Hi everybody, thank you very much for having me here. It's really an honor to be invited. Thank you to Kaladar Bapu. I apologize if I, which were the name. It's very challenging for me, especially on West Coast time. So it's, we are now 12 and a half hours in the future of where I work. So I feel that if I could do my research here, I would actually have better insights than most of my teams back home and I could tell them what the future looks like. So thank you so much for the wonderful introduction. I really appreciate it. The talk today is really about embracing a team approach to research in the agile world. And before I get into that, I want to just tell you a little bit about myself to help explain a dilemma that I find myself in day-to-day, although not as much now in my job at Salesforce. I'm a kind of classically trained human factors engineer, cognitive psychologist, and systems engineer. My degree is in engineering psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Perhaps maybe some of you have heard of it. I started my life out doing basic research, building cognitive models and studying visual perception and understanding how people understood their world when they read and also when they looked at scenes. We did a lot of eye-tracking research back in the 1980s to build models of human information processing. Over the years, I got more interested in decision-making, started looking at display design, started exploring how people understand data and making insights from data. That's where I work now. I'm an analytics user experience doing research, which is just a fascinating world to be in. I've always had a lifelong interest in learning. I study how people learn and how people understand things. Because of this background, I think, I have a dilemma. That dilemma when I work with my product teams is that I, as a classically trained researcher, am coming to teams that have a number of pressures on them every day. Many of you know this because this is the world that you live in. In Agile at Salesforce, we work typically in one and two-week sprints, sometimes longer, but kind of a traditional sprint cadence. We have, in my mind, that's a pretty short development cycle. We have cross-functional teams. They all want a greater understanding of the end users and their context of use and their goals and their pain points as Adam so eloquently stated in the opening keynote today. Also, for me, the challenge is they want just-in-time answers. They have requests that say things like, we need to make a critical decision and, oh, by the way, we're going to start working on it in the next sprint, which starts next week. And we're going to close that sprint in under a month from now. And so we'd like to have answers by then. As a researcher, that just makes me crazy because I want to do research that's comprehensive. I want validation of my results. I want to minimize bias. I want to improve my likelihood of actually understanding what's really going on. So that's really, really difficult. Meanwhile, my team just wants to implement before we fully understand the problem. It's like, hey, just give us a hint of what to do. It's like, no, we can do better than hints. So how can we improve research and understanding for our teams, especially working in rapid development environments? I'm going to ask you to look at an image. It's an illusion, so there's nothing hidden here. For those of you who've seen this before, please don't shout it out. I'll ask for your help in a moment. For people who haven't seen this before, I'd like you to think about what you see from this image. So just take a moment, look at the image. Now, show of hands. How many people who don't know what this is think you see what this is? Okay, so under half, it's kind of hard for me to see this entire side of the audience because there's like a sun in my face. So I trust that some hands are probably up. So for people, somebody who raised their hand, can you just say what you think it is? Dog. So we have a lot of people saying dog. How many people do not see a dog? Awesome, that's great because the illusion actually is supposed to be a dog. Now for somebody, I heard dog from over here. Can you explain where you see the dog? Where's the dog located in this screen? Right side toward the center, right side toward the center. Do people who don't see it start to see a dog? Anybody starting to see a dog? What if I told you the dog was a Dalmatian, right?  What if I told you the head was toward the middle and the head's kind of down, kind of like grazing almost like a cow, which is awesome to see here in India. This is still my most favorite thing about visiting India, seeing cows on the streets. And for people who can't see it, if I maybe put a shadow around it like here, to get a sense of where that is, how many people now are pretty sure you see a dog here? If you don't keep your hands down, it's fine. Okay, so with a team approach, we can improve the greater overall understanding of the team. If everybody's involved in research and understanding our research needs, we're never going to have 100% understanding, but we can always improve how much understanding we have. We can get a greater understanding of our user needs, goals, context of use, also the opportunities that we have as designers of solutions for those folks, and a better understanding of what we don't know. Say, oh, this person in QE still doesn't see the dog. What can we do to help her? This person, the person in design doesn't see the dog. How can we help him? So here's another way that research can improve thinking. We're going to do an activity. Anybody who's taken a college psychology class, you're about to experience something you've already experienced before. I want to ask you how accurately you can read. Specifically, we're going to look at these colors. So let's just do a favor and if we can start at the top and go to the bottom. So let's start reading. So it's yellow, red, blue, and black. So now you know what the colors look like. All right, we're going to do this a little bit more colors, a little faster. Go to the left-hand side at the top and just start up there and we're going to go down. I'll start with you. So it's yellow, red. Okay, now go to the right-hand side and continue. Red. Okay, great. And I'm not trying to preach a sermon. I don't need everyone to be in sync. I just want you to feel what that was like mentally as you did that.  