What do we mean exactly when we say that we want to participate in
thoughtful dialogue in a project? What is our intention with this? When
I recently came across some essays by David
Gurteen and read his definition of dialogue as
being “a disciplined form of conversation” it got me thinking about
how we often forget that like all skills, practice makes perfect. What
make our conversations discilplined in the first place? Based on my
experience, dialogue (disciplined conversation) manifests when all
participants in a conversation are practicing mindfulness. I don’t
believe that most people learn or behave well by being beaten into
submission, so we must come to an understanding while we actively
involve ourselves in dialogue. Most of us are civil towards one another,
which does wonders for allowing us to tolerate each other, but I still
can’t help but feel that we’re still missing the mark when it comes to
having consistent and thoughtful dialogue.
Over the past several months, our team has been spending quite a bit of
time and energy analyzing these problems. What we really starting to
uncover is that the real problem seems to exist somewhere outside of our
development methodologies. Working under the Agile umbrella provides no
silver
bullet.
The real issues seem to exist much deeper in our human nature.
We’re not all that great at communicating
Humans are not perfect… therefore… our ideas are probably far from
perfect as well. Our thoughts aren’t perfect. Our interactions aren’t
perfect. We’re consistently inconsistent (heh) and while we can rely on
averages to some extent to calculate probabilities, we can’t always
explain why somethings still go horribly wrong. The principles outlines
in the Agile manifesto stress the
importance of focusing on people not processes and responding to change.
If we are to put a heavy focus on the people involved in projects, we
must acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses and find innovative ways
to improve our communication skills.
On a daily basis, we’re faced with complex problems. Hopefully, we’re
using a lot of our prior experience to aid us in making rational
decisions about how we respond to them. There is a lot that goes through
each decision that we make. We can’t automate this process (yet), but we
can definitely share our lessons with one another. Our intentions need
to be thoughtful and empathetic to the needs of all parties affected by
each decision. As humans, we have the opportunity to really listen to
the concerns of others and use not only our logical intelligence… but
also our emotional intelligence.
Much of this comes down to each of us learning to understand how we make
decisions and interact with people. It’s our goal with Dialogue-Driven
Development that with your help, we’ll be able to outline patterns of
dialogue,
which we hope will be of great value to the community. Our team has been
analyzing our interaction with clients and discussing what has worked
well and what hasn’t. How did our clients respond to approach X versus
Y? It’s important that we capture this information and have
conversations about the results.
“The meaning is what holds it [dialogue] together. ..Meaning is not
static – it is flowing. And if we have the meaning being shared, then
it is flowing among us; it holds the group together…in that way we
can talk together coherently and think together.” - David
Bohm
Doesn’t that sound beautiful? Who wouldn’t want to reach such levels of
project enlightenment?
d3 aims to be to communication what BDD is to specification
While at RailsConf Europe, I had the
privilege to speak with several Rail developers… several of which are
doing contract development for several clients, just like our team. We
discussed d3 for a while and I walked away feeling really excited about
the whole concept. When I explained that our team didn’t see d3 as a
replacement for Agile methodologies like Scrum, XP, etc… but as
another tool in our tool belt. Dialogue between developers, clients, and
users should be agnostic about particular methodologies. We’re really
excited about Behavior-Driven
Development as a best practice in our
development process and we’re seeing Dialogue-Driven Development as
another best practice that we start using from the initial point of
contact with a potential client to long after we deliver the working
product that we were contracted to develop.
We’ll be posting some fun announcements about the d3 project in the
coming week(s). Stay tuned…
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