 So good morning everyone, congratulations to those of you who are able to accomplish coffee this morning. For those of you who weren't able to manage coffee this morning, may you be first in line at lunch for the beverage lineup. Today I'm going to be giving a presentation that I've given a couple of times. The slides are already uploaded for you and this session is being recorded and it's also been recorded previously. Should there be any kind of failure with the recording? So with that in mind, I will be delightful and charming for the next 57 minutes. I'm happy to do a Q&A as well but if you found that there was another session that you were also interested in seeing, I will not in the slightest be offended if you sneak out and go to that other session because I want you to be getting best value for your entire DrupalCon experience. So this presentation is, I mean it's a great title but if I'm being perfectly honest, it's not really what this title for this presentation is called. Really this presentation is called something to the effect of a primer on how I learned to be a more empathetic person in the workplace and I don't have that sort of caveat on that slide. But as we see throughout the presentation, this is a skill that can be developed and it can be used or not used and it wasn't a skill that I was comfortable using in the workplace for various reasons. So the gist of what I'm going to say is going to kind of end up feeling a little bit touchy touchy feely woo-woo but in the best possible way and a lot of it, the presentations that I've seen where, and especially around DevOps and user research, they talk about how important empathy is but they don't go on to actually give you the how to empathy and so this presentation I'm hoping will give people a bit more either vocabulary to discuss with other people in terms of your coworkers and getting empathy to be a tool in your toolkit at work or perhaps the actual steps that you need to use yourself to be a more empathetic person in the workplace while still maintaining really healthy boundaries. One of the things that Temple Grandin is a biology researcher I think is the best way to describe her also with Asperger's I think is the right definition of her diagnosis condition and what she has discovered or what she will say about people is that we have an incredible lack of empathy and it is again a skill that needs to be practiced. So one of the things that I did a couple of years ago was a leadership training program and I had always considered myself someone to be relatively empathetic but also relatively self aware and able to understand that just because I had seen a movie on the big screen about topic whatever that suddenly didn't make me able to experience the conditions that were depicted in that movie in real life and so I've been fairly cautious about saying yes I can put myself in someone else's shoes yes I can experience something through someone else and so I took this leadership program and one of the things that was a key part of the leadership program was the skills assessment and it showed us our preferences of where we liked or what skills we like to use in the workplace they were all thinking strategies so there's 18 thinking strategies I'll talk a lot about them later on but one of the things that I came to realize is that actually I was not quite as empathetic as I thought in the workplace and when I say not quite as empathetic as I thought for those of you who aren't able to perceive or see the graphic on the screen I scored a zero for empathy and it's one of those binary question surveys where if you score high in something you have to score low in something else so given the choice of whatever the two things were I would always choose the non empathetic answer as what I would prefer to do in the workplace and for me some of those questions were just structured in a way that I felt I wasn't able to accomplish the task so did I really truly feel like I could perceive a problem from someone else's point of view and I just didn't think I could because I didn't think that being who I am as a person in terms of my upbringing, my background, the color of my skin, my gender all of those things I couldn't pretend to be someone else with a great deal of accuracy and so every time one of those empathy questions came up I would just say no I just can't do that or at least I can't do it with the casual nature which you have suggested is possible in the workplace so as a result of this course I had to decide is this a skill that I want to try and develop or is this something that I'm comfortable just continuing to say no I'm going to leave that for outside the workplace where I actually have the capacity to be empathetic with my friends and my families and with people who are around me in a day to day situation and this talk is sort of my realization that it was a skill that I could bring into the workplace and that I could nurture and I could develop if I so choose so the first thing I want to kind of double check with you is the definition of empathy versus sympathy Empathy is as I have said many times already and will continue to say during this presentation it is that ability to get yourself in someone else's situation later in the presentation I'll talk about essentially empathy practitioners and user researchers and DevOps and people who it's their job to get inside what the experience is as a user or as a person using software so understand and share is different from having pity for someone so when I'm talking about empathy in this the first sort of like stage one or level one scenario I'm kind of really talking about sympathy and that's that ability to safely leave yourself detached from someone else and say oh I'm sorry that this sucks for you and that sort of disengagement but acknowledgement that there's a problem Donna's presentation which is later in this week Catacrab is she adds a third dimension to this and talks about compassion so if this topic is of interest to you or you want to send your friends and co-workers to a similar session I think she does a nice job of going one step deeper in terms of looking at a framework it's less of a how-to but a nice follow-up to this one so today we'll be talking about empathy