Welcome everyone to the session by Konstantin Korn-Schmid-Pauly. So the session is titled as Customer Obsession. So just to have a quick introduction, so Konstantin has over 30 years of combined experience as a program leader and agile transformation coach. He has helped transition various US federal agencies, non-profit organizations and the Fortune 100 enterprises from the existing work practices to the Agile understanding. So that connects all the layers of the organization to the new lean and agile self-sustaining ways of working. So without further delay, I'll give it to you Konstantin. Thank you so much for the introduction. I really appreciate it. So good evening everyone. Good morning or anything in between wherever you might be located. So I'm excited to be able to present on a topic that's very near and dear to me because at the end of the day when we talk about agility, really it has to involve everyone in the organization. And I think when we look at one enterprise that clearly has embraced obsessively focusing on the customer, we know that this is arguably Amazon. They have in many ways become the blueprint of how we actually engage feverishly with our customer, making sure that we are doing everything for the customer and everything that we're not doing is waste. So really kind of they have set the blueprint, a lot of organizations try to model them. And really it requires a discipline and what I want to kind of walk through today is some of the things that we as an organization can do to connect. But why is there a disconnect with customers? So these are some of the things that I in my practice have found. And really I'm not going to read all the bullets on the slide, but it's really sums up in kind of a couple of sentences that a lot of organizations still, if you look at the customer being on the left, a lot of organizations are still traveling out to the right. So they're having large projects. They're happy about quality of the projects, but the outcomes come very late and they're not necessarily lined up with what was initially requested. We build long requirements documents, but that's not necessarily written to this what the customer actually wanted. And also very important is that a lot of organizations don't leverage the discipline of user experience, which is really an investment that is very, very valuable to have, because really that connects you with the customer and their experts in that field that can help with that. So let's take a look kind of at the lifecycle, if you will, of customer obsession and the touchpoints and the disciplines that we have associated with that. So clearly on the top, you know what's mentioned that user experience, being able to connect, understand, sense what the customer needs and then tying back to a lean delivery model. So what's valuable today may not be valuable six months down the road. So we have to connect and really resonate with the customer very quickly. But then once we have a solution introduced to the customer and really the road starts because then you have the digital experience. You need to make sure that you have your customers be able to work with you in the way that they want to. So a digital experience that's useful, fast, easy, simple, that they are actionable and that they really have can get, because oftentimes you may have a product that still has some issues, but if you have great customer service, then that will make up for it and vice versa. And then to the top circle there as we loop back, the customer experience, that's kind of the goodwill, the citizen engagement, the brand that you're building. So this is all kind of one circular loop. But we are going to focus on really tying user experience to a lean operating model. I want to spend a little bit of time on the discipline of human-centered design. So this is really where it starts. Again, the customer is on the left and we purposefully do research. We try to empathize. What are some of the problem areas that we're trying to address? We then help coming out of that step define by compiling the research, what we've observed and really pinning down kind of those air problem areas, which we then go into kind of design thinking. We ideate on some solutions and we bring that into kind of a prototype form and we loop it back to the customer through some form of rapid iterative testing and evaluation and then we launch, which would be hopefully a short-cycle minimal marketable feature in which we gather feedback. And we use some of the methodologies that you see on the screen as well. Key thing is design thinking, experience design, because you really want to connect with your customer in that respect. So really what we're looking at at a high level is that we need to travel from the problem to the solution space. And we need to have that interactive feedback loop with the customer. All the while, sometimes customers have pie-in-the-sky ideas and say, you know what, we really love this. You build it for us. Well, it may not necessarily be aligned with the architectural runway. There may be solution architecture that is not in pace with that. So you want to make sure that you are in lockstep with your solution architects, the technical advisors that can kind of validate that along the way. So that's very important. Pulling the onion back a little more because I kind of wanted to make sure that we have two artifacts or two processes to share with you here. User journeys. If we don't do user journeys, if we don't interact with our customers, how do we know? So we need to put ourselves in that space and say, let's walk through the scenarios. What are your goals? What are the challenges, the touch points? And then figure out the persona. How do we make that persona get what they need? And ultimately here you have the other thing is where you have empathy maps and the empathy maps are basically let you think, feel and hear and see how you interact with a customer and what your customer really needs. So that's kind of the user experience side to the left. Now let's focus on for a moment here on how we visualize what we've learned from user experience to actually define it, how we build out the product roadmap. So this is basically Karen Martin and Martin Osterling have been authorities in kind of lean design thinking. They wrote a book back in 2013. And I like what they say is if you can't describe what you're doing as a value stream, you don't know what you're doing. And so that resonates I think with a lot of organizations. What value streams maps really are is that you are basically defining every step that it takes to deliver value to the customer. And it looks at the people that support these steps and it looks like the systems that are supported by it. So wouldn't that be wonderful if you at some point could say, oh, I can eliminate two steps in this process and make it more efficient for my customer to get my products. That will help you illuminate where are their areas. And then if you exercise value stream mapping on the road, you are actually able to build a situation where you can hone in on problem areas where there's waste, where you look at cycle time, you can look at lead time. So again, that combined with what you learn from the customer and now you're visualizing your product roadmap, very, very powerful. So who are the benefactors, right? So the customer again in the middle, as an agile team, if I can see the chevrons that I'm trying to improve in the process flow by reducing lead time or cycle time, I can clearly hone in on and say here are the things that we are going to focus on in terms of our development efforts. Quality operations, your regression testing or your root cause analysis will be easier to see because you're looking at problem areas at a particular process step. You don't have to go all the way back necessarily where it's not relevant so you have that visibility. And clearly user experience, you can better align on areas to optimize and then the product management has the visualization of the overall product roadmap, lifecycle value stream, so they can make some strategic decisions to make it more efficient down the road. So I know I'm jumping very quickly here around a lot of concepts but there's a discipline that needs to happen to bring this all together. So let me kind of bring it all together in an initial and don't worry if you don't have to read this on a very small screen I'm going to be showing you some highlights on steps across the way. So first let's just take a look at this map here, right? So you have everything starts with the customer at the left, all great ideas are welcome. We then take it all the way through this whole process of analysis, UX and ultimately feedback loops through MVPs. And now let's take a look at this in a little more detail. The first one is you need to kind of create a space for your customer to say we welcome all great ideas depending if you're B2C or BTB you might have different artifacts. In this example you have a lean business canvas that someone representing the customer could fill out the customer could do it himself or herself or you simply have a feedback insights form where you gather great ideas that come in and then you as a product management team are really looking at this is the voice of the customer that's coming in, right? This isn't kind of just the surrogate which we at the enterprise think we are assuming. So then the second step you go through analyzing and the analyzing really is taking the initial input and bringing it into a format where you can gather a little more information but the idea is that you remove yourself from creating large tomes of business requirements documents. You have a single lean feature canvas where you identify the problem statement. You look at the things that you have on the screen here you fill those out and by the way that also sets the stage for some formulas and prioritization which we're going to go to in a little while so that this could be something that's sliced up small enough for the team to understand and build in a very short life cycle versus aligned with a big project plan that again will take things down a path that we don't want to be we want to be more feature oriented not project oriented. And also we're validating is what we're being proposed we're proposed here is it aligned with a value screen that we've established and if it's not still a good idea but it might not be one that you want may be prioritized as a high priority or you would align it with another part of the organization. So the third step is again we looked at it in on a previous slide is there's a whole area of lean UX where we take this process of human-centered design but we do it in a more compressed format we don't eliminate the steps but we cycle through it quicker so that we can get through this diverged converge approach and ultimately come up with something that will then culminate where you then can say okay now I have some initial analysis now let me take a look we can't do everything at once right it's impossible so we need to basically prioritize these are a couple of prioritization models that you can look at organizations will use different ones there's probably some additional ones also but these are some of the main ones that organizations will use okay so all these features we're going to basically use this formula we're going to prioritize them based on that way now we get into kind of the implementing part of the story so one