Cristine: 0:00

The human coalitional mind gravitates towards homogenous in-groups. It feels cozy, you don't get challenged, you have the same incentive structure. But the truth is that the best ideas and solutions come from very diverse, on all dimensions by the way, groups of people who have new ideas, who are thinking about the world in different ways.

Cat: 0:32

The editing for this is going to be incredible which is maybe a great way to introduce our next guest, Dr. Cristine Legare, who's a scientist interested in how we learn to become human. Today we talk about having intellectual openness. Today we talk about curiosity. Today we talk about coalitions and stepping outside of the silo to work together, which I believe is one of the biggest questions facing humanity today. So yeah, we're probably going to solve that in this episode.

Cristine: 1:04

I'm the founder and director of the Center for Applied Cognitive Science, where we're studying how do you harness insights about how the mind works to inform the design of more effective, culturally sensitive, social and behavioral change interventions. I'm also writing a book on ritual and how understanding the pervasive and essential role of ritual provides unique insight into how to solve human problems, improve our interpersonal interactions and our overall capacity to work together to solve complex problems.

Cat: 1:42

I wanted to maybe start with a small story about this because I was thinking about the first time I knew who you were as a person and I was a graduate student on UC San Diego campus and I want to say you were perhaps very early at your own job. and I, I have to disclose that I don't actually remember like the scientific content that you came to share. Right? I'm sure you had shared some amazing experiment. What I remember was walking into this room and then walking out of it thinking, Oh my gosh, psychology could be so much bigger than I knew. Like, I really didn't know how much we could go to other countries, talk to other people expand the boundaries of our science. And I mean, I was very early in my scientific career. So I was kind of just even figuring out. I don't think I even knew maybe what a scientific journal fully was at all. So I just thought I'd share that that that was my main memory of you and I followed your work ever since and it's continued to expand my mind. So I'm really glad you're here.

Cristine: 2:47

I'm delighted to be here and I'm glad there was some impression left. I appreciate that. I, I

Cat: 2:53

know, memory is complicated.

Ashley: 2:55

Mm hmm.

Cristine: 2:55

It's true. It's absolutely true. And I think it's worth thinking about the kinds of, ultimately, the impressions we want to make. Because often we get so caught up in the minutiae of what we do and what we study, that we forget that human memory can't retain everything. No one's going to take away every detail of what you share. So what's most critical and what do you most want to get across? It's one of the reasons why I love podcasts because

Cat: 3:20

Mm.

Cristine: 3:21

much more savvy about what people really resonate with and what they're excited to hear about.

Cat: 3:27

Awesome. I know that one of the things we're really excited to talk about is just this question of how do we work together? Like, what is a strategic way to try to work together? And I feel like you, Ashley, I, we're all coming at this with this being an imperative in our slightly different but very connected worlds, you know, in science, education and technology right now, um, in the cultures we live in more broadly. How do we work together? So I don't, that's a really big question to start you off with. Um, but I'd love to hear a little bit maybe about what informs your perspective on this question, the work that you do, you know, your main areas of focus.

Cristine: 4:09

So, my interest in working together, I think that's a lovely way to put it, is both scholarly and practical. So the types of scientific interests that I have include things like how we become members of the complex cultural environments that we're born into. I think my core scientific interest is really the, how the plasticity and flexibility of our minds allow us to learn any, any language, any body of knowledge, any skill within the human repertoire. And that requires, you know, from a cognitive perspective, plasticity, flexibility that no other species have. So, I've always been interested in understanding the diversity of cultural contexts that humans inhabit. And that requires studying more than Euro American middle class populations, as it turns out. Um, which have, in the field of psychology, often been assumed to be an acceptable prototype for the universal mind. Um, which is couldn't possibly be further from the truth. I mean, the populations that Western industrialized, highly educated populations live in are historically incredibly unrepresentative and, um, you know, even globally unrepresentative in many ways. So, um, it's always been critical to look outside of the, you know, the population that I currently inhabit and try to understand, not just describing cultural environments, but, um, explaining them. And that takes, that requires a complex systems approach that requires more than just one scientific discipline that frankly requires more than science that requires working across different sectors, um, people who do practice people who apply the, you know, scientific Dare I say policymakers, corporate partners, nonprofits. So the future requires tackling big challenges. And that is, that's bigger than a discipline, subdiscipline discipline, that's bigger than science. And it requires, again, from a practical perspective, large scale collaboration, um, of sort of unprecedented degrees.

