 I don't need to use my stage voice. So somehow I always get to be the second from last speaker. That means you're all a little more drunk. That's either good for me or bad for me. So I'm going to be talking today about intuition, innovation, and decision making. I'm Susan Bond, by the way, in case you don't know who I am. A little bit more about who I am. I'm not a developer, but I work with developers. Thank you. Appreciate that. So I'm not a developer, but I work with developers. I had my first kind of experiences with technology back in 97, when I started working on the intranet way back when that was early new sorts of things, and then worked in with intranets and intranets. Nice. I'm a little nervous after my computer getting borked. So I worked on the internet during Web 1.0. I managed a project management department. And I used to go on business trips. It was me and 11 developers on business trips. So I have a big love of developers. These days, what I do is I'm more of a marketing person in tech startups. And my background in this sort of stuff is I have a couple of degrees in psychology, sociology, coaching, and I was an executive coach for 10 years. So Marty asked me to talk about intuition. I thought, oh, that'll be a fun blast for my past. So let's start with one of my favorite words, corpus callosum. It's one of the best words ever. So what I want to talk about the corpus callosum is how intuition is connected to really what most developers tend to use when they're developing the rational mind. So what is intuition? It's simply information that you get access to without benefit of a rational thinking process. There are going to be some of you want to debate this with me and know, really, what is it? And we can have a drink later. But let's go with that definition for now. So really today, what I want to talk about is how the corpus callosum, what that means is going from the right side of your brain to the left side of the brain, which Mike talked about earlier from that rational side of your brain to the more creative side of the brain where intuition often lives. I tend to like to call them your rational brain versus your intuitive mind. So I'm not going to make you go away from your rational brain. I just want to be able to have you use both sides of your corpus callosum for more effectiveness. So this is actually my dad from the 1970s. My dad built prototypes for GM. He worked on the Electrover2, one of the first electric cars that GM actually created. And he worked on three-wheeled cars. And I mentioned him because he was my first guy. This was a very rational guy, very, very analytical in his thinking. Yet he was the person who taught me the most about intuition in my life. He was incredibly intuitive. And he's been the person who's really taught me the most about it throughout my whole life. And he's created some really awesome stuff. He has his own Wikipedia page. Code smell. I heard about this the other night, right? Code smell. And it's really funny. I'd never heard of it before. So I was a little worried that you guys might think I was weird talking about intuition. And Jim Gay was the one who said, code smell. You need to know about code smell. And I said, OK, so how do you know when you have a code smell? And this is what I got. It's like a, you know, it's a, and I'm like, what is, I don't know what that means. Or you just a pinch of something's needed. And I thought, wow, that's, I don't know what that means. So today is all really helping you figure out how do you know, you know, we know code smells. Some people know when you find them. There are some things that you can figure out afterwards, like duplication, you know, too long of code. But I want to talk to you about how to use your intuition even more and how to describe it to other people, how to have your teamwork more effectively, and you work more effectively. So it's not a presentation without a horse's ass. Yep, it is down. I spared you. It wasn't in action. Right? Nice like that. So the problem with intuition is that it is not always pretty. Because sometimes you have to make an ass out of yourself. Exactly. So let me tell you about a time when I actually had to make an ass out of myself. I was living in San Francisco, and I'd been sick for a number of weeks. And I couldn't figure out what was wrong, but I had 102 degree fever for three weeks. And I was pretty sure that wasn't normal, despite what doctors said, you know, something wrong. So I finally went to the hospital with a 105 degree fever and pain radiating down my shoulders, out my arms. And I begged the doctor to admit me. She said, I can't find anything wrong with you. I can't admit you. And I said, I don't care, find something. You're not sending me home. There's something wrong with me. And so she finally found something, and she begged this doctor who finally admitted me. And they did all these tests. And I was on a regular floor. And I knew that night. I'm like, I'm on the wrong floor. I am way too sick for this floor. The next day, they did necocardiogram of my heart. It's a picture of your heart. And they found a pint of fluid in my pericardium, right? A pint of fluid surrounding my heart, squeezing my heart shut. Someone's going like this. Yeah, that's a lot of fluid. And they removed it with a needle, like this big. It was huge. And within, so my parents got there, they realized finally that I might be dying. My parents got there the next day. All of a sudden I got sick to my stomach and I flatlined. Literally on the table, flatlined, had the whole vision. It wasn't really like a white tunnel though. Anyway, that's another story. But I flatlined, you know when you're dying. And I think God that I had the intuition that something was seriously wrong because I would have died that day, right? I would have absolutely collapsed on a sidewalk and no one would have known it was wrong with me. So that's an extreme one. I don't think you're gonna die from coding. Hopefully no one has. But it just reminds you that sometimes you're gonna have to maybe look like an ass. You know, you're gonna have to say no, we need to stop production and we need to go back and we need to look. So some of it is we have to not be afraid to look like an