 Yes, thank you very much. Hi everybody out there into the world. So it's unfortunate that there's not coffee. So I'll get a few of the formalities out of the way. So my name is Adam Cuppy. If you didn't read from the program here from Jeff or know that. So my name is Adam and I come from a company called Zeal. We're a consultancy and more specifically we sell certainty and I'm gonna get into a little bit about what that means and trust and the relationship to that. But before we get too far because there wasn't any coffee, can you all stand up for me real quick? Just stand up, stand up. All right you know the thing is is we want to get some blood flowing right? Like we got to have the blood flowing. It's kind of like what time is it right now? Oh start that. I mean it's like two o'clock. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to look around the team. So face each other on your on your table. Face each other on your table. This is good. You're doing so well. Okay now what I want you to do is reach your hands out to the right and gently touch the shoulders of the person next to you and give a nice gentle coffee massage. That's right. You can do it. Don't worry about it. It's a nice gentle coffee massage and I want you to gently whisper into the ear of the person next to you. I am your caffeine. Very gently. I am your caffeine. Okay if you were someone else's caffeine I want you to say yes. Say yes. Outstanding. You can take a seat but do it with that caffeinated hand shoulder love from the person next to you. So before we get too far I want to remind you that this is my Twitter handle. You can send all your appreciations to that. I just want to remind you if you need to check the anti-harassment policy it's on the top of the website. It's like the top link up there. If you have any questions about that. Thank you Jeff for trusting me. Alright so the nature of this talk is about trust and I know you've heard a lot about that today so we're going to go a little bit further into a couple of different components and more specifically how you can bring trust into a team which I know you've heard a lot of as well. Now I have our organization has a more unique perspective on it because the type of work we do. While we are software developers just like all of you if not most of you. While we do the exact same type of work the nature of how we work is a little different because we work with many teams over the course of a year. In fact our company might work with a dozen different companies across maybe upwards of 15 to 20 different projects in different stacks and so forth. So trust is a huge part of what we have to provide and ultimately the way we think about it is in the form of certainty that at the end of the day really the only thing that's worth all the value is the certainty that it's going to happen right and it's my belief and I'm going to show a little bit of evidence so hopefully you believe with me too that trust is a big part of that certainty. But how we build that trust is really important and I'm going to get to this in the end but spoiler alert trust is not something that you can guarantee from somebody else but you can absolutely work to encourage it and foster it and that's exactly what I'm going to talk about. So this topic of trust is a very unique thing so I want to tell you a little bit about a story about mine and actually I've decided to change my story on the fly because taking the risk and going to Australia and putting a bunch of Americans on stage and saying hey I want you to do something from Shakespeare it's something that might make you twinge a little bit. So what I was told before I went there is I got the talk accepted from RubyConf Australia and I was like wow right on the name of the talk is what if Shakespeare wrote Ruby right? And so the nature of the talk is I literally will call four volunteers up on stage and they will do a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Blind right? So I get this whole thing accepted and an Australian friend of mine reaches out and he goes that's awesome you got that talk done. Just so you know the number one thing Australians hate is being called on stage. Great I'll just fly on the other side of the world this is awesome. Then a few months later so we did the talk Jeff was one of my wonderful volunteers I will gladly post the link to that talk and more specifically I'll make sure to put it right to the point where Jeff starts his wonderful verging on soliloquy. But then the following couple months later the talk gets accepted again and this time in Taiwan. And I'm like okay wow so here's the thing like just so you know like it's you know I only speak English so I want to be really clear like this talk is going to be in English and I just want to make sure you know we're talking about old English specifically and more traditional English so do you feel that's going to be a concern and the response was yeah we think it's going to be a total concern but it's going to be a fun thing to watch. Right on. So on the fly I made a decision I had to put my trust in one thing the trust was is that if I put the intention behind it properly that whatever the outcome became it would fulfill the ultimate purpose and it was to entertain and inform. So I took of the biggest risk I could imagine and I had the entire script that they read translated to Chinese. Okay I was the only person other than my wife who was lucky enough to fly out there with me that had no idea where they were at in the script right at all. The beautiful thing was again that we took a risk we trusted in something that we couldn't prove would come out to be true but what we had is we had the right intentions and the right purpose and I think it paid off. So that's really what we're going to go into a little bit more about. All