At Scrum Gathering Orlando, I ran an experiential workshop titled Improve your communication through non-verbal rapport. The session turned out really well so thanks to everyone who participated. My only tools were a flip chart and some markers, so the purpose of this post is to provide details for attendees as well as provide visibility to anyone interested in better communication.

(Part 6 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando – ok, so not very good at counting

Mehrabian Study

Amazingly, only 7% of communication is based on words while 38% is based on tonality and 55% on physiology.

The Mehrabian Study produced these numbers to quantify the importance of non-verbal communication.

Rapport

Briefly, rapport is about making and feeling a connection with another person. We do this automatically with our friends: we match physiology and tonality. The key practice for connecting with others is to:

1. Face a similar direction
2. Be at the same or lower height
3. Match the angle of their spine and head tilt.

This goes a long way towards making a comfortable connection.  For more on rapport refer to NLP: The New Technology of Achievement by Steve Andreas, and Charles Faulkner.

Keys to great communication

There are some important approaches that complement non-verbal rapport skills.

I just posted on Crucial Conversations.

Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has two models that relate to effective communication.

Win/Win is about seeking a good outcome for everyone involved – seeking a long-term, sustainable relationship.

“Seek first to understand, then be understood“ is about really listening to people around you. To really connect, you need to understand the person and where they are coming from.

Exercise to understand rapport

Caution: These exercises are here for those who attended the workshop and want to use them to help others. Please attend a workshop before trying these on your own.

This exercise is about getting an internal sense of how important rapport is in conversation.

Exercise to sense broken rapport

This exercise is about practicing rapport and getting a sense of what it is like for rapport to be broken.

Want to learn more?

These are some of the skill that I learned as an NLP (NeuroLinguisticProgramming) Practitioner. I have found Practitioner as well as Master Practioner skills to be an important part of my toolkit as an Agile Coach.

I strongly recommend Wauneen McMonagle Innergize Training if you are interested in building skills in this area.

Luiz Claudio Parzianello and Rafael Prikladnicki gave a talk at Agile 2009 titled “Logical Levels and Statistical Games: A Powerful Strategy for Agile Adoption”.  Slides are available here.

On the surface this may seem like a rehash of standard trainers games, but that is missing the point.

One important aspect is that all the games are statistical and can be numerically measured so that it appeals to the left-brain scientific types that dominate the software industry.  The three games are outlined below.

The bottom left of the diagram show the NLP logical levels.   By asking specific questions related to identity and values, it is possible to get a shift in perspective that will provide an openness to learning about Agile.

After playing game #1 comparing the effect of large batches versus small, there are some hard hitting questions:

1. Who has decided to keep your team too slow? (by using large batches)
2. Why has your team agreed with that?
3. What stops your team from changing this situation?
4. Do delivery and time really matter to your managers?

These questions use the NLP meta model to help people uncover information that has been buried beneath their conscious awareness.   This can help them get unstuck from their waterfall world and be open to considering new ideas.  How cool is that?

The games plus the questions form a useful adoption tool. Check out the presentation and try out the questions – there are some real zingers there.  Once caveat – these are appropriate for a Brazilian context and may need some tuning for other locales.