Agile Australia 2022
In this blog post, we summarise Alex Stokes’ Linkedin posts attending & MC’ing at Agile Australia- if you didn’t attend, hopefully this gives you a good summary of what you missed, see you next time!
Lisa Frazier (Judo Bank) - Agility Matters
A keynote that started with a flash dance theme tune had us all bopping with anticipation in our seats. Lisa shared with us her story of humble beginnings and how she ‘takes her passion and makes it happen’, her talk contained several gems and was visually stunning, something for the eyes, ears and intellect.
Some points I captured.
“Strategy is a set of strategic choices (not a powerpoint deck)” “Can you articulate it to your family?”
“Stop the creep, stop the wish lists” a theme that we heard many times during the conference. No matter what culture matters “Resilient teams work hard and solve hard problems, but they can’t do that all the time”
How you respond as a leader matters, you need to apologise and claim no excuses.
Posses an owners mindset, eliminate bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a reaction to something that happened in the past. Bad bureaucracy leads to a “frozen middle”.
Leaders must be doers.
Frederic Etiemble (Vibrance Partners) Unlocking Innovation
Frederic gave us slides with many juicy stats on innovation. Posing the question, How many 100 million dollar bets would you need to make to crack a winning big innovation play? Answer - a lot. With well researched analysis he led us to conclude that Transformative Innovation is a volume game. A pointed challenge was “Why would corporates think they would do innovation better?” Ouch! Makes you realise how incredible some of those start up companies that make it are, and why so very many fail.
James JC Zhang - Building on Human Centred Innovation
James gave a high energy talk with real time polling (always risky at a conference). The take-away I took was that Human Centred Facilitation is about valuing all the people in the room when you are designing and running your workshops. A timely reminder for me! The other take-away was the template that James generously gifted us, a downloadable PDF of his Facilitation Tree template. Thanks James!
Sharon Robson - How agility events promote and support Psychological Safety
I’ve seen Sharon speak before so I felt safe in the hands of a top class presenter, I found myself in an agreement-fest for most of this talk, “The thing that scares us the most is being excluded”
“A lack of contribution is a lack of psychological safety. Lack of psychological safety is inauthentic agile.”
I really chimed with this model of the levels of safety. Sharon concluded on a slide with the original Agile Manifesto 4 values and 12 principles, as a staunch 1st principles fan I appreciated this, the values and principles still stack up.
Penelope Barr - Kick Kiss Kill
Once again returning to a fave presenter in Penelope at Agile Aus, Penelope is a great thinker AND doer, it’s a pleasure to hear content when you know the person has the delivery reputation to back it up. Penelope has devised her Kiss Kick Kill (Who doesn’t love a snappy title?) framework to make the idea generation and decision making process efficient in innovation and experimentation.
Many notes made, here are just a few.
80% of new products fail, Discovery costs too much you need to be really ruthless about ideas. Use the same format to assess every time. Capture the killed ideas so they don’t come back! The value of a Lean Assessment Team, a cross functional team that includes roles like Risk, Legal, Tech, Commercial - very clever.
I didn't take a photo of Penelope's talk because I was furiously writing down notes, a shame because she was a vision in style and colour as always.
So far Lisa, Frederic and Penelope are all hitting the theme of culling the volume of ideas down to the best ones.
Pub Choir https://lnkd.in/g-95w2gT
After a day of absorbing concepts, models and exchanging information with peers, what a delight to end the day with a sing-a-long by Pub Choir. This genius Astrid Jorgensen cajoled, coached, teased and cheered us into a rough harmonising choir of (somewhat) unified voices. A blend of her skills and technology and cleverly thought out instructions made US become the finale performance of Day 1, we were all in it together. Bravo Rachel Slattery for choosing such an uplifting act. A gorgeous salve to the weary mind.
Day 2!
Terri Janke The Unwritten Track
Day 2 was kicked off with a powerful keynote by Dr Terri Janke - Solicitor specialising in Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property. It was inspiring to hear her story, her connection to her people - Worries Strait Islands (Meriam) and Cape York (Wuthathi) and her challenges to us “What will be your legacy, what will we hand on to the next generation to inspire them?” And her advise to find our purpose that’s bigger than us and “Stay on Track and leave your track true so that others can follow” I was left moved by the messages and how she connected us with her story.
