#118 - Lead Without Blame: Building Resilient Learning Teams - Diana Larsen

[00:01:14] Episode Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello to all of you, my friends and my listeners. I’m back with another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast, the show where you can learn about technical leadership and excellence from my conversations with great thought leaders in the tech industry. If this is your first time listening to Tech Lead Journal, please subscribe and follow the show on your podcast app and on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. And to support my journey creating this podcast, subscribe as a patron at techleadjournal.dev/patron.

My guest for today’s episode is Diana Larsen. Diana is the co-founder of Agile Fluency Project and the co-author of multiple Agile and leadership books, including her latest “Lead Without Blame”.

In this episode, Diana and I discussed insights from her book about how we can build resilient learning teams by moving away from blaming culture. Diana first described the definition of blame and its characteristics, and explained the kind of negative impacts it can bring to any organization and its culture. Afterwards, Diana then advised that instead of a blaming culture, organizations should focus on building a learning culture by adopting the 3 essential motivators (which are the team purpose, autonomous teams, and co-intelligence) and additionally also adopting the 4 resilience factors (which are collaborative connection, embracing conflict, inclusive collaboration, and minimizing power dynamics).

I really enjoyed my conversation with Diana. Blaming culture is toxic and doesn’t lead to a culture of innovation, creativity, and psychological safety. Even though I’m sure that most of us understand these implications, however, such culture is still prevalent in many teams and organizations, especially in traditional organizations or places where command-and-control is the dominant leadership style adopted. I sincerely hope that after listening to this episode, especially if you are a manager or a leader, you could build more awareness on how to avoid having blaming culture, and instead opting to build resilient learning teams by implementing some of the practices shared by Diana in this episode, which you can also dive deeper by reading her latest book “Lead Without Blame”.

And if you find this episode useful, please help share it with your friends and your colleagues, so they can also benefit from listening to this episode. Also don’t forget to give this podcast a 5-star rating and your review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so it can be easily discovered by others as well. Before we continue to the conversation with Diana, let’s hear some words from our sponsors.

[00:04:37] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today, I’m so excited. I have one of the thought leaders in the agile world, in the software engineering world. So her name is Diana Larsen. She recently just published a book titled “Lead Without Blame”. Actually, she has written a number of books, like “Agile Retrospectives”, “Lift Off”, and she also co-created “Agile Fluency Model” with James Shore.

So today, in particular, we’ll be talking about this book “Lead Without Blame”, which is quite recent. When I read the title itself, I find it really interesting. Blame is something that sometimes happened in many of workplaces, in traditional companies. So hopefully today, we’ll be learning something about not doing any kind of blame and shaming in your work culture. So Diana, thank you for this opportunity. Looking forward for this conversation.

Diana Larsen: Oh, you’re welcome. I’m happy to be here. Thank you.

[00:05:30] Career Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: So Diana, let’s start with maybe having yourself introduce a little bit about yourself in your career journey. Maybe there are highlights or turning points that you experienced that you may want to share with the listeners here.

Diana Larsen: Yeah. Well, I have had quite a varied career and a couple of big turning points. For a while, I was mostly involved with support roles at my children’s school. As time went by, I sort of shifted into instructional design, and the instructional design and training led me to organization development and design, and a lot of change management with organizations. The thing that brought me most directly to where I am now is in that role, in the organization’s development role. I worked mostly with high-tech organizations and technical teams, engineering teams, and software development teams. Because I was doing that work, mostly around work process design, I was invited to a gathering, sort of a symposium. It wasn’t really a conference, it was more of a everybody talking to everybody else kind of situation. I met a number of the folks who ended up being Agile Manifesto signers a few years later.

As we began to talk, we identified some intersections in what they were thinking about and in what I was interested in. Over time, that’s become clearer and clearer that I’m really interested in how do we have healthy workplaces, and so I am very interested in leadership and healthy workplaces. How do people in those healthy workplaces learn how to be effective as team members? In addition to that, going back to my kind of early life, is how do we learn well in groups? We know a lot about people learning as individuals, but we don’t know as much about how we learn in groups, the kinds of insights that you get from that.

And so those three things. Providing leadership no matter what level you are in the organization, and working well in teams, and then focusing on learning. Because we are in such a changing world that we need to know how to amplify the effects of the learning that we do, particularly when we learn in groups. Led me to one degree or another to all of the books that I’ve written and the major articles that I’ve written. And it’s really been a part of the through thread of all of my career. And so different things that I did added in different pieces of that. My attitude has always been pay attention to what is really capturing my interest and to what doors that might be opening for me in my career, and always be ready to sort of explore those doors when they open and what can happen through that. And it’s been very effective for me. I’m really pleased with where I am in my career now. What am I going to be when I grow up? I’m not ready to stop working yet, so I’m still looking for new challenges.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for reminding us for paying attention to what interests us, maybe in your career, maybe in your life. Sometimes it could lead us to many new doors, many new opportunities, and many new interests as well in the future. Who knows that probably you could do something that you didn’t thought about when you were younger. Thanks for sharing that.

