How do you spell this? Penis Reg and you follow us on instagram So it's on Patreon, it's on the official Twitter account, ring the bell if you haven't already, in case you're in the squad. BAM! And also, follow us on our personal YouTube channels, we each have one, the links are always in the description below. Also, just an update, I created a whole bunch of different playlists for movie reviews. So now each playlist is divided by the language. So there's a Tamil movie review playlist, there's a Telugu, Bengali, Hindi. So if you ever want to see a playlist of that certain language, just letting you know that they're there now. Anyways, today... You are making us even more awesome than we were. We are doing a movie review of a Tamil film, even though it stars a Malaliam, very legendary actor, in case no one's ever heard of him. We are reviewing Paranbu, I believe is how you pronounce it, correct? I think you're close enough for hand grenades and horseshoes. Directed by Ram, I think he's a pretty, I don't think we've gotten into him, but I know he's like a legendary director. And we've heard of him, yeah. Yeah, and then starring Mamudi, who is with him and Mohanl, the two biggest legendary actors in, some would say Indian cinema, definitely Malaliam cinema for sure. And then also the little girl's name is Sadhana. I think you are correct, and this would be the first time I think we have a film whose director and two stars only go by one name. Did Oprah and Cher ever do a movie together? And Madonna? Maybe. I don't think they were in the color purple outside of Oprah. A single father tries to raise his daughter who has cerebral palsy, or they called it spas-tick, which I think is a, I don't know if that's the correct translation, maybe that's what it's called in India. But cerebral palsy I know is the medical name for it, even as she's beginning to wake up to her sexuality. Yes. So yeah, this is a spoiler review. If you haven't seen it, please go see it and then come back and watch the review.  Also, I know a lot of you haven't seen this because a lot of you are North Indian that only watch Hindi cinema. I got an idea. Why don't we do this as if this was a brand new release and let's do half of this without spoilers and then cut to the stuff we want to talk about so that people can hear half of it. Now you just want to go straight to the juggler? Go watch it. Anyways, Rick, initial thoughts. Fine with me. I didn't write a paragraph out because I would just like to stemperize. I have so much more to say about this than a singular paragraph. I can say this at the outset. Not only is this one of my favorite films we've seen, this is probably as much as Kambalanji Nights has such an aesthetic beauty to it and as artistry for me is just such a delight to watch. The level of importance I feel this film has. Definitely it's an important film. And I think it's truly groundbreaking for Indian cinema, especially South Indian cinema from what we've seen and heard. I think this movie is magnificent and it's right up there at the top of my list of if you want to see an important movie touching on subject matter that is about as important as you could possibly talk about right now, not just in India but anywhere in the world, it's this. I loved it. Yeah, same. I thought it was a really good, brilliant, powerful, important story that you don't get to see a lot and also could be done totally wrong because this actress does not have cerebral palsy. And so that's not an easy task to put somebody up to, especially a child that's only done two films. Yeah, should we just talk about her for a little bit? Yeah, let's talk about her because she's obviously the hair and the star. Yeah, so we'll get to him for sure and then we'll get to the film as a whole, but let's start with her. I thought, I haven't seen an actor portraying a disability at that age that is such a profound physical betrayal as Patty Duke did playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. I thought that her physical work was extraordinary for an actress of her age and her experience. She had, I mean, yes, I can be tremendously nitpicky in some moments where I saw some lack of continuity with the physicality she represented, but the complexity of what her physicality had to incorporate as well as the emotion her character had to portray. And what she was able to do with the disjointing of fingers that are clearly because she's double-jointed, that not everybody could do what she was able to do to make it even more believable, I have nothing but stellar accolades for this young lady's portrayal of this character, nothing but accolades. Yeah, she, I kept looking, just like when we watched, and it was not the exact same story, but a similar story like, oh, with a straw in terms of a... And I guess that's an important way to tell that story is because a lot of people almost see people with cerebral palsy or ailments like this as almost not human. They tend to see them as just broken things. And a lot of people treated her in this film as just a thing that somebody should have just murdered a long time ago, which was another thing about this film that there was almost no good people in this film outside of a transgender prostitute and a girl with cerebral palsy. Those are like the only two good people in this entire film. Well, we'll talk more about it. I actually felt, I felt her dad, for his limitations and his failings, I thought ultimately in his core, I felt he was trying to be the best he could possibly be even though he definitively had some shortcomings. I thought ultimately he handled the majority of the things he was having to deal with with what I would construe is more of a good man than a bad man. Well, no, I agree. The way he lost me in terms of being a good man... Was that the end? Was that the end where he tried to murder his daughter? I mean... Okay, come on. No, he was trying to murder himself and his daughter. That is not okay. That is not okay. Well, no, no, no, no. I don't care what he learned from it. Obviously he learned. He was like, oh, I guess I shouldn't do that. Maybe I shouldn't try to murder my daughter. Anyway, I know what they were trying to say, but he still tried to murder his daughter. So that's where he lost me. Also in the beginning, obviously his wife, who is still a terrible person for abandoning her child, took care of her child for the first however many years. And apparently the father was out of the picture or was not doing it. They didn't really specify what he was doing, but it was led to believe he wasn't really there or something. So one of them deserted and then the other one dropped that one off and then deserted the child then. And so there was just no good people outside of the transgender prostitute and this little girl, which I thought was kind of beautiful.  And they described the prostitute as not a human. I think that one the driver did, he described her as not human and a lot of people did that to that little girl. But I thought that was really beautiful that those two people were like the good ones. And so I thought that message was great. Let's talk about Mohana. This is Mamoudi, sorry. This is our first introduction to the legend. And I thought this was a brilliant performance, a very sub and I don't know. This is obviously just like going in with Ranveer and Gully Boy. This is our first introduction to him. So yes, I thought this was a very good, very subdued performance by this man. And I saw no faults in his performance at all. I thought he conveyed a lot without showing, indicating anything. And then I thought he did a really good job interacting and showing different types of emotions. Like when the wife that came in and then the husband of that girl who they were trying to swindle, this guy and the girl. I thought that was a great scene where he kept bringing that guy, he called him Uncle, right? Brother-in-law. I thought that whole scene where he fell asleep right next to him was a really good sequence of events. And so yeah, I thought his performance was really, really good. I'm really excited to see more from him because obviously we know from his reputation that he is a legend. Yeah, we have nothing to measure it according to any other roles to see what he does with his different roles. But I felt this is a fully fleshed out character. Completely believable. I never doubted for a moment that he was not her dad. That was her dad. She was his daughter. They were living these moments. And the direction by Ram, do you know if it's Ram or Ram? I think it's Ram, but I could be... I think it's Ram. That's why I'm saying that. I felt the direction, which we'll get into the larger picture. And I have so much to say that I'm definitely doing an afterthought on this on my channel because there's so much to talk about with this. But yes, he clearly demonstrated that he is a very good actor. And I would really like to see more of his work. It was nuanced, fleshed out is the best word I can say. A fully believable character. And yes, no indicating, pure honesty, definitively grounded, never aware of the camera. Didn't need to perform all of the things that you just check off the list of. Can you act? Set that aside. It's not a matter of this guy can act. It's a matter of how good is this guy. Do you know how old he is? No, I didn't. How old do you think he is? 53. 68. Wow. Rock on, brother. Rock on. Has found the fountain of youth. That's magnificent. Wow, he does not look more than about your age. He looks about your age. I was going to say he looks like he's a couple of years older than me. Yeah. Magnificent. He takes great care of himself. He looks great. If he has gray hair now, and they just kind of died for the film, or whatever, but either way, the man looks great for 68 years old. Looks great. Looks fantastic. Anyways, so let us know what film of his we should get into next. He gave very similar weight to Mahanl in terms of acting weight. Yeah. He has a gravitas, exactly. Yeah. But let's talk about the direct, actually, before I get to the direction, I want to talk about one of my favorite parts, which was the score. The score in this, I don't know if you noticed it very much, but especially, God, it was so beautiful and quirky and upbeat at times. I know. It was a really, really unique score that I really ended up loving a lot. I agree. I thought the score was great. I thought the direction was really beautiful. I loved the story, and I loved how it began with him telling us the story and it maintaining the chapters, and nature is fill in the blank. Nature is fill in the blank. And massive spoilers. So anyone who has stayed around now and you don't want the ending to be ruined, go away. Yeah. Because when he started walking her out into the ocean, I thought, oh my goodness, I had the stereotypical kind of twist to a film that we've seen in some of the films we've seen where it turns into some massive macabre destructive ending. And is he really going to, are they both going to drown in the ocean right now? Because what I wanted, and I was so hurt when he got back to his house and Mira was in cooking and the guy had let her in and he, the dad, tells them to get out what were you doing in my place. I was literally thinking no, no, do not turn on her. She's the one you're looking for, man. She's the one that she needs to have a feminine role model in her life. Don't push this one away. And so when it flipped the page on us and he's talking at the end and he's talking about how he's talking about his wife and everything I literally laying there I threw my arms up in the air and went oh, yes. Thank you that you didn't throw her away. Thank you. And I loved, that's the thing that we could do a whole other video on. The subject matter of the way people who have cerebral palsy or any other disability are treated by society and how you then get into she is treated exactly the same way prostitutes are treated the transgender community is treated the homosexual community is treated