A conversation with Spawrks, Co-Host of Space Pencils & Software Engineer Leader

“Learning by being with an expert and learning how they think and why they think is super important, but not necessarily an expert who’s the best. …The best ways that you can learn are from people who just learned it. Scaffolding your learning and putting yourself in environments where you’re learning from someone who just learned something is the fastest way you can basically learn things in the modern world.” -Spawrks

Spawrks is the Co-Host of Space Pencils, a community built to enrich leadership skills where leaders can focus on leadership development within their organizations. Spawrks’ cutting-edge point of view on learning in the moment changes the common narrative of the learning process. In his work, he emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions to help people ultimately accomplish their leadership goals in their organizations. Spawrks believes the way you approach learning can have a direct impact on your work as well as collaboration with other members of your organization. He is also a leading software engineer at Vrbo where he challenges the learning approach through learning in action as the most impactful solution forward.  

In this episode of Control the Room, Spawrks and I unpack the benefits of learning from an unorthodox perspective, the moments of stepping outside of the traditional learning loop, the crucial “linking” aspect in facilitation, and the responsibility of learning from the lessons of the pandemic as we embrace a new hybrid workplace. Listen in to hear Spawrks explore the endless possibilities of an innovative hybrid workplace and the significance of the learning process reimagined in the modern world.  

Show Highlights

[1:34] Spawrks’s Start in Leadership Development 
[12:13] The Linking Moment in Facilitation 
[23:41] The Potential Lost Learnings into a Hybrid Workplace
[35:52] An Impactful, Imaginative Hybrid World

Spawrk’s LinkedIn
Vrbo

About the Guest

Spawrks is the Co-Host of Space Pencils, a community built to enrich leadership skills where leaders can solely focus on leadership development through a Discord community, live stream, and video podcast.  Spawrks believes in the power of redefining how we learn in the workplace and continues to transform our approaches in learning to build healthier work cultures. As a technology leader with a career spanning over 15 years in managing business and technology efforts, he remains passionate about uncovering technologies that are innovative and inspiring. Spawrks is the Senior Software Engineer at Vrbo, where he continues his cross-functional management skillset by creating an unforgettable traveler experience in the travel industry and mentoring software development engineers to expand their expertise. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

Run Magical Meetings

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control
Join us at our weekly Facilitation Lab.

Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control the Room Facilitation Lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.

Douglas:

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, your free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas:

Today I’m with Spawrks, the software engineering leader and cohost of Space Pencils, a community focused on developing leadership skills, including a Discord community, live stream and video podcast, all focused on leadership development. Welcome to the show, Spawrks.

Spawrks:

Thanks, Douglas. Thank you for having me.

Douglas:

Of course. Of course. Let’s start off with learning a bit about how you got your start. How did you get into leadership development?

Spawrks:

Sure. I have been mainly working on cell phone technology, back when phones were just for talking, and I had a long career in developing some really cool things like working with Shazam and MusicID, the first video streaming app store, a lot of cutting edge stuff. Eventually I ended up getting to a place where I had a school, both for iOS and Android development, and I learned that everything I knew about learning was wrong. We were a great school but a terrible business. From there I ended up moving on, and now I help people take vacation for a living at my current job. So my journey has been one from being one who had to be led, to being out on my own, to then eventually working with larger and larger groups. I think that there’s some things I’ve learned along the way, because I had such a diverse background and experiences that I have.

Douglas:

I’m really curious about your comment about how everything you knew about learning was wrong, so I’d love to unpack that and then also stitch back to how these learnings, these understandings about learning have allowed you to become a better leader.

Spawrks:

Sure. When I was first asked to teach at the school, I was asked by somebody who was actually a learning scientist. What I found myself doing, having not really ever taught any formal setting before, was I was copying bad behaviors from teachers that I saw or YouTube videos or just instructional material. It was just the first thing to do. You’re kind of like, oh, if I’m going to do this, then I’ll do how I’ve seen it done. And that’s where this learning scientist friend of mine was like, “No, no, no, no. We’re here to actually help people learn, and what you’re doing is not accomplishing that goal.” And I was like, “Okay. Well, what do I need to do differently?”

