moderator: 0:00

Welcome to the scrum.org community Podcast, the podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, agile experts, including professional scrum trainers and other industry thought leaders, share their stories and experiences. We also explore hot topics in our space with thought provoking, challenging, energetic discussions. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Dave West: 0:25

Hello and welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host, Dave West, CEO here@scrum.org in today's podcast, we're talking to Dave Dame PST and Senior Director of Product Accessibility and human centered design at Microsoft. Dave's from Canada, so we're obviously not going to mention the hockey and we'll try to avoid any mention of the Winter Olympics, obviously. So welcome to the podcast, Dave.

Dave Dame: 0:53

Thank you, Dave, and thank you for being so empathetic of the Winter Games.

Dave West: 0:59

Yes, I imagine that the entire nation was in mourning after those two hockey defeats.

Dave Dame: 1:06

We took the week off just to kind of mourn it and stuff, and then we apologize to each other and had some meatballs here, if it was good.

Dave West: 1:16

That sounds, that sounds what I'd expect, which is great. Now we're actually got you on the podcast because you've just about to publish a new book, but before we talk about that, I think our audience would be a little bit interested in who you are, what you do, and what product accessibility in human centered design is.

Dave Dame: 1:38

Yeah. So my name is Dave dame. I work at Microsoft, and I lead the human centered design team. And human centered design, I have a group of really cross functional scientists and analysts. So I have, like, a team that focuses on inclusive design, that really runs the inclusive tech lab and focuses on building products for people with disabilities, the human factor of it like, what are the mismatches of our hardware and software? How do we work with the community? By bringing people with disabilities in and understanding what those struggles are firsthand, and sit them right next to product makers so we can design and build better products. I also have human factors. That does the ergonomics of all the devices for all humans, right? How do we make sure the keyboard has that beautiful touch on the keyboard in the field, how do we make sure the mouse feels just right? What are the what is the tension of the screen when you lift it up, all those details that the user doesn't have to worry about, they just get the comfort and enjoy. And then we also have cognitive sciences. What really looks at all the digital experiences and measures the human mental load of really trying to navigate those things. Because we know when we build experiences, we want an intuitive where the user just unconsciously knows how to use this system, and then we have a great user research team that really works with users, so we can go back and inform design and really make those decisions that are the best for the human. And I have a team too that does prototyping with high real production like code, so we can get things to users quicker. The real thing we want to do with this team is we're really trying to make sure we built the right thing where we're solving the right human problem or going for the right opportunity, by testing it with humans right away, quickly. So when we learn, hey, does this work? Does it got the value prop. We hope, if it does, great, we'll go make it and build it. If not, we'll pivot and go, maybe there's another user demographic. Maybe we'll get to adjust it we can, or if we just decide to kill the product altogether, because we don't want to waste the user's time delivering something of low value. So regardless of ability, whether they have a disability or not, we want to make sure the technology is centered around human grounding, to make sure it's a delight for them to use, whether it's physically, cognitively or inclusively.

Dave West: 4:39

Wow, that's that's a bit of a big mission, isn't it? I I guess the you're sort of dealing with the challenge that everybody builds stuff for themselves

Dave Dame: 4:49

exactly, exactly you nailed it on the head. Dave, like we're biased, right? You're Yeah, you come from product to we. Build something, we think it's the most incredible idea ever, or we're technical, and we think everybody would like it. But then you put it in front of somebody in a different domain or different type of work, and they're like, What is this like? We use technology just to get our job done. We don't get excited about it. So in order for us to really kind of get that wide scope of idea, we got to test it with people other than ourselves

Dave West: 5:30

and that, and distill that learning so that you can effectively, consistently deliver to that audience and to that to that group,

Dave Dame: 5:41

and continually learn from that audience, right? Like, once we release, we need to know, how was it? What did we what should we think of is the roadmap still aligned to because we don't build it all at once and make sure we're building the right thing at the right time? Hopefully,

