 All right, everybody, welcome back to OpenShift Commons and to the Transformation Fridays Briefing series that I have the pleasure of doing with different members of the Global Transformation Office from Red Hat and a lot of the times Jay Bloom is my special guest and he is again today and I am totally thrilled to have him here for a topic about saying with the trouble and building systems we can care for. And just a little background on this. The last briefing we did in 2020, we did a sort of a review and riff on a number of books that Diane should read or that Jay recommended or books that we had referenced in past briefings over the past year. And one of them was Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chihousian. I think I'm pronouncing that right. And it was an unexpected book around the themes of systems thinking and I am so grateful that Jay did recommend it. And it may seem an unlikely book for systems thinking but once you dive into it and realize what it is that she's talking about and the interplay, the being with the odd kins and some of the words that she uses and reshapes for her purposes, it really does come to a point where it's talking about collaboration and the collaborations that we need to make to stay in the trenches, whether it's in our tech organizations or in our activism or any part of the world that we live in. And there was a wonderful quote at the beginning and I won't read the whole thing but I will read the last half of it. And she says, Staying with the Trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful and even pass or apococococ Orsalvic futures, but as mortal creatures entwined in a myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters meaning. And with all of the stuff that's been going on over the past four years and the transitions and everything we are, a lot of what she says really resonates with where we're all probably at and thinking about taking our lives forward and our organizations forward. So I'm really thinking that today, I encourage all of you to read the book. It's also on audio. So you can audio listen to it as well. But Donna Haraway is one of I think one of the great thinkers on this topic. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation with Jay. So I'm going to pause and stop sharing and let Jay introduce himself and take the topic away. And again, grateful for the introduction to Donna Haraway and also the movie that was made with her and in collaboration. I'll find the link to that too. That was an awesome treat over the Christmas holiday. So welcome back, Jay. And the stage is yours. Give us your interpretation of this wonderful book. It's hard to do justice to something like quite this big in a brief discussion. And I also, you know, probably want to say before we start, you know, the topics that Donna Haraway is trying to address, certainly, I think are applicable to things like organizational transformation and stuff like that, but also should not be minimized in any way. I mean, I think they're very significant topics. So I will be talking about them in the context of the work that we do. And I think that they give us some tools in some ways of thinking about that work, but we shouldn't we shouldn't minimize them or trivialize them at the same time. Can you guys see my my slide there? We can. We can see the whole slide, including the the sideways. So you're not quite in present mode yet. Yeah. If I'm going to present mode, then I will not be able to then don't don't worry about it. We can read the slides. Yeah. Okay. So Haraway is an interesting character, an interesting thinker in a lot of ways. And I want to introduce some of her thinking really quickly, and then kind of contextualize what she's thinking about a little bit. So Haraway initially was quite famous for having written the cyborg manifesto. And in it, she is trying very hard to to kind of recontextualize this idea of being a cyborg. At the time she's writing this. She's very interested in science fiction, close collaborators with a bunch of science fiction writers. And she's interested in the idea that kind of cyborgs are always at the time that she's writing kind of war war machines, humans that have been embedded with kind of weapons or mechanisms to, you know, be aggressive, angry, war making things. And one of the things she becomes interested in is whether or not she can repurpose the idea of a cyborg from a feminist perspective. How how would a feminist look at a cyborg? What would it be mean to be a feminist cyborg? And part of the reason she's interested in that is because she like like many other philosophers have kind of a theory, a way of thinking about kind of humans' relationships with technology that looks like cyborg. Like it looks like like humans regularly extend their themselves by attaching themselves or becoming entangled with technology, with material artifacts, with artificial systems, both that enable them to do things but also commit them to doing certain things. So in particular humans who become cyborgs then become committed to caring for the machinery that now is part of them. And so Harway spends a good deal of time kind of thinking about this way in which humans become entangled with technology and what that might mean for the way we kind of think about ourselves. And other philosophers have talked about these ideas. But one of my favorite is Stiegler. And Stiegler kind of goes all the way back to the the myth of Prometheus and suggests the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus who Epimetheus is Prometheus's brother. So and this will kind of like start towards some of the interesting