 Welcome to Transformation Friday, edition and we're going to talk today on OpenShift Commons, a little bit about rebooting transformations and I have my colleague and friend Jay Bloom with us here today and we may have a few more entrants into this conversation as everyone wakes up to Friday and tries to figure out what the next steps are for building some of the bridges across the communities when we watch the election returns come in. And today, yeah, we may all be a little tapped out as Jay said a few minutes ago in the pre-production meeting here but I think it's an important conversation to have about, you know, now that we're here and we see some of the deep divides that are in different global faces, whether it's the US or Myanmar or wherever the election is today or whatever's happening in the world. One of the things that I think that we talk a lot about in organizational change and digital transformation is like how to build teams and what are some of the best practices. And in these times, one of the questions that I was going to put to Jay today to talk about a little bit was how do these disparate social organizations and movements come together to find some sense of connectedness in order to do the collaborative work that we need to move this universe forward. That's why I have the universe in the background here. I was thinking that this was kind of the conversation for today is that now that we're here, we may not know exactly what the results are today for the elections and we'll try and steer clear of politics and that, but that might be hard. But I thought that maybe, Jay, we could have a conversation about that and maybe what some of the practices from tech and from our open source community days that we can use to sort of nurture the independence, forge new connections and strengthen existing ones and figure out how to move forward from here. So with that preamble, Jay, what are your thoughts on this where we're at right now in the universe of things and how do we move this whole conversation forward? Yeah, I mean, I was talking earlier this week at another conference about this kind of like another kind of version of the question like what's the new normal like how do we get back to normalcy again or something like that. And I think one of the things to think about. Well, one of the things I like to think about is the idea that like we, I don't think we need to have a new universal one way, one size fits all view of how things should be or how things could be in the future. I think it would be more interesting. It would be richer. It would be more sustainable to have kind of a plural, a plural, universal view of the future as opposed to a universal view of the future. That just partially means accepting that there's kind of different ways of viewing the world and what we need is to be tolerant of these different ways of kind of existing in the world as opposed to reducing them or ingesting them or integrating them or something like that. And so I think I think there's some interesting, you know, work we're thinking to be done around. Again, the difference between like building bridges between unique communities and polycentric communities where different, you know, maybe overlapping goals. Some shared goals, but not all the goals have to be the same so that we kind of have a fabric as opposed to a pyramid. If that makes any sense. Yeah, I'm a bit of an NPR addict. And they had this really interesting thing. And I think it was it was focused on building what some people call emotional bridges between they would bring two people, one from either side of the political spectrum together who seemingly had very little in common. I guess they did a little bit of surveying before and so maybe they both would be single parents and, you know, or divorced or, you know, you know, preacher sons or something like that. And they would just have them have a conversation about, you know, what what what was going on for them, what they thought about that. And it was really interesting to me to see that they weren't trying to get people to give up their universes. Neither side was trying. And I think that was might have been one of the ground rules was don't be trying to convince the other one of the betterness of your worldview, but find some commonality find things and because they might have culled out these things but some of the work I think of leadership now in these new new things and trying to find those little neural networks, connection this things is doing is creating some of those spaces for people to have those conversations because it was really interesting because, you know, one of the women was African American, and she was definitely on the Democratic leaning side of things and the other guy was on on paper was this conservative blah blah blah and when they got them in the room it turned out the other guy was African American. And she was, she didn't know that until the last minute till they were on stage together. And I thought that was really interesting because we have so many preconceived notions about who's in each of these universes and and and one of my roles I think even with doing things like today, just making people talk about this is just creating the spaces for people to make those connections and to figure out how, because if you don't have some connectedness, it's really really difficult to collaborate we're going to watch that play out in the Senate and the Congress and, you know, you know, everywhere in the United States and I'm up above the 49th parallel in Canada so I may feel a little bit like I'm above you all but no, because I'm from down there to so, but it's an interesting concept when you have to apply at an organizational level, right, like how, you know, how do we do that and then, you know, when those things are in social clusters. We have a group of people who, you know, whether it's DevOps folks and, you know, bringing DevOps folks. And so I kind of think one of the things we have to start bringing to the Forte is some of our expertise, or at least our practices that we've seen work in open doors, things around diversity and inclusivity and creating spaces. So I think that's, that's