idiot sometimes. There we go. One of the other problems and why we don't trust or use it is we don't know how to interpret it, right? We know something's wrong, but we don't always understand how to interpret what it's saying, what it's thinking like this picture, which I accidentally took with a weird filter on. You don't really kind of know what's going on. You think it's a glass, but is it a glass? Is it a drink? What is it? So there's a big problem with interpreting what your intuition tells you. And in the beginning, you don't always know. You know some things off maybe, but you don't always know what. So your gut is gonna fail you sometimes. That's what we say. Failed me, I don't trust it, I can't trust it because it's not accurate. The problem isn't that your gut failed, it's that it was something else and you don't actually understand what your gut really is. Because there is a method to the madness. I actually took this picture at lunch. I watched this little girl try to run around and figure out where the bubbles were gonna come up next and I watched it and there was a pattern to it. It wasn't random. There was one set of pattern and then there was another set of patterns that they ran, the way that they ran. And so the problem with intuition is that we think it's like this, but the truth is it isn't. Our intuition actually has a lot of rules and logic to it if you just understand what they are. So that's what I wanna spend the rest of my time really talking with you about. So a problem, one of the problems and why we don't know what it is is we think it's wishful thinking. I really want this to work this way so I'm gonna pretend it's my intuition. I'm gonna call it my intuition. I wanna be done with the day. I wanna stop coding. I wanna be done so. It looks good, right? It's great, we're done. We did everything we thought we should do. So this is a big trap that we can get caught into is thinking that it is something when it really isn't our intuition we're just calling on something that we want. All right, here's this one. Everybody knows what this is from, right? My favorite movie ever. She looks really pretty but don't mess with him, right? So this is really about shape shifting. So in intuition, it's not intuition if it's shape shifting. If it's moving around, if the answer keeps changing I'm not certain that you've hit your intuition because intuition is concise. It's calm, it's steady, it's not freaking out. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. You know, it's not, it's this, it's that, it's this, it's that. It's concise. It says it's this. It doesn't have like a novella around its language. It's got a one or two words or a phrase. It's gonna be consistent over time. And it's gonna be pretty calm. So hopefully this kind of makes sense with you but you know, this whole shape shifting piece can really get us into trouble because we think, again, we think it's this pretty, you know, blonde in a red dress when really it's something that could kill us. So maybe again, I'm using a lot of dying, dying themes apparently I didn't realize but I know you're not gonna die in code but think about business, right? It's a big deal maybe when we're coding and we're developing something we want it to be successful. So here's some other hallmarks actually of intuition is synchronicity. It's when something, I'm sure you guys know what it is. You've had an example of it. Think of an example of when you've had synchronicity. It could be a small one. For me, I know I'm really in my flow between my two brains when actually, I don't see if he's here anymore but I was just thinking about Prakash. And oh, here you are. I was just thinking about him yesterday and all of a sudden, literally 30 seconds later he comes running up the stairs at me. And I was like, hey Prakash, how are you? You know, so it was great. It was just a moment of like, oh that synchronicity. I thought of him and poof. This person starts running up the stairs. Those are moments when you're really in flow and you have a balance between them if you can be doing that. And I was actually, in the moment that I was actually doing it, I was writing something for a client in my head. I was sort of really focused on that but all of a sudden I had this instinct in there. Synchronicity can happen within you. It can also happen within your team. So it's really important to get your teams to sort of have some synchronicity so that teams can start to go, I think that's off and they can develop that with that. I'm sure when there's paired programming, right? Paired programming, I'm sure there's some pieces where synchronicity can help or hurt that. But synchronicity is a big piece of intuition that you know you're in it when that happens. So here's a big piece. While intuition speaks and it does have a logic to it, it is a little bit different for everybody. So yours was going to have very unique things and ways that it will act that are different than mine. For example, one of mine is when I work with clients or I'm working with anyone, I get tears in my eyes when it's a moment when I need to pay attention. I really, it's like pay attention, slow down, something good is happening here. Happened just last week with my marketing client. So I tell my clients when I get tears in my eyes it means we need to slow down and pay attention because something has just struck. It's usually an insight or something we've broken through, some way to market them or think about their message. So that's one way that mine communicates with me. There are four different channels in the way that it communicates. So the first one is seeing, right? Clarivoyance, that's everything psychic or intuition is, but it's when you might see visual images. So is anyone pretty visual person and do they ever see intuitions? They'll see a picture of something in their head. Yeah, I got a saw a little hand over there. Thank you, John, for being brave. So that's one way. Another one is you might hear something. No, you're not crazy. You might hear a little voice in your ear. For example, one time I was running late for a bus when I lived in Chicago and something in this ear said, run faster, you're gonna miss the bus. And it wasn't on time schedule, I had