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Rewriting the Rules of Expertise with J. B. Rainsberger
87 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of Empathy in Tech, Andrea and Ray sit down with J.B. Rainsberger, a software professional who transitioned from a purely technical focus to championing interpersonal skills in the tech world. J.B. shares his evolution from a programmer obsessed with "correct" solutions to a mentor helping others navigate the human challenges of software development. Through stories of personal growth, insights from Buddhism, and reflections on the dangers of dogmatic expertise, J.B. challenges listeners to embrace curiosity, patience, and compassion in their work.
Sponsored by CodeCrafters - discount link
LINKS
- J. B.'s website - jbrains.ca
- J. B.'s LinkedIn
- Contract Testing and Pact
- Geoffrey Moore - Crossing The Chasm book, video
- Robert B Miller - The new strategic selling
- Chip Heath & Dan Heath - Switch: How to change when change is hard
- Chip Heath & Dan Heath - Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
- Gerald Weinberg - Secrets of consulting
HOSTS
- Andrea Goulet LinkedIn | andreagoulet.com
- Ray Myers LinkedIn | Craft vs Cruft on YouTube
ABOUT EMPATHY IN TECH
Empathy in Tech is on a mission to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry by:
- Closing the empathy skills gap by treating empathy as a technical skill.
- Teaching technical empathy through accessible, affordable, actionable training.
- Building community and breaking down harmful stereotypes and tropes.
- Promoting technical empathy for ethics, equity, and social justice.
Learn more at empathyintech.com
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Transcript
Self-Reflection: Am I the Antagonist?
00:00:01
Speaker
I stood on those stages and yelled and screamed and loved it and really leaned into it as a performer because marketing is hard, because I thought that's what I needed to do. One day I sort of looked in the mirror and said, I i i think I'm the baddie here. I think I actually made a mistake.
'Empathy in Tech' Podcast Introduction
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome to Empathy in Tech, where we explore the deeply technical side of empathy. And the critical need for empathy in technology.
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm Andrea Goulet. And I'm Ray Myers.
Introducing J.B. Rainsberger
00:00:32
Speaker
Today on the show, we have J.B. Rainsberger, also known as Jay Brains. J.B. helps software professionals work with less stress. He often starts by helping programmers with a programming task. Then the conversation quickly turns to tricky relationships, difficult policies struggle to, quote, just get some real work done.
00:00:58
Speaker
Thanks so much for being here, JBrains. Thanks very much for having me. it's ah It's nice to have the chance to talk with you again. Yeah, we're excited. So tell us a little bit about yourself and what is on your mind right now about empathy and tech?
Programming vs. People Skills
00:01:13
Speaker
ah Well, I began life as a programmer who was attracted to computers because they did what I told them to do. um And I understood them.
00:01:26
Speaker
And they seemed to understand me in a way that people didn't. It took me many years of struggling to get along with people, but succeeding in getting along with computers um before I started working professionally, actually getting paid to write software. And it didn't take very long at all for me to realize that the programming part of what I was doing was actually pretty straightforward, and that the hard part was dealing with the people. And early on, I mostly looked at them as obstacles. And I gradually, ah you know, in the 25 years since, I have learned to see them um as
00:02:07
Speaker
curiosities in maybe the best sense of the word. Um, I find people endlessly interesting in a way that technology isn't to me anymore. That's not to say that I don't like programming. I do, but I don't like struggling with technical problems. I like struggling with people problems. And that's, that's what has led me, especially over the last 10 to 15 years to really focus on that aspect of the world of the professional software developer.
Developing Empathy and People Skills
00:02:35
Speaker
And since I got my start as a programmer, and since I've made a name for myself in programmer spheres, even to this day, I tend to work mostly with programmers, although gradually other software professionals are starting to understand that I can help them too. And so what's really interesting for me these days is, so the the feeling that you don't have to have been born with it, the feeling that you don't have to have figured out by age six,
00:03:02
Speaker
how to get along with people, how to deal with people, that you can learn that stuff in adulthood. And that it's not just the stereotypical anti-social programmer type who struggles with this. But a lot of people who are drawn to the software profession, to different aspects of it, struggle with the same thing. They want to just be left alone to do what they think of as real work. And what i've come to I've come to realize that the real work is actually figuring out how to do this with other people.
00:03:32
Speaker
If all you ever want to do is work on your own on projects that are small enough that you can do them all yourself, cool.
The Importance of Collaboration
00:03:38
Speaker
Then lock yourself in a room, do what makes you happy, and I hope you make lots of money. But um as soon as you need other people, you really need other people. And that's where that's what interests me is is not so much the, how do I test this? How do I build that? How do I verify this? It's how do I get these nice people to play well together so that we can deliver good results for whoever seems to be paying us this week. Yeah. Was there like an inflection point where that mindset kind of shifted?
