 Good afternoon, folks. Welcome. Warning and caveat. This session is about soft and fuzzy stuff, people skills. I'm going to ask you to hold a mirror up to yourself and examine your own preconceptions and the things that are your unwritten rules. So interpreting the unwritten rules and perhaps turning them into guidelines. This is me. I'm a Kiwi. I'm from New Zealand. I work for that organization. I do a lot for InfoQ. I'm on the board of the Agile Alliance. I have five children and the thing that is the most fun at the moment in my life is I have seven grandchildren. Now, those of you who are parents, when you take your children to your parents and they spoil them rotten, feed them full of sugar and so forth, just want to let you know it is deliberate. It is revenge. Deal with it. Grandchildren are an absolute joy. Okay. Here are two plates. Turn to the people that you're sitting with. Which one of these plates is right? What do you feel when you see these two plates? Turn and have a conversation. Which one feels correct or incorrect? And why? That one. Why? What? Which one is correct? Why? Okay. What else? Any other feelings when you look at this plate? Okay. So the way the fork is? Why? There's no food wasted. There we got waste food. That cutting knife was actually a steak knife. Both of these had pieces of steak. All right. Now they're all wrong because that was non-veg. Not like that. They should have been crossed. All right. Now, I grew up in New Zealand. My parents came through the Second World War or the aftermath of the Second World War when we had food rationing. My unwritten rule that was beaten into me was clean your plate. If there is food left on your plate, you are a waste roll. I remember being told there are children in Africa who would love that cauliflower. I made the foolish mistake of actually saying please send it to them. It's not a wise thing to do as a six-year-old. If I'm in China, in Hong Kong in particular, if I clean my plate, I'm saying to my host that wasn't enough. I'm hungry. On the other hand, in New Zealand, that's waste. Or if I'm in the Middle East, by leaving something on my plate, I'm saying your generosity is appreciated. This is an example of an unwritten rule. We all have them, and they've come from many, many different aspects of our lives. How do you feel? I told you this was all about soft fuzzy stuff. In your tables, have a quick conversation. What is your emotive reaction to these three events? How do you feel? Again, another two or three minutes chat. Let's get some feedback. How do you feel? Somebody new joins the team. Exciting. Anxiety. Why anxiety? What are they going to take with mine? Or what can I learn from this new person? There's an all-hands meeting in the canteen. Everyone's called. Pizza again. Waste of time. When's the next cricket match? That's all right. New Zealand won, so I'm okay. I almost didn't believe that that happened. I was once in an organization where we had the all-hands meeting, and what was happening was we were being told, we're closing this office. Thereafter, my response to the all-hands meeting was abject terror. We're heading out to do a team building activity. Is lunch included? Is booze included? It's on a weekday or a weekend? We've got a mandatory company barbecue on Sunday. Gee, wow. Well, we all again have these visceral reactions, and they're a result very much of our filters. Another question that often comes up, and this is one that we're seeing a lot harder today, a lot of different responses to. There's a really good TED talk by this lady, Taisa Lassie, that talks about where are you local. And if I look at myself, I was born in New Zealand, lived in the UK, lived in South Africa, returned to New Zealand, subsequently lived in the UK again, and in Hong Kong. And this here on my trip, it's that. So far this year, excluding this trip, I have traveled 73,000 kilometers, 48 days away from home, nine cities, four countries. It's March. So, yeah, my most common residential address is seat 34C. But we often ask people, where are you from? How would I answer that? I'm going home tonight to New Zealand. So maybe that's where I'm from. But perhaps a better question, and this is what Taisa Lassie asks, is where are you local? Where are the places in the world where you go that the shopkeepers recognize you? And I can think of five cities where I go there regularly enough that I'm a local. I've got at least some friends who I know I can get hold of on a Friday afternoon and plan something for the evening. So I'm not sitting bored in a hotel. But I know where the local convenience store is, and the person behind the counter recognizes me. We might not know each other's name, but we see each other regularly enough that we feel local. So this is a phenomenon in the modern world, is this being multi-local. We do. You two gents. You're almost local here now. You've been here three weeks. Yeah. Where's Ellen? Is she in? No, she's not here. She is local. Man, she had taken us around here phenomenally. Ellen Grove, she gets local very quickly. Again, these are things that influence our thinking. When you do become multi-local, we move easier between different societies and we adapt. So I understand if I'm in Hong Kong and having a meal with somebody, I will leave some food on my plate. Even though in the back of my head, I hear my mother saying, there's a child in Africa who wants that. So we look at our world through multiple filters, and these are the things that give us our viewpoints, the angle. They're like a kaleidoscope. Each one overlays and changes the picture that we look at. One of them is culture. There are multiple aspects of culture, and those of you who were in Evan's session, he did actually mention the Huffsteader's model of the five culture dimensions. This is a comparative view of two cultures that I'm very familiar with. I live in New Zealand now, but I spend a reasonable amount of time in Saudi Arabia. The five elements, the first one is power distance. How important is status in that society? And the scoring goes from zero to 100. Saudi Arabia scores a 95. I come from a country that has a 22. We are the third lowest power distance society in the world. Status does not matter. If the Prime Minister of the country were to walk into our office to come and talk to us, and we've had ministers of parliament and so forth come and do this, he'd be lucky if I'd call him John. Because really, we pay his wages. He's just a civil servant, an expensive civil servant. We pay far too much for him. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, I would never get near the king. I wouldn't be let within a thousand paces, because there would be too many people in the status. We also look at individualism versus collectivism. We're a very individualistic society in New Zealand. The rights of the individual, whereas Saudi Arabia is strongly collectivist. The needs of the many, family honor, those sort of things matter significantly. We don't, and as Westerners in general, we have no perception of this concept of face and loss of face that is strong in many of the Asian cultures, because it's just not part of our makeup. A badly named factor is what Hofsteder calls masculinity. He says this is the difference between living to work and working to live in the society, which is more important, the quality of life or success in the workplace. Now, both of us are slightly on the success in the workplace side of things. Above 50 is considered to live to work rather than work to live. Uncertainty avoidance, and this point for me, has a strong correlation with the uptake of agile methods in particular in a society. How comfortable are we with ambiguity? So 49. We're on the ambiguity is okay side, but we still want some requirements. 80. Don't give me anything less than a 200 page specification document. And if you want to change it, there will be a change control process. Now, I'm working with teams in Saudi Arabia, and one of the hardest things that they're finding is accepting the agile philosophy towards ambiguity and requirements. And this makes it make sense to me. The other one is not every society was measured there for long or short term orientation. How far in advance do we plan? The extreme case of this one is Japan. Japanese companies generally have a 100 year plan. It's not detailed, but they are working towards a 100 year plan. What Toyota is achieving today, they were thinking about in the 1960s. It's an adaptive plan. It does change. But that's their time horizon. The lowest society in this measure is the USA. I think they score a 12. And you can see it in the US financial system. The quarterly results are the things that matter the most. For me, I think this one is a danger in my own economy in that we are not very good at planning for things like retirement. New Zealand didn't have a compulsory superannuation scheme until about 10 years ago now. Whereas Australia scores a bit higher in that, and one of the things that I can see the difference is they've had compulsory superannuation for the last 50 years. And it provides their economy with a strong foundation as well. So understanding who you are, what are those cultural aspects? It's things like, you know, there's the visible stuff, but a lot of it is the hidden meaning. Time is a great one. Evan asked us what direction does time flow? I figured out that in the Middle East, inshallah is a time period. It means when God wills. So if you ask somebody when something will happen, inshallah. At some stage in the future, when its time is right. Until then, don't get worried about it. I worked on a team where we had a person from France and a person from Germany. Now to a German person, this is a broad generalization, but to a German person, time is an absolute precise factor. If we make an appointment for 9 a.m., they will be there at 8.59 and 57 seconds ready to start talking business. To the French person, as long as the clock had not struck 10 o'clock, they were on time. These two struggled to communicate. And it was only when we sat down and tried to figure out what was causing the tension in the team. And we came to our team's agreement on what time meant. And that's the other thing that we see as we begin to understand each other as we come to our common acceptance of what are the right for us factors. Another of the filters that we look through is who am I? My personality. And there's myriads of different tools for exploring these things. The introvert, extrovert, the mire, the Briggs. I can never remember the name of the other one there, but it looks at the four general perspectives that we take. And none of these tools are particularly precise. But what they are, they are useful tools for thinking about what and how you want to be communicated with. Nourish spoke about all of the introverts. Well, I've got a beautiful introvert story and my wife will forgive me for this. We've been married 24, 25 years. And we finally did one of these tests together. We were at the Expanding Your Effect in this conference with Jerry Weinberg, Johanna Rothman, and a lot of these ideas come from them, by the way. And Johanna took us through a simple Myers-Briggs profile. And something came out. My profile shows that I'm the super-E extrovert. I'm way out on the extreme end. You would never have guessed. My wife, on the other hand, is pretty much at the opposite extreme introvert. She is so afraid of public speaking that she gave up a degree in fine arts because she had to do a presentation at the end to a group of a hundred people. She could not do it, and she failed her degree. I hadn't really thought about these differences much, but it explained a particular event that happened in our marriage. Nancy was having a significant birthday. And my youngest daughter, who is very much like me, the E in extrovert could be us. She said to us, don't make a big fuss. Just have a few people around and we'll have a quiet dinner. Yeah, that was not going to happen. So we sent out invitations, come to what is not my wife's 50th birthday party. And we got a cake made that said this is not mom's 50th birthday cake. And the two of us were absolutely mortified that she had a horrible evening. Once we did this Myers-Briggs thing together and looked at it, it was, oh, yeah, maybe I shouldn't have done that. I'm learning. We're coming up 36 years and we're still together, so I must have learned something. Just to give the contrast, a few years later I turned 50 and we had a quiet party with 65 people at home and bagpipers. That was a quiet party for me. Another one of our filters is our values. So these come from very much our experiences and the beliefs that the people who are influential in our lives have given us. So don't