 So, this is the talk, Nerd Wrangling 101. I have with me on stage two wonderful people who manage tech and product, as they told me, and they're going to talk about neurodiversity as an approach to disability and learning. And as I have no idea what this is all about, I will leave the stage to you. Let's give a warm applause to our wonderful speakers. Hi. We're going to talk about neurodiversity and cognitive empathy. And if those two words don't ring a bell for you, don't worry. We're going to get that covered in a minute. They will by the end of the talk. Who are we? We're Meredith. Hi. And I'm Julian. We work at Mountainowa Technologies, which is a small fintech startup. And yeah. And Meredith managed the technical side of things, I managed the product side of things. And together we also manage a bunch of highly neurodiverse people who happen to be great people. We happen to also be, you know, pretty neurodiverse ourselves as it turns out. But neurodiversity, what is neurodiversity? Neurodiversity is very well depicted in Winnie the Pooh. And the idea behind it is that traits such as ADHD, ADD, things on the autism spectrum, but also disorders such as depression and anxiety are all just part of the normal human biome. They're nothing outlandish. They're just less common, but they're still part of everyday... The overall spectrum of human expression, basically. Thank you very much. Just a show of diversity. That's so far, but what does that actually mean? Quick show of hands. Who have you been diagnosed with one of the symptoms I just mentioned? ADHD, ADHD, autism, depression, anxiety. That's not a lot of hands. So who of you wouldn't admit that they had been diagnosed even if they were? See? And that's the problem. We're going to talk about why we want to do this talk. That's actually your slide. The reason why we're giving this talk will be going over shortly. Then we'll talk about... We'll go into a little more detail on what neurodiversity is. This is mostly from our own experience, so we're going to be talking largely about what we individually deal with and what we deal with with regard to our teammates. And then we're going to talk about who's affected. So yeah, why are we doing this talk? First of all, it matters to us. I'm diagnosed with ADHD. I'm autistic, and both of us have been in work situations where processes and procedures that were tailored to people with a more modal, more neurotypical way of functioning really did a lot of damage to us. We were not able to function in environments that expected behaviors that we weren't able to deliver and weren't willing to help us cope with the differences of our own brains. It should also matter to you, because why not all of you have been diagnosed with some sort of neurodiverse quirk? Your peers probably have, at least if you're hackers, if you consider yourself nerds, if you are around a hacker space, if you work in an environment where there are highly skilled people, you will probably encounter people who either have ADHD or they're diagnosed with autism or they're suffering from depression, and that should actually matter to you because you want to take them seriously. There is stuff to be done about it, and that's what we're going to talk at the end, is how we approach dealing with a very diverse crowd. These variations are not necessarily fixed points, and the processes that we organize for ourselves are certainly not fixed points, and there are ways to define processes that are much more accepting and welcoming to people with less typical traits. So, let's explain neurodiversity a little. That's the interest. As far as I said earlier, there's an extremely wide range of human phenotypic expression, and this stems both from the genes that people are born with and the environments that they are raised in. Many of the components of what people regard as disorders are actually coping strategies for environments that people were raised in. They learned these coping strategies early, they haven't learned to let go of them yet. But that said, there can be plus sides as well. As far as ADHD and Asperger's go, let's move on, because Julian's going to talk about the ADHD part. So, yeah, ADHD. I'm going to do a sort of intro about ADHD. First of all, I can't remember everything, so this is going to be a little unstructured in a second. It's impossible to do more than just scratching the surface on that kind of topic. We could fill whole evenings with talking about classifying and explaining such a disorder as ADHD or ADHD. Someone, I think, on Reddit once explained ADHD as trying to concentrate while tense grills are jumping up your legs, which is partially accurate. ADHD, and that's a very, very, very short explanation, comes from a certain type of filter weakness where you are not able to filter out impulses from the outside or external stimuli and therefore consider it equally important talking on stage while watching the people pass in the back of the tent. And therefore it's quite difficult to actually concentrate on what you're doing right now. But it manifests itself in very, very different types, and I'm going to go into that in a second. And part of ADHD is coming, even though only part of it is actually neurological and therefore cannot be changed, only medicated to a certain point, it comes with a lot of acquired psychological behavior that is basically learned as a coping technique for managing to run around the real world. There's a wonderful post on Tumblr we found recently that explains one part of ADHD, and it's really not everything, but just as I said, to scratch the surface. There's also things like the emotional roller-coaster problem that comes with it and other things. There's basically two ADHD moods, and that's I can't do it and I can't stop doing it. Or put it differently, there's two types of ADHD time now and not now. Or even differently, there's two type of ADHD memory modes. I literally cannot recall the words that just came out of my mouth and I can recite the opening paragraph of every single magic treehouse book. There's a reason for that, and the reason for that is called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is this part of the brain, and the basal ganglia and its