Life is negotiation

The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge: I want.

But can negotiation techniques used by FBI to deal with drug dealers, terrorists and brutal killers also work with normal humans? Yes!

Active listening

We all want to be heard, understood and accepted, and listening is the cheapest, yet most effective way to get there. Negotiation is not a battle. It is a process of discovery. 

Extract and observe as much information as possible. Work in teams because these extra sets of ears will pick up extra information. We tend to hear what we want to hear.

Labeling

Imagine yourself in their place. Labeling is a way of validating someone's emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone's emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. Once you have thrown out a label, be quiet and listen.

"No" is pure gold

For good negotiators, "No" is pure gold. "No" is the start of the negotiation. A "no" gives the other party the feeling of safety, security and control. It provides a great opportunity for you and the other party to clarify what they really want by eliminating what they don't want.

"That's right"

The sweetest two words in any negotiation are "That's right". They then feel they have assessed what you have said and pronounced it as correct of their own free will. They embrace it. 

Use a summary to trigger those two words. 

Hearing "You're right" on the other hand is a disaster. They then agree, in theory, but don't own the conclusion.

What's the consequence of inaction?

To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that there is something to lose by inaction. People will make more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals.

Don't forget to make it happen as well

Your job as a negotiator isn't just to get to an agreement. It's getting to one that can be implemented and making sure it happens. 

Asking "how" forces your counterpart to consider and explain how it will be implemented. By making your counterparts articulate implementation in their own words, you convince them that the final solution is their idea, and that's crucial.

Incomplete information

People operating with incomplete information appear crazy to those who have different information. Your job when faced with someone like this in a negotiation is to discover what they don't know and supply that information.

"Never split the difference" by former FBI hostage negotiator Christopher Voss

The secrets of consulting

Consulting is the art of influencing people at their request. People want some sort of change, or fear some sort of change, so they seek consulting.

What are some of the Gerald Weinberg's secrets?

  • In spite of what your client may tell you, there is always a problem, and no matter how it looks first, it is always a people problem.

  • Remember that once you eliminate your number one problem, you promote number two. The ability to find the problem in any situation is the consultant's best asset. You must give up the illusion that you will ever finish solving problems.

  • Things are the way they are because they got that way. You never start with a blank slate. There were, at the time, good and sufficient reasons for decisions that seem idiotic today. Study for understanding, not for criticism.

  • When you point your finger at someone, notice where the other three fingers are pointing.

  • The name of a thing is not the thing. We have a tendency to attach a label to every new thing we see, and then treat that thing as if the label were true and a total description. Each person sees a part of the whole and identifies the whole with that part. The true expert can see multiple aspects of a situation but the novice sees only one thing.

  • Deal gently with systems that should be able to cure themselves. Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't. And remember that every prescription has two parts: the medicine and the method of ensuring correct use. If the treatment stops too soon, the disease springs back.

  • Nothing new ever works, but there is always hope that this time will be different. Accept that the new will fail. If it can't be perfect, how can you use it so it will be better than the one you have today? Improvement is easier than perfection.

  • You can make buffalo go anywhere, just so long as they want to go there. You don't make people change when you more interested in what you want than in what your clients want.

  • If we want to learn anything, we must not try to learn everything. When you stop learning new things, it's time to move on. You are hired for knowing what others don't know, so a consultant that stops learning soon decays in value.

  • Give away your best ideas. Do everything to encourage your clients to take over your work. This increases the chance they will give you future business, or recommend to you others. If you try to have an answer to every question, you drive your clients away. The best marketing tool is a satisfied client.

"Secrets of Consulting" and "More Secrets of Consulting" by Gerald M. Weinberg

The product operating model

Many have witnessed failed transformations, but few have witnessed true successes. 

Moving to the product operating model is a transformation. At the end, it's about consistently creating technology-powered solutions that your customers love, yet work for your business. It's about delivering real results. But what do you change exactly?

You change how you build. Products are managed as an ongoing effort - improving every week until it's decided to sunset it. You do frequent, small releases so you know that it's working and how it's being used.

You change how you solve problems. Empowered product teams are given problems to solve and outcomes to achieve instead of a list of prioritized features, projects and perceived solutions decided by various stakeholders.

