Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel

We'll be talking about conversational transformation, "the missing foundation," and then we get to the buzzword-bingo part: how difficult conversations unlock successful digital, agile, DevOps, and lean transformations. We wanted to cast why this is a big-tent topic, so I'm very happy all of you joined us here.

We're going to be talking about information that we have in a book we've written that will be coming out in May of 2020. However, all of you, by being here tonight, are very lucky that we'll be doing a book signing later of our pre-print galley. This is not the final version, but it has a lot of the key techniques that we'll be talking about in our presentation.

One other note about our presentation: slides will be available for you to download and read later. We've designed it that way. There is some information for you to study later, as you reflect on the talk, because we want you to be able to apply the techniques that we talk about.

This is not, I don't know why you're here, but it's not just for entertainment.

In our minds, it's not just theory.

That's right. A lot of talks you come to and you listen and you say, "Well, that was fun," and then you go away. This is not one of those talks. We're going to be asking you to do something, and it's something that you'll be able to do tonight. You'll be able to apply and learn something.

And just so you know, learning is horrible, because learning is the detection and correction of error. If you don't feel uncomfortable doing what we're talking about, you're not doing it right.

So with that lovely introduction: why do transformations fail?

I've been doing agile for about 20 years, and people who have a good grasp of dates will say, "Wait a minute, there was no such thing as agile 20 years ago." That's true, but I was on the Ward Wiki, the C2 Wiki. The gray hairs here will know what I'm talking about, talking about the things that were later branded agile.

I've seen many transformational waves come through our industry. I've seen the pain and suffering of people on both sides: people who are very excited about the transformation and then get very frustrated when it isn't working. I see some nodding of heads. If you're here, you're probably one of these people who are very excited about what will be better, and you want to bring better to everyone.

I'll tell you now: you'll be frustrated when you come back from this conference and you're very excited and you talk to them and they're not interested in your better. Oh, you've been here before.

So what do you do?

In the transformation, we're looking for wide-scale change, not just adopting another set of practices, another punch list. We're looking to change how people relate to one another. We're looking to change culture.

That's hard, but it's actually not complicated. What we're going to tell you here is: if you change your conversations, you will change your culture.

If you're involved in a cultural transformation, one of the things you might think is that you can go read a book. Maybe you can even read our book. Or you could read, how many people have read "Five Dysfunctions of a Team"?

Great. Anybody remember what the first dysfunction is? Shout it out.

Trust. Trust. Thank you. Anybody remember what Lencioni tells you to do if you have low trust?

Anybody?

Vulnerability. Go ahead, shout it louder.

Vulnerability.

I can't hear it.

Vulnerability.

Vulnerability. Okay. Does he tell you how to become vulnerable?

Read the book again. I'll tell you, because I've read it more recently than you guys. He tells you that you should talk to your team about their strengths and weaknesses, and you should go on a ropes course.

When I read that, I threw the book across the room. I wanted my money back because I was very frustrated that Lencioni, and he's not the only one, doesn't tell you what to do.

The difference we claim, and what we're going to tell you, is it's something you can walk away from today and do differently with immediate results. Not immediate super-results. You'll have to get better at it, but something will happen that will be different. You'll build trust, for example.

The thing is, you already have a good idea of where you want to get. This is part of what makes it possible. There's not a lot of disagreement out of people about what they want.

One way to look at this is, if people have read the book "Accelerate," one of the ideas I really liked in there was from Ron Westrum, the three cultures. You can see the three cultures: there's the pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. You can guess which one you want to be.

No one's like, "Yeah, we're aiming for pathological."

But here's the thing. You have a corporate culture right now. Doesn't that make sense? You're in one of these categories. That's the context you're in. If you're in one of these three cultures and you go start a transformation, guess what? You're going to approach it in one of these three ways.

If you're a pathological corporation and you start a transformation, what's going to happen? You're going to approach it pathologically, top-down, and then ride roughshod over the bodies.

If you are in a bureaucratic organization, it's going to be punch-list by the rules: "I'm sorry, that's not what the Scrum manual says."

And if you're in a generative culture, you're probably not here, because it's already working.

So that's kind of the bad news. You want to get to a generative culture, but you're starting in one that's not. Just out of curiosity, how many of you would say you were in a pathological culture? Hands up. Don't worry, the camera can't see your faces. We're not taking names.

How many of you would say you're in a bureaucratic culture? A lot of hands for that one.

How many in a generative culture? Some. Good. Excellent. You might be in the wrong room. It's okay if you leave.

All right. Changing your culture. This is where we're saying you're going to start with a conversational transformation.

