Ben Linders

Improving Agile Development and Operations with Gamification at DevOpsCon Berlin 2024
2024-06-17 - 2024-06-20 | Maritim proArte Hotel Berlin, Friedrichstraße 151, Berlin, 10117, Germany
I will be returning to DevOpsCon Berlin to give a talk about Improving Agile Development and Operations with Gamification. Join me in Berlin on June 17 at the DevOps Transformation Day.

Gamify it until you make it: Improving Agile Development and Operations with Gamification
So many challenges, so little time. While we’re busy developing software and keeping it operational, we also need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone involved and get the best out of people.
In this presentation, Ben Linders will show how playing games with the DevOps coaching cards can help to explore your current development and deployment (DevOps) practices and decide as a team what to improve or experiment with.
The games that we play are based on an engagement model. Instead of imposing change, the games enable people to pull in ideas for change and apply those in a way that best suits their collective needs.
By playing games, you can learn from each other. Teams can use games, exercises, and coaching cards to discuss values, principles, and practices, and share their experiences and learnings.
Different game formats can be used to share experiences on DevOps principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively. This presentation provides an overview of playing formats and will inspire you to come up with your own formats.
DevOpsCon Berlin
DevOpsCon is the Conference for CI/CD, the Kubernetes Ecosystem, and Agile & Lean Business.
Because we want to ensure that the lively exchange of knowledge and ideas so typical of DevOpsCon Berlin continues to work well, we were one of the first in the conference industry to develop our hybrid concept.
You can choose to attend the conference either on site or online from your home or office. In order to be accessible to all participants, all DevOpsCon tracks will be streamed live. Using professional video technology, all lectures and workshops will be broadcast live. And that’s not all: You can also get in touch with our speakers and expo partners, even if you won’t be there!

ACE! 2024 conference - Talk and workshop on Psychological Safety
2024-06-13 - 2024-06-14 | Multikino Kraków, Dobrego Pasterza 128, Krakow, 30-962, Poland
I’m returning to ACE! in 2024 to do a talk and a mini workshop on Psychological Safety: Learn why psychological safety matters and what can be done to explore it and increase safety in your team.
Why Psychological Safety Matters for Software Teams
Psychological safety: some see it as a buzzword of these times. Others view it as out of their world, impossible to reach in the company where they work. It’s a hot topic, and I wonder if people truly understand what makes it so important and what difference it can make.
This talk goes back to the “why” of psychological safety, exploring why it matters and why we should care about psychological safety in software teams (I also proposed a mini-workshop that is about the “what” and “how” of psychological safety). Psychological safety should be a no-brainer for teams to work on, as it lays the foundation for effective collaboration and teamwork.
Teams where people feel safe sometimes aren’t even aware of having it, as it feels like a natural thing. An absence of psychological safety can seriously bring damage to people and impact the team’s performance. In the end, establishing safe teams is the right thing to do, it’s common sense (but not common practice, unfortunately).
In this talk, Ben explores why software teams should care about psychological safety. He will show what can happen when people feel truly safe to raise issues, admit mistakes, ask for help and offer help, take risks, and share any concerns that they may feel. Next, he will dive into the aspects of psychological safety and provide ideas for making it safer at work. Trust and inclusion have strong relationships with psychological safety.
He will share how they relate to each other and how working on one or more of them can benefit the others. In this presentation, He will share his learnings of working in and with teams where people felt psychologically safe. He will also present findings from research that has been done on psychological safety (partly based on what he published on InfoQ: Psychological Safety in Tech Teams).
Fostering Psychological Safety in Agile Teams – Mini Workshop
Psychological safety in teams is important; team members must feel safe and able to communicate and collaborate effectively to deliver value. It’s also necessary to build long-lasting teams since things will happen and relationships will be strained.
But, how safe is a team? How can we determine if there are any factors that make the team unsafe or have an impact on the team’s culture?
In this mini-workshop, we’ll play games for psychological safety and team culture utilizing a deck of coaching cards, The Psychological Safety Cards. We will learn how to use gamification to gain a better understanding of what’s going on in teams. Individuals share what they have learned from working in teams, what has impacted the team’s safety and culture, and what has led to positive change.
Different game formats will be played in groups in parallel. Examples are an ice-breaker to get people talking about psychological safety, a constellation where people take positions about aspects of psychological safety in their team or organization, and collaborative card games where people work together to create an environment that fosters psychological safety.
Here’s an article with more background on psychological safety and some approaches that can be used to apply it: Re-establishing psychological safety in teams. Happy to design new game formats to have people experiment with the concepts and ideas, let me know your thoughts on it?
After playing the game, each group will take time to debrief and reflect on how the game went and what they learned about psychological safety. Next, there’s time for each group to share their learnings with all workshop attendees.
The Psychological Safety Cards have been developed by Ben Linders and Fabio Armani and have been reviewed by people from the worldwide agile community. These cards are available as a downloadable product. Attendees can get a free personal copy of the product on request: Psychological Safety Cards.
ACE! Conference
ACE! is the largest regional conference of its kind in Central Europe, attracting people from all over the region. We’re really excited about the next edition which will combine two tracks: Agile Software Development and Product Design & Management into one conference.

The Building Software Better track is a great place to learn for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Project & Product Managers, Team Leaders, attendees on the C-level position and everyone engaged in the Product Delivery process.
The Building Better Products track is for everyone involved in creating products, including Product Managers, UI and Interaction Designers, and UX Designers & Researchers.

ACE! 2024:

In Kraków (Multikino): for those of you who missed the full conference experience and would love to share knowledge & experience with others in person
Learn with experts: join Agile Coaching Corner, Product & Design Cafe, Open Space sessions and many more
Make new connections that last: get to know practitioners from all over the world during the Dinner with Stranger

QCon London 2024
2024-04-08 - 2024-04-10 | Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Broad Sanctuary, Westminster, London, England, SW1P 3EE, United Kingdom
I’m attending QCon London 2024 as an InfoQ editor. It’s a conference with curated learning set by senior software leaders, with real-world technical talks from software leaders at early adopter companies.
QCon London
QCon is an international software development conference for senior software engineers, software architects, and team leaders.
QCon focuses on emerging software trends and innovations in software development and technical leadership with all talks by software domain experts. Our Programming Committee identifies the key trends and creates a curated learning journey by selecting leading software practitioners to deep-dive on each topic.
Sessions are composed of keynotes from world-class practitioners, tech talks with leading authorities, Q&As, and an opportunity to engage with peers to help answer your questions. You’ll gain actionable ideas that you can take back to your team and implement right away.
At QCon, we prefer Engineers over Evangelists, Practitioners over Trainers/Coaches, and Team Leads over Consultants. That is not to say we don’t find value on the people on the right, we just prefer those on the left. This simple mantra guides our editorial content. We want to hear from the people who are living with decisions and implementations. This is core to what makes QCon QCon.

Mini-workshop on Psychological Safety at FlowCon France 2024
2024-03-06 - 2024-03-07 | Centre culturel le Beffroi, 2 Place Emile Cresp, Paris, 92120, France
I will be returning to FlowCon France, this time to do a mini-workshop on Psychological Safety on March 6-7 in Paris, France.
Psychological Safety in Teams
Psychological safety in teams is important; team members must feel safe and able to communicate and collaborate effectively to deliver value. It’s also necessary to build long-lasting teams since things will happen and relationships will be strained.
But, how safe is a team? How can we determine if there are any factors that make the team unsafe or have an impact on the team’s culture?
In this mini-workshop, we’ll play games for psychological safety and team culture utilizing a deck of coaching cards, The Psychological Safety Cards. We will learn how to use gamification to gain a better understanding of what’s going on in teams. Individuals share what they have learned from working in teams, what has impacted the team’s safety and culture, and what has led to positive change.
Different game formats will be played in groups in parallel. Examples are an ice-breaker to get people talking about psychological safety, a constellation where people take positions about aspects of psychological safety in their team or organization, and collaborative card games where people work together to create an environment that fosters psychological safety.
FlowCon France
FlowCon has been bringing together software development professionals for 10 years around a main concept: product development flow, whether Lean Kanban (originally), agility, Lean, Continuous Delivery, Beyond Budgeting, and all the international thoughts on how to work better as a team. All the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and participants come together around these questions.
Attendees come to FlowCon to experience a selection of talks from around the world. Flowcon claims a mix of participants, from the developer to the boss, rarely gathered in the same place, and all concerned by common subjects.
Flowcon has become a key conference for the French Agile community, with the ambition to go beyond our borders. Hosted by renowned national and international speakers, the conference addresses the topics at the heart of the concerns of modern agility.

