Podcast – Hired Thought: Recent Episodes
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Susan Almon joins Ben to discuss the long, hard journey of recovering from burnout.
Follow Susan on Twitter (@susanalmon):
Me on most calls pic.twitter.com/0qOf30HaCT
— Susan Almon (@susanalmon) December 2, 2020
Resources mentioned:
- HBR Article: Burnout Is About Your Workplace Not Your People
- Dr. Christina Maslach: Understanding Job Burnout
- Aundi Kolber: Try Softer
- RescueTime: Our Best Articles on How to Avoid Burnout
- The Hustle: How to avoid burnout by working less and doing more
- Esther Derby: 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change
- Casey Watts: Debugging Your Brain
- John Willis (from the world of DevOps): Karōjisatsu
- Matt Stratton’s episode on Hired Thought: Organizational Resilience
Transcript Ben: Hello everyone. And welcome to The Hired Thought Podcast. I get paid to think and others get paid to think, and so today, I’m going to talk with someone who gets paid to think, and her name is Susan. Susan Almon is with us. We’re going to talk a little bit about how she came to be paid to think. And also some of the lessons she’s learned about a career in thinking for a living. Susan, Tell us a little about yourself, and then also tell us how you got to be paid to think.
Susan: Hi Ben, thanks for inviting me here. well, I’ve always been curious, wanting to know new things, how things work. And I was fortunate to start early in my career in a consulting company that really gave us ways to express our ideas, ways to collaborate. And I think I’ve always been interested in that way.
And then I think this is something I’ve never told you is one time on Twitter, @FakeGrimlock tweeted about the Phoenix project book, that was like in 2013. So I looked at this book and I started to read it and I had to close it a few times because I thought I was going to have a stroke.
I was just, Oh my goodness, I’ve lived this, I’ve lived this. And from that book, I met some people on Twitter, like Kevin Behr. And I started interacting with Jabe Bloom, and I was meeting all these people on Twitter and it just expanded my world to all these people who would have conversations with me. So I was working with really good people, but I wanted to be in a bigger pool of thought maybe.
And by meeting with these people online and building relationships, I was able to really start to hear ideas that I’d never heard. “Okay. Is that a real word or did you make that up, Jabe?
But now it’s just so there’s so many ideas out there and so many opportunities to have conversations. And I spent a lot of time, a bunch of years in small consulting companies where I felt, I never knew what my next project was going to be. It might be a data conversion, or it might be a process change.
I was working with a startup. I wanted to help them fill out a government loan application. And I ended up leading them through a product definition. They’d never fully defined their product. They didn’t know what that meant. So I led them through, so I never knew what my next assignment was going to be.
So I kind of felt like I had to learn “all the things.” Which wasn’t healthy, but I always wanted to be prepared. And if I couldn’t learn all of everything, I could at least learn who the people were for every area of thought. I knew who the experts were, the people who had invented or created something.
But then I knew the people who could, curate it and explain it better. So, you know, kind of different levels of knowledge in, in that way. So that I have the whole world of thought at my, at my fingertips, you know, a lot of it through Twitter, through conversations. So I think that was, that was really helpful because I know that there’s so many helpful, friendly, kind, caring people out there that if I have a question, something that I need to figure out that goes beyond my knowledge, I can find somebody who can, who can help me.
Ben: It seems like relationships are really important to you and have kind of played this role of being the bedrock upon which you’ve built your career and your explorations, like going back to how you got into doing the consulting side of things and yeah.
Like how you, how you got those initial good experiences, what relationships sort of paved the way for you to be able to do that?
Susan: There was a lot of mentorship. There was a lot of people caring about and, informing and bringing up junior people. And that made all the difference. I was never treated as someone when I was new to something, I was never treated as someone who was inferior, it was explained. And we worked through things together. And I think that all the relationships were like that for me in my first company. And it was, it was so good
Ben: How did that come to be like, was it just that you got lucky as you, as you got the first job, and they just happened to have a culture like that?
Susan: Yes.
Ben: Wow. For sure. It makes me a little sad!
Susan: I applied to a bunch of companies and this is the one where I got hired and it was just a dream. I get such a good base in consulting. And we had our own methodology and it was a big, heavy one, but we were taught very early that we didn’t have to use all the, all the documents… so this would have been in the early nineties, we were taught to use only the ones we need. To combine them. If they were going to be small, each, each deliverable didn’t need to be its own whole deliverable. It was about the content and meeting the needs of the customer. So that prepared me for being agile, being a consultant, pulling the things that only the things that I need, not because it’s in the list, but because this is what this situation, this engagement at this client needs today.
Which can be very different from something I would do six months ago or six months in the future.
Ben: with that kind of initial experience, it’s, it’s kind of curious how you might build off of that as your career progressed. So what kind of opportunities presented themselves to you after those initial kind of learning years?
Susan: Well, I guess some leadership roles. And then, I was at companies that got sold, so I had some, some big changes and I took, I took a lot everything I had learned and some of the people that I had been with moved along as well, but it wasn’t the same environment in the new companies. Like it would be good for a while, or maybe at one place, there was a whole group of architects. So we would, we would meet regularly whether I was, I was there as a business architect. There were the, the technical people, the data architect, and we would all meet regularly and share ideas. And that was wonderful, but then they all left and that was just, that was probably 2015.
And that’s when I got more involved with meeting people on Twitter. I ended up going to Lean Agile Scotland. And that, that kind of gave me the out. I feel that I want to learn more and I wasn’t, I wasn’t in an environment where I, I had, a team of people who wanted to learn with me. So I found it outside my company.
Ben: So that sounds like more, the typical kind of experience that many people working, say, in the enterprise have where the organization doesn’t have much in the way of team dynamics, much in the way of working together on something. And it’s more like individuals each pursuing their own agendas, each trying to survive each trying to just live their life and maybe get paid and go home.
And that dynamic is probably really shocking after you had such a great first experience. So you, I think, took the route that many people take with that, which is to try to find fulfillment elsewhere. Right. In other communities of people in perhaps in other hobbies or other kinds of activities outside of work.
What was it like to sort of experienced that splitting between your everyday life and this, these extra networks that you were trying to be a part of.
Susan: It was, consider it just layers.
You know, it’s like having a, an inside network and an outside network and I could draw on the outside network, drawn the inside network and kind of combine them all, you know, lots of, lots of loose threads that I can weave together to form the fabric. So I didn’t ever consider them to be opposite or conflicting in any way.
It was just, it was up to me to pull, pull what I needed from, from both.
Ben: Hmm. That makes sense. One thing that I kind of started to think about with that is how. With the situations constantly changing. Yes. And you’re used to change and you’re used to sort of having to sort of meet new people and learn new skills and adjust to sometimes very abrupt changes, but sometimes the change can be slow and sometimes it might be hard to tell the difference between whether this changes significantly bad or just the regular kind of change.
And I was kind of wondering about, one of the things that I think, we could talk about and really help a lot of people by providing some, some sort of experiential descriptions of what it’s like is the topic of burnout and in particular, the sort of path to burnout.
Yeah. And I started to think about how slow change or, or perhaps change that seems fine or normal, but is in fact deeply toxic or I don’t know how to describe, I don’t know what word to use there, but how would you describe that kind of experience? Like what, what words would you use?
Susan: There’s a really good HBR article on how your environment at work contributes to burnout because it, it, it’s not just… and it helps that it takes away the responsibility from the person. “Oh, you’re weak. So you’ve burnt out.” It’s not that. It’s often situational. If you’re an environment where actually you, you want to make change, you want to make things better, but you can’t, you’re not treated fairly or feel that you’re not treated fairly.
You’re not. There’s no room for you to grow. There’s no room for you to share ideas. So things like that where you, you’re not able to do the things you want to do, you know that you can make things better, but you don’t have any power to do that. You’re not supported in doing that. That can be a major contributor to burnout.
And if you’re someone who’s a high achieving. You want to do a good job? Maybe you’re a perfectionist, but I don’t think you have to be that, that, that word comes up a lot. And I always reject that, but you want to do a good job. And as a consultant, it’s, you know, my, my commitment was to my clients and I always wanted to do the best work.
And I pushed myself really hard to do that while raising kids and running a house and all those other things that, that take time and energy and. I think the, my, my outside network where I could share ideas and things, it alleviated some of the stress from my inside network, so that, that helped.
But at the end of the day, it didn’t make my day job better. And then, I had some things happen. I was in a car crash. I had injuries. My father was sick, whole bunch of, of. Big emotional events that just kind of wore me out. You know, it took, it took the little bit that I had left and that, that was the first time I burnt out.
But I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know, until a few years later when I understood what burnout was and I’d been up and down in the cycle in the times between them, you know, sort of getting better. And, you know, I left my job and I thought, okay, this will be great. But then it wasn’t. And I didn’t, I had no idea what, what to think or what to do.
And then one day in 2019, I was watching a DevOps conference talk. Christina Maslack was speaking and she talked about burnout and she listed well burnout. You know, if you find you’re you’re negative and you find that you’re exhausted. And you find that you’re not able to do your work and things like that.
And I thought, Oh my goodness, that’s it, it has a name. Now I can do something about it. And that was so, so empowering too, to understand. No, it’s like, if you, if you, if you don’t have the words to describe something, you can’t do anything about it. You don’t understand it. You can’t fix it. You can’t avoid it.
You can’t do anything. And you it’s just such a big, a big deal.
Ben: There’s an interesting tie in here with, Dr. Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice work where the, one of the modes of epistemic injustice is, being deprived of ways to make sense of your experiences and to convey those experiences to others.
So when you have a name for something, or when you yourself can create the name, Yeah. Then that gives you that initial sort of ability to sort of create an anchor point to have those kinds of conversations.
Susan: Exactly.
Ben: And I’ve seen these patterns like across a couple of different contexts, like in workplace harassment or, burnout or, Autism, like, there are a lot of these different kinds of ways that people suddenly encounter these words and these bodies of material that, that suddenly helped them make sense of their own experiences.
And they’re like, Oh… Like a weight has been lifted. Everything makes sense. And there’s still work there…
Susan: Oh, for sure. But, but you have a place to start and you have words to take to your doctor, your therapist, your friend, that you can, you know, check Dr. Google. And at least start, start your quest.
Ben: Yeah. One of the biggest issues I had when, when I, in my experience as a burnout is the kind of internal mental game around, so how, how I judge myself based on whether or not I’m able to do the things that I used to be able to do. and I’m kind of having a… I’m coming out of some experiences recently that look an awful lot, like burnout, except this time they were kind of planned.
It was like the typical thing where you, you panic about not having enough work for the year. And then you go get a bunch of work. And then a bunch of people say yes, and then suddenly you have to do it all. And I found myself like realizing, Oh, this isn’t sustainable. I can tell it’s not sustainable. And. It’s going to be really weird after that for a bit of time, because I’m going to feel completely incapable none of that sort of preparatory kind of anticipation of that thing happening prepared me for the actual thing happening because the instant I pulled my foot off the gas, everything came crashing down.
And I had no energy. I had no hope I had no belief that things would be fine. I kind of just like went, day-to-day just sort of, I don’t know, just kind of… wandering.
Susan: Yeah.
Ben: So for your experiences in, in burnout when you’re in the fog, yeah. How, how are you able to think about making sense of it? How, how can you even become oriented?
Beyond lucking into wandering into the right talk at DevOps days.
Susan: Yeah, it was actually, it was a recorded talk. So it was, you know, one of the million tents that I, I take that one to why? I think it’s burnout the first time is a surprise and you don’t know what it is. And then maybe the second time it’s a surprise and it couldn’t be, I mean, I’m no expert.
I have a degree in computer science, not psychiatry or anything. It could be that because you were expecting it, you thought you could control it. And the, the strength of it, the severity of it may have surprised you because you thought, Oh yeah, I, I I’m good. I know what to expect. So I’m good. And maybe you underestimated what the impact would be that you weren’t any more able to.
To absorb all this extra stress and work and everything then you had been before.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I think overestimating my own capabilities is certainly like a thing I do sometimes. Like, it’ll be fine. And then you realize that it’s not going to be fine. And then, then you have to still get through it. But. I think there’s, there’s something here about the environment we’re in, that’s really important, which is like, have we created an environment or are we part of an environment that is regenerative or healing, I guess, or when, when I think about like how stable things can be, even though they’re tenuous, right.
You’re working really hard. But you’re in a structure that seems to be like making that something that you could do for a number of years and then a specific shark comes along and disrupts the system. And how quickly you recover, I think is a, basically a, an evaluation of how good that environment is at, at regenerating your ability to, do the work and to build yourself back up and in your ability to work.
But I’m not sure that people view organizations. In that way. I don’t think they did try to design them in that way. So I feel we have to take a significant amount of that control into our own hands. So beyond the relationships that you’ve built and the social kind of networks and engagements that you’ve been able to have to stay connected to people and to have people to talk to how have you changed your environment to preempt or to at least make recovery from burnout more?
Of an easy sort of deliberate process.
Susan: One of the big things that I’m currently working on was that I’m, I’m writing a talk on, and submitting it to conferences about what to expect when you’re recovering from Burnett. Cause people don’t know, I didn’t know what to expect. And the, to talks that I’ve seen, talk about burnout mostly. The advice is big, you know, leave your job, take some time off and then, you know, get some rest and you’ll be okay, but that’s not true. That’s not enough. It may be. But for a lot of people, it’s just not enough.
If your brain’s not working, if your emotions are just dull. If you can’t do your normal things every day, if you’ve got that orange juice in the coffee brain all the time and not just, you know, on the odd time when you’re tired or distracted and hap, and a couple of days off, isn’t going to fix that. So one of the books I’m reading called , try softer.
it talks about defining what your window of tolerance is. It’s like, it talks about your fight or flight instinct. What, what triggers it, understanding what the effect is and that for each of us, we need to define what our window of tolerance is and what triggers us to each of these reactions, because our reactions won’t necessarily be what they should be.
We may have, skewed beliefs. We may misunderstand or misinterpret people’s actions. we may have inappropriate reactions that cause us harm internally or cause us to, to fight or to flight or, you know, it may, it may trigger the wrong thing and we have to understand what those are.
And one of the things that. I stress in this talk that it’s still a work in progress. It gets better every week, as I learned more, but is knowing what your triggers are and knowing that it’s work to figure all this out. And it’s not likely anything you can do on your own without counseling. But my intent is to give people that help them set expectations.
And give them words and ideas that they can take to a professional or that they can look up instead of just feeling like a blob. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to start if you’re, if you’re, you know, after serious burnout, you’re so tired and so unable to do anything that you can’t take all this good advice.
So there’s a point where you have to, I guess, understand where you are, that this is to be expected. And that you have to do little things, little steps. And one of the first ones is self-compassion and it’s not saying, Oh, I’m so stupid. How did I let this happen? I’m so weak. What’s wrong with me? I’m never going to be smart.
I’m never going to be healthy that we all know is self-defeating, but you have to be able to get past that. Or you can’t in my view, you can’t do anything about it. And I, I turned to Esther Derby seven rules of change, and the second one. Is respect how things got to be, how they are. you know, in, in consulting, you don’t go in and say to your client, Oh my goodness, what a mess?
You, people are so stupid that I can help you. We would never say that we have to think what people were doing the best that they could the whole time. So using those rules of change on yourself, you can think, you know, what. I was doing the best I could. I didn’t mean for this to happen. It’s not my fault that this happened.
I need to accept myself. I need to love myself and I need to slowly, slowly move forward. So changing your mindset like that is, is pretty important.
I have a, I have a friend!
Ben: Oh, goodness. For those of you who can’t see, there’s now a cat participating in a podcast and a very cute one.
Susan: And that’s, that’s an important thing.
Like you have to have to have the foundation to be able to make the changes so that you can recover. And that’s part of what I want to explain to people. so they know. Well, you know, well, how come I’m not better? I’ve changed jobs. Shouldn’t I be okay. Well, no, the damage has been done. And then you pointed me to the book.
It keeps the score. And I haven’t read that yet. I got it. yesterday from the library I had to wait my turn. So I’m going to read that next. But there’s so much that we don’t, we don’t understand. And that people, as you know, we’re not, we’re not psychologists, we’re not trained counselors. We don’t know these things, but as we learn more and we share it with others, then they can understand it.
And I think that’s so, so important again, to, to have words to say, Oh, okay. I thought it was just me. Well, no, it’s not you. This is to be expected. And I think that goes a long way to helping people have self-compassion no, you’re not weak. You’re you’re injured. Your brain is injured.
The damage was caused by whatever, whatever, but you have an injury. So compare yourself to an athlete you know, a marathon runner who has, a serious muscle pull. The, the muscle can heal, but then they need rehabilitation. So to be fast runners again. So for anyone coming through burnout, you know, there’s, there’s a time for rest.
There’s a time for healing. And then there’s a time for rehabilitation to get your brain healthy again. To get back to your, your former self. You’ll be different, but you know, I want to be smart again. I want to be able to do my job. I want to be able to do the things that I used to be able to do, and that takes time and it takes work.
I think that’s something that’s missing in the messaging about burnout.
Ben: yeah. the messaging around the big interventions, like just take time off or just to do this or just do that. Yeah, you’re right. I mean that while. That might work and that might help. And maybe that’s the most immediate thing for some people.
I feel it misses the point. It’s really missing the continuous everyday process of how do you work with yourself to do small things every day. Expressions of self-compassion. I think, you know, those are small behaviors and it doesn’t really, you don’t have to lift a big thing to do that. You can just maybe notice.
And the moment that you’re being judgmental of yourself and
Susan: reward small, small achievements. Oh, great. I was able to do that today, where I couldn’t do that last week. And do you know where I’m getting a lot of really good, insight is from a whole lot of women on Twitter who have ADHD who have trouble focusing.
They’re hard on themselves. And, you know, as they figure things out, they’re tweeting about it and I’m thinking, Oh my goodness, this is excellent advice for anybody. And it’s just, it’s wonderful that I wasn’t looking for. You know, it’s just, I came across this community. A couple of tweets and other, Oh, so this morning I followed two more people, two more women with ADHD and they have the best ideas.
There’s one who, Renee, Renee Brooks, who’s written an ebook on cleaning with ADHD, you know, how do you, how do you do it anyway? So there’s, there’s help out there. But I mean that, that’s a rock that I would never have looked under for, for advice. So a lot of it is just, just coming up. And I found a new book, Friday night, two days ago by Casey Watts.
And it’s called Debugging Your Brain. And I bought it right away and it is amazing. It’s less than a hundred pages, but it is so full of. Everything you need to know to understand how your brain works, the limbic system, the prefrontal cortex, what you might get through therapy when your emotions are a mess and you have inappropriate reactions to things and how to handle some of this.
It’s just, it’s wonderful. I’m going to start sharing about that book because it’s, it’s one that, you know, again, and it’s, it’s having words to understand things and the way that Casey lays it out. It’s really easy to understand. It’s not written for, for psychiatrist or psychologist. It’s written for us in, in software, you know, in technology, we can, we can relate more to, to how he’s got it laid out.
And it’s just, it’s, it’s going to be a really, really helpful book for a lot of people.
Ben: Oh, that’s great. I love the concept and I’m really fascinated to sort of take a look at that. Yeah. Before we leave, I, there was an idea that you shared with me that I wanted to dig into a little bit because it’s something that is really fascinating to me.
I think it’s this idea of, anticipation, right. Or being able to notice when things are headed in a certain direction. you, you and I both have seen this thing that, that JB and I have played with called the anticipatory awareness. And it has a lot to do with telling stories about how, you know, what signs you might see if a particularly terrifying story might be starting. and in that doing so you, you get triggered to take a closer look and to be more sensitive, to certain kinds of signs that the story would be continuing to play out. And that’s so that you can change your behavior and shift the direction, shift the course of events.
That’s a very fancy theoretical framework, but Susan, you’ve been doing your own thinking about anticipation and burnout. And I wanted to know. What is, how does that work? How do you anticipate burnout in order to avert it, avoid it or make it less likely?
Susan: I’m still working on that. And my, my goal is to create a, sort of a, a template or a canvas that people can fill out, but the way that I see it and what I’m trying to to create for myself is, understanding what my triggers are.
I know what type of work environment is safe and what is unsafe. I’m in a new place now. And I’m with the best team in the safest and friendly kind, caring, smart, smart people who it’s just, it’s wonderful. Wonderful. So I have to train myself. I remind myself all the time that this is a safe environment, so there’s a whole lot of.
Monitoring I think, and, and what I brought up was observability, you know, and I, I read which, and I’m still trying to figure that out, how, how to catch these feelings early. And I think it’s just being able to identify what the triggers are for burnout. I know that for me, it’s certain environmental issues.
I’m sleeping a lot more now, which helps a lot, but some things that I have to undo from, from my burnout is. not giving people credit or not trusting people. And I have to adjust that. So it’s a lot of, a lot of monitoring and I have, I have problems with sugar and I have to monitor. I can always tell how I feel with just, it’s just this, this feeling, that I’ve, that I’ve got.
And I know, you know, right now, what would happen if I had too much sugar? Well, I would feel this way. And I always always know exactly what the reaction would be. So it’s a similar thing that I’m trying to create in my head. Like, I don’t know, still trying to figure out what it’s going to look like, but it’s understanding what, what the triggers are and watching for those early.
And then if something does get triggered and I think, Oh, no, no, no, no, that’s not right. That’s not true. That’s not what that person meant. Or that’s not, what’s going to happen. That’s not going to happen. What are you thinking? So it’s still a bit of a jumble, but it’s becoming more and more clear.
So ask me in a month. I may have it figured out.
Ben: Fantastic. Yeah. How can people find you online if they want to reach out to you and connect with you?
Susan: Oh, they can ping me on Twitter @SusanAlmon.
Ben: Excellent.
Susan: That’s the place I am more than any other place.
Ben: Yeah, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. And, if you want, if you’re running a conference and you want to reach out to Susan to give the inaugural version of her talk on how to recover from burnout, you can find her on Twitter. And thank you all for being here and listening to us.
And thank you, Susan, for sharing these experiences. We had another episode with Matt Stratton where he talked a bit about anxiety..
Susan: Oh yeah, Matt, let’s see, that, that, that is something I think of all the time. So I need to, I need to, to tell him, but again, I think I’ve said it a couple of times on Twitter, I’ve posted zebras at him because that’s, that’s exactly what it is.
It’s that response is my response appropriate. You know, you can, you, can you just shake it off like the zebra does, or is it something you really need to do something about. And it’s that awareness. So, yeah, that’s great.
Ben: Check out that episode. If you want to hear some, some additional thoughts on topics like this, but find Susan on Twitter, follow her. And I really am excited to find out what you discover about anticipating burnout in the future.
Susan: Thanks Ben, it’s been great! Take care.
Ben and Jenny discuss the absurdity of life, how to create and test learning models, and a unique approach to experience sharing known as “kything.”
Follow Jenny on Twitter (@jdcarlston):
I keep working on making this chart better. I would love feedback and critiques. Do you find it helpful? Message me.https://t.co/pjaZ4FMaEF pic.twitter.com/Ci79mL4WKN
— J. Carlston (@jdcarlston) March 25, 2020
Read Jenny on Medium: https://jdcarlston.medium.com/
Transcript Ben: Hello everyone. And welcome to the Hired Thought podcast. Today I’m joined by Jennifer Carlston. Thanks for joining me!
Jenny: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. I’m excited to do this!
Ben: Yeah. So kind of wanted to start with your Twitter profile, ’cause it had a bunch of really interesting words in it that just made me think, “Hmm. I should probably get to know this person!”
You frame yourself as searching for the Renaissance, you call yourself a creatrix and a swarchitect. And I was kind of curious about some of those words and sort of how you came to those.
Jenny: Well, I like language, I enjoy linguistics.
I’d like people to understand kind of what went into the Renaissance and like the forms of thought that people were trying to develop. And I’d like, you know, people to start thinking about what would make it possible for them to create a new Renaissance, a future Renaissance in a sense.
Creatrix means a creator. So, you know, I’ve been involved in the maker community. I’ve been involved in a lot of artistic communities. And so I just thought creative… creatrix means a female creator. Swarchitect is software architect, which I think accurately describes it a little bit better and, you know, it’s, it’s a made up word. I just made it up.
Ben: I mean, all the words are made up and that’s beautiful. So let’s, let’s add a few more to the dictionary, right.?
What keeps happening for me is I keep… when we speak, I always seem to be noticing whenever you find something that really is causing joy, um, you, you have like this kind of “eyes light up bright” kind of moment where you get really excited about something and… sort of diving into what it means and what it could mean and how that could reshape kind of the way that you approach the world.
And I think that that maybe touches back to the point about searching for the Renaissance a little bit. And I was kind of curious how you connect to the joy you find in learning and understanding these things back to creating a world where we can, we can create new renaissances, like we can actually start those movements ourselves.
What does all that mean to you?
Jenny: I think as humans, we’re meaning making machines. We tell stories, we tell stories about ourselves. We tell stories to ourselves, we lie and we tell the truth and we mix it all up. Like the world is completely absurd in so many ways.
Right. You know, uh, on a fundamental level it’s absurd with a few patterns,
Ben: I love that characterization. Cause it, it, I guess when I think about how I grew up, it was always trying to align myself to like formal social structures, like religion or focusing on kind of. The the way that people were trying to raise me to be and sort of fit within that. And then I kind of reached this moment in life where I ha I was like, I sort of broke out of those patterns and the world did start to just look kind of like a giant ball of absurdity with a few patterns.
Jenny: Yeah. So at the same time, while everything’s absurd, we are these creatures that are trying to make meaning from absurdity. And there are our chains of events, right? So there are things that connect and everything ultimately is connected at the same time.
Right? So we have to try to connect the events that are important to us. And that’s where you get like this mapping function in your own mind. You’re saying this means this, right. This thing happened. And that means this to me. And so what I like thinking about a lot is what principles are informing those, uh, assignments and the, the things that when we’re making these assignments in our everyday world, something happens to us and we assign it, meaning we do that naturally.
We can’t help it, our biases or assumptions, they all inform how we make meaning of whatever’s happening around us. And in order to really. Take control of that. You have to align with certain principles. And I think that’s what ultimately the Renaissance was about, which I really admire. And I want to take whatever we can learn from that past history that kind of elevated human thought and higher thought and apply it to our future. And personally.
Ben: So why did you decide to pursue understanding, learning specifically?
Jenny: Um, I think that’s just something that’s fascinated me since I was a kid. My parents… my mom was a teacher. My grandparents were teachers. My, my grandpa was a coach, but his, his entire existence centered around kind of melding the body and the mind and creating these, I don’t know, experiences for people that help them do that.
Like, he ran a sports school in a ski school that helped people understand how their bodies and minds work together for an extent develop that, you know, a physical sense of space.
Ben: And so this brings us to the learning process, which is a model that you’ve started to develop and share and I’m thinking how we develop ourselves, how others develop around us.
How did a model come into being like a lot of times how things start is an interesting question because, um, some people put a bunch of things on the table and try to sort through the mess. other people kind of meander through different like experiences and try to sort through those experiences make sense of them.
How did you kind of come to create this learning process.
Jenny: Um, I saw another graphic and that was similar to what, what I created, um, that had, uh, had fewer zones and had fewer behavioral things. And I’d been going through a lot of like, really stressful situations at the time and really started looking at what, what, what I was experiencing and what, what helped bring me joy.
What helped like me helped me calm down and help me learn. And as I was trying to learn, what helped me learn faster. Um, and then I was also reading, I think, um, Algorithms to Live By. So it kind of takes computer algorithms and applies them to like your life. It’s an it’s, I don’t know, 2014 book or somewhere around there, but, um, it talked about the explore exploit algorithm and, and a few others that you can use in your life.
And I, I. Wanted to kind of create my own explore exploit algorithm. And, and so I just looked at, I combined all of these things and um, what the learners mindset was all about, what the growth mindset with what a Senator and Sanford there’s, there’s a lot of just.
Things that I just started putting in here, and this seems to fit here and this kind of, you know, if I do this, then these things connect and the questioning process that you go through when you’re trying to assign, meaning will often start with what just happened and when did it happen, and then kind of where and what, and that helps you relate what you’ve assigned internally to external. Uh, two external, similar things, perhaps. So you’re assigning meaning, then you’re relating meaning, um, you’re exploring what’s going on. And then you’re able to build and exploit that like build, build off of that. So there’s so many thoughts there and I’m still trying to like, Get them into a straight line so that it makes sense for other people, but it’s like this explosion of things for me that I’ve, I’ve seen all these things that, that kind of one follow the other, like, like an event sourcing pattern or something, you know, with domain-driven design.
It’s like, these are the things that happen in order to build up, uh, The added context of language and understanding, right? And it happens on an internal level for a human being. It happens when we write software, it happens as anything is trying to learn something like whether it’s a computer, an animal, a person it’s the learning process.
Ben: Yeah. So I see there are kind of, uh, it looks like five kind of spaces, um, and it all starts with an event. Um, and it seems like there’s a progression of sorts from the comfort zone to the explore zone, to the related zone. So the relate zone and the exploit zone, and then beyond that is kind of this trauma space and.
How does all this kind of work like walk is the event that starting point. And then how does this kind of all unfold?
Jenny: Yeah. It’s an event or an observation, right. Something that you observe and it starts out like if it comes in and it’s something, it’s a known event, you understand it. Then you’re, you’re hanging out in the comfort zone.
If it’s something you’re ignoring that it might be a weak signal that doesn’t fit quite into your comfort zone. So you just ignore it. Um, if those things keep on happening, they might in one, you know, like week events might circle you around into the trauma zone. If they keep happening and you keep ignoring them, if they’re super like.
If there’s such strong events, like probably what COVID has been for a lot of people, it’s such a powerful event that it just shoots them straight through to the trauma zone and two coping mechanisms and freezing and running away and fighting and angry, you know? So like all of these responses that we see in.
The world out, out there, like people protesting and people like hunkering down in their house. And all of those are trauma responses to this super strong event as high pressure event that makes it hard to learn. Right. And so if they can dial it back and start asking questions and exploring what’s going on, and they start looking at the new sources and the sources that they trust and really asking questions, is that really true?
What does this mean to me? And so that ties into those, these five questions that I’ve come up with that really help you explore in while you’re in the exploration zone to relate to your, to relate what’s going on to yourself and begin. Building and expanding your comfort zone.
Ben: And so walk us through kind of how to process or begin processing an event in terms of this framework.
I see a lot of different words that are sort of associated with each of the spaces in the model. And I was kind of wondering how, like, this might work in your brain, as you, as you, as you walk through, come up potentially traumatizing event, like a COVID-19 response. Like, how does this work?
Jenny: So let’s say we all, you know, COVID, we have something happens that scares us.
We start. Worrying about it. We start cycling on it. We start having flashbacks to like, I was sick and I don’t want my family to die. I’ve I’ve seen people die before and it’s not fun to go through or, you know, and you’re kind of thrashing around trying to figure things out. Um, that would be kind of an exploration zone.
If you stay in the idea of questioning what’s going on. And started questioning, “okay, why am I feeling this way? What does it say? You know, what does it making me think about? What, what can I learn from this? And how can I mitigate and anticipate?” You know, like, and that ties into anticipatory awareness, which is why I was so fascinated with it.
Right. So in the exploration zone, you’re questioning you have questions more than answers. And then in the relate zone, you start relating those questions to things that you’re observing and seeing and the environment outside of yourself. So you’re going to start hypothesizing. You’re going to start experimenting.
If you have psychological safety. But you might also be experiencing imposter syndrome. You might be feeling like, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve got to start making comparisons between this situation and other situations that are similar and, you know, uh, you might start critiquing what’s happening and saying, I don’t think this is right.
If you keep questioning and saying, why don’t I think this is right? Why don’t I think what’s happening is. Is a good response to the situation. You can actually do research and keep learning and build better responses. And that’s where you start looking at, you know, measurements. What, why, why is COVID different than the flu?
