Steve Wade: The Killer Question: How One Sentence Can Transform Your Engineering Career

In this session, the speaker explores the challenge engineers face in communicating their value effectively within their teams and to stakeholders. He emphasizes the importance of non-verbal communication and shares insights into how body language, vocal delivery, and the content of conversations impact interactions. Using personal anecdotes, the speaker highlights a specific engineer's struggle to convey the value of her work, leading to a lack of project approval. He introduces practical strategies, such as asking open-ended questions and utilizing confident body language, to foster better communication. The session culminates in advice on how to build rapport and influence in technical settings, encouraging engineers to reflect on their communication styles.

Uh in this session we will talk about the killer question and I leave that up to you. Welcome Steve please. [applause] So I'm I'm pretty awkward right and and looking around I think some of you are probably pretty awkward too but luckily enough for you guys I'm a recovering awkward person. So you're in good luck. So, I want you to imagine if you've ever been to a

wedding and you have this awkward interaction where someone you barely know asks you what you do, right? And you've got about 30 seconds to either build a connection with that person and come across as really charming or like the other opposite end of the spectrum, which is you default back to your safe space. And what's the safe space? Technology. We're going to talk about everything tech because

that's our safe space. So I was at a wedding. It was my cousin's wedding and my auntie introduced me to four of her friends. And someone said, one of them said, "Steve, what do you do?" And I said, "Hi, you know, I'm the founder of platform fix. I do Kubernetes transformations. You know, it's a desired state reconciliation tool. It's open source. I do githops with flux, right?

What's happening? 40 60 year old women have just got glossed over faces, right? And I'm thinking to myself, I have one of two things I need to do right now. One, I need to find the first person that has champagne on a on a platter so that I can grab it. Or I'm looking for the next person that I can talk to so that I don't embarrass

myself anymore. So 16%. This is the amount of time that engineers spend per week building features. And 93% of these people say that building features is the most valuable thing that they do in their career. Right? This is from a chain guard report last year. So what the hell are they doing for the other 84%. Meetings almost definitely some kind of red tape or process most likely.

But really, it comes down to communication friction, misunderstanding of Slack messages, right? Misconstrued emails, going and having oneto ones with people and them not being able to understand what you're actually trying to say because they're too scared in order to be able to say it. And then Microsoft did another study and they said of the people that work in an office, people get inter interrupted every two

minutes. So that's 275 interruptions per day. That's a pretty large number. So why do we think that it's 275 interruptions per day? Because we don't practice how to communicate with people. Who's been in a meeting about the meeting that they had yesterday or the day before because there was no agenda in that meeting. So they have to go and continue the meeting the next day. almost everybody,

right? And we spend all of our life in meetings. No one loves meetings. Everybody hates meetings. And that's why we're at 16% and not 60%. So when you're in a room, you're in a meeting and you're sitting there with your arms folded slightly lean back. It's pretty boring meeting, right? Maybe a leg crossed over the other. You're actually communicating. Or if I come up to your desk

and I ask you a question and you're too busy prompting chat GPT or Claude and not interested in what I'm saying, you're also communicating. Or if I come up and try and build a conversation with you and you're too busy on your phones looking at X trying to work out the next stupid thing that Elon Musk or Donald Trump has done, you're also communicating. And guess what?

You haven't said a single word, right? And all of you are communicating with me right this instant and you're not saying anything. Some of you okay, some of you are going to work on it. But that's the power of non-verbal communication. We don't always communicate by the words that come out of our mouths. So I want to introduce you to Sarah. Sarah was a platform engineer in

one of the customers that I was working at. Absolutely fantastic engineer. One of the best platform engineers I've ever worked with. and her job in this specific time frame that I was working with her was to improve the performance of the underlying platform. So she did what every great engineer does, creates a PC, makes sure it's working, writes a few tests, adds a little bit of documentation,

and then she bowls into the meeting room. She goes, "I've got it, guys. I'm going to go in there. We're going to get to do this piece of work." So she bowls into the meeting room and then 25 minutes she comes 25 minutes later she comes out. No, we're not doing it. Why? Why do people think that they're not doing it? Shout out guesses. It's a safe

space. You can get it wrong. You can get it right. It doesn't matter. So why why did she bowl into that meeting room and 25 minutes later come out and someone said it's not happening? not no story. She couldn't give the perceived value to the customer, right? Why do we want to do this piece of work? It's technically brilliant. It looks great on a slide deck, right?

