All right. Perfect time. Thanks everyone for coming. This is How to Foster Team Success. I know DrupalCon is usually a conference where it's more tech focused, so you guys are going to learn a lot more than other people normally would. They're going to miss all this because they're more for the tech, and this is more for what goes behind the tech, which is the team that builds the projects, so everyone can benefit. Before we get started, just a little bit about myself. My name is Mike Miles. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. I've been working with Drupal for almost a decade now since 2008, so it's been a while. I am the lead organizer for the Boston Drupal Meetup. I give sessions at conferences. I am lucky enough to have been published in the last Drupal Wash Dog magazine, which is what I was really excited about. And I have done everything under the sun when it comes to Drupal, and I've worked on many teams building Drupal projects. I'm just doing basic content entry all the way up to what I do most of the day, which is large-scale Drupal architecture. And I do that in my day job at Genuine, who's a full-service digital agency, so we're not a Drupal shop, which means we do a whole lot more than just development. We have a video team that does digital and traditional video, SEO, strategy teams, UX teams, a design team, experiential team who build digital applications and touch screen stuff. If you visited the Drupal Diversity Inclusion booth and had your photo taken, that's our app that's taking that photo. It is powered by Drupal on the back end, actually. And in terms of development, we have three main dev teams. We have our .NET team, who focuses on Sitecore and EpiServer, our front-end team who does node stuff and JavaScript and CSS and all that front-end stuff, and then the PHP team, which 99% of the time we are the Drupal team. So at Genuine, we have a lot of experience working with teams in fostering a team environment. Now, I also am one of the hosts of the Developing Up podcast. If you haven't heard of it, it is a podcast focused on the non-technal side of being a developer, so things like working on a team or setting professional goals. If you want to check it out, it's really cool, I think so. If you want to know any more about me, I'm not going to spend the whole session talking about myself. You can find me anywhere on the Internet, from Twitter to Drupal to Google+, if anyone ever uses that. I don't think anybody does. I don't know why I ever mention it, but I do. So how to foster team success? When coming up with this session, it was revealed to me really quickly from my team, who I collaborated with on this, that success means many different things to many different people. All right, we all here work on different teams. We all have different goals that we're trying to reach on our teams, from bringing a product to a client, it's building an internal product. Most likely it's something to do at Drupal, I assume, since you're at DrupalCon. But what we try to do individually as teams is very different. But how we define success, I believe, is very universal. So in the scope of this talk, for what determines successful teams, I have three metrics. The first is that a successful team is one that delivers value, whether that is business value, product value, internal value.  Successful teams are those that can manage time. They can figure out priorities, schedule their tasks as need be, and reach deadlines. Without that, a team cannot be successful. And finally, a successful team is one that can maximize the skill sets of every member of that team. So for the scope of this talk, a successful team is one that can best utilize everyone who makes up the team, one that can manage the time effectively to reach endpoints and deadlines, and the team that delivers value on whatever goals they're trying to reach. Now successful teams are made up of effective team members.  They foster them within themselves, encourage others to foster them. These traits are communication. Effective team members are able to talk with each other and talk to people outside the team and share messaging and goals and align. Effective team members can collaborate. They foster a sense of collaboration. They know how to work with other people, how to share responsibilities, and how to share responsibilities. They foster positivity in a positive mindset. This is not that they ignore any problems that the team may run into, but they almost foster a can-do attitude that they know they can overcome. And finally, effective team members foster responsibility. They hold the success of the team on their shoulders. They embody the sense of not... the team doesn't succeed, every single person on the team succeeds. One person doesn't fail, the whole team fails. So I have a question for everybody here. Audience participation today. Who here wants their team to be successful? That's a trick question, right? Everyone should raise their hand or else you should go to another talk. Who here wants to change people on their team to be more successful? Not as many hands. And that's good because wanting to change people is problematic. The problem is you cannot force change on others. No matter where your current team or teams you've been on is struggling, you cannot expect to learn something from me today, which I hope you do, and then try to implement that on others. People will only change when they want to, not when they're forced to. But what you can do is inspire change in other people. You can demonstrate the value of being an effective team member. You can demonstrate what it takes for a team to be successful, and you can inspire others on your team to do the same. So that's what I'm going to go over today, is those four traits that make up effective team members, communication, collaboration, positivity and responsibility. I'm not going to tell you how you can do these and how you can implement these and expect other people to become more successful, but I'm going to give you ideas on how within yourselves you can foster these traits and demonstrate them to your team to drive your team to success of maximizing skill sets, managing time and delivering value. So for each one of these