If it weren't about 5.30 in the morning my time, I might have something special to say to Mark after that introduction, but I have. It's one of the things that I'm struck by being here is how different this is in its atmosphere and its mission from the last early genomics meeting, which had a frightful amount of focus surrounding questions like, should we do a draft genome sequence? And I remember with some trepidation becoming convinced that that was a good idea and actually feel pretty good about it now because I don't know about all the people out there in the audience, but I've certainly found it a wonderful thing to have and have been equally pleased that the commitment of NHGRI to actually finish it to high quality sequence has not, as was once feared, wavered. And so I'm grateful on two counts. But now on to the charge that Francis has given, which was actually just ever so slightly more focused than to talk about all of biology, which is really hubris beyond belief. And this is almost hubris beyond belief, is to talk about the interface of biology with genomics with a 20-year time horizon. So that's all a very nice idea and the notion of trying to think about what we will have learned by 2020 is something that I wish I could think about with any kind of thought that I was going to be even vaguely accurate. But in fact, I'm shamelessly clueless. And I want to own up to that. What there is out there that will have happened that is profound and important, I'm sure that I can't and possibly even most people here wouldn't dare to guess, which is perhaps the most wonderful thing about being a biologist. The really great stuff comes crawling out from places and observations that you just can't predict. With this in mind, I'd like to just get this huge 20-year thing kind of wrestled down into something that a smaller mind can deal with, namely mine. If we can agree on the cosmic, maybe it's a little easier to get down to things that are a little less cosmic. So the cosmic, in my view, would be to link the entire genome plan that we find writ in ATGC with the heritable properties of the organism. I think if we're able to do that, we can all go home, but I think it's fairly safe to say that most of us in this room won't have that happen before we're moldering in our graves. I'm optimistic, but I'm not that optimistic. And the other thing that you'd really like to know that's cosmic is to understand how genomes have evolved. And so what I really want to try to find a framework for people to talk about in the rest of this meeting is how we approach that cosmic. And to my mind, oh, here, actually, I couldn't resist the temptation of pointing to just two random cases. You can pull these out of any of our friendly neighborhood journals by just picking up an issue, the things you don't expect. And I want to make a point here about the interface, not of all of biology, but particularly of what we think of as classical genetics with genomics. And what I'm showing here is a figure out of one paper out of a group of three that were recently in Nature that are about small, untranslated RNAs that are found in C. elegans and they're also found in close relatives and conserved as in Briggsier. They're found also in Drosophila in humans. I mean, these are serious, they're conserved. And one of the things is you can't go out and find them by looking with our old algorithms. And so these were kicked off in the old-fashioned way by forward genetics finding something called let7, which was one of them. And then these various investigators went on to enumerate a large fraction of what's probably in the elegans genome, and maybe there's now enough known about them to be able to go forward and plumb other genomes where there may very well be more with something like a knowledgeable algorithm. And so it's this interplay of particularly classical genetics and genomics, and in fact, what you might call classical molecular biology and genomics, that for my money is a good thing to think about as the future of genomics itself. There's a second case that arises differently and backwards. That is, it arises first from pure genomics. And this comes from recent microbial sequencing. And in the adventure that I think the DOE has sponsored, which was its microbial month of last year, in which it did, I don't know how many, Ari, how many microbial genomes? 17. Okay, big number of microbial genomes. Not quite one a day, but a lot. And in doing those, when people sat down and started to look at the genomes, they found something that I think was entirely unexpected. And that is that very large fractions of genomes from disparate organisms that are not close relatives are found apparently exchanged or zorched up. And so you get to a really interesting idea, which may or may not pan out, which is at least in the microbial world of evolution by large pieces of genomes, even bigger than pathways for metabolism and pathways for pathogenesis, which had already been seen, actually exchanging and moving around so that one might eventually have to think of sort of a phylo genome, the genes available to an entire phylum to swap around. It's more than the kind of lateral transmission, at least, that I had ever thought of. And this you can pick up looking in J-Random Journal today. And so for this reason, I think projecting some of the most interesting things that may turn out to be the most profound is indeed a thankless task. But now on to maybe how we set our trajectory. So I guess the first pass is to figure out a little bit about where we are now. And I think Francis talked to some extent about where NHGRI is with things that are supported in their genomic program, but where are we scientifically and what intermediate steps do we need to take that are non-negotiable, the ones we know we need to take that are perhaps worthy of our talk and attention over the next day and a half. So what we wouldn't want to do in this next day and a half is miss an opportunity of the form of what if we hadn't committed to the human genome project over a decade ago, or what if when we had, it had committed only to the human genome and not to the key model organisms. Now it seems impossible to consider that either of those things might not have happened or run amuck from the perspective of now, but I think from the perspective of then it was actually a pretty hot and heavy debate. So I guess we need to think up are there equivalents right now and what needs special cultivation. And there seemed to me to be three broad categories. The first one is the people, and this is going to be kind of my saw for today. Thinking about the people that we're training right now and how we're training them and how that fits in with what genome science is bringing to biology and how it's going to change biology. Of course there are technologies and there's going to be an entire talk where Jeff DeWick is going to talk about the interface of technologies of all kinds and of new approaches to biology. And finally there are the issues of public data sets, clone resources and other things that might specifically be the kinds of things that individual laboratories or even centers cannot do and that call for some kind of community consensus. Oh and then there's access to the basement of the Federal Reserve where they keep all the gold. Francis I hope is getting a key. So this starts and ends this framework with students and I think that's appropriate because one shocking fact about projecting to the year 2020 is that unless things about scientists developing their research programs change dramatically the leaders of genome biology and biology at large are in our labs right now and so thinking about what it's going to be like 20 years ago is a lot more concrete and material to me when I look at the people in the lab and realize that they are it and what it is that they're learning to do now or what it is maybe that they're not learning to do right now is going to affect our trajectory perhaps more than any single data gathering project that we can now think up. Then there are the special properties of genomics and the two that strike me as being singular and particularly important and I feel it so strongly as an armchair aficionado of yeast biology is first the property of completeness. It is so different to be addressing the organism at the level of the full set of genes that it has to offer or even in the case of mice and humans most of it and not quite all of it perhaps and the further companion to that the two C's are combinatorics. The degree to which what's going on in almost any process that you delve into deeply is deeply deeply combinatoric and this is what means to me that 30,000 genes is more than enough if that turns out to be what we have. The novel combinations that one can put together given 30,000 genes and a significant fraction of that in the regulatory spaghetti of signal transduction and regulation of transcription and regulation of protein turnover is just absolutely mind bending and so I think looking from this perspective of completeness to judge how it is that genomics is going to have its impact and how we should select perhaps the next to gathering things that we do how we should address the question of when is completeness of the next genome and the next genome and the next genome as important as was completeness in the first of the model organisms and then there are a couple of overarching questions one I simply abbreviate by calling the arrows the arrows are those nasty arrows and I'll show a few just as a frame of reference they connect things in pathways and they connect things in pathways based largely on genetic evidence and now genomic evidence to some degree not so much yet and biochemical evidence but if we're ever going to figure out what's actually written in the genome and how it is that it specifies all the heritable traits and behaviors of an organism then figuring out in a meaningful way what those arrows actually mean I think is really key this is a challenge for biology not just for genome biology it's an extraordinary challenge the fact that genomics has been one of the first items to drag the larger community kicking and screaming toward some degree of computation is probably an incredibly good collateral it's the opposite of collateral damage it's a collateral good effect of genomics but it is just the beginning and it's something that I think we all think needs a lot of attention and finally there's the other big overarching question that comes with natural variation and evolution I'm not going to delve deeply into that there are people here that are vastly more qualified to talk about it in the breakout sessions than I am except to say that if there's something deeply profound to be understood understanding natural variations it's degrees and what it is that it brings not only to humans but to all organisms and to their evolution seems deep and core and so if we can somehow do something serious about those overarching questions in what it is that we plan out then I think we will have done a good thing and at the end of the day it's what do these students of ours need in terms of intellectual tools and technical tools in order to do this so I'm just going to flesh out a little bit my rant about the students of today and the lead scientists of 2020 so that it can't possibly get lost at the end and the most obvious thing that's different about growing biologists today than even 5 years ago or 10 years ago is that instead of being computationally oriented as a subset and perhaps numerically a minor subset of biologists now being able to use computational tools as something other than a black box and even invent them or at least knowing what you're doing with them is absolutely critical and so this means more math skills and computational tools it's not clear to me that it's critical that everybody be able to write code but it sure is clear to me that you need to be able to talk to people who do and that's not a trivial art form and I'm not sure most of us biologists have mastered it yet even those of us who are trying there's the usual genetics biochemistry and molecular biology and I think it's interesting for this group to consider how those relate to genomics itself and how genomics fits into all of this personally I'll carry my rant a little farther and see that I don't so much see genomics emerging as a pure