 Okay. Thanks everybody for coming. I appreciate the time. I want to walk through a presentation this morning, kind of a presentation or training exercise or introduction or whatever you want to call it to a behavioral profiling tool called disk. Liam, Rachel, are you all familiar with disk? Have you used it before? I've used something similar, not disk. Rachel, did you do the profit training at Currency Cloud? I did the profit training at Currency Cloud and I've taken the FIRO B one as well. And then when I read the disk profile on Tommy's read me, I took the disk test online just to see what that was like. So I've done some reading there. Okay, cool. So we have some familiarity and I know Dallin, Mariner here and they've heard me talk about it a lot because it's kind of a default go to for me ever since I had the training. So I want to talk a little bit about, you know, I want to start off and say why am I planning to do this introduction? What's my goal here? And then we'll walk through the basics of disk. We'll talk about the approaches that you can take to assess someone's disk profile because one of the things that I think is really valuable about disk as a tool is that you don't have to have somebody take a test in order to at least roughly place them on the chart and understand how they fit into the profile. We'll walk through some examples for each of the different profiles in the disk section and then we'll talk about what, you know, I see is some of the main takeaways in terms of how you can take this information and apply it and what I think our next step should be as a team in terms of approaching disk and how we might use it ourselves. So first, you know, why introduce any personal profiling? I think if you had asked me to do training around this or something like that a few years ago, I would have probably gotten a little indignant and laughed about it. I come from a mindset where personal behavioral profiles or personality profiles, things like Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram that's becoming popular even disk, I used to refer to them primarily as business horoscopes because the idea was you could get this really generic description of who you were and you could say, oh, yes, that's me. But you could say, oh, yes, that's me about just about any of the profiles and as soon as you accept that as your identity, you start living it out and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That said, the deeper that I've gotten into management, the more I've realized that obvious statement alert, right? Dealing with people is hard. So providing a good system for dealing with people means you need to provide a good system for talking about different classifications of people. And even just saying different classifications of people is already a troublesome statement, right? It's really hard to do that without getting into stereotypes or biases or other kinds of non-inclusive behaviors. So it's important to try to build a system where you can talk about it and you can have a shared vocabulary that is safe, that is inclusive. So if you do it well, having a good behavioral profiling system can help you do that. And you can talk about people and you can talk about different types of people and you can say things using the disk vocabulary like, well, this person's a D without it being a judgmental statement, right? It's also just a helpful tool as a result because it helps provide a framework around things, much like we try to provide in software engineering, we have concepts like the single responsibility principle or these other ideas that are very strongly tight and very strongly stated, but they codify specific wisdom about what makes a good software program. How can we evaluate that and how can we learn to deal with and make changes in the same way when we talk about interacting with other people, having a strong framework like something like desk where we can talk about it and we can say, okay, well, what does it mean that this person is a D? How should that change? How I interact with them is helpful, not just in explaining and understanding others' behavior, but also helping you assess your own and determine whether you're being as effective as you possibly could be in this scenario. So why disk rather than any of the others that I already mentioned, Myers-Briggs, Anya Graham, any of that other stuff. I didn't put this as a main bullet point, but this is probably the main reason I'm doing the training. I like it. I've done disk. I think it speaks well to me. I think there are a few other specific reasons though. One is the simplicity. At heart disk is a two-by-two matrix. You have four quadrants in the simplest version that people can fit into. It's easy to learn. It's easy to use in the moment. It's not, you know, you think of something like Myers-Briggs where you have four dimensions, not two. So there's 16 different possibilities and trying to keep in mind what all those different possibilities mean and how you should interact with them is a lot as opposed to, you know, thinking about this in terms of the different, the two different dimensions that you have in disk that we'll get to later helps keep it simple and helps keep it easy to apply. I think it's obvious. Like I mentioned, once you get a good understanding of disk, you don't have to say, okay, great, sit down and take this test and share your results with me so that I can understand what type you are so that we can start working better together. I'm hoping, even as we go through this training, you'll start thinking in your head, oh yeah, that person on my team, they're clearly a very high D or they're very clearly a high S, you know, and like it'll start to click a little bit and then you can start to say, okay, well now that I understand that and observe that, I can start improving my behavior without having to go through a whole collaborative process with them in order to get them engaged and bought in on what the system means that the test results are valid and everything else. It's behavioral. So this is one of those things that's very, you have to be very careful when you talk about these things to say you're talking about a behavioral profile and not a personality profile. Behavior is what somebody does. Behavior is something you can change. Personality is an innate attribute of you as an individual. So if I start trying to describe your personality, then I'm putting you in a box and we're perhaps setting ourselves up for failure because I'm not giving you any opportunity to say, well, this is just how I happen to be behaving at the moment. I think disk does a really good job of addressing that by being very behavioral focused. I think if you do it right, you're being even more explicitly behavioral focused about what somebody does while they're at work and acknowledging that that can change over time and in fact even encouraging you to try to change depending on who you're interacting with in order to get better results. And then the final main point is the lack of bias. I was having a I mean implicit bias in this case. I was having a conversation with a fellow team member at GitLab a few weeks ago and they mentioned that they're they