discussions I think. Prometheus means forethought and Epimetheus means afterthought. And the gods basically give Prometheus and Epimetheus who are the Titans, who are Titans, the responsibility of creating humans, like how or creating all the animals on the planet. And Prometheus kind of like goes away and leaves Epimetheus alone for the while and Epimetheus makes humans. And one of the things about Epimetheus is because he's afterthought. He forgets to do things. He doesn't plan ahead, doesn't think about things carefully, doesn't forethought things like his brother. And so he makes humans without fur, without a way of protecting themselves against the cold. And so Prometheus gets upset about this. And so he goes and steals fire from the gods. And and originally he meant to steal kind of the ability to be congenial to each other to like have politics. But instead he steals fire because he can't get to the other thing. And he delivers fire to humans. And this is the first technology. This is the first artificial system that's that is created or is that enables humans to do something they shouldn't be able to survive in the cold. Now they can survive in the cold. But then they become committed to it, right? Of course, all of this stuff kind of plays out in different ways. But Prometheus eventually gives birth to Pandora. And we get Pandora's box and all sorts of interesting ways of thinking about technology and the way that technology allows humans to do things, but also commits them to do other things. And fire becomes the kind of gift and the curse similar to other things inside of inside of Pandora's box as well. So when we think about these ideas of technology and the interactions with humans, we get different ways of thinking about our relationship to technology and what technology is like. And there's three big ones that I like to talk about. I got this from one of my other PhD students that I worked with, Dr. Ann. I've got a space on her last name, damn it. Anyway, so the three are this. Human-centered design, cyborgs and accurate network, right? So these are three different ways of thinking about the relationships that humans have to technology. So the first one is like what almost everyone thinks about and it's human centered. And the idea of this is that there's lots of human beings and each of them is an individual agent in the system. They control all the agency in the system and they make decisions. They make good rational decisions about things and therefore they can decide to do things like make a hammer, but they use the hammer. They do things with the hammer and the agency is with the human being. And therefore the hammer doesn't work well or the hammer doesn't work quite right or there could be a better hammer. It's because the technology isn't matched well to the human, that somehow you could make a better hammer because it would be more ergonomic. It would fit in your hand better or it would have a better balance or it would somehow interact with other technologies better. But all of it has to do with the centering of the design activity of the technology of the artificial system on matching the technology to the human's cognitive abilities or physical ability. So it becomes human centered. In which case technology is inert. It's objective. It doesn't have politics. It doesn't have agency. It doesn't do things. Humans do things with technology. And you can hear this kind of idea, this way of thinking in things like guns don't kill people. People kill people with guns. The idea is that guns are inert. They don't do anything. There's another version of this kind of way of thinking about designing and material interactions and technology interactions. That one's from a guy named Bruno Latour. Latour and Harway consider themselves kind of co-travelers. They work together. They talk together about similar things. But they have subtly different opinions. Recording has started. They have subtly different ideas about how this kind of works. And one of the things that they say is this. One of the things that Latour says is this is that things, objects, technologies, hammers, guns, nails, all the things around you have agency or they are agents. And so there's a little bit of rewiring of what we mean by agency. So agency in a kind of humanism perspective means the ability to make decisions. In Latour's world, he wants to say that technology has agency because it can influence your decisions. It can change what's possible. And so he would say something like guns have agency. And how do guns have agency? Well, if I were locked in a room with someone I was having a fight with and there was no gun in the room, the fight would emerge in a certain kind of way. We'd probably spar with each other verbally. Maybe we would try to talk each other down a little bit, whatever. But if there was a gun in the room and I felt threatened by the other person, the interactions would be very different because I might be worried that he's going to grab the gun or he might be worried that I'm going to grab the gun. In which case the gun, the presence of the gun changes the social interactions that I'm having. It changes what's possible. It changes how I imagine the system is unfolding. And therefore, I react differently. And therefore, the gun has agency. So in Latourian language, you are a gunman or a gun human. You are merged with technology as a unit, as a system where the human and the gun become kind of a greater system. But also there's this lack of, it's a network theory. So there's not an entanglement. There's a set of relationships and different relationships produce different kind of outcomes or