“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

Confucius

Big, important parts of agile are counter-intuitive. If you had to guess how important some of our practices are without experience, you would problably come to the wrong conclusion.

So, a lot of time, I find myself discussing concepts and theories with people who are interested in the domain. They want to understand. They are curious. But their gut tells them that this will problably never work. There’s no way I can talk a gut into believing me with logic and diagrams. Guts just don’t listen to reason.

Let me explain how I see this. I imagine a small kid, scrawny and innocent. He’s riding a big elephant. He has this stick in his hand, which he uses to prod the elephant to get it to go where he wants to go. Anyone looking at the pair instantly recognises that the elephant goes wherever the elephant chooses to go. The kid’s prodding is but a suggestion, and nothing to take seriously. If the elephant wants to go somewhere, the elephant will go there, no matter what the kid thinks.

The kid is the brain, and the gut is the elephant. It’s hard enough to talk to the kid under these circumstanses. But it gets worse. Most of the time, if the elephant goes somewhere where the kid didn’t want to go, the kid will make up excuses to explain to you that he really wanted to go there. Not only does the elephant go where it wants to go - the kid will actually believe that this is exactly what the kid wants! Rational arguments might be interesting to the kid on top of a huge elephant, but it will never move the duo into action.

So, to influence the duo, I can’t talk to the kid at all. It’s just a delusional child, after all. We want to talk to the top man - the elephant. And in this quest, I have a new weapon. Experential Meetings.

Experential Meetings help me design an experience where the persons will feel first hand how our proposed way of working feels and looks like. If we can design the experience well enough, the persons will want to go there, and their rational mind (scrawny kid, remember) will make up excuses to get there. Much easier.

Anyone introducing new ways of working should really look into how you can use Experential Meetings to get the people you work with to really experience what you mean, instead of talking about it.

Chris writes:

” [A]n experiential meeting (or workshop, training session etc) is a meeting that includes activities that allow you to experience something (through discussion, hands-on work, simulations or something
similar) and then learn from that experience by reflecting on it.
[...]
During the debriefing participants get to hear other participants’ perspectives. By sharing your own thoughts with others you will refine and extend your own understanding.”

So not only do you get to experience things first hand instead of looking at a slide deck - you will get the chance to talk about what you’ve learned with other people and strengthen your own understanding.

We used this with a client last week. They had literally no experience at all with agile, and we were afraid that they would have a hard time understanding us. They have very long experience doing things their own waterfally way, and might not be open to two consultants telling them they’ve been doing it wrong for all this time.

So we designed a few experential sessions, and invited the managers and the dev-team to two hours of playing. By the end of the meeting, the CEO and CTO were saying exactly what we wanted to say to them, without us having to convince anyone. Incredibly powerful, and so much fun too.

Posted by Andres on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 12:00.