Host Intro (Gene Kim)

So the topic is workplace engagement and burnout, and I think we have an amazing world-class panel to talk about both aspects. I think the first thing we should do is prove that. We do that by having each person introduce themselves and say their interest in the area and their experience in the field. Why don't we start with that? Dr. Nicole Forsgren.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

Okay. Hi, I'm Nicole Forsgren. I am doing research and strategy, leading the DORA team at Google right now. I have been leading, I think, one of the largest DevOps studies to date. I've been doing the State of DevOps reports, and I wrote the book "Accelerate."

Some of my interest in the area started originally when I was an engineer at IBM. For the longest time, we were doing what we started calling seven-day forced marches. I'm seeing some nods in the audience. For so long, we had to push through this unbelievably difficult push through hardware and software and firmware updates, and it ended up taking two or three years. It took this huge toll, and it was much more than just exhaustion and overwork. It took this personal toll on so many of the people there, and then bled over into their personal lives and family lives.

Then, as I went to get my PhD and studied what we now call DevOps, there was this promise that if we change the way we build technology, and we change our technology, practice, process, and culture, it can not only make our organizations better -- it is not only a capitalistic thing -- it can also make our lives better. I wanted to do the research-y thing and study it and see if the numbers also back up the story and intuition. That's how I ended up including that aspect of it in my research. Spoiler alert: it's true. It showed up in the 2015 -- I think 2015?

Gene Kim

State of DevOps Report?

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

2016. I think most of the research up until, including this year. In 2019, we included a couple additional measures as well.

Gene Kim

Awesome. So the first of the three PhDs on the panel. Thank you, Dr. Forsgren. Dr. Maslach.

Dr. Christina Maslach

Okay. Well, I am a professor of psychology at Berkeley for my entire career. I stumbled upon burnout as an issue and a topic when I was interviewing people out in the field on other questions relating to their job. They would answer my questions, and then they would say, "This is confidential, anonymous?" I said, "Yeah." They'd say, "Can we talk about something else?" Then they would start describing other experiences they had at work.

After a while, I noticed a pattern and rhythm. I was getting the same kind of story that people were talking about, and they didn't have a name for it. I would ask them things that related to psychological or sociological concepts. Finally one day, by chance, someone said, "Okay, what are you hearing in the research? Tell me a bit about it." I described it and said, "People keep telling me this kind of thing." She said, "Oh, well, I don't know what anybody else calls it, but we call it burnout in..." This was legal services, poverty law.

So I thought, "Huh, okay." In the next interviews, I would end by saying, "Is it detached concern? Is it something like dehumanization and self-defense?" "No." "Is it burnout?" "Yes. That's it." It really captured something, and that's why we decided to go with it. I decided to go with not my original questions, but this thing that people were anxious to talk about in a safe place. It would not get back to anybody. They would cry. They would get angry. It was clearly emotional. It was important. I thought this was something I needed to spend time on.

I've been doing research for many years. In the '90s, my colleagues and I were facing different challenges. People didn't want you to come in and gather data about burnout and other things in their organization because they thought they might get sued, and there's a litigious society we've got going. It was also the rise of positive psychology: let's look at good stuff as well as negative stuff. So we did a pivot and said, "Well, we're getting on the burnout measures people on the more extreme end, like the burnout profile I was showing yesterday. But there are also these other things. If you look at the other end of what we're measuring, people are not exhausted; they've got a lot of energy and enthusiasm. They're not trying to distance themselves and be cynical; they want to get more deeply involved. They're feeling really good about what they're doing in terms of efficacy." We saw, "Maybe if we look and say, how do we get to a better place? Let's call this place engagement with work." That's how we got involved in doing it.

Gene Kim

Fantastic. Thank you, Dr. Maslach. Dr. Spear, who is the closing keynote today and someone who has influenced my thinking so much over the last decade. I think that's the realm that you've been living in, in terms of dynamic learning organizations that engage people. Tell us about that.

Dr. Steve Spear

Just by quick self-introduction, I spend some of my time teaching at MIT. I spend the bulk of my time working with organizations across different verticals: .com, .mil, .gov, .org. As far as this engagement and burnout thing, people matter.

