In this session, two co-creators of Org Topologies™, Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm, will share a method to design, assess and improve your organizational ecosystem.
They will do that by familiarizing you with a set of organizational archetypes that are easy to spot. Hopefully, you will have much better clarity on which organization ecosystem you want to build and which behaviors you expect it to exhibit.
You shall be able to take this tool home and use it as a map in your ongoing, never-ending transformation journey toward agility.

Target Audience: Decision Makers, Transformation Team Members, Coaches, Leadership
Prerequisites: Challenges with scaling agility
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
The legacy of the original lightweight barely sufficient Agile ideas (namely XP and Scrum) has been impeded by the difficulties of applying them beyond a single team without losing the key principles and the promised gains.
Over the last decade, that challenge has led to a rose in heavy-weight methods, especially SAFe™, which has become a go-to place for "everything agile". It provides the user with a profound variety of specific tools and techniques for "scaling agile". Many enterprises are on the path of "rolling out" these ideas by the book with the help of trained coaches. But will we eventually get the promised gains of agility once we fulfill the requirements of the framework in our enterprise? Is such a prescriptive approach agile itself? And more importantly: will we own the change and know how to keep improving beyond the rule book?
In recent years, we have seen the emergence of other methods: framework-agnostic org design DIY toolboxes. In this family of modern ideas, Team Topologies™ and unFix™ stand out from the crowd. Their approach is to offer us a "lunch buffet" to pick structures and processes that suit our situation. It is a flexible approach with a lot of freedom of choice. It offers a fresh path for some of us trying to avoid the burden of frameworks. But the freedom of freely picking org elements implies that we possess a clear bigger picture and won't get lost in the night-gritty details of the puzzle pieces. As leaders, managers, and coaches, how fluent are we in org design, queuing theory, and systems thinking? How can we be confident that we won't lose the plot by trying to put together those puzzle pieces? And more importantly: will we get long-term gains, or will we inflict more unforeseen problems by focusing too much on the small building blocks rather than the whole system?
Difficult questions. Org Topologies™ doesn't have all of them answered for us. But being a framework-agnostic approach for designing agile ecosystems where business and technology would work as one, it can provide us with a solid basis on which all other decisions can be grounded. Essentially, Org Topologies™ moves us from the dualism of frameworks vs. DIY methods into the realm of ecosystems - a unity of interdependent organizational parts that together exhibit well-recognized behaviors.
In this session, two co-creators of Org Topologies™, Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm, will share a method to design, assess and improve your organizational ecosystem. They will do that by familiarizing you with a set of organizational archetypes that are easy to spot in any organization. Hopefully, by the end of the talk, you will have much better clarity on which organization ecosystem you want to build and which behaviors you expect it to exhibit. Eventually, you shall be able to take this tool home and use it with your leadership group as a map in your ongoing, never-ending transformation journey toward agility.

You have to deal with people - always! Konflikte & Veränderungen fordern uns heraus. Wir schaffen es nicht, diese Themen zu bearbeiten. Das führt zu Unzufriedenheit & Frust.
In unserem Vortrag wollen wir konkrete systemische Prinzipien und Methoden von 2 erfahrenen Coaches mitgeben, die eine neue Perspektive auf Herausforderungen im Projektalltag geben und eine persönliche Weiterentwicklung unterstützen können. Laut Zukunftsforschern wird die systemische Perspektive immer mehr zu einer Kernkompetenz von Akteuren in der modernen Arbeitswelt.

Target Audience: Software Engineers, Leaders, Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches
Prerequisites: None
Level: Basic

Extended Abstract:
Wenn Menschen zusammenarbeiten, kann es immer wieder Situationen geben, die in uns Stress erzeugen. Termin- und Entscheidungsdruck, ungelöste Konflikte und eine rasante Veränderungsgeschwindigkeit fordern uns täglich heraus. Als Führungskraft möchte ich meine Mitarbeiter:innen in Entscheidungen einbeziehen, muss aber trotzdem meiner Führungsrolle gerecht werden. Als Team-Mitglied habe ich vielleicht einen Konflikt mit jemandem im Team und weiß nicht, wie ich damit umgehen soll. Als Scrum Master begleite ich agile Veränderungsprozesse und bin auf der Suche nach Ideen und Impulsen, wie ich besser mit auftretenden Widerständen umgehen kann.
Systemisch beobachten, denken und handeln ist eine Grundhaltung, die uns helfen kann, besser mit sozialer Komplexität und organisatorischen Paradoxien umzugehen. Laut Zukunftsforschern wird die systemische Perspektive, wie sie z.B. auch professionelle Coaches und Therapeuten nutzen, immer mehr zu einer unverzichtbaren Kernkompetenz von Akteuren in der modernen Arbeitswelt (siehe auch Harvard Business Manager 01/2022 „Führen wie ein Coach“ oder „Future Skills“ von Pechstein, Spiegel et al., 2021).
Die Systemische Perspektive einnehmen bedeutet z.B., Zusammenhänge, Wechselwirkungen, Rückkopplungen, Rollen und Wahrnehmungen (auch die eigene) in komplexen Systemen zu erkennen und darauf aufbauend achtsam zu kommunizieren und zu handeln. Weitere Prinzipien wie Wertschätzung, Ressourcen-Orientierung, Lösungsfokussierung helfen, den Menschen und seine Bedürfnisse in den Mittelpunkt der Betrachtung zu stellen, und dadurch anschlussfähigere Lösungsansätze zu gewinnen.
In unserem Vortrag wollen wir die Systemische Haltung als „Mindset“ der Systemiker vorstellen. Darüber hinaus stellen wir 10 Denkanstöße und konkrete Methoden vor, die jede/r im Arbeitsalltag ausprobieren und seine/ihre systemische Haltung ausprobieren bzw. üben kann.
Als Führungskraft und Agile Coach bringen wir zwei wertvolle Perspektiven auf Menschen und Organisationen mit und finden so große Anschlussfähigkeit für die täglichen Herausforderungen von Teams, Führungskräften, Scrum Mastern und Agile Coaches.

