 It's so great to be back in India. I was here in 2020. I was meant to be here as part of Agile India 2020. But if anything happened that year, actually, I was lucky enough earlier in the beginning of March in 2020. I was at Agility Today, another Agile conference in Delhi. And at that time, I decided, oh, OK, I'll go to this conference and I'll stay until, I think, was the 18th of March. Sorry, 18th of March was Agile India. And then my client said, can you please come home and run some workshops with us? And I said, OK, I will. That means I'll fly back to India later in time. And if I hadn't of, I think I would have still been here the whole way through, which would have been fantastic. In fact, I was in Varanasi. I did a five-day retreat with lots of arti, puja, and meditation. That's me. I have studied the Vedas to be a transfer and I am Buddhist. But of course Buddha was Hindu, let's be honest. That's way too much about me. Yes, I'm from Australia. Funny enough, I've been doing Agile since the 1990s. 1990s. How many of you are even alive then, right? I feel so old sometimes. So many of us have not even been around that long. So I'd realised a long time ago, not what I'm talking today, but I realised my mindfulness and meditation practice had a huge influence on Agile innovation, creativity, the Agile mindset we talk a lot about. And there's going to be some more talk about that in this very comprehensive thing I'm very passionate about. And I started realising that the application of mindfulness is whilst it comes back to people thinking of Buddhism or people meditating under a tree or whatever, it's not about that at all. It's just about clarity and awareness. So my talk today is about maintaining curiosity. And it's a fascinating topic because when you think of Agile, you think of IT, you think of technology, we're all about innovation. The innovation doesn't happen like that. Innovation has to come with firstly a curiosity to know more and creativity. So we're going to talk about how we can maintain curiosity to drive innovation. And I've done the worst thing, I haven't got my clicker with me, so I've got to go back to the podium. And just as a bit of bonus, being from Australia, I bring presents, I always bring presents. So I've got a bag full of koalas and kangaroos. I always bring them. So if you answer some questions, I might throw a kangaroo at you. So hopefully I won't hit you. So I've got a few giveaways to help it make it a bit more encourage some of your input as we go through this very short session. I will have a workshop tomorrow, which will be a completely different subject, and there'll be more giveaways for that too. So from this out today, come tomorrow, you never know, you might get more kangaroos then. All right, so let's start with a few definitions. Curiosity and I always think about a cat. And many of you know that saying curiosity killed the cat. You heard this? Well, I say if curiosity killed the cat, I say the cat died nobly. And that's the kind of mindset we want to encourage. If we want innovation, if we don't want to do things the same way, if we want to break the mold, we need to look at it with curiosity. So when we think about curiosity, it's associated with a thirst, a wanting to know more. So a few definitions there, strong desire to learn or know something, leading to inquiry and eager wish to learn about something. And I asked you to just reflect back on the first time you saw a smartphone, whether it was Apple or Android, don't care. The first time you saw a smartphone from your old Nokia's probably, you picked it up and you wanted to learn about it. You tried every button, you pressed every key, you tried everything. You really were like, whoa, I've never seen this before. And I was really into it. I really wanted to try because your mind was open. Your mind was wanting to learn more. Now, how do you view your smartphone? Meh. Yep, I do my stuff on it. It's no longer an object of curiosity because we know about it. Now, this indicates a big problem with curiosity and creativity. Because once we think we know something, the curiosity disappears. It's like, ah. And even if you've got children, which I know many of you have, I have, well, I don't have a child, I have an adult, but when she was a child, she asked me in questions because she'd never seen things before. She's experiencing the world and all the things in it with the first time. Mum, what's that? Why does that happen? Can you, what's that? Because she's got that curiosity and there's this weird thing that happens between eight and 10 years old. You stop being curious because normally our parents tell us to stop asking so many questions. But also we just kind of think we know and we feel embarrassed to kind of relook at something as if it was the first time. So when I think of curiosity and a concept from Buddhism, from meditation, is having that childlike mind of looking at it openly, looking at it as if it was the very first time you saw something. And that looking at it without that sort of prior memory, prior history will possibly open our mind to a more creative way to look at things. So that's one little concept based on the title of this talk. I thought I'd define a few things, curiosity. And then I said a curiosity mindset. So does anybody know what we mean by the word mindset? Thought process, yep. Perspective, yep. Over there, where you perceive things. Yep, yep, yep. Let me grab some. What if I've got kangaroos in this hand? Whoops, whoops, too much there. One over there. Throwing kangaroos around like they're jumping around the place. Oh, oh, good catch. So a mindset is a way of thinking. It's quite often