Eugene delivered this session at LAST Conf Sydney 2024 and after receiving outstanding feedback we invited him to present it to the wider LAST Community, via LAST Club online.

There's so much focus on AI tools and technology, but not enough focus on how teams can use AI more effectively. With 75% of people using AI at work today, it’s critical for teams to have clarity of how AI is used to maximise its potential to supercharge teamwork.
This session will equip attendees with a foundational understanding of how to approach AI and teamwork, and equip them with a hands-on workshop to begin using the “AI Working Agreements” Workshop, which includes must-have topics that cover how and why AI is used, shared norms, and how to continuously experiment and improve.

Key takeaways:

• How we should approach AI and teamwork
• Common anti-patterns to avoid when using AI in teamwork
• How to run an “AI Working Agreements” Workshop with your team
• Key AI ground rules for teams

Eugene Chung is a Product Evangelist and Coach at TeamForm, where his job is to inspire as many organisations as possible to think differently about how to set their teams up for success.Before TeamForm, Eugene was the Team Coach Lead at Atlassian, improving ways of working with leadership squads and creating new plays and toolkits to enable teams around the world to be more effective.
He’s an experienced team coach and recovering consultant of 15+ years, with a personal mission of empowering leaders and teams to adapt to change, adopt new mindsets, behaviours, & practices, and achieve their missions.

Originally from Texas, Eugene now lives and works from home in Bondi with his family.

Mark delivered this session at LAST Conf Melb 2024 and after receiving outstanding feedback we have invited him to present it to the wider LAST Community, via LAST Club online.

In this talk Mark will discuss Product Operations, the increasing popularity of the Product Operations Manager role and why he thinks it is a key product delivery role that all companies should be looking at. He’ll talk about product ops as a practice and the tools, methods and operating models that make it work. 

You will look at:

• What are Product Operations and the Product Operations Manager role?
• What does a day/month/quarter in the life of a Product Operations Manager look like?
• How do product operations overlap with, or complement, what we traditionally know as delivery management, and why does that matter?

Mark Barber is a highly experienced product operations and delivery professional with a proven record of execution and leadership at highly successful tech companies such as REA Group, Culture Amp and Deel. Mark's passion lies in helping organisations realise their potential by developing and nurturing strong collaborative environments. He strongly believe in principles that drive agile and lean methodologies and strive to empower teams to work effectively with all parts of the business. Different teams find ways of working that are unique to them and it is always Mark's goal to guide them in discovering and building on these techniques and workflows.

Meet the Co-authors of The Six Big Ideas of Adaptive Organizations

Jason Little is well know to the LAST Community as the author of Lean Change Management, a collection of innovative practices for managing organizational change. He is a two-time #1 Amazon best-selling author for The Six Big Ideas of Adaptive Organizations and well as for From Skeptic to Strategist: Embracing AI in Change Management. 

Ken Rickard (ICE-EC) is a spark for transformative good — a change alchemist, deep thinker, and a catalyst for personal growth and organizational evolution. With over 15 years in the agile community, he's honed the art of navigating change and embracing adaptation as the true essence of agility.

The Six Big Ideas of Adaptive Organizations is a refreshing take on transformation.
In a world that values click-bait and easy-answers to complex questions, Ken & Jason have done the opposite. They’ve crafted a masterpiece that helps change agents help their organization think in their own context.

You won’t find recipes that ensure successful transformation, but you will find ideas that will help you diagnose why your organization is stuck and what you *might* want to do about it. 

This book explores six pivotal concepts:

1. The 2 Change Strategies of Effective Organizations: Delve into the dichotomy between optimizing existing systems and evolving organizational beliefs for profound transformation.
2. The 5 Universals of Change: Learn why fostering a common purpose and embracing meaningful dialogue trumps creating urgency and seeking buy-in.
3. The 5 Levers of Change: Uncover how a holistic adjustment across people, processes, technologies, strategies, and structures can catalyze significant change.
4. The 3 Agilities of Effective Organizations: Discover the critical roles of leadership, change, and delivery agility in ensuring an organization's adaptability.
5. The 5 Waves of Transformational Change: Understand the evolutionary phases of change, from superficial adjustments to deep, systemic shifts.
6. The 4 Dimensions of Change: Appreciate the interplay between personal development and the use of change tools to achieve effective and sustainable transformation.

Change agents will gain from this book not just theories but actionable knowledge that melds the art and science of change. Written for agile coaches and seasoned change management practitioners, this book emphasizes discovery-based learning to master the dynamics of organizational change. It's a guide that transforms readers into architects of adaptability, equipped to foster environments where change is not only possible but embraced as a continuous opportunity for growth and innovation.

