Want Better Scrum? Learn How to Create and Sustain Dialogue
A common complaint one hears about Scrum, especially from Developers, is that there are too many meetings. I don’t think that is entirely true. I think when people complain about “too many meetings” in Scrum what they are really complaining about is there are too many bad meetings that distract them from doing the real work.
Each of the core Scrum meetings, Sprint Planning, Retrospectives, Daily Scrum and Sprint Review, exists to advance the real work of the Scrum Team. All are required and all require the participation of the entire Scrum Team. Ideally, they are collaborative and interactive events. When they are not, it’s usually because there is little, or no, design. Based on my twenty years of working with Scrum and Agile teams, I can confidently say that collaboration is a designed experience.
Meeting Design is Important, But Not Enough
While meeting design is a very important factor to create a collaborative experience, you also have to have an effective facilitator; one that knows how to create and sustain dialogue. Without a facilitator, most meetings lose their focus and revert to an open discussion. If you want to have better meetings in Scrum you need both good meeting design and good facilitation.
In this series of articles, I am going to share with you what good facilitation looks like. Over the course of these ten plus articles, I will share with you the facilitative listening techniques that facilitators use to create and sustain dialogue. If you want to go deeper, I recommend that you read Sam Kaner’s fantastic book, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, 3nd Edition. In addition to sharing these techniques, I will share examples from my work as well as some personal commentary on how to get the most value from these practices.
The first technique you must master as a facilitator is called paraphrasing. We start with paraphrasing because this skill is the basis for many of the other facilitative listening techniques we will highlight later in the series.
What is it?
Paraphrasing is not much more than your classic active listening. If you are familiar with active listening in your regular day-to-day life, you will have no problems with paraphrasing. The three steps of paraphrasing are:
- Use tentative language.
- In your own words, state what you think you heard the speaker say.
- Check-in with the speaker to see that you correctly restated their idea.
Why You Want to Use It
Paraphrasing is a powerful facilitative listening technique because it allows the speaker the opportunity to hear their thoughts played back to them by a neutral party without judgment or criticism. As one of the three fundamental facilitative listening techniques, this is an important skill to master since it will be used over and over again.
Example
Here is a scenario that shows the basics of paraphrasing. Jaya is an engineering manager for a Scrum Team that is debating how much time to dedicate for new features versus reducing technical debt. Jaya wants the team to deliver more features while the Scrum Team wants to reduce technical debt. Rama is a Scrum Master acting as the facilitator to this conversation.
- Jaya: “I know this new decision contradicts my earlier guidance to reduce technical debt, but my director is pressuring me to deliver more features. What am I supposed to do?”
- Rama: “It sounds like you’re saying you’re feeling pressure to deliver more, but you’re at a loss on what’s the right thing to do, right?”
- Vikash: “Yep.”
This example illustrates all the steps of paraphrasing.
- If there had been a video of this encounter, we would have heard Rama using tentative language, i.e. choosing his words carefully and not racing to complete his observation.
- Using his own words, Rama restated Jaya’s experience, beginning with the phrase, “It sounds like you’re saying. . .”
- Rama confirmed with Jaya that the words he selected were consistent with the information she was trying to communicate.
Additional Commentary
When paraphrasing, feel free to mix up how you lead-in. There are many ways to lead-in, but most importantly you need to use language that feels comfortable and sounds natural to you. Here are some common phrases you could use when leading into paraphrasing.
- “Let me make sure I understand you. You said…”
- “Let me restate what you just said so that you can hear it…”
- “I thought I heard you say…”
When a person is speaking in entire paragraphs, rather than a few sentences at a time, it is OK to summarize what they said when you paraphrase. No one expects you to paraphrase the Gettysburg Address line-by-line.
The final step of paraphrasing, the check-in, is often overlooked. Remember to take time to check-in with the speaker because your paraphrasing may have changed the meaning of what they were trying to communicate. If that’s the case, it’s not a big deal if you make a mistake. Simply apologize and provide the speaker the opportunity to clarify their true intentions.
Up Next…Mirroring
That’s all we have for paraphrasing. There are two other fundamental skills you need to master before proceeding to more advanced facilitative listening techniques – mirroring and drawing people out.