dopamine-producing cells are responsible for things like voluntary movement, and in people with ADHD it gets stuck in the either-on or the off position. There's absolutely no middle ground, so it's either go or no go, and that's it, and getting it unstuck is damn near impossible. And in addition to many other things, the basal ganglia and its dopamine-producing cells also happen to be involved in both the formation and the recall of memory. Basically, dopamine is how our ancestors survived in the before times, learning new things, discovering new food sources, developing new technologies, teaching all those things that not only make people and communities survive, but also thrive and are in large part related to dopamine in the pathways that originate from the basal ganglia. ADHD is a basal ganglia neurodivergence. Ours are literally different than theirs, and it basically involves our thresholds for make more dopamine, or, okay, that's enough, stop making dopamine right now. Thanks. Being different, so we always either don't have enough to make anything happen at all, being stuck in the off position, or we have so much that we will keep going on forever and ever and ever, being stuck in the on position. Whereas neurotypical basal ganglia are more even with more steady amounts of production, thus they don't get stuck in the other position and they don't have these extremes. This basically means either I don't do work at all or I get stuck in it and get in a hyper-focus mode where I can go on forever and even forget food sometimes. And that actually makes it sort of one of the, we called it earlier, superpowers. It's basically like your favorite Marvel superheroes, right? They have superpowers, but they're also weakened by them. The Hulk, who's probably more an autistic type, has his meltdowns and smashes things, but he's also incredibly strong. And incredibly smart. He's Bruce Banner as well. So just that one example where weaknesses and strengths come together, they're just more on the extreme side. As I said, there's different type of ADHD. There's the hyperactive type, which is, yeah, Tigger is inattentive, impulsive, hyperactive, restless and bouncy. Tigger just wants to bounce. But there's also Winnie the Pooh, for example, who's actually not 100% ADHD, but still is. He's inattentive, he's distractible, he's disorganized. He's nice, but he lives in a cloud. But that said, he exhibits more of an inattentive type of ADHD. He's also very routine bound. He tends to get distressed when his routine gets disrupted. And he also looks for comfort in certain stimuli, particularly taste. Pooh is possibly a hypotaster and looks for comfort in tasting honey. Yeah. So let's continue to the next slide, which is also yours, Autism Spectrum Disorder. Somebody said this on Reddit, and it rings very, very true to me. I mean, being autistic is very much like being part of a movie where everybody else has the script. And in fact, oftentimes I find myself, you know, when I need to prepare for something, you know, something new or, you know, like, you know, calling up a new doctor's office or something like that, I will literally prepare myself a script to work through. One thing that a lot of people really don't understand about autism that I think is super important and I wish more people understood is that at the baseline, it's very much a disorder of, you know, difference in senses. It's like the gain is way turned, turned way up or way down on, you know, vision or hearing or taste or even internal senses like interception, your feeling of what's going on inside your body or even your emotions. I mean, I know people, I know autistic people who are just super hyper aware of not just their own emotions, but the emotions of others. In my case, I kind of have crazy bat hearing. I can typically resolve conversations through walls and hear about three or four conversations going on around me at a time and keep track of them all. And this actually gets kind of overwhelming after a while and so if you, you know, if I suddenly disappear at a con, it's probably because I've just gotten way too much audio input for the last couple of hours and need to go off and hide for a while. Pattern matching is also a huge strength among autistic kids and adults, but, you know, it can also be a weakness. Studies on children have shown that autistic children recognize patterns faster than neurotypical kids do. You know, they give them a pattern matching exercise and the autistic kids pick it up quicker, but they're slower to recognize when the pattern has changed. And, you know, when that pattern changes, it can be kind of distressing. You know, we're very detail oriented and that often tends to derive from increased sensory acuity. I know a lot of, like more than one at least, autistic network admins who have set up audio pipelines that let them listen to the state of their network because that's the sense that they process information most efficiently on. And now we don't really know why autistic people tend to be systematizers. There's still a lot of brain imaging going on, you know, trying to figure out what exactly is going on here. You know, we know that there are differences like, you know, neurons tend to be locally overconnected but underconnected over long distances compared to neurotypical people. We also know that there tends to be synaptic overgrowth. Autistic people don't prune away... don't prune away new synapses as fast as neurotypical people do, but, you know, we're still working on figuring out the implications of this. And so our Winnie the Pooh character for this, that we chose as Roo, you know, he's seemingly unaware of risk. You know, he's always rushing off into the next interesting thing. He's utterly fascinated by small details. But he's also got some sensory-seeking behavior. When he's, you know, when he's feeling shy or stressed out, he climbs into his mother's pouch to get tactile stimulation for comfort. So I've talked a little bit about, you know, the way that the strengths of autism can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Let's talk about some of the more general problems that tend to come up as comorbidities with these, with other disorders. So yes, we're