Spawrks:

A lot of it had to do with, I think the biggest insight I had, was trying to understand where people are starting from, because we all go through the same learning loop. And most people want to start at the beginning, and that’s actually terrible. If you want to learn how to do something and you use a YouTube video, maybe it’s a 30-minute-long video, but you just want to watch minute 16 to 17. That’s the one gap that you have in order to accomplish a task. In fact, that’s another thing that we don’t have with learning, is a lot of times people don’t have an actual learning objective that they’re going after. They have like, oh, you need to understand everything about iOS development. It’s like, maybe not. Maybe what you need to do is tell me what it is that you’re working on. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? What are you trying to build right now? And then you can tailor and find the right material that you need in order to accomplish that goal.

Spawrks:

The other part that I learned that was kind of funny was, they have all these scalability problems with how you can scale up curriculum and scale up development. But when it comes down to it, it turns out that the apprenticeship model apparently is the superior model. It just has all these scaling problems. But actually learning by being with an expert and learning how they think and why they think is super important, but not necessarily an expert who’s the best. We all want to learn from the best, but actually that’s terrible. An expert doesn’t know what a beginner… They’ve been doing it for so long, they don’t know what it’s like to not know it. And a beginner doesn’t know what questions to ask.

Spawrks:

And so actually the best ways that you can learn are from people who just learned it. And we see this sometimes, where you see maybe an assistant teaching a student, as opposed to the master or whatnot. But actually scaffolding your learning and putting yourself in environments where you’re learning from someone who just learned something is the fastest way you can basically learn things in the modern world.

Douglas:

Also, if you want to take intermediate knowledge and make it really advanced, teaching it to someone else is a great way to do that, because they’re going to ask questions and help you understand the gaps in your knowledge. So for sure, these programs where people want to go deeper, I think a lot of programs call them fellowship programs, are really powerful.

Spawrks:

Yeah. Well, I feel like what I learned was that what we’re doing right is sprinkled throughout all the different ways we’re trying to do it as human beings. Somebody connecting the dots for me and being like, that’s pretty good, that’s not as good. I don’t know. For you, what is your go-to method to something, and how much has it changed since you were maybe younger and were in school?

Douglas:

I think it’s been the same all my life, which is the best way for me to learn something is to do it, especially if I’ve got someone nearby that can help me understand how poorly I’m doing it. Someone can observe me doing it and saying… For instance, a golf swing is a perfect example. I’m not a golfer, but I know enough about golf to know that you can watch all the videos you want, get all the training you want, but until someone watches you and breaks down your issues and helps you get to that reflection moment, you’re not going to be able to make those improvements. To me, it’s always like, sure, you got to read and you got to understand theory, but practice makes practice.

Spawrks:

Totally. And actually, there’s a description, I believe, about that problem that you’re talking about. What you’re doing is you’re breaking the learning loop. What you’re doing is you’re going from, I have a question of what to do, I’m going to simulate that by reading about it, and you’re not going through the feedback cycle. You’re just going simulation back to question, simulation back to question. And yeah, you can’t read a book about how to throw a baseball, then know how to throw a baseball. I think you have to start throwing a baseball.

Douglas:

Yeah. And to take the baseball analogy and tie it back to your comment about the experts, so often when they ask someone who is a home run hitter how they hit a home run, they’re always like, “Don’t take my eye off the ball.” And if you use a high-speed camera, it’s like, they totally aren’t looking at the ball all the time. There’s a great book on this, man. Have you heard of The Inner Game of Tennis? Really great read, talking about exactly what we’re discussing. He was basically a tennis coach for many years, and he started to realize that the best way to coach was to have folks do things until they could basically remove the inner critic. Because if you’re constantly thinking about how you do the thing and trying to apply logic to how you make the move, you’re not going to be good at it. And so how do they find those moments of intuition, where it becomes muscle memory and it’s just, you’ve got the flow, so to speak.

Spawrks:

How do you under this philosophy deal with that feedback? You’re saying you want to remove the critic? I think I’m missing something.

Douglas:

You want to remove the critic, yeah, but the thing is, how can you feel it? The feedback is training the muscle memory so that you know how to recognize it. Though instead of saying, “I need to do A, B and C,” instead of me coaching you saying, “Put your hip here, move this left, spin like this, turn 10 degrees,” it’s like you do it and basically the coach is the feedback, saying, “Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no,” until you’re like, “Oh, I don’t even know how to describe it, but I got it.”

