Talk: Agile Conversations with Douglas, Jeffrey & Johan

Let's talk Agile Conversations with Douglas Squirrel (Squirrel Squared), Jeffrey Fredrick (TIM) and Johan Abildskov (Uber)!

Linda (00:04):

As the goal of this conference is to bring people together from all walks of life and within an organization whether it's executives, managers, engineers, programmers, and designers. I think one thing is for certain. There are bound to be so many fights! So, to help us solve these fights, we have invited some very special people on board.

Lauri (00:29):

Yes. So, we are glad to have Jeffrey, Douglas, and Johan online. Welcome, all three of you. And I believe this is the time when we are supposed to pull out our papers and crayons, right?

Johan (00:49):

Thank you.

Douglas (00:49):

Good morning.

Johan (00:50):

Good morning. Welcome to this fantastic lunch and learn session we have here where we want to turn the way we talk into the way we transform our organizations and our teams and even the way we work as individual contributors. I'm Johan. And I have the extreme pleasure of being together here with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel who are the authors of Agile Conversations, a fantastic book. I still fail to bring it. But perhaps, we can handle it. I don't know if any of you, guys, have one copy-

Douglas (01:22):

I didn’t bring it.

Johan (01:22):

... that you can show. Oh, you didn’t bring it.

Douglas (01:24):

Jeffrey had. Jeffrey's organized.

Johan (01:25):

Excellent. And how we can talk about using the way we can transform our conversations to transform our culture and how we can be concrete and work with these fluffy kinds of things that we talk about culture. We talk about psychological safety. And last time I talked with you, I think it was you, Jeffrey, who said something along the lines of, "We know that culture and psychological safety is so important," because I agree. But could you perhaps, Jeffrey, put a few words on what is culture? When you say culture, what do you mean? When you say psychological safety, what do you mean? So, we just have applied that baseline of what it is that we're trying to achieve here.

Jeffrey (02:14):

Great. Yeah. Absolutely. I'll start with culture. I kind of say it is the sum total of how people interact with each other. That is the culture of an organization is that's the culture of the team. And within this, that really covers everything. And that's why we look at conversations as the key element of culture because the conversations are how you actually interact.

Jeffrey (02:39):

Now, in a conversation, there's a lot more than the words. There's all the stuff that's going on in your head. And that's where we need to do a lot of the work. But the culture is the combination of all these interactions between the people. And that's why we say if you can change your conversations, you also change your culture.

Jeffrey (02:55):

Now, their psychological safety is a topic that's gotten huge attention in the last few years especially since Google published the results of Project Aristotle. And the term, I first learned it from Amy Edmondson, I believe she's the one who coined it. Now, initially, I recently heard a podcast where she said she actually gave a terrible name, and she wished that she had used a different name that she set the whole industry back by years because there's no way that when people say psychological safety, it sounds like something soft and fuzzy.

Jeffrey (03:26):

And she says maybe a better description is a felt permission to take interpersonal risks which is the ability to raise things and even maybe a bit of an obligation to raise differing points of view to add more to the conversation. And I think that's the element in which we all believe that culture and psychological safety are important because when we ask people, "What's the best way to make a decision as a group? What's the value of having a group at all?" And they said, "Well, it's the diversity of opinion. It's the diversity of experience. It's bringing what everyone knows into the conversation to get the best result."

Jeffrey (04:06):

So, everyone believes that already. The problem is they don't know how to achieve that in practice except for by luck. And I don't mean to just miss luck. Luck is fantastic. If you can be lucky, I recommend being lucky. But if you're not being lucky, then I think it's useful to know that there are skills you can learn that could substitute for that luck, and you could start building the culture and psychological safety that you'd like to have.

Douglas (04:30):

And I just want to underline something there which is that this is a skill we're talking about. And when people talk about all that fluffy stuff, that cultural stuff, some people probably went off and got a coffee. They said, "Oh, man. We want to hear more about AWS Well-Architected designs," which is a fantastic thing. That was fascinating to listen to. And I don't want to hear this fluffy stuff. But I just want you to think about it a little bit differently because what happened some years ago is we decided that maybe it would be good if we treated all that infrastructure stuff as first-class elements of building software.

Douglas (05:05):

And instead of saying, "It's oh some other operations team somewhere far away over there, it's their job." We should make that part of what we do. We should say that the operations team and the developers are, "Oh, we could call that DevOps. What a great idea. And by treating something that wasn't previously a first-class element of our work as an important element that we could work on and that we could improve, we got better.

Douglas (05:27):

And the argument we're making today is that you can make your conversations better and your culture better, and you can actually make that a first class part of your actions, first class part of what you do. And that's a bold claim. You should be doubting that just the same way that I doubted, "Oh, those operations people." Why would I ever want to talk to them? Why would they be interesting? Do they have something? It turns out, lo and behold, there's tremendous value you can get from that. And we all have seen it. We're making the same claim for something that you have probably said, "Oh, I can't do anything about that. I can't do anything about this crazy boss who has these impossible deadlines. I can't do anything about my team who are just not motivated. I can't do anything about the fire that we had last week that nobody anticipated in the French data center. Nobody had the psychological safety to bring that up. I can't do anything about that."

Douglas (06:17):

If you believe that, then you should go get the coffee because we can't help you. But we're inviting you to not believe that. We're inviting you to think about skills that you could develop just the way that I, a developer, develop some skills in understanding how to operate software systems, and that helped me to be better. You could develop skills in improving your culture, the kind of thing that people complain about all the time and say, "Oh, I can't do anything about it." We're giving you a way to do something about it.

Jeffrey (06:44):

We'd love to get this in the comments.

Douglas (06:47):

Exactly. Yeah.

Jeffrey (06:49):

Please. Challenge us or ask questions. We'd love to hear different points of view. 

Johan (06:55):

And we're watching the chat.

Douglas (06:56):

Exactly. Yeah. We like questions in the middle. So, don't wait till the end because we'd rather hear your questions and arguments. So, I hope I've provoked at least one of you to say, "That's baloney. You can't do anything about that." I've tried for years. It's impossible. So, give us an example. We'd like to hear it.

