Christina Wodtke
Radical Thoughts On Living and Learning
In this episode of Brave UX, Christina Wodtke reminds us to stop carrying the weight of the world, to start giving others the benefit of the doubt, and to make the most of the gift that is feedback.
Highlights include:
- What did you learn about collaboration from swing dancing?
- Why do we need to give other people the benefit of the doubt?
- What was it like being an executive in big tech?
- Where can people start to develop more confidence?
- What is important to remember when giving feedback?
Who is Christina Wodtke?
Christina is one of the most impactful, established, and original thought leaders in Silicon Valley. There won’t be many of you listening who haven’t at least heard of her groundbreaking and bestselling book on OKRs, Radical Focus - now in its second edition!
A self-described “curious human” with a serious big-tech resume, her work in design and product has included redesigns and IPOs at companies such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga, and Yahoo!
But those big names only scratch the surface of Christina’s professional story. She has co-founded a tech startup, co-founded the Information Architecture Institute, founded and was the original publisher of Boxes and Arrows, and is the founder Women Talk Design.
Christina is currently preparing the next generation of product and game designers, as a full-time lecturer at Stanford University. Previously, Christina was an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts, where she taught creative entrepreneurship.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Christina Wodtke. Christina is one of the most impactful, established and original thought leaders in Silicon Valley. There won't be many of you listening who haven't at least heard of her groundbreaking and bestselling book on OKRs, Radical Focus (now in its second edition). A self-described curious human with a serious big tech resume.
- Her work in design and product has included redesigns and IPOs at companies such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga, and Yahoo. But those big names only scratched the surface of Christina's professional story. She has also worked as a Design Consultant, as a Co-Founder of the Information Architecture Institute, has also been a Co-Founder of a tech startup and is the founder and original publisher of the popular online design magazine Boxes and Arrows. Now under the care and protection of another Brave UX guest, Amy Jimenez Marquez. Christina is currently preparing the next generation of product and game designers for the real world, working in a full-time capacity as a lecturer at Stanford University. And she has previously taught creative entrepreneurship as an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts. Aside from writing Radical Focus (did I mention that it's now in its second edition?) Christina is the author of three other books, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, Pencil Me In: The Business Drawing Book for People Who Can't Draw (that's definitely me) and The Team That Managed Itself: A Story of Leadership. When Christina is not lecturing or writing, she's often found speaking publicly and advising privately across the world on topics such as design thinking for innovation, implementing OKRs with radical focus, designing high performance teams, and working with storytelling. And now she's here to spin a few yarns with me on Brave UX. Christina, welcome to the show.
- Christina Wodtke:
- Thank you so much. I'm so honored to be a guest
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Here. No, it is my pleasure. I've really been looking forward to this conversation As we were talking about before we hit record and we got through some technical difficulties together. So we are now here. It's happening. Christina, you are someone who is an interesting person and I mean that in the truest and most meaningful sense of that word. One of the many things that I learned about you preparing for today was that you used to do a bit of swing dancing.
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh my gosh.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What is swing dancing for the Unenlightened and how did you get involved in it?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh, I was a swing kid. Gosh, that was so long ago. I mean, when Big Bad Voodoo daddy was on the charts and Swingers was in the cinema, I should say. And yeah, I was living in San Francisco at the time and I would walk down to Club Deluxe and I would swing dance almost like three to five nights a week. I just love dancing so much. So swing dancing is what they did back in the forties into the fifties a little bit. And it's the kind where everybody wears the big skirts and they throw each other in the air. There was no throwing in the air with me and my best friend, but we love dancing a couple times. He almost dropped me into the drums though, so that was a thrill. He
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Was big fun. You're still friends.
- Christina Wodtke:
- Yes, we're still really good friends. Absolutely.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] That's good. I actually, I didn't know much about swing dancing, but I did watch some videos before we jumped on the call and could see it's really high energy. It certainly looks like a really good workout.
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh, it's so much fun though. The best part. And I love the music anyway. I remember my father going, why are you listening to the music of my father? Why are you listening to your grandfather's music? And I'm like, cause it's awesome cuz it swings. So I was glad to see the revival of, and I still listened to it all the time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So what, if anything, did you learn from your time swing dancing that you've applied in other areas of your life?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh, well, if you wanna learn how to collaborate, it's really fascinating to swing dance because you really have to pay very close attention to your partner because they're leading you. Although I think my friend and I took turns leading each other a little bit, he would complain that I was leading again, but eventually after doing enough dancing together that we just had a feeling about each other, I'm, he's going to flip me, he's going to spin me under his arm. And so that's sort of paying very, very close attention to someone and then practice. You don't get that the first time. And I think there's a lot of teams that get together for the very first time and they think, okay, we're just going to dive into it. We're just going to do it right. We're going to start building this product, but you're going to fall into the drums.
- I think if you do that, you really have to get to know each other. You have to decide on the norms. How are we going to interact? How are we going to solve conflict? How are we going to deal with challenges? And you have to be willing to constantly evolve it, constantly get better. I love doing weekly retros with teams, and I loved dancing a lot, practice and then going, Hey, you remember that one time when you spun me and I got stuck? Then let's not do it that way again. So again, it, it's all about feedback and learning.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now with the dancing, you mentioned there that there was sometimes some tension or it sounded like between you and your partner where they felt that you were starting to lead the dance, and that to me is a really interesting observational self observation of yours. Is that a tension that you have experienced in your professional career with peers or people that you are being managed by that tension between who's going to take charge here and who's actually going to follow the other person's lead?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh my gosh, there's always a lot of tension. How do we decide what we're going to do going forward? I remember ages ago, I was reading a book that was a bunch of interviews with CEOs and there's one quote I've never forgotten, which is, if we're arguing with opinions, my opinion wins. And I realized, yeah, that's that. If you're in a position where you're not the final decider, which almost nobody really is, to be honest, then you have to argue with logic, with insights, with data. You can't just be like, I really feel it's this way. And I'm like, I'm glad you have feelings, good for you. But I also think about a lot when I first started coaching, so I went to a Stanford continuing education a while back. They have the most amazing teachers there. It's discontinuing education. And I actually took a class from Julia Child's editor on how to do food writing.
