This is a transcript of episode 116 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel.

What we’re doing these days is not “remote working”—we have people ill, kids at home, and no option to work from a cafe. But even more than this, most of us haven’t put in place alignment and accountability mechanisms, and we’re operating on shared understanding from March that is going to expire very soon if it hasn’t already. We discuss these and other challenges and briefly point to solutions that we’ve seen work, like briefing and back briefing from Bungay’s Art of Action.

Show links:

Listen to the episode on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.

Introduction

Listen to this section at 00:14

Squirrel:
Welcome back to troubleshooting agile. Hi there, Jeffrey

Jeffrey:
Hi Squirrel.

Jeffrey:
I want to talk today about something that is affecting a lot of us, which is what’s going on with working during this time of lockdown and craziness, people being very disruptive. And in particular, I wanted to talk about something that I’ve seen that I think is worth repeating people may not have heard the message about this topic of remote working going on.

Squirrel:
How does it sound to you? It sounds great. I’m in my shed, and I’m having to adjust quite a lot of things to how things are, are currently structured. So I’m all ears. What, what what do you think?

Jeffrey:
Well, what I wanted to talk about was two different things that I’m seeing and one is people saying they’re talking about how things will be different after the pandemic, and after COVID-19, a lot of people are pretty excited that this will lead to a world where remote working is much more common. Because I’ve heard people say, this is going to show that being remote working can be just as productive as being in the office together. So that’s the one hand I see people making this claim. On the other hand, that’s really missing something. And I think it’s worth saying that what you’re doing right now, and this is the big message for me, that is what you’re doing right now is is not actually remote working. What you’re doing instead is you’re working from home in the middle of a crisis. And this is actually, I saw this on Twitter, which made me think is worth discussing that, you know, you’re at home during a crisis trying to work that’s not the same as remote working in normal everyday circumstances. And there’s a lot of reasons for this. And I thought it’d be worth us talking about this on the podcast, both about some of the differences and what people might be able to do about it.

Squirrel:
Yeah, sounds really good. I’m finding the same thing online. When you mentioned that I went and found like, several other links, so put all those in the show notes. So people can see the breadth of opinion on this topic, and what we’re responding to.

Jeffrey:
It’s funny. I think it’`s really interesting the difference here, there are some people who are finding themselves currently coping just fine. And they’re saying ‘no, this is good. I’m actually find myself more productive than I was at the office normally, and I have a lot of extra time and I’m able to do side projects, during the time I was formerly commuting and I’m getting new skills and I’m doing new hobbies. I’m picking up new habits and, yet I’m at least as productive I was before.’ And this is really great.

Squirrel:
And I have fewer meetings, so I don’t have to deal with all those silly meetings and chatting and of course meeting and so on.

Jeffrey:
That’s right. And I can understand why people would have that response in some cases, I think, well, first of all, I think there are people like that who are fortunate, who are actually having that experience. And I think that those people are very fortunate, and that’s good for them. It’s worth understanding that that a lot of people are not in that category. And there are some cases where that’s really for very obvious reasons. Perhaps the one of the most dramatic are people who, well are sick. think there are people who are actually affected by the virus, of course, they’re, impacted and not able to be as productive or maybe the people they are living with or their loved ones, that who they’re caring for, are sick or even who they’re not caring for, people that are not living with them, but their extended family. And they’re thinking a lot about how they’re going to be affected and they’re worried about other people. They’re not going to have their minds completely on their job the way they would normally. So I think there’s a bunch of people who have that very direct impact. I think there’s some people who are also pretty directly impacted. The most obvious category are people with young children. I feel very fortunate that my youngest child is 16 years old. Unlike people who I know some former colleagues were there, their youngest child is closer to 16 months old, and trying to get work done at home while the little one is awake. It seems like it’s not really happening that you know, best you can get some things done while child sleeping or maybe even other parents who can take your shift. But there’s definitely not the same kind of productivity going on with people because they no longer have the support systems they’re used to of children in school or children with daycare. And so there’s a big logistical impact.

Squirrel:
Mm hmm.

Logistical Challenges

Listen to this section at 05:17

Jeffrey:
And even for people who are used to working from home, and I’m one of them, I’ve often worked from home off and on over the years. This is a very different experience for me. If only because of things like location flexibility, I’m quite used to going out and working from a cafe or using that, at least to break up part of my day, rather than just being in the living room with headphones on all day.