Johan (07:13):

I really like the thing you're saying because you said like we have probably lost some of the odds now. It became fluffy. And now, we're talking about cultural things and we can all sense that there are some things that's wrong. But it feels out of our control, and it's so vague and where are the numbers and the hardcore facts? But I'm now going to make a promise on behalf of Jeffrey and Squirrel because I know they are so awesome.

Johan (07:42):

Before this session is over, you will have concrete things, actionable things, that you can bring back to your teams and start doing later this day or tomorrow. Even though we feel like these are so fluffy, there will be something actionable for you that can simply just be thinking a different way or doing something concretely that will start you on this journey towards achieving a higher degree of interpersonal trust on your teams, higher degrees of psychological safety, culture, all those kind of things.

Douglas (08:20):

Both claims Johan made on our behalf and valid ones. That's certainly true, but I want to give a caveat. We've been saying fluffy and soft and so on which is what people often refer to. Our good friend, Mark Coleman, likes to say that these are real, and he uses a bad word here, freaking hard skills. These are very, very difficult. And he's right. It takes you time to learn to do this just the same as when I first touched AWS, I messed it up and broke servers and brought systems down and so on I had to learn. So, it's the same process. Learning is difficult and painful and sometimes horrible. So, I'm not suggesting these will be easy things that we're going to ask you to do.

Douglas (08:57):

They won't require that much in terms of material. Pen and paper is all you really... And the ability to fold things in half. We'll get to that, I'm sure. But the psychological challenge for you will be significant. But if you're willing to put in some effort, then I'm not suggesting rocket science, but it's like learning a game of tennis or learning to play the piano. If you put in that level of effort, you can get progress on the things that are driving you bananas that you think you can't right now. That's the promise. So now, we should try delivering on that.

Jeffrey (09:27):

I think we should just go directly into step number one, so people can do this now.

Douglas (09:33):

You need paper.

Jeffrey (09:39):

Then, you need advanced folding skills which is to fold the paper in half so that you have two columns. So, if you've mastered the vertical fold, then, you're all set.

Douglas (09:52):

Excellent.

Jeffrey (09:52):

With those two-

Douglas (09:53):

With horizontally fold, you failed. You can try again.

Jeffrey (09:57):

Yeah. That's right. Two columns. Now, people will say, "Can I do this on a spreadsheet? Can I do this in a word document?" Absolutely. Anything will give you two columns. What you cannot do is do it in your head. You need to actually be able to get this out of your head. That's a key step. Then, what you do is think of a conversation or that either maybe it could be a conversation you had. And in the intro, we heard about bringing all these people together and all the fighting. Maybe, it was a fight. More likely, in my experience, it was a conversation where there was no fighting. It was just something you were frustrated that didn't seem to be going anywhere. It was probably, if not frustrating, maybe it was boring. Why are we talking about this so much when it's obvious...

Douglas (10:35):

There goes Jeffrey again. He's always going on about this stuff. I can't believe it. Why is he bringing it up again? That would be a good one.

Jeffrey (10:44):

Exactly. So something you're frustrated about and that frustration may have been external, but I'm more likely it was internal. And this could even be a conversation that you haven't had yet. It's a situation that's frustrating to you and you know you should do what you really would like to address it with this person, but you're not sure how. That conversation that you've been dreading or putting off, that's also valid. Think of that conversation. And then, what you do is on the right-hand side, you're going to write down the conversation in the sort of they said I said format. This said this, I said that, and back and forth. Now, you'll notice that this is relevant...

Douglas (11:19):

So, Jeffrey, there's a terrible problem. I can't remember my conversation very well. I guess I can't do this. I'll have to sit it out.

Jeffrey (11:26):

And nope, that's no excuse. You're doing this. You're getting this stuff written down so it's out of your head because you'd like to sort of offset some of the cognitive biases you have that impact your conversations. And the good news is that when you go to generate from memory and an imperfect memory or generate a future conversation, your cognitive biases are still with you. So, you will still create the same kind of mistakes in your partially remembered dialogue or your fictitious dialogue that you will make in the real conversation because you are still you. You're still human. You still have these cognitive biases.

Jeffrey (12:03):

So, you're going to be recording your conversation on the right. And you see it's not very big. So, we're not saying if you talk to someone for an hour, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the sort of where's the juice in the conversation. What are the key elements, the critical elements? Maybe the places where things started to go wrong early on or the place to start.

Jeffrey (12:23):

So, you can be as little as two lines of dialogue. You might have maybe four or six but not too many. And just do that. And I think in the course of the talking, I can see Squirrel writing already. Maybe, Johan as well. And then, what you'll end up with...

Douglas (12:37):

I'm already done. I already have mine, not to keep very long.

Jeffrey (12:42):

And you've gone ahead because I see you've done things in both columns. After you have the dialogue, then you'll move to the left-hand column. And if the right-hand column is where the external voice is, it's where things would show up on a video camera. On the left is stuff that only shows up like a FMRI. This is only the stuff that's in your head, your thoughts and feelings. And the key part is only your thoughts and feelings. So, what you're thinking in response to what they say, what you're thinking as you're speaking. And you write those down on the left-hand side.

Douglas (13:19):

There is an exception. If there are any telepaths in the audience, you can write what the other person was thinking, but you already knew that I would say that. So, I didn't need to include that. But if you're not telepathic and that should be probably most of you, then you can only write down what you were thinking and feeling because you can't know what the other person thought.

Jeffrey (13:38):

And that's it. That's step one. And I'd like to actually just stop there for a minute and say, "So, what's the first thing you can do is record your conversation." So, it's coming up here. There's going to be four Rs that we're going to talk through. And they record, reflect, revise, role play. And then you might also repeat and role reversal. So, there's six four Rs. But anyway, the four Rs will go through those. But the first thing you can do here is record the conversation. And it doesn't take very long.

Johan (14:13):

And I just want to add that all this information, these golden nuggets, I'm sure that you will put or have already put somewhere. So, you can just focus on the nice storytelling, and you have on your websites or somewhere a brief guide to this one pager or something that we can link to like that.

