Why We’re Not Technical Enough
Hint: It’s not us.
Today I had my first encounter with one of the best things I’ve ever seen on the internet: Bharatanatyam Dance. I found it by following the listed profile interests of a new colleague of mine from Write of Passage, an online writing program — Santhoshi DB.
Instantly I was struck by the absolute technical precision of Bharatanatyam Dance.
Some people on the internet (or in writing world) are deeply fascinated with German words. German strings together small words to become large words, and as such, each very long German word can tell a whole story.
In my very, very limited study of Sanskrit so far (the Latin of Indian languages as far as I can tell) (very limited, but very impactful), words in the realm of Sanskrit - similar to German - string together seed sounds. Where German strings together small words to describe the function or the operation in physical reality of an item or tool, Sanskrit seems - to me - to string together phenomena in the conceptual realm which tend to have some overtone of beauty or simplicity, some suggestion or pointer toward piece.
After the first five seconds of seeing a YouTube video on Bharatanatyam Dance, I was instantly reminded of a conversation with my husband yesterday, who got plucked by his division to help manage a Women in Technology track for their Culture Club in Azure.
What movie would they recommend for a “movie night”/fundraiser on issues for women in tech?
For me — if we’re going to choose a movie to watch on women in tech, my guts want to ask about the value. If we optimize for value, so that folks who participate get something awesome for their money, my brain wants to consider… who do we mean by Women? And what do we mean by Tech?
Today I am keen to suggest to us that, if and as we want to talk about the “history” of “women” in “tech,” we have a MASSIVE opportunity to create and offer meaning and make our women’s groups in technology actually powerful by looking broadly at the ways in which women have been being technically adept and designing product for tens of thousands of years. And if we are at all interested in doing that fairly, thoroughly, or inclusively, it would make sense to look at that question in context - of the factors of production that Women have had available over time, and the factors of production from which they’ve been categorically, and violently, excluded.
Dance is Experience Design
The first time I did Bollywood dancing in earnest, I came home hurting like hell from head to toe. Tiny, sprightly women warriors, compared to my five ten scale, jumped and turned and moved and pumped body iron like crossfit magnates while the rubber bands of my limbs began to squeak and then tear as I followed along shamefully but enthusiastically.
Bollywood is warrior training, folks.
Bharatanatyam Dance is straight-up product design, to my eyes.
Women completely cut off from the factors of production for capital-based products for tens of thousands of years have been doing this stuff in plain sight, with a forced customer base of men, to my eyes.
If we stopped ruling Lived Experience out as Valid or Credible Leadership or Career Experience, we’d have a whole new potential workforce of scrum masters in about one second, if the epicly powerful performers and practitioners of Bharatanayam had any interest in actually devoting their massive skillsets to the interests of tech firms.
Women in Tech are already practicing this kind of masterful art and craft on the side, and have been for decades, and tech loses out big when we force women to craft or cover their tens of thousands of hours of expertise leading teams and crafting product for rapturous audience delight through art and designforms like Bharatanayam.
A New Form of Leader
I’m so sick of hearing hand-wringing in the tech field about all the women who are just not interested in entering CS or other skills and qualifications pipelines. I’m so sick of sitting around with my amazing male friends who didn’t graduate from high school, or studied art history, sharing about their journeys in Product teams from some of the world’s biggest companies, while others in the field say cringingly that they wish they had the pipeline, but women either just aren’t skilled, or aren’t interested.
We’re interested in technology, friends. Technology, done well, blends into the background. It’s the place where science turns to magic. It’s the place where tools become livelihoods. It’s the place where we organize and scale technique, according to our values, through the essential media and factors of production of our time, so that humanity in one corner of industry or the world can more quickly both:
Learn, and
Live
according to the most effective ideas, techniques, and tactics of humanity elsewhere, in accordance with our values.
Tech is funded and developed according to the values of its funders and investors.
Tech is developed into high-fidelity products where folks with access to capital invest it in building out the permanence of a prototype to the extent it can be, and is, distributed to the wider market.
Marketing plays a role in determining whether that tech finds a lifelong or well-utilized home in the workflows of the masses. People don’t trust technology alone. They don’t get it. They (sometimes rightly) bear suspicion that the overlords and their salesmen are actually more interested in booking the producer surplus of the item sold, rather than the utility or wonderfulness of the consumer surplus, the profit the customer earns in terms of their lived experience, from the risk that they’ve taken to deploy the new product and invite it into their core and treasured workflows, as an input to their values - their jobs to be done.
In tech, our leadership is old and trite and often dead on the inside, rotting like a rootless old tree.