coming and I think that's the thing that I would hope that we could offer up today a little bit some of our ideas around that. There's, you know, one of my favorite, one of my favorite of Christopher Alexander's patterns from the pattern language book, which, you know, kind of burst the gang of four patterns that people use inside of software engineering all the time. He talks about this idea of a city and he says that, you know, a city can be in three different kinds of ways. It can be a monolith or a homogenous city where every, there's no neighborhoods really it's just kind of all the same. And I tend to think of that like, Manhattan these days is very homogenous to me like you know the Starbucks is every five blocks that when I was there I don't think this is true anymore but there was a gap every five blocks it was like the same thing happened over and over again. And you couldn't really like, there was a couple neighborhoods but really it was pretty homogenous when I was there. But if you went, if you kind of rolled it back to when I got there in the 90s, there were distinct neighborhoods, and it wasn't quite so homogenous. And at that time, I think it was, you know, what Alexander would have wanted the city a city to be because it's heterogeneous, but you were safe to move from one neighborhood to another. So he basically says, the other extreme of course is radical neighborhoods in the city, which he called ghettos, where it wasn't safe to go from one part of the city to another part of the city. It wasn't safe to travel among these different neighborhoods, right. And so I think one of the things to think about. I used to rant about this in the combine community quite a bit was like how do we keep things strange or weird. And what I mean by that is like how do we keep the neighborhoods, so that we can kind of wander from one neighborhood to another and have an experience of, you know, difference or friction with our views, but feel safe in doing it and be invited to be there at the same time. So that, you know, I like to talk about this partially in the DevOps world because I think it's, it's a mistake to think of DevOps as a way of creating a single culture inside of an organization. It's about creating a culture that accepts multiple points of view on the system. There's an operator's way of looking at the system and there's a developer's way of looking at the system. And there's a limited shared set of practices that we need to establish to allow those communications and understanding to happen. But we're not trying to create a homogenous single view of the system. That's not what we're trying to achieve. I think if we think through that the goal of leadership gets a little interesting to me at least because I, you know, in a lot of kind of agile ways of thinking there's an idea where you need to push the decision making down into the organization. Decentralized decision making. And I think the illusion there is, is heightened by also an obsession with the idea that pushing that down creates autonomy, creates autonomous teams and those. And the thing that I think is so interesting or dangerous about that is that very few teams get to make significant decisions in a vacuum. Very few teams truly are autonomous. And so when we're talking about pushing decisions down, one of the things we have to recognize is that if we're going to ask teams to make important decisions and those teams are interdependent, they're not autonomous. They depend on other teams, other ways of seeing the world. Some of them are developers. Some of them are operators. Some of them are platform owners. Some of them are product owners. Some of them are your customers. These are all different people, different goals, different needs. Well, that means that what leaders need to be doing is working to help them negotiate. Not make decisions, but make decisions together to negotiate. And this is the skill that I think is so important to develop inside organizations now. Not decision making, but negotiating amongst multiple groups. And the thing is that I think it's really obvious to a lot of executives. I don't know if it's obvious to what the problem is or what the solution is. But I do think it's obvious to a lot of managers who try to do Agile and DevOps because they try to push the decisions down into the teams. But it's almost like a reflexive reaction. When they push the decisions down, they get DDoS by all sorts of detailed decisions coming back up at them. Yeah. There's just like all of a sudden, like everybody's at their door asking. And I think that's again, the mistake they make there often is that they try to help make those decisions instead of trying to help the teams learn how to negotiate those decisions for themselves. So what we need to push to the edge is how to have good relationships with others, how to negotiate with others, how to make decisions with others. Because if you don't learn those things, it doesn't matter how much you want the decisions to be made at the edge because the decisions are going to be made amongst diverse viewpoints, not by individuals. Well, I also think there's this fear of homogenization, right? Is that if, you know, there's a couple of sides to the coin. It's like if we think we all have to have group think and to be really clear about that this is, there's a diversity of opinions. And we've always said at Red Hat and other places that I've worked is that, you know, it's the diversity of opinion that drives innovation, right? So really if leadership can continue to use that mantra in an organization that that is helpful if they can help build the negotiation skills and the diplomacy skills. There we go. Of course the phone rings. I hope that's a good thing. We'll see. But I think the negotiation skills that is really hard, it is a hard or a soft skill that we need to teach more. And that's, I mean, I'm always on it about storytelling and getting people to share their stories and their point of view, not to convince people, but to be heard and listen to. And I think that's, I think the fear of creating a homogeneous team or organization where everybody thinks the same way and follows and lockstep is what people