 What a gracious welcome. Thank you. Good morning to all of the wonderful humans assembled here this morning. As Lydia has mentioned, my name is Leslie Hawthorne. And I think I've gotten the opportunity to know many of you in the audience, at least virtually, through my past life as the program manager for Google Summer of Code. I have spent about over a decade working in the free and open source software world. And right now, I'm currently at Red Hat on their open source and standards team, where I focus on the CentOS project and its ecosystem and contributor community. I'm also on the board of directors for the open source initiative. And I generally tend to live, eat, sleep, and breathe fos, which is fun for me, but confuses my family because they don't understand what I mean when I say my daughter is a fork. They're pretty convinced that she is not cutlery of any kind, and they are correct. So I'm actually honored to be here this morning giving a talk that I once upon a time gave with another dear friend of mine who actually lives in Berlin, Diana Gunther. How many of you folks are Berliners? OK, I see a few hands in the audience. How many of you know Diana? I bet it's the exact same hands. OK, close, very close. So Diana Gunther is a community manager, very active in the Ruby community here in Berlin. And she and I were sitting down one day and chatting about messages that we thought would be very useful to the developer community coming from folks who really like to deal with squishy human problems and maybe deal a bit less with the creation of software. And we, in our discussion, decided that a very important message to take to the community was about the importance of empathy and the importance of being able to effectively understand the emotions and motivations of the people that we work with. And so, without further ado, let's talk about why empathy actually matters. And this is the part where my slides are going to be very unapathetic and unkind to me and not advance, because they're just like that. Where is the love? I can also do this talk as interpretive dance. So if we have complete slide fail, it's cool. Once upon a time, I was a slide and I advanced. I'm actually running out of jokes. So if you could work, that'd be super cool. You're a kid. Where, oh, hey, look at that. Where is the love? And there was a thing here. Nope. All right, so anyway, someone over here is going to touch my laptop while I perform interpretive dance. So empathy is actually a search. Four slides. Excellent. Muah, muah, muah. So why empathy matters? So typically when we hear about the value of empathy, we hear about it in terms of a lot of shiny, happy, being friends with people and making people feel good about interacting with you. And that is certainly true. And that is certainly very important. And I will be focusing a decent amount of this presentation talking about interpersonal dynamics. But I think that empathy matters much more extensively just beyond our interpersonal interactions. It is a driver of success in those interpersonal interactions. But without successful interpersonal interactions, we are not successful human beings in our various endeavors. So without empathy, we create projects that are terrible. We create products that are unusable. And we create communities where very few people want to participate. And given the fact that everyone in this room is in some way involved in free and open source software, I think we all know the importance of having a healthy community filled with contributors who want to stick around and keep contributing because we're all in this together. And if someone feels like their time is not well spent with us, we're going to lose not only that person's time commitment, but also the unique abilities that they bring to the project. So the goal of empathy is to create harmony in our interactions. It's not about creating a world in which everyone is contented or everyone is happy. That would be wonderful if we could do that. But let's be realistic. We are all human beings. We all have flaws. Everyone will not be happy all the time. But what we want is harmonious interactions, the ability for there to be effective give and take for people to be able to understand that even if they don't get what they want, that their needs are being heard and that their desire to contribute and what they have brought to the table is appreciated and respected even if it is not acted upon. So rather than thinking about empathy in terms of why it's great, let's talk about what happens when we have empathy fail. This is a total failure of empathy and failure of design. And if you are bored later, and I hope you are not this bored, just type into your favorite search engine, bad design. You will discover that the answer to this question is always a bathroom. Universally, I don't know why. Apparently, architects just have deep hatred for designing toilets. So let's take this as a wonderful example. So let's not even getting to having the power outlet in a really scary position right below the soap. Because as you dispense your soap, no doubt what you really want to do is get your liquid soap into the power outlet, making sure that no one can use the power later and possibly doing some serious damage to yourself. I'm not quite certain. Or we have our wonderful mirror, which it's great. It's important to be able to look at yourself and make sure that you're presentable before heading out to the world. But if you'd like to actually wash your hands in the sink, you can do so by shoving them underneath that wonderful shelf there and then pulling on the handles in order to dispense water, which is wonderful because therefore you can scrape your knuckles every single time you try and turn the sink on or off. Or perhaps after you have finished washing your hands, you'd like to dry them. Seems reasonable. So the best thing we can possibly do is put the paper towel dispenser right next to the sink so that each time you extend your paper towel by pushing down on the handle, your paper towel falls and the sinking gets wet. Because that's the best way to dry your hands is with a wet paper towel. I can't possibly imagine a better way to do it. And then finally, if you need a tissue, well, the best place to put those is on top of the paper towel dispenser so that they can fall directly into the sink and get wet. Because I don't know about you, but there's nothing like blowing your nose with a wet Kleenex. I mean, that's my favorite, right? It's just great. This is a complete failure of empathy right here, right? No one actually thought about how their user would make use of this space. Not to mention that it's ugly. The paint is peeling. The furniture is weird and has a price tag on it. Like, I don't even want to get into that. That's just bizarre. But this is what happens when you have no empathy, when you don't think about how other people are feeling, how they're going to use