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00:00:01
Who is "The Business"?
59 Plays2 months ago
What do we mean when we talk about what "The Business" wants? Aren't we part of the business? If not us then who? Andrea and Ray discuss the tension between roles, and the alienation experienced from both sides.
LINKS
- Dr. Nick Morgan (communications coach)
- Paper: “A grounded theory of coordination in remote-first and hybrid software teams” by Ronnie de Souza Santos and Paul Ralph
- How Empathy Drove Grace Hopper's Software Development by Andrea Goulet
- ACL2: A Computational Logic for Applicative Common Lisp
HOSTS
- Andrea Goulet LinkedIn | andreagoulet.com
- Ray Myers LinkedIn | Mender.AI
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
Introduction to Empathy in Tech
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Empathy in Tech, where we explore the deeply technical side of empathy. And the critical need for empathy in technology. I'm Andre Goulet. And I'm Ray Myers.
The Art of Storytelling
00:00:13
Speaker
Andrea, what did you learn this week?
00:00:18
Speaker
I love these Hot Take episodes. They're so much fun. I ah got to attend a class with Dr. Nick Morgan, and he is a really awesome um speaker trainer, storyteller, um and his website is publicwords dot.com.
00:00:38
Speaker
and just really, really loved hearing his ideas. I had heard his name, but I hadn't really like familiarized my stuff with his content. But he gave a presentation about the different kind of story
Exploring Story Structures
00:00:55
Speaker
structures. So when we're putting together a story, what are some different ways that people like to He had that story structured so one of them was the quest which is like the hero's journey and that's like about persistence and you know sticking something through another is like
00:01:13
Speaker
a stranger in a strange land. So I feel like a lot of my stories are around this where I'm like, I was a marketer and then I came to software and I was really confused, but then I found out how to operate in it. um and Another is revenge, which is about justice and injustice and then rags to riches and then love story. And I realized, so I have a love story that I share on stage because My business partner and I ended up getting married, Scott, and like how I got into software. and it was like I attended my high school reunion and Scott saw my potential and then we worked together and then, oh, we got married. I think maybe some of this, you don't hear a love story at a software conference very often.
00:01:59
Speaker
so so that's ah So I think this was a great example. What I loved about this, too, was that this is a great example of how we think that storytelling, we think that communication, and we think that empathy in all of this is just on the fly, but really there's a lot of structure behind it and there's a lot of nuance and there's a lot of technical detail that goes into each one of these in terms of how to tell it right. um And so yeah, I was just really grateful to have that and I've since checked out his blog and his podcast and like if folks are looking to um be better communicators, highly recommend.
Fascination with Storytelling Mechanics
00:02:36
Speaker
So yeah, it was a lot of fun. Love learning. How about you? Yeah, the mechanics of
00:02:42
Speaker
what makes stories work, what makes media work is really fascinating to me, even though I am not that kind of creator, right? I watch a lot of content of like just in-depth movie reviews and analysis and things of that nature. Someone's picking apart like, this is why this worked. This is why this didn't. The mechanics are so are so interesting Anyway, so what I learned, well, as you know, I am in this rabbit hole about formal methods and ah code proofs and things. So I have been um still, you know, in theorem prover world, learning learning about all this stuff.
Deep Dive into Programming Languages
00:03:24
Speaker
The the latest prover that I've used is called ACL two. OK, I haven't heard that. It is a a lisp dialect. It is a a purely functional lisp dialect.
00:03:35
Speaker
and For folks who are not coders, Lisp is a programming language. This is right. so It's a family of of programming languages. It's yeah the second oldest programming language still in use, the Lisp family. Oh, interesting. Is Smalltalk... Wait, no. Is it pre-day Smalltalk? Smalltalk is decades later, yeah. Okay, yeah. Oh, no. Lisp was probably around the same time as Fortran, right?
00:03:58
Speaker
That's correct. The oldest still in use is Fortran. Yep. John Bacchus. Yes, it goes something like Fortran, LISP, COBOL, those were the early three. I just wrote an article this week about Grace Hopper. So yeah, I was very much in very early programming language land this week. Yes, salute to Admiral Grace Hopper. But ACL2, it is not the second version of ACL, unfortunately. It's more like ACL squared because the actual acronym is ACL, ACL.
00:04:28
Speaker
a computational logic for applicative common Lisp. Wow. I'm curious when you say a computational logic, is a used as a like article or is it used as a negator, like, like atypical? Oh, yeah, that's a good question. It's not an a computational logic. It is a computational logic, just like APL stood for a programming language. Yeah. So what do you what did you enjoy about it? Or would you find interesting about it? Well, it takes advantage of
00:05:06
Speaker
a number of things. Lisp has really interesting properties for manipulating code because it has the most uniform syntax of any um you know programming language that's actually usable to the extent where some people even say that it has no syntax. like the The syntax for writing the code and for defining a data structure is the same. oh Interesting. so That means you can manipulate code just like you're manipulating a data structure.
00:05:33
Speaker
And so certain kinds of, of they say, meta-programming that you might do, including what goes on in a theorem prover, like are very well attuned for this. And another property of it is they've taken lists and said, now there's no modifications. It's what's called purely functional. And that's what the applicative means in that in that situation. That means like there's no variables. There's only constants. Imagine you know like if you've ever written one program, like the first thing you do is set x to 1. You'll probably increment it. later. right ahh you can't in In purely functional programming, you cannot modify a variable. If you set X to one, that's it. X is one forever now, and yet you can still do everything with that. You just have to learn how to express loops as recursion instead and all that. and Once you've shifted to programming this way though,
00:06:24
Speaker
there's so much so many more assumptions that can be made about what you're doing because you know that no symbol will ever change ah within its scope. And so that makes theorem provers able to do interesting things. like you can You can reason very deeply about the formal properties of of code you've written in this style.
00:06:44
Speaker
a little bit long-winded. No, no. It's really interesting. I love thinking about different paradigms and different ways of programming. That was something I didn't know. I just thought coding was coding, right? um And I have not done as much functional programming. I did participate in kind of a you know group coding like ensemble, sometimes called mob programming, that was hosted just as a like learning opportunity. and I was learning in Erlang, which I had never coded in before. um yeah and It was interesting because like you're almost thinking in terms of regular expressions. in like It does require kind of a ah mindset shift. and I think for people who don't code,
00:07:28
Speaker
it's what What was one of the most surprising things to me coming from a non-software background was learning that how much mental model shifting you have to do when you're working in different parts of the code base. Because to me, it was like, oh, it's just a bunch of dollar signs and semicolons scrolling across the screen. How different can it be? But to me, what I learned the most is that in an engineer's world, it's very different than the business, which is the topic of our conversation today.
The Business in Tech: An Abstract Force?
00:08:06
Speaker
Oh, that was an amazing segue.
00:08:10
Speaker
So today we are talking about the business and everyone other than the business. And what does that even mean? Who is the business? I'm excited to explore this because I've been very curious. Who do you think is the business? I have not met the business. ah that if If you don't know who the business is, it might be you then. I am the business. I know I often am. But what's funny is that when I worked in other departments,
00:08:40
Speaker
Like, because I was in brand marketing and I was in, you know, like strategic communications in places. And I would be labeled as the business, but I always thought the business was more like finance people.
00:08:56
Speaker
So I never thought that me in the marketing role was the business. So I'm wondering, like I never identified as the business, but I know software developers see me as the business. And I opened my keynotes a lot of times, like, I promise I'm at the right conference. I am the business, but I'm not, I'm not here to like ruin your lives. It's rare that I get to hear about this kind of stereotype from the other side of the table.
00:09:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's what this whole thing is about, right? Yeah. So I think what I've heard. the business referred to. It's usually, well, the business needs this. They asked us to do this. They want us to do this, but it's usually, we're not speaking of like a person we actually interacted with. So our stakeholders, our immediate stakeholders are intermediaries for this ephemeral force that knows what is in the interest of the company or what the the power in the company has decided is in the interest of the company.
00:10:04
Speaker
And, you know, that that need is is trickling into us through these people we actually have access to.
