DevOps Transformation Day with Psychological Safety Workshop
2025-06-16 | Maritim proArte Hotel Berlin, Friedrichstraße 151, Berlin, 10117, Germany
On June 16 I will be hosting the DevOps Transformation Day and giving the workshop Fostering a Sustainable Collaborative Culture with Psychological Safety. Join me at DevOpsCon Berlin.

DevOps Transformation Day
By joining DevOpsCon’s Transformation Day, you’ll get a comprehensive insight into all the necessary aspects to make a DevOps transformation in your organization successful. As many DevOps efforts struggle with developing an appropriate company culture, DevOpsCon’s Transformation Day focuses on becoming more agile as an entire organization.
You will not only get valuable insights into many theoretical aspects of a DevOps transformation, but you’ll learn through practical examples how to encourage a sustainable culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Insights, Strategy & Culture in One Day!
Workshop: Fostering a Sustainable Collaborative Culture with Psychological Safety
Many DevOps efforts struggle with developing an appropriate company culture. Psychological safety is a key enabler for an effective and sustainable organizational-wide collaborative culture. It increases personal engagement, makes it easier for people to speak up at work, and enables learning from failure. When people feel psychologically safe, your organization will become more adaptive and resilient, able to deal with changes and innovate.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to foster a culture of psychological safety that enables high-performing teams to deliver faster and better. The practical exercises teach you to recognize the warning signals of low psychological safety and to take appropriate action to increase the level of psychological safety.
Psychological safety is important for tech organizations as it enables faster delivery, innovation, learning from failures, and experimentation. People only dare to challenge the status quo when they feel included and safe to contribute. Then failures can become opportunities for learning and sharing ideas for improvement across the whole organization.
Learning objectives:
– Learn what psychological safety is and what it isn’t
– Recognize warning signals of low psychological safety
– See the benefits that improving psychological safety can bring
– Explore factors that foster and drive psychological safety
Agenda:
– Workshop introduction and check-in exercise
– Definitions and theory of psychological safety
– What psychological safety isn’t, and what to (not) expect from it
– How psychological safety and DevOps relate to each other
– Exercise: Recognizing warning signals about lower levels of psychological safety
– The benefits that psychological safety can bring
– Exercise: Exploring factors that drive and foster psychological safety
– Dos and don’ts for leaders for establishing psychological safety.
– Wrap up, ask me anything, and takeaways
DevOpsCon Berlin
DevOps is fundamentally changing the IT world and sets the path for successful business transformation. Join DevOpsCon to learn about the latest tools.
How do cloud platforms, microservices, and Kubernetes play together with comprehensive automation and continuous delivery? How can you handle increasing complexity in your organization?
At DevOpsCon, you will meet internationally recognized thought leaders of the DevOps movement and benefit from their expertise.

Spicing Up Your Retro: Proven Techniques to Energize Teams
2025-11-10 14:00 - 15:30 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Online, Netherlands
I’m giving a live session for entwicker.de / DevOpsCon on November 10: Spicing Up Your Retro: Proven Techniques to Energize Teams.
Are your retrospective meetings not helping teams to improve? Do the same actions keep coming up every time? Do people skip retrospectives or find them boring? Is there a lack of energy and collaboration in the room during the retrospective? There’s no need for any of that! Let’s find out how we can reflect on our retrospectives to turn them into great learning and improvement sessions!
This session provides you with ideas and techniques to debug your agile retrospectives. You’ll learn how to find out why they aren’t working and what you can do to spice them up and make them valuable. Ben will be sharing from his 25+ years of agile retrospectives and will provide practical tools and solutions that you can use in your daily work.
Ben Linders’ talk about the right setup for Agile Retrospectives is part of the DevOps Con in Munich. Meet him in person during the first week of December.
Make your sprint retrospectives more effective. Learn how to get participants to share their past experiences and turn their feedback into actionable steps. You’ll gain techniques to facilitate a collaborative retrospective that’s energizing, not boring.

Workshop Fostering a Sustainable Collaborative Culture with Psychological Safety
2025-12-01 | Holiday Inn Munich – City Centre, Hochstraße 3, Munich, Bayern, 81669, Germany
I’m giving the workshop Fostering a Sustainable Collaborative Culture with Psychological Safety at DevOpsCon Munich Transformation Day, December 1. Book your seat.

