A very good evening aspirants, I welcome you all to the Hindu Daily News Analysis brought to you by Shankar Ayes Academy. Aspirants, many of you are watching our video without subscribing to our YouTube channel. So please subscribe and hit the bell icon button so that you will get regular notifications about our videos. Now, before getting into discussion, I have an important announcement to you. The announcement is regarding Pritilum's test series. The batch 2 of pre-storming is about to begin. The orientation for the first test will be conducted on 15th October 2023 and the first test will be conducted on 22nd October. A total of 48 tests including C-Sat and Mach tests are provided in the test series and the test is conducted both in offline and online mode. Aspirants, this is a weekend batch, so kindly register to the test series immediately and boost your film score. Now, with this happy announcement, let us get into the news analysis. Today, I am going to cover important news articles from the Hindu newspaper dated 29th of September 2023. Displayed here is a list of news articles that we will be discussing today. At the end of the video, we will also have Pritilum's practice question discussions. So try to watch the entire video. Now, let us get into our first news article discussion. Look at this article. This article is taken from the Text and Context page. This article is speaking about the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance. Now, why is it in the news? Recently, the Canadian Prime Minister alleged that Indian agents were involved in the killing of Kalistani leader, Hardeep Singh Nijer, on Canadian soil. It is believed that the Canadian Prime Minister made these allegations based on the intelligence received from the Five Eyes Alliance. This is why the Five Eyes Alliance made the news today. So, in this discussion, we will see the important Pritilum's related facts about Five Eyes Alliance. Now, first, let us see the origin of the Five Eyes Alliance. Post World War II, the United States and the United Kingdom decided to enter into an Intelligence Alliance Agreement to combat the expanding influence of the Soviet Union. In 1946, this alliance was formulated through a treaty called the British-U.S. Communication Intelligence Agreement, or BRUSA, which is now known as the UK-USA Agreement. Later, Canada joined the alliance in 1948, while Australia and New Zealand became part of the alliance in 1956. See, this treaty remained top secret for a very long period of time. It was only in 2010 that the text of the agreement was first officially released in public. So, currently, the Five Eyes Alliance is a multilateral intelligence sharing network of five countries, namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. See, very recently, that is in 2016, the Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council was established. This council shares best practices and it engages with non-Five Eyes countries. Okay, here you may have a doubt. Why the name Five Eyes? See the intelligence documents that are shared between the five members are classified and it is titled Secret AUSCANNZUKUSISONLY. Because of this title, the alliance is called the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance. Okay, now moving on to see about the objectives of Five Eyes Alliance. As I already mentioned, the Five Eyes Alliance was initially established to prevent the expanding influence of the Soviet Union. But post the collapse of the Soviet Union, the goals of the Five Eyes Alliance shifted to combat terrorism and to restrict the growing influence of China. Okay, see to achieve these objectives, the countries take up various surveillance activities. The activities include ocean and maritime surveillance, scientific and defense intelligence analysis, medical intelligence, geospatial intelligence, counterintelligence and the continuous sharing of intelligence products. See the intelligence gathered through these surveillance activities are stored in a database called the STONE GHOST. Okay, this is all about the objectives and various surveillance activities carried out by the Five Eyes Alliance. Now finally, let us look at the concerns regarding Five Eyes Alliance. The first concern is the issue of privacy. Some members of the alliance have been accused of engaging in extensive surveillance activities both domestically and internationally. So this affects the privacy of the people. The second concern is lack of transparency. As we saw just now, the Five Eyes Alliance operates in secrecy and many of its activities are undisclosed. So this lack of transparency can lead to distrust between the nations. Then the next concern is regarding the lack of oversight mechanism. See the Five Eyes Alliance operates without meaningful checks and balances. This might lead to potential abuses of power. And the last concern is regarding economic espionage. See there have been some allegations that some members of the alliance had used the gathered intelligence for national security purposes to benefit their own economic interests. This is a major concern that can lead to an increase in distrust over the alliance. Okay. These are all some of the important concerns surrounding the Five Eyes Alliance. And that's all regarding this discussion. In this discussion we saw about the origin of Five Eyes Alliance. Then we saw about the objectives and activities of Five Eyes Alliance. And finally we saw some concerns regarding Five Eyes Alliance. See this topic is very important for your problems exam. So revise all the facts that we discussed. Now with these points in mind, let us move on to the next news article discussion. Look at this editorial article. This article highlights the major issue of India's organ shortage, especially in the transplantation of kidney. This article provides us some data about kidney transplantation. The data says that in 2022 over 2 lakh patients needed a kidney transplant. But there were only about 7,500 transplants happened in India. So only around 3.4% of transplant demand was met. The author here compares the data from United States and other developed countries. See the US and other developed countries can able to perform 20% kidney transplants over a demand. But India can perform only 3.4% kidney transplants. So the author argues that this transplant gap is more due to stringent regulations in India. Okay. This is the crux of the editorial. Now in this discussion, we will see the challenges prevailing in organ transplantation in India and then we will see the steps taken by the government to promote organ transplantation. As part of our new initiative, we will approach this topic with mains answer writing approach. Before that, let us look into the syllabus. In prylums, this topic comes under general science. And in mains, this topic comes under GS2 and GS3. And it falls under the topics like issues relating to development and management of social sector and health and science and technology developments and their applications and effects in everyday life. Okay. This is the syllabus. Now let us get into the discussion. Now first we will look at the mains question. Here the question is in 2022 over 2 lakh patients needed a kidney transplant in India but there were only about 7,500 transplants happened in India. In this light of above statement, discuss the challenges in organ transplantation in India and steps taken by the government to promote organ transplantation in India. 250 words, 15 marks. See this is the question. This question contains two parts. First, we have to discuss the challenges in organ transplantation in India. Here the key word is discuss. See if the question contains the word discuss, we have to provide a written debate that is the arguments on the issue and keep in mind our arguments should be backed up with evidence. In simple terms, in these types of questions, we have to discuss various perspectives of the issue by presenting a logical argument. Okay. So for this question, first we have to provide some argument regarding the challenges in organ transplantation in India. Okay. Here the second part of the question demands us to list out the steps taken by the government to promote and regulate organ donation in India. See this is the direct demand. So it is enough for us to list out the steps. Okay. Now having decoded the question, now let us begin to answer the question. What can be the introduction for the question? Here the question is about the organ transplantation. So we will start our answer with some basic facts about organ transplantation in India. Keep in mind we should be very careful while writing the fact in introduction part. If you make mistake in introduction itself, it will create a bad opinion in the minds of evaluator. So be careful while writing facts. You can also begin the answer by writing the source of the data like according to WHO, according to UN, according to ICMR and so on. Okay. Now coming to intro for this main question, we can write the intro like according to the national organ and tissue transplantation organization that is the NOTO in India over 3 lakh patients are waiting to receive organ transplantation. The huge demand is because the supply of organs from the donors are not up to the line with increasing demand. The NOTO also states that approximately 20 individuals die daily without awaiting organ transplants and this is due to shortage of organs. As we are going to discuss the challenge in organ transplantation, this can be a better intro for this question. Okay. Now coming to the body part, here first we have to discuss the challenges prevailing in organ transplantation in India. As it is a discussed question, we shall give some examples to back our arguments. Now let us look at the challenges. The first challenge is there is a huge gap between the demand and supply of organs in India. The data shows that only around 10% of the patients who are in need getting the organs. If you put it in numbers, for the estimated 1.5 to 2 lakh persons who need a kidney transplant every year in India, only around 8000 people get organs and of the 10,000 people who need a hot transplant in India, only 200 get the heart. So there is a huge mismatch in supply and demand. This is the first challenge. Then the second important challenge is cultural factor over donating the organs of deceased persons. The India conducts the third highest number of transplants in the world. The data shows that organ transplants in India have increased from 806 transplants in 2002 over 15,000 transplants in 2022. But the problem here is that over 80% of the organs were received from living donor transplants. Therefore only 20% of organs are coming from the deceased persons. This huge gap is due to stringent cultural aspects that various religions follow in India. This is the second challenge. Then the third important challenge is lack of awareness and superstition. See in India the concern from the family of deceased person is necessary to harvest organs even though such person has registered as an organ donor. So if the family refuses, the organ cannot be harvested. And note that the countries like Spain have an opt-out system for organ donation. As per the system, a person will be automatically a donor after his death if such person does not mention anything about his organ donation when he is alive. But as we saw earlier, this is not the case with India. In India we need concern from the family and most of the time the family refuses to organ donation due to superstitious belief and lack of awareness. This is the third important challenge. And finally the lack of necessary infrastructure to preserve the harvested organs in many parts of India is also pose a challenge in organ transplantation in India. These are all the challenges of organ transplantation. See like we discussed, if you provide points with some data, it would give you an edge over other's answers. Now coming to the second part, the second part of the question demands us to list out the steps taken by the government to promote the organ transplantation in India. Now we will see the steps one by one. Firstly, the government of India has adopted one nation, one policy for organ donation and transplantation in February 2023. Under the policy, the government has removed the requirement of domicile of the state for registration of patients for receiving organ from the deceased donor. For example, earlier if a patient heals from Tamil Nadu, he can only register in Tamil Nadu for obtaining organs. But as per the new policy, the patients will be able to go to any state in India and register themselves for organ transplantation. This is the first important step. Secondly, several states like Gujarat, Telangana, Maharashtra and Kerala, they have removed registration fees for the registration to receive organs. This helps poor patients to afford organ transplantation in India. Thirdly, the National Organ and Tissue Transplantation Organization has removed the age cap to get registered for organ transplantation. Earlier, the NOTO guidelines prohibited the person's age above 65 from registering for organ transplants. But now this age cap has been removed, so everyone irrespective of the age will now register for organ transplantation. And finally, the government is taking more efforts to streamline organ transport processes through air, rail, metros and so on. For example, recently in May 2023, the government amended the metro rules to allow for organ transport through metro rails. These are some of the steps taken by the government to promote organ transplantation in India. So we have finished the body part. Now finally, let us see the conclusion aspect. Since it is a discussion, we can give a forward-looking conclusion. Here you can write a conclusion like, even though the good initiatives are taken by the government, the demand for organ transplantation is keep on increasing. So the government should bring in comprehensive reforms through suitable policies for the efficient management of organ donation and transplantation in India. In addition to this, the government can also collaborate with NGOs to spread awareness about the organ donation. This is a balanced conclusion for this question. And this is how you have to approach these types of questions. If you like this approach, do like and share your thoughts in the comment section. As friends, we are planning to follow this approach based on your feedback. So don't forget to comment your opinion in the comment section. And that's all regarding this discussion. Now let us move on to the next news article discussion. Look at this article. This article is taken from the side column of the editorial page. This article is written in the backdrop of recently released India Aging Report 2023. Note that this report was released by the United Nations Population Fund. The report provides us some facts about India's elderly population, that is the population aged above 60 years. This editorial here highlights some crucial data from the India Aging Report 2023. This is the essence of the editorial. Now in this discussion, let us first understand the data from the report. Then we'll see the challenges faced by elderly population in India. And finally, let us see the steps taken by the government to assist the elderly population. This is the plan. Now first, let us understand a few facts from the India Aging Report 2023 as provided in the editorial article. Firstly, the report mentioned that the elderly population in India will increase from 10.5% in 2022 to 20.8% by 2050. This means that the elderly population will be doubled in the next 25 years. Secondly, the report observed that there were variations in elderly population within the states itself. As per the report, the southern states have a higher proportion of elderly residents compared to the national average. Meanwhile, states with higher fertility rates like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh also have an increase in the elderly population. But it is below the national average. This is the second finding. Thirdly, the report noted that women constitute a larger proportion of the elderly population in India. The report observed that most of the elderly women do not have economic and social security. So they will become more vulnerable in old age. And finally, the report says that more than 2.5th of the elderly population have poor wealth and they do not have any income. So these factors will create significant implications on health, economy and society in the long term. Okay, these are all the important findings of the report, as mentioned in the news article. Now moving on to see about the challenges faced by the old age population in India. See, although aging is the natural stage of human life, it brings innumerable problems and challenges. The challenges generally vary from financial to psychological to social aspects. Now first, let us take financial issues. See, the elderly population are generally not preferred for any jobs. So they are pushed out of the labor force. This leads to loss of employment and income. This in turn burden the elderly people financially. Okay, this is the first challenge. Secondly, the elderly people face psychological stress due to their deteriorating health. See, the elderly people are more vulnerable to cardiac diseases, high sight and hearing problems. So they have to make periodic visits to the hospitals and they take lots of medicines. So this affects the elderly people mentally. Okay, this is the second challenge. Thirdly, the elderly population are more vulnerable to be the victim of crimes. The elderly people become soft targets for the criminal elements. For example, the aged persons are facing many problems such as murder, theft, cheating and back snatching. Okay, this is the third problem. And finally, most of the elderly population are lost social relevance with the increasing age. Here, losing social relevance means that the elderly people are seen as a liability by the younger generation. So this leads to widespread depression among the old age population. Okay, so these are the major challenges faced by the old age population in India. Now let us see some of the important initiatives taken by the government for the welfare of elderly community in India. See the constitutional safeguards for elderly are included under Article 41 and Article 46 of DPSP. Here, Article 41 mandates the state to provide public assistance to the old age population. Then Article 46 wants to remove social injustice and all forms of exploitation with respect to the weaker sections of the society. Here, weaker sections also include the elderly population in India. So in the line of these two articles, the government of India has created many welfare schemes and aids for elderly people. Now let us see the schemes one by one. The first scheme is Raashtriya Vayyoshri Yojana, or the Y. It was introduced by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in 2017. This scheme aims to provide assisted living devices and physical aids for senior citizens belonging to the BPL category who are suffering from age-related infirmities or disabilities. So the main purpose of the Raashtriya Vayyoshri Yojana is to provide assistance to the poor elderly people who are facing difficulties in walking with increasing age. Note that the Raashtriya Vayyoshri Yojana is a central sector scheme, which means the scheme is entirely funded by the central government. And note that the expenditure for implementing the Raashtriya Vayyoshri Yojana scheme will be made from the senior citizens welfare fund, okay? The Raashtriya Vayyoshri Yojana scheme is implemented through the Artificial Limbs Manufacturing Corporation, which is in short called as Alimco. It is a public sector undertaking, working under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. The Alimco distributes physical aids, equipment and assisted living devices at free of cost to all the beneficiaries of Raashtriya Vayyoshri Yojana. And note that 30% of the beneficiaries in every district should be women. Then the second important initiative is Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme. The scheme was launched in 2007 as a part of National Social Assistance Program. And the scheme is being administered by the Ministry of Rural Development. Under the scheme, below poverty line persons aged 60 years or above are entitled to a monthly pension of Rs.200 up to 79 years of age. And after 79 years, they will get Rs.500 under the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme, okay? Then the third important initiative is Pradhan Mantri Vayyavandana Yojana. The scheme was launched in May 2017. It aims to provide social security for old age people. Note that Pradhan Mantri Vayyavandana Yojana is exclusively available to those who are 60 years of age and above. It is basically a pension scheme for senior citizens. And note that the scheme is implemented by the Life Insurance Corporation of India, that is the LIC. And the final important initiative is Integrated Program for Older Persons. It was launched in 1992. The main objective of the scheme is to improve the quality of life of the older persons. This objective is being made by providing basic amenities to elder people like shelter, food, medical care and entertainment opportunities. Okay, these are all some of the important steps taken by the government for the welfare of old age population in India. And that's all regarding this discussion. And this discussion is about the important facts from the recently released India Aging Report 2023. Then we saw about the challenges faced by the older age population in India. And finally, we saw some points about the steps taken by the government to aid elderly population. Since the discussion we have discussed various schemes which can be asked in prilams. Also, you can quote these schemes while writing your main censor. This will definitely enrich your main censor. Okay, now with these points in mind, let us move on to the next news article discussion. Look at this news article, the chief architect of our country's Green Revolution, Mr. M. Swaminathan