- I mean, it's just really fun and smart and amazing. But I took this one day coaching class and I hadn't really realized that when you go into coach, you are not coaching with your body of knowledge. You're coaching to listen and you're really helping people learn how to solve their own problems and teach them a way of looking at things. And I've gotta say, I'm a fixer. I'm a fixer all the way down to my toes. So I'd be talking to someone and I'm like, I know the answer. I know the answer. I'm like, Hermione, ah, hi, I can't. And I was like, no, I, okay, I've gotta figure out. I'm have to ask 'em a question. I have to ask them to compare, what's the advantage of this? What's the advantage of that? And that was me learning not to lead more than almost anything else in my life was. And then at the very end you can say, Hey, I have a couple ideas if you'd like to hear them. Consent makes everything possible. So once a person goes, oh yes, it's them changing their mindset instead of you just dumping ideas to them, you're offering your ideas. And then when they say, yes, I'd like to hear them, they're still in a position of power. They're still in a position of control. And that makes it easier for them to hear what you're trying to say.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've just made a rather large light bulb go off in my brain. And it's to do with giving people advice. And every now and then, I'm sure you've experienced this as well, but just recently I had a situation with a friend that I felt compelled to offer them some advice, sort of take it or leave it kind of advice. But that technique that you've just mentioned there of actually asking for their consent, checking in with them as to whether or not they're ready for it. Yeah, I feel like I didn't do a very good job of that and I probably never have. So this conversation, we may as well just end it here. That's been super valuable. Thank you. Christina [laugh]. Just kidding. But that is, wow, what an insight. And you seem to suggest that this is something that taking that breath and asking for that consent and letting the other person be receptive of this, sounds like that's something that's also been a bit of a, oh, I don't wanna say struggle, but it's certainly something that you've been working on.
- And I wanna go back and now if we may into your childhood, and while this isn't a therapy session, I promise, but I was curious about a couple of dimensions of your life, one of them that you've just raised proactively here, which is this this will to lead and this ability to lead and how you are working on your leadership style over time. But the other thing that I wanted to touch on was that I heard you briefly reflect on your childhood in a previous interview. I think it was on the product podcast one. And I heard you say, and I'll quote you now, I was one of those kids who in seventh grade tried to read every book in the library. And I was wondering, where did this thirst, where did you, I mean you're clearly, you have a thirst for knowledge. It's expressed in your career that we can see publicly now, but where did this originate from?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Who knows? Is it nature? Is it nurture? I mean, I've always been curious and I always wanna know things and I love it. I love that feeling of going from being confused or lost or feeling, I don't even know how to say it. There's a hole in me about things that I don't understand and don't know. And so yeah, my whole life I've been, I just enjoy it. So I read every book because we didn't have the internet then, so just anything anybody wanted to teach me, I was down for it. Sometimes I think it's, we've lost something that way because it used to be that I would literally read absolutely anything, which meant I would read much more broadly than I do now. It's very easy to get only the kind of books you like, and if you don't like something, there's 40, 50, a hundred more in the same space that you could read instead.
- I think that being pushed is good. I just experienced it again and it was horrible. And then wonderful. So the spring, I was teaching a college class because he was on sabbatical and it's social computing and this is my space. I worked at LinkedIn, MySpace, et cetera, and I thought, okay, I can take over this class. It'll be super easy. Things have changed. There's a lot of new knowledge since then. And so I'm reading five to 10 academic papers a week. In the beginning it was like a nightmare. It was digging going, oh, why do people have to write like this? But after a while, I got good at it. It's like any muscle. It's like, okay, here's where the useful information is, where the conclusions are. This is what it means within the larger scope of things. And it made me better. And so I think it's very important for people to think about what am I doing to improve myself and what am I doing to take care of myself? So every morning when I get coffee, I read and because I just woke up and I have coffee, I read hard stuff, stuff like the academic papers. And then every evening when I'm tired, I have a glass of wine or soda water depending on the evening. And I'll read fun fiction just to relax. And that rhythm of getting yourself to grow but then relaxing and enjoying very important I think at least it's very important for me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I know that's been a journey of discovery for you as well throughout your career. And I do want to come to, in particular, your time at Zinger and your decision around leaving the corporate life behind in favor of education. And I promise we'll get there before we do those. Is it true that you come from a long line of librarians?
- Christina Wodtke:
- There have been a surprising number of librarians in my family. My parents were lawyers, which is not librarians, but trust me, lot of words, a lot of books in their lives. But yeah, and my cousin Katie is currently a practicing librarian and there's librarians throughout. I mean, books were always part of my growing up. And my parents would take me to a bookstore and we were so poor, we were so broke when we were growing up. Sometimes we'd have scrambled eggs for dinner cuz that was the most affordable way to get protein and that's fine. Luckily my dad is a tremendous cook. But if we went to a bookstore, I could have any book I wanted. It was just understood. I would find a book and my parents would buy it for me. And it's sort of built into me this idea that some things are worth paying for no matter what. And knowledge is one of
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Them. There's been a high price paid in many respects for many people to actually create and for us to have that knowledge that we now have so much ease of access to as well. I think what you've said is a wonderful gift that your parents gave you. Where did they get that gift from?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh, just we're very literate. People going back, like I said, lots of librarians, lots of other reading professions throughout, but they met at Carleton College and it's a very small university in Minnesota. I don't know if you know where that is, but it's in the middle on the top bits and very cold and lots and lots of reading. I mean I think we often wanna know where things come from, but I think it's more important to ask ourselves, what does this thing mean for me? So I can't say where it came from. I know this is who I am. It's I suppose being gay or being female or being male, you kind of just know these things. I know I'm built to learn and that's something that's profound about me as any other aspect of who I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Am. Well, speaking of another aspect of who you are, I heard you mention almost casually and in one of your other interviews that you had dyslexia. Is this the case?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh yes. I have dyslexia and D h, adhd. It's been fun with a d h ADHD because if you read the literature they say, oh, it's most often found in children. But now I have all these friends who are like, I just got diagnosed with a d h, adhd, I just got diagnosed. And so I think it's was diagnosed in children, but I think it's prevalent in adults as well. And the reason it's diagnosed in children along with dyslexia is the teachers go, this kid will not sit still and listen to me or this kid writes can't spell to save their life. Which was basically things that people thought about me. And it's actually, it's a little bit dyslexia and my kid has it too, but it's mostly dyscalculia, which is something very few people have heard of. So I usually say dyslexia, but it's really very extreme with numbers and maps.