what you've created, when you just say, OK, what is it equal to create the space? OK, I need a sink. I need a mirror. I need some paper towels. And I need some tissue. You end up with something that meets spec and is completely useless and, in fact, creates frustration and misery in the user because they end up using a wet Kleenex, right? Like, it's just not effective. So our goal here today is to talk about some concrete ways that individuals and project communities can build empathy within themselves and within that community so that you don't end up in this terrible room right here. And I'm serious. Like, just go and spend some time on your favorite search engine. This is not even the worst one. It's just the one that didn't have anything unsavory but it was not keynote appropriate. Slides, I love you and I understand that you're tired this morning on a Saturday. And I want you to advance. So empathy is not just about the people that we interact with, right? It's also about you. One of the things that I find to be personally very frustrating when we are talking about sticky human problems in the free and open source software community is there's often a lot of focus on how we build up effective teams and how we have good interpersonal reactions and the reactions of other people to us. And I think that that's very important but I also think that it is silly of me to think that I can persuade an audience to care about empathy just by saying, you should be empathetic because it'll make other people happy. Well, that's great. And I think I would like to think that we all care about making other people happy but I care about you being happy and you making yourselves happy as well. So empathy is also about you as an individual. If you look at research that's been done by various organizations that focus on questions of human resources allocation such as the McKinsey Group and looking through the Harvard Business Review there's an article about this at least once a week detailing various scientific studies about the success of people in the workplace who are effective at empathizing with their peers. So people who are very empathetic tend to find that they are promoted more quickly. They tend to find that they are considered to be better leaders. They get paid a little bit more. I think that the research that I saw was around 4% and they tend to report greater workplace satisfaction. So empathy is not just about creating a better product, creating a better team, and any of that other raw, raw, raw stuff although I like to raw, raw clearly. It's also about making sure that you as an individual are able to benefit. So this is not just about other people. This is also about you. So first and foremost, empathy is a choice. This may come as a huge shock to you but it has been shown in recent research that empathy is actually something that we choose to exercise. So some scientists performed an experiment and I always hate using this as an example because it seems kind of reductive and sad but effectively they measured whether or not empathy was something innate or a choice by telling people that they were going to find themselves in a situation in which their empathy would be invoked. So if you walk down this hallway, you will get to the soda machine. If you walk down this hallway, you will get to the soda machine but you will have to pass the room of someone who is being treated for health issues. And near universally, people would choose the option which meant that their empathy would not be invoked, right? Their sense of connection with that other person wouldn't be tapped. And the scientists who were doing the study theorized, one, that they thought that this was surprising. They assumed that certain people would just be more empathetic than others innately as part of their biochemistry. They discovered that that was not the case. And two, they also were very surprised because they assumed that people who self-described themselves as very caring individuals would not shy away from the option which would invoke empathy in themselves. And what they discovered was that people described a fear, a fear of having an empathetic reaction, thinking that it would cost them something to feel that sense of connection, right? That they wanted to avoid it because they were worried that they were going to have to give too much of themselves by having that sense of connection. Now, interestingly enough, in a follow-up study, they also discovered that if people were encouraged, just told that it would be helpful for them to be empathetic, that it would be helpful for them to say hello to the person in hallway number two who was being treated for disease, that they would choose then to do so. As soon as they understood that there was a benefit, a reward to their behavior, as opposed to just simply thinking it was going to cost them something to connect, they were much more willing to connect and they felt the benefit of doing so. So the reason that I think that this is important is fairly frequently I've had a conversation about empathy with some folks in the free software world and they've said, well, you know, I'm just not really a people person and I'm not good at the feelings part of stuff and I'm not really good at social cues and fair enough, right? I'm actually secretly a huge introvert. I play an extrovert on stage and on TV. So I get the feelings are hard, right? And I get the interpersonal interactions are really difficult, but by hiding behind kind of a, I don't wanna call it a veil of excuses, but it is kind of a veil of excuses, right? Of just being able to say, I am not this person who is good at interacting with other people, you know? We cut ourselves off from the opportunity to learn and to exercise that choice, to be empathetic and to be the kind of person who is able to have those connections with other people that are mutually beneficial. So again, empathy is a choice. If you don't think of yourself as an empathetic person, that's okay, it's something you can choose to do because it's not an innate skill. It is something that has to be learned and this is true of all of us, right? I did not wake up one day and suddenly go, well, wow, I'm super empathetic now, that's great. Everyone's gonna totally wanna hang out at Leslie's house because Leslie's that super cool person who really understands us. No, that is not how it works. You learn this through your repeated exercises of interacting with other human beings and some of the wonderful tips that we will go through in this very presentation. So easy one to start off with. You start practicing empathy through self-awareness and I think that this is one of the reasons why people can have a great deal of trouble trying to be empathetic. It's hard enough having a relationship with yourself, let alone having a relationship with other human beings. I mean, how many of you wake up every morning and when you're thinking like, hey, what