Squirrel:
Sure, but one of the services I’m continuing to subscribe to, but not using is service here in London called AndCo that provides an opportunity for you to go to a pub or cafe or anything around London, and just use it for the afternoon. Well, that’s not running right now. That’s, that’s not in operation for us right now. So I’m used to that same location flexibility. And I get a lot of benefit from just the change of scene. That’s very noticeable.

Jeffrey:
Right. So I think there’s a lot of logistical elements. So I think this these are only a few. I mean, I think there’s many more things we could go into the people who don’t have proper remote working environments and haven’t been able to get the kit they needed. My wife just today was trying to order a webcam online. And as you might expect-

Squirrel:
Haha! Not going to find one of those

Jeffrey:
Right? Yeah, fortunately for her, this was kind of an ancillary one. She was looking to have a second camera without needing to use her phone and join the meeting twice, but she’ll be able to work around that. But for the people they’re not as fortunate they don’t have the basics in place.

Squirrel:
Certainly so.

Jeffrey:
So this these are kind of elements that I think are some of the more obvious challenges. But one of the things that’s interesting to me is, even for people who are experiencing and reporting positive elements of higher productivity, at least some of those to me seemed to me like they’re kind of ephemeral, that people are going through a, in some cases, an unrealistic scenario for, what they might expect, as time goes on. And so I also want to talk about the people who are experiencing higher productivity because it occurred to me that what we might be seeing here is not sustainable. In particular, I think there’s at least some cases where people are going into kind of conversational debt, an alignment debt with their colleagues, where they’re currently living on a surplus of alignment that they had built up with their colleagues, before the crisis hit, before they were all scattered to the winds. And now, yes, they have their heads down. They’re not in those meetings and they’re able to, you know, crank out work products, you know, crank out the code or whatever is that they’re focused on. And they’re feeling really good about that.

Squirrel:
But there’s a wall coming, there’s something that’s gonna go wrong.

Jeffrey:
That’s right, exactly, that they’re gonna run out of that surplus that they’re draining that alignment. And, you know, they were able to build a design together at the whiteboard while in the office. And now they’re gonna suddenly, at some point, figure out that they don’t have a game plan for how to build that same kind of alignment and shared understanding when they’re outside of the office.

Squirrel:
It certainly seems to me that this is going to be hitting my clients. It’s not hitting any of them right now. They all feel really positive in exactly the way you’re describing. But I’m in farming country, so it’s natural to use a farming analogy that they’re they’re eating their seed corn. There would be activities they would be doing now that’s exactly those meetings that they’re missing. And the activities that could be setting them up for the next project for the next thing that’s coming a few weeks from now, even tomorrow. And they’ve been running on what they’ve already set up and the alignment that they already have. But how are they going to know what to do next?

Jeffrey:
That’s right. And this is the good case where you have people who are fairly focused on particular problems or trying to solve, people are pretty engaged, and they’re not describing themselves as heavily impacted by the crisis that’s going on. And I think even in those best cases, that if people have not figured out how to do sustainable remote working, that they’re going to be facing that challenge coming up.

Squirrel:
So what should they do about it?

Jeffrey:
Yeah, I think that’s it. So we have we’ve laid out like several different types of challenges now. I think the the one question or one idea I would put out to people out there is if you find yourself reading about these other people having higher productivity, and you’re wondering what’s what’s wrong with you? I would just start with maybe a bit of self empathy.

Squirrel:
Yeah, exactly. We’ll have empathy for you. You’re not doing anything wrong.

You’re Surviving a Crisis

Listen to this section at 10:25

Jeffrey:
That’s right. So I think that’s what’s useful about, for example, the blog post that you found that idea that you’re coping with a global emergency. This is not remote work. This is something different.

Squirrel:
And if you want to get great productivity, the first thing to do is to not have lots of people dying from a mysterious virus.

Jeffrey:
Yes. And to not be in a place where, as someone put it, you know, ‘the world is on fire and our leaders are idiots.’ So don’t have that sort of macro global crisis as a way of boosting productivity, do that first. So hopefully people can have this empathy for themselves, and also look around for their colleagues and friends and loved ones who could use that kind of support. People who might be feeling despondent over the fact they’re not able to focus on their work, people who feel guilty, that they’re not being as productive as they see other people being and wondering what’s wrong with them. This is a message that I think is something that people can definitely pass on.

