Communication improbable

Speaker 1: Thank you very much for coming and joining me. This is going to be an interesting talk about communication, hopefully. I certainly would love your feedback. And again, that's all about communication too. So I'm gonna communicate who I actually am.

Speaker 1: This is me. This is pretty much what's on my Twitter. If you want to follow me, that'll be great because it's always good for my numbers. This is a this is a zero in my Twitter I think just to make it even harder for you to type into it. And these are all the kind of communities and events I get involved in as well.

Speaker 1: So again, all all the things I do, communication is really kind of an essential part of what I'm doing. Without communication, then I wouldn't be able to do the things I'm doing. So feel free to tweet me. I think I mentioned that already. And this is kind of when I was doing this, I kinda realized that this is actually really about a five day workshop.

Speaker 1: And I've got now less than twenty minutes to do this, so I better get on and actually do it. So it's quite distilled. It's quite high level. And hopefully you'll get something interesting. But for me, this is the start of the conversation, the start of communicating with you about these ideas.

Speaker 1: So feel free to reach out to me, say perhaps via Twitter. Is Andy Piper in the house? Maybe? I don't know. But yeah, so feel free to talk to me after the talk.

Speaker 1: I'm around for a little while and I'd love to find out your feedback too. So communication has many forms. Oh, sorry. I forgot to actually vibrate the air in front of me, which is how we actually do most via communication. We're actually simply just like vibrating the air that's going in front of me.

Speaker 1: It's going into this microphone. It's going into the speakers. It's going into your eardrums. You can then hear me. But hearing is not necessarily communication.

Speaker 1: Actually understanding what I'm saying, me making actually some sense in what I'm saying. Hopefully Bevis will let me know at the end whether I've actually said anything that makes any sense whatsoever. So it's we've got lots of channels. We've got lots of ways to actually talk about how we communicate. I really like the visual channel.

Speaker 1: I like to see images of things, to see images of concepts of ideas that really makes a lot of sense to me. Just listening to somebody read out some source code would be the most boring and uninteresting and unexpiring thing that I would ever do. But actually reading a good blog is really interesting, but if it's got pictures in it, it makes it even better. So yeah, there's lots of different forms and I think the most underused and underappreciated forms of communication are things like touch and smell and taste. These really kind of help build on our emotional sense of our brain and really kind of drive home that kind of feeling of experience that you get.

Speaker 1: So if you're in a good event, you've enjoyed the talks and then you go and have some great food, it kind of builds on that as well. It makes you even more kind of attached to the experience that you've actually had. So having a good meal and something other than pizza is usually a good way to communicate that you actually care about the experience of the event you're running or whatever you're doing. So again, this is an important kind of aspect of communication you should consider when you're doing things. So with all these kind of methods of communication, we've got speaking, we've got the written word which is very powerful, we've got visuals, we've got touch type, all our senses.

Speaker 1: It should be really, really easy to communicate with each other. Nobody has any problems whatsoever. Yes? Then we can go. Well, that's not quite the right thing because communication is kind of improbable.

Speaker 1: And why is that the case? Well, because our brain just likes to forget things. It likes to ignore things. It likes to just filter out millions of things, which it has to do because there's so much input we get from all our senses all the time. We have to filter out things because our brain can't that amount of work.

Speaker 1: It's like if we were trying to stream 500 YouTube videos to our phone, our phone would explode and it would blow up like all the Samsung phones do. All of the latest ones anyway. But yeah, so our brain has to make decisions for us about what it wants to actually listen to. So we have to kind of cut through all our filters and and make sure that when we're giving a message out that we kind of can work within those filters that people are gonna apply to all their messages. And there's lots of talk about fast and slow thinking.

Speaker 1: So your brain has two levels. It's kind of got this level one, system one, where you're instantly reacting to something. If I say, who wants chocolate? Some people will think, yes, I want chocolate. I want chocolate.

Speaker 1: I want chocolate. And I say, well, do you want chocolate? Do you want like a big block of chocolate and you want to gorge on it and then feel really big and unhealthy afterwards. And then, okay, your slower brain will start to kick in and think, well, okay, maybe I shouldn't have chocolate. I've already had chocolate every day or I've already had pizza every day because I've been to so many events, but perhaps I won't have pizza today.