talking about the disorders. What we mean is things like depression, anxiety, and things like that. And we call them super weaknesses because compared to, say, ADHD or autism, there's no real upside. No one wants to be depressed. And even if depression itself can give you a sort of unique insight into life, that's at least what I've never, gladly never been depressed in a clinical way. But that's what people tell me who have. They gain a certain perspective on life they wouldn't have gained otherwise. It's still no real upside on it. It's very often, however, a coping technique for neurological situations such as ADHD and autism, and therefore very, very often comorbid. When people are put into situations where they're essentially forced to, you know, fit into routines that don't fit them, you know, shutting down is a common reaction to that. And that's basically what depression is. I mean, you know, our representative character for this is Eor, right? You know, everybody thinks of him as like, you know, he's sad, he never wants to go anywhere, you know, but his friends take him seriously and they ask him along anyway. But it's important to realize that depression is way more than just sadness. It's basically the inability to feel like you ever will be happy again at some point. And, you know, Eor's got intrusive thoughts. You know, he's, you know, his tagline is thanks for noticing me. You know, he feels invisible. And, you know, depression is one that, you know, that at least, you know, between the two of us we're always very careful to look out for because, you know, depression kills people. You know, my husband, Len, died to suicide six years ago. And, you know, we've lost other people just in the last month or so. We don't want to lose any more. So, anxiety. Piglet is nervous. Piglet worries all the time. Piglet is anxious. Anxiety comes with very many different, for many different reasons out of comes to people for many different reasons. But a certain anxiety, especially a certain social anxiety lives within all those people who feel some are not fitting into society. And that comes very much with people, with neurodiverse people. Because, as you can all imagine, if you don't fit in, you actually start to be talking, to be afraid to talking to people at some point. It kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy after a while. And then there's another weakness, and that is addiction. Addiction is very common because it's a very common comorbidity. Because substance is used, is often referred to as self-medication. And as Winnie the Pooh self-medicates with a lot of sugar, like honey, others medicate with, say, weed. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I woke up this morning with the pre-toc jitters, and I screwed up and I left my Lyrica at home. Lyrica is a GABA inhibitor, so is ethanol. Breakfast this morning was pancakes and stout. Also stimulants like amphetamines, because, turns out, insulin that is prescribed medically for people with ADHD is not that different from speed. So people who try this feel really, really much better during trying this, will probably tend to try it again or use it again and therefore get into some sort of habit of using it, and then that slowly slides into an addiction. So, yes, addiction to substances is very common, and it is a problem. Sometimes the condition itself, the disorder itself keeps self-medicated people from seeking help for their addiction or even for their situation, because if you're way out depressed and whatever you do to handle your depression is turning into addiction, you're still too depressed to go to a doctor, just as an example. But the executive function to make that phone call can be really hard. Then there's another thing that's not that much a clinical term, but it's still worth noticing, because most of you will likely suffer from it, and that's the imposter syndrome, and I found this slide yesterday on Twitter, I think, and I found it really nice, so we put it up there. I think this one tends to be a driver of a lot of pathology, because people have a bad tendency to compare themselves unfairly. They think, oh gosh, what I know is just this small amount, and everybody else knows so much more stuff. But what they're not taking into account is that when they're comparing themselves to everybody else as a unit, you're comparing one person to all the people, and none of us is as smart as all of us. It's much more fair to look at what other people know as the overlap of everybody's knowledge, of course you're not going to be able to subsume all of. Yeah, social aspects, also a very, very important point, and that also comes into what people are dealing with, for example, in their workplace. Your diversity is not visible, and that means that behaving differently will just turn people, the others, to turn away from you, to shun you out, because they don't see that you are somehow different. They just experience you as annoying, as weird, as awkward. I mean, even if you have an assistive device, it's usually an assistive device that is available to you because it's available on the open market, like sunglasses or noise-canceling headphones, which makes you that weirdo that wears sunglasses inside because the fluorescent lights fuck with you. Exactly. Discrimination happens a lot, therefore, and discrimination is not only people in school yard pointing fingers at you and shouting, ha ha, discrimination is also systemic. The way schools are built, the way university is built, expects a certain neurotypical behavior, like listening, like being attentive, like not fidgeting around, like being able to actually study for an exam and take this exam and being able to function under pressure. People who don't, people who can't cope with that fall through the system. Hence, a quote from Alan Ruskin, The Wrestling Game, which is a children's mystery novel. That I read when I was a kid, seriously. Yeah, but the quote is beautiful and the quote is the poor are crazy, the rich just eccentric. Meaning that while Meredith and I grew up in a sort of middle-class background, having helpful parents and living in an environment that sort of even though we were weird and we didn't really manage school