 We've got a game downstairs, which is can you fix the broken dual, right? So if you're interested, head on down and have a crack. We've also got comics. Bruce and Abdul, they're the two senior managers at our Bangalore office at Aconex. That's Bruce there. Hello, Bruce. And Lakshmi is with Bruce. They're people at our Aconex office. I'm based in Melbourne. But we've got these cool little comic books, which are neat. Would you like one? Yeah, cool. There's something like that in your show bags that come with the conference. I'm just going to hand a few out. But if you come downstairs, we'll give you more. We've got stacks, boxes of them. Here you go. A little taster. Have we started yet? Is the clock on? Cheers. I'd like to... Hey, I'm on. Excellent. First of all, I'd like to say I've been having a really good time in this room today. There's been a track of really excellent talks in here so far today. So if any of the people in here are speakers, then thank you for the interesting talks that you've given. Secondly, I'm going to talk a little bit, but I'm going to get you to do most of the work. My core competency is delegating things to other people. Now, when you come to a conference like this, you hear a lot of stories. You learn some stuff. You get inspired. And then what do you do when you go back to work on Monday? What do you change? Say it louder. You remember to switch off the mobile. What do you change at work? Not much, right? So you're either already a change agent. You're already committed to doing work smarter and better ways. And you're already out there fighting the good fight. Or you're in an environment that doesn't really let you shift things much. And it takes a lot of effort to change the way the organization around you works. I get a little sharp hands. Who here has already been in talks all about change management and changing organizational behaviors? Or is this your first one for the day? Yeah, so for most of you, it's a newish topic today. So what stops us from making change? You know, you guys are all literate in the idea of systems thinking. And the Deming quote about people come to work wanting to do a good day's job. Nod? You with me? Can you hear that? Yeah, you're familiar with the idea? You are, aren't you? Yeah, what stops people from doing a good job? I told you, you guys are going to do most of the work. Yeah, go on, shout it out. The organization, the way the organization is set up and the systems of the organization are the things that get in our way. Would you say that's a fair statement? You disagree. No one's nodding. No one's guessing. No one's even giving me the famous Indian. I'm not sure. It depends. Thank you. You've got a consultant in the room. Thank you very much. So I thought what I might do today is share a technique, a little technique around how to inspire and enlist people in getting change done. So this technique is just little human interaction stuff, something that you can do with the people that you work with day to day and something that will help you shift the way the system is so that maybe you can be a bit more effective, maybe you can be a bit more efficient in the way you get things done. So what am I going to do? Well, I've already told you that you're going to do most of the work so I'm going to give you some instructions and I'm going to put the clock on my phone and I'm going to time some conversations. What I will do at the end is I will loop back to the beginning and I'm going to ask you guys to debrief and share some expressions, some lessons that you've pulled out of the conversations. So here's what we're going to do. All in all, if this goes smoothly, it'll take 50 minutes. If anything happens like there's a blackout or an earthquake or somebody naked runs into the room, it might take a little longer. But we'll get it done in an hour. So what I'm going to do is ask you guys to go through three different conversations with each other. And at the end of those, we're going to have a little moment of reflection. But it looks like there's, I don't know, 80 people in the room thereabouts. So I'm not going to ask you all to reflect back to me because that'll take too long. What I'll ask you to do is reflect back to the groups that you're in. And then at the end, we'll just try to pull out a couple of key lessons. You with me? Does anyone want to go? You're all sticking around? All right, cool. I apologize in advance. Just kidding. Just kidding. So what I'm going to do, there's going to be three rounds, right? And I'm going to make the conversations increasingly more difficult as you go through each one. And at the end of each round, I'm going to ask you to reflect in the groups you're in about what happened that made it more difficult, all right? That's all I'm going to ask you to talk about. And at the end, we'll collect some, you know, some meta information about it. The first conversation I'm going to ask you to start in just a moment and it's going to go for five minutes. The second conversation I'm going to ask you guys to have is going to go for about eight minutes. And the reason for that is it's going to be a bigger group. And the third conversation will probably go for around 12 minutes and again, it's going to be a bigger group, thus it's, you know, bigger. Now, not everyone has to talk in each of these conversations, but in some of them, it'll be awkward if you don't. Especially this first one. Could you please pair up with someone? And if you're at a table that's got an odd number of people, find someone at a different table to work with. Yep, just, just be clear about who you're partnered up with. And at the end of this, at the end of this little pairing session, it'll be a threesome. That's okay. All right. Is anyone here in a threesome now? Right, so it's mostly pairs. Cool. Good. All right, so the first conversation I would like you guys to have is a really straightforward one. What I would like you to do, and I'm going to put my clock on in just one second, is you've got five minutes. That means five minutes for both people to talk. I want you to share a story about where you've seen someone at work do something really good and what you liked about it. Does that sound like you can do it? You've been at work. You've seen somebody else at work. They've done something really good. You're impressed and you're going to share that story. Yeah? Because let's be inspired by the good things that we've seen at work. All right? Cool. Take the minute. Take the five minutes. Not if you go, clock has started. I've snuck up the back of the room, haven't I? Where will he be next? So. All right. So we'll call that done. And, yeah, everyone can