21st Century Management and Leadership

An unstoppable revolution is now under way in our society, affecting almost everyone. In a world of accelerating change, today’s leading firms are thriving by acting entrepreneurially at scale and hardwiring innovation into their DNA. They are being led and managed very differently from the corporate icons of the 20th century. What exactly do the new leaders do? Steve Denning’s presentation will illuminate the principles, processes, and practices of 21st century leadership and management. It will show in simple practical terms what it takes to thrive in this new context.

About Steve

Steve Denning is the author of the eight business books, including The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done (HarperCollins, 2018), which was selected by the Financial Times as one the “best business books of 2018.”

Steve is the former Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank. He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on leadership, innovation, business agility and organizational storytelling. Steve’s innovative work has been recognized world-wide. His clients have included many Fortune 500 companies.

Steve leads the SD Learning Consortium, a group of major private sector firms that are sharing knowledge about the Agile transformation journey. Steve has written over 30 articles for the management journal, Strategy & Leadership.

Steve has written over 800 articles as a senior contributor on Forbes.com with around 4 million pageviews since January 2019: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/.

Habits of mind to navigate uncertainty

The relentless uncertainty that 2020 has brought has left decision-makers across all levels in organisations feeling unmoored.  For many, the ways of and being in the world, as well as the tools and methods that brought success in the past, are no longer sufficient.  We constantly find ourselves on the uncomfortable edge of unknowing, and for many this can be paralysing.

The field of complexity offer insights that are invaluable in these times.  Also known as the science of uncertainty, a practical understanding of complexity can help us navigate this uncharted territory we find ourselves in.  In this talk, we will explore briefly what complexity is, what the implications are for us, and the habits of mind that can help us make sense of, and act in uncertainty.

About Sonja

Sonja is a thinking and sense-making partner for leaders and change-makers who need to better navigate uncertainty.  She is based in South Africa and has a background in the natural sciences.  She is a sought after speaker and recognised authority in Complexity and Sense-making.  She has almost two decades consulting experience and is certified in various individual and systemic coaching methods. She looks after the commercial business of Cognitive Edge and is also founder and Managing Director of More Beyond in South Africa.

Business Leadership Agility: Integrating Bold Visions and Harsh Realities

The times they are a changing. The great American songwriter Bob Dylan is no business analyst, but his iconic song The Times They Are A-Changin’ has something very pertinent to say about the economy and the global landscapes we live in.

As businesses our goal is to make our organisations resilient to change, the idea being to weather the ups and downs of the market and geopolitical conditions to achieve long-term profitability and growth. In this view of the world, changes are seen as exterior events, things that happen to a business outside of the normal run of affairs. This risks taking a negative view of change: Change is something to be mitigated against, avoided or at best, managed.

Is there a different way to view change, and is there a different way for a business to approach how it reacts to change? Do we need a different type of leadership?, even new organisational designs? The answer my friend is, Yes. And it begins with the recognition that change is the norm, not the exception with Agility and Adaptiveness the business of doing business has changed.

About Stephen

Multi-award winning transformation leader, strategist, and author of Sense and Respond: The Journey to Customer Purpose. Stephen Parry has an outstanding global reputation for organizational transformation and building customer and employee centric businesses.

Stephen is recognised as world-class expert in creating strategic differentiation for medium to global organizations, including change program design, competitive and operational strategy, Sense-and-Adapt business models, lean and agility enterprises.
Stephen’s strategic success has been featured on the BBC, in the Harvard Business Review with Professors Womack and Jones and secured his place on the judging panel for the National Business Awards.

Cited as one of the Top 25 CX influencers of 2019/2020 by the Customer Experience Magazine, Stephen was a pioneer in applying Lean and Agile to Service Operations especially to large Scale IT infrastructure business and outsourcing.

He is also the founder of the Sense and Adapt Academy: Creating Lean and Agility enterprises through long-term high performing change teams, customer centricity, leading to profitability, differentiation and superior work-climates.