do I wanna do today? You can't even figure out like, do I want the coffee first or do I wanna like read the news first? I know I can't, I don't know. I can't really figure out what I wanna do until I have the coffee, so I know I have to do that first. So every day, practice this process of self-awareness and it can be very simple, right? Just what has happened to me in the past day or in the past week that I found really useful, that I really enjoyed, that I thought was really good? And then ask yourself, why? Why was that useful? Why was that good? Why did I enjoy that moment? And conversely for things that were terrible, like moments that just sucked, why did this suck? Was it because I was frustrated? Well, why was I frustrated, right? Practicing the process of the five whys on ourselves as individuals and not just on our projects and retrospectives or post-mortems, I think is an incredibly valuable tool for those of us who work in the software industry to begin to have a greater level of self-awareness. And once we're aware of what's going on with ourselves, it's that much easier to understand what's going on with other people and the great thing that I've learned through trying to practice greater self-awareness is we're really not all that different as individuals, as much as we may think that we're divided by culture, time zone, language, pasts, presence and future. We're all human beings and fundamentally, we are very all much alike. And I find that to be a very promising thing to have learned. All right, so now let's get out of interacting with just ourselves and talk about interacting with other people. So practice active listening if you want to make yourself a more empathetic person. Everybody know what active listening is? Oh, I see so many hands, this is great, I get to tell you a new thing, I'm very excited. Excellent, so active listening actually comes out of the school of folks who were practicing negotiation in the Middle East peace process. And the idea was to put individuals who were involved on both sides of the debate in a room together and to get them to talk about their feelings about the Middle East peace process. So putting people from Palestine and people from Israel in the same room and getting them to talk about their concerns and this is just a topic that is fraught with peril, so I'll just say their concerns. And how are they going to interact with one another? And the idea was that rather than becoming upset, rather than bringing one's assumptions to that conversation, your overall goal as an individual participant was to listen and to show the person that you were speaking to that you were listening. So active listening involves the process of something that we call mirroring. So to use a very basic example, if I come in to the office and I look grumpy and I clearly, my body language is really reserved and I'm not really looking up and then you've been in the eye and I don't really want to talk to anybody and somebody is concerned wants to ask me how I'm doing. Hey, hey Leslie, how are you this morning? You look like maybe this isn't your morning. And if I say, yeah, I'm having, I hate everything day, my car wouldn't start and I've got to run in my stocking and my jewelry doesn't match and blah, blah, blah, blah. These are by the way things I would never say because I don't wear stockings and jewelry is not, that's just too advanced for me. But so then if I want to show that I'm actually paying attention instead of checking email on my phone, which most of us are want to do these days, it's like, oh, I understand. It sounds like you had a really frustrating morning, right? Like things didn't go the way you expected. You had issues with your transportation, you didn't have the opportunity to kind of present yourself to the world the way that you wanted to, like I get it, that's a bummer. Well, just so you know, I hear you, I understand that's super frustrating. I want you to have your space, but none of us care if you're having a grumpy morning, we still appreciate that you're here and I'll let everybody know to maybe come in and ask you questions in your office after an hour or two when you've had some time to kind of get plugged back in. Active listening is the process of mirroring what someone has said to you, not repeating verbatim what they said, but summarizing it in such a way so that it is clear that you have listened to what they said, you actually heard the words, that you engaged with what they said enough to interpret it, right, to internalize it, like not to say, oh, your car wouldn't start, but to say, wow, that sounds like it was really frustrating, right, because the problem is not that the car wouldn't start, it was clearly everything that followed thereafter. And to also, as part of that, to say, here is what I would like to offer you by way of what has changed in my mind and my thinking from having to listen to you, right? I'll let people know to give you a little while to get ready this morning. Now that's a very silly example, but when you practice active listening, when you actually take the time to listen to other people and not just listen, but show them that you have listened by practicing that mirroring, you'll find that people respond to you much, much better in conversation. Has anyone seen the movie or read the book Fight Club? I see a couple of hands, okay. So for those of you who have not, I don't know if I necessarily recommend it, there's some unsavory bits in there, but I loved it because there is one scene that has stuck with me forever, and this movie is, I think, 15 years old. So the two of the main characters are having a conversation, and they're talking about why they drop in on support groups for terminally ill people when neither one of them is ill. So like I said, if you haven't seen this movie, I don't necessarily know if I recommend it, it's a little weird, but they're having a chat, and so character one says, why do you do this? And character two says, I don't know. It seems like when you're dying, people really listen to you instead of, and she interrupts him and says, instead of just waiting for their turn to talk. We live in a world where we're all just waiting for our turn to talk, right? We form ideas quickly, we're ready to share them. We think it's really, really great that we have something to bring to the table by sharing our ideas and our knowledge and our thoughts, and that's not a bad thing, but if we spend all of our time just waiting for our turn to talk, we've never actually internalized anything that's been said to us. We've never given ourselves the opportunity to learn and grow and be changed by what someone else has brought to us, and I just think that it's not a cool way to live, right? Like we're not growing as individuals, we're just bringing to the table what we already knew and listening to ourselves talk, right? And frankly, I don't think I'm that interesting, so I wanna hear