 Am I coming through? Okay, cool. I'm very loud, so I may not need it, but we'll see. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we'll kick off here in just a couple minutes. Almost, oh, just hit. We'll give people 30 seconds, those last minute stragglers, and then we'll, all right. Hello everyone, thanks for being here. It was a little louder than I expected. But yes, thanks for being here. I'm John Richards, and I manage the Developer Advocacy Team at Pantheon. This is my first DrupalCon Europe, so thank you all for having me, and it's a real privilege to get to be up here and speak to you all today, so thank you for that. Today, we're gonna dig into collaboration and look at what these five famous wizards can teach us about teamwork. So these are my sources for the wizards. So what is a wizard? Now, the definition I'm going to use today is a wizard is a gender-neutral term referring to a wise individual who practices magic. Usually that magic is learned through some kind of dedicated study. Now, this isn't a list of the top wizards, but those that worked well to illustrate how people can work together or maybe how not to work together. And apologies in advance for my English-heavy references. I'd love to hear about all of your favorite wizards later, so please tweet at them to me or come up to me later and tell me about your favorite wizards. But why talk about collaborations? Well, it's because of website operations. So Dries was talking to us this morning, if you made it to the keynote, about early web and the use of homepages. I started out web development by building a homepage for myself, and then I started building websites for someone else. Soon, I partnered up with a designer and we were building websites for local businesses. Eventually, I joined a university where I was on a whole team who focused on building websites for other departments. There's a odd sound coming from up here. I'm not sure what it is. Oh. All right. So building websites at the university for whole departments, and then we can look at today, at top Drupal agencies. We now have entire companies who are focused on building websites for other companies. We've got developers, designers, content strategists, project managers, quality assurance, DevOps, system admins, IT, security operations, marketers, business analysts, social media, and these people and more make up our web ops teams. And don't forget that when you have your project, it's for somebody. You now have all your project stakeholders and that can end up being a whole other committee. As soon as we left building our own personal homepages, websites became a collaborative effort. But why did they start to get so complicated? Well, there's an African proverb that says if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And organizations found themselves needing websites that went further. The purposes of websites, they morphed. They were no longer just for brochures, but now they became essential at times being the primary revenue generator for the company. And with so many people involved, collaboration becomes a necessary skill for anyone working on websites. So we're gonna jump into our first wizard and perhaps the most well-known, that's Gandalf. So our first wizard here is the only one on my list who did not study at some school of magic, but he's probably the most famous, so I'll give him a pass. In Tolkien's books, Gandalf is a powerful wizard, but he doesn't flaunt it. Instead, he often relies on others who might be considered weak or small, but Gandalf doesn't see them that way. In the Fellowship of the Ring, it's not the wizard or even a warrior who's the least physically imposing member of the group who takes on the most difficult challenge. Gandalf reminds us that help often comes from the hands of the weak when the wise falter. Our first lesson is that collaboration is made stronger by diversity. And let me be clear, it's not that those who are diverse are weak, it's that we tend to evaluate others based on our strengths rather than on theirs. So those who prioritize different strengths, yeah, prioritize different strengths, they can seem weak to our metrics. We always think our way is wise until it fails. What we see with top performing teams is that they have a diverse set of roles, backgrounds, and thought processes. Each member providing insight and skills that compliment instead of just copying the other people on the team. So I wanna encourage you, be intentional about finding collaborators who are different from you. Now in the Harry Potter book series, Hermione was often referred to as the cleverest wizard of her time. Hermione valued precision at times to the point of being very annoying. But this was important because the language around magic in their universe also needed to be precise. Early on, they're attempting to learn magic and one of her classmates named Ron, he just keeps failing and Hermione steps in to correct him, reminding Ron that it's pronounced levi-o-sa, not levi-o-sa. Lesson two is that clear communication is critical for collaboration. And this was highlighted for me once in a very painful meeting that went for over two hours and ended with verbal fighting in the halls afterwards. We were talking about the steps in our process and then it all came to a screeching halt when we needed to talk about what it meant to be done. The developers and myself, we said, hey, a feature is done as soon as we build it. The design team said, no, it needs to pass design review and quality assurance to be done. And our project manager said, no, something's not done until it's working in production. And we realized that for months, we had all been using this term done, but we admit very different things by it. And so we were arguing about what that meant. And what we needed was really three different terms. When I first started at Pantheon, our documentation team shared a document that cataloged and described our company's acronyms and terminologies. And this allowed us to have a very clear and consistent communication, because we could reference back and say, when I use this term, this is what it means. So documenting your terms goes a long way to enabling clear communication across teams. Now, Kvoth here is probably the most obscure wizard on my list, but he's also the reason I made this list and had this idea for this talk, so I had to have him on here. But don't worry if you've never heard of Kvoth or Patrick Rothfuss' book, The Name of the Wind. That's fine, because what really stood out to me was less Kvoth, but the magic system in this world. His mentor is trying to teach Kvoth how magic works. And he's told, this relies on a very strong belief. To do this well, one has to be able to hold two very different contradictory thoughts in their head at the same time. So, in attempting to make a rock float, Kvoth must understand that rocks fall as we all experience when you let go of them, but he also has to firmly believe that the next time this rock is let go, it will not fall. So lesson three is double think is the silent killer of collaboration. And by this I mean that believing two different contradictory things at the same time is what will destroy collaborating. This is the evil magic, the necromancy, if you will, of collaboration. Why? Because this creates a necromanic facsimile of a trusting environment. But inside this environment, it's dead. And eventually it will be revealed that there's just a skeleton hiding inside of truth's clothing. So let me give you an example. Many years ago, I was on a project that had the