 All right, good morning everyone Either you partied really hard and you woke up and I really appreciate you being here We're didn't party hard. He slept in and I really appreciate you being here. So By show of hands who's heard me talk or Seen this talk before anyone The reason I asked is because I have given this talk for almost like 10 years and it's changed It's a very kind of dynamic living thing You know 10 years ago the conversation of diversity in tech was a different conversation that it is now, right for the good We're making progress and so I changed kind of how I've approached this and Yeah, I hope you you know get some get something from it. So again, my name is Frederick Mitchell. I'm the principal at Bright Plum We're based in Chicago, but like most places we have team members everywhere We're mission-driven Drupal agency We like to work with organizations and projects and own that not only want to invest their Drupal dollars in the project But also in the community So we really try to focus and put our kind of you know money where our mouth is by bringing in new folks And we're really excited and happy that one of our new junior developers has been working Drupal association and you know Has been doing some great work doing some some of the new community stuff And we actually have team members their first Drupal con they had their first commit all that stuff for trying to you know Keep including more folks in this community. So again, I appreciate you being here a little bit of context about this session, so The way that I've approached this whole thing is really in kind of two ways so the first is that What I really want to focus on and the the audience I'm speaking to is really kind of our community the tech community Right and the goal really is of this this talk is to provide Almost like developer like tools of how to think when you're trying to work through these ideas within Your office within your families within your communities, etc. Right, so we all kind of like tools and things that nature That's what this is really focused on mental models things of that nature Okay, the second thing is is that the way that I've kind of developed a lot of these bullet points and nuggets is based on my own personal experience as a heterosexual man and being part of groups specifically groups led by women and the idea was to try to take a Part of my DNA where I do have privilege in our society and then try to bring it into a different group writer where They don't have that same privilege and then try to figure out okay based on what I'm hearing what I'm learning the questions I'm asking the mistakes that I make What are the parallels and the nuggets that I can kind of glean to share with others? Especially given the fact that a lot of the tech community, you know, we have a lot of members who have you know multi multiple layers of privilege where they're You know identify as white we're identified as a man where the identify is able We're gonna have a heterosexual all those different things right again The goal is to kind of how do we think about these things? How can I better understand it? So when I show some of the examples specifically the examples on the studies Regarding women and people who identify as women. It's again meant to kind of parse out data points It's not meant to create any type of Causational link to say this is definitive, but you'll see that in a second. So I just want to make sure I add that context all right so as I was saying so Mental models are a way as it are tools for you to be able to process information and What's really cool about mental models are that they are Easy to remember but really hard to practice So the three mental models that I want to focus on and I'll be kind of talking through specifically with These topics are that the mental model inversion basically taking a question in inverting it And what this does is that when you're thinking about you know conversations hard conversations trying to figure out? Okay, you know, how do I understand these concepts especially when it comes to community building and team member development? Switching it from like I have an opinion prove me wrong. I e-correct what I'm doing to maybe what am I missing inverting the question Another mental model to kind of think about is something called the map is not the territory and Basically what that means is that if you if you ever looked at a map You know that it's not a direct one-to-one Representation of the place that you're going it can't be right. There's all these nuances. There's elevations There's rocks. There's all these different stuff and the mental model there is to basically Remember that just because you may have read something or heard something or know someone who's part of a particular group That doesn't necessarily mean that that's a definitive Right representation of the thing in the real world So having that nuance understanding that you know hesitation is important and the third mental model because we're talking about is the circle of competence and basically it's this kind of conflicting idea Especially within the tech community, which is okay as I'm working through these processes and as I may be frustrated I'm trying to figure these things out is my goal to be right Or is my goal to be successful and Sometimes if you think about how to get to that particular goal, you'll start to think okay Well, maybe I have to be wrong in order to actually be successful because that will force me to ask questions So let's play a game and again No, one's gonna get a grade. I'm not gonna tell on you. So please participate a young woman was three years old when she started to read books What is our college GPA? so you have options as a 2.5 3.5 She was above a 3.6 Or she was less than a 2.5 So by show of hands who picks the first answer who picks the second answer Okay, and who picks the third answer All right, so what I've asked you to do is essentially take a limited amount of information, right and try to essentially Figure out this this question this very difficult question through inference What you've done is literally what bias is right and the point of this example is to Go deeper into this fact of okay Sometimes when you hear that you're