Squirrel:
Sounds like a good plan. How about that alignment problem? What would you do about that?

Jeffrey:
Yeah, exactly. And then for people who are feeling like things have been going well. Our prediction is that this is a problem that you might be facing . And so what kind of conversations might you plan for and what you might check in with. One is to say, you know, do we all feel like we are actually aligned on what we’re doing, and how much runway we have left on the work we’re currently doing. It’s a good thing we can, as you were pointing out to me Squirrel that we took the time to write a book that will be coming out in May. And it was useful for us even to talk about it amongst ourselves, how we might frame it, you know. So what happens if we’re not aligned with people on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it? What kind of conversation should we have?

Squirrel:
I looked it up in the book because I couldn’t remember that’s one of the best things about writing a book. So the the answer from ourselves is that you should have the ‘why conversation ‘and the ‘accountability conversation’. We won’t try to read out the entire book. But the basic idea is that after you have trust, and fear, dealt with, then you can ‘start to start with why’ to quote Simon Sinek and to figure out what the your, your global purpose is . Now you may already have that, that might be kind of seed corn that is safely in the silo, and you’ve got that well aligned, but most people don’t. So they’re relying on more iterative alignment and more iterative feedback about where you’re going. So they may need a refresher much sooner for your whole organization. Why are we building this software? Why are we providing this service? Is this service relevant? You know, I have a travel startup. They’re their services not relevant right now. They’ve shut down their website. So they have to figure out their purpose, which is to survive until people travel again. So you may have to revise your ‘why’. So that’s one part of the conversation. And the other is we get a lot of people who are asking Jeffrey, you’re seeing this like me? ‘How do I make sure my teams are working?’ ‘ How do I make sure that they’re focused?’ ‘ Suddenly I can’t see them. I can’t use the metrics I used to be using.’ The accountability conversation is very important one there.

Jeffrey:
Yeah, I think that this is one of the reasons I had this on my mind, I think is, I have seen various leaders in various companies who are expressing some concern about, you know, how do I make sure my teams are engaged, and as you said that they’re not able to use what they’re used to using. And I think what they’re used to using, though, is something that I don’t have a tremendous amount of empathy for. In Silicon Valley, we used to call this the parking lot metric, which is were there are a lot of cars in the parking lot when I leave the office. And for a lot of managers and more senior manager leaders who were a bit further away from the work. It’s like, well, I don’t really know what people are doing. But I have faith because there’s cars in the parking lot, so they must be doing something. Not a good metric, similar poor metric the pizza bots metric. There are a lot of pizzas ordered last night from people working late. So therefore, they must be doing good work.

Jeffrey:
I think these are the people who are, I think, especially wondering right now and unsure about what their teams are doing. I think that those are kind of extreme cases. But I think it’s natural for people to feel more confident about the people they’re talking to about the people they see. And when suddenly these teams are no longer visible to them and there are people who they don’t traditionally have scheduled meetings with, to be wondering what’s going on. And so I think, for the accountability conversation that, you and I talked about which we can say one element of this is sort of a briefing and back briefing, to be saying, yep, here’s our understanding of the plan. Here’s what we’re doing about it. You know, here’s how we are executing, can be very helpful in filling a gap that people are not used to having to consciously fill. So it is a technique that people can be using to be clear about what’s happening. And I think that’s also useful in a time right now for things that aren’t happening. So, you know, this is the plan we’re working on. And and here’s our plan. And by the way, one of things we’re planning is that we only expect about 50% productivity from some of these people, or, you know, we’re our expectation is that we’re at 60%, or 40%, wherever we are, and having that shared understanding, and this ‘how do you know, as a team, what kind of productivity you can expect from the group?’ Again, that’s a conversation that I think is one that people need to be having. What’s a realistic kind of output we can expect as a group, as a team, what things do we feel like we’re able to execute on well, and what are the things we feel that we’re not executing well? Given the current circumstances, you know, making that discussable, I think is a really important element, a step that people can take right now, as people are learning how to cope with this unprecedented environment.

