Women in Agile and the Confidence Code

The Book

What is confidence and how do you know you have it? While confidence is partly influenced by genetics, it is not a fixed psychological state. However, you won’t discover it thinking positive thoughts or by simply squaring your shoulders and faking it. It requires work and choices: less focus on people pleasing and perfectionism and more action, risk-taking and fast failures. This is why it can seem harder for women because these behaviors aren’t typically the ‘norm’ for women but generally come naturally for men.

Buy the book: https://amzn.to/2wJP1BW (paid Amazon affiliate link)

Conference Video

Watch the video here: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/women-agile-confidence

Description

What is confidence and how do you know you have it? While confidence is partly influenced by genetics, it is not a fixed psychological state. However, you won’t discover it thinking positive thoughts or by simply squaring your shoulders and faking it. It requires work and choices: less focus on people pleasing and perfectionism and more action, risk taking and fast failures. This is why it can seem harder for women because these behaviors aren’t typically the ‘norm’ for women but generally come naturally for men.

In this talk we will explore the roots of confidence and the gender gap between men and women. To ground the learnings, we will also hear interview summaries from four great and diverse women in agile: Lyssa Adkins, Esther Derby, Ellen Grove, and Kat Conner

This talk is inspired by the book 'The Confidence Code' by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.

Kelly is a passionate agilest focusing on helping teams and organizations discover how to maximize the value they get from applying and scaling Agile principles. She is a pragmatist who excels at applying Agile in ways that work in current environment while working to change the environment to support greater agility that can scale. Kelly is also an experienced facilitator and trainer. She enjoys designing and facilitating experiential workshops and seeing students light up with “Ah ha moments.” Kelly is a great communicator and works well at all levels of organizations.

Kelly spent 5 years doing large scale agile transformation at Capital One. She recently joined Lexis Nexis as the Lead Lean Agile Coach helping the company implement Agile at Scale in pragmatic way.