This description encapsulates the essence of each big idea and emphasizes the practical benefits and broader significance of the concepts presented in the book.

Jurgen "Jojo" Appelo is well known to the LAST Community. He is the author of the best-selling book Management 3.0, which describes the role of the manager in agile organizations; How to Change the World, which describes a supermodel for change management; Managing for Happiness, which offers you practical ideas to engage workers, improve work, and delight clients; and Startup, Scaleup, Screwup, which dives into the major topics that business leaders and entrepreneurs are confronted with throughout the business lifecycle.

Jurgen joins us for his first online talk about his fifth book Glitches of Gods … a sci-fi novel! 
Find out what inspired Jurgen to write a sci-fi novel. Does it align in any way with his previous books? Come along and ask him your own questions!

Glitches of Gods. A Playspheres Novel

Julien, the AI genius, craves freedom, but the gods wield total control.
In this ominous world, will his android bring hope and salvation or yet more death and destruction?

Julien feels utterly miserable. Creator of the AI that killed his father, the brilliant engineer deftly evades work on the world’s first human-level android, dodging the off-chance of snuffing out more lives. Yet, due to a maddening jump across timelines, he grudgingly faces his greatest dreads: raising a family and leading his team to win the AI race.

Drowning in new duties, Julien aims to avoid a second AI disaster. But when a mysterious, technological infection wreaks havoc on the city, Julien flip-flops between shielding his loved ones and heading his team as he battles it out with broken machines, idiot protestors, and a rather sinister cat. Learning he got himself involved in a war between gods, should Julien save his new family or finish his team’s android to prevent an AI apocalypse?

Glitches of Gods is the extraordinary first book in the Playspheres epic science fantasy series. If you like cynical sentients, wonderful worlds, and plenteous profanity, then you’ll love the kick-off of Jurgen Appelo’s bewildering saga.

As an author, speaker, and entrepreneur, Jurgen Appelo helps innovative organisations survive and thrive in the 21st century. He gladly shares stories, games, tools, and practices, so you can create your own way of working as a network organisation. Most importantly, he offers the unFIX model for organisation design, continuous innovation, and a better human experience.

Jurgen calls himself a creative networker. But sometimes he’s a writer, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, designer, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, runner, freethinker, or … Dutch guy. Inc.com has called him a Top 50 Leadership Expert and a Top 100 Leadership Speaker.

Join Ross MacIntyre and Arnold Stroobach for an overview of Buurtzorg’s values, principles and beliefs that have revolutionised patient care and are adaptable across various organisations and industries. Discover Buurtzorg’s innovative approaches to self-management and independence, and learn how these can transform your organisation.

This session is designed for Organisational Design and Development Consultants and Agile Coaches and any professionals already embracing customer-centric methodologies and those eager to weave these practices into the fabric of their company.

Most consultants and coaches who work in the space of organisational development and design can benefit from this training. See a working model of self-managing teams that focus on customer needs and business outcomes. Adapt Buurtzorg’s flexible principles to help your clients achieve similar successes and enhance your consulting toolkit with proven strategies for fostering self-managed, high-performing teams.

"Buurtzorg is not merely an academic exercise; it is a practical initiative yielding remarkable results in client and staff satisfaction, health and well-being, and financial sustainability. It is a financially attractive model, making it future-proof." - Arnold Stroobach

Ross MacIntyre presented a great session at LAST Conference Melb 2023 on OST’s 6 Criteria for Productive Groups. If you are a Full LAST Club Members you can review the session after logging into the Club Library HERE.
Ross an experienced enterprise coach who has worked with some of Australia’s most well known companies.
“I never meet teams who aren’t doing their best. Helping individual teams won’t shift the needle for organisations. The challenges teams face are systemic. Leaders need to manage the system so teams can manage themselves and focus on delivering value to customers”.
Ross has many years software development experience and many more years in delivery and transformation. He is certified in multiple methodologies and has a Grad Cert in Organisational Coaching from Swinburne University of Technology.