biased or I'm not biased or I can't be biased We have to kind of let go of this notion that it's something that we can escape or something that is not that that you know That I'm I don't do Human nature because of just the way our brains work, right? We're always trying to make shortcuts and we're always trying to take a little bit of information a particular model our own particular Understanding of what does it mean to be a reader at that early age and then try to make an inference of a person's potential Based on that little minute limited amount of information, right? The point is that that is just how our brains work and there's a Psychology book called thinking fast thinking slow if any of you have ever read it But it basically kind of breaks down this idea that we have kind of two sides to our brain The first side is that when we see something we have an immediate reaction, right almost that fight-or-flight model the thinking fast portion Right, this is where bias comes in you see someone their physical appearance you immediately kind of make a judgment You try to figure out whether it's you know a particular situation except that's just how our brains have been developed the biological science of it Right, but then we have this other part of our brain that thinks it's slower and we either try to Take the things that we know From how we've been raised from things we've been exposed to to either justify that bias or to try to course correct Right, so as we learn maybe new words new ways of thinking new pronouncing that nature You may have kind of an immediate way that you think about something based on your initial Just quick reaction to it But again given how you are working on interacting with others you also try to course correct that again The point is is that that is natural that is what we all do Okay, this is the science of how we make decisions and given the fact they're in the tech community the point is to Disabuse the notion that this is something that we have to get over or this is something that it can't possibly be me Because I'm a good person kind of thing right just kind of laying the foundation of this fundamental Biological thing that we have that's shaped by the social science and the context and the societies that we live in Okay, and that little GPA example was one of those So what that means is that if we go deeper into? Social psychology and deeper into the social science. We're essentially using kind of two concepts The first is perspective and that's how you look at a problem, right? So if you go back to that GPA example, right? I asked you that particular question Your lived experience is going to inform how you think about that problem Have you had an interaction with someone who said, you know, I learned to read when I was young To her fault right that that may or may not have happened to you, right? You may have known someone you may have been that particular person Your heuristic is how you arrive at that solution Right based on your own experience if you did go to college if you know how difficult college is if you know What GPAs are if you understand that context you're going to make a guess Right based on what you think the solution is again These are the natural biological ways that our brains work when it comes to trying to figure out how to solve Problems right and within the tech community. That's something that we do all the time Whether you're a developer whether you're a leader whether you X person with your project manager whether you're fun in person, right? We are in this particular context where we're constantly being bombarded with problems to solve and so What I'm offering to you are these tools to say, okay What is happening as we're bombarded with these particular opportunities and how does it? How does this specifically tie into how we think about the concept of? Diversity which I'll get to in a second and I'm sure you're all excited to see which start track I'm actually gonna pick as well, so I'll get there just and just just just bear with them Just trying to lay a foundation of terms and things so it'll make sense as we get through it So a quick story And how this kind of has worked out in the real world A long time ago on a land far far away There was a farmer Who constantly was you know had cows that were? Sick based on what they were eating out in the meadow And it turns out that the particular cows were eating a particular type of grass That was making them sick and they you know couldn't figure out so they went to the local Scientists that try to figure out from the University, okay What is it that's making them sick and you've please studied etc? And they figured out that a particular weed and grass within that area You know was causing those cows to be sick so in one particular perspective the perspective of the farmer, right? They had a problem to solve and they were looking for a solution and the perspective that they gave to the scientists was I want my cows to not be sick, right? However that same Compound that was in that grass right ended up being the key ingredient to one of the most popular and most Powerful drugs that we use today in this case blood thinners right that with a different perspective of that harmful ingredient it can be Reconfigured and thought completely differently because if you're trying to solve a different problem or you have different perspective I'm trying to help someone with a different disease or different affliction, right? Versus trying to save a cow who is getting sick from a particular thing, right? The heuristic of how to solve the problem completely changes What that basically means is that just because Your lived experience or where you're coming from what you've learned in forms of particular perspective when you come to a specific conclusion It doesn't mean that that conclusion is the only thing and the only applicability of how you came to that conclusion, right? Of what truth is and what it act what it what it could become things can always be reconfigured Especially when you're trying to solve very difficult problems like how do we save millions of people who need blood thinners? Right you start you have a different perspective You have to bring in different perspectives to come