Agile Outrage! The 2024 Conference Controversy with Chris Williams

Discover how to handle the sting of rejection and turn it into a stepping stone for success with Agile Coach Chris Williams from Badass Agile. 

Chris and I explore the emotional landscape of the Agile community, particularly when it comes to conference submission highs and lows. This episode is a masterclass in self-reflection, empathy, and finding strength in setbacks.

Ever wondered how to make your mark in a crowd that seems to favor the familiar over the fresh? Listen as Chris dissects the art of connecting with your ideal 'Agile Tribe' and how to effectively amplify your voice amidst a sea of established norms. He also shares experiences with various conferences, and discusses the value of creating your own platforms when conventional doors don't open. Through strategy and sincerity, he shows you how to craft proposals that resonate with your audience and align with conference themes, providing a beacon for those eager to share their innovative ideas.

Wrapping up, we tackle the crucial skills of receiving constructive feedback and nurturing professional relationships. We'll give you an insider's view into the strategic moves that can elevate your career, from refining your pitch to leveraging personal referrals in the job market. And when faced with rejection, we emphasize the power of perseverance and the importance of staying true to your message. 

This episode isn't just about finding your footing in the Agile space—it's about shaping a career path that's as unique as your insights. Join us for a conversation that's as much about personal growth as it is about professional development.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/badassagilehost/

Visit Chris' website to listen to the Badass Agile podcast, enroll in his leadership immersion program (The Forge), and check out his other offerings:
https://badassagile.com/

Download Chris' free guide to getting your conference proposal approved:
https://learning.fusechamber.com/conference-proposal-guide

Join the Alliance and support the show!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now. Well, welcome back everybody. This is Mark Metz. Your host is always for the Agile Within podcast. Today, I have a guest whose name is Chris Williams. Chris is an Agile coach and the host of the Badass Agile Podcast. So, chris, welcome to the Agile Within. Thank you for having me, mark. It's great to be with you. So, chris, tell me where you're from and if I were coming to your city for a day, what's one thing that I couldn't miss?

Speaker 2: 1:05

Hmm, Well, I'm from New Market, Ontario, which is about 30 miles north of Toronto. So I used to live in Toronto but once I started a family I moved north, like so many do, and so it's only about 100,000 people. But if you were to come I would say you got to see. Main Street would be one of them. It's a very historic Main Street and if you or your family like to watch the Hallmark Christmas movies a lot of them were filmed on our Main Street just because it's really charming, very historic. You know, it's got a little bit of fame associated with it.

Speaker 2: 1:39

Getty Lee's mom owned a convenience store as Getty Lee from Rush, for those who don't know, and Connor McDavid, which is one of the NHL's currently probably most famous players for the Edmonton Oilers. He lived here and was from here and played hockey here. So I would say Main Street would be one of the big ones, the historic district, but also we have this really great arts culture too. So there's all these old town hall and a whole bunch of new things being constructed where there's a ton of culture happening in this town. Those would probably be the big ones.

Speaker 1: 2:11

So I'll have to tell you my wife she would totally agree with this. She is a Hallmark movie junkie, so much to the fact that she records every single Christmas movie that comes on, and I think she finished the last Christmas movie that she hadn't finished watching like a couple weeks ago. So maybe we'll have to come and visit because that is something that's near and dear to her heart. Oh, definitely, thanks for sharing, of course. So I've invited Chris and we've been talking and something that's top of mind right now Agile Conferences and we've been reading a lot on LinkedIn from people that are not happy, some of them there's 1100 entries that were made for 125 spots. That's about 11% acceptance rate and some people are not happy about not being accepted. They're saying things like we're seeing the same people, we're hearing the same topics. So, chris, you and I talked a little bit. What's your take on this?