I first got into the work I do when people were trying to understand why a very small number of Japanese companies were having disproportionate impact on their sectors. The initial explanations were all racist, then nationalist, and then there was the technical explanation: "Oh, they must have better robots or scheduling algorithms." It turned out, when you took a close look, it was how those very few companies managed people to tap deeply into their innate potential to create value, and figure out how to channel that innate potential in the form of value delivered into the marketplace. It's all about people.

Gene Kim

Can you go a little more into what was the effect of the people? They just worked longer hours? I don't know.

Dr. Steve Spear

You start thinking on a spectrum of extremes. Take Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had some profoundly good ideas about design of process and tapping deeply into better ways and standards and that kind of thing. Taylor was about 50% a genius and 50% an outright pig. If you read his stuff in the original, you have this guy talking about a rationalist approach toward studying the things we do and delving deeply to find insights to do it better. Then he has this bifurcation between the people who are smart enough and well-motivated enough to do the thinking -- given when he wrote, they were all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants -- and the people who applied muscle to those ideas -- given when he wrote, German, non-English-speaking immigrants. It was a separation of the minds and the hands.

Taylor was right about the importance of studying something to understand the problems you have, diagnose the cause, and come up with corrective action. He was grotesque in his view of the other. What you found when you looked at the companies that had disproportionate impact on their sectors and markets is they accepted the rational side of Taylor, the need for a continuous, ongoing, deep, broad study of a problem space. But they rejected entirely his non-democratic ethos that there are thinkers and doers. They said, if you have an organization where dozens, scores, hundreds of people show up every day and engage the minds, hands, and hearts, you'll get the better outcome.

Gene Kim

Awesome. I understand that you had a 30-minute interview outside. I've heard all of you say it was an interesting half hour. Could you reflect, in no particular order, on impressions or reflections? Whoever wants to go first.

Dr. Christina Maslach

One of the things we were getting interested in talking about was thinking about this not just as individuals -- there are people who are engaged, and others who aren't or can't be -- but that we need to think about it in terms of the context and the environment people are in. How is it that we work together, manage people, inspire people, help people?

It is very much a social environment. Engagement is not just something you have all by yourself, sitting alone in a monastic cell. It's other people who get you turned on, or, "Oh my gosh, now I see something." Engagement is as much a social phenomenon. Do we do enough to figure out how to make that happen even more, less focused on a few, and really something where you think of everybody? How do you get a lot of people to reach full potential, to thrive? You don't even know where they might be able to go with it. Part of everybody's job is to look for those people, make the circumstances right, and learn how to get the best.

Gene Kim

So less about the canary, more about the coal mine that the canary is in.

Dr. Christina Maslach

Definitely. Yeah.

Gene Kim

And you were talking about the management issue of not being taught how to manage to do these things.

Dr. Steve Spear

Right. There is talk about burnout as an actual phenomenon and how to deal with people who are suffering burnout. It seems to me it would be more productive to deal with the conditions that created it in the first place, because trying to repair after the fact is not so good. One of the things you come to appreciate is materials have plastic deformation and history. The same thing is true of people. If a person has a bad experience, it is not like you have restorative actions and the effect of that bad experience is removed and erased.

We talk about physical health fairly comfortably. If someone has a busted knee, there's not a stigma to having a busted knee. You have a repair on the knee. At least in the United States, we have rules and laws meant to avoid breaking a knee on the work site, or burning, or amputation. If someone avoids having a broken knee, burn, or amputation on the work site, they're way better off than the person who suffered that and then needs restorative treatment.

I think this is a societal problem, not just a workplace problem. We don't give consideration to emotional and mental problems in the same non-stigma way. We don't talk about Lucy's depression, this anxiety, or burnout in quite the same way. But it's the same thing: a health problem and well-being problem. If we agree as a society that we don't want to create conditions in which someone gets hurt and has to be repaired physically, why would we tolerate conditions in which someone gets damaged mentally, emotionally, psychologically, and then we have to restore them? One, we can't restore them. But why put them through that trouble in the first place?