mentioned their Myers-Briggs type. And they said, usually I tell people that and they go, Oh, wow, you're weird, though. Because they have the least common Myers-Briggs type. It's something that's only 1.4% of the population according to estimates. And that I think that innately sets up kind of a bias. And that's one of the things that I think is really nice about disk is again, if it's done well, there have been studies suggest that you can pick a population of any kind of distribution, any kind of, you know, as long as it's an appropriate sample size, and you'll get roughly an even distribution across the four different groups. So there is no context, I think in which you sit down with this can say, Oh, well, those D's, that's just 3% of the population and they're crazy weirdos. And we don't have to worry about too much other than here's how you get out of their way kind of thing. So I think these are the advantages that disk conveys. And this is one of the reasons that I like to use it. And I like to try to share it and communicate across a few things I want to get out of the way up front. Starting at the bottom, we already mentioned, disk is not rigid behavior canon does change. I had a conversation, we'll get more into why this is a thing as we get into examining the different types. But I had a conversation with someone who's a very big trainer around disk materials. And he was saying he started as an executive with a very high D behavior profile at work. But then he got put in charge of sales, and being put in charge of sales, and he needed to focus more on networking, he needed to focus more on people side of things. And after a couple years of being in sales, he was as strong and high as he was a D. So his profile actually shifted based on the requirements of his job. And that's definitely something that can happen. And we want to be very clear that just because you figure out what your disk profile or someone else's disk profile is now doesn't mean it won't change over time. And it doesn't mean it can't change. Going back up to the top, this is not comprehensive. If you've looked at my manager read me, I have a link to my 25 some odd, I think page PDF breakdown of my test. And it gives you specific numeric scores for each of the four letters in the disk profile and gives you a full breakdown and tells me I think it's created it gives me some kind of profile with a start to start into one of those business horoscopes, like I was talking about earlier, if you pay too much attention to it. And it gets really specific, it gets down to the point where it breaks down a huge list of adjectives and tells you which ones are most likely to describe me and which ones are least likely to describe me. And the example that I always use for why I don't like to go into that much detail is if you go look at my report, one of the adjectives that it thinks is absolutely at the bottom of the pile in terms of likeliness to describe me is the word sarcastic. And I know some of you haven't had the opportunity to work with me all that much yet, but I see Dawa kind of laughing a little bit when I say that. So it's clearly inaccurate when you get down to some of those very specific levels. So it's not comprehensive. Let's try to make sure that we keep it at a very high level when we're thinking about how we apply this. And then the other thing that I want to make sure we're being very clear on is this is not discriminatory. Right, I did imply earlier, for example, a lot of executives at companies end up being high Ds. That does not mean that you have to be a high D in order to be successful as an executive. Those are two, those are two different things, right? There's a correlation there, not a causation, or perhaps the causation maybe doesn't go the direction you might think. So I definitely don't want to talk about this and have you take, for example, take it into job interviews or something and say, well, really, what we're looking for is a high C and this person doesn't fit that bill, right? That's absolutely not what we're intending to do with this. So that's all the introductory material. Not quite all the introductory material actually forgot about this slide. What I hope happens next, after we have this training just so that we're all on the same page. Really, the big takeaway I would like is that we have a shared vocabulary around how we talk about this stuff. I'd like for us to be able to have conversations about how we communicate with our teams, manage up, deal with difficult conversations. Having the shorthand of being able to say, well, remember, this person is a high S, so you need to do X, Y, and Z. Being able to have that kind of conversation, you can get to the same result without having to go through all the, okay, well, remember, this person is somebody who tends to want to avoid change and it gives you a good shorthand. Again, going back to the coding example, it's a lot easier to say this violates the single responsibility principle than it is to go in and say, I feel like this code is doing too much and go into all the details about what that means and essentially redefine the term to get there. I'd like to use this as a springboard for us to start more actively observing and assessing the personal composition of our team a little bit more explicitly. I think we do a great job already. We have a lot of great tools in place with the experience factor worksheet and all of that other stuff in order to assess the technical capacity of our team. But being able to assess more the personal aspect of our team is important for us as we're growing out of management culture and it's also important as we're trying to identify as we grow, who do we think is somebody who's going to be able to manage well? Who do we think are we going to be able to put on the team together and expect them to function effectively? These are all important questions that we need to start trying to get ahead of them a little bit so that we can start having these conversations for more of an educating standpoint, for more of an aware standpoint, then try to figure it out on the fly. And then finally, again, going back to the idea of the shared vocabulary in the shorthand, if we get to a point where we do adopt disk as a shorthand that we like to use, that's going to make it really easy for us to build other training on top of that down the future so that if we do need to get into details of how do we do career coaching? How do we do performance management? These are things that we can then talk about and it's very easy to go through and say, okay, well, if you're dealing with a D or an I or an S or a C, here are the things that you need to keep in mind. And we can cover a lot of detail and cover a lot of potential cases without having to spend a whole bunch of time, again, going back over what it means to be in those different groups. So all that said, and I'm sorry, this is going to be a little bit of an information dump as we move through the first part of the call and then I want to get into more questions and discussion towards the end. This is typically how you'll see disk represented visually. There's a lot of images out there. I'm not sure how they fit into copyright