- Although I think dyslexic have trouble with maps too. It's a symbol recognition problem in your brain, which means often you're very verbal, you're often really good at taking in audio information and you're harder for you to either read or do math or combination. And it does usually mean dysgraphia, which is terrible handwriting. Cuz again, making the symbols is hard. So we've been reading and writing only fairly recently in the history of all humanity. John Macor says that if all of human history was a clock, we started reading at 11:00 PM So that kind of gets you an idea. So we're not completely evolved to reading. Some people are more, some people are less. And then when you evolve towards reading, you get a little lazy in the audio processing as my understanding. I'm not a doctor, just a nerd who likes to research these things out. So instead of thinking of it as a learning problem, you have to see it as sort of something that has pluses and minuses just like everything else. I'm good at some things and I'm less good at other things and if I'm not good at it, I just have to work harder. So,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well something that you are very good at, masterful at as storytelling, whether that be spoken like we're doing today or whether that be in the books that you've written. So hearing you talk about the dyslexia that you have, and I can't say it properly, but I'll have a go Dyscalculia, is that close?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Yeah, dyscalculia. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is this something, this storytelling, this ability to communicate meaning to people and really them to have a deep understanding of what it is that you're getting across to them. Is this something that has come easy to you or is this something that you've actually had to work quite hard at from perhaps a base that is not the same starting point as some other people may have had?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh, well it's very, very easy for me to tell stories orally. I've always made them up since I was little. I always have these really complicated, ridiculous fantasy stories and it was really fun and I'd tell stories to my kid that I'd make up. But writing is actually fairly hard, partially because I have repetitive stress injuries, R rsi a little bit like carpal tunnel and typing. I never learned to type properly. I think all kids are taught to type properly now, but back in the old days you would learn to type if that was going to be part of your profession. Now it's unavoidable. So I'm not the world's best typist. And so when I'm writing things down, I'm a little, I'm definitely slower. But I think that that lends my pros and economy in the style in that I know I'll never write Purple Pros.
- It's just too much work. I'll always write things that are much more on the Hemingway side, not that I'm Hemingway, but a little shorter, a little crisper. And it means I'll think a little more about each sentence because I have to. And I think that that's actually a benefit. I think most things in life, people categorize as either bad or good, and very few of them are either, most of the time it's a mess of things. So sure, I wish I could type super fast, but that's not who I am. And there are some advantages to going slow
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is a realization that I assume only comes with a healthy dose of hard work and self-reflection. Been talking for the most part and age. As I age, I'm finding out that there are some positive and negative parts of getting older, but we won't go into those. We we've been talking about learning for the most part here, and I know that for the past 11 years or so, you've been helping students, as I mentioned in your introduction to learn about design. And you spent a significant part of your career before that, both as a design and product leader within tech organizations and your efforts there seem to me at least to have been trying to help those organizations to learn what works, what doesn't, and why. You've also through your work at Boxes and Arrows, which is now, as I mentioned, Amy Jimenez. Marquez is looking after now and in charge of, you've been helping and through the INF Information Architecture Institute, you've been helping designers to learn things that advance their practice. Why has supporting other people's learning been such a central focus for your career?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Well the short answer is nacu, which is a wonderful Yiddish word that means the pride in somebody else's accomplishment. So when your kid hits a home run or your students make something really incredible, which mine definitely do a really smart escape room. I taught game design in the spring and they made escape rooms, which was so awesome. It's like a high, they're feeling good cuz they're making stuff and they're learning and you're feeling good cuz you get to be there in part of it. It's just, it's a fabulous emotion. I really enjoy it. The other one is really simple, which is, man, things suck. I think tech is a shit show. I hate to say it. Look at the tools we're using. They're buggy, they're crappy. And people are doing things that are very ethically suss. Like a little button that used to say, yes, I wanna get the newsletter.
- No thank you. Now says, yes, I want the new newsletter maybe later. And that way they can keep popping the popup on you over and over and over again. And I'm just so frustrated at the sort of abusive relationship that human beings and technology seem to have at this time. And I say at this time, because in the old days, walk 10 miles each way uphill to school. Now, back in the old days, there was a real passion for human computer interaction. Really making things good, making people more efficient, making people feel more satisfied, really making them happy. And I think that a lot of people fall into this tension between making money or making people happy. And I just think that's lazy. If you work hard enough, you can get all the goals met. So I wanted to, well I didn't just do it right away when I left industry. I Am I jumping ahead? No,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Not at all. Go wherever you like.
- Christina Wodtke:
- Well, when I left industry, I was just so frigging blurred out. I was really tired. I was like, okay, I have to do something else. What will it be? I thought, well I really love food. So I went to culinary school for six weeks, not the full two years. And I love that I learned so much, but it was too physically demanding for someone who's a little bit older. You're on your feet a long time. And so I thought, well maybe not culinary school, so maybe I'll help a food startup. And I consulted with some food startups and I realized that the food business has really low margins and if I kept doing it, I would end up hating food. So I said, okay, let's leave food in this happy place as a hobby. Let's not do it for a living. And I thought, well maybe I'd like to teach.
- And I taught one class in the evening, met twice a week at General Assembly, and I thought, I really like this. I really like this a lot. It feels good. And whenever I'm looking at my life, I think about what am I optimizing for? Am I optimizing for money or am I optimizing for joy or am I optimizing for learning? And I used to optimize for learning, but I've been more and more optimizing for joy, which includes learning for me anyway. And so I was following that trail of joy, how can I make myself happy? And teaching turned out to be something that made me profoundly happy and gave me meaning a lot of meaning. So I want products to be good. I want my life to be happy. I wanna work where I have a good skillset, where I'm strong and I have knowledge.
- And this meant all the things I was looking for. So yeah, I did design simply cuz that was the easiest one to do and find out about. But this fall I'm teaching a new product management class at Stanford, which I'm very excited by. I've always want taught business back in the art school to designers. I'm like, designers should understand business cuz that way they'll get invited to all the good meetings. But then now I'm trying to say, okay, how do you balance, navigate and balance thinking about keeping the business healthy and keeping your customers committed to your company and working well with the people inside the company. So with this class human-centered product management, I'm going to be teaching not only how to understand customers, but also how do you work with other human beings who are not like you. And that can be quite challenging.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes. Can't it? One of life's greatest challenges is how do we work together with the people that are close to us and also the people we come into occasional contact with is certainly something that I think I mentioned before we recorded, I'm an only child so it's maybe something that hasn't naturally [laugh] come to me been working on myself. You mentioned leaving zinger, you said, I dunno if I'm quoting you correctly here, but it sounded like burnout or near to burnout, what you were experiencing. That was back in 2012, right? So that's around about a decade ago. I just wanna quote something that you said when you about leaving zinger now, which is because you swore it was going to be your last corporate job and you said, I've been a senior executive for quite a while and I will tell you something about being a senior executive. You do not own your own time. I used to message my boss at 2:00 AM because that's when she had the time to talk to me. I realized this was not really a life that was working out for me. What's not life? What? What's not to like about messaging your boss at 2:00 AM Isn't that just what we do?
