The Power of Serendipity

Piotr Prokopowicz, PhD

What predicts professional and personal success? What do Bill Gates, Mona Lisa and JK Rowling have in common? Why are some people creative while others are not? All of these questions have a clear, evidence-based answers, yet for most of them we still value myths and intuition over science and evidence.

For the last 10 years I have explored various ways in which best scientific evidence can inform our day-to-day lives. In my talk, I’m going to examine and question wildly popular beliefs in the areas of innovation, creativity and success, sharing key principles for adapting evidence-based approach to coming up and implementing new ideas. Ultimately, I will point to the power of serendipity as an answer to an age old question: “Where do great ideas come from?”

Agility Scales: Shifting Teams in Better Shapes 

Jurgen Appelo

You want to scale agile, but you don’t know how. You like some methods and frameworks, but they don’t fit in your context. You know the organization needs to change, but there is a strong sense of “change resistance”.
Scaling Agile to work in large and fast-growing organizations is a hot topic. Some coaches and consultants offer methods and frameworks (SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, Holocracy) but others don’t believe such models can work. Companies such as Spotify publish their own custom approach, but it appears that people try to copy these examples without thinking, and that doesn’t work either.
To survive as a company, the organization needs to become a shapeshifter: sometimes hierarchical, sometimes networked; sometimes efficient, sometimes effective; sometimes great at execution, and other times great at innovation. You can only achieve this by motivating people to change continuously.
To achieve this, we take a closer look at gamification and habit-forming. Because games and habits are the keys to intrinsic motivation and change. And you need those in your company to become a great shapeshifter!

Emotional Safety: The Fuel of Innovation

Paweł Brodziński

When we talk about effective teams discussions almost always boils down to processes, methods and practices. As a matter of fact, it was the part of our story at Lunar Logic. However, on our evolution toward becoming a company with no managers we uncovered a whole another context to that dispute.
Emotional safety is something you’d rather expect to discuss at a psychologist’s couch and not in a professional setup. In modern workplace it is a common expectation that we suppress our emotions. At the same we learned time emotional safety is the superpower that improves problem solving skills, boosts learning, enables feedback, and triggers personal development. Simply put, it is what fuels innovation. At the same time, extremely often it is a blind spot that prevents organizations to get beyond their current status quo.
Having said that, you can’t just roll out emotional safety just as you introduce a new method or a new tool. Let me discuss what can be done to introduce emotional safety at work and how it transformed us as an organization and as individuals. Ultimately, let me share how it catalyzed effective innovation in individual, organizational and, most importantly, commercial context.
DISCUSSION PANEL: „Management Models and Scaling Leadership”
Moderator: Jakub Piwnik (Communications Manager – Brainly)

Speakers: Jurgen Appelo (Management 3.0), Paweł Brodziński (CEO – Lunar Logic), Wojciech Mach (co-CEO – IT Kontrakt), Józef Kącki (CEO – Leaders Island), Piotr Bucki (VP CTO – J-LABS)

Description:

Jurgen Appelo, Piotr Bucki, Paweł Brodziński, Wojciech Mach and Józef Kącki will discuss scaling leadership challanges and their experience with management models. We will compare their different approaches and experience in managing teams. Among others, we will aim to answer the following questions:
– How to give autonomy and empower teams to be successful?
– How to ensure emotional safety of team members and organize hierarchy in a team?
– How to be a leader while working remotely?
– Are good leaders born or made?
– How does IT sector compare to other businesses in these areas?

Evolution of a team, and its management

Dawid Ostręga

A case study on the change in the management philosophy of a team over time, and the impact the methodology of its leader can have on the entire organization.

 

The Kraków Kings American football team, has gone from a championship, to 2nd from bottom back to championship team in the span of three seasons.  Most things remained consistent, with the only fundamental change being the management approach.

What impact did the soft changes have on the results of the team, and what can we learn from this about people management, when leading an existing or building a new organization?

EXPERT DEBATE: ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE, MODERN LEADERSHIP AND DIVERSITY AS FACTORS BUILDING AN ENVIRONMENT OF INNOVATION AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Moderator: JUSTYNA PAWLAK-MIHUŁKA (Freenovation.org) |

SPEAKERS: ANNA SZWIEC (Women in Technology / Lonsley), RAFAŁ SZCZEPAŃSKI (SmartRecruiters), JACEK CZECH (KIG)

Issues:

– What is the culture of innovation? What is the organizational, cultural, marketing, and sales innovation in the area of ​​management?

– Is it how organizational culture affects innovation?

– What systems, tools and values ​​to implement to create a work environment conducive to creativity and ingenuity?

– What tools, values, systems and standards support the implementation of innovative solutions?

– What programs and solutions are implemented by companies that base their business effectiveness on innovation? What can we learn from Market leaders?

– What impact do startup circles have on the national scale of innovation?

– What can we learn from innovation leaders: US, Estonia, Israel?

– What bothers us? Does national culture have an impact on the level of innovation? How can you “jump”?

– What impact diversity has on the culture of innovation (national, age, gender, etc.)

Narrative techniques to build a coherent culture

John Cieślik-Bridgen

Every company has a culture, but not every company consciously works on developing it. Estimote is a NY and Krakow based startup (and alumnus of the famous Y Combinator program) that has invested significantly in developing a cultural framework for a team on two continents. This talk will give details of just how carefully the narrative of the Estimote Culture Book was crafted, and show how the Estimote Culture Team use these techniques more broadly to help the company.

3 Steps to maturity in innovation

Bartosz Józefowski

When everybody is talking about innovation and looking for cooperation with startups it’s good to take one step back to understand what is really our real business goal. The aim of this talk is debunking some myths about innovation, exposing some silly trends and logic of the crowd in the area of innovation. We will answer the question: What does it really mean to be innovative company, without all these unnecessary fireworks?

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