Well, there’s an exponential mathematical difference and you can start measuring that and seeing this is why we’re responding in this way versus why we don’t do this when we have the flu. Uh, and, and then you can. Start seeing, how can I get better at understanding these responses? Well, I can go learn a little bit more about the math that really goes into understanding what, what, uh, how viruses spread, you know, that’s, that’s just one example.
Uh, and then you could, you know, build something that allows you to build a mental model that allows you to respond in a better way as you’re moving through this, this experience, this event.
Ben: And is there like kind of a feedback loop that occurs where you’re trying not to escape the exploit zone. You’re trying to stay in different forms of the explore, relate and exploit.
How, how does the progression unfold beyond the initial cycle? Does it loop back?
Jenny: Oh yeah. I mean, you could. Depending on what’s going on. It, depending on the questions you’re answering, you could end up in any one of these places at any point in time, but it does loop back in the sense that you’re feeling comfortable.
Once you get comfortable, like there’s a certain level of comfort. And I think I’ve got a quote on the screen that says, if you’re too comfortable, you’re not productive. And if you’re too uncomfortable, you’re not productive. And. Productive is one thing. I mean, you can take it for what you will, but you can, you can understand it from the sense of growth, I would say more than anything and learning.
So if you’re too comfortable, you’re not learning. If you’re too uncomfortable, you’re not learning. And I think that’s a better, better way of looking at it
Ben: One of the interesting kind of problems with model development is how do you test it? How do you get feedback on it? How do you actually put it into the world to see how it holds up and like models are. Like, why, why are models useful? Right? Like, w we’re we’re trying to understand a space and try to act more meaningfully within it.
How have you been trying to get feedback on the learning process? And as you do get that feedback, what, what is, how, how is that actually changing your view on the world through the lens of a model?
Jenny: So I’ve been trying to float it with other people I’ve been trying to test. Test. It’s just an observational model.
It’s not like fully vetted by any organization at this point. But I’ve been trained to send it to people and see what they think and see if it actually describes their experiences and get feedback in that way. So that I posted it on Twitter. I posted it to my friends and, and they’ve given me critiques and they’ve told me what they’ve thought and that’s where I’m at with it.
Um, I’ve definitely added. And I keep adding more things. Like if you look at what I posted on Twitter versus the link, like it’s grown, I call it the build zone now, because I thought exploit is a little bit of a manipulate, you know, like for a lot of people explore, it can have a ton of manipulation. And I D I don’t want that.
I think, you know, manipulation is not generally going to help us build a better build, a better world.
Ben: And the exploit word in particular, in theory of constraints, that’s part of the central terminology. And it’s also something that we’ve struggled with, like understanding how to, uh, if you want to make a concept accessible to a whole group of people, then you have to reckon with the fact that. This will be perceived that way people will have negative reactions to it based on just the word choice alone.
So you change the word to, from exploit to build, and that of course opens up a whole, the new set of worlds and problems.
Jenny: Um, so ultimately communication is about transfer of meaning and transfer of understanding. So for me that when you have a visual model, you can transfer, you know, a picture’s worth, worth a thousand words. You can transfer meaning more quickly and more easily.
And, uh, take, uh, I think Simon Wardley went on about this, where you can take the, the, take, the personal out of it, take the ego out of it and just. Say, here’s this thing on a map. I disagree with what you’re actually mapping here. Now let’s talk about it and break it down and pull it apart.
Ben: Yeah. A lot of times the places that we need to disagree, um, most critically are implicit or tacit and they’re kind of hidden.
And, um, the difficulty that that introduces into an organization is that we can’t actually confronted, um, Like I’ve been, uh, getting into Sidney Dekker’s work, um, particularly as a book called drift into failure. And it’s, it’s very much like focused on like how we try to rationalize a way, like, The kinds of, um, kind of ways that the things fail and we like to have causes and effects and be able to point to the thing that caused all the problems.
But the, yeah, the problem is when it is all about like collective meeting that we have together in a group and we’re trying to build stuff together, um, it’s, what’s not said is what’s not discussed and what isn’t actually, um, brought forward. To be critiqued or to be explicitly recognized that ends up shaping things in ways we can’t anticipate which can cause our failure.
So like we, we don’t get to have an event to say caused the problems that we’re all experiencing at work. We only have these like tacit things underneath the surface. And knowing that you’ve spent a lot of time trying to extract tacit, meaning from like what’s going on just in your head, um, from, from a group perspective, like having models really allows you to sort of have a container for people to go, Oh yeah, I have one of those in my head and here it is, Oh, yours looks different.
Like what’s going on there. And then you have that conversation. And suddenly th the it’s not that everyone has the same picture in their head, but they start to have. Overlapping pictures of similar things in their head. That’s and it’s like, it’s not the elephant. It’s like, I have my part of the elephant in my head.
And you have your part of the elephant, your head, but there’s sort of enough overlap for us to be, make sense, I guess. So when you think about how to create visual models and how to create the space for that kind of conversation, Like what kind of objections usually come up or what kind of problems do people encounter when talking through this kind of stuff?
Jenny: Um, a lot of the things that I know notice is that words have two different meanings. Yeah. You know, that’s really what it comes down to. Like the same word means different things, depending, depending on. How you’re looking at it. There’s, there’s a graphic of like someone looking at a six from one side and a nine from the other, you know, it’s like, well, this is a nine, this is a six.
It’s actually both. It just is. Depending on your perspective, um, you might see different parts of the elephant in different ways. And so. The stories that people are telling might have some conjunction. They might have some level of similarity, but they’re looking completely differently and trying to bring people together in that.
Ben: Excellent. So one of the other things that I know that you have a lot of expertise on, is this concept, um, am I saying it right? Kything?
Jenny: Mm, yeah, Kything it’s um, It’s a word that I learned about as a kid from Madeleine L’Engle and her book wind in the door. And I went to a conference on relating with people it’s called relay con it’s an awesome conference and fun, fun people that I, that I really enjoy.
I’m going to speak there this year, but they canceled it. I was sad. I was disappointed, but, um, When I was up there, I woke up one morning and I was completely alone in the hotel room and it was just a gorgeous morning and I was so I was excited to be there. And. I started conceptualizing around. If I wanted to share how could I share this experience?
How could I share these feelings? How could I share what I’m seeing? How could I share what I’m smelling? How could I share my senses with another person? And it reminded me of this kything experience that one of the characters in that book has, and, you know, while I can’t have telepathy with someone, I can get as close as… possibly I possibly can using words and using poetries and art. I could draw a picture. I could take a picture. I can photograph it. I could record it. I can describe, describe it to someone. And for me, that’s what Kything is about trying to share the totality of an experience with another person.
And like, I think ultimately, like the word means to announce, to proclaim, to declare, tell, to make known in words, to make manifest and to make visible. So being psychologically present with another person, um, it’s like the idea of trying to see through another person’s eyes, even though you really can’t.
Ben: And like, just if you could distinguish that from the idea of empathy, right. Trying to live or understand someone else’s experiences. What’s the difference, from a fundamental standpoint,
Jenny: from a fundamental standpoint, I think empathy has an end goal in mind, oftentimes like you’re empathizing, whereas this is just more about the sense of the experience without any like value judgements, or a lot of times people, when they’re asking for empathy, they’re in, they’re in pain and they need you to put yourself in that position. Um, for me, kything is less about, you know, meeting some need beyond the, beyond the sh the sharing of. Who you are and your experience or being shared with, by someone else.
Ben: Hmm. So what does kything look like? Sound like?
Jenny: when I’ve done it with friends, for example, uh, we both, it’s almost like a co meditation. Like you can do it wherever and it’s just like put yourself in a calm state and describe something that you remember very clearly.
Describe how you felt, describe what what’s happening in your body. Describe what, what you remember of the light, used as much language as he possibly can to put that person there. Um, be open to questions, be open to, um, greater understanding using maybe different words than you might. If, if they’re saying, I don’t understand, it’s, it’s a very focused set of attention.
So it’s, we don’t often do this, I think with other people, any, any more, it’s not something it’s an intentional empathy, perhaps, but it’s an intentional empathy with no and goal. And. It could be you sharing a poem and listening intently and trying to really understand what’s going on. It could be listening to music, but it is about the intention that you’re putting into it.
Um, I think all art is a form of kything, but it’s about a, to a certain extent. It’s about the conversation with the, the observer as well as the creator.
Ben: Thank you for sharing that with me. so I’m curious since learning has been kind of a theme of today, um, what you’ve been learning about lately.
Jenny: I’ve been, I’ve been, Oh gosh, Friday. I started looking into how, how to do like vector maps with, with vectors, because I’d like to actually take the flow model of emotions and map them on a vector graph.
And I’ve been talking to my friends about doing that and doing some research into tools that would make that easy.
Ben: That’s really cool! I kind of liked the idea of connection and people learning about the models that you’re playing with and the ideas that you’re pursuing.
So where can people find you? Should they follow you on Twitter or, uh, do you have a website? Anything else they should know?
Jenny: I just have a Twitter and I have.
I guess I have a medium page where I write a lot of poetry. I have an Instagram where I post some of the art that I paint and maybe eventually I’ll post some of the music that I write.
Ben: With time, time, energy, and motivation, and maybe less pandemic. I don’t know. Um, yeah. Well, thanks for being here with me, Jenny, and thanks so much for sharing about kything and about the learning process and just sharing your time with us.
Jenny: Thank you, Ben. I appreciate it. It’s fun. It’s been great.
Ben and Jenny discuss the absurdity of life, how to create and test learning models, and a unique approach to experience sharing known as "kything."
In the midst of a pandemic, Andrew Clay Shafer and Ben Mosior talk transformation, hope, and civic duty. Recorded March 23, 2020.
In the midst of a pandemic, Andrew Clay Shafer and Ben Mosior talk transformation, hope, and civic duty. Recorded March 23, 2020.
Listen to more of Andrew’s talks:
- There Is No Talent Shortage (Velocity NYC 2013) (Ben’s notes)
- DevOps Progressions: Teaching Old DevOps New Tricks (DOES18 Las Vegas) (Ben’s notes)
Andrew’s logo (@littleidea) Follow Andrew on Twitter (@littleidea):
Always Take Sideshttps://t.co/EE83pEHOjs#BlackLivesMatter
— Andrew Clay Shafer 雷启理 (@littleidea) June 4, 2020
Transcript Ben: Hey everyone, this is Ben Mosior from the Hired Thought podcast. This conversation is with Andrew Clay Shafer and he and I got together back in March of 2020 to do a little bit of discussion around kind of context of transformation, but it turns out that was also right around when the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to really take hold in the United States. So this episode is a bit of a reflective moment in an otherwise chaotic circumstance.
Andrew’s been kind of a role model for me with organizational transformation and he’s given a lot of really good talks that I highly recommend. I’ll put those in the show notes. If you like what you hear today, definitely go check those out. And with that, we’ll kick things off.
Andrew: So how are you doing?
Ben: I dunno, I, I’m oscillating kind of wildly these days between despair, anger, sadness, and I like to think that usually the way that ends up is, I feel inspired.
Because nobody else is going to figure out how to work through this stuff. So, you know, I don’t know. I’m in it for the long term. See you in two years.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s, that’s a, I think reality is going to be significantly reconfigured in a matter of months. Which is, we’re in a moment in time where by circumstance most of the world is being forced to have this shared experience,
As horrible as it might end up being, um, by the end of it.
But we we’re like forced to confront it.
it’s, it’s basically you have kind of operational posture about proactive prevention. And then you have, the, the reactive incident management. And at this point, we’re, we’re in an incident management mitigation scenario, especially in, in kind of like the Western world where if you look at what happened in Korea, they, they had an outbreak. Um, they definitely, had infections and they had some deaths.
But because of their, their posture with respect to outbreaks, in near memory, they’re, they’re 18 years removed from SARS outbreaks, going, going back to 2002. They, they were able to activate this kind of preemptive, proactive response, which was predicated on thermal checkpoints, fever clinics, and forced isolation so that they could remain, in, in a bit more kind of normal operating, structure and functions than I think you’re going to see in most of the, the Western countries.
Ben: Yeah. So they had the sensitivity to the narrative around SARS. So they were able to anticipate another situation like this. And frankly, we were able to anticipate this as well. It’s just, we cut off the heads of the, you know, the organizations that were supposed to do that.
Now, one might say that in the United States, who knows whether or not even if that those organizations were fully functioning, whether or not we would have been effectively able to deal with this like federalism thing, right? Like States are still States. I kind of view the United States more like an EU-like entity.
And so what do you, what do you think. There’s a decentralized versus centralized response thing here, and there’s the problem of collectivism versus individualism,
how…
Andrew: I almost think the second is more important. And if you look at what’s happening in Europe, they, they weren’t, they weren’t any better prepared from a pandemic prevention proactive perspective to, to do this or handle this any more than the US was.
And. You know, I think Korea is probably the best model that we can look at where they had a significant outbreak, and then were able to kind of bend that curve to zero. I mean, I, I don’t know about anyone else out in the world, but I, I’ve, I’ve had a hard time not consuming as much, like information about COVID and this pandemic as I possibly could. And tracking this, I started having conversations with some of my friends in Asia as early as, you know, mid January about some of the stuff that they were seeing or preparing for. And then, and then just kind of watch that evolve over, over the last few months. It’s been, it’s been like standing on a beach that you could see the tsunami coming towards.
And there’s no high ground. And I was like, well, what are you going to do?
Ben: We have this cynical frame, right? Nobody’s changing their behavior. And it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about enterprise IT, or if we’re talking about large wholesale response to pandemic conditions, right? Nobody’s changing their behavior or behaviors…
Andrew: Is that cynical, though? I mean, it’s a statement of fact, in some sense to me more than, than I frame it. I don’t, I don’t necessarily believe that that’s cynical, like,
Ben: okay, okay.
Andrew: But the opportunity, but the opportunity is also to change your behaviors.
Right. And, and who knows what will reconfigure coming out of this, but lots of things that were, you know, “impossible” even a few weeks ago, all of a sudden people are like, “Oh yeah, that seems like completely reasonable now as an action,” right? It’s like we, we got away from, we were, we were forced to get away from, “Oh, what’s like this moderate incremental way that we can kind of change,” to like, “We better change.”
When, when I talk about changing behaviors in the framing of enterprise IT, you know, like I, I think much larger than enterprise IT, but, but that is sort of where my career thrust me. Right? It’s like, because that’s where I ended up. So, so to make it not cynical, and, and I, I hope that I do this when I’m talking to other people.
It’s not just that people aren’t changing their behavior. There literally is people who have changed and, and there’s a demonstrable competitive advantage. Right? So, so just in that kind of like narrow framing of enterprise IT where most of my, kind of talks about this have lived, you, you do have the, these exemplar companies who have done amazing things, and they do it in a way that is fundamentally different from the kind of “traditional” enterprise IT. And it’s so different in, in some sense, that it’s almost viewed as unbelievable. Right?
So when, when we first started talking about 10 deploys per day and the kind of, you know, beginning of like these devops things at Flickr. So there’s like a very famous Velocity Conference talk people. People thought that was not true. And anyone who would do that is irresponsible, where now it’s, it’s basically passe. So it’s not that people aren’t changing, it’s just like how fast. Can you take advantage of new information to catalyze the change that is demonstrably and provably better for all these other reasons? Right? So If you want to play a new game, if you want to get into the Pareto inefficient thing, it’s basically showing you, here’s this way that you could get things to be better for yourself and nothing would be worse for anyone if you could simply change X, Y, and Z. And, and, and that’s being thrust upon all of us right now.
Ben: So we’re pointing at the existence of exemplars, right? We’re pointing at, the Netflixes of the world. What have you and…
Andrew: South Korea.
Ben: Exactly. Yeah. but it doesn’t do anything for us to now say that South Korea exists. We are here though. So how… Changing behavior looks like, what? I know you can’t tell us what to do and you can only tell us what you’ve seen, but what does changing your behavior actually look like right now? Because the reason this is important to Andrew in my mind is that because of this instability.
It means we get to shape the transition. It means that thoughtful, purposeful action right now means we get to change what the game becomes. Now, whether or not we take agency in that process is a different question. Whether or not, we have the knowledge and the skills to do that is another question, but the existence of exemplars, I mean, maybe that gives us a desirable future state, but what are we literally doing now.
Andrew: So, so I think I understand, the, the framing and the question, and where you’re trying to take this. I think that the, in some ways it’s, it’s not the right way to frame it in the beginning, but I, I like how it ends. and the reason I say that is we’re, we’re actually in the incident right now.
Ben: Yes.
Andrew: Right. So, so like doesn’t matter how well someone could have prevented an incident that they’re literally in right now.
And so all of the behaviors that you have to do in an incident to manage it, are… should never be confused with what you want to be the “normal.” Right.
Ben: Right.
Andrew: And, and I, I personally don’t know exactly how this ends or like what the reconfiguration looks like, but I will say this, the only way that we get a chance to reconfigure this as individuals is through our collective voice and by active political participation right so when you look at one of the things I like to talk about in kind of the context of of mapping or like strategy. And you know, one of my favorite games is chess. It doesn’t matter how well you understand the way the chessboard is set up, if you don’t have the, the ability to touch the pieces, if you don’t have the ability to move the pieces and, and the way that our our whole thing is set up, the only way that I see us getting things reconfigured in, in a more beneficial, more positive way, is by activating our collective political consciousness, and participating. Right?
So one of the things is, I think put us in this situation , not, not about, you know, distributed or collective or whatever, is like we, we literally abdicated our political responsibilities to allow, you know, and we could, we could describe why and how this happened over over decades, but we haven’t really been participating or driving this world in a positive way because we’ve all had, you know, some of you might be familiar with this metaphor of bread and circuses. Like we had enough bread, we had enough circuses and, and it’s like, okay. We’ll just let the, we’ll let the emperors do what they want.
Ben: so I’m going to point at urgency, right? How many times have you heard an IT leader say there’s no urgency about something, right?
Andrew: Uh, more than zero times. Yeah.
Ben: Change your behavior.
Why, right? Why would I bother changing my behavior? this is a moment where it’s going to be really clear who leaders are and who leaders aren’t. And on top of that, there’s, it’s a moment where it’s gonna be really clear how much your values are worth, whether or not they’re on a page on your website, right?
So in this moment, I’m expecting. Leaders to do certain things, even if they’re in the middle of the incident right now, to notice the focus and attention that we have on what we’re feeling and experiencing right now. How are they going to marshall that energy towards changing our collective behavior.
And I, I literally want to know how we’re going to no longer abdicate our political responsibility. And I can’t ask you to tell the future, but if your responsibility is to marshall the energy of the people in your organization, to use that energy on purpose in this moment, what are you doing? What are you thinking?
Andrew: So just because it’s the domain that have the most kind of exposure and experience with, I’ll drag it back to kind of the IT, you know, framing. In, in some real sense there are organizations who, because of the core business that they run, probably rightfully should not have urgency or they don’t, they don’t have the necessary urgency, right?
And so there’s, there’s this kind of mismatch where people are talking about, “Oh, you know, the, the, the Netflix and the, and the Googles and the, and the opportunity to create these, these like technical, digital experiences.” And then you have the reality of what we do and what we sell, right? And like, here’s our IT budget, and like, it’s, it’s this small part of like this big thing that we do, which involves real world, and factories, and distribution and, and all these things. And so for, for us to reimagine all of that in, in kind of like an urgent framing, is probably too much, right? Like we, we’re going to, we’re going to do these things this way and we don’t necessarily have something that forces us to change.
And with that framing, looking at what I’ve seen kind of as a pattern across industries and across organizations is when you start talking about kind of transformation and changing behaviors, there’s two pre-conditions that I’ve seen that create the necessary impetus to, to be successful at transforming. And one of those is that you have someone who has both the social capital in the organization and the vision, right? So they can, they can touch the chess pieces. They have control of the, the chess board, and they have the vision for how they could play this game in a different way.
And so they come to, to, you know, get that support. They’re a leader in the true sense of the word and everyone sort of follows in that vision and brings that new vision to, to be reality. And that that’s, that’s successful or has been a pattern that I’ve seen be successful.
I’ve also seen that pattern, not be successful when they don’t quite have the social capital they thought they had and they get crushed as a rebel. And then, and then the second one, which is in some ways more relevant to, to the way you’re framing this, is when organizations are faced with an existential crisis, right? So when you’re in a business that can see the way that digital experiences will start to, to bend the dynamics and assumptions of how you’ve built that business over time. And, and you know, sometimes these businesses are a hundred years old, right?
So insurance, healthcare, or whatever is feeling certain things and they’re experiencing certain things, you know. And, and I’ll just take insurance as an example. Insurance is basically kind of having a pool of money and being able to build models and do math, and then like, you sell this thing and it’s, it’s not that it’s ever been really that differentiated, but you know, you have this distribution model and these sales models that allow you to do that.
You move into a modern, situation. Google has a lot of money. Google’s pretty good at doing math. Amazon has a lot of money. Amazon is pretty good doing math. Even Walmart has a lot of money. They’re pretty good at doing math, and there’s like signals that they could get involved in different aspects of health insurance, car insurance, you know, whether cars will even exist is like another question, right?
So you see these sort of edges change of where those opportunities and where those crises are, and, and so those industries kind of in a rolling fashion start to feel this existential pressure to change. And so you’re starting to see sort of meaningful changes in the, in those organizations that feel the existential pressure feel, the feel, the existential prices.
Ben: Yeah, that makes sense. And I’m going to push you on this a little bit because I think you, you have some super secret ingredients that maybe people haven’t seen yet. Or maybe you’re, you know, you’re stuck like the rest of us, who knows? I think that the way you frame this is really helpful, right?
Do you have the social capital to harness the energy of the people, the hearts and minds, and the vision to actually be going somewhere worth going to, right? To actually long for a sea that’s worth longing for. And on the other side of this, there’s the existential kind of moment.
So we are in an existential moment right now, right? I don’t think individuals in the United States in particular feel like they have agency in any meaningful container. Not, not a company, not a team. Barely a family unit. Right. I don’t think people really have, feel like they have agency at a large enough scale to be able to rally around something. And leadership is broadly absent at every level of this sort of government, local community, that kind of thing. I’m gonna, I’m going to assert this for a moment, right?
And then on top of that. Nobody’s coming to save us. There is no leader right now with a vision. There is no leader with broad social capital who could swoop in and save the day right now.
So let me pose this question, Andrew. If nobody’s coming to save us and we can’t even save ourselves. What’s the path forward? How does every individual in the United States becomes sensitized to this issue such that some small percentage of them start to notice that they could become leaders and actually create a new scope that is local enough that they could build that agency?
What is, what is the first step of changing our behavior in that regard?
Andrew: There’s so much there. There’s so much. So I don’t even, I don’t, I’m not sure where to start. I, I think that the, one of the example you gave, and, and, and I’m, you know, publicly a fan of Bernie Sanders, in, in some ways, like he came with a bit of a vision.
He got, he got some momentum, but he didn’t have the social capital in the, in the established power dynamics, and essentially got kind of blacklisted, from, from some of the conversation. Right. So there’s like, interesting dynamic there in parallel. I think the way that you framed it, no one’s coming to save us and we can’t even save ourselves.
You essentially said we’re doomed, which is like, okay. Mmm. And, and, and if you just look at the numbers. And model it out or whatever. Like there’s probably going to be some disruption and some death, but this isn’t the end of the world. Um, There’s been pandemics and there will be, kind of a, a re-imagining and a reconfiguration of this.
And, and going back to, this sort of political, civic duty, the, the whole idea, philosophical idea, of a functional democracy, in my understanding and opinion, is sort of predicated on activated, educated participation.
Ben: Okay. So what are the conditions for activated educated participation?
Andrew: Well, I, I’m not, I’m not sure there are conditions, and in some sense I would say that a lot of what we consider modern “experiences” is in some ways, maybe not by design, but, but certainly by function, taking us away from activated educated participation. Right? So it’s like the bread and circuses.
So the, the way that I would hope that people start to think about this. And I wouldn’t consider myself a greatest example for my whole life, but I’ve become more and more, um, understanding of the political process and trying to be more and more active. And I think we over-rotate onto, these like large scale events and, and, and, you know, the, the elections at the national level, when in reality there’s, there’s tons of civic responsibility on, on the local level, on the city level, on the county level, on the state level, that have a huge impact on how we and everyone else around us lives. And you know, again, kind of finding that tension between the collectivist and the individual. I think one of the things that I personally feel- I was a libertarian, like I was, I was part of a libertarian like college organization. Like actually the president at one point. And, and, like, I believe in, you know, my personal ability and like this liberty and all this stuff. And then as I, as I experienced more of life and I experienced more humanity, then I, I rejected most of those ideas, through, through my logic.
And I think those ideas have essentially been obliterated in the last few weeks in the United States. Because everything is connected, like the life that we have, no one’s an island. We’re, we’re all, we’re all kind of in this together. And so finding the ability to grow those connections… Like, like the framing of devops is basically, you have these humans, we’re trying to do this thing that’s meaningful to them and for, for a variety of reasons, they’re not communicating, collaborating, working effectively together.
And so if you just, if you just try to expand that system thinking to everything about all of humans and what we experience, then the more that we can have empathy for what other humans experience and make choices that will, kind of from this Pareto inefficient framing, not make it worse for them, you know, for, for not making it better for ourselves, then then like we’re going to have a better world. But it has to be built up locally, citywide, countywide, statewide, countrywide. And, and there’s no, there’s no way, just the way the, the scope and scale of this is globally, that any one centralized thing can, can kind of fix all of these things for us.
Ben: I follow that and what it helps me, actually, this is sort of sort of selfish, I am trying to figure out what, how to act as an individual, right? I, like, do this mapping thing and I sort of come to recently, know, that mapping is about what you can know together. And so I think if we can know things together, then we can start working on problems like this, but it requires kind of a fundamental kind of problem statement.
And look, I’m not, I’m not actually saying that we’re doomed because if we don’t have agency to actually act now and nobody’s coming to save us, what this is, is an extraordinary opportunity. Millions of people are going to die. Right? That’s just the frank truth of it. And this is an enormous opportunity for us to do better things.
So as a problem statement, we have to be aware of the realities of the situation. Not everyone’s going to make it, but what can we work on together to actually gain agency to become more capable of designing, right? Whatever this future pathway is, not some ideal whatever, but to start moving and start learning from that movement.
And frankly to change our behavior,
Andrew: So I love, I love the mapping community and I love kind of mapping as an activity. Uh, one of the things I think is interesting, in conversation with, with some people in that community is what I consider like an over kind of rotation, an emphasis on the map that information and having that shared information is interesting. And kind of like an under, so that’s like a sensor, but you, you need to activate something. You need to, you need to take the actions…
Ben: You have to do something.
Andrew: You have to do something. And so like that’s where I think there, there’s a huge opportunity, is taking the information, and I’ll go back to the chess metaphor.
Like if you, if you have the perfect understanding of the best move, but you can’t make it, then like it doesn’t matter. Right? So, so what we, what we can do with this shared information is hopefully build coalitions of, not just understanding, but coalitions of action that can, that can start to make meaningful, things happen.
So, so getting to the point where we all agree there’s a problem is one thing, getting to the point where we all agree that if we could, you know, move this one, dynamic component, whatever, in a certain way, is another. Then being able to actually move it is, is where the magic happens. And I think that that’s like a huge opportunity, but also I don’t want to, minimize what some of those challenges are going to be, when you look at the larger power dynamics.
Ben: I believe that the mapping community right now, you know, it’s, it’s young, but it is a little bit over indexed on people who are sort of enjoying the theoretical understanding of mapping as a thing and like the knowing is the satisfying part for them. And that’s fine.
But it’s not actually going to change anything. So what I’m trying to do right now, and this is like a little impromptu plug, is I’m trying to create space for people to play and work together in order to do things. So, for listeners at home, if you like Wardley Mapping, if you like working on problems and actually turning it into action.
Then, um, we’re running events every week at learnwardleymapping.com/events come learn mapping, do group mapping sessions, work on things that matter, and then do stuff, do things. You’re going to mess it all up and that’s going to be fine. But do things. Change behavior. This is, I think this is how we turn knowledge into action is by actually putting it into the world.
I don’t think we’re doomed. Right. I do think we have a tremendous opportunity right now, and I’m grateful that you’ve helped frame the problem. Hope is the kind of thing that gets us through situations like this one, but it also can preemptively destroy our ability to stay for the duration, to stay engaged. And I, I want us to be thinking about hope in terms of what the next five to ten years look like and not what the next two to three weeks looks like.
So Andrew, I want to ask you, what right now is giving you the most hope?
Andrew: Interesting framing. I, I have three kids and you know, I, I’m in a, in a place that I’m, I’m pretty far from, you know, real community spread at this point, but I’ve been watching this all evolve, and to be honest, one of the things that gives me the most hope, and this might sound a little silly and certainly political, but just watching some of the energy around the Senator Sanders campaign and some of the personalities that are activated, and I believe that that is, that’s representative of a real collectivist movement to change things for the better in a meaningful way. So that that’s something that I’m hopeful for and that I hope, I personally hope, drives more and more of the conversation.
It’s, it’s interesting to watch the, the framing just in the last few weeks, change from how unrealistic Medicare for all was and how troubling it would be to figure out how to fund it, to watching, you know, literally trillions of dollars be vaporized at a whim and being forced to reconcile how healthcare for any individual is impacting the health care of every individual. and, and lots of what the, these proposals look like, in the larger scheme of the world, are actually quite moderate compared to to what other countries have adopted wholesale.
So that’s certainly something like, I believe if you think about democracy and individualism and all the rest of the things that Americans love to hold up as their values, that there is a, a world that we can build where democracy and, and the, the things that we create and experience are built by a community of people who are educated and healthy.
So, I hope that we can reimagine a society where the foundation of economics is predicated on an educated, and healthy group of individuals that, that not necessarily are completely collectivists. Like I, I enjoy being individual. I enjoy having some measures of freedom, but, but I’m, I’m empathizing with the, the lowest and, and the highest members of our society in a way that I’m, I’m willing like, I, I would fund, tax the crap out of me, like healthcare for all, and like, educate everyone. Like why, why would you, if you’re moving into a world where you actually believe knowledge work matters, and this kind of work matters, why wouldn’t you want the most educated people to, to be the ones driving that?
We live in interesting times. And the reality is that the historical moments, if you go back through through time, we read about them far removed in time, most of them probably were not very pleasant to experience firsthand.
But, but humans have, have gone through bad things before, and we have, some measured capacity to be resilient and re-imagine, um, lots of these things. So what we have basically taken for granted as realities about economics, as reality, reality about money, currency, ownership, all of these things are, are social constructs.
There’s no objective truth to the majority of those things and we are kind of at a unique time where we could potentially re-imagine aspects of that in a way that’s beneficial for all of us.
Ben: Yeah. There there’s no better way to realize how much is made up than spending time with executives.
Andrew: Yes.
Ben: So on a, on a more lighthearted note, I had a personal curiosity.
And, you every talk you have given, you begin with a little bit of your background and your sort of biography. And then you always mentioned that you’re so narcissistic that you have your own logo and. I want to know what’s behind that. I think what I want to know, what led you to make a logo and what it means to you?
Is that something you’d be open to sharing?
Andrew: So, I mean, on the spectrum of narcissism, I mostly say that as a tongue in cheek, but I definitely have an individualist streak and you know, some, healthy feelings about my own capabilities. You know, over over time you kind of come to a figure out who you are, hopefully.
And so, so I designed a logo and there there’s, there’s sort of like a longer version of it, but it’s essentially a drop, like a, a raindrop. And there’s kind of a, a stylized or idealized Yin-Yang inside of the, of the teardrop. And then the, the, the raindrop teardrop or whatever is, is creating ripples.
And so there’s, you know, there’s a bunch of symbolism and I won’t, I won’t necessarily, go through all of my thinking and how I got to that. But it’s basically like balancing these, these elements and these forces of light and darkness and then, and then having this kind of cascading rippling impact and that, that’s sort of like the.
