Suppose you and I are having a conversation, and I say one of the following:

• Jeff is a resister.
• Jeff is resisting.
• Jeff said, “I don’t have time for that.”

Each sentence has a different effect on our conversation. Each carries a different weight.

The first sentence, “Jeff is a resister,” declares what looks like a fact about Jeff. The present tense “is” says that resister-ness is an ongoing quality, perhaps a permanent one.

My choosing this one fact about Jeff, out of all of the things that are true about him, says that for the purposes of this conversation the important thing about Jeff is that he is a resister.

Finally, the word “resister” expresses a great deal about my point of view. By calling him a resister, I am expressing (implicitly) that I want Jeff to do something and that he is not doing it. And I am expressing these things not as truths about my point of view, but as if they were facts about Jeff.

So by saying, “Jeff is a resister,” I am hanging my point of view onto Jeff as if it were a persistent truth about him, and as if it were the important thing to know about him. Those four words carry a lot of weight. They weigh down our conversation.

Let’s look at the second sentence, “Jeff is resisting.”
I’m now characterizing not Jeff, but his actions.
This allows for Jeff to be a manager, a father, an amateur trombonist, a former volunteer firefighter — a person. And it allows space for us to talk about Jeff’s other qualities. It loads less weight onto Jeff and onto our conversation.

Still, “Jeff is resisting” carries weight. By characterizing Jeff’s actions instead of describing them, my words express my point of view as if it were a fact about Jeff. And they says that, for our conversation, my characterization is the important thing to know about Jeff’s actions.

Now the third sentence. “Jeff said ‘I don’t have time for that.’” Here I am describing what I observed. I am allowing for Jeff’s many other qualities and actions to enter our conversation. The past tense “said” places Jeff’s action clearly in the past, where it occurred. It’s done. Compared to my earlier statements, this one leaves the conversation freer to go in many directions.

And this statement, too, carries weight. As Jerry Weinberg said, “Sometimes the most important thing about what you said is that you said it.” When I say anything, my words bring ideas into the present conversation. Whatever my words say, my uttering them says even more. It says that I believe that the ideas I’ve expressed are relevant and important to our conversation. By singling out one of Jeff’s actions, I’m am saying that this action is relevant and important to our conversation.

Words carry weight. In fact, that’s the point of words: to carry meaning — and meaning is a kind of weight. I’m interested in the weight of words, how heavier words constrain our conversations, and lighter words leave us freer to be present with each other in this moment, to see what is here and now.

Experiment: For one day, notice the weight of your words. In what ways do your words express temporary qualities as if they were permanent? Express past events or conditions as if they were ongoing? Express your characterizations and point of view as truths about people, things, or events? How does this affect your conversations?

Experiment: For one day, notice the weight of other people’s words.

Experiment: For one day, notice the metaphors that you and others use in your conversations. What weight do these metaphors carry? How does this affect your conversations?

Experiment: What does my metaphor of weight bring into our conversation? What does it leave out? How does this affect our conversation?

In “Congruence and the Prime Directive“, I wrote about how congruence — honoring Self, Other, and Context — allows people to bring their talents more fully into a project. By bringing greater talent to bear, congruence helps projects succeed.

By my definition, a project is successful if:

• it delights its customers,
• it enhances the team’s ability to work together in the future, and
• it creates value and meaning for its individual members.

For most projects, I want all three of those conditions. If the customers aren’t happy, the project wasn’t successful, no matter what value the project team members enjoyed. If the project team is burned out, the project wasn’t successful, no matter how happy the customer are.

In some cases, I might consider a project successful even if it does not leave the team better able to work together in the future. Some projects, for example, are accomplished by a task force that comes together, accomplishes its goal, and disbands, never to work together again. But perhaps even in these cases, the team members would do well to learn something about how to work on projects and how to work in teams. And if the team members will work together on subsequent projects, I want not only for the project to satisfy its customers and its members. I also want the team to learn from its experience, to create value for itself as a team,

Like any definition I offer, my definition of project success tells you more about me than about the thing I’m defining. And I suspect that any definition of project success is essentially an expression of who and what the definer cares about. My definition tells you that I care about the people the project was intended to serve, I care about the individual project team members, and I care about the team as a team.

