How to Keep Learning
Congratulations! If you’ve finished this book (instead of just flipping to the conclusion) and tried holding some or all of the Five Conversations, then you have overcome your dread of difficult conversations, have undertaken difficult emotional work, and are on the road to developing the five key attributes of high-performing teams: high Trust, low Fear, clear Why, definite Commitment, and solid Accountability. You have mastered a wide array of skills and techniques that contribute to successful conversations, including Test-Driven Development for People, Coherence Busting, Joint Design, the Walking Skeleton, and Directed Opportunism. These are fantastic accomplishments!
But we have challenging news for you. Though you’ve come a long way, there are still years of practice ahead of you. That’s because none of the Five Conversations ever end. After you build Trust using TDD for People, you will need to keep aligning your stories as circumstances evolve and your view of the other person changes. After you define a clear Why with Joint Design, the market or your company will shift, and you will have to rebuild another Why. You and your team will want to discuss Accountability with each other throughout your time together, rendering meaningful accounts over and over as you fulfill your commitments to each other.
The Road Never Ends
As we argued throughout this book, a conversational transformation is the way out of the feature factory that traps so many Agile, Lean, and DevOps teams. Now that you know this, we’re sure you will drive many conversational transformations in teams and organizations you work in. This means you will have the opportunity to keep improving your conversation technique throughout your life. As with any other skill, such as playing an instrument or practicing a sport, continued practice allows us to perform with more grace and style. It also challenges us by showing us that further improvement is always possible. Even after studying these methods for over ten years, both of us continue to make and discover new mistakes, which also allows us to learn new skills and invent new techniques. In the morning, we may have a wonderful, relationship-building conversation, but that afternoon, we may stumble through an acrimonious discussion that leaves everyone frustrated. We have experienced the real value in continuing to practice methods like conversational analysis, and even more value in patient friends willing to practice and role play with us. The failed conversations may be painful, but they give us the greatest opportunity to develop our most important skills.
Start a Learning Group
The most useful resource you have in improving your conversations is the help of other people who are also looking to improve the same skills. And so our final recommendation to you is that you find others in your organization or your community who can work with you regularly to jointly improve their mastery of the techniques in this book—others who will join you in following Argyris’s strategy of using conversations to investigate and improve your organization’s performance.
It is a quirk of human nature and the result of our cognitive biases that the mistakes of other people are easier to spot than our own. Your fellow learners will spot alternatives in your discussions that you missed, and you will do the same for them. A learning group also offers a good space for deliberate practice, where you can try applying the techniques in the room and get immediate feedback from other people on how it felt for them.
Our advice for starting a learning group is to start simple and to focus on building the habit of regular practice. Begin by asking each person to read out a conversation analysis, and discuss each person’s conversation with the group. Creating and scoring your conversations in advance will help you get more out of your time. However, it is better to meet without preparation—to do the conversation analysis in the session—than to skip the session; even the smallest amount of work will be rewarded. We have held successful practice sessions in groups from two to twenty, with coworkers and friends and people who started as strangers, and discussed conversations with bosses, colleagues, neighbors, spouses, parents, roommates, and more. Every conversation offers the opportunity to improve if you are looking for it.
As you become more comfortable with your learning group, you may want to study articles or videos, or undertake other deliberate practices to help you improve further. One group we know is working its way through the Agile Manifesto principles one at a time; another meets monthly to practice new techniques, like nonviolent communication1 and relationship journaling.2 The “Further Reading and Resources” section at the end of this book (page 189) will give you many ideas and sources for additional work, including ways to keep in touch with both of us online on the companion website and podcast for this book.
Dry Kitesurfing
After a long lunch with much discussion of conversation techniques from this book, a client of ours said, “I feel like I’ve just had a lecture on kitesurfing, but I didn’t get wet.” You can study all the theoretical knowledge you want, but it will do you no good at all without getting in the water and falling off the board a few times.
We invite you to dive in and practice the conversation techniques we have shared with you on a regular basis. The rewards are enormous.
Keep talking,
Jeffrey and Squirrel