Jade Meskill: Hello, welcome to another episode of the Agile Weekly Podcast. I’m Jade Meskill.

Derek Neighbors: I’m Derek Neighbors.

Roy VanDeWater: And I’m Roy VanDeWater.

The Fear Of Taking Action

Jade: We wanted to talk about a pattern that we’ve noticed lately of [talking very slowly] people who like to slow things down. That’s for you listeners listening at two speed. We’ve seen on different teams, different companies, different environments that people have this fear of taking action.

What are some of the ways that you guys have seen people slow down the process of moving forward, of moving to something new?

Derek: I see a lot of discussion, so when I’m afraid of something, I think we’d call that slowly slowing something down until I’m comfortable. “Hey, you guys are all going way fast. I’m not comfortable. Let’s slow it down.”

“Hey, can we talk about what’s the best way that we can solve this problem”? Or, “I’m not so comfortable. We haven’t talked to Roy about it and I think we really need to have Roy involved in this conversation.”

Or, “I don’t think the boss is going to be OK with that. I think we need to set up a meeting and figure out if we would even be allowed to do something like that before we can really make a decision.”

Sometimes it will revolve around a decision, but a lot of times, I see it just around action. We should be doing something, we should be moving something forward, but instead we’re going to talk about it.

“Let’s talk a lot about what the new product should have in it. Let’s talk about what the product should be like. Let’s talk about who should be on the team.” Instead of doing things to move some step closer to doing something.

What It Means To Own The Result

Roy: Why don’t people just do things?

Derek: Because I think you have to then own the result.

Jade: How does that affect an Agile team? So if you have a team that is trying to become Agile, be more Agile, what side effect does this have on them?

Roy: I think Jim McCarthy talked about it in terms of, “You are slowing things down to the lowest common denominator,” or, Derek, you’ve put it this way too, where you are slowing things down to the comfort level of the least comfortable developer.

Jade: What does that do?

The Effects Of Slowing Down

Derek: It frustrates people who want to go faster, but what it really does is it retards people’s ability to have cycles of doing, failing, correcting. Doing, failing, correcting. Doing, failing, correcting.

If it takes me a long time to have action ‑‑ there’s a whole bunch of frustration and buildup and everything that goes along with that ‑‑ and then when we actually do something and we don’t get the exact result we want or it’s not quite right, we have to go back and we have another long process.

Two things happen ‑‑ we expend an enormous amount of energy, which is really, really valuable, and time which is the also really, really, valuable.

We also slow down our ability to learn and correct. If we choose an action and it’s not the right action but we learn something from it, that’s probably quicker than if we debated 10 different…

If we debated three different ways to do something for 15 minutes and it only takes three minutes to do each one of those things, we could be done and know for certain which one is the right one quicker than if we sat and talked about which one might theoretically be the right one.

Roy: It’s also frustrating as a developer. All of a sudden you’re demoted from having new ideas. It’s now become a bad thing to have new ideas and a new way of doing things. Anything that you suggest is going to start another chain of endless discussions. You’ll get into the mindset of, “I better keep this to myself, because I don’t want to talk about it”.

We Stop Trying When We Are Paralyzed By Fear

Derek: I think there are studies out there that really show that. We get so afraid of putting out a wrong answer ‑‑ it is so bad to do that we stop putting out the scary ideas, and the scary ideas are usually the ones that have the best results.

I think when you start to train yourself, “I’m really afraid of throwing this out there, doing it or trying it,” you debate it and you debate it and you debate it. You’ll debate 20 really awesome things that will set you all the way forward in taking the worst idea.

I see this all the time when we do the ballpoint games. If you look that up, invariably, I’ll see somebody who would throw out an awesome idea that would probably quadruple to 10 times the team’s productivity in this particular game. They usually laugh and step back and be like, “Ha, ha, just kidding”.

In reality, if they would go forward with that idea, the team would be way more effective. I think when people slow things down, it gives them more doubt and more time to second guess and to criticize their own thoughts and actions. It breeds more inactivity ‑‑ it literally becomes an energy sink.

Dealing With Uncomfortable People

Jade: So what happens to those people that were saying they want to slow things down to their most comfortable level? How do you deal with those?

Roy: First off, do those people actually ever get comfortable? Is there any amount of discussion that actually ever gets those people at the comfort level they want to be.

Jade: Sure, if nothing happens, right?

[crosstalk]

Jade: If I could use it as a weapon to stop things from changing…

Roy: The only way to effectively give the person the value that they are looking for is to continue the discussion and definitely never do anything. That sounds like we could just skip to discussion and not do anything.

Jade: [laughs]

Derek: They think a lot of times those people would prefer that. I don’t think they’re in love with the discussion. I think they’re in love with the idea of [laughs] “Well, let’s make myself comfortable with this.”

Roy: If they don’t want to do it, why don’t we just give them the power to say, “I don’t want to do this”?

Jade: How do you do that though? You have a team of people who are trying to work together.

The Decider Protocol

Roy: In the past we talked about using the decider protocol ‑‑ it requires unanimous vote, so if one person’s out, then it doesn’t go through ‑‑ so everybody has the power to say no. Every person is going to get listened to ‑‑ not listened to in the “talk‑forever” sense ‑‑ but listened to in the “have‑their‑way” sense.

Derek: I think it comes down to a couple of things. Certainly if you’re using the core protocols, there’s a lot built‑in that allows you to do that, but if you’re not, you can still handle it in one or two ways. One is we refuse to not do anything, so we’re going to do the best idea that we currently have, and if you have a better idea, awesome, let’s hear it, but just slowing down to discuss is not going to be allowed.

You can say, when we’re in a discussion point, it becomes, “Hey, I think we should do XYZ.” If multiple people are, “Yes, let’s do XYZ,” and somebody continues to, “Well, I want to slow down,” part of me says…at that point, do you just check out and say, “I’m going to go spend my time doing something else”? Or do you say, “I’m going to do X”? “I’m no longer going to wait for you. It’s taking too long. I’m going to suffer whatever consequence comes from just taking action ‑‑ that inaction is too much of a penalty already. I would rather suffer some other retribution for taking action than suffer the penalty in the problems with taking no action.”

Culture Of Uncomfortableness

Roy: I think there’s a culture component to this as well ‑‑ if you have a culture in which everybody needs to be comfortable, you’re going to have problems in terms of going fast because as we often say, “If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not going fast enough.” So creating a culture where it’s OK to be uncomfortable starts promoting that type of thought.

If you have a culture of uncomfortableness, that’s probably going to be very tightly linked to a culture of “No Criticism”, and a culture of dishonesty. If we’re a culture that’s all about you being comfortable, Jade, then I can never criticize anything you do because I’m going to be making you uncomfortable.

Jade: Which is true.

Roy: Right, exactly.

The Motivation Behind Slowing Down

Derek: [laughs] I think you’re touching on something really interesting. There’s something behind the motivation to slow things down. It’s not that people are completely unreasonable, or just not decent human beings. They’re afraid of something. Have you ever worked with someone to