In this episode of Innovation and Digital Enterprise, Patrick and Shelli interview Adan Pope, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Applications, and AI at The Aspen Group. Adan shares insights from his career in engineering and technology leadership, from his roles in public safety, telecommunications, and healthcare. He also discusses his books, “Respect the Weeds” and “Intentional Tensions”, which reflect on principled leadership and effective digital transformation strategies. He emphasizes the importance of humility, continuous learning, and building teams that thrive on productive tension. Adan unpacks the ways he drives innovation, and how engineering teams can balance velocity with stability, while maintaining high standards of quality.

• (00:00) Welcome Adan Pope
• (02:21) Early Career and Influences
• (04:37) Leadership and Innovation
• (07:35) Writing 'Respect the Weeds'
• (11:30) Intentional Tensions in Leadership
• (19:42) Building Effective Teams
• (21:46) Navigating Human Dynamics in Teams
• (22:22) The Importance of Positive Tension
• (22:56) Lessons from Bell Labs
• (24:47) Balancing Sales and Engineering Goals
• (29:00) Fostering Ownership and Pride in Work
• (33:18) The Power of Visual Communication

Adan Pope is a technology executive, professor, and published author and speaker, currently the Senior Vice President of Engineering Applications and AI at The Aspen Group. He also is an Adjunct Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology teaching in the graduate Information Technology Management Department. He is the cofounder of Taraxa Labs LLC, providing workshops, consultancy practical tools, and guidebooks to help leaders navigate digital transformation. Previously he has held roles at Intrado Life & Safety, InnerWorkings, Ciena, ShopperTrak, Ericsson, Telcordia Technologies, and Bell Labs. He earned a BSEET at DeVry University and a MCS and MBA from North Central College.

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Patrick Emmons:

Hello, fellow innovators. This is Patrick Emmons.

Shelli Nelson:

And this is Shelli Nelson.

Patrick Emmons:

Welcome to the Innovation and the Digital Enterprise Podcast, where we interview successful visionaries and leaders and give you insight into how they drive and support innovation within their organizations.

Shelli Nelson:

Patrick Emmons:

Welcome to the show, Adan.

Adan Pope:

Hey, thank you so much. It's great to be here with you all.

Patrick Emmons:

Adan, your career spans decades of transformation in tech in the last 20 years.

Adan Pope:

I feel that, I feel that.

Patrick Emmons:

But you're doing your push-ups, as we talked about.

Adan Pope:

I am, every day, exactly, 75.

Patrick Emmons:

It's important. That's amazing.

Adan Pope:

I'm at 75 every day, do those push-ups.

Patrick Emmons:

How many?

Adan Pope:

75 a day so far.

Patrick Emmons:

Holy cow.

Shelli Nelson:

Impressive.

Adan Pope:

I'm working toward 100, I'm working toward 100.

Patrick Emmons:

I'm not getting in a fight with you. Well, like I said, your career spans some pretty impressive... If you think about just the last 20 years, how much has changed, it's odd to think that the iPhone is still not even 20 years old.

Adan Pope:

Crazy.

Patrick Emmons:

We're at like 15, 16 years old, and how much of an impact that's had on everybody. And you've been a developer, an executive, you've been an author twice now. When you look back on that, what defines your leadership journey from where it began to where you are now?

Adan Pope:

I look back at my first job, actually, as the most influential job I ever took. That was at AT&T Bell Labs in Naperville. When I graduated with my undergrad in electrical engineering, I was a hardware guy at undergrad and I ended up in this great group of leaders and developers at Bell Labs that just were excellent and they were just beyond my understanding of how great they were and the computer science skills that they had. I was an electrical engineer, this was a computer science job. And so, within six months, I realized, I better go get a master's degree in computer science to be able to hang with these folks, because they were super, super good. I was solving defects and doing MRs, like we all do in our first jobs.

