New arrows for the Agile quiver: Now that the team's head is in the game, how do you get their heart in?
Great software comes from getting the best ideas into the product. Jim McCarthy, who led the legendary turnaround of the Visual C++ group at Microsoft, left Microsoft in 1996 to create a team dynamics laboratory to figure out how to always create a create a high performace team. His lab has focused on this challenge, and has produced 11 protocols for making unanimous decisions, supporting quality thinking, strengthening design iterations, and incorporating feedback, emotions, nobility, and passion into products. Learn about an entirely new class of tools.
•Do you notice too much discussion and arguing and would prefer the best ideas would just get implemented now? –Learn about the Decider Protocol which guarantees unanimous team decisions with accountability and moves the team forward with a bias toward action.
•Do you accept that it is vitally important that you get the opinions of others about the quality of work products but notice that it is consistently painful to give and receive feedback? – Learn about the Perfection Protocol which solves all the problems associated with criticism.
•Do you notice that dumb things consistently happen on your team and everyone seems to lack self-awareness to some degree, including you? – Learn about the Core Commitments which provide a team constitution about commitment and accountability to the team. And learn about the Personal Alignment Protocol which allows each team member to address self-awareness around courage, integrity, passion and other virtuous behaviors.
Jim McCarthy’s keynotes at dozens of conferences all over the world are repeatedly considered the “Best of Show.” He wrote the classic 57 rules-of-thumb in, “The Dynamics of Software Development,” as well as the book, “Software For Your Head: Core Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision.” www.mccarthyshow.com
How the time will be used: Jim uses interaction with the audience in his talks so that people can participate with what he is saying. For instance he will do an exercise that makes each audience member consider the quality of team interactions of teams he or she has been on and how accountable we each are for creating that quality. Jim has lots of experience with audience attention and will take a break if needed or shorten or make the session more lively if needed depending on the feedback from the audience. Interaction will be encouraged throughout the talk. If the talk reaches its goals before 90 minutes, it will end early.
We are very flexible to the wants of the customer. If the conference coordinators would like something different than what is proposed here, we welcome the input. We want the conference coordinators and the attendees to walk away thinking this talk exceeded expectations.