But she couldn't physically communicate the value to the stakeholders, right? And hold on to Sarah because we're going to come on to her a little bit later. So, this is the paradox we all live in, right? I guarantee you that you are all great engineers, right? or you're all great platform engineers. We can write applications that can connect billions of people together, right? However, if I asked

you to talk to the person next to you that you've never met before, I guarantee you it's going to be the most awkward 10 seconds of your whole entire week. And why is that? Hands up. The last time someone debugged a conversation after it happened, right? I want you to look around the room. It's about four or five people, But if I asked you the same question

and I said, "When was the last time that you debugged an application when there was a priority one incident?" You'd all put your hands up, right? You'd all sit there, you'd grind it out, and you'd make sure that you got to the end destination, which is the solution. But we know that being able to communicate is the most important skill that we have in our whole entire

careers, right? but it's the least practiced and least retrospectively looked at thing that we do in our industry. So, there's a couple of rules of engagement before I start. I'm going to get you all to stand up in 10 seconds. If the answer to the question that I say is yes, I want you to sit down. Everybody understand the rules? Okay, everyone stand up. Now, what I'd

normally do is take a photo of you and I'd admit that I got a standing ovation, but I won't do that. So, the first question is I want to ask if any of you have been Sarah. Have you walked into a meeting and you couldn't convey your value to the stakeholders, so the project didn't go anywhere? You're all pretty good engineers. No one sat down. So, second

question, have you seen someone less technical than you get promoted before you? There we go. Okay, final question. Do you think that you're really good at communicating with but actually all those people are doing is nodding along because they just want you to be quiet, right? Did anyone notice what I did? So, on the last question, I said nodding along and then I didn't say anything. And

I went like this and about four of you started nodding. And I didn't say nod. I just said stand up and then sit down again. Right? And that's the power of these. That's the power of the hands. So before we debug anything, right, we have to understand the architecture of what the heck we're debugging. So we're going to start with layer one of the stack when we

communicate. So anyone hasn't a guess of what layer one in our stack is going to be? Shout out. >> Okay. Eye contact. Yeah. So non-verbal communication, right? Body language, eye contact, posture, etc., etc. Layer two, vocal delivery. So that's pace, volume, tone. Then we have layer three, right? That's the verbal content, the words that are coming out my mouth and the way that I structure my sentences.

Layer four, this one here is the most important one, right? Who am I talking to? What do they care about? What do they want me to say? And most importantly, what are they scared of? So, before we get to layer four and we talk about some of the context, I am going to talk to you and give you a question that will stop all of this awkward

conversation that we had at the wedding and it will touch all of those four layers of the stack. But before we do that, we're going to have to do layer one and layer two. So we're going to talk about hand signals and we're going to talk about voice and we're going to debug these together. So 12.5 is the amount of weight that your brain gives hand signals.

So your hand signals g your brain gives hand signals 12 point times more weight than the words that come out your mouth. So guess what? These are more important than this when you talk. spoiler. so I'm going to give you three gestures that you can use in your organization. So the first one is the steeple. Hands up people who are familiar with the None of you. So

the steeple is this, right? So I want you to sit there and I want you to do this for a second. What do you feel? Do you feel confident? Do you feel authoritarian? Do you feel slightly more relaxed now? Do you feel like me and you could have an interesting conversation? Do you know how many leaders and CTOs when you go and when you have boardroom conversations

or maybe public speeches, they all stand there like this and I bet you don't even realize that they're doing it, right? It's a way to ground and center yourself when you're having a conversation. The second one is the platter. It's like this. I've met a bunch of you over the last couple of days and you would have seen me do this. I do this a lot, right?

