Workshops

The flow thinking experience

with Hakan Forss

“Time is money,” said Benjamin Franklin. When you’re working on bringing a product to market, it’s the last thing you can afford to waste.

In this hands-on workshop, Hakan Forss will guide attendees through the ‘flow thinking’ experience. Flow thinking isn’t about working harder or working longer hours. It’s not about looking or feeling busy. Instead, it’s about making your time count.

Hakan will show you how to truly optimise your workflow: eliminating unnecessary waiting times, reducing wasted resources, and shifting your daily focus to the tasks that really matter.

Through demonstrating how to speed up the process of making a pizza, Hakan will teach a far more valuable lesson (though we’re sure your newfound pizza prowess will come in handy, too!). Ultimately, you’ll learn to keep products flowing to customers at the highest possible speed.

Hakan’s half-day workshop equips you with knowledge that can easily be applied within your workplace, including:

• An overview of flow thinking and how it can be applied to a Lean/Agile environment.
• The difference between flow efficiency and resource efficiency, and why it matters.
• How to create flow using a pull system.
• How to shift your approach to daily meetings and visual management, allowing you to identify the most efficient route.
• What process metrics you should be collecting and evaluating as you go about your work. (It’s one thing to try to optimise your workflow but, without reflecting back on the right metrics, you’ll never know if your efforts are actually working!)

This workshop is suitable for anyone interested in optimising their workflow, reducing wasted time, and working as efficiently as possible to deliver value to their customers!

Learn about Hakan Forss here »

The Toyota Kata puzzle experience

with Hakan Forss

You’ve been working in an Agile way for a while now. You regularly conduct retrospectives, and plenty of problems, potential solutions and great opportunities for improvement are raised. Yet, for some reason, you still haven’t seen any actual change.

Hakan Forss is ready to put your retrospectives on steroids — helping you achieve some real growth! This half-day workshop explores the concept and applications of Toyota Kata: a methodology that promotes a kaizen culture of daily continuous learning and improvement. Hakan will show how, with Toyota Kata, you can much more easily implement changes; such as those you raise in your retrospectives.

Toyota Kata recognises the powerful hold our daily habits and routines have over us. This workshop will help you break old behavioural patterns and adopt more productive practices. As Hakan will outline, through making manageable adjustments to your behaviour and conducting small experiments, you can change your daily habits and routines to push you towards a state of awesomeness!

 Hakan’s workshop allows small teams to work together in interactive exercises; gaining a hands-on, practical understanding of the following subjects:

• The two main Kata of the Toyota Kata — the ‘Improvement Kata’ and the ‘Coaching Kata’. Hakan will provide attendees with an introduction to these Kata, and explain how their core routines, mindset and behavioural practices can lead to change.
  
• The fundamental behaviour patterns at the core of the Toyota Kata methodology — rapid experimental cycles and the Coaching Dialog.
  

No prior knowledge is required for this workshop. However, if you’re keen to do a bit of pre-reading, the following books come highly recommended by Hakan:

• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother.
  
• Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly.

This workshop is aimed at anyone looking to break old habits and embrace constant change. If you’re in a position where you run retrospectives, you’ll benefit greatly from Hakan’s teachings on continuous learning, and will leave the workshop with a greater capacity to effect change.

Learn about Hakan Forss here »

New ways of working require new ways of learning!

with Dr Jen Frahm, Conversations of Change - Lena Ross, Changehacks

The need for everyone in your organisation to be change capable has never been more important. But our work lives are increasingly busy. It’s really hard to get people in a room and ‘teach’ or ‘train’ them on how to be change-ready.

If this sounds like your organisation, it may be time to carve out some time and discover how to use micro-learning to build change capability in your organisation!

Jen Frahm and Lena Ross will show you that developing a habit of continuous learning doesn’t have to be so difficult. If you build your change capability through micro learning, breaking bad habits and adopting new ones becomes far more manageable.

In this Learning Agility workshop, Jen and Lena will use ‘working-out-loud’ and provide behavioural nudges to help you construct your own 'Change Pick n Mix' — a self-directed behaviour change program that makes constant learning and change agility come naturally.

You’ll learn how to:

• Create and introduce ‘change nudges’ to the business (these are regular prompts that inspire new action).
• Confidently scaffold new knowledge in bite size chunks.
• Inspire self-directed learning in those around you.
• Curate and create micro content that inspires new ways of working.

All workshop participants will receive a free copy of Lena’s book Hacking for Agile Change - With an Agile Mindset, Behaviours and Practices and Jen’s book Conversations of Change: A Guide to Implementing Workplace Change.

This is a workshop for anyone who needs to build change capability in organisations that don’t have the time to do so!