Cat: 6:33

Mmm. Preach. I'm resonating with this so much as someone who is at a corporation. Who does make recommendations from my research about policy, you know, the policy that changes the lives sometimes of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of groups of real working humans in software and then because software goes everywhere in the world you know in systematically unevenly distributed ways, but it does affect so many things you know the ripple effects of what we think people need and who we think people are are so massive. I love the way that you put it. This that what do we think is the prototypical mind and how much that has just not been a question that's been asked enough. I certainly feel like in software teams we're coming up on that question constantly is the prototypical problem solving that the future needs the kind of thing that was 10 guys in a basement 40 years ago or 30 years ago or something. I don't think so. So I think a really interesting question for me is Oh, how do we get those steps of breaking down the silo going? How do we as experts maybe step out of our lanes of expertise and even just begin to form those partnerships? Do you have any maybe stories or examples on this?

Cristine: 8:04

Sure, I'd be happy to share my attempts at this. I think before I go into the details. Infrastructure that directly supports cross sector partnerships is essential. So the National Science Foundation has funded what I think of as immensely cutting edge network partnerships. Of network development grants. So a lot of what NSF has historically funded is research, critical, important, but the these core complex challenges require the time and space and culture building that's required to understand different sectors well enough to build the right sorts of teams to tackle these, uh, you know, these complex problems. So assuming that these partnerships will just, or networks of networks, just, you know, organically happen, I think is misguided. There needs to be investment in building these partnerships because historically all sectors have been very siloed. You know, certainly this is true of science and a lot of academia, but this is true of a lot of other sectors as well. So we need infrastructure to build the space and time to learn enough about other sectors in order to work together effectively. Um, I can give you one example of a very early attempt that I'm still working on, uh, which is, is I think interesting because it's I'm working with us with informal learning institutions who specialize in scientific learning. Science education, you know, children's science museums. One of my areas of expertise is the development of scientific reasoning. I have expertise in child development and cognitive development. I did my dissertation on the development of causal reasoning. These seem pretty close, quite close. And I had, uh, I think very naively assumed that building a closer relationship with a more synergistic relationship with a, an informal learning institution that really specializes in early childhood education would be a seamless process. But what I learned pretty rapidly is that this nonprofit organization has a completely different institutional culture, different goals. different incentives than the academic culture that I'm most familiar with. And it took years of getting to know these different cultures, you know, these different cultural norms, expectations, et cetera, before we really started to make progress. This wasn't a fast process. I think loose and largely self serving collaborations. You can get those off the ground pretty easily, right? All I'm interested in doing is collecting data at their establishment.

Cat: 11:07

As much data as you can get

Cristine: 11:08

to do. It's not a partnership. I am gathering information there and analyzing it in ways that are very scientifically specific, discipline specific, publishing it in journals, peer reviewed journals, which is our incentive system, and going on my merry way, right? That's making honestly no impact on their organization at all. They're not reading those journals we know up until really recently they didn't even have access to those journals. How in the world could they read them even if they wanted to? But say they did have access using you know, I'm using multi level modeling of really complex data sets, there's not training in that sector, um, typically, to understand that. So, it's taken more than a decade in order to really get to a point where, frankly, I am becoming useful to them, and not just they are useful to me. Scientists have to be part of that translation process.

Ashley: 12:10

I love that so much. I love too that you're just like naming the hard work and the time that goes into this because I think that that is such a barrier for people like who might for you, you know, your example like show up at a museum and be like, okay, I know something about scientific reasoning. Let me tell you how to structure your whole exhibit about how the brain works for kids like as if they're just going to be like, yes, come on in expert like, please do the thing. We are aligned. Um, and that's not how it works. And I think you're totally right. And as someone too, who like I've, I interned at my local science museum in Philadelphia when I was like transitioning into grad school and have done like a lot of informal science communication myself, like seeing the ways in which there are just these like massive barriers between what's going on in academia and what actually gets translated and you know, put into practice, like they're there. And I think you're so right that it takes time and it takes effort and it takes acknowledgement of the different kinds of cultures that exist in these spaces.

