My Talks
Leadership
Leadership is NOT About You
What makes a leader? Is it a granted title? Some kind of inborn skill? Neither! One does not need a title to lead. In fact, leadership isn’t even about the leader! Join me for a discussion on the nature of leadership, and how a better understanding can rank up your own practice whether you’re new to leadership, or you’re career is headed there! Naturally, we’ll discuss the difference between leadership and management, what it looks like to practice leadership. Join us as we put leadership in context within the organization!
Cracking the Team Dynamics Code
You’ve probably heard the story of that mystical team with dynamics so great that they blew all expectations of productivity out of the water. You want to believe it but it seems so impossible that it sounds more like an infomercial - “… buy in the next 5 minutes and you’ll also get fewer defects and greater productivity! Just pay shipping and handling.”. But in all seriousness, why are those dynamics so hard to come by? Is it really possible? What’s the trick?
Well, I’m here to tell you it is possible, and, not only that, it’s realistic for your team! It’ll just take longer than you’d like. Nothing changes overnight, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. Let’s Crack the Team Dynamics Code! Join this talk as we discuss the building blocks of team culture, and how you can begin to intentionally use them to strengthen your team!
Agility
The Foundations of agility
Agile gained traction because it promised to help us produce more value. And since its birth in the early 2000s, we’ve seen some spectacular successes, high performance cultures. Sadly, those are not the norm. What could those high performance teams be doing that we’re not?
The question might be better put, what are you doing that they are not? If you look back to the root of agility, iteratively delivering value and learning better what value to deliver, you’ll find another flower growing. Lean Manufacturing focuses heavily on delivering value well, especially by avoiding unnecessary work. If we look back to our roots, perhaps we can learn from Agile’s sister how to build stronger foundations of agility. Let’s learn to find out how to eliminate the waste in our processes.
Helping your Waterfall Flow Faster
A perfect world _might_ be agile. But what do you do with reality? What can you do against the immense inertia of a well-worn Waterfall Culture? Platitudes aren’t enough! Failed agile transformations are proof of that. The change must be deeper. It must be actions. But who can do this?!
You can. In fact, if you see the need, you are in the single best position to make the change! You can demonstrate or derive the principles of agility right before their very eyes! It isn’t an easy road, but let me show you how you can start! Are you willing to try?
Effectiveness
TDD For People
Has this ever happened to you? You’re in a meeting, and but you and your colleagues just can’t seem to get each other. You’ve shared all the relevant data, and the solution seems obvious to you… But there they go again heading off in some completely esoteric and unintelligible way. Frustrating right? It’s a little like what happens when you write some code, only to find it misbehaving in production right?
As developers we solved misbehaving code with Unit Tests. WE adjusted the way we develop so we could get more predictable outcomes. We invented TDD. What if there was a way to apply to that those confusing and often frustrating conversations with our colleagues? What if we could test our conversations as we make them to get to better results? Let’s talk about how we might apply the Ladder of Inference to help us test and verify our conversations and our conclusions as we make them!
Designing and Running Effective Meetings
Do meeting at your company drag on and on and on… ? Do you wish they’d get to the point already? Have you ever had to have a meeting after the meeting to make the real decisions? What if there was a way to fix this broken process? What if we could make meetings effective again? Come learn some guiding principles to help make your meetings more effective, and not just the ones you lead! Tips include how to organize your meeting, how to help ensure decisions are made, and suggestions for follow-ups to communicate the decisions, so they don’t die in the meeting!