It is an implicit reality of the Agile Manifesto that we need to accept being wrong, yet people hate to be wrong. I’ve asked lots of rooms of lots of people to describe what it feels like to be wrong, and the response fall into a narrow range: Embarrassing. Depressing. Humiliating. All sort of variations on Bad.

This is an existential challenge to Agile. If there's anything people can agree on about the agile manifesto is that it is about people, and about the inability to perfectly predict the future. It gets worse: "bad" is not what being wrong feels like. Being wrong feels great! That’s because being wrong feels exactly like being right. What feels terrible is when you learn you were wrong. But if I ask these same people if they like to learn, they claim that they do, even though they just describe the feeling of learning as horrible. What’s going on here? To be a fully capable member of an agile team — learning, communicating, and collaborating — means overcoming the harsh realities that work against us. We are subject to many cognitive biases, predictable gaps between perception and reality. We have limited cognitive energy. We are adept at spotting mistakes in others that we are blind to in ourselves. You might attend this talk if you are curious how human psychology works against successful agile adoption. But my real goal is to change your behavior. My experience is that seeking excellence in agile development requires difficult emotional work. I will challenge you to reconsider your accountability for failure and frustration, and invite you to establish the habits and patterns that can lay the groundwork for success. They are simple, but not easy. Are you up for it?