You can learn product management, you can learn the full-stack environment your dev works in, and you can learn how to prototype; these are all professional skills we learn in our jobs. But the rest, the big stuff, the important stuff, you gotta feel it. In product management, we make a truckload of rational decisions and choices. Using reason and method we immerse ourselves in the data so we can make "data driven decisions". And they're good decisions right, cause it's data. And to get there, we revere rationality, logic, structure, but often to the exclusion of emotion, feeling, gut, instinct and knowledge. So I wanna talk about this 'soft/tough' stuff. Of giving voice, of feeling and expressing vulnerability, of the power of listening, of using empathy and emotion ... the stuff of creativity that helps us make great choices and decisions. And you learn this by feeling it, experiencing and doing it, by being it.

1. sandra@theproductspace.com
www.theproductspace.com
LAST, Canberra
September 2017
Thinking is good …
Feeling is better

2.  Love affair with industrialised ways of
working & thinking (Taylorism)
 Leadership predominantly based on
hierarchical structures with “leaders”
telling “workers” what to do
 Rationality, control, formalism
heroed in management texts
 IQ valued over EQ
Thinking trumps feeling

3. Current management is quakery
 Work has shifted from semi-skilled to
knowledge work
 Complexity in our environments that current
Management wasn’t designed to deal with
 Centralised control is too slow for innovation
and shit for communication
 Organisations need the commitment of the
workforce: autonomy is the new normal

4. We demand a new way to work
 Emotion, empathy, compassion,
vulnerability, qualitative
experiences and insights
 Radical candour, radical
transparency
 Theory Y over Theory X
 The way we work is changing
Douglas McGregor: “The
human side of the
enterprise”

5.  Do you make decisions based on
quantitative data, log files, surveys,
split tests?
 Does your Team use rigorous
prioritisation frameworks, bringing
logic and sense to already logical
data sets?
 If that’s all your using to make
decisions, please stop
Stop right now …

6. r u serious

7.  How we work, make decisions is labelled as
objective – the ‘norm’
 More intuitive responses are labelled
subjective – as less valid, less important – a
weakness
 We act rationally at work, we don’t bring our
homes into the workplaces, we try not to
express or feel emotion
 Too boring, too binary
0’s and 1’s won’t take us there

9. “I have no
fucking
idea”

10. Truth trumps bullshit
 Try “I don’t know”, "let me think
about that" or "what do you
think?”
 Practice truth and fight
institutionalised bullshit
 The next time you bullshit, and
we’ve all done it, stop yourself

11.  The philosopher, the feminine, the
soft side of me: sucker for
contradiction, for irrationality, for
compassion and emotion
 “Emotion isn't a frivolous
distraction from the serious
business of achievement, it's an
integral part of the process”
 You can’t have one over the other
Feeling trumps thinking

12.  You need the full gamut for
creativity and decision making
 Structure, data, logic and rationality
 Emotion, insight, gut, vulnerability
Systems thinking for decisions
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of
innovation, creativity and
change.”

13. Thinking wrapped in a meta layer of feeling

14.  Practice by feeling, by doing
 Read differently: the
humanities, philosophy
 Feel: Do something that
makes you cry
 Listen deeply
 Do something without ego,
 Be empathetic: walk in
someone’s shoes,
 Feel from your gut, use your
experience and failures, and
others’ lessons to guide you
What else can we do

15. “The quality of the results that we create
in any kind of social system is a function
of the quality of awareness, attention or
consciousness that the participants in the
system operate from.”