In today's episode we are going to be thinking about how to communicate with neurodiverse children or indeed adults like myself without making their brains melt. Let's get started. Okay we should start by saying that I have broken tip number one rule number one guidance number one whatever you want to call it by suggesting in the intro that we're going to not make neurodiverse people's brains melt. To clarify for any neurodiverse friends our brains don't actually melt but what I'm talking about here is that idea of kind of feeling really overwhelmed by the communications around us feeling unable to process them as quickly as they're coming trying to figure out what on earth is going on and feeling like we're still on step one whenever one else has worked to about step 83 and we're still thinking the brains actually melt then or is that an idiom don't know. So these communication tips are for supporting people who again like me might appear to really know what's going on maybe they're the master of masking maybe they're good at the nod and the smile and they found strategies for making it all kind of work that doesn't mean they're not inwardly really struggling to keep up and also these acknowledge the fact that our autistic our ADHD population community friends family students are not stupid we've just got a heck of a lot going on in our brains so one thing I just want you to bear in mind when communicating with your neurodiverse children friends family students colleagues is that we're doing a lot processing all the time so the kind of the basic tenet of good communication with neurodiverse people is keep it simple basically treat us like we're a little bit stupid and that does kind of work it gets the appropriate outcome but it's the wrong mindset from your point of view what you actually need to remember is that we live in really complicated worlds where you maybe can just focus on the main task in hand we meanwhile are distracted by a faint smell of food cooking three rooms away or the fact that there's a clock ticking that sounds like a jack hammer to us or the fact that the temperature in the room is just ever so slightly changed or the fact that amily over there is writing and her pencil is really really scratchy on the piece of paper or the fact that you just said the word apples and it triggered a whole load of really deep sensory memories for us about that time that we picked apples in our grandmas garden and then we picked one and then there was a worm and did you know that worms it we just have a lot going on in our heads so even quite simple instructions and communications can trigger lots of stuff that we're having to process and think adds to all that the fact that every time we're having any kind of conversation and interaction we're generally trying to second guess how to make that work because we don't understand the rules completely in sort of intuitively as other people might do so we're thinking am I holding my body right am I making appropriate eye contact did I say a totally socially inappropriate thing was that a joke am I meant to laugh all that's going on as well says loads going on okay so the context is we're not stupid there's a whole tonne going on in our head there are things you can do to help us here's what you can do I'm going to share six ideas they're super simple and I will also make a little kind of print off a ball downloadable summary of these six should you want it something pretty you know I love to make something pretty so number one use concrete language so I said in my intro I broke rule number one by saying that we're going to avoid brain melt okay we're going to avoid brain melt by using concrete language we are going to say what we actually mean we're not going to use any kind of language that has any possibility of being misinterpreted if at all possible so taking an example I'm doing some work at the moment around death and dying we would not talk about someone passing away going to sleep being lost kicking the bucket any of these things we would instead say and I think this is really good practice with every child not just those with special needs we would say this person is dead this person is dying this is what our neurodiverse children need to hear in order to actually understand what you've said now the tricky thing with this is that in everyday life there's a whole tonne of stuff that we say that we don't mean and you will if you become more aware of it notice that you do these things all the time and some of them it's okay we learn them over time but for you know to be as helpful as you possibly can try to avoid using anything that's not literal where you can it makes life just so much easier for us if you just say what you mean sounds simple right okay so that's number one concrete language say what you mean number two is to keep things short and simple if you are going to issue me with some instructions perhaps you're my teacher and we are going to be making something and you're going to tell me how to make that thing I need to know in the simplest possible way broken down into very short simple steps exactly what I need to do I need to know nothing more than that because every additional word or superfluous instruction or embellishment that you give me gives me more stuff that I've got to analyze interpret work through make sense of so we break it right down to the very basics what's the absolute minimum that you need to tell me think about it like you are going to do a presentation and you'd think about what you would put on your PowerPoint slides so everybody knows though not everybody does it everybody knows that a great PowerPoint slide has got very few words on it but they're really clear it's really obvious what it is that they are saying they'll be short succinct to the point they say exactly what needs to be said but they don't say anything more that's exactly what we're looking for when you're giving instructions or explaining something to a neuro diverse child to keep it short and keep it simple and chunk it down into steps so short simple chunks so far so good so we're keeping it concrete we're saying what we mean we're keeping it in short simple little chunks number three is talk and then stop well that was awkward wasn't it it feels really awkward when it goes silent and the thing is that for you that that silence feels like it needs to be filled but for the child it's unlikely to be silent I say the child these tips are just as applicable when working with adults talking to adults that silence will be filled by our heads by the constant questioning and wondering and general processing that's going on in our heads so our heads are noisy all the time we're not going to be worried about that silence other than that you providing that silence you stopping after you speak will give us some sort of opportunity to catch up to what you were saying and if you speak and then you stop count to ten slowly if you speak and then you stop and I've got some chance of understanding point number one before you get to point number two otherwise and this happens all the time what happens is you've made point number one and I'm there I really want to get this right I'm focusing on it I'm trying to learn from you and I've got it and you're on point four and I've missed two and three in the meantime and it's not because you've explained them badly that you've done anything especially wrong it's just it takes me a little bit longer and so I just need a moment so speak and then stop try to resist the urge to jump in and fill that gap the world does not need to be continuously filled with our voices she says recording a podcast where she speaks all the time I am aware of the irony klaxon that should be going off here but speak and then stop count to ten slowly would be my tip number four is it's okay to repeat what you say so you might need to you might need to tell us more than once the same instruction in order for us to actually hear what you've said to clarify it to really understand it so it's okay to repeat things it's okay to repeat things many times we won't find that offensive generally although you know once you've met one neurodiverse person you've met one neurodiverse person do check that you're not annoying or offending the person that you're working with but generally speaking repetition is okay we may from the first time you said it I've been just so focused on a smell in the room that we didn't even really hear it the first time or you know it's okay to repeat stuff it might drive you a little bit mad and it might make you feel like you're treating us like we're stupid which might seem disrespectful but sometimes just repeating something is the most useful thing you can do one of the reasons why I like creating online content that can be kind of captured and recording is because I learn by watching and rewatching and rewatching stuff like I read intensely all the time but I read and reread and reread it takes me just a few more attempts at stuff to kind of process and get it than it does for other people and that's a mixture of autism and dyslexia at play there and you know many of your neurodiverse children adults friends whoever will have complex profiles where all this stuff interacts I have a feeling that like in 10 20 30 years we'll look back at this time and go oh how quaint they didn't understand how all the neurodiversities interacted because so many of us have a whole bunch of them and there's got to be reasons why and we will understand that interplay a lot better one day but the thing for you to know right now is that you may be working with someone supporting someone who's got a whole bunch of different stuff going on and this need to support with their processing may be multifaceted so we are going to repeat as we need to it's okay we don't mind and check for understanding so one of the temptations when you're communicating with someone who doesn't seem to be quite getting it or who you worry about whether they're going to get it is to say something to give an instruction or an explanation and then right away if they don't reply or they didn't seem to have got it to explain that in a different way and for some people that's a really helpful thing for many of us who are neurodiverse it's a really unhelpful thing because now not only am I trying to process what you said the first time I'm now also trying to process what you said the second time and if those things are a bit different I'm you know that doubles the workload for me so I'd much rather you repeat exactly what you said the first time you might repeat it more slowly you might give a little bit more space you might say does that make sense to you would you like me to explain it in a different way and if we say actually yeah I didn't really get that can you explain it in a different way or can you repeat it then by all means please do so one thing I would say here when we're checking for understanding we need to work really hard and this is over time not an instant thing but we need to work really hard to create an environment where it's okay for the person that you're talking to or teaching to say yeah I didn't understand that actually can you help me because we need to be able to ask you to repeat to ask you to rephrase to ask you to clarify or what have you and that can feel difficult if you're in a relationship where there's a clear hierarchy maybe you're the teacher or teaching assistant and I'm the student I might feel that I can't question you I might feel that it's not okay to say what you said wasn't good enough basically I didn't didn't get it I don't understand and so I might do the thing that we all do every day and mask and nod and smile and pretend it's all right and it might only become apparent to you that I've not