room during this session for the attendees to share experiences and learn from each other.

Bernie Pinnola and Dineke van Vliet worked closely in a multinational, diverse and distributed setting for several years at ING Infrastructure in the Netherlands – a predominantly masculine company expanding in numbers, delivery challenges and cultures.

Diversity and Inclusion as a means to build bridges.

Do you sometimes wonder, “Who are we doing this for?” or “Why are we speaking the same spoken language, but we are not connecting for some reason or other?” We experienced the same and are sharing the journey that led us to take a different approach to build bridges in closing the gaps between experiences, culture, and background which got in the way.

This workshop aims to inspire Agilists and leaders to apply themselves to break down cultural barriers within their organisations by maximising diversity and inclusion to build bridges. If you are looking for ways to recognise the tell-tale signs in your organisation that diversity and inclusion could help improve, then sign up for this interactive session!

In this session, you will be equipped with the necessary language to help you have the right conversations about inclusion. In addition, you will practice with us how to conduct a dialogue to increase your ability to influence and promote diversity and inclusion in your organisation.

Disclaimer: be prepared to be disappointed.

During this interactive session, we will share how applying diversity by mirroring the organisation’s desired state helped us build a strong coalition within the centre of excellence, with leadership and the organisation. We will also share what did not work and how we would have done it differently. And of course, there will be plenty of room during this session for the attendees to share experiences and learn from each other.

Bernie Pinnola and Dineke van Vliet worked closely in a multinational, diverse and distributed setting for several years at ING Infrastructure in the Netherlands – a predominantly masculine company expanding in numbers, delivery challenges and cultures.

When we enter the workplace or reflect on our experience so far – we are often trying to fit our natural systems into a team, company, client and culture that may or may not support us to show up at our best.

Clean Language and Systemic Modelling offer tools to understand our own system and advocate for our needs in a complex world. At the same time it offers simple, efficient tools for finding out about others and making small adjustments to be supporting our colleagues and clients to show up at their best.

In this keynote, Caitlin will be asking some questions of each participant and supporting you to develop a ‘rough guide to you’ that will enable you to advocate for your needs as a professional woman and to challenge boundaries that prevent you from showing up at your best.

This will be an interactive keynote and you may like to have paper and coloured pens to create resources that will allow you to break, create and maintain boundaries at work. There will be a slide deck of these tools available following the conference.

Women represent 10% of the organisation’s workforce and 3.9% of women are in the most senior levels. This presentation is to discuss the lessons we have learned as female leaders responsible for guiding the world’s largest military Agile Transformation.

Chains of command in any organisation presents challenges to the typical Agile Transformation strategies. These strategies encourage the organisation to reduce hierarchy, empower lower level decision making, and to form cross-functional structures.

In order to secure funding and prioritisation of the transformation efforts the Agile Center of Excellence spent a year and a half building an evidence based foundation. This presentation will cover topics related to measuring and communicating success.

As the Transformation efforts have grown and expanded, we have had to solidify a Center of Excellence approach and Transformation strategy that allows us to share a unified approach across a variety of customers. This presentation will cover the steps we took to create a mission, roadmap, cadence, skills composition, and shared lexicon. These steps have helped us form a self-sustaining Center of Excellence.

The CoE was challenged to create an Enduring Model that doesn’t rely on external consultants. This has inspired the CoE to create new dedicated roles and integrate Agile training and coaching responsibilities into the existing structure.

The CoE used Agile Communication Campaigns to build rapport and create momentum using a lexicon that the employees can embrace and understand.

Working remotely is not just working from a “different” location.

In the last decade, in most agile teams, collocated team members have been front and center and remote workers were an afterthought who saw and heard the collaboration on a video call.

In the coming decade, remote workers are going to be front and center.

Teams and organizations will adapt their communication and collaboration to be inclusive, respectful of freedom and independent of location and time.

The current style of management will no longer be relevant as the world is changing.

The future is remote-first and asynchronous.

