 Welcome again to yet another OpenShift Commons briefing. It feels like every day we're online, and it's no different today. So we're a little late starting, so I apologize for that. But today, Jay Bloom and I are going to try and recap all of the books, which is impossible, that every one of the speakers on all the Transformation Friday sessions and other sessions that have been done over 2020, that people have mentioned or recommended, and we're not going to do it justice. But some of the ones that influenced us and where we're going, and what we're going to be reading hopefully over the holiday break, which is always a joke because we always end up just eating too much food and playing video games or playing with our kids or going outside, which is what you should be doing. But if you were going to do that, you know, January 1st, I'm going to read these books and be serious about catching up on all of these books. These are some of the books that influenced us a bit over the past year. And I'm going to start this whole thing off by making a confession. Everybody comes to these OpenShift Commons briefings, and I think of them personally for me as little tutorials on subjects that I don't know enough a lot or thought leaders in a space that I'm interested in. And so these have been for me over the past three, four years that I've been doing them, basically tutorials for the community and for myself to avoid reading the books and be able to get a synopsis quickly and succinctly from sometimes the author of the book like with Digital Nudge and Fabio Piero who came a couple weeks back and then if it sparks joy, as Maria Kondo would have said, then I may go and download it to my Kindle and read it. And if it doesn't spark joy or it doesn't trick my interest, it usually goes right out of the back of my brain. And so one of the things that we're going to try and do today, and hopefully, Jay is on board with me about this rock and enrolment today, is to talk about some of the seminal books that influenced us over the past, I don't know, 20 years or so that we've been reading books about organizational change, computer science, DevOps as it arose, and other things that influence us about cultural shifts and, you know, relationship maybe building, I think a couple of them, how to win friends and influence people became one of the things that Andrew suggested we recommend. But I'm also going to tell this story about this book. I don't have slides today and this may be coming out backwards. If you can't read it, it's The Mythical Man Month. And back when I was in computer science in the Dark Ages, it was the book that was, it was a textbook, basically, by Frederick Rooks, Jr., an IBMer, and it came out in 1975, so it was 10 years old by the time I first read it already. But it really shaped the way that I thought about software engineering and teams and communication between teams and I think one of the key things that takeaways that for me was adding more resources to a team didn't always help the project go faster. Like if I could say that the one underlying thread that I walked away with that has always influenced me is how important the lines of communications were and the myth of adding more people to a project doesn't help it get done any faster. So if you haven't read this book yet, I don't know, Jay, have you read The Mythical Man Month? You must have. When did you read it and what did you get from it? So I read The Mythical Man Month, I think maybe 18 years ago, like early in my career, I read it. It actually got another really interesting book about design theory, that's more general design theory. But I think there's a couple really interesting things. Brooks' Law, of course, is really famous from that book and it involves like understanding teams as being like a communication network. And I think that's really been super influential in Agile and the way that people imagine like the two-pizza team theory. So I think that's super important. I used to, when I was early in my dissertation on temporality, I used to talk a lot about how the way that he uses the metaphor of a woman being pregnant as a form of time that can't be collapsed as a way of talking about like duration or the way it just sometimes it takes time to do things. And trying to give people like a better idea of how to identify those moments. I think that's kind of interesting. Yeah, so that was for me probably, because it was a textbook, I had to read it. It was assigned and so Brooks' Law sort of influenced everything else or the ways that we thought about things. But recently there's been, not recent, let's talk, let's go historically a little bit. I want to call it the fifth element. I know that's not the name of the book. Peter Sange's book. That's the fifth discipline, fifth element. It's a wonderful movie. You should watch it. I watch it. It's excellent. I love it. It's excellent. We'll be back. Luke Besant, I love. He can do no wrong. Well, maybe he can. But he's done a few wrong. But anyways, Peter Sange, a book that I really should have read. Okay. It's one of those books that everybody talks about systems thinking. Everybody pretends that they know what we mean when we say systems thinking. And here's the guy who basically started the whole genre or the concepts around it. And frankly, I did one of those things, naughty. Every time someone said systems thinking, I'd be like, yeah, oh yeah, I know what that is. And I never really read the book and never really got it. I conceptually got it. But so this week in between other Zoom meetings, I looked at the book list that we generated here and went and watched the three minute synopsis of the book. You can sort of like the, what were those cliff notes, but the video one of it. And I'm like, oh yeah. So this, it twigged my, yes, my interest. So then I watched a longer YouTube video. And I think that's what's happening is that now we rather than read the actual book, the physical book, we watched the YouTube lecture by the author who talks about the book a lot more than reading the book. And we simply just don't get as much out of it. Though I must say that Peter Sange's talk that he gave in Finland a while ago, really, I