to a different solution even though initially That particular perspective and that particularly heuristic was defined as well. It's something that could kill cows So what does this mean in terms of okay? Let's bring this back now that we've kind of talked about it the 30,000 foot view of these terms Perspective heuristic mental models, etc How do we bring this back into this room today the Drupal community the company that I work for the company that I'm leading the team That I'm leading etc. etc Typically the question that we're all trying to figure out right is Do I work with a bunch of superheroes? Do I like the team that I'm working on? Am I hiring the right people? Are we doing things that we have the kind of culture that can solve hard problems, right? And we believe which is great That yes we do And as you Get more and more exposed to some of the concept that I've been talked about as I said I've been given this talk for 10 years. So of course the conversations of diversity have evolved, right? These ideas of diversity also have nuances in them as well, right? So on one part you have demographic diversity So that's you know, what someone looks like the things you see where they come from class that nature You have experiential diversity this idea of the different experiences, right? Not all people who identify as black have the same experience some depending upon you know Parts of the country or traumatic experiences have different experiences same as true for people who have different identities, right? Then you also have cognitive diversity how people process things that nature so with what in particularly for this particular talk what I'm gonna focus on is The gender diversity specifically demographic diversity to create an analogy to bring in home of how we should think about Our community how we think about our hiring how we think about our teams how we think about our interactivity with each other But I'm just pointing out that I do recognize that diversity can be a lot of different things because a lot of times when you're trying to have these conversations You have folks, you know, which is totally legitimate Sometimes kind of falling in the what about ism piece, right? Well, what about? Those who have this neurocognitive diverse or what about those who have this and while that's important the focus of this particular talk is to Specifically start and go into an aspect of gender diversity to pull out some nuggets of how you can at least have Developer tools to keep having this conversation as you're trying to get towards your goal of whether you're you know Try to increase your professional development increase the effectiveness of your team or in you know increase the The effectiveness of your culture at your organization and the Star Trek we're gonna focus on is Star Trek Voyager So for those Because I got to keep doing this so for start for those who don't know Star Trek Voyager Who don't not familiar with the Star Trek universe Star Trek Voyager the premise in the context is basically that a Set of Starfleet officers and rebels who were who were rebelling against that particular group within Starfleet were essentially thrown 30,000 light years from their home together through some particular accident and wormhole, etc And they were tasked with even though they were fighting and killing each other right before The the series starts with the premise of okay Now you all are basically merged together and you got to figure out how to get home essentially a common goal Right, even though you have all these specific different Perspectives and heuristics of how you even see the world and how you see each other, right? That's the premise of this particular series You'll also notice in this series That it was ground-baking because it was the first time within The particular universe there was a captain who identified as a woman, right? And that was very groundbreaking You had characters especially black characters who were put in positions of logic versus warrior class That was also groundbreaking at the time again. This is the this is the 90s So I know that seems like very long time ago and every time I think about I was like wow That was 30 years ago, but This is this is groundbreaking stuff and this you know this this came on during prime time It had a full seven seasons. It had all these different controversies It had all this kind of interplay with you know gender conflicts and species conflicts and personality conflicts And so that's kind of the context of why we're kind of talking about Voyager in this particular case So the first character we want to kind of dive into is It's Janeway again. She was the first captain who identifies woman Her character was specific on the fact that she was bullheaded and stubborn She was very kind of dogmatic and again that particular character hadn't been seen within that particular gender role before Her job as I said before was to bring a lot of different people together You got you got to figure out how to build a crew from all these disparate, right different backgrounds And that Specifically she had folks who were literally killing her not the day before and she had to bring them into the fold because There was no way they were able to get back home if they just continued You know that that war that they were having before they were thrust 80,000 years away One of her favorite savings were to keep your shirt tucked in and go down with your ship and never abandon your crew and The allegory here is that as a leader, right when you're trying to bring together all these different perspectives The most important thing is to focus on the team and to focus on the fact that you are almost at the bottom of the Pyramid if you think of your organization as a pyramid, right? You almost want to turn the pyramid upside down and be at the bottom, right? You should be the last kind of quote-unquote line of defense and one of the things that I think helps when you're trying to think about The ideas and the value of what diversity can bring is asking yourself the question Am I am I open to unorthodox thinking, right? Or do we just have this kind of set way and I'm always just looking for this particular Model and mold of a person that fits into the