This is a presentation to the accompanying blog article that I created on my return from DARE13 in Antwerp. I shared this with my colleagues on the Connecting Improvers community that I lead at OpenText.

1. On Tempo
Social
Connecting Improvers in June DAREs you to improve!
DARE conference 2013
Luke Firth, Improvement Office, Engineering
Luke will be reporting back from the DARE conference which has the motto- Be Agile, Scale up,
Stay Happy. The conference focuses on how can you change your organization to a more
productive, creative, and engaging environment for everybody involved and continue to
improve your product at great speed.

2. DARE13 is a Happy Melly production in its first year
Its an Improvement gathering for
the software industry
Focusing on SMEs and the
companies that support them
Delegates were typically
scrumcoaches, agile coaches,
consultants, or organisations
wanting to sell services and
software products
Held in a converted shipping
hanger in the port area of
Antwerp, Belgium
Showcasing an eclectic band of
speakers and interests…..

3. Improvement
Ideology
Philosophical
Conventional
Application
Radical
Cult of Seddon
Free spirits
Scrum’ers
Kanbanistas
Blueprint for a Tribal business- Jurgen Appelo
Inner Innovation- Peter Moreno
The Art of Culture Hacking- Stefan Haas
Happiness at work: you deserve it!- Laurence
Vanhee
Are we solving the right problem?- Richard
Moir
Kanban: isn’t it just common sense?- Karl
Scotland
Taming the flow- Steve Tendon
“Just do it” approach to change management-
Wouter Lagerweij
Scaling Agile @ Spotify- Jimmy Janlen
Be Agile. Scale Up. Stay Lean- Dean
Leffingwell
Lean Innovation at Atlassian- Tony Atkins
Habits of Kanban- Hakan Forss
Cohesion and complexity- Chris Young
My first 2 years with Kanban- Paul Klipp
The conference topics and agenda could be organised into 4 distinct
groupings

4. 5 themes reoccurred throughout the two days in a variety of discussions
Semi-autonomous
teams
Scaling up
Vanguard method
Experiments

5. DARE13 in quotes….
We didn’t do status
updates, we simply
asked the team which
squad was holding them
back- Jimmy Janlen
If things seem under
control, you’re not going
fast enough- Mario
Andretti The shorter the sprint cycles the
more responsive you are, but the
larger the administrative overhead
becomes- Dean Leffingwell
Increasingly networks
are replacing
hierarchies within
organisations-
Jurgen Appelo
I don’t criticize waterfall, it
got us this far- Dean
LeffingwellI’ve taken the oath of non-
allegiance- Steve Tendon
We got the company focused on
reducing the number of calls
they received not on the number
they resolved- Richard Moir
We’re aiming for
80% time not 20%-
Atlassian
I gave the Unions a limit of
3 meetings on a particular
topic, before I took it off
the agenda for good-
Laurence Vanhee
Experiments: expect to be
wrong 50% of the time,
this is where the learning
happens- Haken Forss
We didn’t want to scale our
team in line with call volume
as that would’ve meant we
spent too much time on hiring
and not on working with
customers- Tony Atkins
We don’t learn from
mistakes or best
practice, but from
experimentation-
Jurgen Appelo
Kill the backlog, the PO knows
the next most important thing-
Paul Klipps

6. Did you know?
1/5 people consider themselves engaged at their current job?
It takes 4/5 sprints to gain basic adoption of Agile in a team?
Google have a personal growth programme?
Changing culture is the equivalent of changing personality?
Agile was designed for small teams?
The root French for the word for “work” is torture?
The root Dutch for the word for “work” is slave?