“Fry complaining” by Umberto Salvagnin, under Creative Commons
- As agile and lean practitioners, why do we always focus on the negative? “It’s management’s fault”, “This needs to go faster”, “The quality is substandard”, “You don’t use TDD” … tell me when to stop…
- Because that’s where we have “unrealized improvement opportunities”, dummy!
- But it’s not very attractive and makes our “sell” much harder.
- Yeah, but it sucks! So it needs to be improved.
- Is there maybe another way to say that so that the receivers don’t feel that they suck?
- Maybe… but it’s very much up to them. They still suck, are they ready to hear it or not? Also, I’m not actually telling them that they suck, of course. I just tell them that “we’re looking for better”.
- But that means that we’re never satisfied.
- No, exactly! I’m never satisfied.
- Sucks to be there… No highs… never content with where you are…
- Yeah! That’s what makes me great.
I don’t know. I just don’t know. This post is not finished. It’s just a reflection I’ve had over the last couple of weeks. When I watch, read tweets or blogs, and listen to myself and others, I find that as Lean and Agile advocates we often come across as complaining, whining, or generally negative.
I exchanged some thoughts with Jon and Anders about this. It seems partly about how the receiver’s mindset is set to the message being delivered and whose agenda is being pushed. Who is the receiver really? If I deliver a message that comes across as whining and hitting people in the head… have I listened to their part and adjusted?
The number of times I have felt like I’m just complaining and never bringing good news is too many now. This is even more true when I see keynotes and other presentations that challenge the listener. Who wants to leave a presentation feeling pushed down, diminished, or like a failure? I want to be lifted up and see that I’m great. Through this greatness, I can continue to evolve.
Just because there’s a better tomorrow doesn’t mean today sucks.
Two things: listen and context
I’m the first to confess that I do this poorly now, but I’ve found two areas where I will focus to become better: listening and using context.
The first one is pretty obvious and a so-called truism: everyone needs to be better at listening, always. But maybe if I stop for a while and think about what they are actually saying to me. One of my heroes, Dan North, has a nice saying that I quote from time to time:
What is true in their world to make them do this/think this/say this?
If I reflected more about things like that when I see objections or notice that I’m just “whining”… maybe that could be better.
Also, stating things without context is something that I will shy away from. There’s a Swedish word that I haven’t found a good translation for: “floskel”. It means roughly “smart words that really don’t mean anything”, “big but empty words”, or “things you’d say over people’s heads”.
Profoundly smart things said without context are just a floskel, I think. It doesn’t help me where I am. I, for one, want to try to talk more from the context of the people I talk to. I’d much rather say something simplified but useful than something profound (I don’t do that anyway) that the receiver cannot apply in their context.
When we just had written the table of contents for Kanban In Action, it was sent out for a review. A kind of “if this was a complete book, would you read it?” survey. I never forget one of the answers that came back:
Yes, it sounds pretty interesting… but that’s what we call the easy parts of kanban.
You know what; fine with me. I’m happy just talking about the easy parts of kanban. Maybe people can use that. And smarter people than me can talk about the complex parts of kanban.