 There are a few more of the hand-its available up front. There are a few more of the activity things that we'll need. But it will definitely work better if we can have groups of people. But if really sitting at the back and watching is your thing, that's OK, too. We'll just give it a minute more before we get started, because it's just turning two now, and people are finishing up from lunch, but we will not wait very long. I have everything that I need for the workshop. I have a bottle of water. The tech is all set up. iPad helps. All good. No, no, don't need that for here today. Thank you. So is everybody feeling good and lively after having had a nice big lunch? Sleepy. Oh, excellent. I'm so glad you came. We will wake you up. We will wake you up. I was feeling a little sleepy myself earlier today. It's been here for about a week and a half, and there's been a lot going on, a lot of participating in the conference, a little bit of partying in the evenings. So I'm going to be waking myself up as well, which means I try to wake myself up. I wake up all of you. OK, I think we will get underway. So welcome. Thank you for coming to attend my session. My name is Ellen Grove. I am an Agile coach from Ottawa, Canada. I'm also one of the organizers of Agile India. I'm really thrilled to be back in Bangalore. This is my second time at Agile India, and I've been having a ton of fun here. The session, what we're going to spend the next 90 minutes together exploring, is games for learning about conflict resolution. These are games that, as people who work with teams, you can take back to your organization to help people to start to explore conflict resolution and the nature of conflict. I would like to open this session with a poem by one of the modern masters of American literature, Dr. Seuss. One day making tracks in the prairie of cracks came a north-going Zaks and a south-going Zaks. And it happened that both of them came to a place where they bumped. There they stood, foot to foot, face to face. Look here now, the north-going Zaks said. I say, you are blocking my path. You are right in my way. I'm a north-going Zaks, and I always go north. Get out of my way now and let me go forth. Who's in whose way, snap the south-going Zaks? I always go south, making south-going tracks. So you're in my way. And I ask you to move and let me go south in my south-going groove. Then the north-going Zaks puffed his chest up with pride. I never, he said, take a step to one side. And I'll prove to you that I won't change my ways. If I have to keep standing here 59 days, and I'll prove to you, yelled the south-going Zaks, that I can stand here in the prairie of Prax for 59 years, for I live by a rule that I learned as a boy back in south-going school. Never budge, that's my rule. Never budge in the least, not an inch to the west, not an inch to the east. I'll stay here, not budging. I can and I will. If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still. Well, of course the world didn't stand still. The world grew. In a couple of years, the new highway came through. And they built it right over those two stubborn Zaks and left them there standing, unbudged, in their tracks. Beautiful poem about the nature of unresolved conflict. Thank you. Happy to bring Dr. Seuss. This is what happens if we don't deal with conflict head-on, though. Rather than using all of that energy to help grow our organizations, we concede, we make compromises, we find workarounds, and we end up in this kind of tangle. This is not a good place to be. Having said that, we need to expect that there will be conflict in our organizations. Because we want, this is how growth has achieved, we want to be in a state of productive disequilibrium. Because living systems, when they are in equilibrium, they are dead, right? So what we want to do is in order to grow as organizations, in order to evolve new ideas, in order to make sure that we are bringing, building diversity of thinking and a whole range of ideas and tour organizations, we need to expect that there will be conflict. But we want to try to achieve a state of productive disequilibrium rather than the standoff where everybody has to navigate around it because we can't figure out how to get along. So to start our investigation of conflict resolution this afternoon, I would like to pick a massive fight in this room. Do you play rock, paper, scissors here? Is this a game that people are familiar with? Okay, because I know they played on the Big Bang Theory and I've seen the Big Bang Theory on TV many, many times, but just give me an idea of the depth into which I have to go with the instruction. So rock, paper, scissors is a very simple game. One, two, three, and then you throw. You throw scissors and scissors beats paper. You throw paper, paper beats rock. You throw rock and rock smashes the scissors, okay? So it's a very simple face-to-face game to people stand face-to-face. One, two, three, throw. And whoever is the victor is the victor. What we're going to do in this room is we're gonna have a rock, paper, scissors competition where we're gonna start off in pairs. Any people will compete. One person will be the winner. One person will be the loser. Your obligation as loser will be to follow your new winner and you will cheer for your winners. They go on to find another competitor in the room. So say, sorry, your name is Nitesh. So Nitesh and I play, Nitesh wins, and then I become Nitesh's follower. And I cheer, Nitesh, Nitesh, Nitesh. As he goes on to fight Stelio and then Stelio vanquishes Nitesh and then we find the next competitor until there are only two standing and then there will only be one. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is I'm going to ask you to find a partner to begin with, introduce yourselves. You might wanna start off with a polite handshake. And then the competition will begin. It is okay to be loud. I have already warned Angle that we are going to kind of disrupt his thing for a couple minutes, that's okay. I want a lot of energy. I want a lot of enthusiasm. I want you to cheer for your champions. Everybody ready to go? Excellent, find a partner and we begin. So you will need to stand up. Stand up. Okay, so it's, yeah. Okay, sorry. So it's one, two, three and then you throw either scissors or, moment and I'm gonna pick on Steve. Where did you go? Hey Steve, can I borrow you for a second? I need to be conquered. Okay, so we're gonna throw three and then we throw our shape. So one, two, three and scissors cuts paper, so he would win. If we do, I'm gonna throw rock. You throw scissors. One, two, three. I threw rock, rock smashes scissors. Paper beats rock. So it's a very simple game. One, two, three and then throw. If you happen to throw the same shape, you just do it again. For the first round, we're just gonna do one game. When we get to the last two people standing, we'll do the best two out of three. Anybody have any questions about this? Okay, now let's go. Thank you. We have a new champion. Sorry, I was trying to read your name tag. Sebastri, now you