So I’m in Nashville at the Agile 2022 conference.
And sat in on an interesting presentation by Diana Larsen on ‘Evolving Agile: The Game We Design Together’
In it, she discussed Stanfield’s (et al) ‘Art of Focused Conversation’ which has a 4-part framework for structuring focused and constructive conversations. Then, in the next session, someone had a medical emergency – which turned out fine – and I snowmobiled and merged two streams of thought and had an idea I want to share here.
Among my other forms of geekhood, I’m a first-aid geek. I do things (still) with my friends that contain a fair amount of risk, and over the years, I’ve had to give a decent amount. I have a Wilderness First Responder certificate (from NOLS) as well as a passel of other certs and training. I carry a pretty robust kit with me almost all the time, and overall, it’s been useful.
First Aid also structures your interaction with a patient in a four-part rubric, and my aha here is that the same rubric might just be useful to us as change agents.
The rubric is SOAP.
Subjective – what is the patient telling us?
Objective – what can we see and measure?
Assessment – what do the think the problem is, based on those two sets of information?
Plan – what do we intend to do about it?
Approaching each engagement – at each level of engagement – with this model in mind strikes me as kinda useful (as I’m sitting here in a conference). I’m interested in what folks think, and hope it provokes some conversation.
Subjective – sit and ask why the customer is interested in change? Why do they want to engage us as a change agent? What’s their ‘felt’ problem?
Objective – in first aid, regardless of the patient complaint, we assess the patient. Why? Well, first and foremost because people are unreliable narrators. Someone who has had an accident or a medical emergency is likely to be even more unreliable (stressed, unclear, loss of consciousness, tunnel vision, etc.). Similarly, someone embedded deep in an organization may have imperfect knowledge of what the forest looks like because they are one of the trees.
Assessment – based on the customer problem and our assessment – what’s the problem? Is it clear enough to act one? Is the potential solution one within our scope of control?
Plan – given the assessment and our circumstances, what do we intend to do? How will we know we’ve done it?
Thinking about change in a way driven by a framework like this seems – at first thought – to be useful, because it forces us through a process that aligns the customer, our professional assessment, the problem we align on, our collective capabilities, and defined outcomes that we’re confident we can achieve with the resources we have.