Paula Thrasher

To change minds, change words.

So I'm going to talk about something a little different just now, as soon as the slide changes.

So there's my work self. I go around and I talk about DevOps to customers at CSRA and to all of you all at conferences quite a bit. And obviously, I've spent a lot of my career kind of doing things in that space, especially around change.

And then in my personal self, I'm mom. This is my daughter, and she has an issue with executive function. And one might say I also have an issue with executive function. We won't get into how she might have come to this issue.

But if you don't know what that is, it's how your working memory, your self-talk, your emotional regulation... I describe it as like my secretary, Barb, tells me what to do. It's like there's no Barb in your brain. So that's an issue with executive function, and it's how your brain makes plans.

So if it doesn't work, it really affects everything that you do in your life, and it also affects how flexible you are and how much you're willing to make changes because your brain doesn't have the ability to change from the thing it's doing to the next thing it needs to do.

What does it look like? People think it looks like being oppositional, stubborn. It can also look like being sloppy, erratic, careless, pushy, interrupting, poor planning. You can't start something. So this is what it kind of looks like for someone that doesn't realize that the actual issue is something with the executive function of your brain.

These are kind of familiar behaviors, maybe not just in 10-year-olds you might know, but also in people we interact with. And this issue isn't something someone's doing on purpose if you have an executive function issue. It's just that your brain doesn't have Barb telling you to do the new thing, right?

So it means getting stuck on an idea or a perception. And in IT, especially when we're talking about DevOps, what's the problem? Our organizations and our people get stuck.

So how do you help someone get unstuck? What does that look like, and what can you do?

So we had an interesting experience. We've been working with my daughter since she was in kindergarten on how to get unstuck. We've actually been part of a pilot to talk about specific words. I use them, my husband uses them, her teachers use them, her babysitters use them.

"Be flexible. Great job being flexible." I say it exactly that way.

"Get unstuck. I'm getting stuck on something. How can I get unstuck?"

"Compromise. Let's compromise so that we both get something that we want."

And as we keep saying these things, we say these same words the same way because what was that other executive function problem? Self-talk. I'm creating the self-talk that her brain doesn't have.

And to our employees and other people we might encounter in our lives that have the same issue, this is self-talk. "I have plan A, and then there's plan B if plan A doesn't work. What are we going to do?"

And the more we repeat these phrases, the more they become the self-talk that we use when we're trying to coach through change and being flexible.

So that self-talk is what helps you get through the stuck. And repeating the words, specifically those exact words by everybody, that's how we get unstuck. That's how we train our brains to talk differently and think differently and get better at moving from something that we're fixated on to the new thing.

So if you want to help people that you work with, whether they do or don't have issues with executive function, be flexible, get unstuck, compromise, or think about a plan A or plan B.

Something to try might be to help reinforce that flexible behavior by using those words all the time as a group to talk about how you can become unstuck and how you can move forward.

So now you all know that in addition to talking about DevOps, I've been experimenting on my teams for all these years. But if you're ever interested in this topic, here's the book. It's based on Unstuck and On Target, and it's been an awesome program to be part of.

So bringing something from a very different part of my world into the DevOps world. And if you have any feedback or thoughts on this, you can find me on Twitter, and there's my handle. I'd love to hear it.