right now I want you to take a moment I just want you to close your eyes and we're you won't have to violate a code of conduct apparently. I want you to just close your eyes just for a moment and I want you to think of a time in which you lost the first bit of trust in your life. Can you remember the time in which you lost the first trust you ever had with anyone else. Okay now open your eyes for a moment. Okay so the thing is is I can remember the first time that I lost trust in anybody right. There's all these different moments in which we might lose this modem of trust but here's the thing is it's not all equal right like whether or not you believe in Santa or if that was a part of your family have no comment regarding that but there are these things in which we build trust we build expectation and then oftentimes we're that's at some level violated and so what do we do about that right because ultimately it's not something that we want to lose right. So we kind of work towards that we work towards creating and maintaining that trust. Now here's something that I discovered unfortunately over time I feel in my life was this that I am somebody excuse me that is hard to please but easy to disappoint. Raise your hand if you feel like you are hard to please but easy to disappoint. There are more of you out there come on hard to please and easy to disappoint absolutely right. This is very common place and I don't think it's necessarily problematic but what it is it's it's an indication of evidence that proves towards other things what it should provide is the opportunity for us to dig a little deeper and figure out well why is that right but regardless of that I'm going to talk to a little bit of a few different things right which is first is is why is it hard to please like why do I feel that way and the only real conclusion I can come down to is that I'm afraid. Afraid of what well I could come up with a laundry list of reasons but at the end of the day it's fear. I'm just afraid. I'm afraid that this is that whatever is going to happen on the other side of this is going to define me. I'm afraid that the judgment that's going to get passed back towards me. All of these things are going to apply and so I don't want to extend too much trust out there because if I do if I do and I fail at something then I've not only lost that credibility but I've also lost a sense of my identity and my sense of myself. This is the way I feel about it. Does that resonate for anybody else? So the reality is is that failure is a big part of this now but here's the interesting thing which is if you really look at it and I'm just now learning about stoicism I don't know a lot about it but but some of its core principles that are really attractive to me is to is fundamentally to to work very diligently to stay in the present and trust by nature and the definition of this as far as being hard to please its only definition is defined by the past. There is nothing about this that has to do with the present not at all nor does trust. Trust has nothing to do with the here and now. It has everything to do with the culmination of events perceptions decisions that have been made of the past that culminate to this moment right here. Now it doesn't mean that that's bad right and granted there's a lot of stoics that believe that we want to strive away from that but mostly because it can bring a lot of pain in our life and like I said before I'm afraid I'm fearful that's just real. Now the easy to disappoint is similar to that which is well if I'm hard to please and easy to disappoint it ultimately falls back to well if I can be easy to disappoint if I make this choice that I want to be easy to disappoint then it makes it easier for me to maintain control and my ego to which you were bringing up which I think is very important is really the danger this is why because if I'm afraid my ego is the thing that will be that will be there to protect me or so I think. So what I did is I did this a little bit of this thought experiment for myself which was what if I was to move away from this sort of compliance mode of thinking right that the way in which I evaluate trust is based on me complying or having other or expecting of other people to comply with some sort of arbitrary list that I've defined that maybe they have not accepted like what if I was to take it and just flip it a little bit what if I became easy to please but hard to disappoint what would change now well here's what I found and this was a real thing I was like okay I'm going to meditate my way through this and I'm actually think about what if I was to change the way I thought about these two things like what if I chose to be easier to please what would happen now well here's what I found is I went from a certainty mindset the need to find certainty in my life to a growth mindset that by being easy to please it meant that I always had a pretty darn low bar it didn't mean it was it was a negative thing it just meant that my bar was low enough that I was always excited I always felt I could learn I always felt like I could be better right and interestingly enough the beautiful thing is on a team when I was hard to disappoint or when I'm hard to disappoint not that I maintain this a hundred percent of the time but when I can maintain this as much as possible then the net effect of it is a sense of autonomy by everybody else they feel empowered they are they feel enabled to be able to think past the hurdles that they might be struggling with in the fear that if they don't comply with my demands because I am a business owner and I am a leader of a team and legally speaking like I can I write checks I at some level for many people think I control their future and that's bullshit that this helps me get past right this creates a new sense of dynamic