set way that we have one of the things that If that is a question that you're that you plan to tackle and there are pros and cons to this approach is Kind of the social science Idea of IQ versus EQ if you haven't heard of EQ before it's been something that's been repeated Especially in the last maybe five or six years It basically stands for you know, your emotional intelligence the base the best way to kind of understand the difference between the two is that IQ is about your ability to learn It's not about what you know So it's almost like if you think about them with physics perspective. It's kind of like acceleration, right? It's not the velocity. It's the it's the pace at which you can kind of get to whatever new concept is there And usually there in terms of the nature and nurture kind of argument Even though there's a lot of studies kind of going back and forth The general consensus is that it doesn't really change too much after you're born, right? Your nature nurture all the different things that kind of fit into your rate of learning is a combination of you know Your genes and whatever kind of environment grew up in On the counter though emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize the emotions of other people, right? almost your interpersonal skills that that type of thing and The great thing about emotional intelligence and EQ specifically is that it does change is this something you can constantly work on over time Over and over and over again through your experiences Why is that important because when it when you think about especially as a team leader, right? So we're using the allegory of Janeway and most situations and what most studies show is that the emotional intelligence of groups Not the IQ of individual members are the things that ultimately drive a more successful group versus others and The idea is that teams who develop a greater emotional Intelligence those who actually are make space for each other, right? Who can read each other's emotions can understand can build trust because people feel like they're being listened to They feel like they have a sense of identity, right? We all kind of walk around with our swag Or now I've got my bright poem shirt on right this identity piece. They feel like you're you know We're all kind of in this together And the fact that you have these ability to listen, right? So what we're really sorry talking about is the social science of okay How can we make our groups the most effective as they can be and the underlying? Biological science is this concept of okay this nature-nurture kind of fixed thing of IQ versus this Other part of human beings of the emotional intelligence and when it comes to this group dynamic It's the emotional intelligence of the group that ultimately has the highest correlation to their effectiveness Now we get into one of my personal favorite characters to Vock As I mentioned before to Vock was a groundbreaking character because it was one of the first times especially in my life as I was growing up where a black person was depicted in a Context in media in a logical character and a very calm Logical leadership position again in the 90s a lot of times the characters were extremely strong They you know were driven by their anger. They were warriors They you know they had all these particular different stereotypes and to Vock was really the first one prominent character Especially within Star Trek universe and given the plethora and the emphasis of this You know, we are intelligent and we're higher order He represented a particular idea just by his presence of That folks who look like me kind of belong within this world One of the things that he sort of talked about a lot as his character was that you know keeping peace is how you Obtain your wisdom how you obtain your experience and how you accelerate your ability One of the other things that you know that he was known to have said Within this particular series because it was always again again think about the context of okay You have all these characters. They're fighting with each other. You have all this conflict You have all this chaos or trying to solve something and here you have to Vock who almost acts like a calming presence right and The constant kind of idea he was Presented with was well, you always seem so calm isn't this difficult aren't these things like difficult why aren't you emotional and his point was you know just because I am Composed doesn't mean that it's that it's easy right that the demands of My particular background as a Vulcan and the character that I that I you know that I'm trying to Project are extremely difficult. So how I choose to express or not express my emotions Doesn't have a direct correlation to how easy I have it within that particular case. So what does that mean for us as we're thinking through? Trying to solve some of these complex Problems of how do we talk about and and and push within our organization the importance of diversity How do we have these hard conversations right and one of the things that we can ask ourselves if we use you know To Vock as you know a particular guide is okay. Well, what is the logical solution? What are what are the things? How do we kind of break down some of these conflicts logically? I think a lot of us do this already because again within this space That's sometimes part of our job right trying to have this kind of systematic way of walking through things But there are some things within the nuance within this kind of social piece that we can Kind of think through and I want to share some of those tools with you now So the first is is that again one of the things that we have to kind of remember and again reinforced by tons of studies Right is that at the end of the day we were never really working alone right to not technology doesn't work in Asilo as a matter of fact, I mean everything is connected. That's that's how everything works, right? We we depend we're dependent upon each other other agencies work with other agencies We use technology from Pantheon, okay, which uses technology from Google and Amazon I mean everything is interconnected and so this idea of working with others and working in groups and the effect is that group You know one of the scientists