Events

Many people are familiar with Fierce Conversations (the book and model) by Susan Scott. The book contains 7 principles, including “Master the courage to interrogate reality”, “Tackle your toughest challenge today”, and “Take responsibility for your emotional wake”. In this session, we will review the principles and basic definitions of each. Then we will take a deep dive into them exploring when we follow the principles and when we don’t. Throughout this session and afterwards, you can ponder, “can these fix my problems?” and decide what to do next.  

It can be exhausting to support people through change without an effective change sponsor to do their part as a leader. Change agents in this cycle of “leadership made the decision, and my role is to execute it” can find themselves playing small with leaders and burning out over time. This session will explore the dynamics between change agent and sponsor roles—how we want it to be and how it is currently. Gain awareness into where you behave in a way that feels “off” around your change sponsor. Discover how the key to improving your working relationship may be in the very thing that makes them difficult to work with!

Every idea for a new feature, product, service, strategy, or business contains uncertainty, assumptions, and risk. Driving out uncertainty and reducing risk is an essential part of development. With well-designed experiments, developers can test the theories behind these ideas. Not all assumptions are created equal, however. Some will only require a minor change to your plans if they are proven wrong. Others will invalidate the entire idea. So how do you know what experiments to prioritize? In this session, we will examine the types of risks that a development effort must address. We will also explore a method you can use to uncover the most critical assumptions to test first.

Challenge yourself (it's fun) with a bit of play and practice by joining in a session of presentation karaoke. See what we can learn! Can you think on the fly and adapt to any agile-themed challenge thrown at you? Join the fun and find out! Presentation karaoke is fairly straightforward. If you volunteer to present a session (very short sessions of less than 2 minutes each), you will get a topic and then, present about it, on the fly to random slides that auto-advance!

Observers of organizational structure often focus on formal authority: Who is responsible for what and who reports to whom. They describe some structures as more “hierarchical” and others as more “flat.” Authority is an important element in organizations, but it is not the only one. This session takes an alternative view: Looking at organizations as networks of mutually supportive partnerships. We’ll explore ways to assess and improve the health of these partnerships by examining a specific one – the relationship between you and your manager.

Mentoring can be magical when done right. It can give someone a level up in developing their skills, achieving results, and increasing their confidence. But if the mentor or mentee treat mentorship as something where only the mentee receives, the relationship can fizzle out. This session will explore the archetypal role of the Mentor and what mentees are seeking. Join this Learning Lab to rediscover what a strong mentorship relationship can be like and participate in simple activity you can use to deepen respect between mentor and mentee. Allison will also share resources from her experience leading Women in Agile’s Mentorship program that you can use.

What exactly is self-compassion. Some people hear the term and think it’s about being nice to themselves, which is a part of it - but it is not that simple. Other people hear the term is think it will make them soft or weak. The science behind self-compassion shows that people who have it actually perform BETTER. This session will explore the 3 core elements of self-compassion - what they are, how they relate to stress responses, and how you can utilize them.

"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." This is the twelfth principle behind the Agile Manifesto. Inspecting and adapting are so crucial to agility that many frameworks include a retrospective event dedicated to this principle. At the same time, retrospectives are perhaps the most mysterious and poorly implemented agile practice. What do good retrospectives look like? What are your teams doing in theirs? Join us for a "retro on retros" and learn how to help your teams better embody this agile principle.

We have heard a lot about “self-care”, this basic idea which is, shocker, we should take care of ourselves. As leaders, coaches, and humans, we are both experiencing and helping others who are experiencing frustration, change, conflict, frustration, unfair situations, disappointment, inconsistency, lack of autonomy, and more. How do we do our job and not get burned-out or stressed? Is it even possible?In the end, we want to start to understand what might actually be useful to do and begin to look at what might be holding us back.

Does your organization seem to bless anyone with an opinion about your work with the title of "stakeholder?" As a result, are you surrounded by more stakeholders than Dracula? Is trying to satisfy multiple competing interests a pain in the neck? In this session, we'll sink our teeth into the problem of stakeholder management. We'll look at how organizational structures are reflected in pressures on teams. Together we'll explore how to navigate these tensions in ways that don't suck.

Facilitators often worry about how to bring out quiet voices. Silence can be a sign that people are withholding their ideas because they do not feel safe enough to speak up. But silence is not something to eliminate entirely! This session will explore productive and unproductive uses of silence in group meetings. Find out how high performing teams use silence well and how to talk to your team about silence.