Helping developers thrive | Cat Hicks | Data Science Hangout

Hey there, welcome to the Paws at Data Science Hangout. I'm Libby Herron, and this is a recording of our weekly community call that happens every Thursday at 12 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time. If you are not joining us live, you miss out on the amazing chat that's going on. So find the link in the description where you can add our call to your calendar and come hang out with the most supportive, friendly, and funny data community you'll ever experience.

Can't wait to see you there. Now I'm really excited to announce our featured leader today and introduce you to Cat Hicks, psychologist for software teams at Catharsis Consulting. Cat, thank you so much for joining me. It's nice to see you.

It's a pleasure. It's not every day you get to talk to an audience that's in and around the tools that you use every day, so I love that. I work with a lot of developers and their relationships to their tools, so it's really fun to bring it into my world a little bit here.

Wonderful. Well, I would love it if you could introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do, but also things that you like to do outside of work.

Well, someone already noticed that I have a harp. It is an Irish lever harp. I've played that since I was 15. This is actually the same harp that I got from my mom, who very generously answered her 15-year-old who came up and said, I have to play harp. I can't explain why, but I just love it, and I need you to buy me this really expensive instrument that nobody plays, and she did. So that's something that I love. I love to write outside of work. I'm a huge fiction writer and reader.

In work, I consider myself a research architect. I'm a social scientist by training. I have a PhD in quantitative psychology. I also did a postdoc in computer science and engineering in a design lab, so HCI, kind of human factors stuff, which is a really great place to get into people's relationships with their tools. But very quickly, from even when I was back in academia, I cared a lot about what was happening for people in the real world, in their workplaces, in the classrooms. And so I found myself always pulled towards applied social science, towards doing research projects that I felt put some answers to questions that everyone was kind of asking, but no one was really getting answers to. So in my latest work, I try to do that especially for software developers. So questions like, how can we help software teams thrive? How can we understand their problem solving? How do we break apart old myths about actually how our problem solving works? Because there's a lot of myths and misconceptions out there.

So I'm very interested in our networks of beliefs that we hold about how our own minds operate, and also in intervention science. So I've led and built research departments from zero to actually producing an impactful research agenda, carved out a research department at a company that didn't have one, and have kind of been really interested in the whole logistical side of, how do we get good research structures in place that empower scientists to do creative and good work? That's kind of a really big overview. We can take this in a lot of directions, I'm sure.

About Catharsis Consulting

Yes, we totally can. And I would love to ask some sort of like context building questions, so that we all have a good foundation for figuring out what questions we want to ask you. So my sort of thing I need help understanding is like, okay, we did the PhD, we moved into some industry roles, and then we did consulting, you decided to like found some stuff, do things on your own. What does catharsis consulting help with? Like, what are some of the facets of work within software teams? Like, is it like, do you help with interpersonal stuff, setting boundaries? Is this much more oriented towards the tool and user and, you know, relationship?

Yeah. So it's interesting what people assume psychology is and does in the world, because there's a huge, huge discipline with lots and lots of different ways of going about it. I like to tell people I'm not a couch psychologist. I don't do one on one work. I'm not even necessarily a feelings psychologist. I'm really much more of a structures of beliefs and behavioral science and team practices psychologist. So with catharsis, I built this research consultancy, I would say, six years ago now or something like this. And honestly, people will tell you these stories like, oh, yes, I knew since I was a child, you know, that I would do this. I did not have that vision or clarity. What I knew was that everybody kept asking me these questions about doing research or evaluating evidence that I thought were sort of obvious, you know. It took me a long time to realize the tremendous source of value that research methods and evidence science had in the world.

So with catharsis, I design evidence science with organizations. That's shifted over the years. So I've shifted to focus much more comprehensively on engineering organizations, software organizations. And in part, that's because for the last three years, I was also the VP of research for a tech company where I built a research lab that did open science for software teams. So I was able to kind of understand what I even thought about software teams, build an evidence base on which I can now say, now I know what I want to consult on and what kind of interesting and helpful practices I can offer to engineering orgs. So that might look like things like a developer experience team at an engineering company is really excited to try to improve the lives of 2000 people and they've gotten budget and they've gotten support from their leaders. And now they have to face the hard work, you know, of picking tools for these people, asking, do we know what actually helps these folks that we're building for? And so these folks might come to me and say, Kat, can you help us design a real world comparison, a real world efficacy study, or even some consulting on the basics of how are we thinking about metrics in our environment? Are we falling into a lot of common pitfalls? There's a lot of misuse, I think, of people's activity data and work data. And I'm really interested in helping prevent some of that misuse.