actually understood when I fail to do the thing that you've asked me or my understanding does not come through in the next bit of the learning or I seem to be struggling as the conversation goes on so trying to create an environment where you welcome that feedback from the person that you're talking to where you say you know I I hope that I've explained that right but I don't always so if you need me to repeat it or if you'd like me to clarify it just let me know just being open to it and then also role modelling that so sometimes when they're talking to you saying oh I really want to actually like properly understand what you're telling me but I didn't quite get that last bit would you mind telling me again or can you rephrase it a little bit or can you explain a bit more about x show them the behaviour that you would like to see from them in the other direction role model it so it's okay to repeat it's okay to check for understanding invite them to let you know if they've misunderstood and if you kind of agree between you then you might rephrase things but don't automatically do that because it gives us more to process what was still working on thing one okay so we've had our concrete language we're saying what we mean we've kept it short and simple we've spoken then we've stopped we've repeated what we are saying many times if we need to and we've checked for understanding number five is to share our communications in multiple formats so what can be superbly helpful for our neurodiverse learners is not just to have verbal instructions but to have those verbal instructions accompanied by an oh this makes me smile because it makes life so much easier some written or visual instructions a list of what we need to do that we can see and hold will make life so so much easier for us i totally get that it's extra work i do totally get that and it does make life just a little bit harder what i would say is that you're not doing this just for one or two kids that might be in your class for example it's actually something that will likely help many many children none of these ideas do any harm for anyone for what it's worth but you might find that quite a lot of kids would benefit from this kind of thing or even just noting in very very short sentences on the board what you're saying if you're a teacher just sort of preventing us from having to only hold it in our head is really helpful and it just gives us the space and the time just to process them in our own ways and we might also welcome the opportunity to have it as a handout so we can kind of write on it draw on it annotate it our own way as well to help us to make sense of it but having multiple formats of the same thing will increase our likelihood of being able to grasp what it is that's being asked of us or being explained to us if you can and this sounds like it's just one for teachers and teaching assistants but it's actually something that can be really useful for those of you who are listening and wondering about how to support your child at home as well if there are kind of instructions or explanations that need to made with your child again think about whether you can show them as well so you might with small children you can use things like role play with toys to demonstrate things as well as just speaking them again you can write things down or create little handouts for them some of you will be using lots of visual type aids which can really help with this as well we have a whiteboard at home and we'll often write on there kind of what's happening and what's expected so rather than just telling our children and expecting them to remember and to hold that we have it written down so everybody can see what the expectation is and it's really really clear but finding different ways multiple formats of sharing the same thing will make it much more likely that you will be understood and that the children or indeed adults that you're supporting will respond and develop in the way that you're hoping the final idea that I want to share number six is give me time so as the neurodiverse person that you are caring for working with teaching talking to I just need a little bit more time than my neurotypical peers so don't move too quickly on it just might take me time and do you know what if you give me time I might just be brilliant I might do an amazing job but you might need to temp your expectations a little bit on how much I can get done for many neurodiverse people we do better when you expect fewer better things of us so allowing us to go deep to really grab on to that understanding once we have it and to really run with it get into the flow and really go with it rather than keep on keep on keep on moving us on it's one of the reasons why school I think is such a challenging place where we're always moving from one thing to the next to the next to the next when you think about some of the processing challenges that we've touched on in this episode and you think about what that looks like when you're going from half an hour of math to an hour of English to half an hour of science to break where we've got all those questions of what's going on in the world too to then going into I don't know reading session and then we've got life skills and then we've got an on and on and on I mean it's just moving from thing to thing to thing to thing and probably I'm still thinking about what happened in the very first lesson of maths maybe there was a social interaction that happened and I'm still dwelling on whether I got that right whether I came across as a weirdo whether I made appropriate gestures and eye contact and everything else is kind of passing me by and I'm gradually getting to a point of overwhelm to give me space give me time please don't kind of pressure and push me to hurry up but that is the worst thing when you feel that pressure that you've got to get through this more quickly your brain goes into that kind of trauma response fight flight freeze faint and it tends to be then that our speaking thinking brain kind of shuts down all the processing of what you've said to us has kind of gone on the back burner because we're ready to run or we're going into shutdown or something so hurrying us tends to trigger that kind of anxious trauma type response and it's totally totally counterproductive I'd have to say as a mother of amazing neurodiverse children when you have things that need to be understood need to be done need to be followed places to be it's very tempting in all of our day to day interactions just to try and hurry them up it can be enough to make you feel quite on edge yourself but experience tells me that the best way is to be calm to be consistent to be caring and to give them space and generally they will do these things more quickly than with repeated reminding and hurrying and hurrying much as the repeated reminding and hurrying and hurrying comes very very naturally so there we go six ideas to support your neurodiverse children adults people in your life when communicating with them so their brains don't melt and remembering that that breaks rule number one so we're going to use concrete language we are going to say what we mean we are going to keep it short and simple we're just going to say what we actually need to and no more and we're going to break it down into little chunks we're going to talk and then we're going to stop and create some space we're going to repeat what we've said if we feel that that's necessary and we're going to check for understanding only rephrasing what we've said if invited to do so by the child we're going to share what we say in multiple formats so the child has different opportunities to process things in different ways we might use visual or written communications as well as verbal communications for example and finally we are going to just alter our expectations a little bit of what our neurodiverse person can get done in a given timeframe and we're going to give them a gift of time expecting them if possible to do fewer things better rather than many many many things hopefully there are some ideas in here that you can pick up and run with when supporting the neurodiverse people in your life or maybe there are some ideas that as a neurodiverse person you can share with others to help them to help you i originally started putting these ideas together to support support staff with the children in their classrooms but as i wrote it i realized these are things that bosses need to hear when working with their autistic employees for example as well or that friends need to hear when out with their ADHDF friend there are so many of us that can benefit from communicating in this way i believe good luck with it as ever contact me on the socials at pookieh to let me know your ideas what would you add how did you use it and so on and i look forward to seeing you hearing you talking at you again next time over and out


Welcome everyone! This session is about rethinking newsletters with CESAW. We are honored that you are here learning a little bit more and getting inspired to try something new in your own classroom. I'm Angela and I taught kindergarten for 15 years. I lead the community team now at CESAW because I really am passionate about supporting all of you that are getting started and in our teacher community. You can find me on Twitter so say hi. I'm Mrs. Gagkey. I would love to see... I'm especially interested to see what you do maybe with newsletters after you tune in here. So keep me posted on your progress and if you're watching via recording welcome as well. I am going to be giving you a code that you can write down during this session to get a certificate for viewing if you are watching the recording. So wow! Right? So this is my story of what newsletters look like and I love that the date is still on this. So this is September 16th 2013 right? So that was the year before I started getting involved with CESAW and I was really... it's really important to me as a teacher to make sure my families are involved and I think one way to really involve them is tell them about what is happening in your classroom and I would spend at least an hour a week typing up a really detailed newsletter of what happened, you know, what we were exploring, what the students were involved in and all of that. So you might be doing a similar thing right now. And what I found were a couple things. Number one, I felt like oh my gosh this is a lot of work. I'm really really working hard to communicate with my families and I'm not sure who's reading it and I'm not sure if they even want to read this entire document right? So I started creating and sending newsletters via CESAW because my families were connected. They were already seeing posts from their students and they really enjoyed that because they were hearing from their student. But I love from the teacher side that I could also see who has seen my news. So on the bottom under each post you can see who has viewed it, who has seen it, which is huge. You can't do that with an email right? So that was one just little mini bonus for me. But more importantly, I was saving an hour every single week by creating and sending and, you know, sharing my newsletters in CESAW. So I want to just give some options. There's actually so many options from the very first time that I've actually shared this idea a few years ago. CESAW has so many more creative tools, but we're going to start with kind of three basic ways that you could rethink your newsletter. So number one, really, really quick and easy way is just take a picture. Tap the mic and start talking. Add your audio. So I did that frequently. So sometimes I might just take one picture of something that was going on our classroom and I would talk and I would just talk for maybe a minute, maybe 90 