different expectations of outcomes. Haraway is the third version of this. And one of the things I'll say about Haraway is Haraway also considers herself kind of a co-traveler with Isabel Stengers. And Stengers has an idea that she calls cosmopolitism. And what she means by cosmopolitics is this idea that, so Cosmos is the opposite. The cosmos is the totality of all localities. So in Greek thought, this is the idea that you are cosmopolitan localism. And cosmopolitan localism means that you are an Athenian, but you're also a Greek. So there's the locality that you are part of. You govern Athens as a member of the polis of Athens. But you are also a member of the cosmos, which is all of the Greek world. And in this way you get this idea that there's multiple centers of governance. There's like multiple places that are being governed differently, that are evolving differently, that have different ways of being, different ways of thinking about what good and bad are, different ways of negotiating. And that part of that is because they're located in different places. Some places are on islands, some places are on land masses, the places are near the sea, some places are near the fields. And therefore the politics and the relationships that people have kind of emerge from those things. So Isabel Stangers wrote a book with Ilegine Prigigine. And Prigigine is one of the forefathers or one of the fathers of something called chaos theory. And chaos theory is roughly deterministic complexity theory. And what he kind of is talking about with Stangers in this book called The Air of Time is the idea of complexity and multiple interactions and indeterminacy and the way things become entangled with each other in order to support each other. But also that they stabilize their interactions with each other but that they can't be separated. When they're separated, when the parts are separated, the complexity goes away and so do the emergent properties in the system. So Harway is interested in this kind of theory of complexity, specifically this kind of sense in which complexity, calm plexus, with plecture. Plecture means weeding or entangling. So complexity is with entanglements. She's interested in this idea of thinking through a way in which things are entangled with each other. So if human sector is like agents completely independent of each other, an actor network is agents that are in a network with each other. They have relationships with each other. Cyborgian theory, Harway in theory, this level of complexity now is that they're entangled with each other. So that the cyborg's relationship with technology is not temporary. It's embedded. It's in their body and it extends their existence in a specific kind of way. And this stuff leads into ideas by people like Eddie Clark or William James, who we kind of describe what we would call 4E cognition or ecological cognition, where the idea from James would be if you're a blind man and you have a walking stick, you don't use the stick as in a tool. The stick extends your hand to the ground so that as you're experiencing the world, the stick is not other than you. It is part of your body now. It's part of your way of sensing and being in the world. There's really interesting actually scientific tests around this. One of my favorite ones being that they will take someone have them put both hands on a table and they'll take a hammer and they'll hit the table with the hammer, not the person's hands, hit the table with the hammer so that the person can feel the vibrations of the table. And then they'll say, okay, can you take your left hand down and take the left hand down. And then they'll put a fake left hand there. So the person now looks down and sees what looks like two hands again. And then they pick up the hammer and they smash the fake hand with the hammer. And people have a distinct sense in this experiment of pain that they've been hit by the hammer, right? So this idea that we have these kind of extended sensations or imaginations or ways of thinking about the world in which we're extended seem to be not just kind of like a metaphor, but actually the way our minds work with the world. And Andy Clark would say, you know, there's other examples of this, the way in which he actually has a book called, We've Always Been Cyborgs, and which is excellent, people should read it. And what he would say in that book is, everyone's a cyborg, we all extend our minds using technology all the time. And he says, you know, the really simplest version of this is if I give you a difficult enough mathematical problem, like, let's say six figure addition, or six figure multiplication or division, you'll almost certainly take out a piece of paper and start doing the math on a piece of paper, or, you know, obviously a calculator nowadays, but let's say you only had a piece of paper. And what he says is that the thing to imagine is that you're actually using the paper to extend your mind's ability to remember. It's an extension of memory, so that you can remember where you are, and you can manipulate this complex set of symbols by extending your memory. And so, in which case, the paper has become part of your mind. It's become part of the way you think about things. So, Haraway is very interested in this initial phase of her career, how cyborg theory, this entanglement of humans and technology, kind of plays out in relation to these other theories, I think. So, I also quoted the same quote that you did, so I won't reread it, but the idea here is that we don't necessarily need these, actually this is a subtly different quote than you had, so maybe I'll point out and do it a little bit more. One of the things that often we get when we kind of think through time or through time ideas is that we need to do two things. We need to understand how we got here, and so we need to kind of trace history and understand the decisions and manifestations and materializations that got us to our present location, and so we can understand where we are, and then we also need to have an idea of where we're going. We need to have a future, we need to have a goal, we need to have an imagined future, right? And for Haraway in this particular version of time, she wants to talk about an entanglement of time, and so that the past and the future are somehow entangled in the present, and the way I like to try to explain this is this, I think for Haraway the past is kind of like a forcing function. You materialized or made decisions that are pushing you into the future, you can't stay where you are, but the options that you have in the future make you have to make decisions, you have to choose whether you're going one way or another, and so the present, the present that she is talking about, I think here, is a sense in which what questions are we currently trying to answer? What's the problem that we're trying to solve right now? What is the trouble that we're in? And where the trouble is an interaction not just of the past, but an interaction of the past with the future, and to bring in a little bit of other kind of theorists, it's the agency of being able to change the future, be able to kind of nudge the future in one direction or another, that's the trouble that humans end up being in. Humans end up having to change the natural progression of things. Haraway probably wouldn't like to use the word natural there. So one of the ways to think about it is that without agency, without humans involved in a situation, one would imagine that the situation would simply unfold towards a future that would be somewhat mechanistic, that it would be kind of in in philosophical terminology, it would be a materialistic determination, it would be a deterministic system. Humans, however, because they are involved, kind of embed their decisions and desires and wants and concerns about the future, they embed them in material systems in their technologies, and they become entangled with those materials and technologies moving into the future, so that their future is not simply a set of kind of billiard ball deterministic materialist systems, but instead they're kind of entangled in human desire and the materialization of that desire, and therefore they're trying to figure out how to entangle themselves or disentangle themselves from those things. And so this leads I think for Haraway to want to expand the ideas about which agents are important and how they're important, so that we get this odd kin concepts that she starts talking about where we get an idea that it's not just humans, that it shouldn't be human-centered, it should be kind of centered around all life on the planet for Haraway, where you get other species and the recognition of our entanglement with other species. I think one of the easiest ways to think through that for a lot of people nowadays, just because of the news, is the idea of human entanglement with bees. So we all kind of have an idea or a sense, I think if you kind of follow the news, that bees could go extinct, and if bees go extinct it's not just that we won't get honey anymore, it's that bees are the primary pollinators of most of our crops, and things like corn require pollination in order to produce corn, you can't just plant corn, the corn has to pollinate itself. And so we're kind of like weirdly entangled and enmeshed in a relationship with this other species, in the same way that we're kind of weirdly entangled with our technology, like in a cyborgian theory, right? And then to layer one more thing in there to make sure that we kind of wrap up this other set of theory in really quickly, we're also in a cosmopolitical relationship with these other agents, where like I'm an Athenian and someone else is from somewhere else in Greece, we don't have to end up having the same local needs, desires, wants, goals in order to pursue these things, we don't need a shared concept of the future. What we need is a shared understanding of the current problems, the current ground, the way that things are, so that for Harway when we talk about staying with the trouble, part of what we're talking about is staying, not trying to negotiate the future, not trying to like figure out what we all want together, and somehow like collapsing the future into one desired shared objective goal, but instead trying to figure out what we all need in order to be able to pursue our own goals as members of a cosmopolitical system, right? And so in that way we get this idea, I think, that what for Harway what she becomes concerned with is the establishment of common ground versus common goals. And I think in resilience engineering theory, in a lot of complexity theory that has to do with kind of human systems and human interactions with technology, this idea of common ground becomes more and more important. And I have this weird way of saying it when I talk about it that I think can be useful. A lot of human-centered design and a lot of ways of thinking through how do we know what to do next have to do with identifying a future goal, some designing towards something, and giving everyone to agree that that's the thing we should do, that's the goal, that we should all align around that. And if we don't align around that, we can expect to have kind of lots of divergence, you know, like chaotic behavior and that it will become difficult to achieve that goal. But it seems reasonable if everybody's not aligned to the same goal, you might not achieve that goal. One of the ways to kind of think about the way that common ground works is that it inverts that question. Because what it says is what is the current condition? What is the ground from which we designed from? What are we designing from in order to achieve a lot of potentially different concerns, right? Like we all might have different ideas about what we want the system to be capable of. So you could think about like, again, I hate to trivialize things too much, but like you can think about the idea of dev developers and operators, dev ops. One of the ways to think about it would be that we need to be aligned to the same goal and understand exactly what the system should do in the future and only then will we design and create that system. The other way to think about it would be we all have different goals. The developers want to do certain things. The operators want to do certain things. They want certain properties out of the system. The question then becomes for common ground, what would be required by both parts of the system to achieve their goals? And that becomes the ground. So we're designing from as opposed to designing towards. And the result of this is that, again, we start talking about things like the disposition of the system, the likelihood that the system will unfold in certain ways, the likelihood that the system can or can't do things. And if we think about it in transitionary terms, all of these ideas about designing from then start saying things like, if we want to do something in particular, how might we do it? And what are the different options for doing it? And given the disposition of the system, given the likelihood that the system will do one thing versus the other, when we look at our options, can we pick one based on minimizing the amount of effort required because the system is more disposed towards certain options than it is other options in order to achieve longer goals. So this idea of designing from conditioned consequence thinking is another way of saying these type of things or the ideas of common ground, I think have a lot to do with what Harway wants to talk about here. The idea here, another way I've said it in the past is that huge amounts of like strategy, strategic design, futureing, you know, all these like strategic design activities inside of organizations and firms are frankly escapists. They want to imagine a future without starting from where we are right now. They want to escape the current problems and imagine a better future, as opposed to simply continuously engaging in the most pressing current problems, the trouble that we're currently in, and staying here as opposed to escaping to an imaginary future in which the technology kind of solves all of our problems. One of the things to kind of say there is that for Harway in particular, technology never solves all the problems. It might just move the problems from one place to another, but it doesn't solve the problems. There's no like magical technical fix in the future in Harway's mind. And so one of the other things to really quickly grasp onto here when we think about this stuff and try to think through it with Harway's thought is the difference between like this idea of dynamic balance and what's called anti-foundationalism. I'm actually not convinced that that Harway would use the term anti-foundationalism, but we'll talk about that at some other point. So when we think about this, dynamic balance is this idea that entanglement, the way in which the systems interact with each other, the way in which they play off of each other, means that there's not a complete degree of freedom in the system. Can I freeze? Can anybody hear me out there? We can all hear you out here. Yes, you're fine. Keep going. Great. So there's not a complete degree of freedom in the systems. The interactions between the system create a movement of the system where the system doesn't stay still or doesn't stay completely stable, but it constantly rebalances itself so that the system is reproduced in a way that one can recognize that the system that we saw yesterday is the same system today, even though maybe all the parts significant amount of parts are different or different pieces are involved, still same system just in a different form. And this idea of dynamic and balance becomes really important in relationship to the second piece, which is what's called anti-foundationalism. So foundationalism is just this idea that agency, this idea that we keep on pointing at, that there is an agent and the agent does something requires the pre-existence of the agent. Like there has to be a foundation to the thing. And these ideas have to do with the way in which epistemological systems kind of think their way through things. And any foundationalist system basically says that the agent doesn't actually have to pre-exist its actions. The agents can be created in its actions. And in this way, there's this weird thing that Haraway does where she kind of talks about it's not necessary to completely understand the past. What she means, I think, by that is that there is no need to trace your current decision back through a causal chain to the beginning of time. There's no need for that. There's no foundational decision that deterministically, like a ping pong ball, ends up causing you to make the decision you're making right now. There's no foundation. Instead, there is an emergent complex interaction of things that open a significant amount of possibilities. And those possibilities are offered through