You change how you decide which problems to solve. A strong product company has a compelling product vision and insight-based product strategy identifying the most critical problems that need to be solved to deliver on the business objectives. Your strategy cannot be to serve as many business stakeholders as possible.

Pushing the decisions and responsibilities for finding the best solution to the problem down to the relevant product team, and then holding that team accountable for the results also drives the need for new product core competencies (that normally takes years to learn). 

Unless you are willing to establish these new competencies, your transformation hopes will likely end here.

For the product team together with the product manager to discover and deliver effective solutions, it is absolutely critical that they have direct access to:

  1. Users and customers,
  2. Product data, 
  3. Business stakeholders and
  4. Engineers (the tech lead as a minimum).

Fight any attempt to place a well-meaning person or cumbersome process between the product manager and these constituencies.

An honest and accurate assessment of the organization’s current situation is essential to any plan to successfully transform. Be realistic, talk to all levels and look for evidence. 

Start with pilot teams volunteering to be on the leading edge of these changes. Develop the skills of the product teams (bottom up) and the skills of the product leaders (top down). Ensure your CEO supports and is a champion of the change.

Transformation is a long game, and for that reasons it helps to have some quick wins. It could simply be a team that has never visited users starts doing do and shares it experiences and insights. 

Constantly beat the drum, evangelize and show everyone the progress being made.

"Transformed - Moving to the product operating model" by Marty Cagan.

How to change anyone's mind

Everyone has something they want to change, but change is hard. 

People and organizations are guided by conservation of momentum. Inertia. We tend to do what we have always done.

When trying to change minds and overcome such inertia, the tendency is to push. 

We assume that pushing harder will do the trick. That if we just provide more information, more facts, more reasons, more arguments, or just add a little more force, people will change. Unfortunately, that approach often backfires. People and system pushes back.

Rather than thinking about what you could do to try to create change, ask yourself why things haven't changed already. What’s stopping people? What are the parking brakes?

Stop trying to persuade and instead get people to persuade themselves. Let them choose how they get where you are hoping they will go. People like to feel they have control over their choices and actions.

Start by understanding. Ask, don't tell.

Before people will change, they have to be willing to listen. They have to trust the person they are communicating with.

If you want to truly understand something, try to change it. You can also reverse it. To truly change something, you need to understand it.

Change is also hard because we tend to overvalue what we already have or already are doing.

We compare things to our current state. The status quo. To get people to change, the advantages can't be just a little better; it has to be a lot better. Research suggests that the potential gains of doing something have to be 2.6 times larger than the potential losses to get people to take action. 

You need to surface the cost of inaction. You must make it easier for people to see the difference between what they are doing now and what they could be doing.

People think that, when changing minds, someone has to lose. 

Two chefs needed the last orange in the kitchen for an important dish.  They argued back and forth, but took a big knife and split it half leaving both with only half of what they needed. However, one chef needed the juice for a sauce, and the other needed the peel for a cake.

To change minds, find the root. Discover whatever needs and motivations are driving behavior in the first place. Find the root and the rest will follow.

'The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind' by Jonah Berger.

Sooner, Safer, Happier

I am glad to announce that I have started a transformation, and here's how I will do it.

I treat this as just another temporary project with a big, up-front planning and design that I turn into outputs pushed to my people for implementation within clear deadlines. 

I have decided to roll out a new tool, initiate a mandatory mass-training, and impose a brand new methodology that everyone shall follow.

No. Let's stop here. This is all antipatterns in "Sooner, Safer, Happier - Antipatterns and patterns for business agility" by Jonathan Smart.

Organizations are complex adaptive systems. We need to evolve our ways of working to deliver value in a way that suits the nature of the work (Cynefin framework). 

In the Age of Digital, don't use methods from two technological revolutions ago on unique, knowledge-based work that is emergent and full of unknown-unknowns.

Start with the "Why"

Start with why if the why is not already clearly understood, and communicate it three more times than you think you need. You cannot over-communicate the why.

What happens if the status quo is maintained? What’s the “so what”? Why do people need to go through the discomfort of change and lack of mastery? What appeals to the selfish gene? 

There should be a compelling why unique to your context and organization, which is the call to action. “We want to be more agile”, “We want to be more lean”, “We want to be more product-oriented” are insufficient calls to action.

