Kit Friend ANZ Healthy Minds Network Lead, Accenture

Kit Friend has been told by his bosses at Accenture that his role is to ‘bring the sparkles’, something he’s pleased to attempt whether speaking at conference or helping teams work better! After abandoning a potential lifetime in art and design, and failing to begin a career in politics, Kit has been enjoying the journey of helping teams deliver awesome things since 2010. Folks started calling him an ‘Agile coach’ somewhere in the middle and he’s been trying to spread least-worst-practices ever since, particularly attempting to avoid optimistically constraining effectiveness through over zealous use of tooling. He happily abandoned Brexit in 2022 to move to Brisbane, and has enjoyed spreading the love of Lego Serious Play, inflatable animals, and more at Agile Australia and other forums since. When he’s not making jazz hands at audiences about the benefits of agility, Kit lives with his wife and 2 sons in Brisbane, and enjoys a haphazard mix of cycling, running, and mixed martial arts.

This hands-on murder-mystery experience uses storytelling, investigation, and light chaos to explore how modern ways of working fail — not through bad intent, but through everyday decisions made with incomplete information.

Participants work in small investigative teams in a fictional Atlassian Cloud organisation, uncovering clues, examining artefacts, and using both familiar and new tools. AI acts as a practical partner in sense-making, surfacing patterns and connections hidden in organisational data.

The focus isn’t on blame — it’s on understanding what in the system made the outcome predictable. Participants gain new perspectives and practical insights they can bring back to their own teams.

You’ll leave with:

• Practical experience using AI to detect hidden patterns
• Confidence exploring new tools without needing to be an expert
• Techniques to shift conversations from opinion to evidence
• Ideas to improve transparency, sense-making, and learning in your organisation