Black Lives Matter Special - Time For Change with Ian Forrester - Show Transcript

Welcome to a special edition of the Tech For Good Live podcast, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In the final of three episodes guest hosted by Ian Forrester (BBC R&D, Cubicgarden), he's joined by:

David Eastman (Software Developer)

Annette Joseph (Founder, Diverse & Equal)

Ethar Alali (MD, Axelisys)

To find out more about Black Lives Matter, to support the movement or to download helpful resources, visit blacklivesmatter.com.

Transcript

Ian: Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Tech For Good Live podcast in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m Ian Forrester and I’ll be your host today, and, we have some amazing panellists and I’ll let them introduce themselves, starting with…. David Eastman.

David: Hi there Ian! Yeah, I’m David Eastman, web developer but currently a game developer. My game is coming out in about a month..  that’s me.

Ian: And then we have got Annette.. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Annette: Hi! My name is Annette Joseph. I am the founder of Diverse & Equal. Diverse and Equal was founded to increase the amount of diversity in tech, and we do that by upskilling people from underrepresented backgrounds and also by working with organisations to help them understand the benefits of that diversity, and to unlock those benefits as well. 

Ian: Excellent… and we have Ethar.

Ethar: Hi There! My name is Ethar, I’m a technologist, activist and founder of Axelisys, we have been going for quite a while now. We focus on a number of innovation projects, some of them actually quite exciting, believe it or not. So yeah, that’s me.

Ian: So, I think we wanted to start with the problem of, I prefer people of colour rather than BAME, but kind of the representation at the top of the industry. And I think this kind of fits very closely with what you’re doing Annette, so I don’t know if you wanted to talk about from your experience and also the sort of thing you’re doing?

Annette: So as a person who, a woman, works in tech, I’ve been in and around the tech industry for probably about nearly 30 years, but I have worked in digital services for like 4 years. I’ve found that as I go higher up my career the places, and the events, the rooms I walk into.. there are less and less faces that look like mine. I think there’s a bit of a problem in the industry in general, from the bottom and up to the top, but it definitely gets worse as you go up the ladder. So I think there are a few things going on. Part of it is I think that people, especially if it’s a smaller business or whatever, looking to hire somebody who is sure and somebody who you can depend on, I think that people tend to trust people who are like them. And it's easier for them to take a chance on somebody, or they think of it as less of a chance, when that person is more like them, and more of a risk the further away from them they are. So people who are from BAME backgrounds kind of get left out in the cold no matter how talented, or you know passionate or enthusiastic or skills they have. It's really difficult for them to get a foot in the door.

Ian: I think it's a shame. Because one of the things about tech, is that for a long while it was kind of still unexplored territory. I remember sitting with my old PC.. You know learning to code, learning to do stuff with sound. And it was just like… for a lot of people, the Spectrum, the Amstrads.. all these computers you know, it was more about what you knew, rather than where you've been almost, or who you knew. I guess the maturity of the industry moved on, but it feels like the core aspect has completely gone the way of a lot of the other businesses, which seems a real shame. Ethar, I see that you’re shaking your head?

Ethar: Oh, just to agree basically. But first of all I wanted to shake my head to say you forgot the BBC… The BBC Micro is probably the class of all systems. (laughs)

Ian: (laughs) Of course, sorry!

Ethar: ...made me the man i am today(!)

David: the ZX81!

Ethar: (Laughs) no no Dave, come on. I suppose I kind of want to totally echo what Annette has just said..  As you go further up in an organisation, and I remember my days in Corporate as a lot of people said, part of your role becomes about stakeholder engagement, and selling your ideas and selling yourself. And the difficulty with selling is that people buy from people they trust, and people trust people just like them. And those two simultaneous equations creates a situation where people of colour do find it harder, naturally, to go up the ladder because there’s an unconscious barrier placed in front of them with regards to that difficulty in engagement. And people of colour, I don’t know about anyone else - certainly for me - I was a rather large lad and it was really difficult to convince people without being intimidating. So you had to almost dampen down certain behaviours that you had to try to fit into a mold that is expected of you. And by that very nature it means… it’s not you. And that creates this inauthenticity so you get this cycle where you’re constantly going around, especially in technology, where you have to act inauthentic, which then comes across as inauthentic and then some people also take that the wrong way. So, it’s almost like you have this very very fine line you have to balance on from start to finish. I don’t know how people tackle that, but I suppose for me the way I recruit internally.. I don't focus on that at all. I actually don't care if people wear a suit, I don't care where they work or how they work; it's entirely up to them. And I kind of hope that, believe it or not, things like Covid-19 will get people to start thinking about new ways to recruit and new ways to engage people that actually don't depend at all on necessarily personal engagement in all cases, at least not in the sense we’ve become accustomed to in the past. So for me there's definitely a disparity there. Especially as you start to go into businesses and people give you cash to do something, that becomes a much harder sell overall, which is already a quite hard thing for technologists.