have in the back of their monkey brain. This is what's going to happen. And as long as we help people through that, bridge over that fear so that they feel safe to be in these negotiating relationships with others and do it in a non-threatening way, we can move these conversations forward. And we look out at the big world out there, but it's a very organizational thing too. I've seen it happen lots of times when you acquire a company and you have to meld in an engineering team with a slightly different philosophy and a set of products that then have to be merged with your product line. And that whole negotiation of telling the story and knowing where they're coming from, knowing that you're company, like Red Hat, buying CoreOS and integrating them into the fold or in events or three scale. And part of the processes that we have in place internally at Red Hat for doing that and doing it successfully, I think, in a lot of ways are things that we can reflect out into the bigger world of allowing people to have their space, to continue to have their teams. There's still a CoreOS Slack channel inside of all of the other Slack channels at Red Hat. They still feel that, you know, Jouard Aviv or whatever, and that they are recognized and seen for their contribution to the innovations that are coming and rolling out. And there are some things that Red Hat culture has done really well, especially because a lot of the things that we acquire, we then open source. So that on boards, especially proprietary companies that we acquire into the whole culture of what it takes to open source something. So there's this whole update of infrastructure around that that we have and best practices for that. We're not always perfect, trust me. I remember, you know, early days of OpenShift and there were some interesting conversations there. But I think we successfully managed to learn from all of that and allow people to have their own spaces and tell their stories and bring their expertise there and be recognized for it. So I think that's one of the key things that I see coming from an open source perspective that have helped us be successful. I think, you know, I think that's right. And I think, you know, there's a couple of things that when I was listening, you know, I think one of the things is that when you think about this kind of problem of negotiation versus autonomous decision making, right, like you think about the relationship there. One of the things that will tend to happen in organizations that lean on the autonomy is that they will in order to enable independent decisions, the decisions will become very cactical short term decisions because those are things that people can make by themselves. What should we do for the next two weeks? What user story should we be doing? But you know, like, but it's all very compressed. And this temporal compression, the way it compresses autonomy and it compresses impact down to these very short cycles has some good parts to it. And I think has some problems as well. And one of them is that by by leaning heavily on that kind of autonomous decision making and tactics. You end up with these questions about strategy and negotiation is required to do any real strategy because strategy is about aligning multiple components inside the organization together to achieve some longer term goal. And you can't do that independently. Strategy is about kind of integrating multiple components and capabilities together and having a sustained effort towards achieving something. And that I think, you know, those skill sets that that I think prop, properly, I think often should be represented by, you know, people who do architecture and product management, people who make kind of commitments to build things and try to develop the architectural components that enable more strategic options in the future. That layer in the organization is the layer that needs to be helped by the executives and needs to really be the layer that's kind of working as closely with with developers and operators as possible to allow them to understand how their tactics are enabling or disabling these larger strategic kind of movements. And I think, you know, that to me, one of the things one of the metaphors I always like to play with, because I've spent a lot of my career in, in startups and enterprises like either side of the coin is like there's an obsession with kind of unicorns and to me the unicorn idea is very much the the magical full stack organization that's autonomous. And makes its own decisions and all this kind of stuff right. And then you look at enterprises and to me that the metaphor for enterprises is instead of that like unique magical animal. It's it's Clydesdale and it and what I mean by Clydesdale is the way in which you have these large lumbering animals that are frankly, almost always teemed. It's you, you use draft horses in in doublets and quads to pull things like logs and stuff out of the woods. And in order to do that, these very large animals need to learn to work together with themselves and with the person who is asking them to do the work. And that to me is a much more interesting challenge and a much more convincing challenge because the fact of the matter is that enterprises that actually figure out how to get their teams to align can pull a lot of weight. They can, they can move the move things around in very interesting ways. So learning to do that learning to team effectively that's the trick I think that makes sense. And that the two points that I was going to make is common goals and common language that having a strategy that people are bought into a common goal, you know, that that and articulating it and getting people to gravitate around it and pull in the same direction as those Clydesdales. And the other piece of it is always for me is having a common language. And, you know, an example of that I know organizationally right now like years ago I went to something called pragmatic marketing, which was like every product manager on the planet had to go to that. And I think I've probably went eight years ago it's still there. And now we're inside of the open ship team, all because we've grown so much. We're getting