Transcript of "People and patterns, with Esther Derby LIVE"

[Intro Music]

Clare: Hello and welcome to Making Tech Better, Made Tech’s fortnightly podcast bringing you content from all over the world, on how to improve your software delivery. My name is Clare Sudbery, and my pronouns are, ‘she’ and ‘her’ and I am a Lead Engineer with Made Tech.

It’s Tuesday 4th May 2021 and I have Esther Derby here with me.

Clare: Hello Esther.

Esther: Hi, thanks for having me.

Clare: It’s a pleasure. This is our live launch party episode. We’ve never done a live episode before so bear with us. Why is it a launch party now? Well, to be honest because three weeks ago we were too busy launching to organise a party. I actually have a bottle of fizz in the fridge downstairs to celebrate the launch. I’m not opening it until I have stopped needing to make sense though.

For Made Tech, improving software delivery is often as much about people and their behaviour as it is about technology and systems thinking is where the two come together. This is where Esther Derby really excels, so I’m delighted she has agreed to be here with us today to talk about people and patterns.

Esther, I’m just going to do a really short bio very quickly for you. Esther is the author of Seven Rules for Positive Productive Change. She’s the co-author of Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. She’s also the co-author of Agile Retrospectives and she’s got four decades of experience of leading, observing and living organisational change.

Hello again Esther, I said hello and then I said a load of stuff. I’m going to start with the same question that I always start with. Who in this industry are you inspired by?

Esther: That varies from day to day. Various people do very inspiring things. I think in terms of purely tech, I’m inspired by Geepaw Hill and Ron Jeffries and Jessica Kerr, to name a few.

Clare: Fantastic. We did actually interview Jessica and I do have both Ron Jeffries and Geepaw Hill on my list of people I would like to interview. So hopefully we will get to them.
When I’ve seen you talking about people and patterns, you often reference systems thinking. Let’s start with that, what does systems thinking mean to you?

Esther: Well, there are systems where you can take everything apart and put everything back together, and then there are systems that are the product of the interaction of all the parts; complex, adaptive systems. I tend to live more in the space of complex adaptive systems. Systems where the interactions create something that maybe not predictable from the component parts of it, like any system with humans in it.

Clare: When people talk about systems thinking, does that literally mean thinking about complex adaptive systems?

Esther: Well, I think a lot of people associate it with Peter Senge. I tend to associate it more with complexity thinking and being more inspired by natural systems in the way I think about it.

I actually work with the human and structural parts of it. I’m not so much looking at the systems of code, although they often reflect the human and structural systems, they give rise to them.

Clare: Yes. So, I suppose there’s two ways of thinking about it; you could be thinking of a system as representing an organisation for instance, like a business. Or you could be talking about a system as being the people and the needs that they have, and the way they interact with software in order to fulfil those needs or get things done. It’s the interactions of people with software in order to achieve a particular purpose.

Esther: That’s certainly part of it but there’s always the whole and the greater whole. There are the way people are interacting with software but there’s also the way people are interacting with the policies of an organisation, and the way people are interacting with the reward systems of an organisation, or the way people are separated into departments and relationships. These are all things, for people who are in an organisation, that are contributing to patterns of interactions and patterns of results.

Clare: All of that could be described as complex adaptive systems.

Esther: Yes.

Clare: Yes. So, let’s talk a little bit about the complex adaptive bit. What do we mean by complex, and what do we mean by adaptive?

Esther: In complex systems, there is seldom direct causality. Things are massively intertwined, and they interact with each other and they affect each other, and every change creates some sort of little change in the environment. Just like in a forest system, if you plant a new type of plant community, it will suddenly affect that environment. It may hold more moisture, it may create a little shade, which shifts the environment. So yes, constantly adapting, constantly responding.

Clare: Yes. I think sometimes that’s something that people don’t necessarily take account of the way that in organisations and teams, when we interact with software, we are all changed by those interactions. You can’t take an organisation or a team and describe it as a static thing that always stays the same.

