Saying No

In this week's episode, Dave and Peter explore why you should stop doing too much at the same time. We discuss the culture where we always have to say yes when work is coming through - even though that often means doing a task half-assed or trying desperately juggling everything with no time for anything else in our lives.

 Join us on this week takeaway: 

•  Too much WIP 
• Asking the strategy question
• Not letting go of unfinished work

References in this episode: 

David Rock's SCARF model-  https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/SCARF.htm

Michael Bungay Stanier - The Coaching Habit -  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29342515-the-coaching-habit

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

Transcript

Peter: 0:03

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. Looking forward to another interesting conversation today, dave, and what are we talking about?

Dave: 0:24

I've been just laughing because we're talking about saying no, about not trying to do too many things at once, and the reason I'm laughing is here we are doing back to back recordings instead of the one recording that we do, so we're already violating the principle that we're trying to talk about, which is looking at work in progress, looking at how do you make space for change.

Peter: 0:57

And this is a very, very interesting topic because I know you and I run into this a lot when we go in and start to help organizations where the response is just well, I'm too busy, I'm too busy to change, I can't possibly do that because, well, what can I stop? Everything's a priority number one, everything's critical. All of this has to be done. I've got X number of different people telling me that it needs to be done and no, I won't stop doing what I'm doing, and so I can't possibly make space to change.

Dave: 1:22

I find it. I've just come from having conversations with an organization that has multiple releases, like one backed up one after the other, and, of course, their teams. While they're testing one release, they're already building on the next release, and so there's this busyness factor. And what I'm finding really interesting in just having the conversations is there's almost just a culture that we have and I think this is pervasive, it's not this one organization, I see this everywhere a culture we have that we have to always say yes when work is coming through. In fact, I can think of unique situations where I've worked with people who have said actually no, I can't do that, and I've been surprised.

Dave: 2:05

I'm sitting there going what do you mean? You can't say no, you're expected to say yes and somehow find a way, and I think that's we know this, like the numbers tell us very, very clearly If you take the time to sharpen the ax, if you slow down, you speed up, if you finish things before you start things, you're going to get more done. And yet, at the same time, when somebody tries to impose those constraints, those guiding principles, on the conversations we have, I think even we'll find ourselves going well, can't you fit this in amongst everything else that you're doing.

Peter: 2:41

There's actually some psychological reasons for that too. If human beings are really really bad at saying no, not doing things. If I say to you, don't think of an elephant, what's the first thing you do?

Dave: 2:56

Well, that's it. The negative doesn't work.

Peter: 2:58

We don't hear that negative, we don't absorb it, we just strip it out of the sentence right, yeah, and this means that we end up taking on too much work, or it leads to us taking on too much work might be a way of looking at it, and we know how disruptive work in progress is to flow. It's the biggest enemy of flow. It's the biggest enemy of us getting our work done, and it's one of the first places that I always look when I go into organizations. It's just like how many different things are you trying to do all at once? Oh really, and how are you intending actually doing everything at once?

Dave: 3:34

And as you introduce whatever you were trying to get some continuous improvement or new practices in, there's none of the sort of balancing act of removing capacity, like committed capacity to be able to take on those new skills. So there's that mentality of never letting go is pretty deep. I mean, I'm actually intrigued by the point you just raised about the don't think of elephants, because I do wonder whether it's you know, what is it that you don't want to do becomes what is it you do want to do? And I wonder if just the simple act of asking questions in a different way, changing the mindset to be how can we remove work, what things can we take off? Put to one side, not start this week and start next week, whatever it might be, but changing the language we use around there so that that negative stripping out of the negative is no longer a part of that conversation.

Peter: 4:33

There's a very good question in the Coaching Habit Michael Stanier, I think his name is. I'll post that in the comments where he asks the strategy question is if you say yes to this, what are you going to say no to? Or what will you say no to and this is a very good question to ask yourself at the point that somebody says, hey, could you just spend five minutes working on this, could you just go do that thing? It'll only take you an hour or so to go do that. And you say, well, if I say yes to this, what am I saying no to? What am I going to have to stop doing in order to be able to make this happen? And consciously thinking about that can very much change your behavior and how you look at incoming work.