And I speak to people. I say, "Hi, nice to meet you. how are you? Blah blah blah blah blah. Right? Very open, very engaging. Hopefully, we're going to build a connection. Maybe you like me, maybe you don't. I apologize if you don't. The other end of that spectrum is something that I call the platter. The platter is hands on the table, hands on the chair. This meeting

is over. Leave the boardroom. I'm done with you. Right? So, three different options that we have at our disposal. You can use these on your significant other, the the the platter and the leveler to get slightly different outcomes depending upon what you're asking them to do. Right? It would be really great if I could go out with the boys this weekend, please. Right? Then what she or

he may do is put their hands over the table. Absolutely not. You're not doing that. Right? Then you're back to square one. So that's hand gestures. Now we're going to debug the voice. So this is all we're going to say. We're going to say the deployment failed again. Right? So, repeat after me. The deployment failed Okay. So, now we're going to say it in three different ways.

Rules of engagement. You're going to have to partner up. Sorry, it's going to get a little bit awkward. Yes, you may have to talk to strangers. I'm not that apologetic, but I will be a little bit apologetic that you have to talk to strangers. So, I want you to pair up. Partner A and partner B. If you're not in a pair, slide along, right? There's no excuses.

We're all going to be talking to each other. You all came here to learn about communication. So therefore, you have to start doing communication. Okay. Right. Has everyone got a pair? Anyone not have a pair? Okay. Everyone has a pair. Right. Okay. So, we're going to say the words the deployment has failed. Again, the first one is we're going to do it terrified. The way this works

is who is partner A right now? Put your hand up. Okay. Partner A is going to go first, is simply going to say the words, "The deployment has failed again." Terrified. Afterwards, partner B is going to do the same thing back. I don't want you to listen to the words the person is saying because we already know what the words are, right? What I want you to

do is I want you to watch body language, facial expressions. state the deployment failed again. You're terrified. You're the junior engineer talking to the senior engineer and the senior engineer is an Right? So I want you to go ahead. You're really really nervous. You're really really terrified. And I want you to say this. Go ahead and then switch over. And then I'll raise my hand in a

couple of seconds when you're when you're done. So partner A go first. Then partner B go Okay, both done. >> Okay, now we're going to switch it up a little bit. Partner B is going to go first. You're going to say it like you're angry. You're the senior lead and you're you're you're super frustrated that the build failed again because we have to do a release and

you're talking to a junior. Same thing. B goes first. A goes second. Body language only. I want you to look at. Go >> Okay. Stop. >> Okay. Third one. We're going to do it like we find it kind of hilarious, right? We're like this cocky egotistical guy or girls are not egotistical, right? So, we're going to have to be a guy here, right? We're this egotistical guy

and you find the whole thing subtly hilarious. Go ahead. A first, B second. [snorts] >> Okay, stop. So now I'm going to put like a line down the middle here. You You guys are going to be section A. You're going to be section B. What did section A learn when we said it in a terrified manner? What were some of the things that you saw? Yeah, you

need to work on that. Like otherwise, this is not really going to work. Uh you're you're right. Told you It is. Anything else you noticed? I noticed something very really interesting from a couple of you here when I was watching. I noticed that the person that was terrified did not look in the eyes of the person that they were talking to. It was somewhere else. It was

the wall. It was the floor. It was slightly not really eye contact. It was like looking at their ear, looking at the chin. Okay. So, when you're terrified, you can't hold eye contact with people. You find it really, really, really, really difficult. Right. Section B. Hopefully, we get better responses than section A. Not calling out section A at all. So, section B. When we were angry, what

did we notice? >> Yes. Hand gestures. Exactly. Anything else? Who was who was giving who eye contact? Was partner A and partner B had rock solid eye contact? >> Okay, so an so angry one had more eye contact than the person that was receiving the conversation. Okay. It was very very very loud in here. It all got very very angry, very very loud. Right. I also some

saw some people slap their leg. Right? So interesting thing is when you're angry you can't control your emotions right some of you slap your leg right I didn't say slap your leg I said simply say four words right it's very very difficult to be able to maintain your emotions when you're very very angry okay then as a unit A and B together what did you notice when

you when it was I noticed something pretty interesting in this area here anyone more chatting yeah it was a little Yeah. A little bit more chatty. Anything else? Off the pressure. Yep. Okay. Yes. Both people laughed. So, one person found it hilarious, but the other person also mimicked the fact that this person thought it was hilarious. Guess what happens when two people mimic each other? No one

learns anything, right? The other thing is you both looked at each other because the pressure was off, right? And when the pressure is off, the eye contact is established. So now what I want you to do is I want you to play this scenario out. A and B again. I want A to introduce themselves to B and then I want B to introduce themselves to A. And