thing that we experienced that actually helps is before you do any kind of big room planning or alignment when you have multiple teams dependent on each other is for the product owner, the product management and it's the representation from UX to say okay we're going to now do a story mapping exercise we take the feature that we prioritize we are presented to you and now you can basically take it through the process of sequencing and prioritizing and then you can ring fence what might be viable to release within a release of you know a couple of sprints for example and then you go into big room planning so ultimately the big room planning part is where you bring all the teams together to then create your MVP backlog and then what we like to also often see is that you want to make sure that we're 100% aligned with your customer in terms of any visual design so making sure that you are interpreting this correctly so you can do this in terms of conducting a sprint zero where you essentially are going through the cycle of doing more tendencies and you have the front running of UI designers that would create artifacts might have developers that set up their environments but ultimately then you align on what's needed within that kind of start-up sprint get to a kind of a definition of ready so you work very closely so that when you start development you're not scrambling to say what did the customer interpret for us so then once we've done that we actually execute the MVP so we're getting now to the point where you are executing the MVP and there are some critical decisions you need to make after working through designing the right thing have we done it right and so you need to validate whether or not you've met the business hypothesis or if you basically need to revisit that and take it back through development cycle or you basically need to pivot or you persevere because yes we're online or in worst case scenario you stop while you're not investing too much so that's kind of the decision points that are quite critical and then ultimately you are going to look at adopting because what you do in terms of when you actually map up whether or not the deliverable meets what the requirements were the acceptance criteria at that point you don't know yet how well you interact with how well the customer is proceeding that product so you need to have some adoption metrics and you need to also say how fast do we deliver right with what quality so if you see here for example we have the product value stream we also have the process value stream but we can say how long is it taking us to go through the cycle how long is it really do we need to accelerate certain things so what you see here on this screen is kind of more of a kind of sequential view some of you may have seen this model here before where this is basically an iteratively start-up model to kind of visualize that everything that we talked about is iterative it's not sequential it goes through a cycle essentially showing what I shared with you on some of those process steps but it takes it through the abstract figuring out what do we need to evaluate analyze and making it concrete in terms of getting the solution from problem to actually something valid that the customer can accept and it resonates with so last but not least wanted to kind of share in summary what kind of what are some of the behavior changes that we need to do in terms of being more in tune with our customer as you've kind of seen from the process that we walked through clearly obviously you need to be customer centric at every level of the organization and we don't want to be kind of project to project transactional oriented we want to become more product focused and we want to basically be able to deliver and measure what adds real value just not outputs right sense these multi sensory think like the customer feel like the customer and again I mentioned earlier adapt a lean UX discipline it'll pay dividends and then ultimately what we talked about you visualize your product lifecycle and if you do all these things you can actually successfully build a lean product operating model that will tie the whole organization to what the customer is asking for so that I want to thank you all very much we're just about at time here but welcome any questions that you might have and I thank you very much for listening here thank you Constantine and I believe anybody if you have any questions if you want to put in now we have a few more minutes where Constantine can take some questions so I believe there's one question which has come from Ditanjali which says can you say Jira is the tool that combines lean and agile part well for implementation Oh absolutely great great question all know Jira has its positives and some negatives but yes taking your Jira's construct and not just aligning it with your development but bringing a Jira board at the program level you can create a program Kanban and you can tie those together and you have the traceability because keep in mind you want to trace your feature implementation all the way through development so you want to have that trace back so Jira if you're thinking about that absolutely a great tool that you want to use okay there's one more question from Ankit Agarwal which says what is the top thing customer appreciate with the approach you have mentioned the top things that they appreciate is that they basically are seeing that the company's resonates with what their needs are right so if you are able to identify the need and then very quickly come back with them to them with maybe not even a complete solution but a partial solution that does what intended well then the customer will have the confidence that you are working with them and yet you are not having them wait for long project cycles to deliver something of value so really if there's one thing you kind of want to highlight is this reducing the time to market and reducing the cost of delay because if you delay something that's delivered to the customer they may be lapped by the competition they need to have something quick and so if you can do build unambiguous and fast you are going to be very much in the trust situation with the customer absolutely absolutely thank you I hope Ankit that answers your question we have one more question from Preeti Monod which says to do customer centric development do we need to follow BDD practice agile development that's a great question that was a whole I wanted to actually see to build some slides into it but we would have been 30 minutes 40 minutes into the presentation BDD absolutely taking behavioral driven development aligning it with that is the logical extension having a well established pipeline having the kind of three amiibo concept where you are lockstep with the PO taking what exactly the customer is envisioning and cycling it through and shift that whole process the test first it is perfect in terms of alignment with this because in BDD practice you are ultimately then getting out of the estimation game because you are bringing things down to a very small unit of work which resides in a feature file and you are executing so your throughput is consistent and you are bringing it back so BDD practice harmonizes really well in this customer centric model great thank you I believe that answers your question Preeti please feel free to put in any comments if you have in the comments section there is one I think we will take one more question and we can for rest of the questions we can feel free to have them in the hangout section so there is one question from Srinivasan Sundaram he asked what are the challenges you faced while transforming from project mindset to product centric mindset really good question it is not easy because you think about it the role of a project is guided by a project manager and they are more attuned to command and control or more prescriptive to say I know this is how we need to do things versus being adaptive and taking more of the backseat allowing self and power teams to flourish it becomes really it is an organizational change element as well so when we have this engagement we are looking at the new job families and how these job families are different coaching the existing project managers for example on being a more adaptive and aligning that with the team so there is a lot of if you will there is some one oh ones and then there is more kind of meet the teams where they are each team each engagement is different but it is absolutely depending on the level of maturity and agile maturity will like to do a baseline assessment we will let the teams self-assess and then we as coaches do validate show me some of the artifacts that support your assessment and then we will do our assessment and then take them on the journey and at some point reassess how far they have come and it does not only transcends into other areas product owner roles may not be visible maybe just a business owner so we need to basically go and build this from the ground up from the health directions, from the handshake from what we bring in from the customer and then ultimately how it gets delivered cool great thank you I think Kashra Nivas and I hope that answers your question we have three more questions but there is one question from Ganesh Ganesh which has come on the chat so I will read that for you but maybe if there is a if there is a long answer to it maybe we can take it in the hangout session but regardless I will read that question out to you so he has asked are there any real-time case studies that we can have to understand this that is a great question so certainly at EPAM we do have case studies but we have to be mindful about how we share those but we have materials we clearly have sometimes anonymized ones that we have done but we cross our engagements we always end in engagement with case studies we like to put in place but there is a policy around being able to share those unfortunately I believe there are two more questions and both are from Gitanjali I will take the top one Gitanjali I think the next question please feel free to interact with Konstantin on the hangout so I will take the last question and then we can move so another one which Gitanjali asks according to you which agile job roles should primarily involve with stakeholder with respect to requirement understanding documenting before team onwards from spring zero okay so basically you want to make sure that you are aligned all the way at the left with a product management culture so product management will basically establish the roadmap of alignment with the customer will establish the value stream and then ultimately that's the strategy the longer term strategy then at periodic levels where you are focusing in on areas of the value stream that you want to focus on to create efficiency that then drops to the PO level product owner which is more of a tactical alignment with the teams so the product management will say we have to prioritize these sets of things Chevron on the value stream for example so the product owner will then take those requirements which again are typically more in a lean future canvas so they may be four or five or six of those that have been prioritized and then ultimately they take those to the team in a big room planning or even before the big room planning they do some decomposition of stories through story mapping and then finally bringing it to a kind of an efficient starting point for big room planning to say okay now we've already broken down the stories to the level that we can do some estimation now let's align on our dependencies so the whole aspect is the product owner is not bringing a business requirements document with 500 pages to the team it's all been kind of validated on a very lean definition in terms of what the user needs that can be implemented within a reasonable space to get that feedback cool I think we've had a good number of questions and we are almost eight minutes ahead of our schedule time but I'm glad there are so many questions that are coming in and I would like to thank Constantine for this for sharing your great experience and guidelines with us today


