GitHub CodeConf 2015, 1 Jun 2017

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From YouTube: How Argument Cultures & Critical Feedback are Hurting Eng. Teams, Kate Heddleston - CodeConf 2015

Description

Argument cultures and critical feedback are rampant on engineering teams, but social science research shows that both are ineffective in achieving their goals. Arguments create oppositional cultures that reward people for asserting dominance over others instead of finding the best solutions. Critical feedback can worsen performance and engender resentment in those who receive it, making employees both unhappy and less effective.

Kate Heddleston's talk will focus on the research around arguments and criticism and talk about the ways that people and teams can effectively address these problems.

About CodeConf
CodeConf improves the software community by providing a forum for thought-provoking talks and forging social connections. The third installment of the CodeConf series took place in Nashville in 2015. Attendees came together to discuss open source, best practices, documentation, and community.

For more information on this year's CodeConf, go to:
https://codeconf.com/

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Please welcome Kate Huddleston.

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Hi everybody can the people in the back, hear me and up on the balcony. Am I loud enough? Okay, cool alrighty. Once upon a time, Canaries were regularly used in coal mining as an early warning system. Toxic gases like methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide would kill the canary before would affect the miners, thus alerting them of imminent danger, I like to think of women and minority groups in tech as the canary in the coal mine for our industry.

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So normally, when the canary starts dying and is having trouble breathing, you know the environment is toxic and you should get the hell out. What the tech industry is doing is collectively looking at the canary wondering why it can't breathe, giving it seemingly helpful suggestions like lean in and when one canary died as we go and get another canary, because getting more Canaries is how you solved the problem with the lack of the Canaries in the coal mine right except the problem.

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Is that there's too little oxygen in our environments, not that there are too few Canaries when women are leaving an industry at the rates that women are leaving. Software engineering, which is much higher than the rate of attrition for men, that indicates an unhealthy and potentially dangerous situation, and these anaerobic engineering environments are hurting more than just gender and race diversity, they're also hurting things like productivity, creativity and problem-solving. It just happens that gender and race diversity are the salient symptoms of these larger set of problems.

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So this is my talk: how our engineering environments are killing diversity and how we can fix them. My name is Kate Huddleston I'm, a software engineer out of San Francisco I build mostly web applications and I talk about infrastructure from time to time, and all of the illustrations in this are hand drawn and I've never had a lesson in my life. So.

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This talk is two parts of a much larger series of blog posts, that I wrote, which you can find at Kate Huddleston com, and if you get bored during this talk- and you feel like web stalking me Kate, Ellison comm, slash about- has everything you never wanted to know about me.

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Alright, there are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming. The other way who says morning boys. How is the water and the two young fish them on for a bit and then one of them turns to the other and goes what the hell is. Water.

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Environments are the things that make up our surroundings, both tangible and intangible. They can be physical like a stage layout or they can be things like social norms which are intangible, so a theater layout or a stage layout. Tells you a lot in the physical space about how you should act where you should sit where you should look? Who is the center of attention me by the way, but social norms also have a really strong effect in your behavior.

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There's, nothing physically stopping anyone from standing in the back corner facing the wall, but we're probably not going to do that because that's a little bit weird. Our environments are often so pervasive and they we take them for granted so much that they fall to the background and the story about the fish is from a David, Foster Wallace speech. This is water, where he talks to college graduates about that idea that the mundane details of our everyday life can become so commonplace that we actually don't see them anymore and environments are very much like that.

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We spend so much time in these environments and we understand them on such a subconscious level that they can really become invisible to us and in order to understand our surroundings and environments, we need to think consciously about them.

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So clothing stores have understood this phenomenon for quite some time. So have you any of you ever been into like an Abercrombie, &, Fitch or a Hollister I mean you don't to raise your hand because I know it's a little embarrassing.

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But if you go in you're like a Sal assaulted by that loud house, music, just instance, and what they the clothing stores found, they did a bunch of research which shows that, if is more physically excited, they're, more likely to purchase and they're more likely to purchase more and so statistically across a lot of stores. That's a big difference for these. These clothing companies, so they play loud music to get you physically excited now, most of us walking into a store.

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Don't think that the music playing over the loudspeakers affects our decision to buy that deep, v-neck t-shirt and distress jeans, but it turns out that it does giving our environment so much. Credit for our behavior can seem somewhat fatalistic, but it's really important to take a good look at our environments because it can take a darker turn.

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Social psychology and social science in the 60s was really fascinated with the idea of environments and authority because they were trying to figure out how twenty years prior Nazi Germany was able to convince so many decent and otherwise moral people to do attrocious acts because the majority people involved in that war were everyday citizens. So they did a study I believe it was at Yale where they had a participant come in and their participant was going to help a researcher in a white lab coat shock. A learner it was shock.

