Podcast

Douglas Squirrel & Jeffrey Fredrick

#373: 5 Agile Conversations That Make Your Business Storytelling More Influential

You know the power of storytelling to create even more agile companies and cultures.

But stories can backfire on you if you don’t use the right story in the proper conversation.

In this episode, you’ll learn where to use what stories and when to grow your influence and camaraderie with your teams.

Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel are co-authors of Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture. Jeffrey is an internationally recognized expert in software development and has over 25 years of experience covering both sides of the business/technology divide.

An early adopter of XP and Agile practices, Jeffrey has been a conference speaker in the US, Europe, India, and Japan. Through his work on the pioneering open source project CruiseControl, and through his role as Co-Organiser of the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON), he has had a global impact on software development.

He runs the Agile Conversations Meetup, is a CTO Mentor through CTO Craft, and is the co-host of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast.

Douglas Squirrel has been coding for forty years and has led software teams for twenty. He uses the power of conversations to create dramatic productivity gains in technology organizations of all sizes.

Squirrel’s experience includes growing software teams as a CTO in startups from fintech to biotech to music, and everything in between; consulting on product improvement at over 100 organizations in the UK, US, Australia, and Europe; and coaching a wide variety of leaders in improving their conversations, aligning to business goals, and creating productive conflict.

Today you’ll learn the five conversations you must know how to have with your people to make your communications as agile and effective as possible. We’ll explore the difference between Defensive and Productive Reasoning, AND how you can use their 4R’s method of Record, Reflect, Revise, and Role Play to make your agile conversation with your leadership storytelling as powerful as possible.

Discussed in this episode:

The Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world we must overcome to prosper
Reframing VUCA to Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Action for internal communications (Your VUCA Voice)
The five agile conversations you need to know how to have to create high-performing environments
The 4R’s for refining your conversations
Why you must move from defensive to productive reasoning for greater impact with your storytelling