as well as we could have with our RQs, we still managed to get through all this. I didn't, I wasn't even diagnosed until my 20s, but I did have parents who stood up for me throughout my childhood. Yes, imagine you don't have these kind of parents, you don't have this kind of environment. People just fall through the system and I know quite a few people who have never managed to get a high school diploma, who have never managed to get a proper job, who have maybe taken years and years and years of their life until they finally got a diagnosis or they're undiagnosed and they finally got in help, gotten into jail. Like incarceration rate for people with ADHD is way higher than for neurotypical people because they just fall through the system and that is a huge problem and that is also, therefore, the birth mentioning. So, who has affected us? It's your slide, so continue. Sorry, yeah, so as I said earlier, we're a small startup, we're about 10 people and pretty much everybody that we work with, ourselves included, are somehow affected by neurodiversity. Some of us are on the spectrum, there's a bunch of us on the spectrum in fact, some of us are ADHD, several people have depression, several people have OCD, several people have some anxiety issues. There's a lot going on, but we want to be able to work with people well and so we had to figure out a way to deal with it. We don't want to burn through people, we know that these are smart, talented people and if we can give them the environment they need to excel, they'll do it. Who has also affected you folks? Well, y'all are affected as well. Plenty of people in this audience are going to match the descriptions that we were describing earlier, but even if you yourself are the more modal, neurotypical person, a lot of the people around you are not and being able to interact with them successfully requires being able to understand where they are and where they're coming from and I gotta say the hacker community is a place where I've experienced more of that from neurotypical people than pretty much any place else I've ever been, which is why I stick around here. I'm not sure how we expand this out to the broader world, but we gotta start talking about it here. I mean, you want to take people seriously, that means understanding where they come from. So let's talk about empathy. Empathy comes in two ways. There's cognitive and there's effective empathy and what that is we will explain in the next slides. There's a couple of requirements to manage with cognitive empathy because it's actually not that easy, but we will talk about that and then we will talk about the solution orientation that comes with it. And then with that I will hand over to Meredith who will explain effective empathy to you. Right, so most of the time when people think about empathy, what they're actually thinking of is affective empathy, because you ask the average person, hey, what does empathy mean? They mean, oh, being affected by what other people around you are feeling and that's where it comes from, the word affect. And so there are basically two ways that you can be affected by the emotions of other people. One of them is other oriented and the other one is self-oriented. So if you're expressing empathic concern, if you're expressing sympathy and compassion for the suffering of other people around you, that's an other oriented way of expressing affective empathy. And I'm going to cut to the bottom of the slide. I mean affective empathy is absolutely essential for establishing rapport with people, especially people who you don't know well, but even people who you do. The flip side, however, of empathic concern is the self-oriented response of being personally distressed by other people's discomfort. And this is really not helpful because you're basically shifting the focus from the other person's suffering onto, well, now I'm suffering because of your suffering and that makes them feel bad and it's just this horrible feedback loop of awful. And this can be hard to distance yourself from because somatic empathy is another facet of affective empathy that is literally baked into the neurons in your brain. You have a set of neurons known as mirror neurons and when you perceive that someone else is in distress or in any other mood for that matter, if you perceive their happiness, whatever they're perceiving, these mirror neurons will basically reflect that feeling onto your own emotional state. I mean this is basically part of how we human at all. And if you have very strong somatic empathy, it can be very difficult to kind of tease that out from the self-oriented personal distress aspect of affective empathy. But empathic concern is still really, really important when you're trying to be good to people. Basically it's a shitty tool for understanding other people but it's a really good tool for getting them to respond to you. And by the way, we know that this slide is asymmetrical and we're sorry to people who has aesthetic sensibility this offends. Let's talk about cognitive empathy. Right. So cognitive empathy on the other hand is... So if affective empathy is about near-mode, the right here and now, the present, what you're feeling, cognitive empathy is more thinking-oriented. It's about understanding the state of mind that another person is in and the perspective that they have. How are they seeing things? So the first step is to be able to take other people's perspectives, to be able to understand where their motivations are coming from and what those motivations are driving them to do. And once you can do that, once you can both recognize and accept empathy and model to the other people around you how it works, you can start using it tactically. You can use perspective-taking deliberately. And this is super important, right? Because if you try to use it naively, if you try to prod people into giving you all the information that you need to make inferences before they're ready, you can make people shut down that way, right? So you have to be careful with how you try to get people to open up to you. But basically, you hear sometimes, especially if you pay attention to the autism literature, about theory of mind. Simon Baron Cohen talks about theory of mind