taking everybody through it again. I did it in a startup called active state with some crazy ass wonderful people years ago and and getting a refresher on it, but bringing us all back to a common language. As we grow the ecosystem and all of the products that come under the cloud platform be you. We've, we've grown people from all kinds of startups and larger enterprises and having that common language for how we communicate things like epics. And personas and even the little things. So even if we all have our little silos, you know, whether it's serverless or service mesh or, you know, I don't know, ACM, every MTA, like there are so many different categories of product these things under cloud platform be you right now. It's hard to keep up with the acronym. But I think the thing doing things like this exercise of running everybody back through this pragmatic marketing exercise and there's lots of things out there. That's just, you know, one to make sure everyone's on the same page, you know, and doing that and including other silos or other groups of people, the engineers and the operations people so that they know when we speak these languages that what we're talking about. You know, it's not just throwing another, you know, taxonomy of terms at them again that they have to learn. I think that's, that's for me, strategy and leadership are key, but also making sure people have the skills and the language to communicate the same concepts. And I think that's where the DevOps world has done a really nice job of creating a language or a lingua franca for everybody to communicate with each other. And in these times, it's going to be interesting to see how we bridge some of these big, huge transformational things that we need to do in order to feel connected and to be able to listen. Because it's one thing to tell your story, but if you're doing it in a language that other people can't hear it or understand the term. So I think language becomes a very important piece of this rebooting to make sure that we're doing it safely too. And I think, you know, and I think we can see this in national politics. We don't have to discuss it directly, but I think we can see this there as well. And in this way, you know, saying gay has this idea where he kind of says roughly that one of the things that enables people to have kind of a systemic understanding or systems thinking view on the systems that they're part of is not just a sense of belonging or relationality to like, how am I related to this or that in the system right now? And what's my role in the company right now? And how's my role connected to other roles? Or how's my team connected to other things? That's important. But for him, one of the things he said he tries to say frequently is you have to have a connection to the future of the system. The only way that people invest is they need to know how they will, if this system exists in the future, how will I be in that future? And how will I help establish that new system, that new way of kind of working, that new way of being? And so the transition or the transformation from where the system is to where it's going needs to help people understand. I hate the like, where did my cheese go book? It drives me a bit crazy, but that part of the answer is like, where am I going to get cheese in the future? How is, how is, are these changes? How do they include me? And so many of the kind of arguments that happen when we get these kind of hyper fragmented systems that we see again, like a national level these days, is that they don't allow people to see how they will be part of the system in the future. That terrifies people and they will resist those types of changes as much as possible. And they'll be regressive and they'll try to move the system backwards, because in the past, they had a place. So when we talk about these transformations, we talk about the transitions. You know, one of the things I try to convince executives all the time is, A, there's no such thing as a big red switch transformation. You don't walk in one day and be like, click. Now we're in a new state. That doesn't happen. It's not a thing. Yeah. So all transformations or transitions take time. And during that period of time, one of the most dangerous things you can do is walk around and tell people who are not undergoing the transformation currently that their current way that they do work is wrong. That they don't know what they're doing, that there's a better way of doing this stuff. As opposed to saying we have some people who are trying new ways of working and we think they're advantageous for these things. And we want everyone to have the opportunity to do that work. We wouldn't be in business right now if our current way of working wasn't reasonably good. We're not devaluing the current state in order to create more a more valuable impression of the future state. We're just some people are trying new things. Current people need to keep on doing the amazingly good work that they're doing in the current system. And that's a different way of doing it. And frankly, you know, one of the things that I see a lot during big transformations is that one of the easiest ways to kind of get by in for the future state is to devalue the current state. Is to make the current state less valuable. I won't do it to talk down to talk poorly about the current state. And that's, that's it's the dangerous game. And I think people need to be really conscious that that's not. Yeah, that that will make people resistant to change. It won't. It will potentially make people who see how they can win in the new game. More likely to want to transform, but it will make everyone else who doesn't get to play in the first couple rounds, highly, highly resistant to that change. So that's That's where some of the transparency comes into play as well. I always, I have this. First, I have to say, as soon as you said the cheese thing, my mind race to we're in the future to a Wallace and Gromit. I'm not sure of him going to the moon to find cheese and having a picnic on my right there and then then the big switch. I'm like, right there. I could just see a whole little corporate training program on transformation