and everything else. So I recreated it crudely in Google Slides. But generally you see it represented, like I said, it's a two by two matrix and they typically represented as a circle. I guess circles are soft driven squares. So this makes people feel a little bit better. It's a little more personal this way, I suppose. But the two axes that you have for determining what quadrant somebody fits into in this two by two matrix. If you look top to bottom, which I have over here on the side, on the top end, you have people in the DNI group that are, they tend to express a lot of confidence and they tend to be people who feel like they have a lot of control over their environment. Okay, and we'll get into specifics about what that means here in a minute. On the bottom end, you have the opposite of that. You have people who tend to be maybe a little tentative. Maybe they want to collect more information first before they take action. And that's because they feel like the environment that they're in is very difficult to control or perhaps even impossible to control for some reason. The other axis that you have going left or right is do they typically think in terms of data, facts, logic? Are they more task oriented? Are they more analytical? Or do they tend to think in terms of people, emotions, intuition? This is another one of those spectrums. And it's, again, the nice thing about a two by two matrix is everybody fits somewhere on the spectrum. That's the old joke. There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who believe that the people in the world can be classified neatly into two groups and those who don't. When you have two kind of polar ends of the scale like this, you can put everybody somewhere on both of them. So this is where you get into some of the science again behind it. And why, if you have an appropriately representative sample, you can have people that are 25% D, 25% I, and so on around the group. So the way this typically works, and we'll go through the specific examples here in a second, is if you have somebody who feels like they have a lot of control over their environment and typically thinks in terms of data, facts, and logic, that means they're D. If they are, have that same confidence, but they think in terms of people, emotions, and intuition, then they are not. It's someone around the spectrum. So if we look at what that means for each of the letters individually, and this is where you start to get into some of the information that I think is really useful, and once you're able to identify where people are, this is the kind of stuff that you're gonna wanna come back to, I think on a regular basis. Like I just mentioned, Ds are top left, so they're facts, data, logic oriented, and they act as though they're in control of their environment. This means that if you have someone who's a high D, they tend to be viewed as being direct and firm in how they approach things. They're very results oriented. If you have somebody who's very much in the, it doesn't matter how we got there, the ends justify the means kind of thing, they put a little bit of a negative spin on it. That tends to be a very high D characteristic, strong will, forceful, confident, risk tolerant. Again, kind of going back to the ends justify the means idea, right? Like we're willing to take risks in order to get big rewards is the idea behind Ds. They tend to prioritize for immediate results. So they tend to prioritize for action and they tend to try to take on things that are gonna challenge either themselves or challenge others. They also have certain motivations. They tend to be motivated by competition, specifically competition they can win. Typically is how it comes in, or competition where they have a good chance to win and can challenge themselves in the process. And they tend to be motivated by power and authority. And this is one of those things where you have to be really careful about saying this in a positive way, right? We don't mean to say that Ds are power hungry landgrabbers, but we do mean that, you know, the idea of attaining more responsibility, of being able to drive more results, drive more action, create more challenge for themselves and others. That's very attractive to them as a result. So they're typically people who do want to try to climb the corporate ladder, so to speak, and get into those higher levels of authority so that they can get more done. As a result of all these traits, they can seem impatient, they can seem impersonal or insensitive. They can seem very self-centered because they're trying to drive their own ability to execute. And some common fears that you have to keep in mind with high Ds is they fear losing some of that power and control. They fear losing some of that ability to execute because the less power and control they have, the less that they can get things done, the less that they can drive challenges. And they also tend to fear vulnerability for very similar reasons. The more vulnerable you are, the less stronger position you're in to drive change. So that's kind of a quick overview of what Ds typically look like. Eyes are also on the top. So they share some of the same traits about wanting things to happen and drive action, but then they're on the right side. So they tend to be more focused around people, emotions, intuition, that side of things. So typically eyes are charismatic. They're the social butterflies in the group. If you're familiar with that expression, they're charming, they're outgoing, they're enthusiastic. They tend to be very optimistic about what the future's gonna look like. They're talkative, they're high spirited, they're very influential in this case, which is what I stand for. They tend to prioritize enthusiasm, where somebody who's more on the left side of the spectrum here may try to evaluate ideas based on the end result. And you get into the sort of financial aspect of let's calculate the net present value of this project compared to other projects and determine which one's likely to make us more money or see more impact, that kind of thing. Eyes tend to act more around, okay, which idea's more exciting? Which idea's gonna get more people excited? Which idea's gonna generate more enthusiasm for us because enthusiasm is the energy that I use to get going and get things done. They prioritize action in much the same way that Ds do. So eyes do tend to have similar drives towards quick action, immediate results, all that kind of stuff. But they also tend to prioritize collaboration. They try to create opportunities for collaboration between themselves and others. They tend to be motivated largely in terms of social interactions. So they like to be motivated by social recognition, opportunities to network, build relationships, strengthen relationships, motivated by the opportunity to convince somebody that they're right. Which again is another one of the things you have to be careful about. We're not saying that they're manipulative, although that can be how they can be perceived by other people at times. But rather that they see that as a challenge. You know, that they have this conviction that they're right about their vision and you don't agree with that. That's a challenge