London 2020
Dump The Ceremonies, Build Trust Instead
You’ve adopted the Agile, Lean, or DevOps methods just like you’re supposed to, but it isn’t working. Your sprints are more like marathons, you aren’t getting the flexible, rapid delivery you were promised, and you’re wondering if maybe the team is just going through the motions.
The solution is not “agile harder”. Another ceremonial meeting or by-the-book ritual isn’t going to change the dynamics. Instead, start by building trust, creating a culture of commitment and accountability, and watch the transformational results flow.
How do you change your culture? You do it by changing your conversations.
In our book Agile Conversations, we describe numerous techniques for improving your conversations and getting dramatic agile results quickly. In this talk, we will show you how to take your first steps toward a human-centered transformation, using nothing more than a piece of paper, a pen, and a willingness to learn.
JF
Jeffrey Fredrick
Author, Agile Conversations
DS
Douglas Squirrel
Author, Agile Conversations
Transcript
Well, welcome back to troubleshooting agile. Hi there. Jeffrey.
I scroll.
So this looks a little different as a matter of fact, um, I think the people out there in the podcast audience can see us today.
Yeah. In fact, I think we're not on our podcast. We meaning to do something different. In fact, these people may not be a normal podcast listeners. We may have to introduce ourselves to them.
We probably do. Hi. I'm squirrel. I'm a CTO here in London. I'm a consulting CTO, which means I work with lots of different organizations and I'm a coauthor of the book, agile conversations.
And I'm Jeffrey Fredrick. I'm a long time agile practitioner going back to the days before the word agile was coined. And I'm also in London, currently managing director at a FinTech company four days a week and consulting on the fifth day. And, um, along with squirrel, one of the hosts of a troubleshooting agile podcast. So what are we here to talk to people about today school?
Right. Well, I, I, I think this must be, if it's not our podcast, this must be dev ops enterprise, uh, London, which must mean that we're talking about dumping ceremonies, which is one of my favorite topics.
Uh that's right. And it's something that, uh, readers of our book and your conversations will know that we are focusing on conversations more than ceremonies. Uh, however, if you are one of those readers, don't worry. What we're talking about today is not a repeat of a chart from the book. And similarly, if you're in the audience, don't feel like we're going to be, uh, there's no point in reading the book. You still will. We're going to talk about all of that. Some stuff it's compatible with what we have in the book, that's align with the core message, but it's not the same
Exactly
What we, what is common is essentially who we're talking to and why we're talking to people. When we wrote the book for me, it was very important. I had a, an idea in my head of who I wanted to reach and it's people who are trying to make a transformation. They're trying to change the way they're doing things. They're making a good hearted attempt, and yet they're frustrated things aren't working.
And of course the solution that seems most obvious is to buy the entire it revolution, book, catalog, and read all of them and do what they say.
Uh, and, and that's great. And we do recommend that, uh, especially if you get the newest book, Andrew conversations, but, but there is a problem here, uh, that just knowing what to do is not enough to get the results. And it's those people who were doing the work, buying the books, bringing in the practices and still not getting the results that we wanted to talk to.
Exactly. And even by the way, if they read our book and they just read our book, they could still fall into the same traps. So we're going to talk about those traps and why the ceremonies aren't going to work for you while you should do something else.
That's right. And there's an element of what we're talking to today, which isn't new. The idea that culture is important to something that people in the DevOps space have heard many times, but not just, not just dev ops, but people in agile and lean and digital transformations, uh, which I think is something a bit more than, uh, I guess everything happens on computers now. Uh, but when any of these places, people do talk about the importance of, uh, culture, how important that is. And yet at the same time, how difficult it is.
Well, just the easy thing is this. You should just make sure that you change your culture and then after you've changed your culture, everything will go fine. The strange thing is that even though people know this, they keep failing all over the place. And this is just one statistic. There's another, that we were coming across recently. Uh, half of all transformations in the UK are delayed. So something's going wrong here. And even though everyone knows you're supposed to have a good culture either, they don't know how to create it, or they don't know what they're aiming for.
Uh, and I do think people might have a sense of what they're aiming for. Uh, especially, you know, people who will have, uh, uh, red, uh, accelerate, uh, one of the anti-rotation books and come across the idea of the three cultures, uh, from one Ron Russ from, and he talks about three different cultures. And this is about, uh, what typifies that, how information flows in your culture, what the, the, uh, concerns of people in power are. And basically whatever people in power are concerned about will lead to certain, uh, easy to understand, uh, experiences in the culture.