don't know if you, and I should have, I'll save, I'll throw in the video link here for folks who are watching along. He does, he talks about systems thinking in a way that I finally got it. He talks about it, and it's probably in the book, which I should have read. And now I'm, it is the one book I think on this list that I am going to read and get over the Christmas holiday because it intrigued me. He talks about systems in terms of native cultures. Having early days, the religions were more connected and they, to humans and nature, those were two, they were one system and one way we were one with that. And when the separation, when we started separating humans from nature, that created another layer of systems above it, the separation and the story that he tells, and I'm going to bash it. So you should watch the video, is he says, he talks about plugging in his iPhone or whatever phone it is into the wall socket and getting electricity. And how we don't even think about the complexity of the systems behind that, we just do it. So, and so the electricity is coming from coal or electric power, nuclear power plants. And he basically says something like, yeah, it's all dead shit, right? You know, that is nature. It's coming from nature and ignoring that system. And he's in the talk he's giving is more about climate change and, you know, the things that are going on in the natural world and how we're destroying the universe that we live in. And what we need to do is have better systems thinking about when we do things. He tells a wonderful story about growing up in LA and the orange groves and the lemon groves and how beautiful Los Angeles was when he was a young child and getting to play outside and how in his lifetime, the 10 years of his lifetime, he went from being able to play outside to having smog alerts and all the orange groves and lemon groves and everything else were being cut down. And what he said that sparked my interest really was that had you asked the developers and, you know, the private contractors who were plowing down the lemon groves and the orange groves, if they, you know, if they wanted to just, you know, if they intentionally wanted to destroy the air or if they were wanted to intentionally have their children grow up in a place where there was no place to play outside, where this, you know, this thing, and they would have all said no. Like if you had framed it like that, if you had told them at the beginning of the boom in LA, and this is, you know, around the world too. I mean, this is just one story. Had they been doing systems thinking at that juncture and had an understanding of what was, you know, the impact or how all of these things were interconnected, then they might not have made the decisions they made. And my Los Angeles nephews might be growing up in lemon, lemon trees and orange groves with with clear air. So that that for me caught me. So I'm definitely going to read that book. So did have you read Peter's book? You know, I actually teach a class on systems theory Carnegie Mellon, which is super fun. And I'll, I'm going to teach you next semester. And, you know, saying a book, I think it's particularly interesting because I have like, you know, in my mind, there is Boston is like a place where a certain form of systems thinking kind of arises. And, you know, the earlier forms of systems thinking, like general systems thinking from like von Barton awfully and stuff like that. These guys were basically concerned with with the way in which the study in the university, especially in the sciences was fragmenting so like that they couldn't explain how physics and biology work together. They basically were like, these are two different levels and they don't appear to align usefully any any way. And so systems thinking in a lot of ways was initially about expanding the domain or the the use of the metaphors and language of biology into other areas into other realms. Because biologists tend to think about things like environments and organs and the interrelationships between things. And these become kind of important ways of thinking through how things evolve, right. And you get all sorts of weird interesting versions of like stability and instability and interesting conversations about social systems that are using biological language or biological metaphors. So I think that is kind of super cool and interesting. Jerry Weinberg has a great book called an introduction to general systems theory that's like a little bit more abstract than. So this this course that you're teaching at Carnegie Mellon. Is that an open course or is it something that people so like what I study at Carnegie Mellon and what I teach at Carnegie Mellon is called transition design and so the systems thinking class is part of transition design systems thinking is a critical part of transition design kind of like the way you were describing like understanding the environmental cycles and things like that are all important. And then as designers like learning to think about those things and recognize them becomes really important. So yeah, I, if people want to learn if people want to take a course on systems thinking one of the ones I could recommend is that Kent Beck and Jesse, Jesse Tron are currently running a course on it. And it's their second time through. And I think they do a really good job. I think it's really interesting to. I always assumed that people like Kent already had systems thinking on board, but it's clearly something that he is still engaged with grappling with which is kind of interesting. Anyway, the same case book is great because it basically takes all of those, like, kind of more cybernetic systems theories about kind of machine interactions and human interactions with machines and stuff like that. And it just makes it almost purely about a social system, which I think is kind of interesting. Really interesting insights in there and the like the most kind of contemporary version of that is called theory you, which is also taught at NYU. I'm sorry at MIT. And that's, it's another kind of like system transition, like system movement set of theories about how systems move and how they change and how they