Dave West: 5:58

yeah, it's, it's such an interesting domain. In fact, in another life, I would have loved to have gone into human computer interaction, but I took a pivot and ended up in, you know, the place that that, you know, the process world. Because I think it's, it's really interesting just watching my kids, watching my wife, it's just so interesting to see how she uses it. How my kids use it, how I use it? All of us come of our own, own baggage and it. You must have a really interesting job. Dave,

Dave Dame: 6:30

well, you put it interestingly, like you talk to adults our age, they don't want to use voice a lot with their computer. They'll use it with their phone, but they don't want to use it with their computer, because, well, I'm not going to talk to it, but then you go to my kids, their voice first, right? They use their iPads or tablets, voice first. So just seeing the difference in ages and who's a computer native and who's not like I remember when I used to work at another place before Microsoft, we're trying to get people to do mobile banking and online banking, and there was an age demographic like they were afraid they'd actually delete their savings forever. And that's a real fear, right? But if you don't think about the humans you're building for, designing for and figuring out where to meet them, where they're at, you're just building a digital graveyard. So that's what I love about this group. They're passionate about. Let's validate firsthand. Is this really going to meet the needs of a wide set of humans? Because it's really easy building for one. It's really hard building for a variety of different people and different needs.

Dave West: 7:46

Yeah, I know my mom. She prints out everything she does. So she does mobile, you know, online banking, and then I set up a printer so she can just print out, you know, when it says your transactions done, she prints it out, and she has this big pile. And I'm like, Mom, what are you doing with that? She goes, Well, it's just in case something goes wrong, so I can take it into the bank to show them what I've done,

Dave Dame: 8:09

what? And it's not even age. My wife does the same thing in finance, right? Like she keeps printing things off. And I'm like, you know, you got a digital record? Nope. If everything goes down, I got written record right here.

Dave West: 8:24

Yes, that is true. All right, anyway. So we could spend hours talking about human computer interaction and design, but actually, that's not what we're here to talk about. Maybe we'll do another podcast on that. We're here to talk about your new book. The title of the book is leading with imperfect feet. Tell me a little bit about what motivated you to write a book and what the sort of theme of the book is. Dave,