The Mindset & Culture of Business Agility

The world is changing more rapidly than ever before. Organizations of every size are overwhelmed by the pace of change and are being constantly challenged to understand & react to the major disruptions in the marketplace and in their organizations. High-performing and adaptable organizations that leverage, lead, and thrive in this ambiguous and unpredictable market will be in the best position to win with their customers. We call this business agility; the ability of the organization and its leaders to respond in an effective, sustainable, and disciplined manner to the constant change & disruptions. Business Agility is not something an organization has or doesn’t, it more like fitness or athletic performance, your organization can increase its agility with intentional, deliberate, and disciplined effort. Using the Domains of Business Agility (published by the Business Agility Institute) we will explore the different “muscle groups” that an organization needs to “exercise” in order to increase its agility. Most importantly, we will discuss the Mindset and culture necessary to endure the journey and grind of improving your Business Agility.

About Ahmed

Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D. also known as Dr. Agile, is a renowned global thought-leader in the Business Agility community. As the Head of Business Agility at Riot Games, he is responsible for all change and transformations across the company. His former role at Riot was the Head of Development Management where he led a team of 80 internal agile coaches and delivery leaders. Before Riot Ahmed was a consultant for a variety of Fortune 100 companies (among them Verizon, Caterpillar, Nationwide, and Booz Allen Hamilton), guided enterprise Agile transformations, educated leaders on the Agile mindset, and creating customer-centric cultures of learning. He is also President of the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) and the co-founder of the Business Agility Institute; co-author of “Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World;” and a seasoned international keynote speaker.

What problem are we solving?

Which customers do we sell our products to? How do we know who they are and which problem we are solving for them? And how do we go about solving that problem most effectively?

About Jurgen

As a serial founder, successful entrepreneur, author, and speaker, Jurgen is pioneering management to help creative organizations survive and thrive in the 21st century. He offers concrete games, tools, and practices, so you can introduce better management, with fewer managers. He also offers a platform for you to share your practices and stories with the rest of the world.

Jurgen calls himself a creative networker. But sometimes he’s a writer, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, illustrator, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader, freethinker, or… Dutch guy. Inc.com has called him a Top 50 Leadership Expert and a Top 100 Leadership Speaker. Since 2008, Jurgen writes a popular blog at NOOP.NL, offering ideas on the creative economy, agile management, organizational change, and personal development. He is the author of the 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 most recently, Startup, Scaleup, Screwup, which contains 50% inspiring stories and 50% practices to follow and dives into the major topics that business leaders and entrepreneurs are confronted with throughout the business lifecycle.

Better Value Sooner Safer Happier

In this talk Jon shares the top eight antipatterns and patterns for Business Agility, lessons learnt the hard way, having led on Ways of Working at Barclays Bank and now working with organisations across industry sectors on the topic.

About Jon

Jon Smart leads Business Agility at Deloitte, helping organizations to deliver “Better Value Sooner Safer Happier” and is the author of ‘Sooner Safer Happier’, a collection of antipatterns and patterns for Business Agility, published on 10th Nov and a #1 Bestseller in its category on Amazon.

Prior to this, Jon was Head of Ways of Working across Barclays Bank globally, which is 328 years old, with 80,000 colleagues. Over a three year time period, on average teams were delivering 3x as much in 1/3rd of the time with 20x fewer incidents and with the highest ever colleague engagement and with consistently high customer Net Promoter Scores.

Jon has more than 25 years of experience of taking teams and organisations on the journey from traditional to agile and lean ways of working, starting out as a developer on an investment banking trading floor in the early 90’s. He and his team is the winner in the category of “Best Internal Agile Team” and runner up for “Most Valued Agile Professional (UK) “ at the Agile Awards 2016. Jon shares learnings through sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding at 6 to 7 conferences a year, is the founder of the Enterprise Agility Transformation Leaders Network, is a member of the Programming Committee for the DevOps Enterprise Summit, a member of the Business Agility Institute advisory council and is an occasional guest speaker at London Business School

Lean-Agile Strategy, A Strategic Discovery Approach

How do we create a culture of innovation that embraces continual change?