this set, through this interaction of a complex system that creates a dynamic balance that opens a phase space. And then your decisions contribute to the future complexity of the system. But they only kind of contribute to the future complexity of the system in that kind of like a butterfly wing kind of way. It would be impossible to trace your decision, particularly in the long-term future. It's only that it nudged the system slightly. So there's no foundation. There's no sense of the causality that you would think of in like a Newtonian kind of way. So that when we think about kind of cyborgs and we think about cosmopolitical systems involving multiple species and multiple technologies and multiple centers of power, one of the things we end up having to kind of think through is that there is no determinism to it. There's only kind of an unfolding of it. And that we need, because of that, because of this constant unfolding, we always kind of have to return to, well, what's the system like now? We have to return to this concept of the present or staying with the trouble constantly. I think it's interesting to think through. And there's all sorts of things I could kind of rant about here about kind of compressive time and our misunderstanding of what it means to be present. And there's all sorts of really interesting things to be said about like, you know, Donna Holloway likes to say things like, it's important to be fully present, but I don't actually think that she means that in kind of like a Buddhist sense of being fully present. I think the Buddhist sense of detached detachment of being fully present, but yearning for a detachment or a lack of, you know, commitment as a form of enlightenment, I think for Holloway, she thinks that in fact it's the opposite. Staying with the trouble is an acknowledgement of our entanglement with the present, our entanglement over time, our inability to extract ourselves. And for her, I think this idea of staying with the present or staying with the trouble is about authentically engaging in the challenges that we are currently facing as opposed to trying to escape them. So two more slides and then I'll stop talking. We get this idea then of process theory versus objective reality or senses of objectivity and independence. One of the kind of things to think through here is that Holloway kind of comes from a set of theory that's called process theory that goes back to Whitehead and to Deluz and others who want to think through kind of how things become ongoing entanglement, how things kind of are always becoming. One of the weird ways to say this is that for Holloway and for process theorists in general, nothing is ever complete. There's no way of saying what something is because it never is. It's never fully there. It's always somehow entangled in the future and the past. Parts of it are always missing and that has to do with commitments and things that we've done and committed ourselves to in order to create the stabilities and the ideas we have about identity and who we are and what we want out of the world. All of those things require imagining a future and committing and making things at least trying to recreate or reproduce things in a way that kind of pulls us into the future because what we want to be, what we believe we are, is a commitment to continue to be the way we imagine ourselves and that is a future state. It's not a present state. So we're never fully there. We're never fully realized. We're always kind of smeared across time in a way and that idea is an idea about expanding what we have a sense of as being present or being becoming. Whereas objective systems have more to do with kind of like interdependence, instead of interdependence, instead of entanglement, it's about the way in which objects are separate from each other and can be evaluated as being unique individual things in the world. And these two theories, they go way back in time, frankly. Heraclitus and Promenides argued that you never step in the same river twice, which is a whole interesting conversation to have at some point. And Promenides argued that time doesn't exist, that everything, time is an illusion. There is no such thing as time. The entire universe is fixed. So the idea that you don't step in the same river twice to Promenides is roughly nonsense. So these ideas, these arguments have happened for a long time. And I will tell you just really quickly, in general, Promenides has been taken more seriously than Heraclitus, by most scientists and physicists especially, and Heraclitus is kind of considered to be a little bit nonsense at times. So last thing kind of call to action part of this. For Harway and for a lot of people who are fellow travelers with Harway, she has this idea like there's a fine line between acknowledging that we're in trouble, that there's problems. We have problems that we have to solve as humans, as agents in the world, as odd kin, as entanglements with the rest of living species on the planet. But that we can't, in her terminology, we can't succumb to an abstract futurism. We can't embrace this escapism of imagining that if we just can imagine the right future and align everybody against that future, that we will escape because we'll know where to go next. And so we can't do this escapism, but we also, on the other hand, we can't go to the past and say all of the decisions that we've made mean that this is a f**k big complete, that it is hopeless, that there's nothing we can do about it, that kind of the environmental crisis, it's too late now. We just have to give up. So for her, that is a little bit of this interesting positioning of we