7 ms·

Suppose product development has slowed down, reported bugs have increased 30% since last month, and sprint velocity is down by 40%. Your engineer is feeling des

Suppose product development has slowed down, reported bugs have increased 30% since last month, and sprint velocity is down by 40%. Your engineer is feeling desperately unhappy and is terrified of building new features because of the risk to the system as a whole. They want to stop building new features and refactor some of the system architecture. But what do you think their unmet universal need is here? If I were in a situation like that, my "unmet universal need" would be "a manager that understands the concept of technical debt and taking time for unit testing as opposed to spouting mindless psycho-babble at me". More seriously, this article reinforces my view of NVC as a fundamentally hostile communication framework. By framing itself as the "non-violent" option, it makes any other form of communication "violent" by default, allowing the first person to wield NVC to claim an advantage. "See, I'm being non-violent," he or she will say, and it will serve as an universal shield against all who would object to their claims. My take is that if you're in a situation where reported bugs have increased 30% and sprint velocity is down by 40%, no amount of NVC is going to solve that. What is going to solve it is management that's clued in to the problems at hand. Is it that too much feature work has been done, too quickly, leaving no time for the engineers to attend to technical debt? Is it that the application's architecture is unfit for the problem to which it is being applied, leading to lots of hacks and workarounds? Is it that the engineers are incompetent, and should be replaced? In my experience situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don't just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I've been in where that's happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks that would come back to bite us later on. To respond to something you were warned about with NVC baby-talk (as opposed to a clear and forthright, "Yeah, we screwed up, how do we go forward from here?") seems like it would just make the problem worse.

