When they don't speak engineer try visualizing it | DEMFP780

Key Takeaways

Welcome everyone to sorry I don't speak engineer but let's try visualizing it. Uh my name is Joseph Whiting and I am not an engineer. So hopefully this conversation is useful. Now I have a suspicion of why you're here. I suspect some of you are here because oh gosh uh I came to a engineering conference and I don't understand any of these speakers but this one sounds like I might be able to. Some of you might have thought oh shoot he forgot to mention AI in his topic. Uh, is he okay? Is he in the right conference? I figured there would be at least one of you. And then some of you are engineers and you're frustrated by the non-technical people like me who may not understand what you're talking about. Welcome to all of you, especially the IO ones. In that case, uh, I find this actually quite personal on my side. I have a lot of engineers in my family. In fact, uh, three of my direct siblings and, uh, my parent are all engineers and I find them so interesting to talk to, uh, mostly because I can't understand them sometimes. I went into the career I went into with organizational behavior, organizational communication, and creating communication between people because of that, because I find it so fascinating. Now, in order for this to be valuable to you, I do have to sell you on one principle, and that is that communication is a core function of any organization. That is the why that I'm here to talk about. So, if I can't get you to believe in this, then I don't want to waste your time. Now, um, one of the main principles we have in organizational behavior is the idea that, uh, an organization is like a brain. And a brain is a bunch of neurons, individual cells that communicate with one another. And when they communicate uh you get ideas, you get thoughts, you get memories, you get brilliant ideas that create beautiful things. Organizations are similar in that people are like neurons. If the neuron is not firing and not communicating with the other neurons, it is a useless neuron no matter how good it is. Its connection is its value. And similarly in organizational behavior, we could assume that communication, the interconnection between the neurons, the interconnection between people is the whole reason we have businesses. It's how we connect. It's how we synergize. It's how we're actually able to build things with more than just ourselves. So communication, we could argue, is a core function of any organization. Now, I'm going to show you a statistic, and I am excited to see how you react to it. 86% of employees and executives site that a lack of effective collaboration and communication is the main cause of workplace failure. I'm going to say that again. 86% of employees and executives site the lack of of effective collaboration and communication as the main cause of workplace failure. Now, I bet what went through your head just barely was, "What? That's a big number." And then you thought, "No, that makes sense." Internally, you were like, "Yeah, no, 87, that's probably low." Yeah, it's probably a little bit higher than that. Internally, we all know that communication is the main reason our businesses, organizations fail, right? But we don't treat it that way. We don't invest in it that way. We know it's a problem, but we ignore the problem. And I think that that is one of the major things that uh that I find fascinating. If there was a revenue generation problem that 86% of employees and leaders identified and agreed on, you bet you they'd be throwing a bunch of stuff into that solution, right? Or if the 86 if there was a reason why 86% of an environment failed, we would throw tons of money into it. But when it's communication, we think it's a soft thing and it's something that we can't really invest in. It's not really something worth investing in, even though it is the number one reason that an organization or business fails. So today I want to talk to you about the number one way I think you can improve communication and collaboration at your respective companies and organizations. I'm biased. I work at Lucid so I think you should use Lucid. But in general I think you should use some form of visualization. The reason is according to Milton if we were to if we're to use a old English philosopher the tyranny of the eyes. We visualize. Visualization is the strongest human sense for people who are able-sighted. We uh see fast sight is the fastest sense that the human cognates and it's been proven to increase the engagement of individuals. It increases the number of problem. It increases the number of ideas a person's able to generate in a short period of time. When I was doing my master's degree, when I was doing my dissertation, I uh I actually tested this. I did a neuro I did a a large research project. We took 500 students, some were accountants, some were art students. We took a whole span of them and we gave them tests to test their creativity. How many ideas can you generate in x amount of time? It's called creative fluency. And the results were fascinating. When we gave people written problems versus visual problems, we actually saw that people who ranked themselves as not creative, accounting students were the number one. The accounting students outperformed the art students when we visualized the problem. Visualizing the problem is one of the fastest ways to increase the number of ideas that your team is producing. It's the number way to create alignment. If I give you a big beautiful diagram that shows everything that's going on as opposed to spending 30 minutes talking through the technicalities of it, you're going to see the problem really fast. Otherwise, you're going to have to listen very closely to hear me as I go through it. It makes sense. I'm seeing people like nodding their heads like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense." The problem is we still don't do it because it takes time, right? I don't have time to draw my Azure environment. I don't have time to do this kind of thing. Well, let me show you how Lucid can help with that. But before