 I'm absolutely thrilled and honored to be here today with all of you. I was really looking forward to Agile India back in March and we all know that it didn't work out. So very, very excited to be here, even though it's online and we can't meet each other and greet each other, but really thrilled. So feel free to keep, you know, posting your messages, your thumbs up on the discussion panel. I'll be looking at that. And I'm excited to get started with my topic, which is called Drawing on Psychotherapy to Enrich Agile Coaching as Vikram shared. So even before I get started sharing my presentation, I just wanted to start by saying like, what is psychotherapy and how's that even connected to Agile Coaching? So if you think about it, psychotherapy is the science and art of working, of understanding people more deeply. That's what we do in psychology, right? Trying to understand how people think and behave and what motivates them. And when we understand these things, we can work better with them. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I have a background in clinical psychotherapy. I went to New York University to study my master's in clinical social work and have several years of practice after that. So I'm going to draw on some building blocks that we can bring in from psychology and psychotherapy to build better teams, to be better agile coaches. So with that, let me go ahead and share my screen so that I can begin the presentation. So, you know, if this was in person, we do a lot of activities and it would be much more interactive. The tool doesn't allow us to do a lot of things, but we'll still try to make this interactive. So what are those? So we're going to talk about what those three blocks are that we can use to become better agile coaches. And we're going to talk about some building blocks. We're going to talk about three building blocks to enrich in your agile coaching practice. So let's look at the first one. And just a side note that you can get all the slides on comfengen.com or you can also get it. I have a link at the end where you'll be able to download all the slides that I'm using today. So with that said, let's go ahead to the first thing that we want to talk about. So the first building block is its empathy. And we're going to talk about why is this even important and why do you need empathy in your teams and why do you need to cultivate this sense of empathy in yourself? So before we do that, I always like to understand or define the concept first. So what is empathy? And you can share, if you have quick thoughts on what empathy is, you can share that in the discussion panel. You can post your answer, what you think empathy is. And I will go ahead and share what I think empathy is. So first there is a lot of misconception about what is empathy. And a lot of times people think that maybe it's the same as sympathy or just feeling sorry for somebody else or sharing their concern or feeling pity for them. But the truth is, empathy is not any of those things. Empathy is actually the ability to step into the other person's shoes and really feel what they're feeling and understand it from their perspective. So here's a definition from Roman Zarek. He's the author of the book called Empathy. And he describes it as the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person. So it doesn't have to be something very emotional that they're telling you. They could be just telling you about their new job. And as they're describing it, empathy is our ability to step into their shoes and really experience what they're saying. What is that new job experience like for them? And to be able to then not just cognitively understand it, but also actually feel it emotionally. So if they say that, you know, I love my new job, I got a new laptop, I'm so excited and I've gotten like funds to set up my home office. So I was able to get a better camera so I can, you know, better lights, etc. So I can do a zoom calls better. So, you know, then feeling their excitement. So being able to step into their shoes and say, wow, that's nice. That's cool. So kind of feeling their excitement as they're talking. So there's two parts to it. And this comes to us from the book, Social Empathy by Elizabeth Siegel. And she talks about the two components in empathy. So one is, of course, cognitively understanding what empathy is. And the other is emotionally experienced or what the other person is experienced. And the reason why it's so important is because everyone sees the world differently in their own way. So sometimes when somebody's telling you an experience, they're telling you that, you know, when I was a child, I was bullied all the time in school, being able to really step into their shoes and feel what that felt like is so important because that experience could be very different from somebody else's experience, who also got bullied, but felt differently. So maybe they felt more stressed. This person felt more frightened or scared or had nightmares at home at night every night. So what is that experience like? So understanding that we experience the world in different ways. So being able to really step into the shoes of another person and feel what they're feeling. That's so important to understanding the other person. So coming back to what we were initially saying, that empathy is not compassion. Although, of course, you are compassionately trying to understand the other person's view, but it's not the same thing. It's also not pity. It's not sympathy. And it's not just concern. It's actually the ability to step into another person's shoes and feel what they're feeling. So with that being said, I would now love to have an interactive discussion on why empathy is important. Let's do an activity together. So what we're going to do is we are going to