Who does my definition leave out? It isn’t clear to me where sponsors (or investors) fit in. Are they customers? Are they project team members? I want them to be satisfied, too. What about other stakeholders? What about members of the community in which the project takes place?

I care about those people, too. I feel anxious when I leave out people I care about. So my definition of project success is a work in progress.

Note: I adapted my definition of project success from J. R. Hackman’s definition of “group effectiveness,” which I read in
Intervention Skills
, Brendan Reddy’s excellent guide for facilitators.

Experiment: How do you define success for your current project? How does your definition express who and what you care about? What people and values are included in your definition? What people and values are not included?

Experiment: How do your project teammates define success for your current project? How does their definitions express who and what they care about? What people and values are included in their definitions? What people and values are not included?

Yesterday, I described a conversation in which I’ve been involved about Norm Kerth’s Prime Directive for project retrospectives. The Prime Directive asks us to believe that throughout the project everyone was doing the best they could given the situation at hand.

In that conversation, on the Extreme Programming and Industrial XP mailing lists, several people balked at that belief and raised examples of people acting in their own interests in ways that were detrimental to the project. How can we call that “best?” Referring to one example, Steve Bate said:

I don’t see how this behavior can be labeled as a “best job” in the context of the project (even if was a “best job” for his own personal goals).

Later, Steve added:

Wouldn’t a project charter or the equivalent help to avoid the tendency to define “best” in terms of personal (vs. project) goals?

Here is my answer, slightly edited.

I hope not. If the project is to succeed, it will have to be at least compatible with the needs of the people on the team. If we allow for each person’s personal definition of best, we have a better chance of detecting and addressing incompatibilities.

I believe that one of the conditions that affects a project’s success is congruence. Congruence, Congruence is about honoring myself, each other person with whom I interact, and the context in which we are interacting — Self, Other, and Context. (Congruence was a central element of family therapist Virginia Satir’s work. See her small and powerful book
Making Contact
.)

My take on congruence is that each (Self, Other, and Context) has needs. Each has support to offer. Each offers its support more fully when its needs are met, and the needs of each are better satisfied when each offers its support fully.

In a project retrospective, the context includes the project, the organization, the people affected by the project, and so on. Of course it’s important to honor the needs of the project. If the project isn’t satisfied (I’m anthropomorphizing here), it will offer less support to the project stakeholders, to the team, and to me. I care about all of those things, so I want to satisfy the project’s needs.

It’s also important to honor each other person on the project. If their needs are not satisfied, they will offer less support to themselves, to each other, to me, and to the project.

It’s also important to honor myself. If I’m not getting what I need, I offer less support to my teammates, to myself, and to the project.

Self, Other, and Context form a mutual support system, a whole. The whole is healthier when each part’s needs are met. Each part’s needs are satisfied most fully when the whole is healthy. Any part that I neglect offers less of itself, which affects the other parts.

The Prime Directive reminds us to honor each other, and to honor ourselves, which creates an environment in which we can each bring our full resources to bear to support each other, ourselves, and the project.

I am entirely selfish. I promote congruence and the Prime Directive because my life works better when I attend not only to my own needs, but also to the needs of the people in my life and to the needs of the context around us.

(Thanks to Keith Ray for encouraging me to post this.

Experiment: In what ways are you supporting the needs of your project teammates? In what ways are they supporting your needs?

Experiment: What additional support would help you bring your talents more fully to your project? Where could you find that support?

Experiment: What additional support would help your teammates bring their talents more fully to your project? If you aren’t sure, how could you find out?

In his book
Project Retrospectives
, Norm Kerth says:

For a retrospective to be effective and successful, it needs to be safe. By “safe,” I mean that the participants must feel secure within their community — to discuss their work, to admit that there may have been better ways to perform the work, and to learn from the retrospective exercise itself.

