Empathy for Software Project Managers – Dangerous, Essential or Misunderstood?

Empathy gets a lot of hype-coverage these days in software development project management. Before we jump on the empathy bandwagon blindly, the presenters recommend that we understand the matter a bit better and suggest we explore alternatives.

In this talk, the two presenters collaboratively investigate the benefits and pitfalls of empathy for project managers based on a real life ongoing ‘experiment’ by Pawel Brodzinski since 2014 when he heard Katherine Kirk claim that ‘Empathy can create negative outcomes’.

To this end, Katherine will delve into rethinking and challenging our concepts of empathy (concept: is it safe?) utilizing her eastern philosophical specialization and experience as an agile/lean coach, whilst Pawel will utilize his practical experiences and experiments as a leader of a software development company to explore how that reflects in the real world.

They will discuss whether empathy is useful, what the pitfalls of empathy might be, how we can avoid them, what might be an alternative and suggest how you might want to apply all that on the job.

Video producer: https://leanagile.scot/