Speaker 2: 3:05

I was surprised I was reading LinkedIn, which I should never do. I should practice what I preach and stay off social media, but I do get a lot of here. Case in point a lot of my topics on my show come from the discussions on LinkedIn. So I do try to keep my ear to the ground and make sure that I'm current, because I'm not always practicing full time as a coach. So I try to stay in there and I have a pretty wide array of connections and I saw numerous people complaining about this and the first thing that came to my mind was surprise that for people who are so certain that we're the most empathetic bunch, that we're the most enlightened bunch, that the rest of the organization typically those with legacy mindsets don't get it and we get it better. I was shocked to see how many people went straight for well, there must be a conspiracy theory or agile alliances, racist, or this is more of a profit thing. So if you're sponsored, you're guaranteed a speaking spot. I don't know the extent to which any of those things are true, but I can tell you it surprised me for one of two reasons.

Speaker 2: 4:14

The response is not based on logic. A lot of the reviewers Came online in the comments and said so. You know, we don't know who submits the topics, so we wouldn't be able to tell not only your race, your Gender, any of those things, but we wouldn't even know your name. So we couldn't even infer from your submission which demographic you happen to fit in. And Presumably it's also blind to whether or not the submitter was related to a sponsor somehow. And Keep in mind there's a, as you said, there's an 11% acceptance rate. That means almost 90% of the submissions are going to be rejected. That's the nature in the heart of competition, they said if you make a submission, there's a really good chance it won't be accepted.

Speaker 2: 5:03

It raises a couple of questions. One is it truly colorblind? Because at the end of the day, it looks like a lot of the people who were accepted were 80% white male or Making the stat up, but it was. You know, the balance was heavily leaning towards white male. Is that because it tends to be more white males who submit or I Don't know. But I was disappointed in their response because they weren't starting to interrupt. They went straight for conspiracy theory and not for introspection, which we should be really good at, being the masters of the retrospective, it's one-fifth of what we do. How come we couldn't look at that and say, well, maybe it was my submission and Not my socioeconomic status or any other factor. Sorry, go ahead, mark. What were your?

Speaker 1: 5:42

thoughts. Often do we look inward instead of looking outward and placing blame. So I agree with you things that we preached our teams to our Organizations and, yes, I am a firm believer we should be more inclusive. Totally agree with that. Where I would rather focus our time on here is, if I'm making a submission, what responsibility do I have in the matter? Am I really selling my session to the best of my, to the best of my bill, like you say? I mean a 90 percent, 90 percent decline rate? I mean that's, that's pretty tough. The odds are definitely not in your favor. So you've got to do everything that you can to try to sell your spot. So I actually read on LinkedIn and somebody reading direct quotes here, somebody said my friend is very well known and how dare you reject him?

Speaker 2: 6:30

So there's a bunch of things going on there worth talking about.

Speaker 2: 6:34

One is let's just talk about the submission process and how those things get Selected, and if you ran a conference, what you would look for in a submission most likely. And then let's talk about how you react to Rejection, because all of these things indicate that maybe we're not as self-aware as we profess to be. So let's start with the submission first. When you create a submission for a conference that people pay to go to and they fly across the country to get there, they're expecting some kind of value, and we've all been to a conference and we all probably have experienced that it's often an echo chamber. We talk about things that are easy to talk about. There will not be a lot of controversy or left or right field stuff happening at a conference, but nonetheless, if we begin by thinking, well, what would I like to talk about? You've already started to veer away from the point. The point is what topic would bring value to the community when my expertise can be of service? To my mind, that's a better place to start, because it forces you to ask the question Well, what do people need right now? What's happening in the agile practice in the community, what's happening in the economy at large, in our culture, that's worth talking about, because if you just talk about the same things, like I saw, some people who got their submissions Accepted are talking about agile basics and you would think at this point Well, it's been 25 years. Do we really need to go through the principles, the manifesto and the scrum guide over and over? Don't we have this now? And the answer is maybe not. Maybe you're coming to the conference for the first time. So some there's a small percentage of, I'm guessing topics that are allowed for fundamentals, but then there will be some things that are talking about scaling, talking about non-technical agile, talking about different stuff. So they may have a portfolio of topics which they don't. To be fair, they don't share ahead of time. So how would you know if you're hitting the mark?

