 All right, I hope you had great chats. I eared in on a few of them, impossible to do eight, especially at once. But we'll go from that discussion to something different. We'll have a second round with Mary. And I mean, I've introduced you before, so I think I'll pretty much leave the stage to you. And we got to know you a little bit in the panel before. One thing that obviously, I mean, you're very into this subject, and you worked around this quite some time. When you go to a conference like this, what sort of the takeaway, by now, four o'clock, what are sort of the biggest takeaways you've gotten out of today? Being very into the subject. The thing I think I most love was hearing Joss's story and that it really does scale all the way up into the thousands. To still have such a small back office team and so many independently autonomous teams working is a really awesome story, because there's a lot of people who think that it only works to a certain size. It's really great to hear a story that it's going beyond that. I'll leave this to you, and I'll flip your presentation for you. And then we just assume it would work. Awesome. Great. Thank you. Hi, everybody. You've heard a little bit about who I am, anyway. I started off in South Africa very much a hardware geek and was really terrible at all this people stuff and have learned it along the way. To the extent of I built part of South Africa's first satellite when I was a teenager. Who's got kids? Here's my advice, don't let them do anything cool when they're young. It's all fucking downhill from there. I literally, I sold at something that went into space. I can't ever be as cool as 15-year-old me. So my entire life is just a series of disappointments. So as I say, I was very deeply technical. I was in AI, artificial intelligence research, which is kind of being one of the nerdiest of the geeks as well. And so when I got asked at Proctor to start managing people, that was pretty much my reaction. I'd had a series of not brilliant experiences of being managed. I think some of the experiences this morning are being sent out of class and not dealing well with authority are very true of my childhood as well. And so I had not been easy to manage or enjoyed being managed. And so when I was asked to do it, I was pretty terrified. And I think that's because we all have this terrible image of the pointy head boss, the kind of like useless, but involved, doesn't listen, doesn't do anything useful. And we call, we all hate bad bosses. We call them clueless and we call them empty suits, pointless. Is everybody familiar with the seagull style of management? Fly in, shouted everybody, shit on everything, fly away again. Let's just say that at the point I asked to become a manager, I had experienced quite a lot of that. And so in addition to the kind of deer in the headlights reaction to being asked to become a manager, my other reaction was, I just, I really don't want to be a bad boss. So my good news, guys, I found the best cat gift on the internet. So fuck that thing in particular was my reaction to being forced to become a bad boss. I love this quote from Katarina Fake, who's obviously famous for being involved in Flickr and things like that, that there's three kinds of managers, the shit umbrella who protects some of their people, the shit funnel who chooses who they hate most and shoves it all down onto them. Or the shit van, just spread it around. So hope it's all right. And this led me to my belief that like traditional management beliefs are a pile of shit. And I think something I find, so you guys are not just a tech audience. I find it really frustrating in tech that we are in some ways very arrogant, in many ways very arrogant. And we seem to have gone, you know what, let's go back to 1920s factory management and we'll just evolve from there. We'll just take all the worst bits of management from 100 years ago and we'll figure it out along the way. And so I spend a lot of time just going like put down your sword. Even the modern army wouldn't try and be as directive as you are trying to be right now. And because I'm a geek, I did go. So what's going to work? And I went and found this book. And now you're an audience that might have read it. Who's read this book? First break all the rules. Okay, a few. The rest of you need to. It's awesome. And I think I like it most because it's, it's database. And I'll tweet out links to all the, to all the books I mentioned at the end in case if he's worried about that. And they, this is, is Gallup and they have their faults, but they went and did hundreds of thousands of interviews trying to identify why certain teams were so much more successful than others. So they didn't focus on happiness. They focused on productivity and profitability and which teams were outperforming others. And this was across a whole set of industries. They were looking at why does, why does this particular restaurant do better than the rest of the chain? Why is this automotive division so much better at building quality cars? Why is this factory outperforming that factory? And so what's interesting is they found this across all of those different industries that there are of course hygiene factors. You pay people poorly. You're going to, you pay people terribly. You're going to experience that. But the things that predicted high performance were this set of kind of 12 questions that if people could answer them positively and they had a much better experience and they were much higher performing. My immediate