who studied this basically said that you know, it's not really about The fact that each individual person is you know extremely bright and smart, but it's how do they get along with each other? How do they listen to each other? So here we get into some more specific studies and again if you remember from the context for those who weren't here when I started this particular study goes into okay, how does that work and how do we use the scientific principles of hypothesis and analysis specifically when Focusing on the gender differences and one of the correlations not causation but correlations that kind of came from that is Those who identify as women You don't have a high those groups that have a high correlation of women within their teams tend to have a higher group emotional intelligence Now when I first did when I first put this slide up and I first made this you know that statement I want to say maybe eight years ago. I think almost every word in that sentence was very charged Because I'm talking about people who identify as women and we all know that you know Genders are not binary so there was that one part then I'm talking about emotional intelligence And you have the word emotion into it And of course they're stereotyped when it comes to people identify as women in emotions and then we're talking about okay Well, what about all the other parts in terms of you know what so what you're basically saying is is that only women can be Mostly intelligent in there so that's I just want to make sure that I recognize all of that feedback I recognize all those things the nuance in this particular study again has control for a particular gender difference and The point that the study was trying to make and what I kind of took took took away from it is The idea and what they try to account for was Why was that the case and particularly because of the gender differences within those groups Counting for same education, I mean it was a groups of everyone was a PhD Right accounting for similar class similar backgrounds from the same school, right? It was with it was when they tried to control for all of that what they found what they observed were that Because of the gender differences in the way that were socialized Right the idea of being hesitant of asking a question things that nature has a correlation to how people who identify as women experience the world in general if You are part of a group and your minority in a particular group your initial way to Fit in is to wait and see how the group operates first and then try to adapt some of those things So you don't stick out so that particular muscle of waiting and listening etc Has a correlation to people who are within our societies who have to do that naturally Just want to pause that for a second, right? So this whole idea of okay being emotionally intelligent, which we talked about is how to read other people's emotions how to listen and How the fact that there's a correlation between highly emotional intelligent people and the group in the group outcomes There is also a correlation to those who've had to almost do this as a natural Mechanism within the society that they're in when they're now included within those groups and they bring those skillsets within those groups The group outperforms those who may not have that particular skill set or having socialized that particular skill set That's the conclusion of that part And that's when you kind of get stuff like this where Initially, right? You have this thinking fast thinking slow moment where when you see the comic and you look at it, right? You're saying okay What am I seeing then as you think about it more you start to understand that there is Value in the fact that someone who may come from a different perspective Which has been informed by the social context that they're in Right brings an additional layer when it comes to trying to increase the emotional intelligence of the particular group Now the question is well, why does that happen? Right and again, we're kind of we're trying to get deep into the science We're trying to unpack versus just kind of the moral argument. Why does this happen and basically even a recent study within 2010 at Northwestern Basically, they call it the outgroup advantage And what tends to happen is that when you're in a group of people who are different than you Right again, you tend to be more skeptical of their perspective Because of again, we think about bias, right? And everyone has a bias your bias when you have a bias You'll think quickly and if and if you are in a group where people come from your similar backgrounds, right you'll tend to just Have your bias thought your initial kind of quick fast like I probably think the same thing and then you just kind of leave that You don't introspect it whereas again as a natural human being when you're around something that's different You become more skeptical you you're the slow part of your brain the thinking slow part of I have a bias about this particular idea But now let me inspect it to see is that correct is it not correct? When you do that and you have groups of different people you tend to focus on facts more you tend to want to know Okay, how what of your saying is that rooted in fact? When you're trying to discern fact you're trying to figure out, you know You do a little bit more carefully and what that ultimately does within a group is that when there's less conformity Right, there's more processing of trying to get to a solution that the entire group can almost agree on First is if you have members that come from similar backgrounds There's a pressure social pressure to conform because you have this bias of we come from the same place Or I believe that we have this sort of thing if they say something or have an idea. That's maybe contrary. You're not really sure of Just human nature your likelihood of questioning it is Lower because of the need to conform and be a part of that group whereas if you're within a diverse group You visually have the bias of okay, this isn't there's nothing to conform to because everyone's coming from different perspective I need to process what they're saying a bit more differently and through that process you get more innovative solutions So now we get to