Cognitive Biases are unconscious processes that influence how we perceive the world and how we take decisions. These mechanisms are a result of evolution.
Biases are automatisms of our brain to make our live easier, but they have also a dark side.
There exist more than 150 biases and today we are going to see only 10 of the most relevant to our context and several mitigation strategies.
Learning about biases has helped me professionally and I expect that today after this talk many of you start seeing biases everywhere and applying some of the mitigation techniques I will show.
How should agile coaches and scrum masters deal with some of the most important biases? Why should stop doing retrospectives and start doing proper process improvement and experiments?
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Group Development Models
George Smith (2001) – “Group Development: A Review of the Literature and a Commentary on Future Research Directions”,
Group Facilitation, Number 3, Spring 2001, International Association of Facilitators ISSN 1534-5653
32. 1. Set the Stage
2. Gather Data
3. Generate Insights
4. Decide What to Do
5. Closing
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Retrospectives
Influence
Gather Opinions and Judgments
Generate Assumptions
37. Availability Bias
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Falling coconuts kill more
people than shark attacks
“Falling coconuts kill 150
people worldwide each year,
15 times the number
attributed to sharks.”
41. Data Driven Continuous Improvement
• Retrospect in real time (board)
• Toyota Kata
• Kaizen Events:
– TOC
– Systems Thinking
– 5 WHYs
– Value Stream Map
• Design real experiments
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“If you simply plan on
seeing what happens
you will always
succeed at seeing
what happens
because something is
guaranteed to
happen.” – Eric Ries
43. Experiments
1. Align with team objectives and KPIs
2. Declare your expected outcomes upfront
3. Emphasize accuracy, not precision
4. Turn assumptions into falsifiable hypothesis
5. Time-box experiments
6. Use a control group
7. One experiment at a time
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44. Takeaways
1. Evolution
2. Unconscious
3. You cannot be not biased
4. Mitigation strategies Process not people
5. Engage System 2
6. Perspective
7. Data-driven
8. Coaching
9. Retrospectives
10. +150 Biases
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