A transformation can be beautiful flowers budding from an erstwhile prickly situation. Reading more for inspiration and support.

Coaching and facilitation inspiration

Unlock the secrets to thriving in the AI era with the help of Victoria Morgan-Smith, a respected organizational coach and consultant. She joins me to unravel the transformative power of shared learning in today's dynamic work environments.

This one was great fun. At another of my favourite conferences - Agile on the Beach.

Conference talks from the archive

Boost cross-team learning and engagement with Internal Tech Conferences with Victoria Morgan Smith at Lean Agile London 2022 Victoria shared what’s so great about an internal tech conference, how to create a successful one, and some things that she and others have specifically learned over the past year of online conferences that she thinks will have a useful bearing for some time to come.

What does it take to create a team environment that inspires ambition and creativity? How do we create a culture of generosity? How can internal technical conferences help move the needle towards a culture where people want to help each other out, and so actively want to enable each other? Like many people, I bought a cat during lockdown, and he is my latest obsession.

So I am going to introduce you to my cat, along with 4 others, and we’ll look at their environment to see what helps them and what is hard for them. I’ll then talk about some of the things that could help them - and your teams - to thrive in your environment.

Joining us for this episode is , the Director of Delivery for Engineering Enablement at the Financial Times. Victoria shares some of the tradeoffs in having an autonomous, “you build it, you run it” culture. She also shares how her group equips engineering teams with metrics, best practices, and more.

The AI for the rest of us conference was not only brilliantly executed, but it really made me think about this moment we are all in right now.

This is what I took away:

• Teams are battling for AI ownership

• AI output is lightning-fast to create — but it’s easy to get lost in the hype

• The environmental and social stakes are huge

• Organisations need to either surf these waves or risk wiping out

Having seen Tsvetelina Plummer and Berrin Akvardar’s insightful talk at the Fast Flow Conference about GfK — an NIQ Company’s Learning Enablement Team, I felt compelled to explore the idea more with them. In fact, it aligns closely with a key theme I’ve been exploring in my own work: that balance between autonomy and alignment in teams.

When it comes to how to run an effective conference, you really can’t do much better than AI For the Rest of Us last month. I take my hat off to Hannah and the team for the excellent execution, and want to call out here what was so great, as it provides a fantastic example to learn from.

InfoQ interviewed Morgan-Smith and Skelton about the benefits that internal tech conferences can deliver, how they compare to external/public conferences, supporting and encouraging people to submit a talk, how to ensure that things go well on the conference day and the do’s and don’ts of internal tech conferences, and following up after the conference.

An internal ‘tech’ conference can be a powerful way of communicating and celebrating technology teams that build and operate the software systems that are increasingly essential to many organisations. In this article, we share our experiences of organising and running internal tech conferences: getting buy-in, preparing speakers, promoting the day (before and after), and running the day itself. We hope that you’ll be inspired to help run a tech conference within your own organisation!

I was painting my kitchen last week and it got me thinking about pair programming.