Sharing Experience through Speaking

Photo by Xava du

A group of us sat in a row together. We wanted to listen to our friend Ryan give his presentation on retrospectives. This wasn’t the usual “how to facilitate effective retrospectives” talk either—this was his experience of focusing on one problem and using retros to experiment and learn from trying to solve it. Over the course of a year and a half. It was one line of code.

I LOVED IT. A humble and wise presentation on using retrospectives to do the very thing we dream they can do: enable a team to solve problems. It was honest and inspiring.

Ryan will be presenting this topic again at DFW Scrum tonight (July 16th). It’s an evening of experience reports in preparation for Agile 2019, and I’ll also be presenting the talk I co-wrote with Skylar Watson (“The Downfalls of Coaching in a Hierarchical Model”). Our papers have been published online here.

I hope you come support Ryan (and me) this evening at the meetup. More importantly though, I hope you’ll find your topic and volunteer to speak at a community event. We learn from reflecting on our experiences—good, bad, and ugly—that may inform what all of us can do differently tomorrow. Watch the below video for more of my thoughts on getting started as a speaker:

However how small, or mundane, or obvious it might seem, there is something in sharing your experience with others that can be incredibly powerful. We as a community grow stronger as a result.