Douglas (14:40):

All over conversationaltransformation.com. So, we'll include that in many places. It's in my profile and other places. So, you just find us, you'll find lots of that material. 

Johan (14:50):

And, of course, it's perfect. And you should read that. As you were.

Douglas (14:57):

We should carry on explaining because people probably are thinking, "What good was this?" I hope most of you actually did it. But we find that people have resistance to doing it. But you may be wondering how is this going to help me with the annoying boss I have, and insane deadlines, and the fire in the data center? What good is this?

Jeffrey (15:17):

It's a great question. And I'll just say for people who have done it, we run practice sessions like this all the time including public free ones you can sign up from our website. We have a meet-up that runs twice a month. In fact, there's a session tonight where I'll be doing a free conversational dojo where people do this conversational analysis. And what's very, very common is that every stage of the four Rs, including this record, we ask people, "Do you have any aha moments just from what you've done so far?"

Jeffrey (15:46):

And it's extremely common that just this act of recording the conversations and looking at it, people go, "Oh, I had no idea I was doing that. I can't believe I said that." And the reason this happens comes back to these cognitive biases. And when we're in a conversation, we have the illusion that we're in the same conversation with the other person that we are both hearing the same thing. But the fact is that's not true. And in fact, I go a bit further.

Jeffrey (16:20):

In general, people are unaware of what they're saying in a conversation. What you're much more in tune to is what you're thinking and feeling. And then, words come out of your mouth that in your mind relate to what you're thinking and feeling. However, to the listener, they don't have that context of your thoughts and feelings. So, they only hear the words, and it turns out the words by themselves are generally very, very different from the words with the thoughts and feelings.

Jeffrey (16:49):

And I like to make an analogy between an experiment that people ran. They asked some people to tap out a tune on a table. So, they had tappers, and they had listeners. And they asked the tippers to tap out of tune. And then, they'd ask the guessers to sort of guess the tune. But before they did, they'd ask the tappers, "How likely is it that you think that the guessers will guess correctly?"

Jeffrey (17:15):

And the tappers were wildly over optimistic about the likelihood of the guessers guessing. And the reason is because the tappers could only hear the taps which didn't communicate very much information. The guest rate was something like 5% whereas the tappers didn't hear just the tapping. They heard the music in their head. So, they heard the tapping and the music. And that's very, very different. So, you may have experienced someone singing along while wearing headphones.

Jeffrey (17:45):

And, of course, their experience is very different from yours as someone who's hearing just their singing. And that's what is we're in a conversation. We are just singing with our own headphones on, listening to our thoughts and feelings, and it's only then when we externalize it, when we get it outside of our head, and we separate what we were thinking the feeling from what we actually said that's very often the first time we become aware of the words we actually used. That's the first time we learned what we actually said because we were so caught up in our memory so bound up with what we were thinking and feeling that we are unaware of what we were actually communicating.

Jeffrey (18:25):

Instead, we were thinking of what we intended to communicate and what we had in mind. And that's the problem that was in mind and not in words. And so, that's why even if you did nothing else, but this one step of recording the conversation, I would say we've met Johan's promise that you have something you can do today, that you can try with your teams today.

Jeffrey (18:44):

And, in fact, this is a great exercise, to have a team talk about a scenario. Everyone do this exercise. And then, just share what it was on their page. What did they have in their left-hand columns that didn't come out in the actual conversation? And the team can get a ton out of just that simple exercise.

Douglas (19:03):

And again, I'll just point out again that this should fee like... First of all, it should feel kind of strange why are we suddenly looking at this in the middle of a DevOps conference. But then, remember the first time whichever side you're on, if you started your life as a developer like I did or if you started in the operations side as a lot of my friends have, and you first started to learn about what the other people were doing, it probably seemed very strange.

Douglas (19:24):

I remember the first time I looked at chef or puppet or one of those. And I said, "Boy, this is completely weird." But, boy, is it really useful to suddenly start to understand this area? So, inviting you to think about it in that way. What are we bringing you that could solve a problem that you have thought is insoluble, that is just unapproachable in any way? And I claim that there are problems that you're seeing today like lack of psychological safety that you can solve in this way, that these tools will help you with.

Jeffrey (19:57):

All right. I'm going to move on to step two and for the people who are up for that and following along at home. We would move on to the reflex step. And this is where you start to build your conversation skills of conversation which is to become just in the reflex step. We will choose some tool to examine our conversation. Now, this step, the record step, is always the same. But the reflex step varies based on what we are intending to do.

Jeffrey (20:24):

So, in the book, we have a chapter of the foundations of conversation. We talk about transparency and curiosity. And we give one sort of reflection exercise there. And then, we talk about five different conversations, the trust conversation, the fear conversation, the why conversation, the commitment conversation, and the accountability conversation.

Jeffrey (20:43):

And each of those five chapters, plus the introduction, we have six different ways of reflection that we give you there, and there's more beyond that in the conversational dojos that we've run and through the meetup we've talked about a bunch of other conversational tools as well, non-violent communication, the LEAP method speaking with your ear, a bunch of other elements. So, you can bring in different tools depending on what you want to work on.

Jeffrey (21:09):

The foundation, one we would use, we just said, "Well, let's check for curiosity and transparency." So, we would get our pen to reflect on what we've done. And I'd like to switch to a red pen at this point. And then, what I'll do is on the right-hand column, I will circle all of my question marks because what I'm looking for is: was I curious? And if I'm not asking questions, I probably wasn't very curious...

Douglas (21:37):

I think I failed this step. I don't have any question marks.

Jeffrey (21:41):

That's very common. So, we'll say, "Okay."

Douglas (21:45):

Very easy to circle all of this because there aren't any.

Jeffrey (21:48):

Didn't take very long. Now, now what we'll do though is now we'll want a bit more because, sometimes, there's a conversation where there's lots of questions. But we're not actually very curious because while we're using questions, they're not genuine questions. They're not arising from curiosity. Squirrel, would you like to give us an example?