With only one weekend to go, the BSU women's hockey team is currently in seventh place in the WCHA. But the Beavers can still climb as high as fifth. They do need a little bit of help, but sitting only four points out, there is still a chance if they sweep MSU Mankato this weekend. First period, no score after the deflection. Abby Haluska on the breakaway fires. The Maverick goalie misplays the puck and it goes in for the goal. Beavers up one. It stayed that way till late in the second, then the Beavers would pour things on. Man advantage for BSU. Emily Berglin cleans up the Madison Hutchinson miss. Two nothing, Beavers. A couple minutes later, BSU on the penalty kill but attacking Alexis Joyce drops the puck to Berglin. She lights the lamp. Goal number two for her puts BSU up three. Then under 30 seconds to go in the period. Haley Mack makes the steal in the offensive zone. Goes near post for the goal. Her third of the year. Beavers go up four. They win it tonight. Six to one. Emily Berglin with three points. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


One of the things that I wanted to bring out around to this is breathing, you know If you look at what your body takes in for nutrients you take in liquids solids and gases and You know if you're eating food getting a little snack while you're out there. You can go without that for quite a significant period of time Months under adverse conditions you can survive quite a bit your body elite itself. I got more than a few months. I think You can go without liquids depending on the conditions up to a couple of days But without air you've got minutes to brain death and that's about it So when you're looking at prioritization of what your body needs to do it needs to bring in air Where float tanks coming to this is it takes gravity out of the equation and I think you already know that so I'm not really I'm just kind of preaching the choir on that a Little further closer closer better now Okay The whole thing with breathing What a lot of us don't realize is why people tell you to lift something on the exhale or on the held breath But not on the in breath and that's because your muscles are busy doing something else There are a lot of laws of physiology and sometimes they hold up and sometimes they don't But it's a real easy practical demonstration anytime you want you can even grab a hold of the chair in front of you Squeeze it and try to try to take a deep breath and because you've already prioritized one thing It's a little harder to breathe and your body's busy contracting protect it protect itself from injuries and all these things aches and pains of the day And how much of your body has to breathe it isn't just the lungs the lungs You know even myself I teach this stuff and I run into the misconception sometimes to get this internal image That my lung is this air sac like this air balloon. Do you ever get that image yourself?  They're they're a very liquidy sponge they're they're pretty thickened and It takes actually muscular effort to really draw and create vacuum to pull that air in and When you do that you've got to push everything in your body down a bit to create room Your body needs to expand to three-dimensionally it needs to lengthen broaden and deepen in order to get the fullest breath and For something is as vital as air.  It makes it harder to breathe in That pain in your hip from sitting on these chairs a little too long listening to people a little too long And how many times did you shift one side than the other the other right? You know one leg over and and what your body's doing is protecting itself from injuries We'll stay crunched up like that and take a really deep breath doesn't go so well does it? Add to that.  It's kind of creepy to think about isn't it? You know first ribs way up here, but breathing in deeply up and out and forward Practically every muscle in your body contracts at some level to do that Ever been really exhausted and stood up. That's so easy to do a little bit tired Gravity's influence on your body over time adds to that So making that lifting or pushing down or any of those readjustments just harder to do So one of the things that's really amazing about float tank is that buoyancy neutral right You get into that float tank and it's as close to floating in space as you're going to get If your body needs to expand or contract and I'm just talking about the respiratory rhythms I think the people following me going to talk about more interesting rhythms than that but Talking about a vital rhythm of your life Just made that much easier. I Think that a big part of what people come to a conference like this is to get things that you can tell People that might not know what it is that you do and how it helps and how it's going to directly help their life And if you tell somebody it's going to help them breathe This makes it easier on your muscles. I think that's pretty straightforward. I think most of us kind of stand that And if you want a little bit more follow-up for something like this, you should look at the effects of sleep apnea On weight gain if you can't breathe You can't repair Your body on a cellular level needs to exchange gases In with the good out with the bad all that needs stuff, right? If it can't do that you can't do that you just don't get better as if that isn't bad enough if You can't breathe remember you can take in solids liquids and gases, right? If you can't take in air What do you think that's doing to your stress rates? I think that's doing your blood pressure What do you think that's doing to adrenal response and release a cortisol? Real simple answer. It's making a lot worse so Long story short one of the easiest things to remember about a lot of this stuff is Just give somebody a weight Have them hold it up And ask them if it's easier or harder to breathe try it yourself. Seriously push on something Push on something yet doesn't matter chair back anything push hard Take a really deep breath while you're pushing And now take a deep breath. I'm sorry. Now take a deep breath without doing that Is it different? As easy as that was to demonstrate.  We forget we hold our breath and then everything's going well Didn't want to do that another microphone, right? So imagine if you didn't have to fight for that breath then you already know that You already been in a float tank But just telling somebody they don't have to fight for a breath. It's just gonna be easier They get to rest there and then wow Your brain's free to do so much more If you're not fighting for every breath that you take if you're really rested and relaxed You finally get to exhale You're repairing better You've got hydrostatic pressure. You got buoyancy. You got better pressure on the outside of your body With more pressure on the outside of your body, even though there's pressure there. It's it's easier to breathe I know that's kind of odd that hydrostatic pressure. What do you suppose that's doing to your circulation in your skin? It's actually reducing it. Wouldn't you think it's like a sleeve Why is that important do you think well it'll take down inflammation by Reducing peripheral peripheral Wow It is that time of the afternoon, isn't it? The peripheral vascular compression Compression on the outside of your body.  I don't really have much more to say than that


God has not gone deaf. God has not gone blind. God has not lost his power or compassion. God hasn't stopped interacting with his creation. Therefore, miracles are for today. It is impossible to know God and not know the miraculous. By the necessity of God's very own nature, we can safely conclude that miracles happen. Any interaction with or intervention by God is, by definition, miraculous. I believe in miracles because I believe in God. And his miracles need no defense. Agree with me? Tell me why in the comment section.


Al Ghazali's The Book of Knowledge for Children. Can you see the cover? Yes. Can anyone read what it says underneath, under the little girl who's holding the heart? Yes, Faiza. Yes. Imam Al Ghazali, The Book of Knowledge is Polishing the Heart. Polishing the Heart. Oh my goodness. Isn't that wonderful. And here's the workbook. Now, let's just go to the first part. All right. Now, children, did any of you know that there's two kinds of learning? Did any of you know there are two kinds? One kind is learning what you do every day. You're learning the good things to eat, what not to eat. You're learning two and two is four. You're learning to read. But did you know there's a special knowledge, a really magical, very, very special knowledge? Do you know what that knowledge is? It's how to, it's how to polish your heart. Do you see the two hearts here? The heart on one side on the left side is the heart that beats inside and that pumps blood around.  Blood comes out, right? And then the other heart, the shining heart, that's your real, real heart, right? And what do you do for your physical heart? What do you feed it to make it strong? What do you all feed to make your body strong and good? Can anyone say? Say, what do you feed to the heart? I feed all my fruits. Very good. Excellent idea. That's wonderful. And then what do you, what do you think you would feed your heart to make it a good heart, the beautiful heart that does good things? What kinds of things could you do to make that heart better? You can feed it knowledge. You can feed it knowledge, exactly. And did you know that there are two worlds? You know, we, there are two worlds. We're in this world right now, children. And then after a while, when we get old, we go to the next world, which is beautiful and has everything we need. And how do we get there? We have a shining heart. We have to polish our beautiful hearts. You see? Yeah, we polish our hearts. All right. So children, so we're going, we're going on a journey to the next beautiful world. And do you know how we get there? We need to polish our hearts, right? So we, how do we, how do you think our hearts get dirty? Maybe if we're mean to somebody, right? Maybe if we're not kind. Yes, you would like to answer? Yes. If you do bad things, right? You wouldn't want to. Yes, bad deeds. That gets dirt on your heart, right? But we want to polish our hearts, right? It's very important to polish our hearts. Wait, I'm going the wrong way, right? And then, you know what happens? If we do good things, do you see the here that the whale in the ocean and the ants, those, those whales in the ocean and the ants, they pray for the people who does the, who do the right things. Do you know when you do the right thing, people copy you. And so you become a teacher. And so if you're a teacher by doing the right thing and your brothers and sisters copy you and your friends, the ants, the ants will pray for you and the whales in the sea. Here's a drawing some children made. Do you see the ants and do you see the whales? They're, they're, the Quran says that they pray for you if you do the right thing. And if you polish your heart and look here, here's some children's drawings. You see the whale and you see the ants, they're, they're busily praying for the people who are good teachers because they show others how to do the right thing. And did you know that we have three needs in this world? What's the first thing you need more than anything? The first thing you need, wouldn't it be food? Yes. Yes. And then don't you need clothing after that? Yeah. And then you need a house to protect you, right?  