I’m not very good at interviews. Can you relate?
I feel nervous and embarrassed talking about, and recommending, myself, to strangers.
Nonetheless, it’s something we all have to get through.
A recent scenario
I was in a round of interviews a few years ago. The two interviewers were very experienced Agile practitioners with very different backgrounds and working styles to one another.
One was a dyed-in-the-wool coach, keen to bring out the best in people and always ready to challenge senior leadership on anti-patterns. If transformation grit and emotional intelligence were superpowers, she would be superwoman.
The other interviewer was a long-standing veteran of the gaming business and a hardcore mathematics genius. The opposite of me on every level.
The interview seemed to be going well, but towards the end he paused and asked “what is your favourite metric to track an Agile transformation?”
I stopped.
Numbers really aren’t my thing. I’m pretty sure I have mild discalculia and I would really struggle to settle on any particular type of number at the best of times, let alone in the pressure of an interview.
But I found myself speaking from the heart.
“Laughs per meeting.”
Superwoman smiled. Maths genius shook his head in seeming despair.
Had I blown the interview? Probably.
Was I being flippant? Only partially.
I genuinely believed it at the time. However, on reflection, my faith in this (admittedly very soft) metric has only increased since then.
Strategic Laughter
Agile transformations are hard. People have to change how they do things and that’s never easy.
You get frustrations, suspicion, sometimes even anger and occasionally sabotage. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
But if we’re having meetings and people are laughing, even just occasionally, they may disagree, but at least they’re listening to one another.
Laughter = trust, or at least growing trust
It signals that psychological safety is building. It indicates camaraderie. It helps break the ice. It makes work that little bit easier to get through.
And you’re going to need all of that if you have any hope of successfully transforming your organisation – or even just your own team.
So while there are tonnes of metrics out there to help guide you and your stakeholders on your path, plan or roadmap to smarter working, this one, soft aspect I like to monitor might be the most reassuring indicator of all.
Keep your ears open. Reflect on the end of a call or after a meeting on how it went. Even if it was tense or difficult, did people go to the effort of making one another laugh?
In the age of AI, this very human trait might be even more important to how we work with one another.
What was their decision by the way?
Reader, they hired me. And not only was it one of the best places I ever worked, the maths genius from the gaming world was one of the best bosses I ever had as well.
We had many countless laughs on the often-difficult transformation journey we undertook together from then on.
Trust me! Laughs-per-meeting.
LOL = Delivery
PTSDelivery 
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