Technical vs. Non-Technical Roles: A Historical Context
00:10:11
Speaker
But, you know, we sort of abstract away in this mystical force that is the business. But I think referring to it as like an individual entity like that almost gives it too much credit because that implies that it actually has a cogent list of demands that could be firmly met or not. And and it relieves you of figuring out what that is. Yeah. I mean, when I think of the business, I think of the organization. I think of the company. The company is the business. And I think when we say the business as engineers, it means that you're not part of that company.
00:10:56
Speaker
or that you feel so different and so isolated and you don't feel like you belong. And so it's almost as an identifier. This is how I've seen it used sometimes where it's it's more of a like an affinity kind of use of like, yeah, there's all those business people who are doing all the sales and marketing and finance and everything. i'm ah software developer and nobody understands me. So everybody who doesn't understand me or have a shared experience collectively is the business. Do you think it is almost synonymous with the term decision maker, another really loaded term?
00:11:37
Speaker
I don't know. I think there are definitely ah people who have budget go, no, go authority, right? And that I think like a decision maker, yeah like there are people who that's their job is to make a decision. And a lot of times Like we need to influence them, right? We need to help them understand why a particular implementation deserves to get budget to be implemented into the next release cycle or whatever. So I do think that decision maker is probably applicable to an individual, but I think honestly the business side of things has more to do with culture okay because when we think about
00:12:22
Speaker
programming in the 1970s and 80s, there was this really big push to label computer like programming as computer science. And as part of that effort, um at the time, there was a strongly held belief that there are hard sciences which can be provable,
00:12:47
Speaker
And there are soft sciences, which Richard Feynman equ like called flat-out pseudosciences. So anything that's relating
Bridging Technical and Non-Technical Gaps
00:12:55
Speaker
to people, you can't like say, this is where this thing will definitively end up.
00:13:01
Speaker
We're typically talking about like complexity theory and chaos and like you know systems thinking. where now like There are rules, but they're not as obvious. So there was a very big like soft science, hard science. So when computing was trying to gain legitimacy,
00:13:19
Speaker
as a field and as a profession, there was a very strategic alignment to hard science. So it was hard skills. And then over the years that became technical and then non-technical. So I think actually the business is more aligned with the idea of non-technical, which is a whole opinions on that too. So The business is the amorphous amalgamation of all non-technical decision makers. That's how I kind of conceptualize it. But I think like as somebody who has been called that, I've been called to my face non-technical and I identified as non-technical for a long time. I have like a lot of writing in like the identity crisis that I had to go through.
00:14:16
Speaker
to navigate all of this. But I would go to conferences, especially early in my career, um like around 2009, 2010, when I first came into software. About 30% of the people who I would meet, i I was one of the only people who looked like me at the conferences. um And I think in a way to kind of gauge conversation, like where should I engage in conversation in terms of topic,
00:14:45
Speaker
a common question I got about, you know, one out of three people would say, are you technical or non-technical? And I never knew how to answer that. And I was like, well, I guess I'm non-technical, but what I felt was, oh, I don't belong here. And probably not unfair of you to feel that way because I can tell you, I don't recall ever being asked that question in my entire life.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah. I get asked that a lot. Not as much now. Um, this isn't video yet, but I have a tattoo on my wrist when I shake hands, it's a code snippet. And so it's a, yeah. And so now like, I don't get asked that, but it was, it was a real barrier to overcome. And I think this gets into like, everyone is technical in some capacity. It's more of just what's the domain.
00:15:41
Speaker
So I think the terms like like the business can
Visibility in Corporate Decision-Making
00:15:46
Speaker
be useful as a shorthand for thinking about a concept and not a group of people.
00:15:54
Speaker
where it's like, what is the business as an organization need? And typically we're thinking about, we need to be profitable, right? We need to make sure that our customers are happy. Like what would serve the business, like what would serve the interests of the organization as a whole, rather than thinking about it like what would serve the business, which is some pointy haired boss who is the person who's nefariously making all these decisions to make other people's lives miserable.
