Humans are wired to connect; our relationships with other people help us through bad times and celebrate the good. We get inspired by conversations with other people, benefit from learning about how others see the world and find magic when we join up ideas and collaborate on solutions.
The pandemic has taken some of this away from us. We’ve gone into a survival holding pattern that has left people lonely and lacking the social connections they need. In this talk, we will celebrate connecting people, the power of communities and the magic of serendipity, then look at ways to bring these back into our lives.
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Hello. It's nothing like a whole room of eyes looking at you to kind of trigger your fight or flight. I must stay here. Okay. So I am going to talk about the magic of human connection. Something that I hope we can all take advantage of at this conference.
So my name is Emily. Hello. I'm an agile and delivery and organizational consultant. The way that I kind of, my agile lens, I guess, is around people and creating the right environments and cultures for people to be the best that they can be.
So that includes connecting people, the right kind of teams, good habits. And I do a lot of work around communities of practice as well. Ask me about that later. But generally I believe we are better together. And hopefully after this talk, you'll see why I think that and you'll think the same thing too.
So, no, this is this is us today, maybe tomorrow. As we start to kind of tentatively come out of lockdown or back to whatever back to whatever normal might be the future. We're doing things like meeting up with people, seeing friends, going to events, coming to things like this, and, you know, surrounding ourselves with people.
And as far back as we can kind of trace human beings, you know, as very social creatures, We traveled, lived, hunted and thrive in social communities. Those social communities and those social connections have advanced our society, and they provide us with an important part of our identity.
So you may be familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So Maslow's hierarchy of needs was introduced in nineteen forty three. And it's a motivational theory that talks about, in psychology, talking about this kind of five tier model of human needs represented here as three tiers.
So those tiers lower down, according to Maslow, have to be satisfied before the tiers higher up can be attended to. So at the bottom we have physical needs, so physiological needs like food and clothing, safety needs like shelter, job security. In the middle we have social needs like friendship, love, esteem needs like respect, status recognition, and the top self actualization, which desires to become the most that you can be.
Now the question here is, do we have this wrong? So Matthew Liebman who I'm going to quote lots of people in this talk. I will share my slides later as well. Matthew Liebman is amongst a group of social psychologists who say that we do have this wrong.
It go wrong. So what the thing to consider here is the fact that human beings are born whilst our brains are still growing. Like, it takes us quite a while to be at the point where we can look after ourselves. It takes us years for that.
Other mammals aren't the same, but it takes us a long time. So our number one need as as infants when we're first born is to connect with other people that can provide us with those physical needs. So we have social needs at the bottom.
And that doesn't go away our entire life. So that helps us strive and that helps us to grow. So those social needs come first, connecting with people that can provide us with our physical needs. So we are wired to connect. And how does this present in our society?
So I'd all like you to imagine, if you will, you're in the park. It's a sunny day. It's maybe not November in Edinburgh. And you're with two of your friends, and you're throwing a ball around, and you're playing kind of playing catch and having a great time and trying not to drop the ball.
And for whatever reason, your friends just stop throwing the ball to you. They just keep throwing the ball to each other and just leave you out of it. Think I don't really understand why. So how does that feel? Well, this was part of an experiment that was done by Matthew Liebman with Naomi Eisenberger.
And what they did is they played out this scenario for people that were in a fMRI scanner to understand how that situation affected their brains. And what they found was that the FOMO is real. So what they found is that the parts of your brain that light up when you have that social pain, when you feel that you're not included in something, are the same parts of your brain that light up when you have physical pain.
So the physical and social pain rely on the same parts of the underlying system for their operation. So Matthew excuse me. Matthew Lieberman wrote a book called Social, which I'd recommend reading, which talks all about why our brains are wired to connect. And he says this, that we intuitively believe that social and physical pain are radically different kinds of experiences, yet the way our brain treats them suggests they're more similar than we imagine.