traits, what I'm going to go through for the rest of the session is I'm going to give you a demonstration or I'm going to talk about the importance of this trait. I'm going to give you an example of a team that demonstrates this trait and how it helps lead to their success. I'm going to give you a few ideas of what you could do to demonstrate these traits to your team and hopefully inspire you to carry these past Rubicon back when you go back to work to produce better work and deliver more value. So communication, the first trait. Communication is key to a team being successful. Without communication, people don't necessarily know what they're working towards. Everyone's going to have their own idea of what the team's values are, what the goals are. You're never going to be sure if everyone's on the quote-unquote the same page and are working towards the same value. Having clear and open communication allows team members to lower barriers between each other. If people can communicate effectively, they can raise their hand and offer solutions but also ask for help. Having clear communication prevents wasted time on miscommunication, which is time that your team could be using to deliver value and build the products they need to. Now, a unique team that I think exemplifies communication are flight crews. And what's unique about flight crews is that within a given day, they have to interface with hundreds of clients, the passengers. When there's great communication, it goes very well. People have a pleasant flight. We've seen in the last couple of weeks when there's bad communication on flight crews, what happens? So it's important that everyone who's part of flight crew can openly communicate with the passengers and with each other to resolve issues, to plan out strategies, and to make sure the flight goes very well. Now, a more unique subset of flight crews are long-haul flight crews.  So 10 plus hours. All right, good number of people. It may be interesting for you to know, if you never realized, that on long-haul flights for most airlines, that flight crew, they only work together for that one flight. They've never worked together before, and they won't work together again. This is the case for most large airlines, because they have so many people going to so many different destinations. So it's imperative for long-haul flight crews that they do not waste time on miscommunication. That even though they're partnering up with people they haven't met before, they could be open and honest about what they expect for the flight, who's going to handle what responsibilities and how they message issues that come up. So long-haul flight crews, what they do is they meet two to three hours before a flight. They get together in a room, you know, behind security. They talk about things like the weather for the flight. They talk about where they just came from or where they're planning to go after they land. But they also discuss what roles, what responsibilities is everyone going to take on? What are you best at in your role? Now, there are some dedicated roles. Obviously, flight attendants aren't going to be like, I'm going to pilot for this flight. That doesn't happen. What does happen is they discuss, all right, three hours in the flight we need to do dinner service. Who's going to go the front of the plane? Who's going to go the back of the plane? Let's figure out who works best. If they weren't able to have that time and build up that communication, then it would just be chaos on the flight. And no one would have a good time. So how do you foster communication, effective communication, on your own team? The first thing is be an active listener. So there's two types of listening. There's active and passive. Passive listening, you hear what someone says but you don't process it. You're not paying 100% attention. This is where I expect to see laptops go down if people are on their phones.  But you know, you may be distracted taking notes on your laptop. You may be playing on your phone. You may be thinking about what you're going to say to add to the conversation but we've all done this. We all do this. But when it happens, you miss information that someone's telling you.  That leads to miscommunication and misalignment on the team. Now when you're an active listener, not only do you hear what someone's saying to you but you're processing it. You're giving them your full undivided attention these days coming a real commodity. People were always so distracted on our phones, on our gadgets. We have so many streams of information that it's hard to give someone 100% of your attention. Now when you're speaking to your team, when you're giving solutions, when you're discussing problems, when you're asking your client about requirements, you expect them to give you your full attention, don't you? So when someone is speaking to you on your team, you should do the same. You should give them your full attention. You should get all the information you can to understand what they're saying to you. What this allows you to do is then to ask questions, to ask insightful questions. How questions? What question? Why questions? I'm sorry, I don't understand what you were saying. What are the requirements we need to build for? I don't understand that. Ask those sort of questions. How do you expect me to deliver this feature in three hours? It's like a two-week process. I don't understand what you're asking me to do. Asking those questions to prompt people to provide you with more information until everyone is on the same page. I just realized those were two very negative questions to ask, but it's been a long day. Now when you ask insightful questions, you promote others on your team to start to over-communicate.  