Are your conversations holding back your team’s potential? Douglas Squirrel shares with Kevin shares how improving conversations within teams can drastically enhance trust, reduce fear, and align business goals. Squirrel delves into the concept of "Agile Conversations," a term inspired by the agile methodology in software development but applicable across all business functions. He emphasizes the importance of practicing conversations, much like athletes train for their sports, and introduces the "Four R's" (Record, Reflect, Revise, Role-play) as a method for enhancing communication skills.

Listen For

00:00 Introduction
02:10 Guest Introduction: Douglas Squirrel
03:12 The Journey from Coder to Conversation Expert
06:15 Discovering Chris Argyris' Work and Improving Conversations
07:45 Agile Conversations: Why "Agile"?
09:35 Conversations as the Key to Culture
12:00 The Power of Stories in Shaping Culture
14:00 The Gap Between Behavior and Belief
17:25 Practicing Conversations: The Four Rs
23:45 The Importance of Genuine Questions
27:05 The Five Conversations for Transforming Culture
33:00 Fun and Personal Interests: Squirrel’s Story
34:00 Closing

Meet Doug

Doug's Story: Douglas Squirrel is the author of Squirrel’s Tech Radar, Decoding Tech Talk, and Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture, co-authored with Jeffrey Fredrick. He is the director of Squirrel Squared Limited. He has been coding for forty years and has led software teams for twenty. He uses the power of conversations to create dramatic productivity gains in technology organizations of all sizes. His experience includes growing software teams as a CTO in startups from fintech to biotech to music, and everything in between; consulting on product improvement at over 200 organizations in the UK, US, Australia, Africa, and Europe; and coaching a wide variety of leaders in improving their conversations, aligning to business goals, and creating productive conflict. He lives in Frogholt, England, in a timber-framed cottage built in the year 1450.