We need water too. Yeah. See the little boy here? Does he have enough toys or too many toys? Too many toys. Too many toys. And what if you just have a house and you keep filling it with things and decorating it? You know what Imam al-Ghazali says? If you do that, you forget what you're really supposed to be doing. You forget to polish your heart. If you're so busy eating millions of things, many that, if you're just too many toys, you know, so you need to be, have time to polish the heart. Now also, there's a story.   Now if she does what the good wolf wants, she's feeding him and making him strong.  If, if she listened, if she won't listen to that wolf, he gets very hungry and he dies. So you want to be very careful to listen to just your best thoughts. Isn't that true? If you get a bad thought, what are you going to say to it? Oh, no bad thought, go away, right? Yeah. And, and also, and then also, have you noticed the things that are invisible are really important to you, right? Yeah. Yeah, for example, what's nice about this bird? Here's a bird, but the bird is a friend of the man. Isn't friendship something you love? Yeah. It's invisible. You can't see it. Somebody who's kind to you. You can't see kindness. So the things that you can't see are very, very important to you. Here's friendship. You see these little girls have a wonderful friendship. It's something you can't see, but it's very, very important. So you have to think about the things in your life, not things you can hold or play with or touch, but you have to think about the things that, that you can't see that like love and kindness and goodness. Now I'm going to tell you the story about the ants. Do any of you ever get disappointed if something happens that you didn't want to happen?  All right. Once, Gizali says, we're like little ants, we're on a piece of paper. And we see things being written like things in our life. And sometimes we fall apart. Oh, I didn't want that to happen. Oh, I'm so upset about this because we can't see what a law wants for us. We just see what we think is happening. So I'm going to tell you a story. Once upon a time, there were some baby ants. And the mother and father ant said, we're going to the zoo. And the little ants said, oh, we're so excited. And then the next morning, they got a message that the relatives were coming to spend the night. And they said, the parents said, we're not going to the zoo. What do you suppose the baby ants did? Did they say, oh, no, you promised? Oh, no, you promised. We're disappointed. And the little baby ants weren't a bad mood. And all day long, the relatives stayed. And at the end of the day, the relatives were leaving. And they heard on ant radio that a lion got loose in the zoo and chased all the ants. And it was terrifying. And you know what the mother and father ant said to the baby children ant, children, God sent us the relatives to protect us from going to the zoo.  It could be there's something for a real reason. For example, my grandson Belal, one day we live on a river. I live in Kentucky. We're in the state of Kentucky.  And then the day we were going to go, everyone was excited. Belal got sick and couldn't go. And the next day, I went to see him and he was in bed. And I say, you won't believe what happened. Had we gone yesterday, something terrible would have happened. There was big waves and washing down the river were trees and many and even a dead cow. And it was terrible. So Alhamdulillah, that Allah made you sick and we didn't have to go that day. And of course, another day we did go. So when something happens and you're worried about it, you might think, no, Alhamdulillah, I'm not going to be disappointed because Allah has something better in mind. Now there's the story of the little boy in the horse. See the little boy here? One day he took his family's horse out into the mountains and he lost the horse and he came back. And everyone ran to the grandfather and they said, oh, we're so sorry for you. You were very poor family. All you had was your horse and now it's gone. And the grandfather said, maybe, maybe good, maybe bad. And the next day, the little boy, he went out into the, into the countryside and he looked, he looked and he found a whole herd of horses and he brought all of the horses back and he put them in a corral and the people ran to the grandfather and said, oh, you're so blessed. You're so lucky. You now have a herd of horses. You're rich. And the grandfather said, maybe good, maybe bad. Now the next day, the boy went into the corral with all the horses. He wanted to train or pick one out. And you know what happened? Oh my goodness. The horses got scared and they stepped on him and they crushed his leg and his leg was no good anymore. And everyone ran to the grandfather and they said, this is so sad. Your only grandson, he has a squashed leg. And the grandfather said, maybe good, maybe bad. And the next day, the army came in and they took all the young men away that had, were able bodied and could walk. So the little boy was safe and he didn't have to go. So you see, when the grandfather, when something happens, maybe good, maybe bad, because maybe you think it's not good. But remember, you can trust the law because he plans things out and he makes sure you have everything that you need when you need. So isn't that a wonderful story? Already you know several things. You know your real self is a golden heart, right? You've all got a golden heart, right? What are you going to do? Yes? I liked that story. You like that story? Yeah, me too. I like the story too, because it teaches us a truth, you know, because we've all been told by our parents and we're told in the Quran, you have to trust God because he sends for you what you need. And then something happens, you say, oh no, I'm disappointed. I didn't want it to be that way. But remember three things. One, your real self is a golden heart. Two, God sends you difficulties. Like this little boy hurt his leg or we didn't get to go on the boat or the ants didn't get to go to the zoo.  You should wait and see and you should just trust the law. Can you all trust the law? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I had a baby chick that died, but then I came disappointed, but my dad dig the grave. Oh, that's beautiful. And sometimes I go around and look at it. That's wonderful. You know, we had some fish in my fish pond and they all died, but where do you think the fish went? We're going to the next world, aren't we? Well, so are the fish. You don't have to worry about your chicken. Hallelujah. The chicken is now at peace. You know? Yes. Yes. Yes. And my mom said it is maybe good is maybe bad. You see, but we're, yes, somebody else is that phase. Yes. I never knew that animals went to heaven. Everything returns to God. God brings everything into the world and everything goes back to him. And here's the boy's little horse right here. Now I want all of you see the girl drawing her golden heart. I want everyone to draw a golden heart on a piece of paper tomorrow. And whenever you see that something is happening that you don't like about yourself, you put a dot. Maybe you were not telling the truth and you could write that. Maybe you were lazy. Maybe you didn't help mom. Maybe you didn't share. So you can put the dots on your golden heart and then you can wipe them away. You can quit doing whatever it was. Now look at some of the things you're walking on your, your journey through life. And here's some of the things that try to get you. Okay. Can you see right there? There you, there's the heart walking down the street. Can everyone see the heart? Yes. Just lower than the heart. It says backbiting. Does anyone know what backbiting is? Yes. I know. What is it? It's something that you say something mean about someone and when they're not looking. That's right. And it's, it can also be called gossiping when people sit and talk about somebody who's not there. Just what you said. So that's backbiting. Do you know in Islam, it's one of the most horrible things you can do. Well, all of you promise me you're never going to talk about somebody behind their back. It's the worst. Do you know that if you're fasting in Ramadan, Imam al-Ghazali is a hadith of the prophet peace and blessings be upon him. And there was a lady, there was a lady and, and she asked the prophet, can I break my fast because, because I'm weak and old and tired. He said, you already broke your fast because you were talking badly about someone. So you see, it's not just fasting from food, you fast from backbiting and other things. Look at the other things that are happening here. The heart is walking down the path of life and above backbiting. What word do you see up there? What do you see? Pride. Do you know what pride is to be proud? Do people who show off and they're very proud? Have you ever met someone like that? Yes. Not very nice, is it? And then up above, bragging. Do you know people who brag? No. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Someone says, I have a better bike than you have. That's bragging and showing off. Do you like people who do that? No. No. You don't like people who do that, right? And then you have also that, up in the upper corner, it's called hypocrisy. That's, if you tell people to do something and you don't do it yourself, you tell somebody, stop lying, stop lying. Don't do that. And yet in your, you lie. So you, you, that is telling people to do what you don't do, pretending to be good when in, in your heart, you're doing something wrong. You're sneaking. And then down below, it says arguing. Do any of you argue? Yes. Do you like, when you hear people arguing, do you like that? No. Horrible. I don't. It's horrible. But sometimes you always don't. I'm going to lie. Yes. So if you don't like it, you wouldn't want to do it. If you don't like to listen to it, you wouldn't want to do it, would you? Yes. Don't do it. You know, pretty much every day. Oh yeah. Well, I tried to get out of them, but we continue doing it. Well, Imam al-Ghazali tells a story.  