discuss why is empathy important in our teams? So I have a Mentimeter poll. So if you go to menti.com, so that's M-E-N-T-I, just like you see here on the slide. And if you put in this poll number, 3882453, you'll see this question. And I would love for you to write why you think empathy is so important in our team. So let's take a minute. I encourage all of you to come participate because when we all share our thoughts, we make it so much more enriching a discussion. So come on over to Mentimeter and I can stop sharing and I will pull up the Mentimeter poll in a bit. So let me stop sharing. Let me pull up the Mentimeter poll. Wonderful. I see so much of participation already. Wonderful. So I'm going to present that so we can all see what you're typing. Keep it coming. All right, let me present that. All right. So here we go. Why is empathy important? So effortless collaboration, yes, psych safety. Absolutely. We're going to talk a little bit about what that is, different perspectives, trust. Yes, people coming from different backgrounds, different life experiences. Absolutely. That's why it's so important more than ever, right? People coming from different backgrounds and experiences and we really just have to step into their shoes and understand their perspective. Inclusiveness, building trust, collaboration. Yeah, I love this one. Team is a relationship too. And it needs nurturing and empathy is needed to achieve this. Absolutely. Absolutely. Enables connect, inclusive environment. So we'll give it one more minute. So if any of you want to give Sharon more thoughts and I will load this, I will say this is a PDF and load it back onto the slide so that when you download the slides, you'll have this as well. So please jump in and share so that all of our collective wisdom can be stored here and then you can refer back to this later. So, yeah. It's like seeding a plan of relationship. Yes, absolutely. Inclusivity, trust. Absolutely. Wonderful. Okay, great. So you can keep writing in. I'm going to move to our next topic. But really, you know, empathy is such a deep topic. And it really around the world companies are starting to see the importance of empathy in teams because if you have empathy, you can solve so many problems together as a team. And you are once you understand your team members better, so much more can be achieved, you can become so much more cohesive as a team. So really, it's I encourage you to read more on this topic and to continue your learning because it's such a vital skill to have. And when I went to school to study clinical social work, we actually spend a huge amount of time on just the topic of empathy, because it takes time to truly deeply understand empathy and to have that empathy for people around us. All right, I want to thank all of you for participating in the Mentimeter poll. So, wonderful, great answers, building rapport I see so many wonderful phrases humans at work. Okay, wonderful. Okay, so let's move to our next topic and thank you to all of you that participate in the Mentimeter poll. So let me share back my screen. And we will talk because remember today we're talking about three building blocks. And again, you know, this is not these three are not the only things that you need to do. But it's three things that that are that can be super helpful. I want to make sure that the camera is on. Okay, it is on. So go back and share. Okay, so let's move on to our next thing, which is cognitive biases. So what, what are cognitive biases. And really, you know, economists like us to believe that human beings are very rational. So we, you know, we rationally make all the choices that we make. The research shows and science shows that we have quite a few cognitive biases that make us behave in certain, I would say weird ways. So we don't always follow logic. We tend to make decisions based on irrational parameters. So there's actually a whole list of cognitive biases that scientists have found that human beings tend to make these biases or have these biases. And you can look it up online. It's called the cognitive bias codex. So it lists all the different cognitive biases human beings have. And there, there's a whole bunch of them. And today we're going to talk about just a few of them. We can't talk about so many. We're going to talk about three or four of them and understand how these biases impact our teams and how you as an agile coach or as an agile practitioner can make sure that you're not, these biases are not impacting you or your team members. So let's look at a few. So the first one is, so we're going to look at four of these different ones. So the first one we'll look at is groupthink. And really, how many of you are familiar with groupthink? If you are, put a thumbs up in the chat panel. If you've heard of this term before. And I can share, you know, what, what we mean by groupthink. So groupthink is the idea that a lot of times even well-intentioned people will just end up making these certain choices which are not optimal, but we make it because we just want to conform to our group, our team. And if you're following Scrum inside of your teams and you play Planting Poker together, the reason we have Planting Poker and the reason we don't show our cards one by one, we show it all at once, right? So if you're doing Planting Poker and you're estimating a story and you say three or five and you show it together. The reason we do this is to avoid groupthink. And groupthink is that exact phenomenon where if I show my card and say three, the story is a three. Everyone in this group, in the group might tend to say, okay, it's a three because we as human beings tend to want to conform. We don't want to stand out. So we might just end up saying, okay, it's a three. Even though some of us might know, no, it's not a