Dave Dame: 8:53

yeah, what really motivated me to write the book is, through my whole career, I've enjoyed leaving, like I've had to leave since I was 18 years old. If you remember my TED talk, I talked about where I had to hire personal support workers. Oh, for anybody on the call, by the way, I have cerebral palsy. I zoom around in a power wheelchair, and I've had it all my life, but it's really taught me the Intuit of leadership skills that I think I had to learn just out of necessity, that really gave me the opportunity to really know how to connect with people and really how to lead them, and how to grow them, and really get them to be able to do or work with them, to help them achieve amazing things. And you know what motivated me to write the book is, luckily, I've always had, like, really high leadership scores. I've kept in touch with everybody that I used to lead. And even people that we realized that the organization wasn't a right fit for them, or my team wasn't a right fit, or their role wasn't a right fit, I was still able to continue to keep them around, which you usually don't do when you separate. And it was just they'd always come back to me and go, it was that time with you that I learned and grew this and that, and as I get older, I'm not always going to be here. And you know, when you're younger, you're always like, how do I be a better leader? How do I grow to get to this next thing? As you get older, and you really start to think about, what do you want to leave this world when you're no longer here, and what are some of the learnings you want to leave so someone can grab it and even evolve it further, and to do that. So by writing this book, I wanted to really encapsulate because my disability is cerebral palsy, but I think a lot of leaders. I think leadership disability out there is they feel they need perfection. You got to do it perfect the first time, and you know, you got to really not move until you know all the answers and everything. But as you know Dave, we've had conversations before, the real thing is, is you just start doing it and learning and really embrace that fear, like I had to overcome cerebral palsy to walk on the beach and about, I don't know, about seven or eight years ago, even though I did walks for Terry Fox marathons, I decided to walk on The beach for the very first time, now for years, I would sit on the beach and look out in the ocean, and I would wonder, what would it be like to be out there and in the ocean. And, you know, I would come up with a million excuses why I shouldn't do it. You know, people are going to look at me funny. I'm going to fall and my feet, because of my cerebral palsy, you know, is changed a bit, because it's not like normal feet I walk. But why would I do that? And that one day, I realized I wasn't getting any younger, and I gotta, you know, time to practice what I speak and just try. And we were with friends of ours that, you know, helped me walk along the beach, but when I put my bare feet in the sand for the first time, my really imperfect feet, what I really liked about the sand was it would caress all the imperfections, where they didn't care whether it was perfect or not, the sand all met me where I was at and the feeling of a bare foot in warm sand was a feeling that, you know, I'll never forget. And so as we started walking, I could tell everybody was staring at me, and like, you know, when you're doing something for the first time, really concentrating, you feel every grain of sand, like I was feeling every motion, and then, and then my biggest fear happened. I fell. And then, of course, everybody's looking at me and like, are you okay? And I had a choice I had to make at that time, I could go back, get up and go back in my chair, I was just behind me, or I could get up and keep walking toward the ocean. And of course, you know what I did? That should be a short story. I kept walking toward the ocean every time, following getting back up, I didn't learn to walk all the way there. I just learned to get back up. And then when I got into the ocean, you know, it was like, everybody's like, Oh, are you good? Now go? No, I want to keep going. And I kept going and going and going into the water was right above my lips, so I knew I better stop now, or I'm just going to drown. But I still remember when I turned around and looked back at the shore where I spent my life previously, before looking at it at a completely different way, I got to see, you know, what I thought would have been the biggest problems on this point of view. It didn't seem very big at all. It didn't seem as scary and like, I didn't think I was going far enough, but when I seen how far I went, it was incredible. And then when I got back up to the chair, I remember there was this older gentleman making his way down to the water with a walker. And I was like, Wow. You know, seeing him go in and enjoy himself. And as he was coming up, I was thinking to myself, wow him, seeing me succeed and go in the water. He must have been motivated or inspired. But it turned out, when he came, he's like, yeah, he goes, I seen you keep falling down and getting back up. So he thought, if I could look stupid, so could he, and that was a real kind of confirming lesson. It wasn't what I achieved, it was what I faced, the adversity, adapted and overcame, that really motivated people. So in my book, I tried to relate those learnings into that where there's never going to be a perfect moment. So like, do it now and take care of it. Like, you know, don't avoid risk, avoid over planning, because the world's going to change. And then, like, you can't really control people. Control driven leadership. They'll do what you say, but they might not do what's needed. And by embracing people, to give them those guardrails, to make sure that they have freedom to think and see things differently, like I was able to once I was in the ocean, you get that kind of creativity, and then you reduce your fear of public exposure, or like, failing in public.

Dave West: 16:03

It's interesting. I just want to pick up on you that was a lot of things in there, Dave, but I let's just the embarrassment factor. A lot of leaders, I feel, are more focused on not looking embarrassed by their peers or by their employees, than actually getting to the right solution, etc. Is that something that you know that that's a message that I think I'm taking from that story, but is that something that that's a crucial part to modern leadership, because you are going to be embarrassed, you are going to make mistakes, you are going to get things wrong right?

Dave Dame: 16:41

I think vulnerability is a leadership advantage. It's not a weakness, right? It's because, you know, being younger, I used to try not to let my disability be seen or and I'm in a wheelchair. It's not like I'm going to hide it. I can't put a plant in front of it, and nobody's going to see my wheelchair, but I was so sensitive of not, of not trying to, like, look like I was struggling. And it was one of the people that was on my team that reported to me when I was moving on to another job. He goes, You know what? We don't follow you, because you get it all right. We fall without any challenge. We follow you because you struggle and eventually get us to where we need to right. And so it was kind of a reminder, because you learn as much from your team as they do you. And when I realized it wasn't the avoidance of struggle that made him want to follow me and believe me, but it was the facing the struggle and adversity and being vulnerable about it and doing it anyway. So I think really vulnerability really helps me connect with my with everybody on my team, because we're all vulnerable of something. It just might be a different altitude or a different whatever. But it doesn't mean you become overly vulnerable either. But you find that right balance where you don't let vulnerability limit what you can imagine or what you can innovate, or what can be possible from your team.