Molood has founded Remote Forever with the vision of bringing remote working into agile companies. In this inspirational talk, you will learn how to communicate and collaborate effectively remotely to maintain business agility in a future where teams are remote.

This talk will challenge some of the assumptions you have about working remotely and will inspire you to upgrade your mindset and get ready to adapt to new ways of communication and leadership.

Lean Coffee is based on an idea from Jim Benson, you can watch our last year’s video recording to get an idea.

To participate in the Lean Coffee follow the Zoom link (when you are logged on, so see a video icon to click on this page).

The Lean Coffee will be facilitated by Harry Nieboer.

You can choose how you want to participate.

Participate as a viewer
In that case, just stay in the Zoom session and watch the Lean Coffee Table on the screen Harry will be sharing.

Participate actively
That works best when you have a second screen.
After a short introduction, Harry will share a link to the Lean Coffee Table in the chat.
That works best when you have a second screen.

At the Lean Coffee Table you create a guest account (just enter a name, no need to enter more details now) and you’ll be given the option to watch a short introduction.

Adding topics
You can add topics you would like to talk about by just entering a title. The topic will be added to the table with your name on it. When we’re done entering topics, we give topic ‘owners’ the opportunity to give a two sentence long pitch on their topic.

Voting for topics
Each participant gets three votes, we vote on the topics we prefer most.

Discussing the topics
The facilitator starts the discussion with the topic that received most votes. We spend three minutes on the topic, do a roman vote to add some more minutes or proceed to the next topic.
This way we cover a lot of topics in a very effective way, including and unleashing everybody.

The Lean Coffee Table is open early, so you can already add your topics before the session.
(If you want to take a look already, you can follow this link).

The tool we use, Lean Coffee Table, is ideal for distributed meetings, as the lightweight format ensures that:

1. The attendees talk about what they want to at that moment in time
   • The agenda is built and prioritized at the beginning of the meeting
   • Tap straight into their multiple perspectives and capture insights
2. Maintain focus and avoid disappearing down rabbit holes
   • Each topic discussion is tightly time-boxed. Attendees determine which topics get more or less airtime
3. Capture the actions and insights share them immediately afterwards
   • Actions, comments and learnings are captured by the facilitator or anyone else as the meeting progresses. End results will be circulated in a generated (and curated) .pdf afterwards
4. Join the meeting on any device.
   • You can add topics, vote and record lessons through your phone, laptop or tablet

Well actually it can be quite easy if you just make sure to hire people who fit the same mould, but then you would miss out on getting the great products and result that diversity gives. Or rather that inclusion gives; taking someone different and pressing them into our existing mould will make us miss out on the advantages that diversity gives.

Is it easy to have inclusion? Nope… Is it worth it? Hell yes.

Gitte has been working with the human side of tech for years and seen the effect of this; science shows that we need to focus on the human side to create great things. Inclusion, collaboration, communication – the list goes on and on.

On the other hand, many(?) companies focus on money, accountability, delivery, and the human side seem far away.
So why don’t we use the human side? How can we bridge the two and make it beneficial for all?
Gitte will show how leadership can use psychological safety as the bridge between the human side and the money side, how accountability is not just a bad thing, and how we can start creating companies of the future – if only we are brave enough!

We Agile enthusiasts have a tendency to believe that we’re miles ahead of the rest of the IT industry. And in many ways, we truly are. But let me share a personal experience that might challenge this perception.

Picture this: I’m a woman attending an Agile conference, ready to soak in all the knowledge and excitement. But there’s one thing that never fails to catch my attention. Every time nature calls, I find myself standing in line for what feels like an eternity, just to access the women’s restrooms. Interestingly enough, this never happens at general IT conferences. So, are we there yet? Not quite.

In this session, I want to shed light on the gaps between our perception of Agile and its community and the harsh reality we face. It’s not just about diversity, although that’s an important part of it. We still have hurdles to overcome, and it’s time to cross the chasm that separates us from our ideal Agile world.

Meet our sponsors in the lobby!

Our Gold, Platinum and Title sponsors have a table in the lobby.
Pay them a visit during breaks or lunch.