an attitude, a set of attitudes held by someone, a person's way of thinking, a mental attitude, a tendency. And the mindset is all about it influences our actions, it influences our decisions, it influences our way of life. And the mindset almost influences our choices. So it becomes like a way of life, a way of going about in our world. But mindset is also a weird one because it's not a static thing. We've got a mindset at work. If you're a parent, you've got a parent mindset. If you're a daughter or a son, you've got a family mindset. It's kind of, you've got different mindsets depending on the context or the environment that we're talking about. And of course we're here on an agile conference. So we try to often talk about an agile mindset, which is all about that, you know, the principles and the values of the agile manifesto which define that mindset. So these mindsets become our habits and the way we do things. And we all have them. We're all product of our past and that's where the mindset comes from. And that's why I'm changing mindsets for those who have gone through agile. It's a hard thing to change these habits, these ways of life. So I wanna just for one minute have a think about or maybe talk to one person next to you. What is the difference between creativity and innovation? What's the connection? What's the link? What's the difference? Give you one minute to quickly think about it. Innovation and creativity. What's the difference? What's the link? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so to, if I heard you correctly. Let's see, grab it. Innovation is thinking something differently and creativity may or exists, may or could be. Yep. There's a mindset, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Something you bring into the real world. What was that one? Creativity is beyond just the arts. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I love that. Have a kangaroo. Fantastic. So some great ideas out there. So the problem we're talking about creativity and innovation is that there's so much confusion between the two terms. They are related, but they are quite different. So let's look at it. Creativity is all about new. It's all about, let me think. Da, da, da, da, da, da, let me think. The conceiving, I write the words down because I didn't put them on the slide because I've got these definitions from the internet which I'm allowed to do, but that conceiving, that thought conception coming in that we've never had this thought before, we've never seen it before. So it's all about something new. Ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, roles, et cetera, et cetera. The ability to produce original or unusual ideas. So it's not just about art. We always think about, oh, I'm not creative because I can't draw trees. I know the previous session clearly demonstrated we all can. But creativity is not that artistic side. It's the thought that creates a new, unusual, different original thought or way of thinking. Excuse me. So when we're doing a brainstorm and we're asking people to be creative, we're asking them to put as many ideas on the table that are new, different, unthought of, untried, unusual ways of doing or addressing a problem or a solution. So a brainstorm, we might be thinking creatively. We might be asking people to be creative in opening the floodgates to all the different possibilities that might be out there. But of course, innovation doesn't happen without first creation going to your point. They're 100% unique creativity because innovation is the implementation. So we can have all the creative thoughts in the world. But until that turns into an actual product, an action, something going forward to implement that thought into action, we don't have innovation. So that's the link between them. Innovation is the implementation of something new. It's introduced a new product, a new use, a new idea, a new method that's actually now out of someone's head and into action. It's a bit like my poor partner, who's back in Melbourne, so I can talk about him if he won't hear. He's a, I call him the ideas man. Me and ideas, oh, we're gonna do this. I said, now, what are we gonna do with it? Nothing ever happens. Very creative, not so innovative. Not putting any of this into action. So there is quite a big difference between the two. But we need to be creative to implement something innovative. Sound good so far. So these are all definitions. So when we think about being creative, so innovation is not what I'm gonna talk about because we've already decided that innovation doesn't happen until we're creative and then once we've been creative and we select one of those new unusual ideas or ways of doing things, we implement it that are, so that's the easy bit. That's what you do every day. That's our agile team. That's our teams in production in every industry in every way. So firstly, we have to think about how do we think creatively? So what are the barriers to creative thinking? Yep. Lack of motivation, definitely. Absolutely, courage, that fear, absolutely. What about conditioning? Listening? Conditioning, yes. Whoops. It's gonna be lack of safety. You're gonna get a hard one. Careful, that one's not so soft. Yeah, there's a mindset that believes I'm not creative. So I can't. I just don't even try because I'm not creative person. That's right. Yep. Hang on, let me go to my goodie bag. A few of these are connected here. But all sorts of different ones. Oops, I dropped that one. There you go, koalas everywhere. So can you say that? Confidence, yes, absolutely. So there's many, there's many, many, many, many, many. I will be throwing koalas all around. So let's look at some