seconds and I would explain and share about our week, post it to CESAW and we were good to go really quick and easy. Second option, maybe you want to use the note feature. So instead of typing it up in a different Word document or Google Doc, maybe you're just going to use the note feature in CESAW with a couple bullet points of important info and be good with that. Third option, maybe you want to create a multi-page post and share photos and voice and kind of go through all sorts of things that are happening in your classroom all within CESAW. Now I will show you before multi-page was an option in CESAW. I actually use the app ShadowPuppet, which you'll see actually an example of that as well. So how did I do this? So every Friday, when my kids went to specialist, so if they were in music or gym or art or whatever, I would come back to the room and I would take two minutes and I literally, and this is, you know, this is a real picture of my notebook and I would sit down, I'd have my plan book next to me and I would take about two minutes and just sketch a list of topics that I wanted to discuss. What were we doing in various subjects? What reminders did I have? What skills did I really want to highlight? So I just use this as my talking points because again, most of the time I did audio visual newsletters. So I completely let go of a really, you know, really dense typed full page. I just went with audio visual newsletters in most instances. So this allowed me to quickly prep again, took two minutes, sketch some things out, and that's how I planned. Then what I did is I chose one way that I was going to share it. So I guess one of the things I didn't show you, but it's kind of related to the first example is, like I said, you could take a photo of something in your classroom, maybe it's an anchor chart that you're working on or something, and just use that to start your conversation and go through your newsletter and talk. Or you could do this. This is kind of a fun website. It's called Word Clouds. And you could just use this as kind of a graphic that you can easily create. So I'm actually going to go there right now and show you this. So it's just wordclouds.com. I can go into this word wizard, and I can just type text. So I could say, writing, math, if I want math to be big, maybe I say patterns, what else we do? We explore ants and habitats. Okay, I'm going to say, I don't know what else we did. We did reload. Maybe I'm going to share the title of the book. I don't know whatever your list is, right? I'm just typing them in quick. I'm going to hit apply. And then it is creating this word cloud for me. I can change the colors. I can change to a different theme. I can change the shape of it. I don't know. I can do all sorts of things. Then I can go over here to file. And I can save it as a PNG or a JPEG. And I'm just going to call this newsletter. Okay, so there we go. I'm saving it. It's downloading for me. So if I was in my CSA class, and I was getting ready to get my newsletter ready, and I wanted to use that, I could just go to, I would probably choose to send an announcement because I'm sending me a newsletter. It's communication from me to my families. So I would say send to all family members and say, here's the news for the week. And I could add an attachment right here. In my attachment, I'm going to go ahead and upload this image that I just created. Again, yours would probably be a little bit, you know, fancier or cuter than this one. And then I can just go ahead and tap the mic and I can start recording. So I could say, hey, third grade families, we had a fantastic week this week. In math, we were really focusing on patterns and creating patterns with, you know, three different colors. So basic ABC patterns. We also started exploring ants and their habitat. So make sure to ask your student this guiding question. Okay, so you can go on right, I'm going to click done. And then I'm going to check done. I could rerecord if I want, right? I could do that. But I'm just going to tap the green check. And it's added as an attachment, I can send that now. And again, this would show up for my families right here, they would see that in their announcements and messages. So again, that's just one option. Again, you don't have to go to the other website and do that. But again, you saw how fast that was for me. You could also just start with a photo and add your voice. What I also want to talk about option two, I said, you could just type a note. So what I love is if you're just using a note and sending that as your newsletter, amazing, because guess what? When you do that in Seasaw, any text that you type in a note, in a comment, in a, you know, message will be can be translated automatically for families. So here I am, I'm sending this, I'm just typing it in English. When the family gets it on their side in the family app, if it if the device is set to any, you know, over 55 languages we translate to, they would see a C translation option. So in this scenario, this family had their device set to Somali. So they, it would show up in their language by just tapping C translation, which is huge. Okay, so that is an amazing feature that really comes in handy and quite honestly can redefine and really rethink your newsletters and how you might approach them. Okay, example, I guess this is technically example three, my font is getting a little wonky here, but this is an example of a newsletter that I created in Shadow Puppet, which is a separate app. But let's just pretend you don't even need that anymore, because you can do it all in Seasaw with the new multi page feature. So I'm going to give you an example, I'm going to play this so you can kind of hear whoopsy whoopsy this example of what this sounds like. Let's take a listen. Good afternoon, can you hear in families? It's March 18, 2016. And this week, we wrapped up a nonfiction writing unit, we read the story vegetables, and then our writing this week, continue to look at how we can write nonfiction texts. So we wrote actually about grapes and raised just the sight word makes. So again, you can see me kind of filtering through just various pictures that I've taken throughout the week, and talking through them and kind of giving some highlights to families. I apparently went on for three minutes in this one, but that's okay. Usually yours will be much shorter. But as I mentioned, all of this can take place right in Seasaw now, you don't even need another app because you can choose post student. Again, I would send an announcement because I'm talking directly to families, right? So instead of posting to the journal, I would send an announcement, I could say news for the week. And then the key right here is adding this attachment. So I could upload photos. Let's see, I've got all sorts of things on my computer today. Let's just, I don't know, let's add some, let's add some that we're going to talk about here. Sure, this, this, this probably doesn't look like your classroom, but you're going to get an idea here. Alright, so say you've had three photos from the week, and I'm going to top the green check, I'm going to add those. And then with our new multi page feature, I can go right here on each page and start talking and explaining I could record and talk at the same time as well. Hey, it was a fantastic week in fourth grade this week, we really focused on creating community, please ask your child about x, y, and z. I'm going to pause for that moment. I'm going to click done on this page and I'm going to go to the next page. And again, what I was doing before in shadow puppet, I can do now in Seasaw with multi page. So again, this can be one newsletter that you send to families, right inside Seasaw, which is awesome. And again, I really want to share the length of time this will save you. I mean, some of you might be think that's so complicated, keep it really simple. So what I loved about just doing an audio visual newsletter actually, was that the amount of time it took for me to type that up and explain and do all of that I can do that in about 90 seconds when I'm just talking through it. And I would also say better yet, how can your students take over the news or have ownership in that process as well. So of course, even them just posting to Seasaw they're sharing their news that way. But you might consider doing something, record a video newscast in Seasaw. I had students, my even my young kindergartners, we actually started doing that in the spring where we would have two students, they would maybe have write a list about what happened during the week and they would kind of keep track. And I would have another little friend just doing video and they would record that newscast. And again, really short that they were taking ownership of that. Now, if you really want to get advanced to try some, some different things, I've also seen teachers do some app smashing with green screen, where you can create different backgrounds and do a newsletter that way as well. So that can be also really fun to explore too. I want to pause for a moment and give a code for those of you that want a certificate if you're watching the recording, that code is 773. And I'm going to give you some more in just a little bit. So stay tuned. The other thing that I want to make sure I pause and go over questions or have time for questions as well. So let's hop into a couple questions. Leslie is just clarifying, does translate only exists in a note? No. So if a Seasaw will translate text that is in a note, if it's in a comment, if it is in a message or a caption. So those things are translated automatically. You as a teacher don't need to do anything. It really depends on the device's language that the family is set to. Can you print out the newsletter when you are in notes? So Lee, great question. If you send it as an announcement, I don't know that you can do that. If you post it to the journal, you absolutely could. So we could do that by just tapping the three dots. Can you add more than one attachment? You cannot add more than one attachment. But as I just showed with multi page, if you have that premium feature or want to try it out, you can add up to 10 pages in one post. So that should cover most of what your needs are. I'm going to give the next three digits of the code for the certificate. That's five to six. If you need that for the recording, if you're watching the recording, Catherine, there are over 55 languages that CESA will translate content to. Is there a way to make newsletters or other announcements available to parents who sign up for CESA family after the announcement has been posted? Amazing question. I love that you're asking this, Christy. Great, great question. What you need to know is that in order for families to see an announcement, they have to be connected before the announcement is sent. So what I recommend at the beginning of the school year is if you don't have families connected yet, post to the student journal. So if I go to our class, I just want to just show this difference. If I go to our class, I'm going to delete this for now. And I'm signed in as a teacher. If my family members aren't connected yet, I want to tap the green add button and choose post student work. Then what I would do after my amazing newsletter is done, let's pretend that's it. I'm going to tap the green check and I'm just going to tag all students so that when the family gets connected, they are going to see that post already they're waiting for them. But when you have your family members connected, you absolutely want to go about that through the announcement feature, if that makes sense. So great tips there. Go ahead and keep typing in your questions. The other thing. Yeah, I mean, well, let's just keep cruising through the questions here.