Well, it's easy to tell which one you want to be. It's obvious that number one is the very best. That's why we listed it in this order. So you definitely want to be pathological, right? Definitely.
Okay. Probably not. As, as you said before, that the names are kind of a giveaway it's we probably don't want to be pathological and we don't want to be bureaucratic. Generative sounds much better of the three. If I had to choose one, just by name alone, I'd go with that.
Yep. But if you're pathological there, that's actually got some attractiveness to it because it will be, uh, somebody who's, um, uh, keenly interested in results. It'll be directed from the top. Um, there are lots of examples of successful companies that run this way, so don't dismiss it completely. And, uh, bureaucratic organizations dominate, right? So people all over the place have, uh, fights with bureaucracy. So we're pretty used to the idea that we're going to follow a bunch of rules. I don't think people set out to be pathological or bureaucratic, but they wind up there because, um, that's the easy thing to do. That's uh, yeah. And also for example, that they wind up with ceremonies that don't work in a bureaucratic culture because, um, that's kind of what the books say to do. The tricky part is how on earth do you get to generative?
And I think that part of the issue here is the, the way that people approach transformation, the way they come in trying to change their culture actually reflects the culture they're starting with. And a lot of times when people have a focus on the ceremonies, it's very easy for that to become a bureaucratic exercise where people say, look, we're doing this because that's, what's in the book. We're, we're literally, we were reading the book. This is what it tells us to do. So that's where our focus is.
And it seems like it should work. I mean, all those people wrote those books, right? I mean, you and I wrote a book, so should I eat this? Do what's in the book. That seems the obvious thing to do.
And there's a lot of knowledge in embedding those books when they, when you, it telling you to say, um, have small teams, there's real advantages in that, uh, when they tell you to have a daily ceremony, like a daily standup, there's real value in those ceremonies, but only if you're, uh, the people that are approaching them and are living the right way. Ceremonies are so interesting to me. Ceremonies are only effective if the people in the culture really bind to them. And in a sense that the so many as you have the sermons, that work are going to be only a working, if they're an authentic expression of your culture, unfortunately, we want to be degenerative, which is the third on this list. And this is not a case where one plus two equals three. So a top-down push. We are making a transformation at a bunch of people in the middle saying, we're going to do it by the book, does not get you to a generative transformation
When it gets, he was empty ceremonies, which is what we're telling you to dump. So if you go to your stand-up and it feels like everyone's staring at their shoes and, um, you know, these days it might be staring at their shoes while looking at you and zoom. But however it is, um, they're, they're just saying, yeah, this is what I did. This is what I'm doing. No blockers. If that's the feeling you have in that ceremony or in your planning session or in your retrospective, then you're the people we want to talk to because actually the surprising thing that the case we're going to make here in this talk is there's something you can do about that. Most books in most, uh, uh, training, most consultants, most folks will tell you, look, you just got to find a way to improve the culture you gotta get to generate. If they don't tell you how we will tell you step by step things that you can do. And if they don't work for you, we'd like to hear it. If they do work, then you'll be like thousands of others that have tried.
Right. Um, now the interesting thing here is that what it takes to be effective as something that people already understand. Uh, this is one of my favorite diagrams that kind of layout about, uh, how collaboration goes wrong. And what we have here is a sort of classic consultant, two by two matrix and at the top, uh,
Yeah, I know where we want to be on the two by two matrix. We want to be in the green one on the upper, right. It's easy. I can get all the right answers Jaffrey.
That's fantastic. Now, what, what might be surprising though, is that what's red, the bad zone is not the bottom left. Uh, and the reason is this, uh, article that I've tooken taken this diagram from is describing a transformation. Actually, the, the challenge of moving from a culture of top-down, um, uh, low, uh, disagreement and low trust and respect, and the challenge of trying to move to that upper right. Try to have true collaboration. So if moving it from a traditional environment, what are the pitfalls along the way? And there's two major ways that this fails one is that you have people quite willing to disagree with one another, and, but they don't have trust and respect for each other. And when that happens, you end up unproductive conflict between people. On the other hand, if you do have trust respectfully from people, but they're not willing to disagree, right?