find somebody else. Sebastri, Sebastri, Sebastri. Okay, there you go. I think there's, yeah, okay, so. Okay, so who's the winner now? Stuff. Scissors and the stone. Stone beats scissors. Stone beats scissors. Can we just ask the what is, the noise coming out of the side? Because that room can't be heard at all. Okay. So just ask them to just go with the sound. Yeah, then your paper. Paper beats stone. Okay, oh, oh, okay. Okay, okay. Sorry, great. Apparently we need to cheer a little more quietly. I did warn Angle this was gonna happen, but we're having so much fun that they can't hear anything. So it'll be like, Sebastri, Sebastri, Sebastri. And we'll finish the battle, because it's really important to finish the battle. There can be only one, okay? But what? Okay, so who is, who's left standing at this point? Mayuri? Okay, come on up. Mayuri, Mayuri, Mayuri, Mayuri, Mayuri, Mayuri. Okay, so this, you guys were the last two standing? We'll make this a two out of three. Oh, okay. You're still, you're still in the game? Okay, is there one more competitor who's still in the game? Okay, in this case it'll be who you, you guys game to each other and then you fight him and then we're done, okay? So, Sebastri, Sebastri, my, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So yeah, two, three, whoa, yeah, whoa. Okay, last one in. Clearly everybody's feeling a little more enlivened after lunch. We also have now created a situation where there was one true winner, Puneet. And a room full of losers. The loser really, really sucks, right? It doesn't feel good to be the loser. And so as we are thinking about how do we sort ourselves out when we find ourselves in a conflict situation, I want you to think a little bit about that feeling of being the winner and being the loser. Because the goal that we're trying to accomplish when we're trying to resolve difficult situations is to find one win-win situations so that nobody ends up feeling like they come out of it as losers. So I mentioned previously that conflict is really important. Living systems, high-performance teams experience a lot of conflict. It's natural, it's expected, it's important if you wanna have an organization that grows and changes and thrives and survives. The trick is how to help teams navigate conflict rather than founder in conflict. Because teams that have learned to navigate conflict together successfully, they have stronger relationships. They're more confident about their abilities to take on challenges. They have open communications because people aren't afraid to say what they think. People aren't afraid to disagree with each other because they know how to handle it. They will disagree in a respectful, constructive way rather than I'm right and you're wrong. And I say this as somebody who's custom being right. It makes teams more productive when they can figure out how to resolve differences quickly. And when people know that their team, that their environment, that whatever their container is that they know that they can handle conflict, it lowers the stress level overall because people realize that it's okay. We know that the going will get rough because that is the nature of life but we know how to deal with it. So I don't have to be stressed about the possibility of avoiding conflict. There are many of us who through our life experiences are more attuned to I don't want to be part of conflict. I don't want to confront conflict. If conflict is happening, I want to try away from it. So having that confidence that it's normal, it's expected, you know how to deal with it can help create a more constructive communication for everybody involved. If you don't work with your team, with your organization to build up new conflict resolution skills, what happens is your organization will clown to it, right? Relationships get damaged. People build up, they become defensive and there are hidden agendas and lots of politics and gossip and things. People waste incredible amounts of time and money and energy building all those highways around those two zacks that are there standing off rather than getting things done. Blame storming happens. People have hard feelings and people feel stressful and hostile and chaotic. These are obviously not good things, especially if you're trying to move forward at high speed, right? We don't want to be foundering. So we want to start talking in our teams and organizations about conflict and we'll start doing that before it happens. The next, the first game, second game I guess that I'd like to have happen is we're going to do a very simple exercise to explore our perceptions of conflict. Now the people sitting at the table already have one of these little baggies. If you're not at one of the tables, what I'm going to ask you to do is if you can form yourself into groups of five or six and you'll need one of these little baggies for your group. In the baggies, there are just different colored pieces of cardboard and what I would like you to do is pick the color that for you represents conflict. We're going to take 30 seconds in your group. You each pick your own color, okay? So maybe I pick this color or maybe I pick this color and then we will spend in your group. I would just like you to go around your circle and share with each other why you chose the color you did. Just tell a brief, give a brief explanation, not a long narrative, but just, you know, a short explanation of I picked this color because this is what conflict represents to me, okay? I'm going to give about five, actually these are big tables. I'm going to give about eight minutes for this to happen because it's going to take a little, yeah, yeah. If you can pass those on to the other groups, if you're sitting at a table, grab your bag, dump out the colors, pick your colors and then when everybody's picked, share your story of how that color represents conflict to you. Yeah, the tables are larger than yours so I'm going to give it a couple more minutes. Conversation at their table. Okay, I'm going to assume from that that everybody had a chance to go around. So just quick show of hands in the room. How many people picked black? Few people did, okay. How many people picked dark blue? Few people did, interesting. Green, lots of green. Yellow, I saw a lot of yellow. Maybe the yellow just kind of glows in this light. Red, how many people picked red? A lot of people, but definitely not everybody. Silver, gold, not so many gold. So interesting because I do this exercise and people ask me, well, doesn't everybody pick red? Doesn't everybody pick black? Anybody want to share just a quick share? Why did you pick the color that you picked? Maybe we can hear from two or three people. Oh, come on. Why did you pick red? Okay, so for you that represents loud and bright and sort of imposing other people imposing their viewpoints on you, absolutely. Somebody else want to share? Okay, okay, so you picked green because it kind of represents direction and for you conflict is about two people or more people coming together and going, but my way is right, but my