Cristine: 13:10

It also requires really creating new incentives. So we, you know, building community partnerships is not something that's historically been incentivized or even valued in academia. So it is labor that I do because I'm interested in being useful to these organizations and you know, assisting in translating evidence into practice. But there's a lot of this effort and work that has to be done that isn't directly incentivized at all. And that's what, that's one of the reasons I mentioned we need networks and infrastructure that support these relationships. Otherwise, these partnerships are going to be limited to people who are unusually driven to collaborate in these ways and willing to tolerate a lot of work, um, that isn't directly incentivized.

Ashley: 14:14

Totally.

Cat: 14:15

think about this a lot. I think about this because I run a team, a lab, you know, of scientists, and we have explicit goals of using community based methods, and we set out these values like, okay, we're going to work with software practitioners as if they are also experts, but they're not our kind of experts, and there needs to be some coming together here, and Whew, you can say all that, you can write it all down, you can, you know, you can have the abstract level of the value, but working it out has been a process of years, continues to be, I feel like we've only scratched the surface, but I'm just deeply, profoundly interested in this question of infrastructure. There's a book that I love called How Infrastructure Works, which is about physical materials infrastructure but I read it sometimes and I think about the structure of incentivizing my scientists to hold a community event where we hold space for practitioners and we ask them what they want us to research. And then how do I make that work legible to our leadership, which we have done with our department. And how do I make it something that will show up on a performance review for a scientist, which we have done inside of our organization. And I was pretty clear from the beginning. That if something cannot have words, cannot have a category, cannot, you know, dare I say, have metrics, which is a really bad word in a lot of these human facing, roles, but I think it's so protective to measure your work and show it over time earlier than you think you need to. Can we show the effort? I've thought a lot about that inside of a corporate structure. And I think it's just been the absolute heart of why we keep doing the work we're doing and then why we have trust with our audience at all. So that was pretty like, you know, open disclosure about how I thought about this. But I think it's really useful in this moment. Yeah, and it can be done. That's something that I just try to tell other leaders this can actually happen. It might even be closer than you think some of these levers that you have to pull and it's sometimes been painful and sometimes been like a little embarrassing because I've been in a room with executives and said, I don't know how to incentivize this for my people, but I know we need to do it. Can you please help me understand the language here? Understand how you would measure this. And I've talked to sales leaders, marketing leaders, all kinds of people who software engineers typically don't, you know, really have in the room with them. And you might be surprised that that has been a source of wisdom, you know, for a research team, but it really has.

Cristine: 16:55

I love that you use the word protective because that's actually similar to how I've justified the need to do research on children's learning in these spaces and to show evidence of learning and to document that in scientifically rigorous ways, it's protective for these institutions, you know, which are immensely valuable for our communities that makes getting funding investment for, you know, resources much more likely. So it is, there's a practical value to, um, spending the time and effort to really show that what you're doing is of value. And I think there's lots of different versions of showing your value. I was thinking about, you know, the other day that the, the divide between, you know, basic and applied science in academia has, or scholarship even, has been really, really destructive and that that has, I think, actively contributed to the siloing of scholarship. Including science from practice in that the most intellectually rigorous and the most talented do the work that is most removed from anything of practical value. Um, don't misread that I think there's no value of basic science. There certainly is. Um, but from my perspective, the gold standard is being able to show what you're studying is actually effective in a real world environment. What higher standard of value could there possibly be? So no discipline should be immune to showing value, not just to people in their discipline through the incentives that are valued in that discipline, but to other disciplines and to other sectors. Why is any discipline or sector above showing broader value? I think, um, I think we all should do that. And that is a critical piece of how to collaborate across sectors to translate what your value is to others, um, an essential skill. And we're not going to be taught that as part of the core training in our sector. Um, you have to learn that in the trenches with a lot of humility in collaboration with people who work in spaces that are very different from yours.

