Thought Nursery

It has been three years since my last blog post on this site. I’m guessing most of my readers/friends already know about AgileConversations.com. Still, I like the idea of a recap post, if only for my future self. 

Most notable was the publication of Agile Conversations in May of 2020 by IT Revolution Press. IT Revolution has been a fantastic partner for us and I’ve been thrilled to join their lineup of books. My coauthor Douglas Squirrel had a mention in my 2015 catchup post as the person who brought me to London. Squirrel and I have also been busy over this period with the Troubleshooting Agile podcast. The podcast was a great way for us to develop our material for the book, and I’m enjoying the opportunity it affords to explore a range of situations. 

When we started the podcast we thought the book might be called Troubleshooting Agile (“Sprinting In Place” as another working title). The shift in titles reflects a shift in emphasis. Our early idea was to organize the book by symptoms and then share our approach to troubleshooting and escaping those situations. The change in title to Agile Conversations reflects our solution, which is developing conversational skills. Conversational skills are a key element of our toolkit, and without developing them you can’t apply the solutions that we use… or if you did you wouldn’t get the result. 

The challenge is one of dynamics. Even when you have similar symptoms on an agile team, and even similar dynamics, the cause of those dynamics are idiosyncratic. There isn’t a single recipe that will solve team dynamics. What is required is an approach of “probe-sense-respond”, because you’re dealing with humans and that means you’re dealing with a complex situation (in Cynefin terms). And conversations are how we navigate the complex dynamics of human interactions.

In the three years of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast we’ve put out something like 150 episodes and we’ve had almost 140k plays of the podcast in that time period. We’ve had fairly steady growth over time and in 2019 we had almost half of those listens, with over 63k for the year. From a quick google on podcast stats we seem to be solidly in the top 5% of podcasts, which is something I’m really proud of.

Another major input into the book has been my experience with the London Organizational Learning Meetup (formerly the London Action Science Meetup). Several years of holding monthly meetups helped distill our approach to conversational skill practice, a framework we’ve called The Four Rs, and also our approach to group practice sessions. We’ve come to term the practice sessions “Conversational Dojos”, a term inspired from the “coding dojos” other people have run to develop programming skills. I’ve been really pleased how this conversational dojo approach has worked both for experienced practitioners and for people new to conversational analysis. In 2020 I’ve expanded the number of conversational dojos in the meetup from once to twice per month, with one session on the traditional Tuesday and the added session being on a Thursday.

There are a couple of constants since the last post. I’m still at TIM Group, or rather the successor “TIM, An Acuris Company” following the acquisition of TIM by Acuris in 2017. Or it might be more accurate to say that I’m at “TIM, An Acuris Company, part of ION Analytics”, following the acquisition of Acuris by ION in 2019. For the past year I’ve been Managing Director of TIM and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to bring self-management and self-organization to our commercial team.

The other notable constant is that CITCON has continued, even in this year of COVID. 2018 saw us in Vienna, 2019 in Ghent, and for 2020 we had our first virtual CITCON. I’m looking forward to seeing the CITCON community face-to-face again and at the same time I was pleased with how much of the CITCON vibe came through even in the virtual open space.

My goal for this post was to provide a short recap of where my attention has been the past three years however it feels incomplete without acknowledging one more thought: 2020 was a very weird year, a very difficult year. I hope for a better 2021 for all of us.

Michael Feathers shared what he called his abstract defense of Postel’s law:

Open acceptance allows learning. Narrowness & restriction are valuable for protection, but they have opportunity costs that are largely hidden. It pays to investigate them to make informed design choices in every system – social & technical.

I think Michael’s defense can be applied fairly directly to communication between humans: “Open communication allows learning. Narrowing and restricting what’s acceptable is valuable for protection, but there are hidden opportunity costs. It pays to make informed design choices in how and what you communicate.”

Making informed design choices is what I’m after in my study of psychology, communication skills and techniques. This working with humans stuff is hard!

