Thursday, October 8 at 11:00 am – Noon EDT | Virtual Session

How to keep your head when, all around you, people are losing theirs.

When organizations are under pressure, good people do predictable things. They focus inward, protect their priorities, and work harder on the things they can control. That’s not a character flaw but a rational response to incentives that reward local performance over shared outcomes.

The side effect is that alignment means less. Leaders agree in the room yet pull in different directions afterward. This isn’t bad faith; it’s a system that gives them no real reason to trade anything away. Delivery teams feel it first: too many priorities, too much noise, and the sense that being transparent about capacity just creates more conversations to manage.

There’s a better move. Get agreement, not alignment, on what your team will deliver in the next 30 days. Agreement means someone named a trade-off. Alignment means everyone nodded. The difference? A 30-day commitment that’s genuinely agreed is also a 30-day license to defer everything that isn’t part of that commitment. Less noise. Clearer focus. And the ability to build a track record of delivery that speaks louder than any status report.

You will leave the session with:

• A clear frame for why pressure produces misalignment — and why it’s structural, not personal
• A practical way to shift planning conversations from alignment to agreement
• A 30-day focus model that protects delivery cadence and legitimately defers out-of-cycle noise

Level: Intermediate – for delivery leads, product owners, and practitioners managing in complex or high-pressure environments.

Meet your speaker

Dave Sharrock founded IncrementOne and has spent 25 years helping organizations deliver faster and tell the truth about the work. Across financial services, manufacturing, eCommerce, federal government, and education, he works on the part of change that tools don’t solve: how people absorb new ways of working, and what leaders have to change about how they measure and decide. That is also how he approaches AI adoption. He holds a PhD and an MBA, and is the only person in Canada to hold both Certified Scrum Trainer and Certified Enterprise Coach (Emeritus) designations. He co-hosts the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast.