Neuroscience Strategies for Leading Teams with Mike Bowler

Ever wondered how psychological safety can transform your Agile team dynamics? Join me, Mark Metze, as I sit down with Mike Bowler, a seasoned Agile coach with an impressive 20-year journey from developer to expert in human behaviors. We uncover the intricacies of psychological safety from behavioral, psychological, and neuroscience perspectives. Learn how maintaining access to your team's prefrontal cortex is key to unlocking optimal performance and how you can create an environment where everyone feels free to express their ideas and excel.

Unlock the secrets of the S.A.F.E.T.Y.™ Model—Security, Autonomy, Fairness, Esteem, Trust, and You—and understand their evolutionary significance in workplace dynamics. Mike and I put a spotlight on shared experiences and team-building activities as the cornerstone of building trust, especially in a post-COVID remote work landscape. We'll also dive into practical strategies to foster a sense of safety despite individual biases, with actionable experiments like team lunches designed to enhance trust and collaboration.

Imagine using play to resolve team conflicts and boost learning. We explore the power of engaging team members through playful ego states with activities like Lego, which can break habitual patterns and build rapport. You'll hear real-world examples of how these playful approaches have successfully addressed team dysfunctions. We also discuss techniques for building esteem and fairness, emphasizing the importance of recognizing each team member’s contributions. Tune in to discover how these strategies can not only elevate social standing but also combat the pitfalls of perverse incentives, creating a more cohesive and equitable workplace.

Learn about the S.A.F.E.T.Y.™ Model:
https://brainleadership.com/solution/safetymodel/

Six Thinking Hats Technique:
https://www.mindtools.com/ajlpp1e/six-thinking-hats

Free Resources Available on Mike's Site:
https://gargoylesoftware.com/resources/

Followup on Mike's Guest Appearance:
https://gargoylesoftware.com/mike_bowler/followup/

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbowler/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now. Well, welcome back everybody. This is Mark Metz at the Agile Within. Our guest today from Kelowna, british Columbia, is Mike Bowler. Welcome, mike. Well, thanks for having me, mark. Kelowna, british Columbia I've never been there, but we had a brief conversation. You told me it's in Western Canada. So if I were coming to Kelowna for a day, what's one thing that you would say I couldn't miss doing?

Speaker 2: 1:02

Mike Well, it really depends on what you like, but there's a couple of things we're known for. We're really known for outdoor activities, so there's lots of hiking and mountain biking and all kinds of outdoor stuff. We've got a huge lake here so there's a lot of boating, but outdoor activities are one of the things we're really known for. Tourism is big, but we're also really known for our wine industry. We're a big wine destination. We've got something like 300 wineries in the valley and we're known very much for that.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Oh, very cool. So visitors mainly come during the summer, not so the winter.

Speaker 2: 1:38

Well, we have a number of ski resorts in the area, so we do get a lot of tourists through the winter as well, but the tourists don't tend to stay in Kelowna. They fly into Kelowna and then they head out to the. Oh, that's not far away. I mean, the ski resorts are all within an hour, but they don't stay here, whereas in the summer they stay in Kelowna.

Speaker 1: 1:55

I see Well, sounds wonderful. I'm sure it's absolutely breathtaking there. Maybe my wife and I will get there one day and we'll have to look you up. Well, Mike is coming to us as a longtime Agile coach with over 20 years of experience in the industry. So, Mike, why don't you introduce yourself for us?

Speaker 2: 2:12

Sure, I started off as a developer. I got into Agile back in 1999. I was looking for a better way to do things and I found what was the XP community at the time that later became the Agile community. So I've been doing it for a long time. What was the XP community at the time that later became the Agile community? So I've been doing it for a long time.

Speaker 2: 2:27

But more relevant for what we're doing today is a number of years ago, I don't know, seven or eight years ago now. I decided that of all the things I did as a coach from technical practices to workflow to leadership coaching and all of all the things I did the people things were my weakest area. It was what motivates people, why do people do the things they do? How do we better understand, how do we better teach all of that people stuff? And so I made a determined effort to get better at that and I started taking courses and that's taken me on the wildest journey into neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis, body language and a whole bunch of other things, and most of what we're going to talk about today comes from those worlds, not from the traditional coaching worlds.

Speaker 1: 3:04

I know one of the buzzwords we have in the industry today is psychological safety and it's thrown around quite frequently. So why don't you define what exactly is psychological safety?

Speaker 2: 3:21

Well, it's interesting because there's three different perspectives that we can look at for psychological safety. What Amy Edmondson talks about when she's talking about psychological safety is a very specific behavior it's. We notice that when people are feeling less safe, they are more reluctant to step up and say, hey, we've got a problem. She did a lot of research around medical teams where mistakes were made with dosages of medications and when people felt psychologically safe, they would put their hand up and say, hey, we've got a problem here. I just gave the wrong dosage to somebody, or I gave the wrong medication to somebody and the team would tour and get on that. So she was talking specifically about a behavior.

Speaker 2: 3:53

Psychology looks more generally about how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about the environment, and do we feel safe to step up and be ourselves and do the right thing? But then, from a neuroscience perspective, we have a different perspective again and this is where I spend most of my time on the neuroscience side of things and there we define psychological safety as when we have access to the prefrontal cortex, which is that part of your brain that does rational, higher level thinking. So when we're doing our best work, particularly in the IT space, where we tend to live in our heads when we're doing our best work, we rely heavily on the prefrontal cortex. So if we are feeling psychologically unsafe and we have lost part or all of our ability to use the prefrontal cortex, we're not doing our best work. And that's the essence of why we care about this, because we want all of our people to be operating at their best.

Speaker 1: 4:43

Yeah, I really like that because it takes it from a soft, squishy side to something that's much more tangible, because I think everybody wants to perform at their best right, so everybody wants to do things that improve the way they work, either individually or as a team. What are some ways that you have found that we can improve that psychological safety, so that we are leaning into that more?

Speaker 2: 5:07

Well, where I normally start with this is I start talking through some of the science, because when we say, oh, it's just a behavior, people are inclined to use platitudes and say well, psychological safety is good, do more of it, you know, if you don't feel comfortable stepping up and say it. Well, just, you know, be brave, be courageous and step up and say the right thing. Well, that doesn't help. So instead let's look at the neuroscience. So I like to use the safety model from the Academy of Brain-Based Leadership, which identifies six different things. It's five primary categories of things that are necessary, plus a catch-all, and it spells the word safety, which is nice and convenient. So the S of safety is security, and this is all about consistency in our environment.

Speaker 2: 5:46

We have evolved to be astounding prediction engines. We can predict what's going to come, because it turned out that, from a long-term evolutionary perspective, to survive it was not enough to be able to react to a danger. We needed to be able to anticipate a danger, and all creatures do this. This is not just humans, but all creatures are able to anticipate. Even single-cell organisms are able to anticipate what's going to go on in their environment around them. Science has no understanding of how a single-cell organism could do this, but we're able to observe this. This is an observable behavior that we can see, that we're able to anticipate the environment. Well, when we can anticipate what's going on, when we have enough consistency in our environment, we feel more safe.

Speaker 2: 6:26

So this is the S of the safety model. So we've got that security. We have consistency in our environment, we're able to predict what's going to happen next, and that could be anything from well. We've got set routines. In Agile. We have a lot of routines. We talk about what we're going to do the stand-up now we're going to do the retrospective at this time. We have those routines and that gives us a little bit more consistency, makes it possible for us to anticipate what's coming next. We start to feel safer.

Speaker 1: 6:50

That does speak a lot to the level of psychological safety that a team has is how willing are they to try new things, be open to new ideas, have a growth mindset. Yes, right, yes.

Speaker 2: 7:04

So if it's and that actually is that's a great segue into the next letter in the safety model, which is autonomy A for autonomy. And it may sound that having consistency and security is a little bit at odds with autonomy, but it's true that we need the ability to make our own decisions. The team needs to be able to come up and say now, we'll never have 100% autonomy because there's laws and rules in the place we live. The company we're in has rules around what's going on. So we'll never have 100% autonomy. But it's a matter of the more autonomy we have, the safer we feel.

Speaker 2: 7:35

And I know everybody at this point is usually thinking oh, but I know this person who just wants to be told what to do. We've all seen people like that. They don't want autonomy, they just want to be told what to do. And the reality is that those people don't have enough of the first letter S. They cannot predict what's happening in their environment and because of that they're asking for step-by-step instructions Tell me what to do, because then I'll have consistency in my environment. But once I have that consistency and I'm able to predict what's going to happen next, now I need to make my own decisions. I need autonomy.

Speaker 1: 8:06

That makes a lot of sense because I'll tell you, mike, that's one of my. Everybody has their little quirks, their pet peeves, the things that annoy them, and when somebody says, just tell me what to do, I really see an individual that's totally checked out, that is frustrated, that brings out a lot of negative reactions in me. I start having behaviors that are not, quite frankly, they're toxic.

Speaker 1: 8:33

I'll be honest with you, because I've actually confronted somebody who said that and just point blank. So you're a professional with 15, 20, however many years of experience and you're telling me you have nothing else to bring to the table. All you're there is just to execute, nothing else. I can find any developer, any tester, any, what have you. I can bring them and just have them execute. We're asking for more from you from that. So that really does trigger me as something, but I really haven't thought of it. As you know, I really need to take a step back and see what security is missing. What caused that?

Speaker 2: 9:13

Yeah, and it could be that they're uncertain about their job. Now we'll we'll get to social standing a little bit later, cause that's that's the E in safety there is. Maybe there isn't enough consistency. Maybe I don't know when I'm going to, when I'm expected to get things done. Maybe there isn't enough consistency. Maybe I don't know when I'm expected to get things done. Maybe I don't know who's on my team. Maybe I'm being shared across teams. There's all kinds of things around the environment that would make it unpredictable, and it might not be things at work. It might be things in their home life that are making them feel that way.

Speaker 1: 9:38

That's valid, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 9:42

Then we get to the F, which is fairness. We must perceive fairness in the environment, and this is really interesting, that it doesn't have to be things that are unfair towards me to make me feel less safe. I just need to perceive things in the environment. So if I see two people on my team and one of them is being unfair to another, I feel unsafe, even though it didn't directly affect me. So fairness is critical. We must have fairness in the environment. Now it is worth calling out that, of all of the six things that I'm going to call out here, we all have different levels. So one person would have a higher need for security and a lower need for autonomy, but we all do have some level of need for all six of the things I'm going to talk about. So, fairness we must have fairness in the environment. Maybe somebody didn't get promoted and they should have. Maybe one person is we're not listening to their ideas and we really should be. Whatever it is, there needs to be fairness in the environment. It's really important. So then we get around to E, which is esteem, and that's when we're talking about social standing, because, again, from an evolutionary perspective, those of us who got kicked out of the tribe tended to die because the tribe brought protection. So if your social status is threatened, if you're not going to get the promotion, or if you're not sure if you're still going to be on this team, or people are just not listening to you anymore, they're just sort of tuning out what you're saying. All of a sudden I feel less safe because my social status or my esteem is threatened. This is all about how I perceive myself, how others perceive me, how I perceive other people around me. Esteem, so it's perception. Okay, so that was E for esteem. T is trust. So trust we need to trust each other and trust of all of these. As we're looking at how are we going to improve our environment? Trust is actually the easiest one to build up because we can do that with team building exercises. We talk a lot about us versus them, but in psychology we get far more fine-grained and it's not us versus them, it's in groups and out groups you and I share lots of. In groups, we might discover that we like a lot of the same foods. We might discover that we like a lot of the same foods. We might discover that we like some of the same movies. We have some of the same friends. Those are all in-groups that we share, and the more in-groups that we share, the more we trust each other. So it's a matter of building up that trust is a matter of having more shared experiences, more shared thinking about things. So team building exercises are phenomenal for doing trust. If we want to do things like mob or ensemble programming, that's really great for building trust, because we're actually doing things together and the more we actively work together, the more in groups we start to share, the more we begin to trust. So if we don't have trust, we lose out on that.

Speaker 2: 12:20

Psychological safety Now there's an interesting thing about trust in that I need to feel trusted, but it doesn't really matter if I trust you. So it's a one-directional thing. Really, we want trust to happen in both directions, but specifically from the perspective of psychological safety, what matters is that I feel you trust me, and then we get around to the last one, which is sort of a catch-all. The why in safety is just you, and this is your own personal biases, your own upbringing, all of the things that are uniquely you, and it's just sort of a catch-all.

Speaker 2: 12:54

But there are a lot of factors that go into that that affect the psychological safety as well. Those are things that are much harder to do across the board. Because we really do want to say, well, we want to build up psychological safety across the board and board, because we really do want to say, well, we want to build up psychological safety across the board. And that means that we need to do a little bit of security, a little bit of autonomy, a little bit of fairness, a little bit to get them all up. But the things that fall into the you bucket they're all over the place and so it's harder to take care of in a general sense, but it is critical to understand that if we feel we have a psychological safety problem and today I see it all over the place, particularly ever since COVID hit we've had safety problems because people are feeling less safe about what's going on in their environment, but even then just the pressure of business their psychological safety was an issue even before COVID. It just got worse through COVID.

Speaker 1: 13:39

You know much so that you had to actually see somebody in the office to know that they are working. So let's give a quick review. The safety model security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, trust and you. Okay. So we've listed these qualities that we're looking for in psychological safety. How do we improve those or what can we do to build those up?

Speaker 2: 14:08

Well, step one is just information. I like to start particularly in the IT space, where we're dealing with people that tend to live in their head. Most of us tend to be overly analytical, and I am too. I live in my head all the time, so we need to have some framework to hang this on. I can't just say, yeah, let's get better at psychological safety. We need to have some concrete things. So I talk about the science first. Here's what we know Now of all the things that are up here, where are places that you have observed that were either really good or really bad?

Speaker 2: 14:36

And I get people to brainstorm things. So well, trust, we're really good in this area because of, but we're really bad in this area because of such and such. So we get some brainstorming, we start layering it all out and it's astounding the conversation that gets going. People just usually open up at this point and we're starting to have really good conversations, and they'll often start off with things they observed about other people, but then the conversation comes back to things they felt themselves. Once we've started to identify some of those things, we say, well, let's propose some experiments. What do you think we could do? Well, again, trust is the easiest one. Maybe we should do some team building. Maybe we should go out and have lunch together, because sharing food with people is something that we don't do with people we don't trust. So the very fact that we're sharing food together and again, this is really hard if we're remote, but it still can be done remotely I've been on video calls where we all sit and have a drink, but if we can get together and have food, we're building more in-groups, we're starting to build up that trust. So that's a really, really simple one.

Speaker 2: 15:35

But for any of them it could be esteem, which is a trickier one. We could say well, we're concerned that there's going to be layoffs, because right now we're in a position right now that there's layoffs across the industry. So people are saying I'm concerned that there's going to be layoffs. All right, well, what could we do to feel better about that? Could we go and talk to management to get assurances that there's going to be funding for this group or for whatever? Are there things that we could do to make us feel safer in some way? And they will come up with their own answers. I mean, I could hypothesize about all different things, but they will come up with their own answers. They might say we need more security.

Speaker 2: 16:13

There's too much inconsistency in the environment right now because I'm being split across three teams and this is what's going on. Well, what if we got you to only be on a single team? You'd have more consistency. You'd start to feel better. So if we brainstorm all of these ideas very quickly, we get a set of experiments to run because we're agile. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to let's find an experiment, see if it makes us better, put a time box around it and at the end we'll see did that make us better or not? And we move forward. So just talking through the safety model and brainstorming it all is a really good starting point for that.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Have you had an experience where you're brainstorming and people are picking things on the peripheral that are very easy to talk about? They're very lighthearted, but you know the elephant's in the room and it's not being spoken.

Speaker 2: 17:01

Absolutely, because there's a catch-22 with psychological safety, that if you don't have safety, you're less willing to talk about the fact that you don't have safety. That's right, and so there is that real catch-22 there and that's where we have to start with easy things. So I would do, you know, let's do a team-building exercise. Let's try. If it's a single team, let's try some ensemble programming, because I really find, or mob programming as a lot of people know it, it's the same technique, just two different names. But let's try some of that. Let's actively work on some things together. Let's just go out and have a social, let's do something that. It's interesting that we can start to come together and build a little bit of trust so that we can have the deeper conversations.

Speaker 2: 17:43

It may be that on day one you can't have those deeper conversations. I'll also pull out other techniques. So we're talking, you know, more abstractly here. If we were all together and I felt that the team was having difficulty expressing their ideas, I might bring out lego and start doing some lego serious play techniques, because that's phenomenal at getting people to feel safer and start talking about things. Because in this case, if I'm building an abstract model with Lego about the thing that I'm talking about. First of all, I'm allowing people to dissociate because my little minifigure has a problem with this other little minifigure over there. We're not going to talk about the fact that it's really me having a problem with Joe over there, but my Lego person has a problem with Joe's Lego person, and so we can talk about that openly and candidly, and it lowers the barrier to the conversation. So now we can have the more difficult conversation.

Speaker 1: 18:32

How do you set the stage on that, Mike? Because I've seen where Legos are brought out and you kind of see everybody moan and groan and maybe give a deep sigh, roll their eyes and just immediately become disengaged. How do you set the stage?

Speaker 2: 18:45

Absolutely. And this is where I start with the science. So if I feel I'm going to get that reaction with some teams, you don't, some teams, you bring out the Lego and everybody's just, oh, that's awesome. But if I put Lego out on the table and I start to see some hesitation from people, I'll talk science first and I'll say this is what we're trying to do, that we're trying to get you into a playful state, because playful states, first of all, are your best learning states. It also puts you into a place of safety. It makes you feel more safe when you're in that playful state, without going too far down the rabbit hole. We have all different personalities. A typical healthy person has about 150 personalities, of which we rotate through 10 to 15 each day. They're called egos. You said 150.

Speaker 1: 19:25

of which we rotate through 10 to 15 each day. They're called ego states, you said 150.

Speaker 2: 19:27

150. Most of them are formed in childhood.

Speaker 2: 19:30

Some are formed through traumas, but they aren't always. But we typically shift through about 10 to 15 on any given day. The personality or the ego state that I'm using right now to talk to you is very different from the ego state that I'm in when I'm playing with my cat. They're very, very different and each one brings different personalities, different characteristics. So, in a therapeutic sense, we could actually talk and negotiate with each one of these, but that's not really. Again, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole. It's a fascinating subject ego state therapy but what I'm talking about here is I want to get people into a playful ego state, and so we can do that by pulling out the Lego. Usually, when I put Lego on the table, everybody lights up. You can just see it in their faces. They light up and they're great. But sometimes people don't. Sometimes you'll see people crossing their arms and say, ah, I didn't come to work to play a stupid game, okay, so we're going to talk some science here. We're going to talk a little bit about ego state therapy. We're going to talk a little bit about getting you into the right place we can talk about.

Speaker 2: 20:30

If we want to be learning something effectively, you need to be having a dopamine hit in your brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical in your brain. In order for us to remember something new, we need to have a quick dopamine hit. Well, if I can get you to laugh, you're going to have a big dopamine hit. If I can even get you to smile, you're going to have a small dopamine hit. If I give you something that's got some novelty to it, you get a little bit of a dopamine hit. If you do something successfully and you check something off a checklist, you get a little dopamine hit to help you learn, to put you in the right and more responsive state. And by the time I've talked about this for a few minutes, everybody's at least willing to play along, even if they don't think it's a good idea.

Speaker 2: 21:12

And then inevitably, they end up having fun because they lose track of time, and it's a good fun thing. But I will start off. I'm always looking to see when I bring something out. I'm also very clear that I don't bring out playful things just for the sake of being playful. I always have an ulterior motive and I'll tell people right up front I'm doing this because this is the desired outcome I want. All too often people say oh, we're just going to be fun for the sake of being fun, and that's when everybody disengages. No, no, that's not why I'm here today.

Speaker 1: 21:44

Because, quite frankly, fun is something that has a different definition of different people, right.

Speaker 2: 21:49

Yes, absolutely, yep, absolutely. But if I can explain the reason I'm doing this, is because I want you to retain the information more effectively, and once I've gone through a couple of rounds of this, it doesn't take long for people to realize oh, mike's got a rationale behind this.

Speaker 1: 22:05

People to realize, oh, mike's got a rationale behind this. So, mike, what about trust? That's a tricky one. What do you do to start building trust? Because I know it's very difficult when you move into a team, a new team, and you detect that there is some level of distrust between either certain individuals, which I might argue that is even more difficult than when the whole team doesn't trust itself.