To promote safety and trust, Norm recommends Kerth’s Prime Directive:

Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

The Prime Directive came up recently on the Extreme Programming (XP) mailing list. In a conversation about a technical topic, I had pointed to my recent article about “Creating Empathy.” Ron Jeffries responded by writing an article called “What’s the Second Directive?” Ron describes a situation in which, as he puts it, “Jeffries screwed up.” He ends the article this way:

I don’t get it. I don’t get how accepting badness as “we did our best” leads to learning. There must be something after the Prime Directive. What’s the Second Directive?

In the ensuing conversation, which spilled over into the Industrial XP mailing list, Ron expressed his concerns very clearly:

I don’t want anyone hurt, and I want everyone to feel safe. I also want everyone to feel responsibility for making sure that their actions work well for the team, and for making sure that they are on top of their actions to make that happen.

Is that so much to ask?

No, of course it’s not too much to ask. Like Ron, I also want to promote responsibility in retrospectives. In the mailing list conversation, I described several ways in which, in my experience, the Prime Directive actually promotes responsibility:

• The Prime Directive encourages me to take responsibility for creating an environment in which our actions can be more successful. If we each did the best we could do in that situation (and we did), and if I want us to do better next time (and I do), I’m going to have to take responsibility for changing the situation to support more effective behaviors.
• The Prime Directive encourages me to take responsibility for my contribution to the situation. If we each did the best we could do in that situation (and we did), and if I want us to do better next time (and I do), and I contributed to the situation (let’s suppose I did), I’m going to have to take responsibility for improving my contribution to the situation.
• The Prime Directive encourages me to take responsibility not only for my actions, but also for how I choose my actions. If I did the best I could do in that situation (and I did), and if I want to do better next time (and I do), and I can’t think of a way to change the situation around me (let’s suppose I can’t), I’m going to have to take responsibility for improving the way I choose my behaviors in that situation.

As I write this, I now see that applying the Prime Directive, all by itself, does not necessarily lead to the kind of responsibility I’m describing. As Ron suggested, there is something more than the Prime Directive. The “something more” is The Responsibility Razor. If I want better results next time, I’m going to have to take responsibility.

In the conversation on the mailing lists, I proposed a Second Directive to address Ron’s concerns. Here it is, modified from my original wording to emphasize the central element of responsibility:

The Second Directive: We accept the responsibility to change at least one of the conditions that made our best less than we now want it to be.

I can now see that whenever I’ve applied Kerth’s Prime Directive, I’ve also implicitly applied The Second Directive, and assumed that others were applying it, too. Now I want to make it explicit.

Thanks to Ron Jeffries for the big nudge.

Experiment: Apply The Second Directive on your next retrospective. Let me know what happens.

In response to my recent review of Kelly Bryson’s book Don’t Be Nice, Be Real, a few of us on the Resistance as a Resource mailing list have been talking about empathy. Several people have asked, “How can I feel empathy for someone I don’t feel empathy for?” Good question. What I’d thought was a great idea seems more like a great conundrum.

Here’s how I resolve the conundrum: I can create empathy for others by first learning to empathize with myself, especially when my behaviors violate my image of who I want to be. A wonderful tool for self-empathy is The Value Question: “If I had ________ (that result), what would that do for me that’s even more important?”

Suppose, for example, that I’ve publicly and intentionally insulted Wilbur. By “intentional” I mean that in that moment I wanted him to feel insulted. Looking back, I now see that wanting Wilbur to feel insulted doesn’t fit my vision of who I want to be. Why would I do such a thing? The Value Question can help me find my deeper intentions.

If Wilbur were to feel insulted, what would that do for me that’s even more important? Wilbur would think twice about dismissing my ideas.

I notice two important things about this answer. First, the cause-and-effect is pretty shaky. Would feeling insulted really encourage Wilbur to think twice about my dismissing my ideas? Not likely. One of the benefits of The Value Question is that it helps me to uncover some of the questionable beliefs by which I’m choosing my behavior. We’ll come back to this in a minute. For now, simply note that the cause-and-effect is shaky.