Parking Spots and Pizza Boxes

Listen to this section at 17:16

Squirrel:
And you have lots of options for how to handle reduced productivity. And that’s part of your back briefing as well, I should think so, you’d want to be saying things like, well, we’re particularly low on productivity in our user testing and user interaction, because we can’t walk down to the cafe and ask people what they think of our app. So here are the things we’re going to do to mitigate that. And some of it, we’re just going to take the risk, we’re going to build. This is what my travel startup is doing for example. They found some people who are excited enough and bored enough at home to try out the app, but they can’t actually try out their new features in the real world with thousands of people visiting their website because their website traffic is zero. So they’ve just accepted the risk that they’re going to build some stuff that won’t work once people are actually traveling again. But they are mitigating that by getting some power users to say, Well, if I were in Berlin today, I would be doing x, and therefore I would not like this feature.

Squirrel:
So there are lots of things you can do to mitigate, but the crucial thing is communicating that because if someone else in your organization is using the pizza box metric, that’s not going to work for them. They’re not going to understand what you’re doing, and it never worked before anyway. So that is one place where the people were saying things are going to be better people will have learned that, they might be right. Because suddenly you can’t use parking lots and pizza boxes to measure.

Jeffrey:
That’s right. As usual, you know, it’s kind of no surprise that our takeaway from this is, you know, we’re having a challenge. What are we going to do? Well, probably, we should talk about it with with everyone. We should make sure we’re on the same page. Make sure that we’re focusing on things that we agree are important, and I think this is something that is very important. Our fundamental ideas that we should be dealing with reality, and make sure that we have a shared understanding what reality is. These are times that sometimes can feel very unreal. And the idea that we’re going to somehow go about business, as usual, is an illusion that I’ve seen some people try to put forward, we’re going to be just as productive no matter what, in the current circumstances, and some people may be able to achieve that. And that’s great. But I think that’s a it’s a question and you have to be open to the idea that, you know, that may not be possible for us. And if you’re not able to entertain that as a possibility, then you won’t be able to adjust based on the experiences people are actually having.

Squirrel:
Makes lots of sense. We’ll include some links to some of these techniques in our show notes. As usual, the briefing and back briefing we’ve talked about many times, Simon Sinek Start with Why is a good source. We’d love to be able to link to the book but it’s not out yet. So sorry about that but you can pre order. So we can try that. And I did just struck me, Jeffrey, we might close by actually illustrating some of this. You’re welcome to say no. But would you like to maybe do a briefing and back briefing or do a little roleplay of what this conversation that we’re suggesting might sound really?

Jeffrey:
Sure, absolutely.

A Briefing and Back Briefing Example

Listen to this section at 20:22

Squirrel:
Great. Do you want to be the person who has the pizza box metric and is looking for something better? Or the person who’s explaining the difficulties in productivity? I’m okay to be either.

Jeffrey:
Sure. I’ll go ahead and start as the person with the concerns.

Squirrel:
Great.

Jeffrey:
So I’ll take the leader role here.

Squirrel:
Sounds good. Go for it.

Jeffrey:
Okay!

Jeffrey:
So Squirrel the good news is that you and I do have some things to actually talk about here around our marketing of the book, our book launch activities, so

Squirrel:
Oh, yeah!

Jeffrey:
So Squirrel. I’ve been looking at our Trello board, and, you know, we had a lot of plans that we put together at the end of last year. I do wonder about given the way things have been going, how you’re feeling about all those activities we laid out between now and May.

Squirrel:
Hmm,I’m feeling pretty good about them, but most of them seem delayed. That’s how it seems to me. Does that match your understanding? Like we’re doing them, we’re just not doing them in March when we thought, we’re doing them in April.

Jeffrey:
Yeah, I’ve seen that. And I’ve been wondering, then a bit about sort of what’s happening is it’s been temporary or this mean that we really should adjust our plans, because of what’s happening? You know, the world is very different now than when we were making these plans.

