Conversational Transformation

Frederick Taylor gets a bad rap - even from us, but in the right circumstances, we believe his ideas have a lot of value.

Both of us learned to improve our conversations through regular practise with others - and today we describe how you can do that too.

One of Squirrel's clients finds herself "harping on" a particular point in her technical team, and is frustrated that behaviour doesn't change.

Reacting to an insightful comment from Elisabeth Hendrickson, Squirrel and Jeffrey have a minor tussle over how to interpret the idea of "reflecting and adapting".

A client tells Squirrel about a "horrible" meeting where his team accused him of pushing them to overwork and take shortcuts, but we discover it was actually a great breakthrough.

The Shoe Principle says that if you buy a pair of shoes, you have to get rid of one. Like Marie Kondo, we suggest asking whether each team activity "sparks joy"

Squirrel describes two shirts he makes for clients, the How Shirt and the What Shirt, that provide a brief and memorable description of the roles of a technical leader and a product leader respectively.

Squirrel describes a client of his that is "thrashing"—trying to do so many different things that they aren't getting anything finished.

We're joined by Steve Berez, partner at Bain and co-author of Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos.

A reader points out that our example conversations often show people masking emotions, but we don't say as much about what to do when someone is being rude or when you yourself feel your emotions are out of control.

We respond to an article on user stories that has some good points (user stories are prompts for conversations) and, in our view, misses the mark on others.

Clarke Ching explains why bottlenecks are important, why your developers should always be your bottleneck, and how to explain the theory of constraints using a herd of buffalo.