passed away yesterday. It was under the guidance of Mr. M. Swaminathan, India adopted chemical biological technology in agriculture. The Green Revolution helped India to transform itself into a agriculturally surplus country. Okay, so in this discussion, we'll cover some important points about the Green Revolution. Now first, let us cover the background. If you can recall after independence, India adopted a centralized planning method through fire plans. The first fire plan, India adopted the Harrod-Domer model and focused on agriculture. And in the second fire plan, India adopted the Magalonobis model and focused mainly on capital intensive industries. And this plan neglected agriculture. Due to the complete neglect of agriculture during the second fire plan and two successive droughts, India faced a severe food shortage during the 1960. So to address this dire situation, India decided to act quickly. Therefore, in the mid 1960s, India adopted the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution in India started with the introduction of high yielding varieties of wheat and rice. The other features of Green Revolution were expansion of farming areas and adoption of the double cropping system with improved irrigation facilities. Okay, this is how the Green Revolution came into being in India. Now what were the objectives of the Green Revolution? The primary objective of the Green Revolution was to increase food production and productivity, especially wheat and rice. Through this, India aimed at achieving self-sufficiency in food production. And the other objectives of Green Revolution include adoption of modern techniques, addressing hunger, and increasing agricultural employment. Okay, these are all the objectives of Green Revolution. Now coming to the question, was Green Revolution successful in achieving its objectives? The answer is yes. As you can see in the graph, India's food production increased tremendously due to introduction of the Green Revolution. Due to increased food production, India became self-sufficient in food grain production. The increased productivity in turn helped the farmers economically. See, many big land owners, mainly in the Punjab-Haryana region, became extremely rich. Also, agriculture allied sectors like the fettelace industry, tractor industry, pump industry also witnessed their growth. Okay, these are all some of the positive outcomes of the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution also had some unintended negative consequences as well. Now, what are those? Firstly, the Green Revolution widened the regional disparity in India. The Green Revolution was not evenly distributed across India. The states with good irrigation facilities like Punjab and Haryana benefited more than others. Secondly, the Green Revolution increased chemical fertilizer use, which negatively affected the environment. The excessive chemical fertilizers, which were washed away due to runoff, caused eutrophication in nearby water bodies, which compounded the problem. Thirdly, the high-gilled varieties that fueled the Green Revolution needed more water than native varieties. So, farmers exploited the groundwater indiscriminately. This resulted in groundwater shortage and salinization of arable land. Fourthly, as the Green Revolution promoted the use of high-yielding varieties, the use of native crop varieties declined. This resulted in the reduction of genetic diversity. The reduced genetic diversity made the crops more susceptible to best attack. And finally, as the Green Revolution focused only on food crops, mainly rice and wheat, farmers also preferred growing only rice and wheat. This coupled with the skewed minimum support price policy, which resulted in monoculture of rice and wheat all over the country. And this monoculture, in turn, led to land degradation. Overtime, the Green Revolution faced sustainability challenges. Issues like soil degradation, pest resistance, depletion of groundwater, they led to diminishing returns on agricultural investments. This, in turn, made agriculture a loss-making or less profitable venture, which is only now kept afloat by government subsidies. These are also some of the negative impacts of Green Revolution. See, later the government has realized its mistakes and it is taking some corrective steps in recent times to address the negative impacts of Green Revolution. And that's all regarding this discussion. In this discussion, we saw about the background of Green Revolution, then we saw about the objectives of Green Revolution, then we saw about the benefits and consequences of Green Revolution. Now, with these points in mind, let us move on to the next news article discussion. Look at this small article from the Text and Context page. Recently, the Indian Bureau of Mines has released the index of mineral production of the mining and querying sector. According to the index, the mineral production in India was increased from previous year. In July 2023, the index of mineral production was stood at 111.9. This is a 10.7 percentage increase when compared with July 2022 mineral production. This is all about the news. In this discussion, we'll see important prelims-related facts about the Indian Bureau of Mines. The Indian Bureau of Mines, which is in short known as IBM, is a central government agency functioning under the Ministry of Mines. It was established in 1948. Note that its headquarters is located in Nagpur, Maharashtra. The Indian Bureau of Mines is responsible for the regulation and development of mining sector in India. Initially, the Indian Bureau of Mines functioned purely as an advisory body. During its initial years, the Indian Bureau of Mines helped the central government in framing various legislations and rules regarding mining sector. Some of the legislations and rules framed with the guidance of IBM include mines and minerals, regulation and development act, 1948, mineral concession rules, 1949, and petroleum concession rules, 1949. And later in 1950, the scope of the Indian Bureau of Mines was extended and it was given a set of functions to perform. And these functions kept on evolving over the years. Now, let us see the various functions performed by the Indian Bureau of Mines. Firstly, the Indian Bureau of Mines publishes the National Mineral Information Repository. See, this repository is nothing but a database that contains all mines and mineral related information in India. Secondly, Indian Bureau of Mines functions as the National Technical Regulator in respect of mining sector. As a National Technical Regulator, the Indian Bureau of Mines lays down regulations and procedures to guide the state governments in mining activities. Thirdly, the Indian Bureau of Mines establishes an institutional mechanism to coordinate between the center, the states, mineral industry, research and academic institutions. This mechanism helps in addressing the demands of the mining industry. Fourthly, the IBM promotes research in the mining industry sector and it acts as a bridge between academia and industry. Fifthly, the Indian Bureau of Mines provides technical consultancy services to both the government and the private organizations. Finally, through international collaboration projects, the Indian Bureau of Mines brings useful inputs for the development of Indian mining industry. Okay, these are all some of the important functions performed by the Indian Bureau of Mines. And that's all regarding this discussion and this discussion we saw about the formation of Indian Bureau of Mines. Then we saw about the objective of Indian Bureau of Mines and finally we saw some points about the functions and organizational structure of the Indian Bureau of Mines. See, this topic is very much important for the problem's exam and that's why we have chosen this topic for today's discussion. So, revise all the facts that we discussed. Now, with these points in mind, let us move on to the next part of the video that is to discuss preliminary practice questions. As friends, today we are having three questions. I will solve two of them and one will be a quiz question for you. Look at the first question. This question is regarding green revolution. Here, four aspects are given. We have to find how many of them most appropriately describes the nature of green revolution. First one, seed fertilizer water technology. Second one, high yielding variety. Third one, intensive cultivation of green vegetable. Fourth one, chemical biological technology in agriculture. Here, the correct answer is option D, one, two and four only. As you saw in the discussion, the green revolution focused on intense cultivation of food grains like wheat and rice. And it is not focused on cultivation of green vegetable. Here, all other aspects are covered under green revolution. So, the correct answer is option D, one, two and four. Moving on, let's take up the second question. This is a previous question which was asked in 2022 UPSC prelims. This question is regarding cold controllers organization. Here, four statements are given. We have to find which of these statements are correct. Look at the fourth statement. CCO is the major source of cold statistics in government of India. See, this statement is correct. The cold controllers organization is responsible for carrying out annual cold and lignite survey and publishing of provisional cold statistics and cold directory of India. So, this makes the cold controllers organization the major source of cold statistics in government of India. So, statement one is correct. Now, come to the second statement. It monitors progress of development of captive cold or lignite blocks. See, this statement is also correct. The cold controllers organization is tasked with monitoring captive mines. It also gives permission for opening and reopening of coal mines. So, second statement is correct. Now, coming to the third statement. It hears any objection to the government's notification relating to acquisition of coal bearing areas. See, this statement is correct. Under coal bearing area acquisition and development act 1957, the cold controllers organization hears objection to the central government's notification relating to acquisition of coal bearing areas. So, third statement is also correct. Now, coming to the fourth statement. It ensures that coal mining companies deliver the coal to end users in the prescribed time. See, this statement is incorrect because it is not a function of coal controllers organization. Here, only first, second and third statements are correct. So, the correct answer for the question is option A, one, two, one, three, one, B. This is a quiz question for you today. I will post this question in a community section. Try to answer it. And displayed here is a main question for your practice. Go through the question, write your answer and post it in the comment section. With this, we have come to the end of the video. If you found our video to be useful, do like, comment and share it with your friends. And don't forget to subscribe Shankar IS Academy YouTube channel. Thank you for listening.