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Therapy for learning was what they told the participant and basically, if the learner got something wrong, the participant was to shock them and they tested out the machine to see what it felt like. So they knew exactly what they were doing to this person. Although spoiler, they weren't actually shocking them during the real study, because it would have been torture and, as they went on, the research or the researcher in the white lab coat would prompt a participant to shock the learner when they got something wrong at increasing levels.

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So it started at like 40 volts and went up to 450 volts. Does anyone want to guess how many people in the study shocked the learner to the maximum the 450 volts? You.

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Read the book yeah, it's it's an insanely high percentage, I think it was like 95% went to 350, volts and 60% of the participants went to the maximum allowable voltage, which would be considered torture. These are everyday average students I mean at Yale, but but like just normal people like who went far beyond their moral, their moral. Just in this one small study and the key factor was actually the white lab coat.

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So the presence of a person wearing a white lab coat, whether or not they deserved wear that white lab coat is so powerful to us that we will go beyond our moral boundaries when they tell us that we should, which is insane all right. So now now that we've talked about environments, I'm going to talk about two environmental factors that are hurting diversity and our current engineering environments.

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Now there's these are just the two topics we're going to talk about today, criticism and argument, cultures and we're going to start with criticism and how critical or criticism that permeates our environments can really hurt everyone at the company, but also diversity in the book. The man who lied to his laptop professor Clifford Nass outlines a study that he did with a Japanese car company, so this car company had created very sophisticated software to give drivers feedback on their driving. It had artificial intelligence had sensors. You know the cutting edge technology.

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This was probably about 10 years ago, so pretty cutting edge technology. They asked professor and asked to come in and help them evaluate this system and how how it worked on the drivers, which was a really good idea, because what they found was somewhat counterintuitive. So the system gave really well-intentioned feedback. When someone would drive too fast or someone took corners too sharply, it would say things like you are not driving very well, please slow down.

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So if you think that people were delighted to hear about their poor driving, you are in fact mistaken. It turns out that people were very frustrated and very angry when they were told that they were driving poorly people's damaged egos, wouldn't have mattered if we actually saw an improvement in driver performance, but what we saw was the opposite. In fact, people weren't only frustrated and angry receiving criticism. They started performing worse on the criticized tasks.

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They started driving more quickly, taking corners more sharply and one guy got so upset that he crashed the simulation that he was driving and cliff Nass, summed it up perfectly by saying that even the most stunningly accurate curtis's is not necessarily constructive.

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So the biggest problem with criticism is that it's ineffective at actually changing a person's behavior. So the goal when you tell someone to do something differently, is usually that you want to see a behavior change. So if the type of feedback that you're you're giving is not actually eliciting a behavior change, that feedback is is fundamentally useless and the reason that criticism doesn't cause people to change their behavior is because they become defensive.

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It's an attack and people immediately go on the defensive and they spend way more time justifying their behavior, because we all do think of ourselves as being good people, and so, when we're criticized, we spend all of our time trying to reconcile that defending our behavior defending ourselves. Instead of actually thinking about how we could change and be different, there's a cognitive leap to go from I'm doing this thing poorly in doing this, this thing wrong. How do I actually do this thing correctly?

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So if criticism were given to everyone evenly at a company, this would not be a topic for gender diversity. Would it, but it turns out that women are given more criticism and employee feedback than men, so Karen Schneider recently did a study where she collected about 180 reviews from men and women at tech companies, and she analyzed the feedback that they were given, and what she found was that 76% of women or no 80s are looking at the wrong side.

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88% of women received critical feedback in their reviews versus 59% of men, which is a statistically significant difference. What she found that was also really disturbing to me was that of the criticism that women and men received. So if you take out just the chunk of feedback, that was critical, 76 percent of the feedback given to women was personal in nature. So as things like you're too abrasive, you should let other people shine more.

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You know you are too aggressive things like that things about their person, whereas only 2% of criticism targeted towards men was personal in nature, giving more critical feedback to one group over another isn't just a case of managers or not being as nice to women as men. Given what we've learned about criticism through research, which is that people universally resent criticism, it does not change a person's behavior for the positive and, in fact, can actually worsen their behavior.

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If one group systematically receives more criticism than another, what you can have happen that the best case scenario is that that entire group looks like they resent feedback when in fact they just resent criticism.

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At the worst case scenario, you can actually systematically change the performance of an entire group by criticizing them and potentially worsening their behavior on the criticized task.

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So how do we level the playing field when it comes to critical feedback and the number one question I get when I talk about criticism is well. How do you tell someone they're doing something wrong without giving them like criticism or negative feedback or constructive feedback or whatever, like the words, are for it, and it turns out that there is there's a multitude of ways to get feedback, so the paradigm of positive versus negative feedback is totally wrong. It's not binary I.