So not being part of a social group actually hurts us. Okay. Sorry. So another thing I just wanted to talk about, and this is something that came up during lockdown. And it's an article there was an article in the New York Times that talked about this.
It talked about this thing called languishing, which is the lockdown condition. So the journalist in this article said that he was talking to a bunch of people, and they were saying things like, I feel like I'm living my life in a fog. My brain isn't working properly.
I'm having trouble concentrating. It's kind of not burnout. It's not depression, but it's also not thriving. There's kind of a feeling of stagnation about it. And I saw this, and it's I talk about the emotional long haul of the pandemic. So I saw this article, I thought, yeah, I can relate to that.
I feel that that's been my state as well. And lot of us anxious about what the future holds. And even people that are introverts, like I consider myself an introvert, have really started to suffer from not having social connections with other people. This term languishing was coined by sociologist Corey Keyes. Just want to put that in there.
So in an article in The Independent, Carrie Cooper, a professional of organizational psychology and health, says this, says languishing is prevalent because of the lack of real time social contact with those that you care about, amongst some other things. But I'm going to focus on that lack of real time social contact.
And, you know, lockdown states with everything that's been going on has meant we've had a lot less real time social contact, which has a direct impact on our mental health. And I've definitely seen people are working more and more. I don't know if you've seen this or felt this.
It's like you don't have that disconnect between work life and home life, particularly if you're working at your kitchen table, and there isn't even a physical disconnect between your work life and your home life. So that's really kind of impacted us in quite a big way.
As well as this, this is Sean Aker. This is a book called The Happiness Advantage. And what he says is that people who survive stress the best increase their social investments. And that's something, again, that's something we haven't been able to do. And we've kind of actively been encouraged against doing.
At the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of organizations were scrambling to get the tech right of how do we actually even work? How do we how do we even do that? And kind of forgotten about the cultural side of it, which people are only kind of now trying to trying to catch up with.
And to to this, this is another great person. This is Doctor. Laurie Santos who's a professor of psychology at Yale. She references she's got a great podcast called The Happiness Lab, which is ways to help you be a happier person. And she references some research to say that the simple act of making a social connection, like even talking to a stranger on a train or a coffee shop can significantly increase our positive mood.
And I find this actually, if I'm out running and another runner kind of waves or smiles, it like kind of uplifts me and it helps helps the run and it makes me feel much better about it. So it's really important to take time to build your social connections.
Know, I've talked about the fact that we are inherently social and that we need to connect with other people. It's important for our mental health. So make sure, first of all, make sure you take time to do that. So what does this mean in the workplace?
Well, organizations are collections of people, and we are social beings, so we need to connect with other people. It's not only in our wiring, it actually helps us helps work to become more frictionless. It helps build trust. It makes things better. And social connections influence us at work, and they help expand our knowledge and our thinking.
And together we can do amazing things. I love this picture of murmuration of starlings, where starlings actually protect each other and teach each other about good feeding places as they connect through this murmuration. So we thrive in social groups. It helps make us motivated and happy.
This guy here, this is Alex Pentland. He spends a lot of time studying organizations and seeing how people communicate with each other. And has found that people organizations where people talk to each other are more successful than organizations where people don't talk to each other.
Who'd have thought it? And he says that human communities develop a sort of collective intelligence that's greater than the member's individual intelligence. And the reason I kind of attribute to this is that when we collaborate with other people, what we're able to do is we're able to bring all of our different experiences to the table and build on top of each other's experiences.
And this is increased when those experiences are more diverse. So the more diverse bunch of people that we have with diverse experiences, the better collaboration we get, the better, the less blind spots we get, kind of more neural pathways in the way that we think about things helps us to collaborate even better.
Excuse me. And there was some research done in the 1930s that actually said, that showed that groups solving complex problems, this is groups of four people solving multi step problems, were far more effective than individuals solving those same problems. So what was found there in this research is that groups turned in fifty three percent correct answers to complex problems and individuals turned in seven point nine percent correct answers.