And even though you know what's coming, it's not going to make it any better. I'm going to ask you to say the colors. Don't read the words. Ignore the words. Just say the colors. Let's start at the top. Yellow. Now let's go to the right-hand side. The first color is green. That is awesome. So I don't know what your experience was like, but I heard a lot more uniformity at the beginning. And then when we got to this screen, everything kind of fell apart. It's like there's lots of different speeds and the speed was inconsistent.  What are you doing to me, Steve? Why did we invite you here? So this is, I think, a great example of how engaging in a team approach can help us by improving what Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize economist and psychologist, calls slow thinking. It's the system in our cognitive processing where we deploy attention, where we deploy resources to look at logic and apply things that go beyond our biases and our natural associations. It counters fast thinking, which is kind of that automatic, almost immediate process that you felt when you saw the colors. And then when you saw the colors but the words, most of us read more than we name colors. Like naming colors is not a task you do every day.  So it's easier for your brain to do. So that's a much more automatic process. Similarly, when we engage in a team approach to research and we don't put our researcher off in a little corner or we don't make somebody just take care of, for example, usability testing, we improve everybody's awareness of what the problems are and we process more effectively. We are no longer just victim of our biases and relying on heuristics. So how does this apply to Agile and how does this whole teamwork thing apply to Agile? I would argue that Agile is all about teamwork. I'm often shocked. I teach at UC Berkeley part time and I'm shocked with my students, especially those who work in Agile. I'm shocked that they've never read the Agile manifesto. Has anybody here seen the Agile manifesto? If not, you're looking at it. It's on the screen. It's not long. It's really short. There's a set of Agile principles behind it that are a little longer, but not much. So I'll be citing some of the principles for the rest of this keynote. But I'd like you to just be aware that the majority of Agile is about working as a team to make change faster. And at the top here, it says that regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjust its behavior accordingly. That's all about working together. It's all about what Adam just talked about in terms of taking a collaborative approach, idea number one for his strategy to be effective. So Agile requires teamwork. So at the beginning, I advocate that in order to engage in a team approach to research, you need to surface your concerns and your worries early. And I think the Agile principle here that goes with this is the most effective and efficient method of conveying information is with a face to face conversation. We don't have to be face to face. It could be remote. You could be engaging through even email. But I think it's important to surface our concerns. And a psychologist and researcher, Gary Klein, who studies expert decision making amongst people in high risk environments like smoke jumpers.  That's all around them. They make split second decisions all the time and they don't die. They've made these decisions so quickly over so many years that they're just innate. It's just like reading. It's that conflict you felt between reading and color naming. Their decision making is so great. And so what we need to do is we need to conduct a strategy to focus us on what we think the risks might be before we go into the process of developing our product where we're making those split second decisions. Gary Klein suggests that having a premortem is a great way to do this. A premortem is simply pretending that your project has failed before you've even started on it. And the strategy is really simple. The tactics are simple. Imagine it failed, sit around in a room, brainstorm why, only take a minute to come up with different ideas and then talk about them and then create plans to say, yeah, if what Papu said is correct, how can we prevent that because we haven't even started? The benefit here is that you are able to counter bias. You encourage dissent on the team. You create a safe environment where if a person has a concern that maybe you're taking on too much in your sprint, then there's a safe space to talk about it. And it also sensitizes the team to these problems. So if you see them crop up, the team can say, hey, remember when we had our premortem? I think some of those concerns are coming up. So let's take action to address them. Recommendation number two is understand your questions. For those of you who attended my workshop on Monday, you'll apologize for the repetition here. I think this is about the Agile principle that says simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential. I love this, right? I come from a world where we have to write pages and pages and pages of information to prove to people that the research that we've done is based on a solid foundation. In this context, though, when we're looking for the amount of work not done, we're actually looking for ways to avoid doing unnecessary work. Again, like Adam said, we're avoiding coming up with solutions to problems that don't exist. So I think a great way to engage in this is by building a fishbone diagram. Psychologist Jeffrey Soro refers to this as a cause and effect diagram. Basically, all you do is you identify your main concern. You brainstorm causes. So maybe a main concern is people don't buy our product. And you brainstorm the reasons why people might not buy your product. Ideally, it's better to do this early, but you can do this late as well. And you group them into categories that make sense, maybe usability concerns, maybe functionality concerns, maybe quality issues. And then you use that to drive your research. This helps to illustrate what you've covered and also what your gaps are. If you have nobody looking at or investigating, for example, pricing, and you have a complex pricing model, maybe you should think about deploying some resources for that. It also facilitates prioritization. When we're working in Agile or at Salesforce, most of us work in Agile Scrum, we have to prioritize. We have to ruthlessly prioritize. And if you don't ruthlessly prioritize, you're at risk of shipping nothing. And so we have to figure out what is our top priority for the next two weeks. But what that means is what are we not going to cover for the next two weeks? And it's really important to be aware of that. And so just an example, and all of these slides, by the way, are available on SlideShare. So if you just go to SlideShare.net, look for my name, Steve Fadden, and I'm from the UxIndia. They