Transform Your Remote Meetings Through Facilitation Training with Voltage Control’s CEO, Douglas Ferguson - ep. 070

Recently, Douglas Ferguson, a former software developer turned CTO and founder of Voltage Control, took center stage on the "Remotely One" podcast, engaging in a delightful conversation guided by our hosts Rick Haney and Kaleem Clarkson. This engaging and insightful interview provides a glimpse into Douglas's experiences, detailing his journey from a tech background to becoming a renowned facilitator. The discussion delves deep into the challenges of facilitating remote meetings in large companies, offering valuable insights for seasoned facilitators and those new to the field.

The initial light banter around time zone differences expanded into a comprehensive exploration of various aspects of Douglas's career and expertise. Details about Douglas's educational background at Virginia Tech, his early career as a software developer, and his transition to becoming a CTO underscore his role as a mentor for Techstars and the creation of the Austin CTO Summit, showcasing the vibrant sense of community and support within the tech industry. Notably, Douglas's evolution into a facilitator is both outstanding and expected, drawing parallels between his experiences as a musician and his leadership role as a CTO.

The company he founded, Voltage Control, a facilitation Academy, boasts a notable clientele, including NASA, Nike, Google, and Adobe. Douglas's experiences as a facilitator and the challenges faced during the transition from in-person to remote facilitation amid the pandemic are explored in depth. Our guest underscores the importance of understanding virtual collaboration tools, adapting to the dynamics of remote meetings, and navigating the nuances of reading signals in a digital environment. Additionally, he emphasizes the need to slow down during virtual sessions, recognizing the unique challenges posed by the virtual landscape.

For facilitators grappling with educational challenges during the pandemic, this interview is a must-listen. Douglas addresses the fear among those accustomed to traditional tools, shedding light on the revelation of bad practices carried over to the virtual space and the critical reassessment prompted by the shift to remote work.

Douglas shares his uncertainty about policymakers' decisions as Kaleem and Rick navigate the ongoing debate about workplace flexibility. He highlights the influence of personal preferences, upbringing, and comfort on workplace flexibility. Advocating for intentional design in physical workspaces, Douglas suggests focusing on mandating behaviors rather than rigid office schedules.

In a casual yet impactful revelation, Douglas shares details about the upcoming Facilitation Summit scheduled for February 6th and 7th in Austin, Texas. This summit, featuring eight 90-minute workshops conducted by different facilitators, aims to benefit the Military Families Center through charitable donations.

This interview encapsulates immense value, offering a perfect snapshot of Douglas's expertise in facilitation, adaptability to changing circumstances, and commitment to community engagement and charitable initiatives. Tune in to gain valuable insights into the world of facilitation, remote work challenges, and the evolving landscape of workplace flexibility.

Learn more about Douglas:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglasferguson/
• Voltage Control Webpage: https://voltagecontrol.com/
• Facilitation Summit: https://voltagecontrol.com/events/summit/facilitation-lab/

Transcript

Kaleem: 0:36

right now?

Douglas: 0:37

I am located in my office in Austin, Texas. ha ha ha ha.

Rick: 0:44

That would explain the one hour difference, I guess.

Douglas: 0:46

Yes, yes. Are you on the East Coast?

Rick: 0:49

I am in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Douglas: 0:51

Oh, yeah. Right there where, um, Demetrius is.

Rick: 0:55

Yes, as a matter of fact, I, uh, still can't believe that he and I have never connected here in Charlotte. Yeah, I had to go all the way to D. C. to see him.

Douglas: 1:03

Hey, you know, Demetrius makes you come to him. He's like, you Ha ha ha.

Rick: 1:07

course, of course, of course.

Kaleem: 1:09

So listen. I've had some internet issues, we're trying to figure it out. So, if some shit happens, we just may have to reset. Um, but What the Listen, don't come in here overdoing our production quality! You come in here I'm just

Rick: 1:29

a pal and a confidant. And in, just, just,

Douglas: 1:40

alright, Kalim.

Rick: 1:47

Welcome back, everybody, the remotely one. I am your co host, Rick Haney, joined by my esteemed colleague and co host, Kaleem Clarkson. Hey, brother!