But just the culture of excellence, the culture of egalitarian nature of the business, where you're valued based on what you do and not who you are, where you come from, really sticks with me even today. I thought about it, I had a couple of job opportunities, one was Bell Labs and one was Cray research, and I went to Bell Labs because they invented the transistor and the modern computer and almost every other thing that we look at today as a basis of technology, and things have moved on amazingly since then. But from there, I went to Tellabs, an Illinois start-up, worked with Mike Burke when the stock was $7, and I left in '93, so I'm pretty proud of that.

Patrick Emmons:

Well played.

Shelli Nelson:

Wow.

Adan Pope:

Yeah, I'm really happy about that. Mike was still the founder and what a great guy, would see you in Ogden Avenue having a hot dog and come and pay your bill, that kind of guy. And we really, really grew the business. And from there, I moved into a number of other positions, but more into the executive and leadership side, and got an MBA from North Central. That was a defense move, that was like, I'm going to have to be in the room with a bunch of executives and I don't understand what we're talking about.

Patrick Emmons:

Smart.

Adan Pope:

And so, I went and got an MBA, midnight school. I always tell people, don't make me use my MBA.

Patrick Emmons:

As a guy without an MBA, I think I can tell you, nobody wants you to deploy the MBA.

Adan Pope:

I have one, but don't make me use it, because what I really love to do is to innovate and I really love to solve the problem, but you can't do that unless a problem turns into a business opportunity and it turns into an investment thesis. And so, that really shaped a lot of my thinking. And then, over the years, yeah, I've had the great opportunity of being CTO for 25 years of my career and a CIO. Intrado was an amazing experience, that was public safety and that's about half the country's 911 network, and I was really, really proud to lead that, very consequential job.

So yeah, now here I am at TAG, The Aspen Group, and I lead the engineering and applications group there. And it's been really interesting and unique to move from public safety to healthcare, from business-to-citizenry to business-to-consumer, there's a lot of differences there. But anyway, it's been a great journey so far and we've really made strides on the platforms that we have and it's been a great place.

Shelli Nelson:

That's incredible.

Patrick Emmons:

What I'm hearing is quality, really focused on setting a standard, constantly educating, constantly growing, constantly elevating yourself, and humility with the opportunities that you're given and appreciating the fact that you get to work with great people.

Adan Pope:

Yeah, for sure. I really do. I think humility is one of those things that I hope you either have it or you can learn it, but it's super important, it's super important. Everything I've ever learned, I learned, I wasn't born with this knowledge. And I've worked with folks, as I said, across these companies that have really taught me a lot. When I went to Intrado, I asked the head of engineering that was there, ultimately ended up reporting to me, "What happens when you dial 911?" It took me nine months to figure it out completely. Like, okay, in this circumstance, that happens, and in this one, the other one. But just by asking the question and not assuming, boy, did we really turn that business around. And that business got sold from one private equity owner to another private equity owner, so it was a really great exit for the PE firms as well, and we made it better.

So yeah, humility is an important thing, because I'm always learning, I'm interested in learning. In fact, this fall, Wednesday, I start teaching my first class at IIT on disaster recovery and planning.

Patrick Emmons:

Very cool.

Adan Pope:

And I think I'm probably going to learn as much from the students as they're going to learn from me.

Shelli Nelson:

That's awesome, that's awesome.

Patrick Emmons:

Well, good luck. I love that school.

Adan Pope:

Thank you. Me too.

Patrick Emmons:

Really, I think it's a gem. That and UIC, I think we talked about this, just two amazing universities, I think, really don't get the publicity they deserve.

Adan Pope:

Yeah. I love the fact there's a train going through the campus, right through the building, it's awesome.

Patrick Emmons:

And they have a lacrosse team now.

Adan Pope:

Yeah. Oh, cool. All right.

Patrick Emmons:

That's important to one of us.

Shelli Nelson:

Adan, just curious, what inspired you to write Respect the Weeds, and how does that relate to your current role at TAG?