should pop up right to the top. This is an example of what Fishbone looks like. And so you can create your diagram. You say, maybe there's some usability concerns. Maybe users don't know how to start. Maybe users think it's too many steps. It's an inefficient process. And then you can highlight, okay, this will be the current research focus for this sprint, or for the next month, or for the next release. You can use that to drive a conversation with the rest of your team. So they know if there's a pricing question, we're not looking at it right now. If that's a key concern, you might want to revisit that as a team. If that came up during a pre-mortem, hopefully you haven't prioritized in a way that gives it short shrift compared to the other items. So my third item, and for those of you who are in my workshop or who are familiar with the work that I've done in the past, you know, this is my area. This is a thing I love. Implement flexible methods. Agile is about welcoming changing requirements even late into development. Researchers, designers, developers, I think hate this because that means you're going to change stuff. So if I was working on code, or if I was doing some designs, or I have some schematics, or I started creating my red line specs, and last minute we're going to change it. Now I have to change everything. So, gee, that sounds terrible. But I think it's really great that we now have kind of access to tools that are cloud-based and tools that we can deploy around the world 24-7 asynchronously. There are research methods that we can use without having the person in the same room with us. In fact, without even being at the same point in time, we can get research answers to questions. Not all of the questions, not all of the answers, but enough so that I can deploy some studies to start collecting answers while at the same time maybe doing a site visit, maybe engaging in in-depth interviews, maybe doing some observations, maybe doing some classical usability testing. Right now I actually have two studies running right now, and it's great. Every morning I go to in my room, I open it up, I refresh the browser, oh, 157 responses. That's what I saw to one of the studies this morning. It's really great. I have some bad news to give one of my designers, but that's okay. I was able to do this research while being here at a conference, as opposed to saying, sorry, no support this sprint. And the risk for me as a researcher when I say no support this sprint means, eventually they may decide, I don't need Steve. And so what I would argue is use a team approach so that everybody understands what these methods are and the benefits of them, so you can collaborate and brainstorm. How do we best use our resources to answer the questions during this period of time, this sprint, this release, this year. These tests are listed here. Some examples are click testing, where you kind of ask a person, where would you go if you needed to add a reminder to your calendar. Here's a result of a click test from a fake UI that one of my interns built for me. Very grateful. There's a commenting text on the right where you basically just show a person a UI or an image or a scenario or a set of screenshots and you say comment on things that stand out. Positive or negative. And so there's some helpful information there from a user who participated. Involved customers often is my fourth recommendation. Agile is about engaging developers and other stakeholders. So in Agile they refer to it as business people. I would argue it's everybody, it's not just stakeholders, it's also your customers. Those are stakeholders. So involve them daily throughout the project. I know that's hard to do. So what we need to think about is doing what Steve Blank, he's the many credit him as starting the lean startup movement. He's also a professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford. He says create Goob opportunities. What's Goob? It's not a new snack. Goob is a get out of the building opportunity. Get out of a building. If you have a startup, get out of the building to test your value proposition against as many people as possible to give it a chance to fail or give it a chance to succeed or move closer to success. Same holds true for design, for functionality, for product solutions. You can do this through field visits and remote observations. You could just set up a Google Hangout or a WebEx or a go to meeting session and say hey can you just share your screen and share your audio so I can hear and ideally if you can maybe just point a web camera to the office just so I can get a sense of what your work looks like for the next hour. Just ignore me and I promise I won't do anything with it. We're just using it to give the design team that I work with a better understanding of the context in which you work so we might be able to build some empathy for better decision making. Also have brown bags. Invite your customers in. Give them freebies. Hey, free license to our software. Free gift card. And then also consider JAD and participatory design. JAD actually has been around for several decades. JAD is joint application design and JAD basically says create a council of customers and have them engage with your team at periodic elements. I think it's unrealistic to actually embed customers in our groups because A how many customers work for companies that are comfortable saying sure yeah go just be at sales force for the rest of the year. But having them in maybe for a set of two hour workshops over the course of six months could be a great way to get continuous feedback from them as you're planning what your requirements are and what your designs might look like. The fifth item is develop customer empathy. And I love Chloe Walker. I think sorry if I forgot your last name Chloe did a great workshop yesterday on building empathy. Empathy is really about understanding people's needs and emotions and feelings and philosophies. And I think that really ties to the agile principle of building projects around motivated individuals. If your developers quality engineers etc. Understand what the issues are then I think they'll have a better chance and a better opportunity to design solutions that matter. The way you can build empathy is by communicating compelling stories. Nancy Duarte is one of the leaders in the field of storytelling and great presentation giving Jennifer Acker is a management professor at Stanford and she looks at the role of storytelling especially in marketing. And they've identified that good stories have a big idea. They depict the customer as a hero. They give customers a voice and those customers use that voice to highlight gaps that need to be closed ideally by your team. Stories are memorable engaging and emotional and when we communicate compelling stories we create lasting feelings. Maya Angelou now deceased poet and activist says people will forget what you said they'll forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel. I think that's really what empathy is about.  