amongst the team so instead don't be easy to please and really hard to disappoint so let's talk about how we could do that okay so I was thinking a little bit about like what if we had trust stacks I mean we've got develop you know we have program stacks and technical stacks but like what is the difference between this certainty side and the growth side like what what do those look like in an organization whether it's a it could even be a team of one but a team of one to a team of a thousand it doesn't really matter and what I found was this that teams that were very result focused on the left side result focused were those that were too focused on the past and we're found them way found their way too easily to an unpredictable future right they ended up in a very compliance oriented mindset right but because here's part of the problem is that what we cannot control ever and we have to give this up ultimately tough we have to give this up which is that what we can never control is other people's perceptions other people's emotions and other people's outcomes now here was that the last was the one I struggled with even to this day and I've had to work through with Trevor my partner as well as other other people like trying to really rationalize this which is okay wait a second so what I'm trying to understand here is if I cannot control the outcome then what the fuck am I doing this for right like what do you mean I can't control the outcome at all like yeah so if I'm not result focused then what do I need to be I need to be intention focused that the intentionality behind my actions is true I can control my intention I can control the ultimate purpose that we have behind it but I need to let go of whatever the outcome and the result of that might be now I'll talk a little bit later about what we can do about it because it doesn't mean that we have to give up the idea that we can't produce some great outcome or that you have to just give in to the fact that you'll never get to maybe this hopeful goal that you have not that but instead is if I stay in this contribution mindset and I allow myself to be intention focused over result focused the net effect of that is that I've empowered the team to be able to figure out how to get there and that we get there is the exciting discovery we're all going to make now the other things that I can control is we can control our effort right so by putting the kind of intent or by putting our focus on the right thing then we can control the things we have control over versus the things we never will have control over now the second is measuring compliance versus measuring growth so as a consultancy we work with a lot of organizations that really struggle with this and they don't realize it that they have come to a way of operation where what they measure is they measure the compliance of their team do you show up on time do you never have problems do you fall within the boundaries of time off or otherwise do you do it the way that our whole team is defined you should do it or one person has defined you should do it right are you measuring against that versus measuring against yes but what's the ultimate purpose what are you are you working towards your intention are you working towards some sort of are you evaluating growth as a collective which I think is what I've heard multiple times amongst the teams is amongst excuse me the various speakers is if you're putting your focus back towards measuring the growth of your team like how have we progressed how have we settled and simmered when do we need to spice it up right if we're back at that focus then what we end up with is back to a state of real growth and contribution versus a state of just seeking certainty this is very simple and this is why I think agile is something is very attractive to me personally and I think why it comes up often in our industry which is dogmatic versus pragmatic principles and again this I think goes back to compliance overgrowth which is focusing more on are you doing it this way or are you doing it for this in the service of something greater than that right and dogmatic principles just simply illustrating you do it this way and only this way now I find this agile for many companies sort of ironic that they dogmatically follow agile principles right I don't know if you have a company like that that that says well you know we we pair program a hundred percent of the time period end of story and don't maybe always ask the question or measure well as a team is this most most and best suited towards us driving towards our intention like is that actually a good thing like are we evaluating the pair programming is a necessity for the reasons that our purpose is bound to do and then pragmatism and agile is is effectively a process hopefully that's driving towards the alternative to that which is to say well let's flex around it but really be focused on what is our outcomes and what is our intentions behind this and building a system that's supportive of that based on the team dynamic that we have in the individuals that are involved and if you're there what it actually supports heavily the idea of culture ad being a real asset now because if it's a culture fit what you're ultimately saying is we need you to comply right so to be a we need a fit because we we measure compliance right we're not measuring growth but if your organization say yeah like diversity of approach diversity of personality type thought all of that stuff like that is huge for us it's a huge asset because by measure and growth we need that we need that diversity of thinking we need that that is a real and legitimate asset that we all know and feel that we're actually striving to have verses striving to avoid to not have as a problem and the last is I guess I'm missing a side accidentally and the