Full-day Workshop Improving Organizational Agility @ DevOpsCon Singapore 2023
2023-12-11 - 2023-12-14 | Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Center, 1 Raffles Blvd, Singapore, 039593, Singapore
I’m giving a full-day workshop where people learn to apply agile throughout their organization to develop the right products, deliver faster with better quality, and improve organizational agility. Join my workshop Improving Organizational Agility at DevOpsCon Singapore 2023!
Improving Organizational Agility
Many organizations are going through agile transformations. They are implementing Scrum or Kanban and using large-scale agile frameworks like Lean, SAFe, LeSS or DAD, hoping to better serve the IT needs of the business and to develop products that satisfy their customers’ needs. Unfortunately, those transformations do not always live up to the agile promise of delivering better products, faster, at lower costs.
In the workshop Improving Organizational Agility, you will experience how your organization can become more agile.

Practice creating an environment that enables teams and empowers them to apply agile practices.
Learn to establish an agile collaborative mindset throughout the organization.
Create a culture that supports collaboration and which motivates people to work together to create high-quality products and services.

The workshop is loaded with examples and suggestions to help you become more agile and lean. The practices in this workshop will help you to apply agile (Scrum, Kanban, DevOps) methods and frameworks effectively to increase organizational agility.
Learn to apply agile throughout your organization to develop the right products, deliver faster with better quality, and improve organizational agility!
DevOpsCon Singapore
DevOps is fundamentally changing the IT world and sets the path for successful business transformation. Join DevOpsCon to learn about the latest tools.
How do cloud platforms, microservices, and Kubernetes play together with comprehensive automation and continuous delivery? How can you handle increasing complexity in your organization?
At DevOpsCon, you will meet internationally recognized thought leaders of the DevOps movement and benefit from their expertise.

Why people hate working in agile teams, and what you can do about it @ QA: Challenge Accepted
2023-10-01 | John Atanasoff Forum, Sofia Tech Parc, Boulevard "Tsarigradsko shose" 111Г, Sofia, 1784, Bulgaria
I will be speaking at QA: Challenge Accepted about why people hate working in agile teams, and what you can do about it. Join me on Sunday, October 1 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Why people hate working in agile teams
By now, many of us have been through one or more “agile transformations”. We’ve been surrounded by agile coaches and Scrum masters who tried to help us adapt to agile, with managers who became servant leaders. Hopefully they weren’t telling you what to do or how to do your work! A lot of people simply hate working in agile teams – Ben hears that all the time. And that is why he’s here! In this talk, Ben will explore the difficulties of collaborating in teams and what we can do to make it beneficial and worthwhile for people to work in teams.
What you can do about it
Ben will delve into what teams really need, and what leaders should do and should not do to support them, including providing an environment and culture where teams can flourish and supporting teams in removing barriers. Through this talk, attendees will gain a better understanding of the reasons why people struggle to work in agile teams, and what leaders can do to create a positive and supportive environment for teams. The talk is intended for anyone working in a team or working with teams, from agile coaches and Scrum masters to managers and team members who are looking to improve their collaboration skills and create a more positive and productive work environment.
QA: Challenge Accepted
QA: Challenge Accepted is an international full-day single-track conference targeted towards enthusiasts, specialists and managers participating in software testing and software quality assurance. The event is initiated by the QA community in Bulgaria – for professionals from professionals. After 8 consecutive years, we would like to welcome you on October 1st in Sofia Tech Park. The event will also be streamed online for free. The conference will feature a diverse range of sessions, and you will learn about a variety of topics for QA professionals from all levels. Do not miss QA: Challenge Accepted 2023!

Workshop Improving Organizational Agility
2023-09-20 | Agile Actors #learning, 62A Ethnikis Antistasis, Chalandri, Greece
I’m giving my popular workshop Improving Organizational Agility as an in-person course on September 20, in collaboration with Agile Actors #learning. Sign up.

Many organizations are going through agile transformations. They are implementing Scrum or Kanban and using large-scale agile frameworks like Lean, SAFe, LeSS or DAD, hoping to better serve the IT needs of the business and to develop products that satisfy their customer’s needs. Unfortunately, those transformations do not always live up to the agile promise of delivering better products, faster, at lower costs.
Improving Organizational Agility
This 8-hour workshop aims in helping organizations:

having difficulties to adjust themselves to shorten delivery times
having products with quality issues and are losing customers
doing an agile/Scrum/Kanban transformation but not seeing the expected benefits
unable to remove barriers that are blocking cross-organizational collaboration
trying to adopt agile but finding it hard to change the culture and mindset
looking for ways to apply agile practices more effectively and needs help with that
not able to improve in small but meaningful steps
on an agile journey but unsure where to go next or what would be the best thing to do

Who should attend
This workshop is intended for:

Agile and Lean Coaches
Agile Consultants and Change Managers
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers

The practices in this workshop will help participants apply agile methods and frameworks effectively to increase organizational agility
What will you learn
Participants of this 8-hour workshop will learn how to apply agile throughout their organization to develop the right products, deliver faster with better quality, and improve organizational agility, and more specifically:

Practice how to create an environment that enables teams and empower them to apply agile practices.
Learn ways to establish an agile mindset throughout the organization.
Create a culture that supports collaboration and which motivates people to work together to create high-quality products and services.

The workshop is loaded with examples and suggestions to help you become more agile and lean.
Moreover, participants of this workshop are expected to:

Practice how to assess their agility with Agile Self-assessments to find out how well they are doing
Learn effective ways to travel their agile journey and find out what they need to do this
Get ideas for improving collaboration and communication between teams and stakeholders and break down barriers
Learn tips and tricks to expand and scale an agile way of working throughout the organization
Get advice on selecting and applying agile and lean practices effectively

About the Instructor
Ben Linders runs a one-person business in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives, What Drives Quality, The Agile Self-assessment Game, Problem? What Problem?, and Continuous Improvement. Creator of many Agile Coaching Tools, for example, the Agile Self-assessment Game.
Ben is a well-known speaker and author; he’s much respected for sharing his experiences and helping others share theirs. His books and games have been translated into more than 12 languages and are used by professionals in teams and organizations all around the world.
As an adviser, trainer, and coach, he helps organizations with effectively deploying software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers.
Agile Actors #learning
Agile Actors #learning is the Learning Ecosystem for the ambitious and talented tech professional. From setting meaningful personal goals to getting personal coaching, it helps you find your next career dot and deliver value to the real world.
We are helping Tech Professionals to combine theory with best practices as well as real-world experiences in order to grow and excel.
Our courses, developed by experienced Software Engineers, Testers, Agile Coaches focus on hands-on examples and projects to get you up to speed with any new technology, tool or methodology.
Schedule
Next in-person course has been scheduled for September 20, 2023 10:00 am – 6:00 pm (EEST). Sign up.

Workshop Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices
2023-09-18 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you can practice your problem-solving skills and learn how to deal with agile impediments. Join me on September 18, 2023, for the live workshop Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices.
A one-day workshop for €350 + VAT.

Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices
Teams will face problems in their daily work. Agile calls these problems impediments. Impediments can be something in the way of working, be it processes, tools, or organizational rules or structures. They slow down teams or block the delivery of products or services.
Teams need to be able to deal with impediments as they have an impact on the flow of work, they are problems that reduce outputs and results.
Agile brings problems to the surface and provides solutions for addressing them. In the workshop Problems Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices, you will learn how to recognize, analyze, and solve problems effectively and faster using agile thinking and practices.
Learning by Doing
You will practice:

Recognizing signals of problems, and creating safety in teams for people to bring up problems
Analyzing problems picking one technique: causal analysis, blameless post-mortems, retrospectives, swarming, or blocker analysis
Managing impediments using techniques from Lean & Kanban; decide how to solve them and who should be involved
Using coaching and games to improve collaboration and develop problem-solving skills

Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

In this workshop, we will explore how to handle impediments effectively and faster and practice our problem-solving skills.
Key-Learnings

Become able to create a blameless culture where signals are spotted more easily and problems are brought up sooner
Develop your skills for analyzing problems to get a deep understanding
Explore ways to take action and follow up to remove problems or mitigate the impact
Learn how to collaboratively deal with impediments in your team and organization
Explore ways to prevent problems from happening again in the future

Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Attendees of this workshop will get a free ebook copy of Problem? What problem? – Dealing Effectively with Impediments using Agile Thinking with Problem-solving Practices and a downloadable copy of the Impediment Board Game (value €30).
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Fostering an Agile Culture
2023-09-11 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you can practice culture change, learn how to increase team autonomy and morale, and explore using retrospectives to keep your agile journey going smoothly. Join me on September 11, 2023, for the live workshop Fostering an Agile Culture.
A one-day online workshop for €350 + VAT.
Fostering an Agile Culture
Adopting agile often doesn’t live up to its promise of delivering better products, faster, at lower costs. The missing ingredients that cause failure often have to do with an insufficient agile mindset and difficulties in changing to a culture of agile thinking and acting. An agile culture is a foundation for an agile way of working and a successful agile journey, it is a key factor that you need to work on.
In this workshop, we’ll explore how organizations can visualize their culture. We learn how organizations can foster a mindset and culture change toward agility and how they can apply agile practices and capabilities to deliver value frequently and fast.
Next, we’ll explore how team autonomy and morale can be increased by playing the Agile Impediment Board Game. Finally, we’ll see how agile retrospectives can be used to establish continuous improvement with effective communication and collaboration, to keep your agile journey going in the right direction.
Learning by Doing
You will practice:

Visualize your existing agile culture and see the need and possibilities for culture change
Share agile strengths and challenges to explore what it takes for an agile culture and mindset
Experience how gamification can be used to improve the team’s autonomy and morale
Practice retrospective techniques to reflect and find ways to improve your agile journey

Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

In this workshop, we will explore how to create conditions for culture change and use this to increase the agility of organizations.
Practical information
Four-hour interactive live online workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Attendees of this workshop will get free downloadable copies of the Culture Cards and the Impediment Board Game (value €25).
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Self-assessing your Agility
2023-09-07 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you learn how to assess your agility using gamification and take the next steps on your agile journey: Join me on September 7, 2023, for this live online workshop.
A one-day workshop for €350.

Self-assessing your Agility
In the workshop Self-assessing your Agility, you will practice games and exercises to explore how agile your teams are.
We’ll be playing The Agile Self-Assessment Game, a serious game used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. Playing this game enables professionals to reflect on collaboration and team interworking and agree upon the next steps for their agile journey. With this game, they can discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.
This cooperative card game uses an engagement model to involve people in the assessment. Instead of imposing change, the game enables people to pull in ideas for change and apply those in a way that best suits their collective needs.
Next, you’ll learn how to create an “agile map” that inspires you with ideas for increasing your agility and provides suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey.
In this workshop, you will experience different playing formats of The Agile Self-assessment Game. You’ll hear about the importance of pre-selecting cards to create focused card decks and find out about different exercises that can be used to self-assess and play your agile journey.
The Agile Self-assessment Game supports all agile teams, whether using Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, DevOps, DaD, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, Scrum@Scale, or any other agile framework. Specific agile frameworks are supported by expansion packs for Scrum, DevOps, Business Agility, and Kanban. Many exercises can also be played with card decks on Agile Testings, Agile Quality, and Psychological Safety.
The workshop is loaded with examples and suggestions to help you increase your agility.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

The practices in this workshop will help you to explore your way of working and take the next steps on your agile journey.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore what agile and agility means and the benefits that they can bring
Understand the power of engagement and invitation-based agile adoption approaches
Experience how you can self-assess the agility of teams and organizations
Play the Agile Self-assessment Game using different playing formats and card decks
Learn ways to plan and traveling your own agile journey

Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can play the games and get fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
The workshop Assessing your Agility is based on the Agile Self-assessment Game. All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the Agile Self-Assessment Game and the ebook ‘The Agile Self-assessment Game’ (value €30).

Testimonials
This is what people say who played the Agile Self-assessment Game:
The cards help to get the team out of the daily work and daily mindset.
This is a wonderful way to get your team talking about how they are “being” agile!
The game really did add value and I got some real insight into the thoughts of people.
Ben’s Agile Assessment game is easy to adopt and easy for teams to pick up.
We realized our agile maturity level, recognized actionable improvements and had great fun and insights!
Playing the game builds clarity and alignment on what Agile means to everyone on the team and helps team members meaningfully evaluate their agility.
It’s a great tool to use for a retrospective.
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Improving Your Testing Skills and Practices with Gamification @ Testing United 2023
2023-09-04 - 2023-09-05 | Refinery Gallery Bratislava, Vlčie hrdlo, Bratislava, 821 07, Slovakia (Slovak Republic)
At Testing United 2023 I will talk about Improving Your Testing Skills and Practices with Gamification. The conference will be held in Bratislava and Miami, and in VR, on September 4 & 5.
Improving Your Testing Skills and Practices with Gamification
So many challenges, and so little time. As testers, we need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone engaged and get the best out of people.
With games, we can foster psychological safety and create a setting where people feel safe to speak up about how things are going. Playing games with coaching cards people share what’s working and what isn’t, the challenges they are facing, and what they would like to try out. Everybody will be involved, it’s a fun and effective way to practice new ideas and collaboratively decide on what to improve next.
The testing coaching cards contain statements about agile testing mindset, values, principles, and practices. Playing with these coaching cards helps testers to explore their contributions and look for ways to increase the value that they contribute to their team and organization.
In this presentation, Ben Linders will show how playing games (onsite or online) with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards help to explore your current testing and quality practices and decide as a team on what to improve and experiment with.
3 key takeaways

Learn about gamification as a way to engage people into learning
Understand the importance of psychological safety in improving skills and team performance
See how coaching cards can be used to discuss and self-assess working practices

Testing United
Testing United is a testing conference aimed at all levels of testers, test leads, test managers, test consultants and IT employees that come in daily contact with testing teams. The conference unites experts from the extended central Europe region, and thus expands on this idea by periodically rotating the venue between Vienna, Prague and Bratislava since 2018.
With this year’s main topic “2023: Tester’s place in Universe, Metaverse & Beyond“, experienced speakers will outline the changes testing community is facing.

Workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives
2023-08-31 | Online, Netherlands
Learn how you can facilitate retrospectives, practice exercises that involve everyone, and gain insight into psychological safety in retrospectives in the online workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives on August 31, 2023.
A one-day interactive workshop for €350 +VAT.

Facilitating Retrospectives
Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve by reflecting at the end of each iteration to learn what is going well and what can be improved, and to do improvement actions in the next iteration. Retrospective facilitators need to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises and the skills to design and lead valuable agile retrospectives.
Facilitating retrospectives can be hard. As a facilitator you need to:

Set the stage where people get into a reflection and learning mode
Do exercises that get people involved and bring out issues that the team wants to work on
Establish psychological safety for people to be open about what bothers them
Recognize and deal with retrospective smells or anti-patterns when they happen
Guide the team to come up with their vital few actions to make change happen

Remote retrospectives pose extra challenges due to not having people in one physical room for the retrospective:

It’s more difficult to foster productive and collaborative behavior and keep everyone involved during the meeting
Not physically being together calls for different retrospective exercises or innovative ways to do exercises online
Establishing psychological safety when people collaborate remotely is essential, but can be hard to do

In the workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives, we will practice leading retrospectives while fostering psychological safety using exercises that keep people involved.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Retrospective Facilitators
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile Teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Anybody who is involved in agile retrospectives

The practices in this workshop will help you to get more value from doing (remote) agile retrospectives.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore unproductive behavior in retrospectives and learn to recognize retrospective smells or anti-patterns
Develop your facilitation skills for leading retrospectives
Practice different exercises for in-person and distributed retrospectives using online tools
Learn about psychological safety in retrospectives and what can be done to keep people involved

Practical information
Four-hour interactive online live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until two weeks before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the ebook Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Bingo, and a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Smells Cards. (value €30).