Joshua Kerievsky 🇺🇦 was up next with The Joy of Agility, https://lnkd.in/giVd9bwS
I had seen this talk last year at LAST Conference but was happy to sit through it again, evolved and crisper, with very strong messages and a great listicle, the "mantras"
If you could engrave this on my tombstone when I die I would be happy “Agility is not Certifiable” my favourite quote from his talk. Joshua reminds us what a true joy it is to work in an agile team.
Here are his six mantras:
1. Be Quick but don’t hurry
2. Be balanced and Graceful
3. Be Poised to Adapt
4. Start minimal and Evolve
5. Drive out Fear
6. Be Readily Resourceful
There were a bunch of talks I attended where I was MC'ing so I have few notes! However it would be remiss of me not to mention the following:
Aurelien Beraud- Pragmatic OKRs
An entertaining and USEFUL set of advice on how to use OKRs without unnecessary and burdensome waste, great advice since OKRs are the new black.
It was also playfully illustrated - I do appreciate a lovely looking set of slides.
I wrote down “Don’t prioritise de-prioritise. What do we commit NOT to do”
“KRs - what will have changed? Sometimes it takes you a quarter to find your baseline”
Pragmatic - better to believe in something useful than something that isn’t true - Trying to park the fairy tale.
Co-creating Transformation Metrics that Matter More -
James Harris
I enjoyed Jame’s talk, even the plant of ‘angry townsfolk demanding answers - Alex Sloley' I wrote down “Gather your change community” which reminded me of our own blog on the very topic :
https://lnkd.in/gtyzCkWe
Michael Fagan - Focus - Kill your Darlings
I MC’d and shepherded Michael’s talk therefore the content was not a surprise. However what was a surprise was how many off the cuff jokes we enjoyed as Michael interacted playfully with the audience.
No matter how many times I’m told I’m always surprised at how many jars of tomato sauce varieties are available in supermarkets, how many priorities we have in our lives and how many initiatives organisations are simultaneously working on.
Michael leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling when we realise what that is doing to our ability to make good decisions (we make 35,000 decisions a day, why overburden us with more!) how we as humans are inclined to an additive bias, ‘adding more’ not ‘taking away’, Michael connected us to what that means for our Companies, our teams and ourselves in our lives.
He encourages us to ‘kill our darlings’. Being a ruthless killer of wasteful projects and choices increases revenue and profit, by extraordinary percentages.
“More choice is a tax, not a benefit.”
Craig Smith - 40 Agile methods in 40 minutes: 2022 Edition
Craig Smith is a human database of methodologies, methods, frameworks, approaches and the history of Agile, his information dense slides are a real challenge to take in, even if you think you know a lot about Agile methods. Although I was MCing I managed to jot down some things I definitely want to follow up and read about myself, including but not limited to:
Xanpan - what a name!
Agile2
FastAgile
Mikado Method for refactoring
Patrick Dubois - DevOps, (I would have sworn blue that it was Jez Humble so there you go.)
Evo - surprise surprise, that’s where the Definition of Done first appeared!
You learn something every day with Agile Ways of Working, and Craig Smith is an awesome teacher.
Sandy Mamoli - Empathy with Leadership
Sandy - Esteemed Coach, Author, Speaker, Olympian(!) and all round legend wrapped up the proceedings and turned the Leading with Empathy topic around with her ‘Empathy with Leadership’.
Sandy has been researching the post pandemic experience with leaders around the world and has the data that suggests there has become a kind of learned helplessness in the workplace, that some leaders liken their workers to becoming ‘like a 1950s housewife’.
A series of uncomfortable truths followed accompanied by some quirky 1950s vistas and scenes. Our very ways of working could be under threat if we cannot overcome the trauma of the past few years and return to strong conversations and engagement with the work to regain the autonomy we value so highly.
Virginia Trioli- How did I get here? Finding and making meaning after the Plague Years.
Who could possibly follow someone like Sandy Mamoli on to that stage but none other than Virginia Trioli. Virginia provided a view on the post pandemic world and her perspective as quasi councillor to Australians living through the experience via talk back radio. Her insights cut through like a laser and her style is incredibly engaging. It was the finale of the conference, by then I was a little overwhelmed, I have no notes, just a lot of admiration and some photos for my mum.
That’s a wrap!
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