Speaker 2: 22:28

I want to get them doing something with some novelty to it, something they're not used to doing, because when we all fall back on habitual patterns, we're going to go back to the clicks that we're used to. These two people always work together and these three people always work together and they don't really talk to anybody else. So let's try something very different, and it might mean taking them out of their environment. It might just be doing a radically different, retrospective style, but something that's different from the regular routines that they're in, because when we're in something new, that's when we're most receptive to trying a different approach. If I brought six people straight off the street and said we're going to form a team, they're at their most open to trying new things. But if I take five people who have already been working together and introduce one new one, the five are not willing to listen to the ideas from the new. So we want something brand new to get them into that receptive state.

Speaker 1: 23:18

How do you balance that with the security and the consistency? Different?

Speaker 2: 23:23

goals At the point that I'm trying to get people talking in the first place. I'm less focused on psychological safety as a whole and I'm more focused on just how do we build some rapport, how do we build some, a little bit of trust, and then we'll expand that outwards. So I'm doing one thing at a time.

Speaker 1: 23:42

I see. So you have a story of a team that there was some level of distrust where you did implement some of these exercises and were able to make some inroads in building trust.

Speaker 2: 23:53

I came into one team. I was called in six months into a three-month project and you heard me correctly it was supposed to be a three-month project. They were supposed to be done end-to-end and at six months they called me in because, although they had a lot of code, they had nothing to show for it. There was nothing that was actually working. The team was so dysfunctional that two people wouldn't even sit on the same floor as the rest of the team. We had people talking. You know the language that they used when they're talking to each other. It was just. It was ridiculous.

Speaker 2: 24:20

So I got everybody into the same room. We start bringing out some playful approaches. We started doing some interesting things. Let's go out for lunch together and that was a challenge. Even just to get them out to lunch all at the same time was a challenge. But let's do this. This was a team where we were physically in person. This was all before COVID. Let's go and do these things and build it all up and slowly, slowly. It took a long time, but we built up those relationships and we got people to start trusting each other again. But unfortunately, by the time I got there, there'd been so much damage already that it was really hard to undo. Had I gotten there earlier, had I been there, you know, at month two of the six months, it would have been a lot easier. We would have been able to get people together and start to build them. But this is my most extreme example of a dysfunctional team and, frankly, we might've been better off just saying, okay, we're going to disband this team and we're going to form a couple of new ones.

Speaker 1: 25:12

So when you're in that position, I assume that your mental model is that this is going to be a long play. This isn't going to be a quick fix where it's going to take some time to unwind this and you have to have some resiliency, I would expect, as a coach, because first initial attempts, you're going to meet resistance right.

Speaker 2: 25:32

Absolutely, absolutely. So I'll talk a lot one-on-one with all the individuals, but we need to get into a group setting as quickly as possible, because what we find with one-on-ones particularly with a really dysfunctional organization like that, is that the one-on-ones become pointing sessions this person over here finger pointing. You talk to one person and they'll tell you about everything that everybody else is doing wrong, but not them. So we need to get them all together in a room and talk and actually share some things. So I'll pull out things like the Lego. I'll do retrospectives like six thinking hats, which is a great one for getting people when there's a lot of conflict, I'll use Six Thinking Hats. That is my go-to. When somebody says we want you to facilitate this retro because we're expecting a lot of conflict, I pull out Six Thinking Hats because it's really good at diffusing some of that conflict and getting us to talk more rationally and logically.

Speaker 1: 26:25

So this is good information. One of the things that I've noticed when you have a lot of conflict like that and, just like you mentioned, there's lots of finger pointing, there's lots of well, we would have been successful if it wouldn't have been for insert somebody's name, right, how can we identify the things that were outside of our control? But certainly, certainly, there has to be something that's inside our control, some lever that we could pull to help the situation. So just let's delineate those. So surely we're going to have this huge list of things that were done outside of our control, but there has to be something, some little something, that we could do.

Speaker 2: 27:03

Absolutely. And that's where all of these different retrospective techniques come in. So things like a Lego series, play retro or a Six Thinking Hats, which are my two go-tos when I can't get people to talk. And so you say that we didn't have a lot of options, and we recognize that you probably did, you just didn't see them. So let's start digging into that a bit. We're going to do some brainstorming, because Six Thinking Hats ultimately is a creativity exercise. We're trying to brainstorm and come up with ideas. We're saying here's all the things we could have done and let's just get them up on the wall. Or the same with the Lego.