I mean we can go down the list of people who are not treated with the kind of dignity and respect they should be treated even though they don't fall into the category of what you socially deemed to be appropriate for you they're still a human being and I like the spastic in America guys stupid babies may not know this but the term retarded and the term spastic 50 years ago were actually used all the time and they're now considered really rude to call somebody retarded even if they have cerebral palsy you don't define them as retarded and you definitely don't call them a spastic that's insulting but I don't know again you call by the medical name the medical name that the medical problem they have even it's gotten to the point here where you don't even say someone has a disability a lot of people don't like that terminology either say yes this person has cerebral palsy leave it at that yeah treat people as people exactly but yeah the direction in this was really beautiful and I'm looking forward to watching more from rum because I loved the Quentin Tarantino uses the chapters a lot but this was a very different use of the chapters some of them were very very short and they kind of gave you a linear timeline that was kind of really easy to follow and I thought that was great I really enjoyed his little incorporation with the score and everything like that so yeah I'm really looking forward to watching more from him and I loved the scene when he went to go see his ex-wife oh man yes I thought that was a great scene great scene where he didn't end up actually saying anything to them but then he said when he went down if they would have asked even at all about her well being I would have asked them to take care of her yeah he was still at his wits end trying to give her up somebody else's problem and then he tried to drown his daughter and we have the whole other issue that we could talk long about which I will in afterthought is the whole issue about parents talking to their kids about their sexuality and the development of their sexuality and that one moment when the guy says yeah what else are we supposed to do with her we call her fingering herself and I thought it was beautiful I loved the moment when he was trying to do what he could for her and that moment when she went in to put the pad on he was really hoping she could do it herself not because he felt shame helping he wanted her to be empowered to take care of this as she was becoming a woman and that was probably one of my favorite things in this was to watch this man and see him want his young girl to he was coming to terms with my little girls becoming a woman and I want her to become a woman what can I do to help her become a woman in the midst of this other challenge she has and it wasn't taboo for him even when he's in that place and he's talking to the woman about wanting a male prostitute that got me emotional yeah that was and that's something I think really great films do is to question what you think is okay yeah I would probably wait a few years before I get a prostitute for my daughter right 14 seems a little young but but I think that was a really good scene one because the person he was asking would act I think everybody would act that exact same way if somebody was like right at face value you'd slap him in the face too are you kidding me right now but when you discover where he is and he's at his wit's end and he has no one to turn to and he loves her so much he's willing to go against everything he ever thought was okay and not okay in the hope that maybe this will bring a solution for my girl I just thought it was incredibly well done it definitely raised a lot of interesting and important questions about life without people with cerebral palsy and stuff like that and so I thought it was such a brilliant film and so I'm really glad you guys recommended it and this one was I think this one a lot of people the people that have seen it rave about it it's one of those rave about it but most people since it's I think it's more of an art house film cinematography was fucking gorgeous even the stuff the way they used lighting a lot in the apartment as well the way they used lighting was really interesting there are so many elements of this film that I really really enjoyed and I'm glad we watched it was this I was just going to say this could have been and it might have been was this considered a candidate for submission to the Oscars I'm not sure because it could have been yeah it definitely could have been and it could have done very well could have done very well but as we know there's a lot of politics in what India submits it's that caliber of film for me it's that caliber that I would say if you want to see one of the best Oscar level films that covers important subject matter plural, lots of it it's a great film and do you guys consider this a Tamil film or a Malalium film because because I've seen people ask what are you going to watch the Malalium film Paranbu pretty sure it's Tamil pretty sure it's Tamil some people said since he's such a huge star they've kind of just adopted it into because anything that Mamoudi does is considered Malalium but anyways let us know what you thought of his film down below and let us know what film we should watch and review next from Mamoudi and Ram as well and yeah go watch Rick's Afterthoughts I'm sure he's going to do it alright I am


Hi everybody, Joe for jazby's casebreaks.com coming at you with the Laker Celtics, Cavs, Nets, Wizards, Suns, Jazz, Pacers Random number block randomizer for National Treasures Basketball Peer Team 5 coming up in a separate video There you hear the instructions on the number block Big thanks to these three right here PJ, Sean, and Fred And the numbers are right there. Let's roll it. Let's randomize names and numbers six the hard way three into three one two three four five and six For six we got PJ down to Sean six the hard way one two three four five and six and final time. Good luck That's six down to one All right PJ with six and two Fred with nine and eight Sean with seven PJ with five Fred with zero So you'll get any and all redemptions for that group of teams down there including one of one redemptions Sean You'll still get live one of ones. You also have three and four Let's sort by column B by number and coming up in a in a different video the next video will be the break itself We'll see you for that jazby's casebreak.com


We're giving us a space to do it in. We're usually in the lobby of the public theater. We've been there for 11 years sitting in the lobby. And about three years ago, maybe four years ago, HowlRound came on and offered us the ability to live stream. And so we're saying thank you now to the public theater and to HowlRound, because together they are helping us create this beautiful community. What we do is we work for 20 minutes together. And then you ask me questions about your work and your creative process. That's all. It's just that simple. And if you want to ask a question, Audrey is going to tell you how to get in touch. Go, Audrey. Thanks, SOP. If you want to ask a question and you're inside of the Zoom, all you need to do is click on the Participant tab, likely at the bottom of your screen on a laptop or the top. If you're on an iPad or a tablet, inside of the Participant tab, there's a little button that says Raise Your Hand. Just give it a click. A little blue hand will appear. And I'll call on you if we've got time. If you're watching on HowlRound.tv, you can tweet at us at atwatchmeworkslpu with the hashtag HowlRound, H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D. Or you can tweet at the Public Theater's Twitter, which is at Public Theater NY, or right to the Public Theater's Instagram. And that's it. OK, so here we go. Here we go, here we go. On my phone. I don't think of what to turn off. OK, so here we are, ready to take your questions about your work and your creative process. All right, let's do it. Melania, you are up first. Hey, Melania. Hello, this is Alori. Hey, sweetheart, how are you? Fine, fine, I'm fine. I am here. You remember that I told you about this singer and puppeteer that told about she's interested in knowing about some of my ideas. So I am trying to structure the email that I want to send her with ideas. What is happening to me is that when I wrote the ideas that she read about and she said, OK, I would like to hear more from you, I was playing and I wasn't thinking about anything. And now that she said that, something like, OK. So yes, so what I would like to know is how can I approach this in a respectful way to her? So not over one hair with. I don't want to send a philometric email. But at the same time to honor myself and what I am feeling and at the same time enjoying what is happening to me because it's a wonderful opportunity to connect with her and see what happens. So I would like to know, what do you think about this? A couple of things. One might not be a fun thing to hear, but I would suggest that anything you send her, you first put in a document and either find some way to copyright it or something. Ideas go around. And you never know. And you don't want five years down the road to be like, gee, that was my idea. And she kind of took it without me. I mean, I'm sure she's a wonderful person would never do that, but you never know. So just do that. And that's a way to honor yourself.  I don't know what it is. Just to somehow make it clear that it's your idea that you were sharing with her and create at least a virtual paper trail. OK. Somehow. Or just slap it, make a little play out of it, and then send it to the copyrights office. I don't know. But do something substantial with it before you just send it to her. I think it's a great and wonderful opportunity. I think you should just take a week. I mean, also value yourself. I know you don't have to answer right away. You can spend a week or two, maybe just a week, hopping around, thinking about ideas, getting in that fun frame of mind again. I was talking to her about this and this and this. So having a good time with it. And then, like I said, create some of these actual documents to share with her. Make it very clear in the email that these are maybe you could use these are treatments or these are synopses from things that you've written. OK. These are synopses from some short plays that I've written. And make it like it's something already. Remember who you are. You're someone with a lot of great ideas. And you'd be a fun person to collaborate with. Do you know what I mean? So instead of it looking like this, you know, she's up here and you're down here. She's way up here and you're down here. Create a letter that makes it look like, even though she's awesome and famous and everything, don't sell yourself short. Value yourself, OK? Yes. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these are some, this is a synopsis from a short play that I've written. Here it is. Here's another synopsis from another short play. Or here's another synopsis from another play. Don't call them short plays. Here's another synopsis from another play. And if she says, hey, send me the whole play, guess what? Keep coming to this class. We'll get you to write it. OK. OK. All right. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. Thank you very much. Good, good. Great question. Great question. Oh, thank you. Great answer. Thank you. Thanks for that. Thanks. All right, next we've got Bob. You ready, Bob? There. I am. Hello. Hey, Bob, how you doing? I'm OK. How are you? OK, hanging in there. Me too. I have a question. I've started researching a historical person for something I want to basically a bio pick, bio something on this person. And he's not famous. You know, most people haven't heard of him, in his world of basically sort of science in the 1870s to 1930s. He was, you know, in his little circle, kind of special and wonderful. And I guess I'm sort of wondering, before I really dig in too far into biography and to researching, if you have any thoughts about how, and there are things about him I do relate to, certainly. I mean, he lived 100 years ago, but there are elements of him I'm drawn to. And I'm wondering if you, when you've written things based on people, I know you just wrote the Billie Holiday film and how you researched what you looked for and if you ever sort of found yourself, your voice in her, and if that's OK, and just any thoughts you had in having just sort of really worked on someone, both respectfully, but also wanting to kind of keep it personal so the fire is there as a writer. That's a great question. That's a great question, Bob. I think one of the great advantages to your project is that person is no longer living, nor does that person probably have any, there's nobody living who remembers that person. Good, good, because you're not wrestling with that, you know? So you're just wrestling with the historical record of this person and what you're bringing to it, which will hopefully be like this. Of course they've got things in common with you else. You wouldn't be attracted to them, you know? You're attracted to them because something in them resonates with something in you. And I would exploit that. Actually, that's the coolest thing to exploit, you know? And it can be anything. It might be the way their mind works or the way they have relationships or the way that they wear colorful clothing.  But what you do is you find the points of intersection between, you know, your life meets the life of the person that you're writing about. And you circle, you sort of focus on those points, you know? And it's different from work to work, you know? You know what I mean? It's very different from work to work. I mean, I did the, for some reason, I'm doing a lot of things about musicians now. Billie Holiday, United States versus Billie Holiday. Genius, Aretha Franklin. The harder they come, the play, you know? It's like a lot of, like a lot of musicians and stuff. But with each piece, it's gonna be different. And so you have to find that thing in them that resonates with you. And it doesn't have to be necessarily exactly historically accurate. You know that. You can invent, yeah. Yeah, I'd like to do research, but again, you don't wanna do too much because then you research for five years and then write it, you know? Research, and then when you feel yourself kind of going, I'd like to try, you know? That's when you're gonna take the leap, like the bird out of the nest, you know? Maybe, I can see it, yay! You know what I mean? Okay. Thank you. Sounds like fun, man. Sounds like fun. Thank you. Thanks, Bob. All right, Laura, you are up next. Laura, Laura. Oh, there you go. Hello. Hey, Laura. Hey, how's the stand up, Laura? Hey, I did it incredible yesterday, last night. We did a virtual. But thank you so much for encouraging me like this whole time I've been writing that I had a 10 day block because I was so unhappy with the piece.  So I had something and I thought, okay, I had to meet with my advisor and it was like, oh my God. So 10 days, I couldn't even write or anything. And you guys were on break.   I edit during the day and then performed it. And it was like, oh gosh, but I did it. So thank you. I'm over here just saying thank you to you. So thank you. And when the video comes, I'll let you see it. Okay, everybody. I'm so pleased. I'm so pleased Laura, that's really great. That's really great. Thank you so much. But you did it online, you did it virtual online. I'm in Richfield, Connecticut now. So the Playhouse, Richfield Playhouse we usually perform on stage. But the Playhouse is not doing anything. So the hosts was at the Playhouse and all of us were in our own houses. Oh cool. And it was, virtual was so weird because you can't really hear the audience laughter so much. You know, but, but it was just, thank you, thank you. I'm here religiously now. So thank you. Thanks. Thanks Laura, I'm glad it's working. Thank you. Thank you. All right, up next we've got Michael. Oh, hold on. There we go.  Okay, Michael, over there you are. Hi, SOP, thank you so much for doing this every day with us. My pleasure. So, so I'm writing a play and the central conceit of that play is one that I have since come to learn has already been done in what is a fairly popular play, I guess, that I wasn't familiar with. So I'm wondering in your experience, is it worth continuing with it or am I sort of setting myself up to hear a lot of, oh, we already know that, that sounds just like this other play. Right. Hmm, hmm, hmm. It depends on how you do it, Michael.  Young man comes home to find things different from what they were like when he left, you know? Woman finally decides to leave difficult marriage. I mean, there are a lot of, you know, there are a lot of plays that are like other plays. Oedipus is a lot like Hamlet in a lot of ways and it's not, you know? So I don't know, I would, I mean, I would say write it because the worst thing that can happen is you have a play that's already like another play.  I mean, what might happen is that you, along the way, you realize that there's something going on in this play that you didn't know before. Do you, have you made yourself familiar now with that other play written already? No, I haven't because I didn't want it to influence what I'm doing. Fair enough, fair enough. Okay, okay, so I would say write your play, you know?   You will have spent, you would have spent time writing. And the rule, what's the rule? The rule from the Bhagavad Gita, no effort is ever wasted. So those of us who write movies and teleplays and plays that never see the light of day, I have many of them. I had not wasted time. I've spent time writing, which helps me improve my skill and my craft. But I would say write it, because you don't know how it's gonna turn out. And it might turn out differently. There might be maybe another, a new character is gonna walk in the door in the middle of a scene and go, oh my gosh. You know, okay? I know, I know, I know, that's a direct bummer. It's like meh, you know? Well, I'm hoping that mine is different. I mean, at least it's in my voice, right? There you go, exactly. I do know, as far as having looked into the other one, I know that I'm setting it in a different time period that that one is. There you go, okay. Maybe that makes it different enough. Okay, okay. And maybe there's a character in yours that isn't in the other one, you know? Does it end the same? Sorry, does it? Does it have the same ending? I don't know that. Okay, it's weird, it's weird. That's a very tricky situation because, well, why don't you write your play, right? Finish it, get to the end. And then maybe you wanna go and at least check out this other play, at least read a synopsis online or something, if it's a famous play, then read a synopsis, you know? Okay? So you can at least like kind of know what they're talking about when they say your play's a lot like that other play. Right.  Okay? Okay. All right, thank you, SLP. You're welcome, good question. Thanks, Michael. Up next we've got Cameron. Cameron, are you there? Hey, SLP, hope you're doing well. Hey, Cameron. So I am in the third act of a feature that I'm writing. And I've come to the part where I have to do something to a character that's very dear hearted to me and that I've grown very fond of, but I know for the purpose of the story, I have to do this to this character. What's your advice to getting over that? You know, not wanting to do it, but knowing that it's needed for the story?  Yeah, they have to pass away. They have to pass away. Yeah, well, you know, I was watching just yesterday, I was watching Mean Streets with Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. And you know, Harvey Keitel goes to the whole movie and they tell him, man, you shouldn't be hanging out with Robert De Niro, whatever his name is, Johnny. Cause you know, and you watch that whole movie going, Harvey Keitel is gonna have to do something to Robert De Niro cause even though we love him, he's gonna have to do something if he wants to move up in the ranks, you know, do it. Go ahead and do it Cameron.  You know, and if you feel pain and sadness, that's good. That's good. Hopefully the audience will feel, will have invested in the character like you have. You will have set up those beats. So we're actually feeling things when that thing happens to the character. I appreciate that. Yeah. Okay.  No, I mean, I'm not, yeah. Not in real life, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks Cameron. We actually don't have a question at the moment and I have already practiced my posture today, but. Well. Well, practicing your posture is not a once a day kind of thing. I mean, it's like I practiced it already. Well, then don't, I'll just slump over like that.  She is 100 years old. We are going to Zoom call her. We have Zoom called her. We've sent her 100 birthday cards and lots of flowers and she's in Chicago and we were going to throw our big party, but we can't. Of course.  Yeah, you're right. I will practice. Okay. It also helps. And happy birthday to your aunt. Yeah, happy birthday to Aunt Frieda. Yeah, right? Okay, that too. And we have some questions. There you go. See, napping always works.  Hi, Lynn. Hi. First of all, thank you. I don't know whether you'll remember, but I went to Staples and I got all those folders.  They're really nice, different colors. Yeah, they're nice, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I also have found that I write every day for an hour now, you know, whatever. Awesome. Right. Because I want to be a better writer. And I found that I started writing, you know, I'm working on this play, but I started writing in stories, you know, in prose about each of the different characters, their story, their journey through life and kill this point. And it's kind of, I've never felt so as if I disappear, you know, and the writing takes over their story, you know. So I guess my question is it has, it's kind of, I wanted to thank you because I love you. I always meditate before I write because I like to be not writing.  I don't want to be the writer. I want it just to, does that make any sense? Is this really weird? I'd like to ask your question. I'm just trying to be quiet over here. Well, is this, you know, I might have an idea or, you know, something I want to write about, but after I meditate, something else comes out. So my question is, should I focus on what my intention of writing, what I want to write or did you just let it go with what comes up when I meditate? You always ask the most interesting questions, Len. Yeah, I know. For me, it would depend on what the goal is. Do you know what I mean?   And if you're drawn to things that aren't sort of on your to-do list, I would say generally that's fine. It's just if you continually month after month, find yourself not making the goals that you set for yourself, feeling yucky about that. You know, one might feel down that one can't seem to finish anything, not you necessarily, but anybody, any of us. I would say stick to your goal because that then is the practice. You know what I mean? Yeah. Meditation, the kind of meditation I do anyway, when the mind wanders, you bring it back. Yeah, my mind doesn't actually wander in the sense, but when I get up, it's a different, I can't explain it, you know, it's just, I start writing and it's not necessarily, I mean, I finish stories, which is a great thing. Maybe my intention is just to finish, you know, rather than to write a play and finish. Maybe my intention is just to finish.  Yes, yes. And that's okay. So it doesn't matter, in a way it wouldn't matter what you write, it's that your intention is, your goal, if you will, is to show up every day your writing practice and to do your beautiful practice. I think my goal is to be a better writer. I think that's my goal. Okay, well, I would say, you know, be mindful because part of being a better writer is to be able to say, or let's say part of being a pro, not necessarily money, but a pro is part of it is saying, I have a task to do and I'm going to do it.  