In the latest episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, we dive deep into the world of agile leadership with Jeffrey Fredrick, Vice President of Engineering at Ion Analytics and co-author of the book “Agile Conversations.” Jeffrey shares his rich experience in the tech industry, shedding light on how agile can revolutionize team dynamics and foster innovation.
Key Learnings:
- Importance of Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry: Understanding and implementing the balance between advocacy (presenting your ideas) and inquiry (seeking others’ perspectives) is crucial for effective communication.
- The Four Rs Framework: Jeffrey introduces the Four Rs—Record, Reflect, Revise, and Role Play—a systematic approach for analyzing and improving conversations to achieve better outcomes.
- Building Trust First: Trust is the foundational element for all productive conversations and effective teamwork. Vulnerability and openness are key components in building this trust.
- Handling Fear in Conversations: Addressing and sharing fears can lead to more genuine and effective communication, as fears often underlie significant concerns that need to be surfaced and managed.
- Continuous Practice and Improvement: Deliberate practice, including revisiting and revising conversations, is essential for mastering agile communication techniques.
References:
- Chris Argyrys’ Model: The unilateral control model versus the mutual learning model.
- Agile Conversations, co-authored with Douglas Squirrel.
- CitCon: The conference for developers and testers who were DevOps before DevOps existed 🙂
Jeffrey’s insights provide valuable lessons for leaders and teams aiming to enhance their communication and collaboration skills. By implementing the principles of agile conversations, organizations can foster a more open, trusting, and innovative culture. For a deeper dive into these concepts, tune in to the full episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership.
Transcript:
Alexis: [00:00:00] Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. Today, we are diving into the world of agile leadership with a special guest, Jeffrey Fredrick. Jeffrey is the Vice President of Engineering at Ion Analytics and the co author of the book Agile Conversations. With a wealth of experience in the tech industry, Jeffrey has a unique perspective on how agile can transform teams and drive innovation.
Welcome Welcome to the podcast, Jeffrey. How do you typically introduce yourself to someone you just met?
Jeffrey: Well, I had lots of practice that last couple weekends being at a couple of conferences. So I got to refine my pitch of it. The usual way that I put it is I work four days a week as a software executive, currently VP of engineering and then one day a week as an executive coach, both to individuals and to executive teams.
Alexis: Wow, that’s a perfect pitch. I love it. And I [00:01:00] like the balance between the four days a week doing the job for real and one day a week helping others do it. That reminds me something. You are also the, the co-author of the book Agile Conversations. Can you tell us about the pivotal moment that led you to the book?
Jeffrey: Oh, well, in a sense, I think the pivotal moment came for me actually at a, at a different conference, at CitCon, the conference that I organized and have organized for the past 19 years. I was there and I was talking to someone who I just met, a gentleman named Benjamin Mitchell, and we were talking and he said to me, something very strange.
I didn’t understand what he meant at first. He said well, you seem very, very familiar. Practice very skilled making the case. For what you’re saying, you know, he says you’re, you’re very good at advocacy, but I’m not hearing much inquiry. And I was very confused by what he said. He clearly meant something very particular but I didn’t know what it [00:02:00] was, and that really was my very, very first taste of the model from Chris Argyris what he would call model one and model two where it’s easily understood as the unilateral control model and.
The mutual learning model and the idea. One of the one of the ideas in it is that you should be balancing advocacy inquiry. There’s you should be both making the case for what you believe and sharing the reasons why you believe it. And you should also be curious about the other person’s beliefs and why they believe what they do.
it was, so it was actually that conversation that ended up setting me down the path that led to the book. The gap between that conversation and the book was about nine years. So it wasn’t a quick path, but it was actually fairly direct.
Alexis: I love the story about it and I can understand why in a way, in our current timeframe or mindset [00:03:00] it could seem long, but at the same time When I read the book I was thinking, okay, it sounds very simple at first. And you’re talking about the four R’s and I will ask you to explain that a little bit, but if you want to practice it, suddenly you’ll realize that you will need a lot of practice, but can you give us a taste of what the four R’s are?