Speaker 2: 8:18

But nonetheless, if you start from one of the pressing, burning questions that I hear from practitioners either my own personal experience or when I go on LinkedIn what are people asking about, what are people worried about, what do people want to learn more about? And so start there rather than just focusing on. These are the topics that I like because you may like them, you may be proficient in speaking about them, but if nobody wants to hear it, we're being a little bit selfish. The truth is that if you have something that you're burning to talk about, you really feel that it's important, but you're not certain that the rest of the audience will necessarily get value from it. It's your job to sell it. So when you're making your submission, you have to make a case for why this is relevant.

Speaker 2: 8:59

So if you start saying I don't know if you know this, but 80% of scrum masters struggle with executive level communication, and so it's often reported that one of the big reasons for agile failure is lack of management, synergy, et cetera. So this talk will give you the following number one, an understanding of why it's important. Number two, a list of three things you can do differently to make your executive communications better. And here's how you measure it and here's how you'll know if it's working Like. You have to sell it, and I think one of the problems that we have as a community and I mentioned this to you and I say this safely because I was a developer at the beginning of my career I was an enthusiastic technologist, but a lot of agile people were hatched in the nerdery, which means we came from development team rooms and we were never gifted or given those skills of executive communication and selling.

Speaker 2: 9:46

All right, sorry, not. It's not so much the exact communication I'm referring to here, it's the selling of your idea. If you have an idea and you believe that it's valuable, but you don't necessarily it's not obvious to everyone, it's your job to make the connection and it's your passion for making the community better. Where you study the needs of the users, the needs of the people going to this conference, you become obsessed with what would they really benefit from? What are they saying that they're needing without actually saying it? If you can uncover that, you can start to make a more concrete case for why your topic belongs in the conference.

Speaker 1: 10:19

So I was reading another post on LinkedIn and I could imagine the person who posted this saying, okay, point taken. I hear you, I have to sell it, but I've done that and I'm going to give a quote here. In the quote from this person, what they said was it is a clear pattern and this is related to the Agile 2024 conference through Agile Alliance. They said it is a clear pattern silence the critics and those who might shift the paradigm, ie those who threatened the gravy trains of the I'm giving air quotes real powers behind the Agile Alliance, and they were not happy because they apparently had submitted for several years now and not been chosen to speak.

Speaker 2: 10:55

What do you think about that? Well, I'd ask this question If you are so mistrustful of the Agile Alliance and you're so certain that they're part of the Agile industrial complex and that they're in cahoots with some right wing conspiracy or agenda, why would you want to speak for them in the first place? If this isn't your crew, get out, go bring your stuff to another conference. You know I've applied many times for conferences back in the day. I haven't done it in several years. But one of the groups that really took me under their wing was it runs out of Detroit, michigan, and I think it's called Agile and Beyond. So I submitted the same topic that I submitted to five or six other conferences just as a test, and they were the only ones that responded and said come talk. And when I came, they're like thanks for coming. We really. You know, I've been a follower of your show and I really wanted to have you here. They treated me really, really well. That's my group, that's my bunch, that's my tribe. Go find your tribe.

Speaker 2: 11:46

So if you're saying things that are edgy or counterculture, there's an audience for that, just understand. It may not be with the Agile Alliance, because the soup that they swim in is selling certifications at different levels of Agile Scrum Master Proficiency, product Owner Proficiency. So it may not be. They may not have an appetite for discussing counterculture views. I mean fair enough. So you might say, oh, they just don't want to upset their sponsors. Well, would you, do you go knocking on the door of the people who pay your bills and say, hey, you're ugly and just smell funny Like you? You know what I mean. So I would say there's an audience for what you're trying to push, but it may not be the Agile Alliance. You have to be okay with that. You got to do now the elbow work of going and finding who is it that really needs to hear this message. But don't be disappointed if it's not the really big for-profit organization.