of the barriers. The first one, which is a bit like a few of you have already mentioned, is perceptions. Now when we talk about the word perceptions, we all see the world through our own filters, like if we had colored glasses on. If we put a blue colored glass on, we see everything as blue. But that's obviously using actually the metaphor of glasses, but we'll walk around in the world today with our own filters that are a product of our backgrounds, our beliefs, our conditioning, which is some of what came up before. So depending on our own personal perceptions, that's going to kind of box us in and limit us to what we can or what we'll think because we kind of narrow down that way. The next one is patterns. Now it sounds like an obvious one, but think about your routines. Think about what you do in the morning before work with your kids, with your family. How do you get to work every day? Do you do the same pattern over and over again? And this is how we're made to live in the world. It makes our life easier. We don't have to think. And it's a funny thing to talk about when I've been studying psychology, not that I'm a PhD student or anything silly like that, it's just a bit of personal fun. I do for my own personal benefit, but our brain is actually super lazy. Explains a lot in my mind, but anyway, for me, but our mind does not want to have to rehash things each time. So patterns are useful. It means that I can just like templates, right? How many of you use templates at work? It's a weird sort of pattern. It's a lousy, lazy. I don't have to remember all the things I need to put in that document because all the headings, oh, that's what I have to put those in. So these are patterns that we follow. And so once again, we follow the pattern. Why be creative? We don't need to, right? And we're all conditioned to follow patterns and we all do it. A little challenge for you, for this one. When you're going home from work, maybe not here, because this is not somewhere maybe you typically come to. The next time you're going either to or from work, take a different street. Go one block over, just try it. I mean, we are in Bangalore and there's this thing called traffic. Wow, I take videos and send it home and people are like, whoa, what's going on? But anyway, if you can, just challenge yourself. Take that next street this way or that way, try a different route. Don't do the same, same. But anyway, that's just my pattern challenge for you. Apparently stress has a bit of a barrier. When we are stressed, it's not the time to think creatively. It's the time to look after yourself. When we're stressed, we're thinking, I have to just get through it, have to meet the deadline, have to do this thing. It's not the time to start thinking about, oh, how else could I do this? It's just like, get it done. So stress is gonna absolutely shut us down from being creative. And there's a lot of science behind this one. For those who are interested in that kind of study, there's been studies over and over again on humans and mice of different stress responses on creativity and just little things like a poor little mouse. I feel so sorry for them. They get so tortured. They put a poor little mouse under stress and then give them a puzzle versus a mouse that's got no stress and gives them a puzzle. It's so obvious, the big difference that they can solve problems when they're not under stress. So this is something that's gonna be absolutely, if you are in a stressful environment, it's gonna be impacting you and your team's ability to be creative. The next one, expectations. Now this could be a really interesting one because it can be from yourself and could be from external. You might have expectations where your stakeholders, your managers, your clients, your customers about stuff being done now. And there's this problem with creativity and innovation. Because they're new, they're untried. How can you set a deadline on that? We don't know yet. How, you know, you're five minutes to be creative. All the other thing is that we have the expectation that we are gonna be creative in a certain way and there's this kind of expectation that, oh, I wanna be creative myself. So that we expect that we can be creative immediately at the drop of a hat. We can say, be creative and voila. Doesn't happen that way usually. Gonna come to some of these solutions in a moment. The next one up there, no one has this. Just gonna look around the room. Can see a couple. Distractions, right? The number one most distracting thing that you've all, most of you, some of you have in your hands is that wonderful cell phone, mobile phone and everything else. Notifications, social media, people around us. We've got noise happening there. There's what's happening next door. Who's going, doing what? And the biggest distraction is not actually what's in your hands and on the table. It's actually what's in between your ears. Our own thoughts are really distracting as well. When is she gonna finish? When is she gonna get to the point? What's for dinner later? Oh, this morning the traffic was so bad. So we are distracted and more and more, I think these days than we ever have been, distractions are harder to resist and it's become acceptable that, oh, sorry, I was distracted. You know, it's like, well, just concentrate, get with it. So actually when we're distracted and when we're not focusing on things, that's gonna prevent us being creative because we're so busy off on tangents doing this, that and the other thing. The judgmental part, I think someone also come up with this. We're gonna be, we're too judgmental. That's a ridiculous idea. That's not doable. We pre-judge, we say it's