BeetleB 7y ago
> If I were in a situation like that, my "unmet universal need" would be "a manager that understands the concept of technical debt and taking time for unit testing as opposed to spouting mindless psycho-babble at me". If you cannot state your need without judgmental comments (blaming others, etc), you are not going to get far in solving the problem. Your problems are valid, but you have to be able to communicate them in ways that don't trigger defensiveness. > More seriously, this article reinforces my view of NVC as a fundamentally hostile communication framework. By framing itself as the "non-violent" option, it makes any other form of communication "violent" by default, allowing the first person to wield NVC to claim an advantage. This is a rather large logical fallacy. It is a non-violent option. Not the violent option. And on top of that, dismissals due to semantics are usually insincere. Edit: Wow. Kind of sad that my lowest effort comment for this submission both got the most responses and the most upvotes. I'm sure I'll hit my comment limit if I respond to each response individually, so I'll respond to them here: > But the engineer has a BATNA here - find another job with a better boss. It's such a common BATNA that "people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses" is a catchphrase. The engineer can get extremely far in solving their "unmet universal needs" like fun and safety by finding another job. It's in the company's interest, one would hope, to keep them. I don't disagree with any of this. We seem to be discussing different things. Of course, if your boss/job is problematic finding a different one solves that problem. What I was referring to is the inability to have an effective conversation about the need. Exactly what is your problem with a manager who spouts mindless psycho-babble? What is your problem with technical debt? What is your problem with no unit testing? Imagine you're saying these things to someone who has never dealt with this problem (e.g. someone not in SW). Stating these is not helping the person understand you at all. I come from the engineering (non-SW) world. You will find little sympathy for technical debt and unit testing issues, and will get a response of "Perfect is the enemy of good". Merely explaining that technical debt makes it harder to add features and will lead to longer timelines isn't explaining your needs. It just leads to more questions: Why is that a problem? You're getting paid for it, aren't you? And so on. And please, the whole "manager spouting psycho-babble" is not going to get you far. Everyone has an imperfect boss, imperfect spouse, imperfect other. We all know it. After a while in industry, it is tiresome to hear someone complain about an imperfect manager. We all know it's true, and we all differ in what managerial problems one should put up with. Lots of employees are OK with such managers. And again, it's because different people have different needs. If you can describe how you differ from those employees, people are more likely to understand you. And finally, possibly veering off topic, employers will always find the employee who effectively confronted the problems with the manager instead of running away to be more valuable. Now thankfully the SW world has a lot of mobility so I wouldn't always recommend it, but this looks a lot better on your resume than knowing React. > Sure, nobody likes a full on attack but a perfectly sweet sugar coated message isn’t always great. Every discussion I've seen about communications involves this fallacy: False dichotomy. In fact, one other book I've read even gave a name for it: The Fool's Choice (the notion that if you don't sugarcoat relationships will get hurt). NVC isn't suggesting you sugar coat. In fact, it suggests the opposite. Know the problems. State them. Be direct. > I’m just going to say that we got man on the moon without NVC. The elements of NVC have likely been around since people started talking, so I'm not sure you're right. And I'll also point out we got men on the moon without debuggers, source code control, automated testing, etc. We also accomplished a lot without fundamental freedoms (speech, worship, etc). So what? > I personally find NVC to be degrading and belittling. It presumes I am not a grown up who can handle important criticism, which infantilizes me. I don't understand where you get the idea that it presumes you cannot handle criticism. > but it is very violent in other domains like undermining valid criticisms, changing the conversation so it’s not about the problem In a significant percentage of heated discussions I've seen, there is fundamental disagreement about what the problem is. I wonder if you're merely blaming NVC for something that is independent of NVC. NVC does try to get all parties to understand what the problems are, and I also wonder if that is making you believe it is trying to divert from your problem merely because it is trying to highlight that your problem is not the only one in the discussion. Of course, without concrete examples, I cannot say. > and very often the engineer doesn't know the manager well enough to know how they would react to a statement like, "I feel belittled by the fact that you constantly ignore my feedback and impose unreasonable deadlines because a salesperson put you on the spot in front of the VP." I do hope people have relationships with their managers such that they are free to say stuff like this (I've seen it in person). However, this is orthogonal to NVC. Your statement to the manager pretty much violates NVC's guidelines. It also violates the guidelines in Difficult Conversations and in Crucial Conversations. Sure it would be awesome to be able to say stuff like that to most people (it's not just about power relationships), but that's not the reality. These books exist to give you a way to get your point across without phrasing it that way. Belittling is not a feeling. It is a story you are telling yourself. His ignoring feedback is not a fact, but a story you're telling yourself. Claiming the deadline is unreasonable is merely an opinion, and you did not back it up. Saying it's because of salespeople is also a story you are telling yourself, and not a fact. Pretty much every element of what you said can trigger defensiveness. Your statement implies you know everything, and doesn't have the posture of you attempting to validate what you think you know. What kind of conversation do you expect will happen? If you are wrong about any of the above, it will put the manager in a position of having to defend his actions, which is the very definition of defensiveness. You can say this type of stuff without hurting feelings to only people very close to you (true buddies). Most people are not dealing with true buddies.