become other things, which I think is kind of like a fascinating version of what systems becomes. And the fifth discipline being systems thinking, by the way, is it really interesting early kind of way of talking about and thinking about systems thinking. So I think it's a really valuable read for people who haven't read it yet. So you mentioned design thinking. Is there a seminal good book to get started on design thinking? Yeah, I mean, so the thing that I always encourage people like design thinking as it has arisen recently from idea, right, which is a kind of a particular form of design thinking is not my favorite version of design thinking. Additionally, like I think that most human centered design is pretty confused and actually probably really dangerous. There's there's a reason why we live in unsustainable societies and it's because we've been focusing on human needs for a long time as designers. So my my favorite book on design thinking in particular is called design thinking is by Nigel Cross. And the basic theory in that book is that you can look at a modern university, the current contemporary university and see that it's divided into humanities and sciences and that these are two dominant ways of thinking about the world. And often when people say what is design, they want to say it's either an art or a science. So there's actually stuff called design sciences, which actually emerged from Carnegie Mellon originally. And then there's an Herbert Simon and people like that. And then there's another kind of version of it where design is aesthetics and therefore probably belongs in the humanities. And the current department that I'm in right now the School of Design is in fact in the humanities department process argument is that design should be treated as a peer of the other two that it is in fact not a science. And it is also not a humanity. It's actually a third way of kind of thinking about knowing about being in the world. And that because it's so radically under theorized right now so people don't have a really good idea what design is they don't realize that, you know, in the same way that you kind of talk to your kids these days about like they need to be science literate. They need to be literate they need to be able to read and understand kind of narratives and stories in order to kind of enjoy the world that we live in, you know, to understand how a movie works or how a poem works or all those things. These are kind of humanities based structures right and so most people would argue. I mean most people would argue that you have to be able to read a newspaper to be a, you know, participating in a modern democracy all kinds of so. And then you can say like science lit literacy is a hugely important thing that people need to be better at and we pay a huge penalty for the lack of science literacy in the United States right now, you know, and you could say things like sustainability ecological crisis are based in a lack of scientific literacy. So that's another set of literacies that are important. And then the last one that cross would argue is that all of us are engaged in the same way we're all engaged in scientific discussions whether we're about them or not the same way we're discussed kind of engaged in humanities discussions by telling stories and narratives. All of us basically design things all the time we we put our room together in a certain way we we organize things in a certain way. We organize our computer systems in certain ways. All of us are designing things. But for some reason you start learning about science and humanities in grade school and no almost no, almost everyone. Graduates from college without having a formal design education in any useful way. The, the, the most, most people get out of kind of a design literacy is maybe they go into an engineering program, and then they learn like a version of design which is kind of a science influenced version of design. So that they understand how to put things together in scientifically valid kind of ways like I can build a bridge now. Yeah, but that's not like the day to day every day way of being that all of us kind of always engage in how could children and adults think better about again like putting your room together and what's the value of that. And I think there's this significant huge value in that in that right now, you know, most of the world is designed. Most of the world has been designed by someone. Almost all of the world is artificial. It's not natural anymore. Right. You don't interact with nature directly. And therefore like having some understanding of how it got that way like how people who designed it were thinking so that you could critique it, you could engage it so that you have some literal literary engagement in this idea that like the physical world around you that's been designed is shaping your lifestyle, the way you live, the way you think about things. And most people just walk through life not realizing that like that stuff has been put there on purpose and it's shaping your decisions. And so maybe that would be something we should train more people and understanding, I guess. So that's it. That's a good read. And what it makes me think of is I there's a book about community development by Jono Bacon. That is sort of if you're in open source and you're doing community management of any ilk, you will have read or you should have read and it's called the art of community. And it's a very good book. But it is, I can remember reading it the first time going, not having any aha moments because it was all, I've been doing this kind of work for a long time. I was just really glad that there was like a primer for it. But the thing that felt missing was for me initially was the science side of it, the data driven aspect of it. Let's really look at how all of these people are connected and why. And so I've been like in the back of my on the back burner, I've been like thinking of writing the corollary to that the science of community development, you know, or beyond, beyond doing it by gut or whatever. But this, but since I've been hanging out with you guys and your design thinking and the systems thinking and doing these