Dr. Christina Maslach

That is a nice segue into the World Health Organization. They formally recognized burnout on the basis of lots of evidence. They got it right by saying it is not a disease, not a medical condition, but an occupational phenomenon -- or experience, or hazard -- that can happen, will have health implications, and will send people to health providers and others to try to get some relief.

They identified it as a response to chronic stressors. It has the three components: exhaustion, cynicism or distancing, and inefficacy. I think they explicitly said chronic workplace stressors that have not been managed successfully. Some people said, "Oh my god, that's so vague about management." Since when is chronic workplace stress vague? I know what that feels like. When they say "not managed successfully," they left it open for how people, organizations, teams, groups, or anybody might think about how we manage this. How do we change so we don't have this as the chronic everyday experience? How do we fix or repair? With World Health, rather than narrowing it, they opened it for many more ways of thinking about this kind of thing.

Gene Kim

That was going to be my next question. Let's put it front and center. One of the genesis points came from my co-conspirator John Willis: the supposition that engagement and burnout are diametric opposites on a pole. Is that true? Is it fair to say that on one extreme you have the conditions associated with burnout, and on the other side you have an engaged workplace?

To make it more concrete, one of my biggest takeaways from yesterday was that it has been well known for hundreds of years that great organizations that succeed economically are about workplace engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. If you master those three things, the rest will come naturally. Wouldn't it be great if we could associate the bad things about the workplace with burnout and the positive things we want with employee engagement? I would love your expert thoughts.

Dr. Christina Maslach

Part of the challenge is there hasn't been as much work for as many years on engagement. We saw this with burnout as well: people use the same word to mean different things. What does it mean exactly? If you talk to Gallup, you're going to get a different definition than if you talk to Wilmar Schaufeli and his group at Utrecht, who developed an engagement scale. They don't have the same signifiers. They don't measure it the same way. They make different assumptions.

Gene Kim

Can you raise your hand if you have some sort of employee engagement instrument on a regular basis? Who finds that meaningful? Some do, some don't. For those who raised your hand, how many actually pay attention to those scores and use them to inform decisions you make? All right. That's your audience. These people put some import on that number or set of numbers.

Dr. Christina Maslach

The Utrecht group talks about vigor, dedication, absorption, like flow. Others talk about happiness and reaching your full potential. Gallup talks more about enthusiasm and emotional commitment. We were talking about the reverse of burnout: energy and enthusiasm, deep involvement, and a sense of real efficacy and competence. They're all positive, but they're not always the same thing.

One thing I point out when I talk with managers and management about engagement is that they really like the Gallup concept of discretionary effort. Engaged employees who score high put in discretionary effort, which means they will do more work than they're supposed to, and I don't have to pay them any more. This is getting more for less, and people are really enthusiastic about it. This is not what Schaufeli and others would go with, because the person doing more than they need to, motivated to do 150% rather than 100% of their job, may look good for some people, but for the employees themselves, they may not be the happy, passionate person who says, "Oh my gosh, I've found my thing."

You're not always speaking the same language when you talk about engagement: what it means and why you're finding out if you have engaged employees. In general, every year when different groups say they're measuring engagement, it tends to hover around 30% of the workforce, maybe a little more or less. If we do an entire sample and divide it into those five profiles I was showing, the engaged profile is about 29 or 30%, a third. That begs the question, what about the other 70%?

To pick on Gallup again, you get three types of employees: engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged. Usually it'll be around 30% engaged and maybe half that for actively disengaged. I wonder, are you talking about burned out ones or something else? That leaves at least half your employees in the not engaged. Gallup talks about them as satisfied but not fully engaged. They even have terms I consider derogatory, like they're sleepwalking, just going through the job, working for the next break. They're fine. They're okay. But that's the majority. I worry that if you have a particular engagement hammer, every nail you're looking at is in those terms.

Gene Kim

Steve, I noticed you scrawled some thoughts down.

