Many career ladders focus on a person’s solo achievements. But very few people actually finish anything alone. And we want agile teams to work together. When we reward “individual” achievement, we discourage agility. What if we based career ladders on agile behaviors we want to reinforce? Then, we can use collaboration and influence to see how a person contributes to the greater goals. Not only can we see our contributions more clearly, but we can then create our own remarkable careers.

You will learn:

• How resource-efficiency thinking limits career options for everyone.
• Identify what a valuable career looks like to the person and the organization (increasing influence).
• Rethink valuable careers: from linear to bouncing back and forth between various influence areas
• Identify just one alternative for a three-track career ladder that enables career agility.

Modern work practices demand management excellence. And, you might never have seen management excellence—certainly not applied to you. If you can’t manage yourself, you can manage or lead others.

Learn to see how you manage and to manage yourself:

1. Define the value you bring to the organization.
2. How to create empathy with people who do the work. (And what to do it if you’re
   supposed to still lead and do the work.)
3. How to build a safe environment.
4. How to define and optimize for an overarching goal.
5. How to encourage experiments and learning.
6. How to catch people succeeding as the first form of feedback.
7. How to maintain your value-based integrity as a model for the people you lead
   and serve

Have you encountered particularly stubborn problems at work? You think you “fixed” or “solved” it, but the problem rears its ugly head again. Worse, maybe you have no idea how to solve it. That’s when you know you’re dealing with a complex adaptive system. Too often, those kinds of systems reinforce themselves to continue to get these results. The problem seems unfixable or unsolvable.

However, you can add more critical thinking skills to your toolbox. Those skills can help you clarify the underlying issues and help you solve them.

This workshop is about seeing the kinds of issues that allow or prevent change, starting with what you know and do not (or cannot) know about the situation:

• An introduction to Cynefin, so you can see the kind of problem you’re dealing with.
• Force Field Analysis. This tool exposes the organizational forces that encourage and prevent change.

After I introduce these ideas, you will test your problem with Cynefin. Then, you'll break into teams to practice Force Field Analysis. After a half-hour of practice, we will debrief and discuss any remaining questions.

Bring at least one specific organizational problem so you can practice. (Make sure your problem is “big” enough for you to learn from.)

Have you ever thought, “If I could just avoid all this bureaucracy, I could get things done?” You’re right. Too many organizations think they’re helping the teams when those very practices make work more difficult to accomplish. Sometimes, all you need to do is stop demotivating people from doing the work. Innovative organizations don’t just innovate their products—they innovate their processes.

You might not be able to influence all of these ideas, but you can start the conversation:

1. How to clarify your organization’s purpose.
2. Do you have two sets of practices, one for managers and one for technical people? If so, how can you build empathy with the technical staff?
3. The primary job of management: Psychological and physical safety. 4. How to create management teams at all levels.
4. How to encourage management experiments and learning.
5. How to catch managers and management teams succeeding.
6. How to exercise your value-based integrity and stop some of the organizational craziness.

Are you drowning in data, but it's not helping you decide what to do? Maybe you wonder how to make better decisions faster.

Flow metrics are your evidence of what occurs at every level in the organization. Even better, unlike relative estimation or any other predictive form of estimation, you can use flow metrics and Monte Carlo simulation for much better prediction.

Learn how to start with flow metrics. Then take that learning to ask questions to create a more effective organization at all levels.

1. The four flow metrics and how they interact.
2. Why flow metrics work well for teams and even better for managers.
3. How to use the information for more effective work and outcomes at all levels.
4. How flow metrics can guide better management decisions for more ease and faster decision-making.

Before the pandemic, “everyone” said, “Agile approaches don't work for distributed teams!” Then came the pandemic and everyone figured it out—more or less.

However, now, many teams work in ways they call “hybrid.” Those are the most challenging forms for any distributed team: the satellite team or the cluster team. When those teams assume that they can work as if they were all collocated, the teams tend to lose their agility.