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I personally find NVC to be degrading and belittling. It presumes I am not a grown up who can handle important criticism, which infantilizes me. It is also a political weapon. It may be non-violent in one domain (the tone and language presentation) but it is very violent in other domains like undermining valid criticisms, changing the conversation so it’s not about the problem but instead filibustered with metaproblems about who is / isn’t being kind in someone’s made up subjective & political definition of verbal discourse. Just because it says “non-violent” in the name doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact it’s rather suggestive. If you have to be defensive and _define_ your communication as non-violent, that’s pretty suspect and belies dangerous motives. It’s “politeness theater” in a way similar to how the TSA uses security theater. You can _say_ it’s effective for a stated purpose all you want, but that doesn’t make it true.
  - lobotryas 7y ago
    Agreed. The name NVC reminds me of the DPRoC. A country that is, unfortunately, neither democratic nor of the people nor a republic.
    - tome 7y ago
      What's the DPRoC?
      - munk-a 7y ago
        Democratic People's Republic of China is what I believe he was referencing, though it's officially the People's Republic of China - maybe confusing the PRC with the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo)?
        jdmichal 7y ago
        Probably confusing it with North Korea, which is officially the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
nailer 7y ago
> By framing itself as the "non-violent" option, it makes any other form of communication "violent" by default I like and use NVC, but the naming is terrible. Violence is violence. Communication is not. Not only does the silly name throw aspersions onto other forms of communication, it trivialises actual violence and mars the actual NVC methodology, what I personally have found to be an effective way of resolving disputes. And yes I like NVC: someone else on the thread mentioned they want to talk about their feelings with their SO, not their PM. It doesn't have to be that kind of wishy washy conversation or feel like bullshit. Here's an example: "When we push updates without facing technical debt, it slows down our velocity for future updates as we're having to deal with things like flaky tests and infrastructure outside our configuration. I'm worried we're actually losing long term speed with our current focus" It's a good methodology, but agreed completely on the terrible name.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  The name makes sense, though they have a very explicit definition of violent which is laid out at the beginning of the book. (Which I suspect very few commenting here have read.) The definition is that, by only acknowledging your own needs, you are attempting to persuade others to meet your needs and disregard their own. It's violent in the way that telling someone "you're worthless" is violent -- it's the implicit message in that attempted persuasion. "You're worthless; let's talk about what I need." This is why it has such a strong focus on everyone stating their needs, and working towards common solutions.
  - nailer 7y ago
    > It's violent in the way that telling someone "you're worthless" is violent That is not violent.
    - al_chemist 7y ago
      "How not to resolve a conflict?" by Anonymous Chapter 1 - definitions When the source of a conflict is definition of a word and somebody defines it, just say "No, it's not!".
codingdave 7y ago
> situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don't just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I've been in where that's happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks I've found those result are just as likely to come from a team with low morale. Still a management problem, but if people do not feel valued and don't believe their work matters, they tend to not care about quality. In those cases, improving communication to get to the root cause of problems, re-establishing trust, and making people feel better about their team, role, and work does have an improvement on the velocity and quality of the work.
- quanticle 7y ago
  Ah, but why is the team's morale low? Could it be because the team's feedback is consistently ignored by management? By their deadlines being unreasonable? By the leadership of the team signalling (and, in more than one instance that I've personally witnessed, outright stating) that quality doesn't matter, what we need to do is ship? Of course that will erode the team's morale. Of course that will reduce the team's velocity in the long run. But it's on management to understand that and realize when a short-term intense burst of effort is necessary to hit an important deadline and update the plan accordingly to include both the short-term burst of effort and the recovery downtime afterwards for the team to relax and for technical debt to be cleaned up. If management can't (or won't) recognize the basics of planning and pacing, phrasing one's concerns using NVC isn't going to suddenly enlighten them. The way I see it, NVC is just tone-policing dressed up in psychobabble. It becomes yet another excuse for management to dismiss engineers for "not having great culture fit", when the reality is that the expectations from the leaders create the culture and it's those expectations that need to change.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    The issue with this line of argument is that while you have a point, anything and everything is intimately fault of the management. Even if the team is incompetent, the management needs to upskill or replace them.