Arnold Stroobach is the Managing Director of Neighborhood Care and Buurtzorg Australi as well as co-founder of Genomic Therapeutics PL.has over 30 years of experience in business and non-profit organisations, is multilingual and has an international focus. Since 1997 he has been active at board level (COO and CEO) in Europe (the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany), the US (Boston, Massachusetts) and in Australia (WA, QLD, NSW and VIC). He is an experienced leader, strategist and speaker and has a great passion for start-up companies and growth strategies.
When Arnold migrated to Australia in 2005, he became CEO of the Technology Parks in Perth and Brisbane. Later he was a founding member and Chairman of the successful collaborative innovation agency Spacecubed in Perth. From 2008 to 2018, Arnold was the Honorary Consul of the Netherlands to WA, representing the Netherlands and actively supporting the economic development, cooperation between universities and the mutual cultural heritage of both countries. In 2018, he introduced Buurtzorg to Australia, a pioneering care organisation founded in 2007 in the Netherlands with a nurse-led model of holistic care that revolutionised community care. Buurtzorg in Australia offers advisory services regarding the Buurtzorg way of working and has also a care provider called Neighbourhood Care.

Join Pip Decks authors David Holl and Ben Mosior for a lively, interactive discussion about how teams can build the skills to assess, design, and carry out strategy. They'll demonstrate their recently-published work, Strategy Tactics, which draws heavily from strategy innovators like Simon Wardley (Wardley Mapping) and Dr. Jabe Bloom (Transition Design). Stay to the end for a 10% discount off your own copy!

Visit davidandben.com for more details!

Ben Mosior has been a guest to the LAST Club on two previous occasions, initially with his talk Wardley Mapping: A Remedy to the Crisis of Purpose and followed by an immersive Wardley Mapping Workshop which allowed people to create their own Wardley Map and practice the strategic thinking process.

Ben works to spread tools and techniques for better functional and operational strategy. He guides leaders and teams through challenging experiences that prompt important and powerful conversations about what must be done. He helps leaders treat strategy as a team sport.

David Holl has spent over a decade helping tech teams solve big challenges across stages of product-market fit, hypergrowth, IPO, and Acquisition. He’s worked with some of the biggest companies (and smallest startups) and would love to talk about how he can support you and your company’s goals, regardless of what stage your at.

Effective leadership teams make or break organisations and collaborating well as leaders, especially in the face of diverging priorities and skill sets, can feel difficult. Using concepts from Ruth Wageman, Bruce Tuckman and Patrick Lencioni you will learn how to approach improving your own leadership team, or support your direct reports as a leadership team.

Please note: There will be an optional Interactive Online Workshop following this free session. Registration details will be found here. 

Fiona Siseman and Alia Rose Connor are the Co-Founders of Frank & Eddy Leadership, Inc. in New York City. Fiona's time working in Australia gives her a great insight into conditions in this part of the world. In addition, Fiona and Alia's work in the United States and Sweden, with Spotify, as well as their work with other organisations, will allow a wider insight into the attributes that great leadership teams display.

We are bringing you a duo of highly credentialed tech leaders, who will be able to take your leadership team to the next level.

About Fiona 
I am an enabler and a generalist. I began my career in operations and delivery roles with Lonely Planet. It was here that I honed my systems thinking and people-first leadership skills as I built effective teams, managed digital projects, and discovered the joy of helping people and teams connect and work effectively together. After a stint at Luna Tractor helping teams with agile transformations I moved across the world from Australia to the US – a jump into the unknown!

I am a coach and a leader. It was at Spotify that I found my love of enabling and growing leaders. I saw how the power of a well-placed question or observation could unlock a team. I managed coaches and engineering managers, facilitated the right conversations, and built a high-performing senior leadership team in a large Platform Engineering organization (for a period, leading a cross-functional organization of 130 people). Through this work I gained the skills and experience in coaching leaders and teams to be effective, resilient, and adaptable in an environment of fast-paced growth and change.

About Alia
I am an engineer and entrepreneur I started out as a software engineer, passionate about problem-solving. From there, I opened an agency building e-commerce sites for small publishers, and ventured further into entrepreneurship by launching a successful real-time photo-sharing product which partnered with the likes of Brides Magazine and the Clinton Global Initiative.

I am a coach and a team manager My passion for working with teams eventually led me to coaching at Spotify, where I coached and grew leaders and teams who changed the face of the music industry. The ever-changing, fast-paced environment (I helped grow an organization from 40 to over 450 people) shaped me into a strong senior leader and taught me to manage, grow, and nourish my own team.

Meet the authors who will join us to discuss their new book, to be released on 30 July 2024 but which can be pre-ordered now by going here. 
The three authors had a shared vision and purpose, which they believed they needed to capture and share with leaders and aspiring leaders to help them develop into high-performing leaders who serve.

This book will appeal to leaders and aspiring leaders in every type of organisation. It explains the why and how of creating successful organisations with amazing cultures where people flourish.   