three. It's probably like a 50. It's a huge story. You can't even be done in this one sprint. But we still might say, well, I'll just go along with the group. I'll just say it's a three. So that's groupthink. And because of groupthink, sometimes what ends up happening is called the bandwagon effect. So that's another cognitive bias. And what that means is when you have too many people conforming to something, then you end up having even more people agreeing to that. So for example, in a team, let's say a team inside of your company, a team thinks that building something, they're building out an API to do something. And they think this is a brilliant idea. And the whole team believes that. And they tell other team members and others in the company. And very soon, everybody wants to say, yes, that's a great idea. No one has validated it. And people are just trying to jump on because the group already thinks something so everybody else wants to hop on and not be left behind. So that's called the bandwagon effect. And it's not uncommon at all to see this happening inside companies where large swaths of people are just starting to agree to something because others agree to it without validating it. And a lot of times that's how companies start to make really bad decisions. It's a whole bunch of people think something is a great idea, but they didn't really validate. Is that a good idea or not? So just these are things to be careful of as an agile coach to make sure that you're not seeing this happen inside of your team. If you've seen this happen, if you've seen groups think happen, you can put that in the chat box. And we'll do a little activity together to talk about how we can avoid these cognitive biases. All right, so let's look at another one. So here's two more. So the first is called authority bias. And typically this is where you have human beings have this tendency to put more value on a person's opinion if they are authority figure. And we've seen this where we're senior leadership and stakeholders in the company. Since they have more authority, a lot of times we tend to just say yes to what they're saying. A lot of times in the teams, you might know that what the stakeholder is pushing for is not really correct. Or as a product owner, you might know that the stakeholder, the direction they're trying to give to the product is not the correct one. But because they have more authority, you might just tend to say, okay, we'll go with it. So we have this bias of leaning towards authority figures and just kind of agreeing with what they say. It's also commonly called HIPAA. So we tend to take the highest pay persons opinion. So this is another bias we want to avoid. So that's why we want to be the whole purpose of knowing about the cognitive biases is so that you can catch yourself from not engaging in it. So when you realize that okay, I'm probably agreeing with somebody because of their authority, that's a signal for you to step back and say, okay, I need to be more logical and rational here and I need to stop myself from falling into that cognitive bias. Here's another one, the halo effect. So if somebody is an expert in some fields, so maybe you have a great programmer on your team, like a genius programmer, she's so good that everybody knows that wow, like she's awesome programmer. So the halo effect is our tendency to then take that person's views and opinions in other fields, not connected to their work as authoritative. So for example, as so you have your awesome programmer, and then she starts to talk about design principles that you can put into your work into the app that you're building. And everybody in the team is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's awesome. We'll just go with that. But this person may not be a designer at all, right, they are genius programmer but doesn't mean they're an expert in design. But we tend to have this bias, where we say, okay, this person is so good in one field, so they probably know everything about every field, and we tend to go with their expert opinion. We do this a lot in our personal lives also, if we know a great family doctor, we will often take their opinion on what our kids should study in college or what they should do with their life. We tend to take opinions of people we highly respect or people with expertise in one field, and we think they are experts in every other field. But that's a common cognitive bias. So these are some of the cognitive biases. And I would love for us to think about how we can avoid these in our teams. So I have a mural for us. So we can quickly go over there. It's at this address. And I can post the link in our discussion panel. We're going to try to work on a mural canvas to come up with some ideas to prevent cognitive biases in our teams. And that will bring you over to a mural board. And you will be able to... I can share my screen as well so you can take a look. So let me know. I see some of you are joining in. That's wonderful. So I encourage everybody to come on over. Click this link. Come on. Over to mural. I can share my screen. And I'll show you how mural works. Alright. So I'm sharing my screen. And here... So this is mural. So what happens... And if you want to make this screen a little bit bigger for you to see better, you can always go make this, like zoom in and zoom out if you're seeing my screen at the lower right corner. I'm using that slider to zoom in and out. So you can do the same so that you can see better. So I'm going to come over to the left side here. And so we talked about three different cognitive biases, right? So we talked about group think, authority bias, the halo effect. So what I want you to do is think about how we can avoid these biases in our teams. So let me lock this so that it doesn't... Okay. So what you can