Speaker 1: But your emotional kind of response was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, want, I want, I want. So you kind of can play to these different levels of thinking when you're when you're doing communication. And there's a really good book which just happens to be the little speaker gift that we get. So I might actually get to read all of this instead of just reading the excerpts on Wikipedia. So that'll be really good.

Speaker 1: So I definitely recommend kind of delving into this to kind of understand the brain because we've talked about things like segmentation in the work in the developer workshop we did yesterday. It's like understanding the audience. But inside all our audiences, there's individual people with individual brains. And there is this thought process that we need to kind of appreciate and understand because that's what's going to process all our communication. And if we don't kind of have an understanding of that, they can make it harder to actually understand why people aren't listening to our message.

Speaker 1: And then it's confirmation bias. One of my favorite subjects. It's so easy to kind of think, oh yes, everything we do is fantastic. My company's got the best developer relations thing in the world. We do this, we do this, all, everything is wonderful and everybody just loves us.

Speaker 1: That's not the case. Nobody loves everybody. And so it's, we have to fight our own biases, not just the biases of people we want to communicate with as well. And there's an awful lot of biases as well. I don't know them all, but they are, again, on Wikipedia and I will be studying them a bit more over Christmas.

Speaker 1: And we're all opinionated people. We all have opinions. We all have ideas. We wouldn't be in developer relations if we didn't have opinions about things. We like to share them.

Speaker 1: And there's nothing wrong with that. As long as we appreciate that these are our opinions, they're not necessarily facts. We need to kind of understand how much we actually understand about something when we're actually sharing that information. So if I say x is great, everybody should use emacs, then I have to have an opinion. I have to have a reason about why I have that opinion.

Speaker 1: To really kinda get people to say, okay, well not everybody's gonna use emacs overnight just because I say it's wonderful. Although I think they should. But I I need to kinda back that up with real kinda tangible and valuable things for the people I'm communicating with. And also oh, there we go. Animation.

Speaker 1: If you've got your opinion and a very close mind, that's something that's very hard to to reach out to as a person. If you're trying to get that message to somebody else and they've got a very closed mind, they don't want to hear that message. That's very hard for you to communicate with. But also even worse is if you've also got a quite a closed mind about something, And it's kind of easy to accidentally fall into having a closed mind about something. If something becomes very precious to you, very important, you're very prideful in something you've done, it's very easy to be overprotective in the thing that you've created.

Speaker 1: Therefore you're going to be less able to communicate effectively about that thing as well. So you have to kind of take it on the chin and be open minded. As Lana was talking about about getting her blogs reviewed, then it's a hard thing for somebody else to look at it. But it's better if like a few people give you some constructive feedback than a thousand people give you some horrible feedback on Hacker News. And so yeah, I guess the summary is to avoid living in your own bubble.

Speaker 1: It does look quite fun living in your own bubble, but it does isolate you from the people you're trying to communicate to. So if you are, unless people already want to join this bubble, you're not going to be able to reach out to them. So it is important to kind of know where your own biases are, where your own strong opinions are and not be afraid to kind of change them and be a little bit flexible on that. Because we don't really want to get out the troll spree. Because that would be, that's bad enough time dealing with people who do troll your community.

Speaker 1: But if you're doing that as well, then you're just going to send everybody away from that community as well. So can we communicate? Can we actually share the meaning that we're doing? If we've got all these biases going along, then how do we actually get through all those? Well, one way we don't do that is by trying to do too much.

Speaker 1: The more you actually do in your developer relations programs, the more you're trying to do in whatever you're doing, the less likely you'll be able to communicate effectively. Your brain will be going like this. It'll be going, I don't know what's going on. And I could probably, I can tell by the audience, could probably just leave this up here and walk out the room and nobody would actually notice for five minutes. But this is this is my brain definitely.

Speaker 1: And I need to go away and switch this switch this off to get all this craziness going off. But it is kind of like a matter of standing back and actually thinking, well, what are we doing? What's the what's the value? Why should we do these things? So these are the things I'm gonna go through now.