Great. Because it's hard, you meet that point, you know, you're climbing the mountain and suddenly it's a little hard. And gee, you know, running through the periwinkle over there might be a lot more fun, but if you're really gonna do it, you gotta keep walking and that's, you know, that's something to consider also.  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And you run it for 20 minutes and nail him up to an hour, which is great. There you go. Exactly, exactly. So there you got an hour every day. Yeah. It might be your finishing projects, that's awesome. And so far, so good, sounds to me. So sounds like you're on the road. Thank you, thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Lynn. Thank you. All right, we've got about 12 minutes and we're gonna go to Karla. I mean. Hi, everyone. Hi, SLP, hi, Audrey. How are you feeling, Karla? I'm good, thankfully. I don't know if I should have just, I had a mass in one of my organs, so they were able to take it out and save my organs. Everything went well. And so I'm good now, I'm not even on pain medication, so I'm so happy for you. So much better. So happy for you, we're so happy for you. Yeah, so I'm doing good. All right, that's great. And I'm moving, so I'm still like, there's a lot going on, I'm gonna have boxes next to me and stuff, but I'm still trying to inch along in terms of writing, so I'm only doing 20 minutes, either before this or a little bit after. But I'm finding myself, even in those 20 minutes, I love it. I only get like, I really like my one page, but sometimes I find myself trying to edit other stuff. I'm writing a novel, and so I'm finding like, I should edit that before I write this. And I keep kind of jumping back and forth.  But I'm like, I don't know if I should follow that instinct to kind of edit when I'm just trying to inch along and I go crazy about it or like just pull on, try and write it. I've outlined like 12 chapters, but I'm not completely done with it. So I'm like, ah, it's like, I guess it's in the middle of that mesh process. Yeah. Great question. Would it help Carla to, so everything you're talking about right now has to do with one project, correct? Right. Yes. Okay, okay, I just wanted to make sure. Just a one. Okay, so it's not a couple of projects just switching back and forth. So would it help to finish outlining or doing a beat sheet of the novel? Would that help at all? Just so you know where you're going, you have the confidence that you know where you're going. I think in my, I first did the first 10 chapters just because I had a goal. I was like, I'll do 10 chapters, just the first draft and then I'll leave it. But then I added it, the last chapter I think, and then now I have like a new outline from like 10 to 12, just because I think last time I talked about, I was thinking about my character and I couldn't figure it out. So I was like, I'm gonna be focused on the plot and I will hopefully then figure everything else out. But I just don't wanna do that again because I feel like then I'll just keep editing my own outline and then I won't do the actual thing. I'm like, no, no, no, I don't wanna, it's like the one step forward, one step back. I wanna keep going through it. Yeah. So would it help to just finish the outline of the project? Like, I think at the end of the outline. Yeah, I think it might, I'm just, I guess I have to like be very mindful with myself that I won't edit it or then if I do, I should like really think about it, I don't know. Well, the thing is if you do a beat sheet or an outline, right? From chap, you know, and these are very small, snippets of photographs of the chapters, not an elaborate thing, just this is what happens in chapter one, this is what happens in chapter two, this is what happens in chapter three, with this character, this character and this character. Then this character, like that, it's a beat sheet, just the beats, just the beats, right? If you do this all the way through, this happens to me all the time, then I'm following, not on paper anymore, but I'm following the outline as I'm writing. And then I come to an idea and I'm like, oh, no, no, I want to do something different with that. And I just write. And you just keep going. Okay. Okay, great.  And great, okay, not, it's not about Spain, it's about France. You just keep going. Okay. It doesn't have to be a big deal, but I think you do need to get, finish your outline. Right, yeah. That could sort of bring a certain calm. Yeah, I have them in here. So I have all the chapters on these, but like, so I like keep looking at them so they're in front of me and try to like, okay, make sure I stick to it. So you have all, I'm sorry, I keep asking the same question because that's not clear. You have all the chapters outlined then. No, not all of them now. Okay, yeah. So what I'm suggesting is continue what you're doing. Yeah. With the chapters, right? Get to the end of your outline, and then write forward and know that if you have to change your outline, it's okay, but just keep moving forward. You see what I'm saying? Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know. I know, I'm so sorry. Okay, it's so funny. I know, yeah. Washington Heights. Washington Heights, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, yeah, that makes sense. I guess it's just in my brain, I'm not separating the two. I'm not separating the outline from the act of me sitting down and writing the thing. So I have to like... Outlining is part of writing the thing. Yeah. Like dating is part of a relationship. That's true, that's true. Right, so you got to date, you got to go a few more dates, and then you'll know, you'll just have a roadmap. That's all. I just got to take this out. The ice cream truck in my ears is... It's a lot. Sorry, I muted you, Carla, for now. Okay, does that make sense? Outline and see if that helps. It's outlining as part of writing, and then go back into the writing phase with confidence. It'll give you confidence, and it'll calm your mind down. Because you'll have a map to the treasure. Yeah. Okay, thanks Carla, thanks SLP. All right, Sarah, you're up next. Go for it, Sarah. Hi, thanks so much for doing this. This is my first time. It looks like people have been here a lot this week. I actually had an easier question. I've been writing a piece that's given me like a year of trouble. It was outlined, and now I'm two pages from the end, and I've written myself into an insane corner, like no ending works at all. I can normally write myself out of a corner about halfway through, but since I'm ending here, I have no idea how to proceed. So has this ever happened to you? Also, and how do you handle it? It happens all the time. Cool. But you know what? Just write the ending that doesn't work. Go ahead, write it. Go ahead, write it. You know what? Sometimes things don't work. Some marriages end in divorce. Not everybody lives happily. You know what? Write the ending that doesn't work. Oh, well, fuck, right? The worst thing that's going to happen is that you're going to have an ending that doesn't work for a little while. Yeah. Write it. You print it out. If you've got a printer, you put it down. You put it in a folder. You put it aside. Let it figure itself out. Come back to it in a week or so. Read the whole thing through. Maybe there'll be a solution there for you, probably. Yeah, all right. That sounds good. Just go ahead. Just finish it. Hey, what can you do? Right? Yeah. Because your alternative is to go all the way back to the beginning and try to figure out what went wrong. You know what? Just write the wrong ending. It's okay. How many times do we write the wrong thing? It's going to give you an opportunity to rewrite, which you're going to need to do anyway, right? Correct? Yeah. Yeah, sure. We will rewrite a lot. And it's okay if you don't get it right the first time or if it doesn't make any sense or it feels awful. I mean, you can even write at the end.  I know it doesn't work. Play, could you please figure yourself out while I put you in a folder and put you away for a couple of weeks? And then go outside. On the first tree, you confine and say, Spirit, please help me figure out my play because I'm a hard worker and I am dedicated to my craft. All right, that sounds good. You know what I mean? I'm just saying, let it go for a little bit. It's okay. It's okay. You'll figure it out. Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. It's synopsis by walking up and down the steps or whatever he did. Shit. So, hey. Okay, you're going to figure it out, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thanks, Sarah. All right. We actually don't have any questions at the moment. I've got about three minutes left. Time for pause. Oh no, two more. Yes, two more questions.  Here we go. We're up next. Hi, this is, thank you again for this. This is just like so wonderful to have a place to go every day. And I borrowed a, I'm in my friend's empty house, which makes it even better. So I got to sneak over here and just be alone and escape my family, which was like incredible. I have been really, really struggling on the outlining, but I've been taking your advice and going, like I have, I'm working on a long project for the first time. I've worked only on short stories before or academic writing, but I'm actually trying to write a novel. So I am writing a novel, excuse me. And I have found it extremely helpful what you said about the signposts and not just thinking like, where are you going? And then fill in a few beats in between and all of that. And so I've gotten, before the person before, I was gonna tell you that it's been really great because I've outlined the whole beginning and then the whole first half of the middle. And then the second half of the middle is kind of messy, but, and so it's less filled in, but there's like tent poles. And then the conclusion is kind of the same. It's like much looser, but I really finished the first two parts, I guess. So I gave myself, I meant to have a whole draft of the whole thing done by my birthday, which I did not do, but I gave myself the treat of starting to write a little bit going back and just trying to organize the things that I already had because I have maybe like a hundred pages. And I was like, okay, this goes here, this goes here, and it was so kind of great to do that. And then having like an assignment based on my outline, I can see what you were saying about the confidence of having that and being able to do that. But I think I know the answer to what I'm gonna ask you based on what you told the last person, do I have to outline it in more detail the rest of it? Or can I just keep working on my, with my nuggets and things and allow myself to write a little bit?  You've done a lot of outlining, it sounds like you've had up most of it. You've gotten yourself to an ending. Now you're gonna put the boat in the water and see if it floats, and if it doesn't, you'll figure it out along the way how to make it work. Yeah. You know what I mean? No worries, you've done really well. Just remember your outline is really gonna help you. It doesn't give you all the answers, it won't give you all the sights along the way if you're driving from, say, New York to California.  They're driving to Texas. Okay, well, they even, even better. Wear your mask, put your mask on. I know. As a Texan, I say that to you, yeah. Okay? Yes, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Thanks Erica. Well, it's six o'clock. Okay. And it's Thursday, I think I keep thinking it's Wednesday, but it is Thursday. Yeah, okay, if you say so, I have no idea. It is Thursday, it is Thursday, okay. So we'll see you all next week. Our links for next week will be released tomorrow on the Public Theater's website and on Hal Brown's website, and we will see you Monday to Thursday, 5 p.m. Eastern next week. Okay, we love you. Have a good weekend. Okay, bye. Bye.