The example of this has... Does anyone work in Scrum, Agile methodology? Has anyone done that? A few people in the room. With Scrum and Agile, you have daily stand-ups. 15-minute, quick meetings. Where you share what you did, what you're going to be doing, and where you were stuck. If you work on Agile or not, be the person who provides that information to the rest of your team. Make sure you're letting them know what you've done, where you're going to do, and where you're having trouble. There's a communication between everyone and the team. When you prompt your team with asking insightful questions, and they start asking each other insightful questions, and when everyone starts being an active listener, what you'll see is that your team becomes inspired to start opening up to listening to each other, to sharing ideas and problems. They lower the barriers between each other and come to a common ground and a common understanding. This allows you to know what values the team is seeking to deliver and how you can move forward, what ideas you can do to maximize people's skill sets. Now, the second attribute is collaboration. Collaboration is important to a team because it's the difference between people working together and people working next to each other. Having an active environment of collaboration reduces wasted time from duplication of efforts. Person A and person B are working on the same thing, and they don't realize it. They're going to spend extra time solving the same problems. When one person can take half the problems, the other person can take the second half and reduce that wasted time. Collaboration allows team members to share their skill sets to solve problems that are bigger than anyone individual could solve, allowing them to meet tight deadlines and deliver the values they're expected. Now, a really interesting example of massive team collaboration is the Atlas experiment at the Large Hydron Collider. This is the Atlas device. I wish I had a scale of a person because it's huge. But the Atlas experiment is one of the four main experiments at CERN. They're testing the standard model. They're trying to understand the fabric of our universe. It's a collaboration of over 3,000 scientific minds working together. As many people are at Drupalcon this week are working on this one project. They represent 38 countries and they're self-managing, self-organizing. Everyone in the group has an equal voice. Everyone in the group raises their hand and says I know how to work in this expertise for this experiment. I need help building the actual detector. I need help writing the code. Who can help me? The team also has a core tenant that everyone agrees to and that goes from every experiment that has run with this device is shared to the 3,000 people. For a couple of purposes. One, because in science we love everything to be fact-checked. And it prevents wasted time from repeating the same experiment besides fact-checking it. So it allows teams to build on top of each other to solve these bigger universal problems. Now I don't have a slide for it, but the other team that is massive and really needs strong collaboration is the Drupal community. Drupal itself is a large collaborative project. We have many contributors working together trying to solve the same problems. Sharing skill sets. We have front-end developers, back-end developers, UX people. All different backgrounds giving different insights and sharing their skills to produce one product that we can all build off of which would be crazy. So how do you foster effective collaboration in your own team? First and foremost, you need to share your knowledge.  A few people, like half the room. So hit by the bus scenario goes like this.  Now after a proper time of grieving can your team move on without you? Can they pick up where you left off? Or flip it around? What if someone on your team suddenly gone? What if they were hit by a bus? Can your team effectively move on continue doing the work in a timely fashion to deliver your results? If the answer to that question is no, then you have a problem with knowledge sharing. Now I can admit as a developer I've run into this myself where it can be hard in development to separate yourself from your code to want to hold on to your piece of the puzzle and own it, not let anyone share it. But it's important to share knowledge so that the team can work effectively as possible. So that when you think you have a solution someone else can offer maybe point a hole in it that you didn't realize. Or they could offer a more elegant solution. Or they could just raise an issue that you didn't see. And they could offer to help you. Because when you share knowledge what you're doing is creating opportunities for people to work together. You're giving your team who are communicating well with each other to raise their hands and say know what I know about e-commerce for my last job can I help build the cart checkout system? I know how to write a grant proposal because I've done it before let me help you write this one. And when you create opportunities most of them come from offering and asking for help.  Be the first one to say hey I've seen you have been stuck on this for three days can I just sit down and help you can I just listen to the problem you want to talk it out with me. Maybe you'll be able to help them maybe you'll know the answer maybe you won't but you can work on it together and you know two minds are better than one. And demonstrate to your team that it's okay be the first one to say I am stuck on this I don't know how to solve this problem I'm reaching this deadline I don't think I can do it on my own who can help me. You show your team that it's okay to ask for help that's okay to collaborate with each other that no one needs to just own one piece to feel valuable on a team. When you offer and ask for help when you create those opportunities for sharing is opportunities spelled correctly I'm just noticing if it's it wasn't before and I was worried it was an old version. When you create opportunities and then when you share knowledge when you foster that in your team you build this environment of collaboration where you're going to seize your team members are going to start to share ideas and not work next to each other but work with each other they're going to solve problems bigger than any one person on the team can solve. Positivity. Now again when I was coming up with this presentation I ran it through with my own team because I want to get their collaborative input and someone on my team raised their hand and said well negativity is not a bad thing negativity is a good thing I don't think you should just talk about positivity and I agree with that person. Negativity