Unconscious Agile

Topics

Introduction

The vast majority of both successes and challenges that we encounter in an agile adoption are due to unconscious behaviours. We like or dislike new ideas almost immediately due to unconscious decisions that are being made faster than our conscious mind is capable of doing.

The very best trainings are experiential, not a series of lectures, and the agile community has jumped on these. From "back of the room" trainings to LEGO® Serious Play®, pair programming to clean language. Many of the very best Agile techniques are so effective because we're setting up conditions to leverage unconscious behaviour and yet we rarely recognize that fact. We've found something that works and often don't dig deeper to find out why it works or how we could tweak it to make it even better.

People who have only seen hypnosis in the context of entertainment or therapy may be surprised to discover that some of the very best facilitation and coaching techniques come from this space.