This is a transcript of episode 288 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel.
Convincing a peer can feel like painfully pedaling up a mountain, but a dose of curiosity can take you through the pass and whizzing down the other side.
Listen to the episode on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.
Curiosity Flattens the Mountain
Listen to this section at 00:14
Squirrel: Welcome back to Troubleshooting Agile. Hi there, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Hi, Squirrel. So last week we talked about being in so much of a hurry you didn’t have time to get out on the bike, and then this week, you have a new bike story for us. I thought that would be great to continue.
Squirrel: Sure! Well, one of my clients was talking to me about a difficult conversation where he felt mistrusted. He felt someone was not listening to him, had overruled him. He really thought there was a relationship problem. And so we role-played that. We worked on being curious, on doing what I call test driven development for people, which is a method of slowly and carefully interacting with the other person to learn what their story is.
Squirrel: He went off to have this difficult conversation with one of his executive peers, and he came back, and he said, ‘Squirrel, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been going up a mountain. You know, I’m just kind of riding my bicycle up the mountain, and I’m turning the gears and my feet hurt, and my legs hurt, and I’m really trying. And then I got to the top of the mountain, and I had the conversation, and it was like whizzing down the other side. It was so easy. The person actually didn’t mistrust me at all. We found new ways to collaborate, and it was really effective. My tech team is really energized by it.’
Squirrel: And I just thought that was very interesting, because last week we talked about you feeling like you didn’t have enough time to make the improvements, such as learning test driven development for people, being curious, having ways of interacting and building trust. And in fact, what I found, and he found, was that when you do those things, it actually flattens the mountain. It makes it less painful to go up, and then it’s like whizzing down the other side.
Jeffrey: That’s perfect. I think that’s actually a very natural extension of what we talked about last week, because this is, I think, something that’s very unintuitive. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was doing a training class, actually covering the same material, covering the eight behaviors for smarter teams, covering transparency and curiosity. One of the things that came up was that people often feel time poor, and that’s one of the reasons they avoid having these conversations and avoid doing the preparation for it. So I was explaining how you could be doing a two column case study. You could be preparing for difficult conversations, and people acknowledge that this was these were good techniques.
Jeffrey: But they said, ‘well, but what about if we’re in a hurry? You know, it often feels like we’re trying to get through our agenda, we don’t have a lot of time.’ My experience has been if we can apply these skills that things go faster. So your example here where that slog up the mountain was replaced by whizzing down the other side, that the curiosity and transparency actually made things faster and easier, fits exactly my experience. And yet people are reluctant to do it because they think somehow it’ll be faster doing what they know. And I think this is the kind of thing it’s faster in the short term, but almost immediately not.
Jeffrey: So for the two column case study, preparing for the conversation that you talked about, the technique takes people about ten minutes. If they sit down and actually write out and prepare for the conversation, it doesn’t take very much time. But the feeling when you’re in that sort of time poor, hurry sickness situation, it that feels like too much. Does that match with your experience?
Squirrel: It certainly does. And I see it so often that someone makes that assumption without actually testing it. They say ‘this is a situation where I can get by without doing the good practices I know. This is an exception, this is different,’ and there aren’t that many exceptions where that’s really true because as you say, it should take no more than ten minutes to prepare.
Squirrel: It should be a brief conversation. Once you get into it, and you discover things, and you’re likely to learn things that you didn’t know, such as what happened to my client. He got in there, and he said, ‘man, I had no idea that we didn’t have a trust issue and therefore that we could collaborate much more effectively.’ That kind of learning is really valuable, except for the very few exceptions where you don’t need it.
We Don’t Have Time for Curiosity
Listen to this section at 04:23
Jeffrey: There are exceptions. I think that’s right. I think this is part of the difficulty is there are cases. And this is something that I also was asked in that training class. ‘But like aren’t there times when this is not the right approach? Isn’t there cases? Not every conversation a mutual learning conversation,’ which the answer to that is yes, definitely. There are examples where it’s not.
Jeffrey: I know one that that came to mind from a long time ago. I was discussing the same issue with someone, and it was the classic ‘fire in a crowded theater,’ and I’m pretty sure we’ve said this one on the podcast before. When there’s something that needs to happen right away, when it’s an emergency. Then there are times when you say, ‘no, we actually don’t have time.’ This is not like, ‘hey, there’s smoke. How do you feel about smoke? I’m really curious what you think about a fire,’ that’s not appropriate.