can't escape into the future and we can't excuse ourselves from being entangled with, facing up to our problems in the present by escaping to the past. We can't just say the past determines the future. We have to work together to escape these two extremes, escapism and sublime indifference. And so I think, again, the context that Harroway is talking about these things in is kind of environmental, global, like very large timescapes. But I think these same ideas about sustainability, engagement, understanding, like map some of these ideas onto things like technical debt, organizational debt, the way in which we feel like the technological decisions that we've made in the past are over determining the decisions we can make about our futures so that we feel like the system is in more control than we are and that we give up, that we resign ourselves to those things or the way in which kind of for Harroway, in this cosmopolitical conception, that somehow you have to create a completely aligned ideal future state in order to make good things happen in an organization as opposed to simply having some conception of the common ground that we need to recreate because the common ground already exists. The common ground, the way that we currently are as an organization is based on a set of reproducible ground technologies, ideas, theories about the future in the past that we share. That's the way that the organization kind of sticks together and reproduces itself. So if we want to change our future, focusing on changing the common ground and our common understanding of the technologies and ideas and concepts that we have about who we are and what we're able to do as opposed to reducing autonomy of teams, we can recognize their interdependence and recognize their multiple concerns for what they want as not being the same and still create common ground and stay with the trouble that we have with reproducing that common ground as a way of moving forward through transformation. So I think that's me ranting for a while. And it was a beautiful rant and I really love it. And actually if you go back to the last slide just for a second because I think that quote and I really what I appreciated, I think the most about this book is as you teased out a little bit about staying in what it means to be present and the entanglements we have and having just come out of our 2021 three-day planning meetings and listening to people across the organization having their past baggage and technical debt and trying to come up with a common ground for all of us to move forward with. It's really a good way. It was an enlightening way for me to start thinking about how to move our organizational forward and to find that common ground and where we are all entangled with. And for me one of the things that really, and this is why I like this quote that you ended on, is one of the things she talks about is the apocalyptic despair that many of us may feel at times about global climate change or even though we're working towards something we still, we may publicly present like oh this is, we're going to make the world a better place but we may succumb to in our private talk oh it's never going to happen. So she really creates a space I think for hope and moving forward even in times where there are a lot of things on our plate to try and work out an unentangle or create new conceptual ways of being in there. And also one of the things that I really appreciated about her was she, I think she puts it our comic faith and techno fixes at one point and they could be secular or religious or something else and that somehow technology will come to our rescue and so that for me was really, but she's not also saying go away technology. She's acknowledging that there are lots of situated technology projects that are very important that are going to help us solve some of these issues and help, but it's also for me the important thing was the being with and the collaborations that we have to make in all of our entanglements and in across our organizations whether we're in you know a technology corporation like Red Hat or something and we have multiple silos and lots of products and end users and partners and trying to bring all of those folks together and recognizing them for the entanglements that they are. I just thought that was just a lovely way to think about the work that we do on a daily basis as well as some of the things that we need to do in the bigger world and how even the technology tech that we are in is entangled with the rest of the greater world and our mission at Red Hat and other places and how that is entangled with everything. It was as Joe was saying completely mind-blowing the book and so I encourage everybody who if you haven't read it, it's a great read. So if anyone any further commentary I would happily Mark and other folks to unmute you and let you rant on, but that was for me it really resonated the collaborations and the being with and odd kin. I mean once you accept some of the new vocabulary and new rewording of things it really starts to make a lot of sense and is a nice framework for moving forward in you know this world that is 2021. Absolutely. I think like one of the terms that I've used a bunch of times is being a grumpy optimist. So a grumpy optimist is someone who's not satisfied with the way things are, but part of the reason they're not satisfied is they know that they can get better and so you know it's not falling for either side of it. It's the junction of these two like hopefulness and kind of dissatisfaction that actually makes progress happen I think and allows you to kind of stay with the problems that are