00:04:15
Speaker
Absolutely. I remember maybe a year and a half or so into
Early Career Lessons at IBM
00:04:19
Speaker
my career. I was working at IBM in Toronto. That was ah an excellent place to start because it's a big enough company that the like no mistake you can make is going to threaten anybody's life. it's You can't bring the company down. It's too big. The worst that happens is you get fired.
00:04:35
Speaker
And so that and that gave me the freedom to make lots of mistakes. When I thought I discovered the right way to build features, I started running up and down the hallways, waving my arms, screaming to everybody, I have the answer, I have the answer, everyone listen to me. Follow me. I know what ails us, I know what's going, I have the medicine, um and everyone just follow me and I will take you to the promised land.
00:05:03
Speaker
And I thought that was kind of a no-brainer. Like, I thought that was a pretty good sales pitch. I have the answer, folks. Just follow me. And ah very few did. To their credit, a couple of people did, but very few did. So then I spent a lot of time thinking, well, hmm.
00:05:20
Speaker
What am I doing wrong here? Oh, somebody suggested to me that I was making other people look bad. And I thought, hmm, OK. I hadn't thought about that because i I know it was in my heart. I wasn't trying to make anybody look bad. I was trying to make everybody's life easier. But OK, so some people think I'm trying to make them look bad. So how can I do this without making them look bad? And that's when I adopted the idea of quietly succeeding and waiting for people to ask me, what's your secret?
Strategy of Quiet Success
00:05:48
Speaker
and so I would occasionally bring up the fact that I was going home on time. that i was you know I would be very conspicuously not panicking during the code freeze stage when everybody else was running around with their hair on fire fixing problems. and I would jump in and help them. and I kept waiting patiently for people to ask me, what's your secret?
00:06:12
Speaker
and somebody else suggested to me, oh, well, you're probably making them look bad. That's why they don't want to talk to you. So wait a second. If I run around screaming, I have the answer. I'm making people look bad. If I quietly do good work, I'm making people look bad.
00:06:32
Speaker
Maybe it's me. Like maybe I'm just, maybe I'm giving off the vibe that I'm trying to make people look bad. And that's, and that didn't make any sense to me. That was kind of the moment, sort of two, two and a half years into my career where I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to help people if they don't listen to me.
00:06:50
Speaker
If I can't make them feel comfortable listening to me, if i if they're not going to be willing... Actually, that's not true. I was thinking of it totally on the blaming side. If these stupid people are not going to be willing to pay attention to me, then I can't help them. So I need to figure out how to get them to pay attention to me. I need to get them to to figure out how to get them to listen to me. And that was the beginning of the end. That was the beginning of... Yeah.
00:07:14
Speaker
Programming is not that interesting anymore. It's just a thing that I do to get you know to get bits from A to B. It'll help me out in interesting ways. It'll make some administrative tasks easy. But the real interesting part is, why won't they listen to me?
From Programming to Communication
00:07:31
Speaker
That's where it started. Why won't they listen to me? And that's when I read books like switch and made to stick. And these kinds of books that are about how to craft your message in a way that will help people listen to you, secrets of consulting. And I didn't realize that I was sort of at the intersection of psychology and marketing and sales. But that's kind of how it started. And then coincidentally, that's also when I left IBM and started to become a freelancer. So the marketing sales side of it became interesting to me from a practical point of view.
00:07:59
Speaker
But as far as the work that I was doing with people, mean ostensibly, I was teaching people TDD and doing programming work with them. But what was really happening was I was figuring out how to give and get advice effectively, how to make feel people feel comfortable around me, how to craft messages in a way that were more palatable or more effective to them. So it was all kinds of, you know, a mixture of marketing and sales and general psychology and cognitive psychology, psychology of learning, all that kind of stuff sort of all came together. And I was hooked. I mean, at that point,
00:08:36
Speaker
I was interested in the topics and I had some real practical pressing reasons to get good at it. and Fast forward 20 years and here we are. and I'm still learning this stuff. I just get to practice more of it than I used to 20 years ago. yeah You made a point real quick um about like how it's hard.
00:08:55
Speaker
And I struggle with this all the time because I studied this. yeah This is where I went to college for. And like I've been like a practicing communicator slash CEO slash software executive. But I've always kind of identified first as a communicator. It is hard for me. It is hard for anybody. like Just being human is hard. And connecting to other people who are human is hard. And I think that um There are some people who I've interacted with over the years who think that it's easy, but everybody has their own struggles. Yeah. And I'm sure it's easy to people who had a 20-year head start over me, right? the the my My wife's father is a prime example of the person who grew up and could get the kids in the playground to play the game he wanted to play and make it seem like it was their idea. I did not have that skill.