Before I get to my last recommendation let's do a quick pop quiz. There's some research that shows that people procrastinate but people are least likely to procrastinate when tasks are represented in a way that make them most and then there's a set of choices here. So I would like you to vote with your hands. Let me know if you think that people procrastinate least when a task is most is represented in a way that makes it most abstract. So abstract tasks least likely seems really challenging. How about attractive when a task seems attractive you're least likely to procrastinate it. A few more hands. About concrete when it's task seems really firm. A few more hands. How about difficult. I'm going to challenge you with this really hard task. And how about important prioritize the heck out of it. Okay so good news for all these who said those of you who said concrete. Concrete tasks are routinely and repeatedly shown as being the most likely to get completed. Faster to get completed on time to not be delayed. If you celebrate new years and you have new years resolutions. Typically people have these really vague abstract ambitious attractive but not concrete tasks right the task is I'm going to lose weight. Maybe I'll even lose 10 pounds. But instead I might want to say I'm going to lose weight by eating one fewer cookie every week. Well eating one fewer cookie first of all I need a baseline how many cookies I'm eating. But if I eat just one less cookie. It seems a lot easier it seems a lot more attainable. And so this leads to my last recommendation which is making solutions actionable. Agile is about maintaining a constant pace indefinitely and that means people need to be working on bite sized chunks. Concrete. I think researchers struggle when we want to provide you with a thesis that proves the work we did with is amazing and we have all these findings when in reality we should be providing brief recommendations that are achievable and prioritized. And prioritization really comes back to what Kimberly Weaver at Virginia Tech calls the presenters paradox when we give presentations we think that by providing more information it's better. But in actuality less information is better because people who receive information value it based on the average of the messages that they received not the sum. So if I give two high priority recommendations my audience is more likely to come back and say it sounds like we have some really high priority work to do. But if I give two high priority recommendations and then one medium priority recommendation the average is that of that is medium high it's not as urgent. So avoid the presenters paradox prioritize ruthlessly. So let's recap team approach surface your concerns early understand your questions implement flexible methods involve your customers often develop empathy for your customers and make your work actionable. And I think by following or doing our best to follow these types of principles with our teams we're able to address the dilemma I talked about earlier and thank you very much for your time.


Namaskaram. I'm Raghav from Mumbai. My question is regarding Viragya's dispassion versus something so mere as boredom, if you could just throw a little light on that. Viragya is a word that is used in many, many contexts. If it is used in the context of boredom, then there is absolutely no similarity in these two states. Viragya is more a state of detachment, involved yet detached. Boredom is a state of not being involved, not wanting to be involved, refusing involvement and giving into a state of what one would call tamas. It's a conceptual tamas, boredom. It happens because the person is not tuned in, is not aligned with what is happening here and now. And there is an expectation which is not fulfilled. And when that expectation, which is a conceptual expectation, is not fulfilled, then that's what happens. Then it's called boredom. It is a conceptual state because the person is not tuned in to what is happening now and is always in a state of expectation. And Viragya, in the context of boredom, is detachment but with involvement. Like you have smasana, Viragya. That is when you're there in the cremation ground and some family member of being cremated. You experience smasana, Viragya.  And so it puts you in a state of detachment from the idea that living continues forever. And it brings you into this moment and that is another example of that. So boredom only happens when there is expectation which is not fulfilled. And it's conceptual. It's not emotional. It's not material, physical. It's not transformative in nature. It's a conceptual experience that's very limited. It's the repetitive monotony of situations that keep arising which it's not boredom in the sense that I don't feel like doing anything or I'm not interested in doing anything. It's just the repetitiveness of situations in different forms that you're facing. Like today, for example, there's not tomorrow, there's not the day after tomorrow. I know I'll go home and this and that. It's just endlessly going on. If your system is most of the time in the conceptual, if you're thinking most of the time and planning your life with thinking and responding by analyzing circumstances and reaching conclusions and acting on those conclusions, if you spend your time thinking things through and making inferences and acting from those inferences, there is this experience of repetition, the same things happening again and again. This person shouting, that person crying, the third person bored, the fourth person. The movies even are repeating their themes. Everything becomes boring and repetitive. If you switch the compass and you start to live this life in surrender, not assuming that you can organize your life and control it through thinking, but that you move into a state of surrender and go with the truth impulse, refusing the ego. Because the ego convinces you that you can know something through thinking. You cannot know through thinking. You can plan, but you cannot know. So knowing comes when there is surrender in the system. So as you move into that state of surrender, what actually happens is that the consciousness starts to expand. You're not anymore only in the conceptual and the emotional dancing between these two from morning to night, year after