last is highly value highly values loyalty over highly values contribution so this kind of goes back to compliance when an organization is highly value valuing the loyalty of a person in an organization oftentimes that's symptomatic to the fact that it's more compliance oriented and verses what are the contributions that the that this individual is making to the team and I want to be really clear that if you are measuring contributions that ultimately say that everyone has to be contributing in the exact same way that's just a really fancy sugar-rich way of saying that we value loyalty right contribution can come in one of a multitude of ways and it's always an agile thing it's always pragmatic so like I was saying before what we see on the left-hand side is this compliance oriented mindset this is this is certainty based trust is that we are focused on these things we're result focus we're measuring compliance we're dogmatic about the way we do things and we highly value loyalty whereas on the right side this is this is growth focused right we're intention focused we're measuring growth we're pragmatic and we're highly value in contribution this creates trust in organization ultimately right but here's the thing and this is what we really ran into is most of the problem as a consultancy that we experience with other teams is they'll use things like oh well we're you know we're 60 people and our team is a little over a dozen we're like 12 12 engineers 15 total people right so we're we're relatively small in comparison to much larger teams and that can often be used as an argument like oh well we don't have the same problems as you well totally we know that right so how do we handle that right that's the question how do you handle that so we're tackling the topic of uncertainty and here's the key is the only way to bring value to the right side is if you're making sure that you're measuring and you have a process that creates certainty amidst the uncertainty right so the way I like to think about it is that there are so many things that we can never control right I was discussing those earlier we cannot control other people we can not control that dynamic but what we can do is we can create processes that provide the certainty by allowing those individuals that might have this diversity of emotion and diversity of thought diversity of interest you name it to be able to function in a really positive and constructive way towards the whole right so that creates a layer of certainty around all of that uncertainty so the question becomes how do we do that right so here is the most fundamental way in which we tackle this as an organization at zeal is we talk about things like cycles of feedback now how many of your organizations feel like you do a version of agile somehow like you think in agile principles raise your hand raise your hand if you don't do that so everybody does some some agile flavor in your mind okay cool all right so we talk a lot about cycles of feedback now in our organization I mentioned just earlier like things like pair programming like this may be something that your your company adopts well here's what I found is one of the greatest things to think about excuse me as you were looking at ways to improve to create a layer of certainty around the uncertainty is the more uncertainty that exists as far as how you achieve how you fulfill your intentions how you walk down the path is to shorten the cycles of feedback the more uncertainty the shorter the cycles of feedback should exist that's a very easy way to look at it so here's an example as an organization a lot of teams that we work with don't pair program well coming on to a new project with a new team there is a lot of uncertainty we don't know the domain as well we probably we definitely don't know the code base we don't we're not familiar with the team there's a lot of social dynamics so what's the very first thing we institute can we pair program with your team that is like the shortest cycle of feedback we can provide right let's shorten that down to as small as we can get it now that doesn't work for every team but for us we found great success in that right another alternative is oh well let's do you do a daily stand-up can we institute a daily stand-up for a period of time measure our growth with that see if this is a tool that works for us and decide whether or not this works and sometimes especially on smaller teams they decide that you know daily stand-ups in the morning or better than those in the afternoon or at night or sometimes they do it every other day or sometimes they don't they do it more intermittently and similarly like IPM's iteration planning meetings if you do them on a weekly basis we have some clients where we do retrospectives and IPMs every other week versus every week because that's just that's the flexibility that needs to exist for this to work but what we've recognized is that in all of these individual tools the purpose of it is to address the topic of uncertainty and and addressing and figuring out what is the recipe what's the algorithm of tools that we use and the processes that we can apply and how we apply them and when we apply them to address that threshold of uncertainty that allows the teams on both sides and most definitely product owners that don't have as much of that touch point experience how can they feel that same certainty as well right so you know many of those tools we could use right now so an example that I just came up to me recently was you know I'm getting to the age where I have a lot of more family members especially older ones that are starting to go into a hospital for various reasons ailments are starting to occur and unfortunately I'm losing family members now as well and so the topic of how do we deal with that uncertainty has become