The, the, the first level explanation.
Ben: That’s amazing. Thanks so much for sharing and I really want to express gratitude for you being willing to share your time with me today and talk through this stuff. I’m, I’ve always wondered a lot of the, the kinds of questions that you answered today, and it’s, it’s really helped me understand a lot more about how you think, but also, honestly, it has given me hope because I have been sitting here, thinking about all the…
Andrew: In the flames
Ben: in the flames, thinking about all the stupid little sticky notes on my Kanban board and like, do any of these matter? Does any of this work matter? And I think you’ve helped me see how it matters. And you’ve also given me hope for what we can do to take the next few steps in the future to create our own leadership.
Andrew: We create meaning, right? Like that’s one of the things humans do. It’s, it’s the, the fact that everything’s made up doesn’t mean it isn’t meaningful. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean things. Right. And, and, yeah, one of the things that gives me hope is like me creating meaning. I like these things. I do, the motivations I have, you know, I, I don’t, I don’t pretend to know everything. I, I’m, I’m curious, but I genuinely want people to have nicer things. And that’s what motivates me. And that’s what gives my actions meaning, and so that’s what I keep trying to do. And I also wanted to express gratitude for having me and sharing this time with me. And, and I really appreciate and love watching some of the work you’re doing and the energy you’re putting into the mapping community.
Ben: That means a lot. Andrew, thanks so much. In closing, I’m going to quote something that I’ve heard Cat Swetel say. “Just cause nothing matters doesn’t mean you can’t care about stuff.” So I care about things and I care about you and thanks for being here.
Andrew: I think to a flaw, I probably care too much sometimes, but well, one quick takeaway, everyone stay safe, protect yourselves and your family.
COVID-19 is changing our society, but how are we coping? Ben is joined by digital anthropologist Dr. Caitlin McDonald to discuss our collective re-examination of common assumptions about work, community, and life.
- Read Caitlin’s latest report: Coping with quarantine: pandemics & reconfiguring the collaborative workspace
- Follow Dr. Caitlin McDonald’s work at the Leading Edge Forum
- Social Network Analysis, by John Scott
- Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O’Neil
Intro / Outro Music by DJ Quads
https://soundcloud.com/djquads
Transcript Ben: Hello everyone, and welcome to episode eight of The Hired Thought Podcast. I am very pleased to be joined today by Dr. Caitlin McDonald. Dr. Caitlin McDonald is an award winning scholar. She’s a digital anthropologist and professional thought provoker. She works for the Leading Edge Forum. And Caitlin, you describe your work as helping industry leaders make sense of our technological future.
I was wondering what does that work look like and what kind of topics do you focus on right now?
Caitlin: Yeah, absolutely. So digital anthropologist is such a, I love it because it’s, it’s a, it’s a wonderful job, but it also could mean a lot of different things. and the great thing about the word anthropology is it just means the study of people.
So that covers a lot of ground. and the digital part of course can mean anything from, I, I will bet anything Ben that you have a drawer of cables in your house that you’re saving because you think you might need them someday and you refuse to get rid of them, but you haven’t used it in years.
Ben: You’re not supposed to know that
Caitlin: This is my skill as an anthropologist. This is, this is the thing that I know. but it’s things like that, the material culture aspect of digital lives. it can be anything from looking at, remote working practices, which of course, right now many people are being forced into with little preparation and practice, to looking at digital ethics.
but in essence, I cover a range of issues that have to do with how digital, whatever that means, shows up in people’s lives.
Ben: I know you’ve been doing a lot of exploration around this topic of remote work before coronavirus really started becoming the driving constraint, I guess, for the shift to remote work, and I imagine that there are a lot of people struggling right now because they just don’t even know how to make this thing work.
But at the same time, this is kind of a liminal space where. Because we’re forced into these circumstances, we’re going to learn a lot. So from your perspective, what are the tools that people can put into play to, to learn about how remote work is unfolding in the world right now?
Caitlin: Yeah, great question. And I think the important thing to focus on is, that a lot of information is available about the actual tools themselves so, of course, there’s that. Whole situation to get used to dealing with new tools and new technologies. but really the thing that I think has to change is people’s behavior because, they, when you are used to working in an office where, for example, you have many, many times that you can have micro interactions with your colleagues and you move online and suddenly those informal places for connecting are no longer physically there for you.
How are you going to build space as in mental space? How are you going to build space for that collectively. So we’ve seen lots of different ways that people are doing that. there’s one team who I really love has called their kind of afternoon meeting for 15 minutes afternoon recess. So they all kind of go out at lunchtime and they do something and then they come back and they show off what they’ve done, or they have pictures or dogs or whatever it might be.
But there’s plenty of ways of doing that. You can create remote coffee hours. That’s one thing people have done. If you have a standing meeting already, you can, for example, introduce like a warm up or a cool down time to those kinds of meetings. but it’s really, really critical to introduce those informal ways of connecting because otherwise all of your interactions become really formal because you’ve set up a meeting and you’re going to stick to that meeting.
And that’s the meeting that we’re having and it’s very bulleted. So developing that kind of sense of low level trust is really important for when you really need the high level trust to come into play.
Ben: Yeah that makes sense. I, I’ve heard Kevin Behr just in my, in the back of my head saying, you know, your organization moves at the speed of trust and I think trust depends greatly on communication.
And then I hear Jabe Bloom on the other side of my head just going. Pointing out the difference between transactionality and reciprocity. And so when we don’t have these in person conversations where we, we have reciprocity, we have like, we can see facial expressions, we can know what it’s like to be with you when you’re feeling this way.
but now it’s like, by default, highly transactional show up in the meeting at this time. So, so what’s at stake and how can companies learn to explore this in a safe way?
Caitlin: Yeah, it’s, it’s a really wonderful question because, so many of the companies that work effectively, really well remotely, so this is in the kind of pre coronavirus pandemic situation.
What they were telling us was we, we are a remote company, but we would never say that we don’t get together physically. We always have some cadence of time that we’re spending time all together. And that really accelerates the pace at which we’re able to innovate together when we’re not together.
Because you, like you said, you’ve developed that sense of reciprocity. I understand that that person’s making a joke, or I just have that sense of, they’re a bit tense or whatever it might be. So you develop that in person at a much accelerated rate compared to what you can do offline, but then you can work really effectively, asynchronously if you have that trust established already.
So in this era where. Really being forced not to have those in person interactions. being able to develop those, those kind of micro interactions is so critical. and I, I honestly think that, in some ways we are there. and in some ways we’re not there. So we have lots of tools and technologies that support us being able to have, for example, remote calls.
but one thing that I really think is missing, for example, is being able to triangulate around something. So like, I could share my screen with you on this call right now, but essentially it’s like we’re at a table, sat across from each other, so we couldn’t then mutually say, Oh, why don’t you come look at this with me?
And nobody could kind of wander by and say, Oh, that’s cool. What are you working on? You know? So that kind of stuff, which happens very easily in person, doesn’t happen so well online. there are many great things that do happen while online. but I would suggest that scenario that I’d like to see more innovation happening, for example.
Ben: One of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately is how like literacy in the tools is not enough, and it might be that in a lot of cases, the way we facilitate these discussions and interactions is where we’re just missing so many common sense practices.
What are some of those kinds of things that you’ve seen that could enable people to more effectively attempt to experiment with things like triangulation or emulating that in a virtual space?
Caitlin: I think one of the critical things is we have an assumption that everyone has equal bandwidth and equal ability to get online and the reality of the situation is far different.
so one of the things that’s really critical is having lots of fallback mechanisms so that you can fail gracefully. So if for some reason my screen fails and I can’t present to you anymore, or we can’t be on the video call anymore, we can only do phones. having lots of kind of fallback mechanisms and redundancies that allow us to continue the, the communication flow less impeded than we otherwise would be is really, really critical.
but you then of course, have to agree all of those terms essentially in advance so that you know what’s coming. and that’s true also of our social interactions. So, having a kind of, we’ve started calling it the Manual of We, so, you know, what’s the kind of expected, essentially service level agreement for how long I can leave a message in, the team chat versus email versus whatever it is. So there’s the, having a sense of expectation about which of these channels is absolutely rapid response, which of these channels is, can you get to this when you get to it? And which of these is important or low urgency? So, really having an understanding of what do I need to be paying attention to right now, a shared collective understanding is really critical.
and then there’s some questions about, I think that the main question that I’ve been seeing over the last few days among, people who are suddenly being forced to, to remote working is video on or video off. And this is a really big debate. and my answer of course is as an anthropologist that it depends on your situation.
So, one thing I would say is if you’re having a difficult conversation, have the video on, because it’s really critical to be able to see all of those extra signals beyond what I’m saying. But other things that I’m communicating as well. the second thing I would suggest is, If you’re not in a situation where you can have your own very nice kind of work setup with a beautiful background and all of these nice things, which not everyone can, especially now if you’re, if you’re working from home and you have caring responsibilities, for example, or if you live in a city that’s overcrowded and has very high price in housing and, you can’t have your own office. you know, it’s a little bit unfair to expect people to have the video on in those situations because, it’s, it’s a bit of an intrusion. so, so thinking about those kinds of things, especially now, I’m thinking about all the, the parents in the team that I work in who are, not only trying to carry on with their regular lives, but also have family responsibilities, especially as some of their schools have been shut or their children have been quarantined because of exposure to the virus.
You know, it’s, but their lives are going to be interrupted, their working lives are going to be interrupted, and we need to be more understanding of that than previously we have been. So I think that kind of behavioral change where your, your expectation is different than it previously was, is really critical because, you know, not thinking that people are not paying attention or slacking off or whatever it is.
there are important things happening and urgent things happening in their homes as well. And so we just need to be a little bit more mindful of, being flexible about our schedules as well.
Ben: Okay. Yeah. In this moment in time, it seems reasonable to maybe lower our collective expectations of, you know, we, we, we expect certain things in the workplace, right.
Constant attention. And maybe there are some negative dynamics to that, that we get to revisit by experiencing this situation together in the, in this sort of coronavirus pandemic. I am worried like. People who are going to be caring for their kids. Like usually we kind of hold that against folks. Not, not explicitly, but implicitly in the way that we design our experiences.
I’m hoping maybe some of that gets to be revisited.
Caitlin: Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting to watch the kinds of conversations that are happening now. In particular, one area that I’ve been seeing a lot happening is in academics who are being forced to work from home, especially in couples. so you get lots of people saying, Hey.
Newton developed the theory of gravity when he was doing this. And you know, Shakespeare wrote Lear, so what are you doing? And all of the, the female academics who are, who have children or have caring responsibilities are saying, excuse me. what I’m going to be doing is all of those things. And then my husband is now like, I can write 15 million papers.
So, you know, that kind of disparity and fairness and access, which has to be honest, already been a very much existing dynamic, is really showing up right now. whether we will be able to leverage that. Towards more effective equality for everyone. I think is an open question.
Ben: Yeah. Thinking about that question in particular.
One of the topics that has really been on my radar right now is this, this thing called epistemic injustice. And, it was introduced to me by Cat Swetel and epistemic injustice is something described in a book of the same title by Dr. Miranda Fricker.
Fricker outlines two different kinds of injustice. One is about credibility and the other is about what we can even come to know because we have the language for it or don’t. And so one of the things I’m noticing even in this conversation now is that we’re starting to be able to analyze.
These circumstances, like the fact that there will be a discrepancy between what, women who are academics versus men who are academics who might or might not be sharing caring responsibilities during a time when people are being encouraged to perform social isolation and things along those lines.
We are now able to more explicitly analyze those. what does it look like from the anthropological lens. To observe a community coming into knowing that a certain kind of thing is happening.
Caitlin: I, it’s very, very difficult to talk about epistemology without delving into, areas where you have no language for what you’re trying to describe, because that is the nature of what you are trying to describe.
So I think that there are several fascinating aspects. One is that. certain kinds of social dynamics, which were already very much in existence, are now coming into the highlights of, of people’s consciousness because there is this enforced shift in their behavior. and whether that will exacerbate those existing social dynamics or provide a catalyst for change, again, I think is up for grabs, but simply the fact that it is coming to people’s notice.
although of course, many people have already noticed those dynamics for many hundreds of years. So it’s, it’s essentially, there’s a kind of novelty and yet not, which I find really interesting. I think the second thing as well is, I’ve been thinking a lot, speaking, from an anthropological perspective, less about the justice side and more about like literally the physical distancing part.
So, the reason that we have the phrase personal space comes from an anthropologist in the 1960s named Edward T. Hall, who developed a theory called proxemics. And this theory essentially outlines the kind of physical distances at which you feel, naturally that you are either in kind of an intimate space with someone, a personal space with someone, a public space or et cetera, et cetera.
You can go all the way out to kind of, you know, addressing a crowd. and the dynamics of those things are extremely different. So if I suddenly lean into my camera really far, that has a very different personal feel, in fact, I’ll do it just to kind of simulate that. Or have you ever been on a, like a, a multi-group conference call with someone and there’s someone who’s just.
Too close to the microphone and you’re, it feels really icky because it feels like they’re too close to you, even though of course, they’re like actually at a great distance from you. that’s the kind of thing where, you know, or someone standing too close to you on the tube or in the supermarket or wherever you might be.
you have a sense of when, they’ve invaded your personal space or when they’ve really pushed into your intimate space. and of course, that’s a little bit cultural. So actually Americans have a different kind of concept of personal space than Italians, for example. et cetera, et cetera. So there’s some really interesting cross cultural studies about this.
but the thing that interests me right now is, there is a concept emerging concept of digital proxemics. So if you look at the way that both you and I have set up our cameras, in your case, you can see mostly just your head. In my case, you can see my head and my shoulders, which makes it feel like I’m probably about four or five feet away from you, which is about the distance between me and the camera.
but sometimes I get on conference calls with people and they’re like lounging on the couch and they’re holding the phone right there and things. And of course that has a really different feel. so, and. It feels different, but because people haven’t really strongly considered what that does feel like.
they aren’t making proactive choices about how they want to show up online, specifically in video calls. And I’m seeing one thing that I’m seeing more of now is people wanting to get together virtually instead of going to the pub, for example, which is something we could have always done. But now my friends around my city and around the world, it seems less weird to say, Hey, do you want to have dinner over Skype or whatever, than it previously did, which is super fascinating.
but what I’m getting to with all of this kind of rambling thought is, the, the anthropological piece of this really to me is, enabling people to understand a pattern that previously existed and that subconsciously they were behaving in accordance with. But they maybe never thought about before.
And that to me, relates to the epistemology piece around, being able to bring to light types of knowledge and describe types of knowledge that didn’t exist. So, you know, you, you haven’t a learned sense of when close is too close. And you will behave in accordance with that.
Even if you’re not consciously thinking, I must step one, one half foot further away for this to feel comfortable. You’ll still do that. Now, how we do this online in an era where we are all being forced into relatively static, camera capabilities. You know, most people don’t, I would suggest have excellent home setups or work setups, for conducting conference calls. so even though the camera technology is available, where you position it, how you set up the keyboard, to how you set up your camera. If you’re doing it on your phone, how do you make sure it stays in place? All of that stuff. despite the fact that we have the capabilities to do video calls, all the stuff about how you position yourself relative to the camera and how the other person positions themselves, that stuff is very much emergent.
So I’m really curious about how the next, let’s say six to nine months emerge, both in terms of the technological innovation that will happen. And also the etiquette that will emerge around how we conduct our calls and whether that’s going to be explicit as in, you know, Ms Manners manuals or whether that’s going to be much more implicit and it just becomes normal or weird to, be close or far or whatever it might be or have the background on or have the background off.
All that stuff I think is very much up for grabs. So we’re going to start seeing new rituals and habits emerging in this time period. Definitely.
Ben: I’m really looking forward to the listicles with “top 10 things you need to know about proper etiquette on a zoom call” or something along those lines. And what I really appreciated about the way that you explored that whole space was the anthropological lens of the sort of social practices that are emerging from these, these moments in time where our norms get kind of disrupted.
Something that a friend of mine talks a lot about. his name’s Tasshin Fogleman. He talks a lot about disfluency. So sort of like all that regular everyday stuff that we’re just sort of ignoring, cause it’s not apparent to us. If we slow down long enough to notice those things, then we can start making more explicit decisions about them.
I love the example that you just raised about cameras because the decisions we make every day are often oriented around our own individual perspectives. The considerations that were, you know, at the time important. for example, the consideration behind me using a very close up view of through my camera is based on my embarrassment about the background in my office.
And so I was like, can I put a whiteboard behind my head and then cut off all the rest of the images? The side effect that I did not have a language for until you just now raised it was that. I am probably a little bit more intimate with all the folks that I get on a call with from that standpoint of, you know, the proximal kind of view of that.
than maybe I was intending to be right, and now it’s not that I’m going to sit here and say, now, Caitlin, give me the good or bad value judgment on that. It’s more like, Oh my goodness, I’m aware of this now and I can make active decisions for each call even depending on who it is that I’m talking with.
And so these emergent kind of things become more, it’s like decision spaces that are now accessible to us. Now. I’m really into that idea.
Caitlin: Yeah. And to be honest, I think that that’s one of the core kind of anthropological skills is learning to journal your own experiences and keep, keep field notes about what’s happening that you observe, that you see, that you feel that you experience, and then use that to, forward your decision making.
So it’s, it’s almost like the, the anti metrics, let’s say. Right. You know, so you, you’re still, you’re still engaging in a practice that allows you to engage in decision making, but the inputs that you’re using for that are much more qualitative than they are quantitative, which is not to dumb down quantitative stuff.
I think it is very important. I’m speaking as a former quantitative analyst as well, but I have thoughts about under-utilizing qualitative, inputs as well. So.
Ben: That makes sense. Yeah. I’m thinking about what it looks like for you to do this kind of work. you mentioned the interest in the qualitative side of things. I know ethnography is in your background, and it’s something that I’m really interested in, especially, ethnography around stories and what, what kind of narratives people create for themselves as they go about their daily lives.
but I know you’ve also done the interesting things like social network graph analysis and stuff like that. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what’s in your toolbox as a digital anthropologist.
Caitlin: Yeah, sure. So anthropology covers a range of different, kind of tools to get the data that you want to have.
So, you know, as you pointed out, ethnography as one of those. And typically what ethnography entails is going to live in a community or work in a community depending on the kind of thing that you’re doing, and actually experience the things that they’re experiencing. So, that would entail a method called participant observation, which is.
What it sounds like you do, the things that you’re seeing and you see and you watch the things that other people are doing. So you’re actually trying to become, become one of the community that you are studying. And the reason for this is that, anthropologists, contemporary anthropologists believe that the people that you are studying are the experts in their own experience.
So if you want to be able to describe that experience to anyone else, you must be part of that experience as well. so that creates some kind of interesting dynamics in terms of who you study and how you study. in a digital world, what that will often mean is, participating in online communities.
For example. when I recently did a project. That we call digital ethnography. It was much more of a kind of diary study. Really when you got right down to it. What we were doing is asking people to send in information on their phones, asking them to send us photos, giving them little prompts to send in, survey questions or, just send a little thoughts about what was happening in their day.
so. It was much more immersive than a traditional diary study where I wouldn’t see the information until the end, for example. Or they could only send in, text. And in this case, they could also send video, for example, but to, to call it an ethnography in the traditional sense. I mean, it’s very different than what you typically would do.
But still, it’s really interesting to experience all those immersive methods, especially in a time that we are becoming increasingly digital. So it was important for me to, in a way, doing that study was in itself a digital ethnography because you’re experiencing and experimenting with different, you know, new ethnographic methods.
so another tool that we often use, one of my favorite methods, in the social sciences is something called semiotics, which is the study of signs and symbols. so if you’re thinking about, for example, if you Google AI, you might find that all of the images about it are blue. Why is this? But they are.
and you know, I conjecture that it’s often because LEDs, especially in the early days were blue. So you get that kind of blue screen glow. So it’s probably something about that. But then that means that that kind of shade of blue is become very synonymous with AI. So then it becomes a self-referring system where if you want something to seem like AI, then it has to be blue.
so it becomes really interesting. So that’s really fun. You can do a lot with that. and then the other method that you mentioned is social network analysis. And I will hold up a reference book.
Ben: for those that are home, the book that Caitlin held up was social network analysis by John Scott.
Caitlin: Yes.
So, network analysis is a fascinating discipline and what it really is designed to do is to help you understand the relationships between people. So typically when you do social network analysis, but you can also do network analysis on other things like telephones and you know, objects, physical objects in a, in a computer network, for example. but the, the advantage of doing it in a social sense is you then get a sense of the, the relationships.
And how they are formed. so I’ve done quite a lot of that in the past. typically, I worked with a large education community, online education community. I’ve also done it in a slightly less online way, so it’s, it’s much harder to get the data if you’re not doing it digitally. but you can, you can do things like run surveys to say, who did you work with or who did you collaborate with?
And then get a sense of who that was and then how they. When they did it, how they did it, and you can then build your network in that way. So, it’s really fun. It’s especially fun if you can do it when you have all the data collected. The data collection is the hard bit of social network analysis. So that’s the part that I would, if you can do that digitally, I would definitely recommend it.
but then, An example of that in practice at the moment is that a, a, a social network analysis tool, a graph database called Neo4j, has made their graph database technology available to people who are studying, the spread of the coronavirus.
And at the moment, people in China can essentially upload themselves as a node, as an object in the network, and they can then see who else they’re connected to and whether those people have tested positive for the coronavirus. So you can look at the spread of the virus very quickly. so it’s, it’s an advantage in that sense.
If you want to see how something like a virus or information passes through a network that’s network analysis that means to do that.
Ben: Yeah. When I was doing a lot of management consulting one of the things that we really needed as sort of a core competency was the ability to know what the social graph was in the organization we were working, especially when it was in a larger scale, like, not even for insight, just for understanding how to orient to the system that we were a part of.
And it’s these, it’s these tools that we can build to understand the world around us that help us make more sense of it, help us act more meaningfully within it. And it’s kind of really interesting to see the kinds of tools that you’ve leveraged to understand how people work, how cultures work. And especially now that we’re focusing more on, you know, we tend to privilege the technology over the social part of our interactions, but how those two things really kind of create each other in a way. It’s really fascinating.
Yeah. So. Given the context that we’re in right now. So the date that we’re recording this is March 17th, 2020,
Caitlin: St. Patrick’s day, very important.
Ben: St. Patrick’s day, yeah! so Caitlin is based in the UK. I’m based in the United States.
I’m in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I think we’re both kind of in this somewhat reflective place where we’re sort of getting to watch how the government response is playing out in specifically with coronavirus. And the place it puts me is sort of in this contemplative mode of, what is the responsibility of an organization to its people? One of the things I often say is that the entire point of organizations is to gather human potential and focus to a particular end. and a lot of times. Our, frankly, our institutions fail` to do that.
So now in this moment, corporate responsibility to sort of take some on a different meaning, and I was kind of curious, Caitlin, what your, your thoughts were about corporate responsibility in a coronavirus context? from an anthropological perspective. Hmm.
Caitlin: Yeah. so this is both with my anthropology hat on and just with Caitlin’s hat on.
So it’s, it’s been fascinating to me to watch the difference in responses from companies and governments and seeing some act with such responsibility and care towards not only there clients and their service users in their paying customers, but also towards their staff and others who are behaving in a very, very different way.
so for example, if you look at Microsoft, which committed to closing down their campuses, but also paying all the people that normally would be dependent on the jobs that are physically located in those campuses and can’t be moved, such as canteen workers and drivers and things like that. You know, that speaks to a kind of deep ethos of care in terms of we recognize that by shutting this, we might be very negatively impacting these people’s lives.
So we’ve decided that we’re going to take responsibility for paying their wages, despite the disruption. How long that is sustainable for them. I don’t know. But they’ve, in the meantime at least allowed themselves a breather window to figure it out. you contrast that with something like the UK government yesterday announced that it was going to not mandate that pubs and bars and theaters and, sporting events close, but they were highly recommending that people no longer go to those things.
Which means that because they’ve decided not to officially close any of those things, none of those people who work in those industries can now claim any insurance. So, whether restaurants, bars, and, and theaters can continue to operate after they’ve not been able to do that for a certain period.
it’s very much, again, an open question because those people have been left with no security and also no warning of that happening. So I have quite strong feelings about that. I think it’s extremely irresponsible towards those people. and I think it’s also very shortsighted because humans are social animals and we simply will not be able to sustain a culture where we stay inside all the time and that we, we never have any contact with each other. So, we need pubs and we need theaters and we need sporting events. and of course, at the moment. We, we can’t responsibly have those collective gatherings that we normally would have. but we simply are not going to be able to live in a world where we longterm never have any of those things.
We can’t do it. Aye. It’s not possible. So what does it mean if we then put all of those people out of business and we have no way of rapidly bringing them back into the into the fold. and I’ve been thinking about this not only with reference to social and cultural events, but also with reference to business resiliency.
So I was speaking to one of my, one of my bosses actually the other day, and he was describing a situation previously, where, you know, you as a responsible business would never have used more than 25% of your highest days network capacity when you were planning for, network outages or surges or whatever it might be.
And we now live in a world where we optimize for efficiency over those kinds of, capacity and resilience considerations. if you think about things like, just in time delivery services and, and all that kind of stuff where you’re really prioritizing efficiency, what you’re not doing is allowing for sudden change or allowing for, the ability to respond to, unexpected situations.
And to some degree, they’re unexpected, you can’t possibly know what you will need, but to have some flex in your capacity, which we’ve now decided is not a good thing because we have all these wonderful instrumentation capabilities and we can measure everything to the nth degree. So therefore we can put in only what we need to put in.
But that of course means that your system is very, very low resilience. So, you know, even if you’re not thinking about all of the poor actors who are out of work, which I am thinking about because I love going to the theater and I’m really gonna miss it if we don’t get it back. You know, just thinking about grocery deliveries and power plants and, you know, certainly on everyone’s mind, healthcare services and systems without those kinds of, thoughts about how you deal with shocks and the system.
We, we’re deeply under-preparing ourselves for, for the future where, you know, the future may be very, very different than what we’d had in the past. I think that there probably will be a real overarching change, especially for people who work in what were office jobs. but that doesn’t mean that you can remote everything.
So when we come back out of hibernation and come back out of the cave, what’s going to be out there for us and how are we going to prepare for that future?
Ben: Yeah. This is a moment of kind of destabilization where you know, a lot of the things that we hold dear, a lot of the expectations that we have are as good as gone right now.
And when we emerge from however this plays out, when we emerge, we will have to kind of put the pieces back together and maybe some of the old things will come back and maybe some of them won’t. And maybe there will be some new things. But the difficulty I think is who, who will actually, from an existential perspective, make it, right?
And I mean that both physically and literally, but also from the standpoint of these organizations who are operating on thin margins don’t have a cash reserve. in a way, it’s a, `it’s a demonstration of how fragile a lot of capitalism is at this point where you have businesses with very low cash, suddenly put into a situation of perhaps extreme duress and unable to cope. I’ve been talking with a lot of conference organizers in particular lately because I’ve been interested in learning about the decision making processes that they’re going through right now. and first of all, most who I’m talking to are under extreme mental, mental duress.
And for many of them who operate year to year and, and frankly don’t carry reserves from one year to the next, whether or not they cancel is a matter of whether or not they come back next year. And so that existential question leads me to this other thought that’s been sort of bouncing around my brain.
And I’m kind of curious how you, perceive it and whether you agree or disagree. We need to be making the right thing to do the easy thing to do. beyond that, I think we need to be making the right thing to do the selfish thing to do. So how, how can our institutions, how can our organizations.
Look at the world in this way and maybe is that the right frame to think about this?
Caitlin: Hmm. do you make the right thing to do the selfish thing to do? I think that’s a really interesting way of putting it that will, enable people who are not automatically drawn into the ethics narrative. feel like they have a stake in the game as it were. and. Most of the time people do have a stake in the narrative already.
So, when I’ve been doing a lot, I do a lot of work on digital ethics in general and AI ethics in particular. And for the most part, people are very receptive often because they realize how much these technologies are playing into their own daily lives and they think about things from their perspective.
They’re like, Oh, I wouldn’t want my bank to be doing that. I wouldn’t want my airline to be doing that. Whatever it might be. And that makes them then reconsider. Oh, that means that I have to change the way that I behave because this also has an impact on other people’s lives. But there’s definitely an aspect where if you’re trying to highlight, the selfish value of ethics to organizational leaders.
it’s not just that narrative about do unto others as you would have done unto you. There is also, you know, real hard cash money needs to be made by making ethical decisions, including, for example, looking for underserved communities or looking for markets that are not yet really fully tapped.
and in particular talent. And this is the one that I think is the most interesting because, all the research that we did, and there’s also some other research on this by external other think tank groups, suggests that the people who are most working with the most advanced technologies right now, AI and machine learning, do want to work at places where they feel that their values align with the company.
They want to work in responsible technology organizations. And this is really important because those talented people are so rare and so valuable, that, being so rare and so valuable have the capacity to walk away and to make a difference in a way that perhaps people who are in more vulnerable situations do not.
So that means that those people have an added ability to push for senior management to behave more responsibly. and thank goodness that they are looking to work at responsible places because how awful would it be if they weren’t and still have all of that power.
Ben: You just sent me to all these places that I, I really want to explore and I almost feel like we have to have another followup conversation at some point specifically on the problem of talent.
Is there anything that you’ve come across lately that would be a recommended reading or viewing for the folks who are listening at home.
Caitlin: Well, if it’s not too much, to, push my own research. we recently published a little blog post on how to deal with remote working if it’s being suddenly foisted upon your team, so we can share that with you. I would suggest as well, if you’re broadly interested in issues around digital ethics, which I think does play into that space very nicely, I would strongly suggest Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, which is a great book. Really explains a lot of the kind of challenges of the ethical space with digital products, in simple and easy to understand language and the kind of core concepts of what are the potential pitfalls are well articulated there.
Ben: And what’s a good way for people to find out more about your work and follow you as you publish?
Caitlin: LeadingEdgeForum.com.
Ben: Perfect. Thank you so much for being with me, Caitlin.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Ben.
COVID-19 is changing our society, but how are we coping? Ben is joined by digital anthropologist Dr. Caitlin McDonald to discuss our collective re-examination of common assumptions about work, community, and life.
Ben is joined by artist Dean Distasio to explore what it takes to create transformative conversations through complexity-informed artistic works. Dean shares his process and offers unique perspective on networks, narrative, and the importance of language and context.
Image Link: https://theagilewallaby.com/king-of-context
- The Agile Wallaby
- Power and Ecosystems of Change: Ann Pendleton-Jullian at TEDxGeorgetown (Scaffolding)
Follow Dean on Twitter:
Been chiseling on the digital cave wall pic.twitter.com/WhZ5rRXd5X
— TheAgileWallaby (@theagilewallaby) October 19, 2019
Intro / Outro Music by DJ Quads
https://soundcloud.com/djquads
Transcript Ben: Hello and welcome to episode seven of the Hired Thought podcast. Today I am very happy to be joined by Dean Distasio, and what I’m going to ask him to do is to introduce himself, but in the form of a story. And this story begins with me receiving an envelope on my front doorstep from FedEx.
It was labeled urgent delivery, and I had this panic moment. It was like, oh no. What would someone send me that was urgent delivery? There’s no way this can be good news. But then I open it up, and it is a print, a beautiful print of one of Dean’s works. It’s a concept proof. And it is absolutely gorgeous. So Dean, what led you to send this to me?
Dean: Well, first of all, I’d say if you look at the back, it’s a subpoena, so that urgent letter was a… No, I’m kidding.
Yeah. So I’m a technologist by trade. I’m in the agile space is, as they say, so I’m an agile coach. And the picture is kind of a result of many, many years of training in the agile space… and even saying in the agile space is probably a misnomer because most of the training was around scrum techniques, right?
So if you’re familiar with software development, agile and scrum are synonymous, right? Often get misused or conjoined together there.
