<story><title>How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right</title><url>https://medium.dave-bailey.com/how-to-resolve-a-conflict-when-both-sides-are-right-1f375bc82f7f</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>quanticle</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Suppose product development has slowed down, reported bugs have increased 30% since last month, and sprint velocity is down by 40%. Your engineer is feeling desperately unhappy and is terrified of building new features because of the risk to the system as a whole.&lt;p&gt;They want to stop building new features and refactor some of the system architecture. But what do you think their unmet universal need is here?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I were in a situation like that, my &amp;quot;unmet universal need&amp;quot; would be &amp;quot;a manager that understands the concept of technical debt and taking time for unit testing as opposed to spouting mindless psycho-babble at me&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;More seriously, this article reinforces my view of NVC as a fundamentally &lt;i&gt;hostile&lt;/i&gt; communication framework. By framing itself as the &amp;quot;non-violent&amp;quot; option, it makes any other form of communication &amp;quot;violent&amp;quot; by default, allowing the first person to wield NVC to claim an advantage. &amp;quot;See, I&amp;#x27;m being non-violent,&amp;quot; he or she will say, and it will serve as an universal shield against all who would object to their claims.&lt;p&gt;My take is that if you&amp;#x27;re in a situation where reported bugs have increased 30% and sprint velocity is down by 40%, no amount of NVC is going to solve that. What is going to solve it is management that&amp;#x27;s clued in to the problems at hand. Is it that too much feature work has been done, too quickly, leaving no time for the engineers to attend to technical debt? Is it that the application&amp;#x27;s architecture is unfit for the problem to which it is being applied, leading to lots of hacks and workarounds? Is it that the engineers are incompetent, and should be replaced?&lt;p&gt;In my experience situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don&amp;#x27;t just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I&amp;#x27;ve been in where that&amp;#x27;s happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks that would come back to bite us later on. To respond to something you were warned about with NVC baby-talk (as opposed to a clear and forthright, &amp;quot;Yeah, we screwed up, how do we go forward from here?&amp;quot;) seems like it would just make the problem worse.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right</title><url>https://medium.dave-bailey.com/how-to-resolve-a-conflict-when-both-sides-are-right-1f375bc82f7f</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>supercanuck</author><text>The problem with businesses&amp;#x2F;startup&amp;#x2F;bosses trying to use these is that they come across as disingenuous and manipulative if you try to use these as a tool.&lt;p&gt;The core tenet of NVC is that: NVC is based on the assumption that all human beings have capacity for compassion and empathy. If you can&amp;#x27;t exhibit these skills in your day to day life, it feels manipulative to others because you are asking others to be vulnerable.</text></comment>