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Good morning. I'm Ernie Bauer with the CSIS Southeast Asia Program, and we're honored to be here this morning with Ambassador Winston Thompson, the ambassador of Fiji to the United States. Good morning, Ambassador. The New Year's Day declaration by the Commodore of the end of emergency rule in Fiji has put a lot of questions in people's minds about where Fiji is headed in terms of elect possible elections, return to democratic process. Can you tell us a little bit about what's happening there with with regard to the emergency rule? Well, the removal, which actually is taking place today in Fiji, being Saturday there, was set out in the in the plan and the roadmap that the Prime Minister, Banu Marama, announced in July of 2009, whereby over the period until September of 2014 when elections would take place, it was various things that were supposed to happen. In the first three years was to be social economic development and modification in the legal system, updating of the legal system, because many of our laws go back to even before our independence in 1970s, a lot of this, particularly that the terrorism that has arisen over the last decade or so has become much more significant. So those things had to be done. And then the Constitution was to be reviewed and then elections to take place in 2014. So the removal of the public emergency regulations today is merely the next step in that process. So this has been followed all along. We're quite following the plan that was set out. So it sounds like you're quite confident that the next step is the is the to revise the Constitution and you think you're on track for elections in 2014. Yeah, very much so because the setting up of the committee, the structure to carry out that review is going to be announced next month and this will take place throughout this year, completed next year, and under that new Constitution elections would then be held in 2014. Could you address what changes the government plans to make in the Constitution? What areas of the Constitution would be updated and and changed? Well, many in the area of representation because the Constitution we have which was brought in in 1997 was based on the 1990 Constitution, our independence Constitution, and that took into account the historical background, colonial background that we had, where we had two large components in our population, roughly half, and so provisions put into the Constitution to recognize that division, dichotomy. But that in fact is what has caused the continuing tensions and this is what is to be removed. So that intention in the new Constitution is to remove any racial reference out of it. So that becomes a non-racial Constitution. Everybody's equal. Everybody's vote and value is equal. So one man, one vote, no matter who you are. And what's the timing for the elections in 2014? September, September 2014. What are the prospects for genuine reconciliation between the parties in Fiji? You're talking about the political process, but on the ground, how do you see that reconciliation process? On the ground, there's always been good relations between all the communities. But the fact that the Constitution entrenched the recognition of communal separation is what the government feels is the cause of the problem. So the intention in the revision of the Constitution is to remove that, so that at least everyone is there's one name for everyone, which there wasn't before, and there is hopefully a sense of unity that could be generated because of that. Hillary Clinton and in particular Kirk Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, have talked about the need for the United States to refocus on Asia in general, and they've talked a lot about this, the Pacific. Also being more, the United States being more active in the Pacific. What's Fiji's perspective on that? Should the United States be more active in the Pacific? What can we do? And could you talk a little bit about other countries or other nations, China, India, the Southeast Asians, are they being more active in the Pacific also? Well, America has always been in the Pacific. As far as we're concerned, we have a large Peace Corps contingent in Fiji. They've been there since 1968, except for a short period when they weren't there. And they have a big diplomatic presence in Seoul, because that is the sort of center of that part of the region. So now part of the Pacific, the Americans have always been there, but in many ways they've left it to Australia and New Zealand to sort of look after the broad interests of that alliance. And we feel certainly that the way Australia has been managing it has not been the best way to deal with the situation we have in Fiji. Sure, they have problems with our what happened, but really the way they've addressed it has not helped. They haven't changed anything in the timetable that is set out for return to elections. And in fact, they've probably made things worse rather than better. So very diplomatically, I think I heard you just say that if the United States wants to be more active, we should engage directly and not through sort of proxy relationships with the Kiwis and the Australians. Is that right? We think so. What's the state of Fiji's economy? What does it look like? What are the prospects for the economy and what do you see in the future? Well, we're a small, very small open economy. We rely on trade, import and export trade. We don't have any serious restrictions in that we're a member of the WTO. And over the period since 2006, we could have done better economically. GDP growth has only been very low in the low figures. But that's probably a powerful the rest much of the rest of the world. Anyway, we've all been suffering. We could have done better if if we had not had sanctions imposed on us by by some countries, we probably would have done better. A lot of a lot of observers say that China has stepped up its game in the Pacific. And this is a reason that the United States should should also, you know, re refocus. Is that true? I mean, would you say that you've seen China more proactive over the last decade in Fiji? Not any more than they have been. They've been there since independence, in fact, since before independence. OK. And they've been a continuous partner over the years. I think if there's been any stepping up over the last few years, it's because other partners have fallen off. I see. That they have come in because Fiji has had to refocus its its engagements and its partners over the last seven or eight years in order to maintain its economic momentum. And China has been very much very much there. Last year in the Pacific Island Forum, I think it was held in New Zealand. The Americans had the largest ever and most senior delegation there. And I think the Pacific Island Forum, the PIF, has its secretariat in Fiji. Have you been able to participate fully in the PIF with the with the sanctions regime that exists? And what's Fiji's perspective on the PIF and what do you see going forward? Well, Fiji has been suspended from its membership of the Pacific Island Forum. And it's a bit sort of incongruous that the headquarters is based in Fiji. But they have been allowed to operate quite normally. I don't think there's been any restrictions imposed upon them. They're quite free to come and go and operate because Fiji will resume its membership in due course. So things will move on. But in the meantime, Fiji's had to, for instance, work through its association with other Pacific islands, other than Australia and New Zealand, in what has become known as the Pacific Small Island Developing States. Right. And they caucus as a group, for instance, 12 of them at the United Nations. And they've become a reasonably vocal and visible lobby group within that context. And Fiji is very much a part of that. If you were out on the back porch in Hawaii with President Obama and he asked you, Ambassador, what are the things that we should be doing with Fiji that we're not doing today as the United States? What would be your top-line advice to the President? I think it's mainly to advise or encourage its partners in our part of the world to look at things a bit more long-term rather than just being focused on some of the things that already appear not to have been very productive way of doing things. Ambassador, thank you for joining us at CSIS today for a session of the dialogue. I hope you'll come back soon.


So welcome everybody to the session on team transformation canvas team building starts with you. We have our speaker Richard Kaspariske. Welcome Richard. So without any further delays over to you Richard. So this is a session about this thing called the team transformation canvas. It's about team building. It's about well you know team building is it's about all of us. But it's actually about each one of us individually. We're going to take a look at that. I'm Richard Kaspariske. I'm an author, a teacher, a coach, a speaker. I run a program called certified agile team building. We do training for how to have awesome teams, as well as Agilent scrum skills, product owner skills, technical skills, and a training certification if you want to know how to do this yourself. Also you have all my contact info here. We can we can ask questions. We can have a conversation as we go here today. You can also get in touch with me later on. If you have any questions or you think of something later on, feel free to follow up with me. We're going to start with us individually. And we're going to do a couple of different kinds of interactions as we go. One kind of interaction will be using this electronic tool called Mentimeter. Join me here in Menti. One way to do that is to, hey, just noticing, I have a web browser that looks like this. Do you have a web browser that looks like this with a camera on it? My web browser has a camera on it. You could aim your web camera at that QR code and join me here in Menti or you could type menti.com into your web browser and type 38903352. When you get there, those icons, click one of those icons. Let us know you're here with us. Many of you are in India. I'm in Boston in the United States. It's morning. I'm drinking morning tea. I have a question for you. It's about your team. How awesome is your team? Now, yeah, okay, I'm from the United States. So my, my English tends to be informal. How awesome is your team? That's a really informal question on a scale from not so awesome to wicked awesome. Also, I'm from Boston. So I use this word wicked. It means very, very, the most. How awesome is your team from not very awesome at all to the most awesome team that ever existed on Earth? And how awesome do you want your team to be? From not very awesome to the most awesome team that ever existed on Earth? Yeah, so most, most teams, this is kind of the usual, the usual answer. Most people's teams, most people think their teams are mediocre, somewhere in the middle, good, not great, not terrible, good. And we all want our teams to be the best, the best they could possibly be. So if that's you, you're in the right place. Looks like somebody thinks their team today already is wicked awesome. We probably have some things we could learn from you. So I hope you stick around and you can share some of your ideas with us. We'll start by sharing some of the background on the research on teams and team performance. The background, the research, the science on this, it's a really easy story to tell thanks to this article that was in The New York Times five years ago. So it turns out that people have been studying teams for at least 60 years in academic settings. And during that 60 years, the researchers have discovered hundreds of different characteristics that according to their research correlate to having a really great team. There are 200, maybe 250 of these different characteristics, different attributes that various researchers have identified as the one thing you need for a great team, the one thing you need for a high performance team. 251 things. That's way too many. That's way more than any team could try to understand. That's way more than any team could use to try to make themselves the best team possible. I mean, when we do a retrospective, we try to focus on maybe one thing, maybe two things to make our team better. At Google, they hired a bunch of people to help them reproduce the research. They got about 200 teams to volunteer to participate in reproducing the research. And what they found was that the one thing that mattered more than anything else out of all those 250 different things that you could measure about teams, the one thing that mattered more than anything else was psychological safety. The teams that measured high on psychological safety measured high on performance, whether they were technical teams, software development teams, hardware development teams, or even sales teams. If they measured high on psychological safety, they outperformed other teams that were doing similar work. Psychological safety is this sense that we feel safe when we're together as a group. It's safe to take risks. It's safe to try out something new that you're not already good at. It's safe to take on a new role.  