Ben: I’m having a panic attack, just hearing you right now,
Dean: So, you know, that’s kind of a method and how we deliver value to our customers, and in doing the training and then coaching teams, what I find is that they get, they understand the, you know, the ceremonies and the concepts behind it, but delivery was always still, difficult because there was something missing.
And we always go back to and look at the method, and being a methodologist for so many years, you know, you’re constantly doing research and you know, this is something that I picked up when I worked at IBM. I worked at IBM in the late nineties. kind of the during the .net boom and bust era there.
And, you know, continue learning that new space. And, you know, it was, it was kind of a big thing at IBM. I helped introduce or, or open the innovation center in Chicago. Methodology by trade and continual learning is kind of always been one of my things since that, you know, that experience, which I felt was pretty positive.
Ben: So you felt something was, was missing. And I, I agree 100%, like the mechanical, like ceremonies and doing of the thing. Oftentimes, like that’s the easy part. Right. Okay. and even thinking back to concepts like what we got from, from reading the Toyota Kata and thinking about lean in context, it’s like people adopt the behaviors without understanding the larger why.
Like, why would you have this practice? What does it actually intended to accomplish? And wrestling with that space, I think leads to some really interesting breakthroughs. So. As, as you’re playing around that space of something being missing. What, what was missing? Like what did you find?
Dean: Well, again, I, I gotta go back to my IBM time because when, you know, after the innovation kind of kicked off, one of the projects that I worked on was a knowledge management project. So I kinda got interested in that. And then that’s sort of the link back because let, years later, as I got into agile, you know, right around 2010, you know, in, in doing research, I think it was around probably 2014 or something. I ran across Dave Snowden and it was what caught my attention was. He was an IBMer and IBMers, you know, we kind of stick together. It’s just like, Hey, well, okay, that’s interesting. And, and then find out that the firm that he worked with, the Anglo Dutch firm that they work for, that was acquired by IBM, became Global Services, the division that I worked for. So that was kind of like, Oh, I gotta, I’m going to listen to this guy. And, and, and that’s kinda when I got into kind of the human system side of things. And in the complex adaptive systems approach to better ways of working or, you know, different ways of delivering value to our customers, whatever it is.
In my case, it’s, you know, digital products. And so that, that was really how I got into the space. And, and so in looking at the scrum training that I was doing, how could I start to incorporate some of the concepts and ideas in a way that was meaningful, and actually provided value and help people? You know, avoid some of the traps and pitfalls that are common in, in these software development efforts.
Ben: So tell me a little bit about that, ‘cause that’s really interesting and it takes me back to some of my own kind of like really interesting moments of discovery where it also occurred for me with Cynefin and Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz and all the folks in this sort of complexity space.
And it also occurred for me with like Theory of Constraints and a couple other methodologies, but like. Those moments are really interesting where you have to reconcile all the work that you’ve been doing against these new frameworks and these new sort of world models, not that you have to collapse them and like resolve them, but you do have to reconcile them in a way.
So tell me about that process for you. Because teaching things in the agile space and helping people do good work, now suddenly you have a whole new toolkit and a whole new world that’s opening up for you in this realm of complexity. So what, what was that like?
Dean: Prior to my years in technology, I actually came from the multimedia world. So my career started in kind of a more creative space. I actually, I actually worked for a small multimedia firm in Rochester, New York, and Kodak was our main customer.
Ben: Oh, wow.
Dean: You know, it’s kind of ironic, right? You know, a company that sits on like $3 billion worth of, digital photography technology, you know, and then kind of, you know, we know the story, right? So, again, Kodak, photography, multimedia. I mean, as I was running through the park, you know, I started looking at, there’s some pretty cool images in the park and you know, I got my cell phone here.
I started snapping pictures cause I go pretty early in the morning and sunrise and it’s pretty close to the little Miami river, which is a scenic waterway that it’s a tributary into the Ohio river. And so, you know, some days there’d be fog rolling up. From the river in that, and I started getting the, I thought, some pretty cool pictures.
It was on at the time a Samsung phone, you know, so the resolution wasn’t really great, but at any rate, I started this maybe three and a half year, four years ago. So I got a boatload of pictures, but then I started trying to apply the concepts around complexity thinking to my images. And I got the idea that, you know, can, can I use art as a vehicle to get people interested in this space. Or if not, you know, just to get them to look at it and discover kind of what I’m discovering.
Ben: So you’ve made a brand, The Agile Wallaby that is, kind of like the, in a way, the vehicle for a lot of these explorations. But let’s, let’s zoom in on the process itself.
Dean: Well, it’s a creative process. So I don’t know if you can really explain it, but…
Ben: Well even if it’s just phenomenological, right? How does it occur to you, even if it’s not some perfect framework, right? Like how does it happen? Like how did it happen? At least once.
Dean: I know this is kind of evolutionary thing. So I started going through the park, at least started start is taking pictures and then, you know, this is like
I mean, some of them really aren’t that good. I mean, you say, Oh, that looks really cool. You take a picture and you go back later and you’re looking at all of us. It looks, it’s not really that, you know, and then you start playing around with it. You know, changing the hue, saturation. And you can start to get some interesting things.
Cause I like patterns, you know, being a designer, you know, patterns or, you know, important. And so that’s that. Again, that’s, that’s really, where it kind of started.
This exploration that I’m doing kind of as a… I don’t like to use the word case study, but a live study. Yeah. Kind of like this is kind of, this is what I, I hate to use the word preach, but this is how I train and coach people. but what if I take something and just kind of do it, you know, kind of create a product and kind of do what you’re talk about.
Yeah. And get feedback from people and just see where it goes. Cause again, I come from the multimedia world so. I’m about creating content, but I don’t really need to create all the content. as it relates to this approach.
This Anthro-digital DNA concept that I’m throwing out there. So the DNA is the decision making the networks and narratives and the adaptability, kind of using that biological metabolic kind of construct or metaphor, if you will.
That kind of gets to the image that I sent you, . I’m a runner. So in, in, in the mornings I typically, I’ll go out and do a little jaunt around and, and there’s a, there’s a park, it’s not too far from my home.
So I, I used to go there cause they have trails and then it’s, you know, through somewhere through the woods and there’s a little Creek. I mean it’s 66 acres. So it’s pretty, it’s a pretty good size. And there’s plenty of, two and a half, three miles worth of trails that you can wind around. And that’s where I started when I started going to there.
And really, Mmm. When I got into the Snowden stuff. And then, you know, you have Theory of Constraints and even Wardley and, and you know, Boyd’s cycle and all that stuff. I would listen to a lot of podcasts and other things. And that’s what I would do when I would run, and as I’m running through the park, you know, I’m kinda thinking of these things and how can I apply some of the concepts and whatnot.
Ben: I know it’s kind of a kind of maybe crude to ask an artist to explain their work, but I felt like. That it’s so important that we find new ways to engage with these practices and these approaches that, I, I’m just so grateful that you were willing to come on and share a little bit about it.
Dean: I’ve always kind of wanted to write a book about it. This whole experience that I’ve had through this agile space, but I’m not a writer.
I’m a designer. So I got this idea of a concept picture book taking the concepts of complex adaptive systems, and through artwork kind of. You know, leading people into the space.
Ben: So the, the piece that you sent me, Language Is Key, but Context Is King. and we’ll include , a way to sort of follow along, if you look in the show notes, you’ll, you’ll find this image as well. But what I see is, you know, just observing with my eyes, I see three images that have the same structure.
So it’s, it’s the same image, but the colors and the hues and the saturation and the way that my eye is actually following and looking at each instance of this image is, it is extraordinarily different depending on which one I’m looking at. And so what, what brought to mind this framing as a way to represent.
This idea that you look, language is key, but context is King. Talk to me a little bit about this particular piece.
Dean: Yeah. Well, the actually, the image kind of evolved and, and really first of all, the images. That’s a honey locust tree that has the spikes that come out of it.
So on one of the trails, there’s three pavilions in the park, by the way. So there, there’s, you’ll start to see threes coming up and a lot of the stuff that I do.
Ben: Oh, interesting.
Dean: so there’s this, this locust tree that has these spikes coming. What first attracted me to it is a bird build a nest in, Some of these thorns and it’s like, Oh, that’s pretty cool. So I try to take a picture of it. And, eventually, you know, I started doing things in terms of changing the image around. I kind of mirrored the image. So that again, thinking dual systems, right, in mechanical and, and kind of the human systems thinking.
So that’s sort of how that evolved. And some of the images that I started getting out of. Doing that process of taking a section of an image and flopping it over and putting them together, created some kind of interesting things. A lot of them started to kind of take facial features in the, at least for me it did.
So they kind of looks like a face and. I, I saw that and it kind of, the thorns kind of look like it made a crown to me. And so I sort of saw a face with a crown on and I got the idea of a King. But then as I moved to changing hue and saturation, that is kind of goes back to looking at, the approach that I was taking from a complex adaptive systems perspective in that, that first image just really kind of, I do a lot of space into the decision making areas where like the Cynefin framework and all that stuff. And then being a product designer, you know, is, it’s really about the narrative story is key when you’re trying to, you know, sell a product, if you will, even even a digital product.
And, and so the networks and narrative becomes important.
Networks being kind of making all those connections from the customer. To kind of understanding or gaining the knowledge it need to deliver that value to them down to the, you know, the people that are actually, you know, creating the product, the developers and testers and whatnot. So that’s sort of the next element to this whole concept.
And then the last one’s really about adaptability, being able to evolve. And “exapt” is a new word. Right? And so that’s how the image kinda came to be, is I was exploring these different areas and in different concepts in, in the language that they have… I tried to, to represent that in the artwork.
Ben: It’s one thing to see a work of art in a gallery. It’s a very different sort of thing to see it contextually, somewhere else. And the way that we can engage with the work that we’re doing every day. And also in a way, the art itself depends a lot on the context that we bring to it.
Dean: Context is King, as they say.
Ben: It’s funny because when I, when I look at this piece, I didn’t see the faces and then. You shared the context of the faces and now I can’t unsee the faces. In fact, I keep seeing more faces and more sort of like human structures in here that I wasn’t expecting to see.
And so I think that is, I feel like I’ve learned a lesson just even just now. Engaging with this with you
Dean: And you’ll find that most of the work that I do is abstract cause it is. What I’m doing is an abstraction of these concepts and trying to draw people in through this abstraction.
Ben: Yeah. Well, it’s certainly effective.
Dean: And so if you, if you look at it at the print that I sent you, there’s, there’s also a QR code on there.
Ben: I did see that. I was just about to talk about that.
Dean: So you can kind of look at it and you, okay, Language is Key, Context is King.
And when you, when you click on that, it kind of tells the story. So that’s sort of the next dimension. So the, the concept was the book… it’s a trilogy, right? There’s three parts to the book. The first one is about decision making, the next one is about networks and narratives. And the third volume is going to be on adaptability.
So the idea is, and I’m still working on it, it’s just been a long process. I didn’t realize when I thought what, I’m going to create a, basically, a coffee table book. Yeah.
And, and so, so the book, you know, it’s going to be these pictures, but then you kind of have to tell a story. Yeah.
And so how can you tell the story? Because the story kind of evolves. Well, I could always do another version. You know what I mean? It’s like, well, that’s kind of like the old world way at it. So the words that are in the picture book, tell part of the story.
And then there’s other plot threads or whatever that you kind of get to through the QR code.
While this is my exploration, that’d be interesting to hear other people’s perspectives as it relates to sort of what my experience is and kind of the paths that I’m going down.
The other thing is, the images that I create is like, I’m not telling people what it, what it is.
It’s just really, they, it’s their experience. And, and really that’s the, the other concept behind the QR is, you know, you looked at it, you didn’t see what I see right. and every, cause everybody kind of looks at things from a different context.
Ben: Yeah. Okay. So you’re creating this interesting space where, because it’s art, right. And art as a way to think about the work that we do You kind of create a space to do some work and to actually introduce some new concepts without beating people over the head with theory or really having to engage in the what as much as the visual and sort of multisensory kind of experience for that kind of thing.
And I, I want to like, just take a moment to linger on some of the concepts that you mentioned. So you, you mentioned a dual systems. Do you want to talk a little bit about, like what’s going on with dual systems?
Like what, what, what kind of conversations could we have about that, when we start to look at this material through the lens that you’re providing?
Dean: Yeah. Um. I think it’s, you know, again, I take it from a software development work perspective and we, we get so focused on method and how we get things done, and being able to
Be predictable in how we do it. We find, you know, we kind of lean towards that more mechanical approach where we, Hey, we got to do it this way, and if you don’t do it this way, then it’s wrong.
And that kind of gets into the Taylorism thing, right?
It’s kind of the assembly line. Hey, you need to build a bunch of widgets. How do you do it? You know, the best. That you can, why are you able to do it this way? You know, best practices kind of come into play. See, now we’re kind of moving into the Cynefin framework, right? You know, when things are clear, we try to make everything clear.
Obvious or simple. Yeah, I hear that all the time. I just gotta be simple. It’s like, well, not everything is simple.
Ben: Yeah, that, that is an interesting point because you know, unlike a lot of our views of work where we kind of have this idea that one, one person can sort of see the whole system and make a bunch of decisions about it and then tell everybody what to do.
I think it’s a very broadcast centric. Kind of idea in complexity, like it really matters what the disposition of the system is and how the individual players are acting and responding. And so I like that, that frame for it. So you’re not just broadcasting, you really want to create close that feedback loop and actually start to sense how other people are navigating this space of practice and work.
Thinking about the process and then, and then the output, we can find out more about you by going to theagilewallaby.com, we can engage with your work, and we can connect with you and start that feedback loop. But what are you hoping to see emerge over the next few years around this idea of art as a medium for creating the opportunity for discussion around this. What, what does that future start to look like in your mind?
Dean: Well, there’s more pictures or images. Actually, there’s a gallery series that I’m putting together, and I’m literally trying to get in in galleries. There’s like a gallery show that we can kind of move around from city to city,
One of the things, and one of the reasons why I went to the image, and I think this is key, is… this continual learning thing is expensive. And while the organization I work for, you know, I get, I get my fair share of training, I can’t complain, but I have a ferocious appetite. So I, when I find things, you know, I’d like to. Check them out. And sometimes that requires, I mean, there’s really good conferences and you can kind of get bits and pieces of them on YouTube or you know, some of the other video sites.
But. You gotta hunt around and look for him. So I, there’s the, this idea of the Agile Wallaby network that focuses on complex adaptive systems approach to digital software delivery. You know, that’s, that’s really kind of the, what I’m hoping to do with the network is putting that theory to practice, here’s all this information.
And, and then. You know, have content that here’s how it’s been applied, here’s how you could apply it. Here’s something you could try, and see if, how you can adapt it to your situation. You know, not really case based, but you know, experience-based, I guess. Experience it in your world. Try this, let us know how it works.
What did you do to modify it? That kind of thing.
Ben: One final thought, and this is gonna maybe be a little unfair, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask you a question.
So I’ve apparently been told that every podcast should have a slogan or a catchphrase, and I don’t have one. And so every time I end up podcasts, there’s just this sort of like awkward, like, “and thanks for being here.” And the music plays out, but here’s my question for you. If, if you were to make up a catch phrase for the Hired Thought podcast, what would you guess it might be?
Dean: So I, I guess I would have to ask some questions first.
Ben: I didn’t want to make you feel like you had to do some consulting!
Dean: You know, I’m a creative person, so I, this is a challenge to me. What’s the purpose of your podcast?
Ben: So the, the purpose of this podcast is to basically create a platform for folks who are engaging deeply with work. And, one might say the future of work and to give them a platform to, to discuss what they’ve found so far. And the very, very short context behind that is I find that a lot of people are doing excellent work and there’s kind of an absolute tragedy that they’re not having the chance to showcase it and talk about it.
So I’m kind of taking advantage of the fact that I’m absolutely fascinated by this stuff, have those conversations, and to just create that opportunity where someone might find out about it instead of it just sort of staying hidden away for, for far too long. So that’s my purpose here.
Dean: Cool. A catch phrase…
I can tell you the one for this episode.
Ben: Yeah,
Dean: Context is King.
Ben: Boom. All right.
Dean: Well, language is important.
Language is important. Just to be honest, I don’t know if this is a Snowden phrase or not. But I kind of changed it a little bit. I, you know, I hear all this stuff, I read this stuff, and then I remember it later on a, Hey, you know, this sounds pretty good. And half the time it’s probably because I had read it somewhere.
So language is key, but context is king.
Ben: Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so we’ll do the outro.
Dean: We didn’t even get into the language. Oh,
Ben: I’ll just be for next time. Oh, yeah. I wanted to explore scaffolding. I think that’s going to be next time, if you want,
Dean: And I have to come back now.
Ben: You’ll have to come back. And for those of you who are engaging with Dean’s work for the first time, you’ll have to look up scaffolding and explore what he has to share about
Dean: That and Ann Pendleton-Jullian, you know, and Dave Snowden had a pretty good talk around that, and
Ben: Maybe I’ll have to get a link to that in the show notes.
Dean: There’s a video. I’ll see if I can, I’ll send you the video to, to Ann’s talk on scaffolding.
Ben: Cool. All right, so here, here’s the outro. Dean, I want to thank you so much for being here today and for sharing your work with us, and I want to remind our audience, language is key, but context is King.
Thanks for being, that’s a wrap. That’s a wrap. We’re done!
Ben is joined by artist Dean Distasio to explore what it takes to create transformative conversations through complexity-informed artistic works. Dean shares his process and offers unique perspective on networks, narrative, and the importance of language and context.
Legendary DevOps friend Matt Stratton joins Ben for a discussion on the very near and dear topic of organizational trauma. Matt shares important lessons from his experiences, as well as a few secrets to building organizational resilience through incident response. (Content warning: General discussion of trauma.)
Legendary DevOps friend Matt Stratton joins Ben for a discussion on the very near and dear topic of organizational trauma. Matt shares important lessons from his experiences, as well as a few secrets to building organizational resilience through incident response. (Content warning: General discussion of trauma.)
- Fight, flight or freeze: Releasing organisational trauma (blog)
- Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma (talk)
- Greater Than Code – Healing Organizational Trauma with Matt Stratton
- Window of Tolerance
- Mindfulness & Trauma Part 2 of 4: The Fight-or-Flight Response
- Peter Levine on Somatic Experiencing
- The Fifth Discipline
- Arrested DevOps 2019 Year-End Wrap-Up
- speaking.mattstratton.com
About Matt Matt Stratton is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, where he helps dev and ops teams advance the practice of their craft and become more operationally mature. He collaborates with PagerDuty customers and industry thought leaders in the broader DevOps community, and back in the day, his license plate actually said “DevOps”.
Matt has over 20 years experience in IT operations, ranging from large financial institutions such as JPMorganChase and internet firms, including Apartments.com. He is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and ITSM focused events, including ChefConf, DevOpsDays, Interop, PINK, and others worldwide. Matt is the founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, as well as a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.
He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Doctor Who. He is currently on a mission to discover the best phở in the world.
Hey @nashvilledevops folks! Slides from my talk “Fight, Flight, or Freeze – Releasing Organizational Trauma” are online now at https://t.co/diddN5Yihd #DevOpsDays
— Batty Stratton (@mattstratton) May 10, 2019
I would like to take a minute to thank @jpaulreed for encouraging me to initially submit my talk about organizational trauma. It’s been proving to be my most successful talk ever and I’m so happy every time I get to share it with a new audience. Thanks, Preed!
— Batty Stratton (@mattstratton) March 1, 2019
Intro / Outro Music by DJ Quads
https://soundcloud.com/djquads
Transcript Ben: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to episode six of The Hired Thought Podcast. My name is Ben Mosior and I’m joined today by special guest, Matt Stratton. I want to give you a quick heads up here at the beginning, a bit of a content warning. We are going to be talking about some topics and contents that could be actually triggering, oriented around trauma.
We’re not going to discuss our own individual specific traumatic experiences. However, we are going to talk in general about the topic and get into how it relates to organizations as well. So with that intro, I am just absolutely floored to have Matt with us here today.
I first kind of came into contact with Matt around 2014 attending a DevOpsDays conference. He runs the Arrested DevOps Podcast with his cohosts. He’s also been part of HangOps, all these like wonderful fixtures of my early systems administration career that really set me on a path towards, let’s say towards the light, towards the goodness of collaboration and working together.
Matt, I’m so happy to have you here today.
Matt: [00:00:56] Thank you for having me. I’m really excited, to be a part and I, I love being on podcasts. As you said. you know, I, I have my own show and it’s always really fun as a podcaster to be a guest, cause you’re like… You’ve got all this stuff… What your listeners don’t know, there’s all these things going on in your head cause you’re running the show and I’m like, I just get to talk! It’s so refreshing.
Ben: [00:01:16] Thank you for being here. I gave a bit of an intro and I think that relates you to my audience, but I was just kind of wondering, what else do you think they should know before we kind of dive into this really interesting topic of organizational trauma?
Matt: [00:01:28] Sure. So I work for PagerDuty now, as an advocate. And the reason I’m kind of bringing that up is, my focus, especially over the last couple of years, has been a lot around thinking about incident response, learning from incidents.
And I’ve been doing a lot of thought around incidents and outages because that’s the focus of, what PagerDuty is really helping folks with. Comparatively, so, you know, for folks that don’t know, I used to work for Chef, so my thought was a lot more around software delivery and infra as code … So, you know, as, as you know, there’s all these things I’m interested in, but as I’ve been focusing and thinking a lot more about human factors, especially with incident response and how organizations work, that really is what led me to this topic that we’re talking about.
So, kind of having that thought and background, I think is why it’s relevant.
Ben: [00:02:13] Absolutely. That, that brings me to kind of how we connected. What I’m thinking about right now is the talk that I just watched called, “Fight, Flight, or Freeze” that you’ve been giving at Monitorama and a couple other places, right?
Matt: [00:02:28] Yes. This was, this was my talk of the last year. I’ve traveled the world giving this talk at DevOps days, DevOps Enterprise Summit and Monitorama and all sorts of places. And people seem to like it, so I need to, now I have to, I need a new idea. But yeah, that’s a Future Matt problem.
Ben: [00:02:45] This is a such an interesting topic because I think in general, trauma, as a topic for both individuals and organizations, and frankly from a societal and cultural standpoint as well, it’s a bit stigmatized. And I think a lot of times it’s because it’s tied up with things like shame or, not having the right kind of language to express it in a healthy way, or it just hurts, and so you avoid it. And so when someone comes out with a talk, focused on something very close and near and dear to me like this, I am just absolutely floored that we’re sharing it and talking about this topic.
So what was the background behind the motivation to submit this talk to conferences and really launch on this year long journey of sharing this story with others.
Matt: [00:03:31] So it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a fun story. As fun as anything connected to trauma can be, I realize. So back in the spring of 2018, I spent a month in a rehab facility, for treatment, for trauma, for my post traumatic stress, among a couple of other things. And when I was there, I went through some treatments involving somatic experiencing and EMDR.
And shortly after I got out, I was visiting my friend Paul, so J Paul Reed in San Francisco, and we were, you know, this was like a week or two after I had gotten out and we were having coffee and just sort of debriefing with him about my experience. We both sort of sat there and were like, this sounds a lot like how companies act when they have outages and everything.
And because this is the other thing, when you, when you do this kind of work, everything becomes a talk, everything in your life, you’re always like, how can I turn this into a talk? I have, I have a, a coworker who joined a monastery, she became a monk, and I was like, Oh, you’re going to come out of that with a great DevOps talk, right?
So, so Paul and I were talking about that, and he said, well. I have a CFP open for this new conference I’m doing called redeploy, which is this conference about resilience engineering. And he’s like, you should write a, you should propose it for that. And I had already seen some of the folks that were speaking there and I was like, okay, Paul, whatever, like no way am I in the cohort that you’re talking about.
Right. And but I wanted to do it because I just wanted to get feedback from him and from Mary Thengvall who were the organizers. I was like, okay, this’ll be a good way. Can write the abstract. I’ll submit it. I’ll get good feedback and I can go do it somewhere else. And then of course it got accepted and I went, Oh no, now I have to write this talk.
And, and so I did. And I did. So I gave it for the first time at redeploy in the summer of 2018 and. it was, it was actually kind of funny cause for a long time that was the only video version of the talk. And I hated sharing it because it was so raw and so new to me and it’s gotten better and better. But it was, I ended up giving the talk and I got great positive feedback from a lot of people I respect who said this was really helpful.
This was really interesting. You know, Paul came to me and said, this needs to be your talk of next year, but it really came from my experiences of like what I was learning about individual treatment for post traumatic stress. And, and seeing that as that metaphor. And I think that’s why it’s been a, topic and a talk that I love to give and it’s been, you know, it’s been great to be able to do it over time and continually refine. Every time I do it, it’s a little better because I, like you talked about like this topic, personal trauma is very stigmatized and I get a lot of folks coming up to me after the talk that are just from a personal level or like, Hey, I have trauma in my background.
This is what resonated. This is what didn’t. And there’s also people who don’t have that background can still get something from the talk. But then every time I have these conversations afterwards, there’s always something that I tweak and I go, Oh, now this is better. So it’s, it’s not like, Oh, it’s getting better just cause I’ve been practicing it more, but had been to be able to develop it just from conversations I’ve had with so many people that you, you don’t really realize how prevalent. This is and people don’t talk about it.
Ben: [00:06:46] that right there I think is such an interesting point because by signaling that you are someone who is interested in this topic and willing to talk about it openly, on the one hand, you have people coming up to you and sharing those experiences. On the other hand, it’s helping others feel safe about thinking about it and talking to others about it, which I think is, look, if you can’t speak, if you can’t share. If you can’t process, then a lot of times that stuff stays stuck.
And the way that trauma manifests for individuals and organizations is different, but it has a lot of the same kind of signs and I think sort of comorbidities along with it. It’s interesting that you bring up Paul because Paul, I’m going to get this wrong. So he’s probably gonna like, reach out on Twitter and be like, Hey! But he, he got a master’s right in, in human factors, right? So this, I think is an interesting intersection, right? Where I’ve, as you pointed out on the most recent episode of Arrested DevOps, it’s like anytime someone makes a connection between something, part of the industry that’s been around for awhile, but then applies it to software, it’s like, Oh. I made this, right.
Human factors for software and thinking about outages as traumatic events, and I’ve also been thinking about what layoffs are like for people in organizations and so on. Tell me how that factors into how, what you share about this talk. Like what have you learned about these kinds of events and how organizations can respond to them?
Matt: [00:08:14] So there’s those kind of two, pieces to the, the trauma metaphor, the trauma topic in the talk. so again, an incident can be traumatic to an individual because are participating in it. So I talk in some version of the talk, I talk about self care and talk about things to do.
But the beginning and the first half is a lot more about. The metaphor, right? So if we think about what trauma is and why humans respond the way they do, what causes trauma. Trauma is basically when our nervous systems, our answer to something doesn’t work, right? We don’t know how, I don’t want to say we don’t know how to deal with it, but we don’t know how to respond.
Or rather it’s not that we don’t know how to respond. Our responses are ineffective, right? To this bad thing. So that’s why, that’s why trauma is nuanced, right? So you and I can have a similar experience and it can be traumatic for me. And it can just be a crappy day for you, right? It doesn’t mean that like you love it, but it doesn’t necessarily manifest as trauma because of how our nervous systems respond differently and based on our background.
And what I found was, because of our prefrontal cortex, we respond to perceive trauma physiologically the same way our sympathetic nervous system is activated the same way as the actual trauma. And that’s why, so, you know, trauma that occurred to me as a child, that that’s part of my post traumatic stress, things that are reminiscent of that or that trigger to them. They truly do trigger, that’s the right thing because they cause me to have the physiological response. And so organizations, we do this thing when we have an incident or an outage or something that’s similar to a thing that happened before and when it happened to before, it costs us $1 million a minute.
So we’re like, “well, it’s happening again” and we, and we react the same way. The reality is it’s not necessarily the same. Incidents all have different shapes and just because something looks a little similar with the complexity of all the things going on, it’s not . We don’t want to respond the exact same way.
The same way that like if something that reminds me of this traumatic thing doesn’t mean that I should respond the way that I did this when I was six years old because I’m a 45 year old adult, right? the fear is, it’s, it’s, it’s valid that I have that fear, but it’s not a thing to run and hide from.
Like I’m, I know I’d have to be scared, honestly. I don’t have to be scared of it, but my response is, should be different and I need to learn how to make it different. Same thing with an organization. You know, this, this indicator last time caused this. So, and that’s what we do. And so the thing that happens with individuals, there’s this idea of the window of tolerance, right?
So we get activated between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. We go up and down with activation. That’s just normal. That’s just how we deal, right? Like nobody is even keeled all the time. But, and everybody’s window of tolerance is different. So the window of tolerance is. Beyond which you become activated and you don’t have the healthy response anymore.
Right. And so what you can do is it can either get really spiky up, down, up, down, right? Or you can get stuck on or stuck off. And that’s usually what happens. So if you’re stuck on, that’s where you have. Anxiety. You know, anxiety comes in, a lot of other symptoms stuck off, has more lethargy, and organizations do this too, right?
So when we see something that is reminiscent of that, we get into either being hyper aroused or hypo aroused, where we might fear any kind of change, right? We’re where we get into analysis paralysis because. Uh, or, or we become, almost, uh, paranoid, we have over vigilance, right? Where everything is an attack.
Everything is says, and these are, neither of these are healthy for the org, for the organization, not the people part, but just for the company being able to do what it needs to do. And it’s also, it does reflect into the, Mental and emotional health of the employees, right? and it trickles down into that.
So, so what I found was being able to help people identify that, cause that’s the first thing is like, identify, and remember we talked about the window of tolerance is nuanced. As true for people. And it’s true for organizations, right? Depending upon the culture of your company, the role of your company, the business you’re in, your window of tolerance is different.
And it’s different for Netflix than it is from Chase than it is from, you know, healthcare company than it is from anybody, right? It’s all different and that’s okay. So that’s the first thing that I try to help people understand. Like figuring out where that window of tolerance exists for your organization and can you identify, can you recognize when it’s happening?
Right. ~~Um,~~ cause that’s the first thing you kind of have to understand that, ~~uh,~~ just being aware can be very freeing because you can at least be aware of it. It can also be frustrating because then you’re like, well, yeah, they hear a lot of that too. They’re like, yup, you just described my company. It sucks.
Like, well, the good news is there’s some things that we can do even as practitioners, a lot of times with this, people feel like it has to be a. You know, this is all about the personality of the CEO. It’s because executives doing X, Y, Z, and you know, some of that’s true. Some of this has changed. That is inflicted by senior leadership, but a lot of it is things that we can do to help the organization be better.
Ben: [00:13:04] so there are a couple things in there. One is a, it reminds me of a lot of the work that, you know, I’ve personally done in therapy where a lot of the times it’s about building up the language to describe what is happening so that when it happens, either in that moment. If you have had the chance to do this a couple of times and really reflect on it, or later when you are reflecting back on what happened and trying to understand it, you can have the language to describe, Oh, okay.
So I was stuck on in this moment or I was stuck off. And, it just reminds me a lot just basically having a language for it means that we can together share that experience and reflect on it and actually develop the skills to more quickly bounce back, but also be more resilient to the situation and maybe expand that window over time of what’s, what’s tolerable and, or what’s appropriate.
Matt: [00:13:53] Yeah. So what, it makes me think a little bit around some of the concepts around cognitive behavioral therapy, right? Like where we understand about distortions. And in my talk, I talk about cognitive distortions that happen to us in IT, especially.
But the biggest thing when we think about, and again, other disclaimer, I am not a mental health professional. So none of this is mental health advice, but things that I’ve learned, right? So. Like you can’t control how you feel, right? you’re gonna have a feeling and it’s going to happen, and that’s totally okay.