Learn about Jen Frahm here »
Learn about Lena Ross here »

The Agile & Devops Simulation

with Mirco Hering
Global DevOps Practice Lead and APAC Agile Practice lead, Accenture - Sponsor session

The Agile & DevOps Simulation is an interactive workshop which demonstrates the business value of adopting an Agile and DevOps approach.

By helping to clearly communicate the DevOps case for change, the workshop creates a shared understanding and commitment towards Development and Operations driving Business Agility and working together as a high-performing team.

The workshop explores a real-life complex business problem, allowing participants to practically learn what actions to take in order to overcome their challenges.

Workshop participants will be better prepared to:

• Reduce cultural and political barriers to organisational change.
• Harness buy-in and advocacy for transformation.
• Engage staff on the journey to the future state.
• Approach cross-organisational alignment of business value.
• Actively engage with business and technology.

This workshop is suitable for everyone, and will be of particularly benefit to:

• CxOs & Directors
• Business and Technology Managers
• Scrum Masters and Product Owners
• Dev Teams
• Test Leads

Learn about Mirco Hering here »

Strategic planning for Agile leaders

with Matthew Hodgson and Mia Horrigan

Leaders and managers are critical enablers in helping their organisation be successful, yet their role in an Agile environment can be quite different from what they are used to.

In this workshop, you’ll learn about the Agile mindset and what it means as a leader to create the right conditions for Agile to thrive. We’ll focus on the pragmatic aspects of Agile leadership, the role of leadership in Agile transformation, and how to support cultural changes, as well as the structures and operating models to align teams, programs and portfolios and help them work in harmony.

During this workshop you’ll learn:

• About the Agile mindset and why it’s important for leaders
• How mindset, culture, and values influence your ability to be Agile
• How to create a high-performance culture
• Practical skills for helping you set up and support Agile teams, programs and portfolios
• Pragmatic techniques for scaling an Agile mindset
• Unlocking the metrics for measuring your organisational agility.

This workshop is suitable for:

• Managers embarking on an Agile transformation
• Line managers, Product Owners and Business Owners who want to get the most out of their Agile journey
• Portfolio, Program and Product Managers who want to get the most out of Agile ways of working.

Learn about Matthew Hodgson here »
Learn about Mia Horrigan here »

Foundations of DevOps and continuous delivery

with Jez Humble

Half-day morning - 9:00am to 12:30pm

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky and time-consuming process. However, the practice of continuous delivery sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, low-risk delivery of high-quality, valuable new functionality to users.

Through automation of the build, deployment and testing process, and with improved collaboration between developers, testers and IT operations, teams can get changes released in a matter of hours – sometimes even minutes – no matter the size of the product or the complexity of the enterprise environment.

In this half-day workshop, Jez Humble will provide an overview of the principles and practices behind DevOps and continuous delivery. He’ll also discuss how these improvement paradigms apply to your own work — giving you a framework for implementing continuous delivery and DevOps into your organisation.

You can expect to learn:

• Why continuous delivery is important and how it can help improve your organisation.
• The principles and practices of continuous delivery.
• How continuous learning and DevOps are practically applied. Jez will provide case studies, including from regulated domains and firmware.
• What factors predict software delivery performance – including organisational culture – and how these factors interact.
• How to practically implement continuous learning and DevOps into your own workplace.

Please note: This half-day, morning workshop provides a broad overview of these improvement paradigms. If you want to really sink your teeth into the implementation specifics of continuous delivery and DevOps, Jez’s workshop will continue into the afternoon. Select his full-day workshop offering below if you’re interested!

Developers, testers, systems administrators and managers will benefit most from attending this workshop. However, anyone interested in gaining insight into DevOps and continuous delivery is welcome to attend! There is no coding involved.

Learn about Jez Humble here »

Building a metrics driven organisation

with Jez Humble

As described in Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, organisations adopting principles and practices from the Lean Software and DevOps movements are seeing payoffs in terms of higher quality, better reliability, faster delivery, and reduced costs. Leaders wanting to achieve these results will need to understand how to build a transparent, aligned metrics-driven organisation in order to successfully navigate their improvement journey.

Using material from Accelerate, Jez Humble will discuss important concepts in measurement as well as known predictors of success that any team can use, and the management practices that enable them to be applied successfully.

This workshop is highly participatory, with activities that include:

• A discussion of how metrics play a central role in driving both culture and engineering practices, with real-world examples
• Team exercises in developing metrics to support improvement work
• Common challenges surrounding collecting and analysing metrics, and how to overcome them.

By the end of the day, you will understand:

• How to facilitate gathering metrics, which metrics to focus on, and how to make the current status of those metrics transparent
• How to drive problem-solving throughout your organisation
• How to build a culture of high performance in your organisation.