[00:08:58] Understanding Blame

Henry Suryawirawan: Let’s go to your book, “Lead Without Blame: Building Resilient Learning Teams”. I think many people when they read this title, maybe they could resonate with some of their work experience before. Maybe let’s start with a simple question first. What is exactly blame? In the terms of more philosophical or maybe in your book when you mentioned about blame, what does blame mean, actually?

Diana Larsen: Well, blame is the search for who caused a thing or how did a something that we regard as not good, a problem— I mean, not just a problem to solve but something that’s causing difficulty or so on— and then looking around deciding who’s at fault or who should feel guilty about it. Those kinds of things. What happens with that is that when that’s our focus, rather than understanding what happened, maybe systemically, that contributed to that problem, that thing that’s gone wrong, if we’re only worried about who we can hold at fault, hold accountable for that, as opposed to what conditions are present in our system that allowed that to happen, that didn’t prevent that problem in the first place, then it’s a bad feeling to feel like you’re being blamed. And then it often leads to feeling guilt and shame out of doing that thing.

There are certainly bad things happen in the world, and certainly, there are reasons to say maybe you could do this differently next time or so on, or even criminality. But that’s not really usually what’s going on at work. At work, there are a lot of factors at play and we can’t really distill that down to one thing that one person did. And if we do, we set up conditions where people spend as much or more energy avoiding being the person who’s getting the blame, and less on their time to be productive and creative and energetic. So blaming not only focuses us in the wrong place, but then it has a knock on effect where it de-energizes. It disengages people because they spend their time not wanting to feel shamed, not wanting to feel blamed. So that causes a big problem in our systems.

Henry Suryawirawan: What you mentioned in your book as well, like when people are getting blamed and the leader is trying to find the so called the culprit, right? What mostly happened is that people tend to stop problem solving, tend to stop thinking critically about what happened, and instead they go into defensive mode. That’s why probably creativity, innovation, productivity and problem solving couldn’t happen effectively.

[00:11:50] Blaming Habit

Henry Suryawirawan: So when we talk about blame, sometimes, yeah, it could be because of individual reasons, maybe the person’s characters. But in your book, I find it interesting that you mentioned blaming is actually a habit. And this habit maybe unconsciously come from a certain type of philosophical in terms of leadership. Can you tell us about why, actually, sometimes blaming is just a habit that, because it comes from a traditional leadership management mindset?

Diana Larsen: Well, it comes from the idea that if someone is nearby when something goes wrong, then we should punish them for that somehow. And if you’re the person who gets punished, you tend to internalize that, “Oh, well, I must have done something bad”. It’s a very parental model in some ways. It’s a model that comes from people not really understanding the impact of systems. I mean, Edwards Deming said systems drive behavior. It’s not that a person has caused something to happen. And we even accept it for ourselves. We think, “Oh, I must have been the bad person. I must have done something wrong”.

But you know what caused that to happen? There’s a wonderful thing that we refer to in the book that comes from Norm Kerth’s book, “Project Retrospectives: A Handbook of Team Reviews”. He was talking about learning from experience after the end of a project or a big deliverable. He said, no matter what we discover, if we get together and we try to analyze what we discovered, we really want to assume that everybody was doing the best they could, given —so there’s a lot of caveats here—given their skills and abilities. Were they assigned to the right project? Were they assigned a task that they were really prepared to do that they had the background and the experience to do? Or were they given something like a stretch goal? And they never had any chance, no matter how much of their good effort they put into it, there was no possibility of success. Or did they have the right information? Sometimes we get the wrong information and then we make our decisions, we take our actions, but it’s based on wrong information. Well, where did that come from? Did we have the right resources and access to the right resources and decision making? And were we at our top condition? Were we well fed, well rested, feeling really fit to do the job? Or were we ill? All of those things are going to affect what the best we can offer that day is.

And that’s for everyone. We may have created for ourselves some standard of what we can stretch into when we do our absolute best and everything else is working well, but we can’t expect that to happen all the time. Mistakes will happen. People will make mistakes, but generally that’s going to be based on some conditions outside that person. I’ve been working in this field for a very long time, and I have never come into a workplace that treated its people well and so on, where somebody said to me, “I think I’ll do a bad job today. I came to work this morning and I just think I’m just going to choose to do a bad job.” Nobody’s doing that, right? Everyone is saying, “I’m going to give it my best today.” So if you’re working on a team, you can make some choices about how work gets assigned or who’s working together. I think highly collaborative teams where everyone’s backing each other up, it’s much less likely that a problem is going to happen in teams like that, because you’ve got backup, you’ve got bench strength, they say in baseball. You’ve got that kind of opportunity for someone else to step in and help.