00:16:23
Speaker
So you're talking now about business value. boom And actually got kind of a love hate relationship with that term. Tell me more because I feel like people say business value when they want to just sort of sound as though they've done the homework to understand the cause and effect relationship of what they're doing. But perhaps they haven't like,
00:16:52
Speaker
if you're saying business value and not some tangible outcome that that we, you know, have modeled here, then it sounds like you, uh, you're just punting on actually understanding the situation. Like I've had people say, Oh yeah, well that was business value. And and they're just hand waving. Yeah. Well, I think this is where having what those values are in terms of core values,
00:17:21
Speaker
right? Which are like behaviors. So what do we value as the way we're going to behave as a group as we achieve whatever mission we're trying to. But I think there's also metrics, right? And so I think a lot of times when we think of business value, sometimes it's like metrics, but then it's like, what are the metrics that we're trying to measure ourselves against? And like,
00:17:45
Speaker
you know, that's, that's a whole other world of like, you can game them. Like how do you, how do you measure things? Like there's a whole art and science to that around the, you know, kind of what you measure will impact people's behavior um sometimes in the way you want, sometimes not. So I think that some of it is that it can be hard to define clearly.
00:18:13
Speaker
especially if you're a very large organization. I think this is why you have like OKRs and KPIs. And it's an attempt to say this is the business value that we're trying to deliver. um But i yeah, I think it's hard to communicate. But in general, I think just as a concept, thinking of the business as the organization as a whole, of which engineers are a part, if we think of business, the business,
00:18:43
Speaker
And what is the business value? It's like, well, okay, we can define that in some way. what is the thing What are the things that the business finds valuable? But when we say the business, I think it's everybody in the organization and kind of the organization collectively and not the organization of collectively everybody except for the engineers or the software development team. So I think it's probably a little bit of set theory here.
00:19:12
Speaker
I think we underestimate that. We feel alienated and we somehow assume we're the only ones being alienated when really it's kind of organizations are just so difficult to operate that everyone is somewhat ah alienated from it. It's not that there's someone with like this bird's eye view that actually sees everything. I talked to ah a department head and a financial firm I was working at a while back And she told me, you know, people say, oh, you've got 100 developers and I feel like I have none because all of them are are answerable to some, you know, product person that probably feels powerless in their own way. Yeah. And so when you talk to leaders who you perceive as as very powerful, in some ways they are, you realize that if they're being earnest, they have a lot of indirect control. well We have a very tiny bit of direct control and
00:20:11
Speaker
And we're all just trying to figure this stuff out. Yeah, I think like when I was CEO of Korgie Bites, I noticed that my challenges and when I went to more command and control style was when I had a lack of visibility. Like I didn't know what was going on. And so I was like, I need information.
00:20:37
Speaker
Because I couldn't make strategic decisions. I couldn't help problem solve. I couldn't ah scenario plan. I couldn't like make suggestions on resources. That was a big part of what my job was.
Effective Communication for Collaboration
00:20:53
Speaker
And without information and without knowing what's going on, you're you're kind of flying, it's like flying an airplane and you have no visibility and into what's going on. And so in that, I think there is this sense of fear. And so the more communication can flow back and forth and the more like
00:21:16
Speaker
People who are very detail-oriented specialists can understand how their specialty adds to the strategy or like what are the challenges that more strategic thinkers need to ah need to operate. like There's just different thinking styles, but then it needs to go the other way. so you know For me, a lot of it was learning how to code.
00:21:38
Speaker
it was participating in ensembles when they came up. And that was that was the thing that cracked everything for me. Because as someone who is the business, right?
00:21:53
Speaker
I felt crazy intimidated by anyone who coded and I thought I was always going to look stupid. I always felt like I looked stupid and i I think a big part of it was being called out on things of like, no, that's not the right way to do it because there are right and wrong ways to implement things, especially like with syntax.