They're too worried about being nice and, and not willing to bring up differences with one another. Then you fall into the feeling of motive group. Think so, we have this very intriguing challenge. We want people who trust each other enough to care about what each of those things, but also our trust each other enough to say what they really think that you need to have actually a type of conflict between ideas. And that's what real collaboration is. And the fundamental element here is, is this idea of trust and respect is really the, the, the number one enablement that to really get on both sides without, without trust, to, to share what you're thinking and trust to hear what people are saying. It's not possible.
Th this sounds like motherhood and apple pie, Jeffrey. This just sounds like good stuff. Like a politician says, just to get you to believe it. I don't believe you can get trust and respect other than by having people already who trust and respect each other. There's, there's no way to create it.
Well, actually, the good news is there is something you can do. And, uh, you can start with, we call it conversational transformation, and this is not something we even invented. This is something that we've come to over the past eight years, because we were learning ourselves. And we started realizing, Hey, these are really powerful techniques. And this goes back to a guy named Chris Argyris, a Harvard professor, and a very well known in, in the area. And he's has this whole body of work that goes back now decades. And it says very consistently that if you change your conversations, you can change the way people relate to one another. And those that way they relate. That is your culture. Now, the really funny thing about this is that everyone knows what the end results are supposed to look like. And not just in that sort of like, we should be in the top, right. Culture, you know, we should be up and right in green. Yes. You want that. But we see needs to be more, much more specific, which is, you know, what good collaboration looks like. Even if you're not producing it. And
Exactly. Yeah. Let's, uh, everybody get hands on keyboards. Yeah. We're going to need you in slack. And with the power of my mind, look at me, I'm going to be, I'm going to vantage to get tuned into the universe. And I'm going to see into the future. And about a week from now, you guys are all going to be typing in slack, and you're going to type in what a good collaboration looks like. And I'm going to predict what you say, even though you're in the future and I'm in the past,
All right, let's give me
Jeffrey, tell them what they're supposed to type. So they have to type it in slack at your hands on the keyboard. What do they type?
So we're going to make a decision together. We are all going to decide about, uh, where does should be next year. Like where should the conference be? And what I want you to do now is to say how we go about deciding that as
A decision is don't start arguing about which city
That's right.
And argue about what our discussion is about how to decide.
Yep. So
Psychically thinking, I'm getting psyched up.
So imagine that you personally are the person who's going to decide how we go about making that decision. What would you recommend we do now go type your recommendations into slack now.
Okay. It's coming through the, the, the vision is appearing in front of me. I think I can see it. And if Jeffrey goes to the next slide that we can actually see what you typed in slack. Let's see,
Go ahead, Jeffrey. Isn't switching yet. This slide is not switching. There it is. Okay. So what we're going to predict is that you're going to say that we should be diverse. We should get lots of different ideas that we should share those ideas. So we have everybody sharing, including yourself, and that those ideas should conflict. We should have some discussion about which is the best one and pros and cons. And then we should come up with a decision everyone's happy with. And I predict now a week in advance that you have said that, and believe me, I've got some stocks for you to buy as well.
Well, now it's, it's actually not very hard for us to make this prediction because we've asked lots of group of people in lots of settings, although never, we've never asked people in the future like this before. Usually we do
Real time experiment, but I predict it'll still work
Because basically everyone gives us some variation of this. Uh, I would ask everyone what their views are and I would share my views, but that's it because we all understand that getting all the information in the room is what we want. That more information gives us more choices helps us make better decisions.