One thing that happens: we talk about conversations a lot, and people go, "That's great. I want to have better conversations so people will do what I want." Guess what? That's more pathological than generative, isn't it? So it's a good thing you're here.

But you know what results you want to get to. You know how to have good conversations, and I know that because we talk to a lot of people about it. We will say this: "Look around at the people next to you." Just pick the closest five people, the people in your little row there.

Now imagine that your row, it was up to you to make some decision, like where this conference is going to be next year. Antarctica. It'll be great. We can have penguins.

Imagine you're going to make that decision. How would you recommend you go about doing it in your row? Shout it out. What kinds of things would you do?

Discuss. Brainstorm. Brainstorm, I heard. Discuss. Excellent.

It turns out when we ask this, we always get the same answer. It's said different ways, but it's something like brainstorm. "I want to hear from everyone." "Discuss." "Have different opinions, because diversity is strength."

The more opinions, the more information we get out, the better decisions we get, the more options we have. That would be great, except that's not what people actually do in practice. What that is is espoused behavior.

When you ask people how you should make decisions, they're like, "Yep, get all the information out there, and then we'll decide."

The problem is, in practice, whenever humans, and most of you look like humans... Any non-humans? Good. All right. When humans face the opportunity for either threat or embarrassment, they behave very differently. The fear portion of their brain, the amygdala, kicks in and they shut down. Now diversity is a threat, because they might not agree.

If everybody could just agree with me, it would be great, because I've given this careful thought. I went to the conference. I heard Gene talk. He signed my book. I know what we should be doing. All I need to do is get all these people in my row to agree that penguins are the greatest thing ever, and we need to go to Antarctica.

So we approach it by wanting to win, which is not what we said before was the right way to make a decision.

See what's happening here? We know what good behavior looks like, but knowing is not helpful. That's because conversations are a skill, not a question of knowledge. It's like: do you understand how a piano works? You probably do. You push a key, a hammer hits a string, the string makes a noise. You understand that, right?

Can you play a piano?

Well, not by understanding. It's by practicing. So that's what we're going to talk about. There will be a little bit of understanding.

The first thing to understand is that you have this process going on in your head where, when you are exposed to some information, you unconsciously go through this process. If you look up the ladder of inference, and you look this up on Wiki, you'll find lots of pictures of ladders. This is our favorite, and the reason is because the illustration makes it very clear that this is something that just goes on in your head.

There are things in the world that are real, then there's this process in your head, and then you do something in the world. When you do it, you go through this stage of selecting the data you see, but you tend to select things that confirm what you already believe. You add meaning to it, but you think that meaning is coming from the world, not from your head. You make assumptions. You draw conclusions. You have firm beliefs, like penguins are awesome. From that, you instantly come to an answer that, to you, is obvious.

It's obvious we should go to Antarctica, because that's where the penguins are. Of course.

And none of you followed any of that reasoning. None of you understood why, because you are all shaking your heads at the crazy man saying we should go to Antarctica. That's what happens. This happens in our heads. We feel we've come to an obvious conclusion about the world, and anyone else who disagrees just doesn't understand.

But it turns out what happens is they have their own ladders. They've gone through their own process. They've seen different things. They have different experiences, and this should be the source of our strength, remember.

It can be, if we become curious about what's on their ladder, and we become transparent about what's on ours. If we begin actually sharing that information, if we want to learn about other people, then we can get to that state that we all know is the right way to make decisions.

The problem is, if you look on television, you never see people behaving in the way we just described. You see dueling ladders. You see somebody who says, "We should close the borders," and somebody else who says, "Immigration is great." What never happens is anybody says, "How did you come to that conclusion? Could you tell me more? How did you get there? Actually, that sounds good. Could I join your party?"

That doesn't happen, so we don't have that model around for us to look at.

However, there's something you can do that will change that behavior for you. We're going to break it down into something easy to follow, and this is a process you can start applying right away. This is something you can practice in every conversation, and we call it the Four Rs.

The Four Rs is a generic process for analyzing your conversations. You're going to have a model, and you're going to apply it through these four steps. Start off with record. Then you're going to reflect. You're going to revise. You're going to role-play. Oh yeah, then you might repeat, and then there's some role reversal. Okay, so there's six Four Rs. Sorry. Some things are complex. Don't worry, we'll go through them all. But Four Rs sounds more approachable, so we're going to go with that.

Number one, record.

One of the things we want to stress is how approachable these techniques are. These are simple. They're difficult because they're painful, but they're not difficult in concept.

To record, you need some very complex technology, namely a piece of paper and a pen. You're going to do some very complex origami involved in folding the paper in half. You now have two columns.