Cat: 19:25

Yeah, I feel like this is, this is just making me think about how much when you meet a person and they might just have such a different background or, or be working in such a different context. But sometimes for me, as someone who considers herself interdisciplinary, you know, and, and apply, this is like very healing to the, the inner grad student. Um, you meet this person sometimes and you're like, oh, we're in it together, aren't we? You know, we have both pitched our papers to multiple journals because there isn't really one that names what we're doing as a category. We have both, um, put our papers up as pre prints and then, and then, you know, read them out at a bar as Ashley's done, you know, in some of her informal learning spaces and said, I, I will take on this challenge of being a translator, even though it wasn't in my training and I'm not going to let that stop me. And I do think there's like a beautiful camaraderie, a beautiful, like we're here on the edge, solidarity. Uh, but gosh, like it's really hard also. It's really draining. And if we are in a world that doesn't always have these pathways built up, I've thought a lot about how do I stay here long enough to be the change and to make other people do this, help other people do this as well, I should say. So do you have any thoughts on that, on the resiliency of living in the margins between all these worlds?

Cristine: 20:52

I think you've already touched on it, you've gotta find kindred spirits. And assuming that those kindred spirits are in your sub discipline. Buried in the same sector that you operate in, it seems very limiting. I was on a, a, uh, kind of webinar as part of the Global Science of Learning and Education Network that, um, Professor Andrea Chiba from, um, She's one of the founders and directors of this, and she's a behavioral neuroscientist. She works on the, you know, the, the neural structures using rodent models, um, studies regulation and balance and, um, unbelievably brilliant woman. We have pretty different areas of expertise, uh, but when I met her, I knew we had very much the same kind of intellectual style and willingness to work in an interdisciplinary context. She'd already had much more experience than me at that point, working with policymakers. Most people studying the neuroscience of rodent brains are not working with policymakers and practitioners and really getting in there to try to translate and do that. So she invited me to be in a webinar with, um, a number of different people, but one of the guests was a CEO of an EdTech startup. He's been, he's led many successful EdTech companies. And I could tell immediately there's some intellectual synergy, right? He's a PhD in biomedical engineering, really different expertise. But the intellectual chemistry was there. We've subsequently collaborated on a number of different projects, and I think we've written probably four or five grant applications together. This was, this was like six months ago. I don't know. Maybe it was eight months ago. We have very, very different backgrounds. You've got to find your people.

Ashley: 22:48

I wonder if like one thing you're naming here and you actually use this word earlier is like humility and you know, there's like, um, this, this idea of like walking into a new space where you're going to know less, like whether that space is policy or how science communication works or whatever it is like you, you know, as a scientist who does, you know, maybe rodent research, like in your example, like you don't have training in that. And so you have to walk into these spaces with humility and willingness to learn and kind of be, for a few moments, the person who is not the smartest person in the room.

Cristine: 23:20

Or for a few years.

Ashley: 23:21

Yeah. Or for a few years, however long it takes. Right. And there's actually

Cat: 23:25

it's going I don't think

Cristine: 23:26

it's

Ashley: 23:26

gonna stop

Cat: 23:27

for me,

Ashley: 23:27

yeah, and I really think that's like what it takes to live in these interdisciplinary spaces. And there's actually a really nice paper recently on this that, you know, when the public sees this kind of intellectual humility in scientists, their trust increases, right? So it's like, and, and like, they showed this empirically, and I think it's really interesting because it's like, we almost get trained as scientists to be really defensive. Like we walk in, like we literally have a thesis defense in which you defend with all of your might, everything you have done, you know, so far in your PhD. And like, I think the reality is the real work in the real world requires humility, like as you've named it.

Cristine: 24:08

Completely agree. I think there's a lot of socialization that academics get that we are somehow, um, Just, just that bit smarter than everyone else and that bit more informed and that what we're doing is so important that we are above justifying its value to anyone outside of the core group of experts that we deem worthy. Uh, I think there's a lot of that kind of entitlement. That is a product, not of individuals who are scientists, but of a culture that as it's called ivory tower for a reason, and I think that has been destructive. I think that if we want the world to value science, which has colossal, monumental, positive impacts on the world is essential for so many, um, aspects of human functioning, um, is critical for tackling the challenges that we face as a globe, if we want the world to appreciate the value, we better make clear why it's practically useful and not just hypothetically prestigious or important in some way. And the more you spend time with really talented people in other sectors, the less self important you feel.

