 Hello. Hello, Europe. Wow, this is a long walk. Jenny was right yesterday. Well, thank you very much for the introduction. Thank you very much for coming out today. So as she's already said all of this, I won't repeat it, except if you want to get my slides and anything else about me, you can go to mcduane.com, mcduane.com, and there is my stuff. And again, she's already given a lovely plug for Pantheon, the website management platform. I have some colleagues here. Those are their pictures, Drew and Matt and Andrew. If you see them, bother them. They will appreciate it. Bother me later about this. Happy to talk to you about any kind of workflow, any kind of scale for your websites. That's who I am. I always like to know who I'm talking to, and I know there's a lot of you. So just on the count of three, yell out your name. One, two, three. Excellent. And where do you work? One, two, three. And what city are you from? One, two, three. Thank you. I think I got all of that. But also, who here is a professional developer who spends most of their time who builds websites but does not maintain them? Okay, this guy, he's honest. And who maintains websites but does not build them? Okay, go look at that guy because he needs your help or you need his help. All right, so why am I talking about improv at a word camp? I think it boils down to this. Very simply, we must think on our feet. We cannot predict everything that can possibly happen. We can't script every scenario. We must react in the moment to what's going on. That's why I think it boils down to this one central point. But I'm always curious. Why did you come to a talk about improv at a word camp? Anybody just in the front section so I can hear you, but anybody? Thank you. I got some friends in the front row. Any other thoughts? What's that? It will be entertaining, hopefully. Any other? Curiosity, that's the most common answer I get when I ask this question. Why I personally am giving this talk is really, as she's already said it, I saw so many similarities. And it really comes down to this similarity. And this is the only slide I'll read for Batem. Creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known. Creativity is a state that allows us to touch the unknown and bring it into the phenomenal world to make the invisible visible. The unknown is a territory that holds all possibilities until it is revealed. The actor revealing that is creativity. And if that doesn't describe what web developers do, I don't know what else does. We take ideas on the back of napkins that someone that does not know how a server works will explain to us, I want this and this and this. And we'll transform that into JavaScript, into PHP, into WordPress, and make their dreams come true. But specifically, I saw some very specific parallels between the two worlds. Having done improv for as long as I have, I started to realize that there are best practices of improv. Things like yes and and things we'll talk about the rest of this talk. There are stretched over these frameworks, these formats that you get to do, the Herald, the La Ronde, I'll talk about more later. But the same way that we take don't repeat yourself or code of poetry, and stretch it over PHP, stretch it over LAMP stacks. The end product must be enjoyable, regardless of how it's made. But if you've ever seen a website that's so well designed, you're like, that is just simply beautiful. You'll appreciate it as a developer, but that end user who knows nothing about the technology will also find it beautiful. Same is true of the stage craft. Every single effort is unique, even if it's just content unique, it's very unique. You have to cooperate, even if you're working by yourself, you have to cooperate with the rest of the open source world. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants, everyone here. And at the end of it, we all love to party. After three drinks, you cannot tell a WordPress developer from a Drupal developer from a Joomla developer. And after four drinks, you can't tell the difference between anyone, no matter what they do for a living. All right, so the rest of this talk will work as this. I'm going to go over seven key improv principles and how they relate to the stage craft and how I see them applied to the development process. And then we'll have some fun. I'll ask for a few participants. We'll do something fun up here. So this is the one piece that almost everyone knows about improv. It's the thing you hear repeatedly out there. Many blogs have been written about it. In fact, I've written a blog series to support this talk, and I just copy pasted from other people's blogs about this topic of yes and, agreeing to an idea and adding additional information on top of it to build a world. I'm using Tina Fey here because she wrote this wonderful book called Bossy Pants. And in it, she uses this example of the Christmas gun. So let's imagine for a second that there are two performers on stage. And the first performer comes up and holds his hand like this and says, stick him up. And the second performer says, that's not a gun. He's destroyed the scene. There's nothing to do. There's nowhere to go. You need to start all over from there. And if he says, stick him up. And the second player says, OK. He's added no new information. He's acknowledged that, yes, there's a gun, but he's done nothing to further the cause, further the scene, to carry the idea forward. But if he says, stick him up. He says, oh, Harold, put down your Christmas