There’s a story that we talk about in the book that came out of Etsy. About a young person that works at Etsy and got assigned to be the on call person over the weekend. I mean, I’m really shortening up this story. You can look it up online and get more detail. But something happened, that person took an action and trying to make things better and something really awful happened. The whole site went down or something like that. But what that person did, because they felt like it was a safe environment, they made sure to get in touch right away and say, “Oh my gosh, this thing happened”. And then other people were able to come in and help. And the president or senior executive in that organization gave that person an award. They said, not only did they let everybody know right away when something went wrong, the system was at fault for putting them in that vulnerable position where they didn’t have all the skills and knowledge that they needed to take care of the things that they were put in charge of. And said, this is great. You’ve shown us a hole in our system that we need to fix. So he got congratulated.

I’m sure it must have been very mixed emotions to that person on that day. But, that’s when you don’t have an environment of culture of blame and shame. If he had been in a culture that was full of blame and shame, he probably would’ve tried to hide the fact that something went wrong. He would’ve concealed that he wasn’t really quite up to the job or whatever. So, I just think it’s a huge difference when we have one stance versus the other stance.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. I even read this part of the book where you mentioned about Etsy giving awards quite frequently for people who make mistakes. I mean, this is not just random normal mistakes, but something that is highly unanticipated. It’s not like something like we do it carelessly. But Etsy is trying to find people who make mistakes unintentionally without anticipation, of course, and then learn from that experience. When I read the book, it’s like, wow, this is so different culture. Because in the world when this happened, for example, incident happened, on call incidents happened, the system went down. Obviously, leaders will try to be accountable. That’s the first thing, because they want to do a great job as a team and try to look for the so-called who caused this.

[00:18:12] Leaders & Accountability

Henry Suryawirawan: And you mentioned this is because leaders want to be accountable. Maybe they were not part of the activity themselves. And maybe that is the thing that actually caused them to become in this blaming mode, right? Yeah. Yeah. So tell us about how we should avoid trying to be accountable and trying to find something that caused the issue?

Diana Larsen: Well, it really is about thinking more broadly than just an individual thinking and learning to do systems thinking for one thing. When we look for a single point of failure, we need to also look for what else is going on in that context that had not let that single point of failure be visible before. I mean, there’s not a problem with looking for where is the place that this happened? Why did this happen? That’s all good investigation. But it’s when you take that investigation and turn it into blaming, rather than, oh, this is an opportunity for learning. We’ve just uncovered something we didn’t realize was possible before. That’s an opportunity for learning and when leaders support that they get much better outcomes.

If they spend their time trying to find the person to blame, it not only affects that person. This is the interesting part. It not only affects that one person that is being blamed, but everybody else that blame is visible to, now thinks, “Oh, I better watch out. I better be careful. I better not take any chances. I must play it safe all the time, because otherwise, I will get blamed the next time if something goes wrong”. And what does that do to the creativity of people in the system? I don’t want to take any chances. I don’t want to take any risks. I’m only going to do what’s tried and true and safe, because otherwise, I might get blamed for something, cause I saw this other person and they got blamed. So it doesn’t just translate to the one person who may have some finger pointing at them, but it translates across to everybody they work with. That’s now a message that’s going out, and that’s part of why it becomes such a big problem.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. I think you mentioned this very, very accurately. When it becomes, like a signal for others, right? Okay, this person got blamed because of this. I may not want to do the same thing and maybe be quiet and avoid some kind of risky situations. Like being afraid to be in that position as well, right? Because being blamed is not nice, definitely. Personally, you feel like helpless. You also feel like your self worth is kind of like being challenged there. So I think leaders out there, you should be very cautious before you’re actually trying to blame somebody. For myself, sometimes I can also go into this kind of tendency, but what helps me? Like what you mentioned, the prime directive. The retrospective prime directive. Always try to maybe read that in your mind before you actually say something to someone or the team. So that you get into this more like finding the systemic cause rather than the individual cause of the problem.

[00:21:21] 3 Essential Motivators

Henry Suryawirawan: So let’s move on to your book. Your subtitle of the book is basically calling resilient learning teams. So you mentioned just now when you are in the maybe investigation mode, you should go into the learning mode instead of blaming mode. Part of the learnings actually there are three essential motivators and there are four resilience factors. Let’s start with the essential motivators first. What do you mean by essential motivators? I saw it’s related to Daniel Pink’s research about " Drive", the title of the book. So tell us more about these motivators.

Diana Larsen: Well, we began looking at what was present when we did a sort of what we call an appreciative inquiry, where we looked at places where it seemed like there wasn’t blame there and there were lots of opportunities for learning to go on, and people were being creative and innovative because of that.