00:09:47
Speaker
Um, and I didn't start to even want to develop something even like that skill until my mid twenties, until I reached that point where I realized that no one was going to pay attention to me as long as I kept acting like this and that that limited how I could help them. I couldn't give them what I wanted to give them because they were unwilling to receive it. And.
Empathy Skills at Any Age
00:10:09
Speaker
So I'm sure for for him, it's easy. He has an intuitive understanding of it. That's wonderful for him. I mean, he's so Taoist, he doesn't even know it. um But for the rest of us, like we, what are we supposed to do? Well, you can learn it in adulthood. That's kind of one of my my big Central message in a lot of ways is, it's OK. You can learn to do this. And it's mechanical at first. And I have some tricks to help you get started. And then when you get hooked, when you start seeing some results.
00:10:40
Speaker
Then you might be interested in finding books for yourselves and and and talking with people and just trying things out and and building your own path. You don't need an undergraduate degree in psychology, although maybe that would have helped. um You don't need to have had parents who taught you perfectly in childhood, although that probably would have helped too. We can start now. You can learn stuff, you can get started, and it will make a difference, I promise.
00:11:05
Speaker
I'd like to read you this quote sure that I'm reminded of hearing what you're saying now, which is headlined, everyone will not just. um If your solution to some problem relies on if everyone would just, then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they're not going to start now." yeah End quote. I love
Adapting Communication and Teaching
00:11:35
Speaker
that.
00:11:35
Speaker
perhaps a little bit pessimistic, but it it invokes the feeling in me that I experienced getting everyone to just wondering why everyone would not just. And I happened to share it a couple of weeks ago on LinkedIn with the hashtag extreme programming, yeah which if everyone would just the world would be a better place. I think you you might agree. So.
00:12:05
Speaker
what what's your What's your answer to this? um Because certainly this is getting at a real barrier that exists, but then behavior changes do happen and and some outcomes end up better than others. Obviously, people in in groups are not completely intractable. so If everyone won't just, then how are you going to get them to just?
00:12:29
Speaker
yeah um so Moo, unask the question. um So I feel, and you know, this is ah this is a thing that really came up for me starkly um a few years ago. I had a chance to spend some time with a gentleman named John Turley who um did some, I think some paratherapy with me for a few months. um And one of the things that he helped me identify was
00:13:02
Speaker
the degree to which I had been um perhaps over identifying with myself as an expert. And so he's using a model of sort of evolution of leadership stances. And ah in the middle of this model, there is and ah Chasm might be a too strong, but there is a break between what they call the expert and the individualist.
00:13:32
Speaker
And when you're trying to cross from the expert to the individualist, that's a very difficult thing to do because the expert is very firmly rooted in the idea that I have answers that I need to impart to you. um I have advice that will help you. And even the most well-meaning, empathetic, loving expert still carries with them um quite a parental stance. It's still very much, and I have the answers that you need. And that's i you know when when you started saying, if everyone will just, like I
00:14:11
Speaker
I can't help but have the picture of the impatient parent crossing their arms and saying things like, I'm just trying to get you to learn the lessons that I learned so that you don't have to make the same mistakes I did, which is why won't you just? right and you know And I don't know this model very well. So for those of you who know it better than I do, um I will try not to butcher it. But in the path from expert to individualist,
00:14:41
Speaker
you start moving away from there is an objectively best set of solutions to really embodying it depends, really embodying a stance of everybody needs to do it differently. Yes, there are patterns. ah Yes, there are good ideas, but everybody needs to do it differently. And it's better if they do it than if I do it for them.
00:15:09
Speaker
and The interesting part for me going through this, and and especially with someone guiding me towards this realization, is that um when you have one foot in the expert mode and another foot in the individualist mode, as I did and probably still do,
00:15:32
Speaker
um
00:15:35
Speaker
It feels very chaotic in my head because I'm trying very hard not to give advice even though I know, like the the advice is jumping up and down inside my head screaming. And that's the part of me that wants to say if everyone will just if everyone will just practice extreme programming, if everyone will just practice test-driven development, if everyone will just talk to each other, um then the world will be a better place. so but you know the the The line that keeps coming up in my head that helps me is one that I use a lot, because people will say that to me. I will complain about something, and they will say, well, JB, if you would just, and then the thing, and I would always reply with, if I knew how to do that, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
00:16:21
Speaker
And you know one way to take a huge leap forward in your interactions with people is to assume that whatever snappy comeback you have is the same snappy comeback they have to you and be ready for it. And so I can i can look at you, Ray, and say, well, if you would just blah, blah, blah, and then you will say, well, JB, if I knew how to do that, we wouldn't be having this conversation. OK, great. Now we can have a more productive exchange about
00:16:56
Speaker
what you might be able to do to take some steps forward. And I think one thing that really helps me is as my as my trailing foot is leaving the expert identity, I identify so much less with their success.
