You can find most of my presentations at Slideshare and a few videos at InfoQ. Please contact me for more information.

Talks

Lessons from Lasso: Humble Inquiry and Beginner’s Mind: Ted Lasso may be a fictional coach, but his coaching — imbued with humility and inquiry — is an example for anyone in real life. In the eponymously named hit series, Lasso — a head coach of a championship American football team — takes on the challenge of coaching in a totally different sport: football as it’s known in the rest of the world. This session draws out and applies the lessons from Lasso’s humility, trusting others and “beginner’s mind.” Attendees learn how humble inquiry can help our teams and the people we support and make us better teammates

The Eight Stances of the Transformational Leader: Patterned after the popular “Eight Stances of a Scrum Master,” this session introduces the eight stances — “mental or emotional positions adopted with respect to something” — of leaders at all levels who want to enable high-performing people, teams and organizations.
Metrics at Every (Flight) Level [slides]: Organizational change often stalls out at departmental boundaries, whether that is IT or another division. How do we help organizations connect vertically and horizontally to realize the outcomes that they have when undertaking large-scale change efforts? Join this session to learn from a case study of a bank that combined flight levels and metrics to bridge their departmental boundaries and recognize gains not only in software delivery effectiveness but unifying higher-level strategy.
Stop Writing Stories, Start Validating Working Software [slides]: Barry O’Reilly exhorts today’s leaders to “break the cycle of behaviors that were effective in the past but are no longer relevant in the current business climate, and now limit or may even stand in the way of your success.” After more than two decades of writing, refining, grooming, estimating and documenting user stories, it’s time to unlearn them.
From Andon to Yokoten: Japanese for Agilists [slideshare | pdf | workbook]: Kanban, Andon, Kaizen as we are using these words in our English-speaking knowledge workplaces, but what do they mean? The fact that many of these Japanese terms originate in manufacturing complicates matters. We all discuss what they mean and why they are important in knowledge work today and go beyond the simple buzzwords. To help us remember not only the words but, more importantly, the concepts, we all use our own version of the popular Point travelers books so that participants can have a little fun learning.
No (lab) jacket required: designing experiments for learning: Hypothesis-Driven Development is thinking about the development of new ideas, products and services – even organizational change – as a series of experiments to determine whether an expected outcome will be achieved, so we need to know how to design and run experiments properly. This session helps participants understand the importance of using experiments to help teams and organizations learn and improve, while giving hands-on practice in designing experiments to yield measurable evidence for that learning.
The Agile Leadership Team: Klaus Leopold states that if you have only one agile team in your organization, it should be the leadership team. But how do we do that? Agile methods are familiar to many software-delivery teams but less so to those in leadership. This talk draws on multiple experiences from a leader’s perspective in helping leadership teams become more effective by living by the same values, principles and practices that have made many software-delivery teams successful.
Culture Add Over Culture Fit: Many organizations stress culture fit for their new employees. But by emphasizing culture fit — the person’s assimilable qualities — we lose sight of the person’s additive qualities — prior experiences and new ways of thinking and working — that bring energy, creativity and improvement. Let’s add!
Leadership at Every Level: Practices for Aligned Autonomy [slides]
What does it mean to have leadership at every level of an organization? How do you create aligned autonomy in your team or organization? This talk connects the philosophy of intent-based leadership with practices that enable you to realize the benefits of aligned autonomy, regardless of where your name is in your org chart. By discovering virtual safety nets and vision balloons, you’ll learn how to pragmatically establish safety and alignment of purpose, two of the core traits of high-performing teams.
No Estimates: Forecasting with Less Effort and More Accuracy [slides]
The Service-Delivery Review: The Missing Agile Feedback Loop
Thriving (Not Merely Surviving) the First Year: Redesigning the Onboarding Experience for Capability
Flow From Blockers: How to Use Blocker Clustering to Improve Predictability
Getting Fit(ness Criteria)
The Kanban Iceberg: How do you help teams for whom Kanban is simply card walls?
Coach like a wizard: Agile wisdom of Gandalf
Continuous Play: The Future of Agile
Retrospectives, Revisited: Back to Basics [slides]
If you could have only one agile feedback loop, what would it be? This session shows how vital to learning, improvement and engagement the retrospective is. The session covers basics such as facilitation, the five stages and psychological safety, as well as some ideas for longtime practitioners.
De-Risky Business: Techniques for Mitigating and Managing Risk
Play soccer, not football: How to foster a whole-team approach by thinking in activities rather than roles
Theory of Constraints
Agile QA 2.0

Workshops

Generative Scaling Game: Inspired by Luca Minudel’s Agile at Scale Generative Principles, this in-person game-based workshop addresses needs for today’s teams and organizations to be able to accommodate scaling concerns in a generative way so that people can continue to do their best work and reduce the friction of more heavyweight approaches to scaling.

NoEstimates: Forecasting with Less Effort and More Accuracy (1/2 day): “When will it be done?” That’s a question everyone and every team has to answer. This boardgame-based workshop introduces the concepts that underlie the NoEstimates movement and new options for answering that old question by helping participants understand what and to what degree different factors influence delivery time. This session helps participants learn how to create a data-based probabilistic forecast that provides a more reliable way to talk about when stuff will be done—and expend less effort to do so.
Experiment Design (1/2 day): Hypothesis-Driven Development means thinking about the development of new ideas, products and services – even organizational change – as a series of experiments to determine whether an expected outcome will be achieved, so we need to know how to design and run experiments properly. This session helps participants understand the importance of using experiments to help teams and organizations learn and improve, while giving hands-on practice in designing experiments to yield measurable evidence for that learning.
Digital Leadership (1 day): This workshop is for leaders in digital organizations who want to learn what modern leadership looks like in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world. In equipping leaders to create generative organizations, this workshop includes topics of business agility, self-organizing teams and feedback loops, motivation and culture, productive work systems, leadership at every level, psychological safety, and vision and strategy deployment.
Agile Fundamentals (1 day): Intended primarily for team-level practitioners but open to all who want to know the basics of agility, this is an interactive, non-doctrinaire overview of iterative and incremental delivery values, principles and practices.
Lean Management (1 day): Grace Hopper asserted that “You manage things; you lead people.” This workshop then compliments Digital Leadership by equipping leaders to design and manage productive work systems by focusing on flow and fitness for purpose. Participants learn the basics of the Kanban Method, theory of constraints for knowledge work, value-stream mapping, push vs. pull systems, forecasting, blocker clustering and planning by cost-of-delay.
Planning at Scale (1/2 day): This workshop is for practitioners and leaders who want to achieve better predictability even at scale. Learning objectives include:
- Alternatives to push-based, deterministic models of planning
- Coordinate planning across multiple levels of initiatives and upstream and downstream workflows
- How to use data to forecast at different stages in an initiative’s lifecycle, including at the beginning
- How to use data and risk profiles to create policies for your kanban board to optimize economic outcomes and flow
- How to reduce the pain in moving from points-based sprint loading to flow-based workflows and time-based forecasts