Two days of inspiring speakers and a full day with Quinton Quartel (FaST), unordered snapshots:

  • Eddie Betts – “what you can’t see you can’t be”, how adversity builds you, the importance of goals, who are you going to make smile today?
  • Reanna Browne – we are more than our current (work) title, the way we orientate shapes our future, the future doesn’t exist, our focus on the present shapes our future, scan for preferred futures
  • Chris Howard – move away from delivery and toward outcomes, start with your goal in mind, make outcomes your explicit focus, solve customer not business problems, give decision-making power to your teams, employ autonomy with guidelines
  • Caidyrn and Nick Roder – people are your delivery system, design processes for humans, have clear rules of engagement, checklists are awesome, make it “safe” to raise concerns, mistakes and challenges, do cause analysis and encourage a culture of reporting problems (Ted Lasso approach – be curious not judgemental), 70% of paramedic training is focused on humanistic learning, let the team speak first, without followers there can be no leaders, enhance your authority gradient to allow people to be more effective
  • Roman Lobus – the value of coaching contracts, leaders (can often) unconsciously create the organisational structure based on their worldview, there is a difference between being an agile coach and an awareness coach, uncover your unconscious assumptions and beliefs
  • Chis Chan – hold attention for today and lead for tomorrow, transformation starts with leadership, the value of leadership circle profiling, build conscious leadership, change your form of mind for a personal transformation, great leadership combines relating with achieving
  • Julia Steel – ways of thinking, doing and being, map your organisational values to frameworks as the method of “doing”, the “manifesto” as “thinking” and your org values as “doing”
  • Tricia Boyce & Will Carey-Hill  – work is work, avoid (work) arbitrary classifications – [“bring out your dead!“], make value flow and demand and supply visible with data, make change “usual”
  • Irfan Shehzd – validate the “real” problem, start with the problem space first then move to the solution
  • Sandy Mamoli – are you drowning your autonomy? learned helpless is increasing, anxiety causes a loss of broad thinking which kills innovation, autonomy and mastery motivate us, train your resilience muscles (face into adversity), accept then embrace reality, “do one hard thing every day”, kill the “advice” monster
  • Quinton Quartel – agile as born from unrest and became a step change, Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology, the value of no fixed agenda, the move toward product management over agile software development, be an adaptive coach instead of an agile coach, the importance of management innovation and product management
  • Brian Osman – Māori language’s influence in stage presence, leadership comes from the “kitchen”, from the “back of the room”, frameworks are merely enablers, care for our people, develop connections, build unity, Kotahitanga (Unity),  “For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack ” The Law of the Jungle – Rudyard Kipling
  • Lata Hamilton – the role of NLP and what’s in it for “you” vs “me”, the value of “chunking up” and changing your vision setting
  • Steve Lawrence – moving beyond “cargo cult” agility, intent = principle over process, treating Daily Scrum as an early warning system
  • Peter Wooley – define what excellence is (how do we measure quality?), the value of mentorship, collaboration, confidence, communication and critical thinking in extricating oneself from the “estimation trap”
  • Dallas Jackson – influence as the power to affect something, the power to cause change without directly forcing, the multiple perspectives of influence, we make decisions where emotions are born, Cialdini’s seven principles of influence: reciprocity, authority, commitment and consistency, Social Proof, liking,  scarcity, unity
  • Rhiannon Gaskell, Paul Hughes, Scott Rogers – levelling up your operations game, what are the broader implications across the org, define excellence, the value of adaptability and product management, influence of surveying (real) customers to improve
  • Denis Sunny – “the performance of a system depends on how the parts interact, never on how the parts act taken separately” and “if you optimize the components of a system, you will sub-optimize the system…if you focus everyone on maximizing the performance of the organization’s separate parts you will constrain the performance of the entire organization” (ref Russell Ackoff), the value of cross-functional and cross-component teams, how you can (!) move to a single product backlog servicing multiple feature teams with one product owner and customer centricity, the need for consistency in org design
  • Dipesh Pala – everyone is a leader, a thought-provoking metaphor on relay racing and team delivery – outcomes vs being fully optimised – focus on the baton not the runners, hidden in every “weakness” is a strength