five minutes. So I ran really fast and literally the bus appeared and I got on and got on one on my way. It's a small one. Here are the last two that I think might really resonate for you guys. There's intuitive feeling. Claricentience, when you just have that feeling. And I think this is a kind of, coats now, part of that is feeling. So a feeling is like that pit of your stomach or you just feel like something doesn't feel right. Has anybody ever used that when you're describing a problem? Let's say with a bug or an implementation that saw a couple hands in there. Yeah, right, it happens. You have this feeling in your stomach. And the fourth one that I think actually I've noticed a lot of folks who are quite analytical and do the kind of work that you do often have this channel. It's called intuitive knowing. They just know. They can't tell you why. It's like they have a piece of information and they just know it's wrong. Does anybody have that one? Right, I'm getting a lot of nod. Yep, head nods on that one. Yep. Intuitive feeling and intuitive knowing are often, can go hand in hand. My strongest channel is intuitive feeling. My next one is knowing. Knowing, you won't know where it comes from. You just have this knowing. Slightly different than feeling. So it's important to know those because that is actually how your intuition is communicating with you. Now the tricky part about it is that sometimes you're just having a bad day and you're cranky and it means nothing about the code. And other times, I know for me since I'm an intuitive feeler, I can often get emotional when something is going wrong. When I've chosen a wrong job or wrong client, emotionally things do not work for me. One time I made a bad decision and I cried for like two weeks and I never cried before that. So that was a clue to me. So those are just some quick ways. I mean, this is a deep topic. So I'm giving, like Jay, I have to give you some of the high level sorts of things. But really you want to take time to understand how your gut communicates with you. And to start to find its language and start to talk with your team about how it works with them and start to pay attention to that because it will speed things up. So let's talk a little bit. We've talked a lot today about meditation and having extra space, white space in your life. I actually want to tell you a quick story. I did a class on intuition for a graduate school and I had a woman who was so uptight, she was like a stone. And I asked her just to take five minutes a day to just be quiet. And she said, no way, I can't do that, I can't do that. I finally convinced her to do it. By the end of the semester, she'd had three breakthroughs at work and she was a completely different person. What my dad calls it is taking a walk on the beach. So my dad worked for GM and the tech center is a massive building. He worked in the engineering building. And he would tell me that when he, he used to sit with his feet up on the desk and this is GM right in the 60s and he would get in trouble for goofing off when he was thinking about a problem, he'd get in trouble. So instead he would walk around the building and he always said that by the time he got halfway around, he had to come running back so that he could write down his idea because this was before computers happened and he couldn't carry a smartphone. So really taking time to get quiet with yourself, listening to what it has to say, writing it down, actually even writing it down or talking about it helps to sort of cement it in. So here's my obligatory, it's the day of cognitive science here. So what Jay was actually talking a lot about today was the prefrontal cortex. That has to do with memory and recalling. It also has to do with understanding and deciding things. The prefrontal cortex is like your CPU. It's like your processor in your brain. The problem with the prefrontal cortex is it can get tired really easily. So you wanna make sure that you're using it in really smart ways. The prefrontal cortex gets heavy use when you're trying to figure out something you haven't seen before. So something you've seen before is maybe a problem. What you haven't seen yet is the solution. So you wanna make sure that you use that prefrontal cortex really well. So a couple things, sometimes checking your email first thing in the morning may not be the wisest thing to do because it'll burn up a lot of energy. Arranging meetings burns up a lot of energy from your prefrontal cortex. And when you're doing your work, understanding and deciding are likely big things that you're doing, right? Whether you're implementing, coming up with a solution, fixing bugs. So you really wanna protect that part of your brain, making sure to schedule things, prioritize. Another piece to that is, hang on a second, none of water. So the other piece to it is breaking up your tasks, like batching your tasks, doing certain things at certain times. So breaking it up, breaking up the routine because sometimes working harder isn't actually working smarter when it comes to your prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is really helpful, I think, in where intuition can come from as well. And it can also work along with your corpus callosum. So just a little bit of thinking about how to really use yourself and use your brain. Now, this is what my dad always says, good decisions get better and bad decisions get worse. This is my ultimate intuition advice, right? So it's one of the best things I always remember. It's like, which way am I going on this decision curve? So that's just something to sort of think about and to remember. And last thing, just Steve Jobs, just a big believer in intuition. So I just want to thank him. I also want to thank all of the developers who helped me sort of think about all of this. Sterling Olson, Neal, Jay, Jay. I mean, there's tons of you guys. Thank you so much. I don't know if I have time on where Marty went. I don't know if I have time for questions, but that's all I have for today. Does anyone have any questions? We're going to roll into a panel, but any quick questions about intuition? I did such a good job. Or too much, it's intuitive, right? Or too much beer, just kidding. Yeah, let me turn this off.