And some of the reasons for this is that people are sense checking each other's answers. They're bringing different experiences in. They're able to solve problems better than individuals are. So this isn't this isn't new information. But sometimes I often feel that companies go against this knowledge.
We know this stuff, right? But we often our structures and our reward structures don't help with this. So this is Margaret Heffernan. She's an organizational consultant. She does this great talk called forget the pecking order at work that talks about how rewarding people on an individualistic basis makes your organizations worse.
That never happens, right? In HR departments. So she says that companies don't have ideas. Only people do. And what motivates them is the bonds and loyalties between them. So taking that time to build that trust and build that empathy and build those bonds between people is really important.
I once I was working in an organization where I won't go into how I did this, but I mapped out how knowledge flowed across a particular function. These are people all doing a similar role. And I mapped where kind of knowledge flowed between them, who talked to who, where the little groupings were.
And it was really surprising to see that there were definitely people on the outskirts that weren't sharing information with each other, even though they were doing the same thing. And we get silos of knowledge, silos of information, expertise, learning, support, work and decision making.
Actually one other organization I was working with, I was speaking to their iOS team, they told one of their iOS teams and they told me they spent three weeks trying to fix a problem. And only later, when I brought them together through a community of practice, they realized that another team had previously fixed that problem, and they basically wasted three weeks of time.
Had they only been talking to each other, then they would have found the solution straight away. To add to that, some more research for you here, is that lonely people don't do very well at work. There was this research was called No Employee in Ireland, and was looking at workplace loneliness.
And this was pre pandemic. And they were understanding, you know, how does loneliness defined as a sense of being alienated or having no particular relationship or linkage with others? And how that affects people's performance. And the lonelier people feel, the reduction in their performance.
And that's because they don't feel safe to speak. Contribute. They don't feel part of the group. And this is caused by things like not having enough time to build empathy. So teams springing up, changing, people being moved around, being treated like resources, you know, interchangeable, all that stuff that means that people can't build the connections that they need with each other in order to feel like they're not lonely and feel like they're connected and actually be really productive.
And this is obviously only increased during the pandemic. So if any of you have joined an organization remotely, I'm sure you felt this even more. So remember to collaborate with each other. It's really important. We do better in teams. We do better when we build on top of each other's ideas.
And organizations are built on that trust and those connections. So I'm talk a little bit more about the importance of connecting with people across your organization. And I couldn't talk about that without mentioning serendipity. So this is a word that I feel like I've been talking about loads over the last couple of years.
So serendipity is the unexpected and fortuitous outcomes that come from chance encounters. So you could call them social accidents. And this happens if you remember when we were all in the workplace, you know, you'd be going to a meeting and you bump into somebody in the hallway and you'd have a quick chat, or you're having coffee with somebody and you talk about, you know, a problem or what you're up to, or you're waiting for someone to set up the projector in a meeting and you kind of catch up with somebody that you
haven't seen for a while or somebody you have a question for. And, or it might be that you overhear a conversation or walk past someone's wall and it's got something really interesting in it and you're like, oh, you're working on that, what's that?
So those kind of conversations used to happen when we were in the workplace. And they can help do things like make connections, join up work, spark ideas, solve problems, all those wonderful things that come from that. One thing I've noticed, and I run a online meetup, which I've been running for a few years, is that people now, they join Zoom meetings on the dot.
Like, there is no couple of people turning up early and having a chat. Everyone is in there on the dot, and they leave on the dot because they're running straight to their next meeting. So it doesn't really happen. In the workplace, we do things like make work visible, so things like show and tells.
This picture here on the left of the show and tell is actually a business analyst group talking about the work that they do in a really public place that was in the atrium of that building. And we put work on our walls. People walk past and they kind of spot things.
I always think it's worth noting whenever I talk about serendipity is to say that the Post it note is has owes a lot of its invention to serendipity, which came about after a scientist, Doctor. Spencer Silver, accidentally created microspheres. He was trying to create a strong glue, and he accidentally created a glue that was not strong but would restick.