organizational stuff, I actually think that what I would like to see is to go back a step and to think about how, how open source communities were designed. You know, how they, how they were actually, you know, because they were intentionally created. There was an intention behind them to facilitate different and how they've grown and how those intentions have changed and how the systems underneath all of those open source communities that that I work in and and ecosystems and and how that influences where we are right now and sometimes where we're stuck right now. And when we have all these conversations about diversity and inclusivity and we're trying to retrofit our communities to be, you know, better, healthier, more engaged, more diverse and more innovative. But if we don't step back and look at how they were intentionally designed, then we really aren't really understanding how all the systems within them work. And I think that might be a better approach to analyzing community. Organizational design in general, just as a general practice, like most of, like if you wanted to learn organizational design and it's not community design, it's not exactly what you're talking about. What do you want to learn about organizational design? You go and get an MBA and teach you about like boxes and arrows and, you know, spans of control and the, the, it's not really a design activity. It's like organizational engineering activity, right? It's not really about how systems work, how social systems work. And then to extend that, it's also not clear that organizational design understands sociotechnical theories of design in which like there's a social system that's mediated through a technical system. In other words, like you and I are talking through technology right now. How does that influence our relationship and how we, what we know about each other and how we communicate. And, you know, there's a lot of that involved, especially when we look at kind of organizations like open source where, you know, everything is heavily mediated through ticketing systems and emails and, you know, all these types of things. So, I think it's, you know, probably pretty interesting to think about it that way. Like, you know, to what extent did something like GitHub radically change the nature of the way that people can organize and things like that. I think it's kind of interesting to think through. Yeah. The other book about open source that that I was going to read and former colleague of us from core West Brandon Phillips tweeted about it and it caught my attention was working in public, the making and maintenance of open source software by Nadia. I think is how the ball is how you pronounce it and she's really talking a lot about online communities and how they all interact and I have not read the book, but just on Brandon's recommendation, it is on my actual I'm going to read this book list here. So that's when we're talking about community development and open source. I think maybe some of the systems thinking the design thinking books are on my reading list and if you haven't read the art of community or the mythical man month. Those are two that I definitely recommend and this looking for new books and new new ways of thinking about stuff. Those those were the kind of the things that I'm probably going to read this year. The other one that came up recently because, you know, when your boss recommends you to read a book for a meeting, you know, you normally do. And my one of my many bosses and I have lots of them at Red Hat is how I always like to phrase it suggested reading no rules rules. The one about Netflix and I'm trying to find the author here is the CEO. There's to a man Dana. Read Hastings and Aaron Meyer. There you go. And, and I started reading it and I shared this with you earlier before this this this chat. I started reading it. And at first I really liked it. I know a lot of people at Netflix and Netflix has done some great open source work and Adrian Cockroft and chaos monkey. There's lots of people that and lots of people and great projects that have come out of Netflix. So I've and so I was reading it with the curiosity of oh so this is this is the environment these folks all all lived in and grew up in and these these idea and projects which is pretty amazing. And it's about creating a really innovative organization. But it there was there's something off about it and I can't put my finger on it. And, you know, they talk about, you know, hiring the best people. And, you know, the ones who are passionate about their work and at the top of their game, and, and then figuring out, you know, whether they're fit in the group and, you know, they have a whole I think chapter on getting rid of jerks, even if they're brilliant, but they're a jerk, and they don't fit in, you know, that which is sort of a bow to the Silicon Valley cultural of, you know, startups that are, you know, I think I've been in a few of them where they're they're led by people who are somewhere on the manic schism up there, you know, crazy ass and all that, but there was something about it that I'm now going to have to go back to my Netflix friends and ask them if, if this isn't just a politically correct way of wrapping up exactly Silicon Valley culture, you know, it just, it felt, it felt a bit like they put a modern wrapping on it with a little bit more political correctness, but it still was creating an organization that, and I, and I read it, and it was like the short version of it. So I'm sure inside of Netflix, they have some mentoring programs, they onboard people from diverse backgrounds and stuff like that, but it really read like just hire the best of the best in make sure they fit. They're organizational fit, and, but it didn't seem to have a part of it, and maybe I missed it so I'm going to go back and read it again for raising people up for growing people. So like if you were mediocre and passionate, you weren't going to get that that that inspiration. I'm not sure I would recommend this book, but I know I'm going to have to read it. So what we're going to go ahead. I, you know, I know a lot of people at, at Netflix. I think it's a super interesting culture. I