gun. You're always waving it around. What the heck's a Christmas gun? Now we can unpack that. What does that mean? We know that this person is Harold now. We know that he's always waving a gun around. There's so much information. Simply because he said, yes, I agree with your idea, and I'm going to add to it. So for development, am I saying say yes to every crazy idea a client has? No, absolutely not. I'm saying acknowledge every idea that comes out. And instead of saying no, add more information to lead the conversation in the direction you want to go. For instance, if you have a client call you and say, I would like a picture of my dog at the top of every single web page, every single page on my site, and they sell shoes or something like that. And I want the background to be neon green. That's a terrible idea. And if you just say no, I'm not going to do that, what is your client going to do? They're going to fight you. Human beings do not like to hear the word no. We hate it. We get defensive. It's our idea. We have to protect it. Our egos are all fragile. If instead you say, yes, I hear what you're saying, a dog at the top, neon green, and we need to scope that, and we need to decide what color green specifically, and we need to decide which picture of your dog, and when can you schedule three hours with me? And it's paid discovery, by the way. Well, what can the client do? You've acknowledged their idea. But do they really want to do it? It buys you time, if nothing else. Even when you're working with your colleagues, when you're collaborating on any projects, when someone says a terrible idea, if you just say no, that's a terrible idea, well, you've hurt their feelings, and they need to be defensive. They need to guard their idea. If you say, yes, we could do that, and we need to do the research to back it up, and we need to flesh it out, and we need to scope it, and we need to do these things. You've acknowledged it, and you've given yourself time to maybe talk them out of it, or show them through research that it's not the best of ideas without that knee-jerk reaction and fight. Moving on, second point. Starting with the obvious. In improv, we are building an entire world, an entire story, an entire show from nothing. We're getting on stage. Maybe you get a suggestion from the audience, and we build a whole world from there. But we have to start somewhere. Now, I watched a lot of improvisational comedy, improvisational theater, and there's this phenomenon that happens where people think the scene does not start until they have found the scene. So there will be two players on stage milling about doing something, saying lines of dialogue, and eventually it catches, and they're like, oh, this is the scene, this is what we're doing. But all the information before gets thrown out. They didn't start with the obvious. The best shows, there's two performers in Chicago, TJ and Dave, best shows I've ever seen. They start completely neutral. They start looking at each other, and they start from the information that is there. The information that is clearly on stage. The same way the audience sees those performers. So I'm standing like this, and my partner is standing in another position. This means something. What does this mean? What does this mean to them? And we can build from that world. We can build from that information and start from the obvious thing. So the audience and the performers are all on the same page, at the same place, with the same information. How does this apply to development? Starting with the obvious means starting from what's obvious to your client, not what is obvious to you. Their reality is a very long history, other ideas, previous projects that have failed or succeeded, not just the discovery you've done for this particular point project. Stepping back and seeing, well, have they ever done a project like this before? Have you liked the developers you've worked with? Have you ever been satisfied with a project? It's a good place to start. You're working with internal projects, if you're working with a team. Stepping back and saying, well, not just the problem, the point we're trying to fix, but what is the obvious thing to my coworkers? What is the obvious thing to the company? What is the obvious thing to the project? Stepping back and realizing it's not your obvious, it is the obvious. Active listening is kind of a terrible term because it implies that you're only listening, which is the act of hearing, hearing sound waves and interpreting them. It really means actively engaging in the moment. Again, I'll bring up TJ and Dave for the stage craft. They start from completely neutral, so everything they do is completely absorbing what the other player is doing and completely reflecting and building off of that information. They're seeing how are their eyebrows, how are their feet, how are their hands, at what tone do they say something? For instance, if we start a scene and I say, patch me that pitcher of milk versus pass the pitcher of milk, versus oh, honey, would you be so kind as to lovely pass me the pitcher of milk? Those are three completely different scenes starts. Those are three completely different ideas, even though it's the exact same words, the exact same information. There is another, I'll get to them in a minute, but another improv guru in the world, Del Close, who said we must behave on stage as if we are paranoid schizophrenics, where we see hidden meaning behind every word and see what the intention