Interpreting the Unwritten Rules or are they Guidelines?
How many times has an innocent comment or statement resulted in unnecessary conflict and confusion in a team? How unsettling is it when you make a suggestion which you think will improve some aspect of the work being undertaken and the reaction is explosive, almost violent - what did you say that was so wrong, how could you have been so badly misunderstood?
Even in the most collaborative and communication intensive team there are lots of "rules" which people need to learn about how to work together. In distributed teams this gets magnified and intensified due to the myriad filters and layers of meaning we unwittingly apply to communication.
In this talk Shane presents examples of how the most innocent of question or suggestion can send teams into a spin, and suggests a number of techniques to help create an environment where real communication can happen, irrespective is your team is co-located or distributed
Outline/Structure of the Talk
This is an interactive talk in which the participants explore their own preconceptions and biases, and experience a technique for turning "rules" into "guides".
The first part of the talk explores our instinctive responses to some situations and has the participants examine their own reactions.
Then Shane presents some aspects of psychology that explain where our own filters come from and what some of them are.
The next section looks at how our filters and preconceptions become "rules" which cause stress when we break them, and shows a technique for rationalising and transforming these rules into "guides" which are situational and context dependent and able to be processed by our logical minds.
The participants then explore the technique for themselves.
Learning Outcome
- We all have filters through which we look at the world
- There are many different filters
- My filters are not your filters
- Different is not wrong
- Our filters often become rules which govern our attitudes and behaviour
- Rules are invariant and restrict our choices
- Many rules should be reworked to become guides
- Guides give us freedom to make good contextual decisions
Target Audience
All
Video
Links
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/unwritten-rules - presented at QCon London 2014
Naresh Jain
Joel Tosi
Ravi Kumar
Anish Cheriyan
Venkatraman Lakshminarayanan
