To be honest, I've always looked down on Agile and such methodologies, it's so hard to be fair when you've been bombarded with buzzwords for a long time. Even terms like "iterative" or "incremental" feel like buzzwords to me - even though they are very useful ideas. It felt like boring management stuff. But it turned out Agile is pretty good, but how people implement can differ, and it can go wrong.

Same goes for teaching best practices, some teachers like to follow rubrics: "top 10 things to do as a teacher". But often it fails and it turns students off because the teacher isn't focusing on the values behind the practices, they just implement them mindlessly. For example you see many teachers starting a lecture (in classroom or online course) by stating the objectives of the lecture. The problem is that they treat it as an item on their checklist and it often ends up being boring and soulless and you just feel like skipping it.

In my country we have an old wisdom that is loosely translated as: "judging a thing is a reflection of one's perception of it."

And how we perceive something can affect how motivated we are. For example, two people can perceive studying differently, and hence it can change how much they do it. It's part of being a human. Ideas can have a huge impact on our emotions and actions. The problem with many meetings is that not everyone in the team sees the value in them. Devs for instance often find meetings annoying and take a lot of time that could have been used for "real work" and build software. They perceive meetings as a chore, they think of it as a tool for the PM, management stuff - the PM wants to see if things are going well and if it's according to the plan. so the devs will probably speak as little as possible and just get it done to go back to "real work". - which sadly reduces the meeting's value. They think of it as a status sync. And that's how most stand up meetings are honestly. No wonder many people hate them.

But it doesn't have to be that way, if you can show your team that it can actually be useful for them, by actually designing useful meetings: if the meeting becomes a planning tool for everyone, a meeting that makes sure everyone is taking good decisions (and not just following the plan), not just a mere status sync. Devs might suddenly find it useful. If the devs start to think of it as a way to understand how the project is going and coming up with ways that make everyone work better. Suddenly it becomes important to them.

Yet changing someone's mindset about something is not easy or a simple process. And it's not just about throwing buzzwords or -ities. In fact even a term like "mindset" and "motivation" can be a turnoff to many people - including me. Human beings are complex, it's not a simple equation, thoughts affect emotions and behaviors, and behaviors will affect the thoughts again. And it's not as simple as changing how you perceive something, if something is truly useless no matter how one tries to think of it positively it would shatter when it faces the real world.

One final important idea is that we often try to seek perfection. As if we need to be passionate about everything! People don't need to love everything they do. It's okay if the meeting is a bit boring, it can have some value to the PM nevertheless. But we can do better.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50414450

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