Esther Derby

Have you had the experience of watching smart people argue endlessly over which technology to use? Have you walked out of a meeting believing the group had agreed, only to find out that five different people thought they’d agreed to five different things?

People in our industry pride themselves on their brain power and ability to make good decisions. And most of us are good at thinking, learning, and deciding—on our own. When we work collaboratively on interdependent work, though, we need to think and decide as a group if we want to realize the benefits of the team effect.

In this session, we’ll experience a group decision. Then, we’ll look at the pieces and parts of the process to see what we can learn about how groups think and decide togther. We’ll tease out the techniques that will help you help groups take advantage of all their expertise, see other points of view, and arrive at high-quality decisions.

In this session, we’ll experience a group decision. Then, we’ll look at the pieces and parts of the process to see what we can learn about how groups think and decide togther. We’ll tease out the techniques that will help you help groups take advantage of all their expertise, see other points of view, and arrive at high-quality decisions.

Some teams seem to have some mysterious chemistry from the beginning. Other teams wallow, bicker, and slog their way to uncertain results. What makes one team soar, and another stumble? It's not just chance.

In this session, we'll explore the essential ingredients that result in that mysterious “chemistry.” For example, we’ll examine the prerequisites for cohesion, and factors that pull teams apart. We'll look at myths and realities of software teams.
You'll gain tools to assess your agile team, and insights on how to adapt the environment for growing great teams.

Learning Outcomes:
Identify the essential elements for great teams.
Strategies to adapt the environment to improve the chance of team success.
Identify common pitfalls for agile teams.

Through table activities and facilitated conversation, we'll explore experiences in teams, talk about what works, and what doesn't. I'll present research about teams, and related it to concrete steps that managers, team leads, and team members can apply to their own situations.

It’s not easy to build the right product. People sometimes don’t know exactly what they need, want things that won’t help, and don’t imagine what’s possible. Agile project capture requirements on cards that contain a statement of want and benefit and notes on how to confirm the need is met. The intention isn’t to fully document the requirement on the card, but to make a note and create a reminder for a conversation with the customer. Whether you are using agile methods or traditional requirements, valuable products start with understanding the customers context, their problems, what they want, and how they use a product. However, most people aren’t born with the ability to speak naturally in user stories or fully formed requirements statements. So we must learn how to ask the right questions, draw out pertinent information and understand the customer’s world in those conversations.

In this session, you’ll learn about different types of questions, and when to use them to learn about how the customer currently uses a product, the problems they experience with the product, and problems that new features in the product might solve. Then, we’ll put that to work in practice interviews.

Every organization—whether it is 50, or 50,000 people—faces three broad sets of concerns. How it fits in the market, how it serves customers, how it makes money, what sort of place it wants to be. Leaders in the organization have to figure out what initiatives to invest in, and how to sequence and order work that flows into teams. They have to support teams, so they can do good work. And teams need to figure out the details of their work and how best to collaborate.

The SEEM model provides a way to address these concerns that maximizes the possibility of healthy self-organization, and adaptability.

It may seem paradoxical that something small leads to something big. Yet this is the case. Big changes can feel like an existential threat and cause major disruption. Tiny changes, working obliquely, evolving towards a more desirable pattern may lack drama, but get you where you need to go.

So how does this work? The same way agile does, iteratively, incrementally, with learning as you go. I’ll share some small ideas that will add up to a big change in how you go about changing your team or organization.

Many managers ask me, “How can I motivate my team?” The zeroth step in boosting motivation is to stop doing things that demotivate people. But what is a manager to do after that? Prizes, treats, rewards, pep talks, and recognition events don’t cut it. Why? Many of the common attempts to improve motivation rely on an external source of motivation. That assumes that people need a carrot (or a stick) to keep them going. Research shows a contrary conclusion—that intrinsic motivation has more sustaining power.

In this session, we’ll explore the key elements of intrinsic motivation in the workplace—autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We’ll examine how common management practices either support or work against intrinsic motivation. Then we’ll do an check-up to see where you can tap into autonomy, mastery, and purpose to boost motivation and creativity in your group.

Managers want teams to be empowered….but don’t want to give up decision making authority. Teams want empowerment, but may not know how to act on the power they already have. Executives want to drive engagement and action, but see only half-hearted compliance.

In all of these examples, power dynamics are at play. Words won’t matter until people acknowledge power. Once people acknowledge the fact of power, it’s possible to look at how it is affecting people and actions. When we see power, we can see how power can make it harder–not easier–to achieve desired results.

In this session, we’ll explore different definitions of power, where power comes from, and how people respond to power.

You will learn:

Two definitions of power, and how each affects leadership
Seven sources of power
How the use of power impacts peoples core concerns
How to boost creativity and productivity by addressing sources of power and core concerns

Questions are powerful.