from three different levels and I'm sort of thinking of this as a non-gamer apparently you level up and move from one thing to another so I like to think of this as being the first level everyone should be able to accomplish this first level by the end of this presentation the second level is choosing a framework and I'm going to speak about one specific framework but you could adopt any number of frameworks and thinking about structuring an experience from a framework that has whether it's pseudoscience or actual science background of how people are going to perceive the world and interact with the world but thinking about selecting a framework and using it and getting your team on board with that framework so that you have some common language and then the third one is sort of the empathy practitioner or the level three difficulty I don't expect everyone to be able to walk out of this presentation able to be an empathy practitioner in terms of a user researcher or an anthropologist or however you think or whatever roles you think of as being that's their job to understand someone else's experience and then to make it smoother but that's level three that's the height of what we can get to so the first one, level one is caring just enough and this is sort of the point at which if you speak in human resources speak you stop thinking of people as resources and you start thinking of people as actually people with stories and experiences and someone who didn't get any sleep last night because the baby was up someone who didn't get any sleep last night because they were out drinking may have the same result at 9 a.m. but it is a different experience that they are coming from so this is beginner level stuff I think and the ultimate take away on this one is to stop compartmentalizing and that was something that I tended to do at work and say work is work I'm going to put my professional face on and I'm going to expect professional behavior from my coworkers at all times I'm going to have a very low tolerance for behaviors that I feel are not appropriate to the workplace and then 5 o'clock or whenever that bell goes off at the end of the day we all get to let our hair down we all get to be as inappropriate as we want to be and inappropriate stays outside of work and also work stays in work and doesn't sort of blend over as members of an open source community you are probably aware that the lines get kind of fuzzy and so that compartmentalization can be incredibly difficult and so starting to relate to the people who are in this room who are your coworkers who are your fellow contributors as people is something that I think we need to do more of to the risks and rewards I only have to say that three times in this presentation the risks and rewards are pretty simple it takes a little bit of time investment and ultimately the win on this is that you're going to improve team cohesion so pretty straight forward stuff so far so how do we do this again this is a practical session in terms of how do we actually engage in empathy and ultimately all we need to do at this point is to collect stories from people so you need to ask them questions and you need to listen to the answers and when I say listen to the answers I mean stop and listen to the answers so the acronym may be something that you want to look up STFU I'm not actually going to say that as part of my presentation but I encourage you to Google if you don't know what STFU stands for but the key here is the listening part of empathy and one of the things that I find quite difficult is when I'm hearing someone's experience about something my immediate tendency is to jump in with my own equivalent experience and that's almost denying that person's story because it's changing the focus toward me and all I'm trying to do is make connections and certainly as a professional teacher I am constantly thinking about how can I make a bridge for this learner how can I make that connection a little bit more obvious but that's not what we do when we're practicing empathy in empathy we stop, we listen we receive the information and then we ask questions and maybe at some point we'll start sort of clarifying or when this happened to me I found this can you describe to me how this is different or how it's the same but it's used as a point of clarification not as a way to change the story into or change the situation into something about yourself and then the next part of empathy in this sort of practical sense of the word is to refer back to those stories so a week later, a month later, a year later say back to someone you told me this thing how is it going, has it improved has it resolved the issue are you still enjoying your job as much as you were those connections allow the person to to give you more information and to feel that they were important and to feel that they had something to share with you but it also reminds you that a story is not an isolated incident it's something that's going to continue for that particular person so if you want to be able to place yourself in that person's shoes to be able to experience their life you have to remember that their life does go on and refer back to that story that they've told you about pretty simple stuff, I think so next we move into level two and this is sort of the framework section you can swap out your own system I don't really care which system you use this is the one that I have the most familiarity with and it... my quote here is because I genuinely don't care which system you use but I do really really like this one and the reason why I like it is it doesn't say I'm a bad person for not using empathy in the workplace it says I'm really good at something else and I have to make a conscious decision to engage in some behaviors or thinking strategies is what they call them so the rewards and risks for this particular one is that we can engineer successful outcomes now if I look down on the bottom section you can see that engineering successful outcomes can sometimes be interpreted as manipulative so you need to be careful as you use your frameworks to make sure that they're done in a respectful way that they're done in a transparent way and that it is moving everyone forward that it's not simply you choosing to