Instead, teams can use the eight principles for successful distributed agile teams and optimize for those principles, instead of location. The eight principles are:

● Establish acceptable hours of overlap.
● Create transparency at all levels.
● Create a culture of continuous improvement with experiments.
● Practice pervasive communication at all levels.
● Create a project rhythm.
● Assume good intention.
● Create a culture of resilience.
● Default to collaborative work.

In this presentation, Johanna will address just four of the principles—the ones that focus on and enable collaboration—to help you create the best environment for your distributed agile team.

1. What “hybrid” might mean to you and why that means too many hybrid teams have the worst of all possible worlds.
2. Realistic assessment of what the team can control and what that means for agility.
3. Four principles in this presentation:
4. Acceptable hours of overlap
5. Pervasive communication
6. Culture of resilience (in the team)
7. Default to collaborative work
8. How cycle time and value stream maps can help you see how well your team is working.

Some stubborn problems don’t lend themselves to linear thinking or solutions. That makes it more difficult to explain why anyone should change. However, if you can invite your managers to potential solutions with images. When you show pictures and explain them, your managers will sell themselves. You can draw those pictures, with reinforcing and balancing feedback loops.

In this workshop, Johanna will introduce you to the ideas of balancing and reinforcing feedback loops and how to gather useful, but imperfect data.

• You will learn to draw Balancing and Reinforcing feedback loops.
• And because sometimes, you need some data, you will learn to gather a single source of useful (but not necessarily perfect) data

You will use your problem(s) to practice, so you can learn to see your system and how to make the problems more malleable to change.

Bring at least one specific organizational problem so you can practice. (Make sure your problem is “big” enough for you to learn from.)

All leaders require excellent feedback skills—both to offer and receive feedback. However, too few leaders get feedback training. Worse, no one knows how to support their teams in learning how to offer and receive feedback. That means the leader intervenes in the team, creating a power-over culture.

Instead, leaders can create a power-with culture when they teach team members to offer each other feedback. That allows the team to create an environment that works for them.

You can lead a feedback lab, so everyone can understand how to offer and receive valuable and respectful feedback. Valuable feedback focuses on the data and the impact of that data on others and the team. Armed with that information, people can see what and how to continue or change.

You will learn:

• How to use a peer-to-peer model of feedback as the basis for reinforcing or change-focused feedback.
• Create a “lab” environment, so people find it safe to practice.
• Practice offering feedback (and coaching) in the moment so people learn and adjust.
• Debrief the practice so people can learn from each other.

Do you ever feel caught between what your manager wants and what your team needs? Too much of what passes for management or leadership pushes people away instead of creating an engaging environment.

You can create an environment that frees people to do their best work with your leadership:

1. Clarify your team’s purpose and the value it brings to the organization.
2. How to create empathy with a team and how to know if they’re BS-ing you.
3. How to teach feedback and coaching as part of the work so the team builds a safe environment.
4. How to delegate problems and outcomes, not tasks.
5. How to help the team create small, safe-to-fail experiments and learn from them. 6. How to help the team see its successes and acknowledge them.
6. How to exercise your value-based integrity in the face of organizational craziness.

Agile approaches have downplayed the role of management. Too many people say, “We don’t need no stinkin’ managers.” On the contrary. We need managers to create and refine the agile culture and create leadership capability across the organization. Without modern management, any agile transformation dies a quick and ugly death. Instead, it’s time to invite managers to change their behaviors to transform to an agile culture.

Learn to see and create management excellence for your agile culture;

1. A little about management and the three levels: manage yourself, lead and serve others, innovate as an organization.
2. Brief intro to the principles.
3. Flow efficiency vs resource efficiency and why we need flow efficiency for any agile approach.
4. Think about how you act (manage yourself).
   a. Brief discussion of the many myths.
   b. Tell a story for one of the myths.
5. People remember how they feel (lead and serve to manage others).
   a. A little about management assumptions.
   b. Tell a story for one of the myths.
6. Managers lead for innovation (lead the org)
   a. Strategic vs tactical work
   b. Brief discussion of the many myths and tell a story for one of the myths.
7. What does your organization reward? More about culture.
8. Start with yourself.
   a. Progress, not perfection.
   b. Behaviors before beliefs.