Speaker 1: 12:32

So I'm sure you follow Chris Stone as well. Many of our listeners, I'm sure, follow him. He's got something to the tune of 40, 50,000 followers on LinkedIn and he's accumulated a database of Agile Lean Conferences, and he's been doing this for a while, and so he had listed over 60 Agile Lean Conferences across the globe. I would be in your court, as if this one conference and granted, it's probably one of the bigger, if not the biggest one but if it's not the one that you get accepted to, you got over 60 others that you can apply to. We preach empiricism. We preach experimenting. Why not experiment with other conferences and not just put all your eggs into one basket.

Speaker 2: 13:12

Here's a novel idea.

Speaker 1: 13:13

Start your own. Oh, that'd be too easy. Maybe it'd be too hard.

Speaker 2: 13:17

Run a meetup group and start with 20, 30, 40 people and, as it matures, if there's a groundswell of support for your message or your way of thinking, your way of communicating, trust me it'll grow. I mean, I know personally, but when I made my podcast, the first instinct was I didn't want to do what everyone else was doing, and that's hour-long shows, interviews with the same people that are on every other show talking about the scrum guides biblical agile, corporate agile, bankified agile. I wanted to talk about what agility meant to me in terms of achieving outcomes. At which point agile scrum were less, you know, the name was less important than the foundational principles underneath it and what becomes possible when you really honor them. That's, and I wanted my show to be 10 minutes long and to be as much inspirational as it was informational. So I made a decision to go in the opposite direction and it worked. So why not put out your own shingle? Why not do your?

Speaker 1: 14:10

own thing.

Speaker 2: 14:11

But yeah, when Chris puts out those lists of 60 big agile conferences, I mean what a gift to have a list that you can go and test with. You mentioned something earlier that people say well, like you know, I made my pitch, I combed my pitch and I worked on it and groomed it. But bouncing off of who Like the easiest thing in the world would be to send a submission out and say I would like your help with this topic. Am I close to something that you think the panel would consider? Can you help me understand what you're looking for so I can tailor it? Now?

Speaker 2: 14:36

Here's the interesting thing about life that I've discovered, especially in sales and influence trying to convince somebody of something. Oftentimes, if there's a divide between what you're trying to do, say sell, and what other people want to buy, boil it down to this when you give other people some of what they want, they will help you get some of what you want. So when you start by saying, listen, I have a topic, it's a little bit counterculture, it's a little bit against the grain, but I would love to be part of your conference. Can you give me a sense of what you're looking for? Here's my topic and I know it may not immediately fit into one of your categories, but is there a way that you could see where it would?

Speaker 2: 15:10

And sometimes they'll give you context and they say you just tweak this one piece, if you just tune this one part, then it would be easier to make a case for it. And if you speak to the reviewers, they all say look, it's really hard to give feedback on 1100 applications, but if someone goes out of their way to say I could use your help this is my first go at agile alliance from. I'm changing direction and I would love your input. Usually you'll find somebody who will help you. And again, if they don't, okay, so this year you don't make the conference, I'm pretty sure they run it again next year.

Speaker 1: 15:36

You touched on something that I think is vitally important, and that's your reach and your network and how you're building your relationships and how you're utilizing those. When you apply for a job, do you just send a blind resume into a submission and just cross your fingers and hope for the best, knowing that there's probably a couple hundred other people that are also applying for the same position? I mean, yet you can and you may get success with that, but what I've found is much better is that if you can build a relationship, but if you know somebody that knows somebody, or have some connection and be able to get your foot in the door and be able to have a conversation, then all of a sudden hey, you're not just in this big stack of resumes that are along with everybody else. All of a sudden you start going to the top and you get somebody's attention.

Speaker 1: 16:20

As a former manager, I've seen that before when I was hiring people and I had somebody that I knew and I trusted came up to me and said hey, mark, I know you've got a lot of people applying, but I've got this special person here that I've worked with in the past. I really think you owe it to yourself to give them a look. Am I just going to say no, you know what? I'm just going to stick them in the middle of the pile and look at them. With the rest, no, if it's somebody I trust, I'm going to leverage that and I'm going to at least give it a look. Use what resources you have for connecting with people. That was, that's the advice that I would give and I actually have used that before with some of my conference talks is actually, as you said, have a conversation and not just send it in and hope for the best. What are your thoughts?