Douglas (22:06):

Yeah. I was just going to do that. I was wondering if we should go into that in more depth. Don't you think that would be a good idea?

Jeffrey (22:13):

Yeah. So, this is not actually a question, as Squirrel's saying. It's actually he's making a statement disguised as a question. So, what we do is we create a fraction. And what we'll do with our fraction is the number of questions where we're really curious. And what we mean by curious is the answer the question we're asking might change our mind. So, not just gathering facts, but something that we might plausibly have this lead us to have a different opinion compared to the total number of questions. We end up with a fraction. So, if I had one genuinely curious question of three, I would have a fraction of one over three. The one I have here is like Squirrel.

Douglas (22:53):

Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Jeffrey (22:55):

No questions. Very common.

Douglas (22:56):

Jeffrey and I have been studying this for years. And we advocate asking questions all the time. These are real dialogues that actually happen which we didn't ask questions. So, that means that these are hard skills to master as we were saying, and you should expect that you have constant need for correction and improvement which is why this kind of repeated practice can be very helpful to increase the number of questions you ask.

Jeffrey (23:20):

The other next up we look for transparency and the left-hand side where you have your thoughts and feelings underlying any thoughts of feelings that you didn’t share. So, if you shared it even partially with different words, I'd give yourself credit and not underline it. So, you might have thought that's a stupid idea. But if you said, "I have some concerns," fine. You're at least approaching the subject.

Jeffrey (23:50):

But if you thought, "That's a stupid idea." And externally, you said, "Okay. Yeah. Definitely underline it." And then, what we're going to do then is underline. Yeah. And what we can do now is sort of say reflecting on this, having done this kind of scoring, this particular tool which is testing for transparent curiosity say, "Well, anything on the left that's underlined, I wasn't transparent." If I'm not asking questions, I'm not very curious. If I'm not being transparent and I'm not being curious, I'm really not living up to the idea of what an effective conversation would be where I said, "What we want is everyone participating getting everything everyone knows in the conversation."

Jeffrey (24:31):

So, I should try to do better. And that brings us to the next step which is the third R which is to revise. And, of course, even here having scored it, this is again people often have ahas like, "Oh, my gosh. Turns out I'm not saying what I'm thinking. I'm frustrated in this conversation wondering why they don't do anything different." But I realize I'm not actually sharing that I'm frustrated or that I want something different than what's happening.

Jeffrey (24:53):

So, the revised step, what we do is now look back at our conversation and think in this case because we're focused on transparency and curiosity try to revise our dialogue. How could we have been more curious? How could we have been more transparent? And there, we will now try to write it out, and this is where repeat might come in because after we write out our new version, it's important to go back and sore it and test: did we actually succeed? As it's not uncommon for people to write something out. But they actually did not improve their score. Have you finished your revision already, Squirrel?

Douglas (25:35):

I have, indeed. I have practiced this before. But what I'm doing is crossing out something I said and saying something different which has a question in it that then I'll improve my score so I can tell that I've made an improvement. And I may want to repeat that further because this probably isn't a great question. I did it pretty quickly. What you don't have to do is revise the entire dialogue. It can be quite a brief change.

Jeffrey (25:59):

That's right. You can choose any part of it. I usually recommend it early on. Yeah, Johan.

Johan (26:04):

We just have an excellent question because I think this is key in the chat. Christian Bernard is saying, "Can you concentrate on the conversation if you're doing all this during the discussion? My mind would wander away from listening, I think." So, I think you can address that.

Douglas (26:19):

Perfect question.

Jeffrey (26:20):

Yeah. It's a great question. What I would say is that you're going to build your skills in practice sessions outside of your conversations, and what you're building is this skill. And as you get better at the skill, then you're better able to handle things that come up in real time. So, if you think about any sort of sport, any sort of skill, you have your practice and performance sort of if you're a concert pianist, you'll have your practice sessions, then, your performance or you build your skills. Then, you go in for your improv session. Maybe jazz improv is a better analogy. But you'll only be able to produce in the performance things that you've practiced offline. You have to develop the skills offline. And then, you're able to handle the situations that come up. So, you're right. It's too much.

Jeffrey (27:12):

What you can do and what you might do is find a pattern or something that was simple and say, "What's one thing I can do in the next minute conversation?" And for example, it'd be simple as I'm going to ask a question. I want to make sure that I ask a question. And I want to make sure I ask a question that might change my mind. I'll even give you one. Here's a good example. If you're in a conversation, and you think the other people are wrong, you might say, "I don't have the same opinion. And I'm curious what did you see that led you to think that?" And that's it. That's a kind of a generic all-purpose curious question and acknowledging the other person may have information you don't have.

Jeffrey (27:54):

And if they come back with information that's new to you, that's something that might possibly change your mind. And so, I mean that is developing that kind of canned go-to question. And having it ready can really help when you go into a conversation that you're especially difficult. And so, you're ready to go.

Douglas (28:19):

And I just want to strengthen that for a Christian. I just want to really underline how important it is to do the practice. And I'll make an analogy say to surfing. And if you watch people who are learning to surf, they don't go out in the ocean to start with. You start with a board on the beach, and you stand on the board, and you learn how to stand on the board and move your legs around. And then, you go out in the water, and you fall off the board immediately. Then, come back to the beach, and you stand on the board, and you learn how to do it. It's the same sort of thing just like you also wouldn't go to a production server and start editing the configuration files.

Douglas (28:50):

You would say, "Wait a minute. I better go try this in a development environment." All the same sort of thing. So, Christian's exactly right. This is why these are really freaking hard skills. This is not something that you can just master overnight and say, "Aha, great. Now, I know all the answers." You can improve a little bit. But if you want to get good at it, it requires practice. And that's exactly what we're giving you, is a method of practice that will allow you to say, "Well, the last conversation, I did this. I want to improve better next time. I won't fall off the board this way. I'll fall off a new way."

