Self-Experimentation for Continuous Improvement

Tom Perry

Talk: 60 minutes

Summary

Have you ever struggled to convince a team that your ideas have merit? How can you tell if the change you proposed at the last retrospective will actually pay off? How can we build a mindset of experimentation into team behavior? What if there were a powerful way to demonstrate through your own actions the legitimacy (or fallacy) of your ideas?

Self experimentation offers us a way to test out our ideas and demonstrate their validity. It offers us a way to demonstrate, through modeling the desired behavior, a mindset of experimentation and validation. Self-experimentation has a long history in disciplines like psychology, chemistry and medicine.

Tom Perry shares strategies for setting up self-experiments of your own. Starting with identifying antecedent behaviors, definition of the reinforcement and other behavior modification mechanisms, with hands on examples he teaches how we can use self-experimentation to improve the performance of our selves and our teams.

Short Bio

Tom Perry has been working in software development for over 20 years. He has worked on teams at startup companies, large corporations in the Fortune 100 and the State and Federal Government. His background includes testing, development, project/program management, agile coaching/mentoring and training. As part of his involvement in the greater agile community, he led the Seattle eastside chapter of the APLN. Tom speaks at a wide variety of software development conferences all over the world on a wide variety of Agile and Lean topics. Check out his blog for more information about his writing, presentations and current projects https://agiletools.wordpress.com or follow him on twitter @tlperry