Synecdoche
Raise a glass of bubbly to your agility
Lend me your ears, dear readers…ok, your eyes in this case.
Leaving university with my English Language & Literature Degree, I never could have guessed it would be such a boon in the world of organisational performance, team and scaled agile processes, coaching and especially not in the product software industry. However, a word I find myself using a fair amount and making sure I explain is “Synecdoche”.
Synecdoche (si-nek-duh-kee) is a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in England lost by six wickets (meaning ‘ the English cricket team’) ~ Oxford Languages
Pummelling my brain with literature intensely for years, particularly reading with a literary theory eye, I could reductively conclude that the use of “synecdoche” was more often than not decorative; a prettier way to describe something and used to avoid repetition in the text. More powerfully though, it is used in rhetorical and figurative speech, alongside irony, metaphor and metonymy, which are linguistic tools to help people understand ideas and concepts.
Here’s a new ride you can take for a spin with your company or teams: you can use synecdoche to help you track down systemic issues and improve your organisational systems or team processes.
Let’s use a specific example:
“Our team doesn’t need planning, it is a waste of time”…
(agile coaches and scrummasters: did you just start salivating?)
This is not an unusual assertion; teams may avoid or dump a process or meeting. When people are boots to the ground trying to meet goals under pressure, people do what they need to do, with what they know at the time and tend go with what feels good in the moment too and there is no judgement from me when I meet a team. It is a problem though and it can be particularly pernicious.
When teams omit, forego or have low quality planning, it shows up all over the place, most obviously in low value stand ups, long cycle times and buggy live code. It is not magic when I am able to also pick out, without context, the other areas that are also ailing when I hear one of the above is in trouble; it is synecdoche.
A Planning Meeting, Daily Stand Ups, how a piece of work gets worked on and released are all parts of the whole that is “how a team plans”. Teams that have mastered the art of planning do it well in all things that need planning, because they understand (1) the importance of creating and understanding their goals together, (2) how to do it right/making it a quality step (3) they give time to do it, (4) they think about everyone who needs to be involved, (5) they also consider the end user/client and (6) they consider the context in which they are planning.
If you suddenly feel a bit uneasy in your stomach because this example resonates, don’t worry, you’re in good hands, we’ll step to the side for a moment and look at fix together: **make time to talk about your process and planning** and think about different levels of planning and how they relate.
Some things are easier said than done. We should always aim to be people over process in our thinking, if we want to support agility, so let’s be sensitive to how people feel. It is reasonable to consider that a team may be subject to some environmental issues, such as time pressure, where all hands are needed on deck to pump out the work. Pandemic stress is always a consideration now. If your team is not practiced in planning, there will be heaps of time waste in their system somewhere, so honestly, take the imagined hit and include a couple of hours to work on your process, you will reclaim that time 100 times over afterwards and stress levels will drop. It might feel counter intuitive, especially if you are stressed which is why you’ll need to be brave and try it; remember what Carl Jung told us: “what you resist, persists”. It may be that you tried talking about or tried out having a planning meeting before, for example, and it turned out to be a waste of time in your opinion, hate to say it, but that was feedback that you were getting it wrong, not that planning doesn’t work, so call in fresh eyes to help you next time.
Coming back to the centre: Considering synecdoche will help you zoom in and out of a problem space and get a system level/holistic view to help you effect more powerful hits with your process improvements, by hitting a root cause more directly. You will avoid waste from spending lots of time affecting multiple localised improvements within your process, which are really the symptoms of the larger issue.
As with spotting it in texts when I was a student, spotting synecdoche in organisations needs practice to train your eye. Reflective practice is particularly helpful to help you start understanding relationships and patterns between things such as planning and stand ups, so if you are not already using something such as a Retrospective, consider adding them to your continuous improvement and learning practices.
Interested in a few examples in English of synecdoche?
Just have a look at the lines above in bold and the subtitle of this post :)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Cheers For Reading <<<<<<<<<<<<<<
