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...]
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...]
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...]
Strengthen Your Conversations Skills with Remote Work
BY AGILE CONVERSATIONS AUTHORS DOUGLAS SQUIRREL AND JEFFREY FREDRICK Collaboration is built on skills, and you can build those skills through deliberate practice. This growth mindset view is particularly useful in our world of suddenly enforced remote working. Remote collaboration is more demanding and unfamiliar to a lot of people who are experiencing it for the first time. Responding to these new challenges with a fixed mindset, taking the view that remote working … [Read more...]
Take The Slow Lane To Build Trust
By Agile Conversations authors Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick Congratulations—you’ve decided to improve trust with someone at work. It could be the project manager who sets deadlines without consulting you, or that customer who’s complaining endlessly that you don’t deliver sufficient quality, or the star salesperson who sells features the company can’t deliver. Whoever it is and whatever the symptoms of the lack of trust, the first rule is—SLOW DOWN. When we talk to clients about … [Read more...]