specialty unhinged from all the others nor do I see it completely turning into a toolkit like restriction enzymes were once thought of as molecular biology there really is a subject here which is in a certain sense the global central dogma and that reflects itself in needing to know about forward genetics biochemistry, molecular biology and genomics as a group and then there's phylogenetic flexibility and I think that's a done deal that doesn't need to be argued in this room as one approaches any problem one of the most powerful tools and some of the most interesting stuff you can learn comes from walking across the phyla and seeing how whatever phenomenon you're studying is varying and what one can tell you about the other we've all experienced this it's just there for completeness for someone who's not going to visualize themselves as a sort of genome specialist but an average genome transcriptome proteome user how do they differ and I'd like to suggest as an arguing point they don't differ so much they need to change curriculum as well and a change set of experiences come back my computer was ruffed at length before this and so it has some new characteristics for the average user I think it ain't so different from number one and that you simply add or superimpose those key elements of biological problem where you're not focusing on how genomes evolve and specific things about genomes as the central focus but rather how an organism develops according to what's laid out in the genome neurobiological everything from development to behavior the heritable aspects thereof through environmental microbiology whatever and so to terminate my front-ramp rant on the generation of tomorrow it probably begins with undergraduates and it's time at most places to harden the curriculum and include more quantitative skills early on at the graduate level fusing things as I've discussed at the postdoc level these days there probably has to be extra time given for backfilling courses to learn what they didn't learn as undergraduates and graduate students and finally building these interdisciplinary teams that have people with serious computational skills interacting with the biologist is something that isn't done in a day no matter how much you want it to be done in a day and I think the experience of people who are doing it is that it's sometimes frustrating not only because the computational side folks are very expensive in normal biology budgets but also that just sort of our normal funding cycle doesn't fit very well with the team building cycle and often the degree of assurance that people on that side are used to and want to have as they go forward this is a problem that might only be solved by that you know getting into the basement of the Federal Reserve but I think it is something to think about and I know that NHGRI and staff have worried already about this and have programs that try to address various aspects of this so it's not as if it hasn't been thought of before but I think we're really at a point now where it doesn't refer to just a few specialists but it refers to most of the people in most of our labs so now on to this notion of completeness and a little more science there was a profound change I became keenly aware of the completeness business when an email missive arrived and my recollection is that it's attributable to PRB Paul Revere Botstein and it went something like yes Virginia there is no mick in yeast and for people who had spent two months, two years five years of their time or student time trying to do the phylogenetic dance from species to species to figure out what something like CMIC, a gene of some interest at the time was doing this ability to say it's not there was actually, I mean, sounds vaguely amusing and sounds sort of trivial right now but the ability to say not only what is there but to say definitively what is not there is a very, very powerful thing there's a little more to it than that and it extends pretty quickly to in yeast people and now in other organisms first going after all the targets of a given transcription factor and then all transcription factors to help define genetic regulatory elements asking the impact of every at least viable loss of function mutation under diverse conditions you can look at the binding of a given transcription factor to all possible binding sites of vivo in the organism and these are all things that have already been done there are things that are in progress that people are just sneaking up on but in a very serious way in yeast and that will or may come to other organisms like different forms of asking about the interaction of every protein with every other protein and there are some interesting debates to be had about making protein interaction maps and what you can infer from them is that there can come of two hybrid based maps compared with maps that might be generated based on assaying whole complexes by mass spec and somebody might want to get to that in breakout sessions or going forward as a matter of the scientific agenda but all of these things have this quality of either completeness or an attempt at pseudo completeness and what's interesting as you move out is that while a genome can really be known pretty much completely other things are in varying degrees pseudo complete and we have some sort of philosophic and operational decisions to be made and those have to do with what kinds of projects of this sort one might actually do going forward and one that I'm familiar with thinking about a little bit because the folks at DOE have put serious time into thinking about it is what happens if you go forward and try to map an entire proteome for the content of all of its multi-protein complexes and what you get is this pseudo completeness problem where you start to have to ask more complicated questions than for the genome itself so for example there are many complexes and the one cartoon here is involved in regulated protein turnover it's called an SCF complex and it targets particular things for ubiquitin addition and then going to the 26S proteasome for degradation and much has been learned about it especially in yeast but also in mammalian systems and what is found is that there's a core similarity to this complex but the so-called F-box component as well as the Cullen components vary there are few Cullen components and that gives you combinations of things and lots of different F-boxes for the specificity for recognition of substrate is and so while you can define the machine fairly quickly as containing a Cullen and F-box in these other components defining each and every machine and then attaching it to its function is not so small a trick so what this means is that not only are there components that are variable but that what comes out of this machine and I suspect out of many others is that there are both generic functions in this case targeting something to the proteasome via ubiquitin addition acting as an E3 ligase and very specific functions I mean there's a specific one of these that mediates notch signaling in one pathway there's another one that mediates various stages of cell cycle progression and so on and so on and so on they're turning up all over the place there's yet a different kind of E3 ligase that I've run into in muscle biology which I study that has to do with muscle atrophy they're turning up all over the map and so when you think about mapping them and then a map is important only when you attach it to function how you figure out the functions the question of what is complete starts to be a pretty hairy question so that leaves us with grappling for these future activities about when are our activities best done to pull out completion when are they best done selectively as in a new genome where you only look for protein interactions of say novel genes for example and one might offer from the experience of looking at the multiple microbial genomes for example the notion that letting go of completeness should be done with great care because it is such a valuable quality on the other hand we live in a real world of finite differences and so what we cannot solve by much better much cheaper much faster technology that lets us be complete but at much less scientific peril and for many fewer dollars then we will have to make choices and how those choices get made is a question that I'd like to lay on the table I have no answer for it and then finally the obvious let's solve it by driving technology to the ever cheaper faster better mode then somehow succeed in generating the forces of whatever economic and other that are needed to maximize academic access and Jeff may have something to say about this later but certainly a worry is of a divergent and a two prong genetic world or genomic world forming in the future in which particularly some of these expensive proteomic kinds of approaches are relatively inaccessible to the problems of the day to day user and there are lots of other things that will be invented and may only be used at the level of the pharmaceutical company so pondering how to work our way through that thicket over and over again even as it was tried to be worked through early on and with some success over access to microarray gene ships is going to be an ongoing problem at the interface of genomics and biology so what this is designed to point out what I'm showing you is a famous signal transduction pathway this is one that has been illuminated by studies the form that's shown here is the RAS pathway and in this case it's been illuminated as a problem in developmental biology beginning with a cell identity question and leading laboratories these figures are from a review by Paul Sternberg a colleague of mine at Caltech and it reviews work from his laboratories to Kim's laboratory and a number of others and there are parallel stories in Drosophila that are equally elegant but my point in bringing it up here is first to go from a cellular pathway on the right which is showing cells that will eventually become the vulva of a C. elegans to a biochemical and genetic pathway on the left where most of the biochemistry is by inference from other organisms and the majority of what has been deduced comes from classical forward genetics and a point that comes out of the dissection of this pathway I think is important for considering another kind of full out complete activity that has been done now with yeast and is contemplated with other organisms and that is make the full collection of null mutations that you can make by some form of knockout or use of interfering RNA whatever and what can you learn from that well to a first approximation you can learn a whole lot so it's not a non-starter by any means but the point I want to make here is that in this case and I think in many other pathways null mutations provide a really bare beginning particularly when you're working in a multicellular organisms has to do with early lethal phenotypes and things like that and so what they were able to learn was very much learned by more sophisticated screens off of weak alleles and gain of functional alleles and suppressors of various of these alleles and this isn't going to stop just because we've identified the genes and get to the null mutation what will often have to happen is a deep partnership with what we hope will be a faster form of classical genetics further comparative genomics could not have the comparative genomics that can get you the pathway it can show you RAS sitting up at the top linked to various receptors it can show you a map kinase cascade downstream and it can show you transcription factor targets downstream of the map kinase cascade that kind of connection you can often get from comparative genomics and comparative pathway analysis but often these things are directed toward very different ends in the animal there are not so many that are like a pathway that I'm going to show you in a moment because I'm familiar with it because I work on it which is muscle biogenesis which is actually perhaps unduly remarkably ancient and unduly remarkably conserved and unduly remarkably over simple probably and having said all of that I still love it but the point of this is that you can get connections but you can't get what it does for the animal without dealing with the animal ok so this is I'm exiting the parts as parts part of the interface of biology and genomics and I'm