Adan Pope:

Yeah. Respect the Weeds, so I've traveled a lot in my life, and my way of processing experiences is to write about them, because I want to reflect and try to learn again from, oh my gosh, this happened and that happened, what happened, what did it mean? I'm trying to search for the meaning. And so, I wrote these essays, a lot of them. And Peter had done the same thing, my co-author, and I got to this point where I had this large collection of essays, and Peter and I had done a lot of public speaking together in these jobs, as he was my speech writer and the guy whispering in my ear about the storylines and so forth that we would speak about, and I called him up one night and I said, "Man, I would like to write a book. Would you write a book with me?"

And the answer thankfully was, "Yeah," but then, "About what?"

About the learnings from leadership from a really tangible point of view, and the weed, not the funny weed, but a weed like the one in your garden-

Patrick Emmons:

What are you talking about there?

Adan Pope:

Yeah, I don't know what we're talking about there.

Patrick Emmons:

I don't know what that means.

Adan Pope:

I admire weeds because they thrive in the most inhospitable environments, and in fact, over my life, I'd take pictures of weeds and text them to my friends, like, "Look at this bad-ass weed. This thing's amazing. This thing is growing out of the side of a building. Good grief. How's it doing that?" So I really respect that as an analogy of us as leaders and as people, and I consider myself kind of a weed. I came from nowhere Ohio in a not-very-good school and went to a tech college, and I ended up working at Bell Labs with amazing people and ultimately growing this career and getting all this other secondary and tertiary education.

So that was the inspiration of processing the experiences. And the big experience that I have had, at least in that book at that time, was how to turn an idea into something that's investable and a product, because we have a lot of ideas. How many guys just come and say, "I've got a great idea, Patrick, what should we do?"

You're the CEO, you're like, "Get out of my office. How are we going to make money out of this?"

Sometimes, you might be, "I agree," but most of the time, the CEOs I'd work with would be like, "Really? Go come back when you think you can make some money out of it."

So we established this process about how to turn ideas into innovations into businesses, and with that process, I've launched a dozen products over these companies and to earn great returns for the businesses. And some of them maybe were more or less successful, most of them were quite successful. But it comes down to just, as I said, being humble, approaching this from a learning perspective, having empathy with your customers or with your constituents, and then developing a methodology to turn ideas into products that can earn money for your stakeholders, because again, they're not going to invest unless they can see a return. My MBA is still in the back of my head. So how do we do that? I took a stint in product management too for a while when I was at Tellabs, because I wanted to be on the other side of it. That was not my jam, it was not something I really wanted to do after a while. But it does definitely inform what are the expected returns and what's the competitive marketplace look like.

So that was the basis of that book was leadership being the analogy of a weed, being able to take resources from wherever they are, thrive in an inhospitable environment, and then lead with a principled manner. And so, that's that book in a nutshell, with the methodology on innovation, which works. I've used it dozens of times and it works.

Patrick Emmons:

That's awesome. And then, the new book, you highlight themes like velocity versus stability and scale versus craft, which of those is most alive in your work right now?

Adan Pope:

Yeah, it's a really great question. I think that Intentional Tension is a book that's really born out of a lot of lessons on transformation, and many of those came through sales. So you sell your company to another company, and now you find yourself inside of another company, and how do you perform? Because your company was only bought because of its revenue, EBITDA, strategic objective, some thesis was there that caused the acquisition to be attractive enough for the investors to part with their money. And in my experience, many companies struggle once they're purchased, and the purchasing company has a hard time getting the value they thought they would get, and I think there's some lessons to that.

And then, you put this little company inside of the big company and you wonder why there's a loss of velocity, a loss of throughput, a loss of value, in many cases. In my experience and our experience, it's because we didn't really respect what we bought as a unique system of tension. And so, there's this balance between, do we fully integrate it? Do we leave it alone? How do we integrate it in a manner that actually multiplies its value? And how do we create incentives that align that way? That's another thing in the book. So you ask a question like velocity versus stability, I think that we need stable velocity.

