The talk is about the most powerful tool developers have at their disposal: the human mind! Drawing from cognitive science, we'll explore how we can improve how we learn and store information about our systems in order to respond better to incidents and anomalies. Infused with practical examples of how to improve our memory and learning, this talk moves from advice for individuals to how we can form and develop learning teams. It's a talk broken into four parts: preparing to learn, gaining knowledge, building mental models, and enabling a team to learn well together.

The story you tell about your work is as important as the work itself. You can do great work, but if you talk about it the wrong way, you can destroy its impact. For example, the wrong story can diminish your work, hurt your team's credibility, and throw off project estimates. I know because I've messed this up many times.

In this talk, I'll share the hilarious and painful mistakes I've made as well as the strategies I've learned to avoid these mistakes. By the end, you'll hopefully have a better idea of how to talk about your work.

I believe high performing teams need four things to be effective:

- Mastery - The skills & knowledge needed to do a great job, and a clear path to get to the next level.
- Autonomy - The space to figure out their own solution to a problem & how they want to work
- Purpose - A clear sense of direction, and the knowledge of how what they’re working on fits into the big picture & helps their team succeed.
- Safety - A team that is afraid won’t take risks or experiment, a team that is afraid of finger-pointing won’t learn from mistakes.

In this talk, I’ll explain why those four things are key to teams being successful and give examples of how I’ve turned teams around by fixing the lack of one or more of them. Audience members will leave with practical examples of how to diagnose & improve the performance of their teams.