A useful exercise is doing a “five whys”. Break into pairs with the starting question of “Why change?” and take turns asking why five times with each answer forming the basis of the next question.

Desired outcomes

Next, articulate and agree on your desired outcomes. Agile, DevOps, Lean and Design Thinking are the means to an end, they are not the end. They are bodies of knowledge, wisdom, principles, and practices to be applied in context to achieve desired outcomes.

Outcomes should be measured and visualized. Focus on the trend over time and relative ranking on improvement rather than on absolutes, as everyone has a different starting point. The goal is to improve over time.

Business outcomes are hypotheses and they are nested with a lineage up to longer-term, organization-wide strategic outcome hypotheses. Outcomes are not passed down, unchanged, in a traditional order-giver, order-taker manner. Instead they align. They are written and “owned” by the people at each level in the nested value streams.

Leaders go first

The leadership team is number one. If a leadership team is not willing to role model desired behaviors, why shall other teams do it?

People in senior roles have a disproportionate impact on behavioral norms. Trust and role modeling are essential.

Ways of Working Center of Enablement

In order to be successful, there is a need for people who are dedicated full time in a servant leader capacity to orchestrate the improvement of the system of work across an organization. 

For a large organization, the success patterns is to have federated Ways of Working Centers of Enablement, with one for each business unit or value stream and a central one providing the team-of-teams coordination.

The Center of Enablement deal with impediments to achieve the outcomes that bubble up, with a goal of solving them at the lowest possible level. They are not a department of improvement where improvement actions are lobbed over the fence.

There should be an impediment backlog, with the Center of Enablement orchestrating the right people in the organization to help alleviate the top-priority impediments where this is beyond the sphere of influence of a team.

This is leadership in ways of working, being coaches, guiding people on the journey, sharing learning internally and externally, communicating, creating community, rewarding and recognizing desired behavior and outcomes.

Achieve big through small. 

Achieve big through small instead of big through big. Minimize time to learning. 

Change is hardest at the beginning. There is no one size fits all. Context matters. Every environment is unique. Starting small makes it safe to learn, keeps change within risk appetite, and generates social proof unique to your context.

People have a limited velocity to unlearn and relearn. You cannot force pace of change. If you do, you will only get new labels on existing behavior. Start small and within the risk appetite. 

Amplify the experiments that work well, and quickly dampen the ones that don’t. Experiments are then amplified or dampened.

Let the natural champions go first

Allow people to satisfy their psychological need for agency and control, the need to feel in control of one’s own destiny. Allow the Innovators, the natural champions, to identify themselves. They are motivated by the buzz of being first, and have probably been working this way formally or informally for some time. 

Invite participation and get behind the champions. Give the champions the coaching and the support they need in order to deliver business outcomes. As the benefits are seen, recognized and communicate via every mechanism available, the early adopters will want to join in. They can see that it’s safe to put a toe in the water. Gradually invite them in too, within the pace of unlearning and relearning and within risk appetite.

Invite everyone from top to bottom

Invite everyone from top to bottom (a vertical slice), don't leave the pressurized middle behind. They have to deliver, come what may, and are now being asked to change ways of working as well as continuing to deliver. It’s a difficult role and is often missed during a change that is sponsored from the top table and implemented at grass roots. 

Everyone learns together, and no one is left behind. It's not easy, as the most enthusiastic group of people is at the team level. 

Communicate, communicate and communicate

Communicate three more times than you think you need. Use every communication channel at your disposal and add some more.

Use the channels to reinforce the why, the values and principles, the outcomes, to recognize desired behavior and to do story-telling. Have senior leaders recognize the great work of teams in improving outcomes and have teams share their stories.

Stick at it

It requires commitment and resilience. It takes years for sustainable, lasting culture change, for genuine agility. 

For a large organization with a tailwind, it’s three to five years, longer with headwind. There are no shortcuts. 

In organizations with traditional ways of working, change is staccato. In evolutionary biology terms it is "Punctuated Equilibrium" rather than "Punctuated Gradualism". There are long periods of stasis, then a burst of disruptive change. There is lack of ongoing continuous improvement.

Become the best at being better.