The Magic of Hallway Conversations
As much as I hate to admit it, I can be almost as effective of an agile coach working remote as I can be in person. There are however some pretty serious and yet subtle things that are missing. I suspect that, because we’ve been doing this for a while, we’ve all started forgetting some of the magic of what it was like being together in the open spaces with our teams.
I’d like to share a few anecdotes and snippets from my own story and hope some of it resonates with you. Maybe I can help remind you of some of the subtle things we are missing.
Where I worked at my client site before the pandemic, we had a big common area with standing height tables. It served as a sort of home base when you were between things. You might run into Dawn, Keri, Phil or Kevin or any of our Agile Change Agent Team. You might even run into a stakeholder, an architect, a UX designer, Scrum Master, or Product Owner from other teams. And the conversations around those tables would mostly be small talk. But you’d learn something about these people without even trying. Our friendships deepened and trust grew as well as a result.
One very subtle and important consequence of these casual conversations was that we accumulated these small tidbits of knowledge about a large number of people that we didn’t work with in our own product teams everyday. And occasionally, some other random hallway conversation would remind you of something you’d heard. Maybe you heard Chris was speaking about Product Management at a meetup group next week, and someone you’ve just met was looking to get better connected and learn about being a Product Owner. And bam, a magic connection was made and it happened when it never would have happened otherwise. These kinds of things happened ALL the time. Sometimes it was more closely related to our work too; a retro format that worked well, a team experimenting with a new board or metric idea and as coaches and scrum masters these things rubbed off on each other. Great ideas jumped easily from team to team.
For me, being on a team of agile coaching consultants, one of the best parts were the conversations we’d have before and after work. These casual connections weren’t meetings with agendas. They were breakfasts in the morning at our hotel and dinners with beers in the evening. Over breakfast we’d talk about any number of ridiculous things but also what was going on elsewhere with their teams and what challenges they were working on. There was always something to be learned from working with a team of such very smart people. Some of the best connections were sharing and collaborating on ideas out at dinner or afterwards over drinks in the comfortable chairs of the hotel lobby. That’s really where our strategy came together. And that’s where I gained more experience than I ever realized at the time.
Our time in the office together feels like a distant memory. After being remote for a year and a half, I was recently invited to come back into the office for two wonderful weeks. And I quickly realized, I really had forgotten the magic. Not just of connecting with people in person (which was riddled with a bit of anxiety as well as excitement), but because of everything that was unplanned and unscheduled. A random face to face lunch becomes an amazing reconnection with old colleagues. And the people you bump into that haven’t been in your WebEx meetings were always interesting.
In our office there are huge whiteboards in an open area and I found myself reading and genuinely interested in having a conversation with Jenae about her observability metrics and how we’re going to measure progress in our transformation. Normally, I’d have no idea what she was up to. But we connected and I learned some fantastic things that were going on. Coincidentally, I ran into the CIO in the lunchroom and talked to him about those metrics, and I reinforced some ideas that I really think Jenae was onto. Back at my desk, there are half a dozen people within earshot (not everyone has returned to the office) and I experienced the pleasure of accidentally being in the background of someone else’s WebEx (I could not resist the urge to create bunny ears behind Nicole’s head which was fun to see on her big monitor). And you of course overhear other peoples meetings and can learn about other things going on beyond your teams and regular circles. In just a few days, I had so many random connections and hallway conversations with people I would rarely if ever had spoken to. It was wonderful.
Unfortunately, the surge in the Delta COVID numbers forced my client to shut down travel after just two weeks of remembering the magic of these hallway conversations.
If you have returned to the office, you might not be able to articulate the benefits of being in person the same way. These small conversations may not seem like they amount to much. But I’m sure over time, as they did for my first year working on my client site, it adds up to an awful lot of magic. Deeper relationships, trust, and ultimately friendships with your coworkers which, as we know, contributes dramatically to the psychological safety of working in this new way.
It’s only now, upon reflection, as I’ve written this post that it occurs to me one of the things that makes this so magical. The accumulation of the small tidbits of information about your colleagues, what you notice about their body language, what you see in their faces, and what you learn over breakfasts and beers… it’s a wealth of knowledge, a unique perspective and a newfound ability to connect the dots. There are two quotes from Steve Jobs that come to mind. The first is his theory from 1982 about where creativity comes from. He says, “If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative … you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does or else you’re going to make the same connections as everybody else, and then you won’t be innovative.” Jobs goes on to say something like “Maybe you should even move to France and study poetry for a while,” which is to say, build a unique and diverse set of knowledge that might someday be helpful to you or others. My take here is that your knowledge, background, and experience is one component, but your constant accumulation of tiny experiences is what helps you connect the dots creatively day to day.
The other quote comes from the commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005, where he talks about how dropping out of college was the catalyst for him to explore typography which, years later, inspired him to build smarter fonts into the first Mac and is likely the very reason we have true type fonts in modern day computers. He explains this power of creativity and the ability to connect the dots: “If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
My advice to you is to embrace the opportunity to go back into the office, if only for a few days here and there. Seek out the magic of hallway conversations. Practice your art of noticing. Collect as many experiences, tidbits, and kernels of knowledge from your colleagues. You never know when that magic will emerge to help you connect the dots for others, be a better colleague, agilist, and team member.
It may even help you change your own future.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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