Ideas people can use after the event
I turn complex material into practical talks and visual teaching that give an audience something they can question, remember and apply.
I have given more than 30 talks on strategy, critical thinking, Red Team Thinking®, neurodiversity, ways of working, and how to structure and visualise talks. Appearances include conferences in Cluj, Bangalore, Lithuania and London, plus guest lectures at Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Edinburgh.
Red Team Thinking®: Applied critical thinking for leaders
A talk on decision-making in business: the issues and problems leaders face, and how additional tools adapted from the military into a business-friendly context, Red Team Thinking®, can help. Covers a full list of the tools, with in-depth focus on a selection and their use for leaders, including within Product Management in agile. Given in Cluj, Romania, in September 2024, and also in India in 2025.
Knowledge Canvas
Knowledge Canvas is a mind-map alternative I developed for organising training and learning content into a single page, combining and extending concept maps, mind maps and Cornell notes with time-based structure and colour-coding to tell a story and help people learn and revise it. It’s a digital-friendly format that also works alongside online video, with particular emphasis on people who prefer a clear structure.
I developed it to make talks and conferences more inclusive for neurodivergent audiences: approximately one in seven people in the UK have a neurodifference, according to Acas. I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
I first presented it at Agile Tour London in October 2020, then at Agile Lithuania on 7 September 2022, where the organisers invited me to present it early, ahead of the main conference, so other speakers could use the method while preparing their own talks. The approach has received strong positive feedback and has been used by a training company.
“I just got an idea to add a persona label in each section (problem statement, proposed solution…). In other words, to label the targeted persona in each mind map node when we have a large audience.”
— Elie Rached, Agile Transformation Lead, on LinkedIn
“We tried to apply your concept during Simon Powers’s and my talk during Pierre E. NEIS’s next meetup during the following week. The result looked like this:”
— Wolfgang Hilpert, CPTO & Managing Director, on LinkedIn
Strategy Maps: connect your roadmaps to the bigger picture
“Most strategy dialogues end up with executives talking at cross-purposes because… nobody knows exactly what is meant by vision and strategy, and no two people ever quite agree on which topics belong where.” — Geoffrey Moore, author and business adviser, Geoffrey Moore Consulting, Escape Velocity
All too often, strategy is a static PowerPoint that goes out of date and gives little indication of the “why of movement.”
This talk shows how to form an agile strategy and visualise it in a complex landscape, connecting it to roadmaps, backlogs, Wardley mapping and the Strategy Cycle, drawing on work by Simon Wardley, Roman Pichler and Dave Snowden. It also uses a novel visualisation technique to help visualise the talk itself.
Agile India 2022 · Teaching workshop-format conference talk
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