Dave: 5:19

Well, and I think there's also a responsibility for those of us who are leaders in those situations to create the psychological safety for people to actually say, no, I can't do that, or we should not start that now. Not necessarily, no, I can't do it, but we should not start that now. Let's finish this before we pick that up. Or, to your point, if we start this, if we do this, what do we say? No to Help me make the decision, help the team make the decision as to what's going to get put down and paused and I think this is something that, as leaders, I've certainly seen myself do this where we know we should ask it, but we kind of consciously keep quiet in the hope that the team will somehow magically commit to both and magically deliver both.

Dave: 6:05

Right, and maybe there's a bit of an onus on us as leaders to step in there and say here, we need this. These are the things we're stopping doing. I remember one of the startups I worked with was a fantastic idea of a stop doing list, and on a regular basis, the leadership team would get together and put as many ideas into that stop doing list as possible. It's something that I not as regularly as I should, but certainly revisit often to try and shake out some of those things that are there but should not be.

Peter: 6:37

I was talking to somebody I collaborated with a lot the other day about this, and a year ago we had sat down in the mind map because we'd been collaborating on a whole bunch of different things. We had a bunch of unfinished work. That was all of this in-progress work, and we were getting to the point of how some of these things don't even relate. How does any of this actually relate to where we want to go and which things should we probably be saying no to? And so we've mind mapped that out, we put it on big board and we sort of worked out which of these things do we actually want to work and which ones are we just going to say, okay, that's just not going to happen. We're going to put that one side and we're just going to focus in the right place.

Peter: 7:19

And we were talking about where we've got to a year later and that work's kind of built up in a similar way. So we need to go back and do the same thing again. So I like that like you're saying this idea that you have that list. I like that like you're saying this idea that you have that list, that you're constantly refreshing it, but it needs to be something that's done on a regular cadence. Because of that don't think of an elephant problem that we will constantly say yes to things that we shouldn't say yes to. We need a regular cadence to go back and say what have I said yes to? That I really should have said no to, and so I can stop doing it.

Dave: 7:52

I also wanted to pick up because there's a tendency, I think, to say we'll stop doing that now but we'll somehow pick it up in the future. And I think that one's quite a dangerous one, because it feels like we've stopped doing it but it's almost like too close to hand. You know, it's a little bit like I want to drink less coffee, so I'm going to move my coffee just within arm's reach, but not quite out of arm's reach, so that I can still sort of instinctive, instinctively reach for it, pull it in, and you know, and that's. I think there's a need to actually kind of kill those things that you have hanging around, rather than make that mental promise that you're going to come back to it when you've got time. Would you agree? Does that make sense, would you agree? Oh, 100%.

Peter: 8:40

Yeah, the problem with the thing that's around is that it still takes up your time. You still go back through your to-do list and say, oh, yeah, that thing. And then you remind yourself about that and it brings it to mind. Now you've got all of the context switching that's going on in your mind as you start to think about all of these other things and you refresh your mind about that thing. Now I don't want to forget about that. And now, all of a sudden, you find yourself with a long, long to-do list and the reality is you probably need to just slice a whole ton of that off, not do it.

Dave: 9:08

Now? What do you say if leadership, executive leadership or senior leadership come to you to say, well, we've got a lot to do, we just have to get this done. We can't afford to stop doing things.

Peter: 9:18

So at the point where we say, ok, well, there's only so many hours in a day, there's only so much that is possible. So how do we start to prioritize this? How do we decide which of these things are the ones that should be done and which things should be taken off the table so we can start to consider how valuable are some of these things to do? What are the mechanisms we're going to put into place, which ones of these, if we don't do it, will anybody notice? And taking an approach where we're a lot more calculated about understanding what we will take on and what we won't take on.

Dave: 9:56

I've certainly found it's useful to demonstrate that if you actually remove things from the table effectively the backlog you reduce WIP, that it increases throughput. I love about it is, of course, it's driven by pretty close to physical laws about how if you reduce work in progress, you're going to increase the amount of throughput you can get within a given range and it's counterintuitive. So demonstrating that with some pretty you know running a pilot, really tracking that, and showing that teams can get more done to a higher level of quality without doing, you know, 60-hour weeks and things like that really does make a difference.