Douglas (29:19):

But, of course, the crucial thing is you do have to get wet. You do have to actually go and try it. Mental effort does not do it for you. So, anybody who hasn't written on the paper yet, you still can catch up with us. So, grab your paper. Fold it in half. Write the conversation. I promise you this will make a significant difference in your culture and in your improvement in your team.

Jeffrey (29:40):

So, it's really common if you're getting this revised step. They go write it out. And then, they look at it, and they realize, "Okay. It's actually not any better. I wasn't actually more transparent. My question was not genuine." And then, you have this repeat. So, you go in a cycle until you've written out some revision that you seem pretty happy with. Now, you're ready for the final step, the fourth R which is to role-play.

Jeffrey (30:06):

And, ideally, you have someone you can work with. If you do that yourself, you might role-play with a mirror, less effective. Better to have a real person. But still, what you want to do is practice saying the words out loud because these are going to be new skills. And probably what you wrote out is I mean it's not really the way that you speak. In fact, you quite likely write something that the way that no one speaks.

Jeffrey (30:31):

So, again, this is a chance to practice and say, "How would I feel saying this? Does this sound like something I could say maybe I need to modify the wording and the language to be more natural for me?" And there's often an aha again where people say, "Yeah. No. Actually, I don't like the way that sounds. I liked it on paper. But saying it out loud, I don't like." And that's also where the last the sixth four R comes in which is the role reversal. If ideally, if you have a friend, you can have them say it back to you. And the idea here is it might be something I'm comfortable saying. But once I hear it said back to me, I don't like it so much like, "Oh, actually that sounds kind of harsh. I don't like the way that feels I wouldn't want someone saying that to me."

Jeffrey (31:10):

And so, again a chance to repeat and come up with language that it brings in your transparency, brings in your curiosity, brings in your desire to both share and to learn, and you think is be productive towards generating creative conflict. And I want to point here this. Actually, our goal here is to generate conflict. But we want it to be productive conflict which is a conflict that generates new ideas as opposed to unproductive conflict between people. When we can all get our ideas and information bouncing together off each other in a good teamwork, you've probably all had the experience where he has a different opinions, and in talking them through and talking to the differences, you come up with new ideas. That's very productive.

Jeffrey (31:56):

There's conflict there because there's disagreement. But it's been hardest effectively towards solving the problem, and that happens when we're sharing our thoughts and feelings. We have that psychological safety to felt permission for a candor, to share what we really believe. And when everyone's putting what they really believe in and everyone's listening and taking that on board, that's where this dynamic exciting fun culture comes from which for me is the motivation to do all of this in the first place because that sort of exciting collaboration is like a peak professional experience.

Jeffrey (32:34):

And that's it. Those are four Rs. And now, you can all just practice that, and you have the skills that you can work on today. And we've delivered on Johan's bold promise.

Johan (32:49):

Thank you, this is fantastic. And I'd say that I read and I really enjoyed your book. And I did not practice at all. And then, I had the privilege of taking part in one of your conversational dojos and actually practicing these skills, this method. And that's a completely different experience and having the book and being aware of things and being able to perhaps see a bit more than I was able to see before, but not having put in the effort. 

Jeffrey (33:37):

I'm really nervous.

Johan (33:38):

It takes discipline.

Jeffrey (33:40):

Yeah. I'm nervous.

Johan (33:40):

Why are you nervous? 

Jeffrey (33:42):

People still say they enjoy the book. What it means is I read it. But didn't do the work. The people who do the work say, "Gosh, that was hard. That took me a lot longer to get through the book than I expected." You had these exercises, and I went to go do them, and it was uncomfortable. The people who enjoyed it, they're like, "Oh, that was a really pleasurable read. I really like those ideas." Yeah. Those other people should do these things.

Johan (34:09):

Thank you for calling me out! And I think actually what resonates with me is that we get a language or vocabulary to be able to talk about these things, these sensations. You talked about the cues when you're frustrated or you're bored that you should take that as a cue that something is off that you want to poke around in and see what does this feel here. But until you know that it is a cue and not just noise, then, you will not be able to see it and even act or reflect whether by a structured method like your four Rs or anything. It will just be an unproductive sense of…

Douglas (34:58):

That sense of oh is exactly what so many people feel. And one of the reasons we wrote the book is we got so frustrated with so many books that tell you how to diagnose in great detail all the things that are going wrong with your team or how to do a set of rituals. "Oh, we'll have our stand-ups and we'll do our kanban and we'll do these different steps, and then, we'll co-locate our teams." All of those are great ways to encourage yourself to get lucky. And it may be that you get lucky as Jeffrey says. That's one method of having success in your team.

Douglas (35:32):

But the problem is they give you no recovery methods. They give you nothing to do if the get-lucky process doesn't work, and they have no theory behind why any of those methods would work. So, they just simply say, "Well, teams that are good seem to do this. So, you try it and see if it works." And I got so frustrated with so many both books that say that. And people who would then say, "Well, you can't do anything about this. This is just how it is. Yeah.

Jeffrey (36:05):

Squirrel, the problem is that these people we have, they just don't get it. Can you help us like get new people because these people don't get it.

Douglas (36:12):

The problem is that when you do that, and I've done that as a consultant, I bring in the new people. And the new people aren't any better because the situation is the same. The dynamics come out the same way that you haven't solved the cultural problem, and you get exactly the same results. And a lot of us have just become jaded to that. We think that there's nothing we can do about it. So, we're making this extremely bold claim. And I want to ask everybody who's listening to us no matter whether you believe us or not, whether or not you wrote anything on the paper, the next time somebody says, "Well, it's just this team," "well, bosses are just like that." "Well, nobody's ready for DevOps." These big organizations, they just can't possibly adopt it.

Douglas (36:48):

Please, at least, tell them that you listen to some crazy people who told you that you could whether or not you believed it. And send them to us because there is somebody who is crazy enough to say these things are first-class elements of our development in our software, and that we should do something about it. And there's concrete things we can do.