done by the Wallace and Gromit folks. So it's like, I'm like visualize ago. That would be so cool. Yeah, not a big switch. But I think the other thing, often I think of the world in terms of like a multi dimensional chess board. And one of the things that I always liked about those is that the good ones were always on clear plexiglass so that you could see all of the different levels and where the game was going or what we were doing. And, and I think that this is where this is where you kind of have to have this transparency, especially in times like this where transparency, open meetings, open conversations, you know, not all conversations at every level have to be open and that but it really helps to keep and be as transparent and open as possible in these conversations because that's where where trust is built. You know, and that so someone's asking the questions, how do you team, how do you do team alignment effectively when everything is remote, like everything is remote. I think that's actually an interesting good question because yeah, especially during COVID right now. And I think I just saw an edict saying that I wasn't going to be traveling anywhere. Everything was going to be virtual until July 1 2021 was something came down the pipe the other day. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not surprised. But I still need my supplies from the boot store in Heathrow, but luckily somebody out to Peter Robertson sent me some medicine that that I take which is a headache medicine. And one is a Panadol or something like that. It's called it's like Alka Seltzer with headache medicine. He sent me a box full of those so kudos to Peter for that. So, but I think everything is going to be virtual for a lot longer and being remote is a difficult thing. Some of us, like I've been remote for eight years now. So I have skills for doing that and figuring out how to connect with someone who's new to being remote or entire teams. What is what's your been your experience being remote. Yeah, I mean, I have been remote for seven years now. And I think it's, I mean, I think it's an interesting question. I saw a report the other day said something like 90% of employees never want to go back to offices again. Something like 40 or 50% of business. Not even for the snacks. Damn it. You know, like the free coffee and the snacks and the bananas and the bowl. Like, hey, come on. You go to a lot of cities, right? And it's like, I really like having the two hours that I used to spend in a bus and the train back. That's I and I will even maybe spend an hour of that time doing more work just to not have to get back on the bus and the train again. I think it's going to be very common. Teams teams together. It's like aligning teams like when personally I love being remote and part of part and I feel slightly above office politics or water cooler politics. It feels, you know, I might be an illusion, but but when you have to bring a whole team of people together, that is, there are some really highly skilled people. You know, in Zoom team meetings and having like Trello boards and open plant, you know, planning meetings and that. And I think a lot of what I've learned from being in an open source is because open source pretty much has always been remote team alignment. I've learned a lot from things like what the CNCF is doing with having clear contribution ladders, like really documenting what it's going to take to get to the next level in your organization. The CNCF contributor has done some amazing work around helping all of the projects actually document what is the path to being a maintainer. You know, what are contributors, where are the participation points. And I think having that clear inside of an enterprise is new and different. You know, it's because a lot of that is, and I think we could probably take some of those open source practices and to inner source them. You know, and I think we see that there's a group call the inner source comments, you know, that are just preaching how to take these open source practices and apply them to that. So I think from my point of view, that's how I would try and move this new remote world to be more transparent, to have more clear documentation, not just, you know, HR hierarchy, but, you know, teams explaining, you know, what it's going to take to get through, you know, to, to decline the ladder or whatever it is, or to stay plateau where you are and be effective and stuff. So what's your thought? I think, you know, I think this is less true at Red Hat. Maybe it's just at my, from my perspective, I think that a lot of Red Hat is or was remote to begin with. That just seems like a natural part of the business. However, I have been in a lot of businesses where a vast majority of the work is being done on site and then there's limited off site or limited remote work. And one of the observations I had about that is that that seems to breed significant distrust in the off site workers. You know, people on site are like, I can see Sally and Joe working. So I know they're working, but I can't. That's more for leadership, right? Like leadership, like leadership has to trust that we're actually working, right? That we're actually producing and meeting the deadlines and everything else. I see that more from like, I've been a bunch of startups prior to Red Hat and where everybody had to be in the office. There was no clue, you know, except for like the super guru expert on, you know, some minor networking thing that we hired to do, you know, something. They were allowed because of their expertise to remain remote because they might have been in the UK and not downtown Vancouver. But we really, like, from my experience with startups is at least in the past, and I haven't been there in eight years, so things have changed. There was a tendency for our fearless leaders or benevolent dictators at the startups who want us all in the same office space so that they could have team huddles and stand up meetings and face to face and see that we were working on this stuff. And come around the cubicle wall and I won't say bully, but I just did us to, you know, stay another 24 hours straight and even one startup I