In many ways Antarctica is completely unique – a place unlike any other I’d traveled to before! And yet, during my time there, my mind kept drifting back to how well that environment and traveling there exemplified one specific value of the Agile Manifesto: “Responding to change over following a plan.” In this session, I’ll share how I returned from my Antarctic trip with six key takeaways about change and planning useful for anyone leading teams or initiatives, whether as a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or Agile Coach. I’ll explain how Antarctica drove home for me why we need both planning and, more importantly, the ability to respond to change — and not just to prevent negative outcomes, but to capitalize on positive ones as well! We’ll discuss in small groups how real-life, non-software examples of responding to change, such as this trip, can serve as great reminders to bring back to more typical work environments. We’ll explore what expectation setting and communication lessons we can leverage from the experiences of the crews that run Antarctic expeditions, since change is constant everywhere these days. And after getting stuck in Antarctica, I’ll share why my biggest takeaway of them all was increased empathy for team members struggling with dynamic situations — a lesson that’s only continued to serve me well in a 2020-2022 environment!
You spend the majority of your waking hours at work; how do you feel after a long workday? Do you feel energized or drained by the hours you spend and the people you work with?
For agility to be sustainable, we need to do more than improve through…