Fostering a Sustainable Collaborative Culture with Psychological Safety

Many DevOps efforts struggle with developing an appropriate company culture. Psychological safety is a key enabler for an effective and sustainable organizational-wide collaborative culture. It increases personal engagement, makes it easier for people to speak up at work, and enables learning from failure. When people feel psychologically safe, your organization will become more adaptive and resilient, able to deal with changes and innovate.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to foster a culture of psychological safety that enables high-performing teams to deliver faster and better. The practical exercises teach you to recognize the warning signals of low psychological safety and to take appropriate action to increase the level of psychological safety.
Psychological safety is important for tech organizations as it enables faster delivery, innovation, learning from failures, and experimentation. People only dare to challenge the status quo when they feel included and safe to contribute. Then failures can become opportunities for learning and sharing ideas for improvement across the whole organization.
Learning objectives:
– Learn what psychological safety is and what it isn’t
– Recognize warning signals of low psychological safety
– See the benefits that improving psychological safety can bring
– Explore factors that foster and drive psychological safety
Agenda:
– Workshop introduction and check-in exercise
– Definitions and theory of psychological safety
– What psychological safety isn’t, and what to (not) expect from it
– How psychological safety and DevOps relate to each other
– Exercise: Recognizing warning signals about lower levels of psychological safety
– The benefits that psychological safety can bring
– Exercise: Exploring factors that drive and foster psychological safety
– Dos and don’ts for leaders for establishing psychological safety.
– Wrap up, ask me anything, and takeaways

Workshop Collaborative Problem-solving at DevOpsCon Berlin
2026-06-15 | Maritim proArte Hotel Berlin, Friedrichstraße 151, Berlin, 10117, Germany
I’m giving a workshop on collaborative problem solving at the DevOps Transformation Day at DevOpsCon Berlin on June 15, 2026. Book your seat.

Collaborative Problem-solving – Establishing an Effective Culture With Working Practices to Deal Resiliently With Impediments
Boost your team’s collaborative problem-solving skills in this interactive mini-workshop, using hands-on games, exercises, and coaching cards. Learn how to spot and tackle issues early while creating a culture of psychological safety where everyone feels safe to speak up and contribute.
Every tech team hits blockers; outages, technical debt, flaky systems, impediments, or organizational issues. These aren’t just annoyances—they’re momentum killers. Left unchecked, they drain energy, slow down teams, and frustrate developers. This hands-on workshop is designed for modern product teams who want to break through the noise and move fast without breaking things. You’ll learn how to spot problems early before they derail your work, and will play a team game to dig into problems to discover the root causes and find solutions.
Let’s make teams better at fixing what’s really broken—fast and together.
What Attendees Walk Away With:

Spot Signals: Level up your radar to catch early, subtle signs of trouble before things blow up.
Problem Deep-Dive: Build your engineering skills to analyze issues—getting to the root causes.
Take Action, Fast: Learn practical moves to tackle problems head-on or reduce their impact before they stall your team.
Create a Speak-Up Culture: Explore making your team a psychologically safe space where everyone feels confident raising issues early.
Team Power: Practice working side-by-side to squash blockers and keep momentum flowing.

Outline of the workshop:

Exercise to recognizing problems, how to pick up signals as early as possible
Learn about collaborative problem-solving and see what benefits it can bring
Play a game to ideate solutions and define an approach for applying those
Practice skills and techniques for cross-organizational learning from problems

This workshop consists of exercises and games that we will play in teams, like the impediment board game and agile coaching cards. It’s
learning by doing. Playing these games and doing the exercises will provide attendees with actionable ideas that they can use in their team(s) or organizations to deal effectively with impediments.
Attendees get free downloadable copies of the Impediment Board Game, and ebook Problem? What Problem? (value €30).
The workshop is based on my book Problem? What Problem?
DevOpsCon Berlin
DevOpsCon is the Conference for CI/CD, the Kubernetes Ecosystem, and Agile & Lean Business.
Because we want to ensure that the lively exchange of knowledge and ideas so typical of DevOpsCon Berlin continues to work well, we were one of the first in the conference industry to develop our hybrid concept.
You can choose to attend the conference either on-site or online from your home or office. In order to be accessible to all participants, all DevOpsCon tracks will be streamed live. Using professional video technology, all lectures and workshops will be broadcast live. And that’s not all: You can also get in touch with our speakers and expo partners, even if you won’t be there!