way is right. We must go that way. Excellent, I'll pick, okay, beautiful. So what this gentleman said is he picked gray because we often like to see the world as black and white. And usually in any situation where there's conflict there are many, many, many shades of gray that we maybe need to explore because there is no clear this is my way, this is your way. I offer this to you as an exercise that you can use with a team really, really easily and it can provoke some very interesting conversations about how different people on your team view conflict situations. The amount of information and the surprising diversity of perspectives that you will uncover is really worth the investment. You can do this 10 minutes quickly in a meeting and I think it really helps a team, a group of people that are coming together to get to know each other. Just learn a little bit more about each other and about how they approach conflict. Hopefully before they are in a situation where there is conflict because that may help them to adjust how they work together. It may help them shape some working agreements on their team, help them to understand a little bit better about how other people on the team might react when the going starts to get rough. Absolutely. So I want to talk a little bit now about some of the things that drive conflict and share a model with you that I encountered when I was putting this talk together, and this is not working, come on. Oh dear, sorry, I'm having, there we go. That talks about the different things that drive conflict and how you might use an understanding of conflict drivers in order to help address conflict situations that you're in. So if you're at the table, you have a handout on the table and there's a space for this model if you want to make notes as you go to help you remember. If you don't have a handout, there are a few more of them up here and we will be doing a couple of other exercises based on the handout. So maybe I can ask, we can just sort of spread them around the room if you can pass them around the room so that people can get them. So if I can just hand you this pile and pass it that way. So this model comes from a, he's actually a Canadian academic and mediator called Gary Furlong. And in Furlong's circle of conflict, he identifies several different drivers for conflict situations. In the top of the circle, we have things, we have values, we have relationships, we have external things, external situation things or internal things like moods, right? When we have differing values or goals, for example, if in your organization, the goals of the security department or the ISO compliance department versus the goals of the product organization might be very, very different and hard to reconcile. Relationships, when people are operating on the basis of stereotypes about those guys in, those guys in EAPI governance, all they wanna do is be a pain in the ass. Those kinds of things make it very hard to work together. Externals or moods are environmental or personal issues. Things that are going on unrelated to whatever the conflict is but that are helping to set the tone of the conflict. Maybe around the organization or around that specific conflict, the organization is having difficulties, there's economic troubles, there's layoffs or something and people are generally feeling horrible about that and that energy is going into whatever the specific disagreement they have or that people internally are just having what I like, you know, a bad hair day. Your bad hair day can be a personal thing, everything is wrong. Some of the organizations have bad hair days. The drivers in the bottom of the circle of conflict are different sorts of things, data, information, conflict caused by too much information, not enough information, the wrong information, misleading information being shared, information being controlled in inappropriate ways, information being shared in inappropriate ways. Interests where people have different wants or needs which is different from having different values, right? Or structural things. When there are limitations on resources, people don't have all the stuff they need to get their job done. The way your hierarchical structure is and authority is distributed through the organization, that's a structural problem. The interesting thing about this model, the way you might wanna use this model when you're in a conflict situation is what Gary Furlong says is that the drivers in the top of the circle are really hard things for individuals to manage usually. Those are big situational things that are difficult for people to influence. The stuff that's in the bottom of the circle is something that usually people have more control over. So if you find yourself in a conflict situation with another party or your team and another team is in a conflict situation, what you might choose to do is try to find a way to reframe the conflict so that it's about one of the things in the bottom of the circle rather than one of the things in the top of the circle. Even if it really is about one of the things in the top of the circle, simply because if you can work something out, if you can sort of take part of the problem and reframe it as an information problem or reframe it as a structural problem and resolve that, that might give you the momentum that then will allow you to take the next chunk of the problem and the next chunk of the problem and really address the underlying issue. But often a lot of the times when we get into difficult situations, it really is about things that are in the bottom half of the circle anyway. So if you can identify what kind of problem this is, you can take the steps to help address it. Sorry, if you want to see if there's anything else in there. You know, just, yeah. Focus conflict resolution effort on the drivers that are in the bottom of the circle is likely to be more successful there. Next I want to explore a little bit about how people react to conflict, how people feel on a personal level when they're in a conflict situation. Because quite often we like to think that we are rational beings who deal with things coolly and calmly and can talk our way through anything. And the reality is humans are much more complicated and messier than that and you cannot discount the effect of emotions. So I want to play a little bit, I want to do a little role playing exercise where we are going to explore how conflicts escalate. So what I'm going to need you to do is pair up at your tables. One person in the pair will be the north going zacks. One person in the pair will be the south going zacks. And I'm going to give you a little role play to do. And I'll, we're just going to spend like 30 seconds, 45 seconds doing it. Take whatever stance you want in the role play, but I want you to notice as you're playing at this scenario, what's happening? What's happening in your body? What's happening in your mind? What do you see the other person in the conversation doing, okay? So everybody find a partner at your table, figure out which one of you is going to be the north going zacks and which one of you is going to be the south going zacks. Let's do that really quickly and then I'll give you the scene. To do is stand up and get back to back. Probably a script, because this is more of an improv kind of scene. