communication

My Agile Life: More Talking Less Meeting

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s LinkedIn, and Steve’s Tumblr)

More on my use of “Agile” and Scrum in my life!

As I’ve noted, doing personal Agile (in my case Scrum) makes you more aware of ways Agile goes wrong on the job or in your friend’s jobs. It’s contrast, because you can get your life running smoothly with Agile, so breakdowns elsewhere become more apparent.

An important part of Agile is that people communicate, often several times a day, perhaps even unscheduled. This asynchronous communication lets them meet and talk as needed, making the team open and adaptable. It turns development into a dialogue and is about meeting as needed, not meetings.  Communication is meaningful.

Sure there’s the classic Scrum standup (often done in non-scrum processes) but that’s the bare minimum. Good Agile is about good communications, and that doesn’t mean endlessly sitting in conference rooms. That means dialogue when you need it.

Even solo Agile requires communications that can be spontaneous – maybe even moreso when, say, you need to ask someone if they know what it is you found while cleaning the garage.

I’m guessing that if you’re doing Agile at work – and perhaps at home – you’ve got a lot of items blocked because you can’t get ahold of people. Hell, even if you’re not doing Agile I’m going to guess that you need a lot of signoffs to get things moving.  Those signoffs are probably not happening.

My guess is things aren’t moving. You can’t get people to respond. No one is talking but everyone is busy.

What do we do when we need people? We schedule a meeting. Then we have more meetings . . . and it’s harder to reach people.

Remember my theory that we can’t reduce meetings due to meetings? Yeah, this sounds familiar. We also have so many meetings we can’t talk to people.

We’re now so busy talking, because we didn’t talk, that we can’t talk.

So let me make a further radical proposal in Agile – if you have to schedule meetings to take care of five or ten minute touchbases, maybe you’ve got too damn many meetings as it is. OK, my guess is you always think you have too many meetings, but if you’re endlessly blocked because you can’t talk to someone, then it’s out of hand. I’ll also bet most people are blocked because of . . . meetings.

Let’s fix this.

Imagine if you worked on decreasing meetings, but increased the ability for communicating. Dream a dream like this:

  1. Start cutting out meetings, period. Encourage people to read reports, signoff, and look at information radiators. Verify don’t brief, use tacit signoff.
  2. Encourage spontaneous communication when possible. Sure, you’d have to set up some rules so people weren’t bombarded, but it’d help. Besides, when people practice open communication they also learn when not to interrupt others.
  3. Encourage people to block time on calendars where they cant’t be bothered. I do this at home and at work – when I have to focus, I get me some me time. A big calendar block of “DON’T BUG ME” does wonders.
  4. If you have problems, schedule Open Hours for important folks, where people know they’re available. Think of it as a middle ground between spontaneous communication and regular meetings.

There’s my radical thought of the day. If you start reducing meetings, maybe people will actually communicate.

(By the way I do plenty of books for coaching people to improve in various areas, which may also help you out!)

– Steve

 

My Agile Life: That Glorious Flow

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s LinkedIn, and Steve’s Tumblr)

(My continuing “Agile Life” column, where I use Scrum for a more balanced and productive life continues).

I’m using Scrum to help order my own life. It’s going pretty well, and one of the things that helps is ease of communication, because most of my communication is with me. That’s the Agile ideal of regular, personal communications among team members made easier by me being pretty much the team.  Communication is easy when its in your own head.

This made me think about Scrum and Agile methods when multiple people are involved, from developers to customers. The clarity of my own Scrum-At-Home made me realize how many projects are held up by poor communication, even supposedly Agile ones.

How often is communication delayed on a project? An hour delay in communication can mean days of delay in a project.

How often is communication withheld to avoid conflict or trouble? A lack of information ultimately has to be made up for.

How often is communication handled by some people that aren’t doing, testing, or otherwise involved in the work? Someone abstract from the results will be abstract in their communication.

How often is communication the result of endless layers of people? It becomes a game of telephone operator, of checking and re-checking.

A lot of projects go wrong because of communication.  This is why communication matters, and why the Agile manifesto is almost entirely about communication:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools – TALK directly to people.
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation – RESULTS over documenting them.
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation – WORK with people over messing around with fiddly pits.
  • Responding to change over following a plan – CHANGE in response to information.

Running a “Scrum of One” gives you an idea of what near-perfect communication is since you’re the only one involved. That feeling of flow, of productivity, is what you should be feeling in Agile projects at work. When you don’t feel that, something’s wrong.

My guess is you’re used to feeling something is wrong in your projects.

This is one of the many reasons I reccomend personal Agile to people. Done right, you know what real productivity feels like, real communication. Done right, you learn lessons you can apply.

(By the way I do plenty of books for coaching people to improve in various areas, which may also help you out!)