Upcoming positconf keynote

Kat is giving a keynote at the POSIT conference. Like, hello, that's a really big deal. We're really excited about it. Kat, could you give us a little preview of what you hope to talk about in your keynote?

Yeah. My keynote is about the psychology of technologists. So I'm writing a book right now that's trying to translate big, important ideas from psychology and from what we know about our core psychological needs at work and bring it a little bit into the workplace of knowledge workers. So I hope to puncture some of the misconceptions that y'all probably have had to encounter in your lives. And also, you know, I said the simplest thing I like to say is I hope this will be a book that practitioners will pick up and want to give to their boss and say, hey, you know, please consider this. And in it, there's an interweaving of, you know, rich empirical science, but also a lot of the lived experience of practitioners. So questions like, what helps us feel creative? What creates a culture where we can build coalitions in our workplaces rather than start to devolve into, you know, in-group, out-group? And, you know, what kind of beliefs about technical workers, again, are sort of holding us back? So questions like, you know, are happier people actually productive? My answer to that is usually yes.

My answer to that is usually yes.

So we'll cover in that keynote, I think, how I've tried to set out a research agenda and do open science for technology teams, which I think is a bold new frontier that needs a lot more investment in it. Yeah, and I'm really happy with what we're going to talk about on stage. So come to the conference.

Evaluating team sentiment during change

Okay, so we are going to jump right into an AI question with Mike. Mike, would you like to ask your question?

So the answer to this question isn't, well, it's not specifically about AI, but, and the answer might be, oh, come to the keynote. But the question was something like, there are a lot of teams going through change, you know, whether that's increasing use of open source or embracing AI tools and that kind of thing. Do you have any tips on how to objectively assess whether, you know, how that change is going and the kind of comfort level within teams?

Can you tell me what you mean when you say objectively assess?

Well, it seems that I kind of lead a group, right? And I see big groups undergoing this change. And a lot of times, you kind of get the people who actively hate something will tell you it. People who love something, you can tell they love it because they're quiet and they're diligently getting on with the new thing. There's a kind of bit in the middle and it's hard to assess the overall feeling of, you know, is this going well? Do I need to engage more or are the bulk of people more or less happy with this?

Okay. So it sounds like there's two questions here. One is, let's talk about evaluating AI. Second is, let's talk about how sometimes we're unevenly sampling from our environment, from the people we want to understand. How do I make sure I'm like comprehensively evaluating people's experiences about AI? Something like that. Okay. I see you nodding.

Well, I think actually the thing I'm more leaning towards the second bit.

Okay. Okay. Cool. Let's start with that. Yeah. Because that's like a precondition for the next question, right? So I care a ton about this. There's a chapter in my book, which I haven't written yet, but I'm excited to write it, called Designing an Organization That Wants to Understand Itself. And I think it's a huge freaking question. So I'm just like right off the bat going to say we're not going to answer all of it. But like, if you're struggling with this, Mike, send me an email because I just, I care about this. I think we can all think about places and orgs that have truly cared about trying to get our insight. And that feels really different, right? Than the HR engagement survey that comes to you and you're like, I don't, what's going to happen? You know, is my, right? Am I going to get in trouble?

So the advice I give when I'm doing evidence strategy work with leaders like you is maybe the biggest thing you can start to do is create buy-in from people to trust that your evidence gathering moment is actually a good one. And this is a big thing that social scientists care about. We care about research design, but we actually deeply care about sampling and selection. And have I created a situation in which the information is actually even going to be given to me and that I'm clearing out of people's way the very understandable, sometimes strategic, important to them reasons that they would give me inaccurate information. So a classic example of this is good information travels a lot faster in organizations than bad information. Of course it does because there's like this huge freaking cost all the time. Like you're even just, you have to, if you're a brave person, who's going to bring up the bad news, you still have to think about it more than you have to think about the good information.