Dave West: 18:19

How do you get that balance. Because, you know, I something that I wrestle with a lot, you know, trying to be too open and too will it? Because part of it is about transparency and honesty and authenticness, right? You know, and you're trying to make decisions. You're trying to lead your team in a certain direction. Some things you know really do expose some quite, quite embarrassing weaknesses in you, in yourself as a leader, as a human being. You've not thought things through, or you've not had time, or you'll make or you're actually not in agreement for the decision that you're executing with your team, but you don't want them to lose, you know, the sort of like belief in the organization. How do you balance all of these things? Dave,

Dave Dame: 19:14

that's really hard, right? I think even if you think you know how to do it, you don't, right, like because new challenges come all the time. Like you said, there's things sometimes we got to lead our team that we might not really, we might not really agree with the decision above or believe, but we have a responsibility to the organization, and I think that's when I let humility get in, because we can't know everything, right? So even though I might not understand or support the decision of what I know now, I gotta accept maybe I don't know yet everything that above me knows. So I think by being authentic that way to go. Look, I agree with what you're all saying as a team, but I think we have to also trust others, because trust and humility need to go with with vulnerability. So sometimes you got to trust they have a different insight, they have different notion, they have different or they can't expose everything yet, and then just kind of work that way. I think it's a situation by situation thing. And then you just learn right? Because if you're always vulnerable, then then people think you don't have confidence. So,

Dave West: 20:34

yeah,

Dave Dame: 20:34

like everything, you don't over rely on confidence. You don't over rely on vulnerability. You don't over rely on I have to be right. It's if you could be one extreme in any of those axis, it would be easy. But the real struggle is just like how hard it is to walk. You get a balance between all those fears to try to take your next step. And it's maybe not always trying to get to the finish line, but what simply is the next step we got to go to.

Dave West: 21:05

And what I've seen that you do, Dave, probably better than anybody, is you use humor to diffuse, if that's the right word, the stress of the situation,

Dave Dame: 21:21

yeah, and I think I got that early as a kid, right? Because when I went to school where I was, like, the only person in a wheelchair, like I wasn't the jock. You can see me the audience can. I wasn't overly pretty. But you know, humor was a way to really diffuse the like disability or the uncomfortableness with disability, right So, and I think humor is always from my like, how I deal with things, humor was the way to really connect with people, to make it okay To be wrong, to make it okay to be different, to make it okay to see things differently. Because like, if I can't laugh at myself, others can't laugh either, and work, it's too hard not to take a moment and just use and just kind of enjoy and laugh about it and not take ourselves too seriously. Like, you know, I use my humor when it was even when my wife and I first met, right? We first met online. And then her third question to me was because she knew I had cerebral palsy and I was in a wheelchair, and all that, her third question was to me, Well, can you have sex? And my answer to her was, well, I could tell you, but I'd rather show you. And so she got a sense of who I was and the way I kind of diffused a really stressful question by doing that. Or even when a leader will go, oh, you know, you got to walk the walk. And I'm like, I'll take your word for that. You know, just kind of a bit of humor to open up in the room that at the end of the day, we're all human. And you're right. Humor is what I tried to use to diffuse those situations or try to make the uncomfortable little more approachable. But everybody might have their own tools, right? There might be people that that are creative or that, you know, know how to use different soft skills to connect. And for me, I just have always enjoyed a good laugh, and you can really connect over good laughs.