What we saw was, I mean, humans are humans, and so there was some consistency around how you create a motivated environment where people become motivated. But also because we have such an emphasis on the multiplying factors of collaboration, that what we wanted to see was, okay, so what does that look like if you’re only looking not at individuals, but at groups? So what we learned was that, like Dan Pink, there was this sense of you need purpose. With Katzenbach and Smith in their book, “The Wisdom of Teams,” they talked about everybody needed a common deliverable. They had needed something to focus on. And we think that’s true, but if it’s an individual, it’s only their purpose. But if it’s a team, it has to be a team purpose. It has to be one that everyone can get behind and really accept as a worthy thing to work on. Something we really think we can do, and it will make a benefit both to our team and to our customers. That’s when it becomes meaningful.

In the Aristotle project that Google did, they came up with the five factors. One factor is psychological safety and people focus on that a lot. A couple of other factors there are important. And one is, can we see that we’re having a beneficial impact on the world? Does the work that we’re working on have meaning for us? Seem like meaningful work. And that’s when you have that sense, then you really have purpose. And if it can connect with individual people’s personal interests, personal purposes, it becomes even stronger. So we look for that. Where is the team purpose that we can all embrace together? We’re going to move toward this together.

And then the second one is autonomy. But now we’re not talking about personal autonomy. We’re talking about autonomous teams. When people have a purpose and they feel like they have the scope and permissions and the sense of a group together that autonomy brings, then they can move into full collaboration. We are all moving in this direction together, and we know who’s working and who we need to align with, and who’s going to help us along the way. We can create the right coalitions also with maybe other teams or so on.

And then the last motivator was a little different. We found that the word mastery didn’t really fit as well. When we thought about Team Mastery, that gave us a different image. But we realized that there was this concept called co-intelligence. How do we build our capability as a group? Agile talks about this in the sense of generalizing specialists. Do you have enough, again, that bench strength? Do you have enough people on your team so that the whole team can keep moving your venture, whatever it is, forward. Even if some people aren’t there, or even if some people need to go do some research or learn something or there’s something else keeping them out, the team can keep moving forward. The team can keep gaining competence in areas where it sees it needs more competence. But it’s a group thing, it’s not an individual. Individual mastery is fine, but a bunch of people who only have individual mastery may not come together in a good way. We need people who have the skills and abilities, both their really solid ones and their areas where they’re investigating, and that are willing to do that toward the team purpose. Then you get real co-intelligence.

I encourage people always to think about times when they’ve been a part of a group where they just felt that they were working together, things were going smoothly, that idea of synergy was happening. What these people individually brought, they could create something even bigger. It wasn’t additive. It was multiplicative. So those are the motivators we saw when those three things were present, we saw more engagement. Of all those, we saw a better chance that there would be more psychological safety in the group. We saw a lot of those things. People were more dependable cause they were committed not only to the work, but they were committed to each other as a working group of people by the team.

Henry Suryawirawan: So, I can see how you relate to Dan Pink’s book. So Dan Pink probably is like human motivator. It’s an individual. Autonomy, mastery, purpose, right? But you actually take it to the concept of like building a high-performing team, so to speak. There are the purpose, the autonomy, and the co-intelligence. Yeah. It’s not mastery, but co-intelligence.

[00:27:19] Essential Motivator: Team Purpose

Henry Suryawirawan: Let’s dive a little bit deeper on each of these motivators. So let’s start with purpose, as you mentioned, right? In the book, you mentioned when people have the same shared purpose, it brings alignment with everybody. And essentially, it’s like one of the maybe common traits of a high-performing team. And you mentioned that the purpose must be bigger than an individual, right? So it should not be just, okay I want to do good for myself, right? But actually it must be bigger. So it takes a good collective shared purpose by everybody. So tell us more, how can leaders build a common purpose or shared responsibility in a team? How can we start shaping this purpose?

Diana Larsen: Well, that’s a big order. I think part of it has to do with understanding who we’re doing the work for and how can we make that work better. I was working one time, a long time ago with a team in a manufacturing organization. They were not very excited about their work. The leader of that group, the manager of that group, was worried because he felt like they weren’t very committed to what they were doing, and so there were a lot of defects coming out of their work. It was a small electronics project or device. There were a lot of defects that they were running into. People just weren’t focused.

So we took a couple of teams to one customer location where the device was being used. It was a device that analyzed some chemicals. They took the team to go and visit those folks. And they not only talked to the folks who were using the device, but they also talked to the people who the device was serving. So they would do some analysis. So there were the people who used it to do the analysis, and then there were the people who got the results of the analysis and then were able to do some things. When they started talking to those folks, they realized that this device could change people’s lives. If it was functioning well, if it was well put together, if it was high quality that people were depending on the output of this device or the quality of this device, and then the output that it gave to do diagnoses, to do a lot of different things. Then we took everybody back to work and that team of people, and we talked about what did you hear? What was going on? And they were so much more excited about their jobs. I mean, people said, we didn’t realize that people’s lives depended on our work and the quality of our work. We’d love to hear more stories about that.