is. This is very, very true in any client or other work you're doing as a developer. What is making them want to do this project? What parts get them excited? If you're doing everything over email and Slack, you're missing the entire story. Only 7% of communication is language or is the words themselves. Everything else is body language, intonation. Let's not forget, human beings have been communicating for well over 10,000 years, maybe 100,000 years. We've only had language, what is the way we think of language, for maybe 3,000, maybe 6,000, maybe, maybe 10,000, who knows. But a very small time compared to all of evolution. So, what I'm saying is get in front of the person that you're working with and they're working for. Don't rely on email or Slack. That's a great way to pass around links. It's a great way to change an image from your computer to this computer. It's a terrible way to understand what they want. When you're in a room with someone, you can hear what makes them nervous. You can hear what parts they're excited about and you can dig into those parts and make sure that they're going to be very happy and very satisfied overall. Or relieve those fears early on. So, if you can't do a face-to-face meeting, sometimes you just can't. There is Skype, there is Zoom, there is GoToMeeting. There are 1,000 tools now. There's no excuse. If you're not doing discovery, if you're not doing communication face-to-face where you can see their eyes, you're not really communicating. You need to actively listen to them. I'm not a gentleman in the world, but one of my Improv teachers, John Remak, said the best advice I'd ever gotten in all of Improv to this day still, start your scenes happy, healthy, and well. Or healthy, happy, and well. Improv has this notion of conflict where we expect that two characters will in some point be in a disagreement. There will be a point of contention that we need to get past, that we need to work through. Do we start from there? It's boring. Now imagine you are in a cafe and all of a sudden you hear two people fighting about something. It's distressing because, you know, none of the context, you know, you don't know who to root for, you don't know who you want to win, you don't even know what they're fighting about. I've seen so many Improv scenes that have started out with a disagreement. And then we don't even know who the characters are. We don't know if we like them. We support. If instead we start with two characters that like each other a lot, that are on the same side, then they can go on an adventure. Maybe they'll disagree along the way. Maybe they will have a fight at some point, but then we'll get to know them. We'll get to appreciate them. Now how does this apply to development? I will admit, this is the point that is the loosest of all the connections. But I am from San Francisco and I'm a hippie. So it's more about taking care of yourself. I'll ask a question now to you. Who here writes better code when you are angry? That guy. Always somebody in the crowd. And who here writes better code when you're feeling miserable, just sick and exhausted, even though that's how most of us write code? Exactly. We all know this. We all know this in our hearts. It's true. But how many of us have ever written or designed something while we're angry or very, very tired and sick? Yes, we all have. We've all been there. We've all had to go to work. We've all had to get the project done. Take care of yourself. If you're angry, go for a walk. If you need to resolve something with your coworkers before you work actively on a project or start a project, make sure you're doing that. Start the day. Happy, healthy, well. Whatever it does for you. I recommend meditation. I recommend mindfulness. There's various mindfulness training apps out there in the world. But make sure you're centered on your... centered and happy and healthy and well as you're working. You'll make for much, much better code, much better projects. So, very quick side note. This is one of Darwin's most famous quotes. If you just look up Darwin quote, you'll see this a lot. He never said this. 1963, Leon S. Megason said this in a speech. Paraphrasing. And for whatever reason, it's known as the most famous Darwin quote. So, it's a reminder that the thing you might end up being the most famous for might not be something you actually did. Don't take it personally. Anyway, back on point. In improv, we have these formats. There is a format, the Laurent, which is the round where you have two character scenes where people swap in and out one at a time. The Harold, the mother of all improv forms, long-form improv forms, short-form games. There's many things you need to go to an improv show. You can see a variation on a lot of these forms. And they're great for setting things in motion, for giving a little bit of structure to the performer so they know what to do generally. If they're lost, they can go back to the form. The problem with them is many improvisers adhere to them no matter what, especially beginning improvisers. They will get out and you will see them in their heads. You'll see them completely focused on, I need to do this, and now I need to do this, and now I need to do this, and they're very worried that that's the only way to do it. And as soon as an improviser on stage is in their head and thinking and having a hard time, well, the audience has compassion. The audience wants them to have a good time and they start worrying. They start getting anxious. They