Increasing Internal Communication

After the vacation I've been absolutely on fire at work! Seems that everything I do or try just goes pretty much as well or better than I had expected.

I can't remember exactly where I heard the term, but I got interested in Coding Dojo. We have suffered from teams being in silos and I've been thinking about possible activities to gather developers from across the teams. So I decided to arrange a Dojo!

Coding Dojo is a sort of workshop where everyone participates. There's a driver and a copilot (like in pair programming) and audience. Every five minutes (or any other agreed interval) people change places. Copilot becomes driver, driver goes to audience and someone from the audience becomes the new copilot. There ought to be one sensei also, but we didn't have one.

The subject for the first ever Coding Dojo was Async. No-one knew the subject that well and the group was able to successfully implement a small demo program. One improvement suggestion was that a bit better preparation would have saved a couple of minutes from the start. Point taken, inspect and adapt. ;)

I'm not a big fan of email, since people tend to ignore those messages. Or at least it is very hard to know if your message has been received and understood. I wanted to create a blog. First blog post could be a short report about how the Coding Dojo went by one the participants. It would be nice to get a developers perspective on this.

Third form of internal communication that I've tried this week was video. In a multi site company where people are spread around the globe, it's not possible to get everyone into a meeting room and just give a short training. And as I already mentioned, I don't have too much faith in people reading their emails.

I tried something new. I made a short PowerPoint presentation and uploaded it into our intranet. Then I started recording and talked through my presentation. It took less than ten minutes. After finishing the video and uploading it to the intranet I sent an email with links to both the slides and the video. I can warmly recommend this approach; the feedback was very positive. Of course, if it is an option, stick with the face to face conversation.

This video by Henrik Kniberg about Agile Product Ownership is simply the greatest educational video about any Agile subject that I have ever seen! It's been of great inspiration to me in the way of describing very complex concept in such a clarifying way. Thanks Henrik!

Solving Problems, Together

First of all, without too much advertising, I saw recently an interesting commercial with a powerful message. It was by a company called Wickes and it simply stated:

What more can you say? I think it says: craftsmanship. And it sets the expectation level on quality really high. If you create something and want to tell everyone about that with your back straight, I can imagine myself being interested in what ever you are offering. Hopefully they never have any quality problems. That would shoot them in the leg.

But I was actually going to write about different ways of conflict resolution. The examples that I refer to are from conflicts between parents and their children, but they sound very useful also in agile coaching.

Thomas Gordon's What Every Parent Should Know is a freely available pdf document that describes a conflict resolution where neither party loses. In a resolution to a conflict, if one of the parties needs to "lose", they most probably don't feel happy. They probably feel rather bad. And depending on the circumstances, this might inflict grudge. A historical example of this might be Germany after World War I.

If on the other the conflict can be resolved in a win-win manner, the resulting piece will probably last longer and the resolution process can strengthen the bond between participants. Very practical in parent-child relationships and also in team work.

Another interesting example came to me from my personal life. My son has sometimes difficulties in tolerating changes to plans (well, actually I also suffer from that from time to time.) He gets upset when he has to interrupt building LEGOs and come to dinner. I sympathize with him, but as a parent I also feel as my responsibility to keep the boundaries.

In his book, The Explosive Child, Dr. Ross W. Greene introduces a concept of Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS). If I have understood correctly, it was originally developed for kids with problems in controlling their frustration. Actually, I also found a website that explains the method.

But shortly, there are three ways to solve conflict in CPS: plan A, plan B and plan C. A and C are the extremes. In plan A, the parent wins (and child loses). In plan C, the child wins (and parent gives up his/her plan). The main message of the book is plan B. That's where the parent and the child work together to find a resolution that they both can accept.

There are three steps in plan B:

1. Empathy
2. Problem definition
3. Invitation to negotiation

I can't yet tell anything about the effectiveness of this approach, but if it can offer a win-win resolution for both parties, I think it's worth checking out. 

So all in all, again, everything seems to come down respecting our children/co-workers/others and seeing them as human beings with hopes and dreams. Very common sense stuff that is usually taught already in kindergarten. But we grownups tend to forget...

Also this reminds me of  Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication. The main thing to understand here is that we all have needs and we live our lives trying to fulfill those needs. And if you can understand yours and other peoples needs and find a way to satisfy them all, there's no problem that you can't overcome.