reaction to a list of 12 things is to go, great. Now I'm drowning in shit. I can't remember. Thanks, Mary. So, so, so let's take one step back from that and try not to look at those 12 in detail, but at a broader picture. Who's read drive? More cool. There is a 12 minute sketch note, which tells you everything you want to know. If you don't have enough time to read things, I'll tweet that out as well. I really like Dan Pink's review of the kind of the literature and the science around motivation. And I think we talked a bit this morning about purpose and autonomy and mastery, but this somebody's got a very important call. Somebody's abashed about the very important call. But that these three things come together that if people have purpose and autonomy and mastery, then then they're motivated. So do I believe in why? And what I find really interesting having worked with quite a lot of people over the course of my career at this point is there seems there are sets of people where that piece about purpose is about bigger people purpose in the world. There are people who when you are helping them understand how what they do relates to the why of the organization. They need to care about that why in a really fundamental way. And so when I was working in the digital service in the UK, there were a whole set of people who we had who were hugely motivated by making government better for citizens. And as long as we were doing that they were they were they were in. And then I've worked with a whole bunch of people who all they really want to know is how the thing they're doing relates to the bigger thing that the company is about. And as long as they understand that they're fine. I had a director earlier my career who I actually really I really loved she was she was awesome. But she would say when people got upset about it projects going wrong. She go at the end of the day it's all just boxes of soap guys. And on the one hand it calms people down because it's boxes of soap aren't life and death. But on the other hand for some people that was pretty demotivating because they wanted to believe that what they did mattered. And then I think that autonomy piece. Do I get to say in what and am I proud of how do I think I'm getting better at the thing I do day by day. And then take away from that anything negative that detracts. Number of conversations you will have about negative things that attract if you try make developers work on windows machines is a is an interesting thing. And actually many of these these questions that Gallup found were really important fit pretty neatly into those into those areas. So do I know what's expected me at work to my opinion seemed to count. I think we would go further and go do I get to decide what I do and how I do it. Do I have what I need to do what I do. Do I get the opportunity to do what I do best every day. Does somebody care me care about my development. And then does the mission or purpose of my company make me feel that my work is important is the overall purpose question. It's a really important one. But there's some other stuff on that list. So do I get recognition or praise for good work. Does anybody notice if I'm good at my job. Does anybody notice if I'm shit at my job. Does someone at work seem to care about me as a person. And do I have a best friend at work. And I find that one really funny because I do this talk a lot in England and the British reaction to being forced to choose your best friend from the people at work is not great. And so think of it in the American sense of someone you could really like who you work with rather than a you shall you shall select your one option from here. And I think that's about being respected and rewarded and being yourself and succeeding. And so that's about inclusion. So my base hypothesis here is that when we when we are making changes in our organizations or when we're building new organizations we're trying to create space in which people can be brilliant in which they can be awesome. And that means having purpose having a why to believe in having autonomy getting to getting to have a say in what are we doing the right thing. Mastery being proud of how we're doing it. Am I doing the thing right. And then do I belong here. Is this a place where I can be myself and be successful. Without any terrible things that attract. And I think our mission is to create that space for ourselves and for others. I don't think this is something that you wait for leadership in a company to wake up one morning in a blinding flash and realize they want to do I think this is something we can do at every level. As individuals as managers as HR people as leaders whatever our role is we can help create this space. And really all of those anyway this is the ones take a photo of if you want to remember the 12 questions. So all of these predictors of high performance fit into those areas if we're proud of the thing we're achieving we get to have a say in how we achieve it. We get to be proud of what we're doing day by day and we feel like we're with a team we can love and respect. Then why wouldn't we love coming to work every day. It sounds so simple. So what does it mean day to day week to week. I think the purpose piece is about translation and protection. So some of the some of the thing I worry we lose when we I actually think we can take a lot of manager roles out and a lot of managers are much happier when they're doing more of a when they're doing a different role. But the thing that you can lose unless you