So when you think about that moment of data collection in your organization, what have you done to right up front create trust for people to tell you about their AI experiences? What have you also done if there's somebody needs to make it worth their while, they don't care about AI, they don't care about the decision you care about, what do they care about? So I frequently advise leaders that we need to actually have like a holistic evidence, like data gathering strategy, you know, particularly in my case with the developers they might be working with. Stop asking them, like there's five managers and they're each asking five different things and it's kind of disjointed. We actually have to come together, form a coalitional evidence research strategy. AI is a pretty good wedge in for this because everybody's kind of freaked out about it. But then say, let's do some co-design. I've done this a lot, this has been really successful. Ask the developers, what do you all care about? We'll have a space on the survey or a space on the thing for this and like those kind of combinations will often elicit the engagement from the sort of middle of the road people or the disengaged people.

I tell people completely straight up, I know that some of you find these surveys annoying. I know you might, you know, wonder what we're going to do with it. So I'm going to tell you exactly my plan. I'm going to tell you I got your leadership to actually commit. If we find things in this direction, we're going to do X. If we find things in this direction, we're going to do Y. And then you can have people who are all over the spectrum, like horse race, betting on their outcome, feeling engaged. And what you've done is created that org that's interested in understanding itself, right? And another little tip I'll say is leaders do not, they really underestimate how much people are curious about themselves and how much people actually want something that feeds back to them. So we in my scrappy little research lab got incredible participation from public developers who were getting no money from our research, nothing, you know. And they participated in it in part because in every research project we baked in that we were going to send them some like scientific guidance to help them in their careers, and they were going to get it immediately, like as an email right after they finished the survey. So if you can offer that care somehow, you know, you will become the person who really has the superpower to unlock engagement.

So if you can offer that care somehow, you know, you will become the person who really has the superpower to unlock engagement.

This is wonderful. Thank you. I think that the way you said about, you know, like, let me tell you what I'm going to do with this information if it goes this way or that way, is sort of the heart of a data scientist's conversation that they have with stakeholders. Like, okay, you want this thing. If I make you this thing and it tells you this, what are you going to do with that to kind of get to the heart of what they actually need? So I think if somebody came to me as a data scientist and said, I'm going to turn that back to you and give you that same power and that buy-in to whatever is happening, I would feel so respected.

And I think that this is good. It ties in with community building for me to give people the ownership. I agree. There's a lot of current, like, current intervention science really emphasizes interventions are done with people, not on people. This is like a classic quote. Like, you just can't control other people. And if you try, you're in the land of being a surveillance asshole or something, pardon my, but, you know, you're in a completely different land. And like, we, you know, I have seen the world of software can be very acrimonious. I mean, people yell at me all the time, you know. But you can still really change people by creating, by saying, we're going to respect each other. We may violently disagree about how we should measure progress and software, but let us try to respect each other. Let us break down the disagreement, you know, and it really does go far.

Team dynamics: immediate team vs. larger organization

Yeah. So my question relates to, we're all, most of our steps are embedded in teams that are embedded in bigger organizations. And I'm really curious about how much of this developer thriving comes from your immediate team versus the larger organization, because sometimes you have an kick-ass team and a kind of iffy organization or a kind of so-so team, but a really cool organization.

Yeah. Yeah. This is a very impossible to answer question, but I'm going to tell you what I think is interesting about it. It depends on how much the organization affects the team, right? So there's an interaction there that's really important to pay attention to. So I would think if I was giving advice to my little brother or something, probably knowing nothing else, I would say, pick the good team, I guess. However, make sure there aren't enormous things you need in life safety career that are gated on the organization. So for instance, organization gated decisions tend to be how much you get paid or certain career opportunities that are very important. However, the team is like, who talks to you every day? And so that is visually immediately constant psychological feedback, psychological environment. And they really are not terribly separate. So like, how much could a good team really persist in a super bad org? My questions would be, what makes the org bad? Like, in what way do we see it being bad? Is it bad in the normal way that large collections of people can be very frustrating? Or is it bad in that it's creating very negative incentive cycles that are eventually going to degrade and make your otherwise good team kind of resilient, not resilient, make them fragile and break down?

It is a sign of potentially a lack of accountability in the culture, maybe an uneasy culture or an unstable culture. And you got to think about, well, what's going on in this? Or, you know, two pieces of advice I would give, which are at opposite ends to any person in their career. One is just mindfulness about you have people outside of your work that you can talk to who will really honestly tell you, you know, this place is affecting you in a way that's over the line. Like you got to get out of there and whether that wherever that's coming from. I think that we all need that feedback sometimes. The second part is developing your macroeconomic sense. Actually, I find a lot of technologists and like bless you all, but, you know, as someone who's had to be a VP of research and do budget and argue in front of boards and talk to the CEO, you know, a lot of folks really check out from the larger economic forces that are determining the possibilities their organization can see. And some of that can just a little bit of that can be really helpful. Like if you're at a place that's fundamentally in its economics, not going to invest in innovation, you're going to be facing a lot of headwinds every time you're that person who's trying to get people excited about doing a new technological approach. Maybe you need to think about the industry, the place you're in, the larger forces that, you know, you're just one person and these are like large market forces that we all have to contend with.

