Las Vegas 2019
Conversational Transformation
Is your company transformation falling short of your goals? Have you bought all the books, held the trainings, followed all the practises, but you didn't get the promised results?
If so, it is probably your fault—there are almost certainly several difficult conversations you have been avoiding that could change your results dramatically: increasing trust, reducing fear, creating an inspiring Why, encouraging commitment, and ensuring accountability.
The good news is that there are proven, concrete steps you can take today to start a conversational transformation that will address these problems.
We will show you how to take the first steps toward a truly human-centred technology transformation using nothing more than a sheet of paper, and point the way to further development with techniques like Test-Driven Development for People and Directed Opportunism.
Conversational Transformation
Jeffrey Fredrick, Managing Director at TIM, An Acuris Company
Douglas Squirrel, Director, Squirrel Squared
JF
Jeffrey Fredrick
Author, Agile Conversations
DS
Douglas Squirrel
Author, Agile Conversations
Transcript
We'll be talking about, uh, conversational transformations, uh, the missing foundation. And then we get to sort of the buzzword bingo part, the difficult conversations, unlock, successful, digital, agile DevOps, and lean transformations. We wanted to cast a, you know, this is a big tent kind of topic. So, uh, I'm very happy that all of you joined us here. Um, we're going to be talking about, uh, information that we have in a book that we've written that will be coming out in may of 2020. However, all of you by being here tonight are very lucky that we'll be doing a book signing later of our pre-print galley. Uh, this is not the final version it is, but it has a lot of the key techniques that we'll be talking about in our presentation. Um, one of the note about our presentation, uh, this will be available. Slides will be available for you to download and read later that, and we've designed it that way, that there is some information for you to study later, uh, as you reflect on the talk, because we want you to able to apply the techniques that we talk about.
This is not a, I don't know why you're here, but it's not just for entertainment in our minds. You know? And it's not just theory. That's right. A lot of talks you come to and you listen and, and you say, well, that was fun. And then you go away. This is not one of those talks. We're going to be asking you to do something. Uh, and it's something that you'll be able to do tonight. You'll be able to apply and learn something. And just so you know, learning is horrible because learning is the detection and correction of error. If you don't feel uncomfortable doing what we're talking about, you're not doing it. Right. So with that lovely introduction, why do transformations fail? Uh, I've been doing agile for about 20 years and the people who have a good grasp of dates will say, wait a minute, there was no such thing as agile, 20 years ago.
Uh, that's true. But I was on the, a word Wiki, the C2, Wiki, the gray hairs here will know what I'm talking about. Uh, talking about the things that were later branded agile, and I've seen many transformational waves come through our industry. And I've seen, uh, the pain and suffering of people and on both sides, people who are very excited about the transformation and they get very frustrated when it isn't working. And I see some nodding of heads and I talked to people who really heard they, you, if you're here, you're probably one of these people who are very excited about what will be better and you want to bring better to everyone. And I'll tell you now you'll be frustrated when you come back from this conference and you're very excited and you talk to them and they're not interested in your better. And oh, you've been here before. And so what do you do now in the transformation we're looking for? Wide-scale change in, in not just adopting another set of practices, another punch list. We're looking to change how people relate to one another. We're looking change culture. That's hard, but it's actually not complicated. What we're going to tell you here is if you change your conversations, you will change your culture.
And you know what? If you're involved in a cultural transformation, one of the things you might think is that you can go read a book. Maybe you can even read our book, or you could read how many people have read five dysfunctions of a team. Great. Anybody? Remember what the first dysfunction is? Shout it out. Trust. Thank you anybody. Remember what Lencioni tells you to do? If you have low trust, anybody you want to shout it louder? I can't hear it vulnerability. Okay. Does he tell you how to become vulnerable? I'll tell you because I've read it more recently than you guys. He tells you that you should talk to your team about their strengths and weaknesses, and you should go on a ropes course. When I read that, I threw the book across the room. I wanted my money back because I was very frustrated that Lensioni, and he's not the only one. Doesn't tell you what to do, the difference we claim and what we're going to tell you is that something you can walk away from today and do differently with immediate results, not immediate super results. You'll have to get better at it, but something will happen. That will be different. You'll build trust for example.
And the thing is you already have a good idea of where you want to get. This is part of what makes it possible. Um, there's not a lot of disagreement that of people about what they want. Um, one way to look at this as a, if people read the book accelerate, uh, one of the things I really liked in there was from Ron Western, the three cultures, and they talked about, uh, now you can see the three cultures. There's the pathological, bureaucratic and
Generative. You can guess which one you want to be. Yeah, no,
No. It was like, yeah, we're aiming for pathological, but here's the thing. You have a corporate culture right now, right? Isn't it. Isn't that make sense? You're you're in one of these credit categories, that's the context you're in. And if you're in one of these three cultures and you go start a transformation, guess what? You're going to approach it in one of these three ways. If you're a pathological co transform a corporation and you're charting transformation, what's gonna happen, you're gonna approach it pathologically top-down and then, you know, ride rough shot over the bodies. If you aren't in a bureaucratic organization, it's going to be punchless by the rules. I'm sorry. That's not what the scrum manual says. Right? And if you're in a generative culture, you're probably not here because it's already working. Right. So that's kind of the bad news. You want to get to a generative culture, but you're starting in one. That's not
Just out of curiosity. How many of you would say you were in a pathological culture? Hands
Up. Don't worry. The camera. Can't
See. Don't worry. We're not taking names. How many of you would say you're in a bureaucratic culture? A lot of hands for that one. How many? In a generative culture. Some good. Excellent. You might be in the wrong room here. It's okay. If you leave. That's all right.
All right. So changing your culture. And this is where saying, you're going to start with a conversational transformation. Now, one thing that happens, we talk about conversations a lot and people go, that's great. I want to have better conversations. So people will do what I want. And guess what? That's more of the pathological than generative. Isn't it? So that's a good thing. You're here that you know what results you want to get to, you know how to have good conversations. And I know that because we, we talked to a lot of people about it and we will say this, look around the people next to you.
Just pick the closest five people like the people in gear a little row there.
Now imagine that your row, it was up to you to make some decision like where this conference is going to be next year,
Antarctica. It would be great. We can have penguins, right?
Super. And imagine you're going to make that decision. How would you recommend you go about doing it in your row?
So shout it out. What kinds of things would you do? Brainstorm? I heard discuss.
Excellent. Yeah. And it turns out when we, when we ask this, we always get the same answer. It's said different ways, but it's something like brainstorm. I want to hear from everyone. I same discuss, tell us, you know, have different opinions because diversity is strength, right? The more opinions, the more information we get out, the better decisions we get, the more options we have now, that would be great, except for, that's not what people actually do in practice. What would that is, is a spoused behavior. When you ask people how she can make decisions, they're like, yep. Get all the information out there. And then we'll decide the problem is in practice. Whenever humans and most of you look like humans. Yup.
Any non-humans good. All right. When
Humans face the opportunity for either a threat or an embarrassment, they behave very differently, right? The fear portion of their brain, the amygdala kicks in and they shut down. And now diversity is a threat
Because they might not agree. If everybody could disagree with me, it would be great.
Right? Cause I've given this careful thought I have, I went to the conference. I did. I heard Jean taught. He signed my book. I know what we should be doing.
And all I need to do is get all these people in my road to just agree that penguins are the greatest thing ever. And we need to go to Antarctica.
So we approach it by wanting to win, which is not what we said before was the right way to make a decision. See what's happening here. We know what good behavior looks like, but knowing is not helpful. That's because conversations are a skill, not a question of knowledge. It's sort of like, do you understand how piano works? You probably do. You push a key, a hammer hits the string string makes a noise. You understand that, right? Can you play a piano? Well, not by understanding it's by practicing. So that's what I'm talking about. There will be a little bit of understanding. Like the first thing to understand is that you have this process going on in your head where, when you are exposed to some information, you unconsciously go through this process. And if you look up the ladder of inference and you look this on Wiki, you'll find lots of pictures of ladders.
This is our favorite. And the reason is because the illustration makes it very clear that this is something that goes on in your head, right? There's things in the world that are real. Then there's this process in your head. And then you do something in the world. And when you do it, you go through the stage of going from selecting the data you see, but you tend to select things that confirm what you already believe. You add meaning to it. But you think that's mean is coming from the world, not from your head, you make assumptions. You draw conclusions. You have firm beliefs like penguins are awesome. And from that, you instantly come to an answer. That to you is obvious. It's obvious. We should go to Antarctica because that's where the penguins are. Of course. Now when you,
None of you followed any of that reasoning, none of you understood why, because you are all shaking your heads at the crazy man saying we should go to Antarctica.
