This post is an abridged excerpt from Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture. In his book, Kent Beck says that Test-Driven Development (TDD), the practice of writing a test concurrently with the code it exercises, gives him “a sense of comfort and intimacy.” That is exactly the feeling we want you to have during the Trust Conversation, and the tool to help you achieve it is the Ladder of Inference, another concept from Chris Argyris and colleagues in the book … [Read more...]
Happier Employees Equal Better Business Outcomes
Two Simple Questions for Better Business Outcomes Two questions I ask during 1-on-1s might strike people as a bit unusual, but they directly lead to better business outcomes: Are you happy? Are you able to do work that you’re proud of? Why? A core reason is that I care about the people I work with, and I want good things for them. I want them to be happy! When I learn there are obstacles to their happiness, we generally have a productive conversation about what can be changed. My conceit is … [Read more...]
Accountability: Leaders are Accountable Too
This is a transcript of episode 126 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. Coming to the final chapter of Agile Conversations, we look at how leaders can not only provide accountability for others, but be accountable themselves, including stories from the early days of agile and from today’s clients. So this is our last in the series of podcasts about the book. We’re up to the final chapter of the book. As always in the series, we’re not going to recap … [Read more...]
Why: Finding the Balance for Joint Design
This post was adapted from episode 124 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. As we get to chapter 4 in our tour through Agile Conversations, it’s time to talk about joint design. In this post we focus on a common error that we didn’t cover in depth in the book: how trying to “convince” someone through advocacy fails. Using the Four Rs, we role play an ineffective advocacy-heavy conversation about tech team execution, and then revise it … [Read more...]
Fear: The Original Sin of Unproductive Conversations
This post was adapted from episode 123 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. We’re continuing with our tour through Agile Conversations and we’re up to the fear conversation. That’s when I remember enjoying writing some of the stories. And fear is really important because it’s so foundational. I consider this the original sin of unproductive conversations, in a sense. It’s kind of the root of why our conversations so often go astray. In the … [Read more...]
Trust and Test Driven-Development for People
This post was adapted from Episode 122 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. This is number three in our series as we go through our new book, Agile Conversations. We’re up to Chapter Three and this chapter’s all about trust. One of the things we were having a challenge with was finding something new to say about trust, because we’ve said so much about it. You can listen and read to some of our past thoughts on trust here: The First Thing to Build is Trust Be Predictable to Build … [Read more...]
Conversations: How to Improve and Why You Won’t
This post was adapted from Episode 121 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. Continuing our tour of our new book Agile Conversations, we come to our chapter on the foundational method for conversational analysis, the Four Rs. We briefly explain the value of conversational analysis, and share our observation that even highly motivated people who know how much it can help their agile teams find it hard to actually pull out a piece of paper and do an analysis. The reasons for this are very … [Read more...]
Software Factory to Feature Factory
This post was adapted from Episode 120 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. The Taylorist Mindset and its Outcomes In the Taylorist mindset, management is there to debug the machine of the company. The workers are interchangeable parts. And the job of management is to fine tune the machine and monitor all of the parts to make sure they’re compliant and doing what they’re told. There is a role for motivation here. But the only motivation is negative. Just make sure that people know … [Read more...]
Undoing IT Silos: How the “Walled Garden” Anti-Pattern Gets Started
Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick are the authors of Agile Conversations. This is an excerpt from their recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review, Solving the Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations. Learn more at ConversationalTransformation.com. In the past decade, the growing understanding of the importance of technology to business has led to a surge in business transformations—whether the flavor is digital, DevOps, Lean, or Agile, the aim is to speed up software development by … [Read more...]
You Need More Conflict, Not Less
By Agile Conversations authors Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick. When teams first adopt Agile, Lean, or DevOps practices, they often think that they’ll have less conflict with the new methodology. “We’ll stop fighting over deadlines because we’ll estimate the work first,” they say, or “Work in Progress limits will mean we don’t get overloaded.” Surprise! The estimates and limits and tests usually lead to more clashes, not fewer—and this is a good thing, because the conflicts give us … [Read more...]