worked in had a cot so you could sleep in your own very common practice. But there's really, we, we in part, maybe that might be part of the reason I joined the larger enterprise now so that I didn't have to sleep in an office. I never did that. But, you know, the tendency is the smaller the company, the more people, at least in the past, wanted everybody there. Yep, that's right. And so it was because it was easier for the leadership to make sure one we're working but to also make sure we were all aligned, you could actually verbally talk to them and it's very hard when the teams are not in the same space. I think I think, you know, the thing that I was thinking about that I like people think about more is how amazingly resilient our organizations have been to go through such a trauma for most of them, where they believed, as you just said, I have to have all the people here I have to be able to see them and communicate directly with them. And I need to be making sure that they're, they're efficient and effective at all times. And that can't happen remotely because I don't trust them or I don't believe. Well, I think one of the lessons that we are going to learn out of this is that a huge amount of the workforce is as effective. Remotely. It's not monitored. It's not more. More. And, and so part of that is frankly because there's no control group anymore. There is no one at the office to compare to the remote workers. Everyone's remote. Yeah. And I think that there will be a significant amount of weird tension when the main offices start opening back up again. Who's going to be asked to come back? How are they going to be evaluated different than the remote, the people who choose to stay remote? All of those transitional transformational questions, like in the same way we transformed into all remote organizations, we are about to undergo a process by which some amount of the organizations transform back into on site organizations. And how do we keep site of the lessons that we learned, the positive lessons that we learned through this, this kind of crisis where we've learned how responsible employees are to their companies and how they do go to work and they do good work and they don't need to be micromanaged and sat on all day long. And the fact of the matter is that I bet that most remote workers don't work eight hours straight. They probably work three or four hours a day and get their work done. And then they take the appropriate breaks and time to eat lunch and be with their family and take care of their children. And you know what? From every impression you can look at from the market and from the profitability of the companies that these people are working for, they're doing their job. It's working. Yeah, it is working. The other aspect of it too that, I mean I've been remote at Red Hat for eight years, almost, yeah, at least eight years. Time flies when you're having a really good time and I have been having a really good time. But there's also, I think one of the lessons that we're learning and I've seen what I love seeing in this past seven months, eight months now, is the leveling of the hierarchy even more. You've always had very level organization and stuff, but when someone was on site, they might have access to the management team and the management team would have more visibility of them. So there was an impression that they would rise up the organization and that by being remote, you got all the benefits of being remote, let you just describe, work three hours, take the dog for a walk and come back. You can't do that if you're in the office. So you give up something which in some instances is rising through the organization. So I think one of the great lessons that we've learned here is that it levels that playing field. And one of my, maybe my fears is that when we come start onboarding people back into the office, that we'll lose that a little bit. So that the visibility of someone's work, because you see them around the cubicle wall all the time, you know, hacking madly eight hours a day versus the person that you don't see, you know, who's across the globe in the Czech Republic or, you know, UK or wherever they are, you don't see that. So I think it's on management and leadership and team leads across the board to retain this spirit that we've we've had of, you know, no more water coolers, you know, that's that. But what we've also done some really cool stuff, like zoom meetings that are team meetings, you know, like I or for me across community meetings where, you know, get 35 people that you normally would have seen in the hall. We had a conference on a zoom call, mixing, doing a Japanese whiskey tasting. We found some new things to do together or how much I love seeing people's dogs in their background because I lost my dog last fall and haven't replaced it Monty yet. So it's like, you know, there are little things that make me see people's lives like the flickering lights in your background that make me love you even more. You know, these kinds of things we've brought people into our homes. That's right. You know, and, and I don't want to lose that I really like that about team, whether it's team alignment or just building connections that we didn't, you know, we've missed place and I don't get me wrong. I miss going to conferences. I miss those hallway conversations, but I think we found things that have allowed us to have them and in enough in a way it's democratized access to it to me like so people, anyone can dial me up now on everybody on internet. Don't do this right now. But I can boot up a blue jeans or a Google meet or a zoom meeting and I can have a conversation with someone in Abu Dhabi, you know, and they feel freer to ask. For that now, then they might have in the past. Yep. I think that's, yeah, I think that's right. I think, you know, yeah, I think that, you know, it'd be, it'd be nice if we can keep most of those things around. I think, you know, I spent a lot of time as a consultant influencing executives and it's that is, frankly, it's harder to do remotely. People want to hang out and they want to talk with you. They want to see your face when they're making big decisions. They want to have