Traditional Strategic Planning is cumbersome, expensive, and often completely disconnected from the realities of everyday organizational operations and execution. Likewise, it does not create an environment conducive to innovation and continual change.

While Agile has enjoyed success at the team level, it has struggled to break through across organizations to deliver substantive and lasting changes in how the business or its people operate, nor has it led to the requisite systemic organizational changes necessary to create a culture of innovation that embraces continual change.

For organizations that look to outside help for strategic planning, McKinsey estimates that 70% of all such efforts will fail as they primarily focus on “moving from A-to-B” as a project rather than changing the fundamentals of how organizations, its leaders, and its people operate. Both the pace of change and the need for change is relentless. It does not wait for you to get to B, as by the time you get to B, it will have moved many times, and in ways, you could not have anticipated. And there never really is a B, anyway.

So how do we change the fundamentals of how we operate to create a culture of innovation that embraces continual change? To do that, we believe organizations, its leaders, and their people need to:
1. Close their capability gaps, and we do not just mean the business ones. They also need to be able to update their capabilities over time and to add new ones as needed
2. Embrace two new roles for leaders so they learn how to relinquish personal control to gain organizational control, which also solves some of the biggest organizational constraints to being agile and adaptive
3. Look at value from two time-horizons. Thinking long-term value is good, if you don’t go out of business before you get there.

In this short talk, Dan and Larry share how organizations, their leaders and their people, can change the fundamentals of how they operate to create a culture of innovation that embraces continual change.

About Dan

Dan Murphy is a partner in AdaptiveOrg Inc. He and Larry have developed Lean-Agile Strategy based on their combined experience and have implemented in numerous organizations over the last few years. Currently engaged with the Business Agility Institute, as well as several Universities to further develop LAS-related learning programs.

He began his career at IBM, and later moved to Cisco Systems, where, in the late 1990’s Cisco was implementing 1200 projects per quarter with a 4% failure rate, running early versions of what is now Agile Product and Project Management.

He was an early leader in the application of Agile methods and principles for to non-software development projects. He has led multiple initiatives within the Federal Government to develop competitive IT services, including the development of a Government Metro Area Network and the development of a National Telepresence Service. He is a leader in the use of Agile / Lean methods for the development and implementation of measurable IT infrastructure, and application services.

About Larry

Larry Cooper – Lead author of Lean-Agile Strategy, his goal is to help people and organizations identify and focus on their collective purpose. We have no agenda. We do help you build yours though.

Larry and Dan are currently engaged with the Business Agility Institute, as well as several Universities in the Canada and the US to further develop LAS-related learning programs.

A partner in AdaptiveOrg, Larry has over 40 years in leadership, product development, business development, training development and delivery, technology, and operational experience in public and private sector organizations in Canada and the US.

A lead contributor to the OECD’s ICT Agile Procurement Playbook, he was also the Author Mentor for PRINCE2 Agile from AXELOS. His 2015 book, Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers was endorsed by Dr. Alistair Cockburn, a co-author of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Larry’s work on business value became the basis for the Agile Business Value Management Learning Path of the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile), which is now used globally by training companies to develop certified course content to teach agility. He was an initial contributor to the Business Agility Institute’s (BAI) Domains of Agility and, with his partner, Dan, has recently taken over stewardship of BAI’s Strategic Agility domain. The co-chair of the BAI’s Editorial Board, he is currently leading the BAI’s internal transformation.

Larry was a contributor to #NoProjects: A Culture of Continuous Value (InfoQ) by Evan Leybourn, Founder of the BAI, and Shane Hastie, Director of Agile Learning Programs at ICAgile, as well as to AgileSHIFT from AXLEOS, and a reviewer for “Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World” by Rod Collins.

Outcomes for impact – at scale

We all know the drill, pivot faster and embrace innovation in these turbulent times. But how do you ensure your process reaches outcomes that matter?