And when that happens, well, it turns out we do better work. We're more creative. We're more productive. We do higher quality work. And this cuts across all different industries. It cuts across all different countries and cultures. Here's an example from my dentist. So I told her what I was doing for work and she got really excited about it. And she pulled out the paper version of her dental office magazine. It was all about psychological safety for the workers at the dental office. Now I shared this story of Google with Steve Wolf. Steve Wolf is another one of these researchers. He did his research with his colleague, Vanessa Drusket. He knew all about psychological safety. He was doing his research at the same time as Amy Edmondson. Amy Edmondson is the person who discovered and popularized psychological safety. Steve and Vanessa discovered that there was something a little bit bigger than psychological safety. They called it team emotional intelligence. It's like individual emotional intelligence, but it's at a larger scale. So it means, for example, that as a group, we understand how we're feeling. And as a group, we behave appropriately to make sure that we achieve our goals together no matter how we're feeling. And we can perceive how others are feeling outside of our group, outside of our work team. We can understand how the system works around our work team, the larger organization. And we can influence people outside of our work team to help us accomplish our goals for our team and for the whole organization. It includes the ability to build social capital. It includes measurable executive support. It includes psychological safety as one of the measurements. And it turns out that in this research, just like the research on psychological safety by itself, in the larger research on team emotional intelligence, when teams measure high on team emotional intelligence, they measure high on performance. Now this is science, so this is about where it ends. There's a correlation. If you measure this, you measure that, you notice that the measurements are similar. They don't tell you how to do it, which is kind of disappointing. It turns out you can't just tell people to do more psychological safety or do more emotional intelligence. We don't know how to do it. It's not something that you can just tell us to do. These are outcomes from other behaviors. So there's this related research called the core protocols. This is the work of Jim McCarthy and Michelle McCarthy. They were doing observational research on teams in a lab. And they noticed that successful teams shared similar behaviors. They wrote down these behaviors as little scripts that we could all try to follow and learn from. And then they did some experimental research. They invited teams into their lab. They gave them an assignment in five days to get a ton. And then they would introduce these behaviors that they had observed on high performing teams. Every time they did that, these teams in their experiments were successful. So they shared these behaviors with the rest of us. In my book here, you can find them on a website called thecoreprotocoles.org. And we're going to look at a few of them today. What we notice is that when teams follow these behaviors, they build high emotional intelligence together. They build high psychological safety. And they're very successful together. They're high performing teams. Steve Wolf, he's the team emotional intelligence researcher. He and I have done some work to associate the core protocols with the science and research on teams and team performance. And we notice that for everything that gets measured in team emotional intelligence, there's a related behavior for the habit we can build, a way to do it that comes from the core protocols. So here's another way to look at this. If you want a high performing team, and you probably do, you definitely want psychological safety. The science is really solid. Psychological safety is a subset of this larger thing called team emotional intelligence. So you definitely want that. Now, if you want to know how to do that, the core protocols is one set of behaviors, one way to build higher team emotional intelligence, to build higher psychological safety, and to get a higher performing team. So then the next question is, okay, great, how do we learn these skills fast? I've been sharing these skills that the McCarthy has been sharing these skills in a five day class, right? Five days is a long time. Not many people, not many teams can take five days off from their work and not do any work and take a class to try to learn something. I've been doing it as a one day class or a half day class. That's even challenging for people. I noticed that when I talk to people individually or work with small teams, I always ask the same series of questions. And so I put together that series of questions on a canvas. And here's a view of that canvas. It's a way for us to start exploring and learning these skills very, very quickly. We don't have to take a five day class or a one day class to start learning these skills. We're going to do this canvas together today and begin learning these skills. So here we go. This is the Team Transformation Canvas. You can find it at teamtransformationcanvas.com. You could find a mirror template there and you could use, you could do this electronically with us right now as we go. You could find a PDF there. You could print it or you could just take a blank piece of paper, blank piece of paper fresh from the printer. And you can just draw one of these as you go. Make sure you have a pen, something to write with. A blank piece of paper, maybe a copy of the canvas, maybe the digital version of the canvas. It doesn't matter. At least have a blank piece of paper and a pen and we'll do this canvas together as we go right now. Here's the full view of the canvas again and we're going to start in the top left corner. The one about positive bias. Here's a close up of that. This is about setting the context around you, setting the context around us individually and as a team and as a group here today. We're going to orient ourselves toward getting what we want. One of the ways we do that is by using positive language. We're going to make sure we use the word yes, more than the word no. We're going to make sure we use the word and more than we use the word but. And whatever actions we take, whatever we do, whatever we say, whatever we do while we're here together right now in Zoom and digital space online.  We're going to bias everything we do to getting positive outcomes for ourselves individually and for the people around us. Now, if this is true for you or if you can make this true right now, either check those boxes or write this down on your blank piece of paper. Write down these sentences or check off these boxes. This is kind of like the user agreement for the rest of this session. If you can do this, if you can say yes to this, if you can make this happen, then you are ready for the rest of this session. And then we'll move on to freedom and autonomy. This box in the top in the middle.  Continuing with this user agreement. These sentences are about making sure that you're doing this because you want to do this. Nobody is making you do this. Your boss didn't say you must attend Richard's session and you must do whatever he says. That would be the opposite of what we're looking for. You're here because you want to be here. You are choosing to do this. And while it turns out that when you're with your team, the same thing that if you, on the highest performing teams, there are groups of people who choose to be together. Nobody commanded them to be together. While we're here, you can opt out of anything we're doing anytime for any reason. It's totally okay. We're going to do some activities. This right here is an activity. It's a solo one person activity. You don't have to do any of this and you can leave anytime you want for any reason. This is right here right now for this session. But on the best of the best teams, these two statements are true. If you can make these two statements true right now for this session, check those boxes or write down those sentences on your blank piece of paper. If you can't think about what you can do to make them true. That would be your homework. And then we're going to move on to this box on the left called emotional state. We'll zoom in on that. Now this first fill in the blank. We've got some fill in the blank activities here. I feel blank. How do you feel right now? You can fill in that blank, complete that sentence with any word or words that describe how you feel right now. And do that. Write it down on your piece of paper. Think a little bit and write it down. And then line two is a shorter version of this, a second version of it. It's multiple choice. Write it down right now. And which one or more than one of those words most closely matches how you feel. Do you feel glad or sad or mad, afraid, angry? You could say happy. That would be okay. Which one of those is closest to how you feel right now? Circle that word or write down that word on your blank piece of paper. I feel glad or I feel sad. I feel mad. I feel afraid. And then in box three, add on more information. To how you feel right now. What other information would help you understand how you're feeling right now? What else is going into that sensation in your body? Right. I'm going to ask for help now. We're going to do this bonus activity in groups of approximately three. Get together and share how you feel. Padul is either going to make me the host or she's going to set up breakout rooms right now. Yes. So I will set up breakout rooms. We have about 59 people. So around. So we'll do about 19 rooms. Yeah. Around 18 rooms. Yeah. And we will assign automatically. So. And we'll be there for about two minutes, including whatever countdown timer there is to bring us back. So I think everyone should be back. Yeah. Okay. Welcome back. You just did a little bit of sharing how you feel with somebody. For. And okay, maybe maybe you went to a breakout room and you were alone. Maybe you got to reflect by yourself and how you feel. If you made it to a breakout room and there was somebody else there. And you got to share how you were feeling with somebody else. What was that like for you? How did it go? I want to hear from you. You could share and chat how that went for you or you could unmute and share with your voice. What was that like for you for people for whom that worked? You could share how you were feeling with somebody. They could share how you were feeling. They were feeling with you. You got a friend in chat saying that was okay. No inhibitions. Another friend saying that felt good. It was weirdly comforting. Yeah, you know, I don't know if it's something that you do every day in most work cultures. This is not normal. Oh, let's say most, most teams are average, right? It's kind of the definition of it's one of the definitions of average. On average teams, this is not what people do. On higher performing teams, this is something that people do. They might not do it exactly like this, but they, they share how they're feeling with each other. This is strongly supported by the research. It's good to know how the other person is doing it. Helps you position yourself accordingly. That's exactly the definition of emotional intelligence.  