- Christina Wodtke:
- I'm a big fan of questioning just what we do. [laugh] as much as humanly possible. And if I can't change the world, at least I can change my world. So yeah, don't on your time, there's all these critical meetings, there's all these critical conversations. You're running around if you want to do get anything done. It has to happen when the workdays ended because the whole workday is full of meetings and whatnot. And some of the meetings are great and some of the meetings are horrible. I don't hate all meetings. The reality is if you're a manager, your job is to go to meetings. So you just have to suck it up and figure out how to make, cause I'm make going to meetings acceptable to you, make the meetings better is usually the answer to that. But yeah, I was like, no, I want time to really think.
- I'm starting to think that right now we should start a slow tech movement. I don't know if you've ever heard of the slow food movement. I think it's really wonderful. It happened when the first McDonald's was opened up in Rome near the Tre Fountain. And it so upset the Italians. They started the slow food movement, which said, let's take our time and use beautiful ingredients and make things from hand. And for me, slow tech would be, let's slow down and really think about these hard decisions that we're making So fastly, can we sit down and really think what are the ethical ramifications of these choices? What would happen if it went horribly sideways? And these are all really, really important
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Questions. What's interesting about that McDonald's is I believe I actually visited [laugh] that McDonald's when I was in Rome and now I feel terrible. It's almost like it was it a decision that I should have thought harder about. But the reason why I was heading tore to the Travi fountain is after World War ii, my grandfather who served in the New Zealand Army and fought in North Africa and Italy, he had a photo taken of him and some of his mates after, oh actually after the campaign was no more after the war and Europe had been won on the Travi fountain and also on the, I think there's a step somewhere nearby as well. So anyway, I digress. I understand that when you were reframing your, you are talking about big tech and the need to introduce the slow tech element to what we are doing so we can more deeply consider the decisions that we are making.
- But we were also talking about earlier this tension. I don't even know if it's a tension, but this just reality that exists that unless you are the c e o, unless you have the ability to make decisions, just because you feel that they're the right things to do, you often have to live with the decisions that others make for you. How do you think about the accountability often that maybe more so in design than product, but I don't want to paint with a very broad brush here, but how do you feel about the sort of anxiety that people in design sometimes feel about what it is that they're contributing to? When the outcome for our users or our customers or our fellow humans on the world may not be entirely positive, or at least it's unclear as to whether or not we're actually doing a good or a bad thing. So how do we reconcile that we are not the decision makers, but yet we still have to earn a living and put a roof over? Our families'? Heads
- Christina Wodtke:
- Mean, well first of all, even CEOs don't get to say we're just doing this. They could, but it probably would make it harder to lead. It would probably have bad ramifications. It probably wouldn't be done the way they'd like it to be done because they're not going to sit there and micromanage everybody that little group, cuz they've got such a huge company to pay attention to. Although some certainly try hard. But one of the real shocks of becoming a senior exec is that you have less control than you thought you were going to. And if you check out, there's a classic HBR article, seven Surprises for New CEOs. He goes through all the reasons why it's quite good. I even wrote a Boxes and Arrows article talking about seven surprises for new managers based on that and crediting him. So yeah, you work on something and you don't think it's right.
- So it's very contextual. How bad is it? Right? Is it worth going to war? Because you've can go to war over every single thing. You don't get invited to the important meetings where decisions are made. What you wanna do is build as much social capital as you possibly can by being smart, by really listening, by knowing the entire space, not just the visual design or not just the interaction or the ia, but actually understanding the business and the customers and who the competitors are. If you see something that's really problematic, then you have to figure out where the wedge is. I often think of knocking a wedge into the wall of the product decisions and sometimes it's a person you can talk to has more social capital than you, or it can go around to each person and talk to them separately. So you can build consensus by doing it individually.
- And there's arguments that you can make. For example well what would happen if the New York Times wrote about this decision we've made? Would that make us look good? A lot of people don't like to look bad in the press, but it's a very delicate thing you have to do. The other thing is be careful who you work for. I know there are places where people don't have a lot of choices, although with remote, hopefully that won't always be the same. But I tell my students never work for a company that doesn't share your values because you can survive if the company makes some bad decisions or you disagree with the strategy. But if they fundamentally don't share your core values, you are going to be unhappy and you're going to rage quit at some point. So really look at the company, look at the website, look past their blah blah PR marketing and try to say, okay, considering they've made these choices, this is what I think their values are. How comfortable am I living with those?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like actions speak louder than words
- Christina Wodtke:
- Always. You don't lie with what you
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do. You spoke about values and I want to just briefly come back to you and your personal values because one of them appears to be, at least to me, and I understand that every year you reread Emerson's essay from 1841 called Funnily Enough, when did you start doing this and what was the inspiration behind that?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh gosh, it's a funny question just because I can't really remember. I remember reading it and going, oh, this is really important, I wanna remember this. And then I'm a big fan of temporal landmarks. Dan Pink talks about in his book When and so you just have to hook things to moments in time like a holiday or a Monday. I mean the O K R system I have is full of temporal landmarks. And so I just picked one and actually I still read it, but not before I read it consciously. I thought the 1st of September I'll read, maybe I will do it tomorrow or today for you, but now I'll just pull it up. And the thing that I really, really wanted to remember is that everybody hears that phrase, and I've heard designers use it, which is consistency is the hobb goblin of little minds.
- But if you read the whole thing about it, it talks about the importance of not being afraid to contradict yourself. And he talks about all these great men who when they learn something new, they said, okay, I was wrong. I'm doing this now. And you'll see this, especially in political messages, everybody's complaining, oh this, they keep changing their mind. And I call that learning. So I tried to do that to remind myself if I said something a while ago and learned that it was wrong, the right thing to do is to accept that it was wrong and grow and change. And it's very short. It's a short essay and it really talks about learning how to trust yourself enough to be wrong, if that makes sense.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It does. How do you take that insight from Emerson if you do this and try and instill this approach to learning in your students?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Wow, I don't know if I've ever been super conscious about that. I do believe profoundly in psychological safety in the classroom, I came across Amy Edmondson's work fairly early. I really love it. She wrote the tremendous book, the really wonderful book, the Fearless Organization. I would recommend it to anyone cuz it's a fun read and there's good information all the way through as opposed to repeating yourself halfway through the book like some books do. But to create psychological safety in the classroom or in a business is to make a place where people can disagree with you, where people can ask questions, where people can ask for clarification. And it's really critical for learning and for excellence because if people are afraid to correct, you may launch something that's broken or even dangerous. So learning how to be wrong, learning how to ask those questions are critical and that's where that self-reliance comes in.