Ian: There's a phenomenon that I'm going to butcher now. It's called the ‘Baby face phenomenon’, where all of the black CEOs all tend to have a baby face which kind of relates directly to what you’re talking about. They don't seem as - I’m trying to feel the best word for it - they don’t seem as intimidating as others, and so they kind of make it up that way. But that seems crazy. That shouldn't be the case, it shouldn't work. I just don't understand how that's even possible. Sorry, David, go on.

David: Yeah I was just gonna say a couple of things, one just to wind back - I’ve said this in previous podcasts as well - I don't like the word BAME because that's specific landlines Black and Asian and we’re really just talking about quite a lot more than that. I mean, I'm mixed race so I go off on a couple of different racial barriers so.. That’s why I prefer person of colour as well, which I’ll probably use instead. I was just going to say I've been computing so long that I've actually started off, as we indicated at the beginning of the games industry. Now Interestingly, that was full of weirdos, and strangely enough in that case, it was pretty clear that race was not a thing. You know, the fact that you were doing it was strange enough, and I think that went way beyond race. Oddly enough I think there was a larger Jewish constituency (laughs) who.. North London Jewish Mafia we were even called at one point. So you can see that like all things, industries go through different racial areas really depending on the socio-economic of the time, not really depending on anything else. New things started on the outskirts of the socio-economic barriers because it was easy to pick up, then it moved through and as you indicated it now moved to the middle where it now follows every sort of business dynamic i.e mainstream and anyone not part of the mainstream seems to be slightly on the outside and yeah, I've definitely seen that over the years, there’s no question about that.

Ian: But that's the thing.. I still cling to that kind of, especially when it comes to the internet, this is going to destroy the barriers.. This is going to.. I am going to hold onto the quote: ‘Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy’ where it seems like it kind of doesn't? Now we've got these massive hierarchies you know, we talked quite a bit about the ladder, and you know for people of colour it just seems to be the same game again, you know. Your thoughts Annette?

Annette: I think part of it is because people don't understand the benefits of diversity in tech. There's benefits of diversity everywhere, but in tech specifically, because we're creating products and services that are going to be used by the wider populous it's really important to have a diverse team. And so, one of the things I'm trying to do when speaking to businesses about diversity is to kind of change the narrative. Because at the moment when people talk about diversity, they talk about it from the position of it’s ethics, it's the right thing to do and it's almost like they're trying to do... ‘These poor black people, we’re doing them a favour by bringing them into our industry’ and it's the complete wrong way to take it. It's patronising first of all and the second thing is: when people are hired from that stance, when they go into the organisation they are told ‘oh you only got this job because you're black,’ ‘you only got this job because you’re brown’ and their experience, their skills, their knowledge.. Everything just goes out of the window because people think, you know, they are just a charity hire. So what I try to do when I work with businesses is talk facts, I talk about data (laughs). That's what I look at. We look at the data because the data doesn't care about people's feelings, it doesn’t care about people's emotions. You cannot hide what's going on when you are looking at data. And the data has shown us that basically, diverse teams are way more profitable, more innovative, they make better decisions two times faster. When you're dealing with tech which is all about innovation, it's all about providing great service for people who actually might be in a niche that you don't know about, and you need somebody who are diverse enough or have diverse experience in that thing so that you can deliver the right thing and you can build a better product. So not having diversity is actually detrimental to tech businesses. And I think if we start talking about it from that point of view, people's ears start to pick up then, they start to listen to that, because we're talking about profit, innovation and we’re talking about your ability to compete in the market. You cannot afford to not be diverse, you just cannot unless you just want your company to just die, really.

Ian: yeah I (inaudible) (laughs)... It's just so many things. We’re just all shaking our heads going ‘Absolutely’. I noticed, so I did some research a long time ago, there’s only one time when diversity doesn't work as well, and that's only when you’re at the very very beginning as a startup, when you have a very small group of people and it's because you know each other. And it's literally about 3-4 people who are just kick starting the idea. Once you get … Suddenly that’s when you need a diverse team, suddenly the group thing doesn't work for you. It kind of runs against you. These are the problems, these startups start off and they can have different groups of people, but they all come from the same background, they've gone to the same college, the same university so they kind of know each other. And then, they suddenly grow, and that's when they end up doing the same thing. And the problem is they do the same thing and you get the same ideas again and again, and they wonder why it’s kind of, all not working.

