Overcoming your Fear of Change

Overcoming your Fear of Change: 3 Techniques to Drive Continuous Improvement through Experimentation

Agile prescribes continuous reflection and improvement -- in essence, change. And while everyone fancies change, implementing and even enacting change is scary and painful.

However, most people fear change because they lack the structure and process to approach it, assess it, and then implement it. The key to implementing change is to approach it as an experiment where you form hypotheses, collect data, and assess results. While most people relegate experiments to high school science class, they are powerful business tools to help enact change.

The goal of this session is to introduce three simple, powerful techniques for implementing experiments in any organization. This session will introduce these varied approaches and give the audience experience using them via time-boxed exercises. The next time attendees face change in their organization, they’ll have a simple way to lead others through it.

Part of this talk will be a workshop, so please bring your own pen!

Bio:

Laura Burke is a ScrumMaster at Appia, in Durham, NC. She guides development, operations and management teams to higher levels of agility so that their software can help app creators become profitable. Previously, Laura was the Internal Facilitator managing company-wide Agile steering at Rally Software. She is passionate about helping teams work together effectively and have fun while doing it. Her other interests include Corporate Social Responsibility, Conflict Resolution, Non-Violent Communication.