- So with my students, when I was interviewing at Stanford, one of the people was interviewing me, said, I've never seen teaching feedback like this cuz you know, get the class evaluations. They say your students really love you and they say you're really blunt. How can both these things be true? And what I do is I love them. I care about the students tremendously. So when I say this is not going to work because of X, Y, Z, they don't care. It's fine. Look, you told me was it wasn't working and you didn't dance around it. And I'm like, I think if you can address this, this could be really tremendous. This could really be a successful project. So I think because of that approach to feedback where I'm very honest because I want them to be as awesome as I think they can be. I think there's something there that ties back to Emerson, which is making them realize that it's really important to grow that growing is more important than saving face.
- And I just heard, I love the podcast Hidden Brain and Adam Grant's on it right now, and he was talking about there's a difference between, oh gosh, I wanna put it the way he did it, but it's like there's a difference between feedback about a person and feedback about a task. So if you're talking about a person and you're saying, wow, you're funny looking, wow, I don't know how you can go out with that beard. Your beard is lovely by the way, it's different than saying, I really think that if you added 15 minutes, got people to come on 10 minutes before the podcast, that might be a great way to work out some of the technical kinks and make sure everything works. So if I say that you're like, oh yeah, that's probably a good idea. You don't get all freaky, but if I say that there's something wrong with you as a person, then it's really hard to take that well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that speaks to the difficulty that a lot of people, myself included, have with taking on feedback. If it's framed in such a way that makes you feel like you're on the back foot and defensive because you're being personally challenged,
- Christina Wodtke:
- I might be wrong, but I think for me anyway, I really do have to love people. And I've learned to do that. My agreement with myself is, once you walk in my classroom, I love you. Even if you're driving me completely insane, which, but that's like kids, right? Kids will drive you insane, but you never stop loving them. And when you love somebody, then giving them advice becomes an imperative. Giving them your help is really important. And they can tell, I think people can tell if they're loved or if they're hated.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just reflecting on what you've been talking about in terms of your style, which is to be loving but blunt and to give feedback about the task and not the person. I wonder if through your observations working within tech organizations and now within the university context, whether you've seen a retraction in people's ability to speak what's on their mind, as flawed as it may be, as a result of the heavy social consequences that can come into play if someone's intent or meaning is not construed in a way that the other person is able to understand what they were actually saying.
- Christina Wodtke:
- I'm not sure I know what you mean about consequences. Are you talking within the job or somewhere else?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I suppose what I'm talking about is that the expression of opinion seems to be something that people are more wary of these days as a result of the angry Twitter mob and things that can happen if you say, even in a professional context within an industry such as design, people talk about design Twitter coming down like a ton of bricks on opinions or dissenting voices that they don't align with or majority doesn't align with. And I'm just wondering if you have seen this reflected or if you can reflect on your past 20, 25 years in the industry and whether or not this is actually something that we are losing or at risk of losing this ability to be direct and not offensive, not with intent to offend, but to be able to discuss something openly with other people in a way that you can be challenging but without being offensive.
- Christina Wodtke:
- I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, has it changed? That's the one I can't exactly say mean when I think about the early days. Jeff Weiner, the c e O of LinkedIn, I think he's, is he still CEO O? I'm not sure. Anyway, I worked for him at Yahoo. He was the head of search and marketplace, so it was a little smaller and more intimate setting and he would just say his mind and other people would say their mind. And sometimes it was offensive and sometimes it wasn't. But you kind of had to figure out how to navigate that. And at LinkedIn people were very honest, but it was more the blunt but not personal. It was never personal. That's the kinda company Reid built. So I think that there is a lot of mob behavior on Twitter, the book. So you've been publicly shamed by John Ronson is just wonderful about that.
- All these people who have been shamed on Twitter because they made a bad joke or they had a picture that was inappropriate in some context, which they didn't see. But everybody's just a human being, you know, can't know everything. And the problem with Twitter is it's a bunch of strangers and you can read something that in your head sounded fine and then when they read it does not sound fine. And what I'd like to see is more people being gentle with each other, but it shouldn't affect smaller, more private spaces. For example, a classroom or a team meeting and a team meeting, you should be able to say, I have some questions about this. I'm really concerned about X, Y, and Z. And I had to stop. There was like, I could say, I have a problem with this. Okay, that's going to make people get defensive.
- Okay, what else could I say? I'm really concerned about this a little better. How can I talk through this? And sometimes you have to just say, I have a few questions to just ask those questions and see if you get people talking long enough to figure out where, how it's gone sideways. And that's practice. I mean, I've been fascinated by interpersonal dynamics for a very long time and been working on it because when I was younger I hated feedback, you know, get those annual 360 s and I would just be terrified beforehand, weeping after, I don't know where I got it in my head, but I feel like when I was, I was younger, I thought criticism meant I sucked and I was horrible and I was the worst person to walk this earth. And it was through a combination of books like difficult conversations, but much more doing tea groups, which is something that is offered in continuing studies.
- And at the G S B, which is, I cannot explain it, it's really a fascinating training program. And through that I started to realize that people can criticize me and not hate me at the same time, which was a big step forward. And then I realized I could give people advice and that they didn't necessarily hate me forgiving for pointing out that they were imperfect. So the more you do these things and it doesn't end horribly, the easier it is to be brave and step into that space. I guess it's exposure therapy like they do when you are afraid of snakes or something, you know, just gotta expose yourself to that cycle. And you could take a page from the other radical lady, Kim Scott, who does radical candor, and actually go up to someone and say, if there was one thing you could say I should stop doing, what would it be?
- And if there was one thing you think I should keep doing, what would it be? So you could ask for feedback. And then again, I have the control, I have the power, I'm asking for this and I can get a little more comfortable with that. And you can start with people who say nice things and work your way to the scary people later. You don't have to dive into the deep end of the pool. But I think it's a life skill. I mean it's not just a design skill, it's not just a product skill, it's not just a corporate company skill. It's a life skill to be able to give and take feedback. And it's worth the extraordinary pain to get that knowledge.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- 100%. I'm just thinking about in time, maybe a couple of years ago, three or four years ago actually, where, I don't know what inspired me to do this. I definitely read something, but I went out and I asked 10 of the people closest to me to tell me what I did really well and what I didn't do so well. And the exercise was really around just understanding what my blind spots were and just having that curiosity, but also a little bit of a will to be better. And realizing that maybe some of my current results were a result of my current actions or behaviors, but that I wasn't quite clear on them. So a hundred percent hear you there. I wanted to come back to something you talked about, which was giving feedback and doing 360 s and how that way of structuring feedback was a little deficient.