Gabrielle will give an introduction to Mobius, a navigator that allows you to create a customized innovation model connecting strategy to delivery.

Rather than prescribe one set of practices or one framework, this next-generation approach allows you to combine models in new and novel ways. Alistair Cockburn describes it as the ‘first real post-agile framework’, allowing people the structure and freedom to innovate effectively.

Gabrielle will show you some examples from social transformation in a war zone, pivoting a restaurant business model in 5 hours, to enterprise transformation at Red Hat.

About Gabrielle

Gabrielle Benefield is an author, speaker, innovator, and founder of Mobius (Mobiusloop.com). Gabrielle is an advocate for purposeful innovation and believes the relentless pursuit of ‘more, more, more’ gets in the way of success. Since developing the earliest inception of Mobius in 2009 she has helped individuals and organizations all over the globe, including Google and Red Hat solve complex problems in a transformational way.

She used Agile and Lean techniques in the early 2000s in Silicon Valley to successfully lead teams, including taking a startup to a robust Initial Public Offering, and spearheading one of the largest Agile enterprise transformations – scaling up to 250+ teams across three continents. She founded the Scrum Foundation in 2009 together with key Agile thought leaders, including Jeff Sutherland (the inventor of Scrum), and is an author of the Scrum Primer, one of the most downloaded guides to Scrum.

People Agility and the Future role for HR and Leaders

This talk will cover what Leaders and HR professionals need to be aware of when adjusting Ways of Working to the new paradigm of employee-driven organizations (self-management) and how to inspire people to perform in a common direction without using formal power. Leadership practices need to be adjusted to the new paradigm of employee-driven organizations and it will be more about creating prerequisites for innovation in infrastructure, culture, processes and systems, than providing strict rules & policies and ticking off compliance with the same. Motivating employees becomes possible with less control, transparent visualization, trust, and continuous improvement, together with a deep knowledge of what makes each and every employee tick. What are the changes that HR and Leaders need to make in their own role and behavior to accomplish People and Business Agility?

About Pia-Maria

Pia-Maria is the founder of the global community Agile People and the author of 3 books about Agile People, where the last one, Agile People Principles – Your Call to Action for the Future of Work was co-authored by 35 Agile People Coaches from the whole world. She is a people-centered speaker, author, and consultant with a true agile mindset and a belief that people are performing at their best when they are trusted, supported, and listened to.

How the Neurophysiology of Dignity drives Agility

Take a moment for a brief journey past the fragile neural gateways to collective learning.

Our brains evolved for collective discovery. Agility requires ongoing shared experimenting. Learn how to be a source of collective inquiry: anytime, anywhere. Experience simple ways to open those ancient neural highways. Take this practice back to your world.

About Marsha

Marsha Shenk is a pioneer in Business Anthropology. Beloved teacher, facilitator and Coach seasoned by four decades in the field with Change Leaders. She now co-leads the Dignity Looping Practice Community.

From Hiring for Culture to Employees Engagement. What is the research saying to us?

Hiring and Engagement are key moments in constructing the culture of any organization. New employees bring their personalities, emotions, and habits with them, just as much as their skills and experience, and inevitably influence the company environment. And the organizations that succeed now and into the future will be those that attract, retain and inspire the best talent with the skillset suited to this new landscape. Therefore, organizations should prioritize Hiring for Culture & Employee Engagement, embedding them as key pillars in their strategic planning goals.

This talk will examine general steps and programs that may help boost engagement, present an overview of the many drivers that can impact engagement and discuss techniques to develop engagement strategies. Also, we will have a careful look on frameworks for assessing organizational culture and for determining cultural goals, as well as tools that facilitate hiring for culture.

About Stavros

Stavros is an HR Recruitment Partner agap2IT, a European IT Consultancy, operating as the link between people’s capabilities and IT workforce requirements. That involves Recruitment and Onboarding, Talent Management, Candidate Journey and Employer Branding, and Community Outreach.