year, but you start to expand into a supraconceptual state, into a transformative state where the occult experiences happen. And you also expand downward into the materiality of your body. That is if you don't leave the system through meditation, through long hours of meditation. If you're present, it starts to expand within the system. So as this consciousness expands, you start to observe this world around you differently. It starts to reveal the mystery that is going on, the magic that is going on. As the consciousness expands beyond the conceptual into that transformative state, which is the occult state, suddenly you start to make all these associations. You start to see things you never saw before. You start to understand why this happened and that happened, why the other happened, and you start to see that it is an unfolding magic, a transformative unfolding magic, a matrix of perfection unfolding. So as that expansion is happening, you are actually starting to see this whole world like thousands of crystals lighting up. I don't know how to put it in another way. How can you be bored then? Where is there a single moment to be bored?  So the process of reaching that without going into cosmic experience, so the process of doing that is a gradual one, but it results from bending down and being in surrender and going with the truth impulse, refusing the ego. No, no, no, just the truth, the truth, the truth, and you act from that truth and then gradually you start to see things happening around you that you never saw before and the movie becomes real but you are in the movie. It is not that you are observing life, you are living life in a very vibrant and very real state. So then how can there be any boredom whatsoever? It is because you're continuously allowing the ego to determine your life and that is why that's happening.


It's been a long long day. I got a lot to say. It feels like I'm carrying a two-ton weight. I go to see a friend. Hello, I'm Monsignor Patrick Winslow. And I am Father Matthew Cowth. And we are speaking from the Rooftop. A podcast brought to you by Tan Books, in which we invite you to join our conversation out here in the open air. Where we look out upon the world around us from the rooftop of the church and share with you what we see. Hello Father Winslow. Well hello dear father. How are you? Fine. How are you? You know that's another one of those words that convey so much meaning depending upon how one says it. Is that not true? True. You say to someone that has been scorned, what's the matter? Nothing. I'm fine. That's true. But it is a wonderful social lubricant. Because it gets you by without lying. That's true. That's true. It's a very fine word. It's fine. I've used it many a time. Indeed. That's a really good interest. That's an interesting topic right there. Right to know something. The right to know something. Yeah, you know, I think we've talked about it in the context of formation. When people inquire about your life, it seems just a little too personal.  And at what point are you being dishonest if you don't divulge more personal items? Or for example, can you sort of just only answer to a certain degree even though it's slightly deceptive? Right. It's almost like I'm talking to a moral theologian. I like to tell people that I have friends who are good moral theologians. I call them for all my loopholes. That's right. Yeah, I'm a little stickler on some of these things though. That's a good one. You know, there was a line that seemed Philip Neary used to use a lot. We just had his feast day not long ago. He got from the Song of Songs, which is segreto mia miji, segreto mia miji, which is just my secret is my own. And he would use that principally about those things that were most intimate to him relative to his prayer life or to sort of what was going on in his interior life and in a way shape or form. But he would do it with a sort of smile as the reports say in such a way that people didn't feel as if they were being shut down, but that there was something that was precious to him that he wasn't going to let out. And as priests, I think that one of the things that strikes me relative to our own interior life for better or for worse is that the faithful are always getting it. They're always receiving whatever is going on. Because what else do I have to give them? The Dominican motto is contemplate al istrade, which is to hand on to others when you yourself have contemplated. Did you always speak Klingon so well? Or is that Latin with a Klingon accent? Yeah, that's what it is on a big forehead. The idea is that you're handing on what you've seen, right, what you've contemplated, what you've studied, etc. And so clearly what one is receiving relative to homilies and things of that nature is something deeply about your interior. And even that you have to be sort of careful because it's the faith you're trying to review. Right, not yourself. It's not without you and the way in which you're affected by it. But relative to... Just like the regular circumstance of the door. Or like at the door of the church, someone says, Oh, Father, how are you? Oh, I'm fine. Or one of our seminarians, they're visiting for the weekend. Hey, how are you? What's your name? Where are you from? So what was it like in college for you? Or did you date? And suddenly it takes a turn towards the personal. And these young men, they're young, they want to be honest and sincere. But at the same time, at some point, do you just not answer or do you deflect? What is the right amount of depth for certain conversations? It's a certain art, I would imagine. Well, I think that the example you like to use of the onion is a good one. I mean, there are different layers that people should have access to. And no one has a right to force a layer. I don't think there's anything wrong with even doing so in a sort of kindly, and that's why I brought up Philip Neary, furtive or jocular way, to say if someone said to you, did you date a lot when you were in high school? Oh, Lord have mercy. It's been, for me, if someone asked me that, like, it's been so many years I couldn't possibly remember. That's right. I'd have to check a yearbook. I don't know.  