• Craig’s InfoQ interview with Sanjiv
• “Leadership is about managing change while management is about managing complexity… you need to be both”
• Lithespeed = flexible speed
• “Reinventing Organisations” by Frederick Laloux and the Morningstar model
• The Agile community is excited about the benefits of the teal level but not the responsibility
• Business Agility Sparks – need to shift left from IT to the business and shift right to DevOps and shift up into leadership
• What makes you successful at the executive level is working with others
• Agile Value Management Office (VMO) is a cross functional leadership team that manages the flow of work from end to end
• PMO is more oriented towards best practices process, whereas…

Renee, Craig and Tony are together to chat with Serge Beaumont, Principal Agile Coach at Xebia, live from his man cave and despite showing their lack of mathematical skills in relation to dice they chat about:

• In relation to culture, if the human connections are there you can handle just about anything
• A foundational cultural aspect at Xebia is that they implemented Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE) – every second Tuesday the team has dinner and then has a mini-conference of about 20 streams
• Xebia were at the foundation of the ING Agile transformation
• Gloomhaven
• Rode PodMic
• You need leadership that truly believes in culture as a powerful thing
• Renee does story maps like trees and Serge prefers to ensure that he finds his epic on the horizontal slice rather than using the activities on the vertical backbone, building towards an MVP
• All backlogs should be tree structures
• An…

Craig is as LAST Conference in Canberra and with guest co-host (and co-founder of LAST) Craig Brown they talk to Kerrie Campbell, the CIO at Flinders University in Adelaide and they talk (amongst some unscheduled cup stacking) about:

• LAST Keynote talk “Flinders University Transformation“
• Leadership through seeding rather than driving by changing language, building mindset and removing impediments
• Open the kimono and leaders do Agile by example and muddle through it publicly
• Story telling to move through the change
• Eliminating the PMO – don’t need a middle man to get in between the IT and business to slow you down and sort out the projects if the team is cross skilled and cross facilitating
• Disrupted finance through asking for a five year envelope of money and working and modelling the work that is ready to be done
• Heart of Agile takes the complexity out of Agile –…

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and talk to their former leader Jeff Smith, EVP and COO at World Fuel Services and former CEO of Suncorp Business Services:

• Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services
• Scale of thought is more important than scale of people
• The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen
• Suncorp Building Quality In program
• It all comes down to great people and working through problem
• It’s hard for companies to build great leaders that are interested in building great teams
• Jeff Smith keynote “Leading an Agile Company“
• Availability is not a skillset
• Thinking from a team point…

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and catch up with Esther Derby, co-author of numerous agile books including Agile Retrospectives and Behind Closed Doors. We also ask the question whether Tony is cool or not….

• Agile Australia keynote “Leaders At All Levels“
• Leadership is the ability to adapt the environment so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem
• Need to develop the people we are leading as well as the environment
• Need a bigger overlap of the knowledge in organisations so that we can make better decisions
• Systemic failure that we assume because you are good at something (like software development) you will be good at management / leadership – they are very different skills
• Three C’s – clarity (people know what to work on and how it fits into the big picture), conditions (the means to do the…