That helps you build up group emotional intelligence. And the research shows that this is one of the ingredients for having a great team.  How are we feeling as a whole group? We share in mentee, which one of those was your answer? So there's a lot of glad and there's a lot of happy in our group. There's a little bit of sad. There's a little bit of mad. There's a little bit of afraid. Looks like we're a group of humans. We as humans experienced all of these emotions, all four of these emotions. And I, with these results, this is either really good AI or we really are a group of humans. This is, this is very representative of a normal group of people. And these, this is normal. We, as a group, we all feel, even as individuals, we all feel all of these emotions. And it's totally okay. Here's another way to gauge how we're doing. Just, just ask the large group. How are we doing? We're going to move on to this box in the middle. It's called personal alignment. Here's a little bit of a close up. And we'll start at number one. I want blank. Fill in the blank, either on your canvas or on your blank piece of paper. Write a sentence that starts with I want and finish the sentence with the single most important thing in the world for you. Right? Maybe it's, maybe it's near the end of the day where you are. Maybe, maybe you want a cup of tea. Maybe you're getting hungry. Maybe you want something to eat. Yeah, for sure. But think big. What, what is the biggest, most important thing in the world for you? Big, big, big. Like I want world peace. Or I want everybody to live in great health. I want COVID to be solved. What is your biggest want? The most important thing in the world for you. Fill in the blank with whatever is your most important thing. I think go on to step two. If you answered step one, honestly, then you identified something that you want the most important thing in the world to you. It's a want. That means it's something that you don't have. Or it's something that you don't have all of. You don't have all of it yet. Why not? If it's the most important thing in the world to you, that's all you should be doing, right? Spending all your energy, all your time, all your resources pursuing that most important goal. So what's in your way? What's blocking you? Why, why can't you do that? What's preventing you from obtaining that most important thing? In the world. Answer that question for yourself right now. In 60 to 90 minutes that we have here. That's enough time to give you an introduction to this. You can definitely go back to this. Answer these questions more deeply later if you want to. We're going to continue. Number three here. I want black. This time it's multiple choice. Your choices are to the right-hand side. You could say I want self-awareness or I want integrity or courage or passion or peace or presence or self-care or fun or wisdom or health. Okay, now number one, you talked about what you want. That most important thing in the world. Number two, you identified what's in your way, what's blocking you. Number three, imagine that you had a superpower. That superpower was one of these 10 powers. Which one of those 10 powers would be your future superpower?  Those most important things that you want for yourself.  Fill in the blank with that word. Oh, the default answer is self-awareness. If you're not sure what you want, try self-awareness. I know everybody was laughing at that joke. If we could unmute, oh, you wouldn't have heard 50 people laughing. Okay, we're going to move on. Oh, which one did you pick? What is your future superpower that you're going to start building? You're going to start practicing this every day. You get to define what it means for yourself. Your definition might be different from mine or from anybody else's here. Which one of those is your future superpower that will help you get everything that you care about the most? I think we've got all of them there. A lot of people are looking for peace. A lot of people are looking for self-care. Self-awareness, passion. We're going to be, if we could keep this group together after this session, we would be the super peaceful, self-caring, passionate, healthy, self-aware, courageous, wise, fun people. If each one of us could hone that particular skill, we would be an amazing group together. We'd be an amazing team. We would be unstoppable as a team. We would get everything we want together. Number four here, my signal and response. When I blank, I want my friends and colleagues to blank, fill in these blanks.  You could just say, when I say, I'm practicing integrity. Or it might be some secret hand signal. Or it might be some sound you make. When I, I want my friends and colleagues that might be working on fun. When I, I want my friends and colleagues to do what? This could be as simple as when I say I'm working on integrity. I'm practicing integrity. I want my friends and colleagues to say, I support you. Or it could be when I, woohoo, I want my friends and colleagues to woohoo with me. What would it be for you? How would you tell your friends or colleagues or family members that you're, you're working on your future superpower right now? And what would you want them to do to show you that they recognize that you're doing that and that they support you in that pursuit? Fill in the blanks with your answers. And then finally, number five at the bottom. You could say you want more health or passion or courage or peace, but it's not going to happen unless you practice every day. Unless you build a new habit for yourself. And we build new habits by practicing at least once a day, usually many times a day. What will you do to build this new skill? How will you practice it? This could be as simple as you keep a journal and in your journal every day, you write down an example of having practiced it. You know, it's Friday. I packed my practiced piece. Here's how it's Saturday. I practiced peace. Here's how it's Sunday. I practiced peace. Here's how or could be something. Well, here's an example. My alignment was courage. My future superpower was courage at one point. And I defined courage. Courage meant the ability to face the things I was afraid of. Despite appearances, despite being here as a speaker in front of a large group of people, I'm actually shy. I'm timid. And so one of the things I'm afraid of is meeting new people. One of the things I was afraid of was meeting new people. My courage practice was to meet a new person every day. This was how I practiced it, box number five here. Filled in the blank. This is how I filled in the blank. How will I practice courage? I will meet a new person every day and I will get to know them just enough to know their first name. I'll get to know their name. I'll get to know their name. And then I would write it in my journal. Friday. I met Perul. Saturday. I met somebody named Priyanka. Sunday. I met somebody named Saraswathi. Monday. I met somebody named Amir. I would just write down the name of one person I met every day. It forced me to build this habit. It helped me build this habit of being able to meet new people. Of building more courage. How could you build the habit for your future superpower? What will you do every day to build that skill? Fill in the blank with that. And then actually do it starting today. Practice it today. Practice it tomorrow. Practice it the next day. Practice it every day for two months at least. And see what happens. Try it. Do the experiment. We're going to move on to the top right. It's called Investigating Myself. Here's a close-up. Okay. Your alignment. Your future superpower. You picked one of those 10 words. Peace, passion, health. What does that word mean to you? When you say peace, what does that mean for you? How would a friend be able to observe? We're going to make this empirical. How could a friend observe that you were practicing your future superpower? You're practicing your personal alignment. What else about your personal alignment? Anything else about it? Or what would you like to have happen? What's your goal? What's your outcome? What do you hope will happen? What's the outcome going to be? Hey, encourage you to take a screenshot of this right now, these four simple questions. Maybe you know some fancy key combination on your computer. Maybe you have a screen capture device. My screen capture device looks like a web browser with a camera on it. It's just a camera. Take a screenshot of this. Just remember these four questions. Pause for a moment and answer these questions for yourself. And then we'll try, since you took a screenshot and you remember what these questions are, as a bonus activity, in small breakout groups, talk to each other about your personal alignment. We'll do this really quickly. I'm going to ask Peru for help again. Watch. Peru, will you help me? Of course, I will. I'll just create rooms just a moment. Yeah, it'll be a different number of rooms because we have a different number of people now. Yeah. Maybe 10 rooms. Yes. And we'll do it for one minute plus the one minute countdown. When you get to your breakout room, share, ask your partner, what is their personal alignment? What is their future superpower? Ask them, what are you going to do to, or what does that word mean to you? How would I know you're practicing it? What would you like to have happen? Ask them anything you want to learn as much as you can about them as quickly as possible. We'll see you back here in two minutes. Welcome back. What did you notice? What happened? You're sharing the most important thing in the world with each other. What was that like for you? How did that go? Sometimes we... I had an awesome experience at Richard. It was an awesome experience to share. Yes. Great. And that was with a stranger maybe. I don't know. Imagine if you did this with people you care about. How powerful that would be. Imagine if you did this with your work team. If you could connect with each other so fast and so deeply.  How awesome would that be? So Richard, this is Rashmi here. One thing I observed that opening up with a stranger is a bit more easier than people whom you know. Yeah. So you can speak your mind with people who you know there's some kind of inhibition because you know that person personally you know how that person would react.  Yeah. That's because they judge you. You know that they judge you. Yeah. And strangers don't judge. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah. So interesting. What if we could start back at box number one positive bias and okay.  