Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and once again chat to some old friends from the Australian Agile community:
Sharon Robson from enterprising agility – enjoying the recognition that Agile adoption starts from the top down, agile at scale is about the thinking and thought processes being applied throughout the entire organisation, looking forward to Sandra Davey on “Upon retrospective: the board went Agile“
Steve Lawrence – a member of the “11 club”, agile should be a mechanism to create greater value not reduce headcount, every small step you take is a step forward
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and with guest revolutionist Toby Thompson (who was sitting at the table and initially didn’t want to speak on the podcast but then we couldn’t keep him quiet!) catch up with Jessie Shternshus, CEO at The Improv Effect and author of “CTRLShift“:
When you are facilitating you need to know your audience and believe in what you are doing – to get people involved, do things in small groups in partners so nobody has the attention on them initially and then build them up to group activities
Make people safe and get them to laugh – then you have them for the ride
Tony imitates a dinosaur (which we keep telling him doesn’t work on a podcast)
Introduction Tiebacks – introduce yourself as the facilitator and then when it comes to your turn tie your introduction back to the person who came before you
Game ideas come from twists on old games or from things people say
Last Letter Conversation – use the last letter from what someone just said to be the first letter of what you say
Improv Encyclopedia and a bunch of books are good resources but are usually made for actors (so you need to amend for the workplace)
Helping people change comes back to listening and empathy
Walkshop – 4 day hike for leaders to help them unlearn and connect
Unlearning – need to find experiential learning that helps people unlearn – backwards number game or name things around the room differently
Mayor of Weirdsville – dealing with pushback, pretend you are the mayor, make a proclamation and then the rest of the town has to poke holes in your idea
Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services
Scale of thought is more important than scale of people
The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen
Thinking from a team point of view is important – at World Fuel for example, the MTR dropped 80% due to this approach
Don’t waste time on people who don’t want to follow what you want to do
Most companies surround themselves with the companies being disrupted, not the disruptors – need to work with people and companies who want to change the game
You learn a lot from being around better people
For ANZ, the key to their Agile journey has been that CEO Shayne Elliott was willing to spend time outside the organisation and learn
You need to be structured to support end to end cross functional teams formed around the work – the structure of the team matters
The next disruption is the physical versus virtual world, in particular what happens to things like networking appliances
It’s easy when something is new to find ways to shut it down, its harder to keep it going
Craig and Tony sit down for a personal chat with the microphone turned on for the first time in 2 years (that is not an interview) (wow, time files…), unfortunately without Renee who was out sick:
State of the nation is a lot of dark / fake Agile and lack of collaborative connective tissues
Fail Agility – Craig and Tony’s keynote talk (Episode 150)
The word Agile is done, we are trying to harness agility
Heart of Agile – a reflective improvement framework that helps you find your way forward
The Agile Manifesto tells you the what, the Heart of Agile tells you the how
Rachel Slattery from Slatterys (organiser of Agile Australia) – 1,200 attendees (a sellout) at the conference, such a good level of goodwill in the Agile community, half of the conference are new people and 60% hear about it through word of mouth, all flavours of ice cream (even coconut apparently…), AgileAus hub for all things Agile in Australia
Melissa Perri keynote “The Build Trap“, teal organisations tend to form like that at inception, other organisations have the people but the process to get there is still hard
Adam Boas and Andy Kelk from Marketplacer – enjoying the deep dive sessions as a way to talk to speakers you normally don’t get the opportunity to talk to, outcomes over output is a key theme at the conference
Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia 2017 in Sydney and wander the very busy hallways catching up with attendees and with old friends:
Sieger de Vries – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk “The future of Agile in the enterprise: has the war been lost?”, distributed Agile and use of partnering is here to stay
Sally Greenwood – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk, the advocates at CommBank already existed they just needed to make it happen, “it’s not about scaling agile up, it about descaling the organisation”
Leadership is the ability to adapt the environment so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem
Need to develop the people we are leading as well as the environment
Need a bigger overlap of the knowledge in organisations so that we can make better decisions
Systemic failure that we assume because you are good at something (like software development) you will be good at management / leadership – they are very different skills
Three C’s – clarity (people know what to work on and how it fits into the big picture), conditions (the means to do the work and access to resources required) and constraints (guidelines to know to act and decide) – things you need to consider if you want to move a complex, adaptive system and build empowered teams
Need to focus on the work that needs to be done not just on the little boxes or our job description
Ask the question to leadership – what are you willing to change?
Whilst smaller organisations can focus on the team, bigger organisations have to focus on the systemic level to make any visible difference
People are interested in the allure of the Agile benefits and what to cherry pick in relation to practices, the same happened with TQM and Lean – need to ask what next shift will help you deliver value to your customers
The millenials will be a big disruptor to management practices
At Agile Australia 2014 in Melbourne, Jim Benson of Personal Kanban fame takes some time to talk with Craig, Renee, Tony and (a very silent) Kim Ballestrin and along the way they talk about:
early work implementing David J. Anderson’s Agile Management which resulted in Jim focussing on the person (Personal Kanban) and David focussing on the organisation (Kanban method) – two different viewpoints on the same solution set
XP, Scrum, Kanban method and Personal Kanban exemplify the people who created them
Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and once again chat to some old friends from the Australian Agile community:
The Agile Revolution Podcast 