It is a practical leadership handbook full of real life stories, insights and tips based on the authors' many years of experience in senior leadership roles. A key insight is the need for leaders to recognise that one size does not fit all in the way they lead their organisation and interact with their people. Leaders need to be adaptive to the context and the person.

To enable this the authors have developed the concept of the “5 hats of adaptive leaders”. These enable leaders to understand why, when and how to adapt their style as appropriate any given context.

The book is full of real life examples that every leader can relate to and provides them with a practical, easy to follow approach to building the habits of an adaptive leader.
It is an inspirational and motivational read that enables the reader to immediately take action to make a positive impact on themselves, their people, and their organisation.

Brad Jeavons is a senior leadership coach focused on helping leaders improve themselves and their organisation to create a better future economically, socially and environmentally for future generations. He is host of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast and Community, author of the book "Agile Sales", and a certified trainer and coach in Lean Six Sigma and the Agile Education Program. 
Find out more about Brad at the Enterprise Excellence Academy.

Chris Butterworth is a multi-award winning author, international speaker, and coach. He is a certified Shingo Institute master-level trainer, a Shingo Institute Faculty Fellow, Examiner and Member. He coaches executive teams and transfers continuous improvement knowledge across all levels of an organisation. Chris is also the author of three Shingo Publication Awards for books he has co-authored.
Find out more about Chris at the Chris Butterworth Enterprise Excellence.

Arash will be joining us to launch his latest book; an extremely useful tool with 52 Aha! moments that have transformed hundreds of teams, inspiring them to move beyond the status quo!

The Weekly Aha! is a collection of 52 inspirations developed through years of leading and coaching high-performing teams in large organisations. This book is a treasure trove of insights for professionals seeking to drive change and foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation in their organisations.

This unique book offers:

•  A year’s worth of inspiration for new perspectives and innovative thinking
•  Practical tips and concepts that spark conversations and create a ripple effect of positive change
•  Insights that can be applied by anyone, from team members to middle managers, to C-level executives, to transform their approach to work

Each of the 52 inspirations is a catalyst for change, reshaping mindsets, and elevating performance. Open this book on any page and discover a new way of thinking, a new perspective, a new ‘Aha!’ moment. Share these inspirations with your team, and watch as they transform into a high-performing, innovative force.

It's sure to be your year-long companion for peak performance and team success.

Arash Arabi is a long-standing member of the LAST community, as well as a consultant, speaker, entrepreneur, and Taekwondo practitioner. Find out more about him here at Sprint Agile.

Arash is also the author of The Wise Enterprise: Reshape your organisation for the age of uncertainty. Arash joined us in 2021 to talk about this best selling book.
If you are a Full LAST Club Member we have added the recording of this session to the Library Archives. Please log in to view it here.

Sonal will be joining us for an encore delivery of her highly successful and engaging session at LAST Conf Melb 2023.

When most people think of Architecture, they think of an activity that enables the software to be robust, secure, scalable and manageable, along with a host of other benefits; but one that is susceptible to analysis-paralysis, slows teams down and does not let the team respond to the customer need. In other words, architecture is annoying, architects do not live in the real world, and they're not letting me do the thing I really need to do to make my customer happy.  

And when these same most people think of Lean Agile Delivery, they think of a contemporary approach that's so perfect that it enables the customer to get exactly what they want, and when they want it. Except when it doesn't, but then it's not the delivery approach at fault, so we double down and do exactly what we were doing.

Even if I'm not being facetious, we operate in environments where the general wisdom is that delivery is optimised for speed, while architecture impedes speed. While this view is unfortunately very common, I feel it is one that leads to a lot of pain and takes away from the conversation we should all be having - the conversation around "value". 

Let's have a chat about why do we hold strong opinions on things we seem to believe in, what should we value while delivering customer outcomes, where can we create value together, and what are the considerations and trade-offs we need to work through.

Sonal Premi is a Business Analyst who helps businesses understand their key drivers and needs, resolve ambiguity, and shape solutions that address business challenges. Sonal loves to explore problems, experiment with various approaches and solutions, and challenge and shape the technology culture. Sonal is passionate about all things agility, technology transformation, and outcomes that benefit end users.
When not saving the world one problem at a time, she spends her time learning new skills, mentoring people, travelling and drinking copious amounts of tea!

Gain practical insights into the IAM (Identity Access Management) space through the lens of a Product Manager with a focus on enhancing the customer experience.