for them that's worth pursuing that motivates them is to prove that that vision that they have is worth following. They can seem impulsive as a result of all this because they will potentially flit around as the deprecatory statement goes after ideas that are in varying favor with other people in their network. They can seem disorganized as a result. They can seem like they're poor finishers because they're really quick to get excited about an idea and then get started. But then as soon as you get into the nitty gritty details of how you're gonna execute, for lack of a better way to put it, that's kind of boring. The enthusiasm isn't there anymore. We're in day-to-day execution mode. So eyes are really great at getting things started and building excitement around ideas. But then when you get to the point where you're having the eighth go-no-go call about this project or something like that down at the tail end, a lot of enthusiasm has waned and they tend to lose interest. They can also seem irrational, particularly for somebody who's over on the left side of the fence. This is one thing that I've had to deal with in the past where I've worked with a, I'm on the left side, by the way, in case you don't know, but I've had to work with folks who are high eyes and they've definitely been ties where we've gotten into arguments about things. And I've actually had one literally look at me and tell me, I think you're trying to out-logic me and I don't like it, get to your point. And I'm sitting here thinking in the back of my head, I'm not trying to out-logic, well, again, I am trying to out-logic you, but that's because we're having an argument and that's what arguments are. I'm trying to prove that my logic is better than your logic. So if you're not aware of that difference, it's really easy to fall into the trap where you say, okay, well, this person's just behaving rationally. You don't care about logic and how can we have this conversation at that point? What they tend to fear most is rejection, it's disapproval, anything that might cause loss of influence or voice in their organization. And you'll notice that all of these are obviously interrelated ideas, right? The same things that motivate them, losing those motivations tend to be fears for all four of these groups. So hopefully that gets to a point where it's kind of self-explanatory. S in the chart is steadiness. So this is bottom right. This is people, emotions and intuition, but not in control of their environment. So folks that are Ss tend to be viewed as mild-mannered, even tempered, very interested in kind of preserving an emotional status quo, right? They're not gonna have the same kind of dynamic, highs and lows that you might see with Ds and Is. They are typically seen as being helpful, humble, accommodating. They're people who want to help out. They get a lot of value from knowing that they've contributed and knowing that they've made whatever you're working on better. They also tend to be people who are very tactful and sensitive, because again, they don't feel like they're very much in control of their environment and they think a lot about people, emotions and intuitions. And so when you're in that kind of situation, you spend a lot of time thinking about, well, how can I interact with these people and preserve a good relationship? So that means they spend a lot of time kind of naturally building those skills of tact and sensitivity and learning how to productively interact with other folks. They tend to prioritize, like I mentioned earlier, supporting and helping others. They're typically referred to as peacemakers. So they love to try to minimize conflict and will even go out of their way a little bit to get involved in a conflict that they feel like they can help reduce it and bring things back down to normal, maintaining stability. And where I's were prioritizing driving collaboration and trying to create opportunities for collaboration. S's are very interested in finding opportunities that exist to collaborate and particularly in finding enjoyable opportunities to collaborate, right? So it's not so much just that collaboration happens but also the quality of the collaboration is important. You want it to be enjoyable. You want to feel like you have fun that you learned more about the people you were working with and built more productive relationships as a result. They tend to be motivated by stability, obviously. They tend to be motivated by sincerity, cooperation, like we mentioned earlier in the collaboration point. And they tend to be motivated by clear opportunities for them to step up and add value. So they don't want to try to create those opportunities. They don't want to toot their own horn for lack of a better way to put it. But they do want to find those opportunities and be able to feel like I'm in a situation in my environment where I can exercise my skills and exercise my knowledge and prove useful and make everybody else's life around me better as a result. They can seem passive. They can seem overly accommodating if you've ever worked with someone who you felt like was a doormat, you felt like let people walk over them a lot and kind of had trouble getting their own way. That person was probably a high-ess. They tend to be resistant to change because of their desire to preserve the relationships that they have and everything else. And they can also be seen as indecisive because, again, they're sort of waiting for those opportunities to come up. So occasionally you'll try to engage with an ass and try to get them to create an opportunity for them to add value. And they balk at that and that can make them seem indecisive. They tend to fear that loss of stability and they tend to fear jeopardizing relationships or offending others. S's also tend to be people who are gonna be very much more prone to silence in situations where they're uncomfortable because they don't want to risk, they don't want to risk speaking up and offending someone or hurting their relationship with somebody else. They'd rather take on that pain themselves, that discomfort themselves than risk doing anything to hurt the relationship that they have with someone else. The last of the four going around clockwise like we do is conscientiousness. So those would be the C's. So they're on the bottom much like the S's are, they're on the left like the D's. They tend to be viewed as quiet, reserved, they're analytical, precise and systematic. They care a lot about being very detail oriented. They tend to be seen as skeptical because they're not willing to accept a lot on face value. They have to have the underlying data and reasoning behind it before they're willing to get on board and rigorous for the same reason. They're not willing to kind of skip steps in the reasoning process in order to get from point A to point B. Excuse me. They tend to prioritize accuracy and precision. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that probably if you know somebody who can very quickly tell you the difference between accuracy and precision, you're probably talking to a high C where the analogy that people typically use for that is if you're shooting arrows at a bull's eye, right? Accuracy would be how close your arrows are on average to hitting the target. And the precision would be how tightly grouped your arrows are. So you could have a very widespread around the bull's eye and that could be accurate, but it wouldn't be very precise because of the variation of the data. So that's my proof that I'm a high C, I suppose. They tend to prioritize challenging and eliminating assumptions. Assumptions are anathema to high Cs because why would you assume anything when you don't have data? It doesn't make sense, it's not logical. It's room for error because your assumptions could be wrong. So they like to prioritize challenging any assumptions that are made and doing their best to eliminate them rigorously. And then much like the Ss, they prioritize maintaining stability where they can. Because of all this, they tend to be motivated by opportunities to learn, opportunities to demonstrate their experience, opportunities to show that they have received the training that they've memorized the data that they have the insights necessary in order to make things happen effectively. They're motivated by quality and attention to detail. Again, because of that rigor, any little detail being off could be room for error. So we wanna make sure that we get that taken care of. And they tend to be motivated by clear-cut problems and frameworks. So Cs tend to love problems in the areas of mathematics or computer programming areas where there can be clear, right or wrong answers. And then problems around people or areas around philosophy or any of the other softer sciences, if you wanna look at it that way, tend to be, even the idea of it being a softer science, I guess I should say, is something that comes from kind of a high C mindset because they see those as rooms where you have to be willing to make more assumptions and be willing to accept more fuzziness in your data and your interactions before you can figure out the best way forward. They can seem nitpicky. They can seem overly critical. If you ever have a situation where you're talking with someone and you're like, I get it, the system is not perfect. You can stop telling me the 50 reasons why right now. That's probably somebody who's a high C. They can seem isolationist. They can seem to get very self-absorbed and kind of quiet and internalized. Not for the same reason that S's can, where S's can seem that way because they don't want to risk offending someone. C's can seem that way because they have what they need. They have the data they need. They can figure it out on their own and they wanna figure it out on their own. That's important to them. And they can seem overly analytical. My wife is a high C. This is an example that I like to share. When we had our first child, one of the things she did was she sat down and she built out a spreadsheet that tracked when our boy was sleeping and when he woke up and how often he ate and she was building the spreadsheet out to try to identify what the patterns were so that we could build a better schedule around his napping and eating times and everything else. And that's a very high C thing to do. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I don't share that example because I think it's embarrassing or anything else like that. I share that example because it's a problem that a lot of people might look at and say, we'll just figure it out as we go. But to a high C, it's an opportunity to say, let's analyze this and see if we can find the pattern because when we find the pattern, then we can solve the problem the most efficiently possible. C's tend to fear criticism because criticism means that I made a mistake as a high C and if I made a mistake and something was wrong with my data or something was wrong with my process and that's possibly the most insulting thing that could ever happen to me. They tend to fear being wrong for that same reason whether they get criticized for it or not. And they tend to be very apprehensive of any methods or processes that they perceive as being sloppy because sloppy processes lead to people being wrong. So they prefer to have things very clearly defined up front and they prefer to make sure that they know that they have a process in place that can cover for all the potential negative outcomes whenever they're diving into something. So that's a quick overview across the four. I mentioned at the start that one of the reasons I like disk is that you don't necessarily have to have somebody sit down and take a test in order to figure out where they fit in the profiling process. And like I said, there may even be some people as I was going through and describing these are eyes or S's or C's in the back of your heads, you're going, oh yeah, I know that person. And that's definitely one way that you can do the assessment as you start to recognize some of the traits or maybe you've worked with them long enough that you can reflect on the traits. But also an easy approach you can do is as you're talking to them, start trying to answer these two questions. Try to place them in that two by two quadrant. First, are they top or bottom? Do they feel like they're in control of their environment or not? And then second, are they left or right? Do they seem to focus on data facts, logic? Or do they seem to focus on people, emotions and intuition? And there's some more specific questions you can get into here. I've got examples on these slides. For the top or bottom, here's some things you can look for that give you good indications. Do they use big gestures with their hands? Are they doing this a lot? You know, I'm very much a talker like this as you probably noticed as we go through this meeting. In fact, one time when we were having a conversation, I was having a conversation with someone that was so vigorous that I actually knocked a co-worker's lunch into her face because she was walking up behind me to say something like this and chickpeas went flying everywhere. And do they easily make and maintain eye contact? If they do, that's typically a sign that they feel like they're in control of their environment. If they don't, if they tend to look down at their hands or look down at their computer or kind of are staring off into the corner thinking about what you're saying that tends to be a sign that they're more on the bottom end of the spectrum. Do they speak loudly? Do they speak quickly? These are, again, good indications that they feel like they're in control of their environment. Are they willing to interrupt or be interrupted in conversation? Folks that feel like they're in control of their environment, if they have something important to say, they have something important to say right now and there's no point in waiting until you're done talking for me to cut on say it. Conversely, on the bottom end of the spectrum, the S's and C's, remember, they want stability. They don't wanna do anything that's gonna risk offending people or seeming like they're not paying attention. So they're gonna wait until they feel like there's a good break in the conversation to jump in. Do they tend to speak actively about events? People that feel like they can control their environment like to say things like, hey, I got this shipped. We finished