So before we go on lets share a bit from Amy Edmondson one of the core voices in the area

““Psychological safety does not mean that you feel comfortable all the time. Psychological safety means you feel comfortable talking about what makes you uncomfortable”

Another great researcher in this area Patrick Lencioni places trust at the foundation of his triangle (Its illustration 3), followed by healthy conflict, that totally makes sense, not getting into a brain battle wit Lencioni, but like most models, and life itself, things are rarely static or linear.

Trust is constantly being built, tested, damaged and repaired and I feel healthy conflict can be one of the ways we strengthen it. When we disagree, even passionately, those human hearts beating fast and faces flushing, we discover we can challenge each other without damaging the relationship, we learn something important, the relationships can withstand discomfort…. It took me a long time to learn this, but I am glad I did, my heart still beats to fast, but most of the time I can keep in the moment rather than run away…

Of course, how we navigate that conflict matters, a heated conversation handled with respect, curiosity and care can deepen trust, while one handled badly can destroy it. I like to look at Lencioni’s triangle as a set of interconnected conditions rather than a staircase we climb.

Trust makes healthy conflict possible, healthy conflict, handled well, builds trust and that trust makes the next difficult conversation a little easier.

OK back to my point, I do not feel you should wait till you have psychological safety, I feel you build the retros with care, set the edges loud and clear, and swim with the needs of the rooms eb and flow… yes, but i think retrospectives are one of the ways we can build psychological safety.

One of my favourite phrases is microdosing discomfort (I thought I had come up with it, but after a quick google a few others are using it as well dammmmit). The idea that we can build our tolerance for difficult things by experiencing them in small, manageable doses. I think this applies to retrospectives. Start gently, make it easy for people to contribute, and each time push the edges a little further. Over time, us fleshy people sacks become a little braver, a little more willing to say the thing that needs saying, and a little more comfortable hearing things we might not agree with.

I have a peer at TPXimpact who is incredible at this. She will say the thing that I suspect everyone else is thinking but nobody quite dares to say, once she’s opened that door, everyone else comes running through. Sometimes all a team needs is someone willing to go first.

Lead by example people… I repeat (sorry saying that a lot today)leaaaaaaad by example

Of course, this only works when people are treated well for speaking up, if someone takes a risk and gets punished for it, all we have taught the team is to keep their mouths shut. The DM/facilitator /Lead has a responsibility to help the team respond with curiosity rather than judgement.

I miss being in the room… another ‘there I said it’

A few conversations following my last blog about retrospectives got my brain ticking about how much I miss running them/ being a participant in person. I feel like they were more honest, not that becoming liars was a side effect of the pandemic, but more that its a different experience online, its not necessarily easier, but there was something about sharing a physical space that I feel encouraged people to stay with a hard conversation a little longer, or some of those conversations pulled a thread with them as we walked through the door, maybe not directly in the retro, but those moments still mattered and fed into the future of the team and project.

Online, I find it’s relatively easy to close the laptop and walk away from something uncomfortable, and I hate myself for admitting that, but I do. In person, you’re going to see those people in the corridor, make a cup of tea together, sit beside them that afternoon or tomorrow. There’s something about that continued human connection that can encourage us to work through the awkward bits.

BUT BUT BUTTT… we can still bring some of the things that worked in the room into our online retros. Especially the things that involve our hands.

Start with an egg…

I think we underestimate the humble check-in. That little liminal moment at the beginning of a session that helps people arrive, settle and leave whatever they’ve just been doing behind. It doesn’t need to be too deep, keep it light and people can share what they want to share… something as lite as what type of egg do you feel like today, and why?

You get scrambled eggs, fried eggs, sunny-side-up eggs, occasionally something completely unexpected. I once heard someone say they felt like an egg that had survived, hatched into a chick and woken up to discover everything was going to be okay. I wish I could remember who said it because it was lovely, thanks whoever it was….

It’s playful, but it also tells you something about the room. Who’s exhausted? Who’s feeling positive? Who might need a little more support? Has everyone eaten? (remember snacks in person, or remind them to bring supplies online) Do we need a break?

It also gives everyone a chance to speak before the harder conversations begin. That small transition, through the liminal space between whatever came before and the retro itself, matters. Maybe its just me but I don’t particularly like going in dry.

Draw the journey, then talk about it

One of my favourite retrospectives for smaller teams is a timeline, sometimes called a history map. We did it a lot at Hyper Island, it works incredibly well in person and it translated easily as we flipped online during the pandemic.

The facilitator created a simple timeline of the project, sprint or period you’re reflecting on. I’ve sometimes shared a week-by-week summary beforehand so people can remember what happened. Then everyone draws their own emotional journey across it. Happy face at top, sad below…. Whendid things go well, why? Frustrated? Excited? Exhausted? And gain…. why

Keep it simple, simple formats leave room for the hard thinking to happen inside them.

Everyone shares their timeline, one at a time, and you bring them together into a collective picture, on a large flipchart or on a whiteboard. I’ve run variations of this with loads of teams, and the results have always really helped the team (IMO) after they did the hard honest reflective work.

Sometimes everyone’s lines follow roughly the same path. Sometimes one person’s experience is completely different. I’ve seen someone start a project full of enthusiasm while everyone around them struggled, only for their enthusiasm to slowly disappear just as the rest of the team began to enjoy themselves.

Nobody had realised, or spoken about it and one persons line slowly bt surely plummeted and the quality of the work started being pulled with it.

Seeing those lines together created one of those wonderful ‘ohhhhh’ moments. People began to understand what had been happening around them, and how their own behaviour might have affected others.

This is particularly useful when you want to reflect on HOW the team worked together, alongside WHAT they delivered. Content Process Model, illustration 4)

Six minutes, three drawings

Francesca (Chess) Marsh and Sarah Norman two of our ace DMs at TPXimpact shared another lovely approach with me.

Give everyone six minutes to draw three things that represent the last month:

• Something you’re proud of.
• Something we could improve.
• Something we can take action on going forward.

When the time is up, everyone takes turns sharing their drawings and reflections.

That’s it, no complicated framework, no artistic ability required. Sharpies, Post-its, biro scribbles, whatever you’ve got, you could even use plasticine or objects from around the house.

Don’t forget the ‘proud of bit! It’s a good finisher, cathartic after you have dived into the darker depths of the hard hard work. We can sometimes spend so much time discussing what went wrong that we forget to recognise what went well.

You can also put a collection of images into Miro or Mural and invite people to choose pictures that represent their experiences. We used variations of this again during Covid, including asking people to create little portraits or arrangements from objects around their homes,

The important thing is giving people something to point at while they talk.…. I need to re-embrace this, a lot of this feels cringe initially, but strap into it as cringe it gets shit done…. For me at work pretending to be effortlessly cool and not allowing yourself to actually get into stuff is killing creativity, curiosity and connection… which, well isn’t cool, what is is working as a high functioning team and moving forward together.

Why our hands help us think

I’ve written before about embodied cognition, the idea that thinking is connected to what our bodies do, including how we move, draw and interact with objects.Drawing or making something can help us organise thoughts, notice connections and express experiences that might be difficult to put into words immediately.

There’s also something useful about having a third thing in the conversation. Instead of everyone staring at someone while they explain how they felt, they can talk through a drawing, an object or an image. It gives the conversation somewhere to land and can make sharing feel a little less exposing.

Anddddd yes, this works online. Ask people to bring pen and paper, draw away from their screens, then hold their creations up to the camera, just remember to turn off your background blur!

A few things to take away

You don’t need an elaborate retrospective format to create a meaningful conversation. Sometimes a pen, a piece of paper and a good question will do more than a beautifully organised digital board.

My takeaways would be:

• Start small. Build people’s confidence through manageable moments of discomfort.
• Make the check-in work harder. It helps people arrive, speak and gives you a sense of the room.
• Change the medium. Drawing, making and choosing images can open up different conversations.
• Offer different ways to take part. Give people options to speak, write, draw or reflect individually so everyone has a way to contribute that works for them.
• Look for different experiences. The moments when people’s timelines diverge are often worth exploring.
• Protect the person who goes first. How the team responds to honesty determines whether others will follow.
• Finish with something useful. Make space for the emotional reflection, then agree what the team wants to carry forward or change.

Lets finish where we started, remember that psychological safety is built through what happens when people take interpersonal risks, each retrospective gives us another opportunity to practise.

A little discomfort, a little courage, and hopefully a team that becomes more willing to have the conversations that matter.

Shall we finish on my most over used quotes…… Oh YES we will

“When we avoid difficult conversations, we trade short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction.”