Keeping up is the ultimate challenge for employees and companies within fields of massively fast-emerging trends shaping how to work and deliver. Learning and spreading expertise is also key to success while householding the knowledge of older technologies to maintain systems efficiently. The classic learning approach needs too much time to scale understanding and to adopt new technologies, especially remotely. It needed to be extended to a more self-defining and community-driven model with the ambition of being highly interactive and hands-on.

Target Audience: Engineering Manager, Agile Coaches, Employee Engagement, Senior & Executive Leaders
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
In our talk, we examine a case study on a three-year journey of creating, establishing and organically scaling a continuous learning community within GFK SE. The community started with two people and an idea – and is now an online event with hundreds of participants, from all over the globe!
But the talk doesn’t start with the solution! The story we would like to show you started in the darkness of two COVID-19 home offices occupying an MS Teams call. As was for many other people, the rash switch from mostly in-person, physically-centred collaboration to an environment that eradicated the physical elements of collaboration and made us all equally miserable, exposed a lot of practices that were not so visible before. So was the reality of learning in our company – people learned a lot from each other, but very localized, on a very small scale. Knowledge-sharing, workshops were done in groups of ca 5-10 people at most and were happening completely ad-hoc, all over the place, and as a result, topics would often be done multiple times even in the same physical location, with varying contents, recommendations and quality. With two words – it was all fragmented and invisible. On the other hand, as we went remote, it became really hard to do the same thing, so people, especially trainers, started complaining that it was so complex and time-consuming to do all this now via MS Teams. This is where the recognition started, that behind training content itself, there is so much more that impacts a successful or awful training experience.
Over the course of a few months, we gathered data, started a trainer community and came up with a lofty idea and a vision of what we wished to achieve.
When we started, we had three goals in mind:

1. Spread knowledge and skills efficiently to avoid reinventing the wheel
2. Contextualise learning – make not just the topic relevant, but take the examples, case studies and context for the sessions from our own “GFK kitchen”
3. Grow even more trainers and leaders – we ask trainers to come with a less experienced co-trainer who can in this way easily learn and practice how to be a trainer, gaining leadership skills

In addition to that, we also envisioned some benefits that would come from the unique synergies of the format – building trust, expanding people’s networks into other locations and work contexts through participating in a safe, learning-centred environment; breaking down functional silos more and more through continuous exposure into different areas and problem spaces; employee retention through an opportunity to recognize, grow and engage employees that were very interested in being trainers or mentors.
We were two people, and immediately everyone around us said it can’t be done. As we are in a talk about our success story, obviously we faced mountains of issues and our enthusiasm and idea almost died at one point, but we did it and are here to share with you all the nitty and gritty details, drama and recipes on how to make this happen!

Drei Jahre nach dem Ausbruch der Pandemie haben wir viel Erfahrung mit dem Thema Home-Office gesammelt. Langsam kehrt überall wieder Normalität ein, doch am Arbeitsplatz bleibt die Frage, wie es auf Dauer weitergehen soll. Wollen wir zurück ins Büro oder lieber im Homeoffice bleiben?
In diesem interaktiven Talk geht es um Antworten auf die Frage(n): Wer will wann wie und warum wo arbeiten und vor allem: Wie bringen wir alle unter einen Hut?

Zielpublikum: Software-Entwicklungsteams
Voraussetzungen: Keine
Schwierigkeitsgrad: Anfänger

Extended Abstract:
Dazu hat mich vor allem interessiert, welche Faktoren in unsere individuelle Vorliebe für ein Arbeitsplatzmodell hineinspielen. Bleiben introvertierte Menschen lieber im Homeoffice und Scrum Master:innen sind immer vor Ort? Hängt die Entscheidung davon ab, wie der Arbeitsplatz gestaltet ist? Welches sind die Top-Gründe für die eine oder andere Arbeitsweise? Und wie decken sich die Wünsche mit der Realität?
Um Antworten auf diese und mehr Fragen zu finden, habe ich über 100 Personen befragt und Studien recherchiert. Die Erkenntnisse daraus stelle ich in diesem Talk vor und bringe euch Ideen mit, wie ihr für euer Team und eure Organisation das passende Modell entwickeln könnt.