Even if you don’t have change management in your job description, your job involves change.

Change is a given in modern organizations as they respond to market and technology changes, make improvements, evolve new practices to meet new challenges. These are not simple changes on the organizational, group, or even team level. Often, there is no indisputable right answer, and responding will require learning and unlearning, trial and error. Whatever you do, it will interact with existing policies and structures, with unpredictable results. The answer is not more rigorous planning, more pushing, or more persuading. Instead, attraction works, taking an approach that is adaptive, responsive and engages people in learning and owning the new way.

This session presents seven heuristics to guide complex change.

By now, we been zooming since March— at work, at home, and in these sessions.
So, how are your online meetings going? For me, some are productive, while others are downright painful. People have.a hard time getting a word in, They talk over each other. Some people talk a lot. Other voices are not heard at all. Everyone feels “on,” all the time. It is exhausting!

Part of the problem is our brains. We’re wired to move towards safety and away from threat. Unfortunately, remote space can feel vulnerable and evaluative. That puts people on the defensive—not the best place for creativity and collaboration.

I’ll share a model based on neuroscience that describes the ways we can create more safety. As we work through the model, we’ll use practical techniques that put that model into action.

I'll outline David Rock's SCARF model, which brings attention to the factors that can reduce threat responses. Then put it into practice. We'll analyze some of your past meetings to see how they attended to these factors. Did they lower threat or heighten it? Then we'll look at the methods I'll use in the session–examining our experience within the experience.

You’ll leave with methods you can use in your next meeting.

Traditional definitions of leadership emphasize position, formal authority and power, vision, heroics. Those definitions might have been sufficient in another time. Organizations that need to respond to a fast-changing environment and desire continuous improvement require a different kind of leadership and a different kind of leader.

In this talk, we'll explore a different definition of leadership, one from Jerry Weinberg: “The ability to enhance the environment, so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem(s)” 

In this talk I'll briefly review traditional definitions and assumptions about leadership. Then, we'll explore what is possible when Weinberg's definition is applied. We'll look at what is necessary to empower leadership though out the organization, and how you can move that direction in your organization.

Every organization—whether it is 50, or 50,000 people—faces three broad sets of concerns. How it fits in the market, how it serves customers, how it makes money, what sort of place it wants to be. Leaders in the organization have to figure out what initiatives to invest in, and how to sequence and order work that flows into teams. They have to support teams, so they can do good work. And teams need to figure out the details of their work and how best to collaborate.

The SEEM model provides a way to address these concerns that maximizes the possibility of healthy self-organization, and adaptability.

Every organization—whether it is 50, or 50,000 people—faces three broad sets of concerns. How it fits in the market, how it serves customers, how it makes money, what sort of place it wants to be. Leaders in the organization have to figure out what initiatives to invest in, and how to sequence and order work that flows into teams. They have to support teams, so they can do good work. And teams need to figure out the details of their work and how best to collaborate.

Traditionally, organizations have answered these concerns by setting direction at the top, decomposing responsibilities, and cascading objectives down through the hierarchy.The results is often fragmented effort, diminishing initiative, and important work that falls through the cracks.

I'll share a model that provides a way to address these concerns that maximizes the possibility of healthy self-organization, and adaptability.

The SEEM model distinguishes concerns from hierarchy, and allows managers and executives to think about their roles in a way that is more both more responsible and less reliant on narrow job descriptions.

I'll share the model, work through the domains, and then participant will have a chance to work with some scenarios to explore how concerns are met or not met, and the impact that might have on teams.

It may seem paradoxical that something small leads to something big. Yet this is the case. Big changes can feel like an existential threat and cause major disruption. Tiny changes, working obliquely, evolving towards a more desirable pattern may lack drama, but get you where you need to go.

So how does this work? The same way agile does, iteratively, incrementally, with learning as you go. I’ll share some small ideas that will add up to a big change in how you go about changing your team or organization.

Everyone wishes something was different—CEOs, managers, ScrumMasters, team members.

Often, people try to achieve the difference by rolling out new processes Or, they try to persuade people to try their ideas. Both approaches sometimes work—for some definition of work

But, if you want people to own the change and shape the change, you need to go about things in a different way. I call this change by attraction. In this interactive talk, I want to engage you, as I share strategies to activate curiosity, build credibility, and engage people change.

Let's face it: there is no shortage of good ideas in our field. But getting people to listen to your ideas isn't always easy. But let's face another thing: most people don't like to be told what to do. Nor do they like to be argued into submission.

The attraction principle takes the opposite approach. Rather than telling or arguing, build influence and curiosity.

In this session I'll share how to gain influence and credibility, create reciprocity, and get your ideas put to use (or at least tried!).