engineering and we have Balauna Torres What was cool about her character was One she was part of the human species, but she's also was part of the Klingon species To her character was played by someone who identifies with the Latin X Community, which was also groundbreaking at the time. There's a lot of groundbreaking things in this particular this particular series and Then the third thing that was That pushed the narrative of this particular character was that one as a person to identify as a woman she was in the engineering role the head engineer role and Her initial character was introduced as a rebel So she was actually one of the quote-unquote enemies at the beginning She didn't come through Starfleet and so her attitude in her perspective was to always be compact combative But then she eventually learned based on trying to juggle her identity Whether it's interspecies or even within kind of the human context, right? She had to figure out and the team had to figure out how do we take this brilliant person and Figure out how to maximize the outcome of our group ie get home, right when Individually there's a lot of things that don't fit into the mold of what a Starfleet engineer leader is supposed to be One of her famous sayings was you know if I spring my ankle at least I'm feeling something I'm not trying to kill myself. I'm just trying to see if I'm still alive. So she you know really kind of Was a very emotional character because of a lot of childhood trauma that happened within with that within that particular series This kind of leads to the question Right and we sort of talk about this all the time, you know, how do we or how do I evaluate talent? There's a book out there called the difference by professor named Scott Page and What's interesting about this particular book is that because he is a professor of complex systems of math, etc He actually went deeper into the concept of diversity and basically tried to apply mathematical models to it So now we're getting into the part We've just talked about the social science and the science of biological science the first part of the title of the talk I've given you some star tracks So now we're gonna kind of get into the math of where this actually lands when we think about the concept of diversity What the math is trying to speak to is This statement that we've probably heard a lot right this idea. Well at the end of the day We or I want to hire the most qualified If we go back into how our brains think and we go back into the mental models of inverting questions, right? The circle of confidence. Am I want to be right or do I want to be successful in this adventure? Right the map is not a territory. Am I using my perspective and heuristics to try to answer this question? If we just use the inversion principle the question we can ask ourselves is Well, how do you define most qualified and I'm highlighting the you part Right because how we come to the conclusion of what qualified is is going to be informed by our experiences It's going to be informed by our own Network right and within this idea of how we evaluate team members how we bring people in if we are Conscious and we think slow after we think fast of what we think qualified is Right, we can start to do some introspection Okay, of the team members that we have another process that we know What are we using as criteria for qualification and are there blind spots there? Just merely by the fact that everyone who has a particular idea of what that is is Being informed by their individual perspective and heuristic so consider this You must change your perspective To arrive at a new heuristic, right? So perspective again is how you think about the problem and heuristic is what you use to come to the conclusion or come to the solution right When you do that Again mathematically just trying to solve problems you change the input you change perspective what the inputs mean, right? That's how you can almost come to a new conclusion What that's commonly known as is? innovation Right this I that this is this is the thing that every every every team wants every company wants they want to be innovative They want to be new they want to solve that hard problem. They want to figure out. How can we get to? Right that ultimate solution Right, so basically when we break down how we think the social science Parts of it this idea of chaining perspective to get a new solution This is where innovation comes from and this is where the value of diverse Perspectives starts to really have the rubber meet the road right because from different perspectives of how to think about different problems That's where the new solutions kind of come from that's where the value comes from all right last but not least is the Probably the most controversial character within this particular Series is seven of nine so for those who are not familiar with this particular character They were controversies kind of within The series itself as well as kind of how she was talked about outside of within kind of the landscape so seven of nine was a character who Was basically a former assimilated Borg character and for those who are not familiar with the Borg the Borg is basically a Set of as a race that is a hive mind race that essentially believes that perfection is important So we want to basically assimilate all particular cultures and then strip out the things that we don't think is necessary Right towards ultimate maximum efficiency To dominate that's what that's what kind of their That was their ethos So she was able to escape that But she still had parts of that drive towards ruthless efficiency as part of her role within the crew She was very logical. She was pensive and she was extremely blunt And it probably sounds like people we probably know right within different tech communities, etc We've probably seen these characteristics in specific places, right? And again, I'm not disparaging and I'm just trying to provide this kind of parallel of like, you know Where that kind of comes from and how we can kind of work with folks and work and think about how we can get the maximum from our Group when you have individuals who may share some of those characteristics One of our favorite sayings saying was but that is