a better sense of you and that's hard to do. So I look forward to being able to travel a bit and have those types of conversations again. But I also agree that, you know, the flattening or the democratization of a lot of organizations by basically leveling the playing field and saying everybody, everybody works remote now. I think again has been a significant learning lesson for a lot of executives, a lot of teams help them understand what it means to have an effective team at all. And, you know, I think there was a lot of worry and concern early on how we're going to do this. And I, you know, I think most teams, frankly, just kind of did it. I think ongoing at the one person that the one persona that I was concerned about and I still haven't heard any research or anything on it is people who were brand new to an organization who didn't have a network. And that's where those ladders and organizational stuff and onboarding and introducing people, you know, to the conversations. That is something I think we still need to be hyper aware of whether they're going to vote or coming on the onboarding practices into this new universe. So when you bring a new team member in, how do you effectively inoculate them with the culture of that team? How do you bring them in to the fold and and have them aware of who's in their network, you know, who people are, what world that has been like for. I've been at Red Hat eight years and I'm still meeting constantly new people on new topics or people change topics and stuff. So the the structural the structures that we create to support remote people to kind of also always remember the new folks, you know, how we get them into the network of who's who knows what and that and tools we use probably overuse. G chat and Slack and Oh God, we overuse Slack and Twitter and things like that, like how does that team effectively what tools and things they have. So that's really always in the back of my mind is the onboarding and people who have been in the company for a long time. You know, how do we keep them engaged to, but I, you know, I, I think that a lot of I worry about that onboarding of new folks. But as we're taking people right out of college and the younger folks, they know this that they're like tick tock and away and they have no problem with this remote stuff. They've been playing video games and know how to use all the tools. I think sometimes the mature members of our audiences and our communities might find some of these things daunting. And so I think there's like, there's lots of structural things we can do that, whether it's HR or agile coaches or whomever it is to make sure that people are have the tools that they need. So like, I think that's true. And then, you know, to answer kind of like a, I'm not a fan of the term best practice, but good good social practices for aligning teams answer that very specifically. My suggestion is that you read that people read a book called the art of action by a man named Stephen Bungay. And they read about Hoshan Connery, which is related. And the best version of that is there's a book called Hoshan Connery. And it's a blue book and it looks like a weird, like one of those math textbooks you had in high school. But there's also another one called getting the right things done by Dennis Stevens, I think is his name. Okay. But all of these basically have this idea. And there's, there's a cause called X matrixing, which has to do with helping teams understand how what their tactical outputs relate to the strategies. But the main kind of thing that I think differentiates traditional lean Hoshan Connery style from Art of Action Bungay style stuff is that Bungay is is taking his theory from the military. And one of the things he emphasizes is the importance of back briefing. And so back briefing is as a simple process by which, well, like, I'll describe how I've seen this done in several different companies, and how I've helped other companies do this. If you're doing a strategy cycle, so you're going to do like, what are we going to do for the next six months to a year? The strategy cycles first starts by saying to the leaf nodes, in other words, the kind of people who are doing the work. What's the most important things that we should consider doing for the next six to 12 months? Anybody can contribute. It's all good. We just want to hear what you have to say. That can be filtered through a mid tier where they kind of combine ideas and help understand and kind of compress a bit. It goes up to an executive tier that's going to make some strategic decisions. And what they get is some insight into what the organization sees, what they think is important. But also they get some understanding of like, there's 10 different teams that all want something very similar. That sounds like maybe a strategic thing that we could do because if we do it once for 10 teams, we get 10 times the output, right? Stuff like that. So you kind of see this is what I call this the rain cycle version of strategy. So this is the evaporation process, right? And then you roll the narrative that is created down again. So you say, okay, so as an executive, a, in theory, I have some experience with things. B, I have access to some information that maybe not everybody has because I spend most of my time thinking about the market and what customers want and what our competitors are doing. I have some subtly different insights because I'm not spending all my time doing these really quick cycles that you guys do. I have some time to think about. So I've listened to everything you guys said and I think we should do these three or four things this year. And that's not like, we also have to do kind of business as usual, keep the lights on work. But if we could do these three or four things this year, it would make a massive impact on our company's ability to whatever. And you roll that back down. And one of the things that happens is as you rolling it down, you're not just going, you know, I often think that people don't see this the right way when they think about organizations. It's not just a pyramid, right? It's not just you're rolling down. It's you're rolling into smaller parts of the organization. So