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you your roles. I'll show lights, camera, action, and then you will turn around, you will start your improv. As I said, it's only going to be about 30 seconds because that's usually all it takes one another fight to break out in the room basically. Okay, so here are the roles. The north going zacks, you'll be an employee who desperately needs to take some time off. Pick whatever motivation for your character you would like. The south going zacks, you're going to be that, yeah, people are like, I think I've been here. The south going zacks will be the manager who is really concerned about an upcoming release who is going, you cannot possibly have time off at this time. Is everybody clear on their parts? Okay, back to back, lights, camera, action. Action, thank your partner. Okay, just sorry, first of all, quick sound check. Can everybody hear me? Is it, am I too loud? Yes, sorry, can you hear me now? Okay, can everybody in this room hear me? Because there's always a problem balancing out can you be heard in this room without being heard in the next room? I'm also trying to be really conscious of let's not drown out Angle sessions if I cut after 30 seconds. Okay, so I want you to just think about that a little bit. What were the things that you noticed happening in the conversation as hopefully that was enough time to help you feel a little bit agitated about what was going on? Somebody give me an example of what they noticed going on in their body, in their emotions as this conflict happened. Sorry, sounds fabulous, but okay. So what was his body language like if you were trying to be open and there's ideas? What did you see him doing? Okay, so you saw incremental, did you notice a different kind of reaction? Sorry. Okay, so what was the tone of your conversation? What was the emotion? Okay, so you're going to need some a little bit of, I'm going to put a couple of labels on it, maybe kind of like a little bit of anger, certainly a sturdiness, right? This is what I want. It's about me. Did anybody see fear or retreat, sorry, what did you say? Yeah, I didn't have a notion of fear. I thought it would work, yeah. I saw it going towards a sort of sort of an empty body. Oh, yeah. But I thought it would work, it didn't shoot. Yeah. That's talking in a little bit of a context. Okay, and it had a, in the mind. He started comfortable being a position of authority using that tone in his people. Interesting. Sorry. Okay. So, he demonstrated positive constructive sorts of behaviors, oh, oh he was, he was, he was at the other extreme, okay, I don't, I'm not sure I want to hear any more about that, we don't want to scare people in the room. The point of this exercise is to help people notice what their natural reaction to conflict is. How do we solve this problem is what happens to me when the going starts to get rough, right? What is the stance that I take? Because there are a number of different positions that people tend to fall into. And at different times and different contexts, you may fall into each of these, but often we have a position that we are most comfortable falling into. Whether that's depending on how, we talked about assertiveness, because you talked about expressing your assertiveness. This is one dimension in the Thomas Tillman Conflict Model. And the other dimension is cooperativeness. How much am I inclined towards being, it's about what I want to get out of this situation versus I want to try to work with the other person to come to something that we can agree, you know? And at the top of the assertiveness scale, it's about me. It's I need to win, you need to lose, I need to get my way. The bottom of the scale is let's not deal with this at all. Let's run away, let's not talk about it, maybe it will sort itself out in time. I am a master of this strategy, especially my personal life with my husband. No, no, no, no. It doesn't work out very well in the long run. For small things, sometimes time will sort itself out. For bigger things, this is a really poor strategy in my experience. At the other end of the cooperativeness scale, we have accommodation. Yes, whatever you want, let's do what you want, I want to make you happy. That makes the conflict disappear, but that leaves the person who's doing the compromise thing, who's doing the, we'll do it your way, I want to make you happy, I don't want to fight about it, that leaves them feeling like losers, right? So where we want to try and be when we're entering into a conflict situation is somewhere in the middle, ideally compromising where we're both kind of bending over to make things happen and we can live with the solution or collaborating to achieve a mutually agreeable solution where we're both getting what we want out of it. But in order to get to this place, you have to pay attention to what is my orientation towards the conflict, because if your natural inclination is to avoid, it's going to be hard to climb that ladder towards how do we work together. And if you notice that you're thinking, well, hey, it's all about me, I need to be really right in this, again, difficult to get to that ladder. So role playing is a great exercise that you can do with your team, just to help people notice these things about themselves, right? In a playful kind of way, because sometimes if you can draw people's attention to how they act in a non-threatening kind of circumstance, they will figure, they'll start to think through for themselves. Oh, yeah, I really am a conflict devoider. This is maybe not helping me get what I want out of life. I should do something to learn about that. I want to do another short exercise to talk about the emotional effects of behavior on conflict situations. And I'm going to set up this scenario. I don't know how it's going to work in this room, but we'll try it. We'll see. We are going to pretend that we are quietly at a networking event, such as happens in the hallway at the end of the day. What I'm going to ask you to do is I'm going to ask you, everybody, before we get up, I'm going to ask you to close your eyes. I'm going to walk around the room and I'm going to pick a negative inspector general. The negative inspector general's job will be to be having a very, very bad time at this event. And they are trying to infect other people with their attitude. If you get caught by the negative inspector general, you assume a position of negativity as well. It doesn't have to be the same position. Maybe whoever's negative starts off with crossed arms and angry face or something or do what seems natural to you. Maybe you just shut down, stare at the ground. Staring at the ground will make it hard to infect other people. But I leave it to your creativity to figure out how to project negativity. So this is all we're going