Patrick Emmons:

Totally.

Adan Pope:

We need that. And we start off with a very astable system when we acquire something. And for TAG as well, I think we've focused a lot on that theme, how do we get our systems to a point where they're highly available, reliable, and we can deliver capabilities rapidly into that platform or portfolio? And we did that. I think nothing's ever done, but we're at the point now where we have a very stable operating environment and we're delivering at a nice velocity, and I've got metrics to prove it, again, back to the business case and back to the making sure that you're providing return to your investors. So it's stable velocity is what I would say. And I think the aspect of tensions, people also look at that, many times... We were talking before about it's a negative thing. No, actually, it's a source of energy, it's a source of energy, but it can become negative or it can be very positive.

Patrick Emmons:

Yeah. It can wear people down if not balanced.

Adan Pope:

Yeah, for sure.

Patrick Emmons:

I always think about a watch, a watch is a system of tensions.

Adan Pope:

It is. That's a great analogy.

Patrick Emmons:

How does it click? How does it keep working? You mentioned velocity, stability, quality, I'll put in there too from a software standpoint, and Dr. Forsgren does a great job in the book Accelerate talking about how they're not actually enemies, they are compatriots.

Adan Pope:

For sure.

Patrick Emmons:

Just because you're moving slow, doesn't mean you're building a better product, and in some cases, because you're not speed testing it, because you're not focused on how do we get velocity up, you're actually creating a jalopy that's just never going to be street ready.

Adan Pope:

Patrick Emmons:

That was my high school career right there, 100%. A lot of stuff done quickly.

Adan Pope:

Poorly.

Patrick Emmons:

Poorly.

Adan Pope:

What I really want is I want to know how much we got done that was based on what we said we would do. And my preaching mantra in every company I've been at, including the current one, is we want to be an organization that says what we're going to do, that does what we say, and can prove it. That's basically, I think, the definition of a great engineering team or a technology team. And when we can't, we want to be transparent about it, like, "Hey, this happened, that happened, this was a risk," not to throw your hands up or make an excuse, but to then, "And we're going to do the following."

I think the idea of having a unified plan, it sounds so rudimentary, is a key thing in leadership too, especially in digital transformation technology areas. The first thing we'd always do, and I've done this now for, I don't know, dozens of years, so it seems, is create this VSEM, it's vision, strategy, execution priorities and metrics. That's the Cisco model, it's not mine. But you can put in one page, what's the vision statement, what is the strategy to achieve it, and then have that discussion first, and then what are the execution criteria, the things that we're going to go do, and what are the metrics that are going to show that we've done them. And then, I literally print it on a D-sized paper and hang it on the wall outside of my office, and I did that here, I've done that for every place I've been at for a very, very long time.

And just that transparency changes the mindset of the people around you. I can see myself in that organization and that priority, and by the way, if you're depending upon me, I've been clear, you can disagree with my priorities right now, because they're written on the wall. You know what I mean? And I think that's ultimately a good model too, just have a plan, be transparent about it, and then live it.

Patrick Emmons:

Somebody asked me, "Can you recite your core values?" Of course, I can, but to your point on prove it, how do you prove that you're a value-driven organization? And my prove it is, what is the length of time it takes for a new hire to be able to repeat the core values? Whether they live them or not, just to even know them is step one. So if it takes three months for a new hire to know it, now you've got proof, we are a value-driven organization. And so, I do think... I'm with you on answering those questions, creating that clarity, there's another book, The Four Obsessions of an Executive, create a good leadership team, create clarity, reinforce clarity, hire, fire and promote based upon the clarity that you provided.

Adan Pope:

Yeah, for sure.

Shelli Nelson:

So that teams piece, and I want to go back to that, Adan, so how would you recommend building teams that are comfortable with tension rather than rushing to resolve the issues?