I'm getting dust. It gets dust on your golden heart, doesn't it? If you're bragging, if you're lying, if you're angry, if you backbite, that puts dust on your golden heart. But here's what you're going to do. If you're arguing, you can just suddenly stop. Just stop. You stop arguing and guess what happens. Allah builds you a special place in paradise for stopping arguing. And if you're right, if you're really right about what you're arguing about and you quit arguing, many special things happen for you. So next time you're arguing, think, what am I doing? I'm getting dust on my heart. I've got to stop and polish your heart. Just polish your heart. But how does Allah will give us a new place so we could live if we start arguing? Explain, say that one more time. I couldn't hear. How does Allah give us a new place to live if we start arguing? It's magical. We don't know. But this is what we hear from the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. But how do we don't know? Because it's invisible. Yeah, it's off now. So sorry about that. Very good. All right. So now, now what do you think these little girls are doing right now here? Sharing. Back fighting. Back fighting. Look at this. There's a little girl sitting on the bench. What are the girls doing behind her? They're whispering. Are they saying something bad about her? I think something bad. Now, those girls are getting lots of dirt on their heart. Your heart is like a mirror. If you get lots of dirt on it, it won't reflect light anymore, will it? Right? If it's covered with dirt. If you got a mirror and threw mud all over it, would the mirror be beautiful and reflect light? It wouldn't, would it? Yeah, it wouldn't unless you washed it. Well, that's the whole point.  If you do, let's say you do something wrong. You could go and say you're sorry, right? What if you were mean and didn't share, didn't share? Could you go to the person and say, I'm sorry? I'd like to share. Could you do that? And when you do that, it polishes the heart. Did you realize that? It'll polish it away. Then it's gone. Now, here's another idea from Imam al-Ghazali. See the heart there? Yeah. Your heart is like a house. All right. Let's picture. Everybody touch their hearts right now. Touch your hearts. Okay. Your heart is like a kind of house. And in it are lots of angels living in it. What happens if you have bad thoughts? They're like barking dogs. What's happening here? The barking dogs are scaring the angels away if you have bad thoughts. So if you have a bad thought, shouldn't you try to change it and have a good thought? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to tell you something about thoughts. This is important to understand. Do you know Imam al-Ghazali says, if you have a good thought, do it right away. Because if you don't do it right away, all these little whispering ideas come. Let's say you're watching TV and you have a good thought. Go and help mommy. What are some of the thoughts that will creep in? Don't help mommy. Just watch TV. What you have to do is, if you have the bad thoughts, push them away and just stand up. Whatever your first good thought was, do it right away. Let's say I'm driving down the street and I pass a nursing home where there's some old people and I have a thought, oh, I should go and visit them, right? And then I think, oh no, I'll just do it another day. What should I have done when I had the thought? Go and visit them. The first good thoughts in your life. That's right. And once I had a friend, he was old and he lived in another country. He lived in England and every day I had a thought. Telephone him and the next, and I thought, oh, I can't do it today. Next day, telephone him and the next day. And I kept finding reasons to not do it right away. And the third day when I telephoned, what happened? He had died the day before. So I had a thought. Where was that thought coming? It was coming from a law telling me it comes from the best part of your heart saying, do the right thing. So when you all have a good thought, right? Do it right away. And you can play a game. Here's a game you can all do. You can get with your brother or sister or friends. And one of you say, I have a good thought and say what it is. And the other ones can pretend to be the bad thoughts. Oh, don't do it. Don't help mommy. Don't help that person. And you all can play games. You can say, you can each play a game tomorrow. Give a good thought and then give some of the thoughts that you get that make you not do it. And if you start doing this, you know what will happen? You'll always notice. Say, I'm sitting, I'm having thoughts. Thoughts just come in like clouds. And now if a thought like help mother comes, it's like ringed and bright yellow. Oh, yes, it's a real good thought. I better do it now. Will you all promise to do that when the good thoughts come? Absolutely. Yeah.  Yeah. If they saved your life. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Here's a question.  Wouldn't you thank them too? Yes. If your mother reminds you to do something good, thank her for reminding you, right? Yeah.  So you're really lucky to have their help. Now, did you know you have three selves? Okay. Let's look at them. Look at the picture here, all right? Over on the left, you have a low self and it thinks of me, me, me. I'm hurt. I don't like her. I'm unhappy. I'm not going to help. That's the lower self, right? And then you have here your real self, the real, the golden heart and then you have another part that scolds. It's called the nafs alawama. Let's say you're thinking I'm going to get up and go in the kitchen and help mummy. That's the real self. And then the lower self says, no, I'm not going to do that.  So you have a conversation going on all the time.  Do you see her lying in bed? The mummy is coming in and she's saying, get up, wake up for school. Does that ever happen to you?  Yeah. I don't like it because I like it. No, you don't like it. So look at this. On the left side, it says the lower self. The low, you're lying in bed and you say, I'm going to pretend I didn't hear. I'm going to pretend I'm asleep. That's the low self. Okay.     Yes. Yes.  So children, when you sketch yourself thinking you want to do the pretend or not help, just watch that lower self. But who is your real self? The golden heart or the low self? Golden heart. That's your real. That's the real self. And if it gets dirt on it, like if you pretend or anything, so you don't want to get any dirt, you want to keep your heart polished and golden, right? Yeah. So, so let me see. Oh, here's a mother. Also, see this grandmother here and she's teaching. She's a teacher. All right. Now, grandmother is teaching. And this is a little girl and she's a good kind of teacher too. Do you know, do you ever copy people the way they do things? Have you ever copied anybody? No. Like I sometimes, a girl does her hair like, so I copy that, right? Or you see your friend has this kind of toy. You want to have that too, right? Maybe they have Legos. You want to copy that, right? So, yeah, we all are copying each other, children. We're all copying each other. So if we're copying each other, all right, every time you do something, think, do I want, is this something I want somebody to copy? Right? You don't want, just imagine anything you're doing and thinking, oh my goodness, what if somebody copied me right now, right? And I'm talking about two kinds of trees. You see the straight tree and then you see the bent tree, right? Yeah. A straight tree. If the sun is shining on it, what kind of a shadow comes behind a straight tree? A straight shadow, right? And if you have a bent tree that's all like this, what's a shadow look like? If you're doing things correctly, you're like a straight tree, right? And people, your shadow, people will copy your straight shadow. But if you do things all crumpled up and bent, people will copy something bent. You don't want to do that, do you? No, no, no. No, no, no. Never, never. So now what I'd like to do is just me finish this. Oh, see, look at this. This is a tree in my front yard. I can look out in the morning and see that. Isn't that beautiful? And look at the shadow. That's a beautiful tree. And I've loved it my whole life. I'm living in my father's house where I lived as a little girl and the tree has gotten very, very big. So do we want to be like straight, beautiful trees? Yes, yes, yes.  Something you do that you want people to copy. Okay, everybody say something. Go ahead. One way. I'm a Girl Scout. Okay, a Girl Scout.  Exactly. One way to be a straight, beautiful tree is to follow your golden heart. You do the good deed, more people will follow your good deed. So do you sell a lot of fond of profit today? That's all of that. And then that's what you'd like people to copy. Can you make an example of helping people? Yes, that's a great idea, helping people. And sharing. Be kind. Be kind, yes. Be kind. Yes, listen to your mom. Listen to your family. Is it helping? You sell a lot of fond of profit last time. Exactly. Also, if people want to buy like the trees, money for him or even give money for him. Another way to be a straight, beautiful tree is by showing people who are young how to be generous and care about people who are sad. So you're giving them empathy. That's giving them empathy. Oh, you all know a lot. Your parents and your family have been teaching you so many things, having faith. And doing good deeds, giving people respect. And also doing good deeds are also and the bad thoughts are coming from Shaitan. Yeah, that's the, yeah.  My family goes to this community fridge where anyone can take the stuff for free. Oh, how nice. We take the food that we don't like, that we don't need, and we don't like want to have it. It's in the fridge for the good things that we need. So we just give it to the community fridge for poor people. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Well, it sounds interesting. It sounds to me like you all have golden hearts.  So I would like to be thankful. It would be thankful. That's really true, isn't it? You can get pets from the cell. You can get pets that need rescuing. I have a question. Yes, please ask the question. Yes. When is our class going to end? In five minutes. Is that good for you? Okay. Are you tired? You've had a long day? Yeah. I think you have.  So here's what I'm going to ask. Don't interrupt. What? Don't interrupt. Yes. Could everybody, before we go, would everyone tell one thing that they want to polish off their heart? Just one thing that they're going to polish away. Now we'll start. One person speaks at a time. Okay. I see somebody is yawning because the children are tired. Okay. Give me one thing you want.  I would think you should start to quit arguing. Very good. Quit arguing. That's a good one. One. Okay. Good. Somebody else. I hope your mother in the kitchen. Yeah. It's hard to do that sometimes, isn't it? You'd rather stay in your room and play. You can rescue a dog. Rescue a dog. Yes. Rescue a bunny. Listen to your parents. Very nice. Yes. Lovely. Helping people. Can we say they can? Helping people and doing other kind things. That's wonderful. Helping with my sister. You see, that's a very good point. You could put that on your heart.  Oh, helping your mother with laundry. How wonderful. Does anyone ever help set the table? Me? I set the table. You set the table. My goodness. I help my mom set the table. I am just making it a good thing. So I just, at night, I'm kind of crazy because at one o'clock, one at the night, I'm like, it's amazing.  You can try to rescue animals. Yes. That's great. And that is, wait, I have to put my glasses on. That is, Maria. And Robbie. Helping with my sister. Very nice.  