Kaleem: 1:56

Oh, what's going on, sir? How you doing?

Rick: 1:59

I'm excited, man. We've got a friendly face on this show we haven't seen in a while, and I'm excited to ask some questions.

Kaleem: 2:05

Yeah, man. Hey, you know, what did you do last weekend, man? Do you do anything fun?

Rick: 2:09

Last weekend. Yeah. I went to Florida.

Kaleem: 2:14

Nice, nice. Did you pee your pants?

Rick: 2:16

Um, I, yeah. I mean,

Kaleem: 2:19

Don't we all? Don't we all?

Rick: 2:22

I mean, you ain't cool unless you pee your pants.

Kaleem: 2:24

Exactly. My boy Adam. He knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. Good stuff, man. I'm glad he had a good time. We had a good time. had family around. It was a good time, man. It was a good time.

Rick: 2:34

Yeah, it was different, because I had to leave work and go right to the airport, catch a flight, and of course, traveling, I got sick, and I'm now just getting over it, so, uh, I'm glad to be back

Kaleem: 2:43

You sound great still, though. I mean, you're the voice of remote work, bro. It looks good on you.

Rick: 2:47

There's never a day off. There's never a day off, is the voice of remote work. I'm just

Kaleem: 2:52

Nope.

Rick: 2:53

that out there.

Kaleem: 2:53

Never day off, bro.

Rick: 2:54

Hey everybody, since you know how to find us now, do us a HUGE favor. Go to ratethispodcast. com forward slash remotely one and just leave us a review. Again, ratethispodcast. com forward slash remotely one. And leave us a review if you could do that, we would be ever so thankful. Since 2015, Remotely One is one of the largest communities of remote work professionals, with over 3, 000 Slack members and 5, 000 email subscribers. Now those are no small numbers, and it's all because of viewers and listeners like you. It's free to join. Go check it out at remotelyone. com. And with that out of the way, Kaleem, give us a tease or two about today's guest.

Kaleem: 3:32

Uh, I have two shirts on as usual. I'm sweating it out because these guests, I know, I know these guests, they make me so nervous. Our guest is just so intimidating, uh, the professor, you know what I mean? So here are a couple of things about our guests. I mean, you know, like, first off, again, our guest knows some learnings of things, of thoughts that he's been taught. He went to Virginia Tech. He's a graduate of Virginia Tech. We're at Go Hokies! It's you! Go Hokies. He currently resides in Austin, Texas. So he's down there. I think they are, I don't know, Austinians. We're going to go with that. viewers, guests, Correct us if we're wrong,

Rick: 4:14

Austinians.

Kaleem: 4:15

You just went into it. You just went into the ad voice. That was great.

Rick: 4:21

did. You never seen that show? Austin City Limits? Some of the best

Kaleem: 4:25

definitely, definitely, love that shit. Love that shit. So early in his career, he was a software developer. He was playing around with like Java. he grew up in rural Virginia. Okay. And he just loves hound dogs and guests. I've seen, I've seen his hound dog named skip and he's a cool cat. He's a cool cat. Skip. I guess. How long has skip been in your family guest? How long has skip been in your family?

Douglas: 4:50

We adopted Skip back in June, so six

Kaleem: 4:53

great. That's great. We got to get a shot up on the video edit so everybody can fall in love with skip. Let's see. Let's see our guest Rick. He's been a CTO for a few different companies. just starting off. No big deal. You know. Um, he's been a mentor for Techstars since 2017. So here we go. Here we go. Yup. was a CTO. He created the Austin CTO summit because what did you say? It's what at the top guests. Why did you create the CTO summit? Cause it's what at the top.

Douglas: 5:27

It's quite lonely at the

Kaleem: 5:28

I know,

Douglas: 5:29

right?

Rick: 5:30

It's a long way to the top when you want to rock

Kaleem: 5:32

okay. Here we go. Keep going with at the top. Keep going. What else you got? What else you got? What other one line is you got?

Rick: 5:39

I've never been there, so I don't know.

Kaleem: 5:41

Started from the bottom. Now we're here. Can we do that one?