The second important thing I notice about this answer is that my deeper reason for insulting Wilbur — wanting him to think twice about dismissing my ideas — still doesn’t fit my highest vision for myself. If my answer to The Value Question, doesn’t reflect who I want to be, that’s a clue that I haven’t searched deeply enough into my intentions.

So I’ll ask The Value Question again. If Wilbur were to think twice about dismissing my ideas, what would that do for me that’s even more important? He would consider my ideas more fully. And if he considers my ideas more fully, what would that do for me that’s even more important? I would feel that he respected me. And if I felt that Wilbur respected me, what would that do for me that’s even more important? I would feel safer offering my ideas.

With this step, I’ve found an intention I can truly empathize with. I want to feel safe offering my ideas. This fits my image of who I want to be. Having discovered a deeper intention that I can appreciate, I now have a choice: I can continue with The Value Question or I can discontinue it. The first few times you do this, I recommend continuing with The Value Question as far as you can go, as long as you get answers. And don’t give up if an answer doesn’t come immediately. The last few answers often take some time to emerge. Ask the question, and allow a minute or two for the answer to come. (See the book Core Transformation by Connirae and Tamara Andreas for more ideas about how to use The Value Question.)

Once I’ve discovered my good intentions and empathized with them, that’s a great time to explore the shaky cause-and-effect beliefs I’ve uncovered. Now I can begin to explore more effective ways to achieve my deeper intentions, ways that will cause less pain for others and for myself.

After I’ve done this a few times, I begin to see that even my most “unacceptable” behaviors, as dysfunction as those behaviors are, come from intentions that I can appreciate. The deeper intentions I discover behind even my most dysfunctional behaviors are not only positive intentions, but beautiful intentions.

And the biggest payoff for me has been this: As I learn to see the positive intentions behind even my most dysfunctional behaviors, I begin to see the possibility that other people’s “unacceptable” behaviors might also come from wonderful intentions. This is the beginning of empathy.

Experiment: Think of a recent experience where your behavior was not what you would like it to be. Use The Value Question to trace your intentions as far as you can trace them. What intention do you discover at the end of the line?

Experiment: Use The Value Question to trace four or five of your recent actions (good or bad) all the way to your deepest intentions. Do you find any qualities in common in those “ultimate intentions?” (Connirae and Tamara Andreas call these intentions “core states.”)

A few weeks ago, Peter Lindberg wrote about maximizing learning on his Tesugen.com weblog:

Learning is important in software projects, so how do we maximize learning? In Tom and Mary Poppendieck’s Lean Development: An Agile Toolkit … they say something about the level of learning in scientific experiments — that it peaks when the success rate is about 50 percent. I don’t remember whether they quoted some study about this, but it sure feels right to me that a balance between success and failure would increase learning. You need some friction.

That caught my attention, because I’d read a related idea the night before, in a classic article that was reprinted in the January 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review. In that article, “Pygmalion in Management,” J. Sterling Livingston says that people’s motivation and productivity are highest when the boss’s expectations are both realistic and achievable. What does Livingston mean by “realistic and achievable?” This:

Research … has demonstrated that the relationship of motivation to expectancy varies in the form of a bell-shaped curve.

The degree of motivation and effort rises until the expectancy of success reaches 50%, then begins to fall even though the expectancy of success continues to increase. No motivation or response is aroused when the goal is perceived as being either virtually certain or virtually impossible to attain.

I’ve heard similar ideas in other places. For example, in
Becoming a Technical Leader
, Jerry Weinberg says:

In order to climb [in skill], you must leave the sure footing, letting go of what you already do well and possibly slipping downward into a ravine. If you never let go of what you already do well, you may continue to make steady progress, but you’ll never get off the plateau. (p 40)

A certain amount of failure, it seems, is necessary for learning, motivation, and productivity. So I’m wondering” In addition to motivation and learning, what other qualities might benefit from failure? What are the implications for us as individuals? As managers? As coaches? As leaders? As agents of change?