Marisa. Say, Dick. Yes. Could you speak? The one who raised her hand? I raised my hand. Yes. What would you like to say? What are you planning to polish your heart? To polish my heart, I'm going to, like, I have a, my friend's cat has been, like, almost injured. I helped that cat. Oh, that's so nice. That's so nice. That's so nice. So I think what we'll do is we'll review. We'll just do a little review. I'll ask you. We started by saying, right, that there are two kinds of learning. One is normal learning and what is the real, real learning? What's that about? Question. Yes. What's the question? Um, uh, my question, um, was that actually I have a comment. A comment. I'd love a comment. Yes. I like people to do equal stuff and people to not do bad equal stuff. Oh, how nice. And I think I should be kind. Yes. You see, you already are. We already are golden hearts. We don't have to become golden hearts. Everybody is a golden heart. We just have, but dust gets on the heart. We just have to keep it polished. So a bad thought comes or you make a mistake. You can always say you're sorry and that polishes it off, doesn't it? You know? Yes. Yeah. And so another question. If a disappointment comes, if you thought you were going to be doing something and then it doesn't work out or maybe you were expecting something and it doesn't happen, are you going to be upset and mad? Or are you going to trust a law? A law has it all figured out. He's taking care of, you know? And so you just have to wait and see. Oh, it's so important for me to go to the zoo today. But how do you know that there's not some reason you shouldn't go to the zoo? Sometimes. Do you get disappointed sometimes? Yes. I was disappointed. I was disappointed when my baby chick died. Oh, I know. I know. I know. That's very sad. I have a question. Yes. So whenever I think of bad thought, I can't ever get the good start to win before the bad start gets too strong. How do I stop this from happening? Well, when you notice you have a bad thought, just say, go away. Go away, bad thought. Right? That's all you do. Just go away. It's not really you.  It's not you. It's just, it's a chance for you to polish your heart. Just say I'm going to polish it away. All right? Can I share how I would polish my heart? I would love that. Okay. So I thought of reading Quran. And that's my thought, number one. That's great. That's great. My name is Zoya, but that's my mom's name. That's on. I see. Okay. Nice to meet you, Zoya. I have a question. Yes. Reek and share. This is sad. Can you disable the chat? Because people are using it and doing faces that is distracting me. Oh dear. Oh, oh dear. Yeah. So let's talk about next week. We're going to talk about the very special, magical way to make wudu and to pray. Do any of you do wudu and pray? Uh, sometimes. I do. Yes, I do. I do. I do it all the time. Good. Well, we want to be thinking about it for next week. Next Wednesday evening, we're going to talk about it and we're going to do it every time. You do it. Okay. That's very good. We're going to learn all about a magical story that goes with it. And somebody had a question. Was it Zaynib? Who is it who had the question? I did. Yes. What is your question? I have something to say. We saw a picture of a lost cat. And we think we can try to find it. Oh, I hope you do. I hope you do.  Could I say hello to some of the mothers and fathers? Yeah, my mom is right there. My mom is his. Hi, how are you? Selamu alaikum. Selam. I'm so happy to meet you. This is so nice. We're together. We are so glad. Mashallah. Jazakallah here for putting so much effort in project. Oh, loving it. You know, I wrote this for my grandchildren. And I thought I was writing it for my grandchildren, but I was really writing it for myself because, you know, Islam is very, very deep. And sometimes we don't understand why we're doing certain things. And we need to understand deeply so that we can love what we do. And I simply want the children to take charge of their own hearts, dear children, your golden hearts. It's your life and your hearts. Nobody's going to police you. You can pretend to be doing anything, but it's your heart and you want it to be beautiful and golden. And so everybody's going to take care of their hearts and keep a golden heart, draw it, and everybody put dots, you know, that you notice and then you can polish them away. All right. Can you put black dots? You could. Black dots are like, or even gray. I don't know what to put because gray and black are basically the same colors that make your heart dirty or anything else. They can be because you were angry, because you were arguing, because you were not kind, because you didn't share. And we just want you to keep your golden hearts pure at all times, right?  Every day there's a chance something happens. You can be upset. You can be kind. You're giving a chance every five minutes to polish your heart. And that's what we're doing with our lives. We're trying to make our hearts completely shining. So by the end of our lives, our hearts are just all of light. So I think, I think everybody, yes, Walaikum Salaam, where are you? My name is Amir and this is Ali. Oh, nice to meet you. Yeah, thank you so much for doing this. It's been very beneficial so far. The next two sessions, we actually don't have the book. Do you recommend getting the book and following along? Or do you think this is enough? The books would be very good. My son realized that we should package together the whole, all the children's books together. And a new book just came out on the hodge. I since the COVID starting, I've been working on this. I made two hodges in my life and about 200 umras. And until I did the hodge book for children using Imam al-Ghazali's book, I had no idea what I was doing. It was like overwhelmingly beautiful because it's not just a pilgrimage to the next world, you know, in the pilgrimage. It's the way we should be living in this life. It's really so profound. And so right now we've put together a package of all the children's books without the adult books.  You know, the book of knowledge, we published 8,000. And they're nearly all gone. And they're very expensive to print. And if you were wise, as a family, you would get the step to have them. Yeah. I'm just saying this because it's been so helpful to me, you know, to be able to have my, to be able to understand what I'm doing in my religious life. Yeah. Where can we be able to buy the books? Oh, we'll send you a parents a link so they can get some special deal on it, you know. But it's useful for you to have because it's useful for parents too, you know. And thank you so much for the wonderful lectures and teaching our kids. And inshallah, we as parents are learning as well. And inshallah, we look forward to polishing our hearts as well. Well, it's, it's, we're all together doing this. Absolutely. We're all together doing it. And I learned so much from these books because I became a Muslim of about 50 years ago, more than 50, more like 60, right. And then in New York City and then my husband and I, we traveled over to Morocco and drove in a car all the way across the desert to Cairo and to study at Azhar University.  She was born in Libya. Libya had a king then. So, so she was born. We named her Hajar. And then we reached Cairo and we studied there at Azhar Fik and Tajweed and Ahadith. And after 10 years of that, we moved to England and opened up something called the Islamic Tech Society because we wanted to publish books that were beautiful, you know, on Islam. And we started publishing my sister, Al Ghazali in 1981 that they had 40 years ago with Abdul Hakim Winter. I've been publishing scholarly works and I tried to read them. They were too hard for me. So that's how the children's project came about. Hamza Yusuf said we really need something that children can enjoy and gives them everything they need, right? That's deep. But the same books work for parents because it's just an adult book made in simpler form. But I mean, I can, I can read adult scholarly books, but I don't know how to bring them into my life and see my life through them. But these books for children have made it, I mean, we talk in our minds the language of children. We don't talk. And so these books have actually given me everything I needed. It's a complete mercy and blessing from Allah. Mashallah. I have ordered one the first book, but inshallah, I plan to get all the books. And just read them straight through. Just read them straight through. Yes. I just wanted to say I want to become a vet. You want to become what? A vet. Oh, a vet. I bet that's the best thing in the world to take care of animals. That's a wonderful, wonderful thing to do. Bless your heart. That's great. I have one more question. Yes. I mentioned the adult books along with the children's book. What are the adult books about? Is the situation the same for adults? What it is. Al-Ghazali wrote 40 books. And it's called the Ahia Al-Lumideen, The Revival of Religious Science. And in which Hamza Yusuf said it's like the Quran in a usable form, starting with what is learning, which we began today, and ending with death, 40 books going through the entire faith. He wrote these in Arabic and they're in Persian too. And over the past 30 or 40 years, we've been trying to bring out the best translations possible and the highest and best English through the best scholars. And in 2011, I'm sure this is very boring for the children, but they can be bored for a minute. Hamza Yusuf, a new edition came out in Jeddah from the Dar al-Munhaj press, the latest critical edition in Arabic. So we've taken that edition and we give a scholar, let's say the book of knowledge you just looked at. We take that Arabic and we give it to a top scholar who knows the inwards and they put it into English. And then while that's being perfected, that's the adult book, I took the manuscript and circled all the key points. Those are what you were getting tonight. And then said them in a language that a children or even I can understand. You can a lot of parents read the children's book first and then they read the book from which it was taken. So I mean, you can order all of those books. There's a special where the adult books come with them too. Have you translated all the 40 books for adults or just part of those? We're getting there. We started in 1980 and here it is 2020. We've got about eight or nine to go. For the children I'm going to do after I'm going to do the book 20, which is the prophetic values. I'm going to do the marvels of the heart. I'm going to do, inshallah, one on Tawheed and Tawakal and then the last one on death. Hamza Yusuf said to do this for children so that they will have everything. But you can read the adult books for yourselves. They're very deep and very profound. Thank you. Thank you so much. Alhamdulillah. Well, I think the children are, I'm seeing people yawning and tired. So why don't we say a mini salams to each other and we'll get together next Wednesday evening and yes. Can I introduce my dad? Yes. As-salamu alaikum. Wa alaikum salam. Where is dad? I don't see you but maybe you're there somewhere. Are you with me? Where are you? Come here. As-salamu alaikum. How are you? Yes, now? Probably not. But anyway, my video is not working but thank you for kind effort and may Allah give you a reward for this. I really, really appreciate it and be both learning. Your lecture is really awesome. Great job. Thank you. Thank you. You know, it's so simple, isn't it? That we all have the fitra and we're given opportunities with our difficulties every day to keep it shining and to prepare it and we don't have to the children. Nobody has to worry about death. There's only the next world and that we're all supposed to be good teachers and watch our thoughts. You know, it's not really that hard, is it, the ideas? You know? So that's why we're on a journey together. The children and you and I and all of us parents were all together. So I'll let you all go now and I'll see you in a week. Salamu alaikum.