hear me. The microphone's working. I'm just holding it like an old-school mic. How was that? It's nice to actually chat to each other instead of get talked at all day long, isn't it? But there's a couple of other things that are going on in there, and I'm not going to ask you to kind of reflect just yet. I'll just share some observations that I have from that activity. First of all, how often, when we go to work, do we have genuinely interesting conversations about the good stuff going on around us? All the time? Never? How about hands up if it's all the time? Yeah, that's good. Ah, because you work with me like me. That's good. The people that work with me, they're like, yeah. How about occasionally? In the retrospectives, maybe during the week? Yeah, that's cool. That's nice. That's because you're a good, smart, agile crowd, right? The next one is like storytelling, like we can pull lessons out of that. As you're listening to the other person, again, show of hands, did you get any ideas that you could maybe take or use in your own world? Yeah? Isn't it nice? When we listen to the good things going on around us, there's good things there right in front of us to take and use. Hey, how are you doing? Don't worry about me. I'm in the back of the room. We'll go up in front of some charge. Cool. All right, so I want to do a second round, right? This time what I'd like you to do is the pairs and the occasional threes that were in the room. I'd like you to turn to a group next to you and this time you're going to be a group of four. Make sense? Look around, figure out who it's going to be and when I go to the front of the room, what I'm going to do as I walk to the front of the room, that's your team setup moment, right? When I get to the front of the room, I'm going to put the clock on for eight minutes. Yeah? And then what I'd like you to talk about this time, sorry, what I'd like you to talk about this time, this time is a time when I was at work and I saw someone else screw up and the lesson I took from it. Yeah? So when I've seen somebody make a dumb mistake or a big mistake at work, a medium mistake, a little mistake, whatever, but the lesson I took away from it. Okay? And I'd like you to do that in groups of four or five this time around and for those of you that have just turned up in the room, just attach yourself to a group, all right? Cool. And off you go. I'll be at the... set your rooms up, I'll put the clock on when I get to the front. All right. Just a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes. Hang on, hang on. We'll wind up now. There's a microphone, man. Am I doing the microphone wrong? Can you hear me? But if I hold it here, is it okay? It's too quiet. It needs to be closer. Okay, everyone, shut up. All right, shut up. Hello. I need a hand, Mike. Okay. So this time, I would like some reflections. And I would probably like to collect about four comments from the room. And what I'd like you to do, you might have to stand up and shout so everyone in the room can hear you. And I might repeat, like summarize and repeat at the end. But what did you get out of that conversation? How about I'll do zones of the room. So one of these four tables. Come on. Somebody's got to go first. Thank you. Hang on. I'll come to you next. Hi, I'm Amit here. So one of the key learnings from this group was that we had one team member who had committed to certain stories without checking with his dependent team member. And it was delivered as a commitment to the customer. So they had a lot of issues because of that. That was one of the lessons. The second one was we had one of the team members here who had an organization structure that was not aligned to the contract and the way the team was structured. They were structured around component teams instead of epic teams. So that actually led to a lot of issues. So that was another learning. And lesson. Lesson is you should not have component teams. You should have feature teams. So that's it. Thanks very much for that. My lesson is I'm going to hold the microphone. Not that you went long. That was good. Often when you do things like these people want to tell you their life story. Did anyone else want to share a story? Not going to share a story. Just the thing which stood out from me for this group was that we human and we make mistakes. We need to understand that everyone's like it no matter how much experience you've got. Thank you. Sharing a lesson. Excellent. Thank you. I'll come to you. Hang on. I'm after one more story after this. Waves your arm frantically next is going to get it. Go for it. The thing that we learned was we got to be a very good team player. Work as a team and we would succeed. I think there was some disconnect within the teams. Thank you. Last one. You'll do. You're right here. I'm slipping through. You going to shout? So what we're trying to look at what I could gather out of these three people, doctors, we'll take a few steps back before analyzing, before jumping into any conclusion. All three unanimously had a similar kind of issue that they learned to take it a little slow, try to first understand the problem then jumping into doing something. So I think many of us do that mistake on a daily basis to seeing an email immediately jumping into a conclusion rather than taking two steps away and not replying, reply all immediately. That's the whole point that we're trying to talk about. Has anyone done a reply all recently? Oops, excuse me. Just slipping through. Let me just dash back to the front of the room, read my instruction manual and figure out what's going on. Hey, hang on. I probably don't even need to tell you what's going to happen next, do I? You know. Can you figure it out? Sorry. Exactly. A group of eight. This is the last one. I'm not going to make you 16 and it's 64. So group of eight. And this time I'll put the clock on for 12 minutes just to allow more talking. I know you got to watch the time as the groups get bigger because that guy always talks too much. So usually it's me. Excuse me with the microphone. This time I'm giving you a new topic. Does anyone want to leave yet? You're okay? Notice I asked before I nominate the topic. All right. So this time what I'd like you guys to do is to talk about a time where you really screwed up. Probably at work but potentially anywhere and the special circumstances are such that you felt really embarrassed. Yeah? So I need you to talk authentically with your teammates about a time where you did something that made you feel embarrassed. Be brave. It's just eight people that you're talking to. They're recording it but they're recording me, not you. Okay? Now that we're at eight