Every day over 450,000 new malware and potentially unwanted applications are registered? This number has drastically risen since 1990, at which point there were only 50 known computer viruses. Today, 90% of emails contain some form of malware and most people don't know about it. And now you know.


We now have three different Spider-Man sequels, all with very similar themes, but very different approaches. So you know what time it is. Pizza time. Let's get to the star himself, Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man. I personally like all three actor portrayals of him. I think Andrew Garfield nails down the playful cocky spirit of Spider-Man, while Toby has the whole Peter Parker down on his luck personality perfected. Tom Holland balances both sides very well with a nice blend of awkwardness mixed with heroic qualities. Our Mary Janes couldn't be any different, with Kirsten giving a very serious dramatic performance and easily her best in the trilogy, while Zendaya is played mostly for laughs and far from home.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has a lot of problems, and I'm underselling that statement. One of them, however, is not Gwen Stacy, played by Emma Stone. She's a sharp, quick-witted partner for Peter to bounce ideas and comedy off of, and carries pretty much every scene she's in. The Aunt May lineup is pretty solid all around, too. She's like a fine wine who actually de-ages throughout the course of the series, going from the lovely Rosemary Harris to the always terrific Sally Field. Far from home, Marissa Tome is no slouch either. But as with all things far from home, she too doesn't get much of an opportunity to spread her acting chops. It's mostly played for comedy. It would seem writer Chris McKenna constantly goes out of his way to avoid any sort of drama that's previously been handled by the other iterations. Harris will always be my favorite Aunt May, only because she gets that killer line. I believe there's a hero in all of us. I can't do it. I can't do it like she did. There are plenty of fantastic supporting roles in these films, too, such as Ned and his classmates, J. Jonah Jameson and the Daily Bugle staff, James Franco as Harry Osborn, and of course the Stan Lee cameos. Then there's the villains, who can really make or break a film. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has two of them, and neither of them really work at all, and then there's kind of a third one thrown in here and there to remind us that Sony truly can screw up a film if it wants to. Jamie Foxx's electro just looks silly, and his character motivations match. Harry Osborn has shades of Spider-Man 3's Venom, showing up really late in the game and taken out just as quickly. Granted, he doesn't at least cause some never-ending pain for our hero, which is more than I can say about other villains. Jake Gyllenhaal's Quentin Beck, also known as Mysterio, was probably one of the worst-kept secrets in recent MCU history. I mean, who really thought this guy was going to be good? Gyllenhaal always delivers, and here is no exception. Playing an X-stark worker in the most disgruntled of ways. His Titan creatures were well designed, too, but never really much of a threat. Spider-Man 2's Dr. Octavius, however, has everything go in his way. A brilliant scientist who lost his wife and his mind in the process, taken over by his very creation. Teaming up with Harry for the revenge angle worked incredibly well, too. Nothing feels rushed or out of place here, and that's thanks to a script that takes its time to build up. We'll talk more about that here in round two. Story. Spider-Man Dose, the amazing Spider-Man 2 and Far From Home, may be very different films, but they do have one theme running through all. And that's love. Sam Raimi shows us Peter Parker at his lowest point. He's failing at everything. From the simplest tasks to delivering a pizza or making an eight o'clock play, he has lost his balance, his confidence, and ultimately his spider abilities. I find this to be the most compelling aspect of the film, as everyone can relate to falling down at one point or another, and not entirely sure how to pick oneself back up. Doc Ock's arc also follows the love story angle, albeit in a tragic way, as he accidentally kills his soulmate and his life's work during a press event gone horribly wrong. So the next time you botch a PowerPoint presentation in front of your peers, just remember it could be far worse. And also, maybe don't use PowerPoint. That's on you. Mark Webb's amazing Spider-Man 2 goes for the tragic route also. Parker attempts to keep his word with Gwen Stacy's dead father by staying away from her. That proves to be easier said than done, as Emma Stone is a lovely national treasure who's not easily avoided. Or should she be? He's haunted throughout this picture by the ghost of Stacy's past, which causes him to make some slip-ups from time to time until he finally decides to embrace their relationship. Turns out, the old man was right, as it wasn't much longer before Gwen Stacy snaps her neck harder than Superman did to Zod. This leads to what will surely be a final dramatic chapter for the amazing Spider-Man franchise. Someone out there is still waiting for the third film. Max Dillon is the main antagonist in this movie. He works for Oscorp, met Spider-Man once, fell into an electric eel cage, became a blue man group member, and then hated Spidey for not remembering his name.  He teams up with Harry eventually, who has a disease that makes him overact as the film progresses, and the rest, as they say, is terrible. Far from home picks up after the events of The Avengers Endgame, so the stakes couldn't be lower. Director John Watts knows this and doesn't even pretend there's anything remotely threatening happening in this flick. The story has a very light tone to it all, cracking even more jokes than its predecessor homecoming. Complete with a student made in Memorum for Tony Stark.  He opts to leave the suit back home with Aunt May and Happy, as he joins his fellow classmates on an out-of-state Euro trip, but he quickly finds out there's no running away from your responsibilities. Mainly because Sam Jackson's Nick Fury is controlling the class destinations, strategically placing them in the line of danger.  Peter is informed that there is a supposed multiverse that's making its way into his, consisting of giant earth-destroying creatures and a Dr. Strange-esque superhero to help guide what's left of shield. Parker may be in the mission physically, but his mind is elsewhere, specifically on MJ, who he was hoping to tell how he feels during this big trip. Ultimately, he figures out Mysterio's nefarious ruse, saves the day, gets the girl, and becomes the next Iron Man. While one of these Spider-Man movies is perhaps not like the other when it comes to story, production is an entirely different bag. It's really easy to knock on the amazing Spider-Man, too. That was a statement. From its sloppy handling of its villains or the cliched use of ghost mentors, but I will never make fun of it from a visual standpoint. It really does have good action moments, and the use of slow motion here is stunning, to say the least. This, playing along with the sort of dubstep beats that drop when Electro is on screen and the GoPro-esque shots of Spider-Man swinging are some of the best on screen. Plus, that suit is something pretty special. Its musical score as a whole still pales in comparison to what came before, and some of the villain design is just downright atrocious.  Spider-Man 2 is a lot of things to a lot of people. A sappy drama. A silly, intentional, campy comedy. A tragic horror story with the dash of Evil Dead sprinkled in. I think it contains all those features and more, and I'm perfectly happy with that. These are all shown in the way Raimi frames the picture, sometimes choosing aggressive zoom-ins that are meant to lighten the darker mood of the scene unfolding. Other times, he'll hold a shot for an extended period of time while Toby does a bit of improvisational humor. The Spider Cam is there again for those hero shots of our protagonist as he swings through the city, making us feel like we are up there with him and his thoughts. The effects are of course not as seamless as that of, say, Far From Home, but the less reliance on CGI helps the smaller moments seem real and tangible. Then there's the score by Danny Elfman, which I think far and wide surpasses the others, even the classic score that's used in Homecoming and Far From Home. And speaking of Far From Home, it's another MCU movie which means it has a ton of CGI, a lot of laughs, and a whole lot of budget. 160 million, to be exact. I wouldn't say it was all necessary either, all things considered. The giant Titan fights weren't exactly the most gripping battles to watch unfold, but the final fight against the drones did have some great web slinging action. That, in those few minutes of the mysterious mind-bending visions, were some of the coolest things in the franchise. The mid-credits scene was fun too, but it's more of a reminder to me why the Raimi films are held so highly.  Guy at one point starts to lose his spidey sense, but that means very little to the audience as he barely even used it in the past films. And since Tony Stark has gifted Peter all of his tech, Spider-Man's powers kind of lose their purpose on their own.    But you got Hawkeye running around suitless, shooting arrows, when he could just as easily throw in a suit, fly around, and auto-aim on everything. I call my YouTube community, and they once again made me a proud parent. Here are the results. In Deader Than Gwen Stacy Last Place is the Amazing Spider-Man 2, with a less than amazing 5%. In second place is the middle-of-the-road trip adventure Iron Man Jr. Far From Home, with 33%. And in first place is Spider-Man 2 with 61% of the votes. This was the right call, and I do like Homecoming and Far From Home quite a bit, not so much Amazing Spider-Man 2. And you can call me biased if you'd like. It's the easy thing to do when someone likes something that you don't. But mark my words, someday when you're older, you will be on the receiving end of this as well. And also, this is more than just reviews, this is movie feuds. Like, I can imagine in 15 or 20 years when Hugh Jackman's been replaced and there are six more Wolverine movies, someone's going to say Logan's still the best Wolverine and a bunch of people are going to call him biased. It's probably going to be right.