what you all have to say. All right, step two, to cultivate empathy. This one is one of my favorites because I love to read. So it has been determined that people who are active readers of fiction are more empathetic, which is great. So if you ever wanted an excuse to blow off whatever it was that you were working on because it was frustrating you and just read a good book, that's great, science says that you should do it. All right, thank you, science. So by reading fiction, by creating in our minds the world that we're reading about, right? And filling in the details that the author has not provided in the world that they have created, we are stimulating the centers in our brain that are responsible for the practice of empathy, right? We are actually having an empathetic response to the characters and the story that we're reading because we are understanding a set of details that we've been given and we are filling out the rest of the scene with our own understanding of how characters interact, their emotions, their motivations, their desires. So if you are trying to think of ways to help yourself become a more empathetic person, go read a good book. It'll be an excellent use of your time and I have many great works of fiction that I would love to recommend to you if you are not a fiction reader, but I suspect that that may not be a problem with this particular audience. Maybe our problem is we read too much sci-fi, yeah? Yeah, yeah. I have some squishy human non-sci-fi novels that I can recommend that I did not enjoy but we should probably all learn from because I just wanna read the science fiction too. All right, other ways to cultivate empathy, avoid assumptions and be curious, ask questions. One of the fastest ways that we shut down empathy and our ability to interact effectively with other people is we assume that we know what the other person is thinking and feeling and we don't ask. So somebody doesn't say hello to us in the morning in the hallway and we think, wow, Leslie's mad at me. She didn't even say hi this morning, like why? Oh man, I bet it was that I didn't finish that project that I was supposed to finish for her last week, like, oh man, I wonder if she's told the boss that I didn't do that thing. She's really a jerk anyway. She just walks in here and she's super grumpy until she finishes drinking her coffee and I shouldn't have to put up with that and I'm just gonna go sit in my cubicle and be peeved for the next 20 minutes because wow, I just got treated really badly. In the meantime, our fictional Leslie is upset because her car wouldn't start this morning and it had absolutely nothing to do with me and I have not actually peeved her at all by not finishing our project and it would never have crossed her mind to talk to the boss and complain about me and now suddenly instead of having one person who had a bad morning, we have two people who are having a bad morning and all because of assumptions, right? It is much better to actually ask people what they want, what they need and what they are thinking even if you think you already know the answer, okay? And there's a couple reasons for this. One, you probably don't honestly know the answer. Two, if you do know the answer, you know a little bit of it, right? You know that somebody, you may know that someone is upset but you may not know why, right? So making that assumption eliminates your ability to connect with that person to actually have that moment of exchange of ideas, of exchange of goodwill and you're also, you're cutting yourself off from the ability to be surprised, right? When someone tells you what they're actually thinking, what they're actually feeling and you had no idea that this was important to them, that this was a need that they have, that this is a need you could meet, a way you can contribute to their life. If you don't ask questions, if you don't have curiosity about what's going on with other people around you and you just kind of go through with your script, it's not going to be effective and some people may not be receptive to that curiosity, right? That's okay. Some people are very private and they don't want to share and that's all right, you know? But there are ways to ask questions like that, like, hey, maybe you don't want to talk about this but it looks like maybe this is not your morning. If you want to talk about it, I'm here. Someone may open up to you, someone may choose not to but putting yourself in that position to be curious and to ask questions is much more effective than just going like, oh, yep, I already know what's going on. If you already know what's going on, there's no point in having a dialogue and our goal here is to create a useful, candid dialogue with our peers. This is a way that projects can help to create empathy. Be really explicit and inclusive about your values. So this conference has an attendee code, that's great, wonderful, congratulations. There's been quite a debate about whether or not a project code of conducts or conference codes of conduct are important and I think that they are very important for reasons that sometimes don't get articulated. And that's that I feel like our discussion of who we are as communities, projects, teams, groups usually focuses on what we're trying to build. And that's not a bad thing. We need to tell people why we're here, right? We are here to build a compelling replacement to CVS for the Subversion Project, for example. That's great, but we need to tell people why we are motivated to working together and what are the ties that bind us beyond just the work that we're trying to do? If we are not explicit about what we value and who we are, then we're not giving people the opportunity again to really understand why they belong there and why it matters to the group, the community, the project that they're there. And we all, again, this goes back to avoiding assumptions. We may all think that everyone understands what the raison d'etre of our work is together, right? Otherwise, why would they show up? But the people who have arrived don't necessarily all agree. Not that they all need to agree, but there needs to be some common ground. And think about all the people who don't see themselves in the work that you're doing who would be wonderful contributors to your project if only someone had said to them, we welcome people who are tall, we welcome people who are short, we welcome people who are whatever. Add in whatever is important and valuable to your community. One of the companies, actually, that I think does a really great job with this, and I love giving them a shout out, is a company called ThoughtWorks. Have folks heard of ThoughtWorks? I see a couple of nods. So ThoughtWorks is a software services and consulting company, and they do a wide variety of projects. But I really, really dig on ThoughtWorks because if you go to their company website, so this is their dot com, this is not like charitable anything. This