David: I think I've seen this come in at that particular point, and I'm gonna blame American Angel investor culture. I mean obviously it's always been a case that people start off with their friends and they're going to be similar, but there's no question for me that I started to see this sort of cookie cut nature of the way you expand, you only take on people you know or trust already from that small scene, and there was sort of a built tightness that was actually encouraged from this very early startup angel investor culture which, not only was the word diversity never heard, you tended to feel that not only that, but you need to be in California, you need to be here, you need to be doing this and that, and in the side there was you need to be one of us. And for me that was where that came in most strongly and I don’t think we've really quite shaken that off. That this doesn't help in any way form or help beyond the team, the first 5 or 6 people. And I think we've just not gone beyond that, even with teams and companies that clearly should be beyond that by now.

Ian: Ethar, it sounds like you wanted to say something?

Ethar: Yeah, I just want to echo that in particular. Again, that seems to exist actually not just within the investment culture but also even within the corporates. A lot of the management training people go on, whether that's fresh out of university or an MBA or through their career, is often geared towards a particular cookie cutter approach to business and management. And certainly in, I'll call them classical corporate's I’ve been in, there was a focus on a very regimented ‘this is how you behave, you take care of yourself, you do this particular thing, you spend this amount of time doing whatever’ and it starts to breed some really weird... I'll call them very converging behaviour.

Ian: You say twisted.

Ethar: well erm.. There was some of that too. They are kind of ummm. They might do exactly that. One example is ‘Dress for the job you want, not the job you have’. 

Ian: (LAUGHS)

Ethar: Let's start thinking about it. I was just like ‘OK.’. But the problem is if everybody in the job you want looks this way, you've got to dress like that, again inauthenticity. Even in careers they often say ‘be professionals, stop with the ‘ums’’ and each of those is a way to remove or filter out certain levels of authenticity.

Ian: also it’s underlinding appearance, what you look like, what you seem like.

Ethar: Goodness me, absolutely, for sure.

Ian: and by THAT...

Ethar: Exactly, exactly exactly. Even if you look at this propagation, I’ll call them cable centuries worth of particular behaviours where the result of that is one particular demographic, the expectation is that you become like that demographic. And that becomes in itself non diverse. But in addition to that, tie that into... I think it’s 0.6% of people who go for funding if they are people of colour actually receive it. That's worse than women in business and obviously somewhat say the stereotypical expectations. And even the idea of culture fit as a hiring criteria then creates this very narrow brand of people you expect to fit into this organisation.

David: I heard that culture fit leak out.. I think that was a couple of years ago. There was suddenly this ‘Yeah we need to go for a culture fit’. No, you probably want to do the exact opposite of that. You do not want to give yourself a one track culture, how can you possibly think that's going to work for you? Yeah that was definitely a thing, I think that felt about two years ago?

Ethar: yeah, yeah. I came across that 2-3 years ago, you’re absolutely right. But the problem, if you start to go with culture fit, some people use that as a deliberate racism, some people use that as a way to kind of engage a very narrow group of people and, which again as Annette quite rightly said, reduces your profitability and value generation all the way through. I have talked about this story before of me turning down Oxford because of their black prospectus, which I won't talk about again, you can read about that elsewhere. But that’s, that kind of tokenism is.. it's ridiculous, because actually that’s not the main driving factor. It is the profitability, it’s the gains, the value you get out of this engagement of people of diverse backgrounds.

Annette: And then the other thing I guess, what people do, what companies do, you mentioned tokenism. They’ll hire diversely, then the people who are hired are again expected to conform. They have to dampen down who they are, they're required to be inauthentic. And then.. What is the point? (Laughs) There’s no point to them being there. So you’re not getting the benefits of diversity at all because they're not allowed to be who they are and bring their experiences and whole selves to work. It's… it's almost like a self fulfilling prophecy, because they come in, they don't do well because they are not being themselves, then they fail.. And they are pointed out as an example of why diversity doesn't work. And that is just the wrong way to look at things but that is how most companies look at it. And it's just time to change really, it’s just time for change.