as the ability to model what another person is thinking, what their state of mind is. I disagree with Baron Cohen when he says that autistic people have no theory of mind. I think that we actually have a theory of multiple minds, whereas neurotypicals have the luxury of being able to get away with a theory of just one mind, one that is very much like their own. And so in order to be able to practice cognitive empathy, like I said earlier, you have to be willing to step out of this perspective that may very well have been comfortable to you all your life in order to be able to take the perspectives of other people and understand them. So what do we need to practice cognitive empathy, especially in a team company environment, but it could also be your hacker space or your open source project? First, you need courage. The courage to be able to openly talk about what's going on inside of you, being able to talk about your diagnosis, your neurological conditions, your basic quirks, but also you need time, the time to actually listen to talk about these things, to not just assume that the person opposite to you is neurotypical and doesn't have any special kind of requirements to work together with others, but rather to assume the opposite. And that is going to take a lot of time for listening and for dealing with each other. It also needs a certain understanding of the basic conditions, which means it's helpful if you don't know anything about ADHD to have read a book. It's helpful to read something up about autism. It's helpful maybe to have such a condition yourself, but it's not obviously not necessary. It's just helpful to know what's going on. And you need psychological visibility, and that means regularly checking in on each other and regularly talking openly about the current state of mind. People need to be recognized as people. That's a very deep-seated human need. So going on to being solution-oriented. Solution-orientation in working together as a neurodiverse team, in managing a neurodiverse team, is admitting, listening, and acting, being leading by example, which is also on the next slide, but I'm just grabbing that sentence anyway. So admitting that you're vulnerable, leading by example as management, for example, to say, yes, I have the same problems as you. Being able to listen fully and understanding fully that whatever your colleagues, coworkers, peers are telling you is actually serious and is not just some ha-ha funny thing, or they can just brush it off and act normal again, and acting upon it means that if you then understand what's going on with your peer, finding a way to support this person in any way possible. That can be many ways, and we're going to show some examples later, but acting upon this is very much the next step, and it's not just listening, and it's not just comforting, it's actually doing something. Yeah, it's helping people take steps to help themselves. But before that, it's also important to take the advice that you hear on every airplane and put on your own oxygen mask first before diving into the crisis. Okay, so there are four things that we're going to talk about. What? I know you are fine. Okay, sorry. So there are four strategies that we want to talk about as far as building a robust team that is highly accepting of neurodiversity. Leading by example, which Julian has already mentioned, we're going to talk about maintaining a deep bench, we're going to talk about how we deal with praise and criticism, and then we're going to go into some practical examples from things we've actually dealt with at work. Leading by example, it starts by saying, yes, we are also affected. If you are, if you're not, it's at least a yes, I completely understand that you are neurodiverse in some way. And sometimes it means like taking some initiative, right? There are days that I've said, look folks, I'm having a bad brain day, I'm not expecting to get anything done task-wise today, but if anybody needs me, feel free to hit me up. The next one is to make sure that it's okay to be vulnerable. Creating a culture of vulnerability and creating a culture of accepting that nobody is super strong, but people are actually weak from time to time. As our boss puts it, we're all a bunch of alpharomeos. They're super fast and super slick when they run, but they also need a really long time in the garage every once in a while. And that's basically the motto for our culture. We want alpharomeos, not alpha males. And the last part is listening. Listening to everybody and all the time and being understanding, and I've gotten into that before, so I'll just keep it at that. Maintaining a deep bench. Yeah, so maintaining a deep bench means making sure that people's technical expertise is widespread throughout the organization and that you have lots of people who are familiar with the different components of your system. You don't want to have any bottlenecks, in particular because being the bottleneck for something that people depend on is stressful in and of itself and you want to not put that stress on people's shoulders in the first place. You want to keep the bus number on every component of whatever you're building high so that if somebody gets sick or their brain is screwing with them that day, somebody else can pick up, move on a little with it, set it back down when they're ready to come back to it. Down times are a normal thing though, like this is a thing you have to plan for. Like you have to accept that the duty cycle of the humans under you is not going to be 100% ever. Praise and criticism. Right, so one of the most important lessons that I learned in the Army, believe it or not, is that it is crucial to praise people in public but criticize them in private. Since then, however, I've also learned that it is important to make this public knowledge that that is standard practice because you don't want to end up in a situation where everybody's getting praise, including people who are also getting criticism behind the scenes, but everybody only ever sees themselves getting criticism and so everybody feels like they're the only one ever getting pushback. Make sure that people know that this is the way you're going to do it so that they don't always feel