Frustrations, Disappointments, Friction, Expectation Mismatch and Curiosity

Why don’t you understand?

Why don’t you listen to me?

I told you so. But you never paid attention to the same.

One of these, among many, is usually the beginning of a crucial conversation.

We could be either at the receiving end or at the giving end. It can happen anywhere — at home, at work, with friends. And usually, it leaves both parties in an uncomfortable stage.

Crucial conversations cannot be avoided, instead, we should leverage them to our benefit.

The book Crucial Conversation is about this i.e. how to have useful conversations when things are at stake. The summary is:

• Arrive at a mutual respect or mutual purpose
• The shared understanding brings in a feeling of safety
• Apologise whenever appropriate

The book definitely created a lot of positive impact on me. It helps me to:

• Sense when a crucial conversation starts kicking in. As per the book, sense whether the conversation goes into a “violence way” or a “silence way”
• Bringing in mutual respect and/or mutual purpose

Most of the times I am successful with the first step, but I fail in leveraging these conversations to a win-win situation.

What I’ve started realising is that it depends on how well you are able to channelise these to a positive emotion especially by being curious. You can quickly switch the conversation to a mutual purpose or respect if you are curious to know why the other person is behaving so. The quicker you become curious, the conversation moves to a safer manner.

Lean Enterprise talks about three gaps which get created due to frictions in an organisation with varying levels of human behaviour.

• Knowledge Gap - The difference between what we expected to happen and what actually happened
• Alignment Gap - The difference between what we should be knowing and what we actually know
• Effects Gap - The difference between what we expect people to do and what they actually do

Lean enterprises resolve these gaps by making the intent loud and clear. They follow The Principle of Mission than bringing in more command and control systems. The Principle of Mission brings in the mutual purpose or alignment and enable autonomy for the team members helping them to make better decisions.

But I feel fundamentally it boils down to Curiosity. How curious are you knowing about others or how quickly you can bring in the curiosity even when the stakes are high. Once that gets settled in as a culture in an organisation, the same spreads. It is a culture where the curiosity about the friction results in innovative ideas.

Here is an interesting talk about the types of friction that exists in software development and how to leverage them or avoid them.