“Applying a Systems Thinking lens to teams and organizations to integrate JEDI values into every role to build trauma informed workplaces.”
Hi! I'm Dee Grey. I'm a transfemme lesbian parent of 3, and partner to 1. My family and identity are part of the whole person I bring to my spaces. I'm a geek and a nerd, falling in and out of love with fandoms, programming in my basement, building computers, and arguing on Reddit. I also knew from an early age I was different, and the religious, conservative culture that I was raised in was dangerous to be myself. I didn't discover the words that liberated me, the identity that called me back to ancient, colonized, experiences until I was 38.
I graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in Gender Studies and a minor in Computer Science. I've been certified as an agile coach, scrum master, DEI leader, Eagle Scout, pain in my dad's ass.
I have worked in retail, restaurants, software development, people leadership, people ops, training and development, and most recently as a non-profit founder and Chief People Systems Officer.
My breadth of life has given me insight and understanding of other people's experience in rooms where both are lacking. I seek to continue to broaden these experiences, to collect the stories that help me create understanding in the rooms I'm welcome in.
I believe that through our recent understandings of consciousness, trauma, epigenetics, labor, social justice, and decolonization has shown us the need to do something different. That the lives we're expected to live do not align with our mental and emotional needs.
And I believe it's now management's responsibility to fix it. I believe that the mental health crisis is the direct outcome of the systems of power, community, and wealth that we have purposefully built. Through continuous pro-deregulation and anti-welfare mentality has placed the entirety of a US person's emotional and mental health solely on the work they do, the labor they perform, and the manager that supports, or hinders, them.
My background study in science and social justice has given me the lens to recognize how each impacts each other to the point that they are inseparable.
My previous employment as a software engineer, engineering manager, Agile Coach, DEI Consultant, and Engagement Advocate have granted me the lens to recognize that teams that embody positive JEDI outcomes and agile high-performing teams are the same. Psychological Safety determines the quality of products produced, and also the mental and emotional status of the members of the team.
I introduce JEDI concepts to teams through the use of "agile principles." Agile is a lot of things to a lot of people, but for this space, agile is the process of practice. Agile principles drive us towards continual improvement through frequently seeking feedback and incorporating that feedback into a team's way of working.
I connect a team's performance to the psychological safety of the team. I then tie psychological safety to the entire environment a person lives in, not just their work environment. Because it always comes with us. If that environment comes with us, if we live in an oppressive environment, the entire team will be impacted. The oppression of one is a wound on the entire system. And the magic of that realization is that teams can also be sources of healing, such as the deconstruction of generational trauma, and marginalized people advocacy.
And that if managers don't take this role seriously, as a person whose job it is to create healing teams, then they perpetuate trauma, white supremacy, homophobia or whatever else they attempt to ignore at work.
And, through all of this, the team will be more effective.
Concepts