irrelevant, right? So you have this crew Primarily pose of emotional human beings trying to figure out how our problems and as they bring her into the mix, right? Her biggest kind of feedback was trying to strip all the things that she felt from her perspective Were irrelevant to trying to solve the problem This is where kind of the conversations around diversity usually get the most complex You get folks who are trying to understand and maybe coming to the conversation in good faith but because of their perspective and because of their bias and Again, I'm not using that term Pejoratively we just define what bias is right from their perspective Those other things aren't relevant to them because of possibly their lived experience or possibly because of right what they've been socialized to the math and the theorem that Dr. Page presented Ford is this idea that diversity trumps Ability and he put it in the form of a theorem So with any theorem you have to have conditions for this particular math problem to evaluate So the conditions are that the problem must be hard so we're not talking about right like how to Create a pull request for a particular issue Right what we may be talking about is how do we include as many people as possible to contributing to core? So that core is more robust and we can have more features a really hard problem, right? What does that mechanism look like? The other condition is that each solver within the group has to have a local optimum to the problem What that basically means is that you have a lot of different experts Right, you may have people who are really good at ops You may have people really good at communicating every people are really good at documentation, right? You're starting to hear some of these things and again What's always kind of funny for me is that you know I gave this talk, you know for the last eight to ten years and so to see the Manifestation of how we approach this community and how we want our contribution days to go It you know It makes me feel warm inside because these are the things we sort of talk about But what I'm sharing with you is the mathematical underpinnings of some of these ideas, right? And the fact that at the end of the day an Improvement can be made that the end of the day the solution can be optimized even further That we can include more folks that we can get more things done that there's always a way to optimize what's going on So these conditions have to be true for this theorem to be salient And the last thing is that there has to be a large pool of solvers to get a decent-sized collection, right like The hundreds of thousands of people in the Drupal community, right that are available to solve that particular problem So these are the conditions again This is the actual mathematical equation to the theorem So at least I have to fill my promise of giving you some math of What this title of the title of my talk is, right? if you love math and You're an expert at math. I highly encourage you to go deep into the paper of how this kind of breaks down And without you know any type of scientific proposal or mathematical proposal you got to have Right a counter proposal You have to be vetted by the community has to be vetted by your peers And so there are a couple of links that kind of deepen to that because I want to be honest in this conversation So there are counters to the models that were presented But the great thing is is that the professor As well as his students, right provided answers and counters To the peer feedback that they got presenting this model of the diversity trumps ability theorem right So you have some tools again if you maybe have some team members who are within this particular silo of Well, I need hard evidence that this is something we should actually think about maybe this can help you What the model tells us essentially within this kind of mathematical framework and you think about a commas like an equation Is that You almost want to think of people as a collection of tools Okay, and when I say tools I literally mean like, you know, if you were building a shed Right, you're not just going to have a hammer and that's it, right? You're going to have to do it. Well, anyway To do it. Well, you're going to have to have a A broad set of tools and each tool has its particular purpose The ability of a person Right Is the reflection of the applicability of those tools Given a set of problems Okay, so basically what that means is if people are the tools what they can do Has the context of what they can apply Right given The tools given what they bring to the table And given the problems that are presented Okay So in the most kind of simplest way we can think about that as okay If you may not have a strong maybe back end acuity, right We still believe that you should be part of the group And we and we understand that in terms of solving a very complex problem Having that particular ability Helps us with this particular piece But if you have a different ability, right, you have a different tool set when trying to solve that problem Right That you're able to contribute based on how your ability is defined Right, so what this is basically saying is is that when you're trying to think about your teams Whether you're the leader the owner the team manager a team member Right is each person basically has value, right? This is the kind of mathematical scientific foundation of this kind of ethos this moral ethos that we sort of know Right, but it's proven within some of these really hard kind of science principles Consider this so we talk about kind of the pipeline problem, right Maybe the pipeline problem of talent is actually an incentive problem for the industry And what this statement is basically saying is okay. Well You know, I run an agency. There's a bunch of agencies here. What are we incentivized by we're incentivized by making money Okay, so within that particular incentive Right, what is the primary driver? What is the biggest point of leverage towards that goal? Inefficiency is one of those things, right? How can I how can you as quickly as possible try to capitalize an opportunity to make money for your particular business? Right all the things that I've been talking about All of these ideas how to work