Peter Bromberg

Reading Rabbit holes for your delite

5 dysfunctions of a team — Patrick Lencioni
Patric Lencioni the Table Group
Amy Edmondson Fearless Organisations
Fun Retros
History Map — Hyper Island
Hello Agile from Onions to zombies

“If you adopt only one agile practice let it be retrospectives. Everything else will follow” Woody Zuill

First, the prime directive

Before we go anywhere, I want to start with Norman L. Kerth’s Prime Directive for retrospectives, I am a BIG fan of this…. In basics it asks us to believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew, their skills, the resources available and the situation they were in.

Now, keep that in the back pocket of your brain please as we go through this, because retros can bring out the very best and occasionally (maybe more than occasionally) the very worst in us. If we’re going to reflect on what went wrong, we need to leave the blame at the door. Even Darth Vader, who I feel would have liked the term ‘Prime Directive’ might have benefited from a retro or two, although I suspect the Death Star team had a few issues with psychological safety….

For anyone unfamiliar with agile, a retrospective (retro) is a regular opportunity for a team to reflect on how they’ve worked together, what they’ve learnt and what they might change. They’re often held at the end of a sprint or project, but reflection doesn’t need to wait until the end…. In fact it shouldn’t because as I seem to say repeatedly at the moment ‘Reflection is a skill’ it helps us learn, self-correct, master our roles, and along with a million other things, feeds directly into stronger team performance.

OK back to retros

I’ve facilitated and participated in retros that have been glorious, cathartic learning experiences, where I feel we left understanding each other and our work a little better. I’ve also sat through the icy silences, fixed grins, fake-positive Post-its and the collective agreement that everything is GREAT! REALLLLLLLY GREAT

Dear reader, it was not great…. and it did not get better.

So I asked my beautiful brainy LinkedIn network about their best retros, what made them work and what they’d learnt along the way.

The good: When people feel heard and something actually changes

Vishal Bakshi shared a simple approach. Everyone independently suggests topics, the group votes on what needs discussing now, later or perhaps not at all, and the team works through the priorities together. Vishal also described post-mortems that separate fixing problems from sharing learning across the wider organisation.

IMO I like this because giving people a say in what gets discussed gives them some control and ownership over the conversation, making them more likely to engage in it.

Keith Office talked about capturing wins, frustrations and blockers as they happen, rather than expecting everyone to remember everything at the end. He also emphasised inclusive facilitation, allowing a second session when needed, and leaving with one or two experiments that have clear owners.

I love this, I really feel e often put enormous pressure on a single retro, like a stiletto on ice trying to resolve everything, everywhere all at once…. Sometimes the most useful thing is to identify one small change, try it and see what happens. Little and often, building those muscles of reflection and learning.

The bad: When the format becomes the focus

Amy Hart shared some lovely examples of playful retros, including decorating conkers to represent how people felt and asking what flavour of ice cream they’d be. She also shared a Coronation Street-themed retro that didn’t quite land with everyone, a useful reminder that cultural references aren’t always shared.

Neil Vass recommended a gameshow format he’d learnt from Stephen Mounsey, where people guess how colleagues might answer questions. A playful way to explore how others experience working in the same team.

I’m a fan of a bit of silliness at the right moment, and these both keep it simple, a bit like a lot of ‘fun retros’ Sometimes we need reminding that we’re just fleshy little squirrels hurtling through space on a rock, and perhaps we can loosen our grip on things for a moment. Play can help people relax, connect and see things differently.

But Ali Hanbury made an ace point….. DO keep it simple and build the trust. My take is that the container should be simple enough for the thinking inside it to become complex. If people are spending their energy figuring out the activity, we’re losing the space for reflection…. Did I mention reflection is a valuable skill? …. Good good remember that my lovelies

Echoing this Amy also rightly reminded us, know your audience. UCD them, whose in the room and deliberately design it round their needs rather than throwing ‘Stop Start, Continue’ at them for the 100th time (SSC has its place, no hate)

OH AND….. Amy and Anna Dahlström Williams mentioned snacks, or a fancier version the Swedish tradition of fika, but yep, if in perso….. snacks. Never underestimate good snacks.

The ugly: When everyone knows something is wrong but nobody says it

Charlie Fountaine questioned whether retros can sometimes be the worst possible environment for difficult conversations. If a team is already struggling, asking everyone to open up in a large online meeting, staring at a Mural board, can feel pretty awful.

I agree. I’ve seen it, the harder the conversation needs to be, the more tempting it becomes to avoid it, but TBH thats the very reason it needs to happen…. the very teams that might benefit most can find themselves trapped in a cycle of surface-level positivity, its designing a retro to break the cycle, bravely and deliberately as a DM/Lead or facilitator

Ray Newman emphasised the importance of leadership modelling openness and rewarding people for speaking up rather than punishing them. Richard S. argued that culture will trump format….. Ali Hambury pointed out “It’s not everyone’s comfort zone and takes some real time and energy to create a safer space, sometimes years. Even in small teams. “ tho not all teams these days are together for years….

All true….. BUT I also think the retro itself can help build that culture, we can microdose discomfort (yep you know I love this), gradually nudging the team towards more honest conversations. The facilitator/DM/Lead has a responsibility to hold that space sit with the silence/tension and help people explore what’s underneath the polite agreement, ask the hard whys

I’ve experienced a rather fractious retro where I disagreed with someone quite strongly, we managed to have a respectful disagreement, and afterwards I found I actually trusted them more, I was very meh about them before, simply as we had not really worked massively together in the team and were remote… I liked that they were honest, there I felt I knew they’d tell me the truth (they did). Patrick Lencioni’s work on trust and productive conflict comes to mind here. Sometimes I feel working through disagreement helps us build trust. INVERTTTTT that triangle life is complex and things do not always follow the order of diagrams

Of course, we need to be careful, discomfort can be useful, but pushing people into conversations they’re not ready for can do damage, thats not the aim here. This is where facilitation, care, empathy and understanding the people in the room really matters.

So, what the hell makes a good retro?

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, authors of Agile Retrospectives, have long championed creating the conditions for teams to reflect, learn and improve together. Their approach includes setting the stage, gathering data, generating insights, deciding what to do and closing the retrospective, a useful reminder that the conversation needs both care and direction.

Across all these contributions, a few things have swirled in my head brewing like a good yorkshire tea….. None groundbreaking, all important

• keep the structure simple
• design it deliberately for needs of the room
• make participation possible for everyone
• create opportunities for honesty
• pay attention to what isn’t being said
• make sure something happens afterwards.

PLUS remember that reflection has a human purpose too. Susan Wheelan’s work on group development, alongside Tuckman’s adjourning stage, reminds me how important it can be to acknowledge what a team has experienced together. Sometimes a retro gives people permission to make sense of something, recognise each other’s experiences and move on.

One last thing, finishing where I started, with the Prime Directive. No one really mentioned setting the rules or guidelines for the room. Boxers don’t enter a fight without knowing that low blows aren’t allowed, and while I don’t want a fight, I do feel that agreeing a few boundaries, loud and clear, helps get minds and hearts in the right place before you start.

Next time: Getting our hands involved

I’ve also been talking to Francesca (Chess) Marsh and Sarah Norman about more hands-on approaches to reflection, and I’m hoping to pick the brains of Scott Drayton and Eva O’Brien too.

In the next post, I want to explore what makes a genuinely good retro, including how drawing, making, moving and embodied cognition can help us see things differently, get beyond the Post-its and perhaps have conversations we wouldn’t otherwise have.

Because getting from arghhhhh to ahhhhh takes work…. and sometimes the most valuable bit happens right in the middle of the groan zone.

A huge thank you to everyone who shared their experiences.
More to come.

Ray Newman — CGI — Director of Content Design ( Ray Newman )
Ali Hanbury PHD — Adnodd Head of Strategic Engagement and Communication ( Ali Hanbury )
Charlie Fountaine — Service Designer ( Charlie Fountaine )
Amy Hart — Developer Auto Trader
Vishal Bakshi — Data and Machine Learning Consultant
Anna Dahlström Williams — Author Founder Fika (Anna Dahlström )
Kieth Office — Delivery Manager TPXimpact
Neil Vass — Deliver Sessions Meet Up Co Organiser ( Neil Vass )
Richard S — Learning Manager KPMG
Harry Bailey — Grow Inc, Agency Delivery Specialist ( Harry Bailey )

Retros…. The good the bad and… yep you guessed it, those ugly ones was originally published in Analyst’s corner on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A long, long time ago (yes, I’m going to tell you a tale, sit down and get comfy my fiends), I was a university lecturer, I’d been doing some really interesting work in public spaces and wanted to start writing a little more in the academic research space. So I wrote up one of my projects and shared it with a professor. The work itself was good IMO, but I was nervous about my writing. The feedback I got was pretty brutal, she essentially called me an idiot, in slightly ruder terms, and took the piss out of the way I’d written it as it wasn’t academic enough.

