> In theory, no difference. In practice, good standups to me always feel like a casual conversation, and bad standups always feel like people speaking off a script like bad actors.
As someone who did sales early in my career... acting off of a script correctly feels like a casual conversation to the one you're selling to.
If your script-reading is bad, that's because you haven't practiced enough. Having a script isn't necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact very useful in keeping focus.
The more I grow into senior engineer / more leadership positions, the more and more my sales training from my youth comes in handy.
Every meeting you have with people has a goal (otherwise, you wouldn't meet with them to begin with!!). Maybe the goal is to gather requirements, or maybe the goal is to convince them to do something for you. The latter is 100% sales. None of us exist within a vacuum, we rely upon APIs or libraries or frameworks to do things. And if these APIs / libraries / frameworks are company / organization specific, you'll need to convince their lead engineer that your change is worthwhile to adapt.
As someone who did sales early in my career... acting off of a script correctly feels like a casual conversation to the one you're selling to.
If your script-reading is bad, that's because you haven't practiced enough. Having a script isn't necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact very useful in keeping focus.