And it’s not bad than it happens. What we have control over our responses and our actions. So in CBT, we think about like being able to identify when a distortion occurs. So what happened. And that’s okay. But because like you said, the biggest thing is that we can identify it and we have an awareness of it.
And I think that’s true in the company level too, is to say like, it’s going to happen. Right? And this, this all goes back to the myth of prevention,
I can be known to be a little pedantic about words. Sometimes some words matter, some words don’t. One of the words I’ve been striving to excise from my vocabulary and I, I tried to like get other people along.
This is the word prevention because. you’re setting yourself up to fail, no pun intended. When that happens, if you say, I’m going to prevent this from ever happening again, so you’ll see a lot of language around like, Oh, the point of this post-incident review is to prevent this from ever happening again.
Nope. Cause that’s a fool’s errand. You’re not going to do that.
What you want to do is, like you said, is be more resilient and have the adaptive capacity to mitigate the impact of when something similar happens again. Right? So we’re identify. So again, just like in CBT, we want to identify that it’s okay, it’s going to happen.
We’re going to respond, we’re going to feel a certain way. That’s okay. What we’re not trying to do is keep ourselves from feeling that we’re trying to say, how do we minimize the impact, that feeling that way is, and that we’re able to move along and be productive and, and, and that rather than having, being this thing that sends me into a personal spiral where I’m depressed for three days.
It’s a bad thing happens, I feel crappy about it, but I have a tool to be able to respond. And the same thing is true with your organization, right. Bad stuff’s gonna happen. Things are gonna break. Cool. Great. Don’t try to stop. It doesn’t mean don’t buy the main. Again, to be clear, I’m not saying like just YOLO everything into Prod.
Don’t tell him I tried to say that, but don’t try to prevent. Right. Or don’t expect, don’t have the expectation of perfection. Try to prevent. That’s great. Yeah. Try to make things better. Don’t expect that you’re going to succeed in that, right. Or rather when you don’t succeed in it. That’s okay.
again, It’s all going back to this idea of, the things are going to happen, we can mitigate them, we can minimize them, we can be more healthy and how we respond to them. So that in the case of a person individually, right? When the thing happens, I can move on and I can have this thing happen and I can be back inside my window of tolerance very quickly.
And an organization, it can happen. We can restore service, we can recover, and we can move along with business. And it’s business as usual again. And the biggest thing about that is normalizing incident response. Incident response is business as usual. It’s going to happen. It’s not an anomaly to have an incident.
You need to be that. That’s just a thing you do and doesn’t mean accept like, you know, say like, Oh, well 75% of times fine. I mean, but you’re going to have hiccups are going to have incidents and responding to them should be. Just the thing that you do, man, right? That’s the whole point of this. This idea in the, organizational trauma from incidenc is that we’re normalizing them and we’re trying to create an association with incidents as, for the humans involved, as business as usual.
We’re good at, we’re good at responding to incidents and. The irony is we’ve gotten worse at responding to incidents in some ways as we’ve gotten better at distributing on-call.
so I think back, you know, I’ve been been a CIS admin for, for over 20 years.
Right? And it’s like back in the day, I was probably, you know, first of all, I was on call every other week and backup the weeks I wasn’t. So I was basically on call constantly. That’s, that was our life. Right. And you probably had something breaking at least every hour you were doing incident response. All the time.
It was business as usual, right? So now today you can be, you know, if you’ve got, if you’re doing a really good, healthy on-call rota, and you know, you’ve got developers on call, you’ve got people on their own domain. You could be on call for a year and have two incidents since you deal with. So the problem is when they do happen.
You’re freak out because it’s like, Whoa, this is something crazy, right? This is something out of the blue and you don’t want to be… Number one, you don’t want to be trying to remember how to do instant response. So that’s why practice makes permanent, but also you don’t want it to be this, as much as we would love incidents to be an exception, and they should be, we don’t want to think about, the, the response process. As this exceptional thing that we only sometimes do. Right.
Ben: [00:18:49] That’s something really important that we can open up a little bit right now I’ve been reading through The Fifth Discipline lately, one of the things that comes to mind is, first of all, we always feel like we have to do something in response to something bad happening. We have to take action because that’s very much culturally the way that we approach things. And I think we could have a really good conversation about what non-intervention is and looks like for these big kind of messy problems.
But the other thing that this book kind of points out a little bit is that whenever you’re doing an intervention. Yes. You may have short term effective things that won’t actually help you in the long term. Those are great for buying time, but at all times you need to be building capabilities. And so that building capabilities seems like one of the most important things about organizations and dealing with trauma because when you normalize the incident response, when you normalize what it looks like to work together.
In, in a situation that is pressured, right? Then you can actually start to respond in a healthfully fully enacted way.
And this reminds me of a lot of what I’ve been thinking about with learning things from army doctrine and mission command is like sand table exercises. firefighters use this as well for, for large scale wildfires.
We get together and before we think about how to, deal with this specific problem, we learn in general what it’s like to deal with these specific problems within a model kind of system where we can kind of look from the top down and learn that way. So the question that I kind of want to pivot to is how do organizations build these capabilities.
And what could it look like to take this to the next level?
Matt: [00:20:28] So there’s a, there’s a couple of things that I found to be really effective. And one is, you talked about sand table exercises. So when you think about game day, and this is all wound up into whether it’s part of your chaos engineering practice or your failure injection or just a straight up game day, this is all going to end up applying.
Right? And whatever implementation of this is. What, it’s not is a DR test by the way. DR tests don’t count for this. But a game day of an incident and what you do is you, You, so you need to run your game days or your chaos experiments or anything like that. Run them like an incident, but you do them during a, a safe time, right? If you will.
Like, so it’s, it’s, we always talk about, so PagerDuty, we have, we call them failure Fridays, although really failure any days, but we like alliteration. So we still call it failure Friday and it’s a failure injection exercise, right? It’s like, okay, we’ve got a, we’re going to test the service, we’re going to inject failure into it.
You do a chaos experiment and see what happens, and again, our hypothesis was of course, that it will be fine. I always tell people with chaos, or I’m like, you’re testing a hypothesis, your hypothesis that things will go badly. Don’t test that. Then you’re not ready for the experiment. But anyway, we’re assuming that this will work.
But we run it like a real incident. It’s spun up as an incident. We have it every, we have an incident commander, and in fact, that’s how we train our incident commanders. So if you’re going to join the incident commander rotation, you are expected to have run a failure Friday first.
So what we’ve done is we’ve taken this, we made this pretty safe exercise because I mean, there’s risk, right? Like we’re, we’re, we’re testing in production as you always are, but we know what’s wrong.
We know how we can bail out of it at any time if things go squirly. And that’s a big piece of that is. So what you’re doing is, so all those people involved, when they have an incident on that service at two in the morning, they, they, it’s associated with one in the afternoon, during the day in the office.
Right. It’s just like, it’s a calm thing. And I’ve seen folks sometimes say like, okay, what am I going to do this failure exercise, I want to test it like an incident, that’s great. So the incident response team, we’re not going to tell them what’s wrong. And I’m like, this is not an exercise in troubleshooting.
And it’s not an exercise to test, to stress test your people. People are getting news for you. You don’t need to inject stress into the people that work for you. We get plenty of practice of being under stress. It’s totally fine. We want to do the opposite. So when we’re doing this all the time. As part of our regular cadence of work.
When it does happen at two in the morning, do I mean it’s not going to be stressful? Of course not. It’s going to be stressful because the business is on the line and it’s two in the morning and we’re just upset because we got woke up. But we’re able to be, we, I always like to say the beautiful thing about the human brain is we’re very smart and our brain is also very stupid, right? You can trick your brain, right? So we’re creating a physiological response. And I always tell people, if you don’t believe it, let me tell you some. I’ve worn contacts for the majority of my life, you know, since I was 16 years old, I’ve worn contacts. When I put my contacts in, in the morning, I wake up, I get more alert when I take them out at the end of the evening, I get a little sleepy, and that’s from, you know, 35 years or whatever, of putting contacts in first thing in the morning and taking them out at night. So what we’re doing is we want to create that physiological response, and that’s what we do in post traumatic stress treatment of somatic experiencing is we start with the body, right?
Where we’re getting the physiological way we want to think. And then we associate that. Positive physiology. With the traumatic experience. And so we’re doing the same thing. We’re, we’re leading with the body. And that’s the idea. Beyond doing, like you said, doing these exercises, it’s really not to actually practice and get better at knowing how to log into PagerDuty or how to like, write a document or whatever.
I mean, that’s good. You’re going to get that, but what you’re doing is you’re, you’re, you’re creating that association and it’s really powerful and very, very effective. ~~Um.~~ But you have to do them the same. That’s the trick, right? It doesn’t help if you don’t run those in the same way, you don’t make that association.
There’s a similar thing to do that could be helpful. When you have incidents, you run them at their initial severity no matter what. And you run them to their ending. So false alarm incident, finish it out like an incident. I mean, it doesn’t mean like everybody panic and whatever, but this will happen, right?
Like you’ll, you’ll kick off your instant response process cause you think something’s wrong and you get a few minutes into it and you realize, Oh, you know, flappy monitor, whatever kind of thing. Finish it up. Even if, because what you’re doing there is you’re saying like, we just do incident response.
It’s just a thing. Oh, I bop into the Slack channel for an incident and I do my thing and we get on a call and we do the thing and it takes five minutes and we’re done. Okay. It’s just the thing we do, right. We want severe incidents to be an anomaly. We don’t want responding to squirly things with our systems to be.
Like this weird like edge case, right? This is part of life, right? It’s part of being an engineer.
Ben: [00:25:18] I really want to call out one thing in particular, which is you differentiated what what is troubleshooting work from what is running the incident. And this building these kinds of capabilities by creating a safe place to exercise these capabilities and build that muscle is not, something that someone goes off in a room and designs a weird puzzle for. This is not about trying to make it hard or trying to stress people out or trying to, kind of, make it a different kind of problem than this. It is just making it safe to do incidents.
And I think that is so enormously amazing.
What is something that you would recommend in terms of material around this topic or in general for people to find out more about you?
What kind of recommendations can be made.
Matt: [00:26:04] So a couple of things. And we’ll put some links to put in the show notes. So Dr. Peter Levine is a trauma doctor who’s done a lot of research around and kind of founded the somatic experiencing movement. So I gave a link around what Dr Levine has to say about somatic experiencing.
I have another… gave another link that, that delves into the window of tolerance. And another one about how fight or flight really works. So we didn’t really get into that. But that’s, that’s a big part of where this comes in. I also did an episode of Greater than Code about about a year ago, talking about healing organizational trauma, and we’ve talked about a few different things.
Talk a little bit more about… You mentioned at the beginning about how we have to actually process this stuff and get it out. And we didn’t get into that in this conversation. But that’s a whole other piece is like, we have to tell our stories, we have to share them within the organization because otherwise it’s unprocessed and it doesn’t get any better.
So this is why. I always say, write-only postmortems don’t help anybody. Right? You have to they have to be shared and they need to be told. So we talked a lot more about that on that show. I really like that. You know, I rant about this on the Twitters all the time, you know, feel free to find me at Twitter, @MattStratton.
And, we can follow up on this and talk some more on, and also, if you want to see. Where I might be coming to a conference near you. If you go to speaking.mattstratton.com that’s my speaking page. It’s got all my past talks and any upcoming things, so if you all listen to show and I see you at a conference somewhere, come say hi. I’d love to talk about this.
Ben: [00:27:36] Matt, it’s been so wonderful to have you. this is like one of my happiest moments in a very long time. I really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much.
Matt: [00:27:45] Thank you. My pleasure.
Ben is joined by Colleen Esposito, an agile coach and self-described bridge-builder with an incredible set of unique experiences spanning finance, software development, project management, and even home renovation. She and Ben explore the complexity of engaging with organizations as an outsider and what it really means to change the way we work. Colleen Recommends: […]
Ben is joined by Colleen Esposito, an agile coach and self-described bridge-builder with an incredible set of unique experiences spanning finance, software development, project management, and even home renovation. She and Ben explore the complexity of engaging with organizations as an outsider and what it really means to change the way we work.
Colleen Recommends: From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams
Follow Colleen on Twitter!
Just ONE of the hidden gems I shared with a Tampa/China team that wants to use agile methods from @mkilby and @johannarothman’s book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile teams. Now they have options! https://t.co/pZN3r0IGxJ
— Colleen Esposito (@TheColleenE) November 21, 2019
Intro / Outro Music by DJ Quads
https://soundcloud.com/djquads
Transcript Ben: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to episode five of The Hired Thought Podcast. I am so pleased today to be joined by Colleen Esposito. She is an agile coach who loves launching new teams. She has a deep root in the tech industry. She was a developer. She, even became PMP certified getting into the product management field and made her way all the way to agile.
It’s just an awesome. I think to have you here today, Coleen, could you say a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself to our audience?
Colleen: [00:00:28] Yeah, absolutely. Hi, I’m calling Esposito. You kind of summed it up pretty well. Um, I’ve had this meandering career that ended up in the agile space and I don’t want to go anywhere else.
Um, so I’m happy to share my perspective today.
Ben: [00:00:42] That’s awesome. One of the things that when we first spoke, you pointed out to me immediately was how much you loved helping teams get started. Could you tell me a little bit about what that’s like for you and kind of how that shows up.
Colleen: [00:00:55] Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I think that’s where my passion lies right now. Although I think there’s an, there’s another thing that’s right on the cusp of that. Um, but one of the things I love is when you bring this thing that we call agile to a brand new team and how all of a sudden they start to realize how it’s going to really change the way they work together for the better.
And how it’s going to be about, you know exactly what the manifesto was, which was uncovering better ways of developing software, and helping them not only understand that and really grasp that, but I’ll still identify what that means for them. That’s for me, my biggest passion right now and my second passion right now.
That’s something that’s just starting to really come up, is to help the people who are kind of. Helping these teams in a traditional sense, like the managers and the directors and the VPs, helping them get this thing and what it really means, not only for the teams and how they’re going to work together, but also their interactions with the teams and how that could evolve.
Right. And perhaps even needs to evolve so that the team can truly become empowered. self organizing.
Ben: [00:02:01] So, so coaching kind of in both directions, from the standpoint of the hierarchy, coaching up to the people in management and leadership who are maybe a little uncertain about what this means for them, but also
Colleen: [00:02:12] Absolutely
Ben: [00:02:12] coaching with the people on the ground who are doing the work everyday, who probably are a little bit confused, maybe scared.
Tell me a little bit about what it’s like navigating that transition. Cause launching, launching things is great. Where did we come from and where are we going? What does that look like on the ground?
Colleen: [00:02:30] So I can speak from personal experience, having been, you know, eons ago, right? I’m not that young, but a long time ago I was a developer and I, I kind of left that field for a couple of different reasons, but one of the ones that I left for is because I had some ideas and I would, I would, I’m a, I’m a frequent, “I have an idea”-er.
Is what I call myself. I’m always like, Hey, I have this idea. Now that doesn’t mean it’s the best idea in the world, but at least I have one. And I would bring up these ideas and would be told essentially, and I hate to paraphrase, but it’s pretty true. Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, Colleen.
We’ve already thought through all of those things and you don’t even need to think about them. Just go sit and code. And, that’s one of the reasons I actually left the tech field.
So I love bringing that back to these teams who maybe they have had some ideas and maybe their ideas weren’t necessarily welcomed and, or they just weren’t encouraged. Maybe they were welcomed, but they weren’t necessarily encouraged to have new ideas to approach that same old problem. Uh, and so that’s what I love the most, is helping them get this and bring their best.
Ben: [00:03:37] Adopting agile is such a kind of difficult shift in expectations and understandings. I’m reminded of a recent experience I had where, uh, in Pittsburgh we have a pretty strong agile community, lots of interesting folks working in this space. And there was, kind of this moment, I think I was giving a talk at one of the local tech conferences and I just kind of like asked to see how many people in the room had been using agile methods.
And then I did the same poll, but how many of you have actually like seen the manifesto and kind of read through the principles and, and thought about, uh, what the origins of this, these ideas were. And it, I was surprised how few had had that opportunity. And so that makes me wonder about a bunch of things right.
How do companies come about deciding to go agile and if that is the way that they’re viewing things, is making a switch from what was happening before to this new thing. Are the employees just along for the ride or are they aware of everything that’s about to change? How does it work for them?
Colleen: [00:04:41] So it’s interesting that you say that because I’ve just moved away from forced coaching cause I never, never been much of a forcer but.
Uh, or at least not in the last 10 years. I can’t speak about before then. Matter of fact, I probably was quite a forcer 10 years ago. Um, but this idea of invitation based coaching and inviting people into the solution, making sure that they understand what this thing is all about, the why’s behind everything that we do.
And then what does that look like for you? What does that look like from a very. Far in advance future future spective. What would that end state really be? And then what steps could you as a team, as a team member, actually take to move towards the vision that you’ve already identified?
Ben: [00:05:26] Yeah, that sounds awesome.
And part of this is like, it seems like it’s about giving people on the ground who are doing the work instead of just making them the order takers, be people who are making decisions and having agency in the process of the direction of the software.
Now that has to be counterbalanced though with the strategic direction of the organization. And I think this might have to do a little bit with what you were describing with coaching up, but I’m kind of curious what that looks like.
Colleen: [00:05:54] Absolutely. So the first thing I do when I come into a brand new organization is to try to understand the why’s behind their decisions, first of all. And then, you know, why did you choose to use agile? And if I, what I hear is twice to work and half the time, then I know that I might have to reset expectations.
Right? So, so I mean, but it’s good and it informs that. And the other thing I asked everyone is, what does success look like for you? , what do you envision there? What does that look like? What does that actually feel like? And then as a result of that, we design the coaching plan and the coaching engagement around that.
So that’s that strategic piece of it. I also have to understand the goals of the organization and the values behind that organization because agile is very value based. Very principle based, and if the values of the organization do not align with the values of agile, then we have to have a conversation.
It doesn’t mean agile will never be a fit. It just means we need to talk a little bit more. We need to think a little bit deeper. We need to really figure out what the path forward looks like for you. And it’s not going to be the same path as it is for any other company or any other team even. But once I understand the answers to those questions, then we can start to cocreate together.
Ben: [00:07:08] You drew an interesting distinction between forced coaching and invitation based coaching, and I’m really curious what invitation based coaching looks like.
Colleen: [00:07:19] Me too. No, I know. I have some idea what it is. Um, but, you know, keep in mind, I’m really early in this journey myself. So I think it’s bringing in, um, structures that actually allow the teams to make the right set of decisions for them.
And you know, uh, whether that be, you know, some of the liberating structures, which is something that I’m literally just getting exposure to attend my very first, very first liberating structure, a workshop last week. It was more of an exploration of liberating structures than anything else and having a lot of conversations around that.
But, you know, maybe that’s the thing. The other thing I’ve done, and at Assurant, this is a, it was an experiment that myself as a member of the agile center of excellence, there actually started to run is before we start any sort of adoption, let’s figure out the answers to some common questions.
And the questions are, why are we doing this in the first place? What’s in our way, right? What? What is kind of opposed to this agile thing? What’s in our favor? What are we going to do when, and there were specific ones. What are we going to do when we face anybody who has questions about what we’re going to do?
All right, what are we going to do when there are people who don’t want to work in this new way? What am I going to do then? And what I’ve seen in the past is often what happens is the, the leadership of the company says, well, we’re on this bus and if you’re not on this bus with us, well then you are going to have to decide when you get off.
And if you don’t decide to get off, we’re going to have to decide for you. And that’s a sad place to be because when you think about empowerment, doesn’t that mean empowering to also say, no, I don’t want this. And so what does that mean as an agile coach? Um, and, and I think that’s when I started that experiment, which was a few years ago, where not only did I bring the leaders into this conversation, but I invited them to bring their people into the conversation and to have some real honest conversation around what we’re really facing as an organization, even if it’s not pretty.
And let’s talk about that. And let’s say, okay, we acknowledge this is not where we want to be. This is where we’ve. Become, this is what we’ve become as an organization, but that’s not a place that’s going to be sustainable long time. It’s not a healthy place to stay, and if we want this organization to really be around in 20 years, in 40 years, in a hundred years, we might have to make some changes right now.
As a matter of fact, I would say, given what we’ve seen in the industry, they have to make those changes, but just to make them on their own without any involvement of the people, they’re going to lose their perspective that’s really valuable. That’s why they bring their people into the conversation, for perspective.
And also that’s that first invitation. This is where we’re going. This is why we want to go there. Here’s what we see is in our way and in our favor. Tell us if we’re right. Tell us if there’s something that we missed. Tell us if the approach that we’re about to take is not going to align to how you want to work as a team.
Ben: [00:10:24] It takes a lot, a lot of humility from the standpoint of leadership to be able to entertain that conversation. And I was just struck by what you just said about. Being able to say, no, this reminds me so much of the common kinds of problems that come up with ideas like culture change and culture is, it’s funny, um, is kind of like this ingrained aspect of almost everything that we’re doing.
And it seems kind of interesting to try to like point at it and go like, we should change that, but in any major disruptive. Shift in any major disruptive transition culture is part of that. And I’m curious with that question of whether or not, you know, people who are participating can say no, what does that look like, that cultural aspect of changing the way that the work is done ?
Colleen: [00:11:12] That’s a big question. So, you know, and I’m not sure that I have a complete answer for that. I know, I just know what I’ve seen and what I’ve seen work and. Um, so you’ve got to think of culture. Culture is something more than just the organization.
Of course. It’s more than even just how they interact together. It’s this system of relationships. And I had the pleasure and also the confusion of going to organizational relationship system coaching last year, which took everything that I knew and like kind of threw it on its head. I mean, some of this was instinctive for me, but other pieces of it, the fact that when you have an organization, an organization is built on relationships, makes absolute sense and always has.
But then what about the fact that these relationships actually create entities between the relationships. That is, every relationship is an entity and each person in the relationship is also an entity, and then the organization as a whole is an entity. So you have all of these entities interacting with each other and that big organization system is complex. It is constantly evolving in response to whatever stimulus or whatever change it goes through. So you have to consider what are the possible outcomes of whatever change we’re trying to introduce? What could happen to this system? Not only how can we make it happen, but what could happen? What are the possibilities?
What could go right? What can go wrong. Really wrong and how do we need to consider those things in whatever we decide to do next. The other thing I do is very, very, very small experiments and see what happens as a result of that experiment. And I think that makes a big difference too, to help that organization move to where they want to move.
Because if they think this thing is going to get them there and then they find that it doesn’t. Well then they’re going to have to make a decision about what to do next. It’s different than what they originally planned. How to adapt to change, something like that.
Ben: [00:13:24] Yeah. If they don’t have that presence of mind to recognize the underlying ideas that are driving them, the goals that they have, the hopes that they have about the outcomes.
Then if this one change doesn’t result in what they were expecting. There’s almost like a collapse. And so I always find it’s really helpful to go in, dig in for something deeper. And let’s, what I heard in what you were describing, always going for the underlying kind of, uh, motivations and understandings of what’s going on in the organization and really approaching it from that standpoint.
Addressing complexity like that is, you know, what can go right? What can go wrong? We are speaking the same language. Like, this is just so useful for thinking about these really messy kind of places to, to think about.
Um, one of the things that comes to mind is the notion of being almost a free agent inside these organizations
When someone hires you. Brings you into the organization you are one, constantly trying to understand what the current state is and orient to it and going again, going back to the motivations and underlying kind of mechanisms of how it’s working, but you’re also trying to interact meaningfully with it and intervene in ways that enable a higher state, a better way of working.
I sometimes wonder if roles like that exist and succeed. If only for being able to connect people together and be a line of communication between them. Is that theory close or is it wrong?
Colleen: [00:14:58] I would say that’s pretty valid. Um, relationships do everything right. They, they’re what makes the change happen. Um, and, and I consider myself a connector actually, before I came up with my
Current, you know, kind of describing who Colleen is. I call myself a bridge builder. I am naturally a bridge builder. I try to build these connections between things and especially between people, and I think that’s a huge part of what I do. Um, I also think too, a lot of times organization bring someone like my myself in thinking that I’m going to make huge sweeping changes.
And eventually, maybe, but in the very beginning, it’s often connecting like what a development team is doing. With what an operations team is doing and the company that I’m just about to finish an engagement with had teams that were aligned around the departmental goals for each without a view and an insight into how each of them plays a part in the value stream that then, you know, produces value for their customer.
They had actually completely lost sight of who their customer was. Much less the fact that no matter how quickly development got because of this agile thing, if operations couldn’t deploy those things, just as quickly. We really weren’t going to have any gains at all within that company, so that’s another thing I brought to that organization.
Ben: [00:16:25] So taking a step back and thinking about this larger kind of scope of, of your career, like you, you’ve seen a lot, and so I was wondering, you said that you left tech because you had ideas and you had big thoughts about how to change the world. You entered project management and even got PMP certified, and that was sort of the path your life was taking. Could you connect the dots between there and here? How did you get to where you are?
Colleen: [00:16:53] Oh goodness. Okay. I have a full confession to make and I feel like I’m in church, so I was exhibiting behavior that I didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with, but I kept doing it because it was effective. Right. And by behavior, I mean things like manipulation. Right, and forcing and, and, and things like that.
And what happened? And I was very successful. I was able to deliver a whole bunch of stuff. And I love doing things. I’m a doer, right? But I also got to a point where I realized that the way that I was acting. Was doing harm. It was doing harm to others, right? Because I saw these people who are losing all this, you know, personal time with their family, and they were, their relationships were suffering and they were personally suffering.
I actually saw a team who went from very happy and smiley to completely morose working every night and every weekend, and just hopeless, almost apathetic after a while because they felt like they couldn’t make a difference no matter what they did. And then it started to impact me. And I realized that what was happening was being in that role and working in that way was eroding my soul.
And I was harming other people, so it was harming myself and harming others. And I had to stop. I actually left the profession for about three months, four months while I gathered my thoughts and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next. And what I decided to do was to move to another company.
Because I thought that it was the way that the company’s culture was, and it, it was a very toxic work culture. One of the most toxic I’ve ever been part of. And, um, and, and it was bad. But what happened as a result, as I ended up getting thrown into agile by accident, and thank God for that, because all of a sudden I went from, you know… Am I going to be a project manager? This is what I’m good at. This is what I know. I don’t know how to do anything else right now. What does that mean for me? Do I have to go back to school? … To, got thrown into this, this new team who was working in an agile way and went, Oh my gosh, this is what’s been missing the whole time.
This is the heart. This is the soul. These are the things that are really going to make a difference, not only in the company’s future, but also in the individuals’ future and in my own, and it certainly has.
Ben: [00:19:20] Wow. That is quite a transition. That is quite a story and it’s amazing to me that you were as sensitive to this question of, of suffering, frankly. I think a lot of corporations and large organizations tend to have a lot of like, effects that, you know, no one person is particularly responsible for, but that the structure and the incentives and the way that the entire thing is set up basically guarantees certain kinds of outcomes. Things like stripping people of agency, forcing them to sort of become individualists, or making local politics be the thing that’s most dominant and effective as a way to make decisions.
All these things are kind of, in some respect, right, they have value and they are useful, but to certain extremes and certain extents, they become actually detractive from people’s ability to survive and, and feel good about the work that they’re doing. But suffering is in systems, I think is one of those things that I’m in particularly, fascinated, and, and, and, you know, very like, curious kind of way because I’m so sensitive to it. When I notice something happening where there’s kind of like this wedge of someone being crushed against some system, some incentive, and I can see how they are actually being harmed by the system that they’re a part of.
Um, I’m extraordinarily sensitive to that and I can always point at it. And that’s really hard to do when you’re someone working on the inside. As someone who’s part of this system that is essentially performing this behavior. But as an agile coach and as someone who has maybe a more, uh, not temporary, but less, uh, steeped kind of perspective.
You’re, you’re not the fish in water that can’t see the water so much, cause you still have the external perspective of all the other organizations you’ve been to. And generally being new to the organization generally, um, and how it works and learning how it works in its own ways. Um, how do you see your role as an agile coach in that reduction of suffering? Is it just the sort of helping individuals find agency and power at the ground, or is it also in that coaching above? How do you play that role in making that possible in an organization?
Colleen: [00:21:42] That’s actually a great question. I mean, I think what I, I think I focused on the customer period.
The customer could be that individual who’s in the system, who’s currently suffering. It could be the managers who are part of that system. It could be the executives who, and maybe even unknowingly are creating this system of suffering. They don’t even know. I don’t, I don’t consider that as an intended consequence, but it’s perhaps that they intend to do no harm, but they haven’t considered the entire system and how that actually can, can impact people.
Ben: [00:22:19] The executives don’t always mean to do certain things, right? It’s a large part because what can you fit inside your head, right?
You, you can only. Imagine the impacts of your actions to the extent that you’re actively exposed to the, the feedback, frankly, and thinking about like the iceberg effect, right. Where you only so much information…
Colleen: [00:22:43] …is visible to you. Well, let’s, let’s go even further. Think about this. We all think we can see everything, right?
But what we really can see is what’s just at the end of our thumb. That’s it. That’s all we can really focus on. That’s a really small area. And yet we think we see things. So, you know, there’s this, this, there’s all these things that are, um. Much more visible these days. The idea of you’ll have unconscious biases, you know, cognitive biases and bias is just a part of who we are.
But being aware of the fact that we do have a bias. Yeah. We can only see just at the end of our thumb. It gives us the permission to actually ask questions if we choose to. Now suffering as a whole. You brought it back. My visit to Menlo innovations in Ann Arbor and how their entire purpose in life is to end human suffering as it pertains to software development.
I cannot get out of my brain the image of the guy on the project that went well because I managed it from the very beginning. And how we got to the delivery point. We were ready to start UAT. We had done everything right, checked all the boxes, when there were scope changes we did a change request, and then we went to go deliver this thing and there was an interpretation issue, how the requirement was written and how it was delivered.
They exactly aligned. But the way that the person who wrote the requirement and the rate of the person delivered the requirement was different. And basically our stakeholders at that time decided that they were going to dig their heels in and they were going to do whatever was necessary to win.
And the results was the lead developer who had, by the way, lost his father during that year and still gave everything he had. Was forced to work nights and weekends. And that’s the one that made me leave the industry. Cause I said, I can’t do this to people anymore. So that’s the real impact of some of the decisions that are being made and the lack of perspective, um, awareness and the lack of asking questions.
Ben: [00:24:56] There’s a phrase that comes from lean manufacturing. Basically it’s, it’s go and see. Let’s go and walk the floor. Yes, exactly. And this idea that an executive or a manager. Should kind of have this humble observation, uh, show respect and kind of try to understand how things work and what the impacts of the decisions that are made often completely away from the work that’s actually happening, how those actually have much different and sometimes terrible, uh, effects. I think that kind of perspective is, is necessary, but it’s so often missing.
One thing that we talked about before the podcast started that I was really curious about getting your perspective on, was, I know that you survived as in lived in the moment during the 2008 financial crisis.
Colleen: [00:25:50] Yes, I did. Yes, I did.
Ben: [00:25:52] That is fascinating to me and want to learn, I want to know everything, but I was wondering if you could give me like the short version of the story of what that was like.
Colleen: [00:26:02] Yeah. So it was working for a really large financial institution. Um, one of the secondary mortgage market one of the players in there. And, uh, the project that I was managing could have limited the risk that that institution had to the more the, the crisis. I don’t say that it could have prevented the crisis because there were just way too many factors going on, but what it was all about was taking a look at the derivatives that they were purchasing, basically the mortgage notes that they were purchasing and the risk that was inherent in the purchase of that portfolio of mortgage notes.
And this particular project could have shown them how much risk they were about to take on before they purchased this portfolio of really, really bad loans. And it didn’t go well. Well, I hadn’t managed that project from the very beginning. They had run into a bunch of challenges and I had taken over when they were supposed to be coding and they hadn’t even finished requirements.
But I think often back to the fact that like had agile been mainstream, more mainstream than it was back then. You know, kind of like where it is now and the company moving towards agility at that point. What difference would that have made? Well. What we ended up doing to be successful was to work right alongside the customer because the customer had a lot more domain expertise than the team member would.