In Action Science workshops I teach a technique I call Coherence Busting. To understand why it is useful I ask the audience to imagine themselves making a proposal: “While you are talking you notice the main stakeholder — the person in the audience you most hope to persuade — glance at their watch. What do you do?”

I ask this question to allow the audience to experience the decision-making heuristics that Daniel Kahneman describes in this book Thinking, Fast & Slow. Kahneman models our consciousness as being two systems, our fast, automatic, unconscious System 1 and our slow, deliberate, effortful System 2. Part of what makes System 1 fast are the shortcuts it uses. Two of these shortcuts consistently arise with the watch example. The first is that we  assume that a coherent story must be correct. The second is that we limit the facts to what we can immediately recall, a process Kahneman calls What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI).

These two shortcuts are displayed in the watch scenario.

We unconsciously construct a coherent story for what the glance means — for instance “she has somewhere else to go”. This story is based on first thoughts of what the glance might mean (WYSIATI). The coherence in our story give us the sense that our story is true. We then design our actions in response to a story we made up. This is the key lesson of the watch example: We feel as though we are responding to the reality of the situation, because WYSIATI and coherence cause us to mistake our single plausible story for the truth.

This is why we need Coherence Busting.

With the watch example, I ask the audience to describe what they think the glance means. After I have harvested the normal stories from the audience (“they’re bored”, “their attention has drifted”, “they are running short of time”) I ask them to consider other possible meanings of the glance, all of the possible reasons, even wildly implausible ones (“they have their plan for world domination written on their hand”). Now the audience generates dozens of possible reasons: it is a nervous habit, they were admiring their new watch, there could have been an alert on a smartwatch, maybe an itch on their wrist, and lots more. What makes this Coherence Busting is not just that there are lots of options but that the options are mutually incompatible. Once we can imagine conflicting explanations we are not longer trapped by the original coherent story. These options were always there, but it requires invoking System 2, our conscious and effortful thought process, to bring them to the surface. That’s not something we do when we feel we already have a good explanation. So what would trigger us to use Coherence Busting?

I’ve found Coherence Busting a useful tool to reach for when I recognize that I’m frustrated. A common pattern for me is to get frustrated when I can’t come up with a justifiable explanation for the other person’s actions, when I don’t like the explanation that System 1 has suggested for me. When I recognize that pattern I try and think of at least three incompatible motivations for why they might be behaving the way they are. The technique of Coherence Busting is a way of reminding myself that there are infinitely more possibilities than I have considered. It allows me to let go of the story I’ve made up about the other person. It reminds me that if I want to understand what the other person is thinking, I’m going to have to get out of my head and into theirs — probably starting with asking them a genuine question about what they are thinking.

Much of my work with Action Science is learning the skill of asking good questions. Coherence Busting reminds me to use those skills.

(Thanks to Douglas Squirrel for helping develop Coherence Busting. See more of our work together at ActionScienceConversations.com and the London Action Science Meetup.)

At the prompting of Douglas Squirrel I just read Yossi Kreinin‘s blog post People can read their manager’s mind. This seemingly magical power is the mundane result of combining “People generally don’t do what they’re told, but what they expect to be rewarded for”, and people are good at spotting what is actually rewarded. As a manager/leader I’m taking away a heuristic I want to test:  when I’m not able to get alignment with my stated goals I’m going to pretend the team is reading my mind, and that they are heeding my hidden thoughts rather than my words. From that mindset, what does that suggest about my own values? The results aren’t likely to be flattering. I embrace the idea that “the only way to deal with the problems I cause is an honest journey into the depths of my own rotten mind.”