Spawrks:

Yeah. I have another one that’s really great with this. I learned how to drive stick at an early age, and the way my dad taught me was terrible. It took me about 20 years to finally realize how you should actually teach people stick. Now that we’re all going to be in automated cars, I guess it’s really irrelevant, but I actually realized that the way to teach people how to drive stick is to treat it like you’re trying to teach someone how to kiss. You need to just, first of all, stall the car, feel what it’s like for things to feel bad. You don’t need to explain to them how a clutch works. You don’t need to explain to them what first or second gear is, just, “Do you feel this? This is when the car is unhappy. Now here are some things you can do that’ll feel differently.”

Spawrks:

Eventually, the actual act of driving stick, you don’t need to know how it works at all. It’s like a very, I need to let off the gas, I need to give more gas, all that kind of part of the feedback loop. But it’s a feel thing. It’s not something that you can describe and explain and then have it be like, oh yeah, now I know how to drive stick.

Douglas:

You know, it’s funny. That resonates on many levels, because so often we are working at an abstraction boundary, and yet folks that understand the deeper levels want to explain those lower levels. And the abstraction boundary was put in place for a reason, because we don’t want to worry about those things. And so if we’re teaching stuff below the boundary, we’re doing a disservice to the abstraction boundary.

Spawrks:

I like this idea, this abstraction boundary, because this is something that even though I know that it’s wrong, I still fight. Actually you’re giving me a model of where I need to pay attention, because I still want to tell you how a clutch works. I can’t remove it. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I really appreciate how a clutch works. I know that it’s ineffective, but there’s still a desire to explain all this beautiful stuff you can see past the abstraction boundary. But yeah, it’s not helpful to the person learning.

Douglas:

Well, also I think if we can drive them to that level of passion, where then they start asking, then we can share that stuff, because now they’ve already mastered that layer and now they’re curious about diving lower. But to your point, if we drive too early, it’s just cognitive load and they miss out on learning the feel, learning how to manage that abstraction or live in that layer.

Spawrks:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I see this all the time in software, where one of the things that I try to help my engineers do is I tell them that you want to understand one above and one below. Let’s say you’re writing an API where you’re sending code over the network. You should probably understand, what is that code eventually going to be looking like? And maybe you want to know what the protocol layer is below it. You don’t need to know hardware. You don’t need to become a firmware engineer. That’s way, way too irrelevant at that level of abstraction, although maybe not so nowadays, because there’s a lot of security implications with how that stuff works.

Spawrks:

But if you’re a UI person, know a bit of design, know a little bit about how the servers work. Finding that tunage where you’re just curious enough, I think is really helpful, because knowing one abstraction layer above or below really does help you understand the thing that you thought you understood, because now you’re seeing a little bit more. Like you said, there’s a cognitive load. You can’t do it all at once.

Douglas:

It kind of makes me think about some of the skills that are required to be great facilitators. One of them is the linking and connecting that’s needed to help people understand each other and to get alignment. That’s why, to your point, it’s important to be one above, one below, or one left or one right. What are these boundaries that exist near and around you? And if you can pierce those enough to where you can communicate with people that are living in those other spaces, it’s going to make you a better teammate, a better collaborator.

Douglas:

And if you can hone that skill of piercing the boundary, you may find that you can pierce new ones with ease, just because you built that strength of being able to question and get curious about things that you don’t understand or things that are on the edges of what you know, so that you don’t have to have studied it for months, and you can just get there and be in the conversation, in the exploration.

Spawrks:

With facilitation, now I’m curious. Is the actual thing that you’re talking about that’s valuable not having… Man, how do we talk about abstraction in the abstract? It’s not this knowledge, it’s not the knowledge on the other side, it’s the process of piercing that. Is that the repeatable thing in facilitation, where it’s like, once you get good at piercing, you can apply piercing to many more things?

Douglas:

I think it’s the linking. If I can hear two people saying the same thing but meaning different things, or saying different things but meaning the same thing, then I can link those or unlink them and help people get to those moments of clarity. It’s really about being a really good listener and being able to jump on different wavelengths at different times, which is a skill. It doesn’t mean you have to understand it so much that you’re going to go write a thesis on it, but can you quickly uptake something to the point where you’re like, okay, I’m following your logic here, but don’t know if I fully know exactly how this reactor comes together, but I understand? And if I don’t, I pull you out of the detail and get you to explain it in a way that can bring me along and probably everyone else in the room that were afraid to say anything.