And that's what happens with this happens in our heads. We feel we've come to an obvious conclusion about the world of anyone else who disagrees, just doesn't understand. But it turns out what happens is they have their own ladders, right? They've gone for their own process. They've seen different things. They have different experiences, and this should be the source of our strength. Remember? And it can be, if we become curious about what's on their letter and we become transparent about what's on ours. If we begin actually sharing that information, if we want to learn about other people, then we can get to that state that we all know is the right way to make the sick.
And the problem is that if you look on television, you never see people behaving in the way we just described. You see this dueling ladders, you see somebody who says we should close the borders and somebody else who says immigration is great. And what never happens is anybody says, how did you come to that conclusion? Can you tell me more? How did you get there? And you know what, actually, that sounds good. Could I join your party? That doesn't happen. And so we don't have that model around for us to look at, however, there's something you can do that will change that behavior for you.
We're going to break it down into something easy to follow. And this is a process you can start applying right away to some, you can practice in every conversation and we call it the four RS. The four RS is a, is a generic process for analyzing conversations. And you're going to have a model and you're gonna apply it. And, uh, you're going to apply it through these four steps. Start off with record now, uh, then you're going to reflect, you're going to revise. You're going to role-play. Oh yeah. Then you might repeat. And then there's some role reversal. Okay. So there's six, four RS.
Sorry. Some things are complex. Don't worry. We'll go through them all. But four hours sounds more approachable. So we're going to go with that. Number one record. One of things we want to stress is how approachable these techniques are. These are simple. They're difficult because they're painful, but they're not difficult. It is in concept. So to record, you need some very complex technology, namely, a piece of paper and a pen. You're going to do some very complex origami in, involved in folding the paper in half. You now have two columns now, thinking of a conversation where maybe things didn't go so well, what you do is in the right hand column, you will write down the dialogue. As you recall it, the reason you only use one page is because the essence of your conflict, the dynamics you can capture in probably just a few exchanges, you don't need a whole transcript.
Right? And you don't need to remember exactly what was said, because your contribution is me personally, based on what you remember. So you're going to write down some, your approximation of the major exchanges. You know, you can start with hi and how are you? How was the kids? How are the weekend, right? If you like, but probably going to focus in on the core exchange where there was some conflict and I'm already done. So that's how long it takes you. Right? So it can be that quick. You have your, your exchange. What did they say? And then what, on the left-hand column, after you've written on the dialogue, you'll start adding, what were your thoughts as that was happening? So when they spoke, what did you think? And as you were speaking, what were you thinking? And that's it, that's recording now. A lot of people say, do I have to write it down?
Yeah. I could just make, take care of it. I can think of it in my head. That's okay. I don't need it. Do I? And the answer is no, that doesn't work. The important part here is a process known as self distancing, right? As long as it's in your head, it's you and your brain doesn't think about you the way it thinks about other people, right? This is where a lot of our cognitive biases come from. Things like fundamental attribution error. Right. And if you're not familiar with that, the idea is that, uh, when we look at our own actions, we understand that they're contingent based on the circumstances of the world. So if I have to cut some off in traffic, it's because look, I'm really in a hurry. This is an emergency. Yeah. But that other guy who cut me up, they're a jerk.
Yeah. Right. So when you write it down, actually, and it's not in your head anymore, it's went away. It's no you, right. It's the, you have five minutes ago. It's your past you net. It's someone else now. And your mechanisms for understanding critiquing behavior. And you're very good critics of other people's behavior can now be brought to playing yourself. So that's why you have to record it outside next up reflect. Now there are a lot of words here begin. This is something for you to look at later in the, in the very simplest thing, we're gonna go back to this idea. We're trying to be curious about other people. We're trying to be transparent to better ourselves. And in the process, we're going to look for our own triggers, things that kind of set us off and make us not very curious and not very transparent. And, and this is an example where Norbert and Quinn, uh, had a discussion and Norbert was doing the case. Now we know that it's Norbert's case because on the left-hand column, you'll notice that's Norbert's thoughts.