Managers, leaders and coaches will be particularly interested, but practitioners will benefit most from attending this workshop.

Learn about Jez Humble here »

How to establish a culture of autonomy

with Sharda Nandram

In this half-day workshop, Sharda Nandram places you in the driver’s seat — helping you establish a culture of autonomy and self-management in your workplace.

Industries are increasingly experimenting with self-managed approaches, but they're missing the most important point: the notion that it all starts with having the right mindset. 

Drawing on practical experiences, including her leadership role in teal organisation Buurtzorg, Sharda will guide you through what an "integrative intelligent mindset" is. Further, she'll demonstrate how you can adopt this mindset personally and within your organisation to promote trust, autonomy and better self-management practices. 

You’ll leave with tools to help your organisation embrace and reap the benefits of self-management.

Learn about Sharda Nandram here »

How mindset shifts take place: the role of cognitive dissonance

with Sarah Rose and Jon Gedge

Inconsistencies between our thinking and our behaviour can cause great inner turmoil. Can you recall a time you broke a promise and felt extremely uneasy, as you’ve always considered yourself a trustworthy person? This tension between our actions and beliefs is termed cognitive dissonance.

The methods people use to resolve this resulting discomfort can have a powerful influence on their mindset development. People innately stick with their behaviours and rationalise them in order to deal with this tension — however, this rarely leads to change.

This workshop will explore how small and frequent changes in behaviour can rewire us and lead to significant changes in mindset; creating a self-propelling momentum for individuals and teams. Sarah Rose and Jon Gedge will introduce an approach that promotes flexibility in thinking and drives adaptable behaviour.

Why does this matter to you?

When you’re faced with new ways of working, you (or those within your team!) will likely be exposed to ideas and behaviours contradictory to what you’ve always held true.

In this situation, people have two choices. They can ignore the new behaviour and roll with their existing thinking — resulting in no change and causing frustration as everyone else moves ahead. Alternatively, they can adjust their attitudes and perceptions to align with these new ideas and behaviours — thereby resulting in change and progression.

By learning about the process of cognitive dissonance in this workshop, you’ll become better equipped to bring attention to the root cause of your discomfort, and challenge your thinking or behaviour. Importantly, you’ll also be able to identify this discomfort within your team members, and help them overcome it.

Workshop attendees will leave with the ability to:

• Describe cognitive dissonance and its relevance in changing either mindset or behaviour.
• Practise a technique to promote flexibility in thinking in order to effect behavioural change.
• Confront their own biases, open their minds to new perspectives, and change their behaviour so they’re always ready for change.

This workshop is suitable for anyone interested in gaining a greater sense of self awareness during periods of change. It will be particularly helpful for leaders or coaches responsible for supporting people through new ways of working.

Learn about Sarah Rose here »
Learn about Jon Gedge here »

Rapid experimentation for Product Managers

with Jonny Schneider

Join Jonny Schneider to embrace the learning mindset and discover how you can use experiments to test assumptions and move forward!

In this workshop, you’ll find out how to put customer learning to work by designing fast and effective experiments, allowing you to make better decisions more confidently.

We’re often making product decisions with incomplete information and in conditions of high uncertainty. Product Managers can break through by challenging their default thinking, and treating every action as a learning opportunity.

You’ll learn how to:

• Break down problems/solutions into testable assumptions.
• Decide the most important things to be learned from customers.
• Define ‘Metrics that Matter’ in order to support evidence-based decision making.
• Manage uncertainty with a scientific mindset.
• Select the right customer experiment for the job at hand.
• Embrace the lean mindset to test strategy through execution in minutes, not months.
• Implement a continuous and sustainable learning cadence in your product team.
• Apply customer learning to an ever-evolving strategy.

This workshop is suitable for Product Managers, Product Owners or anyone who works closely with product development.

Learn about Jonny Schneider here »

How to read and lead the room

with Ali Walker

Often we rely on our automatic responses to people and situations, but these have been shown to be unreliable. This workshop explores new models of human connection and leadership, based on Ali Walker's original research.

Leadership is no longer about the leader who can impress. It is about the leader who can connect. The workshop will build your leadership capacity through experiential group work and discussions.

Workshop participants will learn:

• To identify their connection style and the styles of others.
• The five stages of group dynamics, from disconnection to flow/high-performance.

This workshop is suitable for:

• Current and aspiring leaders wanting to gain strategies to build high-performance teams using empathy and connection.
• Team members wanting to learn how to be the best team player possible.
• Anyone interested in examining and improving their interpersonal skills and promoting positive connections.

Learn about Ali Walker here »