Rick: 5:45

That's right, that works, that

Kaleem: 5:46

Okay. So I guess Rick, he's now the founder of voltage control, which is a facilitation Academy. And you ready to hear some of the companies that voltage control has worked with Ricky. Ready? Okay, here we go. NASA, Nike, Google, Gap, Adobe, Dropbox. Ow! Ow! Listeners and viewers, please give a warm welcome to Douglas Ferguson! Let's fucking go! Woo! Woo! Ow! Ssss!

Douglas: 6:25

enjoy a boxing workout and, and it's my favorite way to exercise and I've never actually competed or sparred as a boxer, but man, you brought me right to the ring

Kaleem: 6:36

That's right. Settle down. Studio audience. Settle down. We always tell'em it's quiet. Pipe down.

Rick: 6:42

We're civilized here,

Kaleem: 6:43

thanks for joining us, bro. Thank you.

Rick: 6:45

Yeah, man. It's really great to see you and have you on the show. I have so many questions, but to lead off, I really want to get into your experiences as chief technology officer and certainly with the experiences that kind of led into that role. But what I really want to know is how they all kind of culminated into the formation of the Austin CTO Summit.

Douglas: 7:05

Yeah, for sure. You know, as we mentioned, it can often be a bit lonely at the top when you're at a company, there's only one CTO at a company. And often, you're supposed to have all the answers, and you're the one that has to make all the CTO decisions and do all the CTO things. so, just out of self preservation, to some degree, I started to assemble colleagues and folks from my network that I felt could support and we could lean on each other's expertise and help each other. And then, that couple with my passion for community led me to gather folks more frequently and With more intention and became a monthly meetup. We would gather some months for breakfast, sometimes for happy hours, sometimes for lunches. But we would always, circle around the room and have a one conversation with each other about whatever concerns were surfacing. And, rarely would we ever have a speaker. It was always an opportunity to come together in dialogue. Almost like Some of the, Quaker meetings, right? How they would come together for Clarity Conventions and whatnot. And I think that's how we got together just out of curiosity and the work and how we could support each other.

Rick: 8:24

So have you found that through all of these discussions and events and things that you all get together for, the importance of building a solid community? Like, can that possibly be overstated?

Douglas: 8:37

You know, I guess in some ways people overstate it if they don't understand the real purpose or if they're they're not attaching to the right values or doing it for the right reasons, then sometimes they maybe inflate their activities. But if you're really leaning into community from a real intentional space and, it's really about connecting people. And about the relationships that can be built and about the good work that we can do and how we can elevate the craft together, then the power community is actually quite impressive, surprisingly powerful, even when you expect it to be so, But I think where maybe it gets overstated is when people just, you know, they're just treating it like social media or something else, right? It's just like, Well, let's hire a community manager and run a community. I think we had to be more intentional than

Kaleem: 9:31

Yeah. I mean, the reason why you're on this show today, Douglas, is obviously how we met. It's great that you can use online to build a wonderful community but it is more about engagement and how we met was at an event and it was community. And, you know, I consider you my friend now. You know, we have talked a ton of times and, it's helped me significantly in my career, just, you know, talking with you and asking advice and just feedback and stuff. I can't emphasize how important Being a part of a true community really is. So I want to say thank you. So I got a question though for you. So you're a former engineer playing around, you love Drupal from what I understand, you know, cause everybody does.

Douglas: 10:15

ha ha ha.

Rick: 10:16

heard him say it.

Kaleem: 10:18

So, you know, just like a lot of people, coding, hitting, hitting the keyboard, then you kind of transition to this CTO. Experience. Can you explain how you became one of the most known facilitators in the U. S. How did you make the transition to facilitation from being a tech person, especially with the stigma of technologists and developers are introverts? How did you make that transition?