Experiment: Are there areas of your work or your life in which you almost always succeed? What do you learn from those successes? How motivated are you in those areas?

Experiment Are there areas in which you almost always fail? What do you learn from those failures? How motivated are you in those areas?

Experiment Are there areas in which you sometimes succeed and sometimes fail? What do you learn from those successes and failures? How motivated are you in those areas?

Through several recent conversations on the Resistance as a Resource mailing list and other places, I’ve realized that I’ve written little about two enormously important factors that affect resistance: emotions and relationships. My article “Resistance as a Resource” barely mentions emotions and feelings, and offers only a few ideas about improving your relationships with the people you are asking to change. Emotions and relationships are two key areas in which I want to improve my approach to resistance.

My first improvement is to highly recommend the book
Don’t Be Nice, Be Real
, by Kelly Bryson. I’ll leave it to you to discover why Bryson recommends against being “nice” (those quotes around “nice” are a clue). I want to focus on just one of several important themes that run through the book: empathy. The theme of empathy weaves together the threads of emotions, values, needs, and relationships.

When you’re responding to resistance, relationships matter a great deal. Your relationship with each person affects how you and the person interpret each other’s words and actions. When you change your relationship, you change the conversation.

Bryson offers this idea about changing your relationships:

If I can change my image of you, you cannot help but change your image of me. (p 196)

So how can I change my image of another person? One way is to explore the needs behind the person’s actions and to empathize with the needs.

Almost all the power to inspire compassion comes from expressing the need, and only a little from expressing the feeling. Also when I am listening to someone, it is much more powerful to demonstrate that I understand the other’s need than it is to just show that I have heard their feeling. (p 99)

When Bryson talks about needs, he is talking not about specific behaviors or results that one person might want from another, but about universal human needs, such as honesty, connection, peace, physical wellbeing, autonomy, play, and meaning. (For a more detailed list of needs, see the Needs Inventory on the Center for Nonviolent Communication web site.)

Resistance expresses needs. If I can understand the universal human need that someone is expressing through resistance, I can empathize with it. And if I can express my empathy for the person’s needs, I’ve taken a big step toward creating a relationship that supports trust, respect, communication, and collaboration.

How can you understand the needs that people are expressing through their resistance? My articles “Resistance as a Resource” and “Untangling Communication” give many ideas about that. Bryson offers an additional idea: guess.

You do not have to guess right. Just guess human. Just imagine a human feeling and need that might be behind their words. Guessing feelings and needs at least puts us in the camp of humanness, instead of judgment. (p 122)

The main focus of my “Resistance as a Resource” article is understanding the other person’s point of view. Bryson has helped me to see that we can do even better than understanding. We can empathize.

I had a blast today!

I led a leadership team of 60 wonderful executives and managers through a famous leadership case study called Green Eggs & Ham, developed by leadership guru Dr. Seuss. The case study stars two main characters — a leader named Sam, and another person who I’ll call Herb. In the story, Sam works and works and works to persuade Herb to eat some ham and eggs that are unusually colored.

The story is rich in lessons for leaders, especially on the themes of communication, relationships, and context.

I learned a lot from the leadership team today. We paid a great deal of attention to risk. Some of Sam’s leadership behaviors put Herb and others into increasingly risky environments. As we analyzed one of the interactions (pages 32–35), one of the leadership team’s executives said, “Sure, it looked risky, but everyone ended up okay.” The lesson for me: What feels safe and what feels risky depend a great deal on your point of view.

Another interesting point is that most of the time neither Sam nor the other characters (who are perhaps a little too focused on implementing the leader’s vision) notice when their progress literally goes off the rails. This has two lessons for me: First, am I so busy trying to bring this one last person on board that I am putting my vision at risk? Second, perhaps the people who are reluctant to embrace my vision are able to see dangers that I am not.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There were many more lessons, and lots and lots of laughs. If the leadership team learned as much from each other today as I learned from them, I earned my pay.

I love my job!