Workshop Collaborative Problem-solving at Goto CPH 2026
2026-09-28 - 2026-09-29 | TAP1, Raffinaderivej 10, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
I’m returning to GOTO conferences in Copenhagen to give the workshop Collaborative Problem-solving – Establishing a Culture With Working Practices to Deal Effectively With Impediments on September 28-29, 2026.
Collaborative Problem-solving
Boost your team’s collaborative problem-solving skills through hands-on games, exercises, and coaching cards. Learn to spot and tackle issues early while creating a culture of psychological safety where everyone feels safe to speak up and contribute.
Every tech team hits blockers—outages, technical debt, flaky systems, or organizational issues. These aren’t just annoyances—they’re momentum killers. Left unchecked, they drain energy, slow down teams, and frustrate developers. Sound familiar?
This hands-on workshop is designed for modern product teams who want to break through the noise and move fast without breaking things. You’ll learn how to spot problems early before they derail your sprint, and get practical tools to dig into those problems to discover the root causes.
Through interactive games, coaching cards, and real-world scenarios, you’ll:
• Practice team-based collaborative problem-solving in a safe, engaging environment
• Discover how to surface blockers early—without blame or burnout
• Build a psychological safe team culture where raising issues isn’t scary, it’s expected
Whether you’re building the next big thing or keeping things running, this workshop will give your team the mindset and mechanics to keep delivering value—even when things go sideways. Let’s make teams better at fixing what’s really broken—fast and together.
What You’ll Walk Away With:
• Spot Signals: Level up your radar to catch early, subtle signs of trouble before things blow up.
• Follow the Clues: Master smart ways to dig deeper into those signals and uncover what’s really going on.
• Problem Deep-Dive: Build your engineering skills to analyze issues thoroughly—getting to the root causes.
• Take Action, Fast: Learn practical moves to tackle problems head-on or reduce their impact before they stall your team.
• Create a Speak-Up Culture: Discover how to make your team a psychologically safe space where everyone feels confident raising issues early.
• Break Silos: Unlock cross-team and cross-org collaboration techniques to solve problems faster, together.
• Team Power: Practice working side-by-side to squash blockers and keep momentum flowing.
• Build Resilience: Prepare your team and org to bounce back stronger when new challenges show up.
GOTO Copenhagen
As developers, you’re not just writing code. You’re building the systems that power the world.
That’s a big responsibility.
And that’s why we created GOTO, an all-round software development conference. At GOTO, you can expect to dive into the most important topics in software today.
GOTO is big enough to bring in world-class speakers yet small enough to feel familiar. 75% of speakers stick around even on their non-speaking days, mingle, and hang out—so you can chat with the very people who inspire you.

Workshop Explore and Improve Psychological Safety in Software Teams at Agile Testing Days 2026
2026-11-16 - 2026-11-19 | Dorint Sanssouci Berlin/Potsdam, Jägerallee 20, Potsdam, 14469, Germany
I’m returning to Agile Testing Days to give the workshop Explore and Improve Psychological Safety in Software Teams on Tuesday, November 17th in Potsdam (near Berlin), Germany.
Explore and Improve Psychological Safety in Software Teams
Psychological safety fuels high-performing teams. When people feel safe to speak up, collaborate openly, and share ideas, trust grows – unlocking innovation, resilience, and sustainable delivery.
Audience

Anybody working in or with teams: testers, developers, tech leads, coaches, managers, architects …

Key-Learnings

Understand psychological safety and how it fuels engagement, collaboration, innovation, and sustainable team performance.
Recognize behaviors and team dynamics that build trust and safety, or that undermine culture and results.
Use games and coaching cards to make hidden patterns visible and apply practical techniques to create safer, high-performing teams.

Explore psychological safety and team culture through game-playing and coaching cards. Experience how gamification reveals team dynamics and helps you understand what’s really happening inside teams.
Psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It allows team members to speak up, admit mistakes, share ideas, experiment, discuss conflicts, and ask for feedback. When teams feel psychologically safe, they see failures as opportunities for learning, challenge the status quo, and contribute openly to innovation and improvement.
But, how safe is a team? How can we determine the factors that make the team unsafe or have an impact on the team’s culture?
In this mini-workshop, you’ll explore what happens when people feel safe to raise issues, ask for help, and take smart risks without fear of blame. Through real-world examples, team games, and practical exercises, you’ll uncover the factors that strengthen or weaken psychological safety and learn how to build an environment where every team member feels included, valued, and empowered to act.
Psychological safety is essential for developers, testers, and tech leads who want to build great products and great teams. Without psychological safety, teams cannot build deep, authentic relationships necessary for sustained success and value creation. It’s the hidden engine behind high-performing software teams. Tech teams that foster safety collaborate effectively, innovate confidently, and continuously improve.
You’ll leave this workshop with actionable ideas, techniques, and insights to cultivate trust, enhance team performance, and create a culture where people learn, experiment, and thrive.
Agile Testing Days
Save €180 on your conference ticket with the code “ATD-2026-180-Ben”!
Agile Testing Days is a leading international software testing conference recognized for deep practitioner content and strategic insight. Over four days — onsite and virtual — the event brings together senior testers, engineers, and quality professionals from around the world to explore advanced testing practices, real-world challenges, and emerging trends in modern software quality and agile development.
Since 2009, Agile Testing Days has grown to one of Europe’s leading software testing conferences, welcoming 400–700 onsite participants and 300–500 online attendees each year.
Compared to many other software testing events, Agile Testing Days offers one of the most extensive and content-rich programs worldwide, featuring 100+ sessions, parallel tracks, expert workshops, and strategic discussions. This unique combination of practical depth and breadth distinguishes Agile Testing Days in the global testing community.