AND in all honesty she was right about that last bit, I was not an academic writer, mainly because I had not been practicing for a while. There was a seed of useful feedback in there, even if it was wrapped in a massive wad of shit. HOWEVER instead of taking that feedback and improving, I put my pen down in a drawer, locked that drawer and burnt the drawers down. It remained that way for the next 20-odd years or so, I wrote plenty of things privately, some even academic that got good feedback from the hallowed halls, but I never published them or shared in public. Somewhere along the way, I’d taken somebody else’s words and turned them into a belief about myself. I wasn’t good at writing, I shouldn't’t share, it was weak, so why bother?

There’s a quote often attributed to Anaïs Nin: “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.” Yep I had swallowed that whole, again it wasn’t a lie, there was truth, but I had solidified it into a reality about myself, I was an idiot when it came to writing, I’d allowed one person’s judgement to become my own internal narrative. The thing is, I can’t control how somebody speaks to me, but I can control what I do afterwards, and for a very long time, I sadly let that moment make the decision for me.

What are you giving your power to?

I’ve been using Stephen Covey’s circle of influence model alot recently in learning sessions and workshops, plus personally I come back to again and again. At its simplest, it asks us to think about three things… what is within our control, what we can influence, and what sits outside both.

I couldn’t control that professor’s behaviour, her opinion or the way she delivered feedback. BUTTTT I could control whether I picked up my pen again, I could and SHOULD have practised, asked somebody else for feedback, learned how to write academically and slowly built my confidence. Instead, I spent years carrying something I couldn’t change.

I feel this happens in workplaces all the time, some people worry about other people’s opinions, decisions being made above us, difficult colleagues or situations we have very little influence over. We pour so much energy into those things that there’s often very little left for the things we can actually do something about.

Covey suggests that when we’re proactive and focus our energy on what we can influence, that circle can gradually expand. I see it in my job a lot, theres ace team members that proactively vibrate in the areas they can influence and people see what they can do, relationships develop, trust grows and opportunities open up… I love what Laura Yarrow talks about in her work around trusted agitators in basics its about doing the less visible, foundational groundwork to build credibility so that when you do push back or advocate for the user, stakeholders respect your perspective.

The opposite is also true, when we constantly fight things outside our influence, we can slowly wear ourselves down, plus annoy others often along the way…. SO this is where resilience comes in.

Building resilience through practice TL:DR

I’ve recently been doing some masterclasses drawing on Navy SEAL approaches to resilience, among other things like empathy and listening… but lets stick to resilance atm

Heres the TLDR version…. I dive in more after this

• Embrace the suck: Accept that discomfort and difficulty are sometimes part of learning and growing. We can learn to sit with that discomfort rather than immediately retreating from it.
• Challenge, commitment and control: See difficult situations as challenges we can learn from, stay committed to what matters and focus our energy on what we can control.
• Micro goals: Break overwhelming challenges into small, manageable steps. As I like to call it, microdosing discomfort.
• Visualisation and self-talk: Prepare for what might go wrong, think through how you could respond, but also imagine what could go brilliantly, don’t let your brain run away with the worst-case scenario.
• Repetition and mutual support: Build confidence through practice, learn alongside others and surround yourself with people who can support you, challenge you and help you regain perspective.

For me it all knits back to Covey’s circle of influence, they give us practical ways to focus on what we can do, build confidence in our own abilities and gradually stretch the boundaries of what we feel capable of.

Seeing challenges rather than threats

Happiness researcher Shawn Achor (Watch his talks, pure joy) talks about reframing stressful situations as challenges rather than threats, I sometimes walk into facilitation spaces where things are a little difficult, tensions are high or people aren’t particularly happy to be there. It’s easy to see that as a threat and let my cave brain kick in and start worrying about everything that could go wrong. But what if I see it as a challenge instead? What can I bring to that room? What can I influence? What can I learn? I’m still going to feel a little nervous, I am not a machine, I am a fleshy human with emotions, but by shifting how I see the situation, I give myself permission to try, learn and hopefully grow a little along the way.

Microdosing discomfort

OK so embrace the ‘suck’… the Nany Seals don’t phrase it that way obvs, accepting that discomfort is sometimes part of learning and growing.

I want to make it chrystal clear here I AM NOT not suggesting we should put ourselves into damaging situations. But sometimes we are going to graze our knees a little or get tougher skin and a few tasty callouses from picking up slightly heavier weights, because that’s how we build strength.

When my CDO Ben Holliday gently encouraged me to start writing again, I was terrified, he had no idea he was opening the locked up and burnt drawer that I had been carefully ignoring for years. My first blog wasn’t particularly good, i have written about how i I felt sick publishing it. I got some nice comments on Linkedin, some freiendly feedback, i made it better and wrote another, eventually, I challenged myself to write 52 blogs in a year. Each one became a little easier because I’d practised doing the uncomfortable thing….

I call this microdosing discomfort, it’s the couch to 5K approach you don’t start by running a marathon. You go for a walk, then a longer walk, then perhaps a little jog, if something feels enormous, what’s the smallest increment you can start with … and start

Preparing for the difficult bits

Another idea I like from the Navy Seal resilience approaches is mentally rehearsing what might go wrong. Before I facilitate a difficult session, I might think about the projector failing, somebody derailing the conversation or half the participants arriving late, I consider how I’d respond, what I can prepare and what I might need to adapt.

But I also imagine the good things, what if somebody has a breakthrough?what if a difficult group finds a way forward? what if the session creates a conversation that wouldn’t otherwise have happened?

That balance matters, for my sanikty I need to acknowledge potential difficulties without allowing myself to spiral into them. The idea being we prepare for what we can control, consider where we might have influence and accept that some things will simply happen.

Repetition helps enormously, I learned facilitation by doing it, again and again and again, in different situations, with different people, hard, fun, weird, big groups, small, leaders, kids… I took it all, no matter how nervous it made me feel. I often facilitated alongside brilliant people I could watch and learn from. Early doors having somebody in the room who could catch me if I fell on my face gave me the confidence to try. I still learn every time I facilitate, and I still sometimes feel nervous beforehand.

Resilience is something we build together

There’s something lovely about the role other people play in resilience, I’ve got my people I am priviliged, and 1000000% love them for being my people, the ones I can have a good moan with when something has gone badly, or laugh if it went a bit wonky, we might high-five our failures for a bit, have a laugh, and then somebody will inevitably say, “Yeah, but that bit went really well” or “but I learnt X” we never doom spiral, its more feel it, learn, then let it go….

I find having people around me who can help regain perspective is incredibly valuable. You know those people who encourage you to try again, who give useful feedback, help recognise what we can change and what we might need to let go of.

Maya Angelou wrote, “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it” BREATHE THAT IN…. Maya wrote this in Letter to My Daughter, a collection of essayistic letters written to the daughter she never had, she reflects on personal agency, enduring hardships, and maintaining dignity and self-worth through life’s trials, those trials were more than mine and I am honored to always read her words that seem to sit in my head and heart and help guide me

We can’t always prevent difficult experiences, unkind words or things going wrong, but we can practise how we respond, and we can build the confidence to try again.

I’m going to invite you to do a thing, which I do quite often and it helps…. have a think about what you’re carrying around that was never yours to carry. Use coveys sphere and plot it out. Where are you spending energy on things you cannot control? And what’s one small, slightly uncomfortable thing you could do this week to start expanding your circle of influence?

Because as much as for years I felt it was the professors fault I stopped writing, it wasn’t, it was totally all my own fault, and I wish I’d picked my pen up straight back up 20 years earlier.

Rabbit hole reading for your delite

TEDxBloomington, Shawn Achor “The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance

Fear, momentum and thinking in public, my learning from writing 52 blogs in one year — me

Trusted Agitator — Laura Yarrow

Start, suck, stick at it…. swimming into the unknown (unknowns) — me

A Navy SEAL Explains 8 Secrets To Grit And Resilience

Video — Sphere of Influence

Covey 7 Habits

How I put down the shame and picked up resilience was originally published in Analyst’s corner on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After a recent team away day, where our Service Design team had spent time painting portraits of each other, I got MEGA FOMO I was sitting on the sofa with him and decided I’d have a go at drawing his portrait. As I started to sketch, I realised I hadn’t really LOOKED at him for ages, like properly looked. The sort of looking where you study the shape of someone’s face, the lines around their eyes, the little details that make them who they are.