start getting nervous. We forget sometimes on stage as performers that we're there for you, the audience. You are just as important as any other performers on the stage. And we need to serve you. We need to serve the piece we are doing. The best shows I have ever done didn't follow a form at all. We started following a form, but within a few minutes we realized that's not what this audience needs. We need to serve them. So let's go with what they are enjoying. And those are the best shows for development. We have these wonderful things called best practices, which are a mixed bag. I have a friend in the Drupal community, Tim Erickson from Minneapolis, St. Paul. And he says, we say best practices, and what we really mean are very good idea practices based on the information we have. But that's a lot of words, so we shorten it to best practice. But the problem with best practice is that that means there's a one specific right way, a best way to do it, versus this is a good idea way based on my information. There can be a lot of good ideas, but only one best. Now I pick on this next example a lot, but I'm a huge fan of two-factor authentication. Who uses two-factor authentication for all of their things? Good for you. For everyone else, look into it. It's very much worth it. Good security practices. But if you force that standard on everything you do, your end clients, say your client wants a nice blog about their cat, for whatever reason. And you force, all right, everything you do is going to require two-factor authentication. At some point, they're going to either figure out how to get around it or leave you and go to someone else that will actually do the project in a way that supports them, the customer. I'm not saying best practices are bad. There's a reason we call them best practices. But remember, sometimes we need to serve the piece. We need to serve the bigger picture, not just here's the set of standards that I am adhering to. Maybe another technology is the right decision. Maybe an integration with another tool is a better decision, even though you've never done it that way. One of my colleagues, Michelle Cresci, says it very elegantly. The best developers have very strong opinions held loosely. Be ready to change if it comes down to it. Here's Del Close. Your job as an improviser is always to make the other player look good. There is an award in Chicago called the Jeff Award. And the Jeff Award is given to the best improviser of the year by polls and their colleagues. And the first person who ever won it got on stage and said, well, I guess I wasn't doing my job, thank you, and sat down. Because our job is to make the other players look amazing. Because if they look amazing, and then they make us look amazing, everyone looks amazing, everything's having a good time, and the audience enjoys that. Well, who are the other players as a developer? I think there are a couple. First is your end user. You should strive to make your end users look like geniuses. If your UX makes them have to stop and think, you have done something wrong. You should be able to go through an interface seamlessly. Make them feel like they're geniuses, even if they've never seen it before. But the other, I think, more important player to make look good is the developer who comes next. This is support, and this is anyone that will build on top of your code. Your comments and your code and your support documentation. Think about not the next generation, not the generation after that, but three years from now, someone's still using that version in the wild, and someone needs to look something up. If they can look like a genius in that moment, they're going to do better, their clients are going to like them better, and ultimately, you're going to look better by making them look better. And finally, the last point, before we move on to more fun things, is accepting failure. I almost called this embracing failure. That's what we call it an improv. There are no mistakes in improv, not at all. There are simply happy accidents that you can get information from. You embrace the accident, you embrace the mistakes. Well, we can do that in improv because we have the safety of a stage. If I go like that a bunch of times and my colleague falls down, no one thinks he died. You know, he on stage, his character fell down. There's a safety to it. Well, in development, we also have stage. If you're doing everything in a live production environment, of course, failure is terrible. It has a lot of consequences. There's things you'll have to do to get back from that failure. But if you have the safety of a stage, the safety of a development environment, the safety of a stage environment, go nuts. Why not just update all? If you're using WPCLI, just like all. It might work. It might not, but, yeah, this guy's done it. But if it does work, well, you've saved a lot of time. And if you do it in a safe environment and it works, I'll then just push that to production. The other part is being afraid to fail. And sometimes we will whiteboard things for far too long before we'll just get up and try it. One of my clients a few years ago when I was from Pantheon said that they spent three days going back and forth on the benefits of trying this thing on our platform. And at the end, it took them 10 minutes and they were thrilled with the results. And I'll never forget that story. I said, I can't believe we wasted that much time if we had just tried it. And if it had failed, accepted that instead of