I want you to imagine, sorry, you're going to have to imagine for a second that you've just walked into this door and this is the first time you've ever met that person. And I'm going to give you 30 seconds to do this back and forward. And I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions afterwards. So I want you to listen to words that are said, facial

expressions, volume, eye contact, tone. Okay. 30 seconds. Go ahead. >> [laughter] So, how many This has gone off, but that's okay. How many of you by show of hands said, "Hey, Okay. What about Hey, how are you? Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you. Really good to see you. >> Yep, I didn't say anything. You're right. Rules of engagement were not set successfully. These are what

I call conversation dead ends, right? Why are they called conversation dead ends? Because as soon as the person replies, the conversation's over, right? Hey, how are you? Good, thanks. How are you? I'm okay. Right? What do you do? I'm a platform engineer. Do you write Python? No, I write Terraform. What's Terraform? Right? And what are we doing here? We're just playing verbal ping pong. Right? But we're

not really there's no rally here. Right? It's just just back and forth. All you're doing when you say and have conversation deadends is that you can open your mouth and and talk, right? You're not building any relationship, any rapport with anybody, right? You're just having these transactional conversations. As an example, if I told you that I was the cleaner, what's your next move? You're going to ask

me what cleaning products I do, what cleaning products I use, or where do I clean. Is it a big house? Is it a small house? Is it a flat? Right? And we just go back and forward and you never get to really know anything about me because the thing that you knew about me is really the thing that you asked at the beginning. You found out that

I was the cleaner, right? And we can't build rapport this way. However, there is this question that stops all awkward conversations and is also not a conversation dead end. And luckily enough for you, I'm going to give it to you. It is simply this. Have you been working on anything exciting recently? So, a group of you that I've met recently over the last couple of days, I

asked you this question. So, now unfortunately you two are in the front row. So, one of you is going to have to come up here because we're going to do a little bit of a demonstration. This works like a standup comedy. You decided to sit in the front row. So, we have to pick on people in the front row. So, either of you two have to come

and stand up here. I'll let you argue it out between yourselves, the two gentlemen at the front here or the two gentlemen here. Completely up to you, but someone has to come here because we're going to do this exercise. It's either choose or be chosen. Okay. I'm going to choose you. You're in the same color shirt as me. Unfortunately, that's how this works. Okay. Okay. So, I'm

going to ask you this question. I want you guys to figure out and work out what changed rather than a hey, how are you? So, I'm going to ask you, have you been working on >> Yeah, actually, yes. We we managed to get our products. >> Great. Did anyone notice what happened? >> Okay, he stepped closer. Anything else? He got excited. Yep. Anything else? He would carry

on talking until I told him to stop. Right? Why? Because it's an invitation for him to share passion. You can go and sit down. Thanks so much. It's an invitation for him to share passion. So, let's debug why I think this sentence works. Have you been present perfect tense over a period of time working on? I don't want the end destination. I want to learn about the

journey that you went on. Right? I don't care that you've done this amazing platform over here. I want to know all of the bad problems that you've had, all of the issues that you've had, all of the problems that you've had because I hopefully don't have the same problems as you because I'm about to learn something, right? Anything. The most important word in the whole entire sentence,

right? If you don't want to talk about tech, you don't have to talk about tech. It can be about anything, right? It could be about how you race hamsters, how you have ham or how you have hamsters. Sorry. It could be about one of your hobbies. Maybe you're a rock climber, maybe you're an abs sailor, maybe you're a circus performer, I don't know, right? Exciting. Hopefully some

positive emotional connection, right? That excites you and and doesn't stop you from talking and we don't get to conversation dead end. and then something that's tightly scoped in your brain. I don't want you sitting there thinking about it for the next two minutes. I want to have an immediate conversation with you. So, what I want to do next is I want you to partner up again, partner

