Speaking

Agile: 2024. We're in a bit of a state, aren't we?

Redundancies all over the place because our sponsors (assuming we're lucky enough to have any), leaders and teams aren't "bought in", AI is taking over - and Agile, if you hadn't heard, is now dead.

Or is it? Are we sure?

In this talk, we'll take a look at some of the myths around the state of agile, some of the traps I've seen good practitioners fall into, and we'll explore how that's all impacting us, our organisations and the reputation of our field.

Apparently "delve" is a trigger word now, so instead we'll rifle through some behavioural science and neuroscience, have a look at how these challenges are showing up, what they're doing to us along the way, and what we can possibly hope to do about any of it.

In this practical and gently interactive session, we'll walk through the evolutionary, psychological and neuroscientific factors that have made teamwork during a pandemic so challenging.

Neatly sidestepping pseudoscience and pop psych, we'll explore what actually happens in our brains and bodies (and why) when we experience extremely challenging events – and how this affects our ability to stop, collaborate and listen. And, without a squeezy ball in sight, we'll look at real steps and activities to help your team(s) to pull through and work together more effectively when things get tough.

Feedback sucks. It’s horrible to give, it can be painful to receive – and even when it’s praise, we still feel uncomfortable! From pair programming to retrospectives, even backlog refinement and sprint reviews - feedback is an integral part of our agile lives. It becomes a problem because when we can’t give or receive effective feedback, we struggle to be truly agile, and we can’t hold ourselves accountable for our shared outcomes. No-one wants to “fail forwards” if they’re afraid of what they’re going to be told in the discussion afterwards.

In this session, we’ll look at what makes feedback so hard to give well, and why it can be so painful to receive. We’ll look at various styles of giving feedback that are used, and how we can be more effective both during a conversation, and in the days and weeks afterwards.

Drawing on the work of Kofman, Scott, Rosenberg and more, we’ll explore some more effective ways of giving feedback, and take a look at the neuroscience of effective feedback: how our body responds to what we hear, and how to use that information to give feedback that works the way you want it to.