like they're being single out even in private. It's also important to find understanding ways to criticize people, like sarcasm and criticism do not mix, not if you're trying to create a healthy team. And it's also important to praise people not just for huge milestones but even small accomplishments. I mean, it's an important engineering skill to be able to break down a big task into smaller tasks and so when people say, hey, I got this step done on my larger task, I cheer them on because that helps them to realize that their work and the part of themselves that they put into it is being seen. I can give a concrete example on that because I recently talked to one co-worker who called me up because of depression issues and we figured out that one problem was that his tasks were feeling too large even though they were like standard software development one to two to maybe three-day tasks he was overwhelmed by them. So we actually sat down and tried to somehow break them down even further, even further so that he could have quick response and quick recognition for what he was doing and that actually helped him to get better. Practical examples. And I already gave you one. The other one is that we, as we have team members who have regular anxiety problems, we established what we call an anxiety check-in. Basically, when people feel anxious and people, for example, have problems with asking for help even in a work-related context people are maybe suffering from social anxiety it helps very much to check in once in a while and saying, listen, how are you? Can I help you? Is there anything I can support you with instead of just waiting for them to ask for help? And sometimes this has to be an iterated process, right? I mean, sometimes it takes a while for people to open up to you and you have to be willing to accept the answer of no. Like, if somebody's not willing to talk about something you have to let them, accepting them means being okay with that. Give them time and then maybe they will. The next one is providing both freedom and structure especially important ADHD context. As an ADHD person, I would love to not have no structure at all. Structure is really, really harmful, not harmful but annoying to me. And at the same time, without structure I can't do anything. I need to somehow organize myself and while I'm working and our team is geographically spread out over two continents and five countries we work mostly from home so that is not exactly beneficial to giving people structure so we have to find different ways. On the other hand, it's very helpful if you are absolutely incapable and that includes me of getting up early and maintaining some sort of daily eight-hour showing face time sort of situation. In truth, you're way less productive than eight hours a day. You mostly work in bursts, at least I do. And you're much better at sort of if you get yourself organized it's much better to actually accept that you're not going to be sort of on full speed all the time but rather, you know, if you decide to now that now is time for a nap or for a rest then you actually do that. So that's the kind of freedom we actually like and that works for us at the same time we need some sort of structure. For example, I'm going to put that example later, yeah. The next one is for you. Right, so one thing that we've also noticed particularly with this distributed team is people can start to feel a little isolated after a while. And one thing that's helped not just some of my teammates but also me is, you know, when I'm feeling isolated I reach out and find somebody to pair with and this helps me as a manager because it gets me more hands on with the code that other people are writing. So again, increasing bus numbers. But one thing that's important to keep in mind about that is that, you know, not everybody is necessarily going to have the capacity to be able to pair either remotely or in person. Like some people just cannot maintain like a text channel and an audio channel at the same time, for instance and trying to force them to do that is just cruel and mean. So again, listen to people when they tell you what their capabilities are. By the way, pairing is not only pair programming which is, you know, the most logical example but you can pair in anything. Oh yeah, I pair DevOps. Yeah, that's still technical but you can also pair in a PowerPoint slide if you want to. Oh sure, you can totally pair Cook, yeah. And in fact we've done that when we've done retreats. Everything else is basically stories and we're going to just share a couple of stories from our everyday work life. One is the one I was talking about earlier and that's the structure versus freedom things. One core worker of mine is definitely very, he definitely has ADHD and he's got stronger days and weaker days and recently on a more weaker day I called him up because we agreed upon calling another thing we practice. We don't just call up people, we talk about it before, do you want to rather chat or not because it might, you know, impair their functionality afterwards, their executive function when they are exhausted from a phone call. But we called because he likes to do phone calls and I told him, okay, I need the following and I need it in this manner. I want you to do A, I explicitly don't want you to do B and I need it soon. Two days later, he sent me B and said, I thought you want me to explicitly not do A. What did I learn from that? Well, first of all, next time I gave him a proper deadline and not just said soon, but that was an hour task so he could have done it in the next couple of hours at least. He was distracted doing other things, very productive but not what I needed right now. After every call, after everything we do, I write down a protocol of exactly what we talked about and give him exact instructions because obviously, not everybody is capable of listening properly at all times and that will create problems at some point. So another example, you know, Julian was saying that this developer had good days and bad days. Sometimes good days and bad days and sometimes bad days. We have one developer who lives in an area that is very, very prone to civil disturbances and he is extremely triggered by