this project. There's a very active tone to how they talk about what happens in their world at work. Where folks who are on the bottom end tend to speak a little bit more passively and they talk about how things happened or this is the result that we got. Focused a little bit more on how the environment responded to them rather than how they influenced the environment. And then the final, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, but this is the top six, I guess, for each of these dimensions for me. Do they tend to push for action or do they tend to push for analysis? So folks that are on the top end of the spectrum, if you have a meet and you're trying to make a decision, they'll typically try to wrap things up and say, okay, what's the next step? Who's doing what? When are we making forward progress on this? Folks on the bottom will probably say things more like, okay, what do we need to know next? What do we need to discover? What kind of exploration do we need to do in order to understand where we should go next and in order to make a better decision? So that bias for action or analysis can be a good indicator as well. For left to right, that can again be easy if you start asking a few questions. Do they frequently mention numbers and metrics? So somebody who says our sales grew by 120% this year as opposed to somebody who says our sales team crushed it this year. That can give you a good indication of whether you're talking about somebody that's left or right. Do they use titles rather than names? Do they talk about SID or do they talk about our CEO? In some extreme cases, you can even say, again, I was talking with somebody else about this a while back and we were talking about another member of the team and they said, are we gonna replace, I'm gonna make up a name, are we gonna replace Johnny? And they said, no, we're not gonna replace Johnny, we're gonna hire a new head of international sales or something like that. And Johnny was the head of international sales who left, but that was a good indication of that person who said, no, we're gonna hire a new person to fill this role. What was important to them was the role and the value that they placed around that role, not the person who filled it, as opposed to the person who asked and said, are we gonna replace Johnny? What was important to them was Johnny, who was the person who was filling that role. And do they talk a lot about action plan rather than desired results? Which again is getting a little bit back to the whole idea of kind of task oriented versus people oriented versus effect oriented. So if somebody says, what we need to do is we need to do X, Y and Z and then the project will be completed as opposed to somebody who says, when we get all that stuff done, we're going to have a much more viable product or we're gonna have much more enthusiasm from our customers. That kind of thing, that indication of left versus right. Do they use a lot of bulleted lists? And I put bulleted lists in quote here because sometimes you see this in writing. And I am very much aware of the fact that this is a question about bulleted lists inside a bulleted list. But sometimes they use them when talking and I'm sure everybody's had this experience where you're talking with somebody and they say, okay, three things. First, blah, blah, second, blah, blah, third, blah, blah, blah. And so they're kind of using that bulleted list while they're talking to you because that's how they organize their thoughts. That can be a very good indication that they're on the task, data, factory, and inside of things. And then finally, do they avoid or do they lack interest in small talk? Does it seem like they have a hard time coming up with stuff to say? Do they come to you? And they very clearly have something they wanna talk to you about. And it's, I mean, we've all interacted with these people, I think, where sometimes they do that and they're going through the motions of small talk but it seems like it's almost causing them physical pain to do so because they really have something that they need to get to for you. That can be a good indication that you're talking about somebody on the left as opposed to on the right side of things. For most folks, there actually is an overlap. So if you've looked at mine, you'll see that I'm actually a DC. So I'm not just a D or just a C. That's, I tend to be in both. And what that happens is when you have somebody who has really strong results on one of those dimensions and kind of weak or middling results on the other. So for example, somebody who really feels like they're in control of their environment but oscillates pretty freely between caring about people or caring about facts is probably gonna be a DI. Sometimes if you do these assessments, you may notice that they change the order of the letter based on which one they think is more dominant. So if you have somebody who you think is more of an I, but still kind of both, you might call them an I-D rather than a DI. Somebody who's a strong right. Somebody who definitely thinks about people, emotions and intuition, but vacillates a little bit between whether or not they feel in control of their environment or doesn't have a very strong preference one way or the other would be an I-S. So that's just something to be aware of as you're thinking about this. And there may be some people where you can really quickly peg, you know, okay, the top or bottom question. I got that down, but left or right, I've talked with them four or five times now and I don't know, you know, I don't know where they fit on that spectrum. There may be an indication that they kind of straddle the line in that area. And in that result, then you have, you know, in the case of the I-S down here, you know how I's behave, you know how S's behave, you know some of the areas where they overlap and where they differ and you can still use some of this information in order to try to drive how you interact with them. So examples as I went through this and I'm getting some less, I did decide to throw in some popular fictional characters as well. A lot of military generals, so General George Patton who fought for the U.S. in World War II, a lot of CEOs, particularly a lot of CEOs that people have horror stories about working for. So folks like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, strong-willed political leaders like Margaret Thatcher, these are all characters that can be people, I should say not characters, because these are the real people. These are all people that demonstrate clear high D tendencies, right? They're very action-oriented, they're very much in charge. They're used to being able to say, hey, you get things done and get things done. In the case of people like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, they can even trend towards some potentially harmful tactics where they, in a sense, almost abuse that power and start setting really unrealistic deadlines and unrealistic expectations for people on their teams. So that can be carried out to extremes. And then for each of these, as I mentioned, I decided to include examples from Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. And you can lose a whole bunch of