going to spend a little time in the parts to pathways business which was just indicated by the last slide and talking about connectivity and then getting really to where do we have to go to understand what all those arrows mean I mean those arrows mean x is upstream of y in an epistatic sense those arrows mean x reacts with or phosphorylates y but what really does that have to do with the function that eventually is read out so if we want to go from genome to how you make a worm you have to pass through the pathway but we have to know something more than what its components are and what their order is so here's an example of a very simple metazoan pathway and it's an ancient thing if you're going to be an animal and you're going to figure out how to eat you often have to move and you often have to have a few nerves connected to you in order to move and this is on the moving side this is how you make muscle and what's graphed here is a simplified version of how it happens in vertebrates and how it happens which is not so far what happens in a host of other organisms invertebrates is a multi-potential progenitor cell that can give rise to other fates but when it goes through a switch, a cell state switch as it were, it turns and becomes a committed myoblast which is a cell that can divide and it knows what it's going to become it will under appropriate environmental circumstances become muscle and only muscle and under most environmental circumstances that anybody's thought to present it with it can't become any of those other fates and there's now a molecular correlate of that commitment of end and then there's the differentiation switch where it actually goes to become differentiated muscle and express all the genes that are characteristic of it my reason for bringing it up other than my love of it is that it represents a kind of pathway that at least developmental biologists would like to understand to completion so we'd like to bring this completeness to understanding what each of these three cell states is and even ask are there really just three discreet cell states or have we been kidding ourselves all this time are there really two very discreet, rapid bi-stable switch-like switches that separate them or do they ooze and even though they ultimately seem to go in a unidirectional way do they dither and what does that tell us about the actual process that's going on that's sitting underneath those arrows so this is another way of representing that pathway and you're not expected to or even I would be loath to invite you to try and make heads or tails out of that but each and every one of those negative things indicated by a red blocker or those black things indicated by a arrow indicate respectively a negative or interfering like interaction or a positive interaction and for a large we're looking at what is mainly a group of transcription factors and these transcription factors talk to each other, they talk to themselves and they talk in tiers moving from tier 1 to tier 2 to tier 3 to tier 4 and down to tier 4 there was what was thought to be a fairly homogeneous group regulated by those guys sitting in tier 3 and for several of these there is rather direct knowledge and evidence that a tier 3 protein sits on a tier 4 gene so this is a part of a genetic regulatory network probably not atypical of many in metasomes perhaps even a little oversimplified and it doesn't contain in the graph all of the signaling that leads in to turn these guys on it contains mainly their discourse and discussion with each other and all of that is required to do this relatively simple pathway through what we think are 3 cell states and 2 transitions so this is just to amplify a little more than I actually intended to that even that bottom subgroup can be subdivided and this is a particular subset of things that have to do with getting straight how the cell cycle is regulated and what the arrested state is in the final differentiated myocyte which you're looking at is a sum of data that's been extracted from some chip analysis and as close as you'll get to seeing a chip but what it tells us is that even this group which was thought to be a rather simple set of genes reporting to the upstream regulators are diverse enough and probably because of differences that we're now starting to look at in their cis-regulatory apparatus and the details of the proteins that interact on the DNA that their kinetics reveal that they are not identically regulated in this case the kinetics are probably attributable principally to differential transcription and so all of this says that even when you've got a connection made and even when it seems like you know something about it and you bring out some strong differences probably with some fairly large implications for how the system actually does what it does so in Francis' email handout he said that genetic regulatory networks were one of the things that he wanted people to think about and there are lots of different levels at which one can describe such networks and different kinds of information you need if you're really going to know what such a network consists of and so this is what one regulatory module on one of these downstream genes looks like and all of those nasty little geometric shapes in different colors represent proteins that we know interact directly with the DNA often with each other as heterodimers or homodimers or other kinds of looser interactions and proteins that interact off the DNA to help activate transcription downstream etc. etc. I'm not going to take you through all of this to illustrate and to have appreciated by people who don't think about these aspects of gene regulatory networks is that even after you've connected a pattern of expression with sequences on the DNA and the proteins that bind there there is a measure of complexity in the system that gives subtle but important differences sometimes not so subtle differences in how the downstream genes are regulated moreover it's trivial to pick these guys out and much can be done with comparative genetics but much requires very we hope in the future high throughput rapid and simple assays for how they actually function yep okay and so I will finish up in a few minutes I will simply point out that gene regulatory networks in the MetaZoa also include elements that operate at very considerable distance making sorting them out an interesting task and again the comparative genomics aspect is helpful but not entirely revealing until you've got bioassay where I want to go and spend the last few minutes is at converting arrows and blockers into dynamic behavior and I want to show a little case that comes from the work of Michael Ellowitz and Stan Leibler and this is the little cartoon up there indicates three repressors in this case they're all from prokaryotic systems, lambda, tet and lack so if you've got the diagram at the top A represses B, B represses C and C represses A, what does it do and I'm not sure that all of us would instantaneously have said oh it oscillates but indeed it does and there's a lovely paper reporting the first part of this work and they've the further investigations and I certainly can't do the entire work justice but I just want to show you a little bit of both theoretical prediction that prompted them to actually set up this system and what came out of it so the top right is a system that has a reporter gene on the right that reports what one of these repressors is doing and on the left the system which is sitting on one plasmid and it causes the expression of three different repressors regulated by each other and what's down in the lower left is a prediction of what each one of those repressors ought to be doing it's a computational prediction of what they should be doing given a particular set of initial conditions and turnover times and on the right is data for what the reporter is doing and so and the paper I mean you really should visit the paper and not take this very superficial accounting of it to say all because there's much more to say, there's much to say about whether one treats the system stochastically or not there's much to say about how different cells behave and how cells in a lineage behave over time which is that there's a lot of it's not a perfect oscillator but it's amazing how well it works and so one view I think is that you understand even a simple little system like that when you can build it and it does what you predict and most of us, for most of our problems are nowhere near that level of understanding of our arrows we're still putting the arrows together in order, we're still collecting the parts, we're still finding connectivity at its most basic and even sometimes I think base kinds of levels and to move to a higher level of understanding of dynamically what these things are doing to actually build a cell much less an organism seems to me to be the real push for biology and its interface with genomics. There's also the question of whether there will be a limited number of stereotypical cassette circuits that are equivalent and I'm particularly attracted to this oscillator because I have a problem that I try to study which I'm going to skip by for a moment, we know some of the genes the point is that there's a lovely transcriptional oscillator that is operating in segmenting the vertebrate body making those segments that eventually become your ribs for example and getting to the bottom of that makes us wonder can we take a hint is it going to have a cycle of repressors well probably there's more than one way to build an oscillator, in fact we already know there are other ways which I won't get into but if there are only a few if there are stereotype strategies it's going to make describing the world in this way a lot easier if every game is an all new game and an all new strategy then our world is going to be really difficult and it's a task for much more than 20 years so this student of ours to come back to that student is going to need computational modeling plus increasingly sophisticated genetic manipulations with respect to combinatorics the ability to move around whole circuits and groups of genes seems to me as if it's going to be necessary on the horizon single cell assays that will let you look at discreet events so that you're not confused by the averaging of populations single molecule assays in the same way so that you're not confused and able to really understand what's going on and move out of the level of the kinds of diagrams that we've been drawing for so long and with that I'm going to skip to one last slide so since Francis kind of brought it up in his email I brought out one last thought there have been prior meetings like this at least one that HHMI co-sponsored a while back and it ended up being this incredible hair tearing event in which people were struggling with well what's genomics and what's the boundary and isn't it just all of biology and as if that were the bad news I couldn't understand what the horrible problem was yet from my perspective of course and mine was different than a lot of people in the room who saw the ship dissipating and becoming unfocused and fragmenting and turning into a bunch of from a big iceberg into a bunch of tiny little bits of ice and melting in the great ocean of NIH but I think times have changed at least I hope they have and they've changed partly because genome biology itself I think is in the process of growing up and well there may be an argument about whether one should call it a discipline and frankly I'm still a little confused about what disciplines are is it how you do the science or is it the question we've got both kinds I don't really care what I care about is that it has enough center of gravity and enough problems of its own to evolve and at this interface with its what should be its dearest friend classical genetics that it has plenty of center of gravity to interact with the rest of biology without being lost and so I would at least put on the table great optimism for embracing the interface rather than spending a great deal of time trying to find the boundary and if that's something that Francis and staff have to do and if they had some later time dealing with practicalities we'll let them do it on their own time so that was perhaps a little harsh but I needed a place to end and you know when you got to go you got to go thank you I think she may have