Speaker 2: 27:38

I had one team that I watched a couple of their retros and I was pulling teeth to get anybody to say anything. So I brought out the Lego one day and we filled three huge whiteboards with notes Because they had things they wanted to say but they didn't feel comfortable saying them. So we got the environment that became safe enough and all of a sudden the floodgates opened, because really all it takes is that first little bit and then everybody starts talking. I'm rambling a little bit all over the place here, so I'm hoping this is a somewhat coherent story that you're hearing.

Speaker 1: 28:09

Yeah, I'm probably not doing any favors by hitting questions. You're hitting all these scenarios that I'm thinking through. What I think of when I'm hearing this is you've got somebody that they're very tense and you can see it in their shoulders, you can see it in their face, you can see it in their lips, the way they purse their lips. It's like if you can just get them to relax, take a breath and let's start objectively thinking about that, that's where I see you're really trying to get is to get to where you're not so much on defense, but you're thinking objectively and not just totally being defensive about everything.

Speaker 2: 28:55

Yes, the first step when you've got a situation like that is to truly listen, and I know we say you know we talk a lot of platitudes about. Well, of course I'm listening to what you're saying. Well, the very best therapists, the things they do best, is listen and pay attention. I'm really understanding the thing you're trying to say. You'll find that if somebody repeats the same words over and over again, that's typically an indication that they didn't think you understood what they said the first time and so, at an unconscious level, they're just repeating the same words. So listen for that.

Speaker 2: 29:27

When you hear the same things repeatedly, they don't think you were listening. You might have been, but they didn't think you were. So start echoing back some of what you're hearing. Oh, I'm hearing this. Or, as some people have done, that's very effective is they'll write things down on sticky notes and stick them up on the wall. I had somebody do this to me once years and years ago and it was astounding how effective it was. He heard me say something. He wrote it on a sticky note and put it on the wall, and the next time I brought it up, he just pointed at it and it was oh yes, you're right, We've already captured that.

Speaker 1: 30:01

And all of a sudden, I just felt so much more relaxed because I'd been heard, there's heard, and I'm searching for a word here. Acknowledged maybe isn't the best term.

Speaker 2: 30:08

Well, acknowledged is not bad, yes, but really it's. Does somebody understand your point? They don't have to agree with it, but they have to understand.

Speaker 1: 30:17

Yep, they understand and they've taken the time to hear you out and at least consider it. Yes, right, not just. That'll never work, all right.

Speaker 2: 30:28

Next topic. So I'll do this with a lot of with the individuals in a team that's got a lot of conflict. I do want to have one-on-ones with everybody and I just Next topic as quickly as possible and I'll do it with whatever technique is possible, whether it's six thinking hats, whether it's a bit of Lego, whether it's something playful, whether it's just a conversation around a whiteboard. If we can do something collaboratively, that's even better. So getting a whole bunch of people to draw stuff on a whiteboard or move sticky notes around on a table so we can build up some kind of a map of how things are going to work, it makes everybody feel better that they actually understand what's going on.

Speaker 1: 31:16

How do you help build esteem, mike?

Speaker 2: 31:19

Well, esteem again, it's all about social status. It's all about how we perceive others and how they perceive us. So we could all often ensemble programming I keep coming back to this one because it hits so many of the points it's often you know we'll get one. Because it hits so many of the points it's often you know we'll get a situation, for example, where the developers look down a bit on the testers just as an example. That's a very common pattern in the industry.

Speaker 2: 31:42

When we do ensemble programming and we get to the testing part of the work, the developers are often sitting back saying I didn't realize you did all that. You have to do what for testing, you do this and you do this, and then that hadn't occurred to me. And all of a sudden we've just got the esteem going up on the tester, because now the developers are realizing that there's actually a lot more to testing than they ever thought there was. So that's a perfect example that we can start to build up and we can recognize that we all have skills, even if we're not necessarily seeing it in the office. We all have things that we can do. So the more we can share, the more we learn about what's going on, even things like talking about what did you do on your weekend. Oh, I was out rock climbing. You rock climb, I didn't know you could do that. Now, all of a sudden, esteem, now you're starting to go up a little bit in social standing, even though it didn't affect what went on in the work.