Douglas: 10:48

yeah, you know, it really boils down to a deep interest in collaboration. You know, I, from a young age, was always fascinated about how to do things in concert with other people. And, even though I could easily be a loner and go into my room and listen to music for hours on end, when it came to creating things, I was always interested in tinkering with others and noticing what others were doing and how we inspire each other. And that was further reinforced. In my pursuits as a musician, so one thing we didn't talk about is in my outside of work interest is that, I'm a musician and in the bands that I would play in. I would never come in with a song fully written, you know, I'd have the, some of the ideas, some of the risks, some of the structure in mind, but we would create it together. And the music was always better than anything I would have just created on my own as the magic of what we develop through collaboration. And so as a CTO, I took that the same interest to heart as a leader, and I was always thinking about how we could create sustainable work practices, how we lean into collaborative approaches and tools. You know, there were things like extreme programming, pair programming, and scrum and agile design thinking. And I think the thing that really catapulted me into starting Vultures Control was getting really immersed in the design sprint and, and the fascinating point was that Google Ventures led my startup series a, so I ended up getting to work directly with the Google Ventures design team, building a relationship with Jake Knapp, and that's when I started to think about, wait a second, this stuff that I love doing that I thought was just a essential part of being a good leader. People do that as a career, and there's maybe a market for that stuff. And then guess what, a lot of leaders aren't realizing they need to develop these skills. And so that's when I started to shift and focus on developing leaders through this idea of building facilitation skills. So you don't have to be a facilitator to leverage these skills because I think they're essential for any good leader.

Kaleem: 13:06

How would you quick question? How would you define What Facilitation so not a plug here, but Douglas has a great facilitation event that everybody should check out. what's the name of it now? You're in your sixth year, right?

Douglas: 13:20

Yeah, this is year number six. We went through a little bit of a rebrand. The summit is called Facilitation Lab. It's part of our, our whole community called Facilitation Lab and the summit is Facilitation Lab Summit, but the Facilitation Lab community does lots of different things, including the annual

Kaleem: 13:35

So I had an opportunity to attend it and it was amazing, man. And one of the things I never really considered myself a facilitator because you know, I know that there are levels to this ish, as we would say, quoting the great Jay Z there, but there's a levels to this game and I was just very intimidated. To call myself a facilitator because I know that it takes, you know, it does take some time to just like anything to be very skillful at that So we're sitting there and we're at lunch. It's like yeah, I don't really consider a facilitator and someone was like you're absolutely a facilitator and they went on and explained why I am one could you just Give a, a quick kind of definition to maybe some of us who may not think that they're facilitators, how would you define facilitation and what type of skills are really required to kind of be successful at it?

Douglas: 14:28

Yeah, I actually have a pretty good metaphor that I think might help folks out. So, You know, you have professional speakers. So these are folks like Brene Brown that go out to even Obama goes around and does speech speeches now. Right. And, Those folks may do that for a living. But yet, if you are a leader, or you are inside of a company, even in sales, you have to give presentations, you have to give speeches, and you don't necessarily consider yourself a professional speaker, but you are a speaker in those moments when you're stepping up and doing that work, right? And so, there's a reason why people will go and take, go to Toastmasters, or go take presentation courses and learn to be better. public speakers because it helps with your work, right? So facilitation is very similar, right? There are people that are full time facilitators that make a living out of running meetings. But they're not the only people that run meetings. And in fact, in our book Magical Meetings, we have this we have this saying in the book that goes like this. There's no such thing as horrible meetings. It's just horrible facilitators,