not feasible. We say it's not appropriate. We judge ourselves and we shut ourselves down. As soon as we judge or other people judge us, we know it, you just shut down. So that's gonna be a huge barrier. These are all the ones we have. Fear, the fear of looking stupid. Another one someone said, I think over here, the fear of not being able to be wrong. The fear of it looks dumb. I sound silly. Certainly just coming up here and talking at a conference, there used to be a lot of fear about what do people say. I'm like, look, I know what I wanna say. It may not be exactly how I rehearsed it all these times, but fear is a massive barrier to creativity, especially in teens. Just thinking of the session before about psychological safety for those who were in that excellent session. Maybe it can be a big barrier, because if you're too scared to stay up, because the rest of your team are gonna look at you and say, come forth. Sometimes you have to just absolutely dispel fear and create that safe environment. Negativity, another one, it can't be done. We can't do that. We have to do it this way. Okay, there's projects out there that don't need creativity and innovation. We've been on those projects, compliance. We just have to follow along. So that's great, but when we're trying to be creative and there's a lot of negativity in the room as to whether we could, should, or would do these things, that's gonna absolutely shut you down as well. Time pressures, be creative now, back to this again. If we've got deadlines, we're gonna be too busy. Again, the stress we'll build up to the deadline all becomes a whole negative cycle there. And habits, a habit of doing things a certain way. Now, it's a little bit like patterns. Patterns are like the template view, but we do get habitualized into, not just ourselves, but our organization. And it's kind of like this fixedness. Fixed, you can't do anything outside this certain way. This is the way we always do things. That's thwotty, have you ever heard? This is how we always do it, thwdifotty. So that habitual way of doing things. Oh, why do we do it this way? Why do we stand up at 10 o'clock? I don't know, we always do it that way. Becomes this kind of habit, but that then shuts down creativity because it's the same sort of thing again. And the lack of curiosity. I know it all, so I don't need to ask questions. So once again, going back to the first time you've seen a phone, imagine just looking at your phone as if you've never seen it before and trying to look at it with that child-like mind of being curious, a software problem or an engineering problem or a business problem that's presented to you like, oh, that same old customer with the same old problem, the same old stakeholder with the same old complaint. And then we don't get curious about really leaning into it and finding out about it and really saying, imagine that everything was possible. Imagine I've never heard about this stuff before. What would I ask? What would I want to find out? What would be that thirst for knowledge? And that's going to help us be creative because by leaning into it and being more curious, it'll probably by definition enable more information to come up that might impact the ability for us to be creative in the first place. So being creative is really about creating space and not just physical space, of course. It does help if you've got like lots of tools such as whiteboards and markers and pens and sticky notes, my favorite. So we've got to create some space to be creative and that's within our teams and within ourselves too. Whether it's a personal problem or a team-based problem, we've got to create the space for the new and that space will come without deadlines and expectations. So we've got to break these habits, break the old. We've got to be thinking about some concepts. Creativity is not what you are, it's what you do. Oh, I'm not a creative person. Well, you're all creative people. You've all got here today with shoes on and clothes on and all that stuff that takes a bit of creativity. What am I wearing today? How do I get here today? There's some sort of stuff going on there. Letting go, now this is the hard one, this is what I'm going to come back to the most. Letting go of those perceptions, opinions, bias and habit, that's the hard part. And most importantly is that inner voice, that inner voice that's so mischievous and 90% of the time that inner voice is criticizing us. That inner voice is telling us, oh, that sounds dumb, that's no good, you're no good, whatever it might be. So we've got to be able to do that to break through that creativity barrier, to silence that inner voice and say, actually, I can do this, I can be creative or just turn around. We have to use imagination. Once again, that means all of those things, we have to open our mind. We have to think about new possibilities. We have to say everything's okay on the table, no bad ideas, no judgments, no analysis, no discussion yet. Let's be imaginative, if we could have no barriers, no time, no money, no rules, what could we do? So we've got to open the doors and allow it to come in. And again, it's all about breaking old ways of thinking and seeing things differently. Importantly, which I'm also going to come back to is to settling the mind. To allow your mind to incubate, it's a weird word, incubate these ideas. When our mind is so busy and distracted and stressed, we're not going to be creative. So we have to be able to settle that mind and allow that to come to the conditions to ripen so we can be more creative and breaking those old thinking habits. So this is a bit of a summary of how we need to start thinking about being