do is you can grab a post-it. Wonderful. I see some of you are grabbing post-its. Awesome. If you also double click on this, you will be able to get a post-it. And then you can just start... If you click, double click again inside the post-it, you'll be able to start typing. So I can type whatever I want here. Test post-it. So grab a post-it and you can make it a little bit larger for you by pulling it like this. So grab a post-it and how do you think we can avoid some of the cognitive biases in our teams that happen? And again, I encourage all of you to jump in and participate because this is our collective wisdom together, right? And you'll be able to then download this document and keep it with you. So please come on over. It's wonderful to see so many cursors moving and everyone's thinking and participating. So how can we avoid cognitive biases? What can you do in your teams to avoid falling into these various cognitive biases? And you can put one thought on one post-it and then move on to another post-it to put your thought on. I see so many of you typing. It's so nice to see this collaboration in real time. And we're participating from all over, from different places, cities. So this is wonderful. Oh, I love that one. Appreciating different opinions. Absolutely. Building awareness and calling out when anyone sees it. Absolutely, absolutely. That's so important. Just being aware of these biases and then being able to call out and say, I think we're falling into group think. So let's try to do this in a different way. So just making your teams more aware of these biases, it can be so powerful. Chocolate, yes. Chocolate solves 99% of your problems, right? All right. Asking why? Yeah. Instead of no. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. Wonderful. I love this and you can continue contributing here. And I'm going to show you how you can actually, if you click on the share button here, you should be able to share this with yourself. Like get a link to share it with yourself. If you click export, you'll be able to export this. So we still have one more activity we'll do here. But at the end of this, you can export it to yourself and you have a copy of it. That's why it's so cool that we're all participating because this document has all the shared wisdom of all of you. So keep adding your thoughts. So let's move on to our next topic, which is a third and final building block to becoming better agile coaches. And which is the topic of psychological safety. So let me go back to our presentation and let's think about, let's talk about the third and final building block. Now, I want to make sure the camera is on. Yes, it is. Okay. Perfect. All right. So third and final block is psychological safety. And again, there are many, many components to being an awesome agile coach. And these three are not the only ones, of course, but these are three that I wanted to share today. So let's talk about psychological safety. Because my concern is that we talk so much about this topic that I, a lot of times I hear some misconceptions. And that is why I wanted to share with you first what psychological safety is not. What is it not? Because sometimes I hear thoughts and ideas that, that is actually the opposite of psychological safety. So let's take a look at some of those. So what is it not? So sometimes I hear that, you know, we need to not have any conflict in the team because we need to create a psychologically safe space. But that's not true. In psychologically safe environment, there is still conflict, but it's healthy and productive conflict. The, the whole idea of psychological safety is that we are creating this environment where we feel comfortable saying something or disagreeing with somebody or proposing an opinion. And we don't fear that we're going to be ridiculed or they're going, they're going to be repercussions. So we feel comfortable enough saying what we need to say. But that doesn't mean there's no conflict. Surely the other person can have a different opinion and that's okay. That's their right to express and share that. But the idea is that we don't create this environment of fear. We don't create this environment where you think you're going to be ridiculed or there is going to be repercussions for saying what you believe in. So that's what psychological safety is about. So it's not about, you know, empty high praise all the time. Oh, you did awesome. Even when you did terrible. It's not about that. It's not about lowering all of your standards just so that everybody is happy. It's none of that. It's really a culture where teams are feeling comfortable to express themselves. And, you know, if you don't have some kind of disagreement and, you know, productive conflict, a lot of times it's hard to make those difficult decisions in teams. So some of that is healthy and absolutely natural for teams. But are you creating that environment where everybody feels comfortable sharing their opinion and they feel safe enough to do that? That's what psychological safety is. So again, you know, a lot of research has found that this is really important in our teams where our teams to become higher performing. And if you, if you haven't heard of the book by Amy Edmondson or you haven't come across it yet, I highly recommend it. It's called Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson. And you can look it up. And she also has these podcasts and articles that she writes and you can just Google her name Amy Edmondson and check out her podcast. She's the one who did a lot of research in this field. Of course, it came from the Aristotle project and a lot of other people have worked on psych safety, but Amy Edmondson's work is very seminal in this field. So I encourage you to take a look at that. And, you know, lots and lots of research