Rick: 15:36

Oh

Douglas: 15:36

and so if you've been a part of a bad meeting, there's someone that could have made that meeting better, right? They could have put more thought into it, and you asked about the skills that come to play and being a facilitator, and we bucket them into five qualities or five categories, and so if someone's going to improve meetings or be better facilitator, then they need to think about being purposed. So how are we being intentional about how we're gathering and understanding very clearly why and making sure that's communicated to everyone? Because even if you know why we're meeting, if everyone that's attending isn't clear on it. Then it's not going to go well. Number two, is that we need to be inclusive. Alright, we need to be thoughtful that if we're trying to serve this purpose, who needs to be there, and who shouldn't be there. Let's be very mindful about getting the right people in the room, and really and including them in the dialogue so they feel heard and seen, etc. Also, it needs to be crafted. We need to be very intentional about the tools that we learn and we bring in to our meetings. And we, and really intentional about the journey that we're, that's unfolding. And it's not just a list of topics. We're really being thoughtful about how we structure it. Just like you run this podcast, right? There's an opening, there's a flow, there's some protocol that you're going through. There's an ending question. There's thoughtful editing, your podcast episode is crafted and people should craft their meetings and their engagements with people. Number four is that it is clear. And clarity is super important. We want to make sure everyone understands each other, and everyone knows where we're going, really is aware of the topic. You know, Brene Brown says clear is kind. I think that's really, really profound, and we have to make sure that if we want psychological safety, clarity is important. And then finally adaptive. We can't just create an agenda and stick to it no matter what. Right, these are not cattle, these are people, and so how do we listen to what's emerging and respond to it? And so that's probably the thing that takes the most practice, is that adaptability piece. How do we really make sure that we get so skilled at what we do, that no matter what happens, we can pivot to meet that need.

Rick: 17:50

Well, let's actually, let's dive into that real quick if you don't mind. You've obviously worked with some really big companies. Adobe, Nike, Google. What are some of the challenges, regarding facilitating a remote meeting at a big company versus maybe a smaller company?

Douglas: 18:06

Hmm. You know, one thing I think big companies face more than small companies, let's talk about the clarity piece. Clarity can be really difficult in big companies often because of language and there's a number of ways this could play out, right? If you, if it's a cross cultural group, like the clear language can be really difficult because. Things like ag metaphor that we use to simplify might not translate to different groups. Also, we might have brand terms that are really strong pillars of our brand, like a word that's used often in ad campaigns, or Yeah, and so like, let's say that we have a project that's called Just Do It, and then we're kind of just regurgitating that, and then it's kind of lost any depth of meaning because it's this shallow thing that's been repeated over and over, and people translate it to mean different things in this new context, then now we think we're aligned because we're using the same words, but we're actually not aligned. And so facilitation can be really powerful there because we're just. It can allow us to hit the pause button, slow down, and then invite some deeper dialogue around what do we actually mean. And you'd be surprised how much of a profound effect this will happen because it has ripple impacts, right? It's similar to, if I go back to my technical days, we often talk about, when you discover a bug late in the process, right? Like if a product's been in market, like users have been using it for a year and a bug gets discovered. It's way more costly to fix it for a number of reasons versus if you just introduced the bug five minutes ago and you're just kind of testing some stuff out as you're reworking the code, it's much quicker to fix it because you just introduced it. There's nothing, no other features have been built on top of that bug. And it's idiosyncrasies and it's similar to. Like these bugs in the company OS or the culture, right? If you think about these culture bugs, if they've been around for longer, they're a lot harder to unravel. And if we, let's say in the process of a project we're working on, if we address things early on and we surface up some of the lack of understanding or assumptions that are floating around, people are assuming different things. If we manage to surface that stuff early. We can repair those errors and they're much less costly to repair when we do that

Kaleem: 20:33

Hmm. Yeah, that is interesting. So you've been doing facilitation for a minute now. And now Certifying other facilitators. You're teaching other facilitators how to be facilitators or train the trainer, training, really cool program prior to the pandemic, I'm assuming that there were a good amount of engagements that you had to do in person, you know, because people were meeting in person, he'd probably go there and you'd have, you know, these great workshops during the day and you do your thing. Then all of a sudden, you know, the pandemic happens and there are no more meetings in person, but these meetings still take place. And in fact, a lot of people realize that there are probably even more meetings added once we, went fully remote. So could you just talk a little bit about like what your experience was as a facilitator training, other facilitators about how you had to kind of shift your thinking and do some of these principles change at all. Once you start leading remote meetings. What was the difference there once you went from in person training to now becoming, Hey, we have to start training people on how to run remote meetings.