Simultaneously, he is a Research Lead at Business Agility Institute where he is involved in several research initiatives and they recently published 2 whitepapers with the title “Hiring for Culture” and “”Employee Engagement””. Stavros is highly curious about how employment affects our lives and in which degree the meaning that we give to our responsibilities and tasks affects performance, growth, and team cohesion.

With his presentation, he is aiming from a practitioner’s point of view, to analyze the findings of the above papers; identifying the specific factors that impact the workforce, from hiring to engagement. How vision, culture, and leadership influence engagement and why we need an engaging workforce anyways?

The ART of the People Runway

Human Resources is the most significant enabler – or obstacle – to business agility and success. Unfortunately, we are currently in a ‘People Debt’ crisis, created by not putting people center stage of a human-centric, agile organization. To course-correct, we need to engage in a modern HR and people approach and address those unresolved impediments so that we can create a strong ‘People Runway’ to maximize the potential of your agile workforce and transformation.

About Fabiola

Fabiola is a thought-leader in contemporary HR and the Co-Founder of Just Leading Solutions, a New York based transformation consultancy for HR and Business Agility.

Her work with key players across the private, corporate, and social sector take her across the globe as she helps them build stronger, more responsive, and innovative businesses through Agile HR.

Fabiola is a Switzerland native. She lives in New York City and Louisville (Colorado) and is an avid New York Rangers fan.

Agile in sales. Why? How? Difficulties and results

Would you like to learn how Agile helped to triple sales while keeping the same people and budget? Would you like to learn how an Agile sales team created more than 300 process improvements in a single year? Would you like to learn how to overcome common obstacles when implementing Agile in your Sales teams?

In her presentation, Marina Alex will introduce SWAY (Sales with Agile) which is being used to improve sales around the world; from America to Russia to Thailand! She will explain why Agile in sales is a competitive advantage that is hard to copy. By sharing examples and case studies, Marina will show you how to get started with your sales teams today.

About Marina

As an entrepreneur, management consultant, and agile coach, Marina pioneered the practice of Agile Sales and specializes in building sustainable and robust agile organizations. She is an accomplished sales executive and, over time, has learned what it means to be a true servant leader to sales teams. Under her guidance, her teams regularly outperform all other teams, exceed their sales targets, and enjoy coming to work.

Over the last 6 years, Marina has developed an innovative sales technique based on business agility principles and practices. She has successfully implemented this in 4 major organizations across Russia (in the banking, insurance, healthcare, and hospitality industries). The most recent of these increased their sales performance from 43% to over 120% of target.

Marina’s extensive sales background gives her a unique understanding of how business works – allowing her to uniquely solve complex cultural and business problems. During this time, she has launched more than 170 agile teams and coached more than 50 top-executives.

Marina is the author of SWAY (Sales with Agile) which helps many sales teams across the world today.

OKRs at the center – How a courageous approach to goal setting can develop your organization towards business agility!

Many companies these days start to experiment with Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to follow promises of higher performance, better alignment and even a new culture of collaboration.

After the first enthusiastic steps (or quarters) the glamour often fades and frustration sets in: the alignment process takes way too long, the focus is not clearly given and outcome-orientation is still a buzzword.

Are OKRs maybe overrated? Or what does it take to really change the way we work with goals to develop our organizations towards business agility?

In this talk, Natalija will pursue the typical challenges of organizations with new ways of goal setting and show how utilizing OKRs as a concept for organizational learning can develop your organization over time – if you dare to take courageous decisions along the way!

About Natalija

Natalija is a trainer, coach, and chance taker. She supports companies wanting to increase focus, autonomy, and value creation to identify and prioritize their challenges, set valuable goals and continuously improve.

She has been working within People Development and Transformation since 2010 before starting her own business offering an entire ecosystem of training and coaching focusing on Leadership & Responsibility, OKRs and Remote Collaboration and Learning.

Her work is shaped by living in and working with many different countries, cultures, and customers and changing perspectives to redefine what is possible.