Yeah. And well, sometimes it goes the other way, right? Where you say, hey, how are you? And they really tell you. Yes. And this was just a social way to say I care about you, but I'm not interested in hearing about it right now, right? We don't really mean that. People just mean to check in generally, not specifically. Well, it's true. And that's again, what you use that phrase social lubricant, because you're trying to treat other people with the same sort of relative kindness that you would treat a friend. But the language doesn't mean the same thing as when you say it to a friend. Right. So if I say to you when you just arrived at seminary, how are you? I don't expect to receive just fine. Right. You expect to go right down to a deeper layer? It's that. Talk to me about you. If that's where things are happening. I was at the grocery store the other day. And of course, again, part of the problem of dressing the way we dress, it's not a problem, but it's it confuses the language a bit. Because I said to the cash register girl, how are you doing?  Oh, yes. Okay, here we go. I guess of course she sees what I've embraced. That's true. And so I felt bad for the people behind us because we just. Have a session right now. We had a whole session. Yeah. No, it's true. You know, I feel for people because when you're in social circumstances or when you're at work, you know, that's a totally different social dynamic. Some people don't want their personal stuff really widely known. It'll work context and yet at the same time, they feel pretty close to their coworkers. But those worlds don't really naturally collide or intersect. So it's kind of nice to have them different and a little bit distinct. But when you get into a conversation, people might start asking questions and it feels uncomfortable. That's probably a good indicator right there. When it starts to feel uncomfortable, a certain depth of information, probably better to pause. I always say when in doubt, choose silence. Because you can never take the words back. You can always go back and say something. It doesn't mean I always follow that advice. I run afoul of it all the time. But yes, I think when in doubt, choose silence or in this case, when in doubt, don't overshare. Because it's very difficult to pull that back. And you sometimes walk away feeling uncomfortable. You're exposed. You're socially violated, right? This wasn't right. This wasn't in my context. This person, I'm not comfortable having to share that much with this person. I feel as though I was pressured into oversharing. Or maybe circumstances drew things out of me and the person didn't want to hear it. And I actually did tell them things. And it's just better to choose silence when in doubt. Agreed. I totally agree with you. And that there are those layers, right? Explain your analogy there. So with men in formation and in general and having conversations with people who are looking for some pastoral guidance, I always say that when talking about levels of disclosure, that you have many layers. And appropriately or so. And it doesn't mean that we're duplicitous. The layers betray one another. But in fact, they're just think of it as a deeper color the more we go to the core. And it's okay and appropriate to interact with people at one layer or next, depending on where that relationship has fallen or where it's naturally grown to. But people don't have a right to suddenly insert themselves and go deep. That's not appropriate.  You know, they can be downright pestering about wanting to know about you. And it's flattering to a certain degree. Like that's nice that you have that interest in me. But on the other hand, whoa. Yeah, it's a voyeur. Stop looking my windows at me. This would take a full year of spiritual direction before I start talking about this.  That's a little exaggeration, but still it feels like that. So having, we're like an onion and the onion, it's integral. It's not compartmentalized, but it's just layers that go deeper. We have relationships that hit different layers.  And for some people, when you come fast friends, it happens at a quicker pace. And you recognize that that happened so quickly that, hey, there's a unique connection here because that normally doesn't happen that quickly with someone. Or if there's somebody that stays in the outside for a while and that's just the way, because socially that's the way it works and it actually works nice and it's good to have people just there because it's exhausting to maintain deep friendships. You know, you can't have your hundred best friends. I don't know who can pull that one off. It's just just downright exhausting. I don't know how, I couldn't keep up with the texts if that were the case. So, you know, we're meant to have these different layers and it's not duplicitous. And we're not being false within someone else just because we're at a different layer. It's always a question that comes up in moral theology class relative to the nature of lying because you began the discussion by talking about people's right to know. And that was sort of a bifurcation of the topic. Wait, wait, wait. Before you jump in. So, you and I are familiar with this discussion. That's what I'm going to describe it. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, just like what is a lie? What is a lie? And so there was a time period in one of the attempts to describe what a lie is is that you don't have to give someone information to which they don't have a right. And so when you're speaking, if the person doesn't have a right to the knowledge, you're dissimulating or saying something that's not consonant with the truth, not a lie. Because you're not trying to deceive. But that's not at all what the tradition used to say. That was an attempt by a particular religious order to make good on the fact that someone doesn't have a right to that. Yeah. And it gets into all sorts of interesting questions about wartime and camouflage and espionage and a thousand different topics. But St. Thomas takes his cue from St. Augustine and they're pretty severe on it because of the nature of what truth is. And because it's necessary for our salvation, necessary for our freedom, that's just the truth of salvation, history of the truth of Jesus Christ. But also just speaking the truth of people, if you don't do it, you can't be in a relationship with anyone. And because it's so important, St. Thomas and St. Augustine were quite severe on the fact that you can never ever say something that's contrary to the truth that's in your mind. Well, you can. You can. In terms of possible, you're not permitted to relative to sin. And so take it out of the realm of whether the person has the right to know that's getting back to your point earlier about you don't have to say anything. You can say things that are very clever at times if you're quick-witted. And I had a wonderful priest one time when we were discussing this and we're talking about the classic example of moral theology about, okay, it's, you know, to wartime World War II and I have Jews hiding in my basement and the Nazis come in, are you hiding Jews, right? And so