think there's, there's a lot of kind of influence on individuation, you know, responsibility, freedom. And the kind of way that those two things work together to create a system that is interesting. It's not, there's definitely some fishy parts about the book. I think that's just made me not super comfortable. I, you know, to one extent it's kind of like, if you have as much money as Netflix or Spotify or Google, well, maybe you can go out and hire, quote unquote, the best people in the world, whatever that means. But that's maybe not great advice for most of the planet because, you know, you can't not everybody can afford this type of kind of salaries that Netflix and Google are putting out there these days. So, you know, I think, I think it's describing a set of solutions where you're not sure why they work. You know, I've said a bunch of times in the past, like, you know, you look at something like Spotify and they claim how happy their developers are and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, hey, give me $6 billion to burn in the, in a garbage can. And, you know, and no expectation of profits. I bet I can make a bunch of people real happy too. Yeah, well, and even when you, when you have $6 billion to burn in a trash can, you end up with things like the kerfuffle. And more it's more than a kerfuffle around Google and the AI ethics research tim timnit, gebru being designated from your AI ethics team, you know, you still don't have ethical HR processes, you know, so it's, you know, you can have $6 billion to burn. But you still burn people and you burn people out and it's not. And we at Red Hat, we always pride ourselves, I guess, and pride go with before the horse or the cart or whatever, but on being open and transparent culture and, and growing people too, you know, and helping people. And so I think what, and the other thing that we always say is that diversity and inclusivity is what brings innovation to the party, right? So if everybody's doing group think and everybody's, even if you're all passionate and the top of your game, you're hiring passionate top of the game people. So it's almost like you're boxing yourself in, you may be super innovative and coding geniuses and you're going to write the next TensorFlow or whatever it is. But I think it's telling us in some ways at Google that Kubernetes was called the Borg before. It was called Kubernetes at Google and it was the Borg or a piece of the Borg. I'm sure I'm getting the history quite wrong. But it's like that Borg like thinking comes even when you have the best of the best, the most highly paid group of people, if you don't have things that grow your organization. And I think that's, that was the thing. And there's lots of books out there. I don't mean to pick on the Netflix book, which is. There's a great book that I used to, when I was a consultant, I had a requirement if you wanted to work with me that you had to read this one particular book. It's actually quite small. And I love the printing of it. The printing is like this beautiful small book. And the book is called Teaching Smart People How to Learn. And it's by Edgar Shine. And it's amazing because it's partial. I'm sorry, it's by Chris R. It's amazing because part of what he basically says, part of the basic argument of the book is that the smartest people you know have the most difficulty learning. And the reason is because they fail less frequently than other people. And really part of what he's pointing out there is that like people don't call them on their bullshit enough. Like they don't know how to accept criticism. They don't know how. And the answer is like, they probably are incrementally better than, than, you know, some other option that you might have, but they don't learn well. And the result of that is you often get in kind of these situations where the organization gets stuck. And it can't move forward anymore because it can't kind of like learn and observe from its problems. It tries to hide the problems instead. And I think it's a really super interesting book. And you know, one of the reasons I used to have people read it was because they did so much kind of management consulting and those people in particular managers, middle managers, VPs, executives, they don't really ever want to hear about what they aren't doing well. You know, and so you have to kind of show them that book and say like, you know, arguments like meritocracy and these other kind of arguments about like having the best people around you at all times. All of those things can be very useful if you know exactly where you want to go. But when you engage in situations with uncertainty, having certain people, people who are certain of their beliefs, walk into uncertain situations is a really good way to get everyone killed. Don't do that. And so I think it's really interesting the more we kind of engage in kind of development of systems that kind of are touching on uncertainty or the more that we engage in systems that are significantly more and more complex, the less we have about their outcomes. And the more valuable it becomes to, you know, have people who think of being smart as, you know, capable of re continuously re examining their beliefs right, you know, the silly Socrates quote, you know, I know one thing that everybody else doesn't know and that's that I know nothing. And the way in which the Socratic method is designed to basically teach you that you don't know anything. These are much more interesting long term ways of getting people to engage directly in the context and work that they're in I think. So I don't know, you know, I haven't read I haven't read the read Hastings book but you know, I don't want to get you there. I have it on Kindle, because that's, you know, your boss tells you to read something you automatically download it and you read it and you do and there's lots of books like that. And they fly at you and you read them and my Kindle has is packed with books that I was told to read. And, you know, and they're still there. And I've read them I think probably the Tim Ferriss books are the ones that that I read the most and of all the people who I, you know, I don't want to espouse his