And he spent a lot of time talking about it to other people, trying to find a place for this thing to happen. And it's only when another scientist had a problem with his bookmarks falling out of his hymn book that he remembered a seminar that he'd seen from Doctor.
Silver. And this eureka moment happened. So just by seeing you know, seeing show and tells and and and seeing other people talk about stuff helped create this eureka moment and they ended up creating the Post it note, which I'm sure you're all familiar with.
Steve Jobs also said in when he talked about designing the Pixar building that it's important that the building creates collaboration. He used to put water coolers and coffee places and bathrooms, like, really far away. So people would have to pass each other and see each other along the way and get to know each other.
I think until everyone complained that the bathrooms were too far away. So that kind of act of walking past people and seeing people and bumping into people and getting to know them kind of helps create that serendipity and helps create the opportunity for that serendipity to happen.
Other things that this is one of my favorites actually. So random coffee. So random coffee. Does anyone here do random coffee in their organizations? A few. They sound very popular, which is good. So this is the idea where people are paired up on randomly and given the chance to go and talk to each other.
So there's two two articles here. One is from Hootsuite that says it's called How two thousand Random Coffees Changed My Company Culture, which is a great read. And the other one here, which is I think it's really interesting, which is from Michigan University.
They had a thing called Innovate. They had a program called Innovate Blue, and they created a random coffee program called Innovate Brew. And what that meant is they joined up people from different faculties to come together. And faculties are kind of famously completely siloed.
So people weren't talking to each other at all to have coffee. And what they found is that it opened up their world. They call it a great investment. They said it seeds your mind with lots of ideas. And then some people would end up kind of creating projects and working together because they found they had something that they cared about in common.
But something that I think the quote on Michigan website that I really love, there's a video on there. It says it's about giving permit people the permission to talk to strangers, which I think is really important because it can be very difficult, particularly if you're new to an organization to just kind of go up to someone and speak to them.
I'll caveat that slightly with, I'm from London. And in the south, we don't talk to anyone. So yeah. So giving people the permission to go and talk to each other. Having something kind of an icebreaker is really important. So I'm going to give you a couple of ideas about how you might create an assist serendipity whilst you're distributed.
Now this is just some of my some of the things that I've done. You all there's lots of other things out there, and I'm sure you're all trying things. Hopefully you're all trying things as well. So it'd be great to hear from you in the break to see what you are trying.
So what I'm not going to talk about is kind of show and tells and company meetings, because hopefully you are still having those. I would say with show and tells, particularly when you're online, just shorten them down. If you're ever sitting there through I mean, whoever sits through one hour show and tell, and then you might you just reduce it down to the corner of your screen and carry on with your emails.
Right? Does anyone do that? So what if you had two minute show and tell? Was like, okay, I'm just going to watch the whole thing. Just this thing. So these are just some ideas. I put this is it going to go? No? Yeah.
I put this slide in. Anyone of the right of a certain age will recognize this. And anyone else will be like, what have you just put on the screen? That's really weird. I showed it to someone the other day, and they were like, no idea what that is.
So so there is no serendipity, only Zoom. I was thinking about this the other day. I went to a work kind of social event for the first time in ages. And I realized that you're kind of you talk to people, and then you kind of move around the room, and you talk to some other people.
And you move around the room, you talk to other people. This isn't surprising, but it felt surprising because it's something I hadn't done for so long. And then I thought about how when you try and have these social things on Zoom, if you have a group of people on Zoom trying to have some kind of social thing, it it's a bit like going to a party.
And everyone is sitting in one big circle facing each other and only one person is allowed to talk at any one time. And everyone has to focus really, really closely on them. That's what Zoom socials feel like. So it's really different from being like in a room with people moving around that So the first thing is random coffee.
As I mentioned before, random coffee works really well. Some of you are doing it already, which is brilliant. This is I run a meetup, as I said, which is online. It's called Agile in the Ether. And we have a Slack community with that.