waste food is one of my values and you can see it. What is right and wrong. And it's really important to be able to look at those and values are things that we share. But also when values clash, we don't understand why we don't necessarily get on. And then there's how am I feeling right now? Am I tired? Am I scared? Has it been a good day? Is my stomach a little bit uncomfortable if I had too much curry? What's going on? Position, my feelings. Am I distracted? Am I happy? Am I excited? And very important is if I am feeling in any way threatened, what barriers am I putting up? What is driving my defensive reaction? And every one of these comes together at every moment in time and it drives our interaction and drives our behaviors. Now there's a poem here and everything you should never do on a slide have a lot of words, but I'm going to read it out. It is worth reading. If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. Or if I believe other than you at least pause before you correct my view. Or if my emotion is less than yours or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly. Or yet if I act or fail to act in the manner of your design or action, let me be. I do not for the moment at least ask that you understand me. That will come only when you're willing to give up changing me into a copy of you. And this comes from the book, please understand me. When I read that, it was an epiphany because we do want everyone around us to be like us. So coming back to those rules, those filters have become rules. They've become habitual. Now a rule is something that is inviolate in our minds. And they constrain us and when we are forced to break a rule, it causes us stress. So for me, one of the rules that I grew up with was clean your plate. And being able to move past that and not feel uncomfortable if I did, you know, I've had enough. That was a big pile of food. Thank you. Or I need to leave something there to be polite. That was hard. And it was one of the first things that I personally tackled. There are a lot of other rules that I've managed to work through. And here is a simple technique, simple to describe, hard to do. For transforming these rules into guides. So a guide is something that is contextual and situational. I can look at this and say, okay, under these circumstances, this behavior is appropriate or not. Rather than I must always do this. So the first thing you want to do is state the rule precisely. And here's one that I hope many... No, I'm not going to say hope. I suspect many of us have got in the back of our heads. We want to do that perfect job. We must do the perfect job. And if I don't, I feel under stress. I feel I've let myself down in some way. So the first step is to change the must to a can. I can always do a perfect job. Yeah? Change the always to sometimes. I can sometimes do a perfect job. And now I have the opportunity to say, when is it appropriate? What is the right context? When does this guide matter? So I can do a perfect job when I feel the job is important. I have sufficient time and the nature of the work permits it. If those three things are not met, I am allowed to do a less than perfect job. And suddenly I am free from that stress and tension that I feel when maybe we're under time pressure. We've got to get this out the door. And I have to compromise my quality need. Or am I the only one that has that? Does this make sense, folks? Have time? Your turn. Please turn to maybe pair up for this activity. Find something that you are struggling with. Is there a rule and can you turn it into a guide? We've got 10 minutes. Where did that go? Anyone prepared to share something that they worked through? And under what circumstances now is it safe not to? The guilt of, I want to do something else but I feel I need to go to the office. Good. That is an inviolate rule and there's a piece of legislation about it as well. Yeah, some rules are rules. Yeah, I can't think of a circumstance under which drinking and driving would be worse. Anyone else? Yes, I must respond to phone calls immediately. You feel, did you work through that one? Yeah. And did that, how did that feel coming through that conclusion? That's the key. It gives you the okay not to be guilty. Yeah. So the must not could become a can as well. Yeah. Yeah, and it's okay. Thank you for that. And for that honest exploration. Thank you. Okay, we're coming up to time so any questions or thoughts on this one? We have filters. We look at the world through our many filters and we're all different. We're the result of all of our experiences have brought us to where we are today. Different isn't wrong. Different is just different. Those filters become rules which do govern our attitudes and behaviors and rules restrict our choices and cause us stress. Many rules not drinking and driving should be reworded to become guys and guides give us that freedom to make good contextual decision. So thank you very much folks. And we got two minutes left for questions or conversation. Absolutely. Yes. You know, you should be examining your viewpoint constantly. It's one of the characteristics of emotional intelligence is we were able to take that review constantly. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So there are there are some invariants which often are embodied in law. Yes. Yep. Community perspectives. Well, now we're getting deep into ethics. I lived in South Africa for many years. I consciously broke some of the laws there because my personal ethics said I didn't want to abide by the apartheid rules, for instance. So, but that was a conscious choice and I knew that there was a consequence of that as well. So that, yeah, this is deep into ethics. Where, you know, the we laughed about the drinking and driving, but that is that is an invariant law. There may in fact be a circumstance if where if there is somebody dying and I need to take him to hospital and so forth, which I could imagine needing to to drive even though I've had something to drink. But then I've got to understand that there is I'm making a conscious decision, which is in violation of not just a personal rule, but perhaps one of those bigger laws. Yep. Yep. And where does the how do you deal with things in the situation where where the laws and your personal values differ and and I'm not in a position to advise. Well, our time is up. Thank you very much, folks.