present one version of yourself to one person and another person gets a completely different version and you are not able to give a cohesive experience for your team like this is a framework that's going to help open communication words that you can use across the entire team experience I think it does help to improve diverse thinking as well my example on this I'm a lousy brainstormer so if I know I need to brainstorm a problem then I can go and look for someone who has identified that they love to brainstorm and have them puzzle through a problem with me I'm more of a do a lot of research and sit for a week or sit for a month and then suddenly the answer comes to me in the shower but I'm not a doodler, I can't muscle through I can't force out the ideas in the way that someone who can whiteboard a problem can sort of work to a natural conclusion so those different strategies are things that we can take advantage of I know that I'm still you know I'm still developing my empathy muscle shall we say so if there's other people in my team who I know are better than me at it then I can talk to them and work with them to help me work that muscle it allows you to uncover motivators as well so now that you know that I'm not that I'm someone who consciously practices empathy in the workplace when you watch me in a scenario when you watch me in a situation you may be able to see some of those behaviors and you may be able to spot where I'm using my preferences or where I'm working a little bit harder because I'm trying to practice something new and as you work with your coworkers your teammates you see that someone they just seem to have no patience absolutely never you know they always want to get to the end of the conversation they just want the conclusion they just want to move on this is someone who's a fantastic decision maker and allowing them to experience a brainstormer in full on mode you're going to end up with conflict really quickly so figuring out how to unpack those motivators and saying to someone I know that you love brainstorming but we're going to make a decision now and being able to sort of help people unpack their preferences can make for a smoother experience or in other words think about what would so and so do in a scenario and then make or construct a scenario that's going to work for them so I mentioned a few different empathy being one of those thinking strategies 18 thinking strategies again this is the 4DI system use true colors or Myers-Briggs or any of the different systems that work for you this one works for me and we have on the far left the go or generate thinking strategies and I'll go into each of these in a little more depth and then we have the slow down thinking strategies which are to sort to sort of relate to someone they aren't generating new ideas they're simply gathering and sorting the information and then finally we have the stop and those are the people who are great at making decisions they rely on their gut they're not really sure why something but they just happen to know it so here we go here this is the further breakdown this is the actual 4DI three dimensions seven mindsets and 18 success strategies as they systems do tend to love their language on things so here we go with more specifically the creative thinking and here we have challenge envision brainstorm reframe flash of insight and flow I love reframing problems I'm great at the pivot I'm great at taking what's my scenario here and moving a little bit in one direction or a little bit in another direction in terms of the envision or the long term visioning of something I'm not great at thinking what something could be five years out I don't know if any of you saw Dries' presentation in Drupal Khan Austin where he was looking at sort of the history of photography and he was also talking about retail sales but for me there was a lot of far reaching thinking of future there's a term for this what were the future thinkers does anyone know this word future forecasters, thank you so that far away thinking it's not something that I I'm not a science fiction reader either so for me that one's that's a tricky one but you may be going oh that but that's fun to think about the future it's fun to think about science fiction so those are different things that fall into creative thinking phrasing wise if you hear these phrases a lot from certain people they may be a green or a creative thinker or have strong preferences for that can we try I know we're done but what about oh my goodness I just had this great idea so why do you think and is this the best we can do so all of those are sort of opening up that person who you thought you got to a conclusion and then they open another idea they're probably it's just where they feel most comfortable in terms of the preferred strategy so now let's take a look at understanding or the yellow thinking in terms of slow down and here we have scan structure clarify tune in empathize and express so half of these are dealing with information and half of them okay not quite half two thirds one third and two thirds are dealing more with the human dimension of information and I tend on any given day if I am forced to make a decision in that binary question scenario I feel much safer on the data side of things the information side of things not gooey fleshy human side of things and there are other people who will be the exact opposite so for me that's a skill that I need to practice a random anecdote almost applied to be a librarian which may tell you something as well about how much I love to sort piles of information so my key phrases on this side so what you're saying is that that clarification that person who constantly you just said something and then they're going to repeat exactly what you just said that's me because I'm clarifying that I've understood what you've said just to clarify so I think this is related to so I've made this spreadsheet is anyone in the room guilty of this one come on project managers I know you're out there yes and then that must feel horrible so that's the person who has that empathy preference finally we have the decision makers or the stop thinking the red thinking if we're going in traffic light colors and at this point we're breaking things down into