at table we're going back and forth and all the things you could or could not say or whatever else. And this priest just looked at us and said, you know, you don't have in this scenario the gift of the Holy Spirit relative to counsel. Like, how do you know what you would do in the moment? Because this is going to require a kind of wisdom that you don't necessarily have in the abstract. And I love that answer that in the actual situation, it's a real situation with real divine grace and an appeal to the Holy Spirit. You might just come up with some sort of situation that you could never think of in the abstract that fits the equation. Right. And I appreciated that because it's true. It's what our Lord said about, I will give you the words to speak, but silence is always possible too. Well, you know, I remember reading a book. It's about these two Protestant women, they were sisters. I think they were somewhere like the Netherlands or Belgium in that region, Nazi occupation. They were helping Jewish families, Jewish people on the run, running for their lives. And they were in this situation. They were devoutly Christian. And because they were devoutly Christian, they were not succumbing to the darkness that was befalling their neighbors, particularly their Jewish neighbors. And they wanted to help. And so they were helping. They put themselves in harm's way. And they ultimately ended up in the concentration camp. But I remember a scene, and I apologize for those who may have read the book and they have a better memory of it than me, but I think this is the gist of it. They had hidden a person behind a panel in the wall when these officers came to the door and precisely asked the question, are you hiding any Jews? And the sisters were fastidious about not doing anything to offend the God and in particular the one sister. And she said, oh, we're hiding them in the walls. It came off so ridiculous that the officer heard it as her being snarky and ridiculous. But she told the truth. And they totally dismissed it and they checked around the house and then they left. But it was really, as you say, in the moment, the grace. She was not going to lie because of her convictions. At the same time, she had the grace in the moment to be able to articulate it in a way that made it sound like a complete gist. There's an example that St. Thomas uses when he's asking the question about the Egyptians and the Hebrew women when Pharaoh told them they had to slaughter all the firstborn, slaughter all the Jewish boys. And the Hebrew women and the midwives, they didn't conspire together, but clearly they didn't kill them. And so what happens when they ask the midwives what happened? And they said, well, the Hebrew women are just so robust, right? They have these babies to get there because they didn't want to kill them. That's right. And so Thomas asked the question, which is a really interesting question. Is God blessing them because they lied? Because it says that God blessed them. And Thomas' answer is, he blessed them because of their fear of the Lord. He didn't bless them because of the lie, which is a really good distinction today. Does it say that she lied? They lied to me. They could say, I mean, that could have been true. The women are. But oh, I guess they say they have birth before they get there. So there's some of that going on. Well, circling back to your opening statement, then, what sort of dissimulation or deflecting is possible and what's not? Oh, here we go. And that's a really interesting question. Call them worth theologian. Find the loopholes here. You know, because we do understand, no, because we do understand the language that we're all using. That's true. And so long as it is a common language, we know that that word fine doesn't mean that everything is fine. We know that it means that this is the end of the discussion. It's like a yellow and a red light in Italy. Everybody knows. Let me go. If you come to a hard stop, people are going to get killed. Oh, my heavens, yes. I've just been stepping on the gas. Yeah. So, no, you're right. I mean, what are these signs really symbolize? What is the common grammar? What else do we normally say in those passing moments? I remember there was a wonderful comedian. I think his name was Regan. And he was talking about the fact that we respond to everything so automatically. We don't oftentimes think about what we're saying. So, you're at the airport and you check in your ticket.  You say, you too. That's right. Right, right. But you get the gist, right? You wish them well. You wish it well, right? Yeah. You wish the person well. Yeah. So, what are the sorts of things do we say that we could analyze to see whether or not in the common vocabulary, it's not being deceptive? I think if somebody said to me, I'm fine and I could see tears in their eyes. Yeah. I don't think they're lying to me. Right, they're not. Right. I think what they're saying is it's not appropriate or I don't want to impose. So, they're- I can get through this. I can get this or I'm giving you an out. Yeah. So that you don't get into something too heavy with me. So, I think you're right. I think that there are ways in which we could read that and understand that they're not being deceptive. They're trying to be gracious. They're trying to give you a gentleman's out or they're trying to read the room and say what's appropriate. But of course, most of us in that situation, if we saw them tears in their eyes, we're trying to pull them aside or you reach out them regardless of the circumstance or at least get them to a place where they could be a bit consoled. So, yeah, I think you're right. We have one seminary in here that when you ask him the question, I think you've worked with him to try to get him to not make an entire self-assessment every time someone says, how are you? Because he wants to enter. He wants to answer perfectly honestly. And he just stops. He's not afraid of awkward pauses or silences. And that's part of the reason we respond so quickly is that we want to fill the gaps with speech. We don't usually allow for a lot of silence in a conversation. And this individual will just stop and think for a while. It may be a long while. And then he might just say, I'm fine. Like, he's really checked in. He's done a system check. That sounds about right. You know, you're getting an honest response. That is, you know, you gotta love the charming. The colorful array of personalities that God has allowed us as individuals to possess. Isn't it true? It's great to appreciate them when you can. It can be hard sometimes because when you're dealing with somebody who doesn't react or relate to things in