00:17:17
Speaker
I still care deeply about it. I still want them to succeed. I still care about them as people, but I don't take it personally when they don't take my advice. I don't take it personally when they don't succeed with my advice. um And that frees me up to find out what to help them figure out what's going to work for them and to support them as they try it. And so ironically, that makes something like extreme programming, you know, 13 practices that are like, you know, on stone tablets.
00:17:47
Speaker
um I see them a lot differently than I did. we spent ah We spent decades first telling people, if you just did this, life would be good. And then we started to understand, well, um XP isn't just these 13 rules, but it's the behavior that you exhibit after you've mastered the 13 rules. right It's a mindset, one of the most useless phrases we've ever used. um right True but useless. That's straight out of the Heath brothers.
Learning Through Extreme Programming
00:18:17
Speaker
But now I really see them as as and simply a way of learning. The extreme programming is not a practice
00:18:29
Speaker
It's not a method for delivering software. It's a method for learning what you need to learn about delivering software. And that changed the game for me entirely. Because now I could focus on not, hey, you should do this because it's good for you, or hey, you should do this because it's going to produce better results. But focus on, hey, this has something to teach you.
00:18:47
Speaker
You are probably going to learn something different from it than other people do. But there are some patterns. You're going to learn that you need to write things down. You're going to learn the value of getting feedback sooner instead of later. You're going to learn that um if you have all the time in the world to change your mind, then you don't have to agonize over decisions when you make them. If you learn that you're going to discover mistakes in plenty of time to fix them, then they're going to stop feeling like mistakes. like Those are some of the patterns that emerge from practicing stream programming.
00:19:19
Speaker
But everybody will learn different aspects of them in their own time. And I don't have to rush. I don't have to push them in a particular direction. In fact, it's so much better when I don't. It's so much better when I let them pull all that from me. And then my job becomes mirroring and supporting, giving them a shoulder to cry on, ah giving them a face to slap every so often, whatever it is that they need as they're learning.
00:19:45
Speaker
And that sounds to me like really embracing this individualist mindset, this and individualist leadership approach that um my job is not to tell you the right things. My job is not to give you the stack of textbooks. My job is to help you go to the shelf and figure out which textbooks you need and grab them and feel comfortable reading them and have someone to read them with.
00:20:09
Speaker
um And I like to think that that makes me a much more attractive partner in this work. I mean, time will tell, but I haven't starved yet. And I'm much happier doing the work that I'm doing now than I was 15 years ago. I mean, I was happy then I'm i'm delirious now.
00:20:29
Speaker
Hi,
Codecrafters Curriculum Introduction
00:20:30
Speaker
Ray here, and I'd like to take a quick moment to tell you about Codecrafters. In my career, I've helped a lot of people get to the next level of software developers, and whether you're just starting out or looking to branch out into new challenges, one theme that comes up again and again and again is that people just don't have the right project, and they bounce from tutorial to tutorial. They don't get to integrate what they've learned into a real context. And that's why I'm excited about the CodeCrafters curriculum, which is based on building complete applications from the ground up, step-by-step with choice of language. I'd like to get weird next week. Maybe I'll build my own Kafka in g Gleam. You can find a discount link for
00:21:26
Speaker
I'd like to go into a bit of your journey.
Evolving Messaging: Softer and Nuanced
00:21:32
Speaker
It sounds like you're saying be less dogmatic, be more inquisitive, um pulling people where they're ready to go or helping them get where they want to go rather than, you know, impose wholesale your worldview.
00:21:48
Speaker
And I happen to be familiar with how some of your messaging has evolved over the years in ways that seem to resonate with us. And you may know what I'm what I'm going to say, because the first time I saw you ah was in a talk which I quite liked at the time, actually hit me at the right place at the right time, maybe maybe 10 or 12 years ago, ah called integrated tests are a scam.
00:22:14
Speaker
Now, I saw you in Budapest this year giving um a sequel many iterations later of the same talk where you had softened the language very strongly. and And I actually talked to someone else who was seeing it for the first time. And they said, well, it seems like this was almost a clickbait thing because he came in and he had all this nuance.
00:22:38
Speaker
about well sometimes it's not a scam and this is the things you you should avoid and you know ah you are a lot softer with the messaging and I said oh if you'd have seen the first version it wasn't 100% a scam and you know you open with this threatens your life, you know, very strong language. And um I was using the scam integration tests at the time, and and we needed better alternatives. And it was the right message for for me in that situation. But obviously, you encountered many people for which it wasn't a helpful message. I honestly, by my thinking after that conversation was, actually, I want to watch the talk that's just about the history of your evolving the mess and all the interactions that happened in between A and B.
00:23:23
Speaker
Oddly enough, when um when the folks at PACT had their 10th anniversary celebration ah within the past year, I gave that talk.