We are lucky to have Craig Brown with us today and we're going to do the collaboration deep dive session with him. So without further ado, over to you Craig. Hi everyone. Today we're going to do a little exercise. We're going to do a collaborative exercise and I'm just going to share a link in chat. So what we're going to do today is run through a series of questions. At the end I'm going to share some insights and data that I have accumulated over doing this workshop for three, the last three years. So I've been doing this, I've been doing this session in agile conferences and meetups, mainly in Australia but around the world including the United States and Europe and Asia. I started this process because we wanted to better understand what good collaboration is. We hear the word collaboration and we think, yes, it must be good, but we don't really think beyond that and I think that brute force thinking around the idea is all collaboration is good. But then that leads to problems. For instance, if you're not collaborating my way, your collaboration is bad and my collaboration is good. So how do we unpack those big ideas and turn them into something that's more negotiable, more actionable and tangible and it helps us make real progress at the front line of work. So what we're going to do today is it's a two-part activity.  Now I've just realised none of you can talk to me, is that right? I can hear no one talking to me. So this session is very much built around the idea of me asking you questions and people from the audience sharing back. Now it appears this platform isn't going to let us do that so we're going to have to find a workaround. I think we'll have to use the chat a little bit and then I'll do some narration and just sharing some stories from previous sessions. So another thing that I'd like you to do is you see this link is good, better collab, right? So I've put this in the chat on this site and if you could, there it is, if you could click on that what we're going to do at the beginning is we're going to go through a series of questions together and if you type them in what I've been doing with this website, it's Google Form, at the end of it I'm just creating all the data, right? And so if you put your email address in at the end, I'll share with you the data as I get to stages of doing analysis and insights. If I don't get your name, I don't share anything back but I'll talk about that more at the end. Meanwhile, what I want to do is lead you through these questions and with no one speaking back, it's going to be interesting. There's going to be these moments of silence, right? But just bear with me. So in 35 odd minutes or 30 minutes from now, we're going to run through these questions and at the back, the next step, I'm going to pull up some PowerPoint pages and show you some charts and diagrams and reflect on the things that I've learned doing these activities. So the first thing I would like you to ask yourself is what's the situation where you've seen great collaboration at work? And in particular, as you're thinking about it, what were the attributes? What were the things that made it great? Right? What were the behaviors in the particular situation that you're thinking of that made that situation great? So if you guys type an answer in here, what will happen is over time, I'll add that to my data set. And as we work through this thing, and then I'll play back some information to you after this event. What I will play to you at the end of this event is the aggregated data from previous workshops. So just you're taking a moment right now to think, where did I see great collaboration?  If you don't want to do it online, grab a pen and paper and do it that way, writing things down and reflecting is going to help us get to where we want to be. Okay. So the second question I want to ask you is, why is it we think collaboration is valuable? And again, in your own time with your own pen and paper, I'm going to ask you to write down a couple of dot points. Given you guys can't talk back to me, I'm going to share some examples of things that people have said to me and some examples from my own life. But while I'm doing this, I want you to continue to think about writing your own answer. So two examples of why I think collaboration is valuable for me personally is I don't want to come to work and be a cog in a machine. Right. Work is a major part of my life. And I feel like it's a very communal experience. I live in a community. I interact with people and work for me feels more engaging and rewarding and energizes me more if I'm doing it with other people. So that's one reason why I think collaboration is better for me. Another reason I think collaboration is good is because there's many brains thinking about a problem. For instance, bring more perspectives to bear and are more encompassing in the things that we think about. And so we can see problems from more perspectives and we can generate more options when we start to think about solutions. And we can also bring more experience to bear. So we leverage the experience of more people and the collective history of 10 of us might be 100 years of work experience, whereas the collective experience of two of us might be only 20. Right. Or for some of you, it might be four years. Who knows. So there's two things. Now continue. Write one, two or three dot points more if you want to flood them in. If any of you would like to share any particular examples, throw them into the chat and we can talk about them as well. So I'm very happy for people to as we look at these screens, very happy for people to throw comments into chat and then I'll play them back to the crowd. The next question I would like to ask you guys is I just gave you two examples of collaboration, but they very much were anchored in what I think of immediately. Right. And the context there was me thinking about the experience that I have at work. The second one, the second, this second set of questions here asks us to think in a step by step broader organization. Thanks, Ankit. You've also thrown in great collaboration always comes while resolving a production issue. It's funny, isn't it? When we're in crisis, we're much more able to collaborate than when we're in a planned methodical control process. Good point and hilarious observation. With these questions, what I would like you to do is I'd like you to answer each specific one. So it's what are the benefits of collaboration for me? So you heard me a minute ago say I get energized by working with everyone else. Not everyone has that experience. Different people have different experiences. So if you could just take a moment to think of why you value collaboration, then you can go on and you can say, what about my team? The collective around me, the five or 10 or whatever people it is that I work with day to day. What are they looking for? And in the context of something like resolving a production issue, what does the team get for a better collaboration? What's the value proposition for them? As we continue to think at ever widening perspectives, what's the value of collaboration for our organization? Why is collaboration good for the whole company, good for the whole organization or department or wherever you work? So again, great observation on kit, like the team gets its benefits. That benefit of the experience of iterating on collaborative activities builds trust. And there are feedback loops in competence and in trust and enthusiasm and engagement that kind of play and play and play. And they definitely, we see them happening in teams, especially like in those second stage early adoption of agile, right, where everyone starts to work together and trust and play as a team more. And then that cascades out into the organization as well. But how does it cascade into the organization? What are the benefits, say the executive team or the shareholders see in your organization of better collaboration? Then we can go wider, right? Who is our organization there to serve our customers and clients, right? And so what is the benefit that our customers and clients get from improved collaboration? Why is better collaboration going to make their world better? So Rishit suggested value delivery at the earliest opportunity is great for organization. So if we're working together, we can get things out the door faster, great, great observation. What are the benefits of collaboration for our customers? Again, write these things down because it's going to be good for you to go through the activity of thinking and writing it down. It makes you think more deeply and critically about these issues. The next question I have for you is beyond the organization and customer relationship, it's the society and the community that we live in, right? So what is our collaboration at work going to do for our wider community? And how is it going to make things better? Anand and Ankit have thrown in reduced rework