Esther: Although people would love for that to be true in many cases. If you think about the mental model that many people have of an organisation, it’s very mechanistic, which is static and unchanging. You turn the crank, and it produces a certain kind of result. So, I think we have that in our legacy as a mental model and that leads to people desiring something that is very predictable, unchanging. Then they also want adaptation when they want it but not when they don’t.

Clare: Yes, good point. It came up, actually, when I was talking to Jessica Kerr, who you mentioned before. She used a lovely phrase. One of the things that happens constantly within teams is that we are constantly producing the next versions of ourselves. I really like that way of thinking about it.

So, what we are talking about today is people and patterns. We’ve touched on systems thinking. I read an article by you about people and patterns and one of the things that I was really struck by was three bits of terminology that you introduced; containers, differences, and exchanges. Do you mind telling us a little bit about what they are?

Esther: Sure. Those terms come from Glenda Eoyang’s work in human systems dynamics. They reflect factors that are present in any system, any human system, and containers tend to hold focus. You could think of this interview as a container, it’s holding our focus right now. I’m also in a room, which is a container. You could think about my state, which has some cultural differences from other parts of the country, as a sort of container. So, they can be physical, they can be psychological, they can be organisational. They tend to hold focus.

Differences can be held within a container. They can be a source of creativity or a source of conflict. They are neither good nor bad, they just are. Exchanges are meaningful transfers of knowledge, information, affiliation, affection, money, whatever transfers between people within a container or between containers.

It’s a very, very interesting way to look at organisations. Often when I’m seeing something puzzling, that gives me some clues as to what is going on, if I just sketch out some of the containers and some of the differences in them. That can help me to understand why people are behaving in the way they are.

You see it a lot in teams that are in various different locations. People – on the org chart, there’s this nice little box that says ‘team’, but if you actually look at it from a container perspective, they may actually have the container of one location, the container of another, the container of a third, a reporting relationship that encompasses two of them is another container. Time zones can function as a container because they focus the rhythm of your life.

If we look at it from that perspective, the team container which only exists in that little box on the org chart, isn’t strong enough to counteract the pull of these other different containers; location, time zone, language, culture, past affiliation, all of those things. Very often, when someone says this team just isn’t acting like a team, I’ll sketch out the containers and say well, there’s a lot of things pulling them apart, what is pulling them together? Because when you show all the containers, it very often is just crystal clear why the pattern is what the pattern is.

Clare: Yes, okay. So, the context of this is that in the work you do, you might get called into an organisation who I guess might present you with something very concrete. They might be saying, we never deliver our software on time, or we’re having trouble managing our budget’s, or something. Then what you are going to do is try to analyse the containers, differences, and exchanges you can see within that organisation, to help them to find out why they might have problems?

Esther: It depends on the problem. If it’s teams or groups that aren’t getting along very well or aren’t functioning very well, I may look at that. If their cycle time is too long, I’m probably not going to start with containers, differences, and exchanges. I might look at the value stream, I might look at all the factors that contribute to their cycle time being so long. You have to have the right tool for the issue, and if you only have one, you are kind of stuck.

A friend of mine, actually we were both working with the same client at the same time. They had something like forty teams spread across the Middle East and Europe and India and the West Coast and the East Coast of the US. He just drew a big old container diagram that showed where all the teams were located. Then they were overlaid with what they were supposed to be working on together. He just left that picture up. Managers would come in and look at it and say, ‘What’s that?’. He would explain. This team that’s in India is working with this team on the West Coast and this other team. They are supposed to deliver together blah blah. He didn’t tell people what to do, but over time they started shifting so that teams were only two time zones apart that were expected to deliver together.

So, it can explain certain patterns of behaviour. It wouldn’t be my first place to talk about budgeting issues, probably.

Clare: The way that you describe containers, I am instantly picturing in my mind a Venn diagram. It feels as though the idea of circles and shapes overlapping, so you can see that some people belong to different sets of containers and that there are different intersections.