Dr. Steve Spear

Two: purposefulness and confidence. When you're managing other people, do you give them a sense of purposefulness, that their actions have value and appreciation by someone else? Here's an example. When we go outside and take a break, there will be people working in the conference center serving coffee. Some will think their job is to serve coffee. Their sense of self is, "What did I do today? I brewed coffee and served coffee," probably measured in cups served. There will be some people who, either by how they're managed or intrinsically, are not serving coffee. They are giving you restoration -- resuscitation -- at a break. Coffee and tea happen to be the implement they're using to accomplish that goal.

When you go back to your own organizations, spot check people. Are they defining their work by the physicality of the activity they're doing, or by the appreciated outcome of the work they're doing? That's the purposefulness piece.

The confidence piece is: even if I have purposeful engagement, do I have confidence that when I go to do what I'm supposed to do, I'll actually succeed in fulfilling that purpose? The flip side of confidence is frustration. There is purposefulness and purposelessness. If you couple purposefulness and confidence, that sounds like a good emotional state. If you couple purposelessness with frustration, that seems to be a poor emotional state. Who gets to control that? The people who make decisions for others in terms of how their minds and hands will be, or won't be, engaged.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

To combine those thoughts, we've seen ways to enact this and empower people in organizations. To go back to some of the Gallup work, we had a shared concern that many times the recommended course of action is to attend only to the actively disengaged portion of the workforce, be happy about the engaged portion because you're getting extra work for free, and basically ignore the middle because they're fine.

If we want to encourage purposeful work and confidence, and pay attention to everyone in terms of engagement, some of the best things we've seen through data and research is that, from a leadership point of view, we can set goals and priorities and then empower everyone else to determine how to best achieve those goals. That gives them a purpose. It empowers them to achieve it. It gives them confidence when they're able to achieve it. It grows their skills and abilities so they can ascend through the ranks, for lack of a better term. It addresses everyone. You're not only paying attention to the people at the tail end. It helps everyone along the way.

The challenge is that it takes work because you have to set clear goals and objectives. It takes trust. It takes work to let go of the reins.

Gene Kim

When I hear faith, I'm substituting the word trust: trust that I can verbalize an intent and mobilize a team around me.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

Trust that they know how to design solutions and execute on them. Trust that if my team designs a solution different than I may have designed it, I will let them execute and try and see what happens.

Gene Kim

The word that comes to mind is psychological safety. Not as a one-to-one replacement, but something that came out in your talk, Dr. Maslach, was psychological safety. Dr. Spear, you've brought up psychological safety in terms of worker and leader. It has come up many times through the State of DevOps Report and Google research. Can we talk about its relevance or importance?

Dr. Christina Maslach

There's been a lot of work recently on that. Before, it was really much more about physical safety: physical hazards, exposure to chemicals, jobs where you might get injured or attacked. It took a while before people recognized a parallel in feeling not that you're at risk for physical injury or disease, but that you're under attack verbally, bullied, teased, deliberately not told what you need to know as the new person, going through hazing. Also feeling unsafe when you need advice or help and don't know where to go.

Safety also begins to branch into things having to do with fairness. It is not a safe place if people like me never seem to get the new opportunity or promotion. What's going on here? It doesn't feel like a comfortable, safe environment if I feel I may not really be accepted or I'm here as a token.

Gene Kim

You spent a good chunk of your earlier career, Dr. Spear, on workplace safety. Is physical safety to manufacturing as psychological safety is to knowledge work? That came from Raj Fowler.

Dr. Steve Spear

I'm going to throw a Frederick Winslow Taylor flag on that one, because it implies that in the physical work environment, people aren't concerned about psychological safety, and in the knowledge workplace, people aren't concerned about physical safety. The safest employers in the United States, at least in mining and refining, can be safer places to work than a typical hospital or office. Don't separate hands and minds. They go together. Someone who has the expectation of physical safety also wants the expectation of emotional safety.

If you're in a complex, high-risk, high-hazard physical environment and something goes wrong, how is that approached? Is it, "Gene, you did that wrong. You created that defect, that hazard," or, "A defect occurred. You happened to be part of the circumstances, but there was a lot else going on"? Were you the cause, or were you swept up in conditions we can collectively understand? Because you were the person swept up in those circumstances, we don't need to blame you. We need to tap into your experience, because you have a subtle and nuanced understanding of what occurred that the rest of us lack.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

Plus one everything you've just said.