Testimonials
The below testimonials come from the many workshops on agile retrospectives that I have done over the years.
“The workshop presented in a clear way why retrospectives are the driving force to an organization which wants to improve. Using some playful exercises I learned several easy ways to extract the current status of the team and how to decide which should be the next steps to address potential problems and risks”
Nikolaos Raptis – Scrum Master – Software Developer at Scytl Secure Electronic Voting
“I got a better understanding of retrospectives and many ideas on how to use them in my work. I can suggest this workshop to anyone that wants to go agile. Also thanks for the reading material, I found it very helpful.”
Bill Souliotis – Manager Software Research & Development Graphics User Interface at BETA CAE Systems
“After working together for many years, our team (myself included) grew out of the need for formal retrospectives. This workshop helped to get some fresh ideas that can refuel our retros and stressed some key points about the necessity and importance of facilitation in these events.”
Yorgos Saslis – Solution Design Executive at CytechMobile.com
“I’d like to thank you again for your excellent workshop. It was fun and I already started using some of the ideas with my team. The change is definitely notable.”
Liran Ben-Porat, qSpark LTD
“Thanks once again for a wonderful workshop! We have a lot of useful outputs which we are going to implement. And thanks for the free copy of your book about the retrospectives, now we are able to go through the topics once again and do the exercises in our company.”
Jakub Grós, Project Engineer at Honeywell
“I found the workshop very useful. We’ve already started to experiment with some action items we gave ourselves in the workshop, doing changes in our overall retrospective approach. We are also trying out cross facilitation, having our retrospectives facilitated by a Scrum master of another team.”
Simona Humpolová, Scrum master at EmbedIT
I have taken some of my Scrum masters to Ben’s retrospective training. I like the training very much, and also his website which contains many retro techniques. I still use this as a reference when I coach people.
Zoltán Ludányi, Agile Software Development Consultant
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Continuous Improvement in Remote and Distributed Teams
2023-05-31 - 2023-06-01 | Online, Netherlands
I’m giving an online workshop to practice continuous improvement in remote and distributed teams on May 31 and June 1 in collaboration with Agile Actors #learning.
Sign up for Continuous Improvement in Remote and Distributed Teams.
Remote and Distributed Teams
Working with remote or distributed teams can be challenging. Distance and time differences make it more difficult to work together and to collaboratively improve the way of working.
While remote or distributed teams can certainly have advantages over co-located teams, their benefits can only be reached if teams know how to find effective ways to collaborate and communicate and become able to improve continuously.
Working with remote or distributed teams can be challenging. Distance and time differences make it more difficult to work together and to collaboratively improve the way of working.
While remote or distributed teams can certainly have advantages over co-located teams, their benefits can only be reached if teams know how to find effective ways to collaborate and communicate and become able to improve continuously.
Some of the main challenges that remote or distributed teams have are:

Establishing ongoing communication between team members
Coordinating and synchronizing the work that needs to be done
Changing the way the work is done while keeping alignment between different locations where the work is done
Dealing with cultural differences and establishing trust between team members

These challenges along with relevant best practices will be discussed during this hands-on workshop.
Who should attend
This 8-hour workshop is intended for:

Agile coaches and change agents,
Team members of remote/distributed teams,
Team, product or project managers,
(Senior) managers,
Anybody involved in remote collaboration.

What will you learn
This 8-hour virtual workshop helps teams explore the way that they are collaborating and communicating and to find ways to improve and become more effective as a remote or distributed team.
In the hands-on workshop, participants will learn to:

Define shared goals, values and principles to work together in an effective way
Establish a culture where people respect and trust each other and are open and honest
Manage the balance between dependency and autonomy of team members at different locations
How to do agile self-assessments and remote retrospectives to reflect on the way of working
Define and execute actions to improve collaboration and communication
Improve using tools for collaboration and communications

About the Instructor
Ben Linders runs a one-person business in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives, What Drives Quality, The Agile Self-assessment Game, Problem? What Problem?, and Continuous Improvement. Creator of many Agile Coaching Tools, for example, the Agile Self-assessment Game.
Ben is a well-known speaker and author; he’s much respected for sharing his experiences and helping others share theirs. His books and games have been translated into more than 12 languages and are used by professionals in teams and organizations all around the world.
As an adviser, trainer, and coach, he helps organizations with effectively deploying software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers.
Schedule
Next virtual session has been scheduled for 31 May & 1 June 2023, 10:00 – 14:00 EEST
About Agile Actors #Learning
Agile Actors #learning is the Learning Ecosystem for the ambitious and talented tech professional. From setting meaningful personal goals to getting personal coaching, it helps you find your next career dot and deliver value to the real world.
We are helping Tech Professionals to combine theory with best practices as well as real-world experiences in order to grow and excel.
Our courses, developed by experienced Software Engineers, Testers, Agile Coaches focus on hands-on examples and projects to get you up to speed with any new technology, tool or methodology.

Workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives
2023-04-12 | Online, Netherlands
Learn how you can facilitate retrospectives, practice exercises that involve everyone, and gain insight into psychological safety in retrospectives in the online workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives on April 12, 2023.
A one-day interactive workshop for €350 +VAT.

Facilitating Retrospectives
Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve by reflecting at the end of each iteration to learn what is going well and what can be improved, and to do improvement actions in the next iteration. Retrospective facilitators need to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises and the skills to design and lead valuable agile retrospectives.
Facilitating retrospectives can be hard. As a facilitator you need to:

Set the stage where people get into a reflection and learning mode
Do exercises that get people involved and bring out issues that the team wants to work on
Establish psychological safety for people to be open about what bothers them
Recognize and deal with retrospective smells or anti-patterns when they happen
Guide the team to come up with their vital few actions to make change happen

Remote retrospectives pose extra challenges due to not having people in one physical room for the retrospective:

It’s more difficult to foster productive and collaborative behavior and keep everyone involved during the meeting
Not physically being together calls for different retrospective exercises or innovative ways to do exercises online
Establishing psychological safety when people collaborate remotely is essential, but can be hard to do

In the workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives, we will practice leading retrospectives while fostering psychological safety using exercises that keep people involved.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Retrospective Facilitators
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile Teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Anybody who is involved in agile retrospectives

The practices in this workshop will help you to get more value from doing (remote) agile retrospectives.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore unproductive behavior in retrospectives and learn to recognize retrospective smells or anti-patterns
Develop your facilitation skills for leading retrospectives
Practice different exercises for in-person and distributed retrospectives using online tools
Learn about psychological safety in retrospectives and what can be done to keep people involved

Practical information
Four-hour interactive online live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until two weeks before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the ebook Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Bingo, and a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Smells Cards. (value €30).

Testimonials
The below testimonials come from the many workshops on agile retrospectives that I have done over the years.
“The workshop presented in a clear way why retrospectives are the driving force to an organization which wants to improve. Using some playful exercises I learned several easy ways to extract the current status of the team and how to decide which should be the next steps to address potential problems and risks”
Nikolaos Raptis – Scrum Master – Software Developer at Scytl Secure Electronic Voting
“I got a better understanding of retrospectives and many ideas on how to use them in my work. I can suggest this workshop to anyone that wants to go agile. Also thanks for the reading material, I found it very helpful.”
Bill Souliotis – Manager Software Research & Development Graphics User Interface at BETA CAE Systems
“After working together for many years, our team (myself included) grew out of the need for formal retrospectives. This workshop helped to get some fresh ideas that can refuel our retros and stressed some key points about the necessity and importance of facilitation in these events.”
Yorgos Saslis – Solution Design Executive at CytechMobile.com
“I’d like to thank you again for your excellent workshop. It was fun and I already started using some of the ideas with my team. The change is definitely notable.”
Liran Ben-Porat, qSpark LTD
“Thanks once again for a wonderful workshop! We have a lot of useful outputs which we are going to implement. And thanks for the free copy of your book about the retrospectives, now we are able to go through the topics once again and do the exercises in our company.”
Jakub Grós, Project Engineer at Honeywell
“I found the workshop very useful. We’ve already started to experiment with some action items we gave ourselves in the workshop, doing changes in our overall retrospective approach. We are also trying out cross facilitation, having our retrospectives facilitated by a Scrum master of another team.”
Simona Humpolová, Scrum master at EmbedIT
I have taken some of my Scrum masters to Ben’s retrospective training. I like the training very much, and also his website which contains many retro techniques. I still use this as a reference when I coach people.
Zoltán Ludányi, Agile Software Development Consultant
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices
2023-04-11 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you can practice your problem-solving skills and learn how to deal with agile impediments. Join me on April 11, 2023, for the live workshop Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices.
A one-day workshop for €350 + VAT.

Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices
Teams will face problems in their daily work. Agile calls these problems impediments. Impediments can be something in the way of working, be it processes, tools, or organizational rules or structures. They slow down teams or block the delivery of products or services.
Teams need to be able to deal with impediments as they have an impact on the flow of work, they are problems that reduce outputs and results.
Agile brings problems to the surface and provides solutions for addressing them. In the workshop Problems Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices, you will learn how to recognize, analyze, and solve problems effectively and faster using agile thinking and practices.
Learning by Doing
You will practice:

Recognizing signals of problems, and creating safety in teams for people to bring up problems
Analyzing problems picking one technique: causal analysis, blameless post-mortems, retrospectives, swarming, or blocker analysis
Managing impediments using techniques from Lean & Kanban; decide how to solve them and who should be involved
Using coaching and games to improve collaboration and develop problem-solving skills

Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

In this workshop, we will explore how to handle impediments effectively and faster and practice our problem-solving skills.
Key-Learnings

Become able to create a blameless culture where signals are spotted more easily and problems are brought up sooner
Develop your skills for analyzing problems to get a deep understanding
Explore ways to take action and follow up to remove problems or mitigate the impact
Learn how to collaboratively deal with impediments in your team and organization
Explore ways to prevent problems from happening again in the future

Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Attendees of this workshop will get a free ebook copy of Problem? What problem? – Dealing Effectively with Impediments using Agile Thinking with Problem-solving Practices and a downloadable copy of the Impediment Board Game (value €30).
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Retrospective Facilitators Gathering 2023
2023-03-13 - 2023-03-17 | Golf Resort Konopiste, Benesov, Bystřice 27, Bystřice, 256 01, Czech Republic
Every year, a group of us who are passionate about retrospective facilitation gather to share observations, grow our skills and work out things that are puzzling us. It’s a small, invitation-only gathering, which provides opportunities for very focused and high-density learning, not to mention a bit of fun and interaction with our peers.
The Retrospective Facilitators Gathering is a yearly Open Space conference by and for experienced practitioners in agile retrospectives. People from all over the world come to this gathering to share experiences and ideas and to learn from other facilitators.
Over the years I’ve learned a lot at the RFGs that I attended. It’s great to be among peers who share their experiences. The open space format enables relevant topics to pop up, both for group and one-to-one sessions.
This year the Retrospective Facilitators Gathering (RFG) will be near Prague, Czech Republic. I’m attending it to share my upcoming book Valuable Agile Retrospectives, learn new exercises and techniques, and sharpen my facilitator and (retrospective) teaching skills.

Workshop Fostering an Agile Culture
2023-03-08 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you can practice culture change, learn how to increase team autonomy and morale, and explore using retrospectives to keep your agile journey going smoothly. Join me on March 8, 2023, for the live workshop Fostering an Agile Culture.
A one-day online workshop for €350 + VAT.
Fostering an Agile Culture
Adopting agile often doesn’t live up to its promise of delivering better products, faster, at lower costs. The missing ingredients that cause failure often have to do with an insufficient agile mindset and difficulties in changing to a culture of agile thinking and acting. An agile culture is a foundation for an agile way of working and a successful agile journey, it is a key factor that you need to work on.
In this workshop, we’ll explore how organizations can visualize their culture. We learn how organizations can foster a mindset and culture change toward agility and how they can apply agile practices and capabilities to deliver value frequently and fast.
Next, we’ll explore how team autonomy and morale can be increased by playing the Agile Impediment Board Game. Finally, we’ll see how agile retrospectives can be used to establish continuous improvement with effective communication and collaboration, to keep your agile journey going in the right direction.
Learning by Doing
You will practice:

Visualize your existing agile culture and see the need and possibilities for culture change
Share agile strengths and challenges to explore what it takes for an agile culture and mindset
Experience how gamification can be used to improve the team’s autonomy and morale
Practice retrospective techniques to reflect and find ways to improve your agile journey

Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

In this workshop, we will explore how to create conditions for culture change and use this to increase the agility of organizations.
Practical information
Four-hour interactive live online workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Attendees of this workshop will get free downloadable copies of the Culture Cards and the Impediment Board Game (value €25).
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Self-assessing your Agility
2023-03-07 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you learn how to assess your agility using gamification and take the next steps on your agile journey: Join me on March 7, 2023, for this live online workshop.
A one-day workshop for €350.

Self-assessing your Agility
In the workshop Self-assessing your Agility, you will practice games and exercises to explore how agile your teams are.
We’ll be playing The Agile Self-Assessment Game, a serious game used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. Playing this game enables professionals to reflect on collaboration and team interworking and agree upon the next steps for their agile journey. With this game, they can discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.
Next, you’ll learn how to create an “agile map” that inspires you with ideas for increasing your agility and provides suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey.
In this workshop, you will experience different playing formats of The Agile Self-assessment Game. You’ll hear about the importance of pre-selecting cards to create focused card decks and find out about different exercises that can be used to self-assess and play your agile journey.
The workshop is loaded with examples and suggestions to help you to increase your agility.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

The practices in this workshop will help you to explore your way of working and take the next steps on your agile journey.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore what agile and agility means and the benefits that they can bring
Understand the power of engagement and invitation-based agile adoption approaches
Experience how you can self-assess the agility of teams and organizations
Play the Agile Self-assessment Game using different playing formats and card decks
Learn ways for planning and traveling your own agile journey

Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can play the games and get fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
The workshop Assessing your Agility is based on the Agile Self-assessment Game. All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the Agile Self-Assessment Game and the ebook ‘The Agile Self-assessment Game’ (value €30).

Testimonials
This is what people say who played the Agile Self-assessment Game:
The cards help to get the team out of the daily work and daily mindset.
This is a wonderful way to get your team talking about how they are “being” agile!
The game really did add value and I got some real insight into the thoughts of people.
Ben’s Agile Assessment game is easy to adopt and easy for teams to pick up.
We realized our agile maturity level, recognized actionable improvements and had great fun and insights!
Playing the game builds clarity and alignment on what Agile means to everyone on the team and helps team members meaningfully evaluate their agility.
It’s a great tool to use for a retrospective.
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spend; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives
2023-02-09 | Online, Netherlands
Learn how you can facilitate retrospectives, practice exercises that involve everyone, and gain insight into psychological safety in retrospectives in the online workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives on February 9, 2023.
A one-day interactive workshop for €450.

Facilitating Retrospectives
Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve by reflecting at the end of each iteration to learn what is going well and what can be improved, and to do improvement actions in the next iteration. Retrospective facilitators need to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises and the skills to design and lead valuable agile retrospectives.
Facilitating retrospectives can be hard. As a facilitator you need to:

Set the stage where people get into a reflection and learning mode
Do exercises that get people involved and bring out issues that the team wants to work on
Establish psychological safety for people to be open about what bothers them
Recognize and deal with retrospective smells or anti-patterns when they happen
Guide the team to come up with their vital few actions to make change happen

Remote retrospectives pose extra challenges due to not having people in one physical room for the retrospective:

It’s more difficult to foster productive and collaborative behavior and keep everyone involved during the meeting
Not physically being together calls for different retrospective exercises or innovative ways to do exercises online
Establishing psychological safety when people collaborate remotely is essential, but can be hard to do

In the workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives, we will practice leading retrospectives while fostering psychological safety using exercises that keep people involved.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Retrospective Facilitators
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile Teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Anybody who is involved in agile retrospectives

The practices in this workshop will help you to get more value from doing (remote) agile retrospectives.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore unproductive behavior in retrospectives and learn to recognize retrospective smells or anti-patterns
Develop your facilitation skills for leading retrospectives
Practice different exercises for in-person and distributed retrospectives using online tools
Learn about psychological safety in retrospectives and what can be done to keep people involved

Practical information
Four-hour interactive online live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until two weeks before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the ebook Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Bingo, and a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Smells Cards. (value €30).

