About Brian Osman
Brian Osman is a Kaiako (facilitator) /coach with an awesome company – SoftEd – and is based in Sydney, Australia. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, Brian affiliates with Ngāti Porou (tribe) through his mum and Ngāti Ingarani (England) through his dad. By day, Brian delivers training and coaching that builds on helping individuals and organisations improve the way they work (e.g., agile, lean, systems thinking, software testing and so forth). By night, he pretends to play the bass, ukulele or guitar or shouts at the TV when the All Blacks are playing. He is also a Boston Celtics fan.
Brian was a speaker at Star West 2012 held at Disneyland, California where he spoke on using agile practices on a non-agile project and has spoken at conferences such as ANZTB 2010, STANZ 2009, 2010 conferences (2010 as a keynote speaker) and Let’s Test OZ (2014). He also founded the Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing (KWST) alongside software testing legend, James Bach and has helped build communities in the software and agile spaces.
Brian is also a co-founder of a podcast called Epich Aotearoa – Create a better future! This podcast, born during covid, has interviewed business owners, military and police personnel, social impact people and professional sportspeople and they all had amazing stories to tell!
Session Connecting Te Ao Māori with Agile - how values from the Māori world (te ao) can help create connection as leaders
We talk about leadership, but do we actually demonstrate it? The Māori world permeates values such as manaakitanga, whanaungatanga and kotahitanga amongst many others. These values (roughly translated as hospitality, connections and unity) can help bridge the human world with the corporate world.
In this talk, Brian Osman will share a personal journey of discovery with these values and how this has helped understand better how people work, teams form and the ‘why’ that drives them. By building a caring, connected, inclusive and unified space we then start the road to higher performing teams. The world needs leaders that model these values more than ever.