ended but we're going to keep her up here and ask her some questions I'm only putting the questions on the table I'm not something that you mentioned at the end which is very important and relates to what you had in the beginning of your talk a lot of current diagrams of biological systems you have all the arrows just coming one way and I think a lot of the complexity of the system is lost in that fashion can you comment on that a little bit and how we can capture the full complexity of how the downstream elements influence what's above them yeah so the question is about all of these sort of one way arrows and how many of these interactions either molecular or cellular are actually unidirectional and how much is in the eye of the beholder and I guess I may be rambling off point but I'm reminded particularly of what has always seemed to me to be and has proved to be an unwise asymmetry where we always feel safer when we're looking at synthesis than when we're looking at decay and yet regulated decay is every bit as interesting and every bit is information rich both at the protein level and at the transcriptional level as is regulated synthesis similarly when you look at these regulatory pathways there's an awful lot of feedback going on I mean Adam Ark can better comment on all these different kinds of pathways and how they function than I can do but my impression just from the ones I'm really familiar with is that indeed arrows going in both directions whether directly or indirectly I think indirect happens a lot is clearly a big part of the game and the question is how much we've had our lenses and sunglasses tuned to looking for certain kinds of things if I were going to ramble further which I probably shouldn't but in mammals for example in looking at cis regulatory elements because of the nature of the assay extraordinary bias there has been looking for elements that cause something to turn on as opposed to the parts of those elements that repress and in organisms that don't carry some of the just experimental infrastructure and cost infrastructure that has caused people to relentlessly pursue the positive element because then you can write the paper and move on to the next one and it's very clear that negative regulation is at least as important as positive so yeah I like to weigh arrows it's a wonderful talk and it prompted me to think about two things trying to think about something out in 2020 do we need completeness of data resources or techniques for tissues and for organisms and for siat against of course we're very lucky for the work that was done before us but for I think big fluffy things like us we need probably to have that set of complete resources for organisms and I think that's quite interesting I hadn't really verbalized it internally to say to myself but what actually do we need to do to make that complete set of resources happen in terms of that that's one comment you might want to comment back the other thing about your education which is very very true about getting the people right I think we may miss a trick if we don't steal just directly from our computational colleagues so we don't have to like oh theft is encouraged theft is definitely encouraged but I think we should perhaps have an active thieving policy on computational and physics yes but it has to be thieving with a possible return policy and I have a bioassay and the bioassay is when you think you have successfully stolen someone from the computational or physical world you give them a copy of the latest edition of the molecular biology of the cell and you make sure it's a very fresh new copy and you give it to them and then you go look and see if it's been opened and if after a certain amount of time acts where acts should not exceed three months and it's not dog-eared then it's time for the return policy and by which I mean there are people who come over who wonderfully not only like the problems but are willing to if not become biologists are willing to and enjoy learning about the problems so that when you're talking to them you're not speaking in Swahili I always think of these New Yorker cartoons of a cat that's you know it's master is talking to it little zigzags well that can happen too okay well I don't know but I guess it is interesting to have a a thieving policy on computational side I don't know whether there's a route to do it I don't even know which part of the American system is the computational side you go and say we want to professionally nick people from you consistently over the next ten years I'm not sure we should tell them I think we should just do it I mean engineering departments are interesting places applied math which sometimes exists attached to engineering sometimes it exists attached to math computer science there are a whole host of them but very interesting things do happen even on a campus like ours which prides itself I think justifiably on encouraging interdisciplinary work between the physical sciences and biology even there when you actually get into the down and dirty of what happens in a graduate program when there will be two courses two years of courses about algorithms information theory and building computers and if you try to superimpose the biology on that it starts to look like you know making an mdphd at least so I have a question that deals with the issue of completeness or pseudo completeness at the level of the genome sequence itself and of course sort of the dirty little secret of the flying human genome projects is that about 25% of the genome namely the heterochromatin is currently excluded from our definition of completeness and these are regions that are important not only for inheritance but for understanding genome evolution especially and so we have these wonderful tools in terms of proteins and transcripts etc sort of what level of priority would you place on actually completing the genome sequence it requires you know technology development it will be some time before it can be done and so sort of where should our resources be placed do we really want to have a complete genome sequence or not other people than I should probably take a swing at that but I don't know whether it should be Dr. Lander who can think about whether he really wants to go through and finish sequence of all that quality or whether it should be people at NHGRI I mean I guess the argument about we know there's gold in them of our hills we know there's gold there because there are functions served evolutionary functions and there are genes buried in there I think I remember that you know the principle Mapkinase in Drosophila was sitting in an island of otherwise stuff that would not have been seen and wasn't even cloneable that was one of the arguments for the benefits of whole genome shotgun if I recall correctly so it's clearly a good thing the finishing it down to the last nucleotide is wonderful but it's a cost benefit analysis and what you'd hope is that by incrementally moving the definition of completeness at the same time that you're willing to invest in technology to go after the hard stuff that you'll be able to continue to move and not just decide one day well 15% is left and we're tired and we're going to put all our money somewhere else and I think that's how most genome oriented people think about it time for one more this is just a quick comment Barbara I think some of the points you made about education and culture and combinatoriality in figuring out how genomic information actually explains biology could be more widely promulgated and I think people in this room should be aware that current policy in the biology literature is to make sure that the combinatorial aspects of any system are published last rather than first and that essentially one is constrained by editorial policy good journals quote unquote to start by publishing papers about how one molecule has an input to a system and another paper on how another molecule has an input and I think the genomics perspective has not been heard by many of these organs and it would be very nice to get this word out to other people yeah I think point well made and maybe it's a redefinition of what comprises elegance it's it always seems easier with one gene one input, one relationship to feel at ease with an elegant bit of truth even if it's only transient in its elegance and when you put it all together it starts to get messy again it's that thing that sends our physics friends running away from us yelling and screaming and going oh you people you live in a muddle of confusion and to the extent that biology builds its systems sometimes in a not entirely parsimonious way or that what we think is elegant parsimony actually there's a more elegant thing going on I mean I heard a story which I'm not going to be too specific about because I think it's not published but except to say it's a story of three transcription factors that appear to be entirely redundant and why were the three transcription factors in the cell and indeed until you blew them all out you didn't do something awful to them but if you got down and actually look at the dynamics of the decision making they were actually doing this marvelous dance in which first the first one did something and then the second one did something and then the third one did something but it was also finally resolved they actually had to get into the computational modeling game of the predictions to test what was underlying the redundancy and I think as we see more and more of those cases come up people will become maybe more and more skeptical of real simple one molecule one arrow things Thank you Barbara


Hello, welcome to the session, we're going to go ahead and get started. And I just want to, well first I'll introduce the session as they asked me to, how to build a healthy cohesive team and lead them to success. So hopefully you're in the right spot. I want to just assure you no matter what your role is, there's going to be something for you here to learn. But I do want to just get a feel for the room. How many of you guys are currently leading a team? Perfect. You're in the right place. So hopefully no matter how big of a team this is going to really be applicable to you. So I'm just glad that you're here, hopefully you're in the right place. My goal is that there's going to be a lot of tangible practical things that you can take back to your shops and implement. So first I'll just start off by introducing myself, I'm Tracy Barrett, I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Navigate the Journey. We are a strategic planning and leadership development firm. We do a lot of team building, we do a lot of strategic planning, but we specialize in digital agencies. So we're used to your lingo, used to talking the talk with you guys and we really, really love partnering with agencies for a number of reasons, which I'll bring up several of those today. I do have a background in management but also in psychology and strategic planning so you're going to hear a little bit of that woven through the presentation today. Let me just give you a little bit of overview on how the session is going to go so you know what to expect. We are going to talk about where team dynamics fit in the big picture of your agency. We're going to talk about why a healthy team is even important. We're going to talk about what does it take to get a healthy team and how do we get there from there, from here, where you are today, what are some tips and some really practical techniques that you can take back and implement no matter what stage or level that your team is at right now. And then next step questions that I want you to ask yourself and also bring back and ask your team to get you started on the process. So where do team dynamics fit in the grand scheme of things? Navigate the journey of our company. We like to go into agencies and look through three different lenses. So first is the company journey, which is pretty easy to get people to think about.  