Spawrks:

Yeah. You know what? That skill, I think, is a great skill for so many different reasons across the board of so many different disciplines. I happen to know that you’re actually pretty good at it, because you caught me unawares many times in previous conversations that I really respect, where I will say something and then you’ll ask me questions about it in a way that I’m like, oh, maybe I don’t even know what I’m talking about. It’s really refreshing to have that kind of dance when people are like, they’re genuinely curious with an attitude of respect. I feel like that’s the thing, that if you can have the patience for assuming positive intent all the time as much as possible, you can really find out and learn a lot more, even when you might be completely able to see around the corner. By validating it with that type of respect and in your communication, you can yourself learn more than you even knew about what you’re thinking about.

Douglas:

100%. And look, it’s an important facilitation skill. I think it’s a critical leadership skill. And you don’t even have to even think of yourself as a facilitator or have aspirations to be a full-time facilitator. But as a leader, the more of this kind of stuff that you do and adopt will improve the efficacy of your leadership and the outcomes that your team is creating.

Spawrks:

Yeah. I once had a peer say something to me that, I don’t know, it just haunted me, because what they said, I instantly believed and then suddenly felt like I really had a long way to go in terms of leadership. They said, “Great leaders can work with anyone.” And when it really dawned on me what that meant, it was like, oh man. You know what I mean? Because we all have people that we work with that we jive with better and some that we jive with less. We have, like you said, different wavelengths. But as you want to get better as a leader, you got to be able to have a full frequency sweep. You got to be able to tune in to any frequency, and you got to get good at tuning into any frequency so that any sort of misalignment of what you and the other person that you’re interacting with are thinking and feeling can be resolved in some way and get on a page that’s healthy and happy for everyone.

Douglas:

Yeah. I think also that notion you mentioned a moment ago of assuming positive intent, I think really aligns with that thought pretty well, because if there’s someone that is more difficult to collaborate with, often it’s our own judgment, the lens by which we see that person, that’s impacting our ability to collaborate with them, because that filters everything.

Spawrks:

I got a name for you, because I’m really worried about this particular person, in terms of what the common thought process is. What do you think of Steve Jobs?

Douglas:

You know, I’ve never personally met him, for one thing. I found his work to be very driven. He seemed to be very passionate. I’ve heard a lot of stories that his leadership style was very abrasive, but clearly people were drawn to him and stuck by him and were empowered by him.

Spawrks:

I think the memory of Steve Jobs might be doing a disservice to almost all leaders and new leaders, because I know some people that did work with him and I’ve heard the same thing, abrasive stuff, but I think he might’ve been successful in spite of that. There’s this new idea that, oh, you basically being a real jerk is somehow leadership. It’s a story that’s promoted by his iconic power that he did. I mean, he led a very innovative company through a lot of very crazy things. I don’t know if that’s the lesson to take away from Steve Jobs, and I’m curious, what do you think is with this balance? Because a leader needs to be in service, but also, they do need to be forceful. And so how do you tell the difference of when to ask for input and when to be like, “Nope, this is what we’re doing. It’s just where we’re going now”?

Douglas:

Part of it’s intuition. But I think the more quantifiable piece is when you have a clearly well-defined set of values and a mission has been drafted and adopted by leadership, the strategy is in place, then that decision’s been made. It’s very disruptive to the culture and even the success of the company to rehash those things. And so I think anything that’s going to make you go backwards on those terms are pretty non-negotiable. And the thing is, yes, we want to be inclusive, but if it’s…

Douglas:

I wrote a blog post recently about this notion of accidental exclusion versus intentional exclusion or exclusive by design. Often when we create a community or a group or a guild, we have a thesis. We have a reason for bringing those people together. We have common interests. We have a shared experience of some sort. And if we’re going to bring together people to serve that purpose and to commune with each other around that experience, it would do our group a disservice to invite people who didn’t have that experience or that background or that shared whatever it is. If we start becoming less exclusive for the purpose of diversity or inclusion, it waters down the group, it makes the purpose less clear.

Spawrks:

You let jerks in. You let jerks in. This is the thing.