very relevant to me and and I realized this which was you know at a time in which like I'm thinking about this now with my parents my parents are roughly in their 60s or so and my parents are currently in a state where you know it's like I talk to them once every month or two I feel like an asshole of a child let's be real about it right but what I'm realizing lies like my uncertainty around that relation that time with them is becoming higher and so what am I wanting with my instinct to do it's to talk to them more frequently to shorten those cycles of feedback right and so this is very inherent this is very natural for us as people is let's tighten this up unfortunately oftentimes we will bind something negative to tightening it up right like oh if I'm asking a question which is a cycle of feedback right I'm asking a question to get some information that I'm unsure about and I want to I'm asking you so you will complete that feedback cycle with me right that we we look at that and devalue that thing and say that that's not important or you know there's there's criticism against it but actually asking questions is the tightest form of feedback you can get and so if you look at that also as an asset it can be a huge thing too so think about those as various tools so the ultimate goal is to again kind of wrap all of the uncertainty in the process or uncertainty in the project that we have with this kind of layer certainty that exists right and do the best we can to create certainty in the things that we do control versus not trying to create certainty in the things we don't control right we can control things like our process we can control things like our methods and our intentions and the effort we apply right we can control those things so that will create certainty so here's what I want you to do in front of you you probably have a notepad and what I'd like you to do is I want you to draw this graph on the notepad okay so so all I want you to do is yeah so just make an X at the top I want you to write certainty at the low the lower section I want you to write uncertainty on the far left right long cycles of feedback it was a little bit too much fit on a slide on the right-hand side I want you to do short cycles of feedback all right so here's what I want you to do because I have a handful of minutes is what I would like from you is if you could I want you to take one minute and I'll count you down if you are on a team like I know there's a I think there's a group over here from touring and I think there's probably some companies but I want you to take one minute and I want you to write down what are all the things you do as a software developer either on your team or by yourself that speak to the topic of cycles of feedback what do you do you do things like pair programming do you do you send updates do you email the client regularly if you're a consultancy like us do you have one on ones with maybe your CTO or some manager of sorts what are those things and I want you to strive to come up with 10 items ready and go one minute and while you're doing this think about like what is the shortest thing like the shortest cycle of feedback that you have in your company and what's the longest whatever it is 10 items or more but strive for 10 if you could all right another 10 seconds or so ish and again you don't have to comply with my time if you want to keep writing down please do all right here we go so here's what I want you to do and if you wrote over the top of this because I wasn't explicit about it you could flip it over and write this again but here's what I want you to do is I want you to take each of the items on your list and I want you to pinpoint like an easy thing might be to do like one through ten if you've got 10 items and I want you to put the number that represents where on the spectrum that item is right so it brings a lot of certainty and it's a very short cycle of feedback versus it brings it still has a quite a bit of uncertainty like total uncertainty but it's a really short cycle of feedback right it doesn't create any certainty but it's really short or vice versa something that is really long but creates a lot of certainty and so forth and just put the numbers and kind of scatter plotted over over the top so you'll end up with something whoops yeah that looks you know this ish but with numbers or however you choose to mark it up is fine now there's two ways to evaluate this in my mind right the and the two ways are this you can look at items on this so can somebody tell me like somebody give me an example of this doesn't really matter where somebody give me an example of something that is that they have in this quadrant up here so it brings a lot of certainty and it's a short cycle of feedback give me an example one-on-one with someone more senior than you how frequently is or do you do it every two weeks okay so one-on-one every two weeks with somebody else that's more senior than you anyone else yes code review how frequently do you do it every pull request which is that daily generally okay so like daily pull request code reviews okay what else one more yes sir test suite and writing some sort of automated tests that are running say again feedback from your test suite and how frequently do those run instantaneously like are they done on a some sort of cycle okay fantastic alright so somebody that's great thank you very much now how about items that might does anybody have any items that fall into this category really long cycles of feedback and do not generate a lot of certainty yes qa testing interesting absolutely how frequently are those done for you was right okay what else so qa testing once a month anything else yes road map meetings interesting how frequently do you do do you do a roadmap meeting we've done one ish right yes sir yearly