is a positive driver on a team. So when I talk about positivity here I'm not talking about ignoring bad things ignoring the negatives but having a positive mindset that no matter what challenges your team faces no matter what setbacks you can overcome them work together and figure out a solution. Having a positive mindset on a team reaffirms the team's confidence in each other and their ability to do great work and build amazing things. And a positive mindset keeps the team focused on the goals that the team is trying to reach instead of being stuck on their setbacks instead of just focusing all their energy on where they can't move forward. Now one of the best examples I could think of of a team that demonstrates positivity was the 1985 movie The Goonies. How many people here have seen The Goonies? Alright almost everybody not everybody I'm sorry it's over 30 years old so I don't feel like I have a say spoiler alert. But The Goonies is a movie about a group of kids who are trying to save their homes from foreclosure. Now like any Disney kids movies of course the best way to do that is to build a pirate map to a buried treasure right how else would you save your home? So these group of kids against all odds they have their treasure map they go hunting for this pirate treasure they're being chased by murderous bandits they're in a cave below their town that is full of booby traps set by pirates but no matter what obstacle they face they have a phrase that they use which is Goonies never say die they know that no matter what they do together they can overcome any challenge. A great example of this is a scene in the movie and this is where the no spoiler alert come into play where they're in a chamber in the cave in this cave system and there is a pipe organ made out of skeleton bones where they have to play the right notes to escape if they play the wrong notes the floor is going to fall away and they'll fall to an abysmal death Man I forget her name the character in the yellow she's like in the piano lessons I think I can do this what was it? Andy? Thank you very much I don't know where you pulled that from alright I don't think there's too much as seeing it too many times anyways so Andy plays the right note you see the door open a little bit plays the wrong note, the floor falls away freaky plays the right note, the door opens a little bit more plays another wrong note the floor falls away at this point she's doubting herself because she knows if she gets one more wrong note all these kids are going to die she's going to perish so one of the team members comes up to her and says hey you made a mistake it's okay Goonies make mistakes don't make anymore but we believe that you can do this and sure enough she plays the right note they eventually find the pirate treasure some crazy antics ensue with bandits but they escape extreme positivity from this crazy group of kids that's what you want to foster in your team you want to foster a Goonies don't never say die attitude to do this you want to highlight accomplishments in the team it's easy for us as humans to remember negative impacts in our life I'm sure if I ask you right now you could think of some embarrassing situation you're in or a place where you made a mistake it's very easy and quick for us to do that it's a place where we've triumphed accomplishments we've made so when you can remind your team about all the successes they've had to get up to the point where they were or where they are you know what team I know the client is changing our requirements for the third time but we've been able to meet all the requirements so far I know we can do it again I know we can figure out a way to fit this in this timeline what you start to do is you start to foster a can do attitude it means that they can do anything that together they can accomplish these tasks that they don't focus on we made another mistake we missed a deadline we're not good we can't do this instead they'd be like we made a mistake that's okay the next one we're gonna learn from it and we're gonna work better when the team has a can do attitude they start to trust within the team they start to trust each other let me ask you how many people here want to be the person on their team who is mistrusted and not given any responsibilities yeah no hands go up I expected that no one on a team wants to be that mistrustful person everyone on a team is there to deliver value they try to do their best to make the team succeed no matter how misaligned they may be with the team goals or what the team is working towards everyone there is trying to contribute and you want to foster that you want to show the team that you trust them team I know you can handle these responsibilities I've seen you do before on previous projects I know you can do it because when you put your trust in the team and show them that you trust them just as you expect them to trust you when you foster a can do attitude and when you highlight their previous accomplishments to remind them of how much they've overcome to get to where they are you start seeing your team members facing challenges and opportunities and not as obstacles any time there is a setback any time there is a change any time there is a new requirement you're like yeah we can do this it's another problem for us to solve let's work together let's do it this is awesome we have to do more work we have to solve another challenge it starts to become a more positive experience and finally the fourth trait responsibility promoting responsibility in a team drives them to success because they don't have to engage not their own personal individual goals which are important I'm not saying that they're not but in the aspects of a team whether you're working on a project whether you're building your own product whether it's not even a professional team maybe working with your significant other building an herb garden having everyone have a sense of being responsible for the team delivering those values is what drives a team to success it affirms that every single person on the team matters that they all play an important important point important part on the team now an excellent example of this of responsibility and fostering within every single