Matter of fact, the team never would have that kind of expertise and that knowledge of knowing when we bring this data in and there’s this translate layer that we’re interfacing with that isn’t ours that we’re not actually even building. And then we’d get numbers that are completely different than what we inputted, are they even right?
We had no way to know whether those numbers were right. We just knew the numbers we were receiving. And um, so had we been working alongside the customer, had we, um, build things in a more iterative and incremental fashion where we could show off what was actually ready to be shown off, and then we could have delivered value much quicker.
Could it have prevented the risk and the exposure that they were actually facing. And I believe the answer to that would have been yes, yes. Had we been able to deliver that in an incremental and iterative fashion, that project could have made a huge difference in the future of that company.
Ben: [00:28:25] Wow. That’s amazing.
Yeah. And my, uh, kind of knowledge and experience of having lived through that is, you know, I was only a kid and I, so I recently watched The Big Short, and I’m just like this whole dramatic like portrayal of everything that was going on and happening. But to think that. All, all it really could have come down to is the ability to, to see the risk, uh, with software that could have been delivered in a way that would enable that risk to be, uh, more readily available, maybe not perfect, maybe not feature complete, maybe not perfect requirements, comprehensively documented and very carefully artisanally crafted, um, and maybe delivered never.
But, but maybe just maybe if things had been delivered incrementally, we could have seen a difference in the way that that played out. That is a heartening thought to think, and I wanted to thank you so much for being here today and for sharing this time with me.
Is there anything that you’ve been reading lately or any books or articles that you would like to recommend for people to check out.
Colleen: [00:29:28] Um, let’s see. So I just finished From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams by Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman. Now I’ve been working with distributed teams for a lot of my, my career. Um, surprisingly just because different locations, and even if they’re not sitting together, it’s kind of distributed, right.
Or really is distributed if we’re not right co located. So there’s different approaches that need to be taken.
There is one hidden tip in there that I just tweeted about… And I tweet, by the way, @TheColleenE… that I’ve found in that book. This is almost a matrix of, Hey, is agile, right? For your team? Depending on what your context of work is and what domain you’re actually working in, it may be, but you know what, it may not be. And here are some alternative approaches that many people haven’t even heard about that you could use to weigh in your decision.
Ben: [00:30:24] Awesome. I’ll make sure to include it in the show notes and I’ll make sure that people can find your accounts and follow you on Twitter. And, uh, any final thoughts? Anything else you’d like to share.
Colleen: [00:30:34] So I, you know, agile is not a fit for everything, but agile can be a fit more than you realize.
So I personally have used agile to remodel seven houses. Matter of fact, it didn’t just help us remodel the houses, it helped us really think about the outcome that we wanted to achieve.
And the first outcome that we had, we achieved very quickly to live in a house that was better and nicer than we could normally afford. And then the second was this, getting a house for cash, no mortgage. And it’s been pretty awesome. You can also use agile to respond to crisis.
I’ve done that a couple of different times, so just imagine the possibilities. Yes. Don’t take agile in as something as a solution for everything, but do think about when you’re in the complex zone, when you’re in this complicated zone, where could agile actually fit? Well, it’s more than just software.
Ben: [00:31:25] That’s for sure. Thank you so much, Colleen. It’s been fantastic to have you.
Colleen: [00:31:29] Thank you so much. Take care, Ben.
Ben: [00:31:31] Take care.
Special guests Mario Platt (Privacy Beacon) and Ben Ford (Commando Development) join Ben Mosior for an extensive discussion of the OODA Loop, the Cynefin Framework, and Derek M. C. Yuen’s book, Deciphering Sun Tzu.
- Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
- Thinking in Bets
- The Evolution of Wealth
- Deciphering Sun Tzu
- Loon Shots
- The Willpower Instinct
- The Cynefin MiniBook
OODA Loop, provided courtesy of Patrick Edwin Moran, CC BY 3.0 Cynefin Framework, provided courtesy of Cognitive Edge Check out Privacy Beacon and follow Mario Platt on Twitter:
I’m halfway through writing a huge blog about applying #WardleyMaps, #MaturityMapping, #Stoicism, Identity concepts from Cognitive Edge and @snowded to Personal Development and visualising personal goals. This one will get a bit personal but wanted to share the journey pic.twitter.com/x6LObbW9o8
— Mario Platt (@madplatt) November 4, 2019
Check out Commando Development and follow Ben Ford on Twitter:
1/ Boyd's OODA loop is probably the most valuable mental model I know of for reasoning about the increasing pace of change in the world. But – it's was formulated at a time before much of current complexity science. What's missing?
— Ben Ford – Commando Development (@commandodev) November 1, 2019
Intro / Outro Music by DJ Quads
https://soundcloud.com/djquads
Transcript Ben Mosior: Hello everyone and welcome to episode four of the Hired Thought Podcast. My name is Ben Mosior and I’m very pleased to be joined today by Mario Platt of Privacy Beacon, and Ben Ford of Commando Development. These two people have been amazing companions in the discussions that we’ve had around strategy, and thinking about how to be more purposeful in business. I’m really excited for the conversation that we’re going to have today. And without further ado, I’m going to ask each of them to introduce themselves to you. Mario, why don’t you get started? What’s your background, and what kind of brought you here today?
Mario Platt: So I very early, at age 13, I got interested in security, late 90s, and that’s mainly what I’ve been focusing on since then. So I started as many 13 year olds, when they get interested in security, it’s not because of the control or the governance or the strategy, because they would like to hack, right? So that’s kind of where I came from. So over the years, I’ve had a lot of different roles, so from operations, security engineering. I did assurance, did compliance, risk management, and for circa, a year and a half to two years ago, I went solo. So I’m now an independent consultant. And also a couple of years ago, I’ve not finished but I decided to compliment my security skills with a business degree. I’m almost finished with that as well, to getting a bit of a broader sense of how to apply security to different context, and that’s also when I got more purposeful in learning about strategy, generally speaking.
Ben Mosior: Awesome, and congrats on your nearing completion of the business degree, that’s awesome.
Mario Platt: Yes, thank you.
Ben Mosior: Ben, let’s move on to you. What’s your background? And tell us a little bit about what brought you here today.
Ben Ford: Sure thing. So I’ve been a software developer and a team builder, team leader for sort of 10 years or so. And before that, I was a Royal Marine commando, which for the longest time I thought, well you know, that was something fun I did in my 20s. I had a great time, but that was then and this is now. And it wasn’t until I started building my own teams, and you know, moving up the stack, I guess, if you like, into trying to make people and teams more effective that actually some of the lessons that I learned, it became apparent that actually they were quite important. Around about that time two really pivotal books came out, one was Team of Teams by Stan McChrystal, and the other one was Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. And they really sort of, I was already starting to see some parallels between my military service and the things that I needed to be more effective as a leader, and you know, a builder of teams. And those two books really just sort of, you know, gave me a bit more impetus to go study a bit more. So you know, along the way I came across Boyd’s OODA Loop. One of McChrystal’s later books, One Mission introduced Cynefin. And then from there on, obviously, you know Wardley Maps is basically where you end up, I think, when you’re banging that strategy drum. And then obviously, you know, we met a few months ago. We’ve chatted a bit and I’m in this kind of nice but confusing position where I see a lot of parallels between my military service, some of the concepts of functional programming and that, you know, very, very kind of always seeking more fundamental abstractions. And then in the middle of it, there’s all this kind of research on strategy, and you know, this is going to be a great conversation, I’m sure.
Ben Mosior: I’m really excited to have you both here. Let’s get started with Colonel Boyd. Colonel John Boyd invented a model for sense making in, I guess it was originally applied for dog fighting, right?
Ben Ford: Yep.
Ben Mosior: Ben, do you have kind of like a basic kind of history background that you are familiar with, or you could share with us?
Ben Ford: Yeah, so Boyd’s a weird one, he didn’t really write much down. So much of his kind of teachings, you know, there’s this massive kind of briefing that he gave, lots and lots of people in the US military establishment. There’s a couple of papers that he wrote, but really most of the kind of detail of what I think I know about Boyd has come from his associates. So one really good book if you want to kind of dig into his background and history is his biography, which is, I think, called Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Face of Warfare, or something along those lines. And that gets into a bit of his history and his kind of motivation, and quite important to understand his kind of, how he developed his ideas over several decades. So the OODA Loop wasn’t something that he came up with while he was a pilot, it was something that he came up with after he’d done, you know, energy maneuver theory, and you know, a whole bunch of other stuff. And he’d gone and got an engineering degree, and you know, looked into thermal dynamics, uncertainty principle. Loads of inputs into this thing that gets presented most often, you know, when you first come across the OODA Loop, it gets presented as quite superficial kind of linear loop, which as I’m sure, we’re going to get into, and this conversation is not even beginning to scratch the surface.
Ben Mosior: For anyone who’s not familiar, the most simplistic representation of it is a loop of observe, orient, decide and act, and that repeats. And usually when people explain it, they kind of accompany it with some explanation about going through that loop faster than opponents, and introducing noise into their decision making cycle because of how out of date the way their ability to orient to the situation is, relative to yours, if you’re going faster. It all kind of gets really hand wavy really quick, especially because, for most of us, we’re not flying planes. And so I think there’s an interesting way to look at this, however, from the standpoint of organizational strategy, and even individual strategy. Mario, I was kind of curious, like what’s your background, what’s your experience with using the OODA Loop or thinking about it? What has it shown you in your work, and maybe what do you think about when someone starts talking about the OODA Loop?
Mario Platt: So the first thing that hit me in the OODA Loop, which is, I have already been exposed, because there’s a lot of different people talking about it, to the simplistic way of seeing it as a circle, right? That you go around et cetera, and there are even many security offers that refer to that often. In order to appreciate the complexity, the evolving threat landscape, what we’re gonna do about it, how we’re going to plan to navigate ourselves through its cycle. Now once I started digging a bit more, it was really an ah-ha moment. I think I appreciated that I could actually try and use the loops, on my rediscovery of the concept, than I did originally. Because originally, it’s another kind of cycle type thing, right, yeah it’s interesting but it doesn’t tell me much. When you look at the extended version of the OODA Loop, what was actually drawn, then it’s different, right? It’s a completely different ballgame at that stage, because you have increased guidance, you have feedback loops, you have different ways that information can navigate. It’s not just a loop. You can find yourself in different parts of the situation, in not only that, as you mentioned, you can use it for anything. For business, for personal, right? So for instance, the simplest example that I use when talking OODA to non-technical people is really, what is your implicit guidance, right? So when no one’s looking, when you go to the fridge to get food, what you pick up, right? If you’re someone struggling with weight, or something along those lines. So the OODA Loop, the extended version of it, I think is really, really useful to think about really anything. About the actions that you take, the feedback loop you get from the world, and then how you’re going to base your next decisions, and where does the feedback loop enter? Where does it go, and how you’re going to navigate around it. So when I discovered this extended version, it was really changing for me. Now the way I sometimes use the OODA Loop is I just go to Google and open it in front of me, and think about a problem, right? I’m not writing things down. I’m not trying to be academic about it. I just look at the picture thinking about a particular problem, and I start thinking, well, is this implicit kind? I’m making a conscious decision, so what kind of loops can I expect? Or what kind of feedback can I expect from taking a certain course of action? And for me, and it is something that Mr Rivera is currently writing about. There’s also a session in the US at the end of the month. It’s about how the overlap between Cynefin and the OODA Loop. And one of the things that I really, that I still haven’t completely figured my way around it, to be completely honest, but it’s something that’s been kind of on my mind, and hasn’t moved away for the past two weeks, is in terms of the feedback loops that happen after you make decisions. So particularly, the view that you, as in poker, so I’m referring specifically to thinking in bets book. In terms of after you perform an action, you have two things, you have an outcome and you have a decision, right? That separate between the quality of the decision and the outcome, I think that’s so much to explore there. It is something that, because especially in strategy, and even the way Simon Wardley presents, Wardley mapping, right? We’re always talking chess, right? But chess, it’s a perfect information guide. You see the board, right? When you don’t see the board, I’m not sure that’s the best analogy, right? And I think a poker based analogy is probably much more useful. But as I said, it’s something that’s just been better in my mind. I need to think a lot more about it, and hopefully hear your opinions to see if you can help me move forward with this idea.
Ben Mosior: I liked the way that you described how you approach this kind of idea of using the OODA Loop. Like I’m just kind of curious, Ben, do you have a similar practice where you just kind of sit with the loop and try to understand the implicit guidance, and think about the feedback? How does using this framework look to you, especially in the work that you do now?
Ben Ford: So yeah, so I’ve come at the OODA Loop sort of a bit later, I guess. So, and I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the functional programming world, where everything’s about recursion and hierarchy. So I’ve come to a maybe slight heretical view of the OODA Loop. I think this formulation’s wrong. I think the formulation here is a limitation of the communications medium at the time. So you know, when Boyd was drawing all this stuff out, he had overhead projectors and pen on whatever the material’s called. I believe that what we’re really looking at here with the OODA Loop is a hierarchy. So your orient bit, and your beliefs and your values and everything is in the middle. And the way you interact with the world, or the boundary between you and the world is at the outside, right? And in between, you know, what crosses the boundaries from the outside world inwards is the observations, and those penetrate that bubble to differing levels depending on how impactful they are. So for example, if you have an observation of something that’s completely familiar, you know, something that you know how to do, something that falls within the implicit guidance and control lines there. It’s not going to penetrate very high up the hierarchy of your belief system, right? It’s going to be, okay, I’ve seen this a million times before, I know how to react. There’s no decision required, it’s just an action. Now when you get something that’s perhaps a little bit more novel, then you need to start making decisions and hypothesis, and it maybe starts to change your world view a bit. And that’s where you start to impinge on that blue square there, right?
Ben Mosior: I want to make sure that I describe this for folks who maybe won’t be able to see this. So if the OODA Loop is observe, orient, decide and act, the extended version of that looks like a quite complicated diagram. And observe is about observations which is that external incoming information, which Boyd described as unfolded circumstances, outside information, unfolding interaction with the environment. And then that’s fed forward into this blue square that he was talking about, which is in the orient step.
Ben Ford: Yep.
Ben Mosior: But it looks like a pentagram of cultural traditions, analysis and synthesis, previous experience, new information and genetic heritage. And then that feeds forward into a decision hypothesis, which is in the decision step. And so that’s what you’re describing right before the action step that comes after, for different kinds of decisions, it sounds like the loop occurs differently, am I understanding that correctly?
Ben Ford: Yeah, I believe so. So the other thing that you didn’t mention there is that between the orient and the observe, and the act parts of the loop, there are this implicit guidance and control lines, right? And these are places where, you know, if I would make the analogy of martial arts, if I may, so you know I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, not particularly well.
Mario Platt: Me too!
Ben Ford: Yeah, great. So when I roll with a black belt, they’re not in their orient loop at all, right? I do not ever force them into their orient part of this loop, because I don’t act quickly enough. I’m not fluid enough, whereas they force me into that place all the time, right? I have to think about every single action I do, whereas the black belt is bouncing between observations and actions, observations and actions, because there’s nothing that I’m, I’m not able to force them high enough up their hierarchy that I just mentioned, to require them to think, right? And that’s, I believe, what Boyd is really talking about when he’s talking about getting inside someone’s OODA Loop. It’s actually making them bounce around inside that orient step, and closing them off from the outside world. So what I was talking about earlier, you know, when you’ve got something you’re completely familiar with, your observation leads to action. You know, the action changes the world in a way that’s expected, which gives you more observations. And I love the fact that you just mentioned there’s this word “Unfold” in here, right? This calls directly into Boyd’s paper Destruction and Creation, because destruction and creation is his description of what’s happening inside that orient part of the loop. And unfold is a term from functional programming, which is the opposite of a fold. So the fold is the destruction part, and the unfold is the new possibilities part. And that’s where I first started to kind of think about this in terms of hierarchies and recursion, and you know, the OODA Loop is obviously the scale of a company or a business, is very, very recursive. So there’s, you know, constant small OODA Loops going on, you know, I’m a programmer, one of my OODA Loops is my edit compile loop, right? Edit the code, as it works, and I’m genuinely not thinking very much about that at all, right? It’s mostly procedural, it’s mostly intuition based, until I come across a thorny problem, and then I might have to go out to a longer OODA Loop, which is gonna be Google or look at stack over flow or whatever. And all of these different network of composable OODA Loops, eventually builds this massive, very, very intertwined OODA Loop of the whole company. And that’s the way I’ve been kind of thinking of this.
Ben Mosior: It feels like there is, in the way that you describe that, there’s also this connection to the complexity question, where if you’re a practitioner, and going back to the Brazilian jiu-jitsu, if you’re a practitioner who’s very well experienced dealing with frankly very, for most of us, unanticipatable actions, without extensive training, they don’t spend very much time orienting because they’ve already run all the pathways and know how that works. And so this feels really connected to the topic of complexity, and in particular, you mentioned the Cynefin framework earlier. And just as a quick overview, I’m probably going to butcher this but I’ll do my best. The Cynefin framework is five domains. It basically splits between ordered systems and unordered systems, where within ordered systems you have simple, which is kind of straight forward push button interactions. There’s one best way of doing things. There’s complicated where it’s still knowable, but it might take some expert analysis. And maybe just a long time to figure things out. And then on the unordered side, it’s between complex and chaos. And complexity is, there’s no predictable kind of interaction, but there are stable patterns. So cause and effect isn’t as predictable, and you can’t think ahead, but you can probe and poke the system and see what happens. And then in chaos, there just is no order, and so the best thing to do is to act to escape it, usually. And then the fifth domain is basically this space where you are not aware of which one of those domains you’re in. So Mario, I’m curious about your perspective of how something like Cynefin, something like making sense of a complexity centric framework like that, making sense of reality with it, how that fits into OODA, in particular given what Ben has described about how those decisions might play out differently depending on things like training, or familiarity with circumstance.
Mario Platt: Yep. So I think one of the first things that I think should be done is look at it from a historical perspective, right? So when Boyd was developing the OODA Loop, complexity thinking wasn’t what it is today. Right, so there’s been a lot of work that’s been done in the meantime, particularly the Cynefin framework, Dave Snowden, that have been, so the complexity thinking has advanced enormously since then. So I think that not having certainly read as much of Boyd as Ben did, I’m sure, but when I go through information relating to that, it seems to me that John Boyd appreciates complexity, but didn’t fully grasp the concept, or how that would relate in terms of different circumstances or situations where you could be put, okay? And I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m really excited about the work that Rivera and Snowden are doing with combining both Cynefin and the OODA, because what Ben was saying is exactly that. So when you’re in a simple domain or in a complicated domain, there’s a certain pathway you’d make around the OODA Loop, right? That doesn’t need to, so you know that you’re going to do X, you’re going to get Y, right? It’s an ordered system. There’s no need to do a lot. Going back to the martial arts example, if I’m having a match against someone that is much more experienced than I am, then I’m going to be on the complexity or chaos side of things, right? It’s going to be difficult, I’m going to be trying things. I’m not sure they’re going to work. I’m even stop doing anything, because I suddenly feel overwhelmed by the situation itself, right? For someone that has much more experience, who’s been through that OODA Loop many more times. They’ve built the implicit guidance, so that they can treat, there’s a simple problem, right? So someone put his hand over there, or his weight on a particular arm, then I know I can go around, there’s nothing that he’s going to do about it, right? Unless he knows a countermeasure against this particular thing that I did there. So not only the different applications, depending on the complexity, going back to Cynefin, depending on which domain you find yourself in, there’s this, to me, what attracts me the most is that this is about going through the loop many times over, as a personal development activity, right? You know that the more you can get yourself out of thinking something is complex, in doing the things that you need to do to get you from an unordered complex system to a complicated problem, you’re going to become much more efficient. Relating this to worldly terms, it’s going to give rise to higher level order systems, right? So you’re going to be able to do things that you didn’t know you were ever going to be able to do, because you’ve mastered some components to a degree. Now you have available to you much more complex activities that were even unimaginable, or you could even figure out there were things, a year ago, five years ago, whatever may be the case.
Ben Mosior: Yeah, so thinking about just like what it’s like to have experiences in life, and develop skills, and to develop capabilities. And actually, in a very deliberate way, perhaps, think about what skills you need to be anticipating that you need to build in order to be able to navigate that OODA Loop in that way, in your own domains of expertise. Ben, I’m curious what your response is to that, like how does this show up in your life? And how do you play that game of thinking about what capabilities to build, what to think about in that sense?
Ben Ford: Yeah, so that was a really great summary actually, Mario, it’s kind of sparked a few things off for me. So I think that the bit in the orient bit, what you’re really doing there when you’re building a skill is you’re building structure, or maybe sometimes discovering structure, right? So with things like chess, with things like Brazilian jiu-jitsu, people who are good at it are good at it because they’re able to cognitively compress. And the only way you do that is by allowing this massively parallel processing thing we have between our ears to do that for you, right? There’s nothing really that can do parallel processing and pattern recognition quite like the human brain. So I think that this idea of going through the loop multiple times, it’s a familiar one to me, because that’s exactly what we do in the military, we drill, we drill things, right? We drill how to advance to contact, that’s a drill, right? It’s a drill that we practice over and over again, in very different circumstances. The other thing that we do, as part of the orders process, is we have a very, very structured system, almost like a ritual, in fact, because it gets you into the right mind frame. And one of the parts of that ritual is actions on, which is, okay, we’ve set out our happy path, this is what we want to do, this is what we want to achieve, but we recognize that we’re not in the obvious or complicated domain, more than likely. We’re probably going to dip into the complex and chaotic. Sorry, dip into is not right. I believe, and Mario maybe can correct me afterwards if I’m wrong, but I think the lines in the Cynefin framework are supposed to represent phase transitions, right? So you’re in a phase, you know, like a liquid going into a solid. The actual nature of the way things work changes when you go across one of those boundaries. So what you do with actions on, in the military orders process is you just sprinkle over a little bit of what if thinking. So if something bad does happen, you don’t have to go into this orient phase. You’ve already got a next action picked, so that you can just move forward and get yourself out of that introspective downward spiral, which is exactly what Boyd tries to create in his opponents. The whole point of what Boyd was saying about fast transience, and getting inside somebody’s OODA Loop is, it’s not going through the loop quicker. It’s actually, if you’re in a competitive situation, is actually stopping your opponent from having that check with reality. It’s moving their concept of what’s happening in the world further and further away from reality, until exactly what Mario described in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. When you’re rolling with a black belt, eventually you’re just going to go, there’s nothing I can do right now, right? I am so disoriented, I’m so far away from knowing what the next right thing to do is, I’m done, and then you get choked out and then you go again. And then constantly you’re building your structure up.
Mario Platt: There was something that you mentioned, that I think is really key also when dealing with complexity, which is because when you’re in the unordered domain, one of the things that you need to do is you’re not going to get checklists, right? That’s not going to work to deal with a complex problem. It’s based on heuristics, right, that people can remember, they can relate to, and then within a complex situation, they can refer to that heuristic to help them get out of the complexity of the situation.
Ben Ford: Yeah, absolutely.
Ben Mosior: So what I’m hearing too is this kind of interesting thought around training, and preparation, and learning, and all of that work that goes into it. So maybe switching gears to the Wardley mapping side of things. What comes to mind with all that, when I hear those words, is the doctrinal principles step in the five factors in Wardley mapping. So purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine and leadership. And doctrine is focused in on universal principles that you choose to apply, as in, in your organization, you choose to do these things. And the other way I’ve heard that framed is the training. It’s like, not to use examples that I’m in no way qualified to use, but the idea being that if you’re in the military, you learn how to shoot and clean your rifle and all these kinds of things, before you get deployed onto the battlefield. So from the standpoint of organizations, and preparing organizations for engagements, not even with opponents, because I think a lot of organizations are struggling, like they’re their own worst enemy, in a lot of cases. So how does an organization start to train, how do they start to develop capabilities to enable them to better execute, even just in the sense of getting out of their own way?
Mario Platt: So I think, to me, there are two aspects to that, but the first one is, most organizations probably create problems with checklists, not necessarily on how to deal with complexity, right? So that bit doesn’t help. There’s another aspect to it, which is one thing that I love, and sorry just referencing to Deciphering Sun Tzu book, which is, I completely understand and agree, and it really rings a bell everything that I read on the book, but we also need to appreciate that the world between 2500 years ago was much less complex than what it is now, right? So I think that sometimes, something that we need to not forget, right, because we didn’t have as many identities, we didn’t have as many distractions. We were able to focus on doing something, and that was it, right? Right now, I don’t think that any of us can have that type of luxury, right? I’m not Mario the security consultant, I’m Mario the security consultant, I’m the bad jiu-jitsu guy, I’m the father, I’m the husband, right, there’s a lot of identities to all of us, right? And I find that really difficult to believe that there was so much personal complexity in dealing with daily life 2500 years ago, than it is now, right? But going back to the original question on OODA, I think one of the big reasons why organizations struggle is really on the individual side of things, right? Because there is one thing that only, probably for the past year have I actually, it dawned on me, which is one thing that I think I’ve done much more consistently than mostly everyone I know so far is repetition, right? I don’t read a book once, I read a book 10 times, right. When I go through something of learning material, that’s why I really value getting, generally I don’t do classroom led training, because yeah it’s going to give me something to do, but if I don’t get something that I can physically go through over and over again, until my implicit guidance lets my brain go into that type of decision, or frame that I can actually be effective with the knowledge that I’ve supposedly acquired. It’s not going to do much for me, right? If I’m talking with a customer, we’re assessing a situation, and I constantly need to go back, “I think I read a book “a decade ago that mentioned something along those lines, “I’ll get back to you.” It’s not that it’s a problem, we all take things back a bit further, but I’m not going to be effective, right? I become effective when ways of dealing with complexity are embedded into the way I operate. You can only achieve that through repetition. And if you go tell anyone in the street, look, yeah that book that you said you really enjoyed, yeah, you’re going to have to read it at least 15 or 20 more times to actually get it, right? I’m not going to be very popular.
Ben Mosior: One part of me wants to challenge you on whether things are more complex, but then I immediately think about, oh right, we have the internet right now. When we consume information, I think we’re finding that a lot of it comes down to like volume. Like how many different books can we consume? And there’s a value to consuming a diversity of content and material, to basically calibrate your understanding of what’s possible in the world, but to actually learn something, to actually learn how to apply something, you have to have experiences that help you apply that material, not once but many, many, many times. And so hearing you describe how you read the same book multiple times, that sends me back. Like one of the things, this is such a youthful male thing, like such a funny kind of thing. I read and re-read and re-read and re-read the Art of War time and time again, when I was in circumstances that were frankly oppositional. And it wasn’t because I wanted to just destroy the competition or anything like that, it was really because this one phrase, “Only someone who’s acquainted with the evils of war “can understand the profitable way of carrying it out.” And that quote to me says, so yeah you could fight everybody, yeah you could find a way to destroy your opponents, but actually it’s probably just going to be better if you find the lowest energy way to avoid conflict, but still achieve victory. And that was my entire motivation around that, was trying to understand that material. And it was only when we started, I think all three of us are really into the Deciphering Sun Tzu book. It was only when I read that book that I realized how little I could even understand the Art of War based on reading it and re-reading it and re-reading it, because I was re-reading one translation. I was reading the Lionel Giles translation of this material. And what’s awesome about Deciphering Sun Tzu is that it tries to contextualize that material in culture, in time, in history and in frankly philosophy. So I am just floored to hear that you also read and re-read and all that kind of stuff, but I’m kind of curious if we can move in this direction of Deciphering Sun Tzu, and sort of exploring that material a little bit, and how that impacts each of us. Ben, this is something that you’ve read as well, right?
Ben Ford: I haven’t actually, the only thing I’ve read is your notes.
Ben Mosior: I’m honored, I’m so glad that you read my notes.
Ben Ford: So I have a slightly different approach to reading and learning, I guess. So one of the things that I had to do was re-read a lot of academic papers when I learned my functional programming weapon of choice, which is a programming language called Haskell. Very, very academic, you know, many of the ideas are an academic paper and you either read the paper and understand the paper, or tough, basically. Which has certain similarities to my background in the Royal Marines, and in any kind of armed forces training, but they’re kind of semi-elite, or elite units. Much more so, there is a standard, and we’ll do everything to help you get to the standard, but if you don’t meet the standard, tough s***, basically, you go back a step and you go again. So I have had to take that approach to learning material before, which is, you bang your head against it, no I’m an idiot, I don’t understand it. Go away, maybe read something else, come back, oh actually there’s a little chink in the armor here that now I can understand just that little bit more. And you slowly move up the hierarchy, and you build your mental models as you go.
Ben Mosior: Yeah.
Ben Ford: But there’s one thing that I think is actually quite important, especially given the really somewhat, I mean I think they’re very fundamental, but we’re talking at quite a rarefied level here, maybe a little bit divorced from reality. We’re trying to extract principles, and fundamentals from everything that we talk about. And one of the things that I’ve found, as I read more widely, rather than read the same stuff again and again, is that I start to recognize the fundamentals a bit more. So one of them is, you know, the OODA Loop, I think, is a fundamental. I just read a book, and this could be me over-recognizing many, many things, but I’ve just almost finished a magnificent book called The Origin of Wealth, which looks at our ecosystems and our economies from an evolutionary point of view, and treats it like a complex adaptive biological system. And when you get into the loop of evolution, and how things evolve new capabilities, and explore their environment, I mean that was all screaming OODA Loop to me, so. I think we’re all at the stage where we’ve covered enough related but not the same material that we start to recognize the fundamental building blocks, and I think that’s a real breakthrough. When you look at being in that position versus say, I don’t know, reading if you want to become a better software engineering manager and your read a book on agile, right? The book on agile is not really about fundamentals at all, it’s about practices that have been proven to work somewhere else. And if you’re in that linear environment, what works somewhere else is more likely to work for you now than if you’re in that complex environment, and you take a set of practices that work somewhere else, and you try and apply them to the context that you are now, and all of a sudden, no actually they’re not that effective anymore. And that’s when you need to go back and you need to understand the fundamental building blocks, and how they interact. So in software development terms, that is how they compose, and how they decompose, or destruction and creation in Boyd’s world. So it’s really important, I think, when you come across a new piece of knowledge, to try and pull it apart. You know, this is Boyd’s game of question mark and question mark, where he has the several different pieces of machinery, and he makes a snow mobile. It’s really important to, you know, when you’re not in that operations phase, and the operations phase is all about doing what you know and being effective, it’s really important to take that step back and remove yourself from operations, and think more expansively, and try and pull apart and put together the concepts. So that when you do read a book, I don’t know what’s a good example, I’ve got a book up on my shelf there, Traction, a business book talking about systems and talking about how to build systems. And you could read that book, and you could think, okay this is the system they describe, I will use that system. But actually when you look a bit deeper, what they’re really describing is the process of discovering a system that’s right for you, not taking something off the shelf. That was a bit of a ramble, sorry about that.
Ben Mosior: No, no, that was excellent, and amazingly on point, and it makes me want to ask a different question, like Mario, thinking about all the different reading you’ve been doing to apply things to information security, what are the fundamentals that you’ve noticed on all the different materials that you apply across domains? Because Ben described some really interesting ideas, I think, the Deciphering Sun Tzu book, for example, like for me that brings up conditions consequences thinking, which is all about paying attention to indirect factors, and gardening, and all this metaphor stuff. And I’m finding all the different ways that pops up, but I know you in particular, Mario, are doing a lot of reading across a lot of different boundaries, and so I’m curious what’s come up for you so far.