Fostering psychological safety in remote multidisciplinary teams

I work in a remote multidisciplinary team where colleagues don't really understand each other's roles and interactions often feel transactional. So what strategies can help foster psychological safety by improving understanding and empathy in such a team and help bring that team together?

I really like this question. And I'd love to hear other people chime off as they, you know, or answer this in the chat too. I mean, I think that developing, you can develop your little strategy, your little test balloons for whether or not people are going to pick up your bid for increasing the team culture. And they might not, you know, but there's a concept in relational. I just said I wasn't a couch psychologist, but I do love clinical psych. I like to learn from those people. There's a concept in like relationship psychology of making a bid for attention and how we make these conversational bids all the time. And we might say, hey, you know, look, I saw that cool bird, you know, and if somebody answers your bid, it's kind of like an improv skit, right? They were like, oh, cool. All right. They, yes. And you, you know, and really part of the information that's being conveyed is we're allowed to take a moment and have shared attention. You're not just an object to me. Like I care about your perspective. People reject bids and that feels like social rejection, right? Because it is social rejection. You get into a meeting and you say, you share something a little vulnerable about your day or how hard you're working. And people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Agenda item two, you know, you were receiving like an implicit message that that's not what we do here.

So that's important information. Like it might be accurate information that people will not receive your bid. However, it also could be, they feel like stuck on the other side of this plane of glass of like, no one wants me to waste time. I had a manager one time in my first tech job, which was at Google, which was really scary for me, you know, and I presented all this stuff to very high level people. And my manager gave me this feedback that was like, not a compliment where she said, Kat, you really don't care what title somebody has. Like if you're talking about data and evidence, you just, you just treat everybody the same. And I was like, yeah, you know, because that's a great thing about me. And she was like, no, it's not a great thing about you actually that we want, we don't want that here.

But I remember she, I got feedback one time that I spent too long saying thank you for a compliment that somebody gave me, you know, that kind of thing was just, okay, we have to be transactional here. However, I've moved on from there, you know, and I think there are a lot of times in cultures where we might try to tell other people, again, I'm trying to do something a little different. Or even like, do you guys ever feel like we never get to know each other as people? And a way in I find that's often really fun is through talking about the process of work. So rather than jumping just straight into tell me how you feel, which might be very scary for people and put them a little on the spot, you could be a little bit like, hey, I want to do you want to do like a retro about our communication or our collaboration, or how we find creativity in this work. A little bit of a toward the psychological safety, but you know, through the lens of work, which people often find like less challenging. You can also bring up shared values that has a huge impact on people bringing up, you know, because we all love to learn, like, because, you know, I know, this team wants to have a good learning culture. I'd love to learn from you, I'd love to, you know, and kind of do a little bit of modeling that you want something that's not transactional. I hope that helps as some tips.

Debunking tech myths: the 10x developer

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. This is an interesting framing for this question, too. I try to strategically pick when I do this, I don't know if I've 100% figured it out, because I think you can't just be a crank all day long, you know, then you're not producing anything. And also, it makes you a depressed person, I think it's bad for you. But, you know, I was joking with one of my friends that this was like crank summer for me. I'm like, you know what, I'm in a transition phase right now in my work, I just want to be like little cranky demon a little bit.

An example that comes to mind is there is you probably all heard it, there's a really pervasive idea, trope, myth, phrase that people use where they talk about 10x developers, or 10x engineers, or you know, 10x whatever. I, this comes from a number of places, but there's like a particular 1968 case study where like, the estimate the like, where did I was asking myself, where did this 10x like come from? Besides the fact that it just sounds good, it's nice to say 10 or something. It's a round number. I think it came from this 1968 case study. Because it's quoted in a really influential book, a book in software that's been really influential called The Mythical Man Month, which was by Fred Brooks. It's really uncritically quoted. I like have a personal vendetta against this 1968 paper. I think it's so dumb. I think it was just overextended. You know, it's a really strange little lab task. And it makes the extremely sweeping quite like generalizations. And it essentially says, wow, people who do programming are going to be really expensive. So we should find the few people in the world who are going to be good at it. It uses like the time people took to complete the task as its measure of whether people are good at programming or not, which is like a very simplistic measure. Like people can take the same amount of time to solve something and be solving it with completely different strategies. And so you could have a good or a bad outcome look the same in the numbers.