through this these tools They are slow They are hard. They are difficult So when we think about the challenges we have as a community And what you can individually do As a developer as a team leader as an owner is to acknowledge That conflict that conflict exists And so when you hear the explanations of well, I can't find them or there isn't a pipeline What I am pushing The members of our community To finish that thought is to basically say well the reason why we can't find them is because we're not incentivized to work slowly We're incentivized to do this as quickly as possible Then the question becomes Is that what we want to be? Is that good for us? What are the outcomes of this particular ethos within our company in our organization, etc. Just constant Accelerated progress at all costs Right, what does that mean? So then our conversations can really talk about and we can have conversations on what is the identity of our company team community Drupal, etc Not that it's a pipeline problem. So I can't do anything about it and that's what the problem is Again problem solvers with diverse perspectives May have trouble understanding solutions identified by other agents Well, why is that because we're all coming from different perspectives, right? You're not going to that thinking fast part that bias is not going to be as helpful as it is in other places of your life Can anyone tell me what this is? You want to have an idea? Not sure. Okay, so I'll give you I'll tell you what it is So what's on the screen here? These are essentially uh, mounting points Caring beaners like think about it as if you were putting this on a pole and you're trying to tie tether something down to it That's what these are the first one Was designed by a human Okay, so you can kind of see where those mounting points are you can kind of see, you know where that You know we're probably based on the orientation where you actually do the hooks The second one was designed by an artificial intelligence system with the goal of it being 75% lighter That was the input that was put in Okay Now you start to see this physical manifestation of okay. Well given a different goal efficiency lighter It doesn't even look like the first one. It looks completely different And now the decisions made of how it's actually constructed is completely different that incentive has completely changed the outcome of the actual part Right that ultimately gets to what it's trying to solve the third one was also printed by Artificial intelligence, but from a 3d printer. So it added another input to the goal of Creating a carabiner or creating a mounting point But now it had a different set of tools a 3d printer not a sheet metal printer Right to achieve that goal and ultimately was 50 lighter And if you the point of this slide is to basically say as you change your perspective and as you change the inputs Right, especially if the incentive is speed and efficiency The first will almost become completely unrecognizable to the third Even though they all do the same thing technically Right, and this is where the human ai pieces. This is the pressures that we're under Right as we try to figure out the direction we want to go And i'm running out of time so i'll speed it up This is why ecu is so important because if we just focus on the efficiency if we just focus on Using artificial intelligence using technology technology technology technology will ultimately build something and have something that we don't even recognize What if open source could make this world a better place by requiring equity and emotional intelligence Integral to its interoperability that it becomes a required input Not something optional that is nice to have because we want to feel that what would that mean how what would that change the output and outcome Of what we ultimately built The way we can do that is using mental models When it comes to interacting with each other when it comes to improving our emotional intelligence Right when you're in an issue queue Or you're in charge of a particular module a particular thing if someone is saying hey, this doesn't work for me Right, what questions would you ask if you're asking? Okay, what am I missing in your head versus prove me wrong? It works So tell me what's not working right the fact that Okay, maybe that person is new To the community maybe that person Identifies and says hey i'm more of a front-end person I'm trying to figure out how this back-end thing works and you have this bias of okay Well, I've dealt with people who are front-end and don't know back-end so they probably or whatever right that map is not the territory Right this idea. Well, maybe they're still more here just because I've had a previous experience How would I pause and change based on my own? right experiences in the past And then last but not least again, I'm using the kind of pull request um You know Drupal module issue queue as an example Right, what would it mean that if the goal of the issue is to be successful i.e the issue was closed and that person is satisfied and happy versus being right and it's closed because I said it's closed Right, what questions would you ask then? This is where the diversity and the diverse perspectives and all these things kind of again meet rubber meets the road This is why it's important To continue to push and why this is vital For us all within this community to be successful in conclusion To solve difficult problems. You need different abilities right people with lots of tools You need you need to have a diverse set of those tools to solve those problems and you have to have the ability to efficiently collaborate right So efficiently collaboration doesn't necessarily mean I want everyone that's the same and therefore they're going to be able to get this done Faster It's maybe I have a diverse team and we need to constantly focus and work on our interpersonal skills Are individual emotional intelligence? What are those mental miles that we can be doing to make sure that we're collaborating efficiently? Because I recognize the value of all of these different perspectives when we're trying to solve these problems Here's some additional stories. Um, did you kind of follow up on? Thank you for listening. I appreciate it