A Year of Fierce Conversations

One of the greatest weeks of the year for the Mile6 team falls in the middle of October when everyone makes the trek by car, train, and air (here’s hoping for a boat pilgrim in 2025) to Philadelphia for our annual retreat. It’s always a great time of reconnecting, camaraderie, and recreation. This year, there were museum trips, photo contests, happy hours, and highly competitive mini-golf tournaments. We also use this time to have the types of conversations that are crucial to the continuous improvement of our organization. 

This year, before we broke out into our departments to plan for the year, we had an intense session with facilitator Carla Iliescu from Fierce©, Inc. Initially, it seemed to me a bit of a tone shift. We’re going to spend 2 hours learning how to have hard conversations with each other. But I soon learned that hard conversations feel that way not because of the content of the conversation but because of so many personal and interpersonal factors. Over the course of those two hours, we discovered and dissected the reasons why we avoid each other, why we leave things unsaid, and how we can start having deep conversations that deal with real issues in and out of the workplace.

What the Heck is a Mokita?

We love little interesting vocabulary words. A skillful wordsmith can weave them into conversations in ways that the context can help you understand it, even if you don’t know what it specifically means. Early on in our session, we learned a new one: Mokita. It’s a word in the Kivila language of Papua New Guinea that means “the truth we all know but agree not to talk about.” Our instructor told us how these Mokitas exist in every workplace but that we shouldn’t be afraid of them. She encouraged us to write down 3 (firmly establishing that our individual Mokitas would be confidential). Everyone resonated with this idea, and while we won’t list any of ours (other than we all agreed Josh is way too dominant at Mini-Golf), we can say that writing them down and discussing them as a group sort of took their power away. It helped us to understand that within our working relationships, internally and externally, there are issues that we are not dealing with, either out of fear or apathy. 

The following day, we broke out into departments to begin our planning for 2025, and we could all see that each team had a renewed interest in fixing the underlying and unnamed issues that they were dealing with. Since the retreat, we’ve seen each team take initiatives towards drastic optimizations. There have been proposals for file structure changes that would increase clarity. There’s been open dialog about meeting and scheduling efficiencies. Multiple departments are now working together to develop new services preemptively. By refusing to leave truth unspoken, we’re entering a new era of honesty and empathy.

Some of the Mile6 team in discussions during an exercise during a team building workshop.

How Relationships Die

We’ve all observed professional relationships that start positive and, over time, evolve into frustration and eventual acrimony. It’s only natural for all of us to try and find specific events that cause relationships to end, but during our session with Fierce© Conversations, we were introduced to a way of phrasing that made it so clear: “Relationships fail gradually, then suddenly.” We learned that the key to maintaining a relationship is continually adding context to conversations, applying gentle assertiveness, and constantly monitoring our conversations with other people from their perspective. 

Since our retreat, we’ve made a concerted effort to engage these truths in our coworker and client communications. We’ve seen how confronting scope creep head-on isn’t always met with the resistance we fear. We’ve learned that process improvements within our organization are accepted much more readily when we have open and honest dialog about the context for them. We’ve seen clarifying questions lead to much more robust and thorough proposal writing. The session ended with a stark warning: “The end of the conversation is the end of the relationship.” We pride ourselves in our ability to build relationships that can last decades, so naturally, we’re always looking for insights into how to maintain better conversations.

The Year Ahead

One of our core values is “Respect First.” When we properly apply this, we assume positive intent, and when we model that behavior, we receive it back from our coworkers and clients. For 2025, we are practicing Respect First by tackling our tough conversations, and it’s already begun to pay off. Our goal is to continually reinforce the insights we learned in our session during the retreat. We’ve all committed to continuing to work through the Fierce© Conversations materials provided to us after the session throughout the year. This isn’t just a January-style commitment either; each team member is writing out their plan and will have regular check-ins with their team members and managers to ensure that we’re all holding each other accountable. In essence, we’re making the commitment to a year of Fierce© Conversations. 

We’ve already seen how our session at the retreat has improved our team for the better. We can’t wait to reconvene next year and celebrate all our progress toward a better Mile6 for each other and our clients. And maybe, just maybe, one of us can unseat the reigning mini-golf king while we’re at it.

Jake Trunk

Creative Strategy Director

Jake Trunk is our Creative Strategy Director. He brings a passion for creativity, sound design principles, and a desire to provide delightful digital experiences. Jake is always eager to walk our clients through the process of understanding their users, identifying the users’ needs, and creating digital products that help them accomplish their goals. His aim is to always provide innovative and intuitive solutions to digital problems. Jake brings skills in all kinds of creative mediums from digital illustration to website prototyping, and he believes that the muscles of creativity grow stronger not only with repetition but with stretching. Outside of work, Jake can be found in his art studio working on his latest paintings, or spending time with his wife and two small kids.