Thursday, June 27, 2019 at 6:30:00 PM VeriShip 8880 Ward Pkwy #300, Kansas City, MO

ver time, our brains have evolved to help us survive in a world where we solve the same kinds of problems day to day and interact with a small and rarely changing group of people who closely share our outlooks and opinions. In other words, we're optimized to function in a world nothing like the one we actually live in.

To deal with being confronted with an overwhelming and unprecedented access to information, our brains use mental shortcuts to make timely decisions. What could possibly go wrong? Welcome to the world of cognitive biases.

We'll take a look at some of the most common biases that affect decision making. We'll talk about why everyone else on social media is crazy. We'll explain why we did not pay too much for that car. We'll rationalize why spending $100 on lottery tickets was actually a great investment. We'll take a look at the biases other people have (but not us). Finally, we'll learn how all these are examples of our own biases. #TheresABiasForThat

After exploring some of these concepts we'll talk about the real reasons so many Agile practices work and help protect us from our own brains. We'll cover practices like story points, user stories, information radiators and more, and we'll talk about the biases they help protect us from. Armed with this knowledge, we can start protecting ourselves from our own brains, and help make the teams we work with even more awesome.

Attendees will learn:
Some weird and wonderful facts about how our brains work (and sometimes don't).

To recognize some of the common cognitive biases that affect how we make decisions.

Why agile thought processes can stack the deck in our favor for making good decisions if your company uses Agile or not.

Our Guest Speaker - Nate Adams
As an Agile Coach and Trainer, Nate strives to help organizations do work better; figuring out how to build the right thing and build that thing right. How do we boost team morale? Improve product quality? Prioritize work? Manage change? Disrupt big industries or protect ourselves from being disrupted? These are the questions Nate loves.

As a contract Software Architect Nate helps technical teams in a variety of ways. Want to talk about how to write code that is not only tested but testable? Improve your automated test coverage? Break your system into domains? Make your systems more customizable and maintainable? Or do you just need someone to do some old fashioned code slinging for you? Nate can help with all of these.