asfarley 7y ago
Sounds like you would make a good project manager.
brudgers 7y ago
a manager that understands Is also "an employee who communicates effectively" and the someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet cycle continues. If that's not what I want (and I am wont to want it), then non-violent communication is a method I can use to try and escape the loop along with my antagonist. The cycle is easy and my default. Non-violent communication tends not to be what I want to do in the moment. I don't really like seeing myself as a virtue-ninny either. Pretenseing as a winner strokes the part of my ego that's used to be stroked. Your milage may vary. For me, non-violent communication looks like a channel for personal growth. I'm already really good at being an asshole from long practice and innate talent. Good luck.
btilly 7y ago
In my experience situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don't just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I've been in where that's happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks that would come back to bite us later on. To respond to something you were warned about with NVC baby-talk (as opposed to a clear and forthright, "Yeah, we screwed up, how do we go forward from here?") seems like it would just make the problem worse. In my experience, developers always warn management repeatedly and well in advance that engineering is implementing short term hacks. And if management believes them and gives them a free hand, then sprint velocity goes down by 80% and bug counts go up by 90% as stuff randomly breaks in the refactor. Which seldom works out in the end as well as development thinks it will. (Hint: Refactoring is usually an inefficient way to write a second system, with all of the downsides of the second system effect.) The moral of the story is that "...management has been warned repeatedly..." DOES NOT mean that the warnings are a correct diagnosis. Here are alternate diagnoses that may also cause the same symptom: - Confusing product stories. - Onboarding new developers without proper integration in the team. - Poor communication patterns between developers. - General company morale problems. - Improved QA. (This one is actually an improvement. Reported bugs are up because they are being caught, and developer throughput is down because they have to fix the newly reported bugs. In dysfunctional organizations, though, developers can wind up upset at QA.) And so on.
- elmomle 7y ago
  These are all good points, though I think a deeper point may be missing regarding employing empathic, curious, positive communication tools (If you prefer a term besides NVC, please use it--the politics of taxonomy could only distract us from the potential benefit of ideas). Here's a theorem: For common personal or professional conversation types, I maximize the expected outcome of "difficult conversations" (both to me and to the group) by (in the conversation) assuming the best and focusing on open-mindedness and collaboration. Proof: Enumerate expected outcomes from using that mindset versus not doing so over all possible values of {am I in the wrong?, is other person in the wrong?, other person's disposition}. (For full rigor multiple through by your priors on each of these but I hope the idea is clear enough). In the example you gave, if I'm management and I'm in the wrong, being curious when trying to debug the problem will make it way easier for me to be open to my mistakes, since I've introduced no specter of guilt, shame, or blame for the fact that there is a mistake.
harumph 7y ago
Your comment about "NVC baby-talk" resonates. It reminds me of this, recently posted to HN: https://gp.blaisemcrowly.com/dont-kill-them-with-your-positivity https://gp.blaisemcrowly.com/dont-kill-them-with-your-positi... In my opinion, be honest with people. Consider their feelings too. But people need honesty to make rational decisions. We're in a moment in time in which speaking the truth is in short supply.
davesuperman 7y ago
While there's lots of interesting points in the thread, I'll focus my response on this one. 1) I completely agree that the title 'Nonviolent' is awful. It doesn't even follow the NVC principle of 'say what you want, not what you don't want'. The original author conceded to this. However, you shouldn't judge NVC by its title. 2) NVC doesn't purport to resolve the issue of the bugs or velocity, it aims to help resolve the conflict between the sales manager. Gosh, if NVC actually changed reality that would be awesome. Instead, it helps you find solutions given reality, which is actually very helpful. 3) I sense a lot of irritation and frustration in your tone because you want to be spoken to like an adult. Fair enough—that is a universal need. If you'd like to get your boss to 'give it to you straight', you could NVC to get what you want, without sounding self-righteous :) Hope this clarifies.
spyckie2 7y ago
You have to think of nvc as a systemic solution and not a personal one in order to understand what it is trying to do. Take a population of 100 people. 10 of them are emotional. 40 of them are emotional amplifiers. 10 are combative. And 40 are combative amplifiers. In this system, it tends to chaos when communication is too combative because of the population set (regardless of any ideals or moral judgments of what you think). Nvc is a set of rules that, if a subset of the 100 population follows it, lowers the chance of communication blowing up into chaos. That's about it. It's the best communication style for nullifying others bad communication when bad communication is the root cause of tension or problems.