value driven decisions and critical decisions or critical critical thinking decisions so we have getting to the crux of the problem validating a problem using your experience concluding gut instinct and values driven is here I'm ready to move on so someone who is just always in that stop mode and they don't want to talk about things anymore I don't know why I think this but someone who is going backwards in time in terms of their experience last time we tried this the real problem is getting to the crux of the problem and my gut tells me so again someone who is using this language a fair amount probably is simply showing a preference for that decision based thinking so we can structure our meetings we can structure our interactions in a way that says we're going to brainstorm for 20 minutes and then we're going to make a decision and allowing those preferences to be identified or allowing those skills to be identified ahead of time means that someone who's participating in the experience can say well this is going to suck but it's only going to suck for 20 minutes and then we're going to make a decision so how can you shape that experience so that people know what skills to bring to the table and they know when they need to set their preferences aside to use one of their other strategies this is my breakdown from a couple of years ago more completely I'm trying to remember the year that I took this I think it was if not 2011 then 2012 so it's a couple of years ago now and I am a strong believer in for these systems if you take them before and after coffee you would probably not have the same answers on things so I certainly have no problems sharing this with you but it's not a complete snapshot of who I am today or who I would have been after coffee had I done this at a different time of day so for me some of the interesting things the zeros in terms of the brainstorm and the vision which I mentioned the empathize, validate as well also quite low and then the white scores over on the far right hand side those are sort of like your amplifier so how likely you are to engage in any one of your thinking strategies and that's sort of a volume as well so am I strongly going to engage in one of these or am I kind of meh on things and those are a separate set of questions as you can see the analytical thinking the information one is super high because I have to have zeros somewhere else I do also have those big peaks so if you take that you don't need to do the test to start thinking about what are the things that you prefer to do what are the things that you don't prefer to do and do you want to practice some of the things that you would choose not to engage in and finally we get to the level 3 version of empathy and this is where I this is a really, really tricky one for me and the reason why is because I think when we start to engage at the level 3 if you're not a trained anthropologist if you're not a trained user researcher and you can do your own training you can be community trained doesn't need to be formal training but if you don't have that capacity to keep a personal distance I think it becomes to use yourself in the problems that other people are describing and you can I shouldn't project I have taken on more than what I was capable of dealing with on some of these problems and what we'll see in a second here when I was arguing from the other person's position against myself so it's kind of like playing devil's advocate but when I was arguing from their position and thinking about okay why is this what is it like for this person to experience the problem in this way turns out I was not a very nice person to deal with from that person's perspective and I thought I was being fair and I thought I was being just and I thought everything was good but it really made me question my own decisions and if you're not prepared to question your own decisions and if you don't have a support network to go along with this this level of engagement can be it can be emotionally incredibly difficult so do caution on this one don't just jump in and think you can excel at it but if we do go about it and I've got a couple of good anecdotes I think for you I think we can get truly creative problem solving at this level and there are reasons why this discipline exists and why the outputs are so important for us I think as software developers so here we go the first one is to seek to understand and this is sort of being the devil's advocate the assumption is that the listener is on the side of the complainer so how do you put yourself into the complainer's shoes when you are the person who's being complained about so I'm not great phrasing on this we'll skip ahead to some of my examples here the next one is to seek to experience the problem so my first anecdote I was working in a distributed company last a year ago actually and my account manager who was also onboarding me as a project manager broke her wrist and as a distributed team we did a very large percentage of things through type based communication so Molly started using dictation software and it was new to her it wasn't something that she had practiced it wasn't something that she trained her voice on and the results were phonetically correct shall we say so if you read the dictated email it absolutely made sense if you said the words out loud and could hear what you were saying instead of reading what the actual words were and it was it didn't parse out what the dictation software was trying to do and so what I did in this particular scenario is whenever I needed to get a written response back I would structure the email in a way that she was able to respond with yes or no it wasn't multiple questions that had multiple options in terms of well if I ask it this way it's yes but if I ask it that way then it's no one way to ask the question a really clear and easy way for her to be able to give back the question to me and it resulted in much faster communications much clearer answers and a much better way to actually have the project proceed so that's one example of me thinking about what is this like to be in her shoes and it wasn't until I actually spent time as I went for a visit it wasn't until I actually watched her using the dictation software and realized