And it does take everybody taking a breath, right? You guys are deep into the weeds of your day-to-day activity. And so we're there to kind of pull you out of it. And so is the leadership team and you guys as leaders of your team to have to take a pause and look at the big picture. We also encourage people and you as leaders to think about your own journey. Where are you in your own development and growth as an individual? And for that, it does take some self-awareness. It does take time out to figure out who you are, what your own personal mission and vision is, and how does that fit in with the company, your own core values, and how do your own personal core values fit in with your company core value? And then there's a team journey. And that's primarily what we're going to be talking about today, is how does your team, your team dynamics, your team performance, fit in to the overall big picture? Is your team fulfilled, happy? Is there clarity? Is there high morale? Are there minimal politics? Is it highly productive? And is there low turnover? We want to be in control of our turnover. So sometimes those are great indicators of where we are as a team. So why is any of this important? Why are you here? Why is this important to you? Why are healthy and cohesive teams very, very important to actually profits of a company? I like this quote from a book called The Simpler Way. It's a book on organizational behavior. And it says, what we know about individuals, no matter how rich the details will never give us the ability to predict how they're going to behave as a system once we put them all together, right? Once individuals link together, they become something completely different. Relationships change us, reveal us, evoke more from us. And only when we join with others do our gifts become visible, even to ourselves. And this is really important because we all work in a highly creative environment, right, where our talents and gifts are valued. And we put a lot of stock and weight in that. And what's interesting when you think about this on a psychological standpoint is that when we join together as a healthy and cohesive team, actually those gifts and talents become heightened, which affect our bottom line. So it's really important to remember that healthy teams are one of the most untapped competitive advantages that are out there. At least the healthy team that we're going to be talking about today. So what does this team look like? What type of team am I talking about? This is a graph that's from a book called Wisdom of Teams, which is a great read if you guys are adding to your probably ever-growing stack of books to read. But it takes us from a journey from what a pseudo team is all the way up to a high-performing team. And why a high-performance team is the goal, it's like the gold star pinnacle that we want to reach. And the easiest way to look at it in simplest way is not the prettiest graph, but I thought it would be the simplest way to help you evaluate because I really throughout all of our discussion today want us to think about your own team, to dig deep. So when you look at this and you think about the team that you have back in your agency, where do you fall on the graph? So a pseudo team is just a group of people, come together, complementary skills that come to work, they leave. A potential team also has a bit of fuzzy, not a ton of clarity, but maybe they've discussed a little bit what their common purpose is, what their common goals are, and what the common strategy might be. And then you have a real team, and oftentimes we will see this. A team that has come together, they actually have articulated their common purpose or mission. They have articulated goals, and they are committed to a strategy. They're holding each other actually mutually accountable. Now, this is a tricky little topic I want us to get behind a little bit later, but holding the team mutually accountable for that strategy that they have put together, and then you have the high performance team. So what's the one thing that's missing? Being deeply committed to each other's personal growth and success, right? Not just to their own individual success, but they actually care about their teammate's personal growth and success. This isn't even easy to achieve, but when you can achieve it, this is the competitive advantage that I'm talking about. So why is it so hard to achieve and maintain a healthy team? Well, it takes commitment, and as we talk about a lot in the digital space, this is a fast-paced industry. Things are changing all the time. There's so much that you have to stay on top of, and it's very easy to get stuck in the weeds. And oftentimes, what will happen is that people will make a commitment to saying, hey, we're going to grow as a team. We're going to dig a little deeper as a team. But then it stops there. Maybe they do one or two things. They don't have the discipline to actually carry it through to the end. And it does take that discipline to carry it through to the end. Actually, it can be oftentimes more damaging to a team to keep starting processes and not seeing them through. Because then you start to get that cynic rising up like, here we go again. We're going to try that new thing, but we're not actually going to see it through to the end. Which can be very damaging to the health of a team. So if you're going to commit to this type of growth and development, if you want to take your team to the next level, it's going to take discipline to see it through to the end. To actually be able to take your team to the place that it needs to go. And that's why buy-in is so important, right? So if you've started a lot of processes and you haven't seen it through to the end, it's awfully hard to get that buy-in. And some people, we can be a highly cynical industry, right? And sometimes people's minds go directly to Michael Scott in the office and they think, here we go, team building.  So getting those cynics to turn around and actually understand the value of really getting the team to that next level. It's going to take buy-in. And it's going to take a lot of courage and persistence to get there. And courage, because this is a very human thing we're going to be talking about. Having that courage to maybe be a little vulnerable, to open ourselves up to self-awareness and growth. To understanding what our blind spots are and giving people space to lean into their strengths does take courage and persistence to get there. But it's worth it. Taking your team, going through some of the exercises that we're talking about, it was worth it. Because you are really going to get behind eliminating the politics that often plague organizations, the confusion that keeps us from moving the needle on things, that lack of clarity that can lead us to be much more productive and profitable. And one of the reasons that we love operating in the digital space is because so many digital agencies are really committed to doing good. They really want to make that connection with their users through what they create and the products and services that they create. And it's amazing. And we're often reminding them to start at home. When you really invest in the people that you work in and you really put that time and energy into the people you work in, you're actually creating great citizens that are coming out of your agencies. So it's worth it on so many levels, not just your bottom line, but that positive impact that you're having to the community around you and for the people that are working with you. And it is really, I say it so often, that leadership leading any size team is such a gift. And if we really look at it like a gift, sometimes it can feel like a burden. Sometimes it's really hard. People problems suck, right?  But man, leadership is a gift. And if we can get behind it and really have the right mindset when we go into our workplaces, we realize that actually we're doing more than just developing and designing. We're actually having positive impacts on lives. So what does it take? What does it take to have a cohesive and healthy team? The model that I'm gonna keep going back to today is Patrick Lancioni's five dysfunctions of a team. Another great book. Sorry, I just keep mentioning books for you to read. But this is another great model as a leader and getting behind the common dysfunctions that can plague a team. And here are the dysfunctions. Think about your own team and see if this sounds at all familiar. Having an absence of trust so that fear of being vulnerable and going deep, a fear of conflict. Do you have artificial harmony going on in the workplace? A lack of commitment. There's not a full commitment going on in the decisions that you make. The top two are ones that we see most often when we go into digital studios, which is the avoidance of accountability, not holding each other accountable for what we have, the goals that we have set. And an inattention to results, collective results. Oftentimes we'll see a lot of commitment to individual results but not those collective results. So what do we wanna see? We want to see a team that's really focused on building trust, mastering conflict, achieving commitment, embracing accountability, and focusing on results. So I'm gonna just touch on each one of these about trust. So trust is the most important thing. If you really feel like your team is lacking in deep trust, then the whole rest of the model breaks down. And also, we need the entire model. So to be a high-performing team and to have that competitive advantage, you can't just have three of the five and be happy. We really wanna see all five of these working and sync with each other. But trust is the foundation. And that's really what's gonna get you to the next level. So here are some questions for you to think about for your team. Members of teams with an absence of trust. Are they concealing their weaknesses and mistakes from one another? Do they hesitate to ask for help or provide constructive feedback? Do they hesitate to offer help outside their own areas of responsibility, their own projects? Do they hold grudges when things go wrong? And do they dread meetings and find reasons to cancel? So what does vulnerability-based trust mean? So here's the question you need to ask yourself if you're really wondering, do I have a deep level of trust on my team? Do the people on your team have the capacity, space, and permission to be open, honest, and human? To acknowledge their strengths and tap into them, do we give them the space? And to be honest about weaknesses and blind spots. That's a big one, right? Because in our design world, dev world, our eye is trained to go to the weakness, to go to the thing that needs to be fixed, right? And that's a good thing, because we want high quality. But oftentimes it creates an environment where people don't feel safe. Safe to admit their mistakes are safe to say, I messed up and I need help, right? So sometimes we can say I messed up, but we can't say I need help. Or we can say I need help, but they won't admit that they've messed up. So we're creating that safe environment for each other to get there. And here what I've listed are two key ingredients that you need to really develop this level of trust. You need integrity and you need empathy. And this really, it comes from the top down. I really put kind of the burden on the leader of the team. Because if you have leaders that don't have integrity and empathy, it's really hard to cultivate that across the team. So you have to lead with integrity and empathy. And integrity is the single most important quality of every part and every section of business, right? You want to have integrity in your contracts and your partnerships with your clients, with your vendors, definitely with your coworkers, right? And a lot of people want to see that within their leaders. So if a person doesn't have an integrity to do what they're gonna say or do what they're gonna say or what they have said. And do the right thing at any cost, especially in the business world. If you're willing to take a hit because of integrity, then it's really hard to be the type of leader that people want to follow, right? You'll always be that leader that people have to follow. But I think the goal is to be the type of leader that people want to follow. And so the word integrity actually comes from the word integer, which means whole. So to be whole and living in that truth and in that integrity. And empathy, really important thing for you as a leader to remember. These are the three questions that your team members think about when they look at you. This is what they're thinking in their head about you. They're thinking, does this person like me, right? Do they really like me? Do they have empathy? Can they put themselves in my shoes? Do they care about me? Can you help me, right? And this all speaks to competence. Like, are you the type of leader that's competent? And somebody that they want to get behind, they trust their decisions. And do I trust you? And that's all about character, right?  