Jeffrey (37:06):

And I will say, for me, this is exciting to talk about, this DevOps Conference because for me my whole career has been about trying to make development better. It's been trying to reduce suffering in the context of software development. So, I used to work on cruise control which that old people in the audience might remember as that thing that existed before Hudson, which was the thing before Jenkins, which was the thing before CircleCI. The space has exploded. And I got involved in that because I really had a strong belief about how tools could make things better.

Jeffrey (37:43):

And then, the problem is that people would use the tools. But the situation wouldn't be better. And then, I got very much into methodology. And I organized a conference called Kitcon. DevOps started. And I was talking to people about how to have these processes that would lead to better outcomes, and that people would adopt the processes, and they'd still suffer, and it's about looking to say like, "What's going on here that the tools and the processes don't fix things?" And it came down to the people. And so, what can we do about the peep element? What can I personally do? What can you personally do? What can we do as individuals that doesn't require the CEO to change the company? We don't...

Jeffrey (38:23):

I don't need the executive team to come up with a new mission statement. What's something that I can do where I am? And that's really what excites me about this element about conversations is that I can look at myself and say, "Look, I'm not happy with the way things are going. I'm suffering. I'm frustrated this way." And now, here are some tools that I can use to start addressing it. To me, that's extremely exciting. And that's the message that I would like for people to have is that you don't need to feel trapped, and it doesn't matter where you are in the organization.

Jeffrey (38:53):

I'm scrolling off and work with executives. And executives are just as likely to feel trapped, and it's like when you're a worker, you can go, and you can do things. You can get stuff done. As an executive, I can't do anything. I have no control. Yeah. Everyone feels frustrated and everyone feels that the power is somewhere else. And our experience is that actually you have tremendous power within you to make changes when you can learn how to have effective conversations.

Johan (39:22):

I think at this point here that teamwork is an individual skill, and it's something that you can practice. I think just that point in itself is worth the entire conversation. You're just sparking again so many different thoughts and notes. And I promise you we will not be able to cover them all because we have also gotten some excellent questions in the chat. And I don't remember who started the first question here about being remote. But I would also just read what Ali is writing in the chat because he's saying, "Seems to be a very important topic also during the time of instant messaging where people substitute spoken conversations with flow of text without actually thinking what they're typing." But as we have concluded that people are not even thinking about what they're saying, I think we can address this together. And earlier, unfortunately, I didn't know who asked this question. But what are the things that we can do to build psychological safety and a more healthy culture when we are remote? So, I'd like some thoughts in that area.

Douglas (40:30):

I'll do the first one. Maybe, I'll invite Jeffrey to do the second one. I have my thoughts there too. But the first one is about how do you deal with the fact that so many people are using text all the time and Slack and messaging and everything else? There's one advantage. I'll say a good thing about it before I really rag on it and tell you why I think it's terrible. But a really good thing is that producing dialogues and doing analyses is much simpler. You can cut and paste. I actually know what I said. So, the question of not remembering what you said or not quite understanding what you wrote, what you put out in the world, you don't have that problem.

Douglas (41:06):

So, that is an advantage of written communication. Pretty much everything else doesn't work as well. So, what I'm very frequently counseling do when they come to me as I'm coaching them to change their dynamics is the first thing is get on the phone, and that could be the physical phone. Remember these old things where you don't get to see the people or what we're doing today on video. But you want higher bandwidth because the advantage of higher bandwidth is there's more information, and you have more opportunities to read what the other person is thinking and saying and to check in about it.

Douglas (41:39):

So, I'd say Jeffrey, you look red in the face, and you pound it on the table a couple of times. I think you might be angry. Is that right? And that the opportunity to verify that whereas Squirrel, you're completely wrong in text. Might be said very calmly or angrily or something else. So, that's not terribly new. I think what we can add to that knowledge I think you guys all know that high bandwidth is better. But what we can add there is that if you have a structured approach to improvement, remote can actually be an opportunity to have more or less friction for the interactions.

Douglas (42:18):

So, it's easier to jump on a call with someone. For instance, if they're in some far away country or some far away building, that can be a barrier in person. I remember when my first company we had two floors, and it seemed very difficult to get to the second floor of the other floor. It's walking up a few stairs. But people didn't want to do it. Now, every communication has approximately the same cost. So, that can make it a little easier to get to high bandwidth. But you have to want to. And it's very easy to hide behind the easier thing which doesn't lead to improvement as often which is, oh, I'll just shoot off a quick Slack message. So, that's one response. Jeffrey may see it differently and may want to take the other part of it, the more broad question about how we do this when we're remote.

Jeffrey (43:07):

Yeah. I'll say building psychological safety when we're remote is actually very similar to building psychological safety in person. But what you do lack are some of the affordances that help you get lucky. So, when you're in person, humans are social beings. And we will tend to, in many cases but not always, build up an affinity for other people. We're in the room. We can read them we become comfortable. Probably, the most important thing we do is we talk to people outside of meetings. We talk to them on the way to get coffee. We talk to them after work if I'm in London. So, we were probably at the pub. And we built a relationship apart from the point of conflict that then we bring in to allow us to have that conversation.

Jeffrey (43:53):

And that's what I think is the most difficult sort of accidental psychological safety building that happens when we're remote. That doesn't happen remotely. Now, you can go in and try to build that in some ways remote. However, I think you can also do better because just like that approach of getting lucky doesn't always work in person. You don't always get that rapport.

Jeffrey (44:15):

But what we can do instead is take a more informed approach to what is it we want is the outcome, and how do we make it discussable. And that's something that these skills that we're talking help you with because you start to learn to be transparent, like, I would like everyone to contribute what they know. I think it's important that if we're going to have the best decision that we have all the information, I have a view on this. But I also know there could be things that I don't know.

Jeffrey (44:46):

And in this way, I'm using what Amy Edmondson called framing. I'm framing the situation in a way that invites contribution. I'm framing this as a joint process where collaboration is the way forward. None of us have all the information. We all have our own view, and we should start by trying to level of playing field. Let's try to share what we all know. And we should expect that we'll have different opinions. That's part of the value of having multiple people is that even with the same data, we get different opinions. And we should look at this as an opportunity instead of a threat. And it's not enough just to believe this. The important part for building psychological safety especially when you write is to take these implicit ideas and make them explicit to say them aloud to test them with the group and say, "Well, if we want that, do we all want this kind of outcome? Do we want to have a team where we're each collaborating on what we know, or do we think it's better to have partial information?" 