He’s aged, of course he has, we both have, his face has softened, the laughter lines have become a little deeper, and there’s a tiny mark near the bridge of his nose that I found myself studying as I tried to capture it on paper. He’s more delicious than ever, but as I sat there drawing him, I realised the face in front of me wasn’t quite the same as the picture of him I’d been carrying around in my head. That picture was perhaps a few years younger, a lot less detailed, in basics an accumulation of all the versions of him I’ve known over the last 15 years.

Apparently, and there’s research to back this up, not just me musing, we can miss surprisingly significant changes in things we see a lot. Psychologists call this change blindness. It reminds me of the story of Louis XVI, who tried to flee France disguised as a servant in 1791. Despite his face appearing on French coins, he travelled for hours before being recognised, reportedly by a postmaster who compared him to the image on a banknote. It’s not quite change blindness in the scientific sense, but it does make you wonder how much of what we see is shaped by what we expect to see, rather than what’s actually in front of us.

Anyway, back to the point, it got me thinking about the people we work with, and an exercise I’ve facilitated many, many times over the years.

A room full of terrible portraits

I say ‘terrible’ to grab your attention, I will be honest most are awesome in their strange way, and its not the portrait thats ultimately importand… its the ‘portraiting’ (I feel theres an obvious real word for that)

The exercise is simple ive run with 6 people up to just shy of 100 people, although the larger the group, the more gloriously chaotic it becomes (I split the 100 into 2 groups, rotating in parallel). You divide the team in half, with one group sitting in an inner circle as the muses and the other standing opposite them as the artists, armed with paper and different coloured pens.

Each artist has around 30 seconds to a minute to start drawing the person in front of them. When the time is up, the artists move one place to the right, passing their drawing to the next person, who has a different coloured pen and adds another layer. You keep rotating until everyone has contributed, then swap places so the artists become the muses and the whole thing starts again.

By the end, everyone has a portrait created by half the team. Some are surprisingly good, others are spectacularly awful. We put them up in a gallery, wander around, laugh together and reflect on how it felt to draw and be drawn.

Drawing makes us look differently

Our brains are remarkably good at recognising familiar faces without needing to examine every detail, drawing interrupts that process, gives us a new lens to look through, its not about the shape of them, like the bouma of a word, we have to pay attention, like reallll attention, to the curve of their eyebrows, sparkle in their eyes, the fleckle of freckles, flick of greying hair and the corers of their mouth twitching into a smile as being observed in this way is a little weird.

There’s research into what happens when we draw, a 2022 study from Goldsmiths, University of London explored how artists and non-artists direct their visual attention while drawing. Researchers found differences in eye movements during drawing that weren’t apparent when participants were simply looking at an image. Drawing involves moving our attention between the whole and the details, examining shapes and relationships rather than relying entirely on what we think something looks like.

I love that, especially if i pair it with the assumptions we build about people over time. Like wth my partner, we become familiar with their behaviours, preferences and ways of working, and gradually stop looking quite so closely. We often know how they’ll react, their odd lil ways and what they’ll say, what they’re good at, wellllll at least we think we do.

The connection in paying attention

Drawing another person can feel quite intimate, even when the resulting portrait makes them look like a space Victorian ghost or a jacket potato with eyebrows. You’re giving someone your attention in a way we rarely do at work, and they’re allowing themselves to be observed, it a little liminal door opened and allowed by the portrait you are drawing between you.

Research by psychologist Harry Reis and colleagues into perceived partner responsiveness explores how feeling understood, validated and cared for contributes to human connection. Being drawn isn’t the same as being understood, but I do think there’s an interesting parallel in the attention we give each other.

There’s vulnerability too, someone is studying your face while you’re attempting something you’re probably terrible at. That shared imperfection can be pretty damn liberating in teams where we’re usually expected to be competent and polished, knowing we are not (thats not a slight, we are humans, we are messy). Because each person contributes to the portrait, the finished drawing becomes a wonderfully messy collection of perspectives, a real team is everything, owned portrait, reminding us that we all see the same person slightly differently.

More than a coffee and chat

I’ve started to do more hands on activities recently, a bit of lego here, some drawing or plastercine there and I am pushing for more in person sessions where possible, there’s some interesting psychology behind this called embodied cognition, the idea that we don’t just think with our brains, our bodies play a part too. Working with our hands, whether drawing, painting or building something with LEGO, can help us explore ideas, make connections and express things we might struggle to put into words. It’s part of the thinking behind LEGO Serious Play in basics, which i think most folks have heard of, where making something physical gives us another way to think, reflect and communicate.

Recently at our away day our Service Design team, led by the ace Kelly Duggan paired up to paint portraits in small groups. It changed the dynamic of simply sitting down for a coffee, we wanted an activity to help the team bond as we scale and these beautiful portraits (they really were!) were an ace activity. There was something to do with our hands, a reason to really look at each other, and space for conversation to unfold without the pressure to constantly fill the silence.

We put so much effort into helping teams communicate and connect, introducing frameworks, personality profiles and team charters, but in my experience sometimes a box of coloured pens and permission to be terrible at drawing can create something equally valuable.

OK so I’m not suggesting portraits magically build trust or solve difficult team dynamics, but they create a moment to pay attention, be curious and to see people outside their usual roles.

As I sat on the sofa drawing someone I’ve loved for 15 years, and really looked at them it allowed me to think about how we spend so much time alongside people and how often we actually make real time or opportunity to really see them….

I’m currently thinking of more ways to create these moments and going through my pre pandemic toolbox (Does anyone else feel like theres a sort of second emergence coming?)

I wrote this in a workshop bid recently to help bed in why I wanted 3 boxes of lego after a few furrowed brows that senior leaders may not want to ‘play’ we did … they did, feel free to use it to help unsure minds… because when people draw, doodle, build with Lego, clay or other materials, it can help them:

• Think through their hands. Making something physical can help ideas emerge as people build, rather than requiring them to formulate the whole answer first.
• Make the abstract concrete. Culture, relationships, identity and values are difficult to describe. Metaphor and physical models give people another language for expressing them.
• Surface tacit knowledge. People often know or feel things that they struggle to articulate directly. Making can help bring some of that implicit knowledge to the surface.
• Create richer stories. Instead of saying things like “collaboration matters”, someone can point to part of their model and explain why it is there, what it represents and the experience behind it.
• Give everyone something to contribute. If everyone builds first, you are less reliant on whoever speaks fastest or loudest shaping the conversation.
• Create a shared object to think with. Once the models are on the table, people can literally combine, move, remove and negotiate ideas. The conversation becomes about the thing between you, rather than one person’s opinion versus another’s.

Reading rabbit holes

Embodied Cognition

https://www.sessionlab.com/methods/portrait-gallery

Stick to the Script

Nope not them, I mean a good in depth set the team up to succeed kick off.

In Agile teams we talk a lot about responding to change, collaboration, communication and people over processes, but those things become much harder if we haven’t spent any time understanding the actual people we’re actually collaborating with, those fleshy complicated humans who never quite behave the way you think they will.

A kick-off gives you space to understand the problem, the purpose and what you know so far, but also to understand each other.
Who is in this team?
What are our roles, wheres the overlap.. You’r a BA, I’m a SD… hmmm whats my bits or yours, where do your toes end and mine start?
How do we communicate?
How do we like to receive feedback?
What happens to us under pressure?
Who are our stakeholders?
What does good actually look like for us, the team and the client?
What assumptions do we hold and what do we already know????

Some of this can feel a bit fluffy when there’s a backlog waiting and a client asking when they’re going to see something. But research on team charters links them with better communication, mutual support, cohesion and team functioning, while research into team trust shows a strong positive relationship between trust and performance. Yes of course its more nuanced… charters don’t necessarily improve performance directly, but their value seems to come through improving how the team functions and helping teams navigate disruption.

Basically, the time you think you’re saving by skipping this ‘fluffy stuff’ can become very expensive later… we will come back to that

Build the manual before you need it

One thing I’ve used in kick-offs is a Manual of Me (MoM). Give people time to reflect on some carefully chosen questions individually, then share a few things that would genuinely help the team work with them in the kick off, I quite like seeing peers MoM evolve over the years.

BUT A WARNING as a very wonderful colleague once said to me, “Manuals of Me are amazing… IF people actually read them. If not, useless.”

She was right. I used to go back to them when I hit conflict bumps with an old team. Before giving difficult feedback or surfacing a pain point, I’d sometimes do a bit of Manual of Me revision first. We’d spent time understanding where each of us tended to go in the SDI triangle (a psychometric personality and relationship assessment rooted in Relationship Awareness Theory) when things were going well and how that shifted when we moved into conflict. At the beginning that work took time, but later, when the pressure on the team became enormous and molehills started erupting into mountains all over the place, it proved invaluable.