Speaker 1: So as Lorna was saying earlier on, writing really clear content is really, really valuable, really, really important. But also, if you're going to do something like an event, people need to know why they should go. You need to communicate not just, yes, we're having a great event. It's gonna be fantastic. We're hopefully gonna have hundreds of sign ups.

Speaker 1: But why are people going? What will they benefit from it? Not what will you benefit from it, but what will they actually benefit from it? And that's kind of the thing you need to put front and center. If people don't know why they want to go, they won't go.

Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if you actually put the date on when it's supposed to be there, date and time, location. If people don't know, have a reason for going, then it's gonna be very quiet event that you're gonna run. Also visualizing your message as well. Putting lots of cool graphics in. When I was starting with Heroku and Salesforce, nobody knew like Heroku, but then when I tried to teach them, realized nobody knew git.

Speaker 1: And so I spent I spent the first six months of my job to actually teach people how to use git. And one way I did that was actually draw it because actually doing things on the command line, I found out wasn't that useful for a lot of people. So actually visualizing what I was trying to communicate about a technology actually helped them understand what was happening, understand what the pieces were, how the pieces fit together. And and yeah, and by the end, I I kinda taught over a 100 people how to use git effectively enough. And then when it came to using Heroku, was like, was simple.

Speaker 1: I mean, it's just we just use git. Okay. Yeah. We can use that. It's fine.

Speaker 1: So I already got the message through and helped them understand what it was I was trying to communicate by understanding what their need was and understanding the best way to present a solution to that need. And in all this kind of complexity, all the things that you're doing, trying to keep something as simple as possible is probably the most valuable thing you can actually remember. If you make things confusing, if you make things hard to understand, people won't engage with them. I work for a company where we've got a really big platform we keep adding lots of new features to all the time. I work for Star Wars in case you haven't noticed.

Speaker 1: And it's not as if we can teach people that in five minutes. So we found ways to make that as simple as possible so they can take that take that first step. They can engage with us. How do you have your first experience of working with us? Your first experience of the community?

Speaker 1: Your first experience of the event? If you're running events like making people welcome, like doing the simple things by having somebody there to say, hello, welcome to our community. We're happy to have you here. We want you to get involved. Is there anything particular you're interested in?

Speaker 1: And those kind of things help people engage with what you're trying to do, engage with the message you're trying to send. So keeping it simple but no simpler is very kind of wise words that affect everything we do in communication. And organizing yourself as well. So actually, this is one of the things we continually look at. In fact, had somebody who came in for an interview recently and showed us how we could improve some of our organization and improve the way that we find, that people can discover the things that we're doing.

Speaker 1: We do some really good stuff in our developed programs. Joe's just seen a picture of himself. Look at this Joe. There we go. Yeah.

Speaker 1: It look a bit scruffy now. And yeah, and it it kind of yeah. It helps people to kind of understand what you're about if they can find everything in one place. And I guess Caroline this morning was talking about having like a portal system where everybody can come through this one central place. There's no kind of no surprise that a lot of companies have developer.companyname.com or whatever because it's a central place that people can go and find out what's actually going on.

Speaker 1: If you have lots of different sites all over the place, all called various different names, then it's much harder to find. And so with MLH, it's quite good because they give them a little bit of freedom to kind of they suggest what they can call their hacks, but they put them all in a central place. So if you want to know what's going on in Europe in terms of hacking, you can go to one place. You can find out exactly what they're doing. It's just a really easy way that MLH communicate all the kind of different diverse activities that are going on in their organization and in their community.

Speaker 1: So that's really cool and we need to kind of do that a bit more ourselves. How much time we got? Five minutes. Oh my god, I've got loads of slides left. This is be really quick.

Speaker 1: So listening, obviously, hopefully you've enjoyed listening to me today. But listening is not thinking. Actually trying to actively listen is a really valuable technique, but it takes a lot of practice as well. Actually listening to somebody is a skill that you need to build up. And things like mindfulness can actually help you listen.

