Navigating the quagmire: a story of communication and learning.

There are three steps in the process of creating change: know something, decide to do something and then do that thing. It is how you effect change in the world, yourself and everything else. And as simple as it sounds, we get stuck on all three.

Sometimes you don’t realise the importance or the utility of something you know; sometimes you actually just don’t want to know. Deciding to do something and actually beginning to do that thing is often very challenging. From deciding to start running, for example, or to stop smoking, and then actually doing those things. Even deciding to spend just half an hour, regularly, to think about and work on skills that will make your life simpler and you better is often nearly impossible; something I struggle with myself.

I want to tell you a story and about some of the things I learned about communication: managing conflict, working towards good outcomes, and how I try to motivate myself to get on with it.

On communication

Communication is difficult. There wouldn’t be entire fields of study devoted to it if it wasn’t. Miscommunication and misunderstanding occurs far more frequently than we would like to believe and that fact becomes quite evident when working in a corporate environment. A work mate of mine has a favourite quote that comes up quite frequently:

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” — George Bernard Shaw

I’d be the first one to put my hand up, if anybody cared to ask, and say that verbal communication is not my strong suit. I am not, as they say, a born storyteller, something to which those poor bastards who’ve found themselves at the pub with me can surely attest. Also, my condolences to the unfortunate souls that have had to listen to me leading large group meetings. It’s safe to say I have a firm grasp of the general anxiety that can be associated with verbal communication.

The story

Now, imagine this (real or not) impediment in the context of the barely navigable morass of frustration that is communication in large organisations. Particularly global organisations spanning many time zones, tens of thousands of employees with office counts into the hundreds, and then you will realise that making progress can be painfully slow and challenging. Just finding the right person to talk to is often a real challenge let alone having a valuable conversation with them once you’ve found them.

When you add competing business unit incentives, a lack of trust and bad assumptions into the mix of emerging technologies and insufficient face-to-face contact, you have all the ingredients for a spectacular ordeal.

There was a point in a previous role where we had meandered deep, deep into the Impervious Quagmire of Pain and Confusion (©) through a spectacular series of miscommunications and misunderstandings at nearly every level of the organisation. Let me assure you, nothing creates better opportunities for learning than being deep in the Impervious Quagmire of Pain and Confusion (©) with a skilled leader. Also pain and confusion, though.

The quagmire, in more detail, was the fact that the mobile apps my group worked on were required to integrate a “mobile plugin” built by another business unit that had no previous mobile software development experience, who had built said “plugin” more or less in isolation. Without going into the specifics, consider a set of mobile apps where the UI is completely “brandable” to cater for any number of white-label customers having to “integrate” (at build time) a binary “plugin” with a custom and completely different UI and not built with the same frameworks. Pro tip: not good.

Imagine 10 or so months of, frankly, harrowing effort on the part of test and tech leads, architects, developers, UX people and BAs to work out how to do the impossible thing that had been demanded of them and not making much useful headway, even though dozens of people from several different time zones had started talking on the phone daily.

Real, positive progress was really only made when my CIO and one of the other business unit CIOs called a joint meeting of the product delivery organisation leaders; a dozen people or so. The meeting took several hours and was intense but we got to the start of a positive outcome: some understanding of where we were and agreement on how we would manage future engagement — both technically and operationally — and what the business outcomes were that we were going to work towards together. While it was a good start it wasn’t exactly moonshine and roses afterwards and was followed by many more challenging meetings, however, positive progress continued to be made.

Perhaps I’ve made it sound more straightforward than it really was because the fact that engagement improved isn’t so much the point as how that improvement of engagement was facilitated. That first positive meeting was remarkable because it was a noticeable inflection point; stark against the tsunami of effort and angst that had preceded it for so long. The really valuable lessons lay in the way that meeting and those which followed were handled.

The outcomes were productive even though there was conflict, defensiveness and often substantial disagreement. The skill and finesse with which the situations were navigated inspired me to really think about what was going on.

The moral of the story

This is a summary of the principles that I learned and was taught during that period which I’ve found extremely valuable (if not always easy or straightforward to apply):

• It is much easier to productively resolve conflict face to face in the same room than any other way; the effort of getting together is worth the cost.
• Build relationships, it is the most valuable thing a leader can do. Good relationships create positive returns along every other dimension of value.
• Always be calm, especially in the face of a problem. When you are calm, people respond in kind; it is a virtuous cycle.
• Understand that people are generally good and want to do good work; the problems often rest in differences in their frame of reference.
• People want to find common ground; they might disagree on what that common ground is but remain open to suggestion. Find the common ground and point it out.
• Make the greater purpose clear by building on the common ground. People want to achieve more; show how it can be done better together.
• De-escalate by finding the source of tension and providing an avenue to drain it.
• Depersonalise and create safety. Once people know that you know they are well intentioned and motivated to work together, remove the barriers related to personal safety; provide a safe avenue out of the corner, a path that allows them to be viewed as successful performers even if they agree to change their way.
• Highlight how you’re going to create an opportunity for less pain. If you offer more gain and less pain, people will follow the lead.
• Move attention to something objective. Create a non-personal target for everybody to rally around instead of feeling the need to blame the other side.

Deciding to take action

Knowing good principles to diplomatically manage conflict and communication and actually applying those principles are certainly different things; the latter being exponentially more difficult, for me at least.

Skills and approaches like these require conscious effort and practise to learn and refine. I’ve realised that the way I personally learn to apply communication skills in particular, is to think things through beforehand; to think about how I might act and how I might apply what I’ve learned in situations before they occur. To effectively learn, I need to work through what I want to get out of a challenging meeting or conversation beforehand and work out a strategy, considering how I will apply these and other skills. This helps me remember to try to apply the skills and helps set the context when I reflect on how it went afterwards. Perhaps not the most agile of mental approaches I’ll admit, but you work with what you have.

Knowing this about myself is useful because it sets me up to periodically review these principles and other things I’ve learned, to think about how to put them to use.

Taking action

Volumes have been written about how starting, taking the first step, beginning, is the most difficult part and I don’t have any particularly profound insight to add. It is hard and I often struggle with starting myself.

I’ve found that one effective strategy for me is to set things up so that I am regularly reminded to think about things and am inspired to do so. Notes and quotes in Google Keep, snoozed reminders in Inbox, to-do lists in my old-school physical notebook. I’ve trained myself to make notes and page back in my notebook whenever I have a quiet moment, which helps keep what must be done at top of mind.

Actually starting though is still tricky. I wish it was easier. The most frustrating thing is that I know that once I’ve started something it will not have been as bad as I anticipated prior to starting and finishing, too, will then feel considerably easier. And what you start with doesn’t have to be overcooked; generally anything that moves you in the right direction is sufficient.

Working on the self-control that enables one to overcome procrastination and start difficult things is a lifelong project. Knowing that you need to work on it, however, is the critical insight.

I have a favourite quote that summarises perfectly the mindset I aspire to have, in this and in everything else:

“Dimidium facti, qui coepit, habet; sapere aude, incipe.” — Horace, First Book of Letters

It means: “He who has begun is half done; dare to know; begin!”