Peter: 10:39

Yeah, we mistakenly think, from a leadership and a management perspective, that motivating people and putting posters and driving people in a particular direction will actually help more work get done, whereas the reality is none of that makes a damn difference. It doesn't matter how you decide to rank people, it doesn't matter what you put up on the cat poster on the wall. It doesn't matter any of that. It doesn't impact how the system behaves. The only way you can impact how the system behaves is to change the system. So we have to look at what are things we can do to improve quality. We've got to go back and look at the beginning. We've got to go and look at what's causing the problems. How can we change the system itself to make it better?

Dave: 11:24

So what you're saying is, in order to improve things, we've got to go back to basics and understand how we're doing things today and what's influencing our ability to deliver it right. So, yeah, I mean I think that's certainly avoiding the fads and actually getting down and doing the hard work right of understanding the system that people are working in. And I do think there's that element of being open to learning, because it is so entrenched in how we interact with our teams, how leaders interact with people, what our expectations are when we go into certain meetings, how we commit to things even though we know we can't commit to them, or how we say yes when we really want to say no, we've got to do something. You know, what would you like me to stop doing if I say yes to this, as you pointed out earlier, and I think that that kind of hangs around that there, these sorts of changes have to come from the leaders, who are in those moments when they can make it easy for their team members to say, okay, no, I won't do that.

Dave: 12:27

I can say no to something. Well, in that case, we should say no to this rather than, as I was saying earlier on, that sort of holding back, and I certainly found it myself. I can see that happening and I haven't always vocalized it to say hold on. We don't have to say yes to everything. Maybe what we do is say yes to some things, including this new thing that we have coming in, but the consequence is there's a no to something else.

Peter: 12:51

Yes, exactly, we've got to make sure we're properly balancing those pieces, and leadership plays that important role in empowering and enabling people to be able to make those changes, to come forward with those ideas, to be able to say no. If it isn't safe for you to say no, then people won't speak up, and if people don't speak up, then you won't know that there's a problem. And yeah, then all the cat posters in the world are not going to actually help you move forward and get better.

Dave: 13:24

I was just thinking. I was listening into a team Scrum Master, team daily stand-up earlier this week and what was really interesting is you could see from the burndown chart, you could see from the task board that the team was going to struggle to finish all of the work they committed to, and you could hear it in the conversation that was going on within the team and as we're debriefing afterwards, what I found interesting the conversation with the scrum master is the scrum master and the that was going on within the team and as we're debriefing afterwards, what I found interesting the conversation with the scrum master is the scrum master and the product owner effectively being some of the leaders in that particular conversation. They recognized it but they didn't bring it up to say hold on, we're clearly not going to meet a commitment over what's basically a 10 day time period. In this case, what can we say no to? What should we stop talking about doing?

Dave: 14:13

And even in that simple microcosm of a single team in a two-week sprint, when you've got these information radiators there and you've got experienced people, they know what's going on. The interesting thing listening in was there was still this conversation that somehow something magical was going to happen and everybody would suddenly get to the end of the sprint and make it work, rather than immediately identifying that as an opportunity to come in and say, okay, let's strip out two of these work items, let's just put them on hold on ice for the moment. How can we get these remaining ones wrapped up safely?

Peter: 14:46

Yeah, I think that's a wonderful example. So, in the effort of time, how would you sum this up in like three points?

Dave: 14:55

I've really enjoyed this conversation yeah, and I I think it's close to both of our hearts, isn't it so? Um, a couple of things. One is just that classic stop starting, start finishing. Yes, is you know? That should be on a cat post, yes, yes. And I think that the second one the realization I was getting as we were talking is the responsibility of us, in a leadership role, of really making it safe to address this, rather than staying silent and somehow hoping fingers crossed behind our back that maybe they'll commit to it and somehow pull it off. Why not change that conversation so it becomes a topic of conversation? That maybe is agenda item number one that we can address. Third one can you add anything to that?

Peter: 15:42

I think you've covered it well. There's the work in progress. We touched on that reducing work in progress because work in progress is the biggest detriment to flow. It's the if. If you are trying to do far too many things all at once, then, yeah, you're already setting yourself up for for failure. So one of the first things we need to do is to start to look at that. Yeah, I think I think that's a good way of summing it up and so. So, with that said, it's, it's been a pleasure it up and so, with that said, it's been a pleasure, as always, and we've got through our 20 minutes and I would like to thank you for the wonderful conversation, and if anyone wants to reach out and chat with us, it's at feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom, and I look forward to next time. Until next time, thanks again, peter. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast, where your hosts, Peter Madison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.