Speaker 1: And it's not just listening face to face. It's listening to what people are saying on forums, what people are saying on Twitter. Even if you don't like what they're saying, actually listening to the intent. Even if they're being quite rude or even worse, actually understanding the intent that they're trying to get across even if they're doing that badly is highly valuable. And asking yourselves why are you doing something?

Speaker 1: You might have lots of ideas about what you want to do, but why are you doing it? Why is it going to be valuable to your community? Why is it going to be valuable to your company? Challenge your assumptions. Should we do it right now?

Speaker 1: Should we do it like, is it valuable now? We've got a new product but it's a bit shonky. It's not quite ready. Perhaps we should actually just wait. And it'd be more valuable because if people engage now and they don't like it and we get a lot of negative feedback, it's gonna be a lot harder to actually reengage them in a few months time.

Speaker 1: Perhaps we can just actually wait and then communicate all this stuff later. We build better docs. We build a slightly better, more mature product. And then we'll get a better engagement. We'll get a better communication with that community.

Speaker 1: And there's techniques like six thinking hats as well, which is really helps you think about all the different aspects of what you're trying to do. And also being clear. Do you want to do, do you want to leave this talk right now or not? If you can work out what that says, you can leave. Nobody has.

Speaker 1: There we go. So it's it's quite and people do this in in music as well. Like, I can't get no satisfaction. Double negatives, you have to think about what it is they're actually saying. And if you have to think about somebody's communication too much, you're probably gonna move on and go and look at something else instead.

Speaker 1: So you have to keep everything nice and clear and concise. Otherwise, you get very difficult people and then you have to spend more time dealing with those people and actually understand their concerns. So what can we learn from communication? Well, can learn how we do communication and so having a retrospective is not just for agile projects but for dev rel teams as well. What do we do well?

Speaker 1: What should we do more? What should we do less of? These kind of things. It's always good to kind of test and validate everything that you're doing, and that includes the way you communicate. And so you get survey results.

Speaker 1: We have some really interesting surveys, But does it actually apply to us? It's really interesting information, but does that information actually apply to us? How can we actually make use of it? We still need to make sense, turn that data into real intelligence, real information for the things that we want to achieve and the things that our community wants to achieve as well. So you can't just take a survey and say, well, we should do that.

Speaker 1: You have to test the assumptions very clearly as well. And ask people. So you get a 100, so a 100 people have said, oh yes, we love doing x, but do they? And are they in your community? And are they the ones that are active in your community as well?

Speaker 1: So there's a lot of assumptions from that feedback you can make, but you still need to test these things as well. Think that And keeping it real, it's not just about t shirts. I did use to work for a t shirt company that was also a software company, a really good software company. We also do hype driven development. There's a lot of hype out there we have to cut our way through.

Speaker 1: So again, don't fall into the trap of being a hype driven development dev relations team. And if you have to actually, the way you can tell is if you have to actually force people to use your technology, it's probably not right or it's probably not ready yet. So it's a good way, a good test to do that. Can I have five volunteers on stage please? Really quickly.

Speaker 1: There we go. Selfie time. Yeah. Cool. Selfie time.

Speaker 1: There we go. See if we can go and get him. There we go. There we go. Cool.

Speaker 1: And I should have said you're all gonna get a prize for this. There we go. Thank you very much. Cool. The prize itself is actually the selfie.

Speaker 1: But yeah. So you can quite comfortably say that I went to I went to DevRelCon and all I got was this lousy selfie. So again, the problem is with that, I kinda offered a prize, but I didn't really deliver on that prize. And everybody can actually share in the prize as well, so it's not really that great. So yeah, be careful what you're actually promising.

Speaker 1: You do need to deliver on your communication, whichever form of communication you choose. You need to be giving real value to the community as well. And what is communication? What is it not? It's not Slack.

Speaker 1: You can use Slack to communicate, but it's not actually communication in itself. It's a tool. The way you use it, the way you talk things, messages you share on Slack, that's the real communication, not the actual tools themselves. The tools just help you communicate. So don't forget that.

Speaker 1: In summary, build up trust. Building good communication builds up trust. And communication is probably the most important part of developer relations, but actually making it effective is even more important. And that's me. Because otherwise if we don't do effective communication, we are just vibrating the air between us.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much.