We will dive into what is IAM, the ever-changing threat landscape, what is at stake and exploring how customer friendly IAM solutions are essential for your organisation and safeguarding against security risks

We'll discuss the impact of geographical differences on IAM strategies, highlighting the importance of tailoring solutions to meet unique customer requirements.

Through lessons learned, you'll discover both the wins and challenges of IAM.

This is your opportunity to learn more about customer-centric IAM practices that can make a real difference.

Jamie Mackintosh is a Senior Product Manager with 12 years of experience in product management roles, including the Identity Management space.
He is passionate about leading high performing teams and leveraging technology to solve customer problems.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

The post-Covid workplace craves for the empathetic leader. Advancements in digital technology and artificial intelligence demands that humans be more human. Yet emotions in the workplace are still frowned upon.

Emotions are everywhere and until we get over the stigma of emotions in the workplace, we won’t have a world where leading with empathy is the norm and the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines that we dream of in the future of work will never be achieved.

In this session we will explore empathy and leadership effectiveness through the lens of emotional intelligence, giving you some practical strategies to apply in the areas of perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions for yourself and others in service of healthy decision making and the achievement of good customer and commercial outcomes.

Lai-Ling works with executives, leaders and doctors to solve society's most complex problems and improve the systems and organisations that we live and work in. She does this through the conscious design of human interactions and her specialty areas are in leadership, relationships, performance and wellbeing.

www.helloagility.com.au

Alan Taylor will join us to host this interview with Josie McLean.

About "Big Little Shifts..."
Adaptation has never been so important as it is now, in the disruptive wake of the COVID-19 onset. We are undergoing a whole systems change. The far-reaching impacts on our complex, uncertain world pose questions that individual leaders are unable to answer on their own.

We need a different approach.

The term adaptation comes from the study of natural ecologies, and a complexity (or living systems) approach enables organisations to respond to external changes and evolve their internal culture in ways that support relevance and survival into the future. Engaging with change in this way also nurtures people - it liberates possibilities, creativity, productivity and satisfaction. The lens of complexity alters the way we think about the role of leadership and even how we understand the term 'change'.

This book is for leaders who want to hold the space for change, people who see themselves as agents of change, and government teams working in complex policy areas like sustainability, education and health.

Drawing on 15 years of practical experience, this 'how-to' book offers a comprehensive approach to facilitating emergent change and transformation.

Dr Josie McLean has extensive experience as a catalyst for change. For over twenty years she has been seeding new ways of seeing and doing things by helping individuals, teams, and communities identify and rethink the unconscious assumptions by which they are held captive.

Josie was a pioneer of professional coaching in Australia and co-founded Climate Coaching Alliance in 2019 with Alison Whybrow and Eve Turner. Her latest books, Big Little Shifts (2020) and the co-edited Climate and Ecological Conscious Coaching, both explore how to lead systemic (emergent) change.

Join us for a "meet the authors" book session and learn about The Rock Crusher and how you can use the model to design and improve your backlog management.
Co-authored by Shane Hastie, Steve Adolph and Ryland Leyton, The Rock Crusher Canvas is a collaborative tool to help you transform your backlog into a tool for actively managing and discovering value.

The Rock Crusher offers an agile approach to backlog management, highlighting the power and simplicity of this essential tool in modern agile organizations. The publication emphasizes the importance of the backlog as a single repository from which a team pulls its next most valuable work item, enabling agility through the ability to add, remove, reprioritize, and visualize potential work for a product.

With a focus on fostering efficiency and productivity, The Rock Crusher provides a practical guide to maximizing the potential of the backlog and ensuring success in agile development.

The aim of this session is demonstrate the process of analysing a business domain using Wardley Strategy Maps by walking through real-world example.   This case study describes the process of using Wardley Strategy Maps at construction-tech start-up SignOnSite to map the customer needs and competitor landscape in order to refine the product strategy and agree a roadmap of product features to best leverage their increased investment.

Wardley Mapping are difficult to understand and difficult to start. They have as steep learning curve but are very valuable as a strategy collaboration tool.

My goal is to introduce Wardley Mapping in a more informal manner. I'll talk through the case study with lots of ongoing Q&A to ensure that each concept is well understood before moving onto the next concept.

Dr Nish Mahanty is an experienced product and technology leader with a passion for best practice product development and for building high performing teams in order to deliver great business outcomes. He has a track record of success in delivering challenging software projects in start-up organisations leveraging Agile and Lean methodologies. His deep expertise in cloud technologies, technical leadership and agile methodologies, coupled with demonstrated success in building high performing teams are the key elements to the long-lasting success of the products and teams that he has managed.