A new form of leader is immediately available. She or he (or ze) is hiding in your teams already.
They’re right there in plain sight. They’re alive on the inside. They’re rooted in the ground. They’re - very often - fertilizing and tending to that root structure with new inputs on the side, lively ongoing endeavors that replenish their buckets and inspire new ideas in their life, day after day, which get scoped right out of the workplace because our current standards for working and living have us scope out the expertise each and every human brings to work, by virtue of their outside life.
The new Leadership Laboratory for tech, especially in an age of COVID, is Life. Specifically, the practice and real weekly investment of being a leader who also Co-Invests alongside their dayjob in a Life that Leaves Them Alive.
When women do this, either while participating or taking a step out of the formally-recognized workforce, they prosper and exponentially expand.
If you want to learn about time management in the workplace, goes the 100% consistent advice behind closed doors, go ask a woman leader who has just returned to the workforce after having a baby.
She’s got something important going on outside work. She’s scoping and scanning her environment like a boss. She’s primed for prime investment. She’s absolutely rigorous about creating amazing results not just for one endeavor, but for her portfolio. She’s acting like an investor. And get ready for a TON of great advice if she is willing to staff her own time to share with you her methods for some outlandish Return on Invested Capital.
But I think we get wrong in tech, conventionally, the mechanism by which women who return from having kids become such absolutely badass Time, Energy, Effort, Leadership and Cycle investors in the world of conventionally-recognized Tech Work.
They’ve also grown.
Growing Outside Work
This will not be a long section.
Growing outside work is a matter of facing challenges head-on, and then reflecting on them, with intention to develop.
Employees who do this actively outside of work will develop first as individual people, then as family/community leaders, and immediately as professional leaders.
Employees who do not know they need to do this outside work, even very high-ranking leaders, will not develop, and their root structure and inner tree fibers will rot.
They won’t know what to do, so they’ll protect the bark of that disintegrating inside.
It starts to function like narcissism, or junkyard dog syndrome, or an old and festering, hidden wound.
They’ll also feel dead inside, which will slowly expand toward the outside, until the conflict between their bark-mask and underlying empty feeling, that unrelenting ache of growthlessness and alivelessness, threatens to cut off their heart’s meaning-as-blood-supply. They’ll leave or spontaneously combust. I strongly believe the absolutely shitty behavior we’ve seen from highly-leveraged male leaders in our time has a LOT to do with this phenomenon of feeling and experiencing deadness on the inside. Really high-level creepers are constantly seeking out underage women to hang around with in our culture. It’s predator species behavior, it’s seeking companionship with prey, and it’s a power dynamic that leaves men (and non-men who practice this form of companionship) dead and dying on the inside, and now we’ve seen plenty of documentaries about how the Dying Stars of Michael Jackson (god love him), Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and so forth, become well-understood black holes that drag so much aliveness down with them as they burn.
The most well-understood black holes are created when a massive star reaches the end of its life and implodes, collapsing in on itself. - Korey Haynes, Discover Magazine, “How Do Black Holes Form?”
Growing Outside Work is the #1 way to stay fed as a living star, a living light source and living leader, in an organization. And I believe everyone should have access to activate and direct our own personal leadership capability. I believe all teams who fail to take advantage of this will be less resilient, engaged, and lively; their retention and capacity will suffer; and they will absolutely fail over time to capture their highest potential with customers, cross-functional colleagues, and their company’s top and bottom line purposes.
Where We Go From Here
It’s not always that much fun to look at leadership, and look at space or nature, and see that macrocosm translate right back on into our own inner microcosms, our inner orientation of ourselves and our colleagues on our teams, and to feel that ache of collapse sitting right in the ligaments between our bones and our muscles.
But, seeing the frame, we can adjust it.
Find your true leaders.
Find the people on your teams who are practicing Bharatanayam on the side, leading in those endeavors, risking alienation if they can’t cover their aliveness in the contagion of deadness that is modern middle workforce participation, even in Big Tech America.
Don’t out them. As a leader, Out Yourself.
To solicit your best people to shift their behavior of leaving their best traits off the table, stop silencing yourself and your outside-of-work greatness, so your team can watch from the response you receive and shape, whether it’s actually safe yet over there for them to do the same.
Eat the Dogfood First.
And once you do, get ready for the best 1-1s of your life; get feedback on the risk you took to share honestly about your Aliveness Outside Work and the impact it had on your people.
Note who loves it. Note who’s freaked. Note who looks away when you ask them, and get curious.
Maybe there are folks right here on my team, right here on my family, who could absolutely be trusted with More.
