Continuous Kindness
“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”
The Agile Manifesto
We all know this, right?
Pair programming, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, banter on Slack, random chats at the water-cooler… All that good stuff that we know greases the wheels and unblocks us when we’re stuck. The times we get this right, things just seem to work so much better and we get into that lovely state of flow. Simple, yeah?
Only it’s not, is it? My Twitter feed, conversations with friends and colleagues, and the abundance of books, blogs and solutions being hawked all over the place tells me that this stuff isn’t simple, and that we haven’t got this basic principle down in a large number of our workplaces. Work doesn’t just flow — we are frustrated by conflicting priorities, overwhelmed by too much work in progress, hampered by unsuitable procedures and struggling with tools that aren’t the silver bullet we thought (hoped) they would be.
And yet, shiny new tools, improving processes, scalable frameworks, and updating methodologies get a hell of a lot of airspace, considering it is interactions between individuals that really needs to be the priority.
The word ‘kindness’ came up in a recent conversation with someone, and it got me thinking about how a lack of kindness and related behaviours — compassion, assumption of good faith, empathy, trust — is really what holds us back. We lack trust in other teams, so we add in more process instead of fixing the broken relationship. We assume people in different parts of our value chain don’t understand us, instead of explaining what our difficulties are. We get defensive when someone reacts negatively to a situation instead of asking ourselves why they are struggling with it. So, we unleash our inner badass and have the fight, or we retreat and hide and hope it all goes away, or we grumble and bitch to our close circle, or whatever our own brand of counter-productive behaviour happens to be.
None of these are easy patterns to break — they are often deeply ingrained habits, perhaps reinforced by unhealthy team or company culture, or driven because we just don’t have time for this shit. It takes conscious effort to practice kindness — continual kindness — so that whatever the situation, we’re ready to step back and ask ourselves what is really going on here, and what we could do to change it. (It’s not always possible, of course — sometimes people are just being assholes, but this genuinely is less often than you’d think. I promise.) The really interesting thing is that there is huge power in being kind — it’s hard to fight someone who is being patient and trying to understand you. On the other hand, it’s very easy to start building trust in that person, get a good feeling about working with them, begin to generate that state of flow…
Being badass will undoubtedly get you so far — let’s face it, we all know someone who always seems to get away with it. But being kindass will get you — and everyone else — so much further.
Originally published at kninki.wordpress.com on December 11, 2018.