Live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's the Q, covering the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium. Now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillan. Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Paul Gillan. We're here at the MIT IQ Information Quality. It's the CDO conference that's, I think in its ninth year, Paul, it's not brain surgery or is it? Nick Marco is here at Sigma Horizon. He's the Chief Data Officer of Geisinger Health System. What do you think about that, Paul? We're having a fascinating discussion off-camera because Nick is a brain surgeon who is also a data scientist or a CDO and which naturally begs the question, how does that happen? How do you get from one to the other? So it is an interesting story. So my initial training was in clinical medicine and I'm a clinical neurosurgeon. I still practice. I do neurosurgical oncology, so I operate on brain and spine tumors on a regular basis. I had always been sort of a math, science, technology sort of guy. When I was in undergrad and medical school, my research focus was in molecular biology. So this was back in 2003 toward the end of the human genome time and I spent a year doing Howard Hughes Fellowship at the Institute for Genomics Research where they were finishing up human genome sequencing at the time and I worked with the microarray gene expression group and it was an interesting mix because I went there for the molecular biology part of things and the laboratory-based side of things, but the other half of the group that I was working with wrote software and did the analytics for those large volumes of data. So those were really the first big data or large data sets that we saw in biomedical sectors where these expression arrays or these sequence data from the genome and so the process of how do you analyze those both from a computing standpoint and from an algorithmic standpoint was just starting to be fleshed out. So actually fell in love with the work that the computing group was doing also and the math behind all of that analytics. So I continued to work on that throughout med school and working on sort of the interface between cancer genomics and clinical medicine and once my residency was done I did my residency training at Cleveland Clinic in neurosurgery and once that was finished by that time it wasn't just molecular biology type data or computational biology work. We're starting to see larger volumes of clinical data be available and it was just sort of a natural progression of things saying well if we have these techniques for computing on big amounts of data it doesn't so much matter what the data is you know we're going to be able to put more and more together and that was when the term big data was starting to get popularized and other such things so it was just sort of a logical extension of that. And then because I didn't have you know formal training in the computational side of things or the mathematical side of things most of what I learned was kind of self taught to do the work I needed to do. So I took a year at the end of my residency went to the UK and studied at Cambridge for a year with their applied math department and with Cancer Research UK to bring myself up to speed on that because I think you know I'll never be as good of a mathematician as somebody who spent their life doing it but if you're a clinician who can speak that language and know how to find good mathematicians and good computationalists and know how to pose questions well to them then they can take over from there and do what they do really well and it makes a good synergy but as physicians we're not really used to talking to data people or math people and vice versa. So I think that's kind of the niche that I occupy is that that piece in the middle that helps bring the compute side together with the with the clinical side. So after that I went to Geisinger Health System where I'm at now and started doing computational neuroscience research in addition to clinical neurosurgery and that kind of grew as our informatics division expanded and we took it institution wide and so now I do a couple things I do clinical neurosurgery I'm our organization's chief data officer that's a role that's just emerged for us over the last year or so from from the idea that we want to make a more strategic commitment to how we leverage the data that we've had because Geisinger's had electronic medical records for 20 plus years one of the oldest systems in the country to have that and so we have a lot of data sitting around and we were doing some really good stuff with it but we realized there was a lot more we could do if we're a little more strategic about how we build our infrastructures how we make it accessible that kind of thing so that's where the CDO role came from at Geisinger and then the other thing that I did was take my computational neuroscience group and scale it up to an organization wide data science group and and we focus on sort of the large computational problems so basically three three functions but it's great because you know on any given day I spend part of my time in the hospital part of my time talking about our data strategy part of my time looking at actual data related problems and in every one of those spheres I get to interact with people who are really expert in each of those subsections and it's a great place to kind of be in the middle of all of that so how was the decision made to put a practitioner in the chief data officer so it's interesting I'm just lucky I guess we talked about it for a little while and I was actually one of the people that proposed that we create a chief data officer role and so I think by default I won but yeah that sounds like a great idea but you know it's interesting because as with as with any organizational change or with any sort of creation of a new role there are some people that say wow that's a great idea there are other people that say what do we need that for I don't even know what that is and there are some people that are sort of in the middle and so when we finally collected a critical mass of people saying we should define some role to focus on data strategy and how that integrates with the patient side of things right so I mean the business of health care and the goal of health care is really to provide good care to patients so it's a very patient focused thing it's a very clinician focused thing and so if you're going to make a strategy about your data I think it makes good sense to say how do we focus that that strategy on the people who really need it our doctors and our patients and so putting a clinician in that role I think is a kind of a neat and forward-thinking kind of angle on that and I'm just lucky that you know Geisinger's willing to have a clinician spend part of their time doing that kind of thing because they recognize the potential value of leveraging the information for the patients and for the delivery of care we hear so much about the potential big data in medicine to revolutionize health care what are some some potential breakthroughs or or some sort of short term deliverables short term outcomes that you the particularly site you about the potential combining clinical data with big data right so I think there's a couple of interesting parts to that question so the first part of that question is when we're talking about combining types of data clinical data with big data and other such things the question is where does one stop and the other begin so in many sectors there are you know they'll have one or two key types of data that they use maybe it's sensor data from some sort of engineering process or something like this and just you know volumes of this stuff are created hundreds of terabytes of information and that's truly a large data problem because you've just got a lot of data to manage and comb through in health care our big data challenge is a little bit different so we have plenty of of data sets that are small in terms of size right you can fit someone's entire clinical chart into maybe 50 megabytes worth of storage space because it's just a bunch of text based notes and binary variables but then you've got something like the genome for those patients that may occupy one or two terabytes of storage space and then you've got something in the middle like clinical imaging data that may occupy a few gigabytes or you know 10 or 20 or 30 gigabytes of raw image so now what you've got is you know some very discreet clinical information in one format you've got a little bit larger free text type of information all the notes that doctors are in such you've got a larger set of data and imaging data and other such things with a very different structure and then now you've got a much larger genomic set of data so the question for us has really been how do you combine those things to do something interesting and important for the patient and so that I think speaks to the first part of your question which is how do you combine clinical data with big data for me I don't really know where one starts in the other one stops because how big does it have to be to be big data how small does it have to be to just be clinical data we view it as a spectrum of data sizes and structures and types so the first challenge is really how do you put those things together and that's a data engineering challenge to put it all together in the same place that's an infrastructural challenge to figure out how you're going to be able to move that data and analyze and compute on it and then it's a data science challenge to figure out what are the right algorithms that can take those different kinds of data and how do you put it together and answer questions from it so that's kind of the background answer to the question and then the second part was what are the specific interesting things that you think can happen from that short term and long term so I think there's a lot of low lying fruit that we can get at in the short term by simply combining a couple of simple data types and data sets together in ways that we haven't been able to do so before so this can be anything from patient specific predictive modeling so a good example of this is everyone's talking about you know first was personalized medicine and now it's precision medicine and other such things but the idea is how do we take this set of data that we have about an individual and make a prediction for them about what sort of medication should I give you what drug are you likely to respond to which of these three treatment options should I pick right the challenge with that has always been that you need a little bit more than what we always looked at for clinical trial data which is a couple of thousand patients with 20 or 30 variables now what I need to do is switch that to a patient centric view so I'm looking at an individual patient with lots of variables spread out over time and then to really be able to compare and compute on those I need to look at a couple of thousand or couple hundred thousand patients like that simply because the data structure is different so now because we're starting to be able to use bigger bigger data we can look at this from patient centric standpoint instead of a population centric standpoint and when you do that you start to be able to identify predictive models that are much better at predicting individual survival in response to therapy and the medical literature starting to see that already they're not terribly computationally difficult questions but because we can now deal with the data structure those are really what I think in my mind represents a lot of the low lying fruit of where these you know where we can get some early wins from this and make it very patient centric and patient specific the other part of that is operational or procedural things so the the the process of running a hospital of moving patients from one place to another of how you schedule or how you time things all the logistics of being treated as a patient this is really important to patients because it's part of their experience of going through the health care system right and everybody knows at some point that they've been stuck in a doctor's office waiting for a long time or they've been in the hospital had three or four different people who don't seem to be completely talking to each other and know exactly what's