And that's a very key thing to remember, that you're gonna get a lot further with your teammates, not by boasting about your knowledge or really trying to teach them something first, but by leading with empathy and leading out of that heart of trust. Second is conflict. If you have that firm base of trust, then you can get into a place of what I call healthy conflict, right? So I'm not talking about tension and dissension. We're talking about constructive ideological debate, right? So is there a group thing going on, right? Are there boring meetings happening? This is a really key indicator if you don't have healthy conflict on your team. Are people completely zoning out in your meetings? Is there an environment where there's heavy politics? People feel like they have to kind of really play by the political rules.  Do you fail to tap into all opinions because you really just wanna get the decision made and move on? And do you wait, is there a lot of time with people wasting time and energy posturing? So if any of those sound even remotely true, you might have an avoidance of conflict, of healthy conflict and conflict can be uncomfortable. Like nobody likes conflict. There's so many books that have been written on having hard conversations and getting through conflict, but it's necessary, right? Bernay Brown has a great quote that says you can choose courage or you can choose comfort, but you can't choose both. So what is it gonna be as you're leading a team? Do you have the courage to kind of push through the conflict and really get your team to where it needs to be? And that's gonna take a high level of truth and humility, right? Speaking the truth, but in a humble way. And that is kind of your combination that you need for conflict. And if you can have healthy debate, then you can get to a level of the commitment that you need. And commitment is we're not looking for a unanimous consensus, right? For commitment, you need clarity around decisions, right? We need buy-in. And so if you are a team that's struggling with that type of buy-in, then you might be a team that has ambiguity about direction and priorities. You often could be watching windows of opportunity close because you're talking about things and analyzing things way too much. Unnecessary delay in making decisions. Lack of confidence because of fear of failure. And that could come from the leader as well. You can see a lack of confidence because the leader is scared to make the decision because they don't want backlash or they're scared there might be failure. You know, that imposter syndrome seeps in where it's like, oh, well if we fail or if we make this decision or if I make the call and something doesn't go right, then they're gonna be able to see that I'm not the leader I should be, right? And oftentimes that can put the team behind. If you find that you're revisiting the same issues and the same discussions over and over again, then you can have this kind of lack of commitment that we're thinking about. So a team that debates and commits is a team that really everybody's voice is heard. Everybody's opinion is given, but then the decision is made and you move on. And I put this on the leader. You have to lead, right? And leading, I'm not talking about managing, I'm talking about leading your team to a point of decision. So you need to hear your employees' voices, but then in the end, it's not you can't sit around and wait for unanimous vote, right? And a full consensus. Somebody's gotta pull the trigger. Somebody's gotta make the decision and move the team forward for good or bad. So that's the type of commitment. And once you've made that decision, you need everybody to buy in. This is what we've committed to. This is the direction we're gonna go and we're gonna move forward. And if you do that, then you can hold each other accountable because then you're able to say like, look, we all agreed with this. I know that maybe it wasn't what you wanted to do, but in the end, we all agreed this was the commitment that we were gonna make. And so we're talking about accountability that's not just coming from the leader. That's when leaders get really burnt out and exhausted. But we need to be training our teams to be holding each other accountable. And that's a new and different type of accountability that you don't often see. So if your team isn't holding each other accountable, you might see that there's resentment amongst team members that hold themselves to a higher standard. You might see that there is an environment that's encouraging mediocrity. Remember that it's not what we preach, it's what we tolerate. So you can stand up as a leader and say whatever you want, but if you're tolerating behavior that doesn't jive with what you've committed to, then that's really the thing that's ruling the day, right? You could be missing deadlines and key deliverables because you're not holding each other accountable. And then there's that undue burden that you feel as a leader. So if you feel pretty tired from carrying that weight, it could very well be because you're not holding each other accountable and you haven't empowered your team to do that and given them permission to hold each other accountable. But the enemy of accountability is ambiguity. So if there are things that are unclear, people aren't sure of the decisions that have been made and those decisions haven't been said over and over again and made clear, then you're killing your opportunity to hold people accountable. There needs to be clarity. And then you can have attention to results. So a great team focuses on results, not just the owner of the CEO or the leader of the team. So if your team is not focusing on results, this is what you might be feeling. There might be, you've stagnated, you're failing to grow. You've stopped defeating your competitors. You're starting to see competitors actually winning projects that you should be winning. You're losing achievement-oriented employees.  Becoming increasingly siloed or you're finding that people are easily distracted. So what we wanna do is shift from silo thinking to team thinking where we're all focused on team results. So how do we build this team, this healthy team with these behaviors, right? So how do we get all five of these behaviors? So again, we want to start with trust and building trust as the foundation. And one of the things to remember is we really have to get to know each other on a deeper level to build that kind of trust. I always use the example of the social psychology term fundamental attribution, which is, it's kind of a popular idea that people tend to attribute other people's negative behavior to their character, but their own negative behavior, they attribute to the things going on around them or their environment.  But then if I'm driving to work and I cut somebody off, I'm like, oh, I didn't mean to do that. You know, I dropped my phone or I was thinking about something else or you're in my blind spot. I immediately don't think about, call myself a jerk, I start talking about my environment.  I'm gonna, you know, so I know him, right? So I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. And that really builds trust is knowing each other on a deeper level. And one of the ways that's really helpful in getting to know each other better at work is purposeful learning. So purposeful learning is when you're bringing your team together and you're learning about each other on a different level. You're learning about strengths, you're learning about how people communicate, gaining a deeper understanding about each other's blind spots. Oftentimes when it comes to communication, we can be kind of two ships passing in the night. So I'm gonna give you, we're gonna do a fun little exercise and that you guys can take back to your teams as well on communication, on how we actually think and how that thinking affects how we process things, okay? So some of you have paper which you can use, but if you have your phone, you can use this too. So I'm gonna ask you six questions. This is called thinking wavelengths. So prepare yourself, don't overthink it. I want you to write down or put in your phone the first number that comes to your head with each question that I ask you, okay? So on a scale of one to 10, write down your relationship to risk. So a one is gonna be somebody who's very risk adverse. Gonna push back, lose sleep over risk. A 10 is gonna embrace risk at the snap of a finger, loves risk, doesn't lose sleep, no big deal. A five somewhere in the middle and you can be any number from one to 10 and think of yourself as a whole. This doesn't just have to be at work, it's just who you are as a person. How do you feel about risk? Okay, got your number? Second number you're gonna write down. On a scale of one to 10, identify your relationship to change, right? So one's gonna resist change. They're gonna tell me all the reasons why things shouldn't change, they don't like change. A 10 loves change. Actually they'll change things even when they shouldn't change things, right? And a five somewhere in between. So write down your number between one and 10.  So this isn't multitasking because all the women are like 10. So because we can have a million things. This is ideas or concepts that you can have in any stage of your head. So somebody who's a one would have just maybe a couple fish if the fish were ideas and there was a fishbowl on your head. They maybe have a couple fish swimming around and be happy. A 10 could have a whole school of fish thinking about a million different ideas in their head and be happy. And a five somewhere in between. So then the fourth number you're gonna write down is logic. So a one, to rip off the band aid and go there, you have to push through. And one of the ways that you can do that is really making sure you have structure. And people know what to expect going in. So you have tactical meetings that you might have weekly where you're gonna have issues that you discuss and or identify, discuss and solve and move on. And the leader is gonna make sure a decision is made. And if you can't make a decision because you're missing the right information, you're gonna park it, come back to it next time. But when people start to see like, look, we have an agenda, we're gonna stick to it. This is the process. I know what to expect. You're gonna have more engaged employees. There's nothing that's more frustrating than when you get everybody, especially if you're a remote team, right? It's really hard. You can see everybody check and slack or emailing when you're on a video conference and you're just like, what is happening? If you are really sticking to the time and sticking to the agenda and you're saying to people like, look, this is another area we're gonna hold each other accountable.  Like we have to be all in in these meetings and those tactical meetings are really important. Strategic meetings, which you can have less frequently, once a month, once a quarter, where you dig deep. You really wanna feel some tension in those meetings. You want there to be debate. You want people giving their opinions. You wanna be arguing about those issues that you need to get out on the table. So you want to make sure that people understand that this is a safe environment. We're gonna allow for this to happen. You as a leader are gonna make sure you're facilitating it properly and it's not gonna be contentious and we're gonna be safe and a safe environment means we're gonna be respectful of each other but we're gonna debate things and it's gonna be okay because we have trust and so we trust each other and we know that we care about each other so we can have these debates. So when you create that environment as a leader, you can let people really enter into these strategic tough conversations we need to have to move the needle and then having offsite working retreats, at least once a year where you're getting the team offsite and you're talking about things like mission and vision and values and goals and you're putting, setting the stage for really holding each other accountable is really, really important. So moving your team beyond that into what you can commit to and that's what we're talking about here, mission, vision and strategy. Hopefully your company, I don't know if some of you are owners or on a leadership team for your agency, if you don't have this nailed down, it's really hard to hold people accountable and really start measuring results. So your mission is your why. The whole start with why, the whole golden circle. This should be as a leader, should be sitting on your desk. This should be we need to figure this out and reevaluate it. So do you know your mission? Do you know your why?  