Speaker 2: 17:02

I agree, and I was as you were mentioning. Another thought came to me, but let's address the network part first. You may not know someone at Agile Alliance. I mean, all these people went and got their friends to complain after the fact. Why didn't you go get your friends to help advocate for you, to give you a reference, that you put at the end of your submission, something along those lines, and see if that makes a difference? But in my case I'm generally. The reason I don't apply anymore is because I'm generally invited to things by people who hear my message and love it and say we need exactly what you're trying to say in our company or in our group right now. Which brings me to the next point, which is one of the biggest pieces of feedback from the reviewers. Is that generally, if we don't accept your submission or the ones we eliminate first are the ones that are not clear. In my experience and this might be hard to hear a lot of Agile practitioners can be pleasers, which means we're as concerned with making other people comfortable as we are with achieving our mission and our vision. In fact, we may not have a vision at all.

Speaker 2: 18:04

In the program that I run is a year-long immersion for leaders. The first thing we spend the first quarter of that course working on vision and intention. You have to be able to declare with absolute succinctness what it is you stand for, and so, when you make your submission, you should be able to say who is this for and what will it do to help them. So if your voice is distinct, if you believe, for example, that Scrum is no longer the best framework or methodology, that something else would suit us better, or if you believe that Agile itself has to expand and extend and maybe we're sitting too much inside a container, sitting too much inside the matrix, then say that you have to state your belief clearly, and you have to be able to do it in a way where it's obvious what you're trying to do.

Speaker 2: 18:47

Who are you trying to help? I'm trying to help organizations that are stuck using antiquated Agile or Agile and name only, or corporate Agile. I'm trying to help them get better. Or, in the case of guys like Ryan Ripley just wrote a book on empiricism. So I'm trying to convince people that the best way to adapt your practice is based on evidential data, real proof gained from practice, gained from experience, gained from doing when you're clear about the what and the why.

Speaker 2: 19:11

Then it's easier for a reviewer to say okay, I think I understand where you're going here. And then, when you make your submission and you do reach out and ask for feedback or help, it's easier for them to say I see your point, but I do or don't agree with, or put another way, we're not looking to bring that in front of an audience right now. There's just not enough support for it, we don't think we could fill a room with it and we don't think it's what the industry needs to hear. Once you've heard that, you can decide what to do. This conference is not for me or I will pick a different topic that might be more suitable. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1: 19:41

Yeah, absolutely. I'm a big fan of the show Shark Tank and what I like about Shark Tank is seeing the people that come on the show and the pitches that they make to the sharks to try to sell an idea, and obviously it's made for TV. So there's some that are horrible and there's some that are great, some that are kind of quirky, but you know what you're getting live feedback from the investors on the spot, and that's what I enjoy listening to. So I can't help but put that situation in this. What we're talking about right here, as far as, like you say, making your point clear, who are you serving, and succinctly so that it's easy to digest. Maybe we should be that side of that type of a format.

Speaker 2: 20:23

Chris, that's a great idea and it's a brilliant idea and it as you're, as you're saying it. Here's what I think the same people who got butt hurt and offended because they were rejected would never go on a Shark Tank. They're not open to see. I have friends in my network because of where I came up and how I studied and the kind of quest that I'm on. I have people in my network who I can go to and say if this sucks, tell me it sucks. I want to hear it. I need this feedback. Thank you for making me better.

Speaker 2: 20:51

That's one of the things we teach in the forge, because the feedback that's intended to make me feel better won't make me be better, and so I have a suspicion that the people who are not comfortable with rejection are not going to seek out what we call a red team or a Shark Tank.

Speaker 2: 21:04

But I think that's a brilliant idea. What a great way to use your network. Even if you don't know someone who's a professional reviewer or a volunteer reviewer, you could go to people that you trust who know the industry well and say would you pay $3,000 for a ticket knowing that this would be one of the topics? And they'll tell you with the right crew, they'll be brutal with you because, as you say on Shark Tank, we need to understand if this has been fully fought through. Do you know what your competitors are doing? What makes you say with certainty that people would buy this, that they would sign up for this, that we get value from this? Have you thought about the opposing viewpoint? If you don't have access to that kind of feedback, aren't you just kind of shooting arrows into the dark.

