Rock star developers, charismatic leaders, star players, genius specialists, baby-faced risk takers... just put them in a room, add agility and press go – right? If you’ve ever tried to do it, you know the results are as about as successful as egotistical scientists collaborating themselves out of a paper bag.

So how do we operate effectively in this crazy environment? How can we make great decisions? How do we deal successfully with big egos and political hell? Playing politics and stroking egos is out – being authentic is in. Consider: Innovation is our industry’s primary nirvana but at speed it can make any genius a babbling-has-been in seconds. Our industry now changes at a rate so fast we don’t even have time to laud our achievements over each other before we’ve already become 2nd in line.

Katherine puts forward her experience that, in reality, what has really been most successful for individuals in our rapidly ever-changing landscape is.... being ordinary. As much as possible.

In fact, recent trends in magazines like Harvard Business Review, Forbes and Fortune are recently overflowing with research, articles and conjecture about ‘a new radical leadership’ like ‘being humble’, ‘authentic’, quiet and data driven.

But how does that really work, on the ground...?

In this entertaining talk, Katherine shares real life, practical steps and techniques (inspired from 2,500 year old Eastern Philosophical models) that she's successfully used - fresh from this last year – to help solve tough tech people issues with teams, executives and divisions who have been going through painful change from mergers to highly stressful crucially inter-dependent hell.

Any tech is well familiar with the frustration that, in corporate culture, there is often a long chain-of-blame, cascading down from corporates to the average team – hiding behind finance.  At its worst it becomes a black hole where great ideas and initiatives silently dissolve.   But are things starting to change….?  Is change really possible?

In this talk Katherine suggests it might, and explores how she is seeing an effect of the ‘Continuousness-trend’ (continuous improvement, delivery, innovation etc etc) and how the cultural change we sometimes see might be down to an effect she calls ‘Continuous-Consequence’.

However, she warns that in her experience this is a double edged sword: although ‘Continuousness’ brings in a useful data view of ‘cause and effect’, in large corporations it can create hell-politics upstream that stick like mud and, surprisingly can sometimes cause unexpected negative outcomes.  Its not all rainbows!

So - in our corner of the world, how could we avoid the mud and how could we capitalize on the cultural effect ‘Continuousness’ has to our team’s advantage?  

In this talk, Katherine draws from her practical, recent on-the-ground experiences in multi-national large corporates, including a tough 200 people IT departmental merger to explain what she learned and what might help others – and suggests some Eastern Philosophical models and lenses she found useful.