BeetleB 7y ago

> If I were in a situation like that, my "unmet universal need" would be "a manager that understands the concept of technical debt and taking time for unit testing as opposed to spouting mindless psycho-babble at me". If you cannot state your need without judgmental comments (blaming others, etc), you are not going to get far in solving the problem. Your problems are valid, but you have to be able to communicate them in ways that don't trigger defensiveness. > More seriously, this article reinforces my view of NVC as a fundamentally hostile communication framework. By framing itself as the "non-violent" option, it makes any other form of communication "violent" by default, allowing the first person to wield NVC to claim an advantage. This is a rather large logical fallacy. It is a non-violent option. Not the violent option. And on top of that, dismissals due to semantics are usually insincere. Edit: Wow. Kind of sad that my lowest effort comment for this submission both got the most responses and the most upvotes. I'm sure I'll hit my comment limit if I respond to each response individually, so I'll respond to them here: > But the engineer has a BATNA here - find another job with a better boss. It's such a common BATNA that "people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses" is a catchphrase. The engineer can get extremely far in solving their "unmet universal needs" like fun and safety by finding another job. It's in the company's interest, one would hope, to keep them. I don't disagree with any of this. We seem to be discussing different things. Of course, if your boss/job is problematic finding a different one solves that problem. What I was referring to is the inability to have an effective conversation about the need. Exactly what is your problem with a manager who spouts mindless psycho-babble? What is your problem with technical debt? What is your problem with no unit testing? Imagine you're saying these things to someone who has never dealt with this problem (e.g. someone not in SW). Stating these is not helping the person understand you at all. I come from the engineering (non-SW) world. You will find little sympathy for technical debt and unit testing issues, and will get a response of "Perfect is the enemy of good". Merely explaining that technical debt makes it harder to add features and will lead to longer timelines isn't explaining your needs. It just leads to more questions: Why is that a problem? You're getting paid for it, aren't you? And so on. And please, the whole "manager spouting psycho-babble" is not going to get you far. Everyone has an imperfect boss, imperfect spouse, imperfect other. We all know it. After a while in industry, it is tiresome to hear someone complain about an imperfect manager. We all know it's true, and we all differ in what managerial problems one should put up with. Lots of employees are OK with such managers. And again, it's because different people have different needs. If you can describe how you differ from those employees, people are more likely to understand you. And finally, possibly veering off topic, employers will always find the employee who effectively confronted the problems with the manager instead of running away to be more valuable. Now thankfully the SW world has a lot of mobility so I wouldn't always recommend it, but this looks a lot better on your resume than knowing React. > Sure, nobody likes a full on attack but a perfectly sweet sugar coated message isn’t always great. Every discussion I've seen about communications involves this fallacy: False dichotomy. In fact, one other book I've read even gave a name for it: The Fool's Choice (the notion that if you don't sugarcoat relationships will get hurt). NVC isn't suggesting you sugar coat. In fact, it suggests the opposite. Know the problems. State them. Be direct. > I’m just going to say that we got man on the moon without NVC. The elements of NVC have likely been around since people started talking, so I'm not sure you're right. And I'll also point out we got men on the moon without debuggers, source code control, automated testing, etc. We also accomplished a lot without fundamental freedoms (speech, worship, etc). So what? > I personally find NVC to be degrading and belittling. It presumes I am not a grown up who can handle important criticism, which infantilizes me. I don't understand where you get the idea that it presumes you cannot handle criticism. > but it is very violent in other domains like undermining valid criticisms, changing the conversation so it’s not about the problem In a significant percentage of heated discussions I've seen, there is fundamental disagreement about what the problem is. I wonder if you're merely blaming NVC for something that is independent of NVC. NVC does try to get all parties to understand what the problems are, and I also wonder if that is making you believe it is trying to divert from your problem merely because it is trying to highlight that your problem is not the only one in the discussion. Of course, without concrete examples, I cannot say. > and very often the engineer doesn't know the manager well enough to know how they would react to a statement like, "I feel belittled by the fact that you constantly ignore my feedback and impose unreasonable deadlines because a salesperson put you on the spot in front of the VP." I do hope people have relationships with their managers such that they are free to say stuff like this (I've seen it in person). However, this is orthogonal to NVC. Your statement to the manager pretty much violates NVC's guidelines. It also violates the guidelines in Difficult Conversations and in Crucial Conversations. Sure it would be awesome to be able to say stuff like that to most people (it's not just about power relationships), but that's not the reality. These books exist to give you a way to get your point across without phrasing it that way. Belittling is not a feeling. It is a story you are telling yourself. His ignoring feedback is not a fact, but a story you're telling yourself. Claiming the deadline is unreasonable is merely an opinion, and you did not back it up. Saying it's because of salespeople is also a story you are telling yourself, and not a fact. Pretty much every element of what you said can trigger defensiveness. Your statement implies you know everything, and doesn't have the posture of you attempting to validate what you think you know. What kind of conversation do you expect will happen? If you are wrong about any of the above, it will put the manager in a position of having to defend his actions, which is the very definition of defensiveness. You can say this type of stuff without hurting feelings to only people very close to you (true buddies). Most people are not dealing with true buddies.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I personally find NVC to be degrading and belittling. It presumes I am not a grown up who can handle important criticism, which infantilizes me. It is also a political weapon. It may be non-violent in one domain (the tone and language presentation) but it is very violent in other domains like undermining valid criticisms, changing the conversation so it’s not about the problem but instead filibustered with metaproblems about who is / isn’t being kind in someone’s made up subjective & political definition of verbal discourse. Just because it says “non-violent” in the name doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact it’s rather suggestive. If you have to be defensive and _define_ your communication as non-violent, that’s pretty suspect and belies dangerous motives. It’s “politeness theater” in a way similar to how the TSA uses security theater. You can _say_ it’s effective for a stated purpose all you want, but that doesn’t make it true.
- lobotryas 7y ago
  Agreed. The name NVC reminds me of the DPRoC. A country that is, unfortunately, neither democratic nor of the people nor a republic.
  - tome 7y ago
    What's the DPRoC?
    - munk-a 7y ago
      Democratic People's Republic of China is what I believe he was referencing, though it's officially the People's Republic of China - maybe confusing the PRC with the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo)?
      - jdmichal 7y ago
        Probably confusing it with North Korea, which is officially the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".