is just who they are. And they talk about their values as a company. They have an entire page on social justice. And they talk about the importance of social justice to their company in terms of making sure that technology is accessible to folks who need to make use of it, regardless of their ability to pay. So technology should be accessible and useful to everyone who needs it and not only available to a privileged few. And I really appreciate that because one, it helps them get better hires. Their CEO has explicitly said that. But it also, if you're a customer and you're trying to decide where you're going to spend your time and money, there are any number of companies who will build software for you and who will provide consulting services around it, right? There are tons of them. But I would like to spend my time and energy with a group of people who explicitly say that one of their values as an organization, one of their goals, and one of the things that they will put money behind even though it doesn't contribute to their profit margin is ensuring that technology is available to all who need it. I think that that is incredible. And by actually making it explicit, people in the company use that as a marker, something they can refer back to. If we are in a group, if people are debating whether or not they should work on a particular project, and the question is, well, this doesn't necessarily contribute directly to revenue, this new idea. Should we still propose it? People can point back to the company values and say, well, our company values state that social justice and making this technology available is important to us. So yes, we should go ahead and propose this idea even if it's not necessarily something that's profit-driven right now. And by being explicit about those values, you give, again, people the opportunity to connect. It's not just all what we think is important, right? It's what we know is important because we've taken the time to communicate it and be explicit about it and tell people what we think and to give them that opportunity to connect into our group. All right, discourage hippoing. This is not just because I wanted to show you a cool picture of hippos. Although I really like hippos, they're super cool. So anybody ever heard the acronym HIPPO? It's not just a very large water animal. Okay, so hippoing, highest paid person's opinion is the only one that matters. And if we're thinking about this in terms of free and open source software projects, we could think of this as highest prestige person's opinion is the only one that matters. So the idea that the only the fanciest among us as measured in salary or as measured in prestige are the only people who have something valuable to say is a damaging idea, right? No single one of us knows everything. This is not something that I should have to really hammer home because if any of us were perfect, there would be software projects with no bugs because our benevolent dictators for life would have never introduced any of them into the code base ever. Oh man, this is not actually happening, right? So if you are in an organization, I think it is important to make an explicit value that everyone's ideas are worth contributing. Now you may educate your community about the steps that you would like them to take to vet their idea so that you're not spending every meeting, say rehashing the same proposed technical solution to a problem that came up 10 years ago and it didn't work then and it won't work now. That's okay. It is okay to ask folks to do some background homework, but telling people that you explicitly value their contribution, even if they are junior, even if they are new, even if they don't have the greatest amount of domain expertise in a particular area, provided they're willing to be respectful about how they share their opinion is incredibly important because again, the plethora of perspectives helps us to create better things. If we're just making stuff for people who think like us, that's not very helpful. The only people who are going to use what we've created are people who think exactly like we do. And I would hope ostensibly we're all hoping that we're creating something that is more universally useful. So making it explicit that you want everyone's opinion and that you value all people who have something useful and effective to contribute is important. Now, what to do if you are the hippo? If you are the highest paid person in the room or the highest prestige person in the room, right? So first of all, be aware that this is a thing, that people will, by nature of the way that we have been taught and socialized, think that they're supposed to defer to you. It is amazing to me the number of project maintainers, company founders, right, and executives who have said, oh, it doesn't, no, no, no, no, no, no, everybody thought that this thing was a good idea. Every, no, everyone agreed with me. Everyone thought it was a great idea that we don't do Agile, right? Like, everyone thought Agile was a horrible idea. It's like, well, yeah, when the company founder stands up and says like, if we do Agile, I'm gonna quit and like, I don't wanna talk about this anymore and everyone goes, yes, yes, of course, yes, yes, of course. Cause your status as a founder had nothing to do with that, right? Everybody was talking about it for 10 minutes, really excited up until the part where you were like, no, and then suddenly everyone like, oh no, yes, no. We've all automatically changed our minds. Yes, we suddenly realized we were wrong before this. Be aware of your status, be aware of the power that you carry. Even in groups where we tend to think of ourselves as very non-hierarchical, that's not the way that human beings have been taught to interact with one another, right? So we have to go through this kind of process of unlearning or engaging with standard social dynamics. So be aware of the power that you carry if you are one of these people in more of a high prestige position, right? Either through like an actual like hierarchy, like you are a manager in a company or depending upon your social status within a project. And if you want people to tell you what they really think, ask them. Don't tell people what you think. Don't tell people what your idea is at first, right? Ask other people what they think. You will never actually know what people are really wanting to see happen if all you do is tell them what you think because that's where they think the conversation stops. Oh, Elstyn, your fancy pants wants this. Well, that's what we're going to do. That's terrible, right? This leads to just terrible situations where you end up shipping products that nobody wants and customers don't want and people find stuff unusable because everyone simply nodded along with their wonderful hippo and nobody actually realized that what they were doing was a terrible idea that was going to lead them off a cliff. So again, be