Douglas:

Right. And not only jerks, but also it could be lovely, lovely people. But if this is group is for women who have experienced domestic violence, why does a dude need to come to that?

Spawrks:

That’s right. Or if it turns out that that group is really about domestic support, maybe a dude can come to that.

Douglas:

Yeah, let’s be clear about the purpose.

Spawrks:

Let’s get clear what the purpose is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, this is difficult in the new world.

Douglas:

The trouble, though, is with this accidental exclusion. That’s where when we got blinders on and we’re not thinking about the fact that we’re excluding people that would fit our purpose. Either our onboarding or our recruiting tactics mean that we’re not considering folks that we should be, or we’re excluding them. Maybe there’s some sort of quiz or onboarding tooling. It’s sort of like the biased AI stuff. Are people getting dumped out the side that would be great members and we’re accidentally excluding them? Sure, there’s plenty of people that are just hateful, mean people that are excluded on purpose, and it’s like, whatever, just forget those people. But the people that are trying to do the good work, we have to be really careful about this accidental exclusion.

Spawrks:

Here’s the other thing about this, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this and the accidental exclusion is not about a binary thing of a person. It’s actually about a person’s time. It’s about their brain time. And what I mean by that is, we can look at very obvious accidental exclusions, like the person is not here, and that was for accident with onboarding. But the new world, with people figuring out that they can work from home for certain types of jobs, means you’re accidentally excluding people by saying, “You need to be here from 9:00 to 5:00.” That’s what we learned. Now there’s people who can actually be at a meeting with their video off while they’re in the restroom, and they can be there to listen to a conversation. There’s someone who knows how to have proper mic meeting and can actually be participating in a conversation while they’re going to pick up their kids in the car.

Spawrks:

There’s this new world where, for me, where I see a lot of opportunity is for us to admit that everyone who wants to collaborate and do work, if we can get some of this telepresence tooling down, we open up this huge thing where literally people can be eating dinner, which normally would be considered rude, but they can actually be listening to a bunch of people discussing something and take that with maybe even the next meeting. Maybe they don’t even have to say something, but the fact that they could tune in and hear what people are wanting to discuss and what they’re thinking about will help them at the 9:00 Zoom meeting that they’re about to discuss about what they’re going to do. So there’s also an accidental dynamic thing. It’s not like you’re always in or out. We have ways of being in and out, depending on what we’re doing with our physical bodies.

Douglas:

Yeah, accessibility has changed. Now this is something that we talked about in our pre-show chat, around this moment that we’re in right now, about how people are shifting back to the office. And certainly a lot of people were excited about that. Some people were very concerned or weary about that. We’ve been studying it very closely and are excited about the hybrid guide we’re putting out. And your concern, the one you voiced to me, was are we going to throw out all these learnings or these observations that maybe people haven’t actually converted into learnings? I guess from your perspective, what’s keeping you up or concerning you the most, as far as these learnings that you think might be lost?

Spawrks:

Yeah. Well, the one that I’m the most concerned with, because it seems to me that that hybrid approach is the obvious way to go down, we should take the best of working at home and the best of working in the physical room and we should find out how to get the benefits of both. The thing that I saw was very specific to international teams and cliques. There would always be a team that would be in a local office and maybe have one, two, four other people working in maybe a different time zone, different location. Or maybe even somebody just had a sick kid and had to work from home that day. And I just saw that whenever that was the situation, those people were excluded from the conversation. People would just be normal people. They draw on a whiteboard, they wouldn’t invite those people, all that kind of stuff.

Spawrks:

And then when the pandemic hits, it was a great equalizer, where it’s like, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the Ukraine, Madrid, Austin, New York. We all have the same restraints now. I saw it get, especially international teams, these cliques were suddenly like gone, and I’m really worried about those cliques coming back as people start to be able to be in the same room when others are not, because I think it’s going to take some sort of discipline or real value system to make sure that when three people are going to have a discussion, that they let somebody call in to participate in that who may not be physically there.

Douglas:

That’s fascinating. What can we do to ensure that these cliques don’t start to take root again?

Spawrks:

I don’t know. I think there’s probably something there with tooling. If you have a tool that forces you, that you have to use for some other reason, you might be able to apply a secondary pressure to allow people to be there. If it’s like, oh, well, we all take notes in a Google Doc, and when Google Docs are open, suddenly anybody who is a part of that Google Doc would be notified to jump in and see what’s going on. Things like that. I feel like human beings are going to want to be cliques. We like to make relationships, hang out with comfort. It’s going to take tooling to incentivize that behavior.