Priya Parker talks about the importance of learning to have small fights, sharing restaurateur Gabriel Stulman’s brilliant phrase “keep molehills molehills.” A good kick-off gives you some of the conditions to do that. When something starts to wobble, you have somewhere to go back to and can ask what might actually be happening underneath it.

Think of it a bit like tectonic plates. You can’t stop them moving,, but understanding where the fault lines are means when they start rubbing against each other, you have a better chance of dealing with the tremor before you’re dealing with a tsunami.

What does good actually look like?

The Content-Process model is useful here, it was something we introduced in the first week of every Masters course at Hyper Island, I never regretted it. We often naturally rush towards the content: what are we making, what needs doing, what’s the deadline? The process asks how we’re going to work together to get there, its not either/or… you need both.

The same goes for roles, a simple RACI can make visible who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. The value isn’t in creating a giant spreadsheet mapping every possible task, it’s in the conversation it forces you to have. Who is actually doing this? Who owns the decision? Who needs to be involved, and who just needs to know?

Lets not forget to discuss what good means. What does ‘goo’d look like for you, the team and, crucially, the client? We may nod and think we agree, but have TOTALLY different ideas in our minds. You can kill yourself lovingly building the Millennium Falcon when the client actually needed a perfectly functional Landspeeder, oh and Robyn…. well Robyn the developer has disappeared off and started building the Death Star. None of those things are necessarily bad… (well maybe lets avoid the deathstar)… they’re just not the same thing.

Teams don’t arrive neatly packaged

Your team might be entirely in-house, entirely agency, or a rainbow team of permanent staff, agency people and freelancers, all bringing different organisational cultures, expectations and ways of working with them. You might be together in a room, entirely remote or scattered across the country. Some people will have worked together for years while others met for the first time ten minutes ago.

The team you kick off with might not be the team you finish with. People join halfway through, people leave and roles change. This is where the things you created at kick-off become useful living artefacts rather than a Miro board everyone enthusiastically filled with post-its once and never opened again.

When someone joins, don’t just onboard them into the work, onboard them into the team. Revisit your Manuals of Me, RACI and what good looks like, talk about how decisions get made and where you’ve already discovered some fault lines, but give the new person space to change things too, because their arrival changes the team.

The same applies when somebody leaves, roles shift about or the project moves into a different phase. You don’t necessarily need another giant kick-off, have a mini re-kick-off, reset. What has changed? What have we learned? What isn’t working anymore? What do we need to agree again? A kick-off shouldn’t create a team contract frozen in time. It gives you a baseline to keep returning to and changing as the team changes.

It’s not time away from delivery

Spending a few hours understanding each other, clarifying roles, mapping stakeholders, talking about feedback and agreeing what good looks like can feel like time taken away from delivery.

UNTIL THINGS GET DIFFICULT…….

Then suddenly three people are spending half their week managing a conflict or problem nobody surfaced early enough. Work is being redone because two people had completely different ideas of good. A stakeholder appears from nowhere in week eight, nobody knows who can actually make a decision, feedback lands badly, energy that should be going into the work starts being consumed by the team trying to manage itself.

AND THAT my beauties…. THATS expensive.

I’m wary of putting a neat number on how much time a good kick-off saves because teams and projects don’t work like that, but the evidence around team trust, charters, communication and effectiveness supports the underlying principle: investing in how people will work together isn’t separate from performance, it’s part of creating the conditions for it.

So spend time on the kick-off, talk about the work, but also talk about how you’re going to do the work together. Understand each other, surface assumptions, clarify roles, talk about feedback and conflict, map the people around the work and agree what good enough actually looks like.

Then, importantly, actually go back and read the bloody thing. (I am Cornish ‘bloody is not a swear word)

Because when the shit hits the fan, and at some point on most projects it will, the investment you made when things were calm suddenly doesn’t look like wasted time at all.

Reading Rabbit Holes

About MoMs
Manuel of Me
SDI … Strength Deployment inventory
Session Lab Essential Kickoff Meeting
The WalnutGroup dynamics
https://theteamcanvas.com/learn/
Owning Agile Jeff Patton

Kick off… before it KICKS OFF, adventures in agile mindsets was originally published in Analyst’s corner on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I love an onion, all onions, but let's talk specifically about Simon Powers sexy agile onion. (He doesn’t call it sexy, but I think it is)

If you have been in a learning session with me you may have met one of my slight variations of it, the leadership leek, UCD shallot or facilitation Red Baron (what a name!). Different labels, but IMHO the same core thinking. Because people love a tool, booooooy they love a tool, work in my world and you will see it, and that's cool, I love a tool to, tools are useful, practical and give us somewhere to start.

They are also incredibly easy to adopt badly.

There are plenty of organisations doing agile. A stand-up here, a retro there, Jira boards bpopping up left right and centre, yep we are AGILE BABY WHOOOOP, the upper echalons maybe niavely happy as everyone is dutifully marching through the rituals… but the problem is very little about how decisions are made, how people are trusted or how learning happens has actually changed.

We are not agile… baby (il stop that now)

There are a million names for this, agile theatre, AINO (Agile In Name Only) and one I heard recently Zombie agile/scrum…. Zombie agile can feel a bit like The Last of Us. The ceremonies are still wandering around the organisation, stifled stand-ups, shuffling sprints, rotting retros, all recognisable as the things they once were, but something infected them along the way. The mindsets not there, the rituals are, and lets face it Pedro Pascal isn’t turning up to save you (no spoilers)… These names exist for a reason.

Lets get peeling

Simon Powers’ Agile Onion moves from the things that are most visible and easier to adopt, to those that are less visible but much more powerful. Its that deeper stuff that needs unearthing, but it is also much harder to change.

Lets start at the centre

Tools and processes are the tangible stuff. Boards, backlogs, sprints, stand-ups, retrospectives, we can see them happening, buy the software, put the ceremonies in calendars and teach people how to use them…. lovely, thats a simple fix… but its not

Practices are the things we repeatedly do. Prioritising work, working iteratively, testing, reviewing, reflecting and adapting. They start to shape how work happens rather than simply organising it…. ok we are getting somewhere

Principles help us make decisions when there isn’t a handy template. Deliver value early, work in small increments, get feedback, lovely lovely feedback loops. Respond to what we learn, and keep learning… they give us something to navigate by when the process doesn’t quite fit the situation…. OK great that helps us with all this ambiguty!

Values shape how we behave with each other, collaboration, openness, trust, respect, courage. These are harder to point at on a Trello board, but you notice pretty quickly when they are missing… the peopley bit be peopling

Then we get to mindset… OH HELLLLLLO. We are at the least visible and most powerful part.

Powers describes the agile mindset through three beliefs: complexity, people and proactivity and nods to another fave framework Cynefin, I have added the illustration, but will not go deeper in this blog . The reality of work at the moment, especially in public sector, is that we accept that many of the problems we are working with cannot be fully understood or predicted upfront. We believe people can organise, collaborate and make good decisions when the conditions support them and we continually look for ways to learn and improve.

And then there’s AI…

Yep… is it even a Medium post if I don’t mention AI?
AI is changing the landscape we’re doing all of this in, it can make some parts of agile delivery faster, help us synthesise information, spot patterns, explore options, prototype ideas and get from a blank page to something we can respond to much quicker…. great I use it for lots of these things

Used well, it can multiply the team’s thinking, but there’s a trap here… we can use AI in exactly the same way we’ve sometimes used agile tools… adopt the shiny, shinyyyyy thing, automate the visible bits and accidentally squeeze out the thinking that made them valuable in the first place.

A retro summary generated in seconds is useful, a retro where nobody has really reflected isn’t, fed back or shared, not so.

Ai can also lose some of the valuable friction, the spicy conversation while moving Post-its around or disagreement over what something means that longggg awkward silence thats held by a good DM, the tension quivering till somebody eventually says, “Actually, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.”

Those moments can look inefficient, feel frikking HARD, but most of the time when I have been in those retros and team terminations that’s where the real learning has been hiding.

Being agile in an AI-shaped working world I feel is knowing what to accelerate and what to protect, use AI to remove the drudgery that actually no one want to or needs to do, widen possibilities and multiply what a team can do. Then deliberately push the human judgement, curiosity, challenge, feedback and thinking, the harder stuff, that sometimes we can hide under the drudgery to avoid

DAHHHHLING he ceremonies won’t save you…

We can introduce all the tools and processes we want through command and control and, in fact, that is partly why they are so seductive. Like Odysseus hearing the Sirens calling him towards the rocks, there is something incredibly tempting about the visible stuff. Buy the tool, introduce the framework, mandate the stand-up. LOOK, we’re agile now, sometimes we need to tie ourselves to the mast and resist the urge to mistake activity for change.