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Think off the top of my head, the other day that there's like 14 or more ways that you can give somebody feedback I mean like there's an entire slew of nonverbal ways that you can communicate with people, and so the best advice that I can give from my experience like coaching managing, is rather than give critical feedback, give what I call declarative feedback so basically declare the behavior that you want to see. Rather than telling someone don't open, such large poll requests or don't do things. This way say open. Smaller poll requests, it's better.

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For these reasons, they're easier to review and they're easier to merge, right, you've removed every element of criticism from it by simply stating the desired behavior, and it works really really well, because most people are actually very good people. They want to be good at their jobs, they come into work, hoping to be good at their jobs and so they're not trying to be inefficient employees, and so declaring the behavior that you want to see gives people the benefit of the doubt. Now.

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It also recommend repeating it at least three times and a rule of thumb is that if you can remove the words no and don't from your vocabulary, you will give usually very declarative feedback. So on very rare occasions, you might want to throw in an hour don't like don't alter data on a production read mirror, because what you want people to do is completely freeze into nothing and so, but most of the time just remove the words. No and don't.

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So our next section is argument cultures.

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The story goes like this you're at work, and you need to integrate new technology into your platform, as we do almost every day at the office, and you know a discussion ensues like what technology should we? It was like we're.

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Revamping our infrastructure automation so now you're going to have like the puppet contingent versus like the people who are really excited about docker right and we've probably all seen this the argument that follows where people are like, but we have more domain expertise and puppet and then the other people like, but docker is really cool and the whole thing just starts to escalate, where you're in this conference room and two people are really going at it and everyone's like.

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Oh, my gosh and one person they cross that line across that kind of invisible line, and they say something like a soft and very subtle. They say something like you seem really frustrated, or you seem a little bit emotional which to anyone out there who has not received this. This feedback during an argument they're, basically using a logical fallacy to undermine what you're saying in order to win they're using the logical fallacy that emotions undermine reason, which is completely false. We are all highly illogical.

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Highly emotional beings, so reason was never an option, but what they're doing is they're using this trope to win, because the goal in an argument is winning and that is actually the source of what I call toxic argument, cultures.

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So an argument culture is the use of aggressive opposition to weed out weak ideas, weak ideas and weak logic, and we use them in several prominent places in society, courtrooms and political debates, those the other one. But these environments have really really strict rules and they actually have a third party judge that assesses the winner and these strict rules are necessary, because, if there's anything that we have learned from watching sports, it's that people will do anything to win.

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They will break people's legs, they will deflate footballs, they will lie, they will change, they will steal, they will do all sorts of insane things to win. In fact, people become highly irrational when the goal is winning, but in the workplace. What this means is that people will start to cross boundaries. They'll start to cross these little invisible boundaries. They will start interrupting other people there so they'll start speaking more loudly, they'll start using size and aggression to intimidate the other person, because the goal is winning my goal is: is not the truth.

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It's not the best solution in an argument. My goal is actually to get you to see that I'm right and this it seems like a subtle, a subtle thing, but you see it all the time with engineers where it's not really about kind of working together as a team to find the best solution, even though we say that out loud as soon as that argument starts to happen. It's about winning.

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Now, if we go back to like the argument that we had at the beginning, these sighs and aggression, tactics or using logical fallacies to undermine someone to win systematically hurt women and minority groups more than other groups right. So if size and aggression is something that someone can use to win, arguments and I've worked at places like this. That means that women who have a size disadvantage and who are not allowed by society to generally be as aggressive, are fundamentally like not on an even playing ground.

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Even if I wanted to win an argument, there's a good chance, I wouldn't be able to based on those tactics. Similarly, the more marginalized a group is the more tropes there are to use against them.

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That has to do with the history of our country and power dynamics and things like that, but basically the more ways you can undermine their argument using anything other than rational arguments, and so you can create this culture where people are working to win they're, louder, they're, more aggressive they're, using these really subtle digs at other people that are personal in nature and as we talked about with criticism, these do happen more towards women and other groups, and you can create a really toxic culture around arguments.

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So what do you do? How do you come to conclusions about things? How do you make decisions? Well be very clear about the type of communication you want to use and the goals that you when using it. So if your, if your goal is to brainstorm and expand ideas, all ideas are welcome. In other words, there shouldn't ever be an argument when you're trying to narrow down ideas and decide which one to use use, really structured communication tactics, so make it about discussions, make it about collaboration, but also structure.

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It say like this is the start criteria for selecting a technology over another. We base it on like these four categories. If you want your technology to be selected, you have to make a very compelling argument in these four categories, and people will actually focus on that.

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So, in conclusion, my name is Keith Huddleston. This is just two sections of a talk on how our engineering environments are killing diversity. If you have questions you can find me later and that's all I have for today.

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