A and partner B, and I want both of you to have the same conversation as this gentleman and I had. I'm going to give you 30 seconds and then I'm going to ask you a set of questions. So, go ahead. 30 seconds. Ask the question. Keep the conversation going. Ask whatever you want. [clears throat] Hey. By show of hands, who learned something new about the person compared

to when they said, "Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you." Blah blah blah blah blah. Right? How how well did that conversation flow? Did you have a nice back and forward conversation? Did you learn something new about the person? Or was it a complete and utter disaster? And Steve doesn't know what he's talking about. Where are we? >> Sweet utter disaster. Okay. Well, you need to

practice more. Okay. So what happens here is you may be in the situation where exciting doesn't work right and you're looking for other options right probably happened with a couple of you. So you can go with interesting, you can go with frustrating, you can even go if you really want and you want to go on a nice downward spiral, you can use the word boring, right? I

would use this infrequently because unless you want to also have a very boring conversation, you're you're about to get the same back. So I would change this word in the middle depending upon what you want to talk about, right? So if you want to initiate a conversation with someone and say to them, you know, I I really want to vent this annoying thing that I've been working

on, you go with boring, right? You don't go with exciting because maybe you're not working on anything exciting at the moment. So these are the basic building blocks of what I call the human API, right? And hopefully all of you have built APIs in the past, so this is not something new and revolutionary to you, right? This one's slightly different from the APIs that you're used to

building. So A stands for ask. Ask the killer question, right? Build the rapport. Have a conversation. Learn something new about the person. Position, right? Stand there grounded, steeple stance, authoritarian, confident, composed. And then I is influence, right? How do we influence people? How do we go about influencing and building up an influence within our organization? If we can't influence people, we can't change people's perceptions and we

don't get to do the cool stuff that we really want to be doing. No one wants to be doing BAU constantly, right? And unfortunately, all the product owners are going to ask you to do it, right? We have to be able to influence the product owner and say, "We should do this cool stuff." So that brings me on to something that I call the triple P. The

triple P is the way that I communicate with my audience. So we start with Preview. I am going to explain a way that I communicate and build up the way that I communicate with my with my audience, whether that be in a meeting room or whether that be a group like you today. Then I present it again. This works by establishing multiple neural pathways by exposing my

listeners to different cognitive approaches. And then I preview it again. Imagine it as we're driving in a car and I may be looking at ways or Google maps or I may be looking at the signposts or I may be talking to the person next to me. The whole idea of this is I need the information to get to the end destination. When I'm driving a car, I'm

getting to the destination. When I'm speaking to someone, I'm getting to the destination. Also, the destination is the user's mind. What am I doing when I execute the triple P? Why do you think this is an important method? What was the bottom of the triangle? Okay. Do I know right now who I'm talking to? No. Some of you, yes. Okay. But the large majority of you know,

right? I don't know if you're interns. I don't know if you're juniors. I don't know if you're CTO's. I don't know if you're cleaners. If you're aunties or uncles that I met previously at a wedding. I have no idea. Right? I have to set the context. If I don't set the context, the words that I speak may or may not get to all of you. Right? This

is a very powerful technique. I would highly highly recommend that you use it both in verbal conversation and also in written conversation. Right? It's very very powerful. So I want to take you all the way back to the beginning when we talked about So about three to four months later, Sarah came to me and said, "You know that performance thing that we've been going on about? I

think I'm going to give it another go because I'm kind of bored of BAU work and I don't really want to be fixing things. I want to do something brand new. So I said, "Okay, cool. What's your first move?" So what do people think was her first move? What did she start with? She's going to reboot this whole entire project. She wants to try and get a

success. Where did she go? What was the first thing that she did? Shout out everyone. Anyone having an idea? Did she write more documentation? Did she rearchitect the implementation? What do we think? Correct. Yes, she presented it to her peers, right? Other platform engineers. Has anyone tried to convince three, four, five platform engineers that their idea is brilliant? Right. Platform engineers love to rip holes in absolutely