Thinking of a conversation where maybe things didn't go so well, what you do is in the right-hand column, you will write down the dialogue as you recall it. The reason you only use one page is because the essence of your conflict, the dynamics, you can capture in probably just a few exchanges. You don't need a whole transcript.

You don't need to remember exactly what was said, because your contribution is going to be partially based on what you remember. You're going to write down your approximation of the major exchanges.

You can start with "Hi, how are you? How are the kids? How was the weekend?" if you like, but probably you're going to focus in on the core exchange where there was some conflict.

I'm already done. That's how long it takes you. It can be that quick. You have your exchanges: what did they say? Then on the left-hand column, after you've written down the dialogue, you'll start adding what your thoughts were as that was happening. When they spoke, what did you think? As you were speaking, what were you thinking? That's it. That's recording.

A lot of people say, "Do I have to write it down? I could just take care of it. I can think of it in my head. That's okay. I don't need it, do I?"

The answer is no. That doesn't work.

The important part here is a process known as self-distancing. As long as it's in your head, it's you. Your brain doesn't think about you the way it thinks about other people. This is where a lot of our cognitive biases come from, things like fundamental attribution error. If you're not familiar with that, the idea is that when we look at our own actions, we understand that they're contingent based on the circumstances of the world. If I have to cut someone off in traffic, it's because, look, I'm really in a hurry. This is an emergency. But that other guy who cut me off?

They're a jerk.

Yeah.

When you write it down, and it's not in your head anymore, in a way it's no longer you. It's the you of five minutes ago. It's past you. It's someone else now. Your mechanisms for understanding and critiquing behavior, and you're very good critics of other people's behavior, can now be brought to play in yourself. That's why you have to record it outside.

Next up: reflect. There are a lot of words here. Again, this is something for you to look at later. In the very simplest thing, we're going to go back to this idea: we're trying to be curious about other people, we're trying to be transparent about ourselves, and in the process we're going to look for our own triggers, things that set us off and make us not very curious and not very transparent.

This is an example where Norbert and Quinn had a discussion, and Norbert was doing the case. We know it's Norbert's case because, on the left-hand column, you'll notice it's Norbert's thoughts. Now, the question is, are there any telepaths here tonight? Anybody telepathic? Okay. You folks, you can write what the other person was thinking. All the non-telepaths, you have to write only what you were thinking.

This is Norbert's thought. It's Norbert's case. As you read the case, you read it in the same order that you wrote it. You read the dialogue first, on the right-hand side, and then you can read the thoughts on the left-hand side. Then you get a sense of what the dynamics are that are going on behind the scenes.

When you score it, you simply say, "Am I being curious?" You just mean it simply: how many questions did I ask? If the answer is zero, that's pretty much evidence you weren't being very curious. You might ask questions that are leading questions or aren't very genuine. That's not very curious either. "Jeffrey, weren't you trying to undermine me?"

That's not very curious. That's a statement, not a question.

A genuine curiosity is a question you ask where the answer might actually change your mind. If you're only gathering information to figure out how better to make your argument, you're not actually being very curious.

So you can start by looking for curiosity. The second thing is looking for transparency. In your left-hand column, go ahead and look for thoughts that you had but you didn't share in some form in the actual conversation.

You don't need to share them exactly. Norbert thinks, "Gosh, what a hypocrite you are." That's probably not so productive to say in the right-hand column. But you might find a way to say it that'd be more productive. You might say, "I really don't think what you're saying matches what you described before. Can you help me with the difference?"

Finally, you're going to look for your own triggers. As you do most of these, you're going to find patterns of your own behavior that you realize are difficult situations for you. That's useful, because you can start to plan alternative actions. In this case, Norbert realized the idea of autonomy was very important for him. If he felt there was something else going on, then he knows this might make him unreasonably angry.

Having done this, having reflected, it's time to revise. This is like refactoring. You're going to go back and say, "What's the conversation I could have had that would've been more productive?" You're going to look for a way to revise your dialogue, write it out, and say, "How could I have been more curious here?"

This is something you're remarkably successful at, because you're no longer in the heat of the moment, and it's no longer, in a sense, you. You're like, "Oh yeah, it turns out Jeff could've been more curious here. I wasn't able to in the moment, but looking back, that guy Jeff, he could've been. Here's what he might've said."

You can be more transparent. What were those things I didn't say? Can I find a way to bring them into the conversation? I can write out my revised dialogue about how things might have gone.

This is a way to practice things safely. You can write them out and then say, "No, that's not quite right," and score yourself again. This is the repeat. I'm going to go back and revise it, reflect on whatever my revision is, until I have something I'm pretty happy with.