exactly how much frustration the software how much swearing was involved in using the software and just the drain of energy that it was causing that I was like you know I can do something about this it's not going to take a lot of extra effort on my part to restructure the email but it wasn't until I really watched the experience that I was able to put myself into her shoes before that I kind of got that it was irritating but I didn't really understand how irritating it was the next example that I have is again it's a lot of people being grumpy in my examples so the next example that I have I was working with a client who he was a gem like he was genuinely fantastic to work with he was one of those clients who missed client 101 on how to be a not very nice client and was actually engaged he came to our daily stand-ups he was just wonderful to work with absolutely loved him except every two to four weeks he'd get really grumpy and it was not clear to me why he was getting really grumpy so I sort of second time that it happened I was like hey you know like what's going on cause everything was good and then things weren't so good he's like oh I have to write another report and you guys haven't really done anything that I can put in the report but I know you're working really hard I don't really know what to say I was like oh well why don't I just start giving you weekly summaries that you can copy and paste into your report he was like oh that would be amazing well we were already doing internal reporting it wasn't that big of a deal to email him the information but I didn't I mean I didn't know that he had to write reports and as soon as I was able to start asking him questions about why something you know why was he frustrated cause I we were doing great I knew it had nothing to do with us we were able to get richer information about the experience we were having and support that experience so those are a couple of examples of how understanding someone else's position and being able to experience our world through their lens a couple of easy changes on my side resulted in a much better experience for everyone so that's the sort of empathy practitioner even if you're not a user researcher even if you're not an anthropologist even if you're not I don't know who else is in the room who feels that they are a professional empathy practitioner and what's your role shout out your job title or your role name silence no one is an empathy practitioner you're all here to learn I love it okay now there's a couple of hands yep project leader yep my hearing is horrible can you actually people above below on on on the sides yes excellent and what other titles yep Vicky user experience to user researcher yeah fantastic any other titles that people have where they feel like it's their job to be empathetic yes delivery manager and UX I am repeating as well for the recording just for that benefit any other titles that folks have account management yes yep team lead what were the other ones okay yeah support and maintenance yep service manager yeah yep excellent so the thinking process and ultimately should be not left to chance we make it deliberate we think about how we can actually engage with folks and I think we can get much stronger outcomes and I know I'm not running fast but I know that we're going to have a lot of time so I I think I want to do is run through to the end and then what we may do is clip off the recording and and do an unrecorded Q&A which is sometimes nicer for folks to be able to discuss issues that they're having without it being on the internet for the rest of infinity so we'll do that and if folks want to stick around for it that would be great if you don't that's okay too so as I said three basic levels in our how to empathy piece the first level is to care just enough and in that point we're going to talk to people about their lives and then listen to whatever the experiences that they've had and later on refer back to that experience level two use a framework I'm happy to talk more about the framework that I know best you may know other frameworks there's definitely many out on the market and then the third one is to engage with people from their perspective and I think this is the one which is the most difficult to it sounds straightforward but I think often we end up providing sympathy not empathy so we're going to aim for empathy starting that first level really probably matches a bit better on to sympathy if you aren't able to just stop and listen to the story the second one getting understanding and then the third one really maps on to true empathy another quote from the late Maya Angelou I think we all have empathy we may not have the courage to display it again it's a muscle it has to be practiced it's a skill it has to be practiced and developed you can choose to use it you can choose not to use it but I don't think it's something that is without value and I think that there is more and more in the tech community which places value on empathy than when I first started two decades ago it's actually been anyways so but it's nice that we are starting to recognize it as a skill that needs to be practiced and not just something that gets lip service so that as I mentioned slides are up I'm going to remind everyone about the sprints really quickly because we've been asked to do that you should definitely come on Friday even as a non-technical person one of the hugely valuable things that we can get is a reading of all of the comments and then rewriting the description of what the problem currently is so if you've got some fairly basic analytical skills in terms of being able to decipher a conversation and then present back a summary of the conversation hugely valuable if you are technical as well fantastic we can get you set up but that's happening on Friday so again my slides are already up there's a recording there as well if you at this point if there's questions that you think are relevant to a wider audience there's a mic over in the corner which means that I don't have to repeat your question if there are none then what I'm going to do is I'll step away from the mics that were not recorded for the next bit alright fantastic thank you very much everyone end of the recording la la la