And also, you know, it just does bad math. So like it doesn't account for the idea of individual variance, which is something I'm really interested in as I have a background in learning. So I got to like explore this paper a couple of times. I actually talk about it in my book. I got to give a talk about it to a software audience and sort of talk about myths about cognition. And it was super gratifying and fun because so many people sent me private little messages that were like, this stuff always made me feel really, really bad, you know. And I was always, you know, or even I had a bully in my workplace who used this kind of I'm a 10x developer and you're not, you know, thing against me. So that was like very emotionally gratifying to me. And it was also like a little bit of extending empowerment to people. Like, listen, you're a smart person. You get to read science. You don't have to like, you know, the 1960s, we thought all kinds of bananas things in the 1960s. You know, we didn't let women into college in that year in a lot of places. So that was a very fun conversation for me.

Code review anxiety and developer thriving

Yeah. So I'm also a former applied psychologist turned engineer. So I particularly was interested in your paper on developer thriving, because I used to study group information processing, group decision making. And in kind of classic group decision making literature, there's these hidden profiles that kind of emerge when we have information spread across team members, but not everybody kind of shares what they know. So the group ends up making a worse decision than any one person could have. And so it's kind of this common problem that emerges in a lot of these contexts. And so I was really interested in that visibility component you mentioned. So I was wondering if you looked at any maybe interventions that maybe explicitly scaffold kind of information exchange, maybe like rotating like a data or something.

God, I wish I had been able to. Yeah. And like, let's talk sometime if you ever, because I'm actively piloting and thinking about interventions within the constraints of what I have money to do right now and stuff like that. But I think that software and technologists more generally, technical teams need this kind of work. It's a great question. Dev thriving project was really scrappy, really observational. I think we acknowledge it in the small IEEE software paper that we ultimately published with it, but we're kind of like, look, we need to help developing more items. I was really proud of it as like planting a flag, like more things matter for developers and for their productivity than some of what we talk about. But I think there's a thousand questions provoked by this and a thousand points in which these psychological models need to be brought in.

So I'll just say some things that might be relevant here about information exchange. One thing that we did was we looked at code review anxiety, which is, of course, an internal problem for people and their experience, but it's also an information exchange problem inside of an organization. And I make that connection because, you know, we see people engage in avoidance behaviors, like they check out of a code review. They're not going to bring up the hard thing. They're not. They're wondering who their interlocutor is. So there's a lot of information exchange and dyadic group level questions in that area. So we have built out like a tiny plank, like a little foundation simply by saying, well, here's an empirical and empirically tested model for code review anxiety, which was important to us to get out. And this is a published paper with empirical software engineering. You might like it. It's an intervention study. Our excellent lead author, Carol Lee, who's a clinical psychologist, led that intervention. But it wasn't specifically looking at group effects or dyad effects, although I believe group effects happened because of it and because of things like making the psychological needs of the exchange more visible. We also have a toolkit paper follow up. We sent people home with a toolkit. And they used it in their actual workplaces, code reviews, and reported back to us, at least a lot of positive effects and interesting stories.

So there's like lots to build on. Like, I hope group researchers like you maybe someday find a path inward to help. We always talked about wanting to do dyadic pairs or something like that, bring in a developer and their manager, you know, like that kind of thing is I'm really interested in. No, that's great. I mean, even this sparks ideas. I mean, I'm even thinking like, even like in those code reviews, like one major thing that's missing that might even help with some of that anxiety is just like, we rarely see the intent of the person who's right. So I mean, being understood before going into that review.

Yeah, totally. And we thought we focused on kind of like the thinking traps and the cognitive distortions that might be happening for the individual, right, where they're sort of like, if I mess up in a code review, I will, I will get fired. I mean, I it's just the most wonderful quotes in this study as well. Like I remember one person said, like, panic voice in my head screaming, you know, like that's the level. But the other side of the story is super interesting. And something I'm interested in as well is what you probably know this, like what we call like intra group, not just inter group, but like how group members are themselves talking about the norms of the group and say, and sort of working out, this is who we are here. And this is what we're doing here. And also, I don't know if you know, like the normative dissent model from Dominic Packer.