find a way to do it differently is that translation between what you're doing day by day and what the overall purpose of the company and the team is. I have seen it go wrong when we just go we just don't need that anymore. We don't need these manager people anymore. The things we don't realize they're doing and facilitating other things that catch us just an immediate reason to keep that structure. It's a reason to actively plan for how we meet that need. So help connect what people are doing now and what they can do in future to that overall important purpose. It's also about enabling autonomy and mastery and I call this the the clue skills matrix. You want to pay a few thousand dollars to have somebody teach it to you as situational leadership. That's an option that's also available. Apologies to anybody at the audience who makes their living teaching situational leadership. I'm sure it is a fine course and we would all benefit from it. But most most managers I know are stuck in one of two modes. They assume everybody has no no clue and no skills and so they need to be told exactly what to do all the time. Or they assume that you're fine on your own and they just leave you. And in my experience most people this there's somewhere on here and they're not as an entire individual in one of these quadrants in in different times on different tasks on different. Challenges they need different support. So figuring out whether somebody knows what to do but needs some skills or knowledge or whether they have a whole bunch of skills knowledge and they just need some help understanding how best to bring that to bear. Is the first thing I think that we need to help and when we can get teams to coach each other through this. I think that's the eventual like complete win. But but a lot of the time I'm brought into organizations that have managers who aren't great and need to be better. And this is this is the thing they can get better at because I think our role what we do is different depending on which of these states somebody's in. If somebody really needs telling what to do and how to do it we should be in a brief teaching phase down this bottom corner. Sometimes you need a guide. Sometimes you need someone to pair with. And if somebody really knows exactly what to do and how to get it done our jobs to be a bulldozer in a cheerleader. Tell them they're awesome and get shit out of their way. Right. And when we're learning those new skills though I think there's a whole other talk I do about models of learning. But one of the core things is we're good at what we practice provided we can learn from it. And I imagine in again in this audience the the concept of deliberate practice won't be a very new one. So being motivated to attend to a task exert effort to improve performance. Essentially is what we're doing challenging enough to be interesting and to be growing us but not so challenging as to be frustrating. And I think a lot of us understand that that's how learning happens. But we don't often think about whether we're designing our work in a way that makes it effective practice in that way. Is is is your week this week set up next week because obviously this conference is the best learning opportunity you're having all year. I'm not actually being sarcastic. I think this conference is great. But next week how are you designing your work and your team's work and the people who you collaborate with. How are you all designing your your day to day in a way that you can get the most out of it. I don't think we think like this but then we look at it in sports where they train and then they and then they compete and they train. And then there's like the days that are not match days or different days. We're not great at thinking like that in business and I think we could we could do a lot more to think about how to get the most challenge feedback and learning out of what we do day to day. But the the core pillar for me and most of this talk is about this area which is about diversity and inclusion. How do we how do we move into this new way of working this new way of being how do we become way more motivated way more effective but in a way that isn't exclusionary. And you know what diverse teams outperform non diverse teams by a mile but people who are different have a harder time working together. And that's one of the kind of things we gloss over too much when we when we talk about diversity and we say it's a good thing and then we try and do it and we fuck it up. Right. So we need to help people succeed as themselves. The best way to predict whether you're going to be able to recruit and retain people is their ability to say someone like me can be successful here. Not that they personally can but somebody like them can be successful here and quick show of hands. Who knows who the Daily Mail is or what the Daily Mail is. OK. Somebody who Swedish tell me what the equivalent horrible right wing shit of a tabloid is. OK. So we have this thing in the UK. It hates everybody. It's a newspaper. And I'm going to admit right now that I'm pretty much the one the Daily Mail warned you about. I am. I am. I had I had a director once who went as long as I've got you and Sam Latif in my team. I'm sorted. I've ticked every box. Sam Latif is a colleague of mine who is blind and Muslim and Scottish. And so this director was probably correct but I'm not sure he was really understanding the purpose of diversity. But I am a woman who works in tech that makes me a definite minority. I'm gay and foreign. I'm