inclusive and asking for feedback and opinions. Now I think that there are probably some folks in the audience who are thinking, what if someone is just a total silly person and says terribly silly things all the time? Do we still have to listen to them? How many of you are thinking that? It's okay, you can admit it. Okay, thank you for your honesty, sir. I see a couple of hands. That is a completely fair thing to think. I am not going to stand up here and tell you that everything is always sunshine and roses because it's not. I'm not going to lie to you. Sometimes there are silly people and if you encourage them to share what they think, they will do it and it will be silly. It is true. It is true. This is a true thing. In situations like that, find one of your friends who is good at dealing with squishy human problems and ask them to ask this individual to do a little bit more research before they start sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm. A lot of the time people just don't understand how they're being perceived, right? Or that they may not actually realize because human beings are flawed and we all have to learn things that suggesting something that came up 10 years ago as a solution to the problem now was actually rude. So again, have a conversation with those folks. I'm not suggesting this is always going to be sunshine and roses, but in general, this is useful advice. When dealing with silly people, repent, reflect, reroute. And on silly people, don't flip the bozo bit. Has anyone heard the term flipping the bozo bit before? Okay, this is bozo the clown, which totally makes sense where I'm from in America. It may not make sense here. All right, so flipping the bozo bit is a phrase from, oh shoot, of course I have forgotten the book title. Fortunately, it is in my speaker notes, which you can look at later. So in 1995, a gentleman wrote a book called Principles of Software Design and he talked about the idea of flipping the bozo bit. So having a very binary reaction to individuals, either you were smart or you're a bozo. You're an idiot. And so once you flip the bozo bit on someone, nothing that they ever say or do is going to matter and you are never going to listen to them again because they are a bozo. So the idea is you get one chance. You get one screw up. After you're one mistake, I don't care what you have to say ever again. You were the person who was an idiot that time back in 2003 and you will never do anything good or useful again. Okay, so this is an extra, this is a toxic attitude, right? This is terrible for a lot of reasons. Like one, the idea that we only get one mistake is awful, right? And this is pretty, this is actually pretty widespread, at least from my experience in the business world that people get the opportunity, you get one mistake and then after that, no one trusts you again. And so how many of you never made a mistake? Oh, I see some liars in this audience, woohoo, okay. So there are three perfect people in this audience, make sure you bug them at the breaks and find out how they did it because I wanna know, let me know. So all of us make mistakes, huh? Denial, oh, I love it, okay. It's not just a river in Egypt, woohoo. So again, this is terrible because all of us make mistakes, right? Just plain and simple. Sometimes we make terrible mistakes, sometimes we make small mistakes. The other reason why this is terrible is let's assume you're dealing with a aforementioned silly person, right? If you are blowing off silly person because they're silly, okay, you know, fair enough. The message that you're sending to everyone else involved in this dynamic, in this group process is it's not okay to be imperfect. If you propose an idea, it'd better be perfect. If you have aspirations or a plan, it'd better be perfect because the consequence of a mistake is clear implicit or even explicit social ostracism within the group, right? Like we will just never take you seriously again if you do something wrong. Okay, if that's the message that's being sent to me as another group participant, where is my motivation to do anything that is not status quo? It's zero. It's zero because I have learned that to make a mistake means that I will be judged. People won't take me seriously. People will, you know, people will, I will be the person that people are making jokes about around the coffee machine. Eh, see what Sam did this morning? Yeah, that guy's a silly person. No one wants to be that person. You're cutting people off from motivation, from doing something new, from doing something creative and generative because they're afraid. And also fundamentally, there may be a person in your organization upon whom the bozo bit has been flipped and fair enough, they shouldn't be there. That's okay. It is okay to ask people to leave if they are in the wrong place. And this is hard because as human beings, we don't like confrontation, right? And we don't like messy human interactions, but it is so much better to say to someone, you know what, I think your talents and skills are better used elsewhere in this thing that you're really good at than here. Because having, leaving someone in a situation where you continue to overtly say that you accept them, but your behavior, your bozo bit has flipped, your behavior shows them that they are not accepted, that they are not valued, that their opinions are not useful. Even when they say something good, it's debilitating, it's demoralizing, and that kind of attitude just screws up teams. Like seriously, if there is someone who is in the wrong place, please help them to find the right place. And also if you're thinking that there is someone who is in the wrong place, who doesn't belong with your group or your team or your effort because they are clearly a bozo, before you ask them to go ask yourself if that is really true. And in some cases you'll find that that was completely true and in some cases you'll find that you're just being very judgmental. And maybe you should give this person another chance and that's really hard, right? I think more often than not, we flip the bozo bit because it is easier to be binary with people, right? Either I trust you, I don't. I think you're great or I don't, right? It's very hard to say, wow, if 80% of the time you're awesome and the other 20% of the time I don't wanna spend any time with you, that's hard. How do you know which one you're in on any given day, right? So instead we're very binary. Trouble is it's just not effective and it leads to homogeneous groupthink and fear of failure and fear of doing anything new which leads to stagnation and sadness. Aha, make it okay to fail in your projects, right? Make it actually okay. How many of you work at companies where they tell you that they encourage innovation and it's okay to make mistakes? That's totally cool. Excellent, of the people who have their hands raised, please put your hand down if that mistake didn't impact