Adan Pope:

Yeah, that's a really good point. I think we have to be okay with discomfort. As a leader at least I have to be okay with the fact that there's tension in the room. I think that how do we create teams, we get that tension focused on the objectives of our plan and the business strategy and the things we're trying to do, not focused on the high school aspects of it, like I like you, I don't like you, you called me a name, whatever. Just have no tolerance for that whatsoever, and that's a matter of HR normally.

But if the tensions are really related to the objectives and we can really talk about those, then we can have a meaningful conversation of how to tune them, like, my organization needs QA to be able to turn these epics out in this period of time with this quality, and oh, by the way, if the QA has a problem, the quality has a quality problem, I failed, because the organization will measure the tech, not the QA. And so, that's a tension. Are they sized appropriately? My goal is to help them be sized appropriately. My goal is to help them have automation that really works. My goal is to help them by giving them unit tests for everything I can possibly put into my sprint. So that's, I think, how we create positive tension versus the negative.

And unfortunately, it happens many places. You could take the negative of that and say, "Why isn't QA improving the quality of my product?" Well, it's not my product and it's not them, it's us because we're equally responsible. And I think that comes down to the metrics. We don't want to measure how many story points I put on the board, we want to measure how often I deploy without a rollback, for example, and I think that's the way to do it. Unfortunately, humans are the most intractable of all creatures in the universe, and so personalities do come into it as well, and sometimes people just don't like each other, and sometimes they like each other so much, they don't want to challenge each other.

Patrick Emmons:

Totally.

Adan Pope:

And so, I look for those things and I'm like, hey, let's look back at our strategy, our objectives, are we really aligned on those, and then all the personalities can hopefully set aside. And I coach people a lot about that, like, leave that at the door, leave that at the door.

And also, as I said, we were talking about friction versus tension before, I don't want friction on the personal level. I want friction and intention on the project and on the productivity level.

Patrick Emmons:

Great point.

Adan Pope:

Patrick Emmons:

Didn't they C sea though?

Adan Pope:

They did, they did, they did.

Patrick Emmons:

That's kind of big dogging you a little bit.

Adan Pope:

Well, side story, you might've heard this story before, but you had one chance in your first year to send a piece of your best C to Kernighan, one of the authors of Kernighan and Ritchie, The C Language. And then, the badge of honor was they would shred you and send you back an email, "You obviously did not understand the compiler," that's the beginning of every email.

Patrick Emmons:

Wow.

Adan Pope:

"Comments are a waste of time," that's usually line number two of the email. You get my point, right?

Patrick Emmons:

Yeah, yeah. That's amazing though to think about how close that you get to... Right there at the birth of so many things, the fact that C is still taught, so many CS100 classes. My son was taking CS, his first class was C, and I've got to be honest, I enjoyed doing his homework too, it was nice to get back.

Adan Pope:

Me too, I get it, I get it.

Patrick Emmons:

It was a lot of fun.

Adan Pope:

I have a brother that's an electrical engineer, and I'm a big Python programmer, just for fun, but at work too, and he just tells me, "That's not a language. You've got four levels of indirection and the power output required to program in Python's egregious." But it's so much easier today than it used to be.

Patrick Emmons:

Right, right. I want to go down that rabbit hole, but I'm going to stop myself.

Adan Pope:

Yeah, okay. We'll do that later, we'll do that offline.

Patrick Emmons:

There'll be a beer somewhere involved. So talking about that tension, can you give us a specific, an example of when leaning into that tension, creating the healthy tension that motivates and excites, where it's like, hey, we watch movies and TV shows that have tension all the time and it gets our blood going, there's so much that goes in there, so if there's a time that specifically, where you leaned into that tension to produce a better outcome rather than trying to smooth it over.