Cat: 25:30

And that's a relief, isn't it?

Cristine: 25:32

Yeah. Just as good at what they do as you are what you, you do. I want to know those people. Those are my people.

Cat: 25:39

Same. I found it a profound relief. What a relief to not actually have the world on your shoulders because we really are all in it together and you don't have

Cristine: 25:49

So true.

Cat: 25:50

Pinning your identity to being the smartest person, which at some point is going to fail you. Um, I've shared in public before that I've had the experience of being really profoundly ill. And listen, if, if you don't think you're a biological creature, which like, I think in academia you're, we're so dehumanized. We're kind of like, we're intellectual robots. Um, being very ill will bring you down to earth. Like, I have, you know, you can have this very smart mind, but if your lungs are not functioning as my lungs were not, that's a precondition. And so I began to care a lot about living in a world where people had bodies, you know, not just minds. And then I was like, I'm a psychologist, you know, like we live with this discipline that's about the human experience. And yet we still so often gravitate towards purely mind based explanations. Not the mind, as you've, you've said, you know, the mind is actually much bigger than our prototypical version of it. So

Cristine: 26:51

Absolutely.

Cat: 26:52

sorry, I'm rambling so many, I'm like resonating so hard that this matters to me so much that I'm just going in a million directions, but

Cristine: 26:59

That's what I mean, you've got to find your people

Cat: 27:01

heh heh heh.

Cristine: 27:03

and be open in where you're going to find them.

Cat: 27:06

Yeah.

Cristine: 27:07

I mean, what are the chances that you're going to share big picture, macro level objectives only with people who have similar PhD level training. Sure, you're going to find people in your discipline that you resonate with, but why limit yourself? And I mean, we know from lots of, of research on things like cognitive and cultural evolution, that the more diverse, the groups are in terms of expertise and experience, the more we're going to come up with innovative solutions. There's scientific evidence for this, right? The human coalitional mind gravitates towards homogenous in-groups It feels cozy, you don't get challenged, people, you have the same incentive structure. But the truth is that the best ideas and solutions come from very diverse, on all dimensions by the way, uh, groups of people who have new ideas, who are thinking about the world in different ways. It's funny that I'm a professor in a psychology department in many ways because I think of myself as a cognitive scientist, um, focally, because cognitive science is overtly interdisciplinary, um, and my core interest is in cognition in, in many respects, but I often think my greatest intellectual advantage as someone working as a psychologist in a psychology department is not having an undergraduate degree in psychology because I didn't get any instruction that certain questions and ways of thinking were off limits for me as a member of particular discipline. No one, I didn't get that memo. I didn't go to those classes. Like this is how psychologists think about the world. So instead I took I mean, I, I would have majored in everything. I only picked the major, the two majors I had because my guidance counselor was like, Legare, you know, you need to graduate and have majors to do that. So you got to, so I picked the two most interdisciplinary majors I could find. That's been enormously informative, um, for how I think about the world.

Cat: 29:21

Oh, I love that too. Yeah. I gotta stop saying I love that, but I do. There's the whole, just beaming love at this whole episode. I, something that I've lived this running a research lab and putting together an interdisciplinary team. And hiring people because there, there were no people who lived at exactly the intersections that I wanted, you know, to study software engineers, but to also have a background in social science and kind of the empirical literature that I wanted us to be able to build from. Um, and so I said, Oh, got it. Okay. I have to create a lab where those people have the room in the space to develop that expertise. And so, you know, we have this Developer Success Lab that I run, and we have PhDs in Psychology, but then we've also had expert co authors, what I call them, and I constantly use the word expert because I think people are so often diminished when they're the only person without a PhD on a research team. And, and, um, and bringing those people in has been amazing, you know, and I've seen and felt and lived myself the moments of productive friction that happen and it's not always comfortable, easy, you know, the comfortable, easy thing is to never use your mind and to go on autopilot and to like learn one way of doing a research project and then just never question it again. And we, I think, understood that our audience just needed something more. And we were just profoundly motivated to ask ourselves, like, what is the negative space that no one's talking about with software engineering teams, despite all the resources they have, you know, and how do I even begin to know what that is? I need to build a coalition here, like we need to have someone who has been a software engineer and someone who's been a scientist, and those two people need to be together long enough to write something that matters and to do a project that matters. So

