Helen Lisowski

One day I asked my brother a question.

I thought I was being polite: ‘Did you cancel your session?’.

I thought he would far rather I reminded him to do something that he had already done, than not to remind him, then for him to forget and subsequently be charged for a session he hadn’t used.  (With me so far?)

He quite kindly gave me some feed back that day; he said that I sounded a little bit like mum…a little bossy.

Now, we are all (as in myself and my 2 brothers) used to mum being bossy - she is after all a primary school teacher, and even though we are all now grown up, she has far more mental references of interactions with us as children than as adults.  Besides, she talks to everyone like they are 5 years old…but, what was my excuse?

I hadn’t meant to be bossy, I exclaimed, affronted.  He knew my motivation - how could he deliberately misinterpret me like that?  We discussed it, but at the time still I couldn’t really understand what he was telling me, nor did I know how to change it, although I wanted to.

Now, I may have mentioned that I have a 2 year old daughter.  She’s quite chatty (can’t think where she gets that from) and one of the things that used to make me laugh was watching her talking on her pretend mobile phone (you already know where this is going don’t you… )

Small child with pink fluffy bag over one arm and plastic mobile clamped to one ear: “Hello, hello. It’s me.  Do this, do this.  Ok, ‘bye.”

Really cute I thought…only, over time, the conversation remained essentially unchanged, so one day I asked her why she always had to tell daddy or granny, or whoever, what to do.

I was genuinely stunned as “I’m being you mummy” she happily replied.  It took me days to come to terms with such a brutal, and (retrospectively) pin-point accurate character appraisal.

I’m much better now

I, at least, can accept I have a tendancy towards bossiness, and can mitigate it most of the time, but it got me thinking…

When we know people really well we all tend to use shorthand in our conversations, and we know that our friend or family member (or even long-standing colleague) will choose to listen to what we MEAN to say not what we actually SAY, and we do the same for them.  It is part of getting along with people and everyone does it.  To some extent it forms the basis for a large proportion of the rows we have with people…think about it.

The interesting thing comes when we recognise that we still do this to people we don’t know so well - admittedly usually to a lesser extent, but it is often much more troublesome when we do.

“Just because I wrote an email that you say sounds stroppy, doesn;t mean it is!  I didn’t mean it to sound stroppy, you’ve just taken it the wrong way!”

Hmmm.  So, quick question: what is the ‘Truth’ here?  Go on, quick gut reaction:  who’s right?  Decide now.

The correct answer is: the receiver of the email, although it actually doesn’t matter.

Don’t agree with me?  What if I were to add that the receiver of the above fictional email had showed it to another colleague, who also agreed that it sounded stroppy, does that change anything?

Ok, still not convinced?  How about we change the scenario slightly and say that one person says that they work hard, whilst 100 of his colleagues say he’s a slacker.  Now who’s right?

Truth is in the perception of an event, not in the event itself.  Just because the emailer didn’t mean to be stroppy, doesn’t mean that they weren’t.  The intention was not to be stroppy, that is true, but the ‘truth’ is that this is what happened.  This is because the receiver’s perception is the only thing that validates the event of receiving an email - it means nothing until that has happened.

What is worse is that if you tell the emailer the above, they are likely to be most aggrieved:  how can something they created in one way not be so?

As a coach, it is one of your most important skills that you can recognise (at least in others!) when they are shorthanding in their interactions.  It will depend on the person, and the situation what you do next - you might explain, as above,  what’s actually happening, or instead you might explain what the 3rd party preceives as happening, and then address with your coachee how they might better express what it is they WANT to be saying.

Failing that, I have a perceptive 2 year old with a tongue like cold steel and no compunctions about weilding it - you can borrow her if you like

January 16th, 2009 | Tags: agile coaching, behaviour, Coach, Feedback, perception, truth | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I recently attended a boutique boot camp (it was an excellent experience, but this is not the point of this posting).  Now, I am not known for my fondness of physical activity - no matter how nice the ex-Royal Marine who is pointedly not shouting at me, but I need to tell you a little about this place to explain something really quite cool I learned whilst I was there, about what make people work better as part of a good team than any other way of working.

So imagine the scene:  it’s 7.30 am, on a windswept Devon beach in the last week of October…to give you an idea of the weather, our session ended  with us being hailed upon.  We had been doing varieties of runnning up and down (and muttering darkly under what was left of our breaths) when our instructor (”The Marine”) decided to pay a team game.