Experiment: Buy a half dozen copies of Green Eggs & Ham. Arrange a one-hour meeting for your team. Brainstorm a list of effective leadership values and behaviors. Then work through the case study. Read it out loud, two pages at a time. Take a minute after each pair of pages to talk about what is happening in the story. What leadership qualities is each character exhibiting? What qualities is each failing to exhibit? What are the implications for the leader’s vision? What does Sam finally do differently that helps him achieve his goal? What does all of this have to do with your organization, with your leadership behaviors and abilities, and with the leadership visions you want to create?

Experiment: Similar to the previous exercise, but focus on change and resistance. What does each character want and expect? How well are they communicating? What are the relationships among the characters, and what happens to those relationships throughout the story? How does the context affect each character? How do each characters’ actions affect the context and the other characters? What does Sam finally do differently that helps him achieve his goal? What does all of this have to do with your change efforts?

Often when people become stuck trying to solve a problem, they are stuck because they are trying to solve the problem in a specific way. They’ve framed the problem in a way that suggests a particular solution, and then taken that specific solution as their goal. The process of taking a specific solution as the goal — a process that my friend James Bach calls “goal displacement” — sometimes constrains the problem in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to solve. That’s when people get stuck.

One of the ways I help people solve problems is to ask a seemingly simple question: If you had that, what would that do for you?

I first learned about this question in Connirae and Tamara Andreas’s profound book Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within. The Andreases use the question to help individuals discover the positive purpose behind self-defeating behaviors.

I use the question to help people become unstuck in their problem solving. Because the question asks about the value that lies behind any goal or course of action, I call it The Value Question: If you had that, what would that do for you?

Answering The Value Question helps problem solvers become unstuck in two important ways. First, the answer reminds us of the problem we were originally trying to solve. Second, it relieves the constraints that we inadvertently placed on ourselves when we took a particular solution as the goal. When we relieve the constraints, and bring our attention back to the original problem, we often find that the original problem is easier to solve. Other times, we find that the “solution” upon which we’d been fixated would not solve the real problem after all. Though this can be painful, it’s less painful than implementing the “solution” only to find that the problem remains.

Kenneth, an executive responsible for a large project to create a software system to support four of his company’s internal business units, asked me to help his team assess the project’s risks. Before accepting the assignment, I wanted to know more about the background and motivation for the risk assessment. I asked, “If you had an assessment of the risks, what would that do for you?”

Kenneth thought for a moment, then said, “It would make Charlene calm down. Charlene is the director of one of the business units we’re supporting. All of the other directors are happy with what we’re doing, but Charlene is paranoid. She doesn’t trust us. She keeps seeing problems where there aren’t any problems. She’s threatening to bring in a dozen busybody consultants from Coopers & Lybrand to follow us around for six weeks. We can’t handle that kind of disruption. So I want you to do a risk assessment to get Charlene off my back!”

So Kenneth’s goal was not assessing risks. His goal was to “get Charlene to stop disrupting the project.” As Kenneth and I talked, it became clear that any risk assessment that I led, no matter how thorough, would be unlikely to persuade Charlene that the project was under control. Might it help the team control the risks? Maybe, but Kenneth was convinced that the risks were very small and controllable. In his mind, the problem was not risks, but Charlene’s paranoia.

So we abandoned the risk assessment, and talked about some ways that Kenneth might create a more effective relationship with Charlene.

Answering The Value Question helps you to focus on your real goal, and keeps you from wasting time on ineffective, expensive non-solutions.

Experiment: Think of a goal that you are having trouble achieving. Ask yourself The Value Question. “If I achieve __________, what will that do for me?”

Experiment: Think of a change that you are promoting, and that people are resisting. Ask yourself The Value Question. “If these people make this change, what will that do for me?”

Experiment: Notice that when you answer The Value Question about some goal, your answer is also a goal. Imagine that this goal is a solution to an even more important goal. Ask The Value Question again. “If I achieve __________ (this goal), what will that do for me that is even more important?” Notice that this answer is also a goal, and ask The Value Question again. Repeat as many times as you can answer.