00:22:15
Speaker
Whereas when you're looking at strategy, it's less of a right or wrong, like it's more of a let's test it out, it's it's a little more fuzzy. So I wasn't used to having that like declarative, like it is right or it is wrong, it executes or it doesn't. And so I took that as a threat to my intelligence and to my ah value. And I think that I think is probably where a lot of like not having that psychological safety. And a lot of it is internal, right? But that ability to um cross over into other people's worlds and go, oh, what is
Psychological Safety in Tech Roles
00:23:00
Speaker
important to you? What do you fear? So I know for me, like a lot of people in the marketing or the business, it it's about, I don't wanna look stupid. And it's it's this real fear of,
00:23:14
Speaker
your job is more important than mine and I know it and I'm expendable and you're not because you're a software developer. And so there's this like, if I start learning how to code or if I interact with developers, and everybody's going to see how stupid I am. It's very interesting because i I think this this alienation goes both ways and oh for sure in in they're in different ways driven by their own sense of inadequacy. you know Like if we're talking about a um ah person from the business or a decision maker or whatever. yeah
00:23:54
Speaker
i I definitely don't feel like, oh, like I'm unreplaceable and they are replaceable just because they operate an area of ambiguity. I mean, they have formal authority. to in In my world, this like abstract entity we're a part of is yeah they have much more secure position than than I do or a position of, I should say, more agency. and And that's just what I imagine their life to be like, right? Like, I'm i'm just, I'm not saying that's accurate. They're getting to decide the direction and that they get taken seriously.
00:24:32
Speaker
other decision makers are going to engage with them and and talk to them. and and And, you know, they're not just going to hear about something when we hear about it. They're going to actually be in the room. They're in the room. Yeah.
00:24:47
Speaker
That's really interesting because I know, like I worked really hard in my early career too, to try to bring developers into the room, but they were like, ah I need to work. Like you, I don't want to be in meetings all the time. And so I was like, okay, you don't want to be in the room. Like, so I think there is this, like, how do we negotiate? And I think some of it is recognizing that fear and that inadequacy and then having enough care and respect for each other.
00:25:18
Speaker
to support that and like you did a great job. We were doing some coding on the website today and we were doing some CSS and like I really struggle with text-based stuff. We had a little hook episode on that. and So, but you were so great because you were describing as we were coding, I was feeling so stupid because I i can't remember. Oh, does, where do the quotes go? Is it before or after the equal sign? I can't remember.
00:25:45
Speaker
And just that was stimulating on a ah lot of fear. And you're like, no, it's fine. Like you're good. Like, and just that like, no, Andre, you're smart. Like you're fine. I don't think that you're less technical because you can't remember this specific syntax. But I know I always feel like I'm walking on eggshells. So what are some things that people who are in the business can do to help people or maybe who feel like they have less agency?
00:26:13
Speaker
Well, ah one of the things is you've already given an example of, I think I was kind of struck by your story a minute ago, because you said, you know, you felt you felt out of the loop.
00:26:27
Speaker
you were worried you couldn't have a proper input in the company you were running and you um you needed more visibility. and And my immediate thought was like, oh man, famous last words, the worst things, worst you can hear are like management's here and they need visibility. Like what's that gonna look like? What do you think of? You think of they need some metric, they need some number.
00:26:50
Speaker
And now immediately my blood pressure is rising because I know that they're not going to be like heavily invested in the number and that interpretation of it reflecting our lived reality.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative in Team Dynamics
00:27:03
Speaker
And so now we're not only having to manage our actual challenges, but like how are those are those going to be reflected in a way once once it's interpreted in a flat number is going to cause them to take the opposite action that would actually help us? yeah you know And I'm trying to manage that whole situation. I'm anticipating all the number in a fraction of a second. I'm anticipating all of this world that that could unfold before me because someone in management didn't feel they had enough visibility.
00:27:29
Speaker
Yeah. What did you do instead? You, you, you came down and you actually were, you know, like obviously a smaller organization where, where it's easier maybe to do that, but that doesn't mean you had to, uh, a lot of people don't even try and you, uh, walked among the people and you experienced their reality. Well, yeah, I think that might be, I don't know about other CEOs and, you know, but I know for me, uh,
00:27:53
Speaker
that walk among the people that implies that like I'm not a people. like right So I think I've always seen myself as part of the team and just in a different role. like And yes, my role like as the CEO is to make decisions. that's That was what I saw my role as, is there is a decision to make and what I needed was information on what decisions to make. So what we tried a bunch of things, we just had a very experimental kind of culture. so What we ended up doing was ah running a two-week experiment where we had a wiki. We were using GitHub Wiki. and um just We had everybody in the company write a daily journal. and It was completely unprompted. It was like, write whatever you feel like. Some people wrote a paragraph. Other people wrote 5,000 words a day.