employed which in the UK they really hate it if you're working because you've stolen their jobs. But if you're not working then you're living off benefits. So you're kind of screwed either way. I have a pretty major medical condition makes me disabled. I don't believe in God. But I did and the Daily Mail would especially hate me because my wife is British. So I'm over there stealing their women and their jobs. So they are. I do literally have this t-shirt and when I worked for the government one of the PR people had to politely request I never wear it outside like visibly coming into the office because they were really worried about it. But I grew up white in apartheid South Africa. So I know exactly what unasked for undeserved privileges all about. I grew up where by the accident of the color of my skin I was automatically better off than 90% of the population. And what people forget about apartheid South Africa is it was not a minority being oppressed. It was a majority being oppressed. You want to see how upside down the world is. You see a world where just by your skin color you are automatically the only set of people who are going to get to attend school past the age of 14 ever go to university or ever travel outside of the part of the country you've been restricted to. Because that's the other thing that like I know we have we have inspirational movies about Mandela and the rugby World Cup and similar. You couldn't travel outside your province without government approval unless you are white. It's the only time you had freedom of movement in your own country where you were not given the right to vote or any rights at all. And so I grew up with signs like these everywhere. That says this speech is for whites only these toilets are for whites only. We didn't have a back of the bus problem. We had a you're not allowed on the bus problem. And so I can't deny that privilege I can be in the minority however other other many ways, which seems to be all of them through an accident of other things. But I can't I can't deny that. And it's really disrespectful if I deny that. And so the most useful thing I can do is to assess it and understand it and acknowledge it. In apartheid South Africa we were incredibly blatant about how how we were discriminating. I think as a society in the world, we are worse at acknowledging this when it isn't quite so blatant when it isn't all enshrined in law, but it is enshrined in how we are day to day. I tweeted this link out earlier. If you haven't read it already and unpacking the invisible knapsack of white privilege is a if there's one thing you do for me today, please read it and internalize it because I think we we think that we're past these problems. We think that that is the past. And we are so wrong in so many ways and we look at the US and worry about how being black seems to be a reason for a policeman to shoot you right now. But we don't recognize that we're probably experiencing some of these problems day to day in our in our offices as well. Neil Dash is a great friend of mine and he he's highlighted this in the in the tech industry a lot that we have this pernicious lie that it's a meritocracy. We have this pernicious lie that if you just work hard enough, you will succeed and that all we care about is the quality of your work. And that is a lie as well. And the first step in moving forward is accepting our current reality and accepting that some people I love this graphic and accepting that that people are on a different footing. Due to the circumstances of their birth, let's us better approach how to accommodate that and to get everybody to have a true chance at the same things. We want every child in our world to have the opportunity to succeed the opportunity to be amazing. And that extends into our middle class day to day in in North in North Europe just as much as it does into townships in in South Africa. And not just discriminating is really important like legally you're going to get in trouble if you if you're doing that. But I hate the concept of a tolerant society. My little brother who really doesn't like me much tolerates me because we're related. I don't think what I'm shooting for in the world is to be tolerated much as I need to patch up my relationship with my little brother. But tolerance isn't the thing to aim for. Active inclusion is the thing to aim for. And I think the best thing about trying to become a much more actively inclusive environment is that it helps everybody. It is it is not taking this one small set that we're worried about right now and just lifting them up. We're going how do we make this generally a place where all different types of people all different demographics all different experiences can be successful. I want you to worry just as much about the people who didn't get the opportunity to go to university being successful in your organizations as the folks who've been living with with a with a demographic. Accident of birth that that means that they've got less opportunity. We need to make things better for everybody. And diversity is a spectrum. We have the active. We have like apartheid and Ku Klux Klan territory down down the left here. But indifference and tolerance aren't the things to aim for either. We need to be aiming for active inclusion. Does everybody know what a microaggression is? So Frick says it best. A microaggression is telling young boys that they are very smart and telling young girls that they're very pretty. If you want to you want to see how much this is