And now that everybody knows that we can bring this to an end and take questions, right? Definitely. We're all done now that you know exactly what to do
Well, there's this problem though, is there's this gap between what we espouse. This is, this is the behavior that we think we do that we tell people we do. In fact, you probably all believe that you do this. And actually, this is how you go about making decisions, except when the stakes are high, when there's something important to you, when there's an important decision to be made, and you might feel some loss, if it goes wrong, then suddenly people behave very differently. Well,
In that case, Jeffrey, what I've got to do is convince them. I mean, I understand it well, and in most of the time, really, it's good for that. All that conflict stuff really got it completely with it, but you know what? I I've got the answer here and I just need to convince them, can you help me with,
Yeah, that's that squirrel modeling how people behave when it's something important. And it's like, well, I know what we do is normally the best way, but in this special case now, suddenly we're going to behave differently. Now we want our ideas to win. It's no longer a question of collaboration. We see differences, not as a strength, but as a threat. And as a result, we don't end up being very curious about what other people are thinking. You know, why? Because why should we be curious when we're right? And we also don't share all we know, because it's obvious, right? I mean, not just what we should do. It's like all the facts that lead up to it. Why would we share what's obvious? And so suddenly what we, even though we have this espoused value of curiosity and transparency, when we come into actually making these decisions, instead, we end up trying to win, not sharing wheat. No, not being curious in that undermines trust and respect. So in a sense to build trust and respect is easy but difficult. It's easy. As far as it's simple as doing the things that we know we should be doing,
It's actually doing them. That's hard. It's like losing weight is easy. All you do is don't eat.
Now, the thing is, we said that we're going to teach you in this session, how you can learn how you can start changing your behavior. And we're going to give you some things that you can do in this course, in this time we have, in this limited time, we're going to tell you steps and you can follow along and you can actually begin changing your behavior. By the end of the session,
You do need some equipment though. So it is very important that you get the correct equipment. And that consists of a piece of paper that has been folded in half and a pen. Those were the complex pieces of equipment. You haven't got those, you might want to run and get them, cause you're going to need them for the next section.
That's right. So if you have you get your pen and paper, and we're going to walk you something called the four R's and the four RS are a general set of steps that you can use to improve your conversations. We're going to be using them in a very specific way, which is about how to make sure you're improving your transparency and curiosity. And then the book we talk about using other tools and improving your conversations in other dimensions, but that they will always come back to this core technique of the four RS. And it's so simple that you can learn it in the time we have remaining.
Okay? So by this time you should have your paper ready, go ahead and fold it in half vertically. So you wind up with two columns and that'll prepare you for what we're about to do,
Right? And here's the forest. We're going to walk you through the four RS, start with a first record and make a recording of a conversation that we want to have and use to improve our skills. Second, we're going to reflect to a third. We're going to revise three after we've revised. We're going to repeat that, go back and reflect again for a, and then we're going to, when we have a revision that we like, we're going to move on to role-play
Five
And a and role reversal,
6, 6, 4
RS, the six, four RS. So, uh, w you know, we're, we're helping you with your conversations, not your math skills, but we're going to take you through one through four here. And, uh, we'll start with that recording. So you have your paper and you can do this right now. Think of a conversation where you're frustrated and think of the element of that conversation, where you got frustrated, and you don't
The whole conversation. It's fine to have just a couple of lines as I have here.
That's right. So you get, you're going to think of our, uh, key exchange. What was the element was the time when you, you know, you were getting frustrated when you felt the other person just wasn't getting it. Go ahead. And on the right hand side, you're going to write down what was spoken, what, what you said, what the other person said, the things that would show up on a video camera,
Uh, Jeffrey, I'm sorry. I don't, I don't remember the conversation that, well, I'm not sure I could write down every word.
You know, you don't need every word. You can just go ahead and write down what you can remember. In fact, it's okay. If you're going to be naturally paraphrasing some things you don't need to have it exact, even a faulting incomplete memory. If you're, yes, this is, I'm pretty sure we said something like this that's enough to work with. So this is part of our no excuses policy. There is no reason not to begin working on your conversations today.
And I'm sure that all of you have now written something on the right-hand side of your piece of paper. So you're ready for the left-hand side. What goes
On the left hand side in the right hand column is the visible world. The left hand one is the invisible world. It's your inner dialogue, what you thought and what you felt while that conversation was happening.
Jeffrey I've developed telepathy. So I'm going to write what the other person thinks is that okay?
If, if you have to let pithy
Telepathy,
Okay, but if you do not have to let the thing, you're not allowed to write what the other person is thinking feeling. You only have access to your own thoughts and feelings. So you're going to have this dialogue where the, uh, on the right hand side, you have, uh, their dialogue in your dialogue and their dialogue and your dialogue. But the left hand side is all about you. It's all what you're thinking and feeling as you're reacting to what they're saying, as you're thinking, while you're talking. So your thoughts going left, and this is your record, you know, work with now. It's very important that this is written down. Why, why do I, you know, why don't write this down squirrel? How come I can't just keep it all in my head?