worrying and preparing for a failure that never came. So don't waste your time preparing for failures that won't show up because they might not. They might, but protect yourself as well. All right. Now normally, I would have everyone stand up and participate in this. But unfortunately, I am limited in time today and there's a lot of you and it would get very, very loud in here. So what I'm going to ask for is a few volunteers to do a few exercises with me up here on stage. No, about three, five people? Anyone. You already know who you are. Come on down. Yes. Brave. Yes. Got another one. Yes, yes. And yes, we'll call it at that. I don't need any more after you. So perfect. Unless you really wanted to, if you really wanted to. Hello. We have a secondary mic here. Is this live? What's your name? Kevin. I'm Karasai. I'm Marilyn. Bogdan. Okay. So I'm going to give this to you. And we're all going to have to speak very loud except for me. You'll hold it up like this because you're all going to aim that way. And we're going to play a game called I Love. I Love works like this. It is very simple. You're simply going to say something you love. That's it. And the sentence will just start with I love. I love Word Camp Europe. And then whatever order. I love beer. He loves beer. He loves wine. I love design. Love design. I love clothing. Love bowling. I love vegetarian food. I love terminal stuff. I love CLIs. I love pizzas. I love good APIs. I love croissant. I love exercising. I love brakes. I also love croissants. Sorry. I love avocados. I love Photoshop. I love Cancun Beach. I love CSS. I love good music. I love rock. I love all of you on this stage. Now we'll end there just for now. If you could hold the mic just continually. So why this exercise? What is this? What am I doing? This is an exercise for happy, healthy, well. Because how do all of you feel right now? Better. Hyped. Good. When you say things you... You don't feel any different? This guy's got the right attitude, everybody. Got the right attitude. When we say things we love, it triggers the chemicals in our brain to say, yes, I do love that thing. And how many in the audience heard something, they're like, oh yes, me too. Everyone. Now how many of you, and you already did it once, how many of you wanted to add something on to that thing that someone else said? You heard an idea and like, oh yes, me too. And this other thing. And that's how it works. If we played the opposite of this, we played I hate, we would all shut down, we'd feel miserable and tired. But how many times do we talk to our colleagues and just complain, just commiserate with them about how terrible a project was? Well, it puts us in the spiral. I recommend this game for your meetings. We play a variation of this with my team online, in Slack, where we freely associate words together and it's one group mind. Because we're all on the same page now. I feel like we're in a team now. Thank you so much for being part of my presentation. I'll keep you up here though, because just for the sake of time, I'm going to do one other thing. Why am I not moving? There we go. This is called a shared memory exercise. And you know what? I'm going to call an audible what they do. So give these wonderful people a round of applause. You can go back to your seats. You can go back to your seats. All right, I'm going to call a slight audible on this just for the sake of time. An audible if you're not familiar with American football is you're changing the play right before it happens. And for this, I would like to invite Bridget, actually. If you could join me up here on stage. Bridget Willard, everyone. So I didn't tell you we were doing this. So shared memory works like this. There's a game where we're going to invent a story. Okay. And I would invite all of you to play this. And if you want to come up to me later and play this, I am happy to do it. Just sake of time. We don't have time for everyone today. So all I want you to say is remember the time we went to Mexico. And then I'm going to say yes, and then add something on to that. And then you will add another line. You'll say yes and whatever. I'm in. Hey, Dwayne, remember the time we went to Mexico? Yeah. And then I was wishing I wore better pants. Yes, and then we stopped at the pants store, but they were all out of pants. Yeah, because they didn't have my size. Oh, shoot. Yes, and they didn't have my size, but I bought a skirt instead. Yes, and I bought a skirt, and we ended up losing the donkeys right after that, though. Yes, and we took an epic selfie. Yes, and that selfie got retweeted by Justin Bieber. I have a Justin Bieber at WC Karaoke. Woo! What was the point of this? Yes, it was. This is the idea of let's take information and add to it. Let's take information and build a world on top of it. Let's play a slight variation on this to just to prove a point. Okay. In fact, I'll just start this time because now you know how it's played. Hey, Bridget, remember that time when we were in the US website? Yes, and it was a long process with lots of pizza and beer. Yes, and we bought so much pizza that we were too stuffed to actually continue working that night and fell asleep. Yes, and we woke up and went for coffee. Yes, and over coffee, you realized that it was actually a bad function deep within a plugin. Yes, and we deactivated all of our plugins and we activated them one by time. