5 Things I Wish I’d Known Sooner About Scaling Teams & Culture – Turing Fest

Thanks for welcoming me to beautifully cool Edinburgh, Turing Fest! Below are the slides and links to the books, talks, etc mentioned. Please do shout if I have forgotten anything.

Books & Tools & Talks Mentioned in This Talk

Modern Management at #wintech17

Thank you for the stupendous reception at Women of Silicon Roundabout today — so sorry we ran out of space before we even started, I’m humbled by how many of you sat on the floor or stood at the back through the entire talk!

Slides and books and links below, also a few folks asked about my Be A Brilliant People Developer workshop and The Lead Developer conference — hope to see you there!

Books & Tools Mentioned in This Talk

If you’re new to coaching, you might also enjoy the talk I did on stealing coaching lessons from sports at Dare Conf Mini a couple of years back: video and slides.

Awesome People Management with Agile – at Agile North East

Thanks for welcoming me to speak at Agile North East tonight — it’s always nice to be back in my adoptive hometown and the conversation tonight was especially fab.

Books & Tools Mentioned in This Talk

If you’re new to coaching, you might also enjoy the talk I did on stealing coaching lessons from sports at Dare Conf Mini a couple of years back: video and slides.

Brilliant People Management in an Agile Setting at agile.delivery

Thank you for welcoming me to speak at agile.delivery and for all the positive feedback, especially after the plethora of AV issues. Slides are shared here, as well as the promised links to the various books mentioned.

Books & Tools Mentioned in This Talk

If you’re new to coaching, you might also enjoy the talk I did on stealing coaching lessons from sports at Dare Conf Mini a couple of years back: video and slides.

PHPNW2015 Keynote: Stealing People Lessons from Artificial Intelligence

Thanks for the warm and lively welcome PHPNW 2015. Thoroughly enjoyed kicking off with the opening keynote. Slides & links to the books mentioned below.

Books & Tools Mentioned in This Talk

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TDD for Speaking

One of the things I love about test driven development is that you define what something should do, what purpose it should have, before you implement it. So before you write any feature code, you’ve understood what needs to be achieved by a user. This is often a better way of exploring user needs, and the potential grey areas in particular, than detailed written requirements might be.

A couple of years back I took to using this same approach for writing talks. Rather than starting with what I had to say, I started with what questions the audience might have. What do they want to learn? Who will be at this particular conference? What will they likely know? What knowledge, experiences & skills do I have that would best add to what they already know and can do?

This approach has paid off in a multitude of ways. Rather than trying to shoehorn an existing talk into a conference proposal, I think more about what the attendees will want to learn. I genuinely think I deliver better talks as a result. And often big chunks of existing talks I’ve done fit in with that new set of needs; so I think more of the chunks of narrative, tools & info than in terms of whole talks.

It also has the advantage that I can write the proposal long before I ever write the talk. Usually when I submit to a conference, or am discussing with an organiser who’s approached me, I end up with a good summary of what the talk will be and what people will take away at the end. The written description serves as my own test that I refer back to: am I achieving what this description promises? Does this talk answer those questions? Will people walk away with the understanding we committed they would?

And lastly, it’s pushed me to tailor talks much more to the specific conferences and associated audiences. To be braver in proposing talks that will be more useful (but may be less comfortable for me personally).

In short: thinking of conference proposals & talk descriptions like we do tests in TDD helps a speaker focus on what the audience needs to learn, rather than just what one has to say.

This post was inspired by those fine folk who run the Technically Speaking newsletter, which I’d heartily recommend you subscribe to.

Stealing Project Management Lessons from Artificial Intelligence

I was delighted to speak today at the Digital Project Management Summit 2014 in Austin, Texas. Below are my slides, and the links to the books and resources that I mentioned.

Books Mentioned in This Talk

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Awesome People Management with Agile

As promised, here are my slides from my Agile on the Beach 2014 talk.

I also mentioned my Coaching & Mentoring talk which you can find here (including video kindly published by the Dare Mini folks).

Books Mentioned in This Talk

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