Well, the reason is to do with something called self distancing, which is different to what we're all thinking about now, which is social distancing. It's the idea that if you have something on a piece of paper, it almost feels like it's somebody else. And that's very important because your brain is all conditioned to think about how other people react to you and what, uh, what they're thinking about. And so if you can see yourself as an another person, that's so distanced from yourself, you'll actually have a much better analysis. Um, my favorite story about this is we had, uh, a teacher, a person who worked with us very much on this, who, um, would record his conversations and his name was Benjamin, and he would play them back for himself. And then he would shout at the tape recorder, Benjamin stopped doing that. And, um, the reason he was able to do that is because he could see Benjamin as a different person. It was himself, he was shouting himself to do something differently, but it helped him to have the recording. So he could actually, um, shout that at himself. You don't have to shout at yourself, but it is very, uh, very, very important that you actually write it down. So no excuses, can't just do this in your head, follow along as, as if you're doing it, you need a piece of paper, a pen, and to write these down, it's not too late. You can still do it.
That's right. So once you've written it down, now, you're going to move on to the second step, the second of the four hours, which is reflect and reflect. It's kind of the scoring section. It's when you go ahead and look at what you've done to say, am I following the espouse behavior and the simplest thing to do, as we said, it's just look, the question is, am I being transparent? And am I being curious? So how would I know if I'm being curious?
Well, there's something I know that I can't do. Uh, I can't, I can't achieve curiosity without asking questions. You know, the easiest scoring method is to circle the question marks. So we have a conversation here. We won't read it out to you, but you can see that, uh, what, uh, the person who's recording it, Norbert, uh, actually asked was one question. So we can circle that question, mark.
Right? And then, then he can go and say, okay, I have this question, but wasn't genuine. And, uh, what do we mean by a genuine question?
Well, a non genuine questions is actually easier to explain. It's a leading question. Like, uh, Hey, Jeffrey, uh, we should speed up because we're getting close to the end of the talk, right? That would not be a genuine question because I really have an opinion that I'm stating with a question mark at the end, and that's, what's happening in Norbert here. If you look in the left-hand side, he's an advocate of KVM and he's asked, he's saying, why don't we ask about KVM? He means let's use KTM. Right? Whereas if he were really curious, he might ask and reflect it in the left-hand column. Um, gee KVM sounds interesting. And there are other alternatives to, how could we explore those? That would be a genuine question,
Right? So you can't tell for someone else, if what they're asking a genuine question, you can only do it for yourself because you need to know what someone's actually thinking and feeling to know if the question is genuine or not. So first you're gonna question is, am I being genuinely curious? And in this Norbert's Casey's is okay. Not really. How about transparent? When you look at the left-hand side and the things that Norbert's thinking and feeling, or in your case, what you are thinking and feeling, are there things there that you're not sharing and then probably there are, and you're challenging me. It's like, how can I figure out how to get those over, onto the right-hand side?
And of course you want to get them onto the right-hand side in a productive way. So for example, it would be really helpful for Norbert to say what you're saying, doesn't match what you're doing Quinn, but probably saying what a hypocrite you are is not going to produce a positive reaction. When, so it's very helpful idea. It's a, it's an important notion that I'm hearing one thing and seeing something else, but, um, he wanted to express that in a productive way, rather than an unproductive one.
And one thing that will happen is as you're looking at your different, uh, cases, you'll start to find is there's certain things that are triggers for you. Certain items that you know, will tend to cause you difficulty in living up to your espouse behavior standards. Is that something you can look for in plan for just say the next time that I have one of these triggers, how am I going to behave in a more constructive way?
And I think we're, we're kind of anticipating the next slide, which is all about the third art revise.
That's right. So revise is, we're going to go ahead and come up with a, another set of actions, but this time we're going to be looking at things that I could have said. That would be more similar to the behavior I want to be creating. So I'm going to, in this case, this is what Norbert has gone through and changed, uh, based on his previous examples. So you feel it wasn't curious enough and, uh, he wasn't transparent and he felt he had been triggered.
So, so let's try this one out Jeffrey let's, let's see if this revision actually makes sense. We saw the earlier one where there were a lot of leading questions, a lot of things hidden on the left. Do you want to be Norbert or should do you want to be Quinn?
Oh, I'll be Quinn.