After the seismic shifts in focus, staff reductions and structural overhauls experienced across various workforce domains, we now find ourselves several years beyond the pandemic's onset. This report goes beyond the surface, exploring other pertinent workforce issues, shaping the landscape of higher education today. So what are the key takeaways from the report? Teaching and learning professionals want hybrid options for work. First off, a majority of respondents felt that having access to remote or hybrid work options is important. In fact, two-thirds reported that they do currently have options for remote hybrid work. We also found that a lot of respondents mentioned juggling more than one main responsibility. This might keep growing thanks to staff shortages and budget constraints. In fact, 85% indicated that they have more than one primary area of responsibility. Teaching and learning professionals express a desire for the institutions to broaden the availability of professional development opportunities. The time spent on tasks like artificial intelligence, faculty training, and online learning has shot up. On the flip side, the time needed for staff education, library, and managing and designing learning spaces has gone down. Heavy workloads are contributing to burnout and adversely affecting mental health and morale. Among those who reported experiencing a lot of burnout in the past 12 months, 82% cited an excessive workload, in contrast to 47% among those experiencing little-to-no burnout. As we move forward, it's important to focus on boosting the well-being and morale of staff. It's a key priority. In the ever-shifting realm of teaching and learning, now is the time to explore ways to lend better support for handling all these changes. Adaptability, agility, and change management will be extremely important skills for teaching and learning professionals now and in the future.


human bone marrow contains multiple cell types which are responsible for regulating hematopoiesis. Single cell INA sequencing has allowed researchers to identify six distinct cell types within the bone marrow, each with its own unique characteristics and functions. The study also found that these cell types interact with one another and can influence the development of blood cells. Additionally, the study discovered that certain cell types have the ability to differentiate into other cell types, suggesting that the bone marrow may be more complex than previously thought. This article was authored by Hengja Lee, Sandro Braunig, Parosha Dupola, and others.


Welcome everyone to this session and we have Shriram who is working as a digital IT management consultant. He will be having a session today on agile outside technology and we are glad that everyone has joined this session. So without any further delay, over to you Shriram. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining this session. Thanks to agile India for inviting me to do this. I know agile conference is mostly a lot of people in the IT industry and in the tech industry in general. But this is slightly different topic. It's based on some of my experience of consulting for an organization in the social development sector. So I'm just a little bit curious about the kind of audience if you don't mind. So Shriram, sorry to interrupt. Can you maybe move your zoom to unbar? So it's coming as a grey box in between. Right. Is that better now? Yeah. It's great. So can you please, the people in the audience, if any of you are currently in the social development sector, could you please just say yes on chat or something and then so I get an idea of if there is anybody at all in the audience who is from that sector. Maybe we can ask them to raise their hands? Yeah, sure. If there is a raise hand icon on your screen, if you could do that as well, that's good. Okay. I don't see any hands yet. So that means there's, I mean, it's not a huge surprise. It's meant to be, there are not usually a lot of people from the development sector. I don't see any hands as yet. Is that correct, Meghna? Yeah, there are no hands. Okay. All right. But nevertheless, it's not very specific to social development sector. The stock is generally applicable to anybody who's not in an IT or software or tech industry. But even those who are, there are some, I think there are some useful takeaways. So good to know. All right. So let me start with a bit of a bit of a history. I won't bore you too much, but I think it provides useful context to how I got here and how I began to do this kind of work. So I really started off long back in 1998. I was, you know, through campus interview, my first job was at IBM Global Services. So I joined as an application developer. And I was in that kind of, I did a lot of jobs and end of 2004, early 2005 is when I joined ThoughtWorks. And that's where I got introduced to a lot of agile engineering practices. I had already kind of read about agile and I had already gotten into trouble with people in my earlier companies who were not, at that time, agile was not such a big thing. And instead, what we had was something called CMM, CMM, CMMI and so on. And there were all these quality auditors. And there was a department called Software Engineering Process Group. And I used to get into trouble with them because I was always intuitively in a way like prioritizing working software over comprehensive documentation.  So in a way, it was, you know, I kind of escaped to ThoughtWorks around that time. And I enjoyed myself. I learned a lot. But as time went by, I moved away from a full-time hands-on kind of role to more of a technology leadership and innovation leadership. So I played the role of a director of innovation. And I was a member of the Technology Advisory Board, which is part of the office of the CTO of ThoughtWorks. And then I took a break, actually, around 2009 and 10. I started working half time for a bit. I wanted to like figure out some other things. And that's when I ran the tech. I basically created the tech induction program for lateral hires. So, you know, developers who were joining already with some experience like 3, 4, 5, even 10 years of experience sometimes. But they were not necessarily exposed to the agile engineering and so on. So I developed a program and I ran that program for nearly two years while I was working half time. And around that time, I also did some bit of agile consulting for clients because by that time, there was some interest in agile and people wanted to know like how they can use it and so on. And then around 2011-12, I moved back full time. And this time, there was a products division in ThoughtWorks. And I joined a team that was building a product called GoCD. And initially, I joined as a techie, but since it was a technical product, I got to play a where a product management had for a part of the product. And as part of that, I started getting involved in marketing. You know, when clients are evaluating the product, you would do the sales demo for them, you would do sales support, you would start working on the roadmap, talk to customers about, you know, what features are working out for them, what they would like to see next, keep an eye on the competition, look at industry trends and so on. So I started doing all of that. I enjoyed that a lot. And through that, I also got to understand a lot about the way my client organizations were working. And some of that understanding was also to the agile consulting that I did, but this kind of rounded off that whole understanding. And I began to have a greater appreciation for organizational agility. So the non-technical aspects of agility, things other than what the development team itself does, the surrounding things that happen. I realized that they also need to be addressed if you have to be overall effective as a business. And so I was making notes along the way and all of that came together. I basically, you know, in ThoughtWorks, there's quite a bit of support for people who want to write books. And so I ended up writing a book on this topic agile design and Pearson published it in the US. And it was received quite well in the industry. So much so that I basically, you know, is led to a natural pivot in my career. So from hardcore engineering to product management to now, I started advising organizations on improving the performance of their technology teams and the technology organization in general. So I don't want to call it specific. In some context, this would happen in the context of say an agile transformation program or a digital transformation program and so on. But I think more generally what where at the area I was helping was with improving the performance of organizations. Now, in parallel, what happened is there's one of the aspects of the book is it talks about having semi-autonomous teams and it puts some places that are important on intrinsic motivation. So there are three aspects of intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose. And so it talks a little bit about autonomy, but then it also balances it out with alignment. You need to have, you can't just have autonomy. You also, people need to be aligned to the overall goals of the organization. And there needs to be some amount of accountability as well. So the word accountability was a little foreign in agile circles. It was all about collective ownership and all that. But nevertheless, through my experience, I felt like, no, accountability is also important. And therefore, there was a chapter in the book on accountability. And that was a little bit of a polarizing chapter. Some people really liked that I talked about it. Others felt like, no, I've lost the plot. But nevertheless, through my experience with clients, that whole stream of thinking around balancing autonomy with alignment and accountability, that branched into, oh, by the way, just to complete this picture. Now, since 2021, I've no longer with ThoughtWorks and Independent and doing this kind of work on my own. But that's just to complete that picture. So now coming back to this whole accountability thread, I ended up creating a, I don't want to call it a framework, but it's kind of like a framework called Cleararchy, which is also in some ways a response to self-management. There are some self-management approaches out there, because collective ownership is in a way related to self-management. And there are approaches like sociocracy, holocracy, telogenization, etc. And a lot of people were trying all those things. But my experience of big organizations told me that those things are going to work in very limited contexts. And most of them, they are not going to work. But at the same time, I was not a fan of the traditional, very strict hierarchies. So I've created Cleararchy, which is like a, I think it's a good middle ground and very practical. If you're interested, you can visit cleararchy.com. Actually, a couple of years ago, I did a talk on this at Agile India. So that's the talk is also available on YouTube. But now coming to the social development sector, that's how there is a self-management interest group in Bangalore called Cosmic. And somebody from there, they got in touch with me and said, hey, yours is a slightly different point of view, but we would like to hear it out. And so I ended up doing a talk for this community on Cleararchy. And that's how I came into contact with certain people, because some of the people who were attending that talk, they were from the social development sector. And they were also other people, like there was a sports coach and a leadership coach. So I met a few people like that. And through them, I got introduced to the founder of a social development, of a fairly big social development organization. It's an umbrella organization and there are three or four social development sub organizations under that umbrella. And I got in touch with that founder and that founder, he started, he was already interested in Agile and so on. And so he started, we started talking and eventually I got around to helping them out on a more intensive basis. Like I started having a lot of conversations with them, etc. But I'm going a little bit ahead of myself. During my initial conversations, I asked, okay, so what is the nature of your interest in Agile and so on. And that's where the typical framing, which is very common is people say that what I heard was that they were interested in becoming more agile or introducing agile ways of working into their organization. And over the years, I've become very of goal statements like this. Like people, they say the goal is to become agile and so on. Over the years, because it means different things to different people. We use the same words, but we mean very different things. And one, as I was preparing for this talk, the thing that occurred to me, which I want to share with you is that just asking to be agile is like asking for a sandwich. And I know this is not a very, you might not have heard of this particular analogy before, but I am saying this because it comes from a personal experience. And so I'll share a quick short story about this. But again, to really get a feel of how much you're going to relate to this, I should share that I grew up in Mumbai and my experience of sandwiches are Mumbai sandwiches. The street food in Mumbai is something that I miss a lot of being in Bangalore. I love Bangalore, I