"The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological" argues the book Peopleware. Yet we spend most of our time on developing and training technical skills. We are so careful with error handling, testing, exceptions, etc., in our code but remarkably sloppy about catching the errors in how we talk to each other.
Do you agree with the above? If so, I hope you will enjoy hearing about examples where supposedly objective feedback carried hidden judgments, where being technically correct didn't change anyone's mind, and where teammates were hired for individual strengths and then blamed for thinking differently.
If you did not agree, then maybe you will appreciate that the first paragraph is itself an example of the patterns this talk is about: I smuggle in an evaluation ("we're sloppy"), I state something that may be true but easily triggers defensiveness, and I fail to take ownership of my own contribution to the problem.
I share some communication failures and discuss frameworks from various authors that helped me understand what went wrong. If you have tried to give helpful feedback and wondered why you ended up in an argument, won an argument but lost the conversation, or been frustrated when someone makes what seem like obviously poor decisions, some of these patterns might be familiar. I hope you will leave the talk with insights for improving communication and ideas for getting yourself out of the way in technical conversations.