Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture

by Douglas Squirrel

Trust. If I say I trust you, I mean that I have expectations about what you will do that have been met before and that I believe will be met again. When I trust you, I can use the story we agree on to predict your behavior and evaluate my possible actions, so that we can cooperate effectively. We are likely to come up with jointly designed plans that we can execute in tandem, and we can explain our common story to others so they can align with us too.

To score a conversation with TDD for People in mind, label your statements and questions in either column with the rung they correspond to. If you start at the bottom of the Ladder, with Data, Selections, and Meanings, and then move up to Assumptions, Conclusions, and Beliefs as the conversation progresses, you’re on track. But if you’re spending most of your time at the top of the Ladder, consider ways to consciously bring yourself back down to the lower rungs before proceeding.

To score a Two-Column Conversational Analysis with Coherence Busting as the goal, look in your left-hand column and find as many unsupported conclusions as you can about others’ thoughts or motivations. Look for signals like the words “obviously” or “clearly,” as well as statements that don’t have a firm basis in the right-hand column—for example, the assertion that the other person is denigrating your work without an explicit statement, like “I don’t believe your project is up to scratch.” To check if you’ve identified an unsupported conclusion, apply some Coherence Busting by trying to think up alternative explanations for the observations that led you to the conclusion; if you succeed in developing plausible substitutes, the conclusion must not be supported. Give yourself one point for each unsupported conclusion. Your goal should be to keep your score as low as possible.

Step 1. Make visible all the fears identified so far (by you alone or by the whole team). We like sticky notes because you can move them around easily, but writing on a whiteboard or putting index cards on a table will work too. Solicit more fears from the group, perhaps by asking for more extreme versions of identified fears (“If a bug is bad, would an outage be worse?”) or by asking for the opposite of identified fears (“We’re afraid we’ll lose staff. Are we also afraid of growing the team too fast?”).

Step 2. Ask the group for more items to add or for ways to combine existing cards. Add new fears without editing them—our goal is to get all the ideas of the group identified, not to filter any out. Almost always, some of the identified fears will reinforce each other and/or some will be completely incompatible. Reflect this by putting cards near each other or on top of one another, or by using labelled arrows to connect groups of cards, or use anything else that helps you see connections. Be sure you don’t leave out quiet team members. Ask specifically whether a grouping is okay with those who developed it.

Step 3. Now it’s time to filter the items that are worth pursuing and mitigating from those that we can safely live with. We like to use dot voting***** to identify the fears that we want to mitigate, but you can use another method if you prefer. The more outrageous ideas that helped activate your System 2, such as those involving aliens or secret societies, will almost certainly not survive this process, having served their purpose in encouraging creativity. You will wind up with a subset of the fears that the group wants to deal with—those that are most concerning or most consequential.

Step 4. We’ll achieve the goal of the Fear Conversation if we can identify mitigations that help us reduce each of the target fears. Mitigations may include things like: •Fear of buggy releases angering customers: ∘Discuss quality versus speed trade-offs with customers or their internal proxies, and agree to expectations. ∘Increase manual and automated testing coverage. ∘Agree with executives that they will handle any angry customers while the team improves quality. •Fear of missing deadlines: ∘Understand deadline drivers and negotiate reduced scope or changed dates through conversation with Marketing or Sales. ∘Reduce scope with customer approval. •Fear of failing to master new methods or technologies: ∘Define mastery and milestones on the way to successful mastery to show progress. ∘Increase training and learning opportunities. List each fear, its mitigation, and (this is critical!) someone accountable for ensuring that you carry out the mitigation.

Step 5. Finally, if you like, add to the chart the espoused norm that corresponds to each soon-to-be mitigated fear to clearly display the expected positive result of the mitigation.

Moving the slider toward predictability necessarily means more process, more planning, and less cranking out code. Moving the slider toward productivity means giving up some of the estimation and forward planning that you could be doing in favor of rapid iteration and feedback to correct errors.

The three steps to a successful Commitment Conversation are: 1.Agree on the meaning of the commitment. 2.Agree on the next outcome to commit to. 3.Reaffirm the commitment.

You can score a conversation as a briefing if it involves making a request. Display your score as a fraction over three, providing yourself one point for each of the three elements: intended outcome, constraints within which that outcome should be sought, and freedoms available during execution. If you provided some constraints or some freedoms but not all, give yourself partial credit, such as 0.5 if you described half the constraints.

Similarly, you can score a conversation as a back briefing if you are responding to a request. As with the briefing, display your score as a fraction over three and give yourself one point for including each of three elements: your intended action, your reasoning for adopting that action, and your confirmation that your plans match the briefing provided by the other person.