the same way you do, it's very difficult to read. Communication suffers. And for someone who's social, if you don't have good communication, that creates a very anxious place. You know, we might start speaking too much or maybe we need to pull away because I am, as a highly social person, I'm not able to communicate. And this puts me in a place I'm not normally in. A place where I can't socialize the way in which I'm comfortable or with the means that I have. And so you run away from it. But to be able to maybe overcome some of that anxiety and to just allow yourself to experience the difference in that person and that character, I think we'd be surprised how much we might truly appreciate or be amused by the other. Oh, I think so too. I mean, every character is, if it's true that everyone has made an image of God, it's not exactly the same. I mean, there's an infinite ways in which to reflect the Godhead. And so every person is a slightly different manifestation. Certainly the image of God is found in our own capacity to know and to love, but to know and to love as you. And that's slightly different than knowing and loving as anyone else. And I was thinking about two things of pedagogical concerns that are interesting or communication concerns that I was once told by a priest when he said, I have a thing that I do in communication with others where if I want them to speak and I want them to sort of speak more and divulge things, I don't think he meant it in a manipulative way. He said, I would look, I look down at my shoes. And I always remembered that. So it's a way of indicating that I'm in receiving mode? I guess so. And you're not in any way aggressive by looking directly at them, certainly not in a position above them. It always happens to be the case. And historically, when you design new offices for things of that nature that the important person gets the big chair, right? Because that posture makes a difference in people's minds sort of subconsciously. And I noticed, I never forgot that, but I was watching, in the first year we started the seminaries, watching our incredible Latin teacher, Dr. Nancy Llewelyn, who was really a singular metagogue. I mean, she's just really incredible at teaching. When she's going around the room and she calls them snap jewels, she snaps and then points at someone in sort of a misdirected way to give the answer. So you never know who's going to be called.  She gets smaller and smaller and smaller. A really interesting tool to the point where she's usually on her knees, way beneath you, trying to get you to get the right answer. Like a beggar. And eventually, yeah. And eventually, if you still can't get it, she'll shift it over to someone she knows knows the answer. I see. And then you have to repeat it. And when you get it, even though you just copied, parroted, she does an aujet, which is, you know, well done kind of a thing. And it's really interesting that it so engages the individual if you want to get things right. Like we do when we're little kids. It's like a puppy wanting to treat it. At some point, you want to give it to them. Yeah. No, that's really, that's really well stated. And very well done on her part. Well, of course, she's incredible. Like there's any surprise on that. She's amazing. All right. So before we go, what do you have in your mind, if anything? I mean, we just entered after the fees of Pentecost, back into ordinary time. Yeah. Well, I have to say, this could be a whole talk at some point, but I think I know where you had it. We have to talk about this at some point. I discovered the most fun text in reading the Suma in Saint Thomas Aquinas. Sekuna Sekunik question 168 where Thomas says, it is a vicious thing and sinful to be a boar. So maybe it could be a topic. Yes, well, maybe the next one. I applaud a fantastic line from Saint Thomas. I think we're going to have to reflect up on that one. Tease it out. Tease it out. On a more mundane level. Do you have anything? Ah, well, my life is filled with mundane things. Well, I know, you're the administrator. Parc Salons. You know, I had a woman, we had an event this afternoon at the Paso Center in the diocese where we fed our staff, 100 people, food and things to have a little social event. She said, Father, you need to come down on Thursdays and give out food at the food pantry. And she said it in a way like you need to come. And as if I'm maybe not giving it its due attention. And I said, I would like to, that would be nice. And then she said it again. And I said, would you like to come up and do what I'm doing? Because I think five minutes you'd be running down to the food pantry and washing your hands of it. Please don't assume that I'm like, I'm up into my every castle. You're eating bombons. You know, to be quite honest, to give me any day of the week, I'd like to be down there and meeting people and handing things out. Yeah, so you just, I guess, you know, my words of, I guess my words of wisdom and my, before we go a little segment to say, appreciate the administrators in your life. You know, I used to say as a kid, you never, I never had to worry about toilet paper being in the bathroom or toothpaste in the cabinet, your milk in the fridge. And then as you get older, you realize, wait, that doesn't grow on there. Exactly. What happens when you run out, right? That means, oh, I need money. Oh, I got to go and store and get it. And those practical things. And in retrospect, you realize, I was taken care of. Somebody did that work. Somebody was concerned about it. Somebody did the ordering. Somebody got into the house. Somebody paid for it. Somebody put it out there. And you just say, oh, that's just growing up and maturing. But in the world of organizations in which we live, that's not dissimilar to administration. No, it's not. And I find it to some degree to be the same thing with our men. You know, when they get toward the end of their life in seminary, they begin to have a really difficult time. And I think it's because they're men. They've been men for some time now, but they're not fathers. If they want to be in charge of something, they want to have something that they can give themselves to, be responsible for. And then, of course, we get to our age and it's like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm happy to surrender. I want to be a grandfather now. Yeah, I'm done. Give me the lounge chair. All right, so we can talk about both of these topics. I think we both hit big topics on the Before We Go segment. So we'll say goodbye and then maybe next time we'll touch on them. Have a great week. All right, chat, chat. 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