- And I'll quote you again now, you've said we are doing this corporate feedback thing wrong at Yahoo. We used to do performance reviews and then spend the next month trying to talk people out of quitting. Yes. So you've, you've also talked about just a couple of interesting things around feedback such as talk about the task, not the person, and that you can have the agency to ask for feedback yourself as opposed to have it offered to you. But if we had to talk about aspects of feedback in a company setting that are outside of the ones that we've already covered, what's a better way for, and in this case it could be design leaders who are responsible for giving feedback or product leaders who have to give feedback to their team as well. What is a better way to approach and structure that delivery of that formal feedback that's often tied to things that people care a lot about, such as mm-hmm. Compensation.
- Christina Wodtke:
- Yeah. Well that's part of the problem of course is compensation don't grade on a curve that just punishes good managers who are good at getting rid of their bad people. But the most important thing, if you were going to take one line away from it is always be looking to shorten feedback loops. So something happens and then you get feedback. And the problem with annual is of course if you actually remembered what happened in February or March, which is sort of questionable, it's too late. The person you're talking to probably doesn't really remember it either. It took too long to get to them. And I know again, human beings don't like to give criticism so they'll put it off. But it's so much better that if say somebody's interrupting somebody else over and over again in meeting, when you step outta the meeting and pull 'em aside.
- And I say, I don't know if you're aware of this, but I noticed something in that meeting. And I think if you change it, it would help you to have a moment again, try to give them an out if they're not in a good place to hear it. But then say, I know you get excited but you were interrupting Susan and you did it five times. I counted them. And sometimes that makes people a bit defensive and I was thinking if you can try to deep breath or something until they finish their sentence, that would be great. A lot of times when people are interrupting, they're just excited, but it feels very abusive and that's not what you're trying to do. Sometimes I'll say, your actions are not serving your goals. I know you wanna be this, but if you continue doing that, it's not going to help.
- There's a lot of language out there you can borrow and mod. So it sounds like you, again, these are just my languages, how I would put it, but in that moment he did it, he can remember it. He could be like, oh, I didn't realize I was doing it that much. Okay, I'll try next meeting and then he can practice. But if you wait till the end of the year and you're like, you interrupt people, you do this, you do this, do this. It's too much information and a lot of it's too long ago. So shortened feedback cycles, I think performance reviews should be done quarterly. I've worked at companies that do it and significantly better. It also means that if you can do out of cycle quarterly promotions and bonuses, that's also really good because that way you don't have to get everything perfect right then if you didn't get it that quarter, there's always an next quarter. There's always another quarter to fix it. So there's less stuff free to fix. You give smaller amounts of feedback, you give it faster and you can tie the compensation to the positive things and create a stronger link in people's minds.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sounds like you have to be quite comfortable with the risk of conflict.
- Christina Wodtke:
- I mean, you get to a certain age and you run out of fucks so to speak. [laugh] had conflict and it hasn't killed me and I have a perfectly lovely job and perfectly lovely life. So what is conflict really going to do to you? And if you need to, you can go through your head and say, well, what if they say you're wrong? Okay, I give 'em advice, they don't want it. That's life. What's going to happen is, who are you to say this? And I'm like, Hey, I just saw it no big, you know, can make up responses to things you're scared they're going to say. And that can help a little bit, but most of the time they just go, thanks or, huh, I didn't notice that. Be thoughtful in your language and make sure you're doing it out of love, not revenge or bitterness or anger, but otherwise it should be
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Good. I've heard you talk about a situation at Zynga where you were first hired and one of the experiences you had was that very soon after starting a number of people came up to you and told you that you needed to fire someone.
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh God yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. And the story, I feel you, I mean you tell the story, but I feel the story is quite relevant to a number of things you've been saying around mm-hmm The frequency of feedback and having the courage to give people feedback. So what did you end up doing as a result of people telling you that you needed to let this person go?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh God. It was like I was so mad. I was like, what? You were saving them for me to fire till I was hired? You could have taken care of this yourself if you were grown up and a proper manager. And so I've worked in enough big companies that I know how to put somebody on a PIP and I needed a baseline. I wasn't just going to fire them out for nothing because that leads to lawsuits. So I, I talked to a bunch of people, basically I did a 360 4 her and a collected information about what was working, what wasn't working. And then I sat down in a quiet conference room where nobody could see in and we could talk and gave the feedback. Cuz first you have to tell people the feedback and then you have to give 'em a chance to react to it.
- And oh my god, she starts crying and I was like, fuck, it's going to be one of those meetings. This is terrible. She starts to cry and then she looks at me and goes, thank you. I was like, okay. I thought everybody just hated me, but they hate some of the things I'm doing and I can fix those. She was just, nobody had ever given her any feedback. She had no idea what was going on, and she didn't know that the behavior she had were causing this kind of trouble. And she turned it around. She really dug in and fixed those behaviors and replaced them with better ones and ended up being a star. And she's somewhere not Zynga, where she's very happy in making a bucket of money. I think we make mountains outta molehill sometimes. I mean, surely there's somebody I went to when I was at MySpace.
- I had the opposite situation, which was everybody told me, there's this one VP who's been here since Tom, and you can't fire him. He knows all the relationships of vendors, he knows how the architecture's set up, he knows all this stuff, but he was going around complaining about the current management all the time, and it was depressing everyone. So I fired him. I went through and said, here, here, here. And he goes, I'm surpri surprised it took you so long. He'd been expecting somebody to fire him for a while and he was just making as much money as he could, as long as he could so that he could support the startup that he's part of [laugh]. So I don't know, we make up a lot of stories in our heads about how it's going to go. And in my experience, it rarely goes that way. It's not always good, but it's usually not as bad as what I can imagine.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about the story of the person that turned it around at Zynga. Yeah. And what we were talking about earlier, in particular, I think with reference to Emerson's e essay, self-reliance and also what we were talking about regarding people's ability to feel brave enough to express an imperfect opinion and not be hauled over the calls for doing so. It seems at least that there's a theme emerging here of needing to give people a chance or a way back. Yes. And making sure that you actually hold that space for someone without it being taken advantage of.