The thing is at this tooly layer we cannot mandate curiosity, or demand trust, reflection, challenge or a genuine desire to learn, you can’t put psychological safety in Jira (well you could write on a ticket I spose) or schedule trust for 10am every Tuesday.

And one of my biggest beefs, a retrospective where nobody feels able to say what is actually going wrong, surface the tensions and issues, have the crunch convos, wel…. it’s just another meeting.

Moving from doing agile towards being agile means creating the conditions where teams can learn continuously and change what they are doing because of what they learn.

I like how we describe delivery management at TPXimpact… a delivery manager “creates the right conditions for project teams to work in so that they can deliver as effectively, quickly and efficiently as possible.”

‘CONDITIONS’, for me thats the important word, culture is what allows the rest of the onion to work. People need enough autonomy to respond rather than constantly seek permission, but that autonomy comes with their own personal responsibility.

They also need access to users and feedback rather than assumptions passed down a chain, they need leaders who can tolerate uncertainty rather than demanding false certainty through plans, space to experiment, reflect and admit when something hasn’t worked and not sit waiting to be punished even tho the org is championing a test and learn mentality. They need short feedback loops where learning actually changes what happens next and they need measures that focus on value and outcomes rather than rewarding teams for looking busy….. I could go on but you get the idea

That takes leadership, trust, challenge. Plus it takes organisations being prepared to change some of the structures, incentives and behaviours that made the shiny new agile tools necessary in the first place.

The tools matter, the whole onion is needed, keep the retros, boards and stand-ups if they are USEFUL. Just keep peeling, feeling and unreeling till that mindset is the thing running the show and the zombies have all returned to their graves.

Three ways to encourage an agile mindset

1. Microdose discomfort (yes yes I will keep going on about this!)
Learning often has a little friction in it, the first honest retro might hurt, but hold the silence, keep asking hard questions of each other and building tust and a brave space a little at a time. Create small, regular opportunities to practise sitting with that discomfort as indies and a team, reflecting on it and doing something with what you learn.

2. Reward learning, not just delivery
If success only means hitting the deadline, sticking to the plan and shipping the thing, people quickly learn to hide uncertainty and mistakes. Make it valuable to say we tried this, it didn’t work, and here’s what we learned. Lets start celebrating the changed mind as much as the completed milestone.

3. Give people something real to respond to
Agility needs feedback, get work in front of users earlier and LISTEN. Prototype before polishing, work in the open and share the messy versions.
Feedback from users, feedback to and from each other, feedback to and from stakeholders, it works, its free… actively listen and use it!

Because if the thinking underneath never changes, eventually the onion starts to stink worse than the zombies.

If you didn’t think we’d have smelly onion ref you’ve not been here before

Rabbit holes for your brain

Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable … me

delivery management at TPXimpact

complexity, people and proactivity… Simon powers

Cynefin… Dave Snowden

Agile Manifesto

In 2006, a storm hit the Netherlands and left around 100+ horses stranded on a small patch of higher ground near Marrum. The water had risen around them and over the ensuing days several of their herd died from exposure others got caught in the flooding. Rescue missions were launched by the dutch army, fire departments and animal welfare and a few of the smaller foals were brought back to the mainland but for days the remaining horses stood surrounded by the lowering flood levels held there not by the water, but the belief that had built, the water was dangerous, stay put.

There was a route back to dry land, people tried to encourage the horses to move, but they wouldn’t. The context may have changed, but the horses minds definitly hadn’t.

Don’t worry we are not heading towards a macabre horse skull island end… bare with me

Nope 6 women led by local Norma Miedema rode out into the water on 6 calm, confident horses used to being submerged in icy chest height water. The fire brigade had mapped out a safe-ish route, but it was still a dangerous mission for the equines and their mounts.

They waded across to the stranded herd, turned around, and started the slow, steady journey back, and the herd followed en mass (except one, but that kind of disrupts the story and it did get over OK in the end)

Hundreds of horses moving through the water, following six horses that had shown them the way, it is quite a sight… I have shared the video in further reading for you to admire

The walls we can’t see

OK Tash, lovely story, whats the point, well, well my friends, I feel it brings to life navigating those pesky invisible walls, they are built from some form of reality, sometimes years ago, but they have a habit of standing strong, bouncing people off, back into the comfort zone a little confused as to whats stopping them move forward.

Some invisible work walls are cultural.

• we don’t challenge people that senior here
• you don’t show work until it’s ready
• the client has already decided
• I can’t talk to (insert higherarchichal person role here)

Some are much more personal.

• I’m not experienced enough to do that
• I tried that once and it went badly
• I’m just not that sort of person
• I can’t talk to (insert person that intimidates me a bit here)
• I’m not good at difficult conversations (is ANYONE?)

Like I mentioned, often those walls have a perfectly reasonable origin. Something happened, we got mega embarrassed, totally ignored, knocked back, on our arse and/or told to stay in our lane, and sometimes like the horses we simply watched it happen to someone else.

So we learnt, and we create rules that help us navigate the conditions and potential pain points around us. The problem often comes when these change or remain unchallenged and the brain cave rules sit stagnating and become rigid.

Is the water still dangerous?

Eventually we stop thinking about why and it simply becomes a rule. This is Edgar Schein, and David Gray territory, Scheins work on organisational culture and underlying assumptions, and Grays liminal thinking. They look at the beliefs and assumptions we build in orgs and our minds that can become so embedded that we stop noticing they are there.

The thing that created the rule might have happened five years ago, in a different team, with a different boss, when you had a lot less experience. Yet there it is, still lurking around, clouding your judgement and deciding what you will and won’t do.

Sometimes you need to get on the horse

There is a phrase often used in child psychology and parenting:

“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

digital, design, technology and transformation work can I feel needs a dose of this attitude, particularly if you’re in a head of, principal, or lead role. The roles in the thick of it and seen by the team, the bridgers….

Our work is full of ambiguity, we facilitate conversations where there isn’t a neat answer, we are expected to challenge decisions, with people who often do not like being challenged, surface uncomfortable research, with people who don’t like discomfort. We work across hierarchies, where silos, and grades rule. We get the pleasure of talking to people about the thing they have spent six months to 12 months building that the users do not need it and it might not solve the problem.

We cannot remove every difficult conversation, frustrated stakeholder or uncertain situation from the road, its impossible. Sometimes we just need to get on the horse. Ask the first difficult question, admit we don’t know, share the unfinished thinking, challenge those assumptions and say the damn thing everyone seems to be carefully navigating around.

Then see what happens.

Microdose the discomfort

Amy Edmondson describes psychological safety as a climate where people can take interpersonal risks. In my facilitation world I do like this quote from her…

“Sometimes, you have to take an interpersonal risk to lower interpersonal risk.”

That doesn’t mean charging into every situation shouting uncomfortable truths, I interpret it as microdosing discomfort (yep back on that), take one step into the cold water.

This is where the leadership matters too at that level, as above your actually IN the water, the messy context, you feel the cold bite, get caught on the very real barbed wire and fencing no one could quite see below the murky water. BUT you pause, recalibrate and find a slightly different way to move forward. The people in your teams, clients, stakeholdrrs and orgs see this, your willingness to take that first small risk can make the next person’s risk feel a little smaller, build trust and keep momentum where we could be sinking in the mud

Remember six horses went into the water first, hundreds followed, all survived.

Three things you can do tomorrow to dismantle an invisible wall

Name one wall (Hi Terry the terrible)
Catch yourself saying “I can’t”, “I’m not ready” or “that’s not for me.” Write it down. Where did that rule come from?

Check the conditions (Stick that finger in the air)
Ask yourself…. Is this still true? Look for evidence from now, rather than relying on an old experience.

Microdose discomfort (Stretchy not sketchy)
Test the wall, ask the question, speak up once, share something unfinished. put a toe in cold water and see what happens.

Dismantle the wall

Invisible walls aren’t always irrational, they can be built from experience, culture, fear and things that were once genuinely unsafe.

DO pay attention when you find one, take time to reflect where it came from, then stick a wet finger in the air and check whether the conditions have changed. Test the edges of it, and take that one stretch step, anddd if you are in a position where other people are watching what you do, occasionally be the one willing to wade calm and confidantly into the water first.

You might discover the wall isn’t where you thought it was, you might make it easier for someone else dismantle some of theirs to cross as well.