Mario Platt: So I think with regards to the OODA Loop, and the mention of agile and all those other things, is that I think, generally speaking, and this is something that Derek M. C. Yuen also talks in Deciphering Sun Tzu, is the west has been very good, superior perhaps, in developing operations and tactics, because we are very logic driven. That’s how are brains operate, right? Dialectics is key here, right? Because a big part of the reason why us in the west don’t fully appreciate a lot of the Chinese strategic thinking is exactly because that’s not how we’re wired, right? Our dialectics, based on Hegel, Hegelian dialectics, which means that when we are trying to make sense of things, we explain them, and the objective of communication is to ensure that we all agree on something. In Chinese strategic thinking, that is not the case. Contradiction is expected. You’ve got yin yang, right? So one part of the thinking with regards, in answering more specifically your question regards to cyber security. One of the things that’s been on my mind, but I need to kind of sit down and think about it properly, and write an extended version of it, is I believe the yin yang of cyber security is the dualism between resilience and fragility. I’m sure this has something, I’m sure this will, this is making me rethink about how I think of capital in worldly maps. Because if suddenly you believe that the capital is not just the money flowing up and down, but there’s actually a dualism of something, of whatever capital that you’re thinking about. There exists a dualism there, then things work slightly different, right? It’s no longer just something flowing down your valley chain, and effecting the things underneath. It’s how they mutually support each other in different types of capital that you can think of, right. So I haven’t completely made my mind on what that means, but that’s where my head has been going in my recent reading. But I think mainly, but the key point I think is really the difference in dialectics, right? That we don’t, in the west, we always need to resolve contradictions, otherwise we will not finish the conversation, right? That’s usually how it goes. Well we’re going to schedule a meeting for next week, right, and then to resolve the contradiction, we have no way of communicating and moving forward, right. And the Chinese, they don’t get encumbered with all of that, because they deal with paradox in a natural way, it’s yin and yang, right? It’s part of the cycle. Both are true, right? A and not A can both be true at the same time, as you can, we having a conversation. Right, they’re not having to argue. I think that’s been affecting how I think about security, generally speaking. Some other aspects on Deciphering Sun Tzu that have been coming in my mind a lot is also regarding, let’s say the history, and the actual ebook where Sun Tzu wrote Art of War, which was kind of around the same time that Tao Te Ching was. We now know that they influence each other. But one of the things that also jumps out to me is that Derek M. C. Yuen also mentions in the book that it was around Sun Tzu’s time where there was a separation, a bifurcation in how government was dealing, in that officials got separated from the military strategy, from the colonels. And I think that’s really interesting, and I think that’s why Derek Yuen mentioned that there was this need of Sun Tzu focusing more on the military aspects of it, and left an empty space for Tao Te Ching to address the more political, and the military aspects of Chinese strategy. So one of the things that Derek M. C. Yuen says is that the works compliment each other, because they deal with parts that weren’t completely addressed by either of the authors. What I find is that once that separation is done, I think it led to a lot of things, particularly, I think, Clausewitz then comes much, much later and develops his own theory of war, that is much more, again going back to what I said previously, much more grounded on operations and tactics, right? But not so much something that unites dualism, that deals with contradictions, right? That deals with not being an expert, right, because one of the things from Clausewitz’s is the concept of, he doesn’t call it really like that, but Derek M. C. Yuen mentioned the concept of genius, right? So the non-democratization of strategy, right? In that there is the trinity of war, but there’s the bit in there that is just for some, right? You know it’s part of genius, it’s going to require something that many people may not have. It’s the colonel, it’s the experience, what he brings to the table. So not necessarily something that is accessible to everyone. And I think that’s a really key point as well.
Ben Mosior: Yeah, not to conflate rank with genius, but it takes me back to the metaphor of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it’s like that is not just someone who just spend a lot of time doing this thing. That is a learned, trained behavior, and that same concept can exist there as well. The dualism seems like one of the most important takeaways for me from Deciphering Sun Tzu. I think that’s just because I have lived in a world where there can be no contradiction. I’m very used to that kind of thinking. And allowing paradox into my life, and being willing to say, A and not A are both, they can both be true, that’s fine. And in particular the interplay between them where, take any set of opposites, any direct action, indirect action, or strength and weakness, and the idea of each one leading to the other, as in strength leading to weakness and weakness leading to strength. There just being this constant interplay of accessible options and accessible manifestations of this. And those interactions of those two things becoming one idea, one concept, is just immediately transformative. The problem for me is I have to work really hard at doing it, because I’m so used to the way that I think.
Mario Platt: And there’s a particular concept in the book, in Deciphering Sun Tzu that I think is, I’d call it almost the essence of the OODA Loop, which is the concept of absolute flexibility. So it doesn’t matter what types of operations or tactics that we get a lot from the west that we’re doing, that we have, as are available with full view of ways we can deal with the situation. There’s always this concept of absolute flexibility, right? Even if, look, if you find yourself in a situation, there’s nothing in the book where you can make it a simple or complicated problem, right? It’s not an issue, right? You know that it’s embedded in the framework, let’s say, the absolute flexibility. It doesn’t work, you try something else, and you keep at it until, yeah, until make it work.
Ben Mosior: Ending without breaking, and flowing like water, these metaphors keep cropping up.
Ben Ford: This is reminding me of a book that I read some time ago, I think it was called something like Becoming Superhuman. It was about elite performance in mostly sports. And there’s a bit in that book describing Laird Hamilton, and doing his big wave surfing. And he was surfing, I think it may have been a wave that had never been surfed before, or it may have just been something that was super, super gnarly, scary wave. And it was very steep, I can’t remember the exact story, but basically what happened was he started to fall down the face of the wave and he did something that nobody had ever done before, least of all had he ever done it before, and it was something like he reached across and he grabbed the opposite side of the board, which stabilized him, and enabled him to ride this wave out and not die, essentially. And that’s this, I mean that’s the idea of accessing a state through having just supremely developed intuition, that I think was what Mario was talking about genius there. You know, you’ve never seen a situation before but you’ve got enough pattern matching in your experience, and it has to be very, very deep and broad experience, I think, that you just intuitively make the right call at the right time, and you know, it’s a pivotal moment that either, super high stakes usually as well. And it just drives you into this sort of, you know, to do with the flow state as well, but it drives you into this state where you’re able to access the right, incredibly multifactorial action at the right time. And I think that’s what sprung to mind when Mario was mentioning genius. And the other thing is this duality thing, this is something that I’ve come across as well in a lot of my reading. I did quite a bit tweet storm a few months ago. And it’s, you know, I’ve got something here that, you know, you’ve got something that looks an issue, like completing your contradictory goals, or practices are actually an essential symbiotic dance between different complimentary systems. So you know, you’ve got discipline and freedom from Jocko Willink. Destruction and creation from the OODA Loop, which is what’s happening in the second O. Survive and thrive, double and single loop learning, thinking fast and slow, and they’re all abstract and concrete, kind of bouncing off each other, melding into each other, and this duality is kind of like a phase transition from one state to another, in some ways. And I find it incredibly fascinating, and probably will find it incredible fascinating for the rest of my life, because it’s not something that anyone’s ever going to get to the bottom of, probably.
Ben Mosior: Imagine getting to the bottom of a paradox.
Ben Ford: Yeah, exactly.
Ben Mosior: Yeah, I am looking forward to spending the next few years of my life really diving more deeply into this material, and into these ideas and concepts. And I love particularly the idea of pulling fundamentals out of multiple works, and also reading and re-reading and practicing, and exploring the same material in new ways. I want to thank you both for being here, and for having this conversation with me. This has been absolutely fascinating. Before we go, I was wondering if either of you have recommendations of reading for people to do. We’ll start with Ben. Do you have anything that you think our audience should be reading and looking into that might, if they’re interested in this material, they might appreciate?
Ben Ford: Oh my God, how many more hours do we have? Yeah, so I mean two, so the stuff that we’re talking about, I believe there are actually people with a rigorous scientific background looking into this kind of thing now. So physics is obviously very, very interested in the micro level. Slowly these people, so one of the books I’m reading at the moment, as I mentioned earlier, is The Origin of Wealth. And there’s a bit in there where they talk about the origins of economics, and then about 20 or 30 years ago, so really very, very recent, physicists got involved, and they started to actually apply some rigor and some science to economics. And that book, I’d heard of it before, and I started reading it, and I was like, where did I hear of this book? Where did I hear of this book? And it’s actually Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport, has it as his number one book, right. And Flexport is this company that has basically taken over an industry that’s centuries old, which is shipping, and it’s managed to seep in, and they’ve grown to like 900 people in a few years. And there’s absolutely no way that he’s done that in a traditional, western management style. Just definitely not happened. In fact, in his podcast he says it’s not happened, or his interviews. So The Origins of Wealth is one I would definitely recommend. Unfortunately there’s going to be a lot of recency bias in a lot of these, but whatever, bad luck. Another one that I read recently, which calls out this kind of duality, and it’s bio guy with a physics background. So he doesn’t call it duality, he calls it phase transitions, is Loonshots, which is about how you can maintain this kind of open, questioning mindset as a company, as you pass over something which in traditional companies would be a phase transition, about 100 to 300 people. How you can cross the boundary and still remain in the more open phase. And I could go on for hours and hours, so I’m just gonna leave it with those two, I think.
Ben Mosior: We’ll start with those. Mario, what about you? What would you recommend folks look into?
Mario Platt: So obviously in the spirit of the conversation, I think Deciphering Sun Tzu would definitely be one of them. The other big book would be one that I mentioned at the beginning as well, Thinking In Bets. I think there was, it got me to see things a bit different as well. I think it really helped some people, and especially myself, and other people who like to think that I got this because I did that, right? Sometimes it doesn’t help in not getting a big ego when things actually turn out well for you, right? But I think it’s always good to keep in mind that there was chance, right, there was did do, I may have done a lot of the things that are to get me, to give me good odds of getting a good outcome, but it could have gone horrible wrong without me having done anything different than what I did for it to be right. So I think there’s thinking in that manner also brings a bit of humility back into it. On one hand, for high achievers, it brings a bit of humility into it, and for people who may not perceive themselves as high achievers, or they are go-getters, it gets them to think, are they making the decisions that will improve the likelihood of the outcome that they’re looking for, right. So I think that was definitely a book that I would highly recommend. And another book that I’ve been, it’s about the second or third time, no second time that I’ve read this year is Will Power. And it goes into kind of similar things. And I actually connect the information a lot with Cynefin, on the appreciating that we have multiple identities, and understanding that will power has a reserve, and if you’re trying to tackle seven or eight problems at the same time, you’re probably going to fail at all of them, right, because there’s just too much going on. So having those two books combine with Cynefin, I think, makes it really powerful. And it’s not a book yet, but I’m hoping that in the next five years or so that Cynefin will makes it’s way more into mainstream thinking, because I think at the moment it’s still a bit in the realm of the academics, on people dealing, that are at the edge of things like resilience, and government space where it’s being used to see problems at scale. But I really welcome the day where these things are distilled down more to the common person, because I think there’s tremendous potential in the regular person understanding the difference between a simple, complicated and complex problem, and how they should try, and strategies they can employ to deal with themselves whenever they’re in a different problem space.
Ben Mosior: I’ll take that as a cue to recommend a book that I do know exists about Cynefin called The Cynefin Mini Book and–
Mario Platt: Interesting.
Ben Mosior: I’ll make sure that there are links to all of these materials, and also to Ben and Mario’s Twitter handles and websites, you can find them and reach out to them. Thank you all for listening, and thank you Ben and Mario for being here today.
Mario Platt: Thank you.
Ben Ford: Thanks, that was awesome.
Special guests Mario Platt (Privacy Beacon) and Ben Ford (Commando Development) join Ben Mosior for an extensive discussion of the OODA Loop, the Cynefin Framework, and Derek M. C. Yuen’s book, Deciphering Sun Tzu. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War Thinking in Bets The Evolution of Wealth Deciphering Sun Tzu Loon […]
This episode features a thoughtful discussion with Toby Sola, Co-Founder & CPO of Brightmind, a meditation app for managing stress and anxiety. Ben and Toby explore the intersection of meditation and technology, as well as how to start inviting contemplative practice into your workplace.
- Our mutual friend Tasshin
- Shinzen Young
- The Monastic Academy
- Meditating in Meetings via Brightmind
Follow Toby on Twitter:
A damn good summary of the last decade of my life: https://t.co/FiLHP0Ocj6 https://t.co/FiLHP0Ocj6
— Toby Sola (@tobyornottoby20) April 28, 2018
Try Brightmind today:
Intro / Outro Music by DJ Quads
https://soundcloud.com/djquads
Transcript Ben: Hello and welcome to episode three of the Hired Thought podcast. I’m joined today by Toby Sola of Brightmind. Toby, could you introduce yourself? Because I’m so excited to pick your brain. What should our audience know about you before we get started?
Toby: Hi, Ben. Thanks for having me. It’s really good to be here. Yeah, we originally connected through our mutual friend, Tasshin, and both Tasshin and I are interested in meditation and technology. So I run a meditation app called Brightmind and also on the job, my background is in meditation, practicing and teaching meditation. And on the job, I’ve learned technology so I’ve learned product design and project management and content creation. I haven’t done coding specifically, but everything else, user acquisition. So you and I talked, we’ve had some fun conversations about some of the unique stuff that I do in some of those fields. So yeah, my background is mostly meditation and then I’ve been really blessed to have some pretty rad mentors and advisors about how to learn all this other stuff, all the other skills that you need in order to succeed in the realm of technology. And so now I’ve, you know, slowly starting to know my way around the other spaces of project management and product design and user acquisition. And I live in Los Angeles, downtown. It’s a fun place. And yeah, that’s, I guess, a bit of background.
Ben: That’s a fantastic introduction. And our mutual friend, Tasshin, we found ourselves doing distinctly weird and different kind of strange things, like wearing all the different hats like you mentioned. Tasshin is also very passionate about strategy and things like understanding what it means to make an organization purposeful. And I like that sort of magnetism between the three of us, trying out these different sort of ways of navigating life. And yes, we’re specialized, but we have to wear so many different hats at any one point in time to sort of fit into our roles and I loved hearing you describe that to me in our last conversation about what you do at Brightmind. And I think we might explore that a little bit more today, but I wanted to start out with something you alluded to earlier which is the intersection of meditation and technology. This is, to say the least, interesting. We go about our lives every day augmenting the way that we think, the way that we show up and be, with different things like cell phones and clothing and cars and all this kind of stuff. All this counts as technology, and yet I think maybe the way that we interface with that is less conscious than we would otherwise think. It’s there and we just integrate it without thinking about it. So starting from that point, what do you think of when you say technology as intersecting with meditation?
Toby: A lot. Actually, the first thing that comes to mind is the big picture. And the big picture is since the beginning of time, humans have used two basic methodologies in order to reduce pain and confusion in their lives, and those two methodologies are technology and meditation. Now, of course, I’m painting in really broad strokes and this is one interpretation, it’s not the only interpretation, but just roll with me basically.
Ben: Gladly.
Toby: And so if you think about it, so you’re a hunter-gatherer, you’re cold, you develop the technology of a fur coat, maybe fire, and that objectively reduces the amount of cold that you’re experiencing and that works. So the methodology of technology works. Also, you might do some kind of ceremony, a religious ceremony, and during the ceremony, you may enter flow states where the cold may not bother you as much. You let the cold flow through you. And sure enough, oh my God, so that also works. Meditation, developing these skills of your attention, that also works. And in traditional societies, technology and meditation were actually very close. You know, the healers were often utilized, you know, their knowledge of maybe herbal medicines which is a kind of technology and then also ceremony and spiritual practice. So one way to think about technology and meditation is that it’s the two basic methodologies that humans have been using since the beginning of time to reduce pain and confusion and they both work. And they’re actually not in, they work fine together. And they have been working fine together. And a lot of people think maybe that, oh, technology is real and attention skills aren’t, or, meditation is real and technology’s bad. A lot of people think that way and I just think that that’s ridiculous because the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that technology is helpful for people, or can be helpful for people in general most of the time, and meditation and attention skills can also be really helpful. So I guess that’s kind of a really interesting big frame to watch that happen. I guess the next step, though, then, is to kind of trace that throughout human history. And a lot of what happened, I mean both of these things developed. So especially as technology got more and more refined, so did meditation got more and more refined. And so both of them got in a way better and better. So the meditative techniques that we have now are, you know, a lot of people over thousands of years experimented with different stuff and found out stuff that works really well in regards to, like, oh no, if this happens, try this. And with technology, I mean, it’s crazy, iPhones, whatever. Well I guess actually, I do wanna back up once more which is in hunter-gatherer lifestyle, life kind of induced meditation. What I mean by that is technology wasn’t that good and so people were forced into states of openness and flow. Like if you spend all night freezing, a lot of times, if you’ve ever spent all night freezing, it can sometimes feel like a spiritual experience, right? It’s like, oh my God. I really had to go somewhere that I wasn’t used to going before. And so the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers just naturally induced meditative states. And as technology got better, that actually reduced the requirement on attention skills and on openness, that people just had to work through pain in their lives. That got worse. And so actually, people’s, in a lot of ways, people’s minds got weaker as technology got better. And religion, the development of religion, was a way to keep people’s minds sharp, right? So it’s like, fasting used to just happen because you didn’t have any food. However, with agriculture, all of a sudden religions were like, oh no, that was actually good for us. We should actually fast regularly even if we have food because that’s actually good for the mind and body to fast. So in a way, technology started reducing the load on meditation in spiritual practice. And in a way, it kind of caught up with more sophisticated religious technology. But in a way, it hasn’t. And so that brings us to today, right? At this point in history, technology is really, well one, in terms of warmth and food and water, for a lot of us especially in the developed world, those aren’t concerns anymore. And so we never have to deal with being thirsty, we never have to deal with being hungry. So our minds are just like weak and we just can’t really deal with those states very well. But then especially if you start thinking about the dopamine machine that is your smartphone. Technology also now enables us to just, like, immediately get rid of loneliness.
Ben: Yeah.
Toby: Right? So this is a whole, especially with social media and the way in which smartphone apps have been evolving over the last 10 years, it’s a whole other level where technology is really, in my mind, overstepping its bounds and bandaiding stuff that just is not healthy to bandaid. And you see that. Like, teen suicide rates are going through the roof. Teen loneliness is really bad. People just freak out if they don’t have their phones. And so now what we’re seeing is extremely weak attention skills and people have a really hard time focusing and it’s because, I think, the way in which smartphone applications have really gone overboard on making humans feel happy and secure. And yet I’m also building a mobile app, right? So it’s not black and white. I’m building a mobile app that is kind of Trojan horsing it. I’m building a mobile app that teaches people meditation. And that kind of relates back to what I was originally saying about how fundamentally technology and meditation– There’s nothing fundamental about either of these methodologies which make them incompatible.
Ben: Right.
Toby: However, right now in which specific implementations of technology can have really bad effects on the mind and we’re seeing that today. But I guess part of what I’m trying to do with my work and my life is to get a really mature perspective and do good work in the realm of technology that is helpful for people’s minds and really walk that nice edge between– You’re really utilizing the best of both worlds and utilizing both methodologies in order to make the world a better place. Utilizing technology and also utilizing meditation, bringing those together and kind of letting those dance.
Ben: That was such an incredible explanation of I think a lot of complicated things that are, there’s an interplay here. I really appreciate in particular how you drew the line between how meditation and technology have this kind of supporting relationship, and I’m reminded again of Tasshin and what he’s taught me about in particular the balance between the three elements of wisdom, love and power. And his call to action in a lot of cases is for the meek, for the people who were cultivating, who have already cultivated wisdom and love to begin cultivating power and to begin gaining comfort in being able to do that responsibly given the balance of these three things and the interplay between all three of them. When I hear the words Trojan horsing, for me right now, that’s actually a tell that you’re giving respect to the power of the way the system is disposed to working. So I’m really fascinated by that and what that process looks like from Brightmind. But let’s go back to the other question real quick. So given the history, given the way that technology and meditation have interacted over time, I feel like right now there’s a giant blank between, okay, meditation without technology, your circumstances without technology induces meditation. Between that and developing a mobile app to support meditation, there’s this giant blank space between those two endpoints about how those two things have interacted really well. And I’m curious what comes to mind when I say that.
Toby: Yeah, no, that’s a good question. One answer is, you’re better off without technology, just be a hunter-gatherer. And that’s a legitimate answer. I think that the spiritual life of a hunter-gatherer is tangibly different and perhaps at the end of the day superior than any other spiritual life. And I think it’s important to recognize that, that living with nature might just be the best expression of humanity. And we may just not get better than that.
Ben: Yeah, wow.
Toby: But we are where we are. So another answer to that question is, it’s really hard to meditate if you’re starving to death or you’re, like, about to freeze to death or you have cancer and about to die. What technology does really well is it takes care of our bodies, really. You know, like it helps us not get too cold or too hot, it helps us stay hydrated, it helps us get calories. And if that stuff is at least taken care of to the point where we’re not dying, then we can focus on spiritual practice. A more contemporary answer is my to-do list in my smartphone definitely offloads working memory. If I think of something that I have to do, I can immediately use technology to get it out of my brain and immediately return to my meditation technique. So that’s an example of a technology that allows me to stay focused on my meditation which is great.
Ben: Yeah, okay, that helps a lot with refining that relationship I think because it’s a lot more complex than I was initially stating I think.
Toby: Technology is just, one way to think about it is a bunch of stuff that we figured out in order to effect change in the world, make bigger changes in the world. You know, meditation has the association of kind of transcendence. But one really important aspect of meditation and attention skills and training the mind is to positively change the world, like change the world for the better. And so especially if you define meditation as making the world a better place, it’s not just some side effect. But if part of how you define your practice is how able are you to make the world a better place, and by the way, that’s not always the case. A lot of people don’t really define meditation using that, but I do. And so especially if you incorporate, so how positively can you effect the world, if that’s part of how you define the strength of your mind, then clearly technology can play a really important role.
Ben: Yeah.
Toby: You can scale. You can customize. You can meet people where they are. It’s an amazingly powerful toolkit for effecting change.
Ben: Yeah. Is that definition of meditation something that comes out of like Shinzen’s methodology or what you learned at the Monastic Academy? Where does that definition tend to live?
Toby: Well, it lives in a lot of places. So certainly, this is nothing unique, nothing super unique. People use different languaging and different emphasis, but where I really, I think, got the core of what I’m saying and what I’m kind of expressing now is at the Monastic Academy, which is a training center in Vermont that is really playing with this modern take on integrating meditation and making the world a better place. And basically, to paint in broad strokes, the traditional curriculum of a monastery is just transcend yourself. And after you’ve learned how to transcend yourself, go into the world and make the world a better place. But we don’t really deal with that. We mostly just focus on learning how to transcend yourself. And so part of what the Monastic Academy is experimenting with is, can we create a curriculum that involves teaching people how to transcend themselves but also teaching people how to make skillful decisions, be responsible, run organizations, positively effect the world and creating a positive feedback loop between those two things? So that’s very explicit and that’s where I’ve gotten a lot of the language that I’ve been talking about is from the Monastic Academy. And I think they are doing really innovative stuff in regards to, like, what is a curriculum like that really look like? But it’s definitely, you see this thread in pretty much every major religion and every major spiritual practice. You know, like all religions have ethical codes. So that’s just an example of, like, this is kind of embedded in everything, but it’s just, like, not as– I think humanity as a whole, there’s a lot of work to do. Even though everyone’s talking about it, there’s a lot of work to do in regards to, okay, how does this actually happen? And we’re just not that good at it, to be honest. There’s a lot of ideas and a lot of religious practices and a lot of people talking about how there’s, if you can transcend yourself and look beyond yourself, you can make the world a better place. But, like, we still just, people aren’t that good at it and it’s really hard. So there’s a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of ideas and a lot of people are talking about it, but we’re not there yet.
Ben: Yeah.
Toby: We’re about to destroy life on earth with global warming and nuclear war.
Ben: Seems like that’s what we’re gonna do right now.
Toby: Yeah, exactly.
Ben: Yeah, so not only is that the case with meditation but I also think it’s the case with harnessing human energy together. And I mean that literally in the sense that you get humans together inside organization to do work towards something.
Toby: Mhmm.
Ben: And supposedly, in my mind, and maybe, I’m curious if you agree or disagree with this definition, but in my mind, the purpose of an organization is to focus energy, to focus human effort. And so shifting gears a little bit, thinking about the work that you’re doing at Brightmind to bring meditation to the world through technology by creating a meditation app that helps hijack, helps Trojan horse some of the ways that technology is actually hurting our ability to have mental concentration, hurting our ability to have awareness. Essentially taking advantage of that space and laying a different set of kind of rules over top of it. So with Brightmind, you’re running an organization to bring about that kind of future. I imagine like in general, there’s this larger question of contemplative practice in the workspace, but one of the hardest things I find is being able to look within your own context and apply some of these ideas. Like if your expertise is in meditation, how do you bring contemplative practice into the workplace at Brightmind?
Toby: Yeah, so first I wanna back up and say, I thought about bringing this up when I was talking just now, but, you know, when I was talking about examples of systems that we’ve created in order to help people transcend themselves and do good work, I mentioned religions as examples. But I also think that you can use organizations as examples, which I think is what you were kind of alluding to. And again, roll with me, this is a very different frame from when most people are looking at, but I care about different things than most people. Basically, you can look at, so there’s these two variables: transcending yourself, looking beyond your own perspective, and making the world a better place. Those are both obviously part of religious practice. There’s fasting which helps you get over yourself, and then there’s also ethical codes which help you make a good impression on the world. Those two themes also exist in organizations. However, the emphasis is on effecting change in the world. But there is emphasis on getting over yourself. Like we have stand ups in the morning. Why do you think that it’s a stand up meeting and not a sit down meeting? It’s because it’s an embodied practice that makes people shut up and only say what’s important. That’s a transcendent practice that organizations figured out. You can look at the themes of seeing beyond your own perspective. How do organizations get their employees to see beyond their own perspective and collaborate as a team? And how do we effect change in the world? Organizations are involved in those same exact pursuits as religion. And again, this is kind of from a very bird’s-eye view sociological perspective, but I think it’s a really important lens to look for. And I think part of what I’ve been excited about with the work that I’m doing is that organizations have a lot, they’ve come up with a lot of really good ideas about how to effect change in the world. So yeah, organizations are entities that are effecting the world and they’ve come up with a bunch of different ways to get people to work together as teams and act nicely and see from each other’s perspectives and there’s a lot of really good stuff that organizations have figured out. So I guess one just from a personal perspective, it’s been really refreshing. After being steeped in spiritual communities where people were not very good actually at working in teams and you’d think they would be, to enter the realm of organizations where people have like really thought a lot about and iterated on how to work together as a team. It’s just been really refreshing to, like, oh, there’s ideas out there. And so, yeah, I’m kind of at this intersection where I’m playing with, you know, I have this background in contemplative practice and I’m now learning some of what is best practices within business. And so I mean in terms of, like, contemplative practice within an organization, I mean one, me and my business partner, we meditate together every morning. And it’s really good. You know, even this morning, he was saying how he appreciates the support because it’s hard to have the motivation to meditate and it’s the oldest trick in the book to have a gym buddy. Oh, I don’t have to motivate myself to the gym. I’m meeting Dillon there at 3:00 pm, I need to be there. I don’t have to, it’s so much easier! So I think that organizations, that’s one kind of way that organizations already are and probably will continue to be as their community that can support each other in contemplative practice. And, you know, other than that, a big thing is just, like, work flow and meeting facilitation which we’ve talked about before. There’s a lot, like, if you look at meeting facilitation from this lens that I’m talking about which is, like, how do we set up meetings in a way that help people see beyond their own perspective and work together as a team? And saying that, like, the weight of as if it was, like, a religion, like a spiritual practice, like this is really hard and is not easy and involves people’s sense of identity. People get offended in very deep ways in business meetings. It’s not logical. It’s very, like, people’s identities get rocked in organizations. So, like, to pretend that that’s not going on and pretend we don’t need a kind of sophisticated, mature frame of how people’s minds work is just ridiculous. If you enter into an organization, a lot of it isn’t rational. A lot of it’s energetic and emotional and human stuff going on. And so I think to bring in some of what religions have figured out in regards to really the nuts and bolts of how to see beyond your own perspective and how to empathize with someone else and how to be compassionate, to ask those types of questions when you’re designing a meeting format is, like, that’s really fruitful. And that’s where I think we’re at the kind of cutting edge and a lot of really exciting stuff is gonna happen I think over the next few decades in regards to bringing in contemplative lenses into how organizations run, but it’s gonna be subtle. It’s not gonna look like, it’s not gonna look anything like religion obviously. But there’s so much interesting, yeah. So like, basically, contemplative practice, I think, can come into organizations explicitly like the way in which my business partner and I meditate every morning. But it also can come in in terms of, okay, like, how do we facilitate this meeting? What questions do we start with? What’s the order of questions that we start with? Who talks when? And also, we need to do work flow stuff. Like when do we have retrospectives? And like a lot of this actually can be infused with some of the really skilled and refined lenses from contemplative practices. But it takes, you need to, yeah, the dance of that is pretty interesting. We’ll see how that ends up.
Ben: What’s kind of interesting, especially when you mentioned stand ups, is I imagine some people are listening to this and actually having, like, a moment of panic hearing you describe that as, like, part of a contemplative practice or part of, like, a good thing in an organization. And the reason for that, I think, is very similar, or maybe this is the exact argument with technology. When you develop a practice, if it’s deployed indiscriminately which I think is oftentimes the case inside many organizations, instead of it being deployed through the lens of, you know, this thought process of, how are we going to most effectively cause change in the world for the better? Instead, you often have people adopting technology practices almost as fashion. And one of the particular things, I’m gonna press into this a little bit because I think this will bring us to an interesting place. One of the phrases that tends to be kind of triggering for a lot of people who have dealt with especially trauma in organizations is, are organizations a family?
Toby: Mhmm.
Ben: And in a similar way, I think there’s probably an adjacent feeling with, our organization could take specific practices from religious or contemplative practices and build them in. But I wanna be very careful to draw distinction between what that reactionary feeling is gonna be for the people who hear these kinds of things and immediately go to that place. And what you’re describing as what is essentially a high-jacking of often purposeless, indiscriminately deployed practices and technologies, and instead making it intentional and purposeful, and actually towards a greater good. So when you get together every morning, and let’s look at this through the lens of the average small business, let’s focus on that example for a second, how can an organization like that bring in opportunities for contemplative practice? When I imagine their immediate reaction to meditating together in the morning is, whoa! That’s different. What does a baby step in this direction look like?
Toby: So what are you asking is like, what is a… the way in which, even just, like, the phrase contemplative practice, incorporating that into an organization would often get pushback and people would think it’s weird. I mean, I think it’s what you said, baby steps and skillful framing. You let the experience of benefit drive the implementation.
Ben: Mm.
Toby: So you start with something really small like maybe emotional check-ins at the beginning of a meeting where you say, like, how are you doing as a human? Not as a task-doer, but like how are you doing as a human?
Ben: That by itself, just in the moment recognizing that you and I have our individual lives and we’ve come from some places, we’ve been some places this morning, maybe some very difficult places–
Toby: Yeah, or last night, after we left work or–
Ben: Yeah.
Toby: Yeah, my kid was screaming and I didn’t sleep and I’m actually pretty tired. So even doing something small like that. Over time, people start to experience, like, oh, it’s actually really nice to one, be able to say how I’m doing in front of a group and two, get a read on where people are at because I may not push John on the deadline if I know that he was up all night dealing with his sleepless baby. It’s really practically helpful to know. So you let experiencing the benefits set the stage for the next iteration, I think is the way to do it. And then, like, maybe you start incorporating like at the end of meetings, you reflect. Like, how was that meeting for people, right? In terms of, like, how did we communicate? From like a bird’s-eye view, how was this meeting? How do you think the meeting goes? Like little things like that are totally reasonable upon first hearing about it. Yeah, I mean none of this should be necessarily framed as religious or spiritual. As an anthropologist, I’m saying that these technologies that religions and spiritual practice have a lot to offer, but that’s more of an anthropological statement than some kind of, like, I’m just looking at these religions as, like, groups of people doing things that are having results. I’m not talking about specific beliefs especially or worldviews. It’s more of, like, a sociological anthropological perspective where these people have figured some s*** out and it certainly doesn’t take that frame when it enters into secular organizations at all. It totally leaves that behind and I think that that’s really important. And you just let the actual people’s experience drive that. You start out small, people start appreciating the practices and then you slowly turn it up. And a lot of the times can be organic. There’s no black, there’s definitely no, like, cookie cutter application to this stuff. Like for example, like I really like emotional check-ins and reflections at the end of the meeting, and I try to do that in almost all of the meetings that I’m a part of. But often, when we’re working with consultants where we just don’t spend that much time interacting with them, there’s not the same rapport and it just doesn’t, I’ve kind of tried stuff like that and it never really felt right and so I ditched it. There’s also an element of do what works and, like, be grounded with who you’re with and like–
Ben: Absolutely.