creative and removing those barriers. None of them are easy. Worst of all, and going further to this, is this concept of cognitive bias. Has anybody heard this term before? There's a lot of work done on this particular thing. So it's a thinking error, and I just wanted to quickly say it's unintentional. It's not something we deliberately do. It's unconscious, unintentional, and it's a way that we've learned to cope in the world from our past, from our backgrounds, from our experiences, et cetera, et cetera. It's automatic. It's a part of our brain right down deep that's not really that conscious at all. It's kind of in that reptilian brain people call it. So when we talk about cognitive bias, a couple of the definitions there, the way a person understands events, facts, and other people, based on their own particular set of beliefs, experiences that may not be reasonable or accurate. So when we've got cognitive bias, and we're gonna talk through some of the common ones, when we've got these cognitive biases, they're quite unconscious, as I mentioned, and they may be completely irrational. Unfounded, it's just come from that background. A system of pattern of deviation from the norm or rational judgment, we create our own reality. We do create our own invert reality. So cognitive bias is actually our brains, again, being lazy in a nice possible way, because if we think about all the stimulation around us, all the sight, sound, smells, and feelings right now, if you could just think about every single one that you can see or hear, think about how much, if you're paying attention to every single one of those, you'd be overwhelmed. It's overwhelming for us to take in all the stimulus that we get in our day-to-day lives. So the brain figures out how to prioritize what it doesn't, doesn't pay attention to. So cognitive bias is a kind of coming from that ability for the brain to kind of hone in on what it will or won't kind of bring into play, rather than everything. You know, just think about all the lights and all the sounds, all the feelings. So it's a way that we process information, and it's all, everybody's got them, every single one of them. Unless you're a really, really like one-year-old, and even then they start getting them, they say, well, the time that you're seven, you've got most of them in place, and then they just get worse, anyhow. So cognitive bias is a little bit like the stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are in the world, who we are at work, who we are in family situations, and all that sort of stuff, and it's a product of all those inputs. My opinions, what I like, what I dislike, what I'm neutral about, my past, what have I done in the past? If I've had a very tough past experience with perhaps family drama, that past experience is gonna also influence how I think about things. My filters, as I mentioned, my beliefs. Now, your beliefs are completely your choice. Remember that, and people think, oh, oh, oh, oh. No, well, I mean, of course, there's beliefs in every spectrum of our human experience. Also, our actual knowledge, what we've learned through school and education, the actual knowledge we have, because they're gonna have an influence, and of course, what we've learned and what we haven't learned can also be a case of it, and of course, my cognitive bias. These are all the way, when we're talking about that inner voice that we all have, it's come from all of these points of view. So that inner voice is constantly there, basically preventing you, to some extent, being that creative person that you really want to be. Now, this is on Wikipedia, freely available, and this is an amazing resource, if you're really interested in learning more, because you can see that there are hundreds. You've got those major categories, minor categories, and then individual cognitive biases. I think there's about 203. Each of those little spokes is a cognitive bias. On Wikipedia, when you bring this up, you can actually click on each of them and find out about that particular cognitive bias. There's so many of them. Not everybody has all of them, thankfully. So let's look at a few of the most common ones. I'm just gonna double check my time, because I think I'm doing all right, but I never can tell these things. Whoa, no, I'm not. Okay, some common ones. Confirmation bias. Confirming pre-existing ideas. It's a little bit like, if I think a particular solution, say if I want to implement JIRA for my agile team. So I'm gonna talk to people about it, and I will hear nothing unless it's about JIRA being a good thing. Everything else will just filter away. So basically, this cognitive bias is filtering out everything that does not meet my pre-existing decision or idea. We've all done it. The bandwagon, we've all done this one. Everybody else is doing it, so we must do it too. Everybody's going over there and going to that restaurant, so we'll go too. It must be because it's very good. Everyone else is doing it. So it's a cognitive bias of, well, if no one's there, maybe I shouldn't do it, I'll go where everybody else is. That herd mentality, that group think. And that's the same when we're trying to be creative as well. We sort of jump on what is the rest of the team said. Framing, the way decision-making is based on the way the data is presented rather than facts. Now, I'm not gonna name any names, but there are some people out there that speak at conferences, not me, but other people, that they go at these beautiful presentations and they've got graphics and sound and they've got jokes and they've got all these wonderful things, lots and lots of entertainment. And so you're gonna believe them, oh, that