Douglas:

You mentioned also this stuff you’re noticing on what’s happening in Discord. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about this, because I agree that while tooling isn’t everything, that we’re going to see a lot of experimentation over this transition that people are starting to experience. And we’re going to see new features in web chat software and all sorts of collaboration tool moves to embrace this world that we’re going to find, where people are connecting in different ways. You got five people in a conference room and 10 other people dial in from their houses. Maybe there’s another conference room with three people in it in another country. There’s going to be a weird heterogeneous type of configuration that is going to need to be supported. So anyway, I’m really curious to see where things grow and how things are evolving. So what’s this thing you noticed in Discord?

Spawrks:

Are you familiar with the idea of practicing with a heavy baseball? You throw a heavy baseball so that when you have a real weighted one, you’ve done something harder. This exists right now in the porn industry. They don’t have a lot of technological support and have to be very cutting edge. Because they’re out all alone, they have to do some really crazy stuff. They have to do it without a lot of community support. And it was always an inside joke in Silicon Valley that when you were trying to do something cutting edge, look at how the technology in the porn industry worked first, because they probably had greater demands on what they needed to do. The same thing, I think, is happening right now for the gaming industry.

Spawrks:

Discord, which was primarily a gaming tool, needed to be able to deal with video at high frame rates, needed to deal with audio in high frame rates, a lot of different people coming in, coming out, changing what community they’re a part of, interacting with Twitch and livestream, graphics cards running full bore. It was designed for the gaming community. And now you look at our telepresence tools in the enterprise market. I love Slack and Microsoft Teams. It’s okay, but they’re not the heavy baseball, and Discord kind of is. It’s that bridge of what could Slack be?

Spawrks:

And what I’ve found with Discord is, during the pandemic, it kind of felt like it broadened its scope outside of just the gaming community. And it also felt like you were walking around in a physical environment. You could jump in here, see who’s talking there. Okay, throw up your screen. Okay, cut that screen off, switch that screen. Everybody jumps over here, and now we’re having an audio conversation. Meanwhile, let’s check on this typing thing that’s going on here. I mean, if I want to connect to you in Slack and share something on my screen, it’s a chore compared to how instant it is with that particular tooling system. And so it’s not necessarily Discord so much as it is Discord’s dedication to making jumping around so easy that just blows my mind.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s amazing how one application will come along and solve the challenges in a completely new way and just disrupt things. They set the new bar that everyone has to respond to. And I’m really curious, one of the things I’m excited about is, let’s say that I’m in a Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting and I got four people in the room with me. Well, how are we going to deal with the fact that this PTZ camera that looks like a security camera view of the meeting is just not as compelling as having a straight view of our participants? WebEx has already introduced technology that will basically slice up all the participants and zoom in on their faces and make them appear like individual participants in the meeting. So if they’re doing it, other people might copy that.

Spawrks:

We’re behind in this way. I actually brought this up on last Space Pencils episode. I was reading this thing from the MIT Review that was talking about that the Zoom distance that you are from faces is not healthy perhaps, that it brings a lot of cortisol in, because the way they were describing is the only way that you see people this close up is if you’re going to fight or mate. And so we have to evolve our tools to figure out how you, while bringing the closeness, also don’t use technology to over-intensify it. I found that as a manager, I was doing much better at my current job when I started taking more just voice conference, as opposed to full video chat 24/7. I think from this MIT thing, I mean, I don’t know if they’re right or not, but definitely I felt something different from being 9:00 to 5:00 in video meetings to half and half video meetings and audio.

Douglas:

Yeah, I agree. I definitely reduced some of my video screen time, and it’s been a game changer for sure.

Spawrks:

Yeah. But with that, I think that what you’re bringing up about, okay, so you have four people in a room and maybe there’s two people that aren’t, I don’t know how we solve that, because the pandemic just gave us a cheat code and said, “Nope. No one’s together. No one is together.” And so we haven’t had this challenge yet of okay, we’re going to go back to the same problem, but you possibly have learned something. What are you going to do differently? And that’s why I’m worried. This is why it keeps me up, is because I feel like, oh man, am I going to live in a society that literally just ignored what happened during the pandemic? Because it’s such an opportunity to evolve.