love the weather and everything else about it. But I miss the street food of Mumbai having grown up in Mumbai. And one key aspect of Mumbai street food is the Mumbai sandwich. So, I just want to understand, somebody is saying vada pav paranam, but this example is about a sandwich. So can people reply in the chat saying how many of you have tried the typical street food Mumbai sandwich in Mumbai? There's one person, two. There are a few, cool. Then I mean, I don't know how much you'll relate to this, but for me, the way they do it, not everybody does, but quite a few of them, the way they make that sandwich, that's really my formative in my formative years. That's what I knew as this is what a sandwich is. And for those who are unfamiliar with it, I have like a helpful picture. This is what it looks like. It's not always stacked up like this, but this particular picture helps reveal the feelings. So I have put the feelings on the side. It's nearly like five to six different vegetables, some of them raw, some of them boiled along with the coriander chutney, butter. There is a hot garlic chutney paste on the side and it's typically, you have one or two of these sandwiches and then you like follow it up with a nice masala chai or a ginger chai. So this is what I knew growing up. And then I came into IT and soon enough, I was, I had an onsite assignment and that's when I took my first international flight. Because unlike now, during that time, the middle class didn't use to take international flights. So it's a work related assignment. So that's how I got on my first international flight after the age of 20. So imagine my, I mean, this is what I knew as sandwich. So I sat in the plane and I asked them for like a sandwich, like a vegetarian sandwich. And that's what I got, just like a chunk of cheese and some tomato and some lettuce. And that was quite a major disappointment. And so yeah, that's how I feel when people talk about agile also. Our experiences might be very different. And so I no longer settle for just like, okay, let's help you be more agile and so on. I asked for like, okay, what are your measures of success? What do you mean by you want to be agile? What metric, ideally, what metrics do you want to improve by how much, in what time frame? And do you have a current baseline for this metric? That's ideal. But most of the organizations, they're unable to answer the questions in these terms. They're not able to answer the questions in terms of metrics, but at least they're able to offer some measures of success.  So this case was no different. When I asked, when I really hoped a little about, okay, what do you mean, agile, what are your measures of success? What I got from this, this person who was the founder was that although they were social development sector, I'll get to this in a bit. They used to do a lot of projects and, you know, they had overrun on the projects, effort overrun, schedule overrun.  And the second thing was they had already adopted a certain project management tool. I'm not going to name that tool because it's probably, you know, unfair. But the adoption of that tool wasn't great. And so this person, another thing that he said is, I want to increase the voluntary voluntary adoption, because again, this was being a social development sector, the people who worked in it were people who were kind of self motivated to work, right? It was not like, I think the money isn't as attractive as it is in, say, the IT company or in a startup or whatever. So it was a lot of the culture was fairly open and, you know, people weren't really micromanaged or asked to do things, they would voluntarily sign up for things. And so he wanted to improve the voluntary adoption of the tool that was in place. So now we have something a much more concrete starting points. Okay, so this is what you want to focus on. And so you know, I took up that assignment on that this side. Yeah, and at this point, some of you might think, what do you mean by projects here? Because we are used to say IT projects or other technology projects, product development and so on. But what does projects mean in this space? So it turns out, you know, through my work, I learned quite a bit about this space. And I've tried to represent it in this picture here. There are projects in the social development sector. There are people who fund those projects, they are funders, they might be like various kinds of private foundations or government agencies, or there might be fund aggregators, like nowadays, you have these, like you can go to a website and contribute to a cause and so on. So there are fund aggregators. And then there are implementers who actually make proposals to the funders saying, okay, here is my proposal to run this program. The funder will say, I want to run a program in the area of women's health or in the area of like vaccination or something else, something like that. And the implementers, they present the proposal, they win the work and then they execute the work. And again among the implementers, there are various categories of organizations. The primary organization that gets the funds is called the need granting, and they can then rope in other organizations to execute the project. There are higher in the value chain, how organizations that are like, they design the program, they manage the program and so on. And then the next level, they bring in the next level implementation partners, they implement the program. And at the last level, you have the field partners, like say the self-help groups and other kind of people who are directly in touch with the end beneficiaries. But it is a bit of a chain. And the organization that I was helping, they were more in this kind of space. They were depending on the context, they would be a lead grantee or a program designer or a program manager or even an evaluator. Because again in this space, you do the work, you do some social development project, but then you evaluate the impact of that project. Like and you try to assess whether that thing had a good impact or not. And based on that, you know, the funder might decide to give you another project. You might get more funds if the impact report turns out to be good. So in that sense, if you see, you know, we started talking about outputs and outcomes only in the last, I think five, six years. But in the world of social development, they have understood this long back. This is very much part of anybody who enters social development, they understand this chain very well. Like when you begin with inputs, based on that you perform certain activities, those activities leads to outputs and they lead to outcomes which ultimately create some social impact. So they understand this and there are, you know, there are monitoring and evaluation agencies that are only concerned with the impact evaluation, for example. But projects in this place now, when you talk about project overrun and so on, it turns out projects are usually fixed bid, but somewhat variable scope. That means that, you know, funder says, I am going to spend so much money, I know, and in for this kind of a program. But there is a lot, there is some amount of scope variability within that. But only some amount and it is subject to the discretion of the funder. They might say, okay, I agree that you met this milestone and so I am going to release the next tranche of funds corresponding to this milestone. Therefore, overrun matters. If overrun happens with an effort overrun or schedule overrun, it is often the implementer has to absorb the overrun, the cost of that overrun. The funder, most of the time, the funder is not going to say that, oh, it took 20% more effort or it took, you know, whatever, 30% more time and so, you know, I am going to cover that for you. Most of the time that doesn't happen, right? So overruns matter. So with this context, I started talking to a bunch of people in that organization and I started understanding their context, etc. There are the whole variety of projects. And through that, I presented my findings and recommendations which I am going to give you only very high level summary over here because of time. So the first one, right? The first problem segment related to, you know, they wanted to reduce the overrun on projects. I found consistently that a lot of people were saying that they were already working long hours, they were working weekends voluntarily. This is not the typical deadline kind of thing where people are like, whether they like it or not, they are asked to work long hours. Also, there were a lot of part-time assignments to manage. So most of the key people were working on like five or six different projects, right?  So effectively, they were 150% allocated. And every time they had to present a project status report to their funders or even internally, there was a lot of manual effort required to obtain the data and then to analyze the data to understand the overall project status. So although they had a project management tool in place, that tool wasn't helping to kind of generate this report, because partly because of the way they were using it. And finally, all of this thing, there was hardly any logging of time. People were not logging time. There was no time. They were time sheets for namesake, but there was very little time was being captured, even among the people in the office. Because in an organization like this, a lot of people are working in the field. Well, at the higher level implementer, they are mostly office staff. But if you want to monitor project costs, you have to monitor costs through the chain, right? You have to monitor costs at their implementers at the field level people and so on. And even in this organization, there were some people who were active in the field. So I understand that field level people, it's hard for them to put in time. But my point is that even the others, right, they were not logging time. And then when I talk to people, I heard a bunch of things. I heard things like, they said, we out of our enthusiasm, people sign up for many things.  They said, oh, delays are not just because of us, delays are because of partners not turning around things, funders not reviewing our reports and getting back to us, third party delays on account of third parties and so on. And some people also said that, of course, it will delay because we've submitted such a competitive bid. We've submitted a bid even though we know that it's going to take like, maybe say 1000 hours, we submitted a bid of 700 hours just to win the work. And therefore, unrealistic effort estimates and therefore, obviously there's going to be, the actual effort is going to be much more than the estimated, right? So now as an, I was assessing these things. And so I can, I can only like, I can't always get to the bottom of these things, right? But I've made some notes and I've understood some general patterns, but I felt like I still need to know what's really going on. And so as a recommendation, I said that, you know, in a situation like this, where people are part-time assigned to multiple projects, if you want to know what's going on, you need time logging. I am not a fan of time logging. I used to, I used to consider it like a chore and I was not, you know, I understand time logging is not the, like, the most exciting work. But in a situation like this, you want to know where is the time going? Why is the overrun happening? Then you need data. And so you need to institute a practice of time logging to then even to begin to understand what's happening. Otherwise, all you have is a bunch of opinions of different people, right? And so part of my, one of my key recommendations, the first, the first stage was let's get to a stage, let's take some steps. And I had outlined some detail steps about how to improve time logging. But, but the point was the first milestone is let's get to a stage where at least 70% of total time that people are spending is logged into the system. So we know where it went. So that was my first piece of advice. Sheeran, sorry to interrupt, but we are 30 minutes into the session. So just want to Okay, thanks a lot. I have to then really rush it up. You know what? Okay, I might please already type in your questions. I don't know how much time I'll have at the end for Q&A. Obviously, I have not done this particular talk before. So, so, you know, I'm a little bit behind schedule, which is kind of matches the situation. Anyway, Yeah, now with respect to voluntary adoption, again, my findings was that, you know, adopting a project management tool, first of all, there has to be a bad understanding of the purpose of the tool. Whereas here I felt like, you know, some people were using it more like a document sharing tool, or as a communication archival tool, rather than as a project management tool. And even some people were of course, using it the right way, a couple of projects were using it very well. But in a lot of places, you know, they were also this particular tool, it had these sort of concepts, they had a project, which you could break down into milestones and then tasks and sub tasks. And it was not, you know, you had to use them in a particular way very carefully. If you wanted useful reports out of that tool, yeah, if you just use them, whatever way you saw fit, then it was not possible to get useful reports out of this tool. And also some of the guidelines that were already in place, there was a little bit confusing. And some of it I didn't even agree with. And so I noticed all these things and I said, okay, like I made a couple of recommendations that increase voluntary adoption. First of all, there are a couple of projects that are making a good use. Can we free up some key people from those projects and, you know, help them to coach the rest of the projects. And to these two points, right, how to use it and what is its purpose? Is it document sharing or project management award? Usually there is a, you know, a role like an information architect can help in these kind of contexts who basically decide what is the, what are the information flows within the organization and what is the architecture of the information that the organization uses. So I suggested these things. And I also said, I need to get more hands-on and dive into this tool. So I asked for like access to the tool with a dummy project to help me understand its strengths and limitations. So this is what I said as the first step. First step, this is what I need. Then I can do a little more and come back to you with more recommendations. So at this point, I mean jumping ahead of myself. So the reaction was that, you know, this is all good what you're saying, but this is classic project management. Where's all the agile stuff that you're famous for, right? And I was a little bit puzzled, but because I said, see, you outlined your measures of success. You said that your problems with overruns, you have the problems with voluntary adoption of the tool and I'm suggesting you the first set of steps that you should take to address these problems, right? So really what's more important for you?  