Speaker 1: 32:37

You're doing something cool. All right, I want to hit with one more here, as we're starting to come to an end to our time. But what about fairness? When you come into a team and you observe that there's some element of fairness or I guess I should say there's a level of unfairness that's there.

Speaker 2: 32:49

And sometimes it's purely within the team. Sometimes it's one person responding poorly to another person, treating another person unfairly the example of the team that I was talking about that was all dysfunctional. There was very much unfairness within the team, but typically what I find is that the unfairness is between teams and management, so it's management, hierarchy levels, and so that's when I would go and talk to management and explain you may not be intending to do this, but this is the behavior that we're getting and this is how people are feeling about the things that you've done and you need to change your behavior. And once it's been explained to them in terms of impact, you're doing this has impacted the team in this way, they're usually open to changing what they're doing. Just on that last one, I don't want to go too far off topic, but sometimes we get what's called perverse incentives I was actually blogging about this yesterday where somebody will implement a rule and people go and do all kinds of crazy things that are not expected. One of the examples is volunteer firefighters are typically not paid until they're actually putting out a fire, so they don't get paid for sitting around. Full-time firefighters do, but part-time volunteer firefighters only get paid if there's a fire to be put out, and so every couple of years, there's an article in the news about a volunteer firefighter that got caught starting fires. This is a perverse, and so, in psychology, we call this a perverse incentive. This is a perverse, and so, in psychology, we call this a perverse incentive. The intention was just to pay people for work that they did, but the result was that they actually had more fires than they should have had. There was more damage than they should have had, and this is going on on a regular basis.

Speaker 2: 34:24

There was the example with the cobras in India, where there was a problem that there were too many cobras and they were endangering the population. So the government put a bounty on cobras. Well, what happened? People started breeding cobras so that they could then bring them in and get the bounty. Well, that just made the situation worse, because when the government stopped paying for that, they released all of these new cobras. So now there's more cobras out in the population than there ever were before. So a perverse incentive makes things worse no-transcript.

Speaker 1: 35:27

We just wouldn't be able to get along in a business if it wasn't for this person, because they solve so many problems for us that come up. But what they don't understand is, because of the sloppy practices they did, they're actually causing the problems that they ended up solving, and so they're getting praised for all the problems that they're solving, but they're really not the poor other person over there is doing a good job and not causing any problems. They're viewed as, yeah, they're just kind of sitting over there doing their work, but they're really not engaged. They're not a team player.

Speaker 2: 35:59

It's not fair that you rewarded the person who actually caused the problems. I don't feel that that was fair. Therefore, I feel less safe. My prefrontal cortex is starting to shut down. I'm not doing my best work.

Speaker 1: 36:21

And we're not rewarding the people that are actually building quality into the work that they do. Yes, right, all right, mike Wars, we're coming up to an end here. Why don't you give us just a quick run through the safety model again, and I think that would be a good place for us to close.

Speaker 2: 36:37

Sure, I will give you also a link, a follow-up link that's got articles that go into a lot more depth on all of this stuff, plus more. But safety spell the S is security, which is really all about consistency, but I understand that they needed to spell the word safety because it was a good catchphrase. So it's security, it is autonomy, fairness, esteem, trust, and then you and this is the model from the Academy of Brain-Based Leadership- Great, that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 37:08

Well, mike, thank you for coming on. If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 2: 37:14

Well, the best way is you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Again, the follow-up link that I send you will have all of my contact information. My company is Gargoyle Software and I am an independent coach available for work anywhere.

Speaker 1: 37:26

Okay, great, and those links you'll have links to if anybody's interested in getting your services as well. Perfect, yes, absolutely Awesome, great, all right, mike. Well, this has been very useful for me. I hope it has been for our listeners as we talked about psychological safety really the brain-based science behind that and it's been a pleasure having you on the show. So thank you very much for coming on. Oh well, thanks for having me, mark. Yeah, great, all right, so we're coming to a close for another episode here of the Agile Within. Everybody, we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Agile Within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, mark Metz.