has showed that when you take that fear out of the environment, because fear is such a demotivator and research shows that we are just not higher performing if we are constantly living in fear. Of being rebuked or being, you know, punished for something or the other or, you know, just knowing that we're going to face dire consequences for sharing our opinion. There's lots and lots of benefits of psych safety. And now we have more and more data coming in as researchers than in teams to see the impact of psychological safety. But clearly, when you have more inclusion, because people are able to share more, you have more engagement, you have more collaboration, you just have like a higher performing culture that comes out of psychological safety and team. So with that, and of course, this is a large topic and I believe some of my colleagues and friends in the Agile community have covered this in this conference. I believe Dana was talking about fear in the workplace. And Dana is wonderful, by the way. We had her over for the San Francisco chapter and she did a wonderful talk there. All right, so let's move on to so what I want to do next our final activity together is just really quickly. What do you think are some, how do you think we can create psychological safety in our team. So in the interest of time, because I believe we have another three minutes. Correct me if I'm wrong, Vikram. So, you know, you can put it in the discussions panel. You can just put in your thoughts on how do you think we can create psychological safety in our team. Yeah, we have about three to four minutes, but we can stretch it a little if you want to take some questions, because we have a small break and then we have a closing talk. Okay, wonderful. So I would love for you to share. So I want to be able to take some questions. So, you know, let's share right here in the discussion panel. We won't do it in mural. So how can we create psychological safety in our teams and I can stop sharing now. Wonderful. We have some questions on the Q&A tab. Absolutely. So if you have questions, if you look at the discussions button on the right, there's a Q&A tab on the top. There are three questions already. Okay, sure. Okay, so I see somebody is asking can we use methods like astrology for helping us in understanding the way the people we work with or the people we are hiring. Well, so, you know, astrology is not rooted in hard science like clinical data that you can actually verify with different subsets, you know, how like companies do analysis and run clinical studies. Well, astrology doesn't do very well when you put it to hard science like that. So we always want to veer towards science and make sure that we are using data and science to make our choices. So I would say that there are actually interesting personality tests that a lot of companies do just to understand better what you know how people think and then to be able to work better in teams. So for example, you can do, you may already be familiar with some of these. There's the disk profile. There is a lot of different personality tests, the Enneagram, lots of different personality tests that I know that sometimes teams will do it together just to get a better sense of, you know, how they work together. And that helps you understand that people have different styles. So you can certainly do some of those in your teams. All right, how can we coach teams to avoid authority bias? Yes, absolutely. You want to be able to coach teams to avoid authority bias. One of the things that you can do is just being aware, just being aware of authority bias and telling your team members what it is. Like today we discussed it. You can go back to your teams and say, hey team, here's some cool stuff that I learned from this conference. And these are some of the biases. Take a look and you can even go to that codec and look at others and explore it. If you would do like a Friday, half an hour lunch and learn, you can have this as a topic for one of your Fridays. And you can just talk more because when you talk more about this and everybody on the team becomes aware, they will be able to catch it themselves. And even if they cannot catch it, you can catch it and say, hey team, see what we did there? Do you think we fell for this authority bias? Just because this person is senior, you think we just listened to her because she's senior? Or do you think this is really a good idea? And you can start to have those conversations. Okay. All right, so I see a question here, making people aware of simple psychological concepts. Make them feel we're doing some black magic. Well, no, I would say that psychology is very much a hard sign. So you can certainly bring these topics into your teams and say that team, you know, here's something I learned and this is a topic for psychology. You can talk about this and you can have those conversations in your team just like psychological safety is a topic that draws from psychology, but it's backed by research and data and it's certainly okay to bring this into your teams and talk about it. So just like that, you can bring all these concepts in. You can say, hey team, let's talk about cognitive biases. Let's talk about empathy. And more and more companies and teams are doing that these days. They are talking about empathy and active listening and psychological safety, all these different topics in order to become, you know, more self aware as individual team members. And with that self awareness comes an ability to work better together. All right, so I don't see any other questions. Yes, it was a wonderful session. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It was wonderful to be here. Thank you Vikram for moderating and thank you to all the energy you brought to all the participants. Thank you very much.