personal improvement

Each of us has personal weaknesses that are often perceived to have negative impacts on performance and capability in the workplace. When this weakness is prominent to yourself or others, are you capable of benefiting IT teams and qualified to do the job? In dealing with negative impacts of her Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Julene Johnson falls into this category and has experienced personal doubt in her ability to perform her job well. Over time, however, she’s noticed that habits and techniques developed while dealing with anxiety can be applied in a manner that improves her life and her career and gives confidence to others in her capabilities. Similarly, skills and abilities gained while working as a tester have helped her build successful patterns in her life to help her manage anxiety more effectively.

The cognitive skills of testing are being threatened by two major forces: the assumption that automation can replace all other forms of testing, and the acceptance of lower quality by consumers. You might be feeling like you’re living on an eroding island, but there is a way to adapt and even thrive using your testing skills. Your project still needs to have someone who will question assumptions, examine design, create experiments, analyze data, and report meaningful metrics. It needs your social skill to connect teams who work in silos, bring customer insights to light, and track risks that no one seems to make time to think about. For twenty-two years, Jon was a tester, test manager, test trainer, and test consultant. Now he’s a senior program manager and uses his testing skills differently. What’s your experience? Jon will ask you a few questions via an anonymous polling app and show the results during the session.

As agilists, we know the importance of open, candid feedback for agile teams to be continuously improving. This talk will share how impediments, such as unconscious biases and a person’s level of self-confidence, can impact the feedback and learning cycle. Participants will learn why there are positive and negative reactions when feedback is given, the difference between a defensive (fixed) and accepting (growth) mindset, how age, self-confidence and gender biases influence an individual’s mindset and other impediments that can impact a team member’s ability to provide candid feedback.

Understanding how our brains take shortcuts to process all the data they take in can help us recognize when its happening, take measures to correct our course, and use that information to build stronger teams. This talk sprang from my curiosity about the intersection of neuroscience and organizational behavior. It is my hope that attendees will leave with the ability to recognize when they and their teams are using processing shortcuts, as well as some techniques for mitigating their impact.

Learning Objectives:
- Identify several ways in which our brains short cut processing in order to deal with the wealth of information they take in and decisions they must make
- Understand how those processing mechanisms manifest in our daily lives, both at home and at work
- Recognize when we are falling prey to our brains' misguided ways and learn to mitigate their impact