I dive into that, before I really start my demoing, what I really want to highlight and what I want to challenge you to do today is find one thing that you are talking people's ears off with and visualize it. try and visualize and try and harness that human mechanism because like I said, people are more creative, people are more engaged, people align on solutions faster, and people collaborate better when the problem or the opportunity is visualized. All right, so I'm going to dive in and I'm going to show you a few ways that I think Lucid does this and improves collaboration, communication with your teams. The first one is the cloud accelerator by Lucid. What it allows you to do is bring in to connect up your Azure environment. It also works with AWS and GCP, but I know where I am. So, it allows you to connect up your Azure environment and Lucid will generate this diagram for you. So, automated it brings it in and you can set up a sync so that you can have the most accurate documentation for you and your teams. You can then go in and you can further refine it by showing or not showing different resources, different groups and highlighting those different networking connections. You can then specialize that for security groups etc as you need to for your teams. Another way and this is actually one of my favorite ways is with retrospectives. Now, for most people, what you're going to do is you're going to have a sprint planning meeting and then two weeks later, you're going to sit down and your sprint scrum master, whoever they are, is going to say, "Cool, what went wrong for the last two weeks?" Right? And people are going to be like, "Well, cool. I can't remember yesterday." Right? And so, you lose all this great data, right? What my team does is on the day of sprint planning, we have the retrospective board set up in a centralized location for the team where people can go in and add sticky notes the moment that they're ticked off, right? Cuz it's on a Wednesday or it's on a Tuesday or something like that and I'm like, "Oh, shoot. Well, this process sucks. I just wasted this much time." But I can go straight into the retrospective board, leave my comments, and then go back with my day. And then when the retrospective comes around, that information is there and it's a gold mine. If you take nothing out of this conversation except for one thing to try, I recommend setting up a retrospective board the day of the sprint starts. It is impactful and it allows you to get a lot of details that people forget about because after, you know, 5 days, it's like, oh yeah, well, I don't want to complain about it or bring it up in the retrospective, right? This is a really powerful tool for helping visualize what's going on with the theme. Now, I want to show some additional ways that we can go into this. This is uh one of my favorite ways of using um of working with customers that are trying to visualize the difference between their current state and where they want to go with Azure. What we've done is we've added some custom data here so that we can model out the impacts of changes to an environment. Right? So we can come in here and as we bring in or as we add additional assets we can see the cost change going on automatically as we bring in new resources um as we bring them in or out of the model and we can actually model out hey this is the impact that we're going to see. Having a tool like this when you're trying to talk to a business person and you can see like well look right here we don't have these things in there and that's why it costs this but if we add these things which we need to do it's going to cost this much more. Being able to visualize that becomes a tool that connects uh across our teams allows us to be able to connect across uh you know specialties areas like that. Now, last thing I wanted to show you in our uh extended demo was planning. So, Lucid has a lot of different tools uh around planning and I think that this is a great place where we can actually come in with connecting to your Azure DevOps environment, your Jira environment um and bring in those issues that your your team is seeing. uh whether it's by starting off with just general ideas right different things that we need to do and then turning those into uh converting those automatically to new line items in your new work items in your Azure DevOps uh new Jira issues you can do that automatically uh from here from there you can then actually move them into uh and plan out your sprints within Lucid so that you can see when you've gone over and planning on this visualizing that work is a lot more impactful rather than saying, "Oh, I think we're going to be a little tight if we put that into sprint, too." Right? It's funny how a red line is actually a great storytelling tool to actually say, "Hey, actually, we need to move that out." And being able to move that over and actually plan out your sprints better. In closing, I do just want to recall what I was saying. The human brain is designed to visualize. When our ancestors decided to start communicating, the first written records we have are pictures. That is how we've talked to each other. That's how different cultures have talked to each other. When we don't understand each other's languages, we use pictures. And that is what Lucid is aiming to do. That's why, like I said, I'm biased. I work at Lucid. I love Lucid. I think it's the best visual collaboration platform on the market. But if you're not into Lucen, you want to use something else, all I would do is challenge you to use visual collaboration as a tool to work internally with your fellow engineers, but to work externally with your business partners. I I have seen it be one of the most effective ways of working outside uh your groups. So that's my challenge for the day. Thank you so much for coming to our conference. Uh if you'd like to see us, we're on Thanks for coming to our session, not my conference. Gosh. Um, but yeah, we'd love to talk to you. We're at booth 404. I know that's ironic, but uh promise you won't be too bad there. But thank you so much. Have a great day. [Music]