Somewhat related to confirmation bias is hindsight bias. Hindsight bias makes us forget how ignorant we once were. I love being a writer, but one thing that absolutely sucks about it is that your words are out there forever. You might forget that you ever believed a certain thing, But if you wrote it in a book, someone will eventually remind you about. Here's an example that happened to me that has to do with sprint planning. I'm a pretty strong advocate that a team should leave the sprint planning meeting without having assigned all the tasks to specific team members. That is, we should live with a big pool of tasks, but we shouldn't leave with some tasks assigned to you, some to him, her, and me. Instead, just have a pool unallocated tasks and each day we figure out who should work on what. Well, that's not what I wrote in User Stories Applied back in 2003. Back then, I write that the team puts a name next to every task, because up until then that was how I'd been doing it. I changed my approach shortly after that book came out. So a year or two ago I'm teaching a Scrum class and I am teaching the approach where we do not put names on tasks. And I am teaching that approach as though I've believed it my entire life. Because as far as I can remember, that is what I believed. But as soon as we finish the little discussion on that topic in class, someone asks me about what i'd written in user stories applied. This is an example of hindsight bias. It convinces us that we've always been as brilliant as were are now. So while you're here at the conference, be aware of your biases. Be aware that you might only be looking and listening for things that back up what you already believe. Make a deliberate attempt to seek out things challenge your assumptions instead. You might be surprised with what find.