Esther: Yes, that’s a reasonable analogy for it.

Clare: Can you give an example – just sticking with the containers theme – can you give an example of either a real or a typical type of problem that you might think ok, yes, what I want to do at this point is draw a container diagram?

Esther: When there are issues and patterns over interaction is when I would probably use that. Another example was a group where this team just wasn’t getting along. What could possibly be going wrong here? I just drew a little diagram which started out being just the floor layout. Here’s eight of the people on the team in a team room, and here’s one person around the corner and down the hall. Right there, they’ve got a fractured container. Then I started looking at the differences on top of it, which was all of the guys on the team were men, and the person sitting down the hall was a woman. They all had a computer science background, and she had a different background. They were in their thirties and she was close to fifty. The differences and the containers lined up to amplify that difference. She was just not integrated into the team in any reasonable way, for a whole bunch of reasons that were amplified by the way the containers existed and the way they didn’t have chance to really get to know each other as people, because they were separate.

Clare: It’s interesting because in that example, the differences that you describe are clearly causing issues. There’s one group of people who are all quite closely aligned and then there’s one other person who is effectively just right on the edges of things. There are a series of differences that caused that to happen. In that case, the differences seem like they are effectively negative. I was really interested earlier when you said difference doesn’t have to be negative, difference can be a good thing, diversity, and creativity.

Esther: Well, it could have been in that case too because she had a wealth of business knowledge and experience. That difference could have been amplified to great benefit for everybody.

Clare: That was actually going to be my question. Are there times when you can take differences, acknowledge a negative impact that they are having but turn that on its head and turn it into a positive by recognising the value of diversity?

Esther: Yes, sure. Here’s another example of differences. When I was a dev manager, I had a team that was part contractors and part employees. I went to great lengths to dampen that difference because I don’t believe you can have a team with two classes of people. I treated everybody pretty much the same and that dampened that difference. However, we got a menu from on high one day, saying that contractors could no longer be in certain kinds of meetings, that you couldn’t give contractors feedback and that if there was a little birthday celebration or some other sort of celebration where the cake was paid for out of company petty cash, the contractors could not have cake. Which amplifies the difference. It says, you are a second-class person here.

Clare: Yes. No cake for you!

Esther: No cake for you. Of course, I ignored most of those.

Clare: Good for you.

Esther: Because I was more interested in having a functioning team. I think that’s a really clear example of where you can amplify that difference and you’ll get one pattern of behaviour. You’ll get people who may not be as engaged, they may not be interested in learning stuff, whatever. They are just writing their code and going home if you amplify the difference. If you dampen the difference, then you get a more cohesive group. You are more likely to have everybody learning and you are more likely to have everybody engaged in solving the problems.

Clare: Yes, absolutely. I’m going to pause there.

[Music sting]

Clare: I have to confess; I am childishly excited by the fact that I actually managed to introduce music into a live podcast episode. Anyway. While I’ve got your attention, I want to tell you a bit about Made Tech. After 21 years in the industry, I am quite choosy about who I’ll work for. The reason I am working for Made Tech and there are many reasons, we are software delivery experts with high technical standards. We work exclusively with the public sector, that is to say not for profit. We have an open-source employee handbook on GitHub, which I love. We have unlimited annual leave. What I love most about Made Tech is the people. There is a real passion to make a difference and they really care for each other.

Our Twitter handle is Made Tech, M-A-D-E-T-E-C-H. If you go to madetech.com/resources/books, you’ll find that we have a couple of free books available; Modernising Legacy Applications in the Public Sector and Building High Performance Agile Teams. We are currently recruiting in London, Bristol, South Wales, and the North of England via our Manchester Office. You can find out more about that if you go to madetech.com/careers.
[Music sting]

Clare: We were talking about containers; we were talking about differences.

Esther: Yes, but I have a question for you. You just mentioned five containers. You have London, Bristol, South Wales, Manchester – was it four or five that you mentioned?

