Joseph Pelrine

Joseph Pelrine

Agile Psychologist

A quiet and reserved researcher and practitioner, Joseph Pelrine is considered by cognoscenti to be one of the pioneers and top experts on Agile methods. He has spent over 25 years defining and refining processes to help some of the world’s most well-known companies improve their ability to satisfy the needs of their customers. As a psychologist, his focus on people and his experience in applying leading-edge techniques from social complexity and psychology to process optimisation goes far beyond the domain of software development, and extends to the whole organisation. Although Joseph Pelrine often works as a consultant or interim manager, his preference is passing his knowledge on by counselling and advising individuals and organisations, often in the role of a CTO/CIO/CDO "whisperer". He conducts research in novel applications of psychology to agile processes, and is also a PhD researcher in psychology and psycholinguistics.

Talk: Beyond the Buzzword - A psychologist's thoughts on psychological safety

With ca. 400 million search results on Google, psychological safety (PS) has become one of the biggest buzzwords in business in recent years. Unfortunately, most of the people writing and talking about PS are not psychologists. Although they are for the most part well-meaning, this has led to spread of mis-information about what PS is and how it can be fostered in teams.

This talk addresses some misconceptions about PS, presents techniques used by psychologists to analyse PS, and asks the question whether PS is all that's needed for high-performing teams.