Antidote to Cynicism
In a company I worked years ago, there was a team my colleague gave nickname Graveyard team. “When you needed to collaborate with the team the atmosphere was like in a graveyard”, she moaned, “they didn’t get excited anything no matter how hard you tried, and that drained your energy and passion”. The people in that team kept on complaining but did nothing to the things they did not like.
I’m pretty sure that the members of Graveyard team enjoyed working together. They didn’t seem to suffer, but they didn’t seem to enjoy either. Shared cynicism worked as social glue, and team cohesion deepened the vicious cycle of cynicism. For cynical persons enduring dissatisfaction and passive tolerance of unfairness become virtues. A cynical person knows how things should be, and that this ideal state is unreachable because of something that is out of his control. Convincing everyone — especially oneself — that “you can do nothing, but someone should” becomes a daily ritual needed to prove one’s passive excellence and stoic strength.
Another agile coach tried to improve atmosphere in Graveyard team. I’m wrong persons to judge whether he succeeded in that or not. What I know is that his own increasing cynicism didn’t make this change any easier. According to him, the upper management should have changed its mindset, and before that the True Change was impossible.
Please, don’t ask what kind of change this “the True Change” was. Back then I knew and shared the most of his ideals, but I don’t remember anymore details. I tried hard to reconstruct “the True Change” when was writing this essay. I failed. I just remember that it related to self-organization, purpose, transparency, trust and mutual respect. Probably it was just a vague utopian whim; nothing concrete or actionable. Nonetheless, it was a core component of our cynical attitudes in that company.
This kind of cynicism is rather common among agile coaches; this kind of resentful lamentation about all those agile values and principle that are missing here. I catch myself from this every now and then. It’s fine as long as you don’t get stuck in cynicism. After all, there is nothing that removes your responsibility to figure out what is ‘good’ for you and live accordingly. You’re equally responsible of things you didn’t do as those you did — responsible to yourself.
Small dreams, big dreams
There are two common reasons why people fall into cynicism: either they don’t have enough big dreams, or they don’t have enough small dreams. You need them both, and you need to have balance between them. Of course, in the worst case you lack both big and small dreams, but also imbalance can be devastating.
People without big dreams tend to seek for pain killers instead of a cure to the root causes of suffering and instead of sources of joy and pleasure. Anything goes, but as pain doesn’t go away cynicism remains. People without big dreams tend to conceive small dreams as ends as such and not as small steps forward. Once small dreams make only small difference, they are disappointed. After all, when a dream comes true, you expect something ecstatic... If the most moments of joy are accompanied by disappointments, you soon start to think that dreams are a source of dissatisfaction. While this observation; this incidental correlation between realized small dreams and dissatisfaction can be true, it’s foolish to make schopenhauerian conclusion to not let dreams affect you at all and abstain from willing and desiring. Essentially, without big dreams you’re lost in the swamp on local optimums, jealousness and disappointments. I call this type of cynic persons everyday pessimist.
On the other hand, the people, who have big dreams but no small dreams, are clueless about how to reach their big dreams. Once their big dreams meet the cold reality, the outcome is ugly unless there are small dreams to protect hope and optimism. A common utopian’s analysis after the clash with reality is “this organization is hopeless; it cannot change”, or “humankind does not deserve to happiness”, or something alike. I call this type of cynic persons lost utopians.
Whereas a big dreams shed light over the road toward the better place, a small dream is a bit better place. Without small dreams, the roads have no ends and the light over them makes no difference. This was my case in my previous workplace, Knowit: In the end, I was a lost utopian. I didn’t have enough small dreams — the roads I saw didn’t lead the better place I wished to find (see previous post “Frustrated & angry agile enthusiast”).
Thirdly, there are people, who have neither big nor small dream. Nietzsche’s describe well the ethos of this type of people: “A bit of poison once in a while; that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. […] One no longer becomes poor and rich: they are both too burdensome. […] No shepherd and one herd! Each wants the same, each is the same, and whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the insane asylum.” It’s better to not dream at all, since you might get disappointed and disrespected. Just imitate those whose life you envy most, and you shall be happy and appreciated. Nietzsche calls these people the last men, so do I. The name could be more descriptive, but then again there are always benefits in sticking in well-known terminology.
