61. Unleash the power of Agile Conversations

I can't believe it has been 6 months since my last post... time to catchup!

Today I would like to talk about the book called: "Agile Conversations", written by By Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick, officially published in May 2020.

"We wrote this book because again and again, we saw organizations really trying to improve, to do the right thing, and yet ending up stuck, discouraged, and frustrated. In the last twenty years there have been some real breakthroughs in how software development is done, and yet not everyone has been able to reap the benefits" - Douglas Squirrel

They dive into the significance of improved conversations while undergoing digital transformations, the book provides techniques and exercises that can help you gain insight into communication and collaboration issues and improve your day-to-day conversations, achieving valuable business results from agile team.

SO WHAT IS AGILE CONVERSATION AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Agile conversations are focused on learning, responding to new information, and building trust and internal commitment. By surfacing all the information in the room, you generate more options and make better decisions.

Remember the first value of Agile Manifesto is "Individuals & Interactions over Processes and Tools"? Agile is a lot about collaboration and effective communication in cross-functional teams. It's most effective to convey the message when 2 people are at whiteboard. Many organizations are transforming the way of work through practices like Agile, Lean, and DevOps. But as commonly implemented as these methods are, many transformations still fail, largely because the organization misses a critical step:

transforming their culture and the way people communicate

Conversation builds the cornerstone to enable meaningful "interactions among individuals", culture is an emergent property of all of your conversations. Change your conversations and you change your culture. However, our habits of conversation are deeply ingrained, and powerful cognitive biases work against any change, so we first need to understand how we act depends on how we understand the situation we are in.

HOW TO IMPROVE AGILE CONVERSATION BY APPLYING 4Rs?

1 Record

Fold your paper in half, on right, write what you and the other person said. On left, write what you thought but didn't say. No cheating, must be written down, no need of the whole transcript, one pager is sufficient, where the core exchange exists when conflict happens. Well, do I have do write it? You do, because after writing done, it is extracted from your brain, where the cognitive bias sit, so you can have a fact based evaluation on how conversation really went in a transparent manner;

2 Reflect

Transparency: on the left, underline each emotion or thought that you did not share on the right-hand side. You don’t have to have used the same words, but if you're like most people (including us!) you’ll have left out your most valuable, strongest feelings and ideas, missing the chance to show vulnerability and build trust.

Curiosity: on the right, circle all the question marks in sentences spoken by you. If there are any questions (often there won’t be, revealing a total lack of curiosity!), reflect on whether each question was genuine.

Triggers: what sets off a negative reaction for you?

3 Revise

what conversation could have alternatively? what is my revised dialog?

4 Roleplay

Try roleplaying your conversation. How does it sound? How does it feel? Sometimes it is awkward because it is poorly constructed, sometimes it is awkward because we lack practice. Roleplay can help with both.

It's not about convincing the other side to believe what you believe, the point is about practice it often to encourage exchange of information to make better decisions, improve relationship, trust, create better decisions and better leadership, elevate the missions, how can we become successful?

WHAT ARE FIVE (TYPES) of CONVERSATIONS?

TRUST conversation: we hold a believe that those we work with, inside and outside the team, share our goals and values.

• Be vulnerable
• Be predictable
• Use TDD for people (the ladder of Inference) to align your story with that of someone else to build trust.

Our understandings often seem obvious to us, as if they were given by the situation itself. But people can come to very different understandings, depending on what aspects of the situation they notice and how they interpret what is going on. The Ladder of Inference is a model of the steps we use to make sense of situations in order to act. It helps us to think about our thinking and to coordinate our thinking with others, in a conversation however, those ladder doesn't match naturally, which can result in conflicts or misunderstanding.

FEAR Conversation: we openly discuss problems in our team and its environment and courageously attack those obstacles.

• Identify unsafe practices and habits (“how we do it here”): normalization of deviance
• Overcome the tendency to jump to conclusions by using Coherence Busting (use a more curious, open attitude into the discussion; uncovering fears)
• Jointly create a fear chart and mitigate these fears
• Change the environment of conversation, people will change the way how they respond

WHY conversation: we share a common, explicit purpose that inspires us.

• Distinguish interest from positions
• Combine advocacy and inquiry
• Jointly design a solution

Chris Argyris talked about and used the phrase defensive reasoning, he basically said people move into this model, one unilateral control model, a defensive reasoning mindset, when there’s the potential for threat or embarrassment. And he’s really explicitly pointing out there the fear.

So people end up having this sort of split between their espoused theory and their theory-in-use: what they actually do. It’s sort of like they have this mistaken image of themselves in their mind.

COMMITMENT conversation: we regularly and reliably announce what we will do and when.

• Agree on the meaning of key elements.
• Use a walking skeleton for a series of commitments and show progress
• Compliance isn’t commitment
• Define and agree on your commitments (agree on the meaning, agree on the next outcome to commit to, reaffirm the commitment).

The Walking Skeleton prioritization method appeared in the early 2000s. It was advocated by Dr. Alistair Cockburn, an expert in Agile Software Development and often described this method as:

… a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It need not use the final architecture, but it should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel.

A Walking Skeleton is a proof of concept of your basic architectural concept. Where a typically proof of concept focuses more on a single functionality, a Walking Skeleton is a minimalistic end-to-end implementation.

ACCOUNTABILITY conversation: we radiate our intent to all interested parties and explain publicly how our results stack up against commitments.

• Use theory Y to create a culture that fosters healthy accountability

• Give briefings and back briefings (directed opportunism. Bungay’s 3 gaps: plans – actions – outcomes, alignment gap, effects gap, knowledge gap)

• Radiate intent.

So stop ONLY focusing on processes and practices that leave your organization stuck with culture-less rituals. Instead, unleash the unique human power of conversation. Because "A Successful Digital Transformation Must Start with A Conversational Transformation"

Douglas Squirrel, co-author of Agile Conversations, uses the power of conversations to create dramatic productivity gains in technology organizations of all sizes. Squirrel’s experience includes growing software teams as a CTO in startups from fintech to e-commerce; consulting on product improvement at over 80 organizations in the UK, US, and Europe; and coaching a wide variety of leaders in improving their conversations, aligning to business goals, and creating productive conflict.

Jeffrey Fredrick, co-author of Agile Conversations, is an internationally recognized expert in software development with over 25 years’ experience covering both sides of the business/technology divide. Fredrick is managing director of a FinTech company, runs the London Organisational Learning Meetup, and is a CTO mentor through CTO Craft. 

Source:

1. www.conversationaltransformation.com
2. https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-ladder-of-inference/
3. Devops Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2019
4. https://itrevolution.com/trust-and-test-driven-development-for-people/
5. https://itrevolution.com/article-fear-the-original-sin-of-unproductive-conversations/
6. https://workzchange.com/posts/back-briefing-empowerment
7. https://hennyportman.wordpress.com/2020/09/25/review-agile-conversations/
8. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wmopen-introbusiness/chapter/reading-douglas-mcgregors-theory-x-and-theory-y-2/
9. https://www.infoq.com/articles/book-review-agile-conversations/