Regardless of your place in the organization, you often need to convince others to spend money or time on a necessary effort. Sometimes, those proposals succeed. But too often, they don’t—and the organization suffers.
Instead, you can learn the secrets of successful consulting proposals. Those secrets include:

• Focusing the proposal on the ideal decision-maker,
• Explaining the tangible, intangible, and peripheral benefits, and
• Offering three options for your management’s consideration.

Don’t waste your time trying to calculate an incalculable number, such as ROI. Instead, become an internal consultant to help convince your management to fund the tools, training, or work, you need to succeed.

1. How to identify the real economic buyer
2. Summarize the current situation and how much it costs to work this way now
3. Explain the outcomes your change(s) will deliver.
4. Specify the expected value, in terms of tangible, intangible, and peripheral benefits
5. Create three options for buyer to consider
6. If necessary, write a brief summary.

Your team is supposed to use an agile approach, such as Scrum. But you have a years-long backlog, your standups are individual status reports, and you’re still multitasking. You and your team members wish you had the chance to do great work, but this feels a lot like an “agile” death march.

There’s a reason you feel that way. You’re using fake agility—a waterfall lifecycle masquerading as an agile approach. Worse, fake agility is the norm in our industry.

No one has to work that way.

Instead, you can assess your culture, project, and product risks to select a different approach. That will allow you to choose how to collaborate so you can iterate over features and when to deliver value. When you do, you are more likely to discover actual agility and an easier way to work.

1. Why fake agility harms teams, products, and organizations.
2. “Agile” is not the point—agility is what managers want.
3. Clarify the difference between project, product, and organizational risks and how the various lifecycles focus on which risks.
4. Why late feedback can kill projects and products.
5. Alternatives to manage the (delay) risks due to component teams.
6. Three things every team can do to increase agility.

Do your managers think “agile” is something teams do? If so, they might buy and “install” an agile framework or tools. However, those frameworks or tools don’t create an agile culture. Instead, we can change how we reward managers. Instead of personal deliverables, we can reward managers for reducing their decision time, being servant leaders, and clarifying the purpose of the work. When we do, we create a culture where agility can thrive.

We'll discuss:

• How to create management cohorts and teams.
• Visualize and measure management WIP.
• How to reduce management decision time with collaborative management teams.
• Reimagine management rewards from personal deliverables to reduced decision time and increased team and person capacity.

Do you ever wonder where the time goes? The team thinks they can finish features faster, but the features often take longer than they expected. Or the team spends the last 80% of the time finishing the last 20% of the features. Then, they all learn no one uses those features. Or the management team wants everyone to create innovative products and services in a too-short time. Why? Because they want to go to the next project in the project portfolio.

A real culture of innovation means shortening the learning time, in the team, for the product strategy, and with the corporate strategy. The faster we can learn, the faster we learn what does work for whom—and what doesn’t work for whom. We can use shorter feedback loops to focus on delivering what our ideal customers want and need. We can avoid doing work they don’t need.

If you’ve ever been surprised by how long the work takes, the value of that work to the customers, or how to make time to innovate, learn to see and measure your feedback loops.

You will learn:

• How to do a back-of-the-napkin assessment for your feedback loop durations.
• Why story points never work for understanding durations.
• Why WIP (Work in Progress) matters
• Reframe the “how fast” and “all of it” conversation to creating options at all levels.

Do you need to write as part of your job? You might be a leader in the organization who wants to influence others. You might be a consultant or entrepreneur. But, if you’ve ever looked at a blank page and gotten stuck, this workshop is for you. Bring something to write with (electronic or pen/paper) and start writing now. We will practice writing in this workshop.

Outline:

1. How writing can help your career.
2. Define what you want from your writing.
3. Understand what prevents you from writing.
4. How your data already proves you write and that you’re a good writer.
5. Separate the three parts of writing.
6. Write to a specific audience.
7. Practice, practice, practice.

Learning objectives:

• Define what you want out of your writing.
• Identify why you don’t write now.
• Learn an easy approach to always being able to write what you want.
• Bring your ideal reader into your writing.
• Why writer’s block doesn’t exist and if you think you have it, what to do.