And I started random coffee using the donut app a while back, mostly so people would recognize each other when they went to conferences. And then the pandemic hit and then no one went to conferences, but hey, look, we're back. And it's just so great to have like half an hour either reconnecting with somebody or meeting someone new, just kind of raising, you know, positive vibes.
And what's great about doing online is that you can have people from lots of different locations. So on the left there, actually have someone in Australia and someone in London having random coffee, which they wouldn't be able to do any other way. And not everyone does it over Zoom as well.
Sometimes they take their phone to the park and they walk and talk and they connect in that way. There's different ways to do it. This one I think is really brilliant and different way of thinking about things. So this was this is pre pandemic as well.
But this is something that Etsy did. They did a hack day and they built it on top of their HR system. And this was a way of getting people to recognize to put names and faces together. I think it was so popular that they ended up taking the multiple choice out of the bottom.
And you had to kind of write the name in because everyone was desperately trying to out game each other. But I think it's such a wonderful way to do something like that. If someone is, particularly if you're new to an organization, you start to get to recognize who people are.
So many times I think on Slack, people don't have their photos and Teams is even worse. So one other thing that I do in my okay. In my Slack group for Agile and Ether is is a channel called Daily Outside Photo. Now the point of Daily Outside Photo, I first started because I wanted to make myself go outside every day, because that at times can be a struggle.
So the idea is you go outside every day. You take a photo. You share it in the Slack group. And it's just a way of people connecting that isn't just we talk over Zoom. It's people getting to know each other's environments a little bit more, a little bit more about each other, and they have a conversation over the photo.
I posted a picture in there yesterday of Edinburgh and asked people to guess where I was, which was fairly easy for the person who was from Edinburgh in the group. So it's just a nice way to kind of build those social connections and build that trust, which isn't just, you know, looking at the Zoom screen.
There's someone else yeah, someone else I was talking to the other day said they do the crossword with their coworker on a weekly basis, which is I think is brilliant. So also join up through communities of practice. I have to mention communities of practice in every talk that I do.
So communities practice are about joining up people from across an organisation to learn from each other and support each other around a common practice area or an area of interest. So this picture actually, this is a bunch of product managers in one organisation that I worked with.
And what I said to them is, go and shake that they worked in the same building. Go and shake the hand of someone you haven't met before. And I was surprised that they all got up and shook loads of hands. I was like, oh, people don't they don't even have time to talk to each other.
So just a great way for people to meet. Again with communities of practice there's a couple of quotes here that I have from community of practice members which I think are worth sharing. The first one is from a product community who they again, they didn't get time it's a different product community.
They didn't get time to join up and talk to each other. And so just bringing them together meant they were able to link and share dependencies that they had. And the one at the bottom is actually one of my favorite quotes from a community practice member.
Just this is somebody that found that work was easier. They felt more motivated. They felt more connected because they had a support network around them. And they knew that people would be there to help them if they needed it. And it really, really helped them make them happier at work.
So if you want to know more, I wrote a book about communities of practice, or come and talk to me, or there's many talks online. But I can talk about that for hours. So my kind of third bit of advice here is create the conditions to assist serendipity.
We don't have those conditions when we're not in the same place. We don't have those conditions to kind of bump into people. And even if we're working in a hybrid environment where maybe only one team comes in or another team comes in separately.
It's like how do we finding time to kind of cross pollinate and learn outside your team is really important. Know, find times for people to eat together, like whatever that might be. We do need to go out of our way to make this happen.
So my three takeaways is take time to build your social connections. It will make you happier personally. It makes work life better. Collaborate with others for better results. Know, it makes things, we have less blind spots. We're able to build on top of each other's experiences.
And create the conditions to assist serendipity. And I will finish this deck on my favorite Venn diagram, which I often use in my talks. Is we have a beaver here on the right and a duck with a keyboard. And the magic happens when we're able to overlap, join up with each other, embrace our social connections.
Thank oh, I'll go back. Sorry. I was taking a picture. There you go. Thank you, folks.