The question is, are there any telepaths here tonight? Anybody telepathic? Okay. You folks, you can write the, what the other person was thinking. All the non telepaths. You have to write only what you were thinking. Right? Makes sense. Okay.
So this, this is Norbert thought. It's an over a case. As you read the case, you read it in the same order that you wrote it, right? So you read the dialogue first
On the right hand
Side, and then you can read the thoughts on the left-hand side. And then you get a sense of what the dynamics are there going on behind the scenes. And then when you score it, you just simply say, am I being curious? And you just, I mean, it's simple. Like how many questions did I ask? And if the answer is zero, that's pretty much evidence you weren't being very curious. Yeah.
And you might ask questions that are leading questions or aren't very genuine. That's not very curious, either Jeffrey, weren't you trying to undermine me?
That's very curious. That's a statement, not a question. A, a genuine curiosity is a question you ask where the answer might actually change your mind. If you're only gathering information to figure out how better to make your argument. Don't you
Love penguins.
You're not actually being very curious. Nope. So that's what we, so you can start by looking for curiosity. The second thing is looking for transparency in your left-hand column. Go ahead and look for thoughts that you had, but you didn't share in some form in the actual conversation. So if you're now you don't need to share them example. Exactly. So in Norbert, thanks. You know, gosh, what a hypocrite you are.
That's probably not so productive to say in the right-hand column,
But you might find a way to say it that'd be more productive.
You might say, I really don't think what you're saying matches what you described before. Can you help me with the difference?
Right. And finally, again, you're going to look for your own triggers as you do. Most of that, you're going to find patterns of your own behavior that you realize are difficult situations for you. And that's useful because you can start to plan alternative actions. In this case, uh, Norbert realized that, uh, uh, the idea of autonomy was a very important one for him. And if he felt that there's something else going on, then he knows that's what makes him unreasonably angry. So having done this, having reflected it's time to now revise, this is like refactoring. You're going to go back and say, what's the conversation I could have had two that would have been more productive. Right? So you're going to look for a way to, to revise your dialogue right out and say, how could I have been more curious here? This is something you're remarkably successful on because you're no longer in the heat of the moment.
And it's no longer in a sense of you. You're like, oh yeah, it turns out Jeff could have been more curious here. I wasn't able to in the moment, but looking back that guy, Jeff, he could have been here. Here's what he might've said. And you can be more transparent. What were those things? I didn't say, can I find a way to bring them in the conversation? And I can write out my revised dialogue about how things might have gone. Now, this is a way to practice things safely and you can write them out and then say, Hmm, no, that's not quite right. And score yourself again. This is the repeat, right? I'm going to go back and revise it, reflect on what are my revision until I have something that I'm pretty happy with. And then the question is, now that I've got it in paper, and I'm pretty happy with that, I need to get practice actually saying it. And this is very useful. Have a friend, if you need to, you can use the mirror, but friends are better because you can try role-playing here. Uh, it turns out here we have an alternative dialogue. Yup. This is something you can, you can,
I can give it a try if you're willing to mine. Uh, let's see. So, uh, I'm, I'm starting off and you're going to tell me where the strip is because I can't find my way around Las Vegas. Yeah. Where
Is the strip
There? Oh man. You know, everybody's told me it's over there and I can't find it. And I'm really frustrated with that. And you're the sixth person who told me that. Can you just take me there? Oh, okay. Fantastic. And my original dialogue and all that stuff in the left-hand column about why can't you just take me there? And all I said was okay, and then I got lost again.
So now having done that, role-play that the idea here is that, how does it feel to actually say it, right? It's one thing to write out a script, but that doesn't mean you're going to feel comfortable actually saying it out.
And every time we have somebody do this, they stumble. They own, they all, they get confused. They can't say it and it's on the paper, but it's very difficult. So don't be surprised if you go try this, don't get discouraged. Cause that's normal. Right? It's like when you first play the piano, nothing comes out. Right? That's that's okay. That's what's up.
