Building Resilience - Tricia Broderick (Keynote Outline)

Tricia Broderick — leadership advisor, co-author (with Diana Larsen) of Lead Without Blame, 25+ years’ experience, founder of Ignite Insight + Innovation (2020) — closes Day 1. Building on Kent Beck’s morning “forest vs. desert” framing, she argues that whether you’re in the forest or the desert, resilience is necessary to succeed. There’s no magic checklist — but there are patterns: four pieces of the resilience puzzle, each with a tangible action, illustrated throughout by her 18-month quest to learn a freestanding handstand. (Her family hides one piece from every jigsaw puzzle — hence “pieces, not the full picture.“)

1. Framing

• We all come to work to succeed — even the person “sitting next to you driving you insane.” Goals/ideals of success differ (Kent Beck’s point), but the drive to be engaged, produce, and make an impact is shared.
• Broderick’s own career success owed a lot to resilience — but “not intentional”; only hindsight revealed the pattern. (No longer codes, but it’s her passion; “fixed my son’s CS homework the other night.“)
• Definition (from Lead Without Blame): resilience is our ability — individually and collectively — when crap goes down, which “seems like the norm these days” (fire tornado, COVID, inland hurricane, plus everyday workplace/community chaos).
• No single fix (“fire me if I sell you a checklist”) — but four pieces: compassion, confidence, courage, complexity.

2. Piece 1 — Compassion (concerned care for self and others)

• “It’s business, not personal” is a quote from a fictional mob movie — stop using it as a best practice. Compassion is necessary in the workplace, not just at home.
• The lie: calling yourselves a “team” doesn’t make it one. Progression of what we mislabel as teams:
  • Individuals — worried about your own success/skills when you first join (few of us are hired never to talk to anyone).
  • Group — cooperation, like a relay race: my part, your part. If the 2nd runner falls, no one blames the anchor; you can still earn a bonus for a good individual part even if the team loses. Most orgs are organized and optimized for group behavior (“I’ll help with your part as long as mine gets done”).
  • Team — collaboration: build it together. Knowledge work — discovering what value even is — needs at least a team. Collaboration produces better ideas (“energized and exhausted, but came up with something way better than alone”). Not taught, esp. in the US. (Her son’s “collaboration”: he did all the git commits, everyone got 80% — “that’s not even a group.“)
  • High-performing / self-organizing team — unlocks “co-intelligence” / wisdom of the crowd.
• Leaders must stop being the hub (the “desert of control,” per Beck). You can’t skip to high-performing (“just self-organize, go” = chaos). Many leaders were never taught to stop being the hub — job descriptions say “drive” the results, which fights self-organization. Nobody teaches facilitation, speaking, mentoring — only strategy/visioning/delegation.
• When leaders became less of a hub, panic set in (“I have no job”). In 2020, high-performing teams reverted to group behavior under COVID chaos (“just give me my part”) — revealing the leader should have been helping the team learn to be resilient / embrace complexity.
• Tangible: build compassion through intentional collaboration. Co-building a leadership course with a colleague surfaced his traumas (weaponized estimates — “are you done yet?” → terrified of estimates) and her triggers (“resting unhappy face — don’t comment on it”). Connection → you invest in others’ learning, growth, well-being → they feel safe → best work. Are you cooperating or collaborating?

3. Piece 2 — Confidence (belief in abilities, yours and others’)

• The lie: “I trust them.”
• Live “Queen of Hearts” card trick with volunteer Katalin: repeatedly says “please pick” (never “which to keep”) so she can discard or keep to force the outcome to the Queen of Hearts; reassurance (“you’re doing well, keep going”) plus the power dynamic of the stage guarantees it. Reveal: “I manipulated you” (hence the gift book).
• In Agile, leaders told “don’t be the hub, don’t have all the answers” sometimes decide “I’ll manipulate them” to the answer in their head — everyone’s caught the “just tell me what you want me to say” moment. Manipulation is not leadership or trust.
• Don’t “Queen of Hearts” people: (1) your answer might be wrong; (2) it kills two-way trust — you must trust their knowledge/choices and they must trust how you’ll react. (Not “watch them fall off a cliff” either — that’s not leadership.)
• Tangible: be intentional about building teaching situations. As a director building a learning program, instead of teaching every class herself she asked “who wants to build this course?” — the result was better than she’d have built, and grew mutual confidence. “You stay the expert if you keep acting like the only expert.” Ask: what am I the expert on that makes me the single point of failure/bottleneck, and how do I share it?

4. Piece 3 — Courage (engage in the risky unknown)

• Courage is like “calm down” — you can’t just tell someone “have courage.” It’s personal and situational: stages don’t scare her, but a rustle in the leaves on a hike made her scream (“unless you’re a dog, I’m terrified of you”).
• Story: at a conference she overheard “Is Tricia your token female?” Her colleague responded with lavish, over-the-top praise — yet she found herself angry at him, confusingly. Sitting with it, she realized: of everything he said, he never said “what a crappy question.” She’s tired — 25+ years, COBOL, wrote a book, ran a conference, keynoted — and still gets the question.
• Reframe for someone with privilege and power: “What is my silence saying?” When she saw what silence signals, courage got easier — “it just feels like the right thing.” She used to fear being called the “fun police”; now she doesn’t care, because she knows what silence sends.
• Evidence it matters: her Agile 2025 keynote announcement (her first-ever conference, since 2007 — “full circle”) made her anxious about trolls claiming she got it “because she’s female” — but Dan North and others commented “About time / Finally” and she got zero trolls this time.