Adan Pope:

Yeah, this happens a lot, I think, between... It depends on the organizational structure. I've had structures where I owned product management and ones where I don't, I don't today, but where I had all-in and sometimes I just have a piece of the ecosystem to develop something new or meaningful. There was a company that I recently worked at, I won't tell the name of it, but the sales organization had growth incentives, that was the primary incentive, it wasn't really a farming incentive, and the company was owned by private equity, and so they had EBITDA incentives more than anything else. And so, growth and EBITDA growth, and that means that every dollar invested is going to be challenged, and so how do we actually maintain the farm, the products that we have already built, while we're helping our sales organization grow?

And they'd gotten into a mode of just committing whatever to the customer. "Knock-knock, my name is Joe Sales, I'm here to solve your problem. What's your problem?" We have a solution for that before we even know what it is. And then, that comes into my queue and I've got all this farming work, all this maintenance work, all this legacy enhancements and all this stuff that I've already committed to, I've got a capital plan, and yet I understand that my bonus is going to get paid on EBITDA growth too, I'm an executive in the same pool, so how do I do that? And we had an organizational trust issue, because historically, that would happen and no investment would come, and then people wouldn't get their bonuses and they'd get yelled at. So that was the culture that we came at when I joined.

And what we did instead is we said, "Okay, look, I'll tell you what, I will find a way to solve the problem that you want to solve for the customer, if it makes business sense," and that goes to the CFO and all those normal things, "And I will cost it for you and I will give you the trade-offs, and then we will commit to new product development on behalf of deals. But if we go through this rubric, we go through this rubric, we know what we're signing up to roughly." We never really know, do we? "We know the economics are going to be positive for the business roughly." We generally don't always know that either.

Patrick Emmons:

There's some faith.

Adan Pope:

"And then, I'm going to stand with you." Yeah, there's some faith there. "And then, with the sales leader, I'm going to stand beside you and go commit that." And man, I've got to tell you, that changed the culture 100% from engineering receiving these things that sales sold that no one ever knew about, to sales knowing that if they brought us in, we would find a way economically and get approval together to get the resources to go do it, or to make trade-offs, to not do other stuff. I'm not wed to any given outcome on my roadmap really ever, other than quality, safety, reliability, that sort of stuff, the ilities, I like to say, those are there. But beyond that, beyond that, you can have this feature or that feature, that's okay, you tell me.

And so, that changed everything for us and turned us into a really... And by the way, the engineering organization I was leading was super happy to solve these problems, because we knew that it was going to drive EBITDA growth and we knew that the sales organization was going to stand with us, not put us on the edge of a blade, if you will, to deliver or fail. As engineers, I think I've got a couple on the line here, do we like to build stuff that doesn't get used? No. Do we like to fail? No. Do we like to get paid our bonus? Yes, that's a human nature thing. So that really changed things, that really changed things for us.

And even today, I look at features that come in, I try, rather than wanting the Nth degree of definition, I want to get into the conversation of, "What are we trying to solve? How can we do it? What will it take to do it?" And being transparent. And that's my best effort to do exactly the same, manage the tension between organizations, when sales and product can be pretty tense in a software company.

Patrick Emmons:

Totally. You know what's even more surprising? The tension between sales and marketing.

Adan Pope:

Oh yeah, for sure.

Patrick Emmons:

I always thought the enemy of my enemy is their friends, but I thought they were all my enemy. And then, I realized they don't like each other either. It's kind of like when I found out that Apple didn't like Google, I'm like, wait, what?

Adan Pope:

Well, how could that be?

Patrick Emmons:

Adan Pope:

The ilities.

Patrick Emmons:

Right. I'm like, I've got to work this joke in somehow. I'm like, I don't see an entry, I'm going. All right. You did touch on another subject that I think is really important when we get into developing our teams, you mentioned, do software engineers like to build things that people don't like to use or won't use? And my answer would be the good ones don't, the bad ones don't care.

Adan Pope:

Isn't that the case? Yeah.

