It's never about the process or the methodology and never about the technology but always about the people - those who make things and those who use them and while the customer part of the equation is crystalizing, enterprises everywhere are left wondering how to best change years of paralysing, bankrupt management and business practices to align them around core themes such as flexibility, courage, resilience, learning, openness and purpose. At a team level, nothing is as cornerstone to #Agile as Psychological Safety and lack of impression management and at an individual level, a change of mindset and a continuous practice of courage and striving for better is sine qua non.

Your organization has moved to autonomous, self-organizing teams. Everyone is trained and coached on their new role. But what about managers? The role of a manager is _undefined_. Management is told, “Go figure out your new role” or simply “Stop micromanaging”. They are often still responsible for the outcomes, yet are stripped of authority. Managers were seen as the glue that holds an organization together: How can we all journey together? Success depends on shifts in the behaviours of both staff and management. The Agile Mindset or Being Agile is a prerequisite for making structural changes. Jumping to advanced stages of evolution where there is high autonomy is a painful trap. An incremental and iterative (Agile) approach to shifting power away from managers to individual contributors is more effective.

Many organisations are so focused on delivering features that they tend to forget the outcome or business impact one want to accomplish. Product Owners are writing detailed user stories but not always following up on the business impact of it all. Let's see how we can do things differently! A cocktail of different models that put business outcomes at the center and tighten the connection between business & delivery.

Our world is changing! With cultural evolution and advances in areas such as social and technical connectivity, AI, Cloud and even robotics, the pace of this change rushes faster and faster. Look back 100 years at the ‘Roaring 20s’, one of the most disruptive decades with advancements in post-war culture, antibiotics, communication, entertainment and automotive industries, what will the 2020s hold for us? If we want success, if we want this new decade to be the ‘Soaring 20s’ for our organisations, we that lead also need to change, especially as we support Agility at all levels. During my session I will look at Sendatsu, the Art of Agile Leadership and its three areas of personal change and development. The change to Leadership in both mindset and action, the desire to Guide, to get out of our ‘Ivory Towers’ and be willing to walk alongside our people in this journey of discovery, and to be a Pioneer, to have the courage to go where other people, other organisations, fear to tread.

Humans are inherently agile. That's why we became the prevailing species on this planet. We have an amazing ability to adapt. So why do we need Agile Leaders leading Agile Transformations? Many of our organisational systems inhibit our agility rather than support it, often caused by how ‘leadership’ is practiced within those systems. The concept of leadership as it is seen today in many organisations, is rulership rather than leadership. Appointed ‘leaders’ wield power and authority to rule ‘their’ people in fiefdoms called divisions. Those who call themselves leaders are in fact often rulers, not leaders. We need not only to get rid of the organisational divisions, but of the class divisions too. Leadership is a function of people collaborating. Where people collaborate, leadership emerges and shifts as necessary. When that happens, we can be truly agile : collaborating driven by purpose, self-organising, and continuously improving.

Successful organizations drive innovation via their people. They inspire and engage their employees in ways that promote ideation and creativity through continuous improvement, shared learning, and a blame-free culture that supports a test & fail environment and that pushes the envelope. This requires an openness and readiness to overcome outdated notions of efficiency as highest maxim and create a culture of innovation on all levels. Learn about the impact of an Agile-minded HR approach on the company’s creativity and innovation power. Understand how scaling learning and embracing failure will increase innovation. Discover how a focus on efficiency can diminish creativity. Hear about the role of personalized growth paths to the equation. And identify the role of leadership in influencing innovation on a macro (organizational) and micro (personal) level

