Signals & Levers: Systems Thinking Tools to Unblock Software Delivery

Elisabeth Hendrickson is a technology leader with 30+ years experience and a track record for building highly effective leadership teams. She led a geographically distributed organization with 170 engineers, product managers, and designers as a VP R&D at Pivotal, a publicly traded company. She has also been a VP engineering at a series B startup, and has held various other technical leadership roles in addition to hands-on-the-keyboard roles as a programmer and tester.

Her book Explore It! from Pragmatic Bookshelf remains popular over a decade after publication. These days she works with technology leaders to improve collaboration, decision making, and execution.

Joel Tosi has been delivering software products for over 25 years. Along the way, he has felt frustrations that he couldn't express effectively; managed teams where he could see the problems they were experiencing, but couldn't get peers to see it the same way; and seen far too many good intentions end with less than desirable results. Joel has stories.

For the past decade, Joel has focused on helping make it easier for teams to enjoy their work and innovate. This has led him to need to find new ways to express what is holding teams back so everyone could see the same reality. Frequently what is holding teams back is the network effect inside of an organization - the system reacting. Blindly following processes never solves this.

Joel started leveraging the techniques in this book to help teams tell their story at first, then to educate managers and executives on the techniques in this book so they could make better decisions together. Ultimately it is about stopping change theater.

Joel has been presenting the concepts in this book internationally for over 5 years and continues to explore new ways to leverage these techniques to help make work more enjoyable. The joy when people say "now others can see what I have been feeling" is a wonderful feeling.