and community get dependability. It's true, right? Like if people do what they say they're going to do and it gets done properly, right? There's more feedback loops, the playing to trust and a sense of we're all in it together and a sense of mutual destiny and things like that. So in that page, I've asked you to think about the benefits of collaboration for yourself, for your team, for your organization, for your customers and for the community that you live in. The next page asks us to say, let's get concrete about it. What does good collaboration look like for you today? And what I would like you to do, sorry, well I must mess this up, what I would like you to do as you think about these questions, there they are, is make it tangible. Now you can write one specific example or you can maybe do two or three, but I'll use daily stand-ups as an example, right? So for me, collaboration today is our team, my team come together for 10 to 15 minutes, four days a week and we check in with each other and we ask each other how we're going and what are we working on, right? We don't really follow the standard, what did I do yesterday, what am I going to do today and what's blocking it. We just say, what are we working on and what's challenging us. So I can write that down as an example, but then I could also say, what's better, right? And I would say in the meeting that I do, what would be better would be listening more deeply to each other, right? So we tend to listen superficially and if somebody says, you know, there's a problem that I'm working on and I don't see my way to the end of it yet, we typically won't dive into that and engage in that conversation further. We'll wait for that person to come and grab us later, but that's actually an early signal that somebody could do with some help. So better for me would be better listening to the signals that people need help and what's better than that, right? Well, I can't think of a specific, but as I'm talking, I'm thinking maybe what's better than that is that person before the stand up has already realized that they've got a challenge and they've gone and asked for help before the stand up. And so when we get to the stand up, they say, I've been having this problem with this issue, but I've asked that person for help and it's now under control. So there's an example of like, what does collaboration look like today? What's plus one? And what's another plus one on top of that? So you guys take a moment, I'm going to be silent for just a minute, you guys take a moment and maybe think about and even write down answers to these three questions for me. And if anyone would like to throw a comment into chat, give me a thumbs up if you've answered that question. Zero feedback people. Hey, here we go. Okay, I'm going to move on to the next page. We've got about a third of the people saying, yep. My next question for you all is what's the cost of collaboration? So we've asked what's the benefit of collaboration? We've asked it at these different locus from like myself, my team, my company, customer and community. We've then asked, let's get specific, let's benchmark ourselves of what good looks like, but also what's plus one look like and what's plus two look like. So we've got a tentative roadmap of better collaboration forming in our heads. Now I want to ask you, what are the costs of collaboration? Right. Once again, I'd like you to answer this at the context of the cost to yourself, the cost to your team, the cost to the company, the cost to the customer and the cost to the community. So you guys take some time and then once you've started answering that, I will start playing back some of the entertaining comments that you're going to share with me. Patience is absolutely a cost that we have to bear, right? Because we want to go faster, but it's like that adage, go fast, go alone. Delivering a tangible and scalable solution, opening up cross-functional opportunities within the team and the outside team as well, that strikes me as one of the benefits or one of the plus ones from the previous question. Accepting and learning from failures. I imagine that's an individual cost, cost to an individual, your personal aspiration, you're putting the well-being of the group ahead of your own. Great examples people, great examples. Let's also think about the cost to the team, the cost to the company. What are the costs of collaboration? One example of both the team and the company level is it takes time to do things well. And so the trade-off to work more intimately and collaboratively with each other is jobs take longer. Another cost to the organization may be new tools, new infrastructure need to be deployed into the workspace. So, for example, the last six months as many of us have been working from home, getting access to tools like this that the conference is hosted on or video conferencing tools or better microphones or a mirror boards or whatever you're using are expenses that the company needs to invest in to get the payback of the value of the collaboration. There's a great one here from Madu. The cost to the company, one of the things that the agile teams will do is deliver something that's not really perfect to get it out so that they can get feedback. And in the end that generates a better result because we're sense-making collaboratively with our customers and with our stakeholders, but the company feels like it's suffering reputational damage or it's not in control of the situation and so anxiety and fear levels may go up in some parts of the organization. Another one from Devang is the cost of the team, like if we have to spend time collaborating we've got to start rapport building and start talking to each other and let other people go first and listen to them versus talk and all those sorts of things. They're all true, right? And even just building a basic confidence in collaboration takes time and effort to master. So you've got to put the time in that way as well. What about the cost to the customer or to the community? What examples can you guys share with me on that front? What does it cost the customer to be more collaborative? Dedicating time to collaborate with the R&D team for instance? Absolutely, absolutely. And they need to appreciate the payback, right? And you have to consider what's a person's time horizon? Do they, if they put two hours of their time in, when do they want to get the reward back from that? And is the work you're doing generating that sentiment? One go-to I have with the customer is we've all got phones and we all hate our phone companies. At the end of every phone call to a phone company they like to send you a net promoter score survey. Would you like to advocate on our behalf and get your friends to come and be customers of our company? The answer 100% of the time is no because you're my phone company and the ideal relationship I have with you is you take money out of my bank account every month and I never speak to you. But my phone and internet is always there, right? That's the relationship I want with them. I never want to speak about them but I want them to reliably be there. So when you're working with customers, when we've just had a broadcast message, when you're working with customers, when you're working with customers realize the value proposition that you're offering to them and the expectations that they have of you and balance the work you do in that context. Here's some others, time and money, commitment, reprioritization of work items, as in since initially the value of delivery will be slower, the team might miss on certain commitments, costs to the community, environmental impact, absolutely. We collectively tend to think of technology but all projects aren't just technology ones. I want to talk about reprioritizing briefly as well. We have a plan, we meet customers, we have a plan, we lay it out and then we go and do things to them like say, well actually the end users want something different. We're changing your plan and depending on the person, they can have a spike in anxiety and fear because all of a sudden they're not in control of the situation. And so recognizing people's tolerance for uncertainty is another aspect to thinking about the cost for the customer. And lastly the community one, the environmental one, the physical environments one, also the social and societal aspects. We're hearing a lot about Twitter and Facebook and their contribution to the death of America's democracy at the moment. What's going on there I guess? All right, I'm going to move on to the next page. The next thing I'd like you guys to reflect on is the physical environment you work. It's not the physical environment, it's the systemic environment you're working in. So that includes the physical spaces, the tools, the digital tools as well as the physical ones. It can include organizational structures or standard processes. It can include all sorts of things. And so what I'd like you guys to do is list the things that you think foster collaboration and list the things that you think discourage collaboration. Now it's an interesting topic because some things could live on both sides of the ledger depending on how they're done. And an example I'll share with you is manager one-on-ones. So in the left, Foster's collaboration, managers meet up with their team members maybe on a weekly basis and say, how are things going for you? What are you finding interesting? What are you proud of? What's challenging you? What help can I give you? What's going on? How are you feeling? And a coaching conversation that kind of probes into those areas will surface opportunities for improvement, but it's proactive improvement where you're problem solving together in a coaching context with an employee. A different type of manager one-on-one could be, here are your KPIs, you're 70% done, but you're behind schedule. What's going on? That's an accusatory one. Maybe focused on individual contribution at the expense of team performance. There's a whole bunch of things that could be going wrong in that type of manager one-on-one. So just a thing like a manager one-on-one meeting could live in both of those boxes depending on how they're executed. What I'd like you guys to do is just share one or two or even three, if you like, system conditions that foster collaboration and system conditions that discourage collaborations. Write them down and if anyone would like, throw them into chat and I'll call them out. Meanwhile, I'm going to ask for another thumbs up. If you guys are enjoying the session, could I get the thumbs up? A little bit of feedback for me just to tell me whether I'm on track or not. All right. Well, it is playing okay. Nice one. List the system conditions at your workplace that foster collaboration. List the system conditions at your work that discourage collaboration. No cubicles.  