to do in this scenario. It's going to be very simple. I'm going to ask you to close your eyes. I'm going to walk around the room. I'm going to pick one or two people to be the negative inspector general. And we're going to see how long it takes the entire room to be infected. After I've picked people, I'd like you to just sort of stand up, mingle, chat quietly, and do this for like 45 seconds. And we'll see how far the negativity spreads. So if I can ask everybody to close their eyes. I've got to walk around and pick two people. I have to walk farther than this. If I stop here and go back to the front, everybody will know who I picked. And just keep walking around the room, walking, walking, walking. Headed back to the front right now. And I am almost at the front. And when I get back to the front of the room, what I will do is I will ask everybody to stand up. And the negative inspector general, as you can start infecting people, everybody who isn't infected yet, just chat for a couple of seconds. It's been infected by the negative inspector general. Just, I must have picked the happiest people. Okay, so there's definitely a little pocket bit around here. One, okay, couple, couple. It's kind of hard the way this room works because people can't move around very much. I think actually, I'm going to ask you to sit down. I don't think we'll do the second part of the exercise. I'll tell you about it though. Because it's a fun game to play. What happens in the second part of the exercise, usually what you see at this point is that you will see definite pockets of, there will be a whole corner of the room where everybody's like, this is the worst session I have ever been to. What I do in the second round is we repeat the exercise. And I say, but this time I'm going to infect a positivity inspector general. And we do the same thing, you close your eyes, I walk around the room. Difference is the second time I don't actually pick anybody. Ask everybody to stand up. And you see how quickly the positivity also spreads through the room. It's a silly little exercise. It takes like two minutes. The space kind of has to be right for it. And this room's a little crowded a little. So this is why I'm sort of calling it and we're going to move on to the next one. But it's an interesting exercise that you can play with the team to help them show how much their emotions and their emotional stance will contribute to the behavior of other people. Because if we are exuding negativity, if we're in a conflict situation and we're being super negative about how much this sucks and how much those guys are wrong and we are right and this is going to be so difficult to work out, that attitude will spread through everybody who is involved, right? If we take the other approach and sometimes it's difficult because when emotions are running high, when we feel we're being treated unfairly, it's hard to put a positive face on it. But if we take a more positive orientation towards whatever the subject of conflict is and say, this is going to be difficult but we can work it out and we will be stronger as a result. We need to focus on achieving a mutually beneficial end. We need to focus on being respectful to each other. We need to focus on whatever good behaviors you want to encourage and you actively sort of help people notice is that the stance we're taking or are we sort of sinking into negativity? It can make a really big difference. So this is just, as I said, this is just a silly little game but it's kind of fun to play because if you get, I think it has a lot to do with the shape of the room actually. You get it right. You can show very dramatically how quickly emotions get spread amongst a group of people. There will be a list of references at the end of the presentation where if you want to go and look up instructions for any of these games, they're available to you. So the model that I want to talk about in terms of behaviors, just very quickly, sorry, just keeping an eye on the time. I think we're good for the time, is the different levels of conflict and the kinds of behaviors that go with them. This is material that comes from Lisa Adkin's book on coaching agile teams and some of you will be familiar with it. And it's from a model that hurt, she took the model from a guy named Speed Lease who does a lot of work with the religious organizations of the United States. And it's a helpful model for understanding what the level of conflict is at because there are different kinds of interventions that may be appropriate. If say there's a conflict within the team and you're the stakeholder or you're the manager of a group and you can see there are problems going, right? There are different approaches you're gonna take depending on the level of conflict. Whereas it's a level one conflict, there's just a difficult problem to solve. People need to share information, people need to figure it out. Level two conflict, when there's a real sort of disagreement going on, I'm right and you're wrong. People's defenses start to go up. It's hard to sit down and have just that factual conversation about this is what it looks like because we're starting to guard ourselves, we're starting to talk about us and them, we're not necessarily having open conversations. Level three, it becomes a contest. It's actually more important for us to be right. We need to win, we need to win this one. We don't wanna work on resolving this with you. And I see, I go into organizations where I run into this situation a fair bit. I think part of it is because I live in a government town and I work with a lot of government agencies but I have worked in situations where, say, between the customer, the business team and the IT team, this is the level of the relationship they're at and it's really, really hard to help them along the path to increased agility when you've got two groups of key participants that aren't even talking to each other. Level four and higher, it gets even more difficult, right? You get into the situation where people all becomes about, it's about us, it's about what we want, what we need. Our way is the most important way, the language becomes more ideological and level five is horrible, destroy the other. We hate those guys, they're idiots, we don't wanna work with them anymore. I actually have a client I'm working with right now where there are a couple of teams that are in that situation. The client is so big, difficult, complex project, lots of reasons it's complicated. The IT team is working as hard as they can but it hasn't worked out well and the customers are so frustrated and so they've had it, they've had it. They're like, we wanna hire some bosses off the street because we are tired of working with you. That's kind of level five conflict in an enterprise setting and it's a really difficult kind of thing to deal with and there are definitely different stances that you might take as a manager, as an intervener in the situation depending on the level that you're at. If it's a level one conflict, stay out of it usually or maybe you might