still a part of our day today. Talk to a four year old about what girly means. See what see how see how much of our worldview we have put onto them already at four years old. So how do we so it's all gotten pretty haven't sworn in about five minutes. Nobody's laughed. So it's all gotten very heavy. So what do we do about it? What are the practical things we can do differently? It sounds so simple. Stop pushing under privileged groups away. Start building actively inclusive environments. Two simple steps really fucking hard to do right. But here are some specific things that work. And my experience in this area is kind of a couple of things. I led the LGBT network for Protering Amble for many years. We went from being not somewhere you would necessarily think of working to being one of the top employers to work for LGBT people in the UK. Seven years running with the point that I left. And I also help over helped a series of organizations who had very poor representation of women and people of color in their technical functions to get much better at that. So speaking from some some past experience. So the first thing is reduce fear. We increase opportunities and that is great and that is essential. Think about which groups it's much scarier to take those opportunities for and adjust for that. A PNG at one point in our technology function we had women saying no to promotions because they felt it was so unlikely that they'd be set up for success if they moved up and that they would rather not do so. And we had work to do on reducing fear. And reducing the impact of failure, the risk of humiliation, just understanding that that risk is different. So somebody going for that amazing overseas assignment that's really going to make their career. It's a very different thing if you're going to feel alone for the next two years because there's nobody like you in the location you're being sent to. Then if you're just going to pick up a new set of friends. Educate yourself and others about privilege and implicit bias. If we keep doing what we've always done, we're going to keep getting what we've always got. I love Jackie Chan. The best privilege is a word that is like it sparks internet rage. It makes people shut down. The best explanation I have heard of it that for me resonates the most is think of privilege as which setting your life is set on. If life were a game, are you playing on easy, on medium or on hard? And if you don't know, talk to some people who aren't like you and get their perspective. And you might be surprised at some of the things that they're experiencing that make hard or very hard the default setting that they get no choice about changing. I've just realized that this next cartoon is probably too small. You can read it. And that there's been a lot of internet fights about particularly women speakers at technical conferences over the last few years. And there was an exchange where some really, really wonderful guys were starting to just go, I'm worried about this. How can I help? What can I do? Waded into the fray and then found out how hard some of those conversations were and how high the emotions were running. And one of them tweeted saying, this is important, but it's exhausting. I'm just going to go and not worry about gender diversity at conferences for a bit or gender diversity in our industry for a bit. And somebody responded to them going, you understand that's the definition of privilege, right? Getting the opportunity to not worry about this shit is not an option for everybody. That's not to lack respect or gratitude for the people who aren't personally affected who weighed in and tried to help. But not all of us get the choice about what we're experiencing. Implicit bias as a tool to take back to teams and try to try to baseline. Some really interesting Harvard research into the biases we don't realize that we're applying. So we're not actively discriminating, but we are passively discriminating. There's a tool you can use to do it. Do it when you're in a mode where you can focus, you're not distracted. Because it's about reaction times and things like that. One of the great examples in Blink, Michael Gladwell's book, was a, I forget which symphony orchestra it was, but they were very actively trying to be more representative in their selections, getting a lot more women and people of color to audition, but continuing not to select many of them. And as an experiment, somebody, and they were all very dedicated to doing it, they were trying their hardest. And somebody suggested to put up a screen. And once the screen was up and the music alone was being judged, they selected 51, 49%. Something about how a woman looked holding a violin didn't look world-class to a set of experts selecting from the best in the world. And things like availability bias and similar make us make poor decisions when we're used to not, when we're used to there being a default in the world. If you're not familiar with XKCD, best cartoon on the internet, possibly the world, better than Dilbert by a country mile. If a guy is bad at maths, he's bad at maths. If a girl is bad at maths, all women are shit at maths. And we have that repeatedly that the same thing happens for male nurses in many countries, that they are judged and they have a terrible experience day to day because they're not seen as the default and it's not seen as a manly job and don't even get me started on toxic masculinity because we will be here for days. But think about what signals we're sending. And in a