"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." This quote, attributed to Peter Drucker, emphasises that the ability to measure something is essential for seeing changes in it. Although it is (relatively) easy to measure objectively quantifiable decision criteria such as profit, how does one measure "soft" attributes, such as team dynamics, to judge an intervention's success? The problem with most team/organisational assessments is that they say more about the persons who designed the evaluation (and what they want to sell) than about the persons taking it. This talk will present insights into the practical application of leading-edge research into what makes intelligent, high-performing teams and organisations, exploring the science behind the current buzzwords of psychological safety, diversity, and empathy.

This will be a fun look at the generation gap in Agile Practices and how today they’re used vs how they were used in the 1990’s/Early 2000’s. We’ll also discuss how AI might play a role in coaching product development teams.

Agile Practices have certainly evolved and changed over the years, but so have the people using them. From the early days of developers just trying to find better ways to develop and test code to meet the increasing demands leading to dotcom, to the more people-centric, post-COVID ways that we see today. There are many factors affecting organization’s chances for successfully adopting new practices; often one of the more common challenges is the generational gap between senior management and younger employees. We’ll examine a model for gaining a better understanding of perspectives and look to where we might be headed in the not-too-distant future.

In this session, we will explore different perspectives from one of the earliest adopters of Scrum, Dr. Bob Schatz, and his son, Derek, who grew up seeing Scrum and then became an Agile Coach. Two generations, father, and son, providing two very different perspectives of what it takes to achieve success with agile practices.

“Bad scaling is one of the biggest ‘agile problems’ of modern days for companies. Bad scaling is one of the three (the other two are : “agile tools” mania and falling a victim to big consultancies’ industrial model, one of the most expensive mistakes companies make, when they set themselves on a wrong ‘agile course’. Bad scaling is one of the three corners of “Trippe Taxation” triangle: Bad scaling comes in the form of trivializing agility at is core, weakening agile roles, plagiarizing and relabeling someone else’s experiments and calling them ‘operating models’, copy-pasting Scrum and Scrum roles into Fractal Geometry that look great on paper. Are there better ways to work? Probably not, if the ultimate goal is to relabel existing enterprise complexity with fancy agile terminology and then call it “enterprise scaling”. But there could be better ways to work if an ultimate goal is to simplify existing complexity (de-scale), and by doing so, improve your chances to scale agile ways of working (e.g. do Scrum, by more than one team, working for the same Product Owner, on the same product, out of the same backlog). In this session, Gene will expose some classic pitfalls of bad scaling and will recommend how, more good things could be done with less stuff,…how things could be done better, using Large Scale Scrum (LeSS).”