nailer 7y ago

> By framing itself as the "non-violent" option, it makes any other form of communication "violent" by default I like and use NVC, but the naming is terrible. Violence is violence. Communication is not. Not only does the silly name throw aspersions onto other forms of communication, it trivialises actual violence and mars the actual NVC methodology, what I personally have found to be an effective way of resolving disputes. And yes I like NVC: someone else on the thread mentioned they want to talk about their feelings with their SO, not their PM. It doesn't have to be that kind of wishy washy conversation or feel like bullshit. Here's an example: "When we push updates without facing technical debt, it slows down our velocity for future updates as we're having to deal with things like flaky tests and infrastructure outside our configuration. I'm worried we're actually losing long term speed with our current focus" It's a good methodology, but agreed completely on the terrible name.

jdmichal 7y ago
The name makes sense, though they have a very explicit definition of violent which is laid out at the beginning of the book. (Which I suspect very few commenting here have read.) The definition is that, by only acknowledging your own needs, you are attempting to persuade others to meet your needs and disregard their own. It's violent in the way that telling someone "you're worthless" is violent -- it's the implicit message in that attempted persuasion. "You're worthless; let's talk about what I need." This is why it has such a strong focus on everyone stating their needs, and working towards common solutions.
- nailer 7y ago
  > It's violent in the way that telling someone "you're worthless" is violent That is not violent.
  - al_chemist 7y ago
    "How not to resolve a conflict?" by Anonymous Chapter 1 - definitions When the source of a conflict is definition of a word and somebody defines it, just say "No, it's not!".

codingdave 7y ago

> situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don't just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I've been in where that's happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks I've found those result are just as likely to come from a team with low morale. Still a management problem, but if people do not feel valued and don't believe their work matters, they tend to not care about quality. In those cases, improving communication to get to the root cause of problems, re-establishing trust, and making people feel better about their team, role, and work does have an improvement on the velocity and quality of the work.

quanticle 7y ago
Ah, but why is the team's morale low? Could it be because the team's feedback is consistently ignored by management? By their deadlines being unreasonable? By the leadership of the team signalling (and, in more than one instance that I've personally witnessed, outright stating) that quality doesn't matter, what we need to do is ship? Of course that will erode the team's morale. Of course that will reduce the team's velocity in the long run. But it's on management to understand that and realize when a short-term intense burst of effort is necessary to hit an important deadline and update the plan accordingly to include both the short-term burst of effort and the recovery downtime afterwards for the team to relax and for technical debt to be cleaned up. If management can't (or won't) recognize the basics of planning and pacing, phrasing one's concerns using NVC isn't going to suddenly enlighten them. The way I see it, NVC is just tone-policing dressed up in psychobabble. It becomes yet another excuse for management to dismiss engineers for "not having great culture fit", when the reality is that the expectations from the leaders create the culture and it's those expectations that need to change.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  The issue with this line of argument is that while you have a point, anything and everything is intimately fault of the management. Even if the team is incompetent, the management needs to upskill or replace them.

asfarley 7y ago

Sounds like you would make a good project manager.

