Agile Learning - How to listen (really, really well!)

So, there I am – first day as a Chief Information Officer. I meet the team, they seem nice, but are pretty wary of me, thinking “who is this new guy and what’s he going to do to us”?

From what I’ve picked up through the interview process the rest of the executive management team are encouraging, but worried about some challenges in the business that either stem from or aren’t being resolved quickly enough by “IT”.

We talk about a list of “Key Stakeholders” who I should meet and get to know. There’s no pressure – just settle in for a while, we’re not expecting miracles but we’re confident you can make a difference.

So, I set myself the challenge of meeting everyone and getting to know them. First the IT Team and the Leadership Team, but then wider across the business. In workshops, 1:1s, informal coffees and just bumping into people in the corridor.

We have 21 brands spread across 30+ office locations, so it’s not going to be possible to meet everyone but I’m going to give it a go. Fortunately, I’ve got some techniques from my previous experience as a consultant, I know how to run a workshop, I know how to use post-it notes well, and I know the danger of the Hippo (I’ll explain later)!

For my first visit outside of the head office, I go to our other main central Dublin office just around the corner from HQ. I don’t know anyone there yet, but what the hell, I’ll introduce myself and ask some questions.

I went around each of the eight or nine teams in the office, introduced myself and asked each person to write one thing on each of 2 post-it notes.

-         What is IT doing well?

-         What could IT do better?

We then went around the room and everyone read out their post it notes and handed them to me. It took about an hour and a half in total for me, but only a few minutes for each of the teams and I achieved several things:

1.      Everyone in that office now knew me – and that I was enthusiastic about listening to them

2.      Everyone in that office had a chance to air any frustrations about IT

3.      Everyone in that office, every single person, without exception, has now said something nice about IT!!!

I took all the post-it notes, typed them up into an Excel spreadsheet and then turned them into a word cloud to help explain the challenge and the opportunity. The picture at the top of the article is the “what IT is doing well” one (slightly redacted for an external audience, but I’ve only removed system and business names):     

Over the following few months, I travelled around most of the offices, meeting as many people as I could, understanding their businesses, their challenges and their views of IT.

I came up with a list of the challenges and the opportunities that we could work on, some easy, some much harder, and I set up a session with the Leadership Team to explain what I’d heard, and what we planned to do about it.

The conversation in the room was extremely positive. Everyone agreed with the key points that I’d identified, and everyone was positive about helping the IT team to address them. We were off and running. Now we just had to make it all much better.

Takeaway Tips

As part of this series, I’m going to try and give a couple of good tips in each post that you can take away and use if you’re on your own transformation journey. Most of these are, of course copied from others along the way, but hopefully the way we have used them in Cpl will give more insight into how you can use them yourselves.

Silent Writing

One of the biggest problems in any meeting, workshop, 1:1 or any business situation is the problem of the HIPPO.

The Hippo (HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion) once stated, can force everyone else in the room back into their shells. Even if they have a great idea, they might not mention it in case the HIPP disagrees, or worse is simply holding court and getting everyone to agree with them.

I find that very often the best ideas and solutions come from the people who are closest to the detail. It’s absolutely critical that these people are listened to, you need to make sure that all the context and experiences that they have are considered.

Silent Writing is the most powerful tool I’m aware of to avoid the HIPPO destroying the opportunity for creative problem solving from the people best placed to do it. It’s very simple – just give everyone a few post-it’s and a sharpie, ask the question and then BAN ANY TALKING FOR A FEW MINUTES.

I use a kitchen timer to make it clear that this should be done in a short period of time, 2-5 minutes is usually plenty. Once the ideas, questions, solutions etc are written on a post-it they are safe! You can then go around the room and get everyone to read out their post-its and explain their thoughts without worrying that they might not be in line with the HIPPO because the HIPPO hasn’t been expressed yet!

Parking Lot (Apologies for the americanism, but I think it sounds better than “car park”)

The other damaging thing that can happen in meetings or workshops is when the conversation gets side-tracked by an important (or often just controversial) issue that is not on the agenda.

The simplest way to deal with this is to point to a parking lot on the wall right at the beginning of the meeting and explain that this is where important things that we don’t have time for in this meeting will be noted.

When the inevitable controversial topic comes up, you as a facilitator have a tool to take back control of the meeting. I tend to let the discussion go on for a few minutes to make sure that the point is aired (it’s been brought up in this context for a reason after all). Then I simply write the point down on a post-it and put it up on the parking lot, explaining that while it’s a really great point, it doesn’t quite fit in to the purpose of this meeting.

The person who raised it can see that you’ve taken it seriously and can expect a follow-up afterwards offline.

Design Thinking

These two techniques are just the start. On my listening journey in Cpl, I used lots and lots of different design thinking techniques.

Some of my absolute favourites are affinity clustering, creative matrix, visualise the vote, journey mapping, gemba Walks and bullseye prioritisation. You can search online for any or all of these to have enough to get going, or if you’d like a full suite of these kinds of techniques, you can engage with the Luma institute (https://www.luma-institute.com/). They have loads more.

I’ll probably share a bit more about some of these in future posts, but if not, at least you can look them up yourselves!

I’ll be sharing more from our agile journey at Cpl over the next few weeks. If you have any thoughts, comments or questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section below.