And so they completely changed from my job is I just show up to work every day and I give you eight hours and then I go home and it’s pretty boring. All of a sudden, their job wasn’t boring anymore. The focus on quality and making sure that people were getting these very accurate results out of the device became very important to them. So that purpose grounds the team and helps to bond. It gets them into alignment on where are they headed and why are they doing what they’re doing. So Simon Sinek talks about discover the why, and that’s a form of how do we know what our purpose is as a group.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for sharing this beautiful story. So when you shared about this story, I remembered also another story. I think maybe by Simon Sinek or someone else. So he told a story of a cleaner in the Disney world. When you ask what is your job? So his job is not to clean the room or clean the place, but actually to make people happy. So that is like a true purpose of why you are doing the work in your workplace. I think what you mentioned is very true, right? You have to understand who do you work for? For example, if you build medical devices for people who are probably in the health situation. So by connecting what you do with probably the impact to the others, the users who are going to use your products, I think that is probably one way of how we can build more purpose. Aligns everybody with a shared responsibility.

[00:31:21] Essential Motivator: Autonomous Teams

Henry Suryawirawan: So let’s move on to this autonomy. I think we understand a team has to be autonomous these days, but one of the probably fear of the leaders is can they actually be autonomous? What if nobody is responsible? How do they know what they need to do? Tell us more. How can we align team to be more autonomous?

Diana Larsen: Well, to have an autonomous team, it helps if it is a cross-functional team. If you’ve got all the skills and perspectives on the team that will together build the product that you need. Not every team gets that, and so sometimes they have to get to it another way. But the optimal way we talk about in the agile fluency model, the optimal way is to seek true cross functionality, if you’ve got everybody involved that covers most or all of the skills that you need and the experiences and the understandings.

So if you’re building a product that is going out into the public market as sort of B2C out into the market, the more you understand about the needs of, Clayton Christensen called it the jobs to be done, the more you understand about the job that your user, your whoever’s going to be using this product needs. What do they need to help them? Then you’re starting to get closer to that sense of who do we need on the team? What is it we’re trying to build? How do we learn more about this customer? Who already knows some things about the customer? Who knows how these other things, like the data in a software team? We also may need somebody who can really work well with the database, for instance, who can make sure that the data that we need to collect, we’re organizing it in the right way and making it easily accessible to us as the builders, but then also potentially, it might be a feature, a part of the product that we’re building. How does it feed that data into something? And so if we just have web programmers who are fine as web programmers, but we’re asking them to build this thing that needs all these other things, well, then we don’t really have the right team.

So making sure that we have collected the right people, that they have the right backgrounds and understandings, that they have the permissions to make decisions. Maybe they have a budget so that they can buy the technology that they need, whether it’s physical tools or data or information organizing tools, that they have the right place to do their work. If they’re a co-located team, they’re going to need a space where they can get together and huddle. If they’re a remote team or hybrid team, they’re going to need a virtual space where they can get together and have some sense of boundaries of their work and their workplace. Do we have the right tools and equipment to work on this particular deliverable? What do we need for that? So having all of those things helps to create an autonomous team. The idea of the people with multiple skills, or maybe they’re expert in one thing, but they also can stretch into a couple of other things so they can back each other up. I think that’s also an important part. I talk a lot about when a team really comes together like that, they need to be able to commit to the work, the purpose and the nature of that work. But they also need to be able to commit to each other, to commit to having a good team where they can all feel engaged. And I think that’s a very important part of it as well.

Henry Suryawirawan: So when you mentioned all this, I kind of relate it to this concept empowered team as well. I think Marty Cagan had a topic around that, so I had him in one of the episodes. So when you have an empowered team, they’re cross-functional, they know what jobs to be done, so to speak. And then they have the permission or maybe the constraints, right? It’s not like you can do whatever you like. Maybe as a company you have like constraints. You have the permissions, what this team can do in terms of boundaries. And then, yeah, you need to have the shared purpose, of course. If you don’t have the shared purpose, then it’s not fully autonomous, right? Thanks for sharing this.

[00:35:36] Essential Motivator: Co-Intelligence

Henry Suryawirawan: Let’s go to the co-intelligence. When I read it, I think we all know as leaders we need continuous learning. We need learning in the team. But how to facilitate this co-intelligence within a team?

Diana Larsen: Well, I think one of the biggest things is the company, the organization and the leaders showing that they value learning. And so, the leader stepping up and occasionally saying, “Gosh. I don’t have all the answers. Let’s go find out. Let’s learn about this question that we all have together. Let’s gain some information, some knowledge there. Let’s do that together”. Or, another way is for the leader to be open and talk about when they’ve made a mistake and they had to learn something new to get through the mistake and to resolve that issue. That’s really important.