- Christina Wodtke:
- I think one of the hardest things for us to realize as humans is that other humans will grow and change. I mean, if we just say it. Yeah. But I ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in years, and the way he talked about me was not the way I am now. That I'd spent a lot of time working on some of my less lovely qualities. And I realized we expect people, I guess it's like growth mindset. There's a fixed mindset, which is I was given these talents and that's who I'm going to be forever. And growth mindset, which is, I'm not very good at this, but if I really dig in I can get better. I think we have that on other people. There's people who think, oh, you're just born that way. You're never going to change my ex-husband very much that way. And then there's other people who believe in people's opportunities to grow. And I'm definitely in that second camp, and so when I'm interacting with people, I believe that everybody could become the best version of themselves, whatever that is. I'm not here to say who you're supposed to be, but I am here especially for my students to help them in the ways they want to grow. And I believe that everybody's capable of growing should you choose to grow.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke about candor earlier, radical candor and how that dovetails in with what we're talking here around feedback. If you think back about that experience at Zynga and at MySpace that you recounted there about people not being brave enough to address the issues that were quite evident with this particular vp, what are the conditions that need to be in place to make it more likely that pairs not necessarily just managers, but peers, that we feel safe enough and brave enough to directly address behavior that is not acceptable with our colleagues?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Yeah, I mean, one thing that's really important is don't wait too long because that feeling of needing to give feedback, the longer you wait, the more you're going to kind of start getting angry and bitter and make up stories about that person in your head. You don't wanna ever guess a meaning for why they're doing it. You don't know you could make guess a meaning, which is, oh, be their kid's sick and they're just being rude because their kid's sick. Or you can make up a story where it is, they're a natural born asshole and they treat everybody like that. You got no, you got nothing. You don't know. You don't ever know. So all you can do is say, I see this and it's bothering me and I'd like to know more. So I can say, I see you interrupting a lot and I can see it's affecting this other person, or it's affecting me.
- You're interrupting me a lot and I know how I feel and I'm a big fan of, I'd like to, and this is the formal version, I don't know if you ever wanna say this to a human being, but I'd like to invite you to work with me to solve it so you could be more relaxed about it and say, Hey, this is happening and is there anything I could do to help? Or what do you think? How are we going to make this person feel more comfortable? Who just got ran over? It's delicate, especially if you're advocating for someone else, it's always easier to advocate for yourself because you genuinely know what's happening to you. I was part of a meeting where we had a guest talking about things and it was part in person, in part Zoom, zoom, which is always very complicated. And there was somebody remote who's asking a question and explaining it and the person who was facilitating interrupted that person, which I, I'm, I'm very sensitive about interruptions because it's women who get interrupted and this person is super big, famous, important, done mind boggling work, the person on the zoom.
- And so this other person, I felt it was rude and I quietly reached out and I said, this is a thing I observed. And I don't know how it landed, but I just wanna make sure you're aware that you were doing that. Cuz if you're a facilitator, you don't do that. You don't interrupt people, you gotta be cool, gentle, supportive. And he wrote to the woman and she's like, oh, did that happen? I didn't even notice it. And so was it a mountain out of a mole hill or was it useful information? It's up to the person who I gave feedback to. I'm being very careful with names cuz it's a relatively recent situation. But
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You talked about how as you get older you run out of fucks to give [laugh] and Yes. I wanna come back to a slightly younger Christina. In 2014 I watched your talk, the execution as tale and you opened that talk with a zen story or a parable of sorts about the farmer and the wild horses. Oh yes. How does that story go and how does that actually, the essence of that story, how does that tie back into what we're talking here about being brave enough to give feedback like that you just gave?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Well I will say that when I do the radical focus talk, now I use a Greek myth that is more aligned with the story, but that is one of my favorite zen parables. I've read read 101 Zen stories like hundreds of times. So I can tell zen stories all day long and I love them. And so that one is about a farmer in a small village in China and he had a son who was, I don't know, young man age. And one day the son brought back a wild, like three wild horses I think it is. And everybody in the village who's in everybody's business the way small towns are. I grew up in a small town in Iowa, rush over and go, oh my gosh, what good fortune, how awesome was this? You got this, you found this free horse, free horse, it's cool.
- And the far old farmer who wasn't much of a talker goes, we'll see. So the next day the young man is trying to break the horse trying to tame it and he falls off and this horse steps on, he breaks his collarbone and he breaks his arm, he breaks a leg and everybody in the village of course rushes over to say, oh man, the day you found those horses, that was a bad day. What? Bad luck. How horrible your poor son. And the old man says, well, we'll see. And then about a week or so later, the sun's all casted up and whatnot, bandaged. And the army comes through and they're taking all young men of a certain age off to fight a war that they are losing badly, but they don't take the sun cuz he is all messed up. The villagers all come and say, oh thank God your son doesn't have to go off to this pointless war.
- And I think you know what the old men said. So I also tell my students, at some point or another you're going to walk away from 5 million. The problem is you won't know until it's way too late. And I think about the time when I interviewed it at Google and they were really small, I think there are 70 people and I just hated them. I just dislike Mersel Meyer, I loathe Larry Page and I called the recruiter and said, I don't wanna go forward with this interrupt you. And it's happened again. You know, just don't know. You don't get to know. All you can do is do the thing that you feel is right at the time and see what happens.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's some beautiful simplicity in that, but it seems to me at least a very difficult thing for us to do. It's really easy for us as people to get wrapped up in what's going on. I mean, in the broader context, we've got war in Ukraine, we've got potential global food shortages, we've just been through a pandemic. The states has had a civil rights thickening. Yeah. So I mean how, if at all, has your perspective on the essence of that parable changed as a result of the overall disruption that we've collectively experienced over the past three to four years?
- Christina Wodtke:
- It's such a complicated question because there's so many elements to it, I believe. Okay, so first of all, I hate not getting to know. This has become one of my phrases. I tell myself, you don't get to know because I'm a learner. I love knowing. I wanna chase down people and say, what was that talk conversation about? And what were you two talking about? What's happening you? I'm dying for that. But there's some things you just don't get to know and you have to make your peace with that. And that's already a practice, certainly for me. I don't get to know what's going to happen. I don't know how the Ukrainian war is going to work out. I don't know if we're going to save the planet from dying, I just don't know. And then you get to the second part which is okay, there's so many things going wrong, what can I do?
- And that's a really useful question. But you can't do everything. That's another thing you have to accept. I cannot work on all of these problems. I don't have the time, I don't have the knowledge. I think a lot of designers in particular are very hubristic in that they'll dive in and try to fix something they don't understand at all. I see that with D School quite a bit. And so you have to ask yourself, what is my body of knowledge? And then you can say, okay, I'm going to pick this problem and I'm going to work on that cuz it's a place I can move the needle. So I founded Women talk design because I was so tired of people saying, I can't find any women to speak at my conference. It's like, that's bullshit. And I thought, let me make it insanely easy to get rid of that excuse.