kind of in front of you in front of your organization in front of the world. An interesting example of it for me was yesterday and I don't know you know I know you're on Twitter and everything, but the problem with because I come from an open source community background so I'm always watching for these things that happen out there and Elastic changed the licensing on their projects and Elastic and yesterday AWS announced that they were going to make to create a fork of it and create a truly open source project of it and you know that that is a good thing right but because of all the baggage AWS comes with for around open source and contributing there's a trust issue right and the wonderful thing I got to do on some Twitter stream was quote back something from Haraway just about being in the in the prep being able to be in the present and think of this is a good thing they're doing right we need this right we need this open source project to live on in an open way from my point of view I'm not sure what the rest of everybody in the world thinks of but that by being present and not thinking about not that we deny the any evil that someone has done in the past or may do in the future or what their reasonings are for it but because of the entanglement of their products and their offerings and their end users they didn't have to do this but it was done and it's a good thing and so being able to let go of and I you know we do this all the time in in tech we get pissed off at our competitors or a foundation does something or you know to accept something doesn't but being able to be really present with the people that we are in our entanglement with and to truly collaborate and see when we can work together it's just really again like not foreclosing a future possibility because it may pass transgression right yeah that that's the trick is to say like listen if you want to say that amazon will not do this because they don't really know how to do it and you refuse to let them do it before if you foreclose that future you assure yourself that it won't happen yeah on the hand you know if you open this possibility if you open the space that they could become more like what you'd like them to be like and that this is maybe the first gesture towards making that future a possibility then you would want to encourage it not discourage it yeah so it's uh so I thought it was um it was a really good way um to to be able to and I think that's I people may question why we're talking about harrow way and why we're talking about these these um more philosophical why you're quoting quoting greek folks and stuff like that on a technology podcast but I think it's these um deeper ways of thinking about the problems that we're stuck in today um when we just look at okay I have to get this product to release out the door um and x y and z customers want this and x y and z customers want that and how do we reconcile but how do we bring it bring a true collaboration with our end users our partners our colleagues across silos and things these ways of thinking about how we're related to each other really help um I think help me a lot um and in some ways get your ego out of it too I think there's another whole level of um another conversation about that it's definitely um something that and I look forward to more and I think the isabel stanger books are our next on my list as well as still trying to get through the the sanghae books and there's a whole slew of them so I'm not going to go back and read greek um philosophers this month but maybe in the future maybe that could be a retirement project but um I was going to end with a quote that I really liked um from her and because we're almost at the end of our hour or we are quite close to it but she says this wonderful thing that she says um nobody lives everywhere every everybody lives somewhere nothing is connected to everything and everything is connected to something and I think we she talks about strings and connections and collaborations and I just think that so um is dead on um with how we have to think about moving our our lives our organizations and our world views forward is that um I know biden talked about unity and all of these things in the inauguration speech but it really is when we have such great divides and walls between us um I think realizing that we're you know it's not just six degrees of separation we really are truly all connected and interdependent and it really was a great read and a great way to frame and kick off 2021 so I am again indebted with with you and now I'm going to have to go back and listen to this again and catch all of the the book references um and try and annotate this but um it's it's a wonderful way next week if you're around um Kevin beer is going to do a talk um which he is tentatively in title titling rage against the silos and other windmills and on why many pop organizational truisms are not um so that'll that'll be another fun conversation so if you can join us um we have been with him for eight years I can't it's always fun to listen to always oh yeah it's getting a word edgewise in with with Kevin is always the hard one when I'm trying doing this so thank you again for coming today everyone who's listening um I will post this up um on our youtube channel shortly along with the slides and some semblance of annotation of all those amazing references that you made I'm going to be hitting you up in chat later for a few of them um but yeah great talk again um I just wonder what harroway would think of it not me too maybe we'll send her the link and ask so all right take care everybody be safe and um welcome to 2021 happy new year