Clare: It was four, but I talked about the North of England via our Manchester office and that made it sound like five.

Esther: Okay, so you have four containers and a fifth one being the overall company. How do you keep coherence across those different containers?

Clare: Well, that’s a great question. What’s really interesting is the fact that for the past twelve months we have all been working remotely. That’s actually made it easier in the global sense. In terms of Made Tech having one single identity and working cohesively across the boundaries of those regional containers, that has been a lot easier. The big challenge has actually been, how do we maintain some kind of regional identity? You might even ask why we want to, but there is definitely research about what makes a good size of team. When you have larger numbers of people – I think we are somewhere between 150 and 200 people, I’ve lost track because we are growing quite fast across the whole country. Within the offices, there are much smaller groups of people. It’s easier in a smaller group of people to have some sense of identity and belonging, to then work effectively together because you feel some allegiance and closeness. You can build those relationships as well. So, the challenge has been to have those regional identities, and to encourage people to spend time with each other on a regional basis.

Something that I’ve noticed about lockdown is persuading people to spend time with each other in order to bond and build trust is hard because whatever you do, it involves sitting in front of a computer. Rather than saying. ‘Now we can leave this building and go to the pub.’, if we want to spend time together, we have to make them sit in front of their computers again.

Esther: Yes.

Clare: That’s been quite a challenge. I don’t know if you’ve had any experience of that.

Esther: Sure. The whole issue of containers now that we are remote is, as you said, in some ways easier because the regional thing isn’t so salient anymore. What I have seen happen, and what I have fostered in many cases, is setting up virtual communities not necessarily around work, but around something people care about, a hobby. So, the people who smoke meat or the people who brew beer or the people who knit or the people who quilt. Whatever it is. Just have some sanctioned internal community that allows people to knit across those boundaries.

Clare: That’s a really good point.

Esther: You are looking at trying to knit within a container, so you have that regional identity. So, if there’s something that you could think about that would be a regional project – maybe it’s a volunteer regional project or something, that allows people to form around that isn’t necessarily work, that might help.

Clare: Did you just say, ‘smoke meat’?

Esther: Yes.

Clare: (Laughter)

Esther: I have friends who smoke meat, that’s their hobby.

Clare: I thought you were getting confused between people who smoke and people who eat meat. People who smoke meat. What?

Esther: They smoke meat and then they eat it.

Clare: Wow. Oh! Wait a minute, you mean like a barbecue, put it in smokehouse?

Esther: Yes.

Clare: You don’t mean roll it up into a cigarette.

Esther: No, not like that. They have these amazing smokers with all these temperature sensors, and they very carefully follow the temperature of the meat. There’s a certain point where you have to do this, it’s fancy.

Clare: Okay, that’s impressive.

Esther: It tastes really great. Unfortunately, none of my friends who smoke meat live close to me.

Clare: I don’t know anybody who smokes meat either. But I can’t get it out of my head now, the idea of somebody rolling it up into a cigarette and then eating it.

Esther: Yes, that’s gross.

Clare: It is gross.

Esther: It’s gross, no, don’t do that.

Clare: One of the things that I know that you are really interested in, and which is related to this whole thing of containers and exchanges and differences is identifying patterns. How do you identify patterns in systems?

Esther: First I’ll talk about what I mean by a pattern. That is, some even that has meaning that reoccurs over time or over space. So, sometimes you can observe them, sometimes you look at data. Data is a big place to find that kind of stuff. We are all bombarded with events all the time, and that sort of modelling allows us to get a broader, temporal view of what is going on. Or a broader special view because we might see what’s going on within our own team or within our own department, but we may not realise that this pattern replicates across many teams.

Clare: What is interesting about patterns is when you say okay, I might be helping an organisation to identify how they might be able to improve and what is the source of any problems that they are containing about. I’m going to look for patterns. It sounds obvious, it’s one of those things, you say it and you think well of course you are going to look for patterns, why wouldn’t you look for patterns? Yet it often takes an external observer such as yourself to come in and find those patterns.