Dave West: 23:39

Yeah, empathy. I think humor drives empathy and connection, that the that I think very few other things do. I'm sure there's, you know, tools like liberating structures and that, you know, powerful questions and other things that can also fill that void. But I, I'm with you, Dave, I I like, I like a joke. It makes me, it makes me feel like we're creating not only empathy, but also energy. Well,

Dave Dame: 24:12

exactly, and you know, and everybody's going to develop their own toolkit, right? Like you've heard me say a million times, you can fix a wrong decision quicker than a non decision. So it's like getting things to be like, You know what? We've all made wrong decisions like, you know, we didn't end up always having the answer. But if you have the chance to learn what didn't work, it gets you closer to what does work, and what I tried to do in this book at the end of every chapter, I have exercises to go if you want to develop these skills, here's kind of a way you can develop it and to build things from it. Because it's a small book. I didn't want to write a big, you know, War and Peace novel. I wanted. A book someone could read on two business like two flights on a business trip, and have questions if they wanted to develop some of those skills, whether it's bottom up innovation, because, you know, we've all worked in large organizations, so how do you balance the hierarchy? But let that creativity and innovation come up from those that are closest to the customer.

Dave West: 25:25

Yeah, so that so imperfect is an interesting word that you used, and you've used it a few times during our conversation. Dave The as an ex engineer, I have to say that I don't know if anybody is ever an ex engineer, but software development was your was your passion at university, and your first few jobs right as an engineer, wrestling with the fact that we aren't ever working in a perfect world, I guess, in your job, as in product Accessibility and design, H human centered design. It's very obvious then, but when we're building systems and products, we tend to aspire for perfection, for complete, knowledge, for complete you know, well defined. Everything's nicely understood, then we move forward. Is that another lesson that you drove in the book?

Dave Dame: 26:20

Yeah, just kind of really trying to realize you're never going to get it perfect, but you can move forward like, you know, like Perfection is the enemy of great, you know, those things we've all heard and really realizing, too, is you gotta allow yourself time to grow right? Like we're doing all these great things with AI, but we're moving so fast. We're not giving humans enough time to build a relationship with it and trust it. And and leadership is kind of a journey, too. And like you learn probably because I was a really good engineer when I came out of school, like I I was able to code do that, and then when I was doing technical architecture, and then eventually moving into design, into product, I was really good. But then when you become a leader, it's not about you. It's no longer about you being that individual shining star and going we have to grow others and give them their success stories and get them to really build in, to get to the next role. And to me, that was the hardest shift, because nobody really teaches you that, right. And early in your career, you got to stand out. You got to shine you got to do that, and you want to get noticed by your leadership. And do that. Where I find sometimes when leaders come, they forget where they came from and realize, Hey, your job now is to really add to that flame and add to that fire of your people, and really continually grow them, because we're going to move on. We only get to work with these people for a fixed time, then they either move on, or you move on, or eventually, hopefully we retire, but you got to keep that torch moving. You got to really teach them. You learn all these skills from mistakes, not from knowing all the answers. Because like, like you, I'm sure like you learn something new every day where I'm like, I would have never tried it that way, but great. And then in the book, I had to give examples to when sometimes my team mentored me or educated me on something, and to be a leader, if you don't have a vulnerable empathy, you only treat learning one way, and learning has got to happen bi directional.

Dave West: 28:39

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting insight that, and I'm not sure I do a particularly good job either of this, that this thinking about developing people, and also that this sort of relationship of learning that you create when you're working with people, that it is bi directional. I know that, you know, I mentor a few people, and I get as much out of that as I get as I put in. I've learned more from these conversations mentoring than I think they've learned from me. I hope they would say the same. That would be good, but, and I think that's a really interesting point.

Dave Dame: 29:18

Well, that's the problem. As you grow your career, you're pretty much, you're pretty much, don't get enough time to grow, or you're running out of people you can mentor from above you. So you got to kind of look to the side of you, and then look at like, where do I get that growth? If I can't get it from above, where can I get it right? And you're right. Like, to me, mentoring, like, first of all, you think you're helping others, but most of the time you're helping yourself to along the way. You hope you are.

Dave West: 29:51

Yeah. Do you think that organizations you've worked in in a few and you've worked with a lot of large organizations? Do you think that organization. Organizations ultimately discourage, almost discourage, this kind of leadership style.