00:28:43
Speaker
And that ended up being magical because when everybody writes it then everybody has visibility it's not like oh i'm the manager and so i need visibility into what you're doing but you don't get any visibility into what i'm doing and so i would share like the sales calls i went on or the you know challenges that i was seeing in the marketplace and like.
00:29:06
Speaker
here's something that I see coming and I've done this before in another organization. So I'm trying to like figure out that and people appreciate just as much insight into my day. And I was like, my day's boring. I'm not really doing any, you know, like I'm just going on sales meetings and I'm doing these strategic planning things. Like who cares? But people did care. And I was able to see, like when everybody was doing it, I was able to solve problems before they became problems.
00:29:35
Speaker
because we, and as a consulting company, we tried to bring as many people together, but we had a lot of times where there were silos because people were on different projects. And so for me, you know in reading everybody's journals, ever you know as much as possible, and we built scripts so that it would compile into like a one you know PDF that you could read and stuff, like there were different things that we had done over the years. Being able to see what are the patterns across teams then it was like, oh, like we need to shift ah our strategy to do this, trying to think of an example, where it's like, we need to make sure that we're putting into our contracts that stakeholders will meet with us once a quarter and that they will like contractually agree to that because
00:30:26
Speaker
we're running into a problem where multiple teams are saying, hey, stakeholder, like our client, like we need to meet with you, we need to meet with you. And they would just be like, eh, okay. So then that was something that I could do. Cause I'm like, I do the contract stuff. Let's make this where we hold our clients accountable. Like I'm seeing a pattern of people struggling, like let's fix this, but nobody had to come and tell me that it was a problem. I saw it because I was reading it over. There is a lot of push.
00:30:56
Speaker
for quantitative data. And I think like for me, what I found the best was qualitative data, because then it's like you're talking about people's experiences. And this ended up having the added benefit, because we you know someone was like, oh, I'm trying to implement this thing in Elasticsearch, and I can't figure it out, and blah, blah, blah. Someone was like, oh, I ran into that like six months ago. Let me pull up my Wiki page. And it's like, oh, here's what I learned. Here, boom, implement. And so we ended up being able to share much more efficiently.
00:31:24
Speaker
So you I think there are a lot of different ways it's like knowledge management. That was what ended up. working crazy well for our team. Um, it was hard for me sometimes to remember to write my daily journal. There were a lot of people on our team who it's like, eh, is it important? And I'm somebody who struggles with consistency generally. So, but when we were all reading each other's journals and it was an active part of how we all collectively made decisions, it worked great. It was game changing.
00:31:58
Speaker
That's a really interesting idea. It seems like it's kind of a an asynchronous ah analog to like kind of a combo retro stand up. I don't think i've I've tried to do something like that, though in teams that were more remote first.
00:32:17
Speaker
There is some extent of like daily journaling that that happens in a good Slack channel, a good team Slack channel, where people are good and like yeah like chatty about just sort of their daily frustrations and insights, you know where where you you start to get an intuition for what the team thinks and what what their challenges are. like ah where you start to pick that up and like you say, then you're in some other situation and you you see something and and okay, problems ahead because of of this ah this cohesion we've developed.
Empathy in Business Decision-Making
00:32:50
Speaker
Well, it ended up working really well for us too because then what we ended up doing was we compiled everybody's daily journals and we gave it to our clients.
00:32:59
Speaker
oh and i I just met with a former client a couple of weeks ago and she was like, that was the most valuable information. Because they were seeing the things that people were struggling with. And then we synthesized it, you know met quarterly, and said, okay, here are the things that we can do. It also benefited us as a business. Sometimes you have to take people to collections. And then it's like, no, we we did the work. Here it is. So it created like a little bit of an audit trail too.
00:33:27
Speaker
I think that is probably the biggest thing is we don't think about how information flows. And then we think of these silos and how do we get that information across. And I think we can't get information across unless we are willing to empathize.
00:33:44
Speaker
And say your experience you have a valuable contribution to this company And trying to not feel intimidated and that can be really hard when you're Working across domains. I know that's something i've Really struggled with still struggle with well, I think you said to me recently though that there's a difference between being an expert in someone else's station and knowing enough about it that you can collaborate on it. Yeah. I mean, so when Scott and I first started the company, I was very, my I had been sales all the time like that. I didn't know how to code, i you know, even though I'd had a lot of exposure and kind of thought like a programmer according to Scott and think of myself as a programmer.