Esther: Sure.

Clare: Is that because the organisations themselves are not looking for patterns? Or is it because there are going to be so many patterns? Is it about not being able to see the wood for trees, identifying the most important patterns?

Esther: Well, yes, all of the above. Now I’m going to have to tell you a story because I have a million stories.

Clare: I love stories, tell me a story!

Esther: Years and years ago, when we still lived in Minneapolis, one random weekend, it was a US holiday, our refrigerator just died. So, we rushed around to get a new refrigerator. My husband’s friend was helping move the refrigerator in. He brought his kid with him, a four-year-old. My job was to keep him entertained while they dealt with the refrigerator. My office at the time was right off the kitchen. It had a door to the kitchen, and they somehow got the refrigerator wedged in the door. Just at that moment, the kid said, ‘I need to use the potty.’

So, I’m looking at this four-year-old and I’m looking out of the window, calculating the distance to the ground, and wondering if I can lower him out the window and then run around and bring him back in the other door and get him to the potty in time.

He looks around and says, ‘Why are we thinking about the window? There’s a door right there.’ And there was. But it was a door to the living room, and I got tired of people coming into my office that way, so I had blocked it off with a bookcase. So, to me, its function as a door was completely gone. But to this little kid, who didn’t have that kind of history and that hadn’t become inured to it, it was obviously a door.

This same thing happens in organisations all the time. We just become so used to seeing something or not seeing something, that we lose all consciousness of it. So, I think it is very easy for people not to see patterns. People are, like I said, bombarded with events all the time. The pace of things happening is so intense in most organisations, that people don’t have time to step back and think.

Sometimes, they just don’t recognise that a pattern is of significance. One organisation I worked in, the very first day I was there, one of the senior Vice Presidents was upset that teams were not meeting their sprint commitments. He said, ‘Why aren’t these teams accountable?’. I just started asking different questions. I said, ‘Who was in the room when the team committed to that?’ ‘Well, the team wasn’t there, it was the Programme Manager’. So, I just asked different questions and tested a bunch of hypotheses. Eventually, we figured out that the test environment was really an issue, and it wasn’t very available, you had to wait in line for it.

The teams would take in a lot of extra work because they knew that they were going to get stuck sooner or later. They didn’t want to be slackers. They wanted to be working on something meaningful.

Clare: Yes.

Esther: So, they took on all this stuff, which meant that they didn’t finish all this other stuff. It actually masked the real problem. As long as people were saying, ‘Why aren’t they accountable?’, they were just focusing on the people rather than on the system. People are easy to see and blame and systems are harder to see. We’re taught to focus on people.

Clare: Yes, okay. I saw a talk that you did on the topic of people and patterns. You mentioned blame a few times. You talked about how common it is for people to get in a situation where they will see problems and they will blame people for them, rather than taking a step back and seeing patterns. Is that a really common thing, do you think?

Esther: Oh, for sure. People are easy to see, and patterns are harder to see. But I think businesses in some ways are just wired towards blame. We have all of these promises that are made without necessarily a great understanding of the actual capacity of the organisation. Then when the developers – often that’s the case – can’t make the promise that was made by someone who didn’t understand the capacity of the organisation, rather than say, ‘Oops, we overpromised, we’d better figure out how not to make these wild promises that we can’t meet anymore.’ The blame gets pointed at the other person.

Essentially, that happens when people feel afraid and vulnerable. I’m afraid I’m going to lose my bonus, I’m afraid I’m not going to meet my target, I might get fired. In some ways, people try to protect themselves by projecting the issue onto someone else. It very often comes from fear.

Clare: Yes. That in itself can be a pattern, can’t it?

Esther: Sure.

Clare: If you see within an organisation that several different individuals are being blamed for the same thing, they keep complaining in the example you gave: ‘Why are all the people so bad at accountability?’ If you see a pattern that you keep finding people apparently being blamed for the same thing, then hang on a minute, is it really those individuals that are the problem? Or is there something systemic that is causing this to appear to be a problem?