was fantastic, but there's no facts. So they might be presenting all sorts of wrong things in an entertaining or amusing way, and you're gonna go, well, that was amazing. And you kind of latch onto it, even though the content was not so much interesting. And you probably know people like that in your own workplace. I find that you'll know that person. I'm not gonna ask you to say who they are, but you'll know that person. How about the, I knew that. Yep, yep, I knew that. So after we've got a solution, say if you've been doing some testing and then something's broken and you've brought it into the branch and you kind of ran a regression script and it broke something else, it's like, I knew that was gonna happen. I could have told you that, but you don't say that until after the fact. You know that team member too, right? Not nor, it's usually a developer, let's be honest. Overconfidence. I just watched a YouTube video showing me how to repair my wall when I've got a great big water leak. I just watched it, they did it on YouTube. It can't be that hard. I can do that. That overconfidence. Oh, I can service my own car. If they just did it, it's not that hard. Just a bit of a spanner here. No, I can do that. Yeah. Have to learn what you're good at actually and what you think you're good at and try to distinguish between the two. The halo effect. Now this one's a classic one I've been guilty of over and over again. I had an amazing, amazing manager. Her name was Christine. She was absolutely awesome. I found her to be my best boss, but it was interesting. I spoke to another person, another stakeholder in the organization, and she was telling me how much of a, oh, which? Notice the W there. This Christine was, and I'm just thinking, how could that be? And I was quite kind of, when I thought about it later, I thought as my manager, interested in my personal growth and me, she was amazing. But to that person, she was quite rude. And I didn't realize that, when I think about it for me, I think she's always gonna be perfect in all circumstances, but it's not the case. In this circumstance, yes. In that circumstance, maybe not so much. So that positive trait does not always apply in every circumstance. Making decisions on first impressions, jumping to conclusions. So I see something, and I just go, wow, that's beautiful. And I'll never go back on that decision. Maybe I think that the first time I saw a Tesla, for example. I thought they were such an amazing electric car, but actually, they're not as technology as some of the Toyotas out there, for example. Anyhow. Self-serving, this is another classic one. When I've done something good, it's because of my skill, my education, my background, my knowledge. I'm so good at this. I've done everything positive, and it's because of that. But when I've stuffed up, oh, that was bad luck. That was somebody else's fault. Wasn't me, somebody else. So we attribute that way. So outcomes is best on luck. This one is stereotypes. So everybody thinks everyone from IT are just nerdy types with real technical brains. The amount of times I've been asked to fix a router, and I'm like, no, I can't do that, just because I'm in IT. And they think, as soon as you say you're from IT, oh, you can fix my printer, you can fix this. It's like, no, IT's like this big, but there's this perception that IT people can, anything to do with something with a dashboard on it, we can fix this. It's not gonna be the case. And the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is an interesting one, is that people with low skill are overconfident about their ability, and people with high skill actually underplay their ability. I don't think as a trainer, because I do train, I don't think I'm a particularly great trainer. So I underplay it, and I know other people who think they're amazing trainers and they're just like, so anyhow. So these are 10 common, but there's 200 plus different ones. These are just the most common I've picked out for us to talk about. So how do we address some of these problems? And my answer, of course, is gonna be around mindfulness. Now this is not gonna be a big mindfulness session because I have running out of time, but mindfulness for me is synonymous with the word awareness. It's not about sitting cross-legged in the lowest position for hours on end, chanting all sorts of mantras and stuff like that. Though I do that stuff, but that's not what mindfulness is. Mindfulness is a concept of awareness, self-awareness and other awareness, what's happening in the here and now. So I challenge you just now, what can you hear, see and feel just quickly? What three things can you hear, see and feel right around you now? So that's mindfulness, there you go. You've just did a mindfulness practice. Mindfulness practice is not about endless meditation. Just coming to that point, I just asked you to do, and just to stop your thought flow and just go, oh, what can I see? What can I hear? What can I feel? And that's what mindfulness is about. And it's interesting that we're very rarely, fully aware of what's happening all around us. Have you ever had that experience when you've arrived home after driving and you get in the gate and you think, well, I don't remember driving. Did I have a smash? Did I run over a pedestrian? Because we're so busy mindlessly thinking. So we're not aware. So awareness is that ability to actually come to attention. And again, awareness without those perceptions, noticing without reactions, dropping those stories that we tell ourselves. So first thing is to come to aware of what are the stories that I'm telling myself and then we bring them to the surface and by bringing