It will be fun, he said.

We were unconvinced, but were unimpressed with running up and down large, vertical sand dunes, and grasped at the straw that suggested the team game would be better…(I must post on “optimism, delusion and human tendancies towards compliance” at some point ).

Now, I must first mentioned a key point, namely that my younger brother had joined me for the week, but unlike me, he was fairly fit, having played rugby, cricket and most importantly football, since he could walk.  (Now I know what you’re thinking, but our mother assures us we are related).  The point of mentioning this now is that my brother came from a background of team sports…I am sure that the other 6 guests who were with us on that beach won’t mind me confiding to you that the rest of us were not of the ‘team sports’ ilk at all.

This meant that during every event where we had to take turns, work intervals, or could even basically spare enough breath to talk, my brother used that breath to shout encouragement, congratulations and generally enthuse about the work the rest of us were doing. He was always a lone voice, but he persisted out of habit - he had always done this.

Now my natural instinct is to work hard for someone who asks me to (even The Marine), and my brother had been yelling encouragement and congratulations at me and everyone else fairly randomly all the time which we all found helped.

But back to the team game on the beach.  When we discussed it later as a group, we all found the same thing:  although we all enjoyed the beach event to different degrees, we all found we worked MUCH harder in that session than in any other - somehow it does matter having other people relying on you and at the same time these same team members are cheering you on, with only encouragement for your challenges, asking no more of you than your best, and then congratulating you on giving it make such a difference.

And here’s the thing that I find fascinating (and ties in nicely with the old scum story of chickens and pigs):

1. Giving and receiveing encouragement and congratulations matters hugely….but…
2. Giving and receiveing encouragement and feedback from a fellow team member who is as invested as you is exponentially MORE valuable.

I can tell you from stunned and bewildered personal experience that it makes a HUGE difference.  If you play team sports you probably recognise what I’m telling you here, but as a novice (sports) team member, I got a revelation to how it might feel being a novice team member with an experienced Agile team member.

So, if you are an experienced agile team member, just look how great an influence you can have on a new team member!

And if you are a new team member, struggling to come to terms with the new world you find yourself in - seek out a mentor whose enthusiasm is evident.

And finally, if you are in a team that are not openly encouraging you, and not joining in celebrating your successes, you have 3 choices:

1. Step up.  Lead by example and YOU be the (possibly lone) voice in the team…it may take a while for them to join in, but they will notice very quickly, and they will respond well to it.
2. Find a coach in your company - a lot of companies have them, although some are unofficial roles.  If you are trying to work as part of an Agile team, yet with out open encouragement from within that team, try and persuade your company to get a specialist coach in - either as a permanent role or as a consultant (I’m available ;)  ).
3. If the above two suggestions aren’t working, try my last option: Drop me a line -I’ll coach you, and for free - just because I love doing it!

December 12th, 2008 | Tags: Agile, motivate, motivating, motivation, team, teamwork, working harder | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hard to believe, I know - not your usual intro for a blog on working in the Agile world, but there it is: Embrace Change

I have very much enjoyed working with David Bloor, coming as he does from a lean background, and I am acutely jealous (see my last post) that he in turn is now working with a chap called Will Antjoule. Between them (and with the help and inspiration of the team they are working with) they have one of the best solutions for alerting everyone to the build failing: A giant Santa inflates and rises from the middle of the pod… (It certainly isn’t unique to have something happen - for example, lava lamps when the build fails).

Back to the Santa though, I was at their retrospective today, and am really interested in the outcome of an action that was raised: alerting when the build fails is quite useful, but what if it actually means people become reticent to check code in for fear of breaking the build - after all it will be visible!

Their new action to to find a way of celebrating a successful build, but in a non-invasive way - after all if things go well, this new event could be triggered 20 times a day, so even a quiet, gentle ‘beep’ will not do.

So, intrigued, I have been listening with interest to ideas being floated over the next 2 weeks - my favourite was the idea to rig up a small delivery of smarties or similar directly to the desk of the person who checked in the code. Having first hand experience of the sugar addiciton of this particular team, I personally think this might be a winner

I can’t wait to hear how this turns out!

November 3rd, 2008 | Tags: Agile, Build, CI, Visiblity | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)