Ashley: 31:20

Yeah, you create space for that learning. I think that that's like, and, space for that growth too, which I think is like, again, this stuff takes time. It takes effort. You have to intentionally create the infrastructure for it. And I think like Cat, you've done that on your team. Like you have learning moments, like all together, like you look at papers all together, you know, and you're like, okay, what is this doing? And let's all look at it from our different respective angles, but grow in one direction.

Cat: 31:44

Kristen Foster-Marks, who's the head of developer experience at Depot now, and who was with my lab as an expert software practitioner for a while, had this moment where she pushed all of us in the best way and said, you all do these very rich, wonderful lit reviews. I've sat here and seen it. You know, how much you work on a project is engaging with the literature, situating your thought, you know, with all of these studies. And I just remember so many moments she looked at me and said, Cat, no one is going to go read these studies you're citing. No one is. We have to translate this for the audience, and the audience really wants to know, like, what's the science I can trust? What do you all think about it? And, um, can we put this together, you know, in a format that people would, understand? And so we created this overlay journal where we, um, take original scientific articles and we allow people access into them. But we also write little blog posts essentially about them kind of breaking down. Why do we think you know that this is useful? How does this steer our thinking? And it's just one little drop in the bucket of science translation. But the reason I share this is because I thought that no one would be interested in this. I was just like, I, I can't, this seems so, I don't know, nerdy, like, it seems so, like, I'm stuck doing the work already, I was so deep doing the work of, like, writing the scientific artifact. And it took this wisdom from someone who was living on the other side to say, trust me. I want you to do this. Please do this. And I was like, all right, you know, I'll answer that call any day. Um, and it has been very popular.

Cristine: 33:28

There's a, I think a huge demand for designing, uh, new cultures, because that's what you're doing, that you're creating a different culture within an institution, and that process deserves documentation, because it's not an easy thing to do. And I think there's an enormous demand in many different institutional spaces. To learn how others have done it, even if it's quite a different space. Still, just some kind of a roadmap for how to do this effectively. What works, even more critically, what didn't work. Holding really a kind of lens up to what this process looks like, I think is essential. It prevents people from reinventing the wheel. It gives people hope that it's possible, um, all institutions have, and you've, you've not used this language, but you've described it have rituals that people readily adopt where ritual animals, we have a ritual grammar. It allows for groups to function effectively. It also stymies collaboration between groups. It stymies change. It has critical functionalities, the transmission of values and norms within groups and things of that sort. All institutions have these, and having transparency about that allows you to create different institutions with different practices and rituals and things of that sort. You have to kind of really expose what's there and how it works in order to be able to change it. It's a big part of what my core interest is. And science is, we're full of rituals. We are absolutely full of them. We get our ideas, and then we translate them into a study, and then we write that study up, and it's got like a intro, and a methods, and, and then we publish it, and then only the people right within our discipline ever read it, and then we say congratulations to us, and we put it as a citation on our CV, and we feel wonderful about ourselves. And get lots of pellets for that, for people within our discipline. one. Um, that's a ritual and it's, that's its own kind of incentive. Um, in no way do I mean to trivialize the scientific process and there are advantages, right? There are many, there are many disciplines, not disciplines, but sectors, for example, who collect massive amounts of data and don't publish it. They use it for, you know, certain important reasons in particular ways, but it means that those data aren't accessible, right? Our, one of our great strengths is making information accessible. The whole paywall and all that, that really, that was like, really a step in the wrong direction for many, many years, but we're correcting that.

Cat: 36:21

Counter to our values, really.

Cristine: 36:24

But in principle, having peer reviewed data accessible is our superpower. So it's not all rituals are bad, but there are always strengths and weaknesses for all of the incentive structures that any institution has.

Ashley: 36:42

God, I love anthropology for just putting names on things like,

Cristine: 36:46

Isn't it great? Me too.