Douglas (45:50):

The great thing about being remote is it sort of forces all of us to think in those terms. So, I think that, on balance, the pandemic's been very difficult for all kinds of reasons. But one thing it has forced us to do is to reconsider what the heck we're doing. What does it mean for us to have a stand-up every morning? What should we be doing in that stand-up? Is it actually useful? Should we be doing something else? Should we be interacting with each other differently? And we might not have asked those questions if we were just plowing along doing what we used to do.

Douglas (46:17):

Suddenly, we've all been forced to go home, and we've had to think about what we might do differently. So, I think this is a great kind of historical opportunity to shift the discussion in your team and to suddenly bring up topics like "how do we collaborate?", "And what's the best way for us to get the information on the table?". You do have an opportunity to do it. You would have to have difficult conversations. You might want to write a dialogue about it so that you can understand how to bring that up in your team. That's the sort of thing that even just a few of you did that, I think we'd have a great victory as a result of this talk.

Johan (46:53):

We have so many excellent questions in the chat-

Douglas (46:56):

Bring them on.

Johan (46:56):

... and we're nowhere have enough time to get them. But I think one that touches a bit of mindset is Juha who is writing:"This is mostly concentrating on the output of the message or an instant messaging. Any thoughts on how we can improve interpreting the message or require to understand the message as the center means set?". And perhaps, you could address some of the mindset or things that this question contains.

Douglas (47:26):

It's an excellent question. Do you want that one, Jeffrey, or should I?

Jeffrey (47:29):

I'll do a short version. Maybe, you want to expand on it. I'll say I think the first place even what we just discussed about it is that idea of curiosity. And so, I think you can just start with there. That's kind of the core skill. And one of the first step of curiosity is actually right there in the way you put it. I want to know that I understood it in the way you intended it. Is it okay if I check with you and share my interpretation, and you can tell me if I understood you correctly. So, actually, that combination of transparency and curiosity works very well.

Jeffrey (48:06):

Now, there are other particular skills that go further in this around empathy which you might get from, say, non-violent communication or the LEAP method or things of that nature that get into other parts of active listening, and those particular skills. But I would say the foundational one still is this idea of transparency and curiosity. I want to understand you correctly. Here's what I understood that to mean. Did I have that correctly? And Squirrel, if you'd like to ..?

Douglas (48:38):

I would love to. Well, I'm going to underline an ad. One of the best things that you can do to verify that you understood the other person is simply to say back to them what they said. And this is just a tremendously powerful exercise. We've done this with executive groups for example where nobody had ever actually just said back to the CEO what they had heard, and that was what the CEO meant. And that's tremendously useful just to that level of clarity. But I'll take it even further. There's a wonderful guy. And if you get a chance to watch his videos, I would strongly encourage you.

Douglas (49:11):

His name is Xavier Amador, and he works with schizophrenics, people who believe that there are people on the moon who are beaming messages down to their neighbors to come and kill them. And they will tell you in great detail about the beams and where they're coming from, and when the phase of the moon is right the beams... They'll give you the whole story. He works with these people and gets them to take medicine that helps them to function better. Sometimes, they still believe something's happening on the moon. But they're no longer staying up all night trying to just deal with the aliens. So, he helps them.

Douglas (49:45):

And one of the very first things he does, and this is tremendously difficult, it's very, very painful to do, is he repeats back to the person whatever the person said. And you think this would be easy. I'm kind of like a tape recorder. I just remember what they said. And I say it back to them. But if the person, I bet a lot of you could not if you had to repeat my little story about what was happening up in the sky that was causing this person to have difficulty. You wouldn't remember that it was the moon, that it was beams coming down to earth, that it was specifically at night, and that it was people trying to kill the person. Those things are hard to remember especially the part about the particularly crazy bits. It's something on the moon that's somebody's coming to kill you.

Douglas (50:21):

And he manages by significant effort. This is a skill, again a hard thing to learn, to say back to them what they've said. And one of the things that I train people and teach people and coach people to do is to wait for the word exactly. And I'm sorry, I don't know it in languages like Finnish and Dutch and Danish and so on. So, I won't try to translate. But I'm sure you have a similar word. And, Johan, if I were to say to you, "Johan, I've understood that what you've said is you have so many questions that I can't possibly get to all of them. Is that right? Did I understand it correctly?"

Johan (50:53):

Perfect. Perfect. Exactly.

Douglas (50:55):

And there's an example. That's the exactly moment. That's when I've accurately summarized back what he said. And if he actually said, "Well, you know what? We don't have that many questions. But they're really long. So, we have only a couple. But they're more complex." We might deal with that differently it. Then, that would not be the exactly moment. It would be useful because I would be learning better what feedback Johan has for me. And that's an example of the kind of tool that with practice, it's not trivial especially if you're dealing with schizophrenics. It's very hard. So, Amador is extremely good at this. And that's his LEAP method.

Douglas (51:29):

In whatever situation, you might be in. Being able to get to an exactly moment is the sort of tool that you develop by following exactly the process we've been describing, and it's a pre-planned action that you can then use. I'm going to wait for an exactly moment and only when I've got my exactly, then, I'm going to go on to propose some action.

Johan (51:49):

And this is very interesting to me. And I think we can get one or two more questions. But, first, I want to dwell a bit on this because the question you answered was not the question I thought Juha had or the question I thought I was asking because...

Douglas (52:05):

Perfect example of possibly not understanding the question.

Johan (52:10):

That's completely excellent

Douglas (52:11):

With example.

Johan (52:12):

So, what I thought I was asking was how can I, as the writer of a message, require someone to understand the message as I mean it or how can I, as the sender, because you gave excellent tips as how do I as the recipient, what are the actions I can take to make sure that I have understood the message as the sender intended it? But I read the question as how can I, as the sender, force the recipient to read what I mean and that isn't true.