take a few facilitative sort of steps to help the participants achieve consensus but you probably don't need to intervene at all. As it gets higher, your role in supporting the people in conflict is going to change because you may need to take a more active role and you may need to take a different focus. At the bottom of the scale, the focus is on let's solve the problem. Let's get the problem, bring the data to the table, let's figure it out. When feelings start to escalate, when things get rougher, you need to sort of worry about creating safety for the people who are in this conflict to give them space where they can express emotions hopefully in a constructive way and as it gets higher, level three, you might have to really do some pretty hard ass kind of facilitation in there to get people to bring actual information to the table. Let's set aside all the, they said this, they said this, those guys are stupid and bring facts to the table. Let's use some negotiation tactics that we have to figure out about where are common interests really? Let's try and focus on what is it we want that's the same and how can we work towards that rather than focusing on the differences. When you get to level five, you might actually have to spend some time not working with each side of the conflict individually just to get things diffused enough that people can come to the table and have that kind of conversation because when things get that bad, you can say, hey, let's get together, we'll have a big meeting, clear the little air, put all the laundry on the table and it's just gonna be boom, right? If you don't do any pre-work to help calm people down, to help make sure that everybody feels that they're being heard, to help sort of tease out what some of the issues are so you can get to the place where you can have a constructive conversation, you need to be aware of these things. So we're not spending a huge amount of time on this model but I wanted to make you aware of it so you can go and learn more if you're interested. I find this really useful when I find myself dropped in it in a client's site to take a look at what's going on so I can figure, wow, okay, this is my role in this mess and this is how I'm going to approach it and it's been very helpful to me. One of the things when we're in a conflict situation that we really need to focus on is how do we help communication? How do we help people communicate more effectively in difficult situations? Because some of us like to avoid, some of us get tongue tied, we get fixated on issues and especially in sort of, I'd say level two in that model, level two and level three, one of your roles is somebody who's supporting the conflict or if you're a participant in the conflict might be how do we structure the conversation a little bit in order to help focus on what's really going on, what are the outcomes we're trying to seek, how do we get there and acknowledging how people are feeling without wallowing in it, right? So I found this mnemonic, this technique that I really like and there's lots of models out there. This is just one that I like that I'm sharing with you today called clearing the air. And clearing the air is a way of sort of organizing your thoughts so that you can sit down and prepare to have a difficult conversation with somebody. The first step is to agree. Figure out, start by acknowledging what is the thing that we both care about? What are the things? We both want this project to turn out well, right? It's important to us that we satisfy the customer, we meet the deadline, make her boss happy, whatever. The next statement, as you're trying to sort of frame the problem, is how the situation is affecting you. Not, this is what you're doing and it's getting up my nose, but this is what's happening to me. Because of the way things are right at the moment, I'm having a difficult time meeting my deadlines, I'm not getting the information I need, whatever. This is how it's affecting me. It's kind of giving impact feedback where it's focusing on the impact on me personally of the situation without getting into the, it's about what you're doing. The next statement in a clearing the air kind of conversation is about respect, acknowledging the importance of the other person in the situation. I mean, this stuff seems really simple, but I notice on a day-to-day basis how easy it is to slip into, you're getting in my way and I can't get my work done and boy, are you ever stupid for making me feel this way, right? Maybe you don't say it in those words, but that attitude comes out. So acknowledging, actually it's really important that we figure out, I respect you as a colleague, we've worked together really well in the past, I'm sure we can figure this out. And then the last part of a clearing the air conversation is making the request. What do I need from you? What is it that I want? And it shouldn't be phrased as what do I need from you? I need you to stop being stupid. That's not a request, right? The request is we need to sit down. Can I have some of your time so that we can figure out how to make the information flow more effectively? What is it that I need out of the situation in order to help move forward? And it's a really simple pattern. It's really easy to remember. And I have personally found it very helpful in when you get into difficult situations to think, am I covering all of these bases? Am I being really clear about what's important to both of us? Am I conveying what the impact is on me? Because that gives me a chance to say how this is making me feel what the effect is on me. But it's really got to be about me. It's not about what you're doing. It's about me. Why is it important that we rebuild our relationship? Because we need to work together. Because I want us to go on together. We're just gonna be good. And what do I need in order to make that happen? So the exercise that I'd like to do with this, it's a little bit of role-playing, but it's, I like to call it role-playing for introverts, actually. This is where you'll need the handout. Because what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you a scenario and there's a little comic strip at the bottom here. And what I would like to do you to do is you could do this individually or you could do this in pairs. It's just write out what you would say, what kind of statement you would say for each of these, for agreeing for an impact statement or a respect statement and a request statement for the scenario that I'm gonna give you. And it's a very simple scenario. So it's a little role-play, but nobody actually has to get up and talk to each other. Is there anybody who really, I don't know if there are any more handouts kicking around the room. Are there any that are sitting on a table being unused? Okay. If you don't have a handout, I apologize, you're gonna have to maybe do this in your head or you can have a conversation with the person sitting next to you. You've got, okay. There's a handout over there for somebody who wants one. We're just gonna take two minutes. So if you