Patrick Emmons:

And if you really wanted to filter... When I talk to people about recruiting engineers, find engineers who want to build products that people like using, not people who want to do cool tech, because they suck.

Adan Pope:

Yeah, true. And it's the pride, it's about pride in the work that you've done.

Patrick Emmons:

Yeah, value.

Adan Pope:

You ask the question, "Are you proud of that?"

If the answer is "No," warning, warning.

If the answer is, "Yeah, and I think I could make it better, and here's how, here's my things I'd like to do," and they fight for those things into the prioritization, then I think we've got ownership and joint ownership.

When you go onto the floor in our building, on my floor specifically, I swear to you, I didn't write it on the wall, but I noticed it day one, it says, "Own it." Man, that just speaks to me. We've got to own it, it's my product, yeah, I'm going to stay up until midnight and make sure it works. 911 gave me a lot of experience on that, those... And I still feel superstitious. I knock on wood so many times, I'm like the most superstitious engineer you can imagine.

Patrick Emmons:

How did you run on that one?

Adan Pope:

Woo. We dodged the bullet so many times on really critical outages that would've been extremely consequential. Unfortunately, sometimes those things do bite you, and the feeling of ownership around something that's so life-threatening and life-consequential is like wearing a heavy coat after a while. You don't even realize you're wearing it, but then you realize later, you take it off, oh man, I'm always thinking about what's going to happen next and what incident could occur. That really, I think, points to me, that's really why I'm really interested in teaching this class around disaster preparedness, I want people to be prepared for the worst, because it's coming.

Shelli Nelson:

Yeah, yeah. So just out of curiosity, do you have a ritual or a habit that you use to lead through complexity?

Patrick Emmons:

Yeah. When you get triggered, because these aren't daily things, you don't put on the calendar, "Tension this week, let's go. Tuesday is going to be Taco Tuesday, Wednesday is going to be Tension Wednesday."

Adan Pope:

Tension Day.

Patrick Emmons:

Tension Thursday, we'll go with Tension Thursday. "At 3:30, we're going to have tension."

Adan Pope:

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think that the Socratic method can go a long way.

Patrick Emmons:

Very nice. That came up again, that came up last night too, man, it's just prominent.

Adan Pope:

Ask more questions. Don't ask questions with the intent to answer them before you've heard the question. You guys know this. Truly want and seek to understand and truly be willing to be vulnerable enough to say, "I don't understand," and that's okay.

Patrick Emmons:

I would say intentionally don't understand.

Adan Pope:

I don't know-

Patrick Emmons:

The dummy card is a really powerful thing of, explain that to me.

Adan Pope:

Yeah, help me understand that.

Patrick Emmons:

Totally.

Adan Pope:

And then, I think the first principle for me, to answer your question, and I've been through a lot of digital transformations, this might sound corny, maybe my Bell Labs days, I want a picture. I'm going to draw a picture with you or I'm going to draw a picture for you of what this system is like or what it does, who it serves, how it works, how the gears in your watch click. I want to know that, and we need to know that, because I've got to tell you, my experience is people, when they use the word, "I think... I think it works like this," I go to the repo and I'll read all the code because I want to know and I want you to know, and then I want a picture that is abstract enough that we can actually talk about it.

Patrick Emmons:

Awesome.

Adan Pope:

You can't see on this thing, but I am a big Mondrian fan.

Patrick Emmons:

Who is that?

Adan Pope:

Patrick Emmons:

Is that it? Okay.

Adan Pope:

It is. Abstractionism, in that painting, it's called Victory Boogie Woogie, it was painted at the end of World War II to basically paint jazz. How do you paint a sound? Through abstraction. And I think architecture is the ultimate act of abstraction. It's like, how do we take the problem and then draw a picture about it that ultimately allows us to be framed together to then go write thousands of lines of code and test them and deliver them to someone? So I always go to the picture, I always go