Slowing Down to Speed Up

During the first week of Techstars they introduced the concept of slowing down to speed up. We spent the first week setting up our Kanban boards, developing working agreements, and familiarizing ourselves with Zach Nies’ worksheets.

When we first began program, we painted the picture that slowing down to speed up looked something like this…

turns out that is looks a whole lot more like this

So what’s with the discrepancy?

the people

We slow down when we need to work on being better humans and that can be messy.

“But we don’t have time for that!” -my nagging achiever attitude

You don’t have time to not slow down. 65% of startups fail because of co-founder conflict.

So how do you slow down while not getting stuck?

The answer to that is a bit longer than a single post, so let’s start with a simple but powerful tool that the teams here at Techstars have grown to love. Thanks to Nicole Glaros and Reboot for helping us practice.

OFNR

When tensions have me ready to hurl a stack of post-it notes at my co-founder’s face, I take a few deep breaths and go write an OFNR. It stands for Observations, Feelings, Needs, and Requests and is a component of the NVC Framework. It’s amazing what a little sentence restructuring can do for a tense situation. You may have seen OFRN’s in the past and I’d recommend following the detailed framework, but I’ve added a few personal notes on the areas where I fell flat.

Let me give you fair warning before you read further. This is one of those ‘you won’t know until you try’ methods. It takes time and practice. When we first started, I metaphorically threw the sticky notes stack at our CTO several times.

Mistakes I made:

Not forgiving long pauses.

Someone takes a 10-second pause, mid-conversation… when we have 30-minutes blocked on the calendar… and I have a full inbox … and I moved my 2pm meeting to make this happen.

This stuff is hard. We’re quite literally rewiring our brains to remove blame. Be patient.

Timing. Our CTO, who is essentially nocturnal, had to wake up 6:00 am to do twenty back to back mentor meetings (one the best and most tiring part of the Techstars experience). She was late and I decided to OFNR with her that afternoon. BAD IDEA. They aren’t easy and can make the other person feel as though you’re being righteous, with your touchy-feely language. Just be conscientious about using it at the right time.

1. The premise of the OFNR is that it removes blame and allows you to present an issue without putting the other person on the defense. You start with observations; indisputable facts that remove the blame. “I noticed you were 20-minutes late to the meeting.” I made the mistake when I first started OFNR-ing of not getting agreement on the facts. Try following up by getting their agreement on the facts before moving on.
2. You then move into feelings. “It makes me feel sad when you’re late.” These feelings are your feelings. This was a big game changer for me. I had to figure out how it made me feel. For someone who likes to go go go most all of the time, I sometimes forget to give people insight into how I operate. This was a turning point for us, when our team started understanding each other and the real reasons for our decision making.
3. State what you need. “I need to feel important.” Now this one was tough. This was the vulnerability part for me. The idea that me, the girl with the ‘can do’ attitude, has a moment of need from another person was difficult to spit out the first few times (more on how I got over that for another post). The key to this is total honesty with yourself. If I don’t state my true needs it’s impossible for them to be met.
4. Follow up with the request of the other person that fulfills the need. “Do you think you can communicate when you’re going to be late?” Now keep in mind that the other person may say no. They can object your request, but what they can’t deny is your need. So, if they deny the request, this can open up another conversation about how the need that you stated can be met.

The OFNR framework feels a bit awkward when you first start so take some time and ask permission of your team to try it on for size. It’s not easy to remove blame and accusatory language. Most of us have been using it for the majority of our lives.

So slow down already so you can speed up!

Taking the time to work through issues with my co-founders, having ‘planning to plan’ meetings, and using frameworks like these has been a game changer.Thinking about how we can be excellent through experimentation and driving toward learning more about each other has fundamentally changed our approach to problem solving.

And get accustomed to saying “are you OFNR-ing me right now?”