going on I think from a process standpoint we can now start to integrate the data about what happens to a patient as a result of being in the hospital and also how the patients respond to that and try to optimize those processes so that the the whole experience of health care delivery is is improved in addition to just the picking of a drug or the picking of a therapy and then in the long term I think we're looking at sort of bigger problems in both in those areas and beyond so one of the big projects going on at Geisinger and in a lot of other places is capturing a lot of genomic and molecular information and so now we're saying in the long term how can we take somebody's entire genome sequence and combine that with all of the other pieces and start to get some sense of how the individual is going to respond to treatments what the individual's risk profile looks like over the long term and that's not going to be something that we solve in the next year or two but it's going to take a lot of sort of iterating and observing and looking at new data types and computing in new ways and so I think they're going to be longer term wins that come out of particularly the genomic side of things because that's a data type that is very different in some ways than what we've been working with for a while and the process of integrating it with clinical data still has a lot of development to go on but that's where I think a lot of our longer term ones are looking at technologies like machine learning and like IBM Watson that that are really targeting these these kinds of problems potentially dealing with much larger data sets and humans could ever comprehend does that excite you do you see a lot of opportunity in applying these absolutely absolutely so it's not entirely clear to me exactly which technologies will prove to be the most valuable or which won't I think we're still very much in an exploratory phase we know that there are some algorithms some machine learning technologies and approaches that work very well on this kind of data with the limitations that we have and the structures they have and some that are easily tricked by that so I think it's an exciting time to be in this phase because my data science team for instance looks at these fundamental questions which algorithms should be picked to work on which kinds of data how do we know that when we put it into a black box machine learning kind of algorithm what we're getting out as a reflection of reality and not an easily you know some way that the machine learning algorithm is easily tricked so there's there's plenty of work to do in that domain but I think it only stands to reason that if we can put a lot more information in and we can compute on it in a way that the true patterns are really spotted then there's you know there's got to be something more that we can do then you know than just what we've been able to traditionally get by observing a few hundred patients over a couple of months or a year or two so I think it's a great opportunity there's a lot of great challenges in it both for physicians and for computationalists and mathematicians right now and I think as we get these things sorted out we're going to see a lot of differences at the point of care delivery for the patient somebody made the comment today and the Q&A and one of the keynotes of HIPAA has so many outdated you know pieces to it as you think about patient specific prediction what has to change from a sort of policy perspective so I think that there's always the balance between protecting patient privacy and wanting to get as much data as possible we know that when we're when we're using these sort of machine learning algorithms the more that we put into them the more it can learn about the differences and more that it can get out the flip side to that coin is you know if you're patient you want to be careful about where all of your information goes who has access to it what they use it for and how they compute on it so I think there's always a balance between privacy and availability of data that said as a clinician from working with patients I found that most patients are pretty willing to share their information particularly when it comes to research type questions and things where you say we're really trying to do something better for the group as a whole do you mind if we include your information with it very rarely do I encounter anybody who says no I have a real problem with that you know so I think the HIPAA privacy rules are well-meaning well-intentioned because the idea is you don't want your personal health information floating around but I think we have to make it a little bit easier for people who want to share their data to do so without having to jump through a lot of hoops and there's a lot of artificial concern about HIPAA there's a lot of liability that's coded into that law that makes physicians and researchers say you know what I'm maybe we won't do this or maybe we won't tackle that because you can be you know individually liable for things and it's just very concerning but I think as we get as we get around some of that we're going to find that what it really is important the patients really want to share their information to help the the general cause and and I think you know the doctors wanted the patients wanted it'll sort itself out HIPAA HIPAA is almost 20 years old and it was it was invented at a time when none of the technology exists to do with the this data what we can do now and it's actually maybe holding holding us back sort of in that realm we've been talking about clinical applications of big data but there are also applications to the business and to reducing health care costs and ended just attacking that whole problem what do you see there that you think what are the big opportunities you see in in tackling the cost problem so I think there are huge opportunities in tackling the cost problem I think any clinician that you talk to or anybody who spends time in the hospital will tell you that if you walk around on a daily basis you see areas of waste you see areas of opportunity for process improvement and other such things the challenge is how do you convert all of those anecdotes you know where you observe one event here you say oh look how this process is you know is taking up extra time how do you convert all of that into some sort of unified structure or larger framework in which you can study those well it's been traditionally very difficult because sure there may be a bunch of time stamps recorded for how patients move through certain areas or there may be a variety of pieces of a paperwork trail as a claim moves through the processing pathway but unless you have a real context for studying those things and a real way to pull all that information together those those little one-off things that everyone sees and observes on a daily basis never really get converted to a large pattern or a large set of of common observations that can that can be acted upon so I think the ability to combine a lot of these kind of nontraditional data types so things like log file data things like time stamps on on the way that patients move and to look at environmental variables and other such things are really where we're going to be able to target at least some important strategies for cost reduction and efficiency improvement and those are the exact kind of data that we never really paid attention to before as clinicians so it's not uncommon for instance in a healthcare system to have an electronic medical record where you pay careful attention to all of the patient specific data that's collected but then as a byproduct of that there's just scores of log files that are created that people just ignore or put on the shelf in case they ever need to query them for something I think there's a lot of great value in those log files and those time stamps and other such things but we just always very difficult to get your arms around those and do anything with them and I think you know infrastructures like Hadoop and big data architectures and the ability to analyze those things now and in mass creates a lot of opportunity for process improvement that leads to cost reduction how about adverse drug interactions it's one of the biggest killers of patients in hospitals I understand do you see a promise in the near term for getting a better picture of how patients will respond to different medication yeah absolutely so you know so the the initial problem of adverse drug reactions come you know from say mixing drugs or cross reactivities or whatever is a problem that's nicely dressed by sort of traditional electronic medical record relational database thing because it's easy for the computer to look at every medication you're on compute every possible interaction then worn the clinician without the physician having to think about it but when it comes to patient specific reactions to drugs right it's often difficult to predict if you're going to be the one in a thousand patients who has this one terrible reaction to this drug or something like this right so that's not easily solved by traditionally MR structures however if you've got you know instances of millions of patients nationwide receiving certain drugs you know statistically there's going to be a handful of patients or 10s or 20s or 100 who've had this adverse reaction and now that we can go back and look at their entire medical record and can capture their data we can really start to spot patterns that probably we never would have recognized as clinicians that can raise alarm bells or can make us say hey you know when you see this and this and this co-occurring that really would raise your suspicion for this but as an you know as an individual physician who's got to see you know who sees maybe one or two of these really weird adverse reactions over the course of your career you never have the opportunity to spot a pattern like that so that you know the larger data infrastructures really do hold a lot of potential for that I think we're just about out of time Nicholas but I wanted to ask you about your your CDO role you're establishing a guy singer I presume at some point it becomes a full-time job for somebody so what's your what's your vision as to where you take this thing yeah that's a that's a great question so and this is something that we talk about from time to time how much clinical work should someone do versus how much administrative work should someone do and everybody's got a different perspective on this so my take is I think there's real value to having somebody who's in these in any executive leadership role in health care whether it's chief data officer chief operating officer chief medical officer or whatever you know having some clinical presence that they maintain because the biggest value that I get in doing my job as CDOL is from walking you know in the same shoes as the clinicians practicing medicine and seeing patients every day I know what's important to the clinicians I know it's important to the patients and I know the problems that people are having because I live it you know every day of the week in some way or another I think that doesn't mean that you have to at some point scale back and say well it's a big job I can't do this anymore I think the key is building a good team around right so I don't try to do every part of the job myself you know we've got people who are really great at data governance at data infrastructure at data integration etc etc and you know my role as CDO I think is to coordinate these pieces and focus them on the real-world problems that I see every day in the in the the clinical setting so I think you almost don't my opinions you almost don't want to scale back to be a full-time administrator or full-time executive if you're in health care because it takes you away from the point of care delivery and from the daily patient interaction that helps guide these things the trick is to just focus on the strategic parts focus on the putting the pieces together part and then build a good team around you that doesn't so that's how I think we're trying to do it and and I'll let you know next year how excellent Nicholas Marco thanks very much for coming to the queue was great story thanks everyone right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break this is the cube we're live from MIT IQ and Cambridge Massachusetts