them to the surface by definition, we can then drop them. But if we don't bring them to the surface, we don't bring those cognitive biases to the surface. If we don't bring all those problems with our affecting our creativity, if we don't bring them up to the surface, there's no way for us to drop them to allow us to get creative, to be allow those different thought processes to arise. Awareness and mindfulness is also about a careful attention. And the analogy I use, and you've all got 100% control over your attention. Every single last one of you has 100% control over your attention. No matter what you say, you can choose to look at your phone or you choose not to. That's within your own discretion. I used the analogy of imagine we walked into this room and it was pitch dark, couldn't see a thing, but we had a flashlight in our hands. We turn on the flashlight and then we can move the beam of light to illuminate any part of the room. Well, that flashlight is like your attention. You can choose where you direct it. Is it directed to your inner thoughts? Are you listening to me? Are you perhaps writing notes and maybe on your phone, whatever it is? Your attention is 100% within your control. And half the time we don't know what our attention's on because we are mind drifting, which is lovely, but then we go, hang on, I meant to be doing this stuff. And of course it doesn't happen. So deliberate attention is part of mindfulness. Knowing where your attention is, knowing where your attention should be and then directing your attention to where you want it to be and keeping it there. And that's an ongoing process of mindfulness. And of course meditation builds on that as well. And of course it's about being open and present to anything and everything. So we stop shutting ourselves down. So mindfulness is a massive tool that we can use to combat these cognitive biases, all those perceptions and all those barriers to creativity that I talked about before. And I'm gonna do this in two seconds, even though I've run out of time, is it's a carefulness with our mind. It's a carefulness with our thoughts. It's a carefulness of how we go about it. So being curious, we have to ask lots of questions. I'm gonna go through this in no big amount of detail because I've been wound up by the back of the front. So when we're talking about mindfulness and awareness and we're talking about curiosity and creativity, it means we've got to ask more questions. More questions. Lots and lots of kinds of questions. So just as a quick summary on the wall, these are the kinds of questions. Open, closed, confirmation, probing and clarification. And there's some examples of the kinds of ways you should start those questions. So when we're talking about being curious, it means remembering being a child. Think of your own child asking you, mom, why, dad, why, why, why, why, when, how, why, how come? Going back into that inner child to ask a million questions as if you'd never seen stuff before. And that's what we're trying to get to and asking that at work. Imagine I knew nothing about this system. Imagine I knew nothing about that business process. Imagine I knew nothing about that. Imagine that. What questions would you ask? And be bold enough to say, look, I know this sounds silly, but can we just pretend we know nothing? Explain it again for me. And it's amazing how that can lead to new information. When we think of the questioning life cycle, we have to think about it. And this is from the Baboff and the IIBA, this is analysis manual. We have to open and explore an idea fully by probing deeper and clarifying and bringing more information to life and then confirm and validate. And we go through these cycles of questioning where it's not just one question, one answer, but we've actually got to be mindful and aware so that we can use previous answers to questions as the topic for further questionings to go deeper, to bring out that curious mindset to say, what else is here that I have to explore? Going into that deeper level of clarifying, probing for detail, rather than just accepting what's on the surface. No matter if you're a business analyst, a project manager, or an engineer, this is what we need to be thinking about. How can I go beyond what's on the surface with my first questions? And this for me is my little personal 360 degree questioning tool. So this is my ultimate curiosity and how to really bug your stakeholders. So we ask people about a want, a need, a requirement, something that's happening, and we start off with the why, the five whys. Why is that needed? Why else? What else could be possible? Why, what could happen? Then how would you know? Asking for information, how it would be met. What if the need is met or unmet and then go probing deeper into nouns and verbs? All the nouns that you hear, question them even further. Dig down that next level. Go further, be curious. And through that curiosity, you might find information that will lead you to a more creative answer. So I don't think I've got time for questions. I'm certainly around. The next speaker will set up. There is a few minutes between this session and the next sessions. I'm certainly going to be around at the front here if anybody wants to come up and talk to me and ask me questions. I hope this has been a useful way to get you thinking about how can you be more curious and that curiosity leading to creativity and then that creativity leading to hopefully that next big innovative breakthrough. Thank you again. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn and connect with me. I'm on no other social media because my attention is too precious to me. Thank you very much.