Clean Language - New Insights with Simple Questions

Our brains process an incredible amount of information through the use of metaphor (comparing one thing against another). When you listen carefully to the words we use, you will begin to notice how often metaphor is used in conversation.

As a result, good metaphors improve our comprehension of the ideas we might not have understood otherwise. Metaphors add colors to the story and make it “sticky.” Hence, changing the metaphor changes the way we think.

Imagine that while working with your customer and she says to me “I’m feeling stuck in this new role”. If I respond with “Tell me more about how you’re blocked” then I’ve contaminated her metaphor. I changed stuck to blocked, which can or cannot be the same in her mind, In any case, she distracts herself from the message she was trying to articulate.

Imagine now that she’d said she was stuck and I’d replied with “What kind of stuck is that?” In this case, I’m responding with a question that contains only the metaphor that she had presented to me, in the same words that she had used.

This is the essence of clean language. It is a questioning technique used for discovering, exploring, and working with people’s metaphors without contaminating them using clean conversation structure as shown below.

When you use Clean Language, you hold up a mirror to others and reflect their own words, gestures, and voice to them. The core clean language questions are like below :

Developing Questions :

What kind of X (is that X)?

Is there anything else about X?

Where is X? or (and) whereabouts is X?

Is there a relationship between X and Y?

When X, what happens to Y?

That’s X like what?

Sequence and Source:

Then what happens?

What happens just before X?

Where could X come from?

Intention Questions :

What would X like to have happen?

What needs to happen for X?

Can X (happen)?

Below are some steps which can be used to apply clean language in your conversation as defined above figure:

Step 1: Listen to metaphors

When you are having a conversation with a team member, listen closely to what he/she says. Your goal is to identify the metaphors he/she uses to define their experiences. Initially, it can be difficult to identify metaphors, because they are frequently used and we don't think twice about them.Here comes the relevance of active listening.

Tip: Don’t forget to focus completely on the person you’re speaking with. You don’t have to share your opinion nor give advice. Where possible, use his or her own words in your questions.

Step 2: Speak more slowly and mimic the other person

When the person has finished speaking, you use one of the nine questions about Clean Language to clarify what they said. Out of the nine, the first two are the most popular.

And is there anything more about …?

And what kind of … is that …?

If you’re familiar with the Pareto Principle (often called the 80/20 rule), you’ll know that it’s common for 20% of the effort in a thing to give us 80% of the value. The challenge is to identify which 20% we should focus on. With clean language, the first two questions consistently appear to be that 20%. Using just those two questions, we can get significant value out of clean language without diving into the rest. So we’ll spend more time with those.

Strive to speak twice as slowly as the other person, try to mimic their intonation and body language as much as possible, and speak in a slightly deeper voice. 

Step 3: Keep going

Your conversation partner most likely has new insights with each Clean Language question you use. Keep asking questions until they have fully explored their feelings and have arrived at a solution to their situation.

Applications of Clean Language for Agile Enablers:

Among numerous applications of Clean Language in multiple domains, below are some few in consideration with Agile ways of working :

Conflict Resolution among Teams :

Clean Language can be applied in a team setting and conflict resolution. Every team is going through several development stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing. During the storming phase, team members tend to disagree a lot, and conflicts are not uncommon. It is possible to minimize the duration of this stage by equipping the teams with Clean questions as a conflict resolution technique that will help them to get closer to their optimal performance.

Business Analysis : 

Clean language does embellish the details on how to construct neutral questions. Clean Language helps Product Owners capture the “real requirements” of the stakeholders avoiding the “pollution” of the BAs’ assumptions – something that is accepted as true without question or proof, suggestions,opinions,directions,solutions,or judgements.And, it helps maintain requirement ownership with the stakeholders.

Sprint Retrospectives :

Clean Language can be applied in Team's retrospectives. Understanding the team morale and commitment using metaphor to describe can be helpful. With Clean Questions, it will be easier to collaborate and uncover factors that impact the team in the last sprint.

Improving the communication within a team:

Clean language plays a vital role in communications within the team in complex environments. In essence, it’s a very specific precision inquiry technique that’s built on the idea of probe request and response. The ultimate goal is to find out what it is that somebody means by what they’re saying even when they don’t know themselves.

One to One Coaching :

Clean language enables us to ask clean questions. Once someone experiences being coached this way, they feel the power and feel motivated to learn the questions. Instead of commiserating, or offering a solution, they use the 1 Minute Motivation or the 5 Minute Coach model, to stay in the thinking space of the person with the problem and to encourage them to take ownership of their desired outcome.

Team Coaching :

Clean Language Tools are excellent for creating the conditions for more autonomy, engagement within a team. The idea behind Clean for Teams (devised by Caitlin Walker, of Liverpool, England) is to give members just a minimal set of tools to foster their curiosity, to setup mini contracts for events, or even whole sprints (Clean Setup), to support each other with improvement (Developmental Tasks), and to give one another feedback effectively (Clean Feedback).

Tips To Keep Your Language Clean :

Set your eyes in soft focus, get into your peripheral vision so you are more aware of the big picture rather than specific facial expressions.

Allow the other person time to pause and express their thoughts. Resist the urge to jump in and finish a sentence!

Be curious to understand the other person’s mindset or model of the world.

Set your personal agenda aside and just listen to what the person is saying.

Imagine there’s a whiteboard in front of you in the sky. Literally draw a diagram of what the person is saying, the concepts expressed and how those concepts are linked together.

Practice really believing what the other person is saying. Treat it as truth and then imagine the situation from their perspective.

One approach is to literally ask your ego to get out of the room! It sounds strange, and yet it can stop the inner voice and keep you focused!

Respond to the person using their own words and expanding out with who, what, when, where and how questions.