Jeffrey: Sure. The four Rs actually came about from trying to teach other this model and w what happened is we, we, I started learning Chris Argyris material. I started practicing it myself and I was very fortunate to be in a study group with aforementioned Benjamin Mitchell, Douglas Squirrel, my co author.
And we would have long weekly sessions where we would study it. And then I tried to bring the same material into the workplace and have other people learn it as well. We weren’t though going to be able to have multi hour [00:04:00] conversations. So what I needed was a format that would allow us to get the same, a lot of the same value of practice, but in a shorter timeframe.
And so what the four R’s are is a, process for studying really any kind of conversational technique that nice. And I make this point because there are lots of different models of what good communication looks like. There’s the Chris Argyris model that we just, we’re discussing the mutual learning model, but there’s also models like nonviolent communication.
Xavier Armador’s leap model. Many different types of things that people might want to check to see if they’re doing and the four Rs in a sense is kind of separate from all of those. It’s a process really of studying conversations and it’s the four steps involved are first you record Your conversation, you do this in a, in a two column format and the two column part is important and you write it down and this is important.
We can come back to why. [00:05:00] So there’s the record. And then once you have it written down, then you reflect. This is where you bring whatever model you’re using to bear. You evaluate your conversation that you’ve recorded according to the model you have in mind. And then having reflected. On it and seeing some things that you might improve.
You then revise, you, you try creating an alternate version of the conversation. And this, these two steps are really where the practice is, you know, up until now, you’ve been kind of evaluating what you’ve done, but it’s really in the work of trying to improve as the element of deliberate practice. And once you’ve written down a version of the dialogue that you.
Prefer then you can go to the, the final step of practice, which is to role play which is to actually say things out loud that you have written down and and having done this of course, there’s kind of a loop here. You’re, you might not like your first revision. You might not like it, what it sounds like when you role play.
And that’s the point is that you will then revise or repeat rather, you’ll go back and re [00:06:00] revise and re reflect and come up with better versions. And even In the role play, you might change sides with the person you’re practicing with, and that’s role reversal.
Alexis: It’s very powerful. And just the recording phase is very interesting. I usually take. notes when I have a conversation with people but I realized when I was reading the book that I usually take notes about what the other person says, not so much about what I say. And when I recall the conversation, usually I don’t really remember what I said.
There’s a few things that I note, but it,, that’s basically things that I want to remember. I said that to that person. I give that advice or I asked for a particular thing, but all the rest I am, I forget about it and I am able to remember it. And, and I was stunned by that. That’s, I, I, I just can’t is it something you observed?
Jeffrey: Absolutely. it’s [00:07:00] not surprising that we don’t. Remember what we said exactly because in practice, actually, we aren’t aware of what we say in a conversation this is kind of why people have difficulty improving their conversational skills without this kind of deliberate practice and writing things down.
Now, when I say we don’t know what we see in the conversation, this may sound , hyperbolic, but it’s, but it’s actually true that one of the, one of my favorite experiments about this is they asked a number of people to tap out a tune, one that was very familiar, that everyone would know.
And so for example, the song, happy birthday to you. Right? So they would tap on the table, you know, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, you know, and then, and then they would ask the people, what are the odds that the person listening to it will be able to guess what it was that you were tapping out. Right.
And, and, and and when they ask people, and I’ve done this many times, I’ve done this. And when I, if I’m doing [00:08:00] in person, I will tap it out and, you know, ask people, you know, what do you think? How often people they guess? And people give a whole range. They, you know, some people say 40%. Other people are much more.
Cautious, maybe 20 percent or even 10%, but actually it’s much smaller than that. Even it was something like less than 5 percent of the people could guess what was being tapped. So there’s huge discrepancy between what people guess, what people will be able to guess and the actual number of people can guess.
Now, why is that? And it comes down to this. The person doing the tapping isn’t hearing the tapping. They’re hearing the song playing in their head. They’re hearing the music in their head. And that’s what we are like in our conversations. We aren’t hearing the words we say. We’re hearing the music in our head.
So there’s like, actually two completely different conversations happening. There’s what we’re hearing in our head, and the person we’re talking to, and all they hear is the tapping. And that’s the [00:09:00] that’s that gap explains a lot of our conversational differences and what the four Rs do in the recording format by having one column where you write down your thoughts and feelings and one column where you write down the actual dialogue.
