Speak like a Native
Add to calendarOften I say that my job is about helping people who would rather talk to computers, talk to each other. Yet this isn’t all—I’ve played developer, manager, coach, analyst, and product owner roles—and I’ve learned that it’s important that I speak my audience’s language to be sure we understand each other. In this workshop we’ll practice verbal and non-verbal techniques for bridging the communication gap. Considering how often even spouses often misunderstand one another, speaking like a native is a skill set anyone can benefit from.
When I worked in Philadelphia, I was very lucky to have a demanding and visionary client, who could not talk the language of developers. She often had requests that seemed inconsistent with what we had previously deployed, until we broke through the communication barriers to understand the real business value behind her requests. On top of it all, she had little patience for talking to people when they didn’t understand what she wanted. All this was fertile ground for learning how to talk about, identify, and prioritize business value.
30 minutes: We’ll begin the workshop with a scripted, role-playing game for groups of 3-5 that give participants the chance to experience, first-hand, what it feels like to be either the customer or the developer in a stressful miscommunication-ridden problem. The first script will replay a tricky graphical-interface design that my team struggled with— our client requested that it should “read the user’s mind” by automatically selecting commonly-used options whenever certain criteria were met. Attempts to satisfy the client are sure to lead to frustrated developers in this exercise!
30 minutes: Next we’ll talk about ideas we have for improving the communication, as well as review a list of techniques I’ve identified (identify impact, clarify goal, reflect feeling, non-verbal communication, prototypes, and ideas from the literature).
3x10 minutes: We’ll break down in groups of 2 to practice our new communication tool belt.
- the most authentic communication comes when we can accurately express another person’s values
- why it’s important to connect both rationally and emotionally
- fast feedback loops are key to clearer communication