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you very much, Bridget. Give him a round of applause. You can go back to your seat. So what was the point of that? How many of you have ever been stuck at a whiteboard or in Slack and beating your head against a wall and have no idea how to go forward with something? Why not just pretend you've already solved it? Why not just play this game? Why not just say, hey, remember the time we solved this problem? Yes, and we did this. Yes, and we did this. It will at least give you ideas. It will be fun for a few minutes instead of being frustrating. There is an entire library of improv games in the world that you can go, and I highly recommend studying improv, studying this, and I'm happy to talk much more about this after my talk, and you can go read my blog series on this. But to reiterate, there's exercises you can do to put you in the right mindset to say yes and to build worlds with people, to remember to start with the obvious. To actively listen, engage people, not just hear the words, not just read what's on a screen, but actively engage with a human being, to remember to take care of yourself and start happy, healthy, and well with things. To serve the peace, don't get caught up in best practices. To make the other players look good and the other players are your users and people supporting you far into the future. And lastly, don't be afraid of failure. Failure is a gift. You can't learn unless you're making mistakes. The bigger the mistake, the easier it is to spot the problem and to learn. So don't be afraid to fail. But fail in a safe environment. Use staging environments and development environments. I have some other ideas. Again, you can get these slides over at mcdwayne.com. Some books about improv. The last one is actually about actively listening. How to read faces, how to study the reactions people have and understand what's going on in their heads based on their facial expressions. It's a very good book. But again, I was Dwayne. I come from San Francisco. I do improv. I love karaoke. WC Karaoke for the win. It's a hashtag. It's a lifestyle. You can find all my stuff at mcdwayne.com. Thank you so much, Dwayne. It was so entertaining. I had a great time and I was enjoying your talk so much. So much new points of view. And yeah, I think the audience was also... I don't want to leave the room now because there is still time to ask one or two questions to Dwayne. So if you want, you can use the standing microphones here in front or in the upper rows. Is there any question? Yeah. There's somebody coming. Or is he just want to leave the room? Oh, I got a question. Oh, come on. You were talking about micro... micro... expressions. Oh, there. I'm sorry. I didn't see you up there. Yeah, you can... Please go for it. Page from Cancun. I love your talk, by the way. You were talking a little about micro expressions and which is the book that you recommend for that? Oh, it's a very long... It's an effect book actually by Sylvan Tompkins. Affect Imagery Consciousness Theory by Sylvan S. Thompson. Or Tompkins. He's not the only person that wrote about it. If you look up... I forget his name. Lavheim's Emotional Cube is how I discovered him. It's an emotional... emotional theory based on brain chemistry that maps to this Affect Imagery Consciousness Theory. But there's only nine things that I actually do. Everything else is a variation and a mixture of those nine things. But once you break down reactions there, you can see, oh, that person's afraid, or that person's angry, or that person's happy, or that person's engaged. Very quick. It's extremely useful on stage. That's how I discovered it as a coach and a teacher. Really, thanks again and also for the experience of the Aisle of the Game. That was good. Thanks for the talk. My name is Sami from Finland. How do you deal with the person in your team who is always negative? Is the only way to fire him or her, or is there something that you could do to help overcome with the negativity? If I could answer this question, I would be making a lot more money being a business consultant. This is a hard question. Sometimes people don't know they're negative. Sometimes people don't quite realize it. I have had very mixed experiences as a coach, as a teacher of improv, with explaining to people that, you know, you're being a little more negative than you need to be, and they are very negative reactions to that. I've also had people thank me for pointing it out. So everyone will react differently. Some people are just mean. Some people are just bad people. I hate to say that. I think I'm not going to be at the end of the day, but try engaging them in non-traditional ways. It would be my first thought. If you've never gone bowling with them, invite them bowling. If you've never had a beer with them, make sure you go out and have a beer. There's something behind that negativity. There's something... maybe it's just you need to be nicer to them. Make them feel safer. Sometimes people are negative in defense, that they're trying to guard themselves from the end. But that would be my best advice, is try engaging them in creative ways. Playing I love with people. Actually, when I was given this talk in Chicago for mid-camp, which is a Drupal event, someone came up afterwards and said, the person I love exercise with as a duo, I worked with them seven years ago and hated them. And it just turns out today, we have a lot in common we never talked about. And maybe that's an answer. Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, Dwayne McDaniel. Give her a big applause.