How to speak so that others listen

The first topic is a simple but powerful model that has helped me greatly. Now it can also help you, so without further ado:

Are people listening to what you have to say?

How often do you try to convince someone with your superior logic only to have them ignore your obvious wisdom?

The method known since ancient times tells us to consider three factors:

ethos or personal credibility,
pathos or a worthy purpose,
and only then logos or rational arguments.

Ethos: Why should I listen to you?

Here are some facts:

I have learned from painful experience: in relationships, at work and in business,
I have read a dozen books and hundreds of articles on the subject,
I have spoken at local meetups as well as international conferences,

and most importantly:

despite no formal sales training and an aversion to the activity I managed to connect with enough people to sell $100k worth of training through my Agile consultancy and more then double my salary when I returned to the job market a year ago.

Does this make everything I say true? Of course not, but does it make you more open to listening to what I have to say compared to a random person you know nothing about? I’ll bet it does.

Pathos: What’s in it for me?

How do you feel when something is really important to you, but the people around you don’t seem to respond?

Can you imagine what you could accomplish if you managed to find better ways to (openly and honestly) persuade the most important people in your life? Your spouse? Your children? Your boss? What would that mean to you?

Understand what your audience wants and you will understand why they ignore something that’s obviously (to you!) so very important. Help them see how your idea will bring them closer to what they want and you will earn both their attention and their gratitude.

Logos: Now I’m ready to hear the logic

Are you trustwortly in their eyes? Is what you have to say important to them? Now you can get to the what and the how. It still has to make sense, but you’ll have a much easier time if you have made a genuine connection on the level of ethos and pathos.

Use with care

Don’t try to use this method to manipulate people into doing something that is not in their best interest. People will catch on sooner or later and you will suffer horribly. I don’t want you to suffer; so don’t do it!

Learn more

If you want to read more about ethos, pathos and logos here’s a great article from a blog that I really like: Sources of Insight “Character trumps emotion trumps logic“.

Try it!

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How (not) to begin your journey as a Scrum Master?

In a strict sense the role of a Scrum Master is defined in the Scrum Guide as:

“The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules.“

I personally believe the mission of the Scrum Master is helping the team be happier and more effective at solving problems our customers care about.

(This wider meaning can also be used if Scrum is not accepted or actively disliked in your context; it might be more helpful to use the name Agile Coach then or just do it without using any name at all.)

This allows me to apply the concept in a wider context and also sanity check my methods by their results:

Is the team happier?
Are the customers happier?

If not you have your answer.

How not to start

Imagine you’re at working at a company, you feel you’re good at your job. One day the company hires someone to help you and your team improve.

This person has the best intentions and only wants to help you. Furthermore all his suggestions are actually true. We’re imagining things, remember? 😉

He comes, looks at what you’re doing and starts pointing out mistakes you’re making and asking things like “Is this the best you can do?“.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07So_lJQyqw&w=500]

How do you feel?

I don’t know about you, but I’d probably strangle the guy.

If you make this mistake you deserve:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM_6tgVJb_o&w=500]

(But do keep in mind that Scrum Shock Therapy is an option if the team accepts the challenge willingly.)

So how can you go about helping a new team in a less confrontational way?

Step 1) Get to know them, let them get to know you.

A more promising way would be to first seek first to understand and then to be understood.

In the immortal words of Deckard Cain “stay a while and listen“.

While you’re learning about the company and the team and also letting them learn about you …

Step 2) Help them remove some painful obstacles.

The world is full of major and minor annoyances and every team is struggling with some things that are not that hard to resolve, but somehow don’t get the attention they need.

This is a great opportunity for a new Scrum Master!

If you solve a problem that the team actually cares about and not the ones you think are important and you do it over and over while avoiding major blunders along the way, you will watch the balances in your emotional bank accounts with them grow steadily.

After some time you might be ready to…

Step 3) Facilitate a good retrospective.

The best Scrum Masters don’t tell people what the problems are and how to solve them.

They make reality painfully obvious so that the team can see it themselves.

A lot can be written about retrospectives and a lot has been, but for now keep in mind:

focus on the facts, not opinions; de-escalate emotional conflicts as much as you can,
try to find the root cause, don’t stop at treating the symptoms,
plan concrete actions and fit them in with your regular plans,
check the results of your changes: did they have the desired effects?
remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day; repeat retrospectives regularly,
be happy with incremental improvements as long as they add up to larger gains in the long term.

After some time slowly you can reach for more and more tools and then the sky’s the limit!

Do you want to learn more? Check out:

Outside the box:

Crossfit: Coaching the Positive

User stories for this post:

As a manager or customer I want to understand what a great Scrum master can do for me.
As a Scrum Master I want to improve my own understanding of my role so that I can be successful.
As a member or a creative team I want to understand what a Scrum Master can do for me and my team.

Update 2014-07-31: more about steps to take when you start with a new team.

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Asking the user

Software apps often ask their users to confirm (potentially destructive) actions. The method most often used are dialog boxes with a message and yes/no buttons.

Unfortunately this is often bad design because it:

slows the user down and
doesn’t guarantee safety (there are so many dialog boxes popping-up all the time that many users develop a kind of dialog blindness and sometimes mechanically click “yes” without reading the details).

The worst kind of dialog is that with a long message worded so that it’s not immediately obvious which answer does what (see leftmost dialog in figure).

We can improve upon that by simplifying the message as much as possible and putting meaningful labels on the buttons (save/discard instead of yes/no, middle dialog).

An even better solution would be to have a really short message and big, meaningful buttons (dialog on the right).

yesnosavediscard

That way we can minimise both confusion and delay and have happier, safer users.

But if the overall design (and budget) allows we can go even further: why waste the user’s time at all? Instead provide a robust undo feature and do away with the dialog altogether 😉

Note: the picture was created with Balsamiq Mockups, a great little app for sketching UIs.

Update January 2012: I’ve recreated the example dialog boxes as they were missing after I moved this post from udreka.pl to this site. I’m not sure what the exact wording was on the originals and I feel as though the current version is somewhat less convincing, but I can’t seem to come up with a better one right now so this is going to be it for the time being.

Update December 2016: Moved post from ziggurat.wordpress.com to fluidcircle.net, which is currently my main professional site / blog.