Building psychological safety in your teams is critical if you want them to perform at their best. The challenge is how to develop and encourage the trust and collaboration and to make sure that all voices are heard. The agile community has developed facilitation exercises and tools that make conversations more democratic and inclusive. I have used some of these techniques with my teams for years and have found them incredibly valuable. I will teach you some of the agile methods that I use for large and small team meetings, brainstorms, and one-on-ones that encourage all team members to participate. These tools also help make sure that all voices are respected and valued.

Avvo created tools to encourage data-driven thinking, autonomy and a spirit of continuous improvement. This talk describes those tools, their implementation and the issues and challenges encountered when doing large-scale culture change in a ten-year-old company.

A talk on why failure is important in innovation and tips on how to create en environment where the effects of failure are minimized while maximizing the learning.

What makes distributed teams especially challenging? How can we address these challenges to make our distributed organizations more effective? In this talk, Kevin Goldsmith discusses four main challenges: Conway's Law, Amdahl's Law (as applied to organizations), Empathy, and Communication. He gives examples of these problems and solutions from his experience leading distributed teams over the last 25 years.

One of the challenges when making an agile transformation or trying to level up agile teams is that many folks have never seen a truly high-performing agile organization. In this talk, I show what that looks like, to inspire and give a goal to those who are struggling with agile.

A great team is a like a great dish, balanced flavors, tastes, textures and smells combine to create something unique and delicious. I've made the mistakes of trying to build unbalanced teams either with poor distributions of experience, bad combinations of temperament, clashing skill sets or lack of diversity. I'll share those mistakes. I'll also share some of the things I did right (either intentionally or unintentionally) to create the teams that have worked very well. I'll provide some things to look out and consider for as you build a team or just expand the one you have.