(As much as I embrace that message for myself, I’d warn non-managers from seeking solace in the article, from using it as a shield to deny their own accountability. Yes, the article says that it is an “insane employee” who will work to fix important but unglamorous problems, and that “the average person cannot comprehend the motivation of someone attempting such a feat”. Do you find solace in being average? In being powerless? I don’t. I think it is worth always seeking to improve, and to improve the organization I’m part of. I believe someone out there could improve the situation I’m in, so if I’m frustrated it is probably my fault.)

None of us like to be wrong. I’ve tested this with many audiences, asking them “how does it feel when you’re wrong?” “Embarrassing”, “humiliating” or simply “bad” are among the most common answers. Stop now and try and think of your own list of words to describe the feeling of being wrong.

These common and universally negative answers are great from a teaching perspective, because they are answers to the wrong question. “Bad” isn’t how you feel when you’re wrong; it’s how it feels when you discover you were wrong! Being wrong feels exactly like being right. This question and this insight come from Kathryn Schulz’s TED Talk, On being wrong. Schulz talks about the “internal sense of rightness” we feel, and the problems that result. I think there’s a puzzle here: we’ve all had the experience of being certain while also being wrong. If the results are “embarrassing”, why do we continue to trust our internal feeling of certainty?

My answer comes from Thinking Fast & Slow. That sense of certainty comes from our System 1, the fast, intuitive, pattern recognition part of our brain. We operate most of our lives listening to System 1. It is what allows us to brush our teeth, cross a street, navigate our way through a dinner party. It is the first filter for everything we see and hear. It is how we make sense of the world. We trust our sense of certainty because System 1 is the origin of most of our impulses and actions. If we couldn’t trust System 1, if we had to double check everything with the slow expensive analytical System 2, we would be paralyzed. So we need our System 1 and we need the sense of certainty it provides. We also need to be aware it can lead us astray.

When our sense of being right guides us we are acting from a Model I / Unilateral Control mindset. The result of a Unilateral Control mindset is less information, reduced trust and fewer opportunities to learn. And we all like to learn right? I now ask my audiences this question and I get universal nods. We all like to learn. “No you don’t”, I reply. “You just told me that the feeling of becoming aware you were wrong feels bad! Well guess what? That’s what learning feels like.” That’s my recent ah-ha moment: that we claim we like to learn, but when it actually comes to learning, to correcting a wrong belief with a right one, we don’t like it.

I find this discrepancy very interesting, very revealing. My theory is that when we imagine learning we are thinking of writing on a blank slate. It is about learning facts where before there were none. That is a good feeling, we get a little chemical kick from our brain when that happens. We don’t imagine correcting our mistaken beliefs when we think of learning, and that’s a real shame, that should change. By all rights we should value that kind of learning even more than learning new facts: “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” (Will Rogers)

I think the problem is that we are primates. To primates, from an evolutionary psychology standpoint, status is everything. Status is the primary determinant of reproductive success. Losing status can be the same as a reproductive, evolutionary death sentence. In our modern knowledge economy, chest thumping is the assertion that we are right, and winning the fight is proving the other person wrong. That’s how we put them in their place (in the status hierarchy). This means our instinctive reaction to becoming less wrong tends to be negative. The loss of status feels too high a price to pay for learning. Even trying to help someone else become less wrong is understood as a risky prospect. We don’t want them to lose face, we don’t want them to get angry with us for correcting them. Thus the habits of Unilateral Control, protecting both ourselves and others, are reinforced.

All of this explains why developing habits for learning, developing Model II / Mutual Learning habits, requires a lot of practice. We are fighting decades of acculturation on top of millions of years of evolution. To win this fight we need to be committed to what we are fighting for. We need to care more about learning than being right. We’ve got to care about making the most informed choice possible. When I can remember to hold these values in mind it becomes easier to act differently. I can go seek out those people who are most likely to disagree with me, who are most likely to teach me something. I can deliberately share my chain of reasoning and invite others to poke holes in it. With practice, lots of practice, I can come to see the person who corrects me as more friend than rival, and to feel the correction as the victory of joint learning rather than an individual moment of shame.