don't have a handout, this is also two minutes where you can just kind of sit and breathe and reflect on your day. Oh, I need to show you the scenario. Yes, thank you. I was like, I started my timer, but. So this is a scenario, very simple scenario. Many of you were agile coaches who have been here. Somebody on the team is like, I've done that agile thing on my last team. And it really, really, really sucked. What do you expect me to do this time, right? So you can approach this from the point of view of being a team member, being the scrum master, maybe being the person's manager, whichever role speaks to you. But I'd like you to sort of walk through what are the four statements that you might use in this situation where you've got your very experienced developer going, this is a waste of my time, I don't wanna do it. Oh, sure, sorry. Just jumping back to the previous slide for the people who don't have the handout. Air, agree, impact, respect, request. So there's four things that you're gonna wanna say. So what I would like you to do now is just find a partner at your table or somebody that you're sitting next to. You may share or not share your comic strip as you feel. But what I'd like you to do is just have a quick conversation with the person sitting next to you about can you think of a time where this structure of conversation might have helped you sort out a problem that you were experiencing. Maybe you're a natural and you do this all the time, in which case I bow down before you. But I'd like you to sort of think back and talk with a partner about is there a time in recent history that you can think of where actually this would have helped you? So I'll give you two minutes to have that conversation and bring our attention back to the center of the room, please, thank you. So I wanted to share this exercise with you. There's two things about this exercise I'm really hoping that you'll take away. First of all, the fundamental technique because this is really, really super simple, agree, impact, respect, request, right? It is a very helpful formula for how do I approach a difficult conversation with somebody when I am reluctant to talk to them because things are tough, feelings are running high, situations messy, beautiful, simple formula, it can take you a really long way. The other thing that I'd like you to take away from this exercise though is actually the mechanism that we use to do role playing. Because I was one of the people who was getting a little agitated yesterday morning during Noresh's presentation about the dark side of collaboration and when we sort of veered into introverts don't like to collaborate. I kind of think that's a crock. I think introverts actually like to collaborate just as much as extroverts. The issue is that when we set up activities, when we structure our events and conversations, we pick techniques that favor extroverts. We often pick techniques that favor people who sort of help refine their thinking by talking while they're thinking as opposed to, and this is one of the ways that I think there's lots of ways you can define introverts and extroverts, right? But one of the patterns of behavior that I see is extroverts will talk until they get the idea sorted out, introverts, and I'm one of them, I like to go away and think about my response before I'm ready to share it with people. So if you wanna do something where, for example, you want people to role play, it's very challenging for some people to get up and I'm gonna pretend to have this conversation with you. Something like having them do a comic strip, something to sort of think out their ideas on paper before they have to share them with the rest of the group is a much more comfortable way to engage people who are more introverted into this kind of conversation. And it's kind of sort of aside from games about conflict resolution, but this is a conflict I sense brewing in the agile community. I would encourage you to think about when you are setting up activities, when you are facilitating big discussions, try to find a balance of techniques for getting people's participation and getting people's input that allows people who are comfortable with, who have different levels of comfort with different kinds of activities, make sure you have a mix, right? Some people like to get up and shout out ideas and have loud, passionate conversations. Other people wanna go away and think about it and get their ideas out before they share them with the group. Both ways are good, both are equally important to the collaboration, just keep in mind if you are a facilitator structuring these things that you need to accommodate the whole range of preferred ways to interact. Now that I finished my little sermon on that subject, I wanna move on to our last exercise. And part of the stance of the clearing the air is to take whatever the problem is you're addressing away from making it a personal issue to focusing on the problem. Here is the problem, here is the effect on me. This is why it's important for me, for us to solve it together, I'm assuming positive intentions that we do wanna resolve it. This is what I need out of the situation. One of the really important things to keep in mind when you are in a situation of conflict is everybody is right but partially. I know there are some black and white situations where sometimes it really is I am right and you are completely wrong. But more often than not, when people have a vastly different point of view on something that's going on, everybody's perspective has some element of truth to it. Based on people's experience, based on their understanding of the situation, based on the history of the problem and their knowledge of it, that crazy thing that they're saying about how could you possibly believe that is actually rational and founded on something that is true for them, right? And if we wanna take a constructive attitude to resolving conflict, we need to think about this. We need to be aware that it is possible for two people to hold completely oppositional ideas that both of them have some element of truth in it. And so for our last exercise, I just wanna play with that a little tiny bit. We're gonna do, again, we're gonna have the north going Zaks and the south going Zaks. So I'd like you to find a partner at your table. We'll just do this sitting down. Find a partner who you can work with and I need you to identify who is the north going Zaks and who is the south going Zaks. The reason that I need you to identify this is what I'm gonna ask you to do is I'm gonna ask the south going Zaks to close their eyes and I'm gonna show the north going Zaks something that is their belief, something they believe to be true. Then after everybody's had a chance to read it, I'm gonna ask the north going Zaks to close their eyes. I'm gonna ask the south going Zaks to open their eyes and I'm gonna show them something they believe to be true. Then once everybody's had a chance to sort of understand their position, I want you to have a conversation about this idea. So identify the north