Douglas:

I’m not so concerned by that, because Pandora’s box has been opened. People know what’s possible. So if you try to shove someone into a virtual, let’s say, conduit to a room where you’ve got other people that are together, they’re going to demand a better experience, because they’re like, this is not cool. And you know, every company is going to be different culture-wise. Some will revert back, and they’re going to suffer because of it. But the thing I’m curious about is, how do the software tooling come to the table to allow us to move into that gracefully? Because I can tell you right now, the only way to do it is everyone log in to their own laptop as if they were home. But what’s the version of that?

Douglas:

Imagine if Zoom, Teams, et cetera, had the ability to say… You know that you can pin users. Imagine that you could say somehow either through IP addresses or geolocation or whatever, it would know that I’m in the room with Adam, so I don’t need to see Adam’s video, because I can see him over top of my laptop.

Spawrks:

Oh, interesting.

Douglas:

It could change the experience for me as a meeting participant, and then the people at home would see everybody, because they’re of course by themselves. That could be an interesting change in how some of the software works. But I think it’s like, that’s just the tip of the iceberg once people really start thinking about this challenge.

Spawrks:

I really like that idea. I mean, I feel like that could be a whole study, which would be something about, okay, so if you think of information about a human, so there’s your face, there’s how you’re feeling, there’s the sound, there’s some kind of art that you could just focus on entirely, which is dynamic. I don’t know, make up a new word, I guess, like dynamic human intelligence, where what are you doing? Well, I’m going to be focusing on making sure that for any group of participants, with every accessibility and piece of data that I know about where they are, what their sound environment is, all of it, I’m going to make sure that each one has the missing information that they need in order to have a human-to-human collaborative intent.

Spawrks:

Because there’s other parts of that that are already happening that I think are related to what you’re saying, which is like, some of these graphics cards now have really crazy audio filtering, which is really helpful for people who have loud keyboards or are in a slightly noisy environment. I think that’s also in line with this. It’s not just knowing how to turn off Douglas’s camera because you’re in front of me. It’s also like, what other distractions are preventing a dynamic diverse group of people from talking? Because if Sandra’s in the car, her not being able to be in the conversation because of not having good noise suppression, that’s also a part of this, right?

Douglas:

Yes. It’s the classic problem of like, string a bunch of microphones in the conference room and just assume people are going to be able to hear, and then you’re on the other end of that and it’s just God awful. I think there’s going to be a lot to your point around what information is missing, recognizing that, and then making sure it’s supplied in a way that’s most effective and most helpful to fill in those gaps. And ultimately our goal is to make sure everyone has a multi-sensory experience.

Spawrks:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I can actually imagine a world in the future where rather than… I know we’ve had discussions about equipment, and it can be something you nerd out too much on, but I could see a future where people are having standardized for certain enterprise development, telepresence kits. It’s like, you have to use this mic, you have to use these headphones, you have to have this camera, because we want to make sure that that is not the reason why you guys are not collaborating right. You know what I mean? And I feel like the two things that really help a group actually be diverse are being heard, and that’s why I’m really obsessed with audio more than I am about video nowadays, because it sounds metaphorical, but literally, across all of these different groups of people, hearing what someone has to say is so important. And it starts with our voice for now.

Douglas:

I think that’s a great point to end on, and I’d like to invite you to share a final thought with our listeners.

Spawrks:

Sure. I think the pandemic was terrible, and I think that terrible things can teach you. This really is one of those things that if you haven’t yet, wherever you are, reflect on what you learned and do not forget it, because it’s really easy for humans to just get into a new zone of things. But we had a really terrible thing teach us some really great things. And if we’re doing that in terms of leadership all across the board, not trying to go back to normal, there is no normal, okay? There was a normal, then things got weird, now things are a different normal. And the more that you can participate in creating that new normal, wherever you are in your particular role, the more that everything can be a lot better for everyone. That’s my final thought on that.

Douglas:

Awesome. Thank you for sharing, Spawrks, and want to just say it was a pleasure chatting with you today. And if there’s another opportunity, then I’m always going to welcome it. Hope you enjoy your day, and thanks so much for joining.

Spawrks:

Thanks so much for having me, Douglas.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.