time if you wanna go search around for examples of disc profiles. I've seen them for Seinfeld and The Simpsons and there are all kinds of interesting breakdowns where you can compare how these different characters apply across the different groups. For eyes, there's a high charismatic component to being eyes, obviously, based on the way that we describe them. So you see, again, a lot of eyes in entertainment. So folks like Robin Williams, folks like Oprah Winfrey, folks who like that platform to build connections with people. You see it in certain charismatic political leaders like Bill Clinton and Justin Trudeau. One of the trainers that I worked with around disc had actually spent some time in both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush White Houses. And he said the difference between the two in terms of their charisma, in terms of their ability to interact with people was so great that you could put them both in one room at opposite corners of the room and nobody would be in George W. Bush's corner of the room regardless of their political affiliation because Bill Clinton just had that kind of charismatic attraction and that's something that's very typical of eyes, extremely strong eyes. S's, the quintessential example that I like to go with is Fred Rogers, Mr. Fred Rogers because he did the Mr. Rogers neighborhood show that was popular in the U.S. But you think of, if you wanna see a good example, you can look up the testimony that he made to U.S. Congress in defense of the public broadcasting, funding and everything and it's just this very quiet, very understated, very simple statement of what the public broadcasting in the U.S. does and why it's valuable and how it impacts the children and why we need to preserve it and why we need to keep it where it is. And he's just making this statement and like congressmen are crying in their seats because of the power of what he's saying. Jimmy Carter, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, it's no coincidence that we described S's as being the peacemakers and there's a high correlation between people who are famous strong S's and people who have won things like the Nobel Peace Prize. So there's a very strong correlation there. And then C's, if the slide will load, Bill Gates is the famous entrepreneur, somebody who's very detail oriented and analytical. Harrison Ford, all the great method actors seem to be very high C's because they really get down to the nitty gritty details. And again, if you wanna get example of some very strong C behavior, Harrison Ford did an interview with the show Inside the Actors Studio and I believe you can find clips of that on YouTube and it's really impressive because the whole time Harrison Ford sits there like this and doesn't change posture or anything throughout the whole conversation except when he gets asked a question and he's not so he thinks about it for a second and then he says, well, and delivers this very carefully planned answer to the question and then retreats to his resting position to wait for the next query. So it's very analytical, very measured in terms of his responses. And then Einstein and Nixon and so on down the list there. So those are the some quick examples. And again, like I said, you can find a lot of examples all over the place. Communication, the biggest takeaway that I wanna impart is once you know someone's disc profile and once you feel reasonably confident in it, move in their direction. Okay, so if you're on the left side and you're trying to talk to somebody who's on the right side, if you're a D or C and you're trying to talk to an SI, take that time, talk about the weather, talk about how they're doing, talk about how their kids are doing, talk about how the people on their team are doing, try to move in that direction a little bit. Likewise, if you're on the top and you're on the bottom, try to tamp down your typical forceful, direct, action-driven impulses and try to pull them in a little bit more in collaboration, try to give them a little bit more time to think through the issues and make a decision on their own. The one thing that you really have to watch out for is when I've got it called crossing the diagonal and quotes here, but because this is a two by two matrix, if you're a D and you're in the top left and you're trying to communicate with an S who's on the bottom right, that's the one category that you have the least in common with, because you're both on opposite ends of both spectrums. So that's one area where you need to be extra careful to not fall into those traps. Like I was talking about when I was a high C and I was interacting with a high I and he felt like I was trying to help logic him. It's very easy for you to fall into those old patterns and almost make it kind of a combative relationship if you're not careful and aware of the impact that you have. There are some more, I'm not gonna go through all these slides in detail because I do wanna make sure we have a little bit of time for discussion and questions, but there are a few slides here that has some dos and don'ts for each of the specific groups, which again are really, I think just a summary of everything that we talked about before. So I'll share the slide deck out and everybody can kind of go through these and kind of review them and absorb them on their own time. And then if my slides will turn quickly. Okay, there we go. And then just a quick note here at the end about communicating with groups. Odds are pretty good that your team or really any other audience that you might have for a communication are not homogenous. You don't have a team that is all C's or all S's. So what I like to do is whenever I'm doing a message to a broader audience like that is I like to go through and say, okay, I've put this together, how would I expect the D would respond to this? How does this speak to their motivations, to their fears? Ditto for an I, S, C, go on down through the list. And what that exercise does is in some cases it may show you where you need to alter your message. Like I can't say this, like it's gonna make the D's really happy but the S's are gonna be freaking out and looking for a new job. So I need to figure out how I can massage that in order to speak better to both. In other cases, it may just mean, okay, now that I've thought through how they may respond to this I've identified what some of the potential questions are. You know, I'm communicating a lot of change and I've thought through how the S's and C's are gonna respond to this. And now I can predict what kind of questions they're gonna ask and have a more thorough prepared response for them ready. So going through that exercise can be helpful. I have mentioned here to some other resources. There's a lot of varied stuff out there. Disc was not copyrighted or trademarked. So you will find a lot of stuff online that disagrees with some of the stuff that I've said that uses different words or even different capitalizations. There is a trademark version out there where the I is lowercase and that's how they were able to get the trademark. So you see a lot of stuff like that out there. But there are some resources that I wanted to share. There's some cheesy