The Tech Olympics
At Mendix World 2019 I had the honor of speaking with Andreas Ekström, this year’s Swedish Speaker of the Year and noted critic of Big Tech. After his perfectly delivered endnote on day one of the conference I caught up with him when buying one of the very first copies of his new book On Finding. I asked
“Andreas, I know a fair bit about public speaking, but you are friggin great. Thank you for making this day a lot more memorable. Can you share a few pointers?”.
He was kind enough to take the time and share the following (not verbatim):
1. Invest in training time. Just do it. In front of the mirror or by recording yourself. Practice the delivery!
2. Invest in a team. Do what you are great at and outsource the rest. Not a slide-making genius? Get it done for you. Not a booking maven? Have an agency do it for you, better than you ever could. Focus on the craft and the content and be the best at that, let other people be good at the other components of making a great public speaker.
3. Invest in your topic. Spend the time to know it well, but mainly, be very passionate. Speak about things that really get your goat, with fervor.
4. Invest in truth telling. Get people to give you feedback who don’t love you and don’t need you to like them. Get the straight word, and then get better.
Training
What I loved about this is that all these things are obvious, I do none of them and neither does anyone around me. Therefore, by doing them, I can get a lot better. The essence is to focus and train. This got me thinking. Why don’t I focus and train? Athletes train. All the time. Navy SEALS train until most of the candidates give up, then train some more. Pilots train a lot. heck, restaurant chefs and crews train all the time to make sure that their performance is great when it matters.
Why don’t I practice my craft (as in training) outside of
practicing my craft (as in, working in real life situations)?Is it because I’m in Tech?
Techies don’t train
Techies, like all knowledge workers, like to figure things out as they go along. They are used to rapidly absorbing, integrating and applying new knowledge. With the exception of coders, this leads a lot of people in tech to prefer a passing acquaintance with how things work over deep mastery. As a rule, IT people never practice. And this shows in their day to day. Too much work in progress, too many maybes and far too many assumptions. There’s the occasisonal Disaster Recovery scenario run, to meet some certification requirements. This is a form of practice, but it’s rare and focussed on how to deal with an exceptonal situation in a highly scripted way. But there is rarely the practice of doing things the way they are supposed to, of practicing what is normally considered ‘performance’ in one’s job. Techies, as a rule, do not train.
So it’s a lot more fun when they do!
Simulation
Last week I had the pleasure of chairing an event where 30 IT experts simulated their planned partnership in delivering critical services to a large government ministry. Half of them are technical experts, used to working in agile teams. The other half are true managers, used to dealing with huge external firms, and stay on top of service levels in a very process-oriented way. This was interesting, to say the least. The point of this simulation was to practice working together before having to do it ‘for real’ with thousands of colleagues depending on their success.
Practice makes perfect
I’ve done this kind of thing a few times now and it never fails to hugely improve the way teams work. It’s kind of like an escape room but then based on real life working scenarios, and me to handle group dynamics and coach everyone through the learning process. A day like this always leads to dozens of concrete actions with owners and commitment to solve the issues we find along the way.
Beyond the cave, man!
Because knowledge workers in general and techies in particular are such smart, analytical people we tend to transpose all our interactions into the intellectual domain, leaving no room for some good old-fashioned physical posturing. Very often I’ve witnessed extensive discussions on the merits of Scala or Site Reliability Engineering when the topic at hand was not really at issue, but the relative position of the kids talking secrretly was. It was just guys being guys and measuring whose medulla oblongata was the biggest. Settling into a dominance hierarchy takes a lot of time and wasted breath if the participants are not aware of the talk they are actually having, are not equipped to deal with these kind of power dynamics and arent’t really sure why it’s so important to them to defend their own intellectual trenches.
This highlights another great advantage of running simulations with a third party present. It allows group dynamics to form before actual work is done, and a trusted third party can elevate the discussion to the level where it needs to be in order to be effective. No need to face off with pistols at dawn, or to zealously defend the merits of something really arbitrary. A good group coach tunes the whole violin so every string is in harmony.
Moving the Event Horizon
Simulating the situation that everyone supposes is on the other side of the current [insert your project here] is a great way to surface all the hidden assumptions, hopes and fears about change. No-one has a crystal ball, and that’s the point. Everyone, by and for themselves, sub-counsciously makes a model future they are avoiding or working towards. By getting together and roleplaying our future selves we can align these models and increase the chances we are working towards the same future, and identify the root cause of any avoidance behaviours. Perhaps we can even define steps to solve some of these root causes. In this way, a well run simulation moves the event horizon associated with change projects and shows everyone more of what the future will actually look like. Usually, the advantages are not all they are cracked up to be. The fears are more than a little overblown. And it’s actually more like the present, with a few important (and now more defined and relatable) differences. A very wholesome exercise for all involved.
Want to play?
If you have a team and a challenge, and you think practicing might make a difference? Get in touch! DM me on @sharpestthought on Twitter.