your salary, bonus, or promotion potential. Okay, only one human being works in a company where it is truly, two human beings work in a company where it is truly okay to fail, right? You need to make it okay to fail and this is not just about companies, it's also about projects. You're going to make decisions about what to do and it's going to suck. You're going to make huge mistakes. So there are any number of ways to celebrate failure and make it okay to fail, right? Part of this is explicitly, verbally acknowledging like, wow, that was a huge screw up. We could have done that better. What did we learn through this failure, right? So not just focusing on shaming or blaming or sitting around stewing in our own feelings of, wow, that wasn't cool. And I think this is really hard for nerds because we're really, really smart and so we're not used to being wrong, right? So when we're wrong, we're like, oh, let's just hide that over here under the carpet. Maybe no one else will notice. We moved really fast. No one will see the mistake. Just own it. It's okay, talk about it. Talk about it explicitly. Has anybody heard of the fail cake? I see no hands. Okay, this is great. Let's talk about something else even better because then you get to all eat cake. All right, so there is a process that some groups have instituted, be they projects, be they teams at a company where if there is a catastrophic screw up and they will happen, it's just accepted that they will happen. So when you go in for your retrospective, AKA postmortem, I hate calling them postmortems because no one died. So when you go in for your review or your after action report, the person who is most directly responsible for this catastrophic failure, because again, the whole team is responsible when there's catastrophic failure, but the person who is most directly responsible makes cake or buys cake and brings cake in to the meeting. So everybody gets together and they all get to sit there and eat a slice of cake. So you start off with the breaking of bread, which is a very important process among human beings, right? We have been sitting down together at tables and eating for so long that it's just part of our human experience that when you get together and you consume food with other human beings that you're coming together as a team, right? Like there's a connection among those people. So that's wonderful. You're kind of just like evoking the human experience. And you're eating cake, which is awesome in delicious and sugary. And for any diabetics in the audience, I apologize, it's probably not super inclusive, but you can get sugar-free, tasty things. So you get together, you eat cake, and after you have a couple of bites of cake, then you start talking about what went wrong. Because it's really hard to be a big jerk to each other when you're eating cake. It is, it's just not something that you're gonna find easy to do. You're giving people also the opportunity to demonstrate that they are sorry for what they have done in a way that doesn't shame them, right? I have made a mistake. It has caused difficulty for all of you. I am bringing you a gift that shows that I am sorry, but I don't have to sit here and grovel before you and tell you how terrible I am and how awful it was that I made this mistake. Instead, we are sharing a collective gift in a way that's really non-confrontational, right? Human beings don't like confrontation. And because this is a, it's a ceremonial ritual, right? Like this happens every single time. There's a big problem, right? You're making it okay to fail because it is built into your culture that this is the ritual of failing. And if there is a ritual of failure, if there is a path for understanding and coping with failure, especially one that's fun, people know it's okay to fail. If it wasn't okay to fail, you wouldn't have a ritual for failure. Failure would be ignored. Failure wouldn't be talked about. Failure wouldn't be something that anyone engaged with, right? It simply would not exist. And if you are one of those manager types, I have been one of those manager types before, and you tell your employees it's okay to fail, maybe that should be reflected in their performance reviews. Just saying, how many manager types do we have in the audience? A couple of manager types. Okay, this is for all of us, right? Like if we're gonna tell our teams that it's okay to make mistakes, that should be reflected when we give them feedback later, not just like, wow, were you a total screw-up? It's like, well, so, we learned a lot from that moment in time. All right, my friends, that is all the guidance that I have to give you. This is question mark guy. I love him because he looks really afraid, and also because he's a little finger with stick figures. I am here and happy to take questions about empathy or any other topic, and I want to thank all of you for having me here this morning. It has been wonderful. Thanks. Port Thiago and Lydia got drafted into carrying mics around, so if you want to be gentle and not make them walk, you know, backwards and high heels, I don't know, Thiago forgot his heels, I guess. Yes, nice man who is in denial. Hi, we're a team of six people in four different locations, so it makes it a little bit difficult, especially non-verbal communication and probably the fail cake as well. You can all eat together over the internet. We've done it, it's amazing. Webcam, yeah. So the question is, do you have any specific tips for distributed teams? I mean, the open source community is all over the world as well, right? Yes, totally. Tips for empathy for distributed teams, okay. So the stuff that you can do as an individual is really helpful because each team is made up of individuals. So the practicing self-awareness, active listening, all of those things are very helpful, even in areas where there is no non-verbal communication. In fact, sometimes especially in places where there is no non-verbal communication, active listening in that process of mirroring is really helpful because you're showing people that you've gotten the whole message, even the stuff that you can't see. The other thing that I would suggest is, this is just, this is such a lawyerly, silly answer, but it's the truth, which is, you gotta get together in person even if you're a distributed team, right? This is why you're all here at this awesome conference, right? Like you're all working on various projects all over the world and yet you're all here together today. So giving people the opportunity to create those social ties in person because we are so driven by those in-person social connections that allows people to have more effective interpersonal interactions when they are far away from each other. And last but not least, I think video conferencing is a tough one. A lot of people talk about having more effective communication because of video conferencing because you're getting more visual feedback with your