Well, it makes that difference clear. So that’s that idea that we can’t remember is when you have this mental model is less surprising because what remember is the music, you know, that in our head, not the tapping that we’re making. Right.
Alexis: Mm, I, love the analogy and I’m I’m eager to try the experiment. . I’m pretty sure that all listeners Start With Why. And still, I tend to agree with you that it’s not really where to start.
Why are you saying that?
Jeffrey: it’s worth perhaps saying that , in the book when we lay out conversations that we believe , that team should be having it really comes down to what we value more than why, why is still important, but we put it third. , we, what we say is before you start getting into why.
What you’re doing, [00:10:00] the first place, the place to start is to start with trust. Because this is the, what’s going to be, what is the foundation for how you are able to improve going forward? You know, if you, if you don’t have trust, then . The future conversations are not going to bear any fruit.
That’s our place to start is that is doing things that build trust. Now that the idea of how you build trust generically I’ve only come across one way to do it, which is in some sense to be vulnerable. The idea of being vulnerable means, in this case, it might mean, you know, sharing are really comes out of sharing our thoughts and feelings and being interested in the thoughts and feelings of other people.
And this way of, of being vulnerable is a very common thread that I’ve seen through all the different types of discussions of trust. Now, this is not the kind of trust or being vulnerable that you might have with a [00:11:00] traditional leadership game of, you know, maybe doing trust falls where you’ve leaned back and someone tries to catch you.
This is something that’s a little bit more high stakes. This is sort of like being willing to, to share differences of opinion and where You’re not sure when it’s going to agree but the idea is , that there’s not another approach to really building the relationships with your colleagues, other than to be able to be honest about Your thoughts and feelings.
I could say more about this. It’s not that you you need to be blunt. I can tell people when when they’re doing these kind of exercises, you might have the inner thought that says, That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard. And building trust doesn’t mean therefore saying, Wow, that was the stupidest idea ever heard.
If you if you say something, like, Well, I look, I have some concerns, great, you have full marks. But if you just say, Oh, Okay, then clearly you’re withholding relevant information. And so, that’s the low [00:12:00] trust building approach. And very often people are nervous about how people react.
So they’re nervous about sharing their differences and getting that point where you can say, I have some concerns. And we talk a bit more about how to do that in that chapter. So that’s why we don’t start with why is because we think building trust is essential. And the next thing we get into.
So our second. Conversation we think is important is having the fear conversation. That is, is a sense an extension of the idea , of building trust, because if we’re not sharing our fears, then we’re not really being vulnerable, we’re not sharing important elements to it, but fear is such a large element and actually can be a way to.
For people to better understand us when they understand a lot of our motivations are coming about from what things that we’re concerned about and what we’re concerned about is not going to be the same as other people. That idea that our, our inner fears and thoughts are not going to be different from other people’s actually a really important idea.
One of the big [00:13:00] barriers to good conversations is something called naive realism. Which is a cognitive bias that works like this. It says, I see the world as it is. And so do you we’re both, and we’re both looking at the same objective reality. And therefore we have the same information.
And and of course I’m, what I’m seeing is correct. You know, the right thing. is obvious by just examining reality. So if I can see this thing, you can see it also. And so if you don’t agree with me, well, then you must be confused. In which case, my job is to explain to you how you’re confused or that you’re doing something sort of disingenuous or malicious.
You can see the truth. You’re just choosing not to share it. And in that world, we don’t need to talk about our fears because they’re obvious. And so if we, if we leave that, that mistaken world of naive realism and realism that we’re seeing different worlds, then the need to actually explain our fears become more apparent.
And we, and we start [00:14:00] with fears because people are, tend to have a negativity bias. People tend to have loss aversion, negative emotions and negative feelings have a stronger influence on us than positive ones. And therefore. We think addressing those hidden concerns, surfacing them is important first step before you start getting to the more positive side, which is why and you know what what we hope to address what we have to achieve going forward.
So. why is still very important we just don’t start there.
Alexis: Yeah. And I, and I love it. And I, I really love the way you are framing it about withholding information. I feel it’s very powerful because If you ask me to be vulnerable, I, there’s some discomfort with that. And now if you’re telling me, Oh, but if you want to make progress in that relationship, if you want to make progress in that conversation, you cannot keep [00:15:00] information to yourself.