Dr. Christina Maslach

I want to pick up on not dividing it into physical work and knowledge work. One of the hazards for women in a lot of workplaces is sexual assault. This can happen if you're in the fireman's crew or mining, or if you're a knowledge worker. Having to deal with those kinds of things means it doesn't feel safe to work there, because you don't know when you're going to get hit on in a way that's not good. We need to think about psychological safety more broadly for all kinds of people in all kinds of work.

Gene Kim

What's the false duality you accused me of having?

Dr. Steve Spear

A human being shows up at your workplace. To say that in some places they check their mind at the door and show up with their body, and in other places they check their body at the door and show up with their mind, that doesn't sit.

Gene Kim

What are specific recommendations for technology leaders to make the workplace a better place?

Dr. Steve Spear

You spend your day looking for bugs. You have complex technical systems, and you spend all day looking for bugs that will compromise their performance. Do the same thing. Step up one or two layers from the devices you're designing, building, and managing, and look at the social overlay on top of those. There will be bugs there. They're evident in lack of engagement, frustration, wear and tear, and on and on. Just like technical bugs deserve attention and are fixable, social bugs also deserve attention and are fixable.

That's a positive view, because the alternative view is that the people with whom I work suck, they're whiners, and those bugs are inherent. I don't accept that premise. The alternative premise is that this is an under-designed, under-managed complex dynamic system. If we can recognize those bugs, that's a trigger. If we see those problems, we can diagnose, swarm, and solve them. If we solve them, we can raise the level of the system overall.

Gene Kim

It reminds me of General Stanley McChrystal's "Team of Teams": the team is usually the boundary of where everyone else sucks. If that boundary is you and all your colleagues, that's a bad boundary to define.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

I would say create and support opportunities for people to separate from work, particularly as we think about reducing burnout. There's good research that any time you can get a break from work, that can be physical breaks or psychological breaks. Leaders can set the example. Sometimes we leave to pick up kids, and occasionally we can send emails at night. My manager has set a fantastic example: occasionally I will get an email late at night that explicitly says, "By the way, this is not urgent. Please do not feel the need to respond to this now." Or don't send them at all.

Make sure you, for yourself, also create time: nights, weekends, vacations. The better we are at creating that separation, the better we do at recharging. Just like when we physically work out, we need to physically rest. We also need to mentally rest.

Dr. Christina Maslach

Part of being engaged with your work is that other people recognize you for being engaged and having ideas and possibilities to contribute. Employees in a lot of places get more excited when they have opportunities to talk with managers and the CEO. The old concept of walk-around management is alive and well. I see organizations where people are complaining that they're not getting money to deal with problems, arguing and finger-pointing, and then someone walks the floor for a day and sees the problem and says, "Oh, yeah, sure, we could do that." You could have asked several weeks ago.

Often people say, "I've worked hard. I'm doing good work. I'm getting paid," and then a big change comes that affects what they're doing, and nobody ever asked the core engineers whether this was good, whether it had unintended consequences, or whether they were on board. Basic respect means that if you've hired people, think they're good, and want them to get better and more engaged, spend time listening. Help them feel they are participating and contributing. Not every idea will be good, but people need to feel they have a voice. If you're going to recognize somebody, you have to know who they are and what they do enough that they know you understand what they contribute.

Gene Kim

I think there are known characteristics of what creates greatness. We've spent six years studying attributes that predict performance, whether psychological safety, using the Westrum model, what have you. You've studied empowering the frontline worker and creating supportive systems. I think we can get to a more precise set of guidelines. Nicole, summarize for us the "Accelerate" book: what you've learned about performance.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

Great performance: smart technical practices, good foundations in practice and process, and the smart things that come out of Lean canon. Invest in a good culture grounded in psychological safety. From there, if you want to improve, focus on getting better in a continuous improvement paradigm. Identify your constraint, get better at that constraint, and rinse and repeat with lots of feedback in the system. Involve the whole team. Psychological safety is key because it's the only way you're going to get feedback.