going Zaks and the south going Zaks at your table. So north going Zaks, put up your hand. If you do not have your hand up, close your eyes at the moment. North going Zaks, here is your belief. Don't read it out loud, but here is something that you believe to be true. Everybody had a chance to read it? Okay, north going Zaks, put your hand down, close your eyes and I'm going to ask the south going Zaks to open their eyes and read this belief. This is something that you believe to be true. Okay, I'm now going to ask you to, everybody can open their eyes and I'd like you to have a conversation with your partner about this belief that I have just given you. Let's take like 90 seconds. This won't be a long-winded conversation, but in case it didn't become clear in your conversation, I'll show you the two statements. The north going Zaks, the belief that I implanted in their head was two heads are better than one. And if you're an advocate of pair programming or mobbing, this is probably something you live and breathe daily. The other truth that I gave to the south going Zaks to argue was if you want something right, you better do it yourself. And I'm pretty sure everybody in the room, does everybody in the room, they felt that at one time or another in their lives? Yeah, yeah, it's easier for me to just get it done myself. So how could these things both? How could these things both be true? Yet be so completely opposed to each other? Anybody have somebody, something come up in their discussion that helped them reconcile that cognitive dissonance? Sorry? You want with collaboration? Yeah. Did you, in your conversations, did you find yourself finding examples to support the belief I gave you? Anybody else have anything interesting come up in their conversation trying to reconcile? What, okay. Possible that both of these things are true even though they appear to be mutually exclusive and inherently contradictory. And what happens too is when people become attached to a belief, and this is why I was asking if people sort of found examples in their conversation, found examples from their experience to support the belief that I gave them. Anybody find themselves doing that? Anybody, anybody go, yeah, this happened to me? Or can you add somebody else who was introduced into the situation, you found that to be, it was a challenge, it got in your way. Yeah, and the point is that once we become attached to a belief, once we get handed a belief, I just gave you this one, but once we become attached to an idea, as human beings, it's really easy for us to go back into our memories and our experience and mine for things that support that idea. It's called the hindsight bias, right? If we become convinced something is true, we're really good at convincing ourselves that it is true based on our experience. Humans have very selective memories in this respect and we're really good at convincing ourselves that our current belief is the true belief even though somebody else's belief may be equally true based on their experience, based on where they've been. So the challenge in conversations is how do we find, how can we look past that hindsight bias to see that even if somebody is saying something that we think is completely out of, where the hell did that come from? That there may be some truth to it. And that's another, the last sort of trick that I wanna leave you with, which is something, a very personal trick that works for me that was given to me by a coach at Adjo, a coach camp in the US. He was presenting a paper on something to do with Chris Argyris's work and how do you reframe problems? How do you reframe things? And in this discussion of the session that he was gonna present, he mentioned that when you're in a conflict situation you're trying to figure out where is that from and try and see things from a different perspective. WTF. I know I haven't heard as many people swearing at this conference as I usually do, but that's one of my favorite hashtags on Twitter, WTF. What the fudge is going on, right? It's a word that I may use once in a while. But to be able to reframe that in my head, when I'm having that reaction, when somebody says something to me and I'm going WTF, to rather than going what the, to go where is that from? Why does what that person is saying? Why does it make sense to them? They've just said something completely outrageous and controversial, but it must be coming from a place that it makes sense for them. Because unless they're deliberately trying to stir something up, and that's rarely the case. What they're saying, even if it seems to be to be completely way out, completely goofy, it is true for them in some way. And it's a reminder to myself to sort of pause there when I have that, oh, what, WTF reaction, to stop and think where is that from? So just keep that one in your back pocket in case you need it. My husband actually made me a little necklace with WTF on it as a reminder that I need to engage in that more often. So just to recap where we have been in this session, we took a look at perception. We talked, we gave you, had an exercise that you can use to talk about what is your perception of conflict, and also to sort of think about a model for thinking about what kind of conflict are you engaged in. We did an exercise for escalation so that you can play with, how does it feel when the conflict is mounting? How do I react? And a model to look at the different ways that people react to conflict. We did a little bit of the contagion exercise, it didn't work so well in here, but to examine how moods spread and positivity and negativity can spread unconsciously and you need to be aware of that. We talked about a model for using for having structured conversations in situations where conflict is there, and we played a little bit of the idea with contradiction. How can two mutually exclusive things be true at once? And how can we sort of recognize and overcome hindsight bias? So the last thought that I just wanna leave you with, so everybody got a picture of this, these are on, I'm pretty sure these are on the Agile India website, is that even though conflict is sometimes difficult, uncomfortable, painful, stressful, it is an essential part of human relationship. Great relationships, some people have great relationships where people get along all the time and that's fine, but often the relationships that I'll say are the most productive, the most creative, the things where new big grand things happen are places where people bring different ideas, different experiences, different history to the table and bring those things together to create something newer and bigger and better. So don't be afraid of conflict, don't avoid it, recognize that it's gonna happen and think about how are we going to work with this in our professional lives when we encounter it. On that note, our time is up. Thank you very, very much for your time and participation. I hope you enjoyed this session. I enjoyed being here with you today. I will apologize to Angle for all the noise we made, but thank you again.