More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 13 - May 24, 2020
that the key to success is not only adopting practices but having the difficult conversations that foster the right environment for those practices to work.
power of conversations based on transparency and curiosity.
Great results follow when you learn that a conversation is about more than just talking; it is a skilled activity. There is more to a conversation than what you can see and hear. In addition to what is said out loud, there is what has been left unsaid—the thoughts and feelings behind our spoken and unspoken words.
The Five Conversations are: 1.The Trust Conversation: We hold a belief that those we work with, inside and outside the team, share our goals and values. 2.The Fear Conversation: We openly discuss problems in our team and its environment and courageously attack those obstacles. 3.The Why Conversation: We share a common, explicit purpose that inspires us. 4.The Commitment Conversation: We regularly and reliably announce what we will do and when. 5.The Accountability Conversation: We radiate our intent to all interested parties and explain publicly how our results stack up against commitments.*
“fundamental shift in how people had to think about how they interact, how they collaborate and work, and if you don’t spend time changing people’s behaviors, you don’t spend time changing culture and how people make decisions, all of this falls flat.”2
well-meaning attempts to adopt these new models fail when the focus is on processes and methods, reinventing some of the same mistakes of the software factory on a smaller scale, creating “feature factories,” as John Cutler calls them.3
early proponents in each movement implicitly espoused two fundamental values, transparency and curiosity, which led them to advocate methods that developed some or all of our five key attributes of successful software teams: high trust, low fear, understanding why, making commitments, and being accountable. And these values and attributes were all about human connections, information flow, eliminating barriers, and collaboration—everything the software factory wasn’t.
“The foundation of human respect is to provide an environment where capable workers actively participate in running and improving their work areas and are able to fully use their capabilities.”
reflecting on conversations allowed participants to become aware of and then change their behavior.
that this takes substantial effort, and worse, this effort involves difficult emotional work.
1.We won’t be transparent and curious when we lack Trust. 2.We will, consciously or not, act defensively when we have unspoken Fear. 3.We will be unable to generate productive conflict when we lack a shared Why. 4.We will avoid definite Commitments as long as the situation feels threatening or embarrassing. 5.We will fail to learn from our experiences if we are unwilling to be Accountable.
We apply the Four Rs—Record, Reflect, Revise, and Role Play—as our preferred way of learning from conversations.
To start using the Four Rs, you will need to Record a conversation in writing.
Analysis. It may be tempting to avoid pen and paper and just think about the conversation “in your mind’s eye,” or talk about it with a friend. Do not do this! The act of writing down the words on paper is an inherent part of the process because it forces your brain to think about the conversation at arm’s length, as if it were happening to someone else.
guidelines on how to score your conversation using the tool, and that reflection will lead you to possible improvements.
Having scored the conversation, Revise your conversation to try and produce a better result. How will you know if you’ve improved? Repeat: take your revised dialogue and Reflect again. Did you improve your score from the first time around? You may be surprised to find that your revised version in fact shows no better scores than your original!
Another good check on your progress is the other hidden R: Role Reversal.
You Will Need 1.A single sheet of ordinary writing paper (Don’t get more than a single sheet, for a reason we’ll explain shortly.). 2.A pen, pencil, or other writing implement.
Step 1: Record Your Conversation
Think of a conversation you would like to improve. This can be one you had recently, but it doesn’t have to be: you can analyze a conversation that occurred long ago or (this is a favorite of ours) one that hasn’t happened yet that you’re worried about.
Next, fold the paper down the middle the long way, cre...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In the right-hand column, write down what each person in the...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Don’t worry about getting every word right; you’re aiming for the sound and flavor of the con...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
try hard not to editorialize or add anything to the words. You’re trying to record what a neutral listener or mech...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In the left-hand column, after you have written the dialogue, write what you thought at the time as the words were spoken. Don’t hold back here; often in a difficult conversation, your thoughts will be very different from what you said, so include everything that crossed your mind, no matter how irrelevant or unfair it may ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Tip: Keep I...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
As you are critiquing your conversation, you’ll want to test yourself against standards. We suggest examining conversations for evidence of transparency and curiosity, as these are fundamental elements of collaboration. Also attempt to notice patterns of behavior that apply across conversations.
The first principle of productive reasoning we are looking for is curiosity; and to assess how curious we are being, we start with the Question Fraction.
first looked at his right-hand column and circled all the question marks,
wrote this down at the top of the right-hand column as the bottom ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Norbert asked himself, “Were each of my questions genuine?” A genuine question has these characteristics:18 •You really want to know the answer. •It’s reasonable to expect that the answer might surprise you. •You are willing to ch...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
nongenuine questions are used to make a point rather than learn something new. They are often statements in disguise, or attempts to ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Since none of his questions were genuine, Norbert places a zero in the numerator of his fraction: .
as you analyze your conversation, add up the number of questions you asked; this is your denominator. Then analyze how many of your questions were genuine; this is your numerator: The Question Fraction helps you understand how much curiosity you are demonstrating in your conversation.
Distinguish feelings from thoughts.
Distinguish between what we feel and what we think we are.
Distinguish between what we feel and how we think others react or behave toward us.
Build a vocabulary for feelings.
A trigger is a behavior, statement, or other event outside yourself that typically causes you to react strongly.
A tell (like in poker) is a behavior you exhibit that signals you are not acting with transparency and curiosity.
A twitch is your instinctive default response, regardless of the details of the situation.
Learning your triggers, tells, and twitches can help you become more self-aware and give you more choices in how you respond in the moment.
Finally it was time for Norbert to rewrite the dialogue in a way that addressed the issues he’d identified, using his annotated conversation record as a guide.
Try rescoring this second case yourself with the Question Fraction tool or by underlining for transparency and twitches, tells, and triggers,
When you try this yourself, expect the reflection and revisions to be difficult at first, as the skills you are learning are easy to describe but hard to master. In fact it is quite normal to revise the same case multiple times, reflecting on the revisions and rescoring them. It can take several iterations to come up with a satisfactory alternative.
Role Playing—the fourth of the Four Rs—helps a lot in making these new skills feel natural, so try reading out your revised dialogue with a friend, colleague, or even the mirror.
Record, Reflect, Revise, and Role Play. These techniques will help you have some distance from the conversation so you can see it as another might.
To help the learning go faster, consider reviewing your conversations with other people—they will definitely see it as others do! If you are feeling very brave, consider sharing your analysis with the other person in the conversation to discover their point of view, and ask their advice on how you might have revised the conversation to communicate with them more effectively.