One of the keys is involving the team and engineers, and, touching back to what Christina said earlier, understand that team members from underrepresented groups may need an extra reach-out because their voices may be different or may not be heard the same way. If you do one focus group in a large conference room, they may not speak out, or their voices will be quieter. They will see things very differently. When I was an engineer, I would see things other people completely missed.

Gene Kim

Those are grounded in six years of research and 30,000 respondents. How about you, Dr. Spear?

Dr. Steve Spear

We start as technologists -- I'm not, you all are -- assuming there is an answer. If we have a system of linear equations, there's an answer. If we do a risk-adjusted net present value, there's an answer. We build assumptions that there's an answer, which means we can be right. For a lot of things we do, we're guaranteed to be wrong.

I'm giving a talk today at 5:30. I hope it's good. More than you, I really hope it's good. Something will go wrong with that talk. I guarantee it. That's the one certainty I have. I worked hard on that talk, I've worked on these ideas for a long time, I spent time on the PowerPoint, but I composed and finished it a few hours ago. I'm going to give it in a few hours, and I can't predict perfectly what the conditions will be. I don't know who will be in the room, what the room will be like, how the IT system will work, or how the dynamic at 5:30 will differ from now. That talk will not go as expected.

That's the human condition. Anytime we design, plan, or prepare for something, we like to think we're doing it with great precision, like solving equations. In fact, we're guessing. It may be within wide or narrow boundaries, but we're guessing. We have to accept that things will go wrong. If we accept that, it behooves us to get feedback early, often, clearly, and aggressively as to what's going wrong and surprising, and correct on that. If we take up the habit of recognizing that we're always going to be surprised, and that surprise is useful feedback telling us what in our prediction was wrong, then we can correct. If we reject that and say, "I'll accept no feedback," then for sure we will fail because reality will overcome our predictions.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

I would like to point out how similar our answers were. If you've been to one of my talks, I hate maturity models. They're dumb. I pointed out something similar: lay your foundations, then figure out your constraint, the next thing that's wrong, the next thing you need to fix, and fix it with feedback. Then figure out the next thing. We work in highly complex systems with complex technology, but especially people who are way more complex. I understand wanting maturity models and linear models because they make us feel safe. We want a predictable path with steps. But we need to figure out the next step ahead. We want a hypothesis and a guess, and should move toward the next step, but we can't have five to 10 steps ahead or five years ahead. Take the next best step and go.

Dr. Christina Maslach

Sometimes it's not best to say, "I have to figure out the next step." Sometimes you want another step where you say to people, "Here's the issue we're facing, and I'm hearing some stuff from you. What might be something we could do a little differently?" Maybe they come up with ideas you hadn't thought about. Some might be good, some might not. At least you're trying it out before you say, "Let's do it." People may say why an idea isn't good, and then you can try another thing.

There's an example that may sound silly, but worked well in a medical clinic. They wanted the medical team to be better prepared for the day's work, so they started an initial huddle at the beginning of the day. They looked at what patients they had, what operations were going on, who's doing what, and made sure they were prepared. On suggestions from the team, they added a moment to check in: how are you today, how are things going? It gave people an opportunity to ask questions or say, "I've got a really sick child at home," or "I've got a cold." The team could adjust: maybe give someone time to head home early, cover for them, whatever.

After a while, people on the team, including cultural groups and ethnic minorities from more hierarchical cultures where you don't question the leader or ask something because it could be rude, began to see it was okay. Everybody started participating more, even sharing things like seeing a fabulous film. It built a greater bond and enabled them to adjust as a group. Morale went up. They were highly engaged, to the point where they called it a huddle cuddle. There's the huddling to organize, and the cuddle, which is listening to each other, figuring out how to adjust or try something better. People felt empowered to speak up and contribute. Practicing it every day changed the social dynamics around the team, and it came from the people themselves.

The cuddle huddle doesn't sound big or sexy, like reinventing healthcare for the 21st century. It didn't cost money, but it changed the clinic, and they're very proud of it.

Gene Kim

I'm resonating with that. I feel physically relieved. That sounds like team outcomes, mutual support, outcome-focused, high trust. The challenge is translating concepts into everyday practice: what do we actually do tomorrow? My assertion is that you're surrounded by a community of people pioneering those practices in large organizations. If anyone would like to volunteer to interact with Dr. Maslach, I think you would value those interactions.

