Speak Up. Experiment. Fail Fast: Psychological Safety in Agile Practice

Talk description:
Agile teams are built on fast feedback and continuous learning -- but that only works if people feel safe to speak honestly about what’s really happening. Too often, ceremonies like standups and retros become performative: blockers stay hidden, conflict goes underground, and “lessons learned” never turn into different behaviour.

This session explores psychological safety as a critical enabling condition for agility. We’ll look at what psychological safety actually is (and isn’t), why it matters so much in Scrum and other Agile frameworks, and how it shows up in everyday moments like retrospectives, demos, and 1:1 conversations. You’ll leave with simple, practical tools you can use right away to deepen trust, invite real talk, and help your team learn faster, without needing a new framework or re-org.
In this session, we will explore how to:

• Recognize the signs of low and high psychological safety in Agile ceremonies
• Connect psychological safety to agility, innovation, and delivery outcomes
• Create conditions for more honest, useful retrospectives and standups
• Use deeper listening skills to help teammates feel heard and supported
• Apply a simple conversation framework to navigate tricky feedback and conflict
• Design small, low-risk experiments to start building a safer team climate

This isn’t a theory-heavy psychology lecture; it’s a practical session for practitioners who want braver conversations, better learning, and more effective Agile teams.

Location: Virtual on Zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2475543229
Meeting ID: 247 554 3229

Speaker: Briana Wood
Speaker Bio:
I’m a systemic change consultant and leadership coach with 10+ years of experience guiding public sector, non-profit, and private organizations through complex digital and organizational transformations.

I specialize in co-designing change journeys that center people’s readiness and capacity for change; enabling smoother adoption of new technologies, structures, and ways of working. My work spans IM/IT modernization, digital service transformation, leadership enablement, and organizational change and development initiatives.