Balancing top-down and bottom-up culture

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, boy. So, you know, I think that when I think about organizations that I feel are have unlocked, you know, because they understand how people work and they're not treating people like little robots or something and getting into the common pitfalls of organizations, I think about places that recognize what leaders actually have power over and what is actually within the remit of leaders and also what is best appropriate to be bottom up. And I often find we flip those like we do. I mean, at least in my world, this might be different in the context of y'all's industries or companies, but in the world of the engineering orgs I work with, boy, they love top down tool mandates. I mean, come on. This is you have like the world's most, you know, people who love what they do. People are very passionate about exploring new technologies, people who are like they're so they're so invested in it. They're testing new tools in their evenings and weekends, you know, and then you're not seeing that as a source of information. I mean, I work with a lot of platform engineering and infrastructure, DevEx teams where someone really does care really, really hard about the experience of these people. But then they're elevated to a position in the org where they're told to become a decision maker in that top down mandate. And then they're not given any tools or time or budget to do like maybe user research with their own population. I find that absurd and also like very low hanging fruit for a leader to fix, actually.

So I think about the information loops organizations are leaving on the ground, you know, that could inform and make it not so much a top down mandate, but actually like a solution to the to the need that your organization has been voicing to you, you know. And we can't like meet everybody or I'm not a fan of satisfaction measures for this reason, because I think you can get tyranny of the majority, you know. And I think we need better practices of understanding what our technical people are truly doing and finding and figuring out and working. And this is also a place where the on the bottom up side, if you know, we've all experienced this, if you are in an organization that truly has a learning culture, and is like valuing and celebrating teams, sharing and like powering each other up, this is what I call a cumulative culture. And that is a place that will be more innovative, constantly. But it's really scary and hard to let people do that, because it looks worse before it looks better, you know, because it looks like people make a lot of mistakes, it looks like chasing a lot of dead ends. This is in the nature of innovation, like culture level scholars who compare innovation patterns across societies tell us this, you have to let people jitter and, and pursue lots of solutions, and then kind of get to the one that wins out. And you have to allow that process to happen. I think we're bad at allowing that process to happen.

I think also, like just taking stock of like the really easy wins in the environment around this, like, where is the top where has the leadership blown up people's trust with some mandate that was bad for them. And I often work with teams that want to make the cost visible to their leaders, the cost of like a failed initiative visible to their leaders. Orgs that can say we did kind of mess up with how we did this, boy, they get a huge amount of credit, graciousness, patience from their people, simply by having that collective humility, which is a concept I find really, really important for organizations as well.

What individual contributors can do in difficult times

Yeah. Hey, Kat. Thanks for hanging out with us. I just for context, I'm like a mid senior individual contributor and I work in the federal government. So I'm wondering if you can speak to what staff at my level can do. So I don't have a lot of real power. I'm matrixed into a lot of parts of the org, but I don't have a lot of formal I'm not a senior leader. I don't have a lot of formal authority. What can staff at my level do to like so positive seeds into a culture that has really been through a lot? I mean, morale is like pretty low. I think it's fair to say everyone's like it's a weird culture. Everyone's been through a whole lot. But, you know, I want to help. Everyone wants to help. I don't have a lot of real power. So can you just like speak into that?

This is bringing tears to my eyes. You know, I have a friend at NOAA. I have friends at the NSF. Like, this is a really hard time. I think about the wisdom that comes to us from communities that have had to create their own safety in circumstances we could hardly imagine. So you know, there's a theory I like called the stereotype inoculation theory. I think it's by Das Gupta. And it's about how you're the only minority in an organization that is an experience of extreme threat all the time, you know, and like bias all the time. However, you know, she explored what happens for people where they form their own little group and how that can inoculate you against some of the damage and against the feeling of what they're telling me is who I am. Because it's really, really hard for us to not internalize that stuff. I mean, it may sound really obvious, but you know, we do internalize. It changes our view of ourselves to being an environment that's dysfunctional.

