Robby on Rails

What do we mean exactly when we say that we want to participate in thoughtful dialogue in a project? What is our intention with this? When I recently came across some essays by David Gurteen and read his definition of dialogue as being “a disciplined form of conversation” it got me thinking about how we often forget that like all skills, practice makes perfect. What make our conversations discilplined in the first place? Based on my experience, dialogue (disciplined conversation) manifests when all participants in a conversation are practicing mindfulness. I don’t believe that most people learn or behave well by being beaten into submission, so we must come to an understanding while we actively involve ourselves in dialogue. Most of us are civil towards one another, which does wonders for allowing us to tolerate each other, but I still can’t help but feel that we’re still missing the mark when it comes to having consistent and thoughtful dialogue.

Over the past several months, our team has been spending quite a bit of time and energy analyzing these problems. What we really starting to uncover is that the real problem seems to exist somewhere outside of our development methodologies. Working under the Agile umbrella provides no silver bullet. The real issues seem to exist much deeper in our human nature.

We’re not all that great at communicating

Humans are not perfect… therefore… our ideas are probably far from perfect as well. Our thoughts aren’t perfect. Our interactions aren’t perfect. We’re consistently inconsistent (heh) and while we can rely on averages to some extent to calculate probabilities, we can’t always explain why somethings still go horribly wrong. The principles outlines in the Agile manifesto stress the importance of focusing on people not processes and responding to change. If we are to put a heavy focus on the people involved in projects, we must acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses and find innovative ways to improve our communication skills.

On a daily basis, we’re faced with complex problems. Hopefully, we’re using a lot of our prior experience to aid us in making rational decisions about how we respond to them. There is a lot that goes through each decision that we make. We can’t automate this process (yet), but we can definitely share our lessons with one another. Our intentions need to be thoughtful and empathetic to the needs of all parties affected by each decision. As humans, we have the opportunity to really listen to the concerns of others and use not only our logical intelligence… but also our emotional intelligence.

Much of this comes down to each of us learning to understand how we make decisions and interact with people. It’s our goal with Dialogue-Driven Development that with your help, we’ll be able to outline patterns of dialogue, which we hope will be of great value to the community. Our team has been analyzing our interaction with clients and discussing what has worked well and what hasn’t. How did our clients respond to approach X versus Y? It’s important that we capture this information and have conversations about the results.

“The meaning is what holds it [dialogue] together. ..Meaning is not static – it is flowing. And if we have the meaning being shared, then it is flowing among us; it holds the group together…in that way we can talk together coherently and think together.” – David Bohm

Doesn’t that sound beautiful? Who wouldn’t want to reach such levels of project enlightenment?

d3 aims to be to communication what BDD is to specification

While at RailsConf Europe, I had the privilege to speak with several Rail developers… several of which are doing contract development for several clients, just like our team. We discussed d3 for a while and I walked away feeling really excited about the whole concept. When I explained that our team didn’t see d3 as a replacement for Agile methodologies like Scrum, XP, etc… but as another tool in our tool belt. Dialogue between developers, clients, and users should be agnostic about particular methodologies. We’re really excited about Behavior-Driven Development as a best practice in our development process and we’re seeing Dialogue-Driven Development as another best practice that we start using from the initial point of contact with a potential client to long after we deliver the working product that we were contracted to develop.

We’ll be posting some fun announcements about the d3 project in the coming week(s). Stay tuned…