YouTube videos linked here that walk through each of the different personality tests in animated form. There's also, come on, Google Slides. You can do it. There we go. Manager Tools is a company that, among many other things, produces podcasts on how to be a more effective manager. And they have a massive collection of discussions about disk and about how to use it in the workplace and go from there. There's also a very reliable, and I know Rachel shared a link to one in the site. There are a lot of free tests out there, but if you wanna really drill in and get one that has all the scientific backing behind it and everything else, it's not free, but the EverythingDisk website provides a good tool for that. You can also, as I mentioned earlier, Google disk examples, celebrities, or disk examples, cartoons, or like there's a whole bevy of lists out there that kind of go through and break down for different celebrities or politics or anything else and kind of put people into the different categories. And it's always an interesting exercise to say, well, do I feel like they put them in the right place and not based on what I know about the person or character? Next steps for us, think about how this applies to your team, think about how this applies to other individuals, whether they're peers, do people hire up in the company? Does, you know, can you figure out what their disk profile is? And do you think that changes how you understand their behavior? Do you think that changes how you should interact with them? This may be an interesting conversation for us to start having some in one-on-ones. Are there people on your team that you feel like you're having trouble figuring out? Or are there people on your team that you feel like it's really obvious? Maybe you already have some now as we've been going through this. So thanks just to think about as we go forward. And here we are, cheesy clipart and everything. Questions, discussion, concerns, anything not make sense? Anything seem hokey? I think that was really well presented, Tommy, thank you. I guess the question I would have is if you were filling a role, so you were hiring for a role into a team, would you kind of almost, Oley, I think you made it quite clear at the very beginning, you would not hire into a role because they're a very strong D, for example. But would you have in mind the letter you were looking for, for that role, or do you think it's more important to have a balance of everything within a team? I think, and this is always a tricky question, right? Because you don't want to get into an area where it's discriminatory in any way. So the way that I typically look at it is as the hiring manager, I know what my typical behavioral profile is. So I want to try to identify what a candidate's behavioral profile is so that we can have that conversation, right? So as somebody who's a high D, if I'm interviewing somebody who's clearly a high S, I don't want to say, well, you're a high S so you're clearly not a fit for the job. What I do want to say though is, okay, you seem to be a high S. I may not say it explicitly even, but I may just bring it up in the interview, like, okay, these are some aspects of my management style that I want to make sure you're okay with before we hire you. Because what I don't want to do is hire you and then find out we have this behavioral clash that is going to be either insurmountable or difficult enough for us to surmount that, you know, one of us wishes you hadn't been hired kind of thing, you know. Do you have experience with such an insurmountable clash in behavioral profiles? I do. I don't know that. It's not with me, is it? It's not with you. No, it's not with anybody on this call. I will say that. I have at prior companies had experiences with that both in terms of people that I reported to and in terms of people that I hired. And, you know, again, I don't want to say insurmountable because I think a lot of this stuff, remember, behavior you can control, you can change. I think it's really something which you can fix. But I do think, you know, if you back off the hyperbole a little bit insurmountable in this case really means it's painful enough that we probably should have addressed it more explicitly either in the hiring process or immediately upfront rather than letting it be something that impacts the relationship over years. Cool. Any other questions? Discussion. Anybody think this is a load of crap? I'm curious. No, I think it can definitely be a useful way of figuring out how to communicate and how to work with people. I think it just takes a lot of discipline to try and make sure that it doesn't become the only way that you work with someone. Yeah. Yeah, I like to say having worked at places where taking a disk assessment was part of your onboarding. One of the things that I always like to do with this is say, this is a good starting block. This is a good way for us to start building a relationship together and learning to understand each other. And it gives us a good framework to have an early conversation about how we do and don't work well together and things that we may need to change and things that I may need you to watch out for. But it's not a replacement for actually getting to know you as a person and getting to understand you. And while I may start off, while my boss, if my boss is somebody who knows and practices disk effectively, may start off thinking, okay, Tommy's a D, so that means I need to interact with him in this way. Over time, that should change just as it would with any other relationship to the point where it's like, okay, well, this is the stuff that's important to Tommy because he's Tommy and I understand him and how he thinks. This is the stuff that's important to Tommy because he's a D. So that's why I say like, I like to try to keep it kind of high level. I like to use it as more of an introductory example for starting to think through how do I interact with other people on the team? And I like to think of it as a high level, particularly for group communications. I found that to be really effective to say, I don't have to go through and think, how is Dawa and how is Liam and how is Marin and how are the 50 devs and the team each individually going to respond to this. I can instead really quickly say, okay, I know I've got D's and I's and this is in C, so let's think through kind of the high level responses that they might have and that helps craft a better message and make sure we're able to still communicate honestly with people, but communicate in a way that, effectively addresses their fears and motivations as we go. All right. Well, if there's nothing else, we're wrapping up more or less right on time. So I appreciate again, everybody taking the time. I'm gonna see if I can get this recording published somewhere so that we can share with other folks who may be interested. And yeah, let's plan to talk about this more in one-on-ones, the staff meetings and see if it's a tool that we can apply effectively here across our teams as we start thinking a little bit more about our composition and everything else. So thanks, everybody. Thank you, Dominic. Thanks, Tommy. Cheers. I hope you all have a good weekend. You too.