Ian: This probably hits exactly where we were going anyway, which is, we talked a lot about diversity and we also need to talk about inclusion. I know lots of people who have been hired through diversity drives that kind of go into a business, or pushed into a business almost, and then 6 months later they're like ‘this isn't for me, see you later.’ So kind of bounce in bounce out. And actually, there are recruiters who make a bit of kidding off that, because they get their bonus. If the person survives for 6 months and then 6 months later they're gone, and then they have to hire again. It’s like, this is not good. So that inclusion is so so important. I think this is where the battlelines lie, this is also where people who are not just entering the business, but also making their way up the ladders up into management. And that is probably where we were going before: how to get senior or executive level people of colour? And that's a really big question. I don’t know if anyone’s got any thoughts. Anyone?

David: Yeah so this is an older question, slightly different one but it's just got the same answer. Because this needs the bootstrap process. Otherwise you get the classic ‘but where have you worked before?’ and of course if the whole grounding, if the whole roots system is so small then they're not going to have the same experience necessarily, even today, as someone of an equivalent age or apparent you know, experience and time level in the industry. So this is the bootstrap: until you get past that critical point, you find that there's a lack of experience sometimes in hires who think ‘oh you should have been here, here and here’. But, of course if he hasn't had those opportunities, suddenly it's like ‘wait a minute, oh well if i'm going to do a head to head and the white guy has been in more things..’ So, this already starts to be a bit of a problem, when you hire but you start to say ‘oh I'm expecting you to have this much experience’.. Because we’re still at that point where because we haven't started at an equal footing, it’s difficult to be able to look at someone with equanimity which is always going to be a bit of a problem when youre doing head for head hires. And that's far far harsher in the CEO level than it is ever going to be at the sort of developer starting career level. Everyone can start from the beginning. But as you move up people want to differentiate themselves by their experiences and that can be a bit of a problem if you don't have as many.

Ethar: I’m going to echo this, but also play a slightly different card, it's a bit left field. I'm going to actually start with the problem of corporate as a structure, and that is that you have hierarchy. Now, the natural consequence of hierarchy is actually that it's very very wasteful, if you think about the amount of time you spend communicating upwards as opposed to actually doing the job. There is a lot of that goes on, everyone’s going to communicate upwards. When I do talks I use this one prime example and people are quite shocked when they realise the numbers and hours. But if you imagine you have a FTSE 100 firm, and you spend 100 million pounds a year on say, developers, building some tech, all the sales and marketing. Typically, most studies have shown that corporations waste 35-40% of that. That's the amount of waste that's generated in corporates. And that's usually because the fact that it goes up and down, you get project managers for example that have to go to different departments to pick peoples brains for particular things and that's why obviously we know that the process of dev ops works better by bringing co-located teams together. So that's one example of some of the waste. But because you don't have that process, you hire someone to manage that process. Now, that sort of waste starts to scale exponentially as you scale the organisation. In addition to that, when you start to look at what it actually costs you, you’re effectively spending about 35/40 million of that 100 million you spend, just managing waste. So, in every business transaction you've got to have a trade off for that: what do I get? Do I get, you know... do I save money? What do I get from my 35 million pounds worth of waste? When you start to look at the size of the numbers you ask yourself, okay, communicating upwards which causes that 35 million waste.. allows the board to report on the accounts, they can submit their accounts to companies’ houses say, if they're a PLC, or investors or whatever. And then you think to yourself, ‘well, how much is that going to cost me if I don't do it?’ And I'll ask the audience at this particular case.. How many people know how much the fine is for PLC, for Companies’ House, if your accounts are late by 6 months?

Ian: I guess it's going to be like… I don’t know.

David: I don't think my accountant would tell me that.

Ian: 50.. No 50 000. 100 000.

Annette: I think it’s more like 15 000.

