Business Agility 2020 NYC Summary

What an adventure we had in New York City at our March 10th event that partnered with the Business Agility Conference! Agility might have been in the name of the conference, and it was never more important as during an ever changing pandemic situation.

Women in Agile kicked off the conference with our evening event featuring Marsha Shenk and our two Launching New Voices speakers – Jen and Carmen. Marsha is a business anthropologist and keynote speaker who presented “Dignity Looping – Celebrating and Strengthening our Voices”. She led the room through several exercises to help deepen our understanding on what constitutes different types of interactions, how to focus on the right types of interactions for different groups throughout our days, and how to build in more rich exchanges. 

Jen Willems presented her talk on “Servant Leadership is a Decision”, and walked us through how she faced the difficult challenges of changing mindsets and bringing servant leadership culture to her own approach and organization, and how it impacted her approach to decision making. Carmen Guerra Jurado shared her story on “How to Turn your Biggest Agile Skeptics into Fans”. Her account of how she faced difficult challenges and skeptics and eventually transformed her team into a strong agile team resonated with many of us in the room. 

 While the evening was a bit smaller than we’d hoped with travel restrictions preventing some attendees from making it into town, we had a wonderful evening. We learned about enriching our exchanges, explored new types of interactions, celebrated our new speakers, and laughed together during our networking sessions.  As we carried our connections forward into the main Business Agility event held the following two days, we were grateful that so many made it to the Women in Agile evening and we were able to celebrate our strong voices together.

A special thanks to Accenture | Solutions IQ for sponsoring this event and for the Business Agility Institute for partnering with us for the second year in a row. We were also happy to get an Each for Equal pose in celebration of International Women’s Day!