member of a team is the Red Bull F1 F1 racing pit crew this pit crew has been recorded at getting a race car through a pit stop in under two seconds an unbelievable feat there's a video of it it is crazy like they do over a dozen things in less than two seconds the only reason this works the only reason they can be the best and do this the quickest because every single person on that team knows that their individual job matters and delivers the team to be successful that without them whether they're holding a spare tire washing the window I don't know what pit crews do there's no windows there filling the gas tank lifting the car whatever their little job is it's imperative that they do it and they do it as best as they can for the team to succeed they know that team success is driven by individual success so in your own team how can you foster responsibility first thing you can do is adopt an ownership mindset this is not the team I am working on this is my team this is the team I am a part of the success of this team is driven by my success if I don't do well they're not going to do well if you demonstrate that mindset to your teammates they're going to adopt it themselves they're going to start to foster it within themselves and take ownership of the work this is important because it starts building accountability and you want to demonstrate accountability not only for the roles and responsibilities you take on but going back to communication and collaboration being accountable for the mistakes that you make if you make a mistake be the first one to call it out be the first one to say this is my fault that we missed this deadline I just things came up and I was not able to complete my task I apologize I was accused of making a mistake be the first one to call it out because that shows your team that it's okay to make mistakes that everyone is human that we make mistakes and together as a team you can work through it to be successful that everyone is going to work together to overcome and finally to foster responsibility you need to share and promote success if you are a team leader if you are a manager you can work on them if someone on your team does an important part of the work whatever you are doing make sure they are recognized for it if you are giving a client demo and the functionality that you are demonstrating to the client is due to one person on your team maybe it's the junior member on your team give them credit say hey this was Alex's role Alex did this part it's thanks to them that you are seeing this awesome functionality in time but give them chances to own the spotlight highlight their accomplishments tell your whole company shout it from the rooftops do whatever you can to promote the success of the individuals that's going to build up their confidence within themselves it's going to make them feel important on the team like they played a key role and then it's going to drive them to want to do better and help the team succeed when you promote success when you demonstrate accountability and when you adopt an ownership mindset what you inspire in your team is the thought that team success becomes individual success that if the team does well each person on that team will do well that an individual can't do well unless the whole team does there's no such thing as saying well I did my part okay the team will still fail unless everyone does okay the team starts getting away from well that's not my job mentality there are ways to help where there are gaps where there are missing pieces now those are the four traits communication, collaboration positivity and responsibility but I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about distractors no matter what you try to do there always seems to be in my experience those people on the team who focus on the negatives who constantly battle with everyone on the team who have negative things to say who are just you know what team goals are they seem that they're trying to sabotage the team at every turn now this could be internally within the members of your team maybe fighting for power this could be externally with a bigger team even say your client could seem like to your developers that the client is constantly trying to sabotage the work they're doing distractors happen and I believe they happen from not fostering these four traits of communication, collaboration positivity and responsibility so how can you how can you mitigate distractors weird, alright to overcome team distractors just use some of the values that I've been talking about so far if someone seems like they're just constantly pointing out holes or pointing out issues communicate with them and ask insightful questions Alex why do you think that you know we can't meet these requirements what do you think is getting in the way help me understand what you think is blocking us how would you solve this problem how would you have the team work on it you know encourage their involvement with the team have that distractor remind them that they are part of the team that they are driving the team to be successful that they are an integral part of the team remind them of again team accomplishments set that positive mindset that the team has overcome challenges in the past they can do it again here's examples of where they succeeded I know you know all the examples of where we failed before but here's where we did well and to foster within them most importantly again team ownership that they are an integral part of the team that they need that you want that distractor to be successful in helping the team to be successful so within your own team you can focus you can foster success by fostering and focusing within yourself effective communication collaboration positivity and responsibility how many people here feel like they could work on one of these four to inspire others on their team to be more effective and drive forward success okay a couple people alright just about everybody that's awesome and here's what's really important about inspiration and not forcing change in people but demonstrating the value of change is that inspiration snowballs so as you demonstrate each one of these values as you demonstrate how it leads your team to be successful you