You have to open up a little bit to help the other person. See what you think, see what you, Or see what you fear. I, believe it’s very, very powerful to frame it this way.
Jeffrey: yes. I’m glad that resonates with you. And one thing I’ll say is it resonates resonates with a lot of people. One of the dangers that our book is actually trying to address is that when you read these types of ideas, they all make sense. The challenge is that they make so much sense to people that people think that they not only do they agree with it, but they believe they actually are already doing it. And if we go back to the four Rs, the purpose of the four Rs, the purpose of writing things down is to allow us to observe the fact that we don’t. Behave the way that we espouse the way that we value we think that because we believe this to be true We believe it to be the best way to communicate that therefore that must be how we [00:16:00] communicate But when we look at the evidence unless we’ve done some very deliberate practice What we’ll find is that’s not the way we we actually behave by default.
We we are More strategic we fall into what? Chris Argerys is called, you know, model one or the unilateral control model. And we ended up withholding this information, not by deliberate strategy, but because it’s in a sense of the way we’ve been trained and the way that feels natural.
Alexis: Yeah, and I love the idea of identifying the triggers. Because they are derailing completely the conversation. It’s very interesting to reflect on that and say, okay, okay, let’s, let’s pause for a second on that one. let’s avoid reaction the, the hundred percent hundred percent reaction mode and
Jeffrey: Yeah,
Alexis: spend a little bit more time on that
Jeffrey: that’s right. That’s the triggers that we talk about triggers, tells and twitches, which are three types of patterns we can learn about ourselves through [00:17:00] doing multiple conversation analysis, right? So we use that four Rs for conversation analysis. If we do it multiple times, we’ll tend to spot these patterns and realizing the way we often behave.
And then the idea is that having discovered that we come up with preplanned strategies. Things that we’ve decided in advance that agree with our values rather than trying to improvise in the moment under pressure, in which case we’re likely to go fall back to those default model one strategies.
Alexis: So, you are VP of engineering at ION Analytics.
Jeffrey: Yes.
Alexis: ,are you really able to use that in your day-to-Day? Life and how your teams maybe are using it if they are.
Jeffrey: Would say this is in this scenario, not all of the teams are I use it all the time. I if nothing else, I, I do a workshop every month at a meetup where I have a meetup, the agile conversations meetup, and that we do a it’s open, it’s free to [00:18:00] everyone. And so once a month I will do the four Rs practice along with everyone else.
So minimally I actually do. this practice minimal once a month. Now I actually did something like this. Four or five times in the past week leading different workshops at the conference and quote unquote, summer camp between them at these conferences. So I’ve I’m you’re you’re catching me in a moment where I where I look especially virtuous in practice. So, but I will definitely use this techniques of practice, even though I’ve been doing it for 10 years. It’s still very valuable to keep practicing. Oh, 10 years. It’s much more now. Isn’t it? Time flies more more like 12 or 13 years. Yeah. But it’s not I’m not in it. The thing about these skills that we talked about here, these conversations is there are things that you can initiate.
These are practices you can do on your own without needing to get everyone’s buy in that these, these are things that you can do. These ideas of being more transparent of being more curious , [00:19:00] these are things that work whether or not other people are, have practiced them as well. And I think part of it is because goes back to what I said before, these ideas make a lot of sense to people and Generally, what we’re saying here is take those, those ideas that we would all agree are the best way to make decisions and then actually behave that way.
But, but the important part here is we’re not, we’re not trying to do something wild and crazy. And I often illustrate this in my. Group sessions when I’m doing a workshop, I’ll ask people and I’ll say something like if, if I was going to put you in charge of coming up with a process, we’re going to make a decision and I’ll choose something trivial.
Let’s say you’re going to choose what ice cream we ordered tonight for the group. How would you suggest we go about making the decision? And it’s generally some variation of, well, I would ask everyone. For their idea what they would suggest. Cool. And then I asked you. So you’d be curious. Huh.