theories or anything but Tim Ferriss lately during COVID, I have gone back to him and his four hour work week the four hour chef and the four hour body series, which I bought all the hard copies of, and they sat on my shelf. And, but during COVID I picked them up and they've been, I've been reading him again, which is quite interesting because he's more of a 90s or early 2000s dude, you know, it came out I think he came out in the early 2000s and hit it big. But anyways, that's been that's more self help than organizational help but it's he has lots of great ideas and he's the other but to switch gears. I'm more interested in reading the Netflix book because I think one of the things that people kind of forget about Netflix is that it, it is a good example of an actual transformation, unlike all the other fangish organizations that started as kind of like cloud like online organizations, you know, Netflix transformed itself, it was a it's it started out as I'm going to email you you I'm sorry I'm going to mail you spend so long. And then that gave them just enough of an edge on, you know, the rental system at the time that they could kind of continue, but the transformation of recognizing we're going to change the medium of delivery of bits from CDs to Internet. And the earliest of them recognizing that and really pushing to develop that is like it's it's, I can't think of a really better example of a successful transformation that's that's one of the best ones I can think of. I also think the interesting and you get this in the book so you should read the no rules rules but you get it they talk about, you know, the mythology of, you know, bashing, you know, catching blockbuster out, you know, and trying to sell themselves to blockbuster and thank goodness they didn't. But also that initial business that they were that core business has transformed into, you know, if you go on Netflix now to huge their movie studio they're a, you know, production company that they're you know they're much much more than that so that watching, and they do talk about this in the book about how they they continually transform it through this methodology that they talk about or this culture that they created. So it's not a bad book to read by any shot and it's and they continue to drive out from my perspective in the open source great projects and participate in open source communities in ways that really contribute back. So, just I'm always leery about books that elevate rock stars, you know, and the geographies are a thing. Yeah, and that that's what I think that's what caught me out and so I had, what is it my conformational bias or whatever it is for list my listening for Oh God another Silicon Valley story. Yeah. But I think there are some good bits in it too. But to sort of switch gears a lot. And because a lot of what we talked on this year and transformational Fridays were things about Dimeji and cat and Sasha and other folks came and we talked a lot about diversity and one of the books you put on the list was the Fricker book Miranda Fricker's epistemic injustice. Let's talk a little bit about that because I think that is another one of the books that people if they could get one book this year that they read that would be a good one. Absolutely. You know, it's been super influential in my thinking recently. I got introduced to it by cats with tell who we had on to talk about it and I you know I think she does a pretty amazing job of talking through it. And so you should go watch that video, but she also read the book. It's got a big scary title, but it's actually it's pretty readable. If you can kind of like skim over some of the big words and and I can I always get that get caught up on the pronouncing of epistemic injustice power and ethics of knowing it's like, well, could we put more in one one title than that I don't think so. So yeah, I mean, you know, epistemology is kind of like the way of coming to know the world, like, not quite like a method, it's more like a way in which we know about the world. And so I think it's, it's a very, very interesting set of theories that lead to some really interesting critiques of things like kind of, you know, decision and rational decision making as the as the focus of ethics, where there's some more interesting ways of thinking about like ethics of caring and what does it mean to care about a system and make decisions that kind of reflect your care. So I think there's a whole set of interesting bits there that are useful that come out of Fricker and some other ethicists these days. And then, you know, from a from a like a resilience engineering SRE operator kind of perspective, you can start asking really interesting questions like, how can we develop a system that we are able to care for that we have an engagement in that that the decisions that we're making aren't simply to increase the efficiency and the kind of output of the system but in fact to make it something we can care for, which, you know, is related to sustainability and the sustainability of our systems and adaptive capacity and all those types of things. I think there's some really interesting stuff there and I, I teach from this book, several different courses this year that I've always everybody that I've kind of introduced it to has come away with some really interesting insights so I think it's really awesome. That's definitely on that we have someone asking out in Twitter land or Twitch land rather about when are we going to talk about imposter syndrome for senior leaders like me. Yeah, so there are there are like there's probably 20 books on imposter syndrome and I actually it's interesting because I think as a woman that a lot of them are addressing women's the role of imposter syndrome for for women and you can Google that and there's like tons of them that the imposter cure the secret thoughts of successful women, you know, and you know how you do that and I don't have one seminal book on imposter syndrome that it but I haven't run across one for senior leaders like. Like, again, not to push the book that I've already pushed but the epistemic injustice book has a good that she doesn't use the words imposter syndrome but you can