Rabbit holes for your brain (Further reading)

200 Horses Trapped by the Sea… Then they took the risk!
David Grey Liminal Thinking
Edgar Schein
Amy Edmondson
Rescuers save 100 horses stranded by flood
Fear, momentum and thinking in public, my learning from writing 52 blogs in one year
Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable….. (Spoiler: you don’t)

It’s a simple way to get underneath a problem. Something happens, you ask why, get an answer, then ask why again like an incessant toddler… or toddler detectives, as we levelled it up to the other day in a workshop.

You keep digging beneath the surface, down through the roots, and you can reach one of the causes sitting underneath it. And I say one deliberately, because it’s often not simply one thing.

‘Simples’, as Aleksandr Orlov the meerkat likes to say.

Which also means it can be very easily misused. Ask five questions. BOOOOOOM…. Done. We have found THEEEEEE ROOT CAUSE.

I find myself saying this a lot, you might get somewhere useful in three whys, five whys, or there might be 125 whys tangled together underneath the original problem. If you want to nerd out, there’s a brilliant poster ‘whying’ the hell out of the Titanic and, yes, there are 125 whys on there (see further reading).

Let’s face it, in complex organisations and systems there probably isn’t going to be one beautiful root cause sitting at the bottom waiting for you to uncover it.

And there is another problem with the 5 Whys that I tend to moan about.

It’s NOT about shouting WHY? WHY? WHY? at someone repeatedly.

Why?

Why did you do that?

Why?

Why didn’t you speak to users?

Why?

Why wasn’t research prioritised?

Try having someone repeatedly ask you why and see how long it takes before it starts to feel less like curiosity and more like a minor interrogation. Talking of interrogations, I do love reading about the FBI, negotiation and behavioural techniques. So let’s call in the FBI.

Enter Chris Voss and calibrated questions (Or a good user researcher TBH)

Chris Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference. One of the techniques he talks about is calibrated questions.

This is NOT going to get complicated.

A lot of the stuff I read from Voss, and people like former US Secret Service agent Evy Poumpouras, is actually quite simple humaning, just dialled up and made explicit. Really noticing other people, listening to what they say, understanding their baselines and what makes them tick.

Which is probably why I find so much of it useful in UCD settings. With calibrated questions, Voss makes a lot of use of the words what and how. I told you it wasn’t complicated.

‘Why’ can make someone feel like they need to justify themselves. ‘What’ and ‘how’ can give them a bit more jiggle space to explain what is actually happening.

Now, obviously, we’re working in a very different context. Voss developed and used these techniques in high-stakes negotiation, where getting someone talking, reducing defensiveness and understanding what is really going on can be critical. I’m not suggesting your next stakeholder meeting or user research interview needs treating like a hostage situation.

But the human be humaning, so it maps over (IMO). People can feel challenged, they can become defensive. They can give you the answer they think you want, close down, or start justifying a decision rather than exploring what happened. That can happen in an interrogation, a negotiation, a research interview or a conversation with a team trying to understand why something went wrong.

So how do we ask questions that help people open up, rather than close down?

Cack to the 5 Whys. What happens if we keep the digging, but dump the whys?
Because I tend to say ‘why shaped questions’ but then give an example with ‘why’ in there

Take a really simple example:

A patient was late to the theatre, causing a delay.

The traditional 5 Whys might take us through:

Why? There was a long wait for a trolley.
Why? A replacement trolley had to be found.
Why? The original trolley’s safety rail had broken.
Why? It hadn’t been regularly checked for wear.
Why? There was no equipment maintenance schedule.

(I feel like I got this from the NHS, but I cannot find it to credit so maybe its an example I made myself — if not please do call me out)

We’ve dug underneath the immediate problem and found something useful that we can actually do something about. But this doesn’t really feel like a natural conversation, its an example after all.

Now imagine you’re finding this out by talking to the people involved. Rather than repeatedly asking why, we can start borrowing from Voss:

A patient was late to the theatre, causing a delay….. Why was there a delay?
Because there was a long wait for a trolley.

We’ve got an answer, but we’ve also already framed the conversation around finding a reason.

Lets try:

What was happening when the patient was due to go to theatre?

That gives someone more room. They might tell you about the trolley, they may tell you there were three patients waiting or mention a staffing issue, another emergency, or something you hadn’t even thought to ask about.

Then you can follow what you hear:

What happened next?
How are trolleys usually allocated?
What happens when one isn’t available?
How are equipment problems picked up?

Adding calibrated questions to the 5 Whys party can help us stay curious for a little longer. A why can push someone towards giving us a reason, can as mentioned feel a little accusatory. A ‘what’ or ‘how’ can invite them to tell us what is actually going on.

And that might uncover a root you didn’t even know you needed to explore.

The 5 Whys gives us a really useful reminder to keep digging beneath the first answer. Calibrated questions give us a way to think about how we do that with another human being.

I want to look at this as a bigger point. We tend to love a tool because tools come with instructions. Do this, then this, ask this five times, follow these steps… lovely. They give us something concrete to hold onto and feel relatively easy to use.

The problem is when they hit the real world roads, the wheels tend to fall off.

Because people don’t follow instructions, conversations go sideways, one answer opens up three more questions and Peter from the clinician team gets mega defensive. Something you thought was the problem turns out to be a symptom of something much bigger, which is important.

Mindsets come in here, we need to be thinking through all the layers, from tools, easy to instigate and visible up into mindsets, more powerful, but less visible and much harder

If you understand the mindset underneath the 5 Whys, stay curious, don’t settle for the first answer, keep digging, you can adapt the tool to what is actually happening in front of you. Add Voss’s calibrated question mindset, think about how the question lands, listen properly, give people space to open up, and suddenly we’re less worried about whether we asked exactly five whys.

We’re paying attention to where the conversation is taking us.

So perhaps we should rename it: The maybe more, maybe less than 5 calibrated whats and hows, with the occasional why….. Catchy eh?

NAHHHH maybe we’ll stick with the 5 Whys haha, just remember the calibrated question mindset when you use it.

Further reading for your delite

Chris Voss — Book “Never Split the Difference”
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/1847941494

Titanic example https://thinkreliability.com/hubfs/ThinkReliability_March2024/pdf/Cause_Map-Titanic_Example_Root_Cause_Analysis-2015.pdf

Black swan
https://www.blackswanltd.com/newsletter/the-power-of-calibrated-questions-shaping-conversations-with-precision

A few years ago, I did my first triathlon (YES YES I have mentioned this in other blogs)

I thought I was a pretty good swimmer, I swam loads as a kid. Now I am privilidged to live near the sea and bob around in it occasionally. Before the triathlon I swam out to some buoys and back and thought, yep, yep, Tash, you got this.

Turns out….

I

DID

NOTTTTTT

GOT THIS (Well I did, I did finish)

The sea swim was terrifying, like nothing I have experienced
TE-RR-IFYING, people, terrifying

I was super slow, people were thrashing around me, my nose plug fell off, my goggles kicked sideways and I genuinely remember being in the middle of the sea at one point thinking, this is it. I am going to die here.

Spoiler. I did not die.

I got out, did the cycle, the run and everything was fine (ish). But I had realised, quite literally, that I was out of my depth…. I thought I could swim, what I could actually do was my own weird little side stroke and a version of front crawl where I didn’t breathe properly, well breathe. Fine for bobbing around, 100000% useless in a triathlon.

So I started learning to swim properly, and the more I learned, the more I realised how much I didn’t know.

Armbands, lidos and the unknown unknowns

YES heres the Linkedin lover injection…. lets compare this to work, and I do do this a lot, and it helps me, so go with it…. I think design, facilitation, service design, UCD, and probably a lot careers, work a bit like this.

At the beginning, you’re in the paddling pool with your armbands on. You’re learning some tools, trying things out, mapping a bit, throwing out post-its like they are free. The pool sides are close enough to grab and it feels safe. You don’t know what you don’t know yet.

Then you move into the lido. NICEEEE. You’re swimming lengths, getting stronger, you’ve learned a few strokes. And you can see the sea from where you are swimming and start thinking, dudes…. that doesn’t look so hard.

I think this is the point in your career where it can be very easy to think, I know the tools, I’m doing the work. Why can’t I be senior? Why can’t I lead this?

Why…. Because the lido and the sea are very different places.

Then you get in the sea

The sea is ambiguous, Poseidon is pissed at you and its deep, unfathomable and wait it doesn't even stop at the horizon… wheres the sides???

There are currents you didn’t expect, waves hit you in the face just as you try to breathe, the weather changes and you can’t work out whether you’re moving forwards or backwards due to the tide

All the things you learned in the lido still matter, but now you have to understand when and how to use them. This is the bit where the tools aren’t enough.

It’s understanding context, and this is where mindset starts to matter more than the tools and methods.

