Along with shared goals, tools, and boundaries, psychological safety is a pre-requisite for a truly self-organizing team. Research shows that if you can create psychological safety for your teams, they will be more creative, willing to take risks, and speak their mind — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs and reduce project risk.

But how do you cultivate psychological safety on a team? Is conflict ever ok? This workshop will give participants the chance to practice exercises for building safety in a fun setting. We'll focus on what safety is and isn’t, how agile leaders can support it using a learning mindset, and learn several team exercises for cultivating safety. We’ll also introduce one method for measuring psychological safety over time.

How you launch your project has a huge impact on its success. Done well, a good kickoff focuses the team on shared goals and protects a team from misalignment, role confusion, and expensive rework.

But what happens when the team is hired by a client, the product owner has limited agile experience, the tech stack is new to the team, and some of the team members have never met? How do you set up this team to “hit the ground running” with a clear alignment around teamwork, dependencies, risks, and desired business outcomes? This interactive presentation will share real-world stories and techniques that you can apply to any kickoff to create shared understanding quickly and increase the likelihood of project success—even if you’re working with strangers.