Dave Dame: 30:06

Yeah, it's not rewarded like you get rewarded for being right. You get rewarded for shipping, being like, successful doing that and but if you do it really good. You're still achieving those things, but they take all the hard work for granted, right? Like, you know, we've all had different kinds of leaders. We've all had good leaders, bad leaders, and we've learned something in between them. But I think in a world now where we're always looking at outcome, we got to realize that outcome was a result to all the activity of doing all the things that go unnoticed, and unfortunately, they call it as, Oh, those are the soft skills, or you're a good people leader. But if you're looking at if you're really trying to get high performing teams, you got to make sure all the people are really aligned, focused on the right way. They have permission to fail. They have to do all that they know where the guardrails are, because you got to put the guardrails in as a leader, because you got an obligation to organization. But I think what I found is it goes unnoticed till they come to you and go, can you do that in this group? Or can you show me how you did that? Because they're hoping it's like one simple answer, and it's not like, even with leadership style, with every individual, you got to lead them differently, because every person needs something different on your team. So you can't just say, Oh, we're doing this progressive leadership style. We're all on board. No, but you got to really connect individually with these person some want praise, some want the critical feedback. Don't give me that fluff stuff. Tell me what I'm doing wrong, and I've had to adapt my style. What I've learned is there's no one style that fits all, and I've learned to quickly assess and understand the person, find out what they need that motivates them, or what demotivates them, and really keep an ongoing memory of that and look to let them grow beyond your team. Like, don't feel like you got to keep them forever. Like, to me, it's, we're sharing this time together. You're going to learn a lot, I'm going to learn a lot, and we're going to move on. But it's, I think to your a long winded answer to your question is, I think it does get overlooked,

Dave West: 32:39

yeah. And do you think that's going to get even worse with AI, the fact that you're the the ability to perform and to deliver and productivity and efficiency becomes such a maniacal focus of organizations as we have agentic teams, really, you know, maybe two or three human beings And a bunch of agents that do work for us? Do we think that that it's going to become even less humane in organizations?

Dave Dame: 33:11

It could quite easily be right, because then everybody starts managing by dashboards. Yeah. Who's this agent doing? What is that agent? You can't you can't listen to the agents in the lunch room to see how they're collaborating, right? Because they never take a lunch and stuff. And I think it's gonna be it's gonna be hard, because I think what AI is good at doing is quickly learning and doing stuff. But will be interesting is those innovation, or those sparks of innovation comes

Dave West: 33:44

from

Dave Dame: 33:45

when you're not productive, from when you're sitting in front of a whiteboard just having an ad hoc conversation and go, I have a thought, and it'd be interesting, because you know, when you code things And when you got algorithms and stuff, they're very focused and fixed. So I think we'll get really good at knowing the unknown. I'm concerned with where it can be those new breakthroughs, or verticals where we might say the AI is hallucinating, where they might be innovating for something we haven't seen yet, so we'll correct it before it takes us for a new learning or opportunity. So that's what I personally kind of think is going to be the struggle. Or what could be the danger is maybe when it's going wrong, it might be adjusting and shifting to going where we need to change the way we do it instead of do what we do better.

Dave West: 34:44

It is funny, because how many innovative ideas have come out from your conversations with your team, when actually the team misunderstand you? You know that they're kind of like you've asked them to, you know we're like, this is the goal. Blah, blah. Blah, but because you're not eloquent necessarily in describing it exactly, you can't take your brain and put it in front of them the the resulting conversation. And then all of a sudden they realize, and then you realize that we're actually talking at slightly different directions, but actually we've ended up in a really interesting place, because interesting place because of that. And increasingly, I find with AI that as we become more capable of describing goals, and obviously that's the difference. Through a genic right, you describe not a set of instructions, you describe a goal that you want, then suddenly you won't have that accidental creativity,

Dave Dame: 35:44

Yeah, cuz, like, think about some of the best features you ship, or products was probably from ambiguous requirements. It's interpreted differently, right? Like,