So they understood that. Some of them, not all of them. Some of them understood that and they said, okay, yes, we see what you're saying. We are happy to go along. But the others, there were a few others who said, that's okay, but how do we scale it?  And also I'll come to that. Yeah. So that kind of thinking, right? Like, at that moment, I didn't, I give them, you know, I didn't use this picture because only after later reflection, I came up with this picture. Essentially, what they were asking for is like, you know, they've given me a problem statement and then they want a plan and that plan should have basically these dimensions, right? It should have like, okay, what are we going to do on the process trend? What are the metrics? What are the capabilities we need to have? What is the training program we'll do for those capabilities? And how are we going to address culture, et cetera? This is a very fairly traditional approach to a change program. It's a, if you look at it, this is a functional decomposition of the problem space. You're functionally decomposing into here's what I'm going to do into process capabilities and so on, right? And in some ways, this is not an agile way of going about a big change program like this. This is a big upfront, more waterfall kind of way of taking about this, right? Whereas what I was sharing with them looked more like this. It was a problem solving approach where they said, they gave me a big problem. I would break it down into smaller problems. And each problem, like as I investigated, I would break it down into smaller problems. And then at that, at the level where it becomes a solvable problem, at that level, we will say, okay, now to solve this problem, what do we need to do in terms of process? What do we need to do in terms of metrics and capabilities and culture, right? All those things will come into play on a problem by problem basis, right? And each problem might have, might have to be attacked in a different way with a different combination of process meant like one might be a more process heavy solution to the problem. The other might be a more capability intensive solution and so on, right? So this is, I think, a key difference between an agile way of approaching transformation or a change program, as opposed to a more conventional, you know, consultant framework sort of way. The consultants, they like this other approach usually because they are not aware of the client's specific problems, right? So when they are pitching something, this is easy to pitch because irrespective of the client, you can go and pitch that over framework handles process this way, handles metrics this way and so on. But in my experience, that's not very useful. It doesn't lead to actual results. It leads to a lot of ceremony and, you know, supposedly new ways of working, but it doesn't give results because you don't have a problem for this, right? So I realize I'm running short of time. So I'll basically, you know, I basically said, if you really want to be agile, here is an opportunity. I think the way you're approaching this problem itself is an opportunity to be agile about it, right? Like you design your change in an evolutionary fashion. And it's, you know, so transformation itself can be an, take an iterative approach to transformation, right? So we all know build, measure, learn in the context of say lean startup and so on. But when we talk about change programs, I would say instead of build, what you're doing is your plan, you're deciding interventions, what kind of interventions you're designing. You can use the same approach and you can say, I'll intervene a little, I'll measure or assess the result of my intervention, and then I'll learn about it, and then I'll go on to the next intervention. And so that's how, you know, I would say, like, even though you're not in the tech sector or whatever, you can apply agile outside technology by applying principles like this. So build, measure, learn is a lean agile principle, but you can apply that into your whatever change you're trying to bring into your organization could be a, you know, you might be a real estate company or you might be anything, right? But this is how you can apply practices, not by copying practices. Like, you know, I don't think they would have benefited so much by saying, oh, you should do sprints or you should do stand-up meetings or retrospectives, or you should do points-based estimation, or you should move to an open plan office layout. Yeah, you can do all those things, but is that really going to solve the problem? But if you approach it problem by problem, maybe, yeah, maybe on a particular problem, you'll realize that, okay, for this problem, sprints are actually a good idea. They make sense. And for this other problem, maybe retrospectives are a good idea, right? But I would go like problem first and then practice. So what are the domains in which you can apply this? I would say anything that is, you know, product development, R&D, innovation, creative effort, change programs. I've given some examples there, which is across now only the first of them is technology, software development, everything else is outside the world of technology, right? And in general, the rule is if there is a non-linear relationship between effort and output, then that's a good sign that, yes, agile practices principles are likely to be applicable in those sort of contexts, yeah. And even in each of those domains, it doesn't mean it's uniformly applicable to all the departments within that domain. So let's say, for example, you're a marketing company, right? So if you're creating an ad campaign, yes, that process is a develop or change process, a lot of principles apply, right? But if you're like at some point, right, after creation, there is, there might be a mass production phase, there might be a distribution phase, and there might be a run phase depending on the domain that you are in, right? Agile principles are mainly applicable here. Some of them are also quite applicable in the run phase, but not all of them. So here is a quick sample of, you know, which ones that in this color, I would say that especially for scaled operations, they might not work very well. But in general, for change and for run, a lot of these principles would apply irrespective of the sector that you are in, whether it's a technology sector or some other sector, right? And so I'd like to conclude with the key takeaways that I would like to share with you, is that the principles are more applicable than the practices in several contexts outside the world of technology. And, you know, don't just aim for agility, think about like the problems that you want to address and about the measures of success. And for whatever change you want to introduce into your organization, adopt a intervene, measure, learn approach to improving the performance of your organization. Yeah, that's what I wanted to share with you. Let me quickly look at the Q&A and see if you have any. So Nareef has a question. In Agile, people usually thrown upon tracking process state transit and using a tool. However, they keep talking about taking data-driven decisions without systematically capturing events, very hard to get the data to make data-driven decisions. Where do we draw the line? Yeah, without systematically capturing events, it is very hard to get the data. Exactly. Yeah. So sometimes, you know, people have to participate in creating data, right? They're not explicitly doing data entry, but you know, like time logging is an activity where you're actively participating in generating good quality data. Similarly, if you're using some tool and you're changing the status of a work item from like in progress to done promptly, then you're participating in the process to generate good quality data. And that is essential, even though it's not very exciting work, it is essential because unless you do that, we will be making decisions about on the basis of poor quality data. So, we have one more question in the chat section from Narayan Swamy. So, they say that, isn't the we measure learn not the same as sense respond from Sinofin? I have only like heard this term sense and respond. I have not dive deep into it. So, if you think it's the same, it's the same. You know, that's all I can say. Okay, there's one more from Naresh. It's what is the hardest part of coaching social logs? What is the hardest part? Oh, the hard question. I mean, in the I don't have like, I'm not like post pens of social logs. I have one or two examples. At least in my experience, I discovered this later. The hard part is one is getting across this message that it's not really about agile. It's about solving your problems.  Shall we encourage our people to get certified in all these things? Should we set up a PMO in our organization? So there's a lot of dealing with some of those questions and saying that perhaps you don't need to go all that was a whatever was a bit of a challenge. And the other thing, I think otherwise, I think social logs are potentially because people are motivated and they are mostly working there voluntarily. It's actually I got a quite a good bit of good amount of traction as well. So I wouldn't say it's at least in my experience, there is nothing particularly hard about social log than other although I would say one thing, the feedback loops are much more elongated. So if you hear something, you take something to the market, you say we have product analytics and we are going to based on that, we are going to like build measure low on iterate like that. But in a real, so if you're doing something, if you're trying to improve say literacy levels in some area or something, that kind of program, the feedback loops are much longer to put something in place and to see whether what kind of impact it has had. So there the loops are much longer and that creates some difficulties. But I was talking in the context of bringing about change within the social development organization itself. So there I think the loops are not as long like you can like these kind of things, reducing overrun on projects and so on. You can try a few things and get the feedback and that's where the interweave measure learn loop can actually work with shorter feedback loops. Does the voluntary nature of social or make it hard to get accountability? I haven't experienced this. Everyone that I have spoken to, I found like very high integrity people, they were voluntarily working so long hours and so on. So I personally don't think there is a huge problem of accountability. Although they can always be like, you know, people have pet projects and they have their pet ways of, they have their chosen ways of going about things. And so sometimes we are blind. If I have my own pet ways of working, I might be blind to its ineffectiveness. And in those contexts, yes, a little bit of accountability could help to make sure that I'm not just doing things a certain way because I like it. I think we are towards the end of the session then. And thank you for leaving this. I personally like the sandwich analogy which you gave. And there are just a couple of comments from others from Edina. They mentioned they love the quote with the non-linear effort versus output. And then from Narayan, there's another comment wherein he says that in his observation from volunteering, implementing corporate kind of figure is hard unless there is enough funding of us. So again, I would like to thank you for this experience and the session today. Thanks all for your participation. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. It's a pleasure doing this. Thank you.


Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're here in Barcelona, Spain, where 7,700 attendees are here for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's live two-day coverage. Happy to have on the program two returning guests to talk about five years of Kubernetes. To my right is Tim Hawken, wearing the Barna contributor's shirt, and sitting to his right is Gabe Van Roy. So I didn't introduce their titles and companies, but so Tim's at Google, Gabe's at Microsoft, but heavily involvement in Kubernetes since the very early days. I mean, Tim, you're on the Wikipedia page. Gabe, I think we have to do some re-editing to make sure we get the community expanded in some of the major contributors and get you on there. But gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks. So Tim just spoke to Joe Bada, and we talked about the idea of Craig and Brendan and him sitting in the room, and open source, and really bringing this out there to community. But let's start with you, because I remember back many times in my career, like, oh, I read this phenomenal paper about Google, we're going to spend the next decade figuring out the ripple effect of this technology. Kubernetes has, in five years, had a major impact on what we're doing. Give us a little bit of your insight as to what you've seen from those early days. Yeah, in the early days, we had the same conversations when we produced these papers that are seminal in the industry, and then we sort of don't follow up on them sometimes as Google. We didn't want this to be that. We wanted this to be a live, living thing with a real community that took root in a different way than MapReduce to do sort of situation. So that was very much front of mind as we worked through what are we going to build, how are we going to build it, how are we going to manage it, how are we going to build a community, how do you get people involved, how do you find folks like Gabe and Deis and get them to say, we're in, we want to be a part of this. All right, so Gabe, it was actually, Joe corrected me when I said, well, Google started it and they pulled in some other like-minded vendors, like he said, no, no, Stu. We didn't pull vendors in, we pulled in people, and people that believed in the project and the vision. You were one of those people that got pulled in early. He were, you know, so help give us little context in your viewpoint there. I did, and you know, at the time I was working for a company called Deis that I had started and we were out there trying to make developers more productive in industry using modern technology like containers. And, you know, it was through the process of trying to solve problems for customers was sort of the lens that I was bringing to this where I was introduced to some really novel technology approaches, first through Docker. And, you know, I was close with Solomon Hikes, the founder over there, and then, you know, started to work closely with folks at Google, namely Brennan Burns, who I now work with at Microsoft, you know, part of the founding Kubernetes team. And I agree with that statement, that it is really about people. It's really about individual connections at the end of the day. I think we do these things at these KubeCon events called like contributor summits. And it's very interesting because when folks land at one of these summits, it's not about who you work for, what jersey you're wearing, that sort of thing. It's people talking to people, trying to solve technical problems, trying to solve organizational challenges. And I think, you know, the phenomenon that's happened there and the scale with which that's happened is part of the reason why there's 8,000 people here in Barcelona today. Yeah, it's interesting, Tim, because, you know, I used to be involved in some standards work and I've been, you know, working with the open source community for about 20 years. It used to be, you know, it was the side project that people did at nights and everything like that. Today, a lot of the people that are contributing, well, they do have a full-time job and their job will either let them or asking them to do that. So, I do talk to people here that when they're involved in the working groups, when they're doing these things, yes, you think about who their paycheck comes for, but that's secondary to what they are doing as part of the community. And it is, you know, some of the people. Absolutely, it's part of the ethos of the project that the project comes first and if company comes second or maybe even third. And for the most part, this has been wildly successful. There's this huge base of trust among the leadership and among the contributors. And, you know, it's a big enough project now that I don't know every one of the contributors, but we have this web of trust. And, you know, I have this army of people that I know and I trust very well and they know people and they know people. And it works out that the project has been wildly successful and we've never yet had a major conflict or strife that's centered on company this or company that. Yeah, I'd also add that it's an important development has happened in the wake of Kubernetes where, you know, for example, in my teams at Microsoft, I actually have dedicated PM and engineering staff where their only job is to focus on community engagements, right, running the release team for Kubernetes 115 or working on IPv6 support or Windows container support. And that work, that upstream work puts folks in contact with people from all different companies, Google, you know, Microsoft working closely together on countless initiatives. And the same is true really for the entire community. So I think it's really great to see that you can get not just sort of the interpersonal interactions, but you can also get sort of corporate sponsorship of that model because I do think at the end of the day people need to get their paychecks. And oftentimes that's going to come from a big company and seeing that level of investment is I think pretty encouraging. Okay, well, you know, luckily five years in we've solved all the problems and everything works perfectly. If that's not maybe the case, you know, where do we need people involved? What things would we be looking at kind of the next year or two in this space? You know, a project of this size, a community of this size, a system of this scope has infinite work to do, right? The barrel is never going to be empty. And in some cases it's filling faster than it's draining. Every special interest group, every SIG has a backlog of issues of things that they would like to see fixed, of features that they have some user pounding the table saying, I need this thing to work. IPv6 is a great example, right? And we have people now stepping up to take on these big issues because they have customers who need it or they see it as important foundational work for building future stuff. So, you know, there's no shortage of work to do. That's not just engineering work though, right? It's not just product definition or API. We have what we call contributor experience. People who work with our community to online new contributors and streamline how to get them in and involved in documentation and testing and release engineering. And there's so much sort of non-core work. I could go on this for days.  Yeah, I also had another dimension to this about just the breadth of contribution. We were just talking before the show that, you know, outside at the logo there is this, you know, characters, book characters, Fippy and such. And really that came from a children's book that was created to demonstrate core concepts to developers who were new to Kubernetes. And it ended up taking off and was eventually donated to the CNCF. But things like that, you can't underestimate the importance and impact that that can have on making sure that Kubernetes is accessible to a really broad audience. Okay, yeah, look, I want to give you both just the final word as to, you know, what you shout out you want for the community.  You know, exciting is being here. If you rewind five years and tell me I'm in Barcelona with 7,500 of my best friends, I would think you were crazy or from Mars. This is amazing and I thank everybody who's here who's made this thing possible. We have a ton of work to do, you know, and if you feel like you can't figure out what you need to work on, come talk to me and we'll figure it out. Yeah, for me, I just want to give a big thank you to all the maintainers, folks like Tim, but also, you know, some other folks who, you know, you may not know their name, but they're the ones slogging it out in the GitHub PRQ, you know, trying to just, you know, make the project work in function day to day. And we're not for their ongoing efforts. We wouldn't have any of this. So I thank you to that. Well, and look, thank you, of course, to the community and thank you both for sharing with our community.  Thank you so much. All right, so we will be back with more coverage here from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.