Douglas (52:53):

The hint is in your language. You can't force the other person. And this is painful. Humans are not very good at accepting that they don't know things or that they can't control their environment. But the harsh fact I have for you is you can't control the reaction of the other person. The other person may misinterpret what you have to say.

Johan (53:11):

And that is perfect because Juha has validated that I, of course, my assumptions were wrong, and you answered his question perfectly.

Douglas (53:23):

But your question is good as well. Your question is good, Johan. Let's just deal with that in just a moment because if you're feeling that when this is a very common thing, people say, "Well, now, now I've done all this work. And now, I've kind of got my question exactly right. And I'm going to ask for it." And what happens if they misunderstand it? That's normal, and that's expected. So, what you would want to do is plan a pre-planned action just the same way as if you configure a server. You get it all set up, and you're ready for it to run. And suddenly, AWS decides to turn it off on you which they sometimes do. Sometimes, they just decide to end the life of a server, and it goes away.

Douglas (53:55):

Well, you can't control that. You can't say AWS stop doing that to me. What you can do is plan some monitoring that allows you to spin up a new server to replace it. So, you can do exactly the same thing. You can say, "I'm going to be ready for a misunderstanding of this question." And I can do things like, "Jeffrey, could you just say back to me what you said because I'm not sure I quite expressed it well? I just want to check you got it. Would you mind saying it back to me?" That would be one way among many for verifying that you have been understood correctly.

Johan (54:28):

That is fantastic. I will try to ask a small question or rather a very, very large question that you will have a very brief amount of time...

Douglas (54:36):

We'll try.

Johan (54:38):

... to reply back on. Eva in the chat mentioned, "How do you see the role as leader in fostering better conversations for teams whether that is an informal or formal leader? Do you have any examples of that being a success because we've talked a lot about how we as individual contributors can change the way that we do? But how can we create like the framework, the gut rails, the environment where we can get better conversations? Any thoughts on that?"

Douglas (55:06):

I've got a fantastic example which we'll actually point out how a leader helped, but anybody could have. And it's a good kind of finishing story that brings together a lot of the ideas. So, I was in an executive group. It was all the people leading a particular small company. And they were going around the room. And each one was saying, "What are we going to do to launch this new product?" And the sales person said: "I've got my people lined up. They're headed out. They have their materials all set." The marketing person said,:"The blogs are written. The content's out. I'm ready to tweet. We're all set."

Jeffrey (55:37):

The product person said: "Yup, we've tested the product. We understand what it is. We're ready to go." The tech person said: "The servers are up. We're ready for logins. Ready to take payments. Everything's all ready to go." We got all the way around the table. We got back to the founder. And strangely, he'd been kind of staring out the window the whole time. We thought, "What's the CEO doing? Why is he looking out the window?" And he said: "You know, I just feel something's uncomfortable here. I don't know what it is. But there's something that bugs me about this product launch. Do any of you know what I'm talking about because I don't? But it just bugs me?"

Jeffrey (56:11):

And the salesperson said, "Well, I might. I mean the thing is that none of our sales people think this is going to sell They think this is a bomb, and nobody's going to buy it." And the marketing person said: "So fine, you should say that because we tried a few test tweets and nobody clicked. And the engagement was terrible. I'm not sure this works." And the product person said, "Yeah. Our initial tests, they really showed that nobody liked it. But you guys all said it was working." And the tech person said, "Sure. And we're not sure that actually the payments are going to work either. But we weren't too worried because you guys all said it was working."

Jeffrey (56:39):

It turned out everybody had the same level of concern. But no one had said anything because everybody looked at everyone else and said, "Boy, this looks okay." They're all saying it's all right. So, I guess my little local problem is not important. What happened in that particular case is that the leader staring out the window picked up on this. He kind of got the sense that something wasn't quite right. He didn't know what. And in the end, we didn't launch the product because everybody was concerned about this for all kinds of different reasons. It wasn't a good idea.

Jeffrey (57:07):

But it happened that he was the one staring out the window who pointed this out. And the point of the story is, partly, a leader can do that. Leaders are in a good position to stare out the window and notice something and make an uncomfortable statement that leads to a difficult conversation and lead to a different outcome that's better. But it's not incumbent on the leader. Any of us could have done that. I could have done that, right? Any of us who were sitting around that table could have taken that action. So, Eva suggests that leaders certainly can contribute, and they can be examples for the organization in doing things in a new and different and better way. But there's nothing that makes somebody inherently formally the leader the only one who can do it. You can do it too.

Johan (57:51):

Fantastic. And with that excellent answer to the question, this session is rounded off. Thank you so much for your contributions, Squirrel and Jeffrey. There is so much conversation on the chat. I hope that everyone will take to Twitter and LinkedIn and reach out all over and continue the excellent discussions. And there are so much...

Douglas (58:13):

And I'll just mention...

Johan (58:16):

... collaboration in the chat.

Douglas (58:16):

I'll just mention that we're on conversationaltransformation.com.

Douglas (58:21):

Conversationaltransformation.com is the best place to find us. Oh, agileconversations.com also works if you can remember the name of the book or even if you just remember our names, douglassquirrel.com and jeffreyfredrick.com. Those work too. So, find us at any of those dot coms and ask us more questions the ones that we didn't get to here. We'd love to hear from you. You can listen to our podcast. You can come to the conversational dojo tonight. All the information is on those links.

Johan (58:46):

Thank you, Squirrel. Jeffrey, any very last words from you, where to find you or where to find you or...

Jeffrey (58:54):

Thanks for having me, looking forward to continuing the conversation. Find me at the dojo. We have also our Slack community if people want to interact with us there. Yeah. Hope to hear from all of you soon.

Johan (59:06):

Thank you so much.

Douglas Squirrel
Director, Squirrel Squared
Twitter: @douglassquirrel
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dsquirrel

Jeffrey Fredrick
Managing Director, TIM
Twitter: @Jtf
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick

Johan Abildskov
Software engineer, Uber
Twitter: @RandomSort
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/johanabildskov/