really, really practical way, check the signals you send. If your company has loads of things that are in the evening, you are automatically excluding. You're forcing people to choose between their caring responsibilities, whether it's parents or children or similar, the hobbies that they've got, the other things that they do. We hear a lot about startup culture being play foosball all day, drink all evening, write some code at two in the morning, have some pizza come back again. That's a really extreme view, but think about the messages that you're sending as you send them. People can't judge your intent, it doesn't matter how good a person you are, they're not going to know, they just judge what they see you do. Language matters, the default that you're assuming. There's a pension company in the UK that got into trouble recently because they send a letter out that says this is the pension you're going to have. Here are the assumptions we've made about you. You're going to retire at this age and we're going to assume your wife is three years younger than you and we're going to, things like this. Somebody in corporate comms or legal has gone, there are those same sex marriage things now, so we should probably update this and rather than do it properly, they've put an asterisk and gone, where wife might mean civil partner or similar. Fuck off. Right. The next thing to do is check if systems are loaded. There's some pretty good evidence that companies that separate performance appraisal, and again, I am not the poster child for us always doing annual reviews or performance appraisal or similar, but if you have them, there is some good evidence that shows that if you separate assessing people's performance and deciding people's pay rises, you perpetuate the gender pay gap much less. So if we automate how well you perform means this much money, we have a small agenda pay gap. And one hypothesis for that is the pitching for a pay rise, which is a normal annual thing in many companies, seems to disproportionately favor certain demographics. So if you are comfortable or able to become comfortable going in and going, you know how good I was this year, 27% good. There are people who run YouTube videos about how to do your bonus negotiation or whatever. The fundamental system is flawed. People who are from a non-individualistic culture, people from the Far East, people from places where team means more than individual. Wouldn't we prefer to have places where team means more than individual? You're making them choose between being themselves and being successful if you force them to go into that kind of negotiation. So let's try and find those systems and change them to be better. And you know what? Those shy or humble guys, they're going to benefit from that too. You can move to a process that is better for everyone. You don't have to just choose to start penalizing the people who were privileged in the past. And this comes to one of the core problems I believe we have, which is... So there's a guy called Johnny Clegg. He's a British guy hugely into Zulu culture in South Africa. And he's partnered with a lot of folks. And there's a line of saying, they said, learn to speak a little bit of English. Don't be scared of a suit and tie. We give so much advice that just reads, be more like a straight cis American white guy. Like one of the biggest criticisms of Lean In of Sheryl Sandberg's book is she's basically just going, pretend you're a dude who's loud and angry. And I think particularly in tech, we have a meat grinder problem. We have a pipeline problem and a meat grinder problem is the way we're talking about it now, which is we can't attract enough people into technology. And actually, where the career leads is a meat grinder. You end up spat out, crumbled at the end. And that's because this expectation is pretty impossible to meet. You can't change yourself in order to be successful. And so people either go, I've got to escape. Or... Or this, come at me, bro. And I'll admit, in my younger, naive, terrible, still very damaged by the environment I had grown up in, I doubled down on that, right? I could be just as much of a bro as anyone. And I was an asshole because of it. And I had this realization at one point that I was the most senior woman in technology in the area I was in. And I wore guys' clothes, swore a lot, talked about sports and had a wife. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad set of things. And we can talk about the springbox for seven hours tonight as well, if you'd like. But am I a great role model for women who aren't like me? Not necessarily. And if I'm the only woman who is a role model in that organization, and all the rest of them are guys, I am not showing that you can be... that you can be fair and successful, certainly, right? And so, caring about that stuff. I think I've been through my Come At Me bro stage, and I am now into my Let Me Just Make This Environment Better For Everybody. Two more practical tips, frame guidance altruistically. If you talk about making a bigger pie rather than stealing more of the pie, if you give advice that is selfless rather than selfish, it will appeal to a much broader group. One of the fundamental changes we made to our internship program at Proctor in technology was we used to have a very slick guy come in and go, talk to everybody, man, because you never know who's going to be useful to you. And that didn't resonate with people, or it resonated with a subset of people. And when we said, talk to everybody, because