the strategic implication of choosing to do X in development has a different meaning than doing that strategy and operations. Yeah. It means different things to like, if we want to do that, we'll have to do different things in operations and development. So as you roll it down, you kind of like basically asking each layer as you roll down, can you restate this strategy for your part of the organization? In other words, what would operators need to do in order to achieve this? Can you rewrite this strategy specific to your areas of concern? Compare them with the other peer level stories that are being written to say, if we did all of these littler stories about that strategy, we did all of them together. Would it add up to make that bigger strategy true? That's a peer-wise comparison. And then there's the back brief version of it, which says, hey boss, you didn't notice this or you didn't think about this. So your strategy will have to be modified or changed in some way if you want to be successful. So the back briefing is basically the executive not saying, hey, what should we do? Saying, I think we should do this, but also leaving it kind of open to, could you please tell me if I'm being an idiot? That would be good. Before we commit to doing this, anybody want to tell me why we shouldn't do this? And if you do that at every level, what you do is you get buy-in as you were describing it. You basically are using a process by which if you do it authentically, you do it honestly with your teams, you are asking them, I would like you to give me a mandate to do this strategy. And the reason I'm asking you is because I won't be able to do it unless you think it's possible to do it. And you tell me what you need to get it done. If I just rant and rave and tell you you have to do it, it doesn't work. This goes back to the common goals and common language. This is how you build a mandate or a common mandate with buy-in. It goes back to storytelling and it goes back to having a common language because across peers at all these different layers of the structure, if you don't have a common language and someone doesn't understand the acronyms or the way that you're describing personas or epics or whatever it is, if they don't have that, then that kind of flow up and down can be misinterpreted too. So it's like there's so many, this is where I go to that three-dimensional chess board or the five-dimensional. There's so many dimensions to what you have to kind of, if you're in a leadership role or in a management role or you're leading teams that you have to start thinking about, do we have this common language? Do we have this document in what I'm doing here? There's a lot to think about here and I really think that we've almost come to the end of our hour, which actually today I really didn't think that we were going to be able to fill an hour because I was really feeling a little burnt out and I think some of our other coworkers were a little burnt out too. But I think this is one of the things where we can take things like these skill sets that we have in tech and then go off and volunteer for social change or helping that. There's so many little areas where we've seen really good things happen over the past four years, even with some of the crazy stuff that's happened. The federal bureaucracy, the people working in the federal government who just kept on plugging, kept the post office moving, kept the ballots coming. There's so much goodness out there of people with very disparate points of view that I think when we think about what's going on today in the world, there are a lot of people who are already collaborating effectively, have common goals, and they might not share the same political points of view with each other, but because they're effective as a team and the goals are common and the language is common, they've managed to keep governments working. The federal agency is working, our tax returns being filed and processed, all those things, and it's the same in tech. We see this, people don't agree with all their points of views, but there's a dog in the back room or there's flashy Christmas lights or there's a red hat there. We have something in common that helps us stay together and to continue to collaborate and to connect. So thank you, Jade, for today. Again, an amazing book list that every time you talk, you throw out like three or four books that I have to add to this pile. At least it's a Kindle pile. So I'm going to make you in that document that we shared the notes on. It is certainly in the references to those and I will post those along with the video shortly. And thanks again. And we didn't have to drink bourbon to get through today. We'll drink bourbon next week when it's all over. Maybe it's all over, I don't know. Hopefully it's all over. If you had to count what is it, 73 million pieces of paper or however many ballots there were. My hands. Have you seen those sorting machines they're throwing things through? Crazy ass. I mean, they're just amazing. So the shout out to the poll workers everywhere. At the counties and now levels, all the levels of government for all the efforts they're going to well done. Good example of collaborating across line. So thanks. And the only other thing, the one of the shout out dude that I think is important because we talked about community. What we're seeing in Georgia is the result of sustained work to build a community. Yep. And you can see the radical difference between that and saying just give me money every 10 minutes. And I'm going to spend that money on ads because we'll change people's minds at the last minute by dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into media buys. I think that was, that's a very good point. I think. Oh man, we could riff on that for another hour. Great show to Georgia for that Stacey Abrams for all the work that she did and led to that. But I think it's a really good example of community building and it's not momentary sustained work. It takes time. It takes effort and you got to keep going. Yeah. Regardless of what the outcome is. That's right. Community work is where it's at. So thank you again and take care everybody. Thanks guys.