Critique of Integrated Tests
00:23:33
Speaker
i gave the um Since I knew the audience was a bunch of people who knew about contract testing already and I didn't really need to explain it, I took that opportunity to um to apologize for ah being an asshole um and and and explain to them why i know how I've changed my tune and and what has stayed the same and what has changed. I want to be very clear, and I thought I was very clear on that stage, but maybe I need to hit it harder. yes There's still a scam. The scam is still there. The scam is real.
00:24:09
Speaker
For the people who aren't as fluent in coding, can we talk a little bit about what you're talking about? yeah So what is the thing that is a scam, highlight of why it's a scam? Tests that run large swaths of the system when you're really trying to check a small part of it.
00:24:27
Speaker
are the scam. We call those integrated tests, although many people out there call them integration tests incorrectly, in my opinion. It's ah it's ah it's a language game thing. um But you know if people decide that literally is an intensifier, at some point, you've got to just give in and go with it. So um the scam, the nature of the scam is very specifically that the medicine makes the headache worse. That's the scam part. The scam is not just this is a bad idea, not you're going to have a bad time. The scam is if you lean into the solution of writing integrated tests, even though you really only want to check small parts of the system in isolation from each other,
00:25:13
Speaker
you are You're not merely overpaying for insurance, but it would be it is like taking medication that actually makes the headache worse. like Overpaying for a guarantee is just dumb or reckless or ignorant or something like that. It's largely benign. And if you have spare money, it doesn't matter. But it would be like paying for insurance that increases the risk of the hurricane hitting your house.
00:25:41
Speaker
Is the scam that they are always not good or that they're being used wrong? Because I'm remembering, I forget what social network or whatever I saw, some kind of like animated gif, and it was at a grocery store and there were sliding glass doors, but then there were also these like gates that swung in and out.
00:26:04
Speaker
And the gates would then cause the sliding door to open because the way I've always known about integrated, I've always called them integration. Now I will think about that. is that It's really about testing whether or not two systems play well together. It should be, yes. Okay. An integration test focuses on the point of integration. Yeah.
00:26:26
Speaker
not whether this big thing can talk to that big thing, but whether the last part of the first one talks to the first part of the next one. That's an integration test. It sounds like what you're describing is very similar to one of the other ones is like the the two cabinet doors in the corner and you can't open. If you put the knobs on the cabinet doors, yeah each one blocks the other one from opening. And the caption always reads, two unit tests, no integration tests.
00:26:52
Speaker
And at the end of my talk at PACT, I took that meme and I said, okay, when people start catching this with two unit tests, no contract tests, we've won.
00:27:06
Speaker
Because they're choosing the wrong solution, in my opinion. And um ah the wrong, I mean that literally. This is one of the rare times that I will say that anymore. 12 years ago, I would have said that freely. Nowadays, I reserve that for when I genuinely think it's wrong. There's more than one way to solve that problem, and I think contract tests solve that problem better. That's the very short version. So integrated tests are one way to solve the problem that leads to what a classic anti-pattern, which is not just a bad idea. it's It's a bad idea that seemed like a good idea at the time. And in fact, it's even more than an anti-pattern. It's a scam because it's a bad idea that looks like a good idea for the first 20% of using it. And then once you get committed to it and are in deep,
00:27:52
Speaker
then you're in trouble. You eventually fall over the, you know, you eventually fall off a cliff and now you're in trouble. And the, you know, I was always accused of setting up
Impact of Strong Opinions
00:28:03
Speaker
a straw man as well. Nobody would ever use integration tests for everything. Oh, they absolutely do. yeah Well, but so first of all, yes, they do. you know A surprising number due. Second, you don't have to. There is a point where the yeah you know where one extra grain of sand turns it into a beach. There's a point at which it starts to become a real problem and you don't know until you get there.
00:28:30
Speaker
The sunk cost fallacy is now screaming at you to keep going, and you probably can't see it until somebody else grabs you by the scruff of the neck and pulls you out and says you're drowning. You don't even notice you're drowning. So this is a really great concrete example for how we can think through the, if everyone would just ... Right.
00:28:51
Speaker
if um would just use contract tests instead of the integrated integration tests, things would be fine. yeah So how do you then, you know bringing them back to empathy, bringing them back to communication, this is a great example that I'm sure a lot of people run into. like My technical implementation will work better Please do this thing. Now I need to excel my idea and convince you." So what are some of the ways that you've um found to be successful over the years in changing hearts and minds around different testing ideas?