understand what she's talking about as a diagnosis of imposter syndrome. In particular, she will describe kind of your relationship to knowing the world is is limited by your belief that you can know effectively about the world and so there's a relationship between kind of doubt and doubt about your abilities and the way in which one kind of gets or perpetrates imposter syndrome upon themselves and that, you know, for for Frick or you know some significant amount of this has to do with the way that that that women and people as female are kind of consistently taught to doubt their own experiences. And so imposter syndrome is an excellent kind of outcome of of kind of being kind of constantly taught that you probably don't know what's really happening and therefore your beliefs are wrong. You know, my imposter syndrome I often trace back to I was diagnosed quite young as as having a series of dyslexia dysgraphia every every disk you can you can have. And the way it was kind of described to me was, in essence, your your everybody has a brain and it's in a box and most people's brains are just wired to the world differently than your brain is wired to the world. And so I had a, you know, significant kind of epistemic crisis when I was in my early teenage years because I literally thought I can't actually perceive the world the way other people do. I just don't actually physically incapable of doing it, which I'm not entirely sure is exactly right, but it led to a lot of kind of doubts about what I what I experienced and how I knew things. One of one of my favorite kind of examples of that type of thing is like when I when I when my children were young, I would read them children's books like everybody does. And because I'm dyslexic dyslexic do something called word skipping or word guessing where in order to kind of like scan forward. They'll they'll they'll guess what the next three words are and then they'll start looking at the next sentence right so that so that everything is still coherent it all kind of sticks together because you pick words that make sense but you haven't actually read the sentence. And so my wife would listen to me read these books and she we get done she'd be like, you do realize that you didn't read the book. What you said to them, kind of like what was in the book. But it's yeah and so even from like reading like little little children's books, I had that kind of like experience of like, you know, doubting my own experiences and I just think, you know, there's different extremes to that. And I think Frickers book does a really good job of kind of explaining how that works and and why you need to be careful about it. There was one other book that you put on the list here, the adult education and worldview construction, which I hadn't heard of before tell me a little bit about that one. I put these two books together actually I put software development and reality construction, which I think is amazing. That's by Floyd. And that's there's a whole bunch of really interesting essays in there about kind of like what what what now would be kind of cognitive engineering like the way in which the software shapes the way we imagine the world is really amazing. And then the book with that I have is called worldview construction adult education worldview construction and that book is kind of about the way in which we create worldviews as a way of kind of working out where we are. And that there's multiple worldviews like there's multiple ways of looking at the world so like to bring it like full circle back to the original discussions right like worldviews and kind of. Constructed realities are versions of systems their vision versions of systems thinking and a worldview is a way of imagining. Not the way like a system works isn't like I imagine my computer works this way or I imagine my school works this way a worldview is. I imagine the world that I live in works this way where it's not the world is not the earth or the globe but like the way in which the totality of my experiences work together. That's a worldview so like you know there's different versions of that like you could say like capitalism is a world or you could say that democracy is a worldview because it's it's it's a way of kind of describing how a whole world system works. And the point of the book is roughly to point out that like there are multiple worldviews and actually like if you got into that and you were interested in those two books that I would move from there to. There's an amazing book right now that I really love by Arturo Escobar and the name of the book is designs for the plural verse. So if you go from worldview you can go up one more to cosmology or universal system and which is like how do we imagine that the earth came to be and how does that affect how we imagine what we're capable of doing. That's a cosmology right so you can lots of different religions have different explanations for how the world came to be. And so a plural verse system is one in which multiple people have a multiple different understandings of these very long time frames of how the world became the way it is and how it's going to be different in the future. So it's like it's like diversity, but at the kind of at the at the universe scale like it's important to have multiple people with different ways of imagining how the universe works is kind of one of the one of the rough arguments that you might want to make. And I think that book is amazing to talk about kind of how how we need to preserve different ways of being in the world. And I think that's really cool. So that that makes me think about long term thinking and the long now foundation and a gentleman that I met a long time ago. Funnily enough at South by Southwest we were on a panel together Danny Hillis and I had a wonderful conversation wandering around south by what Southwest about long term thinking and the necessity for it and I can't. They after coming through 2020. One of the things that I really think is that one it might finally be the thing that makes me join the long now foundation and become a member as opposed to just attending events and reading their books but and I can't think of a book