Squirrel:
Yeah, that’s a very good point. Well, we’ve had to adjust a bunch of the plans to the fact that people aren’t for example, as likely to get a physical book from us because supply chains are disrupted and so on. So when we’re offering to hand out books to people to review and so on we’re offering the electronic copy instead of the physical copy. That makes it a little more efficient in one sense, because we don’t have to go to the post office. And it makes it more difficult in another sense, because the electronic copies are harder to deal with. So that’s a place where I think we’re handling it okay, and it’s not likely to continue. I sure hope our next book will not have that particular difficulty because of worldwide pandemic. So it doesn’t seem to me we need to adjust those processes. But it does occur to me, there might be some others. And you and I are both finding that we are definitely less productive. We’re getting less done. We’re closer to deadlines than I think we normally would be. We’re hitting them. So we hit a publisher deadline recently, more or less, and they were very happy, for some marketing material, but I think we probably wouldn’t have been doing it the night before. If we weren’t affected by all these impacts. What do you think?

Jeffrey:
I think you’re right, and we talked about it last week on the podcast when we were talking about missing affordances from remote meetings, the fact that, you know, i think we’ve experienced that we feel a lot more drained at the end of the day.

Squirrel:
Absolutely!

Jeffrey:
That online conversations are really much more draining than what we’re used to. So what I do want to bring up those, we do have some deadlines, because we do have a book launch with a date that’s set we do have some deliverables. And I would think would be useful if we could go ahead and do a triage pass on what we have coming up to say, what are the things that we want to focus on? And is there anything that we should look to deprioritize? And I think it’d be good for each of us to do that independently and then compare notes. Is that something that you think would make sense?

Jeffrey:
I like that better. I was thinking I would do it and then you’d review but no, I like that much better.

Jeffrey:
Okay.

Squirrel:
Let’s do a triage activity we can review it at our weekly book check in which we have on Thursdays.

Jeffrey:
Right. Okay, so what i was going to say was as far as the briefing is going, when might I hear back from you? So some kind of signposting the elements of a briefing. You know, we’re saying what is the outcome we want? You know, what’s the scenario that we find ourselves in? So what’s the element here? And when to expect to hear back? What kind of the the plans are? So you’re saying, you think you could come back on Thursday?

Squirrel:
Exactly. And we’re kind of briefing each other there because we’re planning both to do the, the triaging, but that sounds helpful. Well, great. We got a little of our book alignment done. I wasn’t planning on but, good improvisation there to actually do something that’s important for our joint effort of launching the book. So excellent. And I hope that’s a helpful illustration, for listeners about the kind of conversation you notice that we touched on, why we were doing it and what the purpose was and what we were trying to do: make a successful book launch. We talked about how we’d be accountable to each other and we talked about our shared experiences and what was shared and what wasn’t shared between us in coping with a different situation than we’d invisioned when we laid out our plans. We’re done making up for our seed corn, we’re replenishing our seed corn there, we had a certain plan, and suddenly that’s shifting, and we’re realigning. So I hope all those elements make sense to listeners and they can apply them.

Jeffrey:
Yeah, of course. As always, I’d really like to hear from our listeners, and, you know, how does this episode sound to them? How does it relate to your experiences? What’s your pandemic productivity been like? Are you one of the people who are really hugely affected by what’s going on, either emotionally or logistically or more broadly? Or are you one of the people who feel like ‘No, actually, I feel like, I’m pretty normal or maybe even higher productive than usual.’ And, if so, if you’re in one of these categories, you know, do you think any of these things we’re talking about might be helpful, or maybe you have other tips that have been helpful for you? If you’d like to think we should share to our broader troubleshooting agile community.

Squirrel:
That would be great and you know where to do that. It’s a conversationalTransformation.com. If that’s hard to remember, just search for Troubleshooting Agile on the web, you’ll find us relatively quickly. You’ll find TShootingAgile on Twitter. You’ll find each of us Douglass Squirrel and JTF on Twitter, and you’ll find info@conversationalTransformation.com. If you forget any of those just search for Troubleshooting Agile, you’ll find us relatively quickly because we’d sure like to hear from you. We also of course always like it when people hit the subscribe button or give themselves a reminder for Wednesdays or anything else that works for making sure to listen to us every week. So far, we’ve managed to adjust pretty well to keeping these podcasts up. We haven’t hit the exact timelines every time, but like we were just negotiating, we’ve done pretty well at adjusting and we expect to do that in the future, and to keep bringing you interesting topics that are relevant to your agile team.

Squirrel:
Excellent. Thanks, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey:
Thanks Squirrel