Ethar: 7.5k. So think to yourself, you’re swapping, you’re buying 7.5k worth of stuff with 35 million quid. So that’s why I started to rethink, and this is why Axelisys was born. I started to rethink the idea of hierarchy within corporates. You can imagine that's the most ridiculous kind of trade I’ve ever seen? It's like magic beans jumping the beans stalks, which we’re told not to do.. So what we did with Axelisys, we got rid of it. So, everyone works as kind of an investment model, even within the organisation everyone is responsible for something. So a product owner is actually an internal startup founder, basically. And by doing these tractual models, at any point we can see if these are actually working really really well - let's farm that out into a separate business. So, that's what you'll see with Axelisys, as a parent company will often have subsidiary arrangement with a lot of other companies. We founded those and then split off into other companies to work as a startup in its own right. So, by doing that the hierarchy disappears. Now, if the hierarchy disappears, so does this problem. Because actually, you don't have to worry so much about going further up, you just have to worry about being more of an investor. So that means the actual requirement within your startup, if you're a product manager or a product owner, is you're concentrating very much on growing that. If you find that you have another startup within your startup then you spin that off as another exercise anyway. And actually that means that the organisation as a hierarchy, lets call it hierarchy or a fractal hierarchy of investments, actually form around you instead of the other way around. And that model fundamentally solves a lot of these problems whether it’s women in tech, whether it’s obviously people of colour.. And it gets rid of all kinds of risk. If you just appoint your sales person as a founder going through whatever and you’ve been given an investment to invest in your own startup structure, whatever that cluster might look like and that hopefully should manifest some of the ideas behind Dee Hock’s kind of chaordic organisation, but the bottom line is actually all these hierarchical comms, all these begging to be at the top suddenly start to disappear because you’re creating the top from where... You naturally are. Now that's a fundamental change and that's why I took a kind of very different view to this sort of question, because actually, instead of trying to push up against something else it might be easier to create a kind of organisation that can actually just…

David: I’d like to sort of.. Thumbs up to Virgin because they have the balloon holder model which was the closest to, I think, because what Ethar said is quite a.. It has moved quite a bit in the last 10 years….But Virgin obviously got hold of that. But they tried, I think quite successfully, the balloon holder model which allows just that. You can move separately from the rest of the hierarchy which allowed the sort of thing ‘you don't have to follow a hierarchy’ in that exact sense and that was quite good. The only thing I actually want to add is a lot of the ways you can develop and spin off internally stop as soon as corporations have problems. The classic is two departments competing for resources, one department wins, one department loses. As soon as there's a problem in an organisation, they all revert to type, almost instantly. You can have a year's worth of ‘let's do the’.. I mean everyone seems ‘lets do agile’, ‘let's do it like Spotify!’ As soon as there’s a bit of an issue everything goes out ‘lets do things as we did before’, ‘lets trust hierarchies’ and that is very… if you’re sort of trying to feel your way around and you're just finding your feet it's a bit like the ship’s in storm and everyone goes back to the beginning. And that is going to be much much worse for people of colour who are starting, getting a footing, and actually getting it right. And actually ‘wait a minute, this wasn’t like that when I came in, this is back to 20 years ago!’. I’ve seen that a couple of times now. And it never helps. And to some degree it always happens.

Ian: When you go out and talk to these kinds of corporates and businesses, do you kind of see them like sometimes on... they move salient ‘oh yea yea its great’ and then something kind of hits them and they go ‘No,  we’re going back to.. It’s actually what we knew before.’ With all the things that come with that. You know, I just want to get your thoughts on when you talk to these businesses how they react to stuff like this?

Annette: Yeah, I definitely see people, see businesses reverting to type when there is a problem because it’s.. Just as we talked about in the beginning.. It's about going back to what feels safe. And I think again, the way that we try to do something about that is to change the narrative. We've got to change the idea of what is safe. Safe is not reverting to type. Safe is moving forward with the new plan. I mean you can be diverse, but without the inclusivity it doesn't work. You have to allow people to be themselves and bring their experiences and bring their skills. Instead of talking about the amount of experience they have in a job, talk about what experiences can they bring? It doesn't matter how many years you've had, what can you do? What can you do right now that's going to help? And I think if we focus on that about what people are actually doing, what their skills are, how are they interacting with other team members, what are bringing right now? You know, we focus on that. Then I think there will be less of the temptation to revert when something happens. But then also as well, one other thing I wanted to say with diversity and inclusion: people think that inclusion is easy and it's not. Especially when you already have a business that has a culture, when you’ve got to shift that culture. There's a lot of things that come up. Sometimes it's people in the workplace who aren't diverse, people who are part of the homogeneous group and they have an idea, they think that because of all these diverse people coming in that they are suddenly at a disadvantage. It's really important that you make sure you bring people along for the ride which is why I think that the narrative, the story, the stats, the data... bringing that in is really key. Everybody has to understand that this is good for a business, that we're doing this for a reason, we're doing it to be profitable, we can survive. That's why we're doing this. Were not doing this out of charity. We're not doing it because we think it's the right thing to do. We're doing this for the good of the business. And once you can get people to understand that and then start to make some safe spaces so they can speak about some of their discomforts and be honest about that in a safe space... That's when you start to make a change. That's when you start, but it does take a long time. And the disagreements and the people.. Not disagreements, but people not agreeing is actually part of the richness. It's not about people getting along (laughs). That's what doesn’t work. You kind of want people to rub up a little against each other so that people's ideas, not people rubbing up against each other… People’s ideas rubbing up against each other! (laughs). So that you can get the richness out of their experiences, you want them to disagree. So that then you get the different points of view out of there. I guess that's part of my other job, my day job, I’m a delivery manager and agile coach. That people, the dynamic and behaviours, that is really really key and you need a good delivery manager or a coach when you're doing that, because it can go either way if it’s not done right.