Something else you just mentioned, it’s something I’ve heard you talk about before, is how people are better at understanding special data than temporal data. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Esther: That’s partly why I draw so many diagrams when I’m working with people. I just sketch stuff for them. I don’t say I’m doing a container diagram. I just start sketching stuff because that makes it much easier for people to see the pattern, see what might be going on. It also means it’s no longer that I am trying to convince you of something, or we’re at odds about something. It’s like this thing is out there in front of us and we are both working on it.

I also use that term in a different sense, in terms of spatial being my part of the organisation versus a distant part of the organisation. Or now time versus what happened in the past.

Clare: Yes, fantastic. I love diagrams. I think making things visual, allowing people to see something, is incredibly powerful.

Esther: It also externalises it. It says, ‘This is a problem that is outside of us that we can work with.’ I think that can diffuse a whole level of defensiveness.

Clare: So, you are pointing at a diagram rather than a person.

Esther: Yes. And you can be shoulder to shoulder looking at it. Especially if you can have it up on a wall, you are shoulder to shoulder looking at it.

Clare: Yes. Okay, so time is marching on. I’m going to move to the questions that I always ask every guest at the end. Hopefully, you have had a bit of time to think about this. I’m going to ask you if you can, to tell me one thing about you that is true and one thing that is untrue. Don’t tell me which is which.

Esther: I roller-skated backstage at a Patti Smith concert.

Clare: That’s brilliant.

Esther: And I dye my hair.

Clare: Okay.

Esther: How do you think I get this perfect white colour?

Clare: It’s a wonderful colour. It looks like bleach to me. Okay, so you are just going to have to tell me about roller-skating backstage at a Patti Smith concert. This sounds like a good story, if it happened.

Esther: You don’t think that’s the lie?

Clare: Well, you see, the thing is, if most people had told me that they’d roller-skated backstage at a Patti Smith concert, I would say, ‘No you didn’t!’, but Esther, somehow, I feel like this is something you could have done. Was it just that you just happened to be on roller-skates because that was your preferred footwear at the time?

Esther: I don’t actually remember why I had my roller-skates with me, but I was backstage at a Patti Smith concert. I knew somebody who knew somebody. I knew somebody who was a friend of Patti Smith.

Clare: Okay. To end on a high, what is the best thing that has happened to you in the last month or so? It can be either work-related or non-work related.

Esther: In the last month or so? Can I go back a little further?

Clare: Yes.

Esther: I got vaccinated against the Coronavirus. That is the best thing that has happened.

Clare: Have you had both doses?

Esther: Yes.

Clare: Wonderful. That is very good, yes, absolutely. Where can people find you?

Esther: Esther@EstherDerby.com is my email. My website is EstherDerby.com. I’m on Twitter @EstherDerby. I’m on LinkedIn @EstherDerby. I have a YouTube Channel. If you search on Esther Derby you will find two of us. It will be obvious which one is me.

Clare: Okay. Do you have anything coming up that you would like to plug?

Esther: Well, I do a series of webinars every three months. I send out a different series of webinars on topics of interest to people who work with other humans. You can find those on my website and sign up for them.

Clare: Fantastic.

Esther: They are informal, 45 minutes and then a Q & A. They are a great way to interact with folks and share some stuff that helps with working with humans.

Clare: Brilliant. Thank you so much for speaking to me and thank you for joining our live podcast experiment!

Esther: It’s a pleasure.

Clare: Absolutely, it was a pleasure to talk to you.

As always, I’m going to summarise what you’ve just heard to help you digest it. I have to confess, this is the one bit that wasn’t recorded live, that would have been slightly beyond me. So, systems thinking is all about complex adaptive systems. That is: systems where the interactions create something that you can’t predict purely from knowing about the component parts. So, any system with humans in it.