00:29:28
Speaker
Well, that that begs a question I'm not sure is true. I'm not sure how successful I've been yet because I'm still just learning how to do this. But I can tell you one way in which I failed spectacularly. And that is the dark side of the message that attracted Ray low those many years ago, which is when I used that strong opinionated absolute language it became very easy to wave my argument away because, I mean, if you if you make a claim of all or none,
00:30:04
Speaker
then all you need is a single counterexample, and the argument falls apart. anybody Anybody who prides themselves on knowing any first order propositional logic knows that the easy way to wave away an always or never argument is one. I only need one counterexample, just one. And that's easy. It's not merely JB's wrong. It's, oh, I can stop listening to him now. And that's the dangerous part. The dangerous part was the like i won't I will never know the number of people that I turned away from listening to me because of the way that I delivered that message. Now, there were a whole bunch of rabid, pitchfork-wielding townsfolk who loved it. And I love you, folks. Thank you. You helped me get where I am here. I get the sense that Ray was one of them. I was ready to get my pitchfork. Okay, good. You know, it's like the early days of extreme programming.
00:30:57
Speaker
when you are looking at the ah innovators and the early adopters screaming loudly as an effective marketing tool, we know this, we know this for decades, but eventually you burn through that market, you burn through those people. And they are not really very good at carrying your message onto the later adopters.
00:31:24
Speaker
That's the chasm, right? Jeffrey Moore taught us about that decades ago. And that was the thing I didn't have a good answer for. So the dark side of that message was, I didn't stop listening to this guy. He's nuts. he He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. He's setting up a straw man argument ah just to knock it down. ah He's being intellectually dishonest. And I
00:31:50
Speaker
I did the sensible human thing and I defended myself against that for years. And then one day I sort of looked in the mirror and said, I i think I'm the baddie here. I think I actually made a mistake. I use this phrase all the time. Marketing is hard.
Arguing with Compassion
00:32:06
Speaker
I stood on those stages and yelled and screamed.
00:32:09
Speaker
and loved it and really leaned into it as a performer because marketing is hard because I thought that's what I needed to do. And then I went back and I reread Switch and I reread Made to Stick and I started reading some of the other books that are about um one of the other ones that was really fundamental for me was the the new strategic selling, which really helped me understand a more ethical way of selling. And suddenly I started to understand some of the things that Jerry Weinberg was telling us with Secrets of Consulting.
00:32:38
Speaker
you know, when I first read it nearly 25 years ago, all this stuff started to click. And I realized, you know what? I can probably attract more people less intensely and do better. And one of the ways that I can attract more people if less intensely is to not use the firebrand message.
00:33:04
Speaker
But instead, state gently but firmly, this is a scam. There is a scam here. And you're going to fall for it if you're not careful. I'm not papering over the fact that there's a hole. What I'm doing is I'm not screaming anymore and pointing to the hole and and trying to get everybody's attention. But as I see people walk towards the hole, I'm like, no, stop. There's a hole here.
00:33:33
Speaker
It's right there. I can tell you how you're going to fall into it. Don't do it. And there's sort of two parts to it. One of them is I don't have to scream about the hole. I just need to be vigilant, right? I just watch, you know, so I will tell people, look, here's the scam. Beware. That's why I like beware the integrated test scan. You should be aware of this.
00:33:54
Speaker
You might fall into this. Lots of people do. And you don't even have to follow into it very far before it becomes a problem. But I think I have a better way. And here's what I propose you do instead. Try this instead of that. Warning, this is counterintuitive. But I promise you, I'm here for a reason. I'm here because I fell into this hole a bunch of times. I watched a bunch of other people fall into this hole. And that is how it got out.
00:34:19
Speaker
And by the way, if you don't want to do it, you're not gonna hurt my feelings. I get paid the same. This is where I really exemplify the difference between i I care and I mind. I care but I don't mind. If you need to fall into the hole to understand why, that's cool. I am willing to help you crawl out of the hole when you're ready. I'm not gonna mock you for falling into it because I fell into it too. And when you're ready, try this instead of that.
00:34:48
Speaker
And that whole message, I mean, the key ingredients to me there are, I've been where you are. You don't have to believe me. I'm going to try to make the same argument. I haven't lost my conviction. All I've done is got rid of the scaremongering. I've got rid of the fearmongering, and I've instead said, this is a real risk. You need to worry about this. And when you're ready, I'm here to help.
00:35:13
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds like what you've done is really inject compassion into your argument. And, you know, compassion is a genuine caring about someone else's suffering yes and then wanting to do something about it. Like there's a motivation piece to it. Sometimes it leads to like pro-social behavior. You're actually acting on that. Sometimes you can't act on that desire other than, you know, a small gesture that you want.
00:35:40
Speaker
I think that's an excellent summary. I went from blaming to compassion. I was blaming, and now i you know I really do understand where you've been, and I'm ready to help when you'd like it. Yeah, and I think, too, with with compassion, there's a sense of autonomy where I care about you, I want to help you, and I think this is where compassion, empathy, or some like dysfunctional patterns that happen around these things where it's like, I must help you. And then it becomes like a hero complex or something. Uh-huh. That's the expert.