in your 10 weeks, you're going to become an expert in the thing you're working on, and you never know who you could help by realizing that there's a connection between your project and theirs. That year, we saw our top interns all become women, because we'd equip them with a skill that in that particular business was really essential, which was to go find people who knew things, because the knowledge management was not very written, and help them to integrate better. It's a really small example, but it is really useful. And generally, if we give advice which is, beat the other guy, you will only appeal to a very small subset of the population of the world. As I said earlier, the most important question is, somebody's ability to agree with, someone like me can be successful here. And some of that is about showing multiple roots to success. Let's value the what over the how. If you give advice on specifically what to do, often you're giving advice that people can't follow without betraying themselves in some way, whether that's culturally or reversing the learned behavior they've got from growing up the way they grow up, but coaching them to figure out what they think they should do, and it being possible as long as you get the end result, that the mechanism of getting there doesn't matter so much, is one way to do this. So Stonewall or LGBT, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender rights organization in the UK, they did some research that found that people can be 40% more productive if they're in an environment where they feel like they can be themselves at work. That's pretty massive. And remember that many of those people are performing pretty well right now. They're not getting fired. They're doing pretty good at their jobs. They're offering promotions and things like that. But if we can make an environment where they don't have to hide who they are, or they don't have to pretend to be telling they're not, they'll be even better. Another thing that really surprised me, and I thought role modeling was bullshit, when we were doing recruitment events, when I led recruitment for tech in P&G, when a woman presented, we had 100% more applications from women, but no drop-off in applications from men. So it seems like seeing somebody who you go, oh, people like me are successful there, really, really, really does matter. And if you present a monoculture, people will make assumptions you don't like, and they will choose not to join you, and choose not to stay with you. Think about when you're bringing a candidate around in the office, when you're recruiting them, what do they experience? Who do they see? Is everybody like them in a junior or administrative role? Are they going to be the first person in the office who is somebody like them, and what's that experience going to be like for them? Being expected matters. If I arrive in an organization that's already updated their maternity and paternity policy to say something like parental leave, rather than assuming that there's always a mum and a dad, I'm much more likely to feel welcome, and I'm much more likely to feel like I was expected there. The number of startups who only write a parental leave policy the first time a founder gets pregnant, or a founder's wife gets pregnant are too many. One final piece that really fascinated me, we used to run in this internship program we ran, we had a kind of role modeling session that we'd bring a set of very senior people in to talk to the interns, and they'd always ask something like, did you always know where you were going? Did you always know you were going to be a director or a vice president? And the guys pretty consistently said, yep, at every level I knew I could do more and I knew I was going places and I believed in myself. And every woman said, no, some of the promotions scared the shit out of me, but I had mentors who told me I could do it, and I believed in them when I didn't trust myself. And so if you do one thing differently, other than reading the white privilege knapsack thing, because you really should, go back and tell the people who don't know that you think they're brilliant. There's one thing we can really, really have a major effect by is that. So we talked about the rest of being awesome, but this inclusion piece we don't talk about very often. So practical things we can do. Assume people are scared. Understand their risk. Focus on how to reduce it. Advise people to bake more pie rather than steal more pie. Work and life is not a zero sum game. We don't have to screw each other over to succeed. We can succeed together better. And I'll prefer to live in that world than the world that... I'm about to insult a major consulting company, but I won't. I will not climb over the dead bodies of my colleagues that I have slain in order to achieve business success. Fuck that noise. We can build a better way. Understand yourself and educate others about privilege and implicit bias. Connect people with role models. Grow more role models. Encourage them to be visible. But if you have one woman in your company who is technical, remember that you're asking them for a lot of work if they're going to be the one woman who represents at every event that you ever run. Let's not do that. Remember about somebody like me who can be successful here. Tell people that you believe in that they can. And tell people that you believe in that they're there because of their skills. Nobody, nobody wants to be in a role or to be given an opportunity because of the fact that