Another way that I think is really effective and very powerfully effective, is when we don’t bring people together for special kind of meeting without defining what we hope to learn during that meeting. And so we just continually bringing that back. Agile teams have this idea of the daily standup, where they might say, what did you learn yesterday? What did you do yesterday? What are you planning to do today? And what is it or anything in your way? Well, what if you flipped that, and I found this in one of the early extreme programming books, the idea of doing a daily standup, that’s where you say, what new thing did you learn yesterday that will help the team? What are you hoping to learn through the work you’re going to do today? What is getting in the way of your learning? Having the whole team share the answers to those questions. Whether they do retrospectives every single day or whether they do them weekly or less frequently, then you can say in your retrospective, what was our biggest learning problem this week? Or what was a big victory of our learning this week? And then be able to begin to incorporate those learnings into the work, and get support and encouragement to do that.

So there’s lots of little ways that you could put more focus on why we learn what we learn and how it helps us in the world we’re in today. Some people call it VUCA. It’s just things are fast moving, new opportunities are coming up all the time, and new challenges are coming up all the time. We have to be able to encounter those and get through them. And the only way is if we can learn about them as fast as possible and as thoroughly as possible. And then make choices. Best choice we can with the information we have, which isn’t always going to be perfect, but if we can learn quickly and learn, oh, this isn’t a good path to go down. Let’s stop fast and let’s move to another way. So it’s also that idea of you have to be able to learn fast to be able to fail fast and take the sting out of those failures, because we’re going to see them soon and we can let that go or do something different instead.

Henry Suryawirawan: So yeah, I mean like we all know these days about VUCA, right? The importance of being able to adapt and learn fast. And also, most of the tech world, we are in the knowledge work rather than task oriented work. So knowledge work by itself is like highly complicated. There’s probably not a well-defined process and steps that you just need to do and perform and you get the same results. So I think it’s really key and I like one quote in your book. You mentioned that we should not characterize learning as a separate activity from production work.

Diana Larsen: It is the work.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. It is actually the work. So when I read that, I like it, because sometimes in a team, when we say we are learning, people treat it, oh, you are doing something different. You are in the POC mode, or whatever that is. But actually it is the work. It’s part of the work, right? So I think that’s a very good mindset to have.

Diana Larsen: In some ways, I think knowledge work is a misnomer now. I mean, when Peter Drucker coined that phrase of knowledge work, he was saying people that manipulate information in their heads, they know where to find things in the archives. But now we can’t wait to go find it. It’s more learning work than it is knowledge work.

[00:39:55] Resilience Factor: Collaborative Connection

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So let’s move on to these four resilience factors. We have covered the three essential motivators, but you also mentioned to build resilient teams, you need the four resilience factors. Maybe you can elaborate what are the four factors and why do we need them?

Diana Larsen: Well, I think different teams in different situations are going to need different things, in addition to what we called the resilience factors. So I don’t think it necessarily describe everything a team is going to need, but it looks at some particular things that what we are calling resilience teams can’t really do without. You may need other things in addition, but these are really critical. And they build the team’s resilience. They build the team’s ability to engage a crisis and work and learn their way through it.

So one is you’ve got to have a really good team that understands how to collaborate or is on their learning journey around how to make connections, how to build trust, how to rebuild trust when something goes wrong. Those kinds of things. This is where the ideas of Amy Edmondson’s and other people’s ideas around psychological safety start being important. I have to feel safe to take risks in this group of people. I have to be able to say what I see and stick with it strongly and not worry about are other people going to blame or shame or try to tear me down around that.

Just today, I was talking to a colleague, and we were talking about an old book and maybe an article called The Road to Abilene. The idea being that somebody suggested that a whole group of people go to this other city because some event was happening there, and no one really wanted to go. But they all went because they thought that’s how the other people were doing. It’s the idea of groupthink, right? Ending up in a place where you really didn’t want to be. That’s one expression of the kind of thing that you need when you’ve got psychological safety. You can speak up and say, “You know what? I don’t think this is the right way for us to go. I can’t see any benefit for it in this part of the work that I’ve been working on. What do the rest of you see? Let’s question this a little bit before we all just start heading off in one direction”. And that takes courage to be able to do that. And people can’t bring out their courageous-selves if they don’t feel psychological safety. They’re going to go into that protective mode. They’re not speaking up mode. You don’t get great breakthroughs that way.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for sharing this first one, collaborative connection, right? So when you have collaborative connection, building trust, building good connections with people, and eventually, you need to have a good psychological safety to build these connections. Because people need to be comfortable taking risks, not being afraid of being shamed, being blamed and shamed. So I think that is a very good trait of a resilient team. I can see why you put it as one of the factor.