interactions with other people via video. I really stumble with video conferencing because I spend most of my time being distracted by the fact that I think I have something in my teeth or just that I look funny. So I guess, yay, video conferencing, please acknowledge the introverts on your team who hate being on video and don't make fun of them for turning the video off when they need to. That was my nice lawyerly answer. I hope it helped. Yay, I got a thumbs up, okay. Thank you. Other nice humans. I also want to make it clearer that if you have other questions, I will be around for a bit and I don't want to stand in between you and coffee because I know it is important. I myself have only had four cups this morning, Ken. You tell, yes, you can. That is a stretch, not a question. That is a question, I think. No, that is a scratch my nose. That is totally not a question. All right, coffee, oh, question, yay. See, I'm spoiled, I have coffee up here. It occurred to me with your fail cake that it's a thing I've, one of my past jobs a decade and a half ago, we actually, if you broke the build, you went and bought donuts for everybody. It was a kind of similar idea. Totally. But the thing is, what you're doing is you're instituting a process for atonement without shame. Exactly, thank you. Atonement without shame. See, this is beautiful and I, I guess I'm sort of sensitive to using words that I feel are like in a religious context, but like is atonement a universally understood concept? Does anyone want me to define it? Cause this is a beautiful thing this gentleman has said. Quite confusion, okay, cool. So atonement, and I only know about this in a religious context, so it may exist in other contexts, is the idea that we are imperfect, we have made a mistake, and since it is known that we are imperfect and that we will make mistakes, there is a ritualized process for sort of erasing that mistake from the social consciousness, right? Maybe it's to atone for my sin of breaking the bill that I buy everybody donuts, right? And by ritualizing that, there is an acknowledgement, again, of failure is inevitable. Here's how you get over it. Here's how we move on. Cool, thank you very much. I love that. I may steal that phrase for future talk. The problem I see with this is the cases where the failure is not necessarily attributable to one person. Breaking the bill, that's clear. That's a fact, it's provable. But if overall a project didn't go as it should have and we were late and it's kind of a collective fault, it seems to me that the act of trying to find the guilty person so that this would be the one buying cake actually makes things worse because now we have defined this person is responsible instead of saying collectively we fail because of many reasons. I agree with you completely and in cases like that where it's not something where you can point directly to it, that's when you're a group leader, like let's say that this is a team, this is when the manager goes and buys donuts. Because it's the manager's job to make sure that all of you can be successful. And we weren't as successful as we wanted to be so that's cool, I've got donuts for all of you and we're gonna talk about how we can all be more successful together as a group. And then there's no process of like, well let's talk about why you sucked and let's talk about why you sucked, right? This is why you're a leader, right? Because you get to take one for the team. Well, I would suggest that you can also make really tasty donuts. But yes, also just my dear friends, we are all flawed human beings, budget, just get yourself a dessert budget and you'll be happy that you did. And if anyone is having trouble, I have tips on reasonably priced desserts. Yes, nice, gentlemen. So there is a sort of flip side to that one which is that it doesn't have to be the boss. Anybody in the team who's capable of owning the failure and can just pick it up and say okay, I'll take that. And look, I'm gonna accept responsibility for this and okay, everybody else is involved, but that's okay, I'm gonna get the cake. That is totally cool. And the person who can do that can thereby help the team to recover from what it suffered because there are no downwells they contributed just as much and they're accepting that you don't have to be boss to be leader. This is true. You do not have to be the boss to be a leader and that is awesome. I find that there are fewer brave souls in the world who are willing to do it. You have just suggested that I would like, but I would like to encourage their growth and development. Thank you. Hello, nice person. Hi. Again, about distributed teams, do you think there's inherent difference in failed culture between different parts of the world that you can tell? Oh man, that's a great question. So I actually give a talk just focusing on failure. And maybe this is my own inherent like self-loathing as an American. I think Americans are really not okay with failing, right? Like we all got told for years that, you know, on the Apollo 13 mission, which failed like horrifically to the point where like there was no drinking water and the heat failed and all this other crap that like, oh my God, failure is not an option. And wow, America triumphed and all the astronauts came back to Earth safely except that never actually happened. That wasn't a movie from 1985 where that was said, right? So I feel like Americans like are really uncomfortable with failure and I can say, cause I can speak for all Americans being one, you know? Yeah, totally. I have also noted that in some cultures, like in some Asian cultures, like it is really not okay to fail. Like if you shame yourself through failing in front of an authority figure that can be like a really like socially devastating thing to have happen to you. I don't wanna talk a lot about this because it's not something with which I'm directly familiar, but this is something that I have heard about from folks in Asia who wanna participate in free software projects, talking about bringing more people into free software projects. And a lot of the hesitancy comes from the idea that if you are providing work to the community or to a maintainer who is like an authority figure and they say that the patch is imperfect because which patch is ever perfect that you tend to lose people right there because there's a sense of social stigma and shame attached to that as a failure as opposed to kind of a learning experience. So that's what I know about that. I don't know. I really like Europe, so I'm gonna say all of you are totally fine with failure because I really like it here and clearly you guys are perfect because you have way better bread and stuff. Also, if you are not from Germany, I'm considering a bread as a service company because oh my God, the bread other places is just very sad. Unrelated but useful. All right, thank you so much, Leslie. You are totally welcome. I'm glad to be here. Thank you.