Now, would you also share your own [00:20:00] ideas? I feel like, well, yes. Okay. So you’d be transparent because everyone agrees that we’re going to make a decision together. We want all the information. So we should be curious about what everyone else knows and what they believe. And we should be transparent about what we know and what we believe. And we all agree that that’s the best way to make a decision, but it’s not the way people act in practice. I should be, I should clarify this. It’s not the way people act in practice. If they think something important is at stake, if they, if they think this, the question is trivial and they’re, they’re not concerned about it.
Or, and this is why, for example, people make great facilitators for other people’s problems because they don’t care. And when they don’t care, they. Naturally act in a way that’s very productive, which is they say, well, let’s get all the information on the table. Look, I don’t really know about this dispute.
Let’s hear from both sides. Let’s bring in all the, all the facts. And once we have all the facts, then we can decide. That’s what we, we know in really deeply [00:21:00] believe this is the best way to make decisions, but. If we think there’s something important at stake, suddenly we don’t behave that way. And the reason is because we come up with our own ideas about what we think is best.
And once we have our own idea of what’s best, now, suddenly we want it to win. We’re no longer trying to make the best decision. We’re trying to have the best. Our decision be the decision that approach of how do I get my ideas to win? It just leads to a completely different set of behaviors.
And I don’t think this is a conscious choice people are making. It’s just a function of how our cognition works. It kind of goes back to that fallacy of like the naive realism, like look, the, the right answer is obvious. Therefore, since everyone has the same information, there’s no need to be curious and there’s no need to be transparent.
It’s just a question of being logical. And so I will try to reason people, I will bludgeon them with reason until my way is victorious. And, [00:22:00] and that going along with this is the idea that this is the right thing to do. I should be trying to get my idea to win because my idea is best. And and this is an important decision.
This is consequential. If something else were to happen other than my best idea, well, that would be a loss for all of us. And it’s that fear of loss that I think generates these kinds of behaviors in us. It’s not that people are ill motivated, but the, the way our cognition works gets us caught in this trap, and this is why.
It’s really valuable to have people go and practice this other way of being and practice this other approach of saying, you know, rather than trying to focus on having our idea win, how can we focus on mutual learning? How can I focus on learning what other people believe and sharing what I believe? Now at the end, maybe we won’t agree.
On the best thing to do, but at least in our disagreement, we’ll have all available information. That’s why I think this [00:23:00] works without having other people be trained in it, because if I come to you and I say, look, we have this decision to make, but I really want to understand, Alexis, what is it that you believe and can you tell me what you saw and how you got there?
You’re happy to tell me you’re not going to say like, well, look, I, I think you should, my idea should win, but I’m not going to tell you why I got there. No, no. You’re quite happy to like share your chain of reasoning because you’ll be persuasive. And if having done that, I say, well, look, let me share.
What I’ve seen and how I got there, then people are generally are happy to listen after they’ve had their chance to talk, right? So this kind of reciprocation. So when we’ve done the practice and we can behave this way, we make the whole conversation better for everyone.
Because we’re not trying to mislead people where we’re actually taking them back to what they believe would be the right way to work and and the way that they would behave. If it was something they were designing in advance. It’s only something we fall out [00:24:00] of doing in the moment, in the heat of the moment.
Alexis: Yeah, that’s very interesting. So do you believe that drive way the teams are organized on, on the way the team works because you and probably others start to behave that way, engaging people and their interactions. Excellent.
Jeffrey: What, well, I mean the, the, the conversation I’m part of, I can bring these skills to better, and I’d also would say the more people who’ve done the practice, the better I’m. At ion via a series or a short series of acquisitions when I first was learning this, I was CTO and head of product at a much smaller company called Tim group and at Tim group.
We actually did bring this these, this material in, and we did have everyone in the company practice, and it was very effective to have everyone learn these skills because you start having the kind of jargon and it really did [00:25:00] accelerate things when you could be much more transparent about what your thoughts were in the sense of the metathoughts of saying, well, let’s make sure that we’re using mutual learning here.
You know, there was keywords people would apply and not only that, but people would do practice sessions together. We would have a weekly and then fort later fortnightly practice session where people would bring their conversations for group discussion. It was very valuable to have people to talk through their differences.