everything, right? So if you can get past three platform engineers, most likely by the time you get to the CTO and the the VP of engineering, all at least all of the technical problems have now been resolved, right? Because you've had this conversation. She also practiced it with me. We went through a couple of things. Next, she bowled into the meeting room, right? Like she owned the

place, relaxed, shoulders down, did the staple stance, got herself grounded, asked that killer question to the C the CTO and the CEO and the CFO. built a rapport for five minutes and then went there and execute the presentation. 25 minutes rolls by, she comes out, she comes back to the team and she starts high-fiving people. This female does not high-five anybody What happened? She successfully communicated the

value to the stakeholders and she went in there with influence and purpose. Nothing else changed. No slide deck changes, no application changes, no documentation changes, nothing. It was all about the way that she communicated. of good communication in engineering. I will get out of the way so you can scan it. Otherwise, you're just going to get my fat head in the way. So there is a workshop

that I conduct. It has a number of different protocols that we that I would talk about. The reason why those protocols are in there is because how we communicate as engineers is a little bit more nuanced than this, right? We go into postmortems and we have to try and find a cause, not a name to blame, right? Or we have a back and forward 10-minute rant on

a pull request because someone thinks that the way you've implemented something is not correct, right? Right? And then you have this back and forward and it gets really awkward and then you have to go to a meeting room and try and apologize. So I want you to think about something. I want you to think what about if I could go into any meeting room, right? And I

could go in there with such confidence that I would guarantee myself for this project to be agreed, right? Emphatic yes. or if you're a leader in the audience that your team member could come to you and ask you for the proposal for this project and be a rock star and come out with a yes, right? And now I want you to think about if you could do

that every single time. Well, the difference here is two things. The difference is you're going in there with confidence. You're going in there with influence, Previously, you would have walked there in there as an awkward person. And now, the only awkward person is the people the other side of the table trying to work out how previously you couldn't convince them and now you can convince them. My

name's been Steve Wade. Thank you very much for having me. I'll be around for the rest of the conference today, tomorrow. I'd love to meet all of you. Come and ask me the killer question, and I'll try and give you a completely different answer every time. Otherwise, you're all going to get the same one. >> [snorts] >> Uh, I'm happy to take questions. You can connect with

me on the the left hand one there. The middle one is like a two second just feedback. And the third one there is the playbook. Go ahead, use it. It's free. Uh, reach out to me on LinkedIn if it doesn't work and I'll give you another idea. If it does, I also would be interested as well. Thank you very much. How would you how would you handle

a language barrier carefully? So language barriers come down to two things, right? One is just a lack of understanding from a sheer verbal perspective. So what I would probably do is I'd probably write it in English because I'm a native English speaker. I would ask them to review the document. I would do the triple P. I'd write it in three different ways and then I would ask

them to come to the meeting and I would ask basic questions. Do you did you understand the document? What was your key takeaway from the document? Or if that was still a problem, I would maybe go to an asynchronous way of communicating with that person for a little bit and I would do something with comments on the documentation. The other one and the one that people are

less likely to think about is cultural references. Right? Certain cultures behave differently from each other. Right? Middle Eastern uh business works very very different to Asian business, right? The way that you connect with an with somebody from Asia is really talk about their family. They're very very family orientated, right? So if you want to build a rapport with someone from an Asian country, you ask them a

lot about their family. Where's their family from? What do they do? How many siblings do you have? etc., etc., etc. So that's how I would break down the language barrier. First is try to get that common rapport with someone. make them feel comfortable enough that you're empathetic towards them and understand them from a cultural perspective and then I would go and ask them a bunch of basic

questions. The other thing you can do although I'll tell this group I wouldn't tell necessarily everybody is I would go and say I am going to have this conversation about this topic in claude chat GPT Gemini whatever one you want to choose please explain it to me as if I was a 10-year-old or if I was a 5-year-old and you're going to think wow that's really disrespectful

right I'm I'm going to go and talk to somebody as if they were 10 or 5 years old right it simplifies the way that you talk right and when we simplify down to very very basic English, it's actually very very easy to understand. What we do as engineers is we make everything overly complicated, right? We we complicate the words that come out of our mouth. We make