What if you just started off by agreeing that we're going to have a positive environment around us. No judgment. No judgment. That's probably the best. It's probably the place to start. It's such an interesting observation. Thanks for sharing. We do sometimes I call this big talk. Right. So I'm American. I'm like the champion of small talk. We can make small talk for days and never actually communicate anything important to each other. I'll like. Sure is nice weather. Looking out the window. Nice weather today. Yeah. Nice weather. Hey, how's the weather where you are? Yeah, it's nice weather here. Oh, it's raining here. It's bad weather here. It's nice weather here. Oh, where are you from? I'm from the United States. I'm from Bangalore. I'm from Boston. Okay. Small talk. Big talk. What's the most important thing in the world to you? Big talk. This is how we really connect really deeply. And maybe it is easy with strangers because there's no patterns already. We don't feel judged by strangers. And we have set up this environment for this session where we're all in this positive mindset. On the best of the best teams, we have this environment of positive mindset. So think about what you could do. Maybe you could say the word yes more and say the word and more and avoid saying no and avoid saying but just beginning things to get into this positive mindset together. Maybe we agree that we're not going to judge each other. And that would help. That first box is the foundation for everything else, positive bias. We're going to go down to perfecting my alignment. Now, this is a way you could use these three questions to ask for feedback on anything, to give feedback on anything. Right now, it's going to be to give yourself feedback on your personal alignment, that future superpower. Give your future superpower, that whole plan you made, even how to practice it. Give it a score from 1 to 10 where 10 would mean it couldn't be any better. You can't think of any way to make it better. 9 would be I could make it 10% better. 8 would be like I could make it 20% better. 5 would be like I could make it twice as good. Number 2 is, well, what is good about it? What did you come up with that you think is going to work well? Did you pick the right word? Did you think of a good way to practice it? Do you understand what it means for you? Will it really eliminate everything that's blocking you? What are the positive attributes? And number 3 is, what else would you do to improve it? Maybe change the word. Maybe get a better definition of it. Maybe actually come up with a signal and a response. Maybe share it with other people you care about who you see every day. What else would it be to make it perfectly right for you? And write down your answers. All of this, thank and write. This is to help reinforce the learning. When you bring in some physical motion, even just writing with a pen or pencil, it helps us remember more. And then finally, help. We call this big talk, the most important thing in the world for you.  You're going to try to build a new habit. This is going to be really hard. You are going to need help. How will you ask for help? What help do you think you're going to need? Who do you think will be able to help you? Who will you ask for help? Exactly what help will you ask for? Write down at least one, maybe more than one. Examples of concrete requests for help. Who will you ask and what will you ask for? To help you build this superpower. Okay, that is the entire canvas. It's an introduction to the canvas. I'm going to go back to it later and do it at your own pace. Do it more deeply. How about next steps? First, I want to know what's your key takeaway? What's the most important thing you learned here in this hour? Or the most interesting thing you heard? If your answer is something else, thank you. I would love to hear what your something else is. You could write it in chat or you could message me later. This is one of the ways I learn. This canvas could help each of us be a better one of each of us. Maybe you could do this with your team and it would help the team. Or maybe there's something else. Maybe there's all these canvases in the world.  Oh, also, by the way, there is science on high-performance teams. And we could use that science to help our team be better. Another view of that trail of how the science works. If you want a high-performance team, you definitely want psychological safety. Psych-safety is a subset of team-emotional intelligence. These are concepts, these are feelings, these are sensations. You have to be able to build some new habits, to have some plan for doing it. Core protocols are an example of one way to gain more team-emotional intelligence and psych-safety and to get more performance together for your work team. Or get more of what you want in any group of people you care about. Now, of course, you can have high-performance teams. It's where we started way back at the beginning. Most of us said our team is average and we want our team to be better than average. Well, okay, we just did this canvas as a solo activity. You did it yourself. And it's great for self-awareness and, well, we even shared a little bit with others. You could do this together with your whole team. You could spend 60 minutes together with your teammates. This could be an activity to do together. Starting at that top-left box, positive bias, setting up that environment for positivity that we're not going to judge each other, that it's going to be safe here. That we have freedom. We're together because we want to be. That we share how we're feeling with each other. That we share the most important personal goals with each other. That we talk to each other about it. We have a big talk kind of conversation. That we ask each other for help. That we support each other in each one of ours, in the individual pursuit of each one of us toward the best, the most important things that we want. When we do that, we will be a great team, a wicked, awesome team. Try this yourself. Try this with other people you care about. It will improve the group that you're with. All together, you could find us at teamtransformationcanvas.com or you could just get a blank piece of paper and do it together that way, like we just did. If you want help, ask me for help anytime. If you want to know more about these things, call to the Corp Protocols. Visit that website, thecorprotocols.org. Other ways to get help. We run a lot of classes. We do a lot of talks like this. We have a self-paced course coming soon. We're developing it right now. We're doing a session on technical agility next week at the Excellence in Agile Conference, which will be in your time zone if you're in India. It's based in Singapore. Every Wednesday, I do a free office hour. You're invited to join me every Wednesday. The next one will be next week. You can come and ask a question or just we can have a short conversation. Or maybe we could just be friends. It would be fun. Every Thursday, the first Thursday of every month, we run an event called the Agile Dojo where we learn and practice things to help us be better Agile teams and better facilitators of Agile teams. We're doing a class on this in February, a live online class in association with my friends at Agile for Humanity. You're invited to join us at any of these events. I have a request for help. Will you help me? None of us can do anything amazing solo. We definitely need help. I want your help. Will you help me? This is the help I'm asking for. Will you give me feedback on what we just did? After this feedback, we'll have time for questions and answers and conversation. The feedback is just like you saw in the canvas. Give this session a score from 1 to 10 based on how much better you think you could make it. That's the first question. The second question is, what was good about it? Help me understand what was good about this so I could do more of it. The third question is, what else would it take to be perfect? What could I change? What would make this perfect? Will you give me that help? I'll pause for a moment so you can. For anybody who hasn't finished yet, you can continue doing it. We're at the end of what I was going to share. Thanks for sticking with me to the end. Thanks for trying out these solo activities. Thanks for participating in these small group activities. You have all my contact info here. You can ask me a question. You can ask me for help anytime you want. And we have time for questions and answers right now. If you have a question or a comment, you could unmute and you could ask with your voice or you could ask in chat. And people have been asking some questions in chat. I'm going to scroll through and try to answer some of these. Hey Richard, Harry here. So you had mentioned one of the things that is freedom and autonomy. And you mentioned like I can opt out of any activity or I can exit from any situation. What really happens if this is something like where we have customer commitments, teams having a lot of pressure and all those things. How do it will be taken? How it will be taken if at all? This is probably a sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. It's a great question, Harry. Okay, so there's a lot going on with the best of the best teams. Some of the things we touched on here, like we can opt out, we can opt in. Everything we're doing is because we choose to. On the best of the best teams, when we have a commitment to deliver something to a customer, we made that commitment together. We opted in to that commitment. We chose that commitment for ourselves. Versus, you might experience this on other teams, somebody else made the commitment and told us we had to do it. Somebody else signed a contract or something made a promise to a customer and now they're making us do it. On the best of the best teams, we make that commitment for ourselves. On average teams, maybe somebody else makes that commitment and we're stuck with it. If you can find a way to go more toward we make that commitment together, your team will be better. Because the people on the team, having made that commitment, they're going to honor it. Okay, that's a good answer. Thanks, Richard. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Richard, Amol here. When we were talking about the 10 superpowers, you said self-awareness is one of the defaults. What was the thought process behind that? Does it mean that self-awareness can lead to all the nine of them gradually? Or does it mean the person needs more help so that they can identify at least one of the superpowers? What is the thought process? Self-awareness means you're aware of everything about yourself. If you don't know what you want, if you're not sure what you want, that kind of means you're lacking in self-awareness. If you're not sure what you want, if you don't know everything about yourself, then you don't have enough self-awareness. So self-awareness would be something that you might pursue. That's the easy thinking on that. That's basically the first step. So self-awareness is the first step, which basically leads to one of the other nine. You're hinting at here. It could lead to the other nine. You can't know that you want courage or peace unless you have this self-awareness. You can't have self-awareness without the courage to give yourself enough time and be honest about it or to put yourself in a peaceful environment. Having done that would be an indication of wisdom. It turns out that you have a really good clue about this. They are all the same thing. You can't have any one of them without having all the others. However, to be able to build these skills, we can really only focus on one thing at a time, on building one new skill at a time. That's the one that is your biggest gap right now and work on that one. Okay, great. Sure, Richard. Thanks. It was a great session. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me today. It was really wonderful having you all here. Thanks for all the participation. I hope you got something valuable from this. I hope you got something from this that you could take with you, maybe to work on Monday or maybe just to the people you care about the most, whoever those people are. And I wish you well. Thanks. Thank you, Richard. It was, there's something that I'm definitely going to take to my teams. And I'm sure a lot of people in the audience are also saying that, that they are also going to take it to their teams. So thank you for this session and a lot of information we have got, a lot of takeaways, your website and how we can be connected with you. So thank you so much for that.


