Release 6: Listening from full...

The first thing I want to talk about is the concept of "listening from full".

What is this?

Basically, it refers to the fact that when we enter interpersonal interactions, a number of conversations actually occur on top of the obvious audible one.

For instance, 2 people start having a chat about something.
The first conversation that happens is the one we could hear. What people tell each other. This is the public conversation.
There are in this example 2 more conversations happening.
Two other conversations are happening at the same time: each of the involved individuals will actually have a private conversation, that is “in their head”.

So now we have Private and Public conversations. How important is this for us?

Well, people are at the very foundation of anything we do in Agile. And the way they interact, exchange ideas, raise issues and solve problems.

In XP, a formal interaction heartbeat is started and maintained through Planning Games, Stand Up meetings, Show and Tell meetings, Retrospective meetings, and other important interactions happen in a less formalised and monitored when pairing, talking to team members or the customer during the day.

During the personal development course I have recently been through, we did some exercises to demonstrate how much our attention can shift from Public to Private conversation. It is remarkable how much we actually focus on the Private part and how little we will focus on listening.

One of the reasons for this is that the Public conversation is about understanding the other, the Private conversation is all about planning what we will say next and “how to look good” (ie: not say anything stupid, convert the other to our idea or point of view, etc…).

Sometimes, we have private conversations about completely unrelated subjects to the Public conversation going on. Altogether, Private conversations start because we are “listening from full” (pre-occupied, have no time, can’t be bothered, etc…)

During the same training course, we also practiced the opposite art which is to “listen from nothing”. I am not going to go into more detail about the exercise, but the result I experienced were quite extraordinary: the level of information I could pick up, the emotions, possible motives of the person talking to me where truly enhanced.

How does that help us? As mentioned, Agile relies on human interactions, and it is very likely that most of us have Private conversations during these. What type of result could we expect if, as part of method, XP practitioners could be brought to listening from nothing…

I will try and experiment with my current team, and hopefully come back to these subject later on with some findings.