Attend to the fear in the room

This is a chapter from The Amplio Consultant Educators Toolkit being written online. You can see that here. The book covers the content aspects of Amplio University - a new type of live, affordable training.

This chapter is modified from the corresponding chapter in Al Shalloway and Paula Stewart's book Being an Effective Value Coach: Leading by Creating Value.

When people are together, they won’t tell you they are afraid.

But you learn to sense it.

Typically, the room is quiet. There’s a kind of tension present. People respond to questions with shorter answers than they usually do.

Body language changes with more people taking a closed stance – arms crossed in front of them.

You can often learn how to sense this by remembering how you acted when you were afraid.

Knowing if people are afraid is important because people don’t learn when they are afraid. The brain literally shuts down. As if that’s not enough, people become defensive as well. Resistance increases. A fight or flight response is likely to happen.

You can’t just step over this when it’s present. You have to do something about it. You can ask if people have any fear but it’s often a good idea to just ask open ended questions since people often don’t want to admit they have fear. Sometimes it’s enough to just ask something like “I sense something is going on but I can’t quite tell what it is. Would someone mind telling me?”

An example of dealing with fear in the room

I was brought into a 2-day engagement with about 100 developers to do design pattern training. I had worked with the manager of this group at another company, and he wanted me to help his team become more agile in their programming. I was given 2 days to work with 100 people. This was much less than I thought was needed, but I knew the manager and wanted to help him however I could, so I decided to do what I could within his budget.

We did the workshop in a small auditorium that could hold maybe 200 people. This was not an easy situation but I’ve learned that instilling even a few ideas on how to write emergent code can make a big difference. And I’m pretty good in situations like this.

The group had created an application for the US market and was now converting it to Canada. They, of course, had used whatever localization software was available. But, about two weeks of work were still required for some special parts of the code.

I started the morning of the first day by telling them I planned to spend the first day talking about concepts of design patterns. Then, on the second day, we’d use what we learned and see how we’d make the changes. I asked if they were okay with that, and they all indicated they were. I planned to learn more about the code during the first day, study it that night, and have a real plan for the second day.

The first day went as planned, providing insights into what makes good design. A lot of people study individual patterns, but, as I describe in my book with Jim Trott - Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Software, there is a mental model behind what makes the patterns good designs. Teaching this mindset is not hard if you know how :).

That night, I studied the code to get an idea of what was needed. It didn’t seem that hard to apply what’s known as the Template pattern to make the shift.

I came in the morning of the second day and could sense the room was unhappy. The energy shift from the first day was palpable. People weren’t talking, the room was tense, and no one was looking at me in a friendly way. My presence was no longer welcome.

I asked a person in the front row about this. Saying something like - “You all seem a bit nervous, what’s up?”

He told me that it was all fun and games yesterday because they weren’t expected to do anything then. But now, they were supposed to use these new methods to finish their project, and they felt it would slow things down. Their manager was in the room the day before, and now he’s sitting up near the back and hearing all this.

Now that I know they are afraid, I realize I can’t work with them as planned. It will fail. No doubt. People don’t work well in fear. They won’t be open to it working and will come up with reasons why it won’t. I knew there was no way to succeed with the original plan. Sometimes, you just have to accept reality.

To be candid, I wasn’t sure what to do, but I knew I had to eliminate the fear. So I said to the group, “Tell you what. I know we can do this, but I understand your concerns. How about we spend the next two hours where we work out a plan? If after that time, you don’t see we can do it faster with this new way than what you were planning to do, you can just do what you had planned. I’ll talk to your manager (remember he’s in the back of the room) and tell him it was my fault and I couldn’t pull it off. Is that ok?”

I glanced up at the manager just after I said this, and he gave me a little nod, indicating his trust in me.

There was a palpable sigh of relief. They knew there was no way I could succeed, and they’d be off the hook.

So, I went to the board and sketched out one of the things that needed to change. I teach them the pattern and the rationale behind it. We discussed a few issues. Everyone is in a learning mode because they know we can talk all we want, but there is no way they will have to use this.

After an hour (half the time I had), it was clear there was much less work doing it this way. Instead of dozens (hundreds?) of separate case statements, they’d have to create only a dozen classes, mostly in a copy-and-paste manner,  and then just write in the new code. No new case statements or “if”s except in the code that was going to create the objects being used - which wasn’t a hard thing to do.

I turned to a somewhat amazed audience. They were even happier now than before. I just offloaded their workload. Good design and good thinking can do this.

We spent the next couple of hours doing a few of the cases and then going over some details for the rest of the day. Everyone in the room knew they now had less work than before.

While I was pretty sure I could pull it off, I was 100% sure that taking away the fear had to happen.

The point of this story is that you must know that people won’t learn when they are afraid. When fear is in the room you must address it.

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