Back in 2009, I had a software development team at a government organization and we were moved from the IT floor to a floor full of data entry people that were doing mail and process work. And so our team took our whiteboards. We had all our sticky notes and index cards and we were in little desks that were all interlocked in triangles. And so we put the whiteboards in a circle around our team area and it was kind of like the wagons encircling the camp. And anyway, we were there for a couple of weeks and our team used to laugh a lot, used to enjoy working together, but it was a government organization and most people in that particular organization were pretty miserable most of the time because they had a bad organizational culture. One thing led to another and the employees on the floor we were with complained about our whiteboards making the workspace less visually appealing. And so the cleaners on the weekend took everything away and my team turned up on Monday morning and all of the post-it notes and all of the architecture diagrams and all of the like pinups of the UI were all gone, right? Of course my team wanted to protest and say we can't work, all our planning artifacts are gone. But it's just an example of the space, right? And what's expected from the broader organizational community and how buildings are designed and how workspaces are designed can affect the way we work. Discourage, individual KPIs. I don't know what WE3 environment is to be honest. Sorry about that, could be. Yeah. All right, cool. I'll share a couple of examples. Hope you're amused. Next page. Collaboration workbook. So this is one of you, right? If you are going to make a change in the next 30 days to make your workplace more collaborative, I'm just going to pause for a second and go, we asked ourselves what the benefits of collaboration are at those different levels. We asked, where are we today? What does plus one look like? What does plus two look like? We asked ourselves, what are the costs of collaboration? We've also just then asked ourselves, what are the system conditions, the environmental factors that amplify and suppress collaboration? What I'd like you guys to do now is nominate one thing that you can do within the next 30 days to foster better collaboration. Throw that into the chat if you'd like me to call it out. Because of course, the benefit of a reflective session like this, first of all, you're thinking about your context, but also anything we play back publicly, i.e. in chat, we can help our neighbors. We can share that with our community and then they can be stimulated by great ideas. An open session with the entire team, informal retrospectives. By informal retrospective, I don't know exactly what you mean, Ankit, but I'm going to say sometimes a team coming together and being guided by facilitated structured conversations hinders the right conversation. Sometimes you can just pull people together and say, what do you people want to talk about? Take the structure away and that can open up some really insightful and great conversations. Excellent, Ankit. I knew what you were talking about. Roush it's also asked ask team members to focus on discussions when in a meeting. My business partner one time earlier this year said, Craig, you're always looking at your phone when we're on conferences. I'm like, yeah, I am. He says, put your phone out of reach. So I put my phone out of reach. It became a great habit to do that because then I listened more carefully and focused more intently on the people that I'm talking to. One of the things that we encourage but we don't force is for people to put cameras on because eyes on, face to face, does demonstrate. It's not about what you get. It's about what you give. It demonstrates focus and intent and listening more powerfully than just having the camera off, for instance. Here's another one. In the team meeting, you don't have everyone agreeing with the subject, address the reservations of the individual before, during or after the meeting. So I guess there's circumstances in there. But that's right. Don't force consensus. There's this great stuff around decision making that says consent is a better decision making form than consensus, for instance. Because if you make people say yes in a meeting room, when they walk out of that meeting room, they may not be brought in to what you're doing. So I think giving voice to people and making sure that they're heard. Again, this goes to listening skills. It's a great and powerful tool for levelling up collaboration. How can you manifest that? How can you specifically and demonstrably do that in the next month? Open channels, work spaces for collaboration. Ensure to circulate meeting minutes, presumably, within a timely manner. Yeah. So there's lots of things that we can do to help other people. Right? And again, if you look at these things, a lot of these suggestions that are coming out are all about not what's good for you, but what's good for others. And that's the core of collaboration, stepping forward and helping others be successful. I hope you've all written an idea down and I hope you all post it, note it to your monitor and you look at it every day until it's executed on. You can let me know later. If you've been writing into this thing and you'd like me to share details, I'm eventually probably over my summer at the end of this year going to write up a paper on this and I'll just anonymize all the data and I'll be sharing some stuff, but I'm going to share you some early versions of what that data looks like in just a minute. So, but if you'd like to engage in conversation or anything, just put your contact details there and I will talk to you. And there's also a keep my stuff private thing there as well. So, oh, by the way, and I don't sell any of that. I don't do anything with it. It's purely just to share back into the AdJoc community. It's just because I think this is a really interesting topic. Now, what I'm going to do is just pause for a moment. So, if you guys want, you can find me via ConfEngine and you can message me via that or you can contact me via whatever method you like or this form. So, the form, I'll put this link here, which is a way of doing this form in the chat at the very end of the session. And of course, I'll be in the, I don't know, the VIP lounge or whatever, the lounge or whatever it is at the end of the session. So, we can chat more if anyone wants to.  And then I'm going to summarize that with my insights and what I think this all means to me. Now, you're going to hear me say some very basic things, right? And I think that's amusing because it brings me back to this mode of like, we often think there's magic to high performance, but high performance comes from doing fundamental basic things consistently, right? So, you'll hear that in a minute. Now, before I go down that path, I'm going to talk about my research methodology briefly, just to give you the context of how this data was established. One last thing before I go forward into playing this out, I hope you've enjoyed the opportunity to sit here and reflect on what collaboration means to you and to put a couple of different lenses on it. And I hope that you guys see some opportunity in thinking and talking like this, and perhaps even you just take these questions and run them as a retrospective in your own team. I'm going to be explicit. I'm going to say, if you found value in the session so far, give me a thumbs up. Here we go. It's nice. One of the measures of performance is how many people are interacting versus sitting passively while they're doing other work because we don't know. All right. So, what I want to do now is the methodology, right? So, all right, here we go. Like all science experiments, this started with a hunch. And my hunch was collaboration was starting to turn into a dirty word in the agile community, right? It was starting to turn into one of those power words where some manager says, you're not collaborating my way. And so I don't want to hear you. And it's this convergence into best practices and dogmatic idealism that gets in our way of openness and working together and learning together and improving together, right? And I think if people are locking into, there's a best way to do things. That's this local optimization that gets us good this week that doesn't get us good for next year, right? And so that was one of the things that I was worrying about.  