As the founder of okrs-at-the-center.com, she strives to create a collaborative platform, in which OKR practitioners inside and outside of companies can explore the possibilities of developing organizations with OKRs at the heart of their transformation.

In 2020, she published the practical book “OKRs at the center: How to drive change with goals and create the organization you want” via Sense & Respond Press.

An introduction to Beyond Budgeting – Business Agility in practice

Beyond Budgeting is a set of concepts that can help transform organisations to make them healthier and more productive workplaces. It is also a set of methods that will help improve financial steering processes to make them less bureaucratic, more flexible and less prone to dysfunctional gaming behaviour​. Beyond Budgeting is most powerful when it is both, particularly if BB is invoked as part of a broader change project, perhaps one seeking to spread Agile or Lean methods or create a more empowering culture.

About Bjarte

Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, both in Finance and HR. He is a pioneer in the Beyond Budgeting movement, and has been heading up the implementation of Beyond Budgeting at Equinor (formerly Statoil), Scandinavia’s largest company. He led a similar initiative in Borealis in the mid-nineties, one of the companies that inspired the Beyond Budgeting model.

Bjarte is Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Roundtable (BBRT). He is a popular international business speaker and is the winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award. Bjarte is also author of “”Implementing Beyond Budgeting – Unlocking the Performance Potential””, where he writes about his almost twenty-five years long Beyond Budgeting journey. His employer has opened up for Bjarte to undertake select consulting work.

3 Enemies of Marketing Agility – And why communication is the core of success

Pam Ashby will address 3 common challenges to marketing agility – silos, stakeholder interactions and the lure of sophistication. These are the hidden enemies that fall outside the Agile process, the cross functional teams, the willingness to pivot and adapt, to fail fast, to learn, and to deliver early and often. All these great things can be daily undermined when there is insufficient focus on communication. And marketers are great communicators!

Marketers are naturally agile. Pam will explore the compelling relationship between marketing skills and those needed for business agility. She’ll talk about what’s changed for marketers that now means building on natural agility is an imperative. She will discuss what ‘marketing agility’ really means and where its value lies.

Silos, stakeholder interactions and the lure of sophistication. Understand these and you have a springboard for success.

About Pam

Pam Ashby works with individuals and organisations, supporting them to take an integrated and Agile approach to marketing, improving value and results. She has worked in-house and agency-side, as a journalist and in PR, led international marketing teams and provided coaching for marketing professionals. Her experience spans large multinationals and startups, and her conclusion is solid across all perspectives – an Agile approach is powerful (and necessary) for marketers.

Pam is an AgilePM® Practitioner, a Certified Scrum Master, and an ICAgile authorised instructor for Agile Marketing and Agile Marketing Leadership with AgileSherpas, the world leading Agile Marketing organisation. She is a certified coach, and holds diplomas in NLP, Marketing, and Digital Marketing. In early 2020, Pam founded the fast growing Marketing Agility Community meetup.

Watch this space for more details…

Responding to Uncertainty with People Oriented Leadership

Leader of the financial services affiliate of the largest industrial conglomerate in Turkey, listed on Fortune Global 500, shares experience on overcoming hard times and staying on the growth path. The speech unfolds around purpose, putting people first and leaders’ role in managing uncertainty and change.

Content :

• Sharing Koc Holding’s purpose driven culture and people first approach
• Examples on how agile was the response in the pandemic and how the effect spread over to broader community
• Change management and digital transformation as priorities for all group companies, how all started with the leaders.
• Putting leadership cultural transformation as priority for driving change and business agility
• Company level experience at agile transformation (agile leaders team as lighthouse to business teams)
• How actions/changes across all people/management/business areas reinforce each other to achieve business agility

About Yesim Pinar KITAPCI

Yesim Pinar KITAPCI started her business life in the automotive sector at Tofas, a Fiat Chrysler Automotive JV in Turkey. She moved to financial services with various management roles in Koc Holding affiliated finance companies. She held the position of general manager and board member at Koc Fiat Kredi A.S. between 2010-2012. She is the CEO and Board Member of Koc Finansman A.S., a pioneering financial services company specialised in consumer and SME lending, since 2013.