Ian: I mean you're absolutely right, it’s got to be a bit of tension. And I think that's what makes a diverse workforce work.. Because not everyone’s going ‘yes, yup, yeah. That’s a great idea, yep yep. My background says yes, yeah we should all do that same thing’. No. you need people that are going ‘if we do this, then actually were going to really really come into problems with this community or from my experience this..’ you know, and that's really important and that's what's missing from the companies who are very hierarchical and who are kind of the same university, the same groups of people, the same class.. You know the same cultures. Everyones going ‘Oh! Oh! I didn't realise people would get really annoyed if we suddenly do this.’ Because you didn't have someone else in the room to go ‘duh! Of course’.

Annette: And it can get quite dangerous as well.. You know.. AI you know. AI, if we don't have the right people in the room or the systems are taking on the bias that is already in the data, it can be life threatening for people. I use, when I'm doing talks sometimes, the example of crash test dummies. So, crash test dummies are 6 foot men, and women are 47%, even now, more likely to be seriously injured in the crash because the car is not designed for women, especially not if you're petite. And 17% more likely to die. And that is just because the right people are not involved in the process of making the tech. And that goes across the board.

Ethar: That’s shocking, wow.

David: There was that..  What's her full name..The woman who did the book about precisely that, unequal science for females.. I can't remember the name, she’s well known, we’ll remember it at the end. I just want to touch on one thing because I think we’ve mentioned agile a few couple of times and I suspect we've all done some agile work, we’re probably all agile coaches.. Sorry Ian (laughs) the three of us. And some of the attitudes about, as you say, the creative tension.. The idea is you bring people together in dev ops teams, you don't have separate silos that don't talk about each other, I think there's a little bit of advantage there in some of the problems, not specifically, about racial culture, but there's already an understanding about how to splice culture, how to understand when it's being negative, understand when it's being useful. I think some of the agile guys are probably already talking the same language and it's interesting because when I have seen this sort of stuck hierarchy you can see the arguments that you could be using for culture reasons come out as technical reasons but they're just clothed out as this agile vs waterfall stuff. It is interesting how it's a very similar debate.

Ian: So hold on you’re.. you’re saying that.. To understand you correctly.. I'm gonna use a really horrible analogy here.. So if I complain about how we are not using XML anymore.. (laughs) I'm kidding, sorry I had to throw an XML in somewhere.

David: well, we use JSON instead(!) - There you go.

(Laughs)

Ethar: That's an interesting point actually. My post grad was in mathematics and actually that makes you a good pattern matcher. So one thing I wanted to bring up while you were talking there, was the idea of rubbing off against each other because when you think about systems, and we're talking about the red/green factor, the point to which you get to red is actually the point where your system either becomes inconsistent or you expand functionality... Crucially that means every time you’re rubbing off against someone, even as people you are now red, therefore are expanding your knowledge about the environment, the culture you're working in. so every time you have those debates, those debates and that expansion comes from those failing boundaries. So totally have to echo what Annette said there, while also bridging into Dave's agile world.. If that was any use to us at all (laughs).

Ian: I know we've got to kind of close off the podcast so are there any other thoughts? I've learnt a lot and this is the joy of it right? The different diverse viewpoints make you expand your mind and I think what Annette was talking about, this is what a business can make money from. That diverse discussion, and if you don't have it, what do you have? You have business that's going nowhere. And that's no good.

OUTRO

That's all we had time for today… Thank you for listening. If you have anything to say about what we've talked about, and I'm sure you do, let us know on twitter @techforgoodlive or email hello@techgforgood.live, we’d love for you to join us in the discussion. To find out more about Black Lives Matter or support or download some helpful resources go to blacklivesmatter.com…. Thanks to the wonderful podcast.co for hosting us on their platform. If you've enjoyed the TFGL podcast please consider giving us a review on iTunes.. And if the panel would like to say goodbye?...

All: goodbye!