– Steve

Way With Worlds: Communicating Your World

by

woman phone communication information

(Way With Worlds is a weekly column on the art of worldbuilding published at Seventh Sanctum, Muse Hack, and Ongoing Worlds)

After covering ways to tell people about your world without . . . well, telling people directly about your world with infodumps . .. . I wanted to focus on a few of my favorite ways to communicate about your worlds.

It is of course important to communicate your world to people. You don’t want to spray information around like a firehose of worldbuilding, but also you can easily leave people in the dark about how your setting functions.

Various books and films over time made me realize how the struggle not to drown our readers in information can also turn into the reverse – we don’t explain everything. We don’t want to infodump so we don’t think about how we have to inform our readers or players. We think readers or players “get” our world somehow.

But without some guidance, the reader or player or whatever eventually wonders “what the hell is going on?” Now if they signed on to be confused, fine, but in most cases you’re going to have to let them in on how your world functions somehow.

Just . . . without letting on you’re explaining things. Let’s face it, story flow aside, sometimes you have to figure out how to let people in on what’s going on and how the world looks.

Fortunately, there’s several ways you can do it.

Look For – Or Create Ways – To Do It

There are certain moments that give us a chance to let people in on how the world works. Its’ not an infodump or an instruction manual, but just those moments where a reader or a player can suddenly go “aha,” that’s how it works. They might not even realize they learned something, but they know in one way or another.

The moment someone has to fix a broken device tells people how it works.

The moment someone gets married tells you about traditions.

A character’s perspective lets them understand something through their eyes – in an empathetic way.

There’s all these little moments that we can let people in on our world.

What I recommend doing is as a worldbuilder, when creating your book or game or film, look for these moments. These moments give you an opportunity to gauge how much your audience should know – and see where you can tell them.

I find that finding these moments, as you mature as a worldbuilder and creator, becomes more and more instinctive. You develop a sense of intimacy with both your work and your reader and can “hook them up” so the people perusing your work can “get” the world.

In turn, as you do this you can create them as well, without forcing them.

Let’s take a look at the ways to tell people about your world.

Solution #1: Narrative Moments

I look for what I call “narrative moments.” These are the little moments that let people in on what’s going on. It can be as mysterious as an oddly colored sunset hinting at pollution or as obvious as a newscast that tells what’s going on. These are the moments where your reader or player (hopefully subtly) gets an idea of “whats’ up”

These moments may not necessarily have to be in the story, but can be crafted if you have to leave a few clues. These are little extras, easter eggs hidden in plain site, to help the audience out when needed.

Good narrative moments are everywhere, really. I find that as you improve you need to create them less- and notice them more.

Solution #2: Narrative Characters

For worldbuilders, it’s a great blessing to discover your cast has what I call a Narrative Character or characters.

A Narrative Character is a character whose experiences can help the reader better understand the world. It may be someone new to a setting who learns (and thus readers learn with them) or someone knowledgeable who explains things to others (and in turn, instructs the reader). In their dialogue and communication, even internal dialogue, the reader can learn about the world as that learning is part of the story.

It doesn’t have to be an explanation – their feelings, emotions, reactions, and so on can tell a great deal about a story. The thrill of having what seems to be a boring meal lets your audience grasp the level of a food crisis. Scars from a disease tell your audience just how awful that plague is. An incoherent angry rant can reveal all sorts of thing – as can a cool, internal monologue.

If a character has many of these, then you have a good narrative character.

Narrative characters can easily be overdone or done wrong; they can become tour guides, mary sues/gary stus, or dull hangers-on there merely to tell the story. Narrative characters should be characters.  Wether you find a good narrative character or create one, make sure they’re characters first.

Needless to say, I like to find a pre-existing character and use their experience to illustrate important points.

Of course if you have a first-person narrative, then you already have a potential narrative character. Otherwise I like to keep an idea of who can be a narrative character and switch perspectives now and then.

Solution #3: Visceral Elements

One of the best ways to communicate how things work in your world is to ensure that you write elements that are very visceral in the proper levels of details and address them properly. People get stuff “from the gut,” common and human (or human-like happenings) like:

  • Birth
  • Death
  • Eating
  • Love and Marriage
  • Sleep
  • Travel
  • Work/Leisure

Now these elements are likely to pop up in your stories. These elements are also likely to be illustrative of how your world works and how your characters and your culture work. Showing a complicated marital ritual (or even a memory of how one went) can show a culture is highly organized. Characters playing a popular game tells people the game is popular.

If you’re careful, tiny sentences, little moments, and many things that just happen to be in your stories can communicate the world to your readers. This is probably the most invisible way of doing things – and the way least likely to make the reader feel lectured too.

It also works well with nonverbal or limited verbal/explanatory descriptions.

Closing

I hope these methods help you out – they’re ones that have helped me. Just be aware of them, create them if you must, and hone your abilities so they flow naturally in your works. Done right, your audience knows enough and doesn’t know they know.

Which is just where you want them, totally adsorbed in your world without knowing how you helped them.

Respectfully,

– Steven Savage
http://www.musehack.com/
http://www.informotron.com/
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/