After today’s excellent OSCON keynote speeches I attended Adam Keys “People Hacks” presentation. Adam started with the disclaimer that the goal of this talk was not to manipulate people, but rather how you can change your behavior to foster improved communication when working with groups of people. Adam suggests using People Hacks for advocacy and for gel’ling teams to work more effectively.

First Adam asked why you even need to “People Hack” and he states that the days of cowboy computing where one person hacks out a massive project have passed. In today’s world everything happens in teams, wether the teams share one location or if they’re scattered across the globe. Regardless of the nature of your team, friction between team members will always be present and mastering the skills of People Hacking can make teams more effective.

Adam’s first set of people hacks focus on people’s emotions and the fact that people are ruled by their emotions. Communicating effectively with people in a bad mood can be challenging, if not impossible. Lightening the mood, often with humor, can improve communications in a team. Making people smile and laugh presents the foundation for good people hacking.

Negativity, however, is the opposite of humor. Negativity and ill feelings spread like wildfire and rarely work to improve the effectiveness of a team. Avoid negativity if at all possible! Adam suggests the ABBA method for combatting negativity — a lot of ABBA, like negativity, goes a long way. He suggests listening to Dancing Queen to lift the mood; perhaps you like ABBA and it will lift your mood, or you hate ABBA and when you get to stop listening to ABBA it will lighten your mood. (Ok, that’s silly, but I see where he’s going. :) )

Adam tackled criticism next: Don’t criticize. He says that if you criticize a person, that person is likely to retreat inwards like a turtle might pull back into its shell. People who hide from you don’t want to communicate with you. If you need to criticize someone, do it in a constructive manner and compliment a person before you criticize them. His exact quote: “Kiss their ass before you hand it to them!”. Generally avoid criticism if you can — the best method is to avoid direct criticism like “That idea will never work!” and ask questions that might make the other person realize that their idea may contain flaws.

On the topic of jerks, trolls and assholes Adam commented that sometimes assholes need to be tolerated because they are highly capable people. Generally, you really should strive to avoid assholes on your team since assholes drag everything down and hurt the morale of the team. He suggests reading the “The No Asshole Rule” book for lots more details on how to effectively deal with assholes.

Next Adam suggested implementing a zero tolerance policy on rude and disrespectful behavior in your team. Your team should focus on being positive and not allow negative, rude or disrespectful people. I’ve personally stressed polite and positive communications inside of MusicBrainz and after a while this concept became ingrained in the community. Generally the MusicBrainz community members treat each other with a lot of respect, even in heated arguments.

Finally, Adam talked about advocacy — once you set the stage of respectful communication on a positive note you can move people’s opinions. Adam stressed the need to grok the other person’s position before you attempt to sway their opinion. If you first understand their box, you can help them think outside that box. Then its important to go slow and be patient with people as they learn — people won’t simply jump on board with your ideas. You also need to prepare for hard questions that represent edge cases with the goal to stump you. If someone does nail you on a flaw in your suggestion, its good to step back and acknowledge the flaw, rather than trying to argue to minimize the flaw.

Adam then presented a number of anti-patterns in people:

• stubbornness: Sometimes useful, but mostly annoying. To circumvent stubbornness play to the person’s inner diva and make them a hero for something new. There is no real penalty for trying.
• know it all: Know it all people tend to actually often be wrong a lot and know very little. Play to their perceived knowledge by stating things in this manner: “Certainly you’re aware of X, …”
• teenage males: Teenage males make up a fair number of open source contributors and these brash, impatient and righteous people are often horribly wrong. Wow them with their own awesomeness — Adam jokingly says that this presents a good chance to turn this person into your “personal minion”.

Finally Adam rattled off these anti-patterns in groups:

• Cover your ass people: These people do not care about the team, only about themselves. You encourage people to think for the team and reward them when they do. Boot those who can’t.
• Alpha dog: Everyone wants to work for the alpha dog, but you really want the team to work with everyone on the team. You shouldn’t work for a manipulative alpha dog, but you should try and cooperate with a “benevolent alpha dog” to move the team cooperation into the right direction.
• Bureaucracy: For some people communication only happens as part of the process and deliverables are tossed over the fence. To integrate these bureaucratic people you should consider working with in-jokes. In-jokes present a great way to pull teams together.

Adam presented a lot of great ideas for how to change your personal approach to dealing with people. And as usual, they key is not to change other people, but to change your own behavior in order to more effectively communicate with others on your team. Thanks for the many thoughtful points in your presentation, Adam!