Startups can grow on an agile culture but for existing organization this is different. The size of the organization and its history are indicators that give information on the effort needed to change a large oil tanker into a collaborating group of speedboats. This shift into speedboats is taking place in a lot of large organizations. Internal enterprises with a customer focus are created, business and IT are integrated in Tribes, Areas or release trains. The road toward a responsive organization. At the Rabobank this transformation is also taking place. A transformation for all people in the organization with a shift from management leadership to personal leadership. An exemplary role and a good design to connect strategy with operation is needed to Foster an agile culture through People, Leadership and Business. In 2018 Marjolijn en Jeroen introduced the FOCUS board in the Boardroom of the Rabobank. Now more than a year later this FOCUS board and the corresponding ceremonies are still being used, grown in the organization, and improved. This session will give you insight in the power of a FOCUS board, why to use it, how to use it, and what it is. It will also provide you the lessons learned and the improvements we have made. If you want to prepare for this session, this is our reading tip: https://www.managementboek.nl/boek/9789401803878/agile-focus-in-besturing

If Peter Drucker would still have been alive now, he could well have said something like “Organizational Culture Eats Agile for Dinner!“, a subtle variation of his famous quotation. As Agile Transformers, we tend to propose a structural blueprint for a more organic organization by suggesting SAFe, LeSS, DAD, Sociocracy, Holacracy, Liberating Structures,… and even combinations of those and lots of other frameworks. What if we could chart the preferred value systems of team members and come up with a first Agile MVP that is close enough to the team’s aggregate values, so the jump can be kept small enough? Let me explain how Spiral Dynamics / Reinventing Organizations assessments can cater for that pretty elegantly. You’ll be surprised.

Conscious agile leadership requires the capacities to navigate uncertainty and rapid unpredictable change, to release the illusion of control and share responsibility (for response-ability!), to be open and curious, explore and discover, learn and adapt quickly, and to have the ability to embrace and engage with feedback. Join Certified Transformational Presence Coach and Facilitator Jo Boniszewski for an experiential session of discovery and learning about how to navigate and thrive in uncertainty and complexity. Interactive in nature, this session will focus on simple, practical yet powerful and immediately applicable tools to assist you and your teams in today's rapidly changing and agile working environment.

Agile transformations, changing the organization’s culture, bottom-up vs top-down, small steps vs big bang approach, frameworks: all-in vs blended, involving only IT or also Business, HR… After coaching different Agile and Lean transformations, approaches and departments, I’ve observed that many patterns started popping up across all these different contexts and situations. In this session, we will explore the successes, pitfalls & failures, some key learnings and crazy ideas of teams and companies’ transformation. Ah! Also, let’s see what impact a coffee can have on the culture of an organization.

Rewards, appraisals, recruiting, career paths... there are so many traditional HR processes that focus on individual performance and rigid hierarchies. They are often hindering the organizational flexibility & agile mindset needed to thrive in this VUCA world. During this workshop Inge and Marie will discuss a few HR processes and the challenges with them in an agile environment. Together we will explore this and look for feasible first actions to try out in your company.

How many times have someone told you: Stop being emotional!? Act like a professional? Feelings do not belong at work? Some people seem to be two different people at work and outside work; different identities and definetly different feelings. In fact feelings only exits in one of the roles. Gitte believes this perception of what professionalism is, and the splitting of people is damaging to them. And it is damaging the industry. Companies and individuals need to realise that being professional does not mean being inhuman. In fact humanity is a great asset at works as well as in life, and there is a need for more workplaces where it is safe to be a whole human and not just a part.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation, do you live and breathe this value? Nice… but how is it happening in real life? Let us take you on board with a case where you find yourself to be one of the actors…. Learning by experiencing! This session will explore your reflexes on collaboration when the stakes are high, and on designing the right contract for it. We’ll look at different models, put you into tricky situations and make theoretical discussions come to life. Contracting as you had never thought of it before – agile! Step into this workshop to put your brain to work on contracting.

Anyone can be a host leader at any level of an organisation. In this session we will introduce the metaphor of Host Leadership, its 6 roles and 4 positions. This metaphor will give you a new view and understanding of your own leadership and that of others. To make it practical we will do an exercise and apply the model to a particular role in Scrum, or you can also apply it to your own context!