Toby: Cut out that hippie s*** if it doesn’t feel right. Just work as a team! Like that’s the North Star. The most important thing is that we work together as a team and there’s all sorts of ways that you can do that and different ways of expressing kind of what we’re talking about, you know?
Ben: Yeah, there’s definitely like a certain set of biases that an organization has by default that are informed by its past that are informed by the people that it’s hired and brought in, the way that the culture has evolved from the artifacts, the literal doing combined with, you know, the values that have emerged from that and just as an outcome thinking about the Shook and Schein model of culture, right? What is interesting about the bias that in particular I think the western world has with these kinds of practices is it’s all about action, it’s all about decision and being sure and being confident. And one of the things that I find immensely awesome about introducing contemplation or introducing those little emotional check-ins or starting a retro with a short guided meditation just to sorta get people grounded in where they are in time and space so that they can come at a question with a particular informed kind of approach that is grounded in that whole experience. That changes things ever so slightly where even if you did that once, the answers you’ll find, the decisions that you’ll make as a result of that are going to be completely different and much more informed by a greater spectrum of options and the greater spectrum of possibilities I think. So viewing this as a balancing act or maybe even more as a kind of dispositional direction. If we can do one small thing tomorrow to bring a little bit more contemplation, a little bit more contemplative practice into our workplace, we’re gonna get that much better over time. And I can’t understate the effects of that kind of decision-making and thought process for how we behave as humans ’cause we are human.
Toby: Yeah. The way to sell it in the West especially is to make explicit the way in which it’s improving our work flow and our teamwork. Because, like you say, the bias is, like, well, we need to get s*** done. And that’s a good, yeah, that’s a great viewpoint and honestly, religions need to learn that from organizations, right? That’s the type of mindset that make organizations badass and look super effective in the world, is that they have that hard line of, it’s Q4, we need to , you know, get our reports or whatever. And that’s a beautiful perspective. Obviously, it has its limitations, it’s not the only perspective. So yeah, I think especially when you can get your team to experience the way in which contemplative practice and trying out new meeting formats and stuff like that is actually making the team work better and everyone’s happier and there’s energy. Especially when you can establish that. You should keep that in mind as, like, you need to be doing that and then making people aware of that because then it really is a good thing.
Ben: 100%. I know there are some really great blog posts from Brightmind on meeting practices and just in general what it’s like thinking about meditation in the context of our human experience today. I’ll post a link to a couple of those articles that I’ve really enjoyed reading from Brightmind in the show notes, and what’s a great way for people to reach out to you?
Toby: Yeah, yeah. So my Twitter handle is @tobyornottoby20.
Ben: Awesome .
Toby: T-O-B-Y is how you spell my name. And yeah, that’s the best place to follow me on social media. You can also just shoot me an email. Toby T-O-B-Y dot Sola S-O-L-A at Brightmind.com. And yeah, check out the Brightmind app. It’s available on both iOS and Android. There’s a lot of what makes the app unique, but part of what makes the app unique is that it’s kind of a very systematic look at what meditation is and the different ways to practice, and kind of no bulls*** very clear. Here’s what you can do and really giving the user lots of options and lots of different perspectives outside of that. So, yeah, check it out. I’m super proud of it.
Ben: There’s a reason I switched over from Headspace.
Toby: Yeah, there you go! No and seriously, a lot of our users are coming from Headspace because their learning has kind of plateaued and they need a little more systematic and clear, rigorous instruction. That’s what we got. And we’re also really good for beginners, too, so–
Ben: Thank you so much, Toby, for joining us and I really look forward to chatting with you again soon.
Toby: Yeah, thanks Ben. It was a lovely way to spend the morning.
This episode features a thoughtful discussion with Toby Sola, Co-Founder & CPO of Brightmind, a meditation app for managing stress and anxiety. Ben and Toby explore the intersection of meditation and technology, as well as how to start inviting contemplative practice into your workplace. Our mutual friend Tasshin Shinzen Young The Monastic Academy Meditating in […]
Ben kicks off episode 2 with Anthony Mastrean, a friend, colleague, and professional organizational agitator. They discuss the origin story leading to their work together, what it’s like changing an organization from the inside, and the underrated discipline of Software Configuration Management. Steven Shorrock: The Varieties of Human Work Tasshin Fogleman: Burja Mapping Discussion with […]
Ben kicks off episode 2 with Anthony Mastrean, a friend, colleague, and professional organizational agitator. They discuss the origin story leading to their work together, what it’s like changing an organization from the inside, and the underrated discipline of Software Configuration Management.
- Steven Shorrock: The Varieties of Human Work
- Tasshin Fogleman: Burja Mapping
- Discussion with Jabe Bloom and Sue Borchardt
Follow Anthony on Twitter:
Please define "minor breaking change"
— Anthony (@AnthonyMastrean) June 13, 2019
Music by DJ Quads
https://soundcloud.com/djquads
Transcript Ben [00:00:00] Hello everybody and welcome to episode 2 of the Hired Thought podcast. I am very happy to be joined today by Anthony Mastrean. He and I go way back. We worked together at an old organization. He taught me a lot of things, and I like to think that we have a lot of interesting stories to tell. Anthony tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you right now in this wonderful world.?
Anthony [00:00:23] Hey Ben, I’m actually working from home these days which is… man, it’s really screwing me up for future employment. I don’t know if I can go back to somebody else’s office in any capacity.
Ben [00:00:39] Do you have a kid in each arm while you’re working every morning, is that how it works?
Anthony [00:00:41] Yeah well that’s a big part of it. I’ve got two little ones, so occasionally they’re my pair programmers or office partners, if you want to call them that.
Ben [00:00:51] Family mob programming I guess.
Anthony [00:00:53] Right. Yeah. So maybe in a couple of years when they’re in public school for most the day, that might change things, but…
Ben [00:00:58] So you’re working from home. We met when we were working at McKesson. We were working on pharmacy systems and doing kind of like lots of interesting stuff there. I guess let’s talk through the origin story just a little bit. I think I first met you at devopsdays Pittsburgh 2014.
Anthony [00:01:22] Yeah there was a… I think of that as the year of serendipity. There was a lot of meetings and and happenings and like intellectual things occurring for myself, I don’t know, maybe for Pittsburgh? It’s hard to claim anything for an entire region. But there was definitely some stuff starting that year.
Ben [00:01:40] Yeah, let’s claim it for Pittsburgh. Let’s claim it for you, too. So tell me a little bit about that though. What was going on that year for you?
Anthony [00:01:49] [00:01:49]I think the way I like to describe it to I don’t I don’t know whether to be cheeky or introspective. I think I became like a reluctant devop or something like that. [11.8s]
Ben [00:02:02] [00:02:02]The lone reluctant devop. [1.0s]
Anthony [00:02:05] [00:02:05]Was it reluctant, or is it… I don’t know. Anyway, I had had enough of just normal application development, which is funny, ’cause that’s where… that’s the meat of this industry. So many developers developing right. Yet there’s so much more work to be done. And I think I either accidentally or kind of subconsciously found myself constantly drawn to that other stuff. The things that happened, not just before you start jamming on the keyboard, you know what’s up with work planning, you know? Or organization of teams? Or is this a JIRA ticket? Like what kind of system are we using? Right but like even after all that, right OK, we’ve got this code? Where’s it going? Is there a build?. Are there tests? Should you test first? Is the build passing? Has it been red for four months, like you know all these things. What about deployment. Who’s deploying this? And where and how are those environments managed? You know even down a little bit, like where am I committing this code to? Who’s server is running source control? It’s actually a desktop under someone’s desk… There’s all of these questions I think that surround development that… I think a lot of people make a lot of it, like “well, you know, developers ought to understand all that.” I think that’s like the Twitter version of the job, right. Sure. All you, you know, blue checkmark people on Twitter saying that developers should know all this. That’s different than the thousands of people we’ve all worked with who don’t work like that. So there’s this massive gap. [105.1s]
Ben [00:03:52] [00:03:52]You can point at all sorts of stuff, like how do people learn? How is it that you are supposed to have come by those skills, by that knowledge? And the reality is, I think in a lot of especially enterprise organizations, and perhaps enterprise organizations in Pittsburgh, in particular… Maybe I’m being a little bit too broad sweeping here, but I think there is a tendency to create bubbles and stay within them. And if you are doing any migrating it’s maybe between bubbles every couple of years, and they’re all such small bubbles that they’re missing the larger picture of the larger changes in practice. What do you think is at the center of that? Is it just we’re not learning when we should be learning? Or if we should know that stuff and all the blue checkmark people are telling us that, like OK, but how? And why? And when? [56.5s]
Anthony [00:04:48] [00:04:48]I guess it’s interesting maybe to use Pittsburgh as a foil. I don’t think we have any Thiel organizations right here in Pittsburgh, if you want to think of the wackiest organizations that are out there somewhere. So what we’ve got going on is very traditional right. Like, well, we need project management, so we’ve got a project management office. Well those developers just need to be developing, wo we’ve got the test group, and they’re probably offshore still. It’s 2019, and we still have offshore test groups. Or, well, the developers need to develop, so we need to have… well who’s going to put all that software together? Well let’s have a configuration management group, right, and let’s have a build release team. Certainly we have operators, right, and they’ve got their own V.P. of operations, like there is no direct line between developers and operations so… I hesitate to say these things just exist because they exist right. I don’t want to give a tautalogical answer but, man, these things just seem to exist. I don’t know… I don’t think we have enough… we need to bring the anthropologists in, and say, “Why, why did we do this? Tell us, because we can’t see it. We’re too close to it to to understand why they exist let alone how to change it, in some cases. These are the systems of rewards and incentives and, I mean how about just job descriptions?[78.3s]
Ben [00:06:08] [00:06:08]Oh don’t even get me started [0.0s]
Anthony [00:06:09] [00:06:09]I’m sure I’ve encountered plenty of these team members, right. You know, the developer, the CM guy, the whatever, who… maybe they even want to grow beyond what they’re doing now, but, boy, it’s not in the performance review system. So, “I’m not going to cross that line.” It’s too scary in a way. There’s too much risk in doing that. [20.1s]
Ben [00:06:30] You have to take on a lot of risk as an individual to attempt to be… essentially an anomaly, right? If the rest of the organization is aiming for uniformity… [00:06:42]It’s interesting that you mention job descriptions, because my whole thing with that is… tell me how you are going to describe exactly the kind of person that you want to bring in, as if it’s a part that you can go down to a shop and… “I need part CL-732, and I need it in this configuration and as part of this warranty package.” All that kind of stuff as if it’s a fungible thing you just plug in. [22.8s]
Anthony [00:07:05] [00:07:05]Yeah. Like, how dare you describe a complex job with very simple statements in a job description. Right? [7.5s]
Ben [00:07:15] [00:07:15]When I was looking for work, and really before we started working together, and even after and later stages in my career, I was just looking at job descriptions. And the problem for me was constantly trying to project a version of myself that might fit into some of these boxes, and I just found that to be an impossible kind of idea. Because one, they’re not describing it, remotely. Like phenomenologically they are not describing the thing. They are describing an idealized version of the thing, which is not even… that doesn’t exist. [34.6s]
Anthony [00:07:51] [00:07:51]I’m always going to get this wrong, but there’s a fellow out there, Steven Shorrock. I don’t know if it’s his idea or not, but he often comes back to this concept that there are overlapping and non overlapping things, like work as design, work as described, work as understood. And these things very rarely and in very small parts ever overlap. So you have the job description, it’s like wow, it’s… And who the hell wrote this thing too, right? That probably has a big effect as well. Is it what we want the job to be? Is it what the job is? Is it what I think the job is? Like there’s so many… Or is it what I think will get candidates in for the job? Like it’s just such nonsense. [43.4s]
Ben [00:08:35] It’s so multi-dimensional, and I think this shows up everywhere, right? I guess the kind of joke here is at one point I was helping write job descriptions. When I worked with the state of PA, we needed to hire sysadmins, and I won’t say that that was my responsibility, but I was certainly contributing to that.
Anthony [00:08:54] Like, “I can do this better,” right? “I can help make this improvement.” And maybe you do, within an axis. Like, within whatever version of the job description that you thought the job description should be. Maybe you did make it better but…
Ben [00:09:07] That’s our pathology I think, is we show up and go, “OK. The system seems to be… like, it’s working, clearly, but it’s also causing a lot of pain.” Like there are a lot of bones being ground up in the middle of it.
Anthony [00:09:18] Yeah, so I think it was… lots of accidents, right? Like I started my career at FedEx. And talk about all the syndromes that any organization could have, it was there. There’s pigeonholed development, offshore testing, a CM team. A team that was responsible for “the builds,” the golden images and such. And towards the end of my run there, it was so… I didn’t even know whether to call it dysfunctional or not because actually we made it functional by… At some point someone sent the CM team a script to build the software, because the CM team didn’t even write the scripts, right. They just ran the scripts to build the software. And at some point the script we gave them just printed, “success.” And then a senior architect went off and actually did the build and release separately. So again, dysfunctional or functional? I don’t even know how to describe… So there was some formative stuff going on there, at least. Here’s how some big organizations can operate. I won’t say that was all of them, but it sure did… it looked like a thing.
Ben [00:10:28] Well I mean we like our process. We like having little boxes to check off as we go along. But I think the thing that I learned while working with you a bit, and really the lesson that’s been reinforced over and over again as I’ve been finding my way into larger organizations working in a consulting and support capacity… I just see how much all this stuff is just made up. We are constructing reality around us to the extent that someone else has to construct an interface to that reality. Like the script example you just gave, “Oh this person will be nervous if they don’t have this part of their process to check off.”
Anthony [00:11:14] Or they might not have a job, which I mean, understandable, but like, is that a good reason? I think at McKesson it was interesting. [00:11:24]So I came in, the team was called Software Configuration Management. Like what is that? That terminology is really old, except maybe… it might only be old to the coasts, right? Like a lot of businesses in the middle of the country still have a thing called SCM. And I actually think it’s still a discipline. I think there are topic areas and there are knowledge areas there, and there are patterns and practices, and I hesitate to maybe even say best practices for Software Configuration Management. And oh man, I’m about to be like so, what is the word, well, I’m going to be cheesy. Like, this job shouldn’t exist, right? So I joined this weird place. Not a developer. Which actually I’m happy, because the software system we were working on, this 15-year-old Java Swing application, boy… I really don’t want to jump into that. But I could jump in on the edge of that, in the SCM team. So here, run the Subversion server. Babysit the builds. Handle the build and release process. So now I was that guy that I was previously handing empty scripts to. But could we effect change? Could we come in, and again, cheesy as it may sound, this job doesn’t need to exist. Developers are already doing this work right, or they’re so close to it. You know, and to hint at the Wardley side of things, why can’t we commoditize these things. Like, you’re branching strategy ought not to be creative. Your build system should not be bespoke, in most cases for line of business apps. Like literally, why does this job exist? Let’s buy a couple of cloud services, whether that’s some Bitbucket stuff, some GitLab stuff, some JIRA stuff. Just buy something. Buy something, follow a “best practice” Follow a decent practice that’s probably way better than what you’re doing now, maybe not the best, but the job doesn’t need to exist. But you know what job that does need to exist? The Agitator that gets everybody to change to the commodity thing. [121.7s]
Ben [00:13:26] Yeah I think that’s the key part of this. It’s the transition between… I think all these systems that we build tend to try to maintain what already is working and what already exists… The Known. And it’s working, so we should just keep doing it, right?
Anthony [00:13:41] Right, it’s working but it’s leaving… Look at the damage it’s leaving in its wake. And I don’t think, me 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have been talking like this. I think maybe I was on the same path technically, but I was less focused on the people side. I didn’t see it, maybe because 10 years ago I had boundless energy and whatnot. But like nowadays it’s like, man, we’re just killing people. These jobs are killing people! You know we could do so much better and unleash their capacity. And emotional capacity, too. Not just like, “Boy, we can get more stories done.” “Boy, we can make people feel more valuable.” And if that valuability adds value to the company let’s go for it. I think those two things are intertwined.
Ben [00:14:27] The change that has occurred over… there’s kind of a leapfrog moment, right, where you have the option to… If you’re not going to stay incrementally in step with the change that is going on around you, the evolution if you will, of things that are practices, patterns, the technology, all that kind of stuff. If you’re not going to stay in step with that, or even anticipate it, if you’re not gonna do that, you’re gonna fall behind. So I don’t know exactly how to describe this kind of transition should happen in general, but I think it’s useful to have a momentary transitionary role, where you go from… I mean what was the state of SCM before, before there was a centralized…
Anthony [00:15:16] Tickets were open for three years. Builds were red for four weeks at a time.
Ben [00:15:21] Yeah.
Anthony [00:15:22] It’s funny a lot of it’s technical stuff, right. As a new person into this organization, which I think is desperately what this organization needed. The new guy at this organization had been there for nine years. And I apol- I know I’m saying guy a lot. But like literally, that’s just who they were. But nine years, there’s no way you’re going to come in… you’re already taken away, you’re floating with the system at that point. So to be dropped in and to see that, to be able to see, “Oh that build has literally been red for 4 weeks. This ticket in my backlog now has been open for three years. Close it or fix it or something!” But that’s easy for me to say, because I’m not here with all the organizational, emotional baggage of it how it needs to close that. I think maybe that’s important too. [00:16:15]This journey it’s not just technical. These people were shipping successful software, you know maybe not as fast as they could, which we found out later. We were able to ship much faster. So they were useful, technical, savvy individuals. So I think the problem was probably not like, “Oh we just needed someone to come in and figure Puppet out. Do this migration from SVN to GitLab or whatever.” A lot of people could do that. But a lot of the work was, “How do we bring these people along with us?” They’re scared. Like literally people were scared. “I don’t think we can do it this way. I’m nervous about that, either because we’re gonna lose work, or we’re going to break something, or it’s just going to hurt. What if we mess up? And then I’ve got to go backwards, or I have to learn something new. I’m so comfortable with the way we’re doing it now.” [53.2s]
Ben [00:17:10] The performance improvement situation as well. You are evaluated based on commitments that you made three quarters ago.
Anthony [00:17:17] A year ago.
Ben [00:17:19] What is… How!? You actually cannot change, unless you adopt a mentality and have the support structure that is able to look at that and go, “Yeah, well duh. This should have changed.” I think in some ways we had some luck there where some people were a little bit more willing to go along with the malleability of that.
Anthony [00:17:40] I believe our team was vacant for something like six to nine months. The previous folks had… I think it was a year that the last proper SCM person had quit. Someone had stepped in part time to manage things. So obviously that wasn’t going to be a huge change. And then it was literally vacant. So there was no CM. And again, well so CM shouldn’t exist, but in this context it desperately needed to exist. So yeah, we came in, and I think we came into a total… I don’t know how to recreate this or even if I should… But we had a new manager, a new director, a new VP, the president changed. This whole business unit down to our stupid little seats in the cube farm changed in weeks. So our performance review was not the same one that was happening to these folks who’d been there for 15 years. There’s lots and lots of things right.
Ben [00:18:39] Yeah I mean that was wild, because on the one hand we could literally shape the way that we could do the work, the way that we thought that it should be done.
Anthony [00:18:52] Yeah it was easy to come in and say, “This is not how CM works” even though I didn’t know that. Like I wasn’t sure. It was my first CM job. Like what even is CM right? That’s what I’ve been trying to say. Really accidentally joined the team this way in a position I’ve never formerly held. Is CM even taught? There’s like one book that I know of.
Ben [00:19:12] I remember you like going into all these places on the Internet, just trying to dig and dig and dig… like, “What is branching even?” Not just asking what branching strategy should we use, like what’s popular. It was more like, “What is this even?”
Anthony [00:19:27] Like what even yeah… This is the craziest thing about software development. And I guess a lot of people say, “Oh but it’s a young discipline.” But we don’t actually know for sure, evidence-wise. We don’t know that source control is good. Like prove… I know that it’s good, I feel good when I’m using it, but we don’t have anything like… There’s no study, there’s no pedagogy, there’s not like… all of these hundred dollar words. Like we don’t know why what we do should be done… what to do, why we should do it, how we should do it, we really don’t. We have a lot of stories right now. Maybe that’s how every industry like this starts. We don’t have 5000 years of history programming computers, but maybe someday we will.
Ben [00:20:16] I get really excited when I see some case studies about something.
Anthony [00:20:21] Yeah oh, we only have stories, but at least let’s bring 10 of them together in one paper. Can I make sense of any of this?
Ben [00:20:28] Somebody trying to do some analysis to figure out what makes sense here, what makes there. It’s largely expert based. You have people who we look to as the gods of the industry, if you will.
Anthony [00:20:41] Yeah. That’s problematic.
Ben [00:20:45] That’s the way, it’s the blue checkmark people. Here they are. Here’s the answer. And they’re largely giving experiential anecdotal evidence, and I’m just thinking of…
Anthony [00:20:56] And from a very unique perspective.
Ben [00:20:58] Yeah totally!
Anthony [00:20:58] Right, that’s the thing. Like the blue checkmark consultant, agile consultant, or whatever, devops… Like these people are already in a totally different context than the 30 of us that have been sitting on this team for the last three years just trying to do whatever it is we’re doing. There’s no… I like what the folks are doing with the State of DevOps report. And of course we’re going to go there, right. Like how you’ve got PhDs and scientists and statisticians. You know you’ve got serious people doing serious work on this industry that is sorely lacking anything that’s serious. But I struggle with that, like a lot of this stuff comes out which is just like “Just do Trunk Based Development.” OK.
Ben [00:21:45] “Just.”
Anthony [00:21:45] And then what. Or how do I even… Like, what do you mean, “just do Trunk Based Development?” We literally, I think we had… something on the order of 60 branches when we got there. And it was like, major, minor, patch, and hotfix. And I think we ran the numbers once, and we had like an average of 17 hot fixes. We contractually promised a major, two minors, and like three patch versions. If you did the math on that, we were supporting forty five versions of the software at once. We were doing it through, or you know the team, you know the “we” that was there at the time, we were doing it through whatever branching strategy we could figure out. You can’t just like… these people on Twitter and there 120 characters at the time. “Just do Trunk Based Development. Good luck.” “Thanks a lot. You’re an asshole.” Like you can’t do anything with that. You know?
Ben [00:22:50] I think that’s it.
Anthony [00:22:51] It’s so frustrating.
Ben [00:22:52] It’s always advice, right. I get that in order to move things forward, you have to work at the edge, in the sense that you have to point at something that is… If you’re starting from nothing, you could probably consider starting here. That seems reasonable.
Anthony [00:23:08] Right. Definitely. If you were starting with nothing, right. That’s great. And I think there’s even like, there’s stuff out there, man. I’m just constantly impressed by GitLab. Like just go get GitLab. Like, just buy it. The entire thing they’ve got this whole… I know this is not an advertisement for GitLab but the concept like…
Ben [00:23:27] If they want to sponsor…
Anthony [00:23:27] There’s a team who’s producing tooling for you, and they’re saying, “We want to take care of the entire process, the entire lifecycle of software from planning to designing to developing to capturing issues to doing ops. We’re gonna give you a tool kit. Now, it has opinions. It works in a certain situation. Some of those tools are different maturity levels.” But the fact that they even published a maturity chart for each of their features mind explosion noise is really great.
Ben [00:23:54] I think that’s really important to have that kind of structure in place, because the defaults that you get are… if they’re not perfect, that’s fine. But they’re at least sensible and principled probably.
Anthony [00:24:05] And they’re at least not 15 years of custom scripts tying together custom processes. At least you’re moving from something structured. Hopefully to something else structured but that is a better choice for whatever your context is. And that’s again why it’s so frustrating to get this advice. Or another one that I love is like, “Just do feature flags.” So how do I move to Trunk Based Development when I’ve got release-per-branch, I’ve got 45 releases that I’m contractually obligated to maintain, I can’t… I’m a CM guy. I can’t make this corporation decide to contract their software differently. Right. We eventually did, but only because we had that whole management chain entwined in this. “Hey how can we actually produce software faster.” “Well stop promising that we’re going to support forty five versions.” That idea came from us, but it was enacted by them, they talked to legal and sales and everything. So that is doable, but on a much longer timescale. So okay how do I get to Trunk Based Development now that that’s my, okay great, that’s my holy grail. How do I get there? “Well just do feature flags.” Well that’s not like…. Have you ever done feature flags? It doesn’t mean one thing. It’s complicated at best. You just gotta turn stuff on and off? Well feature flags means you’ve got to really have your configuration sorted out, and that configuration now has to be exposed. Is that feature flags to the user, to an admin, to an operator? Who gets the feature flag? Where do they toggle it? How are you toggling? You really gotta have your dependency injection sorted out. What the hell is dependency injection? You have to unwind all of the job. You know, but just use feature flags dot com. So frustrating, this entire job.
Ben [00:25:50] There’s there’s so much work to be done to help people adopt practices from a standpoint of… you’re starting with what already exists. And actually finding a path from that, do something sensible that’s… not even just sensible, because it all makes sense, right. Even the legacy, if you will, makes sense.
Anthony [00:26:11] Right, like, it can’t be irrational if it got done by human beings and it was sold. You know what I mean, and I think a lot of people like to throw that around like, “Oh we’re not rational hahaha. Like randomness, you know.” No no. I think what rational means is that you’re reasoning. We are always reasoning, whether or not we’re coming up with the right answer or the best answer or whatever. But I think everybody was reasoning all along, right. These 15 years, that transition from startup, to corporation, I think the team was bought and sold three or four times. [00:26:49]Everybody’s reasoning. Throughout all the different performance management programs, all the different changes in methodology, they’re reasoning all along the way. So I think we gotta be careful with that, that we’re not just harming people while we’re trying to unharm people. Like, “You idiots did that.” No, it’s like “We did this thing, obviously. But maybe we can do a little bit of a different thing.” [26.1s]
Ben [00:27:18] This is probably a weird place to go with this but the thing that I heard Jabe (@cyetain) say recently… We had a really interesting conversation with Sue Borchardt (@contemplatethis) about… It was focused on on some things that Jabe was tweeting about, but one of the things he mentioned was like Janus time. The god of transition, the two faces. When you’re changing, you are literally in both the future state and the previous past state at the same time, and you’re trying to reconcile both of those things together. Just hearing that was like, “Ohhhh, right. That’s why it’s so hard.” Because we have to be of two minds at once. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time being of one mind at any one given point in time, let alone…
Anthony [00:28:08] Right. Right. And in part, you’re also, like we talked about earlier, you’re in the mind of the thing that you’re trying to change, too. The thing was brought together by how many people… We call it the organization, because it’s hard to… Sometimes it’s hard to literally know. I don’t know who to blame for this, to go ask them, “What were you thinking and why? And what were all the forces on you?” No, at some point we just have a shortcut. The organization made this, maybe you understand what was going on in the organization at the time. So now you’re of two minds, you’re reflecting on the other minds, right. Ah man!
Ben [00:28:47] Most often the answer is, nobody knows. It’s all in someone’s head, and the only way that would ever make its way out is if you asked them specifically about it. And to even know who to ask is of course a question. If you’re just doing inquiry, you’re just trying to find out what happened, what brought us to this point, so you can figure out how to go from there, how to move on, how to move forward. You almost have to do an archeological dig into the artifacts, into the org charts, into the email threads, just to figure out who was there.
Anthony [00:29:58] Right, these artifacts and these behaviors that other people are having around these artifacts, implicit or explicit, they’re shaping the next person who comes in, and the next person that comes in, or the next decision that’s made. How did you get away doing this for 15 years? It’s because the first person did it and never questioned it? Or it wasn’t hard enough, or it wasn’t within their… That’s what I wonder, too, like how many people… What was special about you and I, that we came in and got rubbed the wrong way by something that had been going on for 15 years. So was it bad if 15 years’ worth of people lived with it for that long? How did we know to change it? Why now? To what? Let’s go, I’m on my TOC (Theory of Constraints) right now. Like why did we change this, and why did we change it to what we changed it to? And what was missing that nobody was changing it before? Or maybe we didn’t notice that they were crashing against the rocks of the organizational inertia, I don’t know.
Ben [00:31:06] I mean there is a notion of agitation here though, too. So you know about Tasshin. And Tasshin is a Buddhist monk. He’s really into the Theory of Constraints, all this kind of stuff. But one of the things he talks about is this thing called Burja Mapping, and Burja Mapping is a way to think about power dynamics in organizations, and really how to… It’s a way to think and model a system of social dynamics and power dynamics. But one of the aspects that he talks about is the difference between live and dead players. Dead players are basically following a script, and sometimes that’s very good to be doing, whereas live players are often breaking scripts and writing their own. And that is also great for certain circumstances, and all this kind of stuff. And it’s not like a binary thing. I think it’s probably more of a gradient kind of dynamic. But when you talk about, like, “What is it that’s keeping the things going?” is that you have a lot of people following scripts, and then there’s the agitator, the heretic. I think that’s kind of the role that you played… Maybe what happened was that there was a pocket of progressively more heretical individuals in this organization. And what that enabled was, those people bringing in other people that were even more heretical.
Anthony [00:32:32] It was kind of by chance then, even.
Ben [00:32:35] Well yeah. I mean everything is by chance, maybe.
Anthony [00:32:38] That’s probably true, right?
Ben [00:32:39] But at the same time, you were particularly… I’m gonna use the word “agitating,” but I mean it in a good way. You’re looking at this system and going, “What!? Like, what are you doing? This doesn’t make any sense. Why would you do that to that person?” All that kind of stuff didn’t make sense to you.
Anthony [00:32:59] And that’s what it comes down to it’s not… And I think this is hard for even the best operator… It’s not, “This is bad, morally.” Like, you’re doing something… Although maybe that is sometimes the first inclination. Maybe it’s more phrased like, “This is wrong technically.” But how do I know that, right. “Well because you’re hurting people.” But like you talked about in the episode I listened to, the process that occurred at the end of a release that someone had to take home on their laptop right and fight all weekend… How can you do this to people? How can you let this person perform this process at the end of the release for years and years on end? Chewing up weekends when it was an rsync. That’s what’s so frustrating. It’s not even new stuff right. It wasn’t new technology. It wasn’t some creative endeavor. Like if anybody took a minute to write it down, they would have been like, “What are we? We’re asking who to do what? How many times? When?” I think it would’ve been so obvious. But it’s hard to go back and think about it like that.
Ben [00:34:08] Anthony, thank you so much for coming on and talking to me. I really appreciate your time, and I’m so glad that we got to talk a little bit about software and systems and humans and all this wonderful stuff. How can people find out more about you? How can people ask you questions and things?
Anthony [00:34:26] Don’t, hahaha. I’m @AnthonyMastrean, and I’m sure Ben will put the link somewhere. That’s probably the best way to get to me right now. I have a bad web site that’s got garbage on it. I’m constantly hoping to update those materials, right…
Ben [00:34:44] It’s almost like it’s kind of a metaphor for software.
Anthony [00:34:48] It really is, right. That’s not gonna do it.
Ben [00:34:52] All right, thanks man. I’ll put a link to all the things in the show notes.
Anthony [00:34:57] Cool