brudgers 7y ago

a manager that understands Is also "an employee who communicates effectively" and the someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet cycle continues. If that's not what I want (and I am wont to want it), then non-violent communication is a method I can use to try and escape the loop along with my antagonist. The cycle is easy and my default. Non-violent communication tends not to be what I want to do in the moment. I don't really like seeing myself as a virtue-ninny either. Pretenseing as a winner strokes the part of my ego that's used to be stroked. Your milage may vary. For me, non-violent communication looks like a channel for personal growth. I'm already really good at being an asshole from long practice and innate talent. Good luck.

btilly 7y ago

In my experience situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don't just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I've been in where that's happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks that would come back to bite us later on. To respond to something you were warned about with NVC baby-talk (as opposed to a clear and forthright, "Yeah, we screwed up, how do we go forward from here?") seems like it would just make the problem worse. In my experience, developers always warn management repeatedly and well in advance that engineering is implementing short term hacks. And if management believes them and gives them a free hand, then sprint velocity goes down by 80% and bug counts go up by 90% as stuff randomly breaks in the refactor. Which seldom works out in the end as well as development thinks it will. (Hint: Refactoring is usually an inefficient way to write a second system, with all of the downsides of the second system effect.) The moral of the story is that "...management has been warned repeatedly..." DOES NOT mean that the warnings are a correct diagnosis. Here are alternate diagnoses that may also cause the same symptom: - Confusing product stories. - Onboarding new developers without proper integration in the team. - Poor communication patterns between developers. - General company morale problems. - Improved QA. (This one is actually an improvement. Reported bugs are up because they are being caught, and developer throughput is down because they have to fix the newly reported bugs. In dysfunctional organizations, though, developers can wind up upset at QA.) And so on.

elmomle 7y ago
These are all good points, though I think a deeper point may be missing regarding employing empathic, curious, positive communication tools (If you prefer a term besides NVC, please use it--the politics of taxonomy could only distract us from the potential benefit of ideas). Here's a theorem: For common personal or professional conversation types, I maximize the expected outcome of "difficult conversations" (both to me and to the group) by (in the conversation) assuming the best and focusing on open-mindedness and collaboration. Proof: Enumerate expected outcomes from using that mindset versus not doing so over all possible values of {am I in the wrong?, is other person in the wrong?, other person's disposition}. (For full rigor multiple through by your priors on each of these but I hope the idea is clear enough). In the example you gave, if I'm management and I'm in the wrong, being curious when trying to debug the problem will make it way easier for me to be open to my mistakes, since I've introduced no specter of guilt, shame, or blame for the fact that there is a mistake.

harumph 7y ago

Your comment about "NVC baby-talk" resonates. It reminds me of this, recently posted to HN: https://gp.blaisemcrowly.com/dont-kill-them-with-your-positivity https://gp.blaisemcrowly.com/dont-kill-them-with-your-positi... In my opinion, be honest with people. Consider their feelings too. But people need honesty to make rational decisions. We're in a moment in time in which speaking the truth is in short supply.

davesuperman 7y ago

While there's lots of interesting points in the thread, I'll focus my response on this one. 1) I completely agree that the title 'Nonviolent' is awful. It doesn't even follow the NVC principle of 'say what you want, not what you don't want'. The original author conceded to this. However, you shouldn't judge NVC by its title. 2) NVC doesn't purport to resolve the issue of the bugs or velocity, it aims to help resolve the conflict between the sales manager. Gosh, if NVC actually changed reality that would be awesome. Instead, it helps you find solutions given reality, which is actually very helpful. 3) I sense a lot of irritation and frustration in your tone because you want to be spoken to like an adult. Fair enough—that is a universal need. If you'd like to get your boss to 'give it to you straight', you could NVC to get what you want, without sounding self-righteous :) Hope this clarifies.

spyckie2 7y ago

You have to think of nvc as a systemic solution and not a personal one in order to understand what it is trying to do. Take a population of 100 people. 10 of them are emotional. 40 of them are emotional amplifiers. 10 are combative. And 40 are combative amplifiers. In this system, it tends to chaos when communication is too combative because of the population set (regardless of any ideals or moral judgments of what you think). Nvc is a set of rules that, if a subset of the 100 population follows it, lowers the chance of communication blowing up into chaos. That's about it. It's the best communication style for nullifying others bad communication when bad communication is the root cause of tension or problems.