It's beautiful. So if this doesn't fit with our mission, we're not gonna do it because it can be shiny and attractive and we might wanna chase after it but it doesn't fit our mission and you need to have that filter especially in this arena of just tons of innovation, tons of like, it's just like the movie up the squirrel. Like there's so many visionaries that work in this industry and they're just chasing the squirrel all the time and you have to like keep yourself focused. This is your formula for focus. It's having a mission, sticking to that why. The visions you're where, where are we going? People wanna know where they're going and then your strategy is how you're gonna get there. So there's a great Harvard Business Review article called Being Happy at Work and there were three things that this research team spent so much time developing the three things that people want at work that make them happy. One was a meaningful vision of the future. The second was a sense of purpose and the third were great relationships. They really, people want solid relationships at work. They want close friends, right? They want people that they can talk to. They wanna sense a purpose. They wanna feel like there's something bigger outside of the world that this isn't all for naught and they want a vision of the future. They wanna know where they're going and the part that they play in that. And then accountability and attention to results. This is what we typically see. We go into a lot of agencies that have great culture, great teams, people get along really well but they just have this fear of holding each other accountable or they don't like measuring results. And oftentimes that's because we're swinging so far from corporate America. Like we hate that world of like really, leaders that are just coming down or heavy management and we don't like all those things that remind us of corporate America and we like being a little bit different but what can happen is we can turn into these sort of passive leaders that just want everybody to be happy and that's not good either, right? We want to have leaders that are strong leaders, leaders that make decisions that are taking us somewhere and in order to get there and move the needle, we do have to hold each other accountable and we have to measure results. And so the best way that I know for that is to have a dashboard, to have a scorecard. Every team needs a scorecard and both my daughters actually play basketball although they're short like I am but I can remember this past season, this scoreboard went out on my daughter's basketball game.  They were just like, what's the score? And then they'd run off the court every time there was a time out, tell us the choice, they just couldn't function without knowing what the score is and that's very much the same as what it's like at work. Your team wants to know what the score is. How are we doing? I wanna be at least the team members you want on your team. The team members that don't care about the score and don't care about how they're performing and don't wanna be held to a certain standard or the team members you need to be thinking about, right? But the team members that really want to achieve and be part of something bigger wanna know what the score is and they want clear goals and clear goals for the company and then clear goals individually. Create a dashboard that has those goals. Think about what the goals are for the company overall. Once you have your vision and your strategy outlined for how you're gonna get to those goals but also think about those personal goals, the clear goals that you're putting together for an individual. Oftentimes in agencies we can see people that will stay in the same position for a while and they can outgrow that position or the position can outgrow them and if you really want to develop your team members and you wanna make sure that they're growing, you're gonna wanna analyze that from time to time. Are people in the right role with the right responsibilities? Are they growing and does it fit where we're going as a company? And for that you do need to evaluate. So lastly, what questions do we need to ask ourselves moving forward? As you guys go back into your world and you start creating again, what are the questions that you can ask of your team and of your company and of the other leaders that you work with? First evaluate your agency. Start through the lens of the company. Does your agency have a clear and compelling mission that the team can get behind or is it fuzzy? Do you have articulated and defined core values that you can measure your team members against? There's nothing like core values to really hold up when you're looking at those performance reviews. Is there clear vision and direction for the agency? And do the members on your team know the part they play in that vision? Are they clear? Do they feel that sense of purpose? Do they know that you want them? You have to say that vision as a leader over and over and over again, at least seven times before somebody hears it. I have yet to go into an agency where somebody on the team says, man, my leader talks way too much about the mission and the vision. The leader, though, thinks they do. Every time they'll say, oh my gosh, I think I just talked about it way too much. So there's that missing gap there. You know, it's too often than not, you're not saying it enough. So does everybody know the strategy? How to achieve the vision and the part they play? So again, my favorite, favorite circle. I want you to take this home. Evaluate your team. So how does your team assess on the five behaviors? You can actually take an assessment. I'll show you a picture of one. And the next slide. Where you can measure, you ask your team a few questions. So the five dysfunctions that we talked about, you can do a survey where you ask several questions on all of these levels and you can get a score for how your team is doing on each level, on trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results and it'll tell you where you're weak. So it's often a little different than what you might guess, all right? So where does the team fall out on personality style? How well are you communicating with each other? Do you have some concrete thinkers that are having a hard time with the abstract thinkers and vice versa? Do you have some behavioral styles that just aren't gelling and you don't know how to get it behind it? You can get behind it, it's possible. So are you clear, cohesive, and productive? Is there collaboration going on? Another issue we see with a lot of teams is that desire to work independently. So there's just a lot of people that really value their independence like creating and working independently and just don't like collaborating. So measuring that, getting behind that, and then are your people having fun? Are their relationships happening? Are they gelling? So this is what results will look like if you do a five behaviors team survey and it's really cool to look at where you might be lacking and where you're doing really well and then understanding what you can get behind and that'll help craft the type of purposeful learning that you need to do. So if you're low on trust, you'd know what kind of exercises to do and so on and so forth, but it's a really handy tool to get behind what you might be missing. And then lastly, as a leader, and you guys, I think almost everybody, raise their hand that they're leading teams, you need to take a breath and a step back at some point and evaluate your own journey. Where are you on your own journey as a leader? Again, because it is such a gift to lead and because whether you know it or not, you're having an impact on every single person that reports up to you or that works on your team. You have to become somebody who's committed to becoming self-aware and being self-aware and going through the process of assessments and really getting behind whether it's a 360 or whether it's just doing an assessment so you can learn more about yourself sometimes can be a scary process. Sometimes it's hard to just ask our team, like, where am I lacking? What am I doing good that adds to the team and what am I doing that's detracting from the team? It's a hard question to ask, but if you really wanna grow as a leader, man, you can gain a lot of respect when you start asking your teammates those types of questions and then becoming better and growing. I mean, my hope is that I'm on my deathbed at whatever age and I'm still growing. I'm never gonna get there, right? So how are we pushing ourselves in that way? Do we really understand our strengths and blind spots? Go on the internet and Google Strength Finders and take a Strength Finders so you're able to articulate and understand what your strengths are and then getting behind those blind spots. Do you have a personal mission and vision for yourself? Oftentimes we just talk about it for companies or organizations or teams but we don't talk about it for ourselves and you can actually think about what's your own personal mission and vision and does it jive with the job that you're at? And do you have personal core values? You know, it's not hard to sit down and kind of scope out like what are the things that mean the most to me? What are the core values and do they match the company that I'm with right now? Is that a right fit for me? Is something rubbing up against my core value? If something really bothers you or a person bothers you it's usually because they're rubbing up against one of your core values. So do you care about the health of the team and do you communicate that way? And are you aware of how others perceive you at work positively or negatively? The last little assessment I'll toss out there is an EQI. Emotional intelligence, you guys have probably heard the phrase it's hot topic right now but man nothing can get behind what your strengths and your blind spots are like understanding how you come out on an emotional intelligence EQI assessment. It is amazing. It looks at five different scales and then there's sub-scales within those composites and you really can get behind how you it's a self assessment. So it's really how you perceive yourself and how others may be perceiving you. And where are you strong and where are you weak? Are you a strong problem solver and very objective but you're kind of lacking in empathy or your interpersonal relationships aren't as strong as they should be and that is a great first step and really self awareness and really going deep as a leader. So if you want information on this you can see me afterwards and I'll tell you how you can have an EQI. So those are the three journeys that and I know it's a lot and you probably feel overwhelmed a little bit as a leader but again I think it's fun. I think it's, team dynamics are amazing and it's kind of, you know, if you want to take a break from the being in the weeds and pull back and look at the big picture. This is a really, really fun and simple way of kind of the checklist of the things that you need to think about. So any questions? Yes. What are the special consideration when leading a team of millennials? Oh yes. Well, millennials are, there's so much written about millennials. One of the first things I like to say because I think that so much has been written and some of it's true and some of it is that us an older generation forget what it was like to be in our 20s. So some of it is simply, you know, just there's more out there, there's more social media and that can be an issue when you're in dated and oftentimes we forget how idealistic we were when we were in our 20s as well. But one of the things that I also have read and researched about and it really speaks to my point about mission and vision and strategy is that millennials want a sense of purpose. They want to feel like they're doing something for the greater good which is fabulous. I think it's amazing. Sometimes it can feel hard to manage because they're always looking for the next thing or they might move on much more quickly than our parents' generation definitely and even more quickly than my generation. But I do feel like if you can get behind crafting a mission and a vision and getting them involved in that, you really are gonna up a millennials engagement and loyalty to you. They're gonna move on until they find that sense of purpose and they'll stay longer with the team that has that. Thank you for the great session. So I have a couple of questions. So by knowing where you stand on the thinking wavelength trend, can a minder can become a finder? Is there a way where you can take some action or by some mentoring you can become and go one way or the other? Typically not. Typically your thinking wavelength is fixed but what I wanna encourage everybody because sometimes people freak out with their number and they're like, oh maybe I shouldn't be doing this or shouldn't be doing that. It's just one facet of who you are as a human being. It's just how you think through things. It's how you sort of think concretely versus abstract. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the end all be all on whether you can lead a big team versus a small team. It does help and really understanding if you are working with, so say you're more of a keeper or a minder and you're working side by side with a conceiver. What it does do is help you understand how to communicate with each other. So whether you're explaining things logically or trying to understand where they're coming from or what you might prefer doing. So it does help with job placement. So sometimes what we find is when we run this on people they are more towards the operational side but they're in a strategic or developmental role and they can't figure out why they just don't like it. This is very eye-opening for them and vice versa. Somebody who's more in an operational role and needs to be more strategic. Sometimes you're gonna, just in a career progression you're gonna start out more of a administrative operational role and you might move up into more of a strategic role and so that just happens with career ladders. But for a lot of people it's eye-opening. Like for a lot of people it's like, this is why I don't want my job. Right, but most of the career ladders are like that like you mentioned, right? I mean very moved from one way to the other. Yeah. And I think that we have to think about that when we're structuring. I mean a lot of agencies are flat organizations. So sometimes we should think about having two different career ladders. Having a ladder for people that are more strategic and abstract in their thinking and developmental and have a path for them to go into leadership or management, but also have a path for those people who really wanna just become experts in their craft. So have two growth paths. Have that path where you're on the path into management or you're on the path to becoming an expert in your craft and both those paths are revered and respected within the agency. Is one really great example of what I've seen some agencies do. Right, and that's quick second question. So as an organization is there need to be maintaining a balance between the minders, keepers or finders? Is there a ratio or something where you need to know once you know as an organization why that this is where your people or team fit in? What's the, are you saying what's the benefit of it or how do you? So is there a ratio that we need to maintain between minders to finders? I don't know if I'd say there's a ratio. I'd say on a leadership team you definitely wanna have more people on the strategic side than you do on further down on the administration side. I would look at that. But as an organization as a whole I like to see people across the spectrum because if you don't have people in each of those categories sometimes it can be hard to get things to move the needle on things. All right, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Anybody else have any other questions? Thank you guys for coming. I really, really appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, I just turned it down just because.


Hey, my name is agent beam star. Do you play NBA 2k 19? Have you ever had this happen to you?  Nah Not at all, sir.  Hello, you get the stop you get a score It's tragic, but it's so funny. It's so funny. It was an open layup $300,000 tournament and they lost because of a layup that hit the back like 2k is not a perfect game. We know that honestly I am enjoying 2k 19 and they finally fixed the the leaderboards in case you're wondering who was the top-ranked program team now You can check so I'm gonna I'm gonna get my program team all together and shit And we're gonna rank our cord up because that's the way you might be asking yourself like bro agent man Let us know my guy. What are these devs doing? You're telling me? We're playing basketball on grass with no nets. How was that possible agent? Hey, listen my guy I have an answer for you if you watch this special edition super-duper Apple event You might have caught them ladies and gentlemen, but this what they've been up to apparently I previously thought maybe they just moved all the devs to like 2k 20 and they don't really give about 2k 19 They put like one guy on it. They get the task one guy. They pay the guy like 20,000 a year They're like here my guy fix 2k 19 because that's the only reason private matchmaking wouldn't work on program Is if that's what they were doing. I genuinely believe that no developers should leave the studio until the game is fixed It's kind of like I know they have lives and and like they're already being overworked and we know the real answer is just to hire More people but Jesus man. Yo today.  You can take anywhere and here to show you guys wait. Did you hear her? iPad pro is the ultimate Gaming platform here. I thought my pc with two 2080 ti graphics cards with the Ultimate gaming platform, but I've been mistaken because all fucking iPad took the throne just last week ladies and gentlemen Of course, of course that makes sense is Greg Thomas executive vice president at 2k games For more than 20 years nba 2k has set the standard For realistic gameplay and attention to detail Each year fans have been delighted to be able to experience the nba on their consoles And now with this incredible new I know did you okay? Okay, I know it's not that important to a lot of you guys, but he didn't give the pc community No love my guys. I don't know if he knows that there's a pc community. He has no idea probably iPad 2k and visual concepts have brought that same console realism to iOS Everything we're gonna show you today Has never been possible on a mobile my guys. Do you see the guy on the bottom right? He's asian His first name is mike. His last name is wang ladies and gentlemen. That is the one and only mike wang. Give it up round of applause Yes Yes, you're right thought maybe he was fixing a Game-breaking bug or two like there's thousands of him in the game, right? But nope nope Here he is in this demonstration somewhere probably in san francisco l. A that's where all the events happen Shout out to mike wang. It's probably his first time out the studio In like two months, but here he is guys He's gonna give us a demonstration and this is very real This is not fake or scripted like some of the trailers you might see at e3 guys. This is an ipad pro This is very very real stuff here device before Choose your favorite team and players Many of you may recognize barclay center We've recreated exactly so that your brooklyn nets feel right at home today But I see my buddy mike here has chosen the world champion golden state warriors Mike we literally were watching your fingers there, dude You didn't click anything the shot went up and you didn't click anything Hey run the replay Mike's hands was off the ipad pro and the shot went up Yo 2k asked mike wang to to stand here and pretend like he was playing on an ipad pro That's actually something Oh my god, they literally find new ways to make money all the time If you tried to convince me that they were working on a port for the ipad pro when the regular versions of the consoles are barely working I wouldn't believe you but here we are Mike wang is dropping buckets with the golden state warriors If but if you want to play as steve curry you can play as steve curry Watch the player with the blue circle at his feet as the rest of the team moves across the court Using seamless motion matching and inverse kinematics. Oh, of course guys They're using seamless motion matching and inverse kinematics.  They just make up meanings for words and phrases and then they're like All right, they're probably gonna be impressed because they don't know what it means inverse kinematics Who do you think why would you think we know what that is? Why would you ever assume an audience of casual ipad pro users would know what an inverse kinematic is? But I know what it is.  I'm talking a lot of shit But that's actually really impressive because just think about it 60 frames per second with the graphics that are on Like I don't keep it. I would never play a game on ipad pro, but just in terms of hardware wow Hey 2k take the guys you have working on the ipad pro Literally make abandon that nobody cares move those guys However, man, even if it's two people and put them on fixing pro and and then when they're done with that Move those guys and then make them fix the rest of the park My team honestly forget about those guys. Let's take a step back and look at this beautiful arena It is beautiful. Let's go. Even the sidelines and the thousands of fans are individually rendered in high resolution This new ipad is simply amazing. But I also feel like they added some contrast to this I don't know why it just it does something was up with the color this year. I'm just saying And it provides an experience That rivals consoles for the very first time it doesn't it doesn't rival consoles unless you have a controller with the ipad Okay Let's take a look at a player How about de angelo russell? We know the angelo russell looks like he hasn't left the gym in six years My guys traps look like this his shoulders look like That he looks like he just came out. He was casted for the last superman movie But like yeah, the graphics look good. You can see the sweat engine looks beautiful the graphics You can even see the hair Usually 2k is pretty bad with hair and teeth in their games But it doesn't show the teeth the hair looks good the eyes look good the facial expressions look good We get it 2k you made your point to pop Just look at his hair the accurate tattoos The beads of sweat on his skin Look at his ear lobes and the way they're formed.  We've even rendered his jersey down to the pinholes. Oh snap the pinholes. Okay.  Yo, it takes up a lot of space hdr Come on, bro. Most of your tv's don't even have hdr yet. I'm impressed How could a thing that tiny Have all that performance that is very very impressive sir But if you think anybody is gonna be playing 2k without a controller on the ipad you are out of your mind In fact, we're rendering nearly six million pixels six million at full retina resolution. Wow with no upscaling nice Okay, we've got a little bit of time left in this game Mike, why don't you show us what you got? Mike show us what you got? Oh time running out step three brings the ball up the court Buzzer beater K2k mobile we'll see you on the court That wasn't scripted at all ladies and gentlemen That was live and real and if you can't tell by the smirk on mike wang's face ladies Whoa Where does his mouth end?  Simple stuff like joining people's parks or glitching out or freezing or blue screening when you hop on the squat spot Like just simple stuff guys. That's all I really want Someone sent me this link on twitter and I was like, yo, is that mike wang playing on an ipad? I have to see this ladies and gentlemen. I don't know what this video is I just thought it was gonna be a lot of fun to record and I enjoyed recording it Hopefully you enjoyed watching it if you did drop a like man subscribe to the channel Click on one of these two videos and I might catch you guys in the next one. I'm out peace