[00:42:55] Resilience Factor: Embracing Conflict

Henry Suryawirawan: Let’s move on to the next one, which is about embracing conflict. I think many people are not comfortable embracing conflict. We don’t want to be in conflict. So why we should embrace conflict more? So tell us more about this.

Diana Larsen: Well, being able to engage conflict when it comes up, when it’s small. It’s very important. And problem is people somehow equate a conflict to disagreeableness and argument and maybe even physical risk, right? That’s not the kind of conflict we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the kind of conflict that if we can work through differences in a point of view, we actually both come out of it better.

This happened to me just today. I was working with a group of four colleagues. One person brought up that she thought it would be good if some part of the thing that we were building, the thing that we were creating together, that some part of it should go away. There were three possibilities, and so we started talking about them, and we very quickly came to an agreement on one of them. But the other ones, it was a lot more difficult because we have different perspectives. One person saw great value in one thing. Another person, it was me, I saw great value in another thing. And so, we were in conflict. We did not have the same idea about how we should move forward. But we embraced that, and we said, well, what else is it we’re missing here? And we asked the other people who are part of this working group, what do you think about this thing that we’re talking about? How do you see it? And he said, “Well, I don’t think we need some of this stuff at all. I’m not sure we need any of it”. I mean, he brought in a completely different point of view. But it got us all thinking about, well, how do we want to structure this thing? How do these things that are on the table right now that we’re discussing? How do they contribute to our overall purpose?

And it gave us a whole other conversation, and in the end, it made what we were working on much better. Because we didn’t go, “Oh no, we don’t want to get into any conflict here”. We just said, “Let’s be grownups. Let’s be adults and work through this as just people who have a different point of view”. And that’s often the case. That conflict is basically, initially, I think that if I get what I want, you can’t get what you want and vice versa, or if you get what you want, I can’t get what I want, and so we feel that tension. But I’ve learned to face that and the groups that I work with have learned to face that and say, that’s just not true. We can find the mutually satisfying other solution if we talk about why we each need the thing we think we need. And is there anything better out there? And how might those things work together? We start having those conversations and we become more creative. And the only path to that creativity comes through those initial disagreements.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for sharing. This is a beautiful story. How you resolve conflict within your personal work, right? So I think, I can see now that how you can actually bring more creativity when people, not to say like embrace conflict per se, but it’s like different perspectives as well, right? So different kind of mindset. People should be able to first convey the differences, and then the groups actually try to see the point of views and bring the win-win situation, right? Not like, you win, I lose. My idea is bad, your idea is better. So I think that is the kind of spirit that we want to embrace in this embracing conflict.

[00:46:40] Resilience Factor: Inclusive Collaboration

Henry Suryawirawan: So we have two more. Due to time, we can cover it maybe in a faster way. So first is inclusive collaboration. So these days people call it DEI and all that. So tell us more about this inclusivity.

Diana Larsen: This comes from the fact that every single one of us who shows up in a team, shows up with a different background, a different point of view, different ability to how fast we read. I mean, all kinds of differences that we bring to the table. And if we choose to identify some of those differences as not as useful or good or comfortable for us, what we do is we get in the way of the effectiveness of the team. So, I mean, on the one hand, paying attention to differences and learning to accommodate differences is just the right thing to do as humans. It’s the kind thing, all of that, and to welcome people into belonging.

But there’s a very practical aspect to it too, and we are finding that out all the time, is that when we have teams of people who are too much alike, they end up building things that really don’t serve their whole customer base. You can’t see the needs if you haven’t experienced the need. And so having more diverse points of view on your team is a huge benefit, and we don’t always see that. And then once we have a group of diverse people on the team, we then need to pay attention to how are we working together and are we helping everyone understand how they belong and what their contribution is? And what they bring that is unique and how much we value that uniqueness.

Henry Suryawirawan: And eventually, it will bring what you say is a greater wisdom, right? Because different kind of background, different perspectives and different cultural things will bring a collective wisdom for the team. So I think diversity, inclusivity is a well-researched topic. People can already see the benefits coming out of this research, and I think it makes sense to always pay attention to this.

[00:48:48] Resilience Factor: Minimizing Power Dynamics

Henry Suryawirawan: And the last one is minimizing power dynamics. I think this is quite interesting for traditional companies, hierarchical. So what do you mean by minimizing power dynamics?

Diana Larsen: Well, I want to say, cause I haven’t had a chance to say yet, that this is a book I wrote with Trisha Broadrick. Trisha did a wonderful session on this at the Agile conference last summer. It resonates particularly with her. And so, I mean, we co-wrote, we pair-wrote the whole book, and we got a review on everything having to do with DEI. A special help for that last chapter from our colleague, Jamara Villanova Mitchell. Wonderful consultant around DEI and helped us so much through the whole book.