Testimonials
The below testimonials come from the many workshops on agile retrospectives that I have done over the years.
“The workshop presented in a clear way why retrospectives are the driving force to an organization which wants to improve. Using some playful exercises I learned several easy ways to extract the current status of the team and how to decide which should be the next steps to address potential problems and risks”
Nikolaos Raptis – Scrum Master – Software Developer at Scytl Secure Electronic Voting
“I got a better understanding of retrospectives and many ideas on how to use them in my work. I can suggest this workshop to anyone that wants to go agile. Also thanks for the reading material, I found it very helpful.”
Bill Souliotis – Manager Software Research & Development Graphics User Interface at BETA CAE Systems
“After working together for many years, our team (myself included) grew out of the need for formal retrospectives. This workshop helped to get some fresh ideas that can refuel our retros and stressed some key points about the necessity and importance of facilitation in these events.”
Yorgos Saslis – Solution Design Executive at CytechMobile.com
“I’d like to thank you again for your excellent workshop. It was fun and I already started using some of the ideas with my team. The change is definitely notable.”
Liran Ben-Porat, qSpark LTD
“Thanks once again for a wonderful workshop! We have a lot of useful outputs which we are going to implement. And thanks for the free copy of your book about the retrospectives, now we are able to go through the topics once again and do the exercises in our company.”
Jakub Grós, Project Engineer at Honeywell
“I found the workshop very useful. We’ve already started to experiment with some action items we gave ourselves in the workshop, doing changes in our overall retrospective approach. We are also trying out cross facilitation, having our retrospectives facilitated by a Scrum master of another team.”
Simona Humpolová, Scrum master at EmbedIT
I have taken some of my Scrum masters to Ben’s retrospective training. I like the training very much, and also his website which contains many retro techniques. I still use this as a reference when I coach people.
Zoltán Ludányi, Agile Software Development Consultant
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Fostering an Agile Culture
2023-02-08 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you can practice culture change, learn how to increase team autonomy and morale, and explore using retrospectives to keep your agile journey going smoothly. Join me on February 8, 2023, for the live workshop Fostering an Agile Culture.
A one-day online workshop for €450.
Fostering an Agile Culture
Adopting agile often doesn’t live up to its promise of delivering better products, faster, at lower costs. The missing ingredients that cause failure often have to do with an insufficient agile mindset and difficulties in changing to a culture of agile thinking and acting. An agile culture is a foundation for an agile way of working and a successful agile journey, it is a key factor that you need to work on.
In this workshop, we’ll explore how organizations can visualize their culture. We learn how organizations can foster a mindset and culture change toward agility and how they can apply agile practices and capabilities to deliver value frequently and fast.
Next, we’ll explore how team autonomy and morale can be increased by playing the Agile Impediment Board Game. Finally, we’ll see how agile retrospectives can be used to establish continuous improvement with effective communication and collaboration, to keep your agile journey going in the right direction.
Learning by Doing
You will practice:

Visualize your existing agile culture and see the need and possibilities for culture change
Share agile strengths and challenges to explore what it takes for an agile culture and mindset
Experience how gamification can be used to improve the team’s autonomy and morale
Practice retrospective techniques to reflect and find ways to improve your agile journey

Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

In this workshop, we will explore how to create conditions for culture change and use this to increase the agility of organizations.
Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop of 4 hours.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Attendees of this workshop will get free downloadable copies of the Culture Cards and the Impediment Board Game (value €25).
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Self-assessing your Agility
2023-02-07 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you learn how to assess your agility using gamification and take the next steps on your agile journey: Join me on February 7, 2023, for this live online workshop.
A one-day workshop for €450.

Self-assessing your Agility
In the workshop Self-assessing your Agility, you will practice games and exercises to explore how agile your teams are.
We’ll be playing The Agile Self-Assessment Game, a serious game used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. Playing this game enables professionals to reflect on collaboration and team interworking and agree upon the next steps for their agile journey. With this game, they can discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.
Next, you’ll learn how to create an “agile map” that inspires you with ideas for increasing your agility and provides suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey.
In this workshop, you will experience different playing formats of The Agile Self-assessment Game. You’ll hear about the importance of pre-selecting cards to create focused card decks and find out about different exercises that can be used to self-assess and play your agile journey.
The workshop is loaded with examples and suggestions to help you to increase your agility.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

The practices in this workshop will help you to explore your way of working and take the next steps on your agile journey.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore what agile and agility means and the benefits that they can bring
Understand the power of engagement and invitation-based agile adoption approaches
Experience how you can self-assess the agility of teams and organizations
Play the Agile Self-assessment Game using different playing formats and card decks
Learn ways for planning and traveling your own agile journey

Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can play the games and get fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
The workshop Assessing your Agility is based on the Agile Self-assessment Game. All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the Agile Self-Assessment Game and the ebook ‘The Agile Self-assessment Game’ (value €30).

Testimonials
This is what people say who played the Agile Self-assessment Game:
The cards help to get the team out of the daily work and daily mindset.
This is a wonderful way to get your team talking about how they are “being” agile!
The game really did add value and I got some real insight into the thoughts of people.
Ben’s Agile Assessment game is easy to adopt and easy for teams to pick up.
We realized our agile maturity level, recognized actionable improvements and had great fun and insights!
Playing the game builds clarity and alignment on what Agile means to everyone on the team and helps team members meaningfully evaluate their agility.
It’s a great tool to use for a retrospective.
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spend; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices
2023-01-12 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you can practice your problem-solving skills and learn how to deal with agile impediments. Join me on January 12, 2023, for the live workshop Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices.
A one-day workshop for €450.

Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices
Teams will face problems in their daily work. Agile calls these problems impediments. Impediments can be something in the way of working, be it processes, tools, or organizational rules or structures. They slow down teams or block the delivery of products or services.
Teams need to be able to deal with impediments as they have an impact on the flow of work, they are problems that reduce outputs and results.
Agile brings problems to the surface and provides solutions for addressing them. In the workshop Problems Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices, you will learn how to recognize, analyze, and solve problems effectively and faster using agile thinking and practices.
Learning by Doing
You will practice:

Recognizing signals of problems, and creating safety in teams for people to bring up problems
Analyzing problems picking one technique: causal analysis, blameless post-mortems, retrospectives, swarming, or blocker analysis
Managing impediments using techniques from Lean & Kanban; decide how to solve them and who should be involved
Using coaching and games to improve collaboration and develop problem-solving skills

Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

In this workshop, we will explore how to handle impediments effectively and faster and practice our problem-solving skills.
Key-Learnings

Become able to create a blameless culture where signals are spotted more easily and problems are brought up sooner
Develop your skills for analyzing problems to get a deep understanding
Explore ways to take action and follow up to remove problems or mitigate the impact
Learn how to collaboratively deal with impediments in your team and organization
Explore ways to prevent problems from happening again in the future

Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Attendees of this workshop will get a free ebook copy of Problem? What problem? – Dealing Effectively with Impediments using Agile Thinking with Problem-solving Practices and a downloadable copy of the Impediment Board Game (value €30).
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Develop Better Products with Agile
2023-01-10 - 2023-01-11 | Online, Netherlands
Learn how to develop better products using agile practices to understand your customers, develop iteratively, deliver faster with better quality, and get valuable product feedback on January 10-11, 2023!
A two-day workshop for €750.
Develop Better Products with Agile
Many teams are adopting an agile way of working, for instance with Scrum. Their expectation is that agile will help them to develop products that satisfy their customer’s needs, be more flexible, and deliver faster. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way. Working in teams and collaborating with your customers to get feedback is hard. It’s not about doing Scrum, it’s about effectively using agile practices to deliver value faster.
In the workshop Develop Better Products with Agile you will practice agile and learn how to apply it effectively:

Practice understanding and prioritizing customer’s needs.
Work in small teams to develop products iteratively.
Learn to gather valuable feedback with product reviews and demos.
See how to improve your way of working with agile retrospectives.
Find out how to effectively apply agile practices with an agile mindset.

The workshop is loaded with examples and suggestions to help you deliver the right products faster.
If your team(s) are

finding it difficult to understand your customer’s needs to decide on what to deliver when
not delivering working software or not able to finish user stories within a reasonable time
not getting feedback from customers and unsure if you are delivering value to your customers
having difficulties communicating and working together as a self-organized team
doing agile/Scrum/Kanban rituals but feeling that they are not always helpful
having difficulty to reflect and learn and get good actions out of your retrospective

then this is the workshop for you!
Learning by Doing
The practices that you will be using in the workshop Develop Better Products with Agile will help you to develop the right products for your business and customers, reduce your delivery time, increase the quality of your software products, and become a collaborative high-performing team.
You will practice:

Communicating with customers to build a backlog and slice it into small product pieces to deliver
Prioritize delivery using criteria like value, risk, learning, debt, dependencies, etc
Collaborating remotely to create products
Doing demo and feedback sessions to find out what customers think of your product
Facilitating retrospectives to learn and improve product development skills

Audience
The workshop Develop Better Products with Agile is intended for:

(Senior) Developers, Architects, UI/UX designers, and Testers
Product Owners/managers
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Project/Line Managers
(Business) Stakeholders working with agile teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Anybody who is supporting teams in increasing their performance

Key-Learnings

Become better at understanding what your customers really need
Skills for prioritizing product development to deliver more value faster
Ability to do product reviews/demos to get valuable feedback
Ways to reflect and learn to increase the performance of your teams

Practical information
Two-day, four-hour per day interactive live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spend; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives
2022-12-15 | Online, Netherlands
Learn how you can facilitate retrospectives, practice exercises that involve everyone, and gain insight into psychological safety in retrospectives in the online workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives on December 15, 2022.
A one-day interactive workshop for €450.