- Let me create a directory. And then I was able to raise a bunch of money and I hired a couple of my students from C C A who didn't have internships and I asked them to research the problem and talk to speakers and everything. And they discovered something really exciting, which was, yes, conference people have trouble finding speakers possibly out of laziness, who knows, possibly or other reasons. But the women often are afraid to speak and then if they are happy to speak and they get interrupted, they often recommend men. So I shared this with Danielle Barnes who stepped in to take Women talk design to the next level. The fundraising showed me there was something bigger than just a blog there. And oh my god, Danielle's amazing, she's an unsung hero and she should be sung a lot more. And she dug in and started doing the trainings to teach women and she and I collaborated on them and we really wanted it to teach women how to speak in their own way with their own ideas as opposed to here's how to talk like a white guy.
- Let's teach people how to present themselves in a truly authentic manner and then create community. Because if there's one thing I know, community creates resiliency. And so if you had a bad time or somebody hit on you or you're talk to, you go how you wanted. If you have a community who's like, oh, you're going to get it next time, it, it's so much better. So that was something, a space I understood enough and presenting yourself and telling stories. I knew enough that I could actually go in and make a difference there. And you could say, well Christina, how's that helping the planet from not set lighting on fire at some point? And I like to think that maybe somebody that we trained will talk about the science in a way that is accessible and people can understand it and they'll, they'll care and they'll step up. I don't know, you do what you can and you hope for the best. And I think that's all you can do. And just doom scrolling and worrying is just, it's not going to make you happy and it's not going to change anything. So instead pick the thing, you can move and work on that, even if it's just an hour a week cuz you've got kids and a full-time job. It makes a difference
- Brendan Jarvis:
- From one deeply insightful thing that you've just said to something else that you've said in the past, which I'll quote you again. You said you get your authority through your own confidence, your own kindness, your own strength. And that's something no title is going to give you. So the more you spend time getting to know who you are and learning to love that, the better. So you talk there about women talk design and wanting to give those women more confidence in expressing themselves authentically. But if we take that thread and then we think more broadly about the people listening today, if there's someone struggling, as we all do from time to time with finding that confidence and expressing that confidence in a way that connects with others, where's a good place for people to start to get to know themselves a little bit better and to develop that confidence?
- Christina Wodtke:
- I like therapy. I think therapy is awesome. I recommend getting therapy and something nobody talks about that I've seen anyway is that the first therapist you meet may not be the right one for you. So you have to shop around a little bit. You should talk to maybe three different people. When I decided to get a coach, a personal coach, I met Andrea Corny, who's amazing. And she said, I won't take you on as a client unless, so you talk to two different coaches. And I was like, whoa, that's amazing. And I did, and I worked with her and I've been in and outta therapy various times in my life. I, I'm lucky enough that I realized it was something that would help me. And when I've had hard times in my life, I've gone into therapy and having someone to talk to you who only cares about your wellbeing, that's all they care about.
- They're there to help you get better. And if they're not there, don't work with them. If you go two or three times and you realize they're not there for that, then get someone else. Don't, people will test drive multiple cars, but they'll take whatever therapist they're given. No, don't do that. So I would say if you've done it and it didn't work out, it could quite easily be that person. It's just not a good fit for you. And fit is more important than competence, I would say. If you find the right person and you can talk to them, then you will really learn and you'll start working on these things that are scary and you'll start realizing, and you'll also build a lot more metacognition and self-awareness because that's what they do. I'm a big fan of C B T, cognitive behavioral therapy, but my favorite is actually mindfulness-based therapy. I've meditated most of my life. And I think that as you become more self-aware and you become more grounded in who you are, managing these challenges becomes more straightforward.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just thinking about bringing the show down to a close. Now, [affirmative], just a little earlier you told the story of the Zen, the zen story of the farmer and the wild horses. Now there's another zen story. I know you said you've read a book of 101 of them. So I'm only picking picking one one more out of that book probably. But there's another one that I heard you speak about, which is about the monk and the professor having a cup of tea. Yeah. How does that story go?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Oh, a cup of tea. That's a classic. A professor who was researching zen came in to have tea with this monk and ask him questions and they sat down and the monk made tea and P was pouring the teacher's cup and kept pouring and pouring and it went over onto the table and down the floor. And the professor's like, stop. The cup is over full. And the monk says, just like this cup, your mind is so full of your own opinions and your own ideas that you can't learn anything from me. If you wanna learn something, you're going to have to, that's my Nina [laugh] barking in the background just in time. So I think it is important when then people talk about beginner's minds, they're talking about a cup of tea. That's the first story in the book. And I think it's a good place to be.
- I have no idea what she's barking about. Probably saying, Hey friend, come play with me. Come play with me. Yeah, I think that's a big one. I was thinking about another one that I think is a really useful one, which was about it's always about monks, right? It's about these two monks who were traveling from one monastery to another one, and there was a woman standing by a stream dressed up as a geisha. Beautiful. All the makeup and socks and stuff, Meina soft mark, come on babe. Goodness. And so the older monk picks her up, carries her across the stream, puts her down, and goes back on the journey. And about five miles later, the younger monk turns to him and says, we're not supposed to touch women like that. Why did you lift her? Why did you carry her? And the poor monk says, I left her at the stream. Why are you still carrying her? And I think about that all the time because I could be beating myself up for three hours saying, whoa, why did I put my dog out? It's ruining the podcast. Everything's terrible. Or I could say, she barked, it's no big deal. Or I could even say, next time I'll put her in the bedroom, whatever. But you don't wanna be beating yourself up forever when you do something wrong. And I think they'll be it easier to take feedback if you can leave the feedback at the stream.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I think that's a wonderful place for us to leave this conversation. Christina, thank you. What a wide ranging and really deep, intensely deep actually cer certainly many light bulbs that have been going off for me conversation that we've had today. Thank you for sharing your insights and your stories with everybody who's listening. And for your contributions to the fields of design and product for over the past 30 years or so.
- Christina Wodtke:
- Well, it is called Brave UX. I had to be brave [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You certainly brough the brave [laugh].
- Christina Wodtke:
- Fabulous. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey Christina, if people wanna find out more about you and the wonderful writing that you've done and the talks that you give, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Christina Wodtke:
- Well, I always like to point out that I have a ridiculously rare name, so you can actually use Google. I'm first initial, last name everywhere, so you can find me on Twitter. And of course my original blog, which I have been working on since 2000, I guess 22 years of a blog is eleganthack.com. I haven't posted in a little while, but I will post again. I always come back to Elegant Hack.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks Christina, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Christina elegant hack and all the other great things that she has contributed to the field. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe. And also if you feel that there's just someone just could be one person that would get some value out of these conversations at depth, then please pass the podcast along to them. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn like Christina, I've got a fairly, fairly, but perhaps not as unique name, but just type in Brennan Jarvis. I'm sure you'll find me. There's also a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes, so you can get to me there or head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.