So that one we talked about and then the power dynamics is, there is not a human system that doesn’t have some kind of power dynamic happening in it. Just the fact that I wrote a book and you wanting to interview me about a book creates a power dynamic between us. It can be not that big or not that deep, but it’s always present in every human interaction. There are folks who really strive for sort of equivalent power and working from that place and we call that power width. But we’re going to each take the power we have and try to work it together. So we talk about a power over, which is the typical kind of power that we think about. Who’s one up and who’s one down in this situation? But then there also are instances where we can tell that there is some kind of power dynamic at work, but we can’t exactly tell where it comes from. And then other times when referring back to the last chapter, the DEI discussion, there are times when the dominant group, the majority does not treat the people who have a different point of view very well. Because they know if you’re voting or whatever, you can make things happen the way you want them.

So understanding that there are always power dynamics. What they are and what’s the nature of them in this particular situation helps us to negotiate our way through the situation to know, oh, I’m trying to get my own way here. I’m in power over. And this problem that we’re trying to solve really would benefit by a different approach. So if we can name them, if we can understand them, then we can make them work for us instead of get in the way and separate us. So that’s really what that chapter is about. We’re looking for understanding the power dynamics that can be present and then using them to create greater positive engagement across the board.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. I think sometimes we don’t realize we are in this power dynamics hierarchy, but sometimes it happens unconsciously, like you mentioned, right? The fact that you wrote a book put you in a higher position than me. But actually, it happens in almost every interactions, right? People are more senior. People are more knowledgeable.

Diana Larsen: You know, better job title.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yes. Exactly.

Diana Larsen: All kinds of things can create the power dynamic. But it’s just important to recognize that it’s there. And a lot of people have written things about trust. There’re all kinds of books about trust and collaboration. There’re all kinds of books out there about conflict and creativity and those kinds of things and innovation, and there’s a lot more and more all the time being written about diversity and inclusion and so on. In some ways, I feel like this power dynamics piece is the newest thing that we, by and large, have not really given this as much attention as some of those other resilience factors.

Henry Suryawirawan: So maybe an advice for leaders out there. Be aware of these power dynamics, even though you think it’s not a problem, but people tend to perceive it differently. So be aware and be cautious about it, and try to make it a level playing field as much as possible, right? Don’t create this hierarchy so that people are more comfortable and hence create a greater engagement.

[00:52:59] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So, Diana, I know we are a little bit over time, but I have one last question for you actually, which is to share this thing I called three technical leadership wisdom. So think of it like an advice that you want to give to the listeners here, maybe from your journey, from your experience. So what will be your three technical leadership wisdom, Diana?

Diana Larsen: The first is to support each other. One of the things that I discover when I go into organizations to help them is that very often, the leaders are isolated. They’re in a silo and then they’re a leader over a group of people. Particularly in the middle layers of the organization, there aren’t as many cross-functional teams. That’s one of the first things I do if I’m trying to help with some kind of a transition to more team based or more agile approaches is, okay, who are the leaders? Who are the managers and leaders of these teams? Then what do they need to do to work together to support the teams? So looking for that, I think is very important.

The other is one of the new models that we have in the book is what we call the “Four Cs of Learning Leadership”. And I think taking those into account. If you don’t really understand much about complexity, there’s lots of people writing about it. Go out and learn some more about complex systems and how complex systems work, because that’s going to give you a huge leg up in being able to understand what’s going on in your organization. There’re four parts, the four Cs. And we talk about courage. We already talked about that. Being willing to say, I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers, and not be intimidated by that. And then understand that when people are learning, it may slow things down at first, because anytime we learn a new thing, we have to practice it before we do it well. But it’s worth the time, because once you’ve practiced it, once you can do that thing well, you get the acceleration.

Then the last one I would say that’s out of those four Cs is don’t be afraid to give your team the kind of support that it needs, to show that you have confidence in their ability to learn and to help them gain that confidence in themselves. I think those are all very important pieces.

Henry Suryawirawan: So thanks for sharing these Four Cs. I think it’s really a good reminder for leaders, right? So in your book, you also mentioned about these four Cs. So I think it’s like complexity, courage, compassion, and confidence. I think it’s a very beautiful message.

So Diana, thank you so much for this conversation. If people want to follow you or connect with you online, is there a place where they can find you?

Diana Larsen: There are lots of places people can find me. But particularly, if people are interested in lead without blame and lift off or some of those things, you can find me at DianaLarsen.com. And if you’re interested in the agile fluency model and those kinds of things, there’s AgileFluency.org where the community of practice for agile fluency is centered. Those are two places. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter, though, I don’t know how long, and a lot of the standard places.

Henry Suryawirawan: So I’ll make sure to put them in the show notes. So thanks again, Diana, for this sharing. I’m really enjoying this and I hope many people here are transformed not to lead with blame, but lead without blame.

Diana Larsen: Thank you.

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