inspire just one person on your team now there's two of you the two of you inspire another person on your team now there's three of you before you know it your whole company is inspired to do better your whole organization is inspired to do better the whole Drupal community is inspired to do better but it takes it within ourselves to inspire ourselves and work on it ourselves because we're the only people we can change so I hope with this talk that I haven't changed you but I've inspired you to do better to try to drive towards more success on your team and foster these traits now I have some resources for you guys I'll read these off I'll get off the slide and I'll put it back up that's how I do things it's weird but I have this presentation annotated this presentation on Slideshare also annotated because I know you can't hear my lovely voice later on unless you watch a recording the way I learned about long-haul flight crews is from a book called Skyfaring by Mark Van Acker who is a pilot for British Airways a really interesting book I learned a lot from it I have information on the Atlas experiment at CERN and how they're collaborating together for 3,000 scientists a video and interview with the Red Bull F1 pit crew the video is really cool they do it at regular speed and it's amazing and then just a book that I really take a lot of value from called Taking People With You by David Novak it's a book about leadership but ultimately it's a book about fostering success within a team and how you build your team up and then I mentioned earlier I have a podcast on the non-technical side of being a developer episode 7 we talked about the four attributes of a great development team which this talk was fostered from I believe sessions is a team our team's experience we have all different roles you have roles to listen, I have roles to hopefully teach and inspire but there's also another role is feedback I can't do better, I can't be more successful as a speaker without your feedback it's imperative so either fill out the survey on the website or come talk to me I'm here all week and give me feedback on this presentation and your own ideas on working with the team and what it takes I greatly appreciate it with that I will say thank you for coming to my session the last session I know there's a lot of stiff competition on both sides of me, I really appreciate it I hope you got a lot out of it I will take questions after applause and if you can come up with a mic I can repeat the question for you so I manage a team of offshore developers as well my biggest challenge is working with that team and the internal team that we have do you have any suggestions on how to better kind of implement some of those things thank you for your question are the issues that you're experiencing in between your on-site team and your remote team working together? just kind of holding everybody how do you do that with an offshore team and an in-house team that can be difficult I only have limited experience in that scenario so I can give some general advice of what I think from reading about teams are you doing agile? really on stand-ups what I find works well for remote teams my experience is making sure if you use hangouts for example that people have cameras on especially for communication it's a lot harder to goof off when you know anyone else could be watching you right at that moment that kind of forces people to pay more attention and then I'm going to say also if you do demos when you finish a sprint really calling out the success of almost every individual person especially if you can get a remote person and a local person to work together on one piece of functionality and show how that teamwork can work together awesome thank you that was a great question so my question is I appreciate all of the suggestions I use a lot of them and I've seen a lot of success you know with say three quarters of my team in that right like you see that those things can make a difference and then on the other side it seems to have an equal and opposite effect of fostering resentment and eye rolls and people being just angry that you are working hard and trying to encourage them to do the same so I'm at the point where I hear all this and I'm like yeah but what do you do with that backfires right do you have experience with like how do you deal with that yeah so I mean the question as I understand it is no matter how hard you try it seems like the more you push the more people pull away against it that is a tough scenario I would agree one of the things I could probably mention is and this is not going to be easy none of this will be easy I would say is try to have honest conversations with those people just be like hey we keep trying to go these extra miles and try these extra things and at every turn you seem to be pushing against us like can you help me understand what the issue is what are you worried about what is blocking up what do I need to do for you to help you be more successful and I've done that too alright okay I'm not going to say a lost cause I'll put it the most diplomatic way I can and you will only have I don't know your role so you'll only have so much control of this it may come a point where you have to reevaluate and see is this person do they are they a valuable part of this team are they causing so much impediment that to protect the team we need to get rid of that person or put them in a different position in a different place that can be a hard thing to have and that can also I don't know if you've had that conversation with somebody I work for government so it's okay man try to figure out how to deal with this I would like to thank you for bringing your bag of wrenches with you today I sometimes there's not a lot you can do the best you can do is try your hardest, demonstrate it inspire as many people on your team and if there are people who are not getting it just find a way to one thing that I've been told is you understand who's going to be a problem and you work around the problem and government I'm sure that happens a lot where there's that person who just comes in that you may have to do that I mean it's unfortunate sometimes but you can only do as much as you can to inspire others and some people don't want to do it but thank you for your question all the twists and turns it was like an M. Mike Shyamalan movie any other questions? I can do a double of applause if you want to alright thank you everyone again I'm around all week if you want to talk about anything Drupal or anything in general I made my wife watch it for the first time like two weeks ago for this talk I know you thank you for that feedback I appreciate it how are you doing Matt? I'm doing good yeah so I have two answers for you one is going to be very shellfish and one is not one is on my podcast the development of this episode number seven we actually talked about that scenario exactly


