Why is communication crucial in an agile environment and how can we communicate in an agile way?
I talked about these questions at Agile Tour Zurich and emphasized that conflicts are nothing bad: In conflicts new perspectives surface and give us a way to deal with our blind spots. I’ve already written here about what agile communication could be. We can communicate following the principles of the Agile Manifesto and of agile values like the Scrum Values.
If we want to collaborate with people, we have to take them seriously: We have to value their factual arguments but also their feelings. That doesn’t mean that we have to admit that they are right or to give up our own believes and feelings. It means that we value others the same we value ourselves. By doing so we can do much better than accommodate or assert and even better than finding a compromise. By doing so, we’ll reach actual cooperation.
You can find some tools for agile communication in my slides and of course there are a lot more in my book (in German).