Do you find yourself, or your team facing unsolvable problems? Problems that start to polarise and get decided by the people with the most rank? Or the majority vote decided and it resolves in a split in the team or in people feeling left out, or excluded? Perhaps you find yourself excluded from a team or company? Polarities cannot be solved, only managed. With polarity mapping we manage that polarity and go from either-or thinking to both-and thinking, and this way includes the entire team in managing that polarity.

Target Audience: Architects, Developers, Decision Makers, CTO, Tech Leads, designers, facilitators
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
Do you find yourself, or your team facing unsolvable problems? Problems that start to polarise and get decided by the people with the most rank? Or the majority vote decided and it resolves in a split in the team or in people feeling left out, or excluded? Perhaps you find yourself excluded from a team or company? And the moment you think you solved it they come back again. The thing is, polarisations like these cannot be solved, like breathing in and breathing out but need to be managed. If we don't, we will make compromises or stay in one polarity and experience the downside of both. To identify and manage polarities, we need to discuss and start using polarity mapping.

In this session, we will interactively expose you to polarity thinking. We will explore how to identify polarities and how we can start managing them with Barry Johnson Polarity Mapping. We will take a common polarity in software design, like too much vs too little upfront design, mob/pair programming vs programming in isolation, and planning vs taking action. By filling in the polarity map together, we show you the power of visualisation to manage the polarity. We will go from either-or thinking to both-and thinking, and this way includes the entire team in managing that polarity.