Satnam 40 here. I just watched the most amazing docker called the rescue is produced by National Geographic It's about the rescue of those 12 Thai boys on the soccer team and their coach from a cave when The the rains came and they'd been exploring the cave and then the rains like flooded Okay, so they couldn't get back out and so you know How the boys got out is because there were these cave divers all right these two two British men who did not look particularly impressive look rather scruffy, but they heard about the problem there flew to Thailand and They figured out with help how to get the boys out now they had a lot of opposition from the Thai authorities and If anything had gone wrong these British divers and then the other Angler that everyone seemed to be Anglo that they brought in to rescue these boys They would have faced you know life imprisonment or death through the Thai legal system So Thailand brought in their Navy SEALs that like their elite divers, but they had no Experience or ability with cave diving All right, so they were useless Looking at the Darko. It seems that every important person who played a major role in the rescue of these kids was not Thai So not every group is equally competent at every single task so the continent with the highest Per capita record for plane crashes is Africa Along with Russia and Southeast Asia. So when you had those two Boeing max planes that crashed I Where did the crashes occur one was on Ethiopian Airlines and one was on my Thai Airlines? Remember you had that that Malaysian airliner that just disappeared All right, that doesn't happen to American airliners doesn't happen to Australian airliners Qantas has never had a fatal crash the Australian airline All right, the worst safety records come from Africa followed by Southeast Asia and Russia and so There are some groups who I'd be a little more dubious about entering a skyscraper that they had designed and built an overseen and maintained right and another big fan of flying out of Malaysian or a Thai airline because these These countries have horrible safety records and it's not just some isolated safety event This this lack of competence shows throughout these societies So it was these two scruffy Englishmen who had this minority sport interest who had this minority hobby interest of cave diving who Yes, that is Bonhoeffer on my shelf. It was these two scruffy Englishmen who who Would with the help from their Anglo friend who found a way out for these Thai boys and Saved their lives at great risk to them because if anything had gone wrong They would have been put on trial in the horrible Thai legal system So all the ways that the the Thai Navy SEALs try to do things We're not gonna work out the kids would have died So just left to the Thai's own devices those kids would have died for sure The only way out for these two scruffy English gentlemen so Competence matters and competence in each task. It's not equally distributed among all groups so These 12 Thai kids and their coach are alive today primarily because of these two scruffy Anglo cave divers and then US Army sent in help and Then these these guys got some of their other cave divers who are all pasty White Anglo guys pretty much became in and did this and the things that the the Thai's tried to do to rescue these kids didn't have a hope but like one Thai Navy SEAL died trying to navigate the the cave system so Keep diving is a particular skill. All right. It's not just the same as like regular diving and so Some people Like Anglos in particular. It's like it in the in the school system Like which type of kid is the most likely to do absurd amounts of work above and beyond What what the course requires? All right, it's it's usually Anglo's right. They do They're the ones who who develop science people like Charles Darwin. They're the ones who you know often Sees a hobby like editing Wikipedia entries like who puts together and edits most Wikipedia entries It's the same sort of people who go into a Thai cave Right and rescue kids that nobody else in the world Would would be confident enough to rescue So these scruffy looking Anglo dudes, right? I know that we're hearing all this in the media about how evil white man I well it took white man to go into Thailand to rescue these kids and no one else could do it. No one else was Remotely competent enough to to do it incredibly moving documentary the rescue Came out this year from National Geographic You will not regret watching this movie and The these Anglo men who put their life on the line, right they would have They risked at all. They had to sedate these kids To bring them out underwater and and sedating kids that you then bring out underwater is incredibly incredibly risky Right and these these altruistic Anglo guys who put their lives on the line They would have had a very very nasty end if anything had gone wrong But there were no alternatives to what they were proposing so Just just the mammoth gap in competence between these Anglo dudes and what the the tie The ties were trying to do was just enormous It's a competence counts competence matters expertise matters Expertise is not equally distributed for every single task equally among every single group in the world All right, some groups have expertise in some areas and other groups have Disproportioned amounts of expertise in other areas and they would not supposed to recognize reality that different groups have different gifts But that's still reality. You can reject reality, but the reality is different groups have different gifts