Douglas: 23:56

Yeah, you know, I think the main changes are how this, the space comes together and the point of connection, right? And so whether that's Zoom or Teams or Mural or real time board, which is the same thing as Miro, but what I was trying to think of was Mintimeter. So, you know, the tools will dictate how a design might happen. That kind of comes back to the crafted piece, right? We have to be really solid on how the tools work and how we bring folks together. And so that's a, big change, right? And the other big change is the signal shift. And a lot of that has to do with the tools that we use, but it's also important to be aware of as a facilitator, because in the room, we spent our entire career or, you know, a good amount of time, even prior to our career, just being in rooms with people. and noticing people responding. So this whole idea of reading the room. As like something that's important to do as a leader and certainly as a facilitator and when you're in a zoom or teams, there is no reading the room. You have to read this zoom where you have to read this technology. And so what are the signals right? Are things coming through chat? Are there? Can we see expressions on this, like, two dimensional, like, thumbnail, like, Brady Bunch view that we have of people? Are they using the reaction tools? How are people moving around? We generally need to slow down quite a bit in the virtual setting. We also found very quickly that you can't go for 8 hours straight in the Zoom, you know. So there, there are a lot of nuances around structuring and designing sessions for virtual that we had to learn. And I think as far as the educational piece, one thing we found in community with everyone was this giant, just there, there was a lot of fear because there were quite a few folks in the facilitation world who had only ever used flip charts or, and sticky notes. And so this idea of like, you know, as a technologist and someone who is running a remote company since 2017, I was very familiar with Mural and all the various tools. I was constantly experimenting with how do we better collaborate? We basically ran our business inside of Google Docs, right? Like just commenting back and forth asynchronously all the time and There were a lot of people that didn't run their businesses that way. A lot of people that were just unfamiliar with these tools. And so we spent a ton of time in 2020 through our community meetups and just through coaching, just helping people come to terms with that shift. And we don't see quite as much of that anymore, which is now we can get back to like more about the fundamentals because at the end of the day, a lot of the issues that people saw shifting into the virtual space, apart from some of the tactical things, They were, what they were doing is they were taking bad practices that they had become accustomed to in person, and were doing them virtually. And now in this new environment, everything was new, so they were judging it a lot more. They were more critical of it. And the funny thing is like, it was just shining a light on these bad practices that weren't really serving them in person

Kaleem: 27:10

Yeah. So like basically remote work showed the cracks in the armor.

Rick: 27:13

Yeah.

Douglas: 27:14

Yes,

Rick: 27:15

Well, you know, it's funny, you were talking about, if I'm correct in hearing you, you started remote working in 2017, is that correct?

Douglas: 27:23

that's when I started Vulture Control. And in fact, I was remote. I mean, we were very liberal about work at home policies at all of my startups. So we were all very, like, if you wanted to code from home and check in your code, like it didn't really matter that much, you know? And so we were at, uh, my, my last startup, we were using Zoom very heavily. But when I started Voltage Journal 2017, even though everyone at first was located in Austin, I just didn't see the need to have them drive to my office, and so everyone was just accustomed to working from home from day one.

Rick: 27:56

that is fantastic.

Kaleem: 27:57

roughly like, what was your first kind of experience? Like you talked about, like as a developer, so like roughly what year was that? And can you remember any of the fun tools that you, well, the fun tools, but like, it's hilarious to talk about the tools that were, that you would use before today. So can you talk about like, roughly like what year was your real first experience? And then like, what's different about it from back then?

Douglas: 28:22

You know, I think my first, first experience, if you really want to break it down to remote work, and this wasn't like a full on, the entire company remote working, but as a dev team, we were just like making it, we were just remote working because we were needing to do it. I think it was on AOL Instant Messenger.

Kaleem: 28:43

Yeah

Douglas: 28:44

and like, you know, we were, we were literally coding and we would hit each other up with questions. If we ran into something, you know, and then like what,

Kaleem: 28:53

what? was your aim name bro, what was your aim name be truthful

Douglas: 28:57

The American Ruse.

Kaleem: 28:59

american what

Douglas: 29:00

The American Ruse.

Kaleem: 29:02

Yes

Douglas: 29:03

I know it's spelled DA, not the d, duh.

Kaleem: 29:06

for you. Where did you get that? Where did you get it from? Because like I like like

Douglas: 29:10

Um, I'm a big fan of the band MC5, and that's one of their

Kaleem: 29:14

That's great. Rick, what was yours? Do you remember yours? Mine was lame.