Dave West: 35:54

totally,

Dave Dame: 35:55

there's probably some features and some product things I get credit for that. It was the ambiguity and the misinterpretation of what I thought was really, what the success was, not what I originally thought. And to me, that's the thing. I think, I don't know how we create a new mechanism to make sure that happens. Because I think, hey, AI is great for doing knowing things and doing the mundane work that will free up that time for creative space. So ideally, if we lived in a world where we could have ai do all the things we've known and all the stuff that gets away from us just having a time to take a breath and have a coffee with another human, and ideate, we'll have more time to do that, and then we'll feed the models to do that again. I think we got to figure out, I think we're just so excited on how to get rid of these mundane tasks that we've had to do for the last 20 years. I got to think we're going to a point. Now with this time, we can either think of efficiency so we can take the route of maybe we don't need as many humans, or now, do we have the humans have time to focus on those forward things and think about that, where they're not rushed to do it, because, you know how it is, you're trying to have ideas, but then you're racing to deliver. And the tension is great sometimes, but sometimes, especially in a mature product, it almost weighs out to the delivery over what next?

Dave West: 37:32

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, who knows what the future holds, but the I do hope that organizations accept that some of the slack is actually valuable, and you need some slack to actually innovate and to be creative, and to find those times to sit and talk and have a cup of coffee and make mistakes and misunderstand each other, and

Dave Dame: 37:58

even talk with customers, right and talk with users like you know, we know that's usually the first that goes. And in my book, I talk about how your team's lower in the organization. They spend more time with your customers than you do. So how do we share those customer learnings?

Dave West: 38:16

Yeah, and how do we gain those customer learnings if we don't actually interact with customers, but just our systems do in a very effective way,

Dave Dame: 38:27

exactly.

Dave West: 38:28

Yeah. Now we could talk all day, Dave, as you well know, as we have in the past, or certainly for two days. So as we leave this podcast, I'd love to leave our listeners with a little nugget, a little idea, a little a little thing that that maybe is a theme of the book, or something that you, if you're going to impart one thing, you know, the Titanic sinking and you're going down with it, what would be that that one thing you would you would give to Rose. You know that? I think that was rose, wasn't it, the lady that didn't drown everybody else did. What would you say to her? Sorry, that's a bad example. It's the best I could think of. Sorry,

Dave Dame: 39:15

that's okay. I think what I would say is, if you wait until everything is perfect, you're going to be left behind. I've been imperfect my whole life. That's exactly why I've learned how to lead you lead through imperfection, of just modeling that behavior. So that's what I would leave rose with that, and maybe some water wings.

Dave West: 39:38

That's what she did. That's you could definitely do with that. I think the new perfection is imperfection, Dave, and I think that's the key, right?

Dave Dame: 39:47

I think once we accept it, that's a weight off our shoulders, and then for our team, they get to go, because we always love to say fail fast, right? Remember when that was the catchphrase,

Unknown: 39:58

yes,

Dave Dame: 39:59

but it should be. Learn fast, and the only way you learn. I've learned way more from my mistakes than I've confirmed being right. And I think just leaving that room for that to happen, and now that we got the opportunity to get the efficiencies through all this new agentic AI, let's embrace that, and let's take that. And you know, if, if a reader can spend a few hours to read my book and go through the exercises, and they can leave something a spark for people to grow and to really deliver effectively, like I've had the opportunity to do, then I think I've left the world a good place.

Dave West: 40:41

That's, that's, that's great words. Well, thank you for spending the time in today's podcast, Dave,

Dave Dame: 40:47

thank you for having me.

Dave West: 40:48

It's always an absolute pleasure. So today, we were very lucky to hear Dave Dane PST, and Senior Director of Product Accessibility and human centered design at Microsoft, talk a little bit about his new book, leading with imperfect feet, the idea that embarrassment, learning, risk, is actually a natural part of leadership and something that should be embraced as you drive through this ever increasingly uncertain world. I've definitely learned a lot from Dave over the years that I've known him over 10 years now, and I feel that this book is going to be a real, valuable asset for you as a leader, to pick up and accept that embarrassment and imperfection is just the reality. And thank you for listening today. Scrum.org, community podcast. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, share with friends, and, of course, come back and listen to some more. I'm lucky enough to have a variety of guests talking about everything in the area of professional, Scrum, product thinking, leadership, and, of course, agile. Thanks everybody. And scrum on

Unknown: 41:54

foreign you.