And I've kind of not directly spoken to it, but I've touched on a bunch of interesting stuff around what makes a good collaboration. And so things like putting other people first and putting the good of the group ahead of the individual, for instance, comes through in the academic research quite strongly. But there's more. Now, I'm a lousy conference speaker because I think it's better for me to pose questions than to give answers, right? And so what I want to do is tease you and say there's a wealth of academic information out there about good collaboration that you can dig into if you'd like to. Regardless, the next thing I did is I formed a hypothesis and then I implemented a survey. And this, by the way, is a cut down version of the survey. Usually, I kind of take about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes to do it. And then I gathered the information, right? And so I went through this analysis process, which I'll talk about in a minute, generated insights, and we're still tinkering around with it. Some of the data that some of the research stuff that I started with at the very beginning, one is there's an organizational psychologist in Australia called Neil Preston, and he presented this model, corruption, coercion, competition, compliance, cooperation, collaboration, and co-creation. So he's linked these kind of different perspectives of working together up to co-creation. And so the idea I got out of that is we can actually unpack this word collaboration and we can actually anchor it to different stages in this hierarchy or this maturity perspective, right? That was one thing I thought of. And so there you go. The next one on the right hand side is like this broad versus local perspective, right? And so, you know, we've got Deming there as well. And so there's this idea of like what's our system and what's the context we operate in. So systems thinkers are always challenging themselves with what are the boundaries on this system that we're talking about. And so by asking about what is collaboration cost and contribute to our community, it changes our perspective than when we're just thinking about like ourselves or our team of four or five people that we work with. And I think by taking that broader perspective, it changes the way we think about some of these topics, right? And we get less focused on some of those details and start to think more holistically in big picture. Of course, there's the Deming stuff, systems drive outcomes. Most of us are familiar with that. And then lastly, there's some ideas out of product management. Whenever you're kind of looking at a problem and you want to get a breakthrough innovation, one of the ideas you should experiment with is bundling and unbundling. Another idea is lean change. So improvements Jason Little wrote that book years ago called Lean Change. And the idea being when change is deployed in an organization, the people at the front line are probably best equipped to know what to improve and how to improve it.  And then the last one is language of a tool is a tool of oppression. And that comes out of some 1960s and early 1970s research about psychology and sociology and stuff like that. So those are some of my areas that I was aware of at the very beginning that helped me form the views. The next thing, the hypothesis. So the hypotheses that I went in with is I think collaborations headed the way of a power word. I think also that people have a very fuzzy and loose idea of what collaboration is. And I think that loose intangible fuzzy view gets in the way of us making concrete improvement plans. And then we fall into the world of best practices and following other people's patterns versus mindfully improving in our own contexts. I also think that the fact of reflecting on a topic makes us more aware and helps us form more concrete views of what a thing is. And so taking a question oriented approach to this session kind of locks me in it, like comes from that comes from that hypothesis. And the last one is like, I actually went in with this hypothesis that I think in the agile community in particular, we say a lot of things are best practice or what we should do, but our behaviors are different. And so one of the things I was thinking of here is we would believe, you know, collaboration and mindful improvement and all those things are good. But then when we look at what agile coaches are doing, they're just kind of teaching us to paint by the numbers using Scrum or Canban or whatever. It turned out, have I answered those things in this? It turned out, I'll give you the answers in a minute. So then I did the survey. When I got the answers, I go through this bucketing process and I create some charts. There's the survey and there's the buckets. I will tell you the hypotheses, right? Do we think, actually, I'll show you the charts first. So the storytelling one, tell me a story of when you did great collaboration at all these meetups and conferences. I've kind of stacked it up. That's the distribution of people and there's some examples there to help you benchmark against your own real world. I'll put this on Confengine immediately after this session, by the way. So that's the kind of spread across Dr. Preston's hierarchy, competition, compliance, cooperation, et cetera. The next thing is what's good look like or what's collaboration look like, what is better, plus one, plus two. And you see these topics, alignment, flow, learning, respect, nurture, purpose, autonomy, shared problems, transparency. They're the things. This is the areas that people are intending to go to improve things. Or what good looks like today is orange, what better looks like is the next two colors. Then I ask the question around the costs. So in this one, the costs, sorry, I'm just working the PowerPoint thing a little bit. In this instance, the cost to me, most people express that as time. The customer team once again expressed as time. The cost of the organization starts to be shaped as money, but money and time more or less the same thing. The cost to customers presented as low quality, where did I put community? I haven't got it there. But what's come out just in the last few months doing it during the COVID season is also emerging is trust over in the organization and customer size is trust and faith. And over on the cost to me and my team, another thing that's emerging more recently is energy, particularly emotional energy.  I'm going into try to make things better. I'm trying to drive for better collaboration. I'm trying to get us on the same page. But there's all these current state factors that play against me. People's current behaviors, how they're centered, the way management treats us, all these things. Sure, they take time, but they also take resilience and emotional energy to persist. So that's another thing that's emerging more recently. Lastly, system conditions. So that's just the same kind of stuff. Shared purpose, respect, co-location. That's one from pre-COVID days. But appreciation autonomy, aligned approach, making progress, nurturing feedback and structure. So all those things help us perform if those things are in place. Now, what I got out of that from the hypotheses is, do we think collaborations headed the way of a cliche or a power word? Or maybe. It doesn't really come through the data, but at the end of each of these sessions, I have a conversation with people and people tend to express that that's true. So I anecdotally am hearing it, but I'm not seeing it come through in the data. The second one is we think people have a fuzzy idea of what collaboration looks like. That leads to suboptimal results. We think getting more concrete will help us build better roadmaps. And that's a very concrete yes to that one. So the feedback of doing this generates concrete plans for people to make their working life better. The next one is by doing this, you form what's part two of the same line. And the last one is we think people will say one thing and do another, and that will come through. And the idea is maybe. So I think that's people, we saw some variation in thoughts and actions, but it doesn't really come through strongly. And I think what the deal is, is that means that there's some signals, but we need to poke into it more further, probably with some interviews or something like that, to reframe that particular thing. So we're not 100% sure. So what's come out of this is like, I have a very firm view that doing this workshop and really asking yourself what is collaboration and unpacking the idea and coming at it from a cost and benefits point of view and looking at it from different perspectives helps you think about what you need to do to make your workplace more collaborative and also get the payoff at the right rate. Here's my three big insights in my last one minute. So we all have a shared view that collaboration is good in the abstract, but we need a more concrete plan. The priority areas that we think have the most impact for good from those two charts, a shared mission, alignment in priorities, flow and a culture of respect and learning. So if you're an agile coach or a manager, those five things are the things that you want to focus on putting in place if you want better collaboration. Shared mission, alignment in priorities, flow and a culture of respect and learning. And lastly, if we want to break beyond our current levels of performance via collaboration, we need you and me, the person to my left and the person to my right. We all need to master the mental and emotional energy to deal with that. So that would go to the idea of forming alliances, talking to other people, not going out the front alone, but going together with others so that we don't burn out. So they're kind of the big takeaways for me. And so I think with that, I will kill the, and I'll say that's my little collaboration story. I hope it was useful for you.