00:36:17
Speaker
That's the expert, right? The expert who is dabbling in compassion will all of a sudden feel like the best thing they could possibly do is to help as many people as they can, as much as they can, whether they want it or not. That's where the phrase inflicting help comes from. And as I move into this and individualist stage, what I'm really, I'm really embracing the idea that for me, the the the way that I put compassion into practice is I let people know that I am here for them, not that not that the universe has brought them here for me. I am here for them. Ooh, that's good. And yes, some of that might be teaching, and some of that might be guided learning, and some of that might just be attending to scraped knees and scraped elbows. I'm ready to do all of that. But my ego is not as much wrapped up in being the source of your success as it was
00:37:14
Speaker
10 years ago, 15 years ago, and definitely 20 years ago. It still pops up every so often. And I still like being i still like being right. I still like being expert. I still like being smart. I still like making connections. All that stuff makes me all tingly. And when I write, I get that feeling. But once I get all my brilliant stuff out, and then I remember, oh, people are going to read this. How do I make this helpful?
00:37:42
Speaker
Because just like vomiting brilliance at them doesn't work. It never did. But if I can figure if i can allow myself to vomit the brilliance onto the page and then figure out how to make it helpful, ah that I think has been a huge part of how I've changed. And i again, i don't I genuinely don't know whether it's better. I know it feels better.
00:38:05
Speaker
And I know that I don't have quite as many people yelling at me as I used to, so something seems to be working. Daoism philosophy as well, as you mentioned earlier, is something that I find really helpful not because I'm a patient person, right? Daoism doesn't resonate with me because I actually naturally embody it, but because I'm a very impatient person.
Buddhist Mindset in Communication
00:38:27
Speaker
So, um I'm interested to see how how you discovered Taoism and we could expand to say Buddhism, these kind of esoteric spiritual philosophies. I should emphasize that it's my wife's father who is the Taoist and doesn't even realize it. That's how Taoist he is. I'm not.
00:38:45
Speaker
But i in having dabbled in, ah let's say, applied Buddhism, I've sort of moved in that direction. And that that so when you say curiosity, for example, I tend to think of that in the Buddhist um perspective of sort of openness, readiness, um lack of clinging to having it my way. All I really know about Taoism is that, you know,
00:39:07
Speaker
Whatever way the river is flowing is the way you're going to go, um whether you like it or not. And you can fight it or you can go with it. One of them wastes less energy. What was your realization that this was something you needed to apply to your effort of trying to get people to fight bugs better?
00:39:27
Speaker
Right. I think it really came down to I burned through all the people who were already with me and that was the only reason that they were willing to listen to me. Like when i'm when I'm wandering around telling people I have the answer and you need to listen to me, the only people who are going to listen to me are the people who were going to listen to me anyway, the people who were primed to listen to me, the people who buy an accident of history are already ready to buy what I'm selling.
00:39:52
Speaker
um And it's easy. like you can make all You can do all kinds of dumb stuff and get them. You can do all kinds of dumb stuff and reach them. And I did all kinds of dumb stuff and reached them. And then there were other folks. It turned out that there was a larger population of people who still needed some of the things that I could offer but were not prepared to listen to me.
00:40:14
Speaker
And I had to learn how to reach them. And I think that that was really that was the that provided the motivation. I want people to feel comfortable to volunteer to listen to me. I don't want to coerce them. I don't want to guilt them. I don't want to do any of those things. And part of that was purely practical. And part of that was purely personal. i'm like It feels good to me.
00:40:40
Speaker
I love the feeling of helping somebody who wants to be helped. I love the feeling of working with somebody who enjoys working with me. I love the feeling of giving something to someone who's ready to receive it. you know In the past, inflicting help gave me a way to feel superior, but I'm bored by that now. If I'm going to help you, I want you to actually benefit from that help instead of me just walking away feeling like i did my I did my job. I feel like people generally feel more comfortable listening to me and taking what I offer, at least listening to it, whether they use it or not.
Sharing Expertise Without Attachment
00:41:19
Speaker
um Ironically, i worry less by trying to get them to listen to me, I have reached a point where I worry less about whether they listen to me. By wanting to help them more effectively, I've reached a place where I don't mind as much if I can't help them.
00:41:37
Speaker
because my my ego is just not wrapped up in the in the expert stance anymore. From time to time, yes, but increasingly no. One of the things that really helped me in that direction was not feeling the pressure to fix them, especially not feeling the pressure to fix them according to a schedule. One of the problems that many people have, along with their job role,
00:42:04
Speaker
is that they feel constant pressure to fix the situation because that's what is expected of them, because that is how they believe they can be effective, because there's always somebody looking over their shoulder asking, is it done yet? Is it done? Is it done yet? um Is it better yet? Did we get there yet?