Sounds good. So Quinn actually, almost everybody already knows KVM. I mean, I can check with them to be sure. Do you think that's a good next step?
Well, it's certainly good to get the information, but don't think the choice has been made. Unfortunately, I can't leave business critical decisions like this up to the team.
Hmm. You know, that does doesn't sit well with me because I think we need more autonomy, not less. Can we talk more about how we make decisions? So if you'll see there that, although this isn't a perfect dialogue, it's got a lot more challenge and productive conflict than the first one, in which Norbert more or less knuckled under Quinn and over, it's actually able to ask some questions to get him some more information that might let him, uh, change the situation. He might not be able to change the situation. Quinn might be unwilling to move, but normally we'll be sure about that rather than being, uh, uh, in the dark and thinking, uh, he already knows what, when things
Right. And the, uh, uh, what we just walked through was actually a role-play of the, uh, conversation now. Uh, we were, uh, role-playing it, uh, even though it's not ours, but when you say when, when you create your revised dialogue after you've scored it again, that's the repeat and you have a revision that you like, and then it's very helpful to move onto a dialogue with someone else. Because a lot of times I might write something down and be very happy with how it feels on the page. But when I say it out loud, I realized, you know what? I don't talk like that, that, that doesn't work for me. I wouldn't actually speak that way. And so, uh, having that role play with someone else can be very helpful to say, okay, this is how I actually would get it across. And, uh, ended up with something very different. We also mentioned in the four RS that sort of six, four R was role reversal. So sometimes it's very good to have someone say something back to me. I can learn something different.
I was trying that with a client the other day, and it just didn't sound right back to that person. And so it's helpful always to hear it. And you say that doesn't sound quite like what I meant again, you get that self distancing it's being said to you. So you feel about it. You can think about and reason about it differently.
That's right. Um, and, and that's it. Those are the, the four RS. And what happens if you can start analyzing your conversations like this and producing different behavior, then there's very predictable demonstrable changes. And what happens in particular, you get improved relationships. You get this improved trust and respect that we talked about improved trust and respect is really the foundation. You need to start having better conversations, better collaboration, which really leads to better decisions and ultimately better leadership. Now, as we said, this is simple, but not fairly easy.
And in notice that these are things that we said that you would do. So the challenge we have to you is take that piece of paper in which you'd revised your conversation and try out some of those techniques, repeat the process, because if you don't make those changes, then if you make those changes, then what you should see is that others, um, behave differently toward you. So this is not a process that someone else does. This is a process that you do. And then the result is that you get these improvements. And if you don't believe this, you can go and try it. You just did it in this conversation, in this, uh, talk, you actually, I hope actually wrote something down and you have an opportunity to have a different conversation. The next time does it work for you tell us we were very interested
And you really have a chance to improve every day, because every day you're having collaborations with people. You're having conversations. Sometimes they're in meetings. Sometimes they're, one-on-one sometimes they're in email. Sometimes they're in slack, but you have multiple types of collaborations every single day. And you can always be using this as a learning opportunity to say, am I being transparent? Am I being curious? Am I behaving the way that I would expect you to behave when they're trying to collaborate, make good decisions. If you do the conversation analysis, you'll learn a lot more, you'll improve your own performance, your own behavior, and that will improve and change the behavior of the entire group.
Well, uh, uh, there's more material here in the slides, which I'm sure you can download. Um, you can, uh, look at the five conversations we talk about in the book, all of which we help you to, uh, address, uh, trust, fear, while and commitment and accountability. So if you have problems with any of those, it's usually not hard to diagnose that it's pretty darn hard to figure out what to do about it. And we give you steps, just like the ones you just learned for addressing these issues. And here's my final and most challenging comment to you. If somebody says, you know, we just have too much fear around here, nobody understands why we're doing this. Uh, nobody trusts us. Um, if you hear that, or if you find yourself saying that, challenge yourself first to try the techniques that we're describing, because what I don't want to hear is the same as when people say, oh yeah, we have a lot of bugs. And some somebody typically these days now, 30 years ago, no one would say this, but these days somebody say, have you tried tests? You know, I hear automated tests could help with that. So I'd sure like it, if, uh, people who are listening to us today think to themselves and for others, you know, have you tried doing a conversational analysis that just might help you with the fact that your team is afraid of its boss.