Esther is interested in the way people interact with organisational policies and reward systems and how they are separated into departments and relationships. People tend to have static mechanistic mental models or organisations that don’t take account of the change that is inherent in complex adaptive systems.

One interesting way to look at organisations is to think about containers, differences, and exchanges, which are concepts that come from Glenda Eoyang’s work on human systems dynamics. Containers hold focus. They can be physical, psychological, or organisational. They can exert pull on other containers and have a strong impact on them. Differences happen within and between containers and can be positive but can also be problematic. Sometimes differences can prevent people from knitting across boundaries. One way of countering this is to encourage communities to form around common interests, like smoking meat.

Exchanges are meaningful transfers between people within a container or between containers. It can help to see what’s going on in an organisation to sketch out the containers, the differences, and the exchanges. Being aware of these concepts can also help you to identify patterns of interactions or results. Where a pattern is an event that has meaning and recurs over time or space. Often, it can take an external observer or a new perspective to observe patterns. To identify patterns, gathering data is key.

Once you do identify patterns, this can help you to help organisations to avoid blame, which often comes when people feel afraid or vulnerable.
In all of this, there is a strong value in using diagrams to represent what you see. You don’t have to be too prescriptive about what those diagrams are, you can simply start sketching stuff out. Because people tend to find spatial data easier to parse than time-based data.

[Music Sting]

It’s time for story time. Every other episode, I tell a story. Storytelling is useful for teaching, for unlocking empathy, for creating a sense of connection and trust in teams. I love telling stories to both children and adults. I’m a lapsed member of the UK Society for Storytelling. I’ve been using stories in the podcast to illustrate various points about effective software development, or sometimes effective teamwork.

Ten years ago, I was a high school maths teacher. I did my teaching practise in a school in Oldham, North-East of Manchester. There was a lot of poverty, there was a lot of challenging behaviour from the children. I wasn’t exhausted and disillusioned yet. At that point I was still energetic, full of ideas. In one of my classes I had a Chinese pupil who was new to the country and didn’t speak very much English. If you can try and imagine what that might feel like, that would be a very overwhelming experience. You are spending a lot of time in lessons where you don’t understand your fellow children, you don’t understand everything the teachers are saying to you. It was difficult for him.
I also had a friend and fellow student teacher, Xiaoqian, who was also Chinese. She was also feeling the impact. Her English was very good, she had been in England for quite a long time. Still, the children didn’t always understand her, and teaching is all about communication. So, she was having a difficult time sometimes as well.

Both of them, my friend, and my pupil, spoke Mandarin. I was thinking what can I do to help my pupil? I was thinking about empathy, I was thinking is there anything I can do to teach the children what it feels like to be their fellow pupil and to teach them about seeing things from somebody else’s point of view?

Then I realised the answer was right in front of me. I was a little bit worried, but I spoke to the school principal and the head of department and my mentor, and they were all excited too. I spoke to the pupil; he was on board with it. I spoke to Xiaoqian, she was well excited. So, what was the plan?

It was all about empathy. It was about what does it feel like to be surrounded by a foreign language all day? What I decided to do was to bring Xiaoqian into the school. She wasn’t actually doing her teaching practise at that school, but everyone agreed that I could bring her in to teach a whole maths lesson in Chinese.

The thing is maths is a universal language. We had a big advantage that we were teaching maths and not English. Because it is a universal language, it wasn’t difficult for us to find a topic that would work. We chose a topic with lots of diagrams which was circle theorems. We also put a lot of effort into making sure that it was a safe environment. We spoke very closely with the pupil, made sure he was absolutely on board with it and that he had get out clauses. He could let us know that if it wasn’t safe for him, if he wasn’t enjoying it.

What we did was we gave them all a crib sheet which I actually have stuck to the wall in my study as a memento, because I was so keen on all of this. It’s a little crib sheet and there are about fifteen phrases on it that we thought we would use during the lesson, with their translations, using the Chinese symbols. Nobody was allowed to speak a word of English. They all had to use the diagrams, use the crib sheet they were given and find other ways of communicating.