it really difficult to be able to understand the person, right? If we can just simplify the language, that conversation actually becomes a lot easier. Uh how do you ask the killer question to someone senior without it sounding like a challenge that puts them on the defensive? So you just have to be confident in the way that you execute that conversation, right? It can be, "Hey man, how's

it going?" Like, "Have you been working on anything exciting recently? Any exciting projects that we have coming up in the pipeline?" Right? That's that's not a challenge to them. That's just a conversation, right? It's all about the tone and the way that you say it. If you say like like, "Have we uh we you've recently?" Right? Hands in the pockets a little bit hunched forward. It's a

slightly different conversation. If the person gets defensive, right, that's an that's a a trigger for you to to work out where you take this conversation, right? One of those triggers is you just walk off, right? Okay, well, this is not going anywhere. Maybe I should just leave or you figure out why that person's getting defensive. The other technique that I would recommend is if you do get

into the situation where you think that it's becoming defensive, give yourself 3 seconds before you respond. Don't say anything for 3 seconds. Why do I say that? Anyone hasn't guessed why I say give yourself 3 seconds. Go ahead, shout out. Okay. Anything else? I also what? Calm down. Yes. Emotional response. Yes, definitely. But one of the things that I'm doing is I'm making that other person deeply

think that I'm listening to what they're saying, right? I may not be processing anything. I might think your idea is batshit crazy, right? But if I if I give you 3 seconds, I guarantee you that you think that I'm really deeply thinking about what you're saying and then I will respond back to you, right? Or you've now given yourself 3 seconds to think about what your next

move is, right? It's not disrespectful to stop the conversation for a couple of seconds. That's okay. Right? If it's five, 10 seconds, we've got a little bit of a problem and it gets a little bit awkward. 3 seconds is about enough time. Right? That's how I would do that. where are we? What's the one communication pattern engineers use that they think makes them look smart but actually

kills trust with their team? Ah, this is easy. So, they just talk too much, right? Everyone's been in that meeting where this person does not shut up for 30 minutes and it's a 35 minute meeting, right? And no, no one gets the chance to be able to talk, right? And that person thinks, I am the senior person and I own this meeting, but the meeting was set

up by the tester because the tester needed to know what the problem was. And this person just goes on a huge massive rant. Right? That that's one being overly talkative. Let me make sure I'm looking at the right question here. Uh, I think the question's changed on here, but that's okay. Um, and the other one from a trust is how well can you communicate with that person

when you're not talking about technology, right? How many times have you had a conversation over a coffee and it just naturally gravitates itself towards tech? Some people, hopefully the large majority of this audience, maybe a small majority of this audience, do not want to talk about tech constantly. There's a reason why there's a coffee machine. There's a reason why there's a cigarette break, right? It's not to

carry on the conversation. It's so they can have five minutes to make a coffee and get their own emotions in check, maybe. Or maybe they just want to not talk about tech for some some reason. They want to talk about, I don't know, some issue that's happening with their partner or, you know, the latest football match or rugby match or cricket match that happened. Where are we?

How do you deal with managers who always point out the issues and problems that never appreciate the work that you put Wow, that's a long one that we put for the team or So it comes from how do you communicate your value to the stakeholders, right? So if we have this situation whereby they always point out the issues and problems, I would spin it, right? So I

would say in my mind, I know that this person is an and all they're going to talk to me about is the issues and problems that I have. So, I'm going to say to them, "What issues and problems do you think that we've got so far with this implementation?" And the person goes, "What the hell?" Like, I I normally like tear this thing to pieces. Why are

you now asking me what you think the problems are? And then this person gets kind of out of kilter and doesn't really know what they're doing, like how to react, right? And then you are like prime position. You're ready to go, right? You've got all the arguments, all the answers, the same as you had before. So, sometimes it's about spinning the conversation the other way around. The

other thing is I told you that we needed to debug conversations. So this situation probably happens because you haven't debugged the conversation previously. Once you debug the conversation before, you know how to go into the next meeting and you know how to ask the certain types of questions. And when you spin these conversations the other way around, watch the way the other person acts, right? they get