I have a question that came through Slack, challenged to me through Jeff Gallimore. So many organizations have leaders who believe this, whether because they've read "Accelerate" or because they're compassionate enough to know burnout is not good and want dynamic learning organizations, but they feel out of control to change the circumstances. What advice would you give them, whether communicating up, around, or down?

Dr. Steve Spear

In terms of communicating up, I don't want to be completely pessimistic and say, "Good luck with that." My suggestion is start down. You have a span of control or influence where you can affect the microenvironment over which you have control and influence. With clients, we go in aggressively unambitious on our starting point because we want to get a test of concept moving into a proof of concept of a different way of behaving, acting, and believing.

When that proof of concept scores much better on quality, productivity, happiness, or whatever else, then you have the ability to affect outward because people look over and say, "Hey, what are you doing different? I'd like to try that too." When you have an incubator in peripheral areas doing things differently and getting different outcomes, then you have data and stories. Data and stories have to be tightly coupled, but you have data and stories you can use to influence upwards. To start upward may be difficult.

Gene Kim

I love that. You're creating pockets of greatness that can be contagious. Nicole, any advice?

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

I would say the same. If you can start with your own team to get momentum. I've seen going up work once or twice, but it takes inordinate amounts of energy.

Dr. Christina Maslach

Or a really unusual up. You have to have a preexisting almost partnership already there. If you don't, you need to think about how you begin to create that and make that possible.

Gene Kim

How about I allow each person to have closing words, whether help you're looking for, reflections, or observations?

Dr. Steve Spear

Since I speak later, I have a lot of time to ask for help, which I need a lot. I want to pick up on something the doctor said earlier about soliciting and hearing voice. The advice is don't compress variety unnaturally to unnecessary consensus. The reason you have variety of opinion is because you have a situation no one understands well. That's why you have a problem in the first place. That variety of opinion reflects different perspectives and understandings which, if entertained, allow you to synthesize an understanding of the situation and construct a corrective action much better and richer than if you rush toward a single point of view too early.

Dr. Christina Maslach

I keep coming back to an image in my head of things that thrive and bloom and grow, and what you need to do that. You can get the very best plant you've ever bought. But if you put it in an environment where the soil is not good, and there's not much sun or light, it doesn't matter how much you invested. It's not going to come up and do as well as it could have in a better setting.

With engagement, it's not just about the single plant. It's about the whole garden, and the way a lot of that depends on and interacts with and gets inspiration and encouragement, not just from people at the top, but from either side and below. You're building more channels in which people can feel they are contributing in little ways, not just big ways, and being part of that and committed. Then, when there's a big challenge ahead, they're ready to go. But you have to have done the prep work to make people feel, "Yeah, I am a part of this, and I have something to contribute." What are the ways many of us in different positions can help foster that? I would love to see a thousand flowers blooming.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

That makes me think about some of the work of one of my colleagues, Jaye Goosby Smith, on inclusion. I love what you said about flowers blooming and that without good soil, no one can really bloom. I would like to encourage all of us to help amplify the voices of everyone, and in particular underrepresented groups, as we try to encourage engagement throughout our organizations and watch out for each other.

This came up earlier in our interview when we think about burnout. Sometimes people who are burned out, we don't necessarily see because we think it's unsafe to speak out, so we all put on a brave face. Think about how we're peers or friends to each other. Look out for each other and amplify the voices for anyone underrepresented among us, in particular people and women of color in our field.

Gene Kim

Thank you for this great panel. By the way, I've been waiting the whole hour to crack this joke, but couldn't figure out how to get it in, so I'll tell it because I don't want it to go to waste. I was thinking about the coffee servers. With purposefulness and confidence, I think I can do a good job resuscitating attendees by putting amphetamines into the drinks, and I feel like that will help the organization achieve its goals.

Thank you so much, Dr. Spear, Dr. Maslach, and Dr. Forsgren.

Dr. Christina Maslach

Okay. Thank you.