Agile Conversations

Big 5: high trust, low fear, clear why, definite commitment and accountability 

Why Agile or DevOps transformations often do not bring the expected results? Many companies implement all the right practices of high-performing teams, but do not see results because they have not fixed the cultural glue, the very thing necessary to make those other practices work. The key to success is not only to adopt good practices, but also to have difficult conversations with people that build the right environment for these practices to work.

“Fundamental shift in how people had to think about how they interact, how they collaborate and work, and if you don’t spend time changing people’s behaviors, you don’t spend time changing culture and how people make decisions, all of this falls flat.”

Michael Gale, 'Why 84% Of Companies Fail At Digital Transformation'

It's not a big secret that in the IT industry most of the so called 'technology' problems are actually people's issues. Conducting difficult conversations with an attitude of transparency and curiosity helps organisations build lasting trust, reduce fear, clear purpose and finally achieve the results you want.

Difficult conversations

There are Five Conversations, crucial discussions of the five key culture characteristics that all high-performing teams share - not just software development teams but all human teams.

The Five Conversations are:

1. The Trust Conversation
2. The Fear Conversation
3. The Why Conversation
4. The Commitment Conversation
5. The Accountability Conversation

#1 The Trust Conversation

Building trust is - for sure - the prerequisite to build a people-oriented organisation with high-performing culture.

Everyone should believe that those we work with, inside our team or outside, share organizational goals and values.

#2 The Fear Conversation

Fear is one of the biggest inhibitors of transformation. People can feel fear of failure, building the wrong product or feature, disappointing managers and many other disasters. Nevertheless, this fear paralyzes the team, inhibiting their creativity and collaboration.

That's why you should openly discuss problems in your team and its environment and deal with those obstacles.

#3 The Why Conversation

Building 'why' gives your company and team a strategic direction that guides big and small decisions and is a strong motivation for a success. It's worth remembering 'Start with why' by Simon Sinek.

So, the company and the team should share a common, clear purpose that inspires people.

#4 The Commitment Conversation

Execution of the transformation, or rather – beginning of the journey, is usually the first issue you will encounter when diagnosing a troubled team. You will probably hear that new processes are slowing down your people or that users have not seen improvements in months. The reason is that if you have not built up trust first, reduced fear, and agreed on why, execution will only get you to the wrong destination faster.

To build commitment you should regularly and reliably announce what you will do and when.

#5 The Accountability Conversation

By building trust, removing fear, defining why and honouring commitment, your team has become much more autonomous and unconstrained. We call this a self-organising team. But now the team needs an accountability. This is an obligation to explain work results. Each team member is empowered to make their own decisions about how to allocate time and energy. However, with this empowerment comes an expectation to share what those decisions are and why they were made.

This is why our intentions should be openly presented to the team and publicly explained how our results compare to commitments.

It's worth talking

The Five Conversations address attributes that give teams everything they need to use modern people-oriented practices. They allow you to smoothly adapt to changes in requirements and present your customers with working software that solves their real problems. And these are exactly the characteristics missing from the teams we often see around, where agile standups are places to hide progress rather than share it, where sprints are part of a rigid water-scrum-fall plan, where the customer’s purpose is lost in a sea of irrelevant scenarios, and where frustration is the only one shared emotion in the whole organisation.

The Five Conversations could be the way to develop the five key attributes of high-performing teams: high trust, low fear, clear why, definite commitment and accountability.

'Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture' book by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick gives a practical guide to using the unique human power of conversation. If you want to be successful with Agile and DevOps, stop following meaningless rituals that don't deliver results. Instead, build effective high-performing team using the Five Conversations.