they're not white or they're a girl or you're our token lesbian. Let's, let's give you that promotion. Fuck off. Let's not do that anymore. We need to find ways people to be true to themselves unsuccessful. And we need to fix, we need to look at our processes and our systems and fix them if they are hurting that. And then don't forget the small stuff. The thing that fascinates me most about this picture is they've got the company, the company this is that's packed people in sardines like that. They have their logo in like massive banners hung from the ceiling and I'm the one who's hiding it. I can't believe that anybody's proud of that being, that being their office environment. But however much we get the other stuff right, if we fuck up the environmental stuff that, that, that hurts people as well. So remember to sweat the small stuff too. Space to be awesome is about purpose, autonomy, mastery and inclusion. And every role is capable of virtuosity. I genuinely believe people come to work wanting to be good at what they do, wanting to be awesome. Let's just help more of them do that and let's recognize them when they do. Go. Shafa makes place to be awesome and be inclusive. Thank you very much. It's not quite as good as the best cat gift on the internet, but the hedgehog of fist bump is pretty good, right? Love the slides. Love some of the key messages. One thing, and we'll open up for some quick questions, but it seems like, I mean, 40% higher productivity if we allow them this. You talk about role models and there are a number of different things that we sort of, we know. So I guess my question is, don't we know all this already? And why isn't it sort of flying? So I think, I think there's a few things. We have a lot of organizations that people come in, look around and go, no, somebody like me could not be successful here. People experience environments where they come in and go, I could change myself, but I will not be happy doing so. And I think you find people who are less experienced try to change themselves and burn out because of it, and people who are more experienced go, I'm opting out right now. And so I think we're not doing enough to make that actually true in enough organizations. Now, as somebody who leads technical organizations, actually it's a massive competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining people if you can create that. And so my approach is to go make places better and then find that people will take, I've got people taking pay cuts to come and work in that team because they can feel like they'll be so much better by being somewhere that they are loved and respected and included. Is the tech industry a place to look if you're interested in sort of looking under the hope of the people that, the companies and industries that have actually gone far and been successful? I think we're pretty terrible at it, but we've got a few outliers who are doing it a lot better. But we also have a thing that happens then that there's a few companies doing it a lot better. There's a bunch who have done it very publicly, very terribly. And so we have the meat grinder problem with people just going, I don't see enough options where I could go and be successful and be myself. So I'm gonna opt out, I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna go do something differently. And so helping that happen less is probably one of my current missions in life to make it, but not to stop them leaving to make it better so they don't wish to. Fair enough mission in life. For those of you interested in the hit list and the shit list, talk directly to you probably because we're running out of time. But let's have one or two questions or more from the audience. What's bubbling? We have a microphone. Yes. As a manager, do you have worked with any assessment tools that tracks this and raises the awareness in the organization or is it just that we bring up the topics and bring up, put words on it so that we help people to see or have you worked with? One of the main bits of advice that organizations like Stonewall give is to get demographic information. If you're doing any kind of happiness survey or staff engagement survey or similar to carefully and sensitively introduce demographic questions to it so you can see whether there are sets of your organization who are experiencing things differently. So there is a, one of the things we found at a company, I probably shouldn't name was when we started doing that, the average, like, likelihood you felt you were going to be bullied at work was very low, like 5% or something, but in the LGBT organizer, the people who identified as LGBT, it was 45%. That's two things, how to measure the outcome. Have you encountered tools to affect it as well and work with it? And I think the specific action to take it, some of the practical steps I was talking about but also looking at how interactions happened day to day, the number one thing that I think affects people is whether there's a culture of respect and conversation and facilitation in dialogue in the workplace or whether it's whoever shouts loudest, fastest and hardest will win. I think that's the first thing to change is reduce combativeness in how your decisions get made or discussions get had, because that's alienating a whole set of people who you don't want to alienate. It's optimizing for the people who are most privileged. Alright. In essence of time I think we'll keep it at that but you'll stick around. Thanks a lot for sharing a big hand for Mary, please.