MEET A NASTY WOMAN: 5 QUESTIONS WITH STEPHANIE OCKERMAN

Meet Stephanie - a Scrum.org certified Professional Scrum Trainer (PST), Scrum Master, and Coach. She started her agile training and coaching business Agile Socks LLC to empower and enable teams and organizations to confidently navigate complexity and uncertainty in order to deliver greater value and thrive in a constantly changing world.

Stephanie believes that with alignment, focus, and smart execution, we can do amazing things together. She combines training and coaching to help people level up their skills and amplify their impact. She also enjoys writing, photography, cheese (all of it), red wine (any time of year paired with any food), IPAs, deep conversations with awesome people, and traveling the world.

What makes you a Nasty Woman?

I speak my mind. I share my ideas and perspectives, even when I’m the only woman in the room. I speak truth to power. I challenge authority.  I don’t ask for permission.

I let my intuition, my passion, and my heart guide me. When opportunities presented, I took on new responsibilities which helped me learn, grow, and find success in a male-dominated industry. I don’t hold parts of myself back, and I deeply care about people. This builds trust and strong relationships.

As a heart-centered entrepreneur, I don’t follow traditional models and practices. I bring an abundance mindset and collaborative (rather than competitive) approach to how I run my business and how I engage with my colleagues and community.

I feel compelled to use my privilege, my skills and gifts, and my success to create the world I want to live in.

Oh, and I curse like a pirate.  

Share an experience that shaped your views or helped get you involved in activism.

Over ten years ago, I found myself with a great job working with good people. I had followed the path I was supposed to. I was respected by my colleagues and considered a go-to person. But I was feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. It felt as if everything was on my shoulders, but so much was out of my control. I was drowning in work because of my willingness to “help” and desire to “fix” things. And I was realizing that most of my “work” wasn’t contributing meaningful value. I was trying to work within a broken system built on a fundamentally flawed set of beliefs. I had been experiencing a growing friction, an internal resistance. What I was expected to do was rubbing against my values and my intuitive approach.

That’s when a co-worker introduced me to the Scrum Framework and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. And everything clicked; it aligned with I intuitively approached things. Change is going to happen, so let’s embrace it and make it easier to adapt. We are dealing with complex problems, so let’s create transparency, work in short cycles to get feedback, and validate we are on the right track. Let’s enable small teams to fully tap into their skills, talents, and experiences to collaboratively find a better way forward.

 I shifted my career towards an agile way of working, becoming a Scrum Master and eventually starting my own business. What my career path has given me is the mindset, approach, and discipline to navigate complexity and unpredictability. I have a deeper understanding and appreciation of people and how to influence change.

 Human rights, inequity, oppression, climate change, public health… these feel like impossible problems filled with so many complexities. Let’s leverage an agile approach based on transparency, experimentation, innovation, and resilience. We must develop more empathy, openness, and curiosity to hold paradox and find alignment.

 Imagine what’s possible when we have a million agile leaders changing the world. 

What advice do you have for people who want to help enact change and push progress but don’t know how to get involved?

Ask yourself what breaks your heart about our world. And just start showing up for that. Bring your openness and curiosity. Leave your judgment and assumptions behind.  Seek to understand others – their experiences, emotions, and perspectives. Be humble and brave. Be open to changing your mind and admitting when you are wrong. Remember that your impact outweighs your intention. Learn from those who have been doing the work, but don’t blindly adopt ideologies.

 Activism was a slow burn for me. My heart ached for a long time. The more I learned and the more aware I became, the more my heart broke. I took small steps, made incremental changes in my life.  And the 2016 election was the catalyst for me to show up bigger. As soon as I heard about the Women’s March on Washington, I bought my plane ticket. It is hard to describe the magic of the experience. I felt love. Expansive, unapologetic, all-encompassing love. The experience filled my heart and fueled the uprising within me.

 That leads to my last bit of advice. Take care of your heart.  It will keep breaking, so be sure to keep filling it up with experiences that bring you joy, laughter, and inspiration. 

If you could look into the future, 10 years from now, and see that real progress has been made, what does that look like to you?

This is such a tough question to answer in 2020. I believe that all the pain, struggle, and grief we are experiencing serves a purpose:  transparency. Without transparency, we cannot productively and creatively solve problems. We have so much more transparency to how broken our world is and to how we have each contributed to and benefited from these systems, structures, and beliefs. We cannot keep our heads down and ignore the damage we are doing anymore.

 I hope we look back 10 years from now and say that we did the brave thing. We let it burn, so we could transform. We seized the opportunity to dismantle the systems and beliefs holding us back, and we created a more inclusive, resilient, and thriving world. We stopped being selfish and motivated by fear. And we started being empathetic and motivated by love.

 In 10 years…. “Busy” is no longer a badge of honor. When someone asks, “how are you?” they actually want to know. We value experiences over consumption. The ability to multi-task is not something you would ever put on a resume. We spend more time looking at people’s faces than looking at devices.

 Big picture, this looks like a healing planet. This looks like people living healthy, joyful, and meaningful lives. This looks like an education system that cultivates personal leadership and critical thinking skills. This looks like diverse teams, organizations, and governments leveraging creativity, technology, and wisdom to continuously improve how we experience this world.

 So basically, badass women are running the world. 

Share with us a wine memory! It can be a favorite wine, moment or experience, or a memorable pairing.  

I am so lucky to have many favorite wine experiences. One of those unconventional things I did in my life was quit a great job and take a travel sabbatical. I spent more than 6 months in Argentina, and that is where I really learned about wine. Something that felt intimidating in the past became approachable and adventurous. I love to learn about the places I travel through food and drink, so I dove into Argentine wine.

 My Buenos Aires friends turned me on to casual wine tastings in the basement of a wine shop in Abasto and a small wine bar in Villa Crespo, neighborhoods well off the tourist track.  I picked out wines to try at the grocery store, creating my own “cheap wine tastings” with friends.  I even attended fancy wine expos.

 My travel sabbatical turned me into a wine snob. When I came home, I couldn’t drink the same wine I used to drink before I left.And as a wine snob, I know what I like and don’t follow the traditional rules about wine. There are many great wines that are affordable and many mediocre wines that are expensive. The best wine is the wine you enjoy.

Stephanie is our label lady for NASTY WOMAN WINES Unapologetically Agile Columbia Valley Petite Sirah.

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