Let's slide in my fave, the agile onion… which maps over most things IMO. On the outside you have the things you do… the tools, practices, methods and processes, your swimming strokes, they’re useful, and you need to learn them.

But move further into the onion and you get to the principles and values underneath them, eventually you get to mindset. MINNNNNNDSET…. That’s the bit that helps you work out what to do when the conditions change and your lovely, practised stroke suddenly isn’t working. (Oh and boy they did not work my friends)

The sea (we all know I am not really talking about the sea here anymore… yes?) doesn’t care that you know the tools, you have to be able to adapt, respond, make decisions and understand the conditions you’re in.

And sometimes get knocked on your arse just trying to get in.

Sometimes you’re not ready for the sea

I was talking about this with my mentee /friend recently and the conversation sparked another really important part to the metaphor for me. Sometimes you need to recognise that today isn’t the day to swim out further.

Being out of your depth affects other people too, if you get into trouble, somebody has to stop what they’re doing and come and get you. Sometimes, if you panic, you can pull them under with you.

Knowing your limits is part of becoming more experienced.

It might mean staying in the lido a little longer, swimming closer to shore, going out with somebody more experienced and/or building strength before going further. I see people racing for promotions, which then burn them out… its OK to take the time it takes… because none of the things mentioned mean you can’t swim.

They mean you’re learning to swim in different conditions.

The Cynefin framework, from Dave Snowden, is useful here, it helps us make sense of the situation we’re in, recognising that different contexts need different responses. What works in something predictable might fall apart completely when things become complex or uncertain.

Another metaphor I use is cooking, I like what Mr Snowden has added there… he talks about complex, unpredictable environments, and that we need adaptive experts (chefs) rather than people blindly following rigid frameworks (recipes)… We need more chefs, not recipies

WAIT… we may need a bigger boat!

OK I just wanted the jaws reference, we may simply need a boat, but equally look out for sharks, most people support you, but there are a few sharks out there ready to bite. For another blog, but it takes a team to navigate a shark…. back to the boat

People swim the Channel, but they don’t really do it alone.

There’s a support boat alongside them, a team of people are watching the conditions, helping them navigate, feeding them and ready to step in when needed. You can be an incredibly strong swimmer and still need the boat.

I think we sometimes mistake progression for needing less support. I 100% did…. still do occasionally, the further out you go, the less you should need other people.

I’m increasingly convinced it’s the opposite…. only this week I cracked the ‘can I get some help’ glass… AND WOW it helped me get back on track

As the water gets deeper, the conditions rougher and the work more complex, knowing when you need the boat becomes part of the skill.

I’m still learning front crawl, I’m much better than I was. I’m still working on my breathing, and every time I get into the sea, I learn something slightly different. But I have videos to watch, swim buddy's and occasionally a coach to help

Is this the point? I think it is… yes we are reaching metaphor crescendo…. getting better isn’t reaching the moment where you’re finally ready for every sea, it’s about learning to understand the water you’re in.

Further reading watching

Critical thinking… or fast decisions, expensive consequences

I have written about this before…. but slightly different stance
Start, suck, stick at it…. swimming into the unknown (unknowns)

Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable….. (Spoiler: you don’t)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRbDJEvuEz4
KNOWN KNOWNS and KNOWN UNKNOWNS — Swans and Elephants

Rumsfeld’s Logic of Known Knowns, Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns
https://medium.com/paul-austin-murphys-essays-on-philosophy/rumsfelds-logic-of-known-knowns-known-unknowns-and-unknown-unknowns-f506db31ac74

Unknown Knowns
https://issues.org/known-unknowns-uncomfortable-knowledge-sarewitz/

In user/human centred design, agile and other areas we often use facilitation to gather feedback.

Retrospectives, crits, workshops, reviews. We create the conditions for people to reflect, contribute, challenge in lots of different ways and say what they really think. Because let’s face it, “Any feedback?” is a bit like “Any questions?” It’s the fastest way to get a tumbleweed bouncing happily through the room.

All ace, but those same facilitation skills can help feedback flow between individuals too.

Managing someone is arguably easier, two-way feedback should already be part of that relationship, if it’s not I’d worry…. But peers, clients, stakeholders or someone more senior?

Harder… but as important.

Sometimes feedback can be a conversation

There is a lot written about the value of people asking for feedback rather than simply receiving it. It gives them some agency and can reduce the defensiveness that comes with an unexpected “Can I give you some feedback?”

That phrase can trigger a threat response before you’ve even started. David Rock’s SCARF model helps explain why.

There is a phenomenon called “brittle smiles”. You’ve prob experienced it. Florence the project manager swooshes over to your desk and drops a “Can I give you some feedback?” two minutes after you presented to the stakeholder. You smile, but your sphincter has clenched tighter than an eagle’s claw, your mind is screaming noooooo and you feel a bit sick.

“Sure,” you utter, still smiling.

That’s a brittle smile, friendly and receptive on the outside, utterly, utttttterly uncomfortable underneath.

Asking for feedback can lower defences, but…. Well…. people don’t always ask.

Plus waiting for the invitation can mean leaving something important unsaid. If something is affecting the work, the relationship or the people around you, there comes a point where you need to surface it.

As Peter Bromberg says, (Q one of my fav quotes) “When we avoid difficult conversations, we trade short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction.” So facilitate them. Create the space for the conversation to happen. Psychological safety isn’t about avoiding the hard stuff. Amy Edmondson reminds us, “Psychological safety is not at odds with having tough conversations. It’s what allows us to have tough conversations.”

That doesn’t mean it always needs to arrive wearing a massive flashing !!FEEDBACK!! Sign. Sometimes it can be as above nods to… a conversation.

With, not at

One of the principles I come back to in facilitation is working with people, rather than at them. I think the same applies here.

It clicked for me when I realised a work buddy had been subtly doing this with me at Hyper Island. Rather than arriving with a fully formed judgement, they created the situation for me to think.

How do you think that went?

What did you notice?

What were you hoping would happen? (Tone of voice is important here!)

Multiple times I DID know. It was simply buried somewhere in the mess of my brain, other times I said something that changed their understanding too. This is where Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry is useful. Stay curious a little longer before deciding you fully understand the situation, hold your perspective lightly enough to make room for theirs.

Sometimes feedback isn’t telling someone something they don’t know. It’s creating the space for them to notice something they already know.

Empathy and assertiveness

I used to struggle with assertiveness. I was great when managing a venue full of drunk people, assertive as hell, but when I moved from bars to boardrooms full of peers or stakeholders and I often struggled. It took me a while to realise assertiveness wasn’t at odds with empathy. Empathy helps me listen, notice and respond. Assertiveness makes sure the important thing actually gets surfaced.

You need both.

Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication asks us to separate what we actually observed from the stories and judgements we attach to it. Kim Scott in Radical Candor talks about caring personally while challenging directly.

So name what you noticed.

“I noticed the conversation changed after that meeting.”

Surface what you think might be happening.

“It sounds like you were frustrated with the decision.”

Then ask.

“How did you see it?”

And back to another learning that took me a while to land (sorry)…

SHUT UP and listen.

Prepare, then work with what is in the room

As facilitators we prepare, then get into the room and respond to what is actually there. As Dale hunter puts it “facilitation is an improvisatory act within an agreed and negotiated structure”

Feedback can work the same way, structure it, but improvise once you enter the conversation. Get clear on what you need to surface, but don’t prepare the conversation so tightly that it becomes a script. I have done this and clung to it like Rose did that door while watching Jack sink.

Now I get the important things straight in my head, then listen, ask, notice and, something I’m still learning, slow down. The conversation might go somewhere you didn’t expect because you’ve learned something too.

Prepare the purpose, not the performance.

Influence rather than control

Facilitating feedback isn’t a clever technique for making somebody arrive at the conclusion you already decided for them. No Machiavellian vibes. The idea I am trying to land is to create the conditions for an honest conversation. Ask good questions, listen, surface assumptions and challenge, or let them challenge you, its not one way, remember with not AT.

But, and it’s a big BUTTTT, you cannot control what the other person does with it, sometimes, after all the listening and exploring, you may still need to say:

“There is something here I think you need to hear.”

That’s part of facilitation too, knowing when to ask, when to listen, when to challenge and when to simply say the thing.
Lets not fall into shit sandwich territory where the feedback gets lost and nothing changes

Sometimes feedback needs to be delivered, other times it needs to be navigated, relationally, together.

#feedback #feedbackCulture #culture #HCD #UCD

Reading rabbit holes for your delite

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain

Dale Hunter … the art of facilitation

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life , Marshall B. Rosenberg

Radical Candor, Kim Scott

The Art of Facilitation, Dale Hunter

Humble Inquiry , Edgar H. Schein

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey