Becca Hiller
Agile Coach, Mindfulness Practitioner, & Creativity Cultivator
Louisville, Kentucky, United States
Driven by courage, curiosity, and compassion, Becca Hiller knows valued people deliver value. As an Agile Coach, Becca helps humans reach agility potential. Her own agility shines through sharpened improv skills, a mighty pen, a hungry brain, and a passion for teaching and coaching.
Becca is currently based in Louisville, KY.
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Individuals, Interactions, and ZOMBIES!
Want a high performing "zombie" survival team? Pulling otherwise lively innovators out of a shambling, mumbling, sluggish funk? Meetings leave everyone feeling dead inside? Everyone's creative thinking in a state of utter decay?
Leverage the power of play, cultural touchstones, personal interests, containers for true collaboration, and a generous helping of humor to bring life back into your teams (and maybe even yourself). Is this necromancy? Not quite, but you can create or strengthen connection among individuals, catalyze valuable interaction, and even humanize agility.
Together, we'll explore practices, concepts, and skills to resurrect creativity, strengthen team cohesion without sacrificing personality, and achieve a successful innovation culture as we prepare to tackle inevitable obstacles ahead (without losing our brains in the process).
First public delivery of this session was at an Agile Midwest Open Space day. Since then, it has been through a few experiments and iterations at Open Spaces in multiple cities. Of the improvements, a need to cultivate and teach creative-catalyzing skillsets emerged along with the need to structure this in an even more interactive, workshop-style setup. The needs for setup are low-tech but require a space in which folks are able to cluster for conversations and movement.
Sometimes Leaders Just Don’t Understand: The Business Case for Doing What’s Right
Ethics and equity matter. Staying in business matters. These guideposts are not mutually exclusive, though it can often feel as such when making priority decisions. We can commit to doing what’s right, not just what’s easy. However, in order to harness business agility, leverage leadership strategy, and obtain company commitment, we must make it easier to do what’s right.
But how do we make the compelling value case? How do we align our business agility to business integrity? In our session, we will build an initial toolkit to:
- Connect high-integrity initiatives to high-value strategy using tangible business cases
- Highlight inclusive solutions as valuable solutions
- Uncover what’s feeding resistance
- Show that economics and ethics don’t have to be separate
- Increase team literacy around Minimum Ethical Delivery
Struggle Scrum: Getting Through It When You (and Team) Feel Over It
Angry stakeholders, upset users, and missed deliveries. Floods of defects and fire drill Friday disasters. Disengaged developers and overbearing executives. Exhausted Product Owners arguing with exhausted Scrum Masters. Bad anti-patterns and worse attitudes.
We’ve all been in one of these scenarios or more, sometimes all at once. How do you get your bearings and back on track when the struggle is way too real, you’re burned out, and you and your team are absolutely over all of it?
Take a breath, slow your roll, and aim for functional. Not perfect, ideal, or smooth overnight. When you and your team are over it, define "functional" for your needs and the next meaningful step forward.
In our session together, we'll talk through struggles and patterns around them, and I’ll equip you with perspective, principles, and practices to tap into your awareness, simplify your approach, and leverage your support systems to get through the now so you can thrive in the future.
First Presented: Middle TN ScrumMaster Guild Meetup on March 8, 2023
Primary Audience: Scrum Masters, Team Coaches, Team Members, Agile Coaches, Agile Leadership
Knowledge Levels: Intermediate to Advanced in areas of Agile Values, Scrum Framework; All Levels in areas of leadership, team dynamics, behavior change, and relationship building
Approx Duration: 60 min presentation-style or 90+ min workshop
The Zen of Agility: Learning, Unlearning, and Why Simple Agile Isn’t Easy
Becoming Agile is just applying values and principles and winning hearts and minds to shift culture and embrace practices and habits that align toward agility. Right? Easier said than done? Let’s peel back the layers and discuss:
What Zen can teach us about Agile (including simplicity, stillness, practice, and the Beginner’s Mind)
Fundamental differences between learning and unlearning
Concepts such as habit building and breaking, singular focus, incremental improvement, and stages of mastery
Explore challenges (and baggage) along the journey to “Agile Enlightenment”
The role of leaders, teachers, mentors, and coaches in bringing a little more mindfulness to agility
Knowledge Levels:
-All Levels in areas of leadership, team dynamics, behavior change, and relationship building
-Intermediate+ in areas of Agile Values, Principles, and Frameworks
Structure Note:
While this session is a presentation style, it is also highly interactive with a few short discussions and activities that are best accomplished in smaller groups. Therefore, having a "discussion cluster" setup via small tables or other groupings are preferred to maximize the value and interaction for the session.
Agile Coaching Exchange East meetup
Struggle Scrum: Getting Through It When You (and Team) Feel Over It
Middle TN ScrumMaster Guild meetup
Struggle Scrum: Getting Through It When You (and Team) Feel Over It
Music City Tech 2021 Sessionize Event
Agile Midwest Conference 2019 Sessionize Event
Music City Tech 2019 Sessionize Event
Becca Hiller
Agile Coach, Mindfulness Practitioner, & Creativity Cultivator
Louisville, Kentucky, United States