Speaker 1: 21:43

That really is what you're doing, right, You're just taking a blind shot. So I'm reading people clamoring for what's the criteria? I need to know what the criteria is. I need to know the rules for this so that I can do a better job, and it's almost like people are so obsessed with what's the LinkedIn algorithm? What are the rules that I need to follow to make my posts be seen by more people? What am I doing as an SEO expert to make sure my results are coming up to the top? What do you think about that? I mean, should the panel that reviews give out some guidelines or some rules that they're looking for and like for Agile Alliance? Do they do that? I don't even know.

Speaker 2: 22:20

I'm not sure I know that giving people a marker to shoot for will help them ensure that they get more of what they want and less of what they don't right. So if someone is to submit a topic idea that has nothing to do with Agile it's in the tech zone but it's really not on the dartboard. You're wasting time by asking your reviewer to look at it when it's really not relevant. But beyond that, again, when I started my podcast and you'll feel this too is your show progresses and grows you're going to have people telling you a lot of things that have the word should in it. You should talk about this, you should change that. You shouldn't say this and it's tempting to go oh yeah, you're right. You know I do a lot of episodes on strength and will and discipline and I have a lot of people write in saying you know you shouldn't say that because we live in a culture where people are burning out and stress and anxiety and all these things. You shouldn't say that and I usually say thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thanks for listening. But you need to know that I will never change what I say because of somebody else's perspective. Not to say your perspective is not valid, not to say I don't want to hear it, but, generally speaking, if I believe in something so strongly, I'm not tempering my topics, my viewpoint, based on someone else's discomfort with the words.

Speaker 2: 23:35

What that means is, as a podcaster, you get used to what is it you really want to say and the right audience, the one that's magnetically aligned to your voice, to your message, to your style. Trust me, they will find you. Whereas if all we do is try to please the algorithm, try to please a certain group of listeners, guess what you get? You get all of the podcasts, all of the submissions, all of the YouTube channels sound exactly the same, and that's a shame, because if you're creative enough to want to speak in front of people, if you're creative enough to want to start a YouTube channel, write a book, you owe it to the public to take them to the edge a little bit right. A teacher teaches concepts, but someone who gets on a conference stage and keynotes or tries to create something valuable for their audience always takes them somewhere new. And I don't think you can do that by honoring first how much it aligns with what other people like or what's popular or trendy.

Speaker 1: 24:33

What do you think? So I think that if you weren't chosen, maybe it wasn't the right talk for the venue Bingo. Have we considered that? Let's talk about that.

Speaker 2: 24:42

Maybe your proposal just got sucked, maybe it's stunk, maybe it just didn't fit in what's happening in the industry and where the industry's going.

Speaker 1: 24:48

Yes. So that was what I wanted to explore in this episode was really bringing it back to ourselves, and what responsibility do we have in this situation? I'm sure there are people that have valid arguments, that did everything that we've suggested. They were very passionate, made a very clear pitch, but it just wasn't chosen. But again, 11% acceptance rate the numbers just Not everybody's going to get.

Speaker 2: 25:13

And part of me wants to say when you know, I saw some people who were not quite so butthurt and offended but were dejected because they were rejected. And part of you wants to say look you, just this particular year, this particular band of reviewers, this particular conference may not be your tribe, but, trust me, what you are trying to say has value. Don't quit. If you don't quit, you'll be successful. You will eventually find people, like I said, who are magnetically aligned to your voice. So don't take one rejection as, oh, my stuff isn't worthy, because to me that sense of not feeling worthy is a disease. Not good enough.

Speaker 2: 25:50

Sure you are, you have everything you need to add value to an audience. But sometimes it's a numbers game. It's like dating and sales. You got to talk to a thousand people to get a hundred phone numbers and then 20 or 30 of them will get on the phone with you and two or three of them will buy from you. Those are the kinds of stats that you get used to when you're in the business of persuading and leading people. It's natural, but I think, as Agilis, like I say, I don't think we've been exposed to that enough. What do you?