It’d be really interesting when two people would bring their own conversational analysis of the same conversation. What we found was that people consistently realize that if they’d been more transparent, more curious earlier in their conversations, the things would have gone better. they often were bringing cases where, they had these long, Debates with each other before eventually settling on something.
So in one sense, they didn’t really need the skills. They would work things out eventually, but having the skills, having done the practice, what would have been maybe three [00:26:00] hours of discussion became 10 minutes. So, and people felt better. So there was definite wins for having done this as a group. It’s not that there isn’t value, but it’s not.
It’s not required to develop it. But it is an accelerant if you have more people on board doing the practice.
Alexis: Excellent. What, what is the size of the, of ion analytics and ion group in general?
Jeffrey: I, Ion group is tens of thousands of people. Ion analytics, is a a couple thousand within engineering we’re talking 300 to 250, 300 ish. So that’s a, a much larger whereas at Tim Group, when I started there was 120 people. We’re now doing this much larger organization than when I was, was at Tim.
Alexis: Yeah, that gives a sense that we are not talking about 10 people or even 100. It’s way larger than that. And you can still see the impact of having better [00:27:00] conversations in the, in the organization. Is it something that can spread to , the other part of the group, or is it only in your area?
Jeffrey: I think it spreads individual by individual. So even if I think back at to Tim group, it it started very much within engineering. It was it was people within engineering who were practicing these things and then, and then product and then people in data science and then until it’s kind of all of the sort of technology side, and then it spread over to the executive team.
Actually, and then the executive team then wanted to instill it in the rest of the company and then took it to sales. So it it, it, it did spread bit by bit through Tim group. It did so because you had people who were explicitly championing it within the context of. Analytics, it’s something that I focus more on using than teaching.
I have done some classes, [00:28:00] but we don’t have the same at the moment, same kind of weekly study group. It’s there for people who like it. And I do think there is an element to which it spreads on the other hand, even though there’s no training , if I’m with a group of people and. We practice the idea of being transparent and curious, then they begin developing those patterns and it comes out in some of even some of the ritualized elements.
So, for example, we’re focused a lot right now on post mortems or root cause analysis. And bringing in the idea of, look we’re going to focus here on first creating a timeline. We want to head of shared facts that we’re discussing before we then go and try to make meaning from those facts. And we’re going to move stepwise and have multiple people involved to sharing their perspective.
We’re kind of embedding in the process, this mutual learning model. And so in that sense, there’s an element which it spreads through experience rather than [00:29:00] through, you know a shared mental model of what’s happening. I do think that does spread in part because if we go back to, we said before about the need to build trust when we have built trust with other people and when we have psychological safety, then we are more likely to behave in the way that we believe is correct.
We’re more likely to share, be vulnerable and share those thoughts and differences. And we’re more likely. Having built trust and respect, we’re more likely to then be curious about what other people say. So there’s an element which the practice leads people into behaving in this fashion.
Alexis: I love it. Thank you very much, Jeffrey. Maybe one last question. What would be one advice you would give to your younger self?
Jeffrey: Well,, the advice I’d give to my younger self is to start this earlier. I’m now 54. I came to this in my forties and it would have made a massive difference to me if I had started this in my [00:30:00] twenties. I could have learned a lot more, a lot faster. I could have been much more.
Persuasive I could have been much of much more help to the groups. I was dealing with if I had learned these Skills earlier. I definitely was a Kind of person who would try to persuade other people about why my position was right and so I think that since Benjamin Mitchell was correct in his analysis when he said I was well practice at advocacy, that was true.
I had a couple decades of serious practice going back to actually the high school. So maybe three decades I had been on the speech and debate team. And so I had learned a lot in practice, a lot of persuasion. I think I would have benefited from a lot more curiosity. That’s my younger self that would be.
You know, become more balanced, learn the value of listening first and to understand that listening is not a weakness. It’s a strength. I think there’s that element of if I, if I’m [00:31:00] curious, then it makes it that I’m somehow losing ground. And that’s just simply not true. I’m, I’m adding value to everyone by being curious.
And then I’ll have my opportunity to be transparent. That’s, that’s advice I could have used a couple decades before I learned it. Thank
Alexis: I love it, Jeffrey. Thank you very much for having joined me on the podcast.
Jeffrey: Thank you for having me.