Rick: 29:17

Mine was uh, Rockyhaven76. It was after my, uh, the camp that we had up in, uh, on a lake in Maine. That was our camp name. Yeah.

Kaleem: 29:29

Oh, okay, that's not so bad. I was I thought rocky haven was going somewhere else rick

Rick: 29:33

What you must think of me.

Kaleem: 29:38

So, um for everyone that doesn't know what we're talking about aim stands for america online instant messenger, right

Rick: 29:47

Yeah.

Kaleem: 29:47

I just made that up. Oh, that's great times. That brings me back. Um, did you ever mess around with irc?

Douglas: 29:53

Yeah, that was more in college though. By the time I was AOL Instant Messenger had come out. You know, the funny thing is, we were all using AOL Instant Messenger, but none of us

Rick: 30:05

Nope.

Douglas: 30:08

We were like, we don't, we don't want that, we don't want that crappy data. We were all getting the CDs in the mail, of course, but like, no, we were like, Hey, this instant messenger is pretty, pretty good product, but we didn't, no one wanted to use anything else. And then we use Skype for a little while, actually. And Skype was really nice because of the phone call capabilities. And we had developers in Ukraine and other places. And this was back in like. 2000, I think. Yeah, 2000, 2001. We were starting to use Skype. This was before Microsoft bought them. We could chat and then jump on quick phone calls, little impromptu things. And then, of course, then Slack came out, and we were using Slack for very much the same, in the same ways where we're chatting and coding and sharing stuff back and forth. Maybe different wikis would come in and out, like Confluence or what have you, for capturing documentation. And then, we generally stayed away from video conferencing. Until, Zoom came out. Cause like, of course there was like GoToMeeting and like WebEx and all these things but like it was so finicky and you always had to every time you started It went through a 15 minute upgrade period You know It's like and so we just got in the habit of sticking to either Skype or instant messaging and then once zoom came out I was like, oh my gosh, this thing actually works reliably I think that was maybe 2016 or 15 when we first started using zoom and I was just blown away because it was so rock solid.

Kaleem: 31:34

So before we get to the end question, I do have a question for you in general. As far as the state of workplace flexibility, you know, the whole world had a taste of autonomy, being able to choose kind of when to get their work done during the day. And, we're still kind of in this, um, I don't know. We're still kind of like in this tug of war between employees and employers. I think I even saw I think, was it Texas, I think, even? Like, they, they said, or Austin they had a return to office policy, but it's not working anymore, so they're like, oh, we're gonna We're going to do this for the environment. We're going to go, we're going to allow the remote working for the environment. You've seen some cancellations of some return to office policies. You're seeing all these reports of it not happening as good as it should be for some of these executives, where are you kind of seeing this going Douglas? Where are you seeing this tug of war going and where are you seeing the transformation of what is called the workplace? Where do you see this going?