Speaker 1: 26:16

think the sales side definitely is something that's foreign to those of us, such as myself, that came up through the engineering ranks, and we're engineers by heart and just through our hard work that we're successful.

Speaker 2: 26:28

You're intellect and you're analytical thinking Like that's your offering to the world. Not everyone can do that, but recognize it's a different set of skills than what gets things sold and ideas pushed across the line.

Speaker 1: 26:42

So what can we learn from the process? What can we learn from this, from being rejected? What should we take away if we're rejected for one of these conferences? Chris?

Speaker 2: 26:50

I think rejection is the ultimate empiricism, isn't it? Even by doing, stick your neck out, be comfortable with failure, because failure is your teacher. And so you have to jump through 20 hoops to get one person to say this is good, this has got some potential. But it's also the bigger question is to what extent is your topic submission serving mostly somebody's ego, whether it's yours or whether it's the approval algorithm or the audience that you think you want to talk to? Because the response was very, very telling.

Speaker 2: 27:20

Some people saying publicly and online I'm disappointed, I'm hurt, I'm broken, I've lost all my faith in myself. But there were some people who were like oh, this is because of conspiracy color my skin, my background, my opinion, I'm not welcome here. And that's the part that surprised me, because, once again, people were supposed to be very empathetic, analytical, and we talk about servant leadership all the time. That seemed to be really really me focused, really really ego focused. Honestly, do you honestly think that an organization selected 100 out of 1000 entries based on people's ethnicity or race? Is that even possible? I mean maybe, but it seems somewhat unlikely. Most importantly, though, the attitude when things go wrong of your first defense is I'm going to point a finger at you. Your fault you're. The blame Couldn't have been me, couldn't have been the quality of my idea had to be some kind of ism or some kind of conspiracy.

Speaker 2: 28:16

I think that response is outright irresponsible and, to be honest, it's a little bit childish. It's like an impetuous kid stomping their feet because they didn't get to play with their favorite toy. Don't we owe the community better? Aren't we supposed to be leaders and mentors to other people? Do we not set an example of saying what can I learn from this?

Speaker 2: 28:34

How can you honestly go into a retrospective and convince a bunch of people who don't want to go to a retrospective or don't want to contribute with their hand up and speak? How can you convince them that they should, when you share the same set of fears and you haven't yet been able to overcome them? How are you going to set an example for those folks? So, to answer your question, what's the takeaway? I think let's inspect first what meaning you attach to being selected for a conference. If you are truly doing it because you want to contribute to the community, you'll understand that either your pitch wasn't good enough or you just got unlucky. The point is, to assign blame elsewhere robs you of the opportunity not only to show up dignified on LinkedIn, but also to get better so that next year you will be selected. I'll stop there and see if that answers your question.

Speaker 1: 29:20

Mark, it absolutely did. I think that's a great place for us to land. So, chris, for our listeners out there, how might they get in?

Speaker 2: 29:29

touch with you. Best way is to go to badassagelcom. You can get all my podcast episodes there. You can also find out about the Ford, which is the year-long immersion experience I was talking about, but I also have some new courses on. What does it mean to be a leader in the post-pandemic, post-recession era? The world of work has changed. There's a new set of skills that everyone who leads needs to be able to adopt, and guess what One of them is? Selling and influence and moderation in your emotional responses all of those things. And hey, this might help you too. I'm launching a new course on storytelling. It's coming out at the end of the month and I think it's like $87 US if you preorder it now. So I'll give you the links and if you would be so kind, just pop them into your show notes, but it's basically learningfusetjambercom forward slash storytelling and the rest you can find at badassagelcom.

Speaker 1: 30:28

We will absolutely do that, and I've heard you talk about storytelling before and you're a very compelling speaker and you have great stories to tell yourself, Chris, so we'll add those to the show notes, not a problem. And that brings to an end this episode of the Agile Within. I want to thank Chris, our guest, for coming here today and to our listeners. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Agile Within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, Mark Nets.