Yesim Pinar KITAPCI is also a board member of the Association of Financial Institutions in Turkey and a board member of Turkish Family Health and Planning Foundation. She is an alumni of Harvard Business School, completed Advanced Management Program in 2016.

Leadership Agility in the New World of Work

Participants will have an opportunity to review and discuss a research-based framework (elements) for Leadership Agility. Since 2001, this framework has been used globally by organizations (companies, government agencies, universities, etc.) as a core element of their leadership development initiatives.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has become a defining disruption impacting leaders in organizations across the globe. Leaders will be confronted with future disruptions as well as ongoing VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) characterizing a turbulent business environment. How can you prepare the leaders in your organization for this New World of Work characterized by VUCA events? This interactive session will enable you to quickly self assess your leadership agility and begin developing your individual development plan for Leadership Agility Fitness.

About Nick

Dr. Horney is an Organizational Psychologist who founded Agility Consulting and Training in 2001 and has been recognized for innovations in organizational and leadership agility, including the global standard for leadership agility — The AGILE Model®. He has written several books on the topics of Change Management and Agility and is often quoted in journals, books and professional associations such as the American Management Association, Project Management Institute (PMI), IBN International and Human Resource People and Strategy.

Prior to forming Agility Consulting, Dr. Horney served on the Executive Committee of the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). His coaching, leadership development and organizational agility management consulting experience spans over 30 years and includes the start-up and management of the Coopers & Lybrand (now Price Waterhouse Coopers) Change Management Practice. Representative clients include Turner Broadcasting, Coca-Cola, Navy SEALs, Hanesbrands, Lenovo, CIA, ARAMARK, REI, Celanese, United Launch Alliance and R.R. Donnelley. Prior to consulting, Nick held senior leadership roles in the consumer products industry (Divisions of Nestle and Pepsi).

Dr. Horney’s first-hand knowledge of coaching and leadership agility was developed during his 23 years as a Navy Special Operations Officer where leadership and team agility were defining characteristics of success. Nick retired from the U.S. Navy reserves at the rank of Captain. He serves as a coach for The Honor Foundation which focuses on the successful transition of Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders and other Special Operations Forces to the business world. Dr. Horney previously served on the Board of Examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and now currently serves on the Editorial Boards of The Business Agility Institute and the Organizational Dynamics Journal.

How Collective Intelligence Can Change Culture 

The fastest way to change the culture in an organization is by changing the way we talk and think together 

The single greatest predictor of success is the way we are having or not having conversations, and if we can learn to be more intentional in how we invite, cultivate, participate and facilitate conversations there will not be any challenge that an organization cannot skillfully navigate in order to produce effective outcomes.

But what if our conversations are stuck or ineffective? What if conversations break down instead of generating new collective thinking? We’ll look at conversations and how to use the structure of the conversations to harvest the intelligence that already exists and the role leaders play in creating a space for dialogue and thinking together in order to greatly change the nature of the discourse.

About Marsha

Marsha Acker is an executive leadership and team coach whose passion and expertise is helping leaders and their teams identify and break through stuck patterns that get in the way of high performance. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Art and Science of Facilitation: How to Lead Effective Collaboration with Agile Teams.

Marsha founded TeamCatapult, a coaching and change leadership firm, in 2005. She has over 20 years of experience designing and facilitating organizational change initiatives. She believes that facilitation and coaching skills are 21^st century leadership skills required for leaders as they learn to lead agility across the organization and develop their teams.

Marsha is a Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF), Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), Professional Certified Coach (ICF-PCC), Organizational and Relationship Systems Coach (Center for Right Relationship), Dialogix – Certified Structural Dynamics Interventionist, ICAgile Certified Expert Agile Team Coaching and ICAgile Expert in Enterprise Coaching.