16 June 2022

Fear Is Your Friend

This is an exec member exclusive video.

Fear warps tech teams. The product manager is too afraid of angry customers to try a new experiment. The engineers are afraid of conflict with sales and accept unreasonable deadlines. The CEO is afraid of board displeasure and keeps trying to deliver to unsuitable clients instead of firing them.

What can you do about fear? It's not enough to exhort or inspire your team to be bold and unafraid—that may just scare them more! There are difficult but rewarding steps you can take to address and mitigate fears, all of which we'll discuss in this highly interactive session:

Learn to recognise the "normalisation of deviance", like skipping tests to "go faster" or designing features "the way we know customers want them".
Use coherence busting to break through unrealistic assumptions about the causes of fear.
Draw a Fear Chart with your team to identify, defang, and mitigate your collective fears.