Facilitating Retrospectives
Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve by reflecting at the end of each iteration to learn what is going well and what can be improved, and to do improvement actions in the next iteration. Retrospective facilitators need to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises and the skills to design and lead valuable agile retrospectives.
Facilitating retrospectives can be hard. As a facilitator you need to:

Set the stage where people get into a reflection and learning mode
Do exercises that get people involved and bring out issues that the team wants to work on
Establish psychological safety for people to be open about what bothers them
Recognize and deal with retrospective smells or anti-patterns when they happen
Guide the team to come up with their vital few actions to make change happen

Remote retrospectives pose extra challenges due to not having people in one physical room for the retrospective:

It’s more difficult to foster productive and collaborative behavior and keep everyone involved during the meeting
Not physically being together calls for different retrospective exercises or innovative ways to do exercises online
Establishing psychological safety when people collaborate remotely is essential, but can be hard to do

In the workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives, we will practice leading retrospectives while fostering psychological safety using exercises that keep people involved.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Retrospective Facilitators
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile Teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Anybody who is involved in agile retrospectives

The practices in this workshop will help you to get more value from doing (remote) agile retrospectives.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore unproductive behavior in retrospectives and learn to recognize retrospective smells or anti-patterns
Develop your facilitation skills for leading retrospectives
Practice different exercises for in-person and distributed retrospectives using online tools
Learn about psychological safety in retrospectives and what can be done to keep people involved

Practical information
Four-hour interactive online live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until two weeks before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the ebook Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Bingo, and a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Smells Cards. (value €30).

Testimonials
The below testimonials come from the many workshops on agile retrospectives that I have done over the years.
“The workshop presented in a clear way why retrospectives are the driving force to an organization which wants to improve. Using some playful exercises I learned several easy ways to extract the current status of the team and how to decide which should be the next steps to address potential problems and risks”
Nikolaos Raptis – Scrum Master – Software Developer at Scytl Secure Electronic Voting
“I got a better understanding of retrospectives and many ideas on how to use them in my work. I can suggest this workshop to anyone that wants to go agile. Also thanks for the reading material, I found it very helpful.”
Bill Souliotis – Manager Software Research & Development Graphics User Interface at BETA CAE Systems
“After working together for many years, our team (myself included) grew out of the need for formal retrospectives. This workshop helped to get some fresh ideas that can refuel our retros and stressed some key points about the necessity and importance of facilitation in these events.”
Yorgos Saslis – Solution Design Executive at CytechMobile.com
“I’d like to thank you again for your excellent workshop. It was fun and I already started using some of the ideas with my team. The change is definitely notable.”
Liran Ben-Porat, qSpark LTD
“Thanks once again for a wonderful workshop! We have a lot of useful outputs which we are going to implement. And thanks for the free copy of your book about the retrospectives, now we are able to go through the topics once again and do the exercises in our company.”
Jakub Grós, Project Engineer at Honeywell
“I found the workshop very useful. We’ve already started to experiment with some action items we gave ourselves in the workshop, doing changes in our overall retrospective approach. We are also trying out cross facilitation, having our retrospectives facilitated by a Scrum master of another team.”
Simona Humpolová, Scrum master at EmbedIT
I have taken some of my Scrum masters to Ben’s retrospective training. I like the training very much, and also his website which contains many retro techniques. I still use this as a reference when I coach people.
Zoltán Ludányi, Agile Software Development Consultant
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Fostering an Agile Culture
2022-11-29 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you can practice culture change, learn how to increase team autonomy and morale, and explore using retrospectives to keep your agile journey going smoothly. Join me on November 29, 2022, for the live workshop Fostering an Agile Culture.
A one-day online workshop for €450.
Fostering an Agile Culture
Adopting agile often doesn’t live up to its promise of delivering better products, faster, at lower costs. The missing ingredients that cause failure often have to do with an insufficient agile mindset and difficulties in changing to a culture of agile thinking and acting. An agile culture is a foundation for an agile way of working and a successful agile journey, it is a key factor that you need to work on.
In this workshop, we’ll explore how organizations can visualize their culture. We learn how organizations can foster a mindset and culture change toward agility and how they can apply agile practices and capabilities to deliver value frequently and fast.
Next, we’ll explore how team autonomy and morale can be increased by playing the Agile Impediment Board Game. Finally, we’ll see how agile retrospectives can be used to establish continuous improvement with effective communication and collaboration, to keep your agile journey going in the right direction.
Learning by Doing
You will practice:

Visualize your existing agile culture and see the need and possibilities for culture change
Share agile strengths and challenges to explore what it takes for an agile culture and mindset
Experience how gamification can be used to improve the team’s autonomy and morale
Practice retrospective techniques to reflect and find ways to improve your agile journey

Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

In this workshop, we will explore how to create conditions for culture change and use this to increase the agility of organizations.
Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop of 4 hours.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Attendees of this workshop will get free downloadable copies of the Culture Cards and the Impediment Board Game (value €25).
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Self-assessing your Agility
2022-11-28 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you learn how to assess your agility using gamification and take the next steps on your agile journey: Join me on November 28, 2022, for this live online workshop.
A one-day workshop for €450.

Self-assessing your Agility
In the workshop Self-assessing your Agility, you will practice games and exercises to explore how agile your teams are.
We’ll be playing The Agile Self-Assessment Game, a serious game used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. Playing this game enables professionals to reflect on collaboration and team interworking and agree upon the next steps for their agile journey. With this game, they can discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.
Next, you’ll learn how to create an “agile map” that inspires you with ideas for increasing your agility and provides suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey.
In this workshop, you will experience different playing formats of The Agile Self-assessment Game. You’ll hear about the importance of pre-selecting cards to create focused card decks and find out about different exercises that can be used to self-assess and play your agile journey.
The workshop is loaded with examples and suggestions to help you to increase your agility.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

The practices in this workshop will help you to explore your way of working and take the next steps on your agile journey.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore what agile and agility means and the benefits that they can bring
Understand the power of engagement and invitation-based agile adoption approaches
Experience how you can self-assess the agility of teams and organizations
Play the Agile Self-assessment Game using different playing formats and card decks
Learn ways for planning and traveling your own agile journey

Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can play the games and get fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
The workshop Assessing your Agility is based on the Agile Self-assessment Game. All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the Agile Self-Assessment Game and the ebook ‘The Agile Self-assessment Game’ (value €30).

Testimonials
This is what people say who played the Agile Self-assessment Game:
The cards help to get the team out of the daily work and daily mindset.
This is a wonderful way to get your team talking about how they are “being” agile!
The game really did add value and I got some real insight into the thoughts of people.
Ben’s Agile Assessment game is easy to adopt and easy for teams to pick up.
We realized our agile maturity level, recognized actionable improvements and had great fun and insights!
Playing the game builds clarity and alignment on what Agile means to everyone on the team and helps team members meaningfully evaluate their agility.
It’s a great tool to use for a retrospective.
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spend; organizations get value for their money!

Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices - Full-day Tutorial at Agile Testing Days 2022
2022-11-21 | Dorint Sanssouci Berlin/Potsdam, Jägerallee 20, Potsdam, 14469, Germany
This year I’m giving a full-day tutorial on Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices at Agile Testing Days. Join me November 21 to learn how you can handle impediments effectively and faster and practice your problem-solving skills.

Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices

Agile brings problems to the surface and provides solutions for addressing them. Learn in this Problem-solving workshop how to recognize, analyze, and solve problems using agile thinking and practices.
Teams need to deal with impediments as they slow them down or block the delivery of products. Impediments can be something in the way of working, be it processes, tools, or organizational rules or structures. They slow down teams or block the delivery of products or services.
Agile can help to identify problems, it tends to bring problems to the surface and provides solutions for addressing them. Teams will face problems in their daily work. Agile calls these problems impediments. Teams need to be able to deal with impediments as they have an impact on the flow of work, they are problems that reduce outputs and results.
In the workshop Problems Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices, you will learn how to recognize, analyze, and solve problems effectively and faster using agile thinking and practices.
You will practice:

Recognizing signals of problems, and creating safety in teams (and beyond) for people to bring up problems
Analyzing problems, for example by using causal analysis, Cynefin, serious games, blameless post-mortems, retrospectives, swarming, or blocker analysis
Managing impediments using techniques from Lean & Kanban; decide how to solve them and who should be involved
Preventing problems using quality techniques like code walkthrough/reviews, pairing, CI/CD Using coaching and games to improve collaboration and develop problem-solving skills

This workshop is intended for Agile Team, Tech lead, Scrum master, Product Owner, Project/Line Manager, Agile and Lean Coach.
Key-Learnings:

Become able to create a blameless culture where signals are spotted more easily and problems are brought up sooner
Develop your skills for analyzing problems to get a deep understanding
Explore ways to take action and follow up to remove problems or mitigate the impact
Learn how to collaboratively deal with impediments in your team and organization
Explore ways to prevent problems from happening again in the future

Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
Agile Testing Days
The Agile Testing Days Conference is a festival for the agile community. Network & get deep insights in testing & agile excellence.
The event is now one of the world’s leading software testing conferences and continues to set new standards with its innovative session formats and diverse speaker line up.

QA&Test 2022: Improving Your Quality and Testing Skills with Gamification
2022-10-19 - 2022-10-21 | Euskalduna Conference Centre and Concert Hall, Abandoibarra Etorb., 4, Bilbao, Bizkaia, 48011, Spain
I will give a special lecture at QA&Test 2022 about Improving Your Quality and Testing Skills with Gamification. Join me October 19-21 in Bilbao, Spain.
Improving Your Quality and Testing Skills with Gamification
So many challenges, so little time. As testers or quality engineers, we need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone engaged and get the best out of people.
In this presentation, Ben Linders will show how playing games (onsite or online) with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards help to explore your current quality and testing practice and decide as a team on what to improve or experiment with.
QA&Test
QA&TEST embedded is a yearly event, held in Bilbao since 2001, with the intention to diffuse the latest technological developments in Software Testing and Quality Assurance for embedded and complex systems.
QA&TEST embedded aims to bring together professionals and international experts from different sectors such as rail, aeronautics, medicine, electronic devices, banking, insurance or telecommunications. Directors, project managers, program directors, as well as all kinds of professionals from the world of testing who work in the field of software quality and testing can benefit from the extraordinary opportunity for training and networking that both conferences involve.
SQS, Software Quality Systems, organises QA&TEST since the very beginning in 2001. SQS, as the leading provider of software quality consultancy and testing services, has witnessed how their customers improve the quality of their software developments while dramatically reducing the costs of correcting bugs and maintenance.

Workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives
2022-10-17 | Online, Netherlands
Learn how you can facilitate retrospectives, practice exercises that involve everyone, and gain insight into psychological safety in retrospectives in the online workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives on October 17, 2022.
A one-day interactive workshop for €450.

Facilitating Retrospectives
Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve by reflecting at the end of each iteration to learn what is going well and what can be improved, and to do improvement actions in the next iteration. Retrospective facilitators need to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises and the skills to design and lead valuable agile retrospectives.
Facilitating retrospectives can be hard. As a facilitator you need to:

Set the stage where people get into a reflection and learning mode
Do exercises that get people involved and bring out issues that the team wants to work on
Establish psychological safety for people to be open about what bothers them
Recognize and deal with retrospective smells or anti-patterns when they happen
Guide the team to come up with their vital few actions to make change happen

Remote retrospectives pose extra challenges due to not having people in one physical room for the retrospective:

It’s more difficult to foster productive and collaborative behavior and keep everyone involved during the meeting
Not physically being together calls for different retrospective exercises or innovative ways to do exercises online
Establishing psychological safety when people collaborate remotely is essential, but can be hard to do

In the workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives, we will practice leading retrospectives while fostering psychological safety using exercises that keep people involved.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Retrospective Facilitators
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile Teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Anybody who is involved in agile retrospectives

The practices in this workshop will help you to get more value from doing (remote) agile retrospectives.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore unproductive behavior in retrospectives and learn to recognize retrospective smells or anti-patterns
Develop your facilitation skills for leading retrospectives
Practice different exercises for in-person and distributed retrospectives using online tools
Learn about psychological safety in retrospectives and what can be done to keep people involved

Practical information
Four-hour interactive online live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until two weeks before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the ebook Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Bingo, and a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Smells Cards. (value €30).

Testimonials
The below testimonials come from the many workshops on agile retrospectives that I have done over the years.
“The workshop presented in a clear way why retrospectives are the driving force to an organization which wants to improve. Using some playful exercises I learned several easy ways to extract the current status of the team and how to decide which should be the next steps to address potential problems and risks”
Nikolaos Raptis – Scrum Master – Software Developer at Scytl Secure Electronic Voting
“I got a better understanding of retrospectives and many ideas on how to use them in my work. I can suggest this workshop to anyone that wants to go agile. Also thanks for the reading material, I found it very helpful.”
Bill Souliotis – Manager Software Research & Development Graphics User Interface at BETA CAE Systems
“After working together for many years, our team (myself included) grew out of the need for formal retrospectives. This workshop helped to get some fresh ideas that can refuel our retros and stressed some key points about the necessity and importance of facilitation in these events.”
Yorgos Saslis – Solution Design Executive at CytechMobile.com
“I’d like to thank you again for your excellent workshop. It was fun and I already started using some of the ideas with my team. The change is definitely notable.”
Liran Ben-Porat, qSpark LTD
“Thanks once again for a wonderful workshop! We have a lot of useful outputs which we are going to implement. And thanks for the free copy of your book about the retrospectives, now we are able to go through the topics once again and do the exercises in our company.”
Jakub Grós, Project Engineer at Honeywell
“I found the workshop very useful. We’ve already started to experiment with some action items we gave ourselves in the workshop, doing changes in our overall retrospective approach. We are also trying out cross facilitation, having our retrospectives facilitated by a Scrum master of another team.”
Simona Humpolová, Scrum master at EmbedIT
I have taken some of my Scrum masters to Ben’s retrospective training. I like the training very much, and also his website which contains many retro techniques. I still use this as a reference when I coach people.
Zoltán Ludányi, Agile Software Development Consultant
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!

Workshop Fostering an Agile Culture
2022-09-27 | Online, Netherlands
An interactive online workshop where you can practice culture change, learn how to increase team autonomy and morale, and explore using retrospectives to keep your agile journey going smoothly. Join me on September 27, 2022, for the live workshop Fostering an Agile Culture.
A one-day workshop for €450.
Fostering an Agile Culture
Adopting agile often doesn’t live up to its promise of delivering better products, faster, at lower costs. The missing ingredients that cause failure often have to do with an insufficient agile mindset and difficulties in changing to a culture of agile thinking and acting. An agile culture is a foundation for an agile way of working and a successful agile journey, it is a key factor that you need to work on.
In this workshop, we’ll explore how organizations can visualize their culture. We learn how organizations can foster a mindset and culture change toward agility and how they can apply agile practices and capabilities to deliver value frequently and fast.
Next, we’ll explore how team autonomy and morale can be increased by playing the Agile Impediment Board Game. Finally, we’ll see how agile retrospectives can be used to establish continuous improvement with effective communication and collaboration, to keep your agile journey going in the right direction.
Learning by Doing
You will practice:

Visualize your existing agile culture and see the need and possibilities for culture change
Share agile strengths and challenges to explore what it takes for an agile culture and mindset
Experience how gamification can be used to improve the team’s autonomy and morale
Practice retrospective techniques to reflect and find ways to improve your agile journey

Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Agile Teams.
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Stakeholders working with agile teams
Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

In this workshop, we will explore how to create conditions for culture change and use this to increase the agility of organizations.
Practical information
Four-hour interactive live workshop of 4 hours.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket below, or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in the exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancellations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
Attendees of this workshop will get free downloadable copies of the Culture Cards and the Impediment Board Game (value €25).
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!