5. Piece 4 — Complexity (explore and embrace the bigger picture — learning)

• The lie: “I love to learn.” Learning is hard, yet it’s exactly what complexity (unknowns, the unexpected) demands. We treat learning as an off-to-the-side once-a-quarter thing when every day’s work is learning. Five inhibitors, each learned through the handstand journey (started Jan 1, 2023, “slightly intoxicated,” with her girlfriend — goal: a 10-second freestanding handstand):

5.1 Learning has baggage

• She’d define success by perception/imaginary context (“successful only if… lead dev → director → own company”). The handstand goal (10 seconds, freestanding) was set because “anything else seemed not cool” — yet she “couldn’t even kick up to the wall” (a “volleyball frame, not a gymnast frame”). A mentee “had to be an executive,” got there, then called: “I hate my life.” Know why a goal is your goal — baggage makes learning harder. (She even doubted doing this talk here — “am I this intelligent?“)

5.2 It means change

• Results are non-linear — a change can look worse before better (“look between your hands”; a friend wrote “heavy” across her midsection to flag she wasn’t straight up). Tempting to revert to what you know. Quote she loves: “I love change that I initiate” — but much change is done to us.
• Don’t overwhelm with change: ~2010 as director, “conference Trisha” came back wanting to go from 18-month releases to “feasible daily deploy” with no CI/automation (“bringing the server down Easter morning”) → terrified the whole engineering department → had to pull back to small steps (start with CI, explore automation/tools).

5.3 It means unknown

• The lie: “just in case” / love of a risk register (trying to control the uncontrollable). On Mount Stupid (Adam Grant / Dunning-Kruger) she felt cocky — then the unknown “smacked her in the face”: she’d never learned how to fall (nearly hurt her dog). Unknowns aren’t just things you don’t know — they hit you as “obvious in hindsight.”
• Tangible: take exploratory steps for curiosity, not decisions/check marks. Terrified to write a book (baggage + risk + overwhelm), she took intentional steps months apart — talking to authors about what was hard/good — “not to validate, but to get curious,” unlocking unknowns (security, why she was writing it) and reducing risk-terror without removing the risk.

5.4 It takes time

• The lie: “no point now / I’ve missed the boat.” Resilience is being committed, digging in when it’s monotonous and “why bother, I’m not getting it.” YouTube’s “six weeks to a handstand” — “they lie” (“if you tell me ‘just do the core,’ I will hit you”).
• Find a community to be challenged and supported — powerful in workplaces (the 2 a.m. release crunch bonds people; “let’s go get a beer”). Developers “don’t like mean people,” not people. Community = who you reach out to when it’s tough, who comments on your LinkedIn, who’s in the front row. (Photo from an Agile conference: Alistair Cockburn kept his word and did a handstand too.)

5.5 It means failure

• The lie: the obsessive check mark (Franklin Covey planner). YouTube said “dig in with your fingers as brakes” — she didn’t stop, knocked the wind out of herself, but learned it’s not simply pushing on fingers. Don’t game metrics to fake a check mark (she once slowed the video down in Camtasia to “get her check mark”) — gaming avoids failure and stops learning.

6. Payoff — Recognize Unexpected Achievements

• In complexity nothing’s a straight line; we celebrate only the goal, missing all the achievements along the way (“this is impressive to so many people” but “NOT THE GOAL → not valuable” in her head).
• What people remember isn’t whether your project shipped on time — it’s the impact you had on others (inspired/supported them, community). Even inventions are remembered for their impact. She finally thanked Kent Beck in person — not for XP itself, but for the journey/impact his 1999 book had on her (then a lead dev teaching J2EE, “just happy not to be in COBOL”).
• Someone in her community said, ”You won’t [get it] if you stop.” She kept going and hit the 10-second handstand at exactly 18 months to the day — while her 17-year-old daughter, in the next room, didn’t even notice (“this is why I record every day”).
• The twist: she’s never done it again — gets 5-second holds now (~once a day in a 30-minute practice) but no consistency. So is she “done”? In complexity and resilience, there is no done — only “what’s next?” (consistency? on stage in red heels? a press handstand?). It was never about the check mark — it was about the journey, leveling up yourself and others.

7. Close — A Live Handstand

• Four pieces (compassion, confidence, courage, complexity) require intentional investment in yourself and others; “how you build resilience is by being resilient.”
• She attempts a live handstand on stage (“the dumbest thing I’ve chosen to do to myself at the end of the day”), with disclaimers: don’t try one after the session; don’t offer techniques unless you’re a gymnast/in the circus; best hold so far is 3 seconds, not 10. “If I fall, it just makes the point of resilience better.”
• Sign-off: “Keep building your resilience. This world needs all of us to keep moving forward.”

People & References Cited

• Tricia Broderick — speaker; co-author of Lead Without Blame (with Diana Larsen); founder of Ignite Insight + Innovation; upcoming Agile 2025 keynote.
• Kent Beck — morning “forest vs. desert” keynote; his 1999 book (XP) and her thank-you.
• Dan North — “About time” support; Alistair Cockburn — did a handstand too.
• Adam Grant — “Mount Stupid”; Dunning-Kruger.
• Katalin — on-stage volunteer for the Queen-of-Hearts trick.
• Employers referenced: TechSmith / Camtasia Studio.
• Concepts: individuals → group (cooperation) → team (collaboration) → high-performing/self-organizing; leader-as-hub; manipulation ≠ leadership; “what is my silence saying?”; five learning inhibitors; recognizing unexpected achievements; “there is no done.”

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVVDlxkWX4 — Transcript via yt-transcript.sh; outline generated from the transcript.