all jittery and they're not really sure what they're talking about and they start to panic and you've kind of hit them with this curve ball that they weren't expecting, right? And then you you're in the power dominant position. How would you introduce how would you introduce focus on communication style in a very technical focused team having a hero culture? So I would ask them as a group

what is the most successful thing that this team has implemented in the last insert time period here right and person X will go I did this person Y will go I did this and then all you say is I didn't ask about you I asked about the team what did the team do here right and then you say to them oh we can't function and we can't

communicate as a team so we actually have quite a significant problem here Right? Because this conversation and the way that we act is going to change the way that we do sprint plannings, retrospectives, etc., etc., when we have these team- based meetings. So then I would say to them, okay, well, the hero culture is probably uh facilitating some kind of dominant person in certain types of team

meetings. So the next move is I would rotate the person that's responsible for executing the meeting. So like as an example, I would rotate standups around each member of the team. I'd rotate retrospectives around each member of the team, right? And then I would put out and communicate as a team what the team has facilitated over the last two weeks, one month. Some people work in six

month cycles. I know I I work in in industries that have six months cycles. That's quite crazy, but six months as an example. So I think the way to stop the hero culture is really just being confident enough to be able to state the fact that there's a problem in the first place, right? And just communicate that. At what point does confident body language stop being communication

and start being performance and people can tell the difference? At what point? I would be genuinely surprised if the large majority of your audience that the people that you're speaking to even knew that you had confident body language, right? How many of you have sat in a meeting room and sat there like this? None of you. How many of you have even realized people that are doing

that have done it? None of you, right? Or or a small majority of you. There's also other things that you can look at when it comes to like the way that you confidently communicate with people. Like I said before, it's not just the words that come out your mouth, it's the way that you act, right? And the if they think it's performance, they will call your bluff,

right? They'll call your bluff in the meeting. They'll say something. They'll say, you know, stop performing. This is all an act, right? But sometimes it's okay to act, right? Sometimes we have to act a different way, right? Sometimes you have to act and you have to be a little bit more performative when you know when you're in an interview, right? Some you have to be overly confident

when you're in an interview. You can't sit back, arms crossed, relaxed, right? I don't really care if I get this job. Like I'm just going to have a conversation with you and we're going to we're going to see how it goes. So I I would I would say it's quite difficult actually to be able to tell if somebody has got overly confident body language. I just think

they're very good speakers or they're very good and they're very comfortable in their body. Some people that are uh that come across as super confident probably bleed into egotistical and arrogant, right? More than actually just being very good at being confident and grounded in their body. Right? I have less than two minutes, so I'm going to try and race through this one. What if the answer to

have you have another problem question is no. Good question. Ask a different question, right? Or or ask why, right? So the person, have you recently? No. Oh, that's a shame. Like, have you been working on something? Insert filler word here. Have you been working on something boring? Like, what was it? Why have you not been working on something exciting? You know, have how long have you been

working on this project? Or their brain when they say no has immediately gone to work and you need to swing it to hobbies, right? Oh, what have you done out like what have you what did you do at the weekend? Was it like really that bad? And they'll go, actually, no, it wasn't. I went and did something, right? And then you take the conversation there. No is

normally defaulted to their work life. Honestly, nine times out of 10, if not more. So, I just switched the conversation to hobbies. And my mic is falling off. >> We're done. I think we're done. >> Which one? Yeah, but I agree. Yeah, you you you have to answer a question where you could get a yes and you could get a no. They are legitimate outcomes to the

>> Correct. You can Yeah, you can spin the front as well. Exactly. >> Yeah. But however, right, the other thing to be aware of is if the person says yes or no and it's not going anywhere, maybe they're not the right person to be communicating with in the first place, right? Sometimes you communicate with pe I'll be honest, sometimes you communicate with people to find out if

they're if they're people that you want to speak to, right? Sometimes it's okay to be like, "This person's no I don't like this person, the way they interact. I'm going to I'm going to go." That's perfectly fine. Okay, I'm being told I'm done. Uh I'll be around out the back. Come and say hello. >> [applause]