Presidential historians believe that the questions presidents ask and the way they ask those questions have huge ramifications. Questions asked and not asked influence policy initiatives, invasions, and trips to the moon.

Likewise, success or failure hangs on the questions managers and technical people ask when planning releases, making decisions, considering strategy alternatives or looking for improvements.
Yet we don’t often stop to consider the questions we ask. Every question contains assumptions and while the question opens one avenue of inquiry, it closes others.
In this session, we’ll consider the questions we do ask, the questions we don’t ask, the questions we could ask. We’ll look at what the questions people ask us reveal assumptions, who gets to ask questions, questions that mislead, and when its best not to ask questions, but rather to go and see.

In this session, we’ll consider the questions we do ask, the questions we don’t ask, the questions we could ask. We’ll look at what the questions people ask us reveal assumptions, who gets to ask questions, questions that mislead, and when its best not to ask questions, but rather to go and see.

Agile methods depend on effective cross-functional teams. We’ve heard many Agile success stories…at the team level. But what happens when a product can’t be delivered by one team? What do you do when the “team” that’s needed to work on a particular product is 20 people? Or 20 teams? One response is to create a coordinating role, decompose work, or add layers of hierarchy. Those solutions introduce overhead and often slow down decision making. There are other options to link teams, and ensure communication and integration across many teams. There are no simple answers. But there are design principles for defining workable arrangements when the product is bigger than a handful of agile teams.

In this talk, I'll cover principles and practices and explain how they work together to address coordination, integration, and technical integrity.

Change is often much slower than hoped for, and more painful than anticipated. In the end, you may be left with feelings of frustration and dismay rather than the benefits you hoped for. How can we make change–whether it’s adopting Scrum at the team level, or agile at the enterprise level–more successful, and more enlivening?

Through my work with many organizations, I’ve distilled six principles for successful transformation. In this talk, we’ll explore these principles and how the support profound change.

This talk shares 6 principles to guide and nurture change in complex systems. I've given it as a keynote at Agile By Example in Warsaw (2017).

Some teams soar; others wallow, bicker and slog their way to uncertain results. Teams that soar have a few things in common: they have a shared goal, interdependent work, complimentary skills, mutual accountability. Slogging teams have a few things in common, too. They fall into predictable traps.

What are those traps and how can you help your team climb out of them? That’s what Esther is here to talk about.

Language shapes thought, and thought shapes action. People talk about installing change, driving change, making change happen. When change doesn't happen as fast as they'd like, the people who want change talk about resistance, and try to kindle a sense of urgency.

What if the language we use makes it harder to bring about the differences we want to see?

I was educated to be logical, objective, “stick to the facts” and rely on reason. But that’s not the only way our brains work. Metaphors pervade our lives and thinking–so much so that we often don’t notice them. Metaphors “shape what we think,” what we see, and therefore affect our choices and options.

Consider the title “Agile Evangelist.” Evangelists are people who are imbued with The Truth–and want to convince everyone else of it. Sometimes evangelists succeed–through persuasion or harsher means. Would you welcome an evangel, come to tell you how wrong you’ve been?

In this talk I'll explore the words we use when we talk about change–and how they may get in our way. I'll look at the nature of change in a complex environment. And we'll try on some different words that might open different possibilities.

Sometimes I see teams that reject all direction and go their own way, declaring, 'We are self-organizing'. They are missing an important fact. When someone is paid by a company to be part of a team, that team exists within the organizational context.

On the other hand, some managers hear the words “self-organizing” and believe the team is on its “own” that they can go into semi-retirement. But that's not the case, either.

In fact,both are risky over-simplifications.

When teams self-organize there's still plenty for managers to do, but management attention must shift from individual to team performance, and creating an environment where teams can excel.

Software teams work in the work system and managers work on the work system. That means that a managers job is to engineer the organization so that teams can do their best work. In this session, I'll share ideas and practical techniques that will help managers make the shift from traditional management practices to those that will best support self-organizing agile teams.

“Self-organizing team” may be the most over-used, mis-understood, vague, and mis-leading term of the decade. So what is a self-organizing team? How are self-organizing teams different from other teams? How can managers and team members get the self-organizing mojo going? What are the challenges that self-organizing teams face?

In this workshop, we'll explore all these questions and get beyond the buzzword.

The world abounds with complex theories and complex advice about complex adaptive systems. But most of them aren't very helpful when it comes to knowing what to do to make a system work better. In this interactive session, we'll explore three levers that you can use to influence patterns of behavior in complex adaptive systems…such as software development teams.

In this session, we'll simulate a small product company and examine the structures, exchanges, and differences that influence how the company worked. Then we'll look for similar levers within our workplaces and develop ideas on how you can use lessons from complexity science to help your team work more effectively.