violence. He basically has PTSD over this. Every time, there's a civil disturbance in his area, we know he's going to freak out. But part of what contributed to the intensity of this is that at previous jobs he'd held, he'd basically been belittled and shamed for having that reaction. And just having, just having people say, shit, yeah man, I completely understand how having that kind of stuff going on, mere steps from your front door is really distressing. Like, you know, we get you. You know, take the day off. You know, just being able to hear people recognize that he was in distress and not tell him that he was bad for being distressed or wrong for being distressed helped tremendously. Another story is that we recently added a co-worker which, you know, that happens in companies and he hadn't been so much integrated into the team yet. He, because that takes time, especially if you work remotely, but what he had picked up on is the culture that we created and that we are very open about things. So even, so it still surprised me when about four weeks into his job he called me up and said, listen, I have a depression and I have a depressive episode right now and here's what's going on with me and here's how it manifests itself. And that is because, A, of course he had somehow learned to talk about depression before that because he just it wasn't his first time. But I'm not sure how much he talked about this in front of all his co-workers or his boss. It was a really important thing because that way I could check in on him and help him and we could create ways of working together that would support him in his depression and we fixed some things and we gave him a little support and after a couple of days it got much better and while this is n equals 1 still I have the impression that this is because we were able to help him. That said, this is actually a point we wanted to make we're a now company that's about nine months old so nothing is like five years proven in anything and we're still evaluating and documenting our examples and probably going to figure out that certain things are not going to work and we hope to do maybe at the next Dutch camp do an update on that and sort of have an actually evaluated results from how we're leading our team. That said, we're also hitting deliverables like the high score in Whack-a-Mole so I think that kind of speaks for itself. Another example is that we actually managed to weaponize our co-worker's OCD. We know that he's very obsessive-convulsive and while we did a company retweet we rented a big mansion and stayed there for two weeks and worked together and cooked together and hung out. It got kind of frat-housy after a while like stuff got messy. Exactly. So we tasked him and he was glad to oblige with taking care of the place because he basically got to set the standards. Exactly. And it's not so much that we abused him as a cleaning person. He set the standards for us and helped us organize in a way that we could take care of of what we were missing while we were deep down in work. And also take care of his needs, his sensory needs. Let's end this part with Miller's law and then continue to ask questions. Right. So probably the most important rule that we operate by is that trying to understand how people mean this, how people mean what they're saying is the norm for us. Miller's law was coined by George Miller, the same guy that came up with the magical number 7 plus or minus 2. And he said to understand what another person is saying, assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of. I think this is the single most important lesson for perspective taking and I hope that you're able to take it with you. So, quickly, some really recommendations on autism. I'll just go through them quickly. There's a book called Neuro Tribes by Stephen Silverman, highly recommended. There's a really, really great article on Medium called The Boy Whose Brain Could Unlock Autism by Maya Salovitz. Google Boy Unlock Autism for that. You will find it at the top. There's a really fantastic Medium post called You Don't Seem Autistic and Pacting Diagnostic Criteria by Martha Rose Sonders. I think that's, if you search for these kind of terms, it's like number 2 or number 3, but it's also really easily easily Googleable. And there's, if you want to turn to help, there's the wrong planet forum on wrongplanet.net. There's the self-help subreddit r slash adhd, which is absolutely fantastic. There's a magazine called Attitude which has some great articles. There's also all sorts of other articles. Books, the problem with books is if you have adhd, you're not going to read them. You're probably going to stop at the halfway through the title. If you want to read a book, I haven't read it myself, but there's apparently a book by Russell Barclay called Taking Charge of Adult Adhd that is written in a way that when you have adhd, you're still going to get through it somehow. And there's lots and lots of good YouTube videos on the subject, so if you go into that sphere, that's probably going to help you. Also, searching for advice, just go to the subreddit, put in something like books and you will find long threads that will give you some more info on that. And by that, we say thank you and ask for questions. And... Thank you very much, Julian Meredith. It's been a wonderful talk, very interesting, very insightful. If you have any questions, please line up at the microphones. If you're leaving, please be quiet. The acoustics in the tent are rather awful. So we have the first question at the second mic, please. Thank you. Interesting talk. A question is how you spot how you spot symptoms. Tempers flaring for one thing. People being less responsive. In a lot of cases, I'm pattern matching off of myself, right? I know that when I'm burning out, I stop responding to people as quickly and so I tend to look for that in other people. We check in with people like Julian was talking about. I didn't fully get the question because I... How do you spot burnout symptoms? How do you spot it before it happens? By creating a work environment that takes care of people thinking too much about work. Make it safe for people to say when they're burning out. And also, you know, this