that there's he actually wrote. I'm just looking here quickly to see if there's a book that he wrote about it. No, no, no, no. Easy. Yeah, the work led to design. He's kind of he's more of a computer. I'm just trying to think if there's a seminal book that he wrote but the thing that that really the conversations and and and I mean to compliment you by this is that having these conversations with you on Fridays has reminded me of these conversations that I got to have with Danny Hillis at that one moment in time and and Southwest and how it really influenced me about thinking about the long term nature of the work that we do within the corporate organizations that we're in within the open source things and the impact it has and really kind of helped me let go of the short term. You still have to be detail oriented. You still have to get that code pushed and those these releases made and everything. But what is the long term impact of the work that we're doing today and how how we have to look at it from a higher level. And that that really helped. It must have been I think 2015 16 or something where I ran into him and that so I think in long term thinking systems thinking are things that for 2021 I think are going to be top of mind for me. So it's been an interesting. The clock along now is is was published by by the Longdown Foundation. That's quite good Stuart brand of course like brands concepts like pace layering and how buildings learn are both really interesting discussions of like multiple temporalities like long and short term temporalities existing together. I think there's some super interesting stuff there. Seeing like a state is really cool. I think as an example of like thinking in long time periods and understanding how, you know, again, a state is something that's supposed to exist beyond the individual people who exist in it. I think that can be super interesting. And that's a great book that everybody should look at at some point the pattern language by by Christopher Alexander, the opposite like kind of long, long backward thinking like the way in which like history informs, I guess, or materiality informs things is also super interesting. And then the other one that like I always like to talk to people about when they talk about long term thinking is Donna Harway's book. It's called staying with the trouble is amazing and really interesting. And for again for operators for people who kind of exist in the system or you know within a social social technical system. That one I think is really super interesting and super fun. So all that said we're almost to the end of our hour or we are at the end of our hour but we started late so I'm going to make Chris stay for a few more seconds to produces. What is the book that you're reading now. Oh, the book that I'm reading right now is this lessons life lessons from Bergson. So Bergson was in his time was maybe the most famous continental philosopher. And he actually got in a huge fight with Einstein about whether time exists or not, which I think is kind of an interesting conversation they had. But Bergson talks about a couple of things. One of them is duration, which is the idea that like you think about most people think about time is like being measurable like there's a beginning and an end. And durations more about like the stuff in the middle between the beginning of the end and sometimes I describe it as like the sensation of pulling your finger down a window pane like there's you can tell that things are moving but there's no beginning and ending to it is just an ongoing. And then the other thing he talks about is extensity and intensity so extensity is like the things that we can measure outside of ourselves. So these tend to be measurable by scientific instruments but intensity is the experiences inside of you like your the sensation of music or the sensation of dancing. And he talks about both of them having an idea of like volume or big loudness or quietness or things like, you know, your intent, your intensity, your experience of love, for instance, you could describe as being muted or impassioned right. And he basically argues that that a significant part of the human experience is is lost when we only view kind of output, like extensities and that we need to understand intensities more. So I think it's my I write about time in my dissertation so he's one version is one of my favorites and this is like a nice thin book. It's it's it's what I'm thinking that that's that might be a good one after all of the other books that we've discussed or or as a topper. So so if you're listening to this, I'm going to try and annotate this video in some way shape or form set to help people find these books maybe create like instead of a YouTube playlist, an audible playlist or book, but I really like the physical books. So to me, I think one of the things is is really getting back to reading real books and not on Kindle and stuff and trying to do a few more of those this year. So it has been intense, shall we say, and I really I look forward to 2021 and having more conversations and getting my book list built here and readings through some of these things. And if you're out there in YouTube land and you're watching this video in the comments below. Put in your suggestions of books that we should be reading about things that are transformational for you or books that were transformational for you or your organization. And and I promise that I will reread the no rules rules book again without my conformational bias hat on and be ready for my conversation about that book at some future meeting. So and maybe we'll even get some of our Netflix colleagues to in the open source world to join us and talk about what it's like working at Netflix. So there you go. Greg, I talked to Greg this week about his talk on kind of resilience theory next week. I think it's going to be really awesome. I'm super excited for it. Yeah. So we, as always, we've got one more coming up. And so we'll see you again next Friday and we'll have have more on the table for you. So thanks everybody for joining us today and for listening afterwards. And thanks, Jay for making the time again today. Thank you. Bye.