At last, there are a lot of people who have both small and big dreams, and balance between them. Most of us goes to this category at least at some periods in our life. Yet, staying in this state of mind all the time is rather rare. I call these people realistic optimists.
Being a dreaming coach
The first step in the counter-attack against cynicism is the identify what kind of dreams people are lacking. If they are lacking both big and small dream, start with big dreams.
The next step is to guide them in an excursion into dreaming.
To generate big dreams, ask “When everything works like in dreams; when everything is perfect, what is different?” Then try to deepen and clarify the insight in the replies. Most people just need someone to ask for big dreams, but there are people who will get confused about that and they’ll get stuck. You may help people to dream, by asking what they love most about their job, and what prevents them from doing more of those things they especially enjoy.
In case the coachee have already small dreams, you may also ask for the common denominator. For instance, “given that you want to have self-organized teams and that these self-organized teams shall have authority to decide their way of work, what makes this important and valuable for you? Once you have this kind of self-organized teams in this organization, what makes your happy and proud about this achievement?”
It seems to be rather common that change agents know what kind of change they want to have in an organization next, but they don’t know why they want that. Even if the reason might be and often is that a professional idol said that this-and-that is good and there is nothing deeper behind their ideal, this is something you as a coach don’t want them to realize. Instead you want that they set their values behind the social reality like if they all the time knew their big dream and higher values. I wish that in future we learn to appreciate more fiction-based and socially fabricated values. Currently, people seem to need more solid foundation for their value system than just a story told by a professional idol or a thought-leader. As a coach, you need to adapt common constraints of the value systems.
To generate small dreams, you need to first understand what is blocking the coaching to reach his big dream. It probably another team, person, role or an attribute in a group of people. You may hear that “managers won’t let me”, or that “the others are not interested in”, or “we don’t have time for this because sales have sold this project too cheaply”.
Most of the time the blocker is someone else, and you’ll hear all kind of blaming. If this is the case, you most likely want to start by rephrasing the big dream using the language the “blocking” stakeholder is familiar. This is probably counter-intuitive. Essentially you seek for the moment where the resisting stakeholders just understand the coachee’s big dream and start supporting him. For instance, when the managers not only let you to do X but also ask you to do X; when the others are not only interested in but also inspires you; when sales not only sell this in high enough price but also use your idea as a sales argument.
The shared dreams have tendency to become reality. Hence, the solution for opposition and resistance is not to convince the others about the superiority of your dream, but rather to make your dreams shared enough for everyone. It is relieving to realized that there is no resistance, just fundamental misunderstandings. While this is the ideal outcome, the game’s not over if that doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t even matter if the perceived blocker is a real antagonist. After all, the biggest impediments are inside our mind. Essentially, you need to break illusion of the overwhelming opposition that nullifies all attempts to make dreams real.
At last, you may try to convert some things that a person already does into small dreams and encourage him to seek perfection in them. For instance, you may ask a developer, what might make his code better. If you cannot start with big dreams, this is the way to go.
Without big dreams, this is a hard and slow route. However, this is exactly what you often end up doing e.g. in retrospectives when coaching a hope-averse team. You as a coach force the team to choose a problem or two they’ve faced within last few weeks in the work, then you ask them to generate improvement ideas, and at last you make them choose one or two to work on in forthcoming week or two. It’s rather likely that no-one really commits these improvements, and nothing changes. However, there is chance that they decide to do something, and you get some results.
If you choose this path to generate dreams, it will take very long time until people start dreaming proactively and find balance between small and big dreams. Most likely they will, eventually, if you keep on repeating the ceremony of dreaming and avoid blaming participants because of the lack of commitment. When I’m facilitating retrospective for a team that lacks both small and big dreams and no-one had worked for the agreed improvements, I usually just note: “in the last retrospective, we had this-and-that kind of ideas… Seemingly we didn’t manage to make them real yet. Maybe we tried to do too big change at once so let’s try this time something smaller and less laborious, so that we actually get it done.”