It was a little bit worrying. It was a little bit nerve-wracking when we finally got to the day of the lesson. I had quite a crowd at the back of the classroom as well. I had the headteacher and my mentor and the head of department and a bunch of other teachers who had just come along for the show. I was quite scared, I was worried. What if the kids had no idea what was going on? What if they didn’t play along? The thing about kids is when they are bored and when they are frustrated, that is when their behaviour starts to deteriorate. I was really quite worried that they might poke fun, that they might not engage with it. Also, that as a result it would be distressing for the Chinese pupil. And out of all of the languages we might have done this in, Chinese is probably one of the languages that is furthest from English. I’m certainly not able to even guess at what somebody is saying when they are speaking English. Whereas with a lot of other languages I can, because there are similarities and connections.

I have got such a clear memory of Xiaoqian standing at the front of the classroom. I did not have the faintest clue what she was saying, except that I did, because of the diagrams that she had drawn, because of the pointing and because of her intonation.

Then, not long after the lesson had started, she asked a question of the whole class in Chinese. The class were silent. This was the crunch point. This was oh no, what’s going to happen now? Nothing happened and I was quite worried.

Then one hand went up and then another, and then another. About ten children put their hands up and were able to answer the question that she had asked by pointing. It was absolutely wonderful. The whole lesson went on well from there. The kids loved it, I loved it, the school leadership loved it. The Chinese pupil loved it, Xiaoqian loved it. It was wonderful. But what did we learn?

I think there are quite a few things that you can learn from that. One of them is that creativity captures imaginations. If you can think of different ways of approaching problems, it can really make a difference. Allowing people to be creative and not always doing things the same way. Empathy is clearly important but sometimes it requires demonstration for people to actually know what it feels like. To actually try and create a situation where they can feel it. It’s always worth paying attention to people who might be excluded and thinking about how you can bring those people in.

When people are different, find ways for them to take control and celebrate those differences rather than trying to eradicate the differences. Celebrate diversity because it is wonderful to see other ways of experiencing things.

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Before we go, because we specialise in working for the not-for-profit sector, at Made Tech we really care about making the world a better place. So, in every podcast episode I come up with or ask people for short suggestions of how we can make life better. Today I’m going to use another one from this book that I have used a couple of times before. It’s called Change the World for a Fiver and it was recommended to me by my colleague Adam Friday. This one says, ’Spend time with someone from a different generation.’ There are two people side by side. One of them is older and one of them is younger. The older person has on their T-shirt, ‘Talk to young people, they know cool stuff you don’t.’ And the young person has on their T-shirt, ‘Talk to old people, they know cool stuff you don’t.’

I like that one, I think it’s a really nice little thing. Remember to spend time with people of different generations.

We’ve reached the end of another episode. I’ve got a few talks coming up that I’m doing. If you look at my events page on my medium blog which is linked to from my Twitter profile, all the details are there. You can find me on Twitter, @claresudbery, which might not be spelled the way that you think. There’s no ‘I’ in Clare, and ‘Sudbery’ is spelled the same way as surgery, with E-R-Y at the end.

You can find the podcast on Twitter @makingtechbett2. That’s; making, T-E-C-H-B-E-T-T-2. You can say hello, give us your feedback, give us any contributions you have for future episodes, or just have a chat with us.

Thank you to Rose for editing and we’ll be editing this episode, so hopefully there will be slightly less work than there has been on previous ones because most of what I wanted to say I have said. Thank you also to Kat Arney who runs First Create the Media and is host of the very successful Genetics Unzipped podcast. When we started making this podcast, none of us had ever made a podcast before, and her expertise and advice has been absolutely invaluable. I will put a link in the description for the episode. Thanks also to Richard Murray for the music. I might have forgotten someone, no, it’s okay, there’s more music coming. Also, in the description there will be a link to subscribe to our newsletter. We are making new episodes every fortnight. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

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