Squirrel: ‘Fire keeps you warm. Is it good or is it bad? I don’t know, we seem to have one here in the building.’ That’s not how you act. But so few situations are really emergencies, in that sense. You might encounter ten such emergencies in your life, unless you’re a firefighter or something like that. I’m just writing my email for the week, I write my weekly email to all my community. I’m just writing about how even airplane pilots make sure that they have a checklist, and they calmly go through it when they lose an engine. So the times when you really have an emergency in which there isn’t time for listening and understanding the other party and their story and aligning on it, that that’s very rare.
Squirrel: There are other examples, though, where the decision’s already been made. I had one of those where someone was requesting a pay rise, and you could have a long discussion with the person about what that pay rise meant to them. Whether it made sense to do, how they felt about it, and really align with it. The decision was made, this person was probably going to be fired. So it just didn’t make any sense to have a long discussion with this person about a pay rise, when this person’s performance was so abysmal that that was the only topic was are you going to keep your job? And so my counsel there, very unusually, to the person I was coaching, was, ‘don’t have a mutual learning conversation. Don’t be curious in this case, about that topic. Just shut down that topic because there’s no point discussing it.’ Those are rare, but they do happen.
Jeffrey: Yes, I had a similar situation earlier this year, and I think it’s a case where expressing curiosity, asking for input, is disingenuous. I think if there’s really nothing that the other person could say that would change the situation, for whatever reason, then that’s not the time for curiosity. Or at least you need to be clear about that, where it’s disingenuous to say, ‘well, okay, I’m considering this, but what’s your input?’ Don’t mislead people.
Jeffrey: In the situation this person had is they were going to be discussing to the department. They had made a decision about how they’re going to handle titles within the company, and they knew it was going to be controversial with some people, but they had decided. When they were talking about how they were introducing it, I said, ‘it seems to me like the way you’re couching this for the presentation is as though it was still under debate, but that’s not true, is it?’ And he acknowledged that, ‘no, in fact, this is a decision.’ This is an experiment he wanted to run. Case closed. Even if people had really good reasons why they didn’t want it, they were going to be doing it anyway. And I said, ‘well then, don’t be misleading.’ So I think it’s one of those times where… Don’t be curious, if that’s not the case, be transparent about the fact that this is not a discussion. I think that’s the right thing to do.
Jeffrey: It actually came up in the training class, I was asked the same question, ‘aren’t there times where we shouldn’t be curious and transparent?’ Once we discuss that it’s cheap and easy to do and will make things easier. And I said, ‘of course,’ and I explained the same thing, and one of them said, ‘oh, right!’ They deal with health care, and they said, ‘so, for example, at the start of Covid, when the mandate came down that everyone needed to be wearing personal protective equipment in the hospital, today! By the end of the day! That probably wasn’t a time to have a mutual learning conversation.’ I said, ‘exactly!’ That’s exactly the scenario where you don’t pretend to be something that it’s not.
Squirrel: Indeed. But we’ll leave listeners with this thought. It’s so easy to think you’re in an emergency when you’re not. Our brains are kind of wired to deal with emergencies, and we kind of create them. We think about situations as emergencies when they’re not.
Squirrel: I’m going to link a video in the show notes, I just thought of it. It’s a fantastic video in which there are two pilots, a pilot and a copilot, and there happened to be a camera in the cockpit when they actually lost an engine. What they do is they calmly snack on some chocolates and hand around fruit while they’re running through the checklist and canceling the flight and turning around and going back to where they were. And they’re doing that in order to remain calm, and curious, and learn more about which engine has gone out and what they should do and where they should dump the fuel. So these are important topics. These are important things to do, in a curious way. And there’s many more circumstances where you can be curious and where you can learn more, and you have more time than you think to do it.
Jeffrey: That’s right. The fear here is if people think that because it’s a fire, they can avoid a difficult conversation, they’re likely to become arsonists. So…
Squirrel: Amazing! Don’t become an arsonist! If you’re considering arson or if you’re thinking there’s another circumstance in which you don’t need curiosity and transparency, or if you’re wondering how you can apply it in your situation, how to help other people in your organization learn how to do it best place to get in touch with us and ask us those questions because we’d love to hear them, and come back next week when we’ll have another edition of Troubleshooting Agile. Thanks, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Thanks, Squirrel.