Ashley: 36:48

like, yeah, rituals. Absolutely. We have them

Cristine: 36:51

I wasn't trained that you're supposed to just stay in your own. I sample and borrow shamelessly from anywhere that I think provides useful insight. Rituals don't belong to, shouldn't belong to anthropology. Culture shouldn't belong to anthropology. That is culture belongs to all humans in all ways at all times. And I think the siloing. of something like ritual is that people thought this was just like a religious ceremony, which by the way, of course is a ritual, but ritual is the behavioral grammar of all human groups. All organizations have rituals and they have functions and they have strengths, but they also have limitations and understanding how things work is the only way to try to change them or even figure out if they should be changed in the first place. You know, going back to, you know, your point about humility, you need to expose yourself to critically honest feedback and figure out how to respond, and in many cases, figure out how to communicate your value much more clearly. That's the only way you learn how to do it. You've gotta, there's a vulnerability there. And it also allows you to build confidence, right? Confidence is is earned, It's not granted, you've, you've gotta put yourself in situations where like, okay, I figured out how to respond to that. Um, I've thought through a different way to, to present information. Uh, here's something we can improve. All, all of that requires. I don't know any other way to achieve it.

Cat: 38:35

Yeah.

Ashley: 38:36

agree. I mean, this is one of the reasons I like teaching actually, is because when you have, when you teach in a way that it's a two way street, not just a like lecture, you know, sage on the stage situation. And you actually hear back from students. They'll give you their honest opinions about what's working and what's not and what's confusing. And, you know, why in the heck does this matter? Right. And they'll ask you those things and they'll push you on it. And it forces you to reconsider why are we teaching this and how? And I, yeah, I love that aspect of teaching.

Cat: 39:10

I think sometimes an interesting way in for people is to flip like the direction of power they think about, or the direction of insight they think about. This is just, I don't know if you'll resonate, but this is a trick of mine is when I did my first big study about developers, and it was a qualitative study. I interviewed them, which is very challenging and new for me because I really came up through the quantitative rituals, and I just wanted to talk to people. I just wanted to hear more, you know, and, um And there was this big conversation in software that was like, Um, Oh, we love learning. We're upskill all day long. We're through our whole careers. We love learning. And I put out this study that was like Do you love learning? Because it doesn't seem like you're acting like people who love learning. Um, you know. And the flip that I think was very successful in this particular piece of science communication was I said, yes, a lot of people talk about junior developers and what they won't get if we don't have learning cultures on our teams. They won't get mentorship. They won't get support. But I would like you to imagine to yourself, what do the very senior engineers no longer get if they are in a culture when they can't talk to newcomers and they're in a culture where they can't mentor people? What are they missing? And what are they losing? And I framed a bunch of talks with that beginning and I saw these conversations. Very established, very important staff engineers kind of just melt, like a little bit, just like, Oh, my gosh, somebody sees that I really miss having people to talk to, and that this is actually something that we need in our fields. And that was such a beautiful communication device that worked a lot for me.

Cristine: 40:55

It also requires the wisdom that you don't always know where you're going to come up with new and fresh ideas. As spaces that we work in have become more and more competitive, and there's such a, you know, major expectation for productivity that that often pushes us towards a more incremental, you know, pebble counting approach of this is something I know how to do. This is something that is labeled as a product in my institutional culture. Um, I'm aiming this to, towards people who are very, very familiar with this form of output. And the reality is that you can't be, you shouldn't be, I think, overly strategic in where good ideas are going to come from. Um, one of the, I think most interesting ideas that I've had in recent years came during a lecture I went to on ancient Egyptian rituals. and noticing parallels between rituals in other places, including other populations I was studying. And I went to that talk, not because I thought I would, of course I had no idea I was going to, that insight would come out of that talk. I just thought, who doesn't want to go to a talk on ancient Egyptian religion? How fascinating is that by someone who is an absolute world expert? And I really try to communicate the need to be intellectually open. and follow your curiosity. Maybe some would argue spending an hour of my time on ancient Egyptian religion, unnecessary, inefficient. I think that's short sighted. Spend a little time exploring new spaces, following your curiosity, get curious about some things. You get to a point in your career where you have very little curiosity left. Your capacity for discovery, innovation, contribution similarly limited, no matter what field you're in.