Douglas: 32:36

You know, I personally, it's a little hard to know exactly what's running through people's heads, you know, cause I'm not talking to the folks that are making these policy decisions. So on some level it's a little baffling, but if I were hazard to guess, I think a lot of it has to do with personal preferences, how they grew up, what they think is like. The way things should be or what's natural or comfortable. it's, it is a complex question though, because while remote work is highly effective, there are some arguments to acknowledge, which are things like, you know, the workers that are new to the workforce are missing out on, because I know I learned a ton. By watching, more senior developers just looking over their shoulder, like walking to lunch and like noticing how they had their IDE set up and just going, Whoa, what is, what did you do there? Or like, you know, just like weird little things that you notice and happen. And, mean, there's easy ways to design moments like that for serendipity, but what I'm getting at is this notion of like the guild, like, how are we creating these mentor relationships to make sure that the newer folks are starting to learn. And this is even more complicated by AI. Folks that are more senior, more established, and know how to ask the right questions have a far superior advantage over folks that are just getting started out because even though AI can write great code, You have to be able to ask the questions in the right way to get it to make the best stuff, right? And then, and also you have to have enough judgment to know if it's spitting crap out at you. And so that's the thing I wonder, like, I would say there's some benefit to in person when it comes to like this relational stuff for noticing and supporting each other. But I think we can be intentional about how we design those things in and saying we're in the office on Wednesdays or Fridays. Is a bullshit like that. That's not gonna solve anything, right? It's not intentional. It's not thoughtful. It's not really looking at the problem and attending to it. So I think that's what people need to start doing. Also, just pushing people back into a container that was probably not the best container even before the pandemic and certainly not the best one now is problematic because if you have offices or if you just have desk drone about So I think that's what In an open seating like that's not the kind of thing if we're really trying to embrace mentor opportunities if we're trying to embrace collaboration opportunities ideation opportunities, like what is what's the best architecture to support that? And I've got a colleague who was part of the facilitation lab community for a long time and I was a freelancer and now she's going to work at the IFC, which is a subsidiary of the world bank. And she's doing some amazing stuff there around thinking about how they repurpose space inside their buildings. And, take out like one half of the entire floor. And replace it with new programming that really invites new ways of being together and just being mindful of how we support employees needs. I think we need more of that. We need more intentional, like interior decorating and architecture. I'm coming to the table to answer some of these questions and I think we need to avoid just saying like, oh, it's mandating certain days or certain amounts of time. Let's mandate the behaviors and outcomes we want. And then let's let teams design how they take

Kaleem: 36:09

Ooh. Let's rewind that. Instead of mandating office, let's mandate behaviors. Ooh. I'm loving that.

Rick: 36:19

Yes. So, Douglas, can you, uh, if you wouldn't mind, share with us a memorable experience or comical or inspiring moment you had while working remotely?

Douglas: 36:32

This is, I went with comical. It's a little bit embarrassing, but, you know, I think it's important, If you're gonna have psychological safety, You have to be willing to be embarrassed. And you have to be willing to Make mistakes, and,

Kaleem: 36:46

and actually be cool with people making fun of you after you tell the embarrassing story.

Douglas: 36:51

that's right, that's right. So So I was preparing for a really important workshop that, we were training some folks and, we had to get up really early in the morning because the, it was a group in the UK. And, so I was still half awake still. And, but I logged in early cause I've got a little, a fairly elaborate setup and I was getting everything dialed in and tuned in. And, I remember I was running behind cause. Windows that installed an update that morning. So then I had to deal with like rebooting and I have a whole protocol for rebooting because my Thunderbolt drivers won't actually start unless you like unplug the actual IEC cable you know, blah blah blah blah. So like there's the whole thing. So I'm going through all that stuff and then I noticed that Dawn who was going to be scribing for us that day, she was one of our employees was in the waiting room and I let her in and um And, uh, a couple other things you should note is like, I didn't have any of my lights on and it was like, you know, I hadn't fully set up everything and, and Dawn goes, I just hear her say, you look like a caveman. And, you know, first, my first surprise was that, wait, how is she commenting on how I look? Because my camera's turned off and I look over and my camera's on. Like, and, you know, I hadn't put a shirt on yet, and like, it was all dark, and like, I'm like hunched over, like, trying to fix stuff, so she's like staring at my bare, hairy chest in the dark, grunting, trying to fix stuff, and she's like, what is happening? So, very,

Rick: 38:27

cool. Oh, I could just see your bearded silhouette going

Kaleem: 38:38

Oh,

Rick: 38:44

That is so good. What a great story. Thank you for sharing. Douglas, where could our listeners find you?

Douglas: 38:52

well, I'm at VoltageControl. com, and also, I'm very active on LinkedIn, so look me

Kaleem: 38:58

awesome. And plug the facilitation summit. When's that coming?

Douglas: 39:01

Uh, that's going to be February 6th and 7th in Austin, Texas, and it's, uh, two days with eight different facilitators, so eight 90 minute workshops that are going to connect together and flow, all to benefit the Military Families Center out of the Austin

Kaleem: 39:14

no shit. Wow. Charity. Damn smart works with clients and donates to charity. Rick, we got to step our game

Rick: 39:22

Douglas. Yeah.

Kaleem: 39:24

Thank you so much, bro. It's nice seeing you as usual. Can't wait see you again, man!