So I think about protection. Where does protection come from? And we do have incredible mechanisms that we use. And these are often where people who are capable of that cultural change comes from. There's another area I look into about reaffirmation, like affirming the self, like self-affirmation is sort of a psych buzzword in like pop airport books. But it's actually like a really beautiful concept. And the concept actually means can you firm up yourself, you know, in a space, in a world that's so difficult, in like all the insults and injuries of human life. And there are ways, you know, one way is accessing support outside. But people can do this to themselves. So you can dialogue with yourself. Actually, this is where a lot of talk therapy helps you do this. Journaling helps people to do this, because you can kind of firm up the self and say, you know, am I replicating the message of the environment to myself? Or do I know I have something higher, transcendent, really meaningful? No matter what storm is on the surface of this ocean, I have that certainty and no one can touch it because, you know, they're not at that level with me.

No matter what storm is on the surface of this ocean, I have that certainty and no one can touch it because, you know, they're not at that level with me.

I can't do a clinical session here, but that's the, those are the directions I would like look at, go into, think about, take inspiration from, try to bring to my colleagues. You know, I have friends who have navigated scary, scary situations. And a lot of navigating that and protecting yourself comes back to who am I talking to right now? How can we be good to each other right now? This 10 minutes of coffee, this 15 minutes where I say I'm not transactional with you. Like, I really care about your soul and your well-being. Look, organizations, institutions shift. My, you know, my ancestors were immigrants who had to leave behind huge identities for themselves, completely remake their identities, you know. And just knowing that there is a legacy, actually, there's a legacy we can learn from around all of this. So, you know, maybe kind of making your identity not so much about being a federal worker, but about being something else, something that's more lasting and more powerful and bigger than an institution that might be failing you right now. That's kind of some thoughts. And we're just, we're here to, you know, I care about you. So.

Making invisible work visible

I wanted to see if I could fit in one more quick question because there was an anonymous question that basically said like, hey, I take on these long-term high-impact projects and people who are involved in my projects see my impact, my value, but across the wider company, I might be seen as unproductive because my work is not visible. So are there any tips on how to get noticed without being performative? And I love this question because I feel the same way.

Y'all be performative. Okay. I'm sorry. Like performance is here for a reason. I don't mean not be yourself. Find your own way. I mean, I, sorry, I'm reacting because I have worked with so many highly conscientious people who get pulled into this sort of situation. And there is a funny effect in psychology, like really high efficacy people, people who are incredibly good at solving hard to solve things, sometimes trap themselves in less productive routes because they're so high self-efficacy. Sorry. And I'm sorry if this is, I hope it's not sounding harsh. I hope this is coming with like big sister energy in a way, which I try to bring to my team. But like, listen, you can have a goal of being the most conscientious person who's cleaning up everybody's stuff at the org. That could be your goal. And you, if that's your goal, you should decide what matters to you besides explicit recognition, because you won't ever get it. And it, and that is a choice that some people I respect truly make. And they decide I'm in a care role and this is what I'm going to do. And it's never quite going to be understood. And understanding and support is going to come from outside of my job. And it's going to come from a community of peers.

However, I am an ambitious person and I want to see more people like us succeed. So I encourage those of us who can do this or want to do this to get strategic about performing. This is a game where there are rules that you can learn and you can learn how to make this kind of work more visible. And that's actually some of what I've worked on. I've worked with nonprofits to say, I know you all have this rich, beautiful, incredible health intervention workshops you're doing in the community. And it's impossible to distill it down into dollars saved. I don't care. Like I care about you to go do your work, but in this room that we're going to have with the city council, we must come in with dollars. We must, you know, and making it a strategic game that we can win a weapon that they can use learning those skills. It's not something we should be ashamed of. It's not something that takes away from the authenticity of our work. Maybe it's something where you need to find a partner who's really good at it. Like I considered myself as a VP of research. Part of my job was being a scientist that then the whole big part of my job was, you know, being, um, being this person who was scrapping and fighting for budget all the time and saying our research work really connects to ROI really connects to values. Oh, and final tip, make the cost visible constantly, like constantly say you are not doing this thing. You should I'm saving you millions of dollars. Here's exactly what would happen if I stopped doing this work. And I advise people to, you know, not do the shrinking violet. I guess I kind of did this thing and it was super helpful. And in your, you know, actually that you helped like thousands of people or whatever extraordinary thing you did, you know, backing away from that is a disservice to like all the young people who are going to come after you. Right. So that's how I think about it.

Fantastic advice. Oh, my gosh, this is so good. Rachel and I actually in our one on one started implementing a brag document where we write down things that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't done them, which has been really helpful every week for me to think about. Everybody. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for staying a few minutes late with Kat and I and Rachel. This was a whole lot of fun. Kat, thank you so much. A pleasure. I look forward to the conference.