opportunity to partner with another department. We were very excited about this, but with that team, we said, hey, we'll work on this together. We're gonna do this. We're all gonna be equal stakeholders. And to help this collaborative effort, we're gonna form a governance committee. We'll all work together. But that team did not know that when we talked about the project, we meant just the application layer. We internally had decided, well, we were footing the bill for the infrastructure and so we would retain sole ownership over that piece. Now, in and of itself, there's no problem with that, but it was never communicated with the other team about the stipulation. And we were telling them all that they would have an equal stake. And while at the same time, we were fully believing that part of that project was still solely our own ownership. So the partnership, it began great. We worked together well, but over the years, anytime something came up related to the infrastructure, we would just move unilaterally and then kind of explain it away when they were wondering why we didn't include them in that process. Eventually that relationship failed and sadly it even ruined some long-term friendships. Double think had destroyed many years of collaborative effort because when double think comes to light, it destroys any trust built and trust is the building block of any collaborative effort. Our next wizard is Alphaba from the musical Wicked. And if you've seen this, you may know right away, she's not necessarily known for being the biggest team player, but we could still learn a lot from Alphaba. She was looked down on for her green skin and had to struggle to succeed, but eventually she's able to make it to Wizard College. And while she's there, she's expecting something very different, but learns that most of the wizards already there care much more about popularity than the terrible plight that's facing sentient animals in the area that they're dealing with. So she's talking to one of her friends and we see that her friend chooses to lie here to fit in with the crowd instead of being willing to deal with the problem. So lesson four is, don't confuse popularity for collaboration. And when I talk about popularity, a lot of times this man expests itself as like a clique, a group of people getting together and forming their insular group. And cliques can seem like collaboration because they're groups of people that work together, but they're built on exclusion instead of acceptance. To me, this is an illusion magic. It looks like collaboration right up until you try to interact with the group, but then you find out it's only an empty and hollow shell. I spoke with Teran Almondares, the lead of the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Initiative about the danger cliques pose to community growth. She summed it up by explaining that communities thrive because they focus on belonging, allowing people to engage or step away as their personal needs dictate. While cliques create a sense of prestige that is reserved for those who are considered part of the in-group. The prestige of the in-group only exists because it is rationed, reserved for a chosen few. This is one of the reasons that personality cults or hero worship can become very toxic to communities. And then we're onto our fifth wizard here, Twilight Sparkle, is a wizard from the TV show known as My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. She's a magical unicorn living in a town full of a bunch of other ponies. But she prefers to be alone reading books. If you study a lot of wizards, you'll find they really love their books. But eventually she learns that, hey, I need friends as well. And this culminates in this important realization that, hey, we've learned friendship isn't always easy, but there's no doubt it's worth fighting for. So our lesson number five is that collaboration is magic. Collaborative teams obviously will outperform dysfunctional teams, but they also outperform lone wolves. At Pantheon, one of our values is collaboration and we define that as no lone wolves. That's what we mean by collaboration. Our goal isn't to be the fastest, it's to go the furthest. But don't take my word that collaboration is better. Dr. Gardner of the Harvard Business Review studied some law firms and how they collaborated and shared these findings. For a firm, the financial benefits of multidisciplinary collaboration are unambiguous. Simply put, the more disciplines that are involved in a client engagement, the greater the annual revenue the client generates. My research clearly shows that professionals who contribute to colleagues' client work sell more services to their clients. So we covered five lessons on collaboration here, but collaboration isn't just a set of tips, it's really about a mindset, an outlook. It's valuing the team over the individual. Now, I'm sad to admit it took me about 10 years of my career to really learn this. I was working on a project and this project began to nosedive. Failed spectacularly and I saw it coming and I was determined to show that the developers were not responsible for this. If you're a developer, you may know, you're at the, well, especially in older workflow processes, you're at the tail end and so if design messes things up, if anybody messes things up in planning, it all gets skewed down to you and the project comes in late. So I had documented every step of the way so that I could prove this was not my fault. I wasn't the reason that this project had failed. So I know I've got this upcoming meeting with my manager, we had this retro to talk about how the project's going and so I come in, I've got all my papers to document what I've been working on, when deliverables happened and how I wasn't at fault at all. I'm so proud of this. I go in and I present this whole thing and say, look, at the end of the day, the problem was design, I knew it was design, that's why this failed, developers are amazing, but he didn't, he wasn't impressed. I thought he was gonna be like, well done, John, you really nailed this, but instead he looked at me very disappointed and he said, John, you're not off the hook, you noticed this problem, you saw it coming and you never let me know. I don't care if you aren't personally responsible, the project is a team effort and you are responsible for saying something. It was then that I realized that I had been working with a lone wolf mindset, I had been focused on what I was doing and something had to change. In the book, Tribal Leadership, they define this moment as realizing that the ego hit of accomplishment is not the same thing as success itself. So I wanna encourage all of you, go out there and crave success, not accomplishment, and you will learn the magic of collaboration. Thank you all. All right, we've got a few extra minutes. I can take if we've got any questions or you could set up for your next meeting. All right, well, if I don't have questions, I tease this at the beginning. I'm looking for more wizards and our starting question here, we'll ask now that we've got more people in the room, is are there space wizards? Are the Jedi, Vinny Jesterite, are they wizards? If you've heard of them, there was a reference to Dune today in Dries's talk, which reminded me of this. So show of hands, who thinks they're a wizard? We've got a couple more takers, but a lot of people who don't. So I respect that choice, but I am in the camp of they're kind of wizards, so. All right, well thank you all for coming out. Let me know your favorite wizard and have a good rest of your drill.