00:34:35
Speaker
At the same time, Scott didn't think about himself as an entrepreneur. and so from When we started like the business together, his idea kind of was like, well, I'm just going to code and you're going to do the business. like You're the business founder, I'm the software founder. like I'll write the code, you do the business. Honestly, that that would sound really great to me. I recognize that you it's just not that easy.
00:35:03
Speaker
Yeah. He's like, that's why I brought you on because you have a business background. You do. You be the business. You be the business. So, yeah. So I guess I explicitly was the business for a while. You got business-ified. Yeah. So we're talking about our finances, right? And I'm like, I need you to be able to use these terms at least sunk cost, opportunity cost, like understanding the difference between a balance sheet and income statement. Like there's, there's kind of some basic structure there. When I'm talking about like how our finances are going, how can we have those discussions? Because like an opportunity cost, it's a trade-off. Like what am I giving up in order to pursue this thing?
00:35:53
Speaker
That's an important conversation to have. And when we're thinking about finances, the way we describe that is opportunity cost, right? A sunk cost is we've invested a lot of money in this. And just because we've invested a lot before doesn't mean that we have to continue to invest. So, and there's even the sunk cost fallacy, right? Where it's like, yeah, we spent a lot of money in this strategy. It's not paying off. We need to stop it.
00:36:22
Speaker
because the opportunity cost is that we could be doing this thing. and so you know and like Let's look at the numbers and let's look at the trends. so I can't do that by myself.
Setting Shared Goals for Business Value
00:36:34
Speaker
The business isn't something that operates outside of any department, I would think.
00:36:41
Speaker
and I struggled with coding, right? And kind of identifying as someone who would be good enough, right? But coding next to Scott on projects, learning about the terms like psychomatic complexity and test coverage and duplication and churn and knowing how those different things relate to each other. And a lot of it, honestly, like we had a product, our code inspection,
00:37:11
Speaker
And it was looking at a lot of these different kind of technical you know dad and you know metrics. like I don't know how to write the scripts and the code that is going to compute cyclomatic complexity.
00:37:28
Speaker
but I know what cyclomatic complexity is. And a lot of that was me and Scott sitting on the couch going, I don't understand it. Explain it to me like I'm five, right? And going back and forth and going, someone who doesn't code is never going to understand it that way. What's a metaphor, right? So there is this like challenging each other.
00:37:51
Speaker
and being able to be like, that doesn't make sense to me. And being flat out. And so then you get that shared understanding. And and that I think is where we need to end up. But yeah, you're a software developer. You don't need to know him not like as much marketing and finance to become a marketer or a salesperson or an accountant, you just need to know enough to be able to have intelligent conversations with your colleagues so that you can negotiate shared goals to achieve whatever value is defined for the business of which you are a part.
Empathy as a Collaborative Tool
00:38:29
Speaker
That's absolutely right. You don't have to know everything in order to be able to work together. And once you can work across boundaries,
00:38:38
Speaker
there. It's not just that you'll be able to do some of their work. There's work that you're able to do as a result of that, that neither of you could have done alone. Yeah. If you didn't know enough of the other side, I have had situations where I was working on something and like, well, if we choose this architecture, then they're not going to be able to do this. And I know that next week they're going to ask us to do like they that. This will inevitably you know, this would commit us to a direction that stops us from doing what obviously will be the thing the business needs to do. I i may not be an expert in, you know, like car dealerships or whatever it actually affected was like, i've I've been paying attention to it when they talk enough to know that this this would make absolutely no sense if we went this with this route. I've been able to stop and other times failed to stop, you know, some um really high stakes decisions that if I were having that oversimplified model about what my responsibilities were, I wouldn't have actually have been doing a good job. Yeah. And I think that's where empathy comes in too, because it's, I want to learn and I want to understand and I care about you as a human. So let me understand your world a little bit better so that, you know, we can work together better.
Building Communication Infrastructure
00:39:56
Speaker
There is a lot
00:39:58
Speaker
in the corporate world that reduces to how do we get better performance out of a low trust system rather than how do we increase the trust level? Tell me more about that.