reviews absolutely so you do those you're right exactly alright what else any others yes sir I'm sorry one more time customer user acceptance testing excellent okay now let's jump over to overhears something that is a short cycle feedback yet does not generate a lot of certainty yes stand-up meetings interesting okay and you do them how frequently Monday Wednesday Friday stand-up meetings and you do always do them in the morning always in the morning okay anything else something that does not bring a lot of certainty but has a relatively short cycle of feedback slack absolutely and more specifically explain it just to me like give me an example like a shared room one-on-one communication a project room okay okay doesn't bring a lot of certainty yet short cycle of feedback absolutely okay so the golden ticket how about this quadrant up here so long cycles of feedback but generate a lot of certainty huh a product launch absolutely so the actual launch of something it may happen once every so often but you got a lot of certainty the thing happened at that point right absolutely yes sir documentation very good right so long cycles of feedback brings a lot of certainty for hopefully right yes post mortems absolutely how frequently post mortems weekly post mortems okay anybody do post mortems less than weekly so less frequently than weekly every other week okay any other items anything any other area on here did anybody have maybe an oddly placed item like right here yes okay Trello cards right in the middle and explain that to me why so that's fantastic I didn't even I never even thought about that so she's saying a Trello card where somebody wrote it months ago and it's now being utilized right that's fantastic really great second and you put a smack dab in the middle that's fantastic I love that that's great yes hiring oh interesting yeah hiring so well I know the answer to this but how frequently he's my business partner right yes absolutely great okay so the idea here behind this exercise and I recommend that you take this as simple as it is it's something that can easily be done with any grouping of your team because it's kind of the answers to it are relatively indifferent but what it can do is it can inform you on things like you know what like the way in which we currently handle it while it's a short cycle of feedback that we think is bringing value the reality is it's not creating any certainty for us right so can we do something with that right that takes it and moves it from a place of uncertainty and makes it more certain can we apply anything can we what do we have control over that allows us to be able to move that something else just one share does anybody have an idea on something that is like down here in this uncertain space that would be an easy modification would take it push it up here I think I'm right so basically is there something that you wrote down in this area down here so this kind of uncertain space short or long cycle of feedback but with a simple modification you could turn it into something that creates certainty performance reviews speak to that yeah so as at our company we're experimenting a lot with this because we we found that the combination of one-on-ones allowed for us to have that tighter cycle of feedback but at the time we assume that clearly we need to have an annual review because that's what everybody apparently does and what we found was well that actually didn't bring a lot of certainty to anything right that if we were doing the one-on-ones well we could actually draw or we could we could apply more of that a more priority to that and possibly even drop the annual review altogether because it didn't actually bring enough certainty to the equation in fact created a lot of uncertainty because it's like oh am I now going to hear something annually that I hopefully would have heard over the last 52 weeks right stuff like that okay great all right moving on to finishing this up so trust is something that you can encourage in your company but you can't guarantee all the time as far as getting it from other people so it's important to remember that it is something to remember the things that you do have control over what are the things that you have the tangible effect on versus things that you don't and if you create a process that the last one being a simple example where you're identifying what things are creating certainty the net effect of that is the creation of trust trust breeds certainty certainty breeds trust right that's the that's the key important takeaway from all of this right and when you're looking at working on a team or in an organization this is the stuff that is not about hierarchy rarely is it about authority and management a lot of these things can actually be introduced in a really micro scale if you just say well this is a thing that we do have control over and if we always embrace the thing we have control over well we can modify that we own that right and you'll be amazed especially seeing it from the standpoint of watching other teams go through this process like it will be amazed at how many shoulders drop like the sense and need that you have to comply starts to really start to melt away I mean many times a little rare it's a rear it's ugly hood because ego is a very real thing but at the same time is like letting that kind of fall and like relying on the process that's more objective to kind of drive that can be really really helpful now if you have any questions whatsoever please feel free to email me hello it's coding zeal dot com again we sell certainty this is what we do so if you have any needs a company that you're working with it's like hey I've got some questions about things we're doing please feel free to email me I'd be more than happy to talk through that but thank you very much everybody