Then the question is: now that I've got it on paper and I'm pretty happy with that, I need to get practice actually saying it. This is very useful to have a friend. If you need to, you can use the mirror, but friends are better because you can try role-playing here.

It turns out here we have an alternative dialogue.

I can give it a try if you're willing.

Where's mine? Let's see. I'm starting off.

Okay.

And you're going to tell me where the Strip is, because I can't find my way around Las Vegas. Where is the Strip?

It's there.

Oh, man. Everybody's told me it's over there, and I can't find it, and I'm really frustrated with that. You're the sixth person who told me that. Can you just take me there?

Oh, okay.

Fantastic. My original dialogue had all that stuff in the left-hand column about "why can't you just take me there," and all I said was, "Okay." Then I got lost again.

Having done that role play, the idea here is: how does it feel to actually say it? It's one thing to write out a script, but that doesn't mean you're going to feel comfortable actually saying it out loud. Every time we have somebody do this, they stumble, they um, they ah, they get confused, they can't say it. It's on the paper, but it's very difficult. So don't be surprised if you go try this. Don't get discouraged, because that's normal.

It's like when you first play the piano. Nothing comes out right. That's okay. That's what's expected.

This is that horrible learning stuff. You realize, "Okay, that's not the way I talk. That's not the way I would say it. I'm not comfortable saying it this way. Let's try again. Let's revise again."

Then a funny thing happens. When you're comfortable, "Yep, I like these words. I like how I say them," I can then try role reversal, because it turns out hearing them: "Oh, actually, I don't like the way that sounds." Back to the drawing board.

With those simple six Four Rs, you're able to start learning what a good conversation would sound like, and you begin practicing it.

Having done that, you can actually go back and revisit some of those conversations. "You know, I thought about the way that went, Squirrel, the other day, and I realized I wasn't very curious. I was trying so hard to convince you, I realized I didn't actually learn why you don't like my idea. Would you be willing to share that with me?"

Absolutely.

That's what you can get to in a very short period of time. What happens then? We're able to have those kinds of conversations that we all agree are the way to make effective decisions. We really start building more of a relationship here.

Now, we don't need to agree. You don't have to like penguins. It's okay. This is not about convincing the other person. What's important here is the sharing of information.

We take what was before a positional battle, where we're arguing from the top of our ladders, and I start explaining: "Here's what I saw and here's what I was thinking, and that's why I think this. Now, would you share mine?" At the end, as Squirrel shares his ladder, his experiences, his reasoning, his thoughts, and I share mine, we might not agree. But at least together, we now have more options. We have more information, and at least I understand him. He's no longer this irrational person who's just blocking me for no good reason. He's someone who has his own reasons, and maybe they value things differently from mine, but at least I understand what they are.

That can get us closer to the espoused theory that you all said and all thought: we like diversity, we want more opinions, we want to share our thoughts, and to that generative culture we talked about at the beginning.

What's the attribute of a generative culture? It's that together, we're both putting the mission ahead of the bureaucratic rules and ahead of our own personal glory. We're elevating the mission. We may disagree about the best way to perform the mission, but we understand that our differences are differences of opinion, not a difference in goal. We're still partners now on elevating that mission. What's the best way for us to jointly succeed?

Now, all this sounds very easy. I imagine you're thinking, "Yeah, I could do this." Well, let's try. Between now and the book signing, find yourself a piece of paper, try writing one up, and bring it to us at the book signing and share your experience. We'd like to hear your successes.

Our experience is that people will feel very comfortable right up to the time they need to speak. Bring your role play with us, and we can role-play as we sign your book. I'd like to hear how that goes.

All right. We're looking forward to that. What we just covered here is a very basic foundation for conversation analysis. In the book, we go and expand on this into five different conversations. This is really going back to Squirrel throwing the book across the room, saying we want to give people more concrete examples about how to start doing things like building trust; how to get the fear conversation; how to have the why conversation: why are we doing this, what is the mission; commitment; and finally, accountability.

Now, we have a question for you. One of the things here is, what's left to address? We really want to learn from all of you about what happens when you try using these tools. We'd also like to know if you think we're missing some conversations that we should be addressing, or if you think there's something where, nope, I have an obstacle, and I don't understand how these tools would help.

If you want to let us know how that goes, as we mentioned, we'll be doing the book signing tonight. We would love to see you there and hear about your cases. You can talk to us afterwards. We'll be here, and then you can reach us at the Conversational Transformation website.

But for now, any questions?

Q&A

Everyone's afraid. Should we go back to the fear conversation?

I'm thinking of practicing this in a group. So now you have two people and you're curiosity-learning. But now you have five people, and we're trying to decide where to go. Does that increase the complexity of this?