00:40:14
Speaker
Yeah, I'll give you an example. So going back to what you said about, well, you didn't feel like you had transparency and I immediately had flashbacks to when a manager didn't feel like they had transparency in a low trust situation and they did all the things you didn't do. Like what?
00:40:36
Speaker
ah reliance on quantitative metrics when you don't yet have a qualitative understanding of the situation in order to model it well enough that that is worth counting anything. And when you have a number, you can hide behind it, you say it's their fault, their numbers are down or whatever you you you can look, it's very easy to look like you've done your homework. And I don't over generalize, because some people do honest things with numbers No, that's a very common experience that I've heard for sure. These things, either doing these things or even me anticipating that ah someone's talking about a number. I bet they're going to bludgeon me with it. That's a low trust response. When we don't trust each other, we can't so share information. Well, we can't collaborate. Well, we can't solve problems. Well, I don't believe that by having an idea, it will actually be listened to, that I'll be able to solve the problem. So like why even try?
00:41:32
Speaker
ah why not just keep my head down and let the plan fight fail? At least it won't be my fault. Like that's the behavior you're going to have in a in a low trust situation. Yeah. I think there's trust. And then I think as a way to build trust, you need a communication infrastructure. And this is something I think that people like overlook the most in an organization because it doesn't fall on any one person's department. Um,
00:41:59
Speaker
But this is how are we going to ensure that conversations are happening? So for example, um one of the biggest reasons, I ah will put the i'll find the research paper and put it in the show notes. um But there was evidence that one of the most important things for collaboration was to make sure that conversations didn't happen in ad hoc DMs.
00:42:26
Speaker
So it's like, oh, I need to talk to, uh, Jamal and Susie and, you know, Kristen. So I'm just going to DM the three of them and then it's in here and you cannot find information when it's like spread out all over the place. So that was another thing we had like, uh, you know, at CorgiBates for every client, we had an internal channel and we had an external channel that was client facing. And the rule was.
00:42:53
Speaker
everything should be like as much client facing as possible. If it is something that is sensitive, then it's internal. If it is something that is private, then it's a DM. And then that way it's like people can see what's going on.
00:43:14
Speaker
And people can take breaks. You can go on vacation because then nobody's bugging you to get the information because everybody has access to it. But that is like an example of the infrastructure. Like it's the plumbing. It's the like roads. Like that is how communication flows. And I think a big problem I see in a lot of organizations is there's no intention behind that. And you just get a lot of clutter.
00:43:43
Speaker
And of course, you can't operate well in it, especially on a remote team. This is so important. And just like you think about the space planning for a physical office, you need to think about the communication infrastructure for your digital office.
Empathy as a Technical Skill
00:43:59
Speaker
And when you can start to think that way, and like I've seen organizations, there's a tool, Donut.
00:44:06
Speaker
where it's like, it'll match you with somebody in the organization, right? Or there's companies that do mentorship programs. You're a software developer, what do you want to learn about? Whoever's in that department, like they'll just meet and then anybody who wants to show up. So it's like the product development, finance. And so then that way it's like, there's a structural way to help those conversations happen. Because like, ah W.R. Deming had a great quote, it's, um a gray individual is no match for a bad system. And I think a lot of times when we are feeling disempowered, it's that we're operating a system that's dysfunctional. And then we blame the business thinking that other people are more empowered than we are when in reality, most people don't feel empowered. All right. We've got a wealth of information here. So well done.
00:45:03
Speaker
We went long on this one, but hopefully that's okay. How about you all tell us if you like the longer episodes? Go on our Discord, talk to us, whatever. Until then, we'll they'll they'll come out whatever length they come out. Yeah, absolutely. You can go to empathyintech dot.com, sign up for our newsletter, and why don't you do the outro? Oh my goodness, okay. Never done the outro before, okay. No pressure. If you want me to do it, I totally can.
00:45:32
Speaker
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, and promoting technical empathy for ethics, equity, and social justice. If you found this conversation interesting, head on over to empathyintech.com to keep the conversation going and join our community of compassionate technologists.
00:46:02
Speaker
Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you in the next episode. All right.