Better Software East 2017 - Personal Excellence
Thursday, November 9
It's All in Your Head: Use Neuroscience to Improve Performance
We humans process millions of bits of information each day. In order to handle that data load, our brains have developed shortcuts to take advantage of patterns, shared knowledge, and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes those shortcuts lead us astray, causing us to draw inaccurate conclusions. Faye Thompson says these shortcuts are amplified when we bring together a team of people, all trying to work together. Understanding how and why our brains take shortcuts to process all the incoming data can help us recognize when it's happening, take measures to correct our course, and even use...
Risk Aware, Not Risk Averse
PreviewMost of us dread failures. But things go wrong. We can become paralyzed by the fear of being the creator of the next outage or critical bug. After a failure, we often hold a postmortem, but this rarely addresses how we can be more proactive in preventing catastrophes. Considering our missteps, failures, and outright crash and burns, we can learn how to ask the right questions at the right time. Siva Katir has thirteen years of experience causing and surviving failures—from the mundane to the maddening. Siva shares the lessons he has learned analyzing his, his co-workers, and his...