workshop
Retrospective Magic
Are your retros running a bit flat? Need something to spice them up and make them more effective and also more interesting for your team? Join us as we walk through a collection of techniques from psychology and applied neuroscience to give your retros that edge you need.
Six Thinking Hats
Six Thinking Hats is a technique to improve creativity by focusing our attention on only one perspective at a time. Useful wherever we need creativity - from retrospectives to product planning to strategic visioning.
Putting the Moose on the Table: Make your retrospectives more effective using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY techniques
In order for teams to step into high performance. it’s critical that they develop the practice of having effective conversations about what is and isn’t working. Yet in practice, the retrospective meeting is often the least-valued of the agile events: team members feel that their retros are boring, repetitive, and superficial.
Exploring the Anti-Anxiety Toolkit
Stress and anxiety are widespread in our industry and you may have already noticed that it’s really hard to coach someone who is highly stressed or anxious. It’s also really hard for you to personally perform at your best when you’re in that state.
Brain Talk
Words direct attention. Some words will encourage superficial conversations while others will allow you to quickly get into deeper, more meaningful ones. Learn some of the language patterns used by hypnotists and other effective communicators.
Clean Language
Our brains process an incredible amount of information through the use of metaphor (comparing one thing against another). When you listen carefully to the words we use, you will begin to notice how often metaphor is used in conversation.
neuroscience
SAFETY model of psychological safety
When discussing psychological safety, we like to use the SAFETY1 model from the Academy of Brain-based Leadership. Note that we’re not affililated with this organization - we just find their model very useful when discussing the topic.
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The SAFETY model is described in depth in the book Psychological Safety: The key to happy, high-performing people and teams by Radecki and Hull, 2018 ↩
Five chemicals (neurotransmitters) that drive behaviour
While science has identified hundreds of different neurotransmitters in our brains, there are five that are most commonly identified with behaviour. Each of these are part of our survival mechanism and will encourage or discourage specific behaviours with the goal of keeping us safe.
Presentation: Neuroscience of psychological safety
Neuroscience of psychological safety
I find that many of the conversations we have about psychological safety tend to devolve into platitudes: “It’s good and we should have more of it” or “managers should create safer spaces”. This doesn’t give anyone any context into why it’s actually important or how we can go about improving it.
Book recommendations for Agile Coaches
I talk a lot about neuroscience and psychology as it relates to Agile methods and the question everyone asks is “what books do you recommend as an introduction?” There is no single best book to start with so I’m giving you a bunch of categories to pick from.
psychological_safety
SAFETY model of psychological safety
When discussing psychological safety, we like to use the SAFETY1 model from the Academy of Brain-based Leadership. Note that we’re not affililated with this organization - we just find their model very useful when discussing the topic.
-
The SAFETY model is described in depth in the book Psychological Safety: The key to happy, high-performing people and teams by Radecki and Hull, 2018 ↩
Presentation: Neuroscience of psychological safety
Neuroscience of psychological safety
I find that many of the conversations we have about psychological safety tend to devolve into platitudes: “It’s good and we should have more of it” or “managers should create safer spaces”. This doesn’t give anyone any context into why it’s actually important or how we can go about improving it.
Google’s Project Aristotle
You may have already heard of Google’s Project Aristotle. Back in 2012, Google set out to identify what made their most effective teams so much better than others. They wanted to reproduce that magic that some teams had across the company and so they interviewed 180 teams and collected all kinds of data.
neurotransmitters
The millennial whoop and our brain as a prediction engine
Our brains are highly advanced prediction engines1. They are constantly trying to predict what will happen next so that we can be prepared for what’s coming. When our brain makes a successful prediction then we get rewarded with a tiny shot of dopamine that makes us feel good.
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Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how our brains evolved as a prediction engine in her excellent book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain ↩