I was luck enough to start my tech career on small close-knit teams where although we weren't really doing anything that might be recognized as agile we worked very collaboratively, tested through all phases, had to figure out how to get closer to our customers.  And so when the Big Company I worked with tried to introduce the One True Way to Deliver Software (based on having a huge team and long delivery cycles and old-school ways of thinking about software delivery) we had to become much more disciplined and intentional about what we were actually doing.

There are still big gaps between "the development team" and the users and often with other entities in the value stream.  There is still not enough recognition that investing in quality all through the process (even if it takes more effort/brainpower/time at points along the way) results in better products in production.  And humans still like to gravitate over-optimistically towards 'easy' fixes and big-bang changes to solve deep organizational issues that require thought and probing and experimenation.

I'm hoping that the budding recognition that making products accessible benefits *everyone* results in increased opportunities in software engineering orgs for people with lived experience of needing different ways of solving problems,  and better, more usable things for all of us.

I wanted to talk about using low-tech visual thinking tools because one thing I'd noticed about everyone working remotely is that suddenly we were back to mostly talking and typing at each other to try to create shared meaning.  And everyone was feeling constrained by needing digital tools to support other kinds of interactions.  But if you have a camera, you can share pictures.  You don't need sophisticated digital graphics tools to be able to collaboratively draw pictures to help understand the work you're doing.

Drawing is fun and easy and you don't need fancy tools to use drawing to dramatically improve shared understanding of complex systems and situations.

Charu Arora's session about visual strategic planning looks really interesting.  I'm always interested in anything that Angie Doyle and Talia Lancaster show up with about how to make facilitating hard work more playful.  And I think Faiza Yousef's talk about supercharging your personal growth will have some amazing insights

.The past many months have been really challenging for all of us--massive disruption and too many personal losses.  But there have been some really amazing opportunities that have come with the shift to remote connection that have enabled us to come together in ways that weren't available before--so many opportunities to learn from and work with people we might not have encountered otherwise.  And it's definitely reinforced the criticality of recognizing that much less is certain and known than we like to think, so we must probe and experiment and always be prepared to adapt to changing circumstances.