is more important for the Americans than the Europeans, but jeez, we've had so many problems with Americans clocking in and being like, yeah, so I'm kind of sick today, but I'm going to try and push it out and we're just like, no, go to bed. Your job today is to get well. Mike in the front. Thank you very much. Please don't take this question as a criticism. I was wondering if you praise in public but criticize in private, how do you deal with keeping track that the multiple complaints actually add up so that the person who is being criticized because maybe somebody else complained about them is not like, oh, this is the first time we hear about it. And then you don't spot abusive behaviors. Okay. So I guess we're talking about this from a slightly different perspective in so far as you're talking about bottom-up and lateral criticism and we're talking about top-down. That's a very good point. I mean, there's definitely a massive there's a big culture of openness among management. So like if somebody comes to me with something, I will talk with Julian about it. I will talk with the CEO about it just so that they're in the loop. So we make sure that momentary or ongoing issues are something that all of management knows about. We've never had the problem where somebody tries to play mom and dad off each other basically, but I know that that's the thing that happens. I was a kid. We also had situations where like casual remarks triggered some sort of RCD or just a misunderstanding and it turned out to be a misunderstanding, but gladly right now with a team of about 10 people people still we talk a lot and we listen a lot and people have feel free enough to just come up at any point in time to talk to us about problems they might have with co-workers and we help resolve them together. Good question. Thanks for asking. Please. About the criticising private thing you have code reviews probably you have retros about what didn't go well in the project or in the current sprint. How do you deal with that then? Because if management or a co-worker explicitly asks what did I do wrong I mean I have co-workers that apparently are never upset and I'm never upset if someone says your code is wrong but I know those people exist and I have interacted with them in the distant past so how do you review of explicitly bad stuff in a group work into don't criticise in public? We don't do that many group reviews That's the funny thing is like we've kind of modified the way we do retros and a lot of this is because of the fact that we're such a distributed team but we tend to do two on one retros like Julian and I will make time with every developer individually just because we're spread out over nine time zones and it's actually really hard to get everybody in one place at one time for a long meeting either it's stupid o'clock in the morning for somebody or it's stupid late at night for somebody. Also having been a scrum master you don't like retros are not the place for criticising at least I feel retros are not the place for criticising people in person but rather criticising the team as a whole and putting in constructive criticism Yeah, retros are more for we fell down on this not I fell down on this Yes, and it's not so much you did this wrong but how do we get this better we need to improve on this and that's also a way of phrasing and improving things is it's not about blaming others it's about trying to get better so that's also a way to do it but actually you're what Meredith said we do this a little differently but there's ways to do this even if you all sit together in the same office. Yeah, on the code review side that also tends to be one on one and me personally I try to make my criticism constructive and I try to tie it to the spec like if somebody is you know we're starting to run out of time actually shorter we need to get through all the people crossing questions but again constructive criticism in a job related environment for trying to find the right job with the right task for person specific talents how do you avoid to pigeonhole people how do you make sure that they're continuing to evolve especially when you're talking about conditions that might have a lot of prejudice or prejudices this has actually happened so one of our developers we originally hired to do back-end work but we also have sort of a more researchy project going on and you know I was asking about burnout earlier you know one of the things that Julian and I noticed was that he was he was seeming kind of less engaged with you know the back-end work that he'd done I knew this guy's background and I was like I wonder if he would be happier on the research side and so we went and talked to him and you know now we're transitioning him into a role that he's happier for that he's going to be happier with that he thinks he's going to be happier with crucially because everybody's got different ideas about how they want to grow right it's also it's also the question about like it's basically about caring about your team it's not always possible to immediately accommodate someone who's sort of unhappy with what they're doing right now because A, the work needs to be done, B, there's not enough resources there might not be enough money to put them in another project and because there's three people on that project and that's what it's staffed for and you don't want to pull anybody out because that's found for that person but there's the important point is listening and taking care of giving people a perspective and understanding where they're at and that's basically saying I hear you I will try and make this work for you let's keep talking about this and not just shoving them off but you know actually listening okay and unfortunately I have to cut you off we'll happily take questions over there though so please give another round of applause to Meredith and Julian and we could one slide also thank you very much to my friend Regan in Seattle she gave us a huge amount of help getting this together Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr we pulled a lot of stuff off of social media our team our the beta audience that helped us go through this last night thank you everybody this has been great thank you