With Linux, most of the commands we run, sometimes they take an input, like an option or a file, and produce some output. Let's look at the concepts of the input and output of programs. And I've got a presentation. It's in the ITS332 directory on your computer. It's called, what is it called? Linux standard interaction. Standard input, output, and error. These are concepts which become quite important when we want to build complex commands on the terminal. We think we run a command. The input to that command is referred to as standard input. STDIN is the short name, the standard input. So often we run a command and it takes some input. We haven't seen many today, but we can use an input to determine what that command will do. The output is what's printed on the screen. You run the command of LS and it shows a set of lines on the screen. That's the output that's referred to as standard output. If you run a command and there are errors, then that's distinguished from the normal output. And it's called standard error. I'll show you an example. LS, the standard output, is these lines of text. That's the standard output. ABCF, I tried to run a command that didn't exist. My terminal shows me ABCF command not found. This is an error message. Although it's shown on the screen, it's referred to as standard error. So when you run commands, the normal output is standard output. Error messages are distinguished and sent to what's called standard error. So we have input to commands, output, normal output and error output. Simple. And the input is typed on the terminal, and the standard output and by default standard error are displayed in the terminal. Normally when we type command the input, we type on the terminal. It's what we type in response to the command and the outputs displayed on the terminal. Now, we can change that. We can redirect the output to a file. So normally the output, the standard output displayed on the terminal, what we can do is send the output to a file and save it in a file. This is called redirection. And to redirect to a file, we use the greater than sign. Let's try it. LS, normally the output of LS is shown on the screen. We redirect using the greater than sign and then a file name. You can choose whatever file name you like. Press Enter and see what's shown on the screen. Nothing. So the output of the command is no longer shown on the terminal. Where is it? It's in the file out.txt. Have a look. So the file now contains what normally would have been printed on the screen. So we redirect the output of the command from the terminal instead from the terminal we send it to a file. Very useful if you want to look at that output later. So that's redirecting the standard output to a file. Use the greater than sign. You can redirect both the output and error messages to a file using this special two characters of ampersand greater than. So note the difference here. The greater than sign shows only the normal output and saves that in a file. Any error messages are still displayed on the screen. I'm not sure if I can find an example. Let's try it. What about our find? I'll just scroll through. Before we searched in our file system for PDF files, let's instead of display the output on the screen let's display it into my file called... I don't care what the name is. So run this find command and every file we find, save it in this file x.txt. What happens? It runs, but the error messages, these permission denied messages are shown on the screen. So the normal output is saved to a file, but the error messages are still shown on the terminal. The tilde character that I typed, the squiggly line, means my directory, my home directory. So the command I executed was saying, I think it wasn't necessary there, but what I executed was find, save the output, the standard output in my home directory, a file called x.txt. If you look in x.txt, using less, you should see the files which were the PDFs, the whole list of PDFs. So note there's a difference between standard output, the normal results, and error results, standard error. If you want to redirect the errors to the file as well, add the ampersand character. I hope it works. Yes. So now if you look in x.txt, you will see the files found plus those error messages. The error messages are caused because I don't have permissions to read some directories. So redirection, we can redirect different things. There are many different ways to do it. Redirect the standard output to a file. Redirect both the standard output and the error messages to a file. We can redirect our files to standard input. I will not show an example now. We'll see one maybe this afternoon. That is, if a command takes input, instead of typing that input, you can take the input from a file. So it's as if you've already typed it into a file, run that command using what you typed into the file as input to that command. So read from the file the input. We'll see one this afternoon of that. Next thing. So this is redirection. Change where the input and output comes from and goes to. Piping. Normally when we run a command, the output is text. Well what we can do is run a command, it produces output, and take that output and send it into another command. And that second command executes using the output of the first command as input. It's called a pipe. And the character we use is the vertical bar. Take the first command, execute it, the output is then used as input to the second command. And the output of the second command is then, in this case, shown on the screen. Let's see an example or a few examples of a pipe. When we do LS, I see the list of files. LS minus L shows you the details. I can pipe the output of the LS, in this case the LS minus L with all the details, and filter it and send it to a new command. And I'll use grep to search for a particular word. So my aim, list all the files, and of that list, print just the lines which contain the word tears. And you see the two lines from the LS which contain the word tears. Now we could have done the same thing just using LS in this case. Just an example of take the output of the first command and then pipe it in to the input of the second command. And then you can have actually multiple commands. And using pipes and redirection is very powerful to build up complex commands based upon very simple ones. As an example, from our introduction to the course, or the poster for the course, this is a command, don't try and run it. Sorry, I've got the slideshow on. This is one long command actually. The slash in the end just means it goes wraps around a line. You'll see this, or actually multiple commands, you'll see these vertical bars in here.  You don't have to understand all of it, but run this tail command here and take the output of that and pipe it into this next command TR. And there was a redirection there. A redirection from A redirected into F. So more so this afternoon we'll start to combine some commands using pipes. Let's give some more real examples. Remember your aim today is to understand this command. Understand why did it print those four or five lines on the screen. Now if you run the command today, it may not print the exact same lines, but it'll be close. Let's go back to our terminal for the last few examples. What else can we do? Let's say there are other ways to do it, but my LS minus L showed me all files in detailed long format. GREP tiers shows me those lines which contain the word tiers. And we see all these strings, this one line. Note that each line is space separated. These characters are space one, space student, space student and so on. And it's the same format. Let's say I just want to get the file size. Which field is it if it's space separator? The first field, the second field. We'll see how we can do that. Think of a space-separate field. The first field, the second, the third, fourth. The file size is the fifth field in that output. Let's pipe it into a program called cut, which can cut an input when the delimiter between fields is a space. Minus D means the delimiter between fields. And we want the fifth field. Sorry, it's wrapped around minus F space five. Cut cuts text according to the spec you give it. And the spec I'm giving it is to say the fields are delimited by space. I'll run it and then show it again if people cannot see. And the fifth field. It got one of them. Let's try again. And it prints this big 38, 380 megabytes. What about the second line? It doesn't print anything. Why? Why did it not work? Let's get, say, the first field. Instead of field five, field one. For each line, it prints field one if the fields are separated by a space. The first to the third field. One to three. The first three fields. The first to the fifth field. Something didn't go as I hoped. What went wrong? What went wrong is that there are in fact two spaces here. Okay, so cut separates fields by spaces. There's a single space here, meaning this is the fourth field. This is the fifth field. Whereas student on this line is the fourth field. There's a space. The fifth field is non-existent. There is no value. The sixth field is 83, so on. So cut is only separated by a single space in this case. So if our input has multiple spaces, it doesn't work very well. We can cut, like I said at the top, we can even cut specific characters and pipe that into cut. Cut the first field from our first output and then pipe that into another cut that cuts characters two to four. So the first field was these ten characters. The next cut grabs just characters two, three and four, which is rw-rw-dash. So cut is just a way to split up strings based upon field delimiters, based upon characters and a few other things. We'll make use of it in some further examples later. What else? Redirection. So this is pipes. Of course, we could redirect all that to a file. Almost done. Some other shortcuts. I think everyone should have two terminals open, at least two terminals. One, you see what I type and one is what you type. Of course, you can copy and paste. If you're lazy, you don't want to type something. Copy and paste from one terminal to another. In most Linux systems, you can do a quick copy and paste by select. Use your mouse. Select. Don't right-click. Select. So you're not about to see it with me, but I can select something. If you want to select a word, you can double-click. And now just move and don't right-click. Middle-click. Pastes. Paste what was selected. So just select as you would select anything with your left mouse button. Once you've selected what you want to copy, it's already copied. And then to paste it, middle-click. On your mouse, the middle scroll button. Click that. That paste. What if you don't have a middle-click? We were supposed to hold this lab in the Mac room and we were going to use VirtualBox, but they don't have a middle-click. So you get a different mouse. But most mouses, you can emulate a middle-click with two buttons. So my laptop, for example, has two buttons only. There's no middle button. Pressing both at the same time emulates a middle-click. And it's usually the case on normal mouses. Not on Mac mouses. So middle-click, if there's no middle button, double-click left and right at the same time. So let's just finish with a few more shortcuts. Can I remember some? You have a command. You want to change something at the start. Press Ctrl-A. Moves your cursor to the start of the line. Ctrl-E to the end. Ctrl-A to the start of the line. Ctrl-E to the end. If you need to edit a long line, they are quite useful.  Ctrl-Y pastes. I'll do it again. Look where my cursor is. It's at the start of the cut. Ctrl-K deletes it. It actually cuts it. Ctrl-Y yanks or pastes that. So we can do some basic things for copy and paste, cut and paste, either using the keyboard, or just use your mouse. The mouse select and middle click is very powerful, very quick to copy and paste. Any commands that we've missed that we may need this afternoon. Any questions as we head into the lunch break? The last five or 10 minutes, so I think maybe at 12 o'clock we'll go have lunch. So the next 10 minutes, just try some of the things. We'll come around and answer any questions. This afternoon, as we know the basics from this morning, we'll just do some other things like convert some videos, manipulate some PDFs, and create some scripts where we put a set of commands into a file and execute them all at once. Which can be much more powerful than just running them individually. So I'll stop talking now. So the last 10 minutes, just try some different things. We'll come around, ask some questions, and then we'll have a break.


I do believe it's a problem because that program originally started as telecommunications service and to subsidize rural America to make sure in high cost areas that we all had connectivity. So it's related to the definition of telecommunications service. The FCC has now tried to use its powers under 706 to extend broadband and offer incentives for investment in broadband in rural America. It is used Section 254 in conjunction with 706. Way too much in the weeds, Senator, but the main point is that those are powers that in the draft as it currently exists could be eviscerated. And so while that it would still be there for telephone service for extending broadband, it's a big question mark.