Yeah. This is that horrible learning stuff you realize. Okay. That's not the way I talk. That's not the way I would say it. I'm not comfortable saying this way. Let's try again. Let's revise again. Now. Then a funny thing happens when you're comfortable. Yep. I like these words. I like how I say them. I can then try role reversal because it turns out hearing them. Oh, actually I don't like the way that sounds back to the drawing board. Okay. So with those simple six, four RS, you're able to start learning what a good conversation would sound like and you begin practicing it. And then having done that, you can actually go back and revisit some of those conversations. You know, I thought about the way that went, uh, you know, scroll the other day. And I realized, I wasn't very curious. I was trying to so hard to convince you.
I realize I didn't actually learn why you don't like my idea. Would you be willing to share that with me? Absolutely. Right. That's what you can get to in a very short period of time. Now what happens then? Right? What happens? Well, we're able to have those kinds of conversations that we all agree are the way to make effective decisions. And, and we really start building more of a relationship here. Now we don't need to agree. I'm going to, don't have to like penguins it's okay. And this is not about convincing you of the person what's important here is that sharing of information. Right? We take what was before a positional battle where we're arguing from the top of our ladders. And I start explain like, well, here's what I saw. And here's what I was thinking. And that's why I think this now you would just share mine at the end, as squirrel shares his letter, his experiences, his reasoning, his thoughts. And I share my, no, we might not agree, but at least together, we now have more options. We have more information. And I, at least I understand him. He's no longer this irrational person. Who's just blocking me for no good reason. But actually he's someone who has their own reasons and maybe the value things differently from mine. But at least I understand what they are. And that can get us
Closer to the espoused theory that you all said and all thought we'd would like diversity. We want more opinions. We want to share our thoughts. And to that generative culture that we talked about
At the beginning, right? And what's the attribute of a generative culture, right? It's that together, we're both putting the mission ahead of the bureaucratic rules and ahead of our own personal glory, we're elevating the mission, right? And we may disagree about the best way to perform the mission, but we understand that our differences, our differences of opinion to this, but not a difference in goal. We're still partners now on elevating that mission. And what's the best way for us to jointly succeed. Now, all of this sounds very easy. I imagine you're thinking, yeah, I could do this. Oh, well, let's try between now and the book signing, go ahead and find yourself a piece of paper, try writing one up and bring it to us at the book, signing and share your experience. We'd like to hear your successes are experiences that people will feel very comfortable right up at the time that they need to speak, bring your role-play with us. And we can role play was we signed your book and I'd like to hear how that goes. All right. We're looking forward to that. Now what we've just covered here is a very basic foundation. I said for conversation analysis, uh, in the book, we go and expand on this into five different conversations. And this is really going back to sort of school throwing the book across the room saying, you know, we want to, we, we want to give people more concrete examples about how to start doing things like building trust, uh, how to, how to get the fear conversation, how to, how to have the why conversation,
Why are we doing this? What is the mission?
Right. And commitment. And finally accountability. Now we have a question for you. Uh, you know, one of the things here is what's less to address. We really want to learn from all of you about what happened to you, try using these tools. We'd also like to know if you think that we're missing some conversations that we should be addressing, or if you think there's something that Nope, I have an obstacle and I don't understand how these tools would help. Uh, if you want to let us know what, uh, how that goes. Um, well, as we mentioned, we did in the book sunny tonight, we would love to see you there and, uh, hear about your cases. Uh, and, uh, you can talk to us afterwards. Uh, we'll be here and then you can reach us at the, uh, con uh, conversational transformation website. Uh, but for now, any questions everyone's afraid should go back to the fear conversation.
Well, that's fine. I'm thinking of practicing in a group now you're Learning, but now you in the hall, and we're trying to decide where to go. Does that increase the complexity of
It does. That's why we started with two. Cause it was easier, easier to fit
And the board, or repeat that, what you were saying is that we just kind of started as practicing it too, but what does he have a group of people like? So we talked about five and that's a really good question. So in practice, it's really good to have these as a shared toolkit, right? In, in our experience. So we have done this with, uh, groups of people practicing together, both their own conversations separately, each bringing, I was first by this one, I was supposed to be that one and they, and they can be very helpful because people can help you point out like you actually don't sound very curious there, even in your revision, this is very good feedback that way. But it also works when you have that, uh, sort of, um, five people all in the same conversation, all frustrated. Um, there's actually a really good article called skilled in competence that was published in Harvard business review because that's what we have.