It does. That's why we started with two, because it was easier and easier to fit on the board.

To repeat that, what you were saying is that we'd started practicing with two, but what if you have a group of people? We talked about five. That's a really good question.

In practice, it's really good to have these as a shared toolkit, in our experience. We have done this with groups of people practicing together, both their own conversations separately, each bringing, "I was frustrated by this one. I was frustrated by that one." They can be very helpful because people can help you point out, "You actually don't sound very curious there, even in your revision." It's very good feedback that way.

But it also works when you have that sort of five people all in the same conversation, all frustrated.

There's actually a really good article called "Skilled Incompetence" that was published in Harvard Business Review, because that's what we have. We're very practiced at having bad conversations. He describes a case where they had a group of people who'd been stuck for months and months on a decision, and what they did is they did this kind of conversational analysis with each person writing up how they thought conversations would go. Then they shared them with each other to say, "Here's how you could be more effective making your point with me." They were actually able to jointly design the dialogues and, in doing that, build the kind of trust to get to the point of making a decision.

So it's a great question: can we do this together? Yes, this is actually a very effective way to overcome dynamics that can have people deadlocked.

Just so you don't get discouraged, this also works in the case where you're the only one out of the five who's using these techniques, because often people will say, "Boy, you asked a lot of questions in that meeting. What's going on?" You can start to tell them about it. Even if you don't, you will still learn an awful lot more because you'll be curious and transparent. We often see that just one person in an organization can start making changes like this and have a big effect.

We had another question over here somewhere. I see one here.

A little bit more of a comment, but I think the most powerful thing that I heard was the importance of the idea that people don't have to agree. I happen to work at Amazon, and that's one of the big parts of our culture, which I happen to think is a generative culture. Others might disagree. But we bring that out, that we have a mission, and it's really important that disagreeing but still getting things done is a real important thing that we bring out.

The comment here is that at Amazon, where this gentleman works, and at other generative cultures, it's very valuable to disagree. I think we would agree that that's a valuable thing.

We were actually asked earlier in an interview, as a consulting CTO who has worked with something like 60 clients, and someone said, "What's the hallmark of the companies that you see who are really succeeding?" What they do is they mine for conflict. They go, "Where's the conflict? Is it over here? Is it over there?" They're looking for it. They're not trying to avoid it: "Oh no, conflict is bad." They're looking around: "Do I have a conflict with you? With you? It'd be really useful if I had a conflict with you."

That's really counterintuitive. But when you do that, and it sounds like this gentleman is doing that in his organization, that's a very useful thing to do because you can expose things you're not curious enough about, you're not transparent enough about, and you can make better decisions.

You learn a lot from disagreements.

You learn a lot from disagreements, you're right.

People have heard of the phrase psychological safety. That's something that comes up quite a lot. What does that mean? Psychological safety is another way of describing a generative culture. Psychological safety is one where you trust that everyone is putting the mission first, and therefore it's safe to disagree because you know that you share that common commitment to the same end result.

We got time for one last one. Be quick.

What happens when you have that kind of conversation in, say, a pathological organization? A pathological organization where the person actually buys into the pathological, who thinks it's great, so you're having it with a person who buys into the glory and personal gain, who discovers their ladder of meaning is pretty toxic?

This is an interesting challenge, and it is one that's come up before, and it's one that we've dealt with. Someone who is pathological: two things can happen.

First, you might find that the person who seemed pathological actually was not. For me, this is the most common thing. Very often, being in a position of power can be very difficult in the sense that you get used to the unconscious exercise of power, and people take what you say as commands. Sometimes it happens that it's a mistake.

Other times, it's not. People deliberately say, "This is what needs to happen." It turns out, in that environment, remember, you're going to start also being transparent. You might say, "Look, I understand this is what you're trying to accomplish. Are you curious about other information? I'm going to offer something."

Again, you might not agree, but if you use this as an ability to speak up and bring up information that otherwise you just are saying, "Well, I'm not going to because no one cares," you're actually changing the environment. Humans are very good at changing their behavior as their environment changes.

It's hard to believe, but you are part of that other person's environment. I know you think you're the hero of the movie, because that's what it feels like. We're in first person. But you're a bit character for them. When you start changing, you're changing their environment, and they will change in response.

It doesn't always work. But at the very worst, you find out and you can verify, and you have verifiable, actionable information: this person actually is pathological, and this is not going to work for me. That's useful. That's a win. I always say to myself, the minimum is I'll find out that this isn't working. More often than not, actually 90% of the time, I find I can change the interaction with that person even a small amount.

All right, and that's it. We're out of time. Thank you very much.

Thanks.