Not A Bad Idea

Over twenty years I have worked with enough different teams in enough different companies to establish that there are lots of repeating patterns of behavior. Some of that behavior is good behavior, and some of it is bad behavior. The good news is that many of these bad behaviors are easy to spot and highlight to people who have them. The even better news is that the fixes for them tend to be relatively easy.

Quite a few bad behaviors fall into the category of communications. I love working on these. My default behavior in many groups is to find clever word play in an active conversation and start throwing around an abundance of puns like I get paid for them (I do not, by the way, get paid for them). I find that word humor is an effective tool for engaging with knowledge workers because it involves thinking about the things you are saying and the way you are saying them. Plus it makes it easy for me to identify the people who get the best end-of-year performance reviews; it is all the people laughing uproariously at my super funny jokes. I am kidding. No I am not. Yes I am. I digress.

It is important to stay positive in your communications with people, especially in writing. Early on in my career I was participating in youth sports as a coach and learned how to deliver a “coaching sandwich”. There are other names for it of course, in our adult world of finding-ways-to-inject-swear-words-into-everything. I will leave the googling up to you to find out more about that.

A coaching sandwich suggests that you should wrap your negative feedback in positive statements. Start by saying something good, giving it a “+1” that is a positive start, add in your feedback, generally a “-1”, and follow up with an encouraging statement, finishing the transaction with a “+1”. If you have your calculator handy and total these three numbers, you will notice that it gives you a total net positive communication.

Generally the person who thinks they know everything has a pretty dismissive reaction to this approach; I know that I sure did. Then I started using it.

Let’s give a few illustrative examples. Which email would you like to receive from your boss, who writes your performance review, written at 3 am?

Option 1:

 Option 2:

Hey John, I hope you are having a great morning. I wanted to let you know we just recovered from a late night incident, and that production is back up and operational.

We did some investigation and it looks like you broke the build at the end of day and committed it to the repo. The overall downtime was about an hour, during peak hours for Europe, which is where most of our customers are.

In the future it would be helpful if you could be a bit more diligent with your commits, especially towards the end of the day. I appreciate that you are working very hard!

I don’t know about you, but I like the second one a little better, and generally most people do. I was shocked at how much better my written communications were received when I started applying this to my correspondence.

This is not the moral of today’s story however; you have been set up. Today we are going to go a little deeper into the realm of positive communications to tackle one of the more insidious patterns that I wrestle with.

The fun thing about working in games, and in working in software in general, is that there are a lot of hard problems to solve. Many times it is great to get together with people and discuss these problems and explore potential solutions. I find that talking over a potential problem with other very smart people tends to increase the quality of the solution.

Sometimes it is hard to internalize other people’s ideas. I am as guilty as anyone at thinking my own ideas are better. When someone has a good idea, it is really hard to let them know this. It is hard to just flat out say “Hey, that is a good idea!”. You should try it out sometime; see how strange it feels.

In fact the first reaction that people have to a really good idea is to subject it to a high level of scrutiny and try to poke holes in it, especially if it is solving a problem that you need to solve.

I am going to paraphrase the thoughts that run through your head when presented with a good idea, using the words of a friend:

“Well, I can’t think of any holes to poke in your suggestion, but I didn’t come up with it, so I don’t like it.”

“I grudgingly accept your idea in the absence of something I like more.”

Does this sound like the voice in your head? It sure does to me sometimes. I do this quite a bit.

When your brain is presented with someone else’s good idea in the context of a conversation, and your internal machinery engages with the process of trying to dismantle it, it is also simultaneously presented with another problem: You need to reply to the person who made the original statement.

Quite often, this reply comes out as follows:

“That is not a bad idea”

Let’s recall the previous conversation about coaching sandwiches and positive communications and re-examine this statement. It is a double negative, which suggests that the originator is a clever person. You will find that the smartest people on your team use this expression frequently, without realizing they are missing out on an opportunity for a positive social reciprocity opportunity. I am also guilty of this from time to time, especially if I am in the middle of an exciting conversation about difficult problems.

So what do we do about it?

The solution to this particular problem is relatively simple, but it will take some time to break this particular habit. During highly excited conversations it may come back, and you will need to double down on the medication.

The best thing to do is to discuss it with the person or people involved. Talk about the power of “the good idea”, and the notion of “not a bad idea” as an unfortunate language choice, to acknowledge a good idea.

Planting the notion in someone’s head to think about how they communicate is a slow-growing seed. Over time they will examine their communication patterns. The best and most adaptive minds will start using positive tones in communication to help break this habit. The slowest and most unfortunate people will come up with reasons not to bother. You may hear people still say “that is not a bad idea”. When I see it happen, I apply additional reinforcement as necessary; I will either say “is it really not a bad idea?” and give them a hard ironic stare, or cheerfully ask “can it be a good idea instead?”

I like to give people tools to improve their communications. It takes time to develop good communication habits, which increases the output of your teams.

To me, that very much sounds like a good idea.

Thank you as always for reading along! I double-dinosaur-dare you to like this article, or the social media item upon which you clicked to find it. I appreciate your positive feedback, and I hope you join me in the coming weeks for additional brain-pourings that are either entertaining or educational.