But we were very practiced at having bad conversations. Um, and he describes a case where they had a group of people who'd been stuck for months and months on a decision. And what they did is they did this kind of conversational analysis with each person writing up how they thought conversations would go. And then they shared them with each other to say, here's how you can be more effective making your point with me. And so they actually were able to jointly design the dialogues and in doing that, build the kind of trust to actually get to the point of making a decision. So it's a, it's a great question. Can we do this together? And yes, this is actually a very effective way to overcome, uh, dynamics that can have people deadlocked.
And just so you don't get discouraged. This also works in the case where you're the only one out of the five who is using these techniques because often people will say, boy, you lost a lot of questions in that meeting what's going on and you can start to tell them about it. And even if you don't, you will still learn an awful lot more because you'll be curious and you'll be transparent. So we see often that just one person in an organization can start making changes like this and have a big effect. We had another question over here, somewhere
A little bit more of a comment, but I think a really powerful, most powerful thing that I heard was the, the importance of the idea that people don't have to agree that bringing that out, you know, I happen to work at Amazon and that's one of the big parts of our culture, which I happen to think is, is generative culture or other type that's great, but we bring that out, that, that we have a mission and we it's really important that disagreeing, but still getting the real important thing that we've heard that.
So the comment here is that at Amazon where this gentleman works and at other generative cultures, it's very valuable to disagree. I think we would agree that that's a valid,
Well, we were actually asked earlier, uh, in, in a, in a, in an interview and, uh, uh, squirter as a consulting CTO, his work was something like 60 clients or less something like that. Yep. And someone said, well, what, what's the hallmark of the companies that you see who are really succeeding?
What they do is they mine for conflict? They go, where's the conflict. Is it over here? Is it over there? They're looking for it. They're not trying to avoid it. Oh, no. Conflict is bad. They're looking around. Do I have a conflict with you with you? It'd be really useful if I had a conflict with you. And that's really counter-intuitive. But when you do that, and it sounds like this gentleman is doing that in his organization. That's a very useful thing to do because you can expose things that you're not curious enough about. You're not transparent enough about, and you can make better decisions. Okay.
You learn a lot from disagreements here. Right. And if people have heard of the phrase, psychological safety, right. That's something that comes up quite a lot. What does that mean? Right. Psychological safety is another way of describing a generative culture. It's psychological safety is one where you trust that everyone is putting the mission first and that therefore it's safe to disagree because you know that you share that common, uh, commitment to the same end result.
We got time for one last one, be quick.
What happens when you've had that kind of conversation and say, pat ,
Can I have that conversation in a pathological organization? Right. Do we do Who thinks it's great. So you're typing it with a person who buys into the glory and, and personal gain.
All right. Okay. So, so this is an interesting challenge and it is one that's come up before. And it's one that we've dealt with. So someone who is, um, is, is pathic and there's two things can happen for the first of all is you might find that that person who's seen pathological, uh, actually was not. And actually this for me, this is the most common thing. Very often, it, it being a position of power. It can be very difficult, uh, in the sense that you get used to the unconscious exercise of power and, uh, people take what you say as commands. Uh, so that's, sometimes it happens that it's a mistake. Other times, it's not people that deliberate, this is what needs to happen. It turns out in that environment, remember, you're going to start also being transparent. And you might say, look, I, I understand this is what you're trying to accomplish.
Um, wouldn't you like, w are you curious about other information? I'm gonna offer something now, again, you might not agree, but if you use this as an ability to speak up and bring up information that otherwise you just are saying, well, I'm not going to cause no one cares. You're actually changing the environment. Uh, humans are very good at reacting, uh, changing their behaviors, their environment changes. It's hard to believe, but you are part of that other person's environment. I know that you think you're the hero of the movie, because that's what it feels like, right? We're the first person, but you're a bit character for them. But when you start changing, you're changing their environment and they will change in response. And it doesn't always mean,
But at the very worst you find out and you can verify, and you have verifiable actionable information. This person actually is pathological, and this is not going to work and that's useful. That's a win. So I always say to myself, the minimum is, I'll find out that this isn't working, but more often than not actually 90% of the time I find I can change the interaction of that person. Even a small.
All right. And that's it. We're out of time. Thank you very much. Thanks.