you might have to kind of get up out of your chair and move to another table. So let's go. You're all going to be hypnotized. Did that work? No. Hey, thanks very much. So I'm going to do the same thing. Shoot for a couple of bits of commentary from the audience. Give me an arm wave. Yeah, here we go. Hang on. Observation of the discussion. Hi, I'm Rajesh. So far out of eight people, six people have screwed up. I am totally drained I guess and the summary is out of this. Some people have missed the final details and some people have delegated but did not have some checkpoints in place. So the last minute they ended up in an embarrassment. And the other lesson was I think better be humble and modest. Look for blind spots because sometimes what you think is not really what it is and not being prepared is another embarrassment as well. So this is the summary of our conversation. Thank you for that and thank you for sharing. Excuse the fight over interruption but I can't offer stupid advice. Anyone else? Okay, the general observation I've had is think twice before you do anything in your productions as productive systems and do not pick up strangers, babies. Anybody else? Yes. Yeah, so similar theme I think we all have screwed up which is a good part of it. One thing was it makes for a good happy hour conversation. Instead of people bragging, it makes people much more human and humane because we tell everyone is fallible and you don't need to have a false sense of either bragging or too much of modesty about it. We are all together in it and that's okay. There's nothing wrong in that. I think there was no stress on the table because everybody was kind of freely flowing with let me tell you one more where I made that kind of thing. That's a great observation. When you're at work how often do you talk about screwing up? You're always selling yourself. Does anyone else want to share the same story or I'll run back to you. Last one. From our group, most of the three or four of them are screwed up because they didn't do the due diligence. They'd be deleting the code or checking in something without verifying and other thing was being transparent. So I like to say budget and I'll be transparent and be vocal and one more thing that came up was don't trust anybody else for your work. So he trusted his friend will review and do changes and went to client presentation but he saw his own version being presented to client and his friend was not there that day in office. Alright. So what did I observe? I just wrote a few notes and they'll be obvious when I save them to you. The fourth one might be interesting. The first one is you know when you're at a conference and everyone's like sitting and concentrating and looking very serious like this thing for the serious person up the front. That wasn't happening at all. There was smiling, there was laughter. The other thing I noticed is that there was genuine listening especially in that last moment it's a slightly larger group. The noise in the first two sessions was heaps louder. Did you notice how quiet that third session was? One person's talking and seven people are listening. That was really interesting just watching how intent they were paying attention to the speaker. How often do you do that when you're in a work meeting and they're saying they're spelling themselves as spinning bullshit rather than saying something authentic and important. Yeah. That was my fourth point. An amplification on that fourth point was in that last conversation it actually started louder and dropped off the quiet. Do you know why that might be? The introverts talked last. So up front the people that always get out and start talking started talking as usual and then as the space gets empty and creates room for them the introverts will start to talk. When we're at work meetings we do that. We make space get out of the microphone to speak the range. When we're at work do we make space for the introverts to speak? Or do we feel every minute with very important brrr stuff? Yeah? Cool. So those were just some observations that I had. I've run this conversation a couple of times at a couple of different conferences and I have an intent. Hello? Is that five minutes until I'm out of here? Yeah, I'm on it. Oh, you broke my rhythm. What was I saying? So a couple of things that I am bringing, what I want people to think about is we go out to work and we're trying to agitate to change and advocate for doing things better and all that sort of stuff. When we go about trying to generate change if we're an individual and we're pushing against the system we've got no chance, right? But if we're a bunch of people working to the same agenda we can make great things happen. Yeah? Do you agree? No. Let the records state, Mr. cameraman and no one in the room agrees. Come on. So when we're working as a group and when we're working as a team when we're all enlisted in the same idea together we can get change to happen, right? How often do we stand there alone frustrated or maybe with a workmate and like express our frustrations and you know, complaints about why things are never going to change? Having authentic conversations in small groups enlisting people in change turning those small groups into big groups, right? That's a pathway to making organizations change. We've had people from IBM talk at this conference. I work in an organization that's got 150 people in product and software development space, right? So I can walk around and have individual conversations with every single person. But when you're doing things at scale and even 150 people or even 50 people when you're trying to get people to kind of turn around and do things differently it's really, really hard but together we can do it, right? And one last point on that is rather than you knowing best and going telling everyone else what they need to be doing talking to each other and finding solutions together is the way that we make forward progress, right? That's what we did today. So different from a normal work meeting. Cool. Look, thanks and just in my last two minutes right? If you can just grab your original pair because it's not over yet. Last time I did this, by the way, I asked the four most embarrassing stories to come up the room and tell everyone but I'm not going to do that. What I'd like you to do is just take the last two minutes Mr. Tom Keeper is to just go back to your original pair and say to them one thing out of this session or out of this conference that I've learned so far that I might be able to take to work and do something about. And then this session is over. There are the doors. I hope you have a lovely afternoon. Thanks very much.