00:42:24
Speaker
um And on the one hand, we need the impatient customer. Otherwise we don't have a business. Like if you, that was one of the things that hit. Without the impatient customer, there is no business. So the impatient customer is not a problem to solve, which angers a lot of people when they hear it the first time. But yeah after you sit with it for a while, it's kind of obvious. But without the impatient boss, without the impatient vice president, executive, whoever, I'm wondering when the change is going to happen.
00:42:54
Speaker
You don't have a job. You don't have a job whose apparent focus is helping things to improve. And those people have it hard. that's Those are some of the people that want to help. I consciously keep myself out of those environments precisely so that I can sit here and be wise and be gentle and be calm and guide them both through the actual changes that they're trying to make, that they're trying to, you know, the the sort of ah change midwife work, as well as the, oh my God, it's not happening, nothing's happening, help me, or my boss is screaming at me, please help me, or I'm not getting anywhere, this is this is a complete waste of my time and effort, I'm no good at anything, I should be shot and left in ditch somewhere,
00:43:49
Speaker
ah So, I get to help with both of those things at the same time, which, like, it's fun and it's rewarding. It really allows me to give with the, you know, the Marshall Rosenberg's line, to give with the joy of an eight-year-old and for no other reason. Yeah.
00:44:09
Speaker
That's awesome. So we could keep going for a long time. We do have to wrap up. And so we have one final question that we ask all of our guests, which is, what do you think is the most important thing that should happen at the intersection of empathy and technology right now? I would love for us, to more of us, to help each other.
00:44:33
Speaker
identify less with our expertise. I would i think that that's you know this is this really falls into the category of since it worked for me, of course, it will work for everyone, which I know is its own mistake, but um people are not going to love you more because you're an expert. just like you're not goingnna you're They're not going to love you less because you don't know. They're not going to love you more because you're more of an expert. You don't need to have all the answers.
00:45:00
Speaker
And you don't need to show everyone all the time all the answers you have. And when Ray falls off the wagon and experts all over a group of people who didn't ask for it, Rather than blaming him for doing that, we can pull him aside and say, they're there. I understand how you feel. I've been where you are. What you did right now is what I do on my worst days. It's okay. We never entirely get over it. But hey, do you think you're expert over those people a little bit too much? Could you dial it back next time? Oh, yeah, it would be great if I could do that. Okay, let's talk about how you might do that in this time. And I think that um we are like our
00:45:39
Speaker
We can be one giant expertise addiction counseling network. We can all be recovering experts. It doesn't mean you have to give up how smart you are. It doesn't mean you have to give up all your body and knowledge. You can still be really good at what you do, but you just don't have to be quite as addicted to your own expertise as you used to be. And I think that's one way that we can spend our spoons um offering empathy and compassion to each other is helping each other to not do that quite as much as we're doing now.
00:46:12
Speaker
That's really good. And it makes me think of kind of the concept of shared cognition. So that is something that evolutionarily helps us so much as a species because I can share my knowledge and pass it down over generations. And it's not one person's expertise. It's all of our collective expertise. And I'm of the belief that everyone is an expert in something. Just the domains might be different.
00:46:41
Speaker
It's hard to live on this planet for a long time and not become really expert at something. And when we recognize the expertise in other people and then we're open to learning and open to sharing, I think that's really where the magic happens too. It sounds like that's kind of the place that you landed as well.
00:46:59
Speaker
I would like us to be comfortable in our expertise and not insecure in our expertise. That's good. So this has been an amazing conversation.
Contacting J.B. Rainsberger
00:47:09
Speaker
How can we get in touch with you and learn more about your work?
00:47:12
Speaker
ah The easiest thing, if you so first if you'd like to read more, start at jbrains dot.ca, J-B-R-A-I-N-S.ca, you'll find me. um If you'd like to reach out, if you'd like to say something, um then it depends on whether you'd like to ask a question or tell me something. You can go to ask.jbrains.ca. You can go to tell.jbrains.ca. And here's a secret, they both go to the same place. So it doesn't matter.
00:47:39
Speaker
But just whichever you happen to remember at the time. So that's how you can get in touch with me. Please don't treat me like chat GPT. I'm not going to do your programming homework for you. um But if you want to ask me a question or tell me something, i'd I'd love to hear it. And as long as you're willing to wait forever for the answer, that service is free. Awesome.
00:47:57
Speaker
Thanks so much, JB, and thanks to you for listening. As a reminder, empathy in tech is on a mission to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the technology industry by doing four things. Closing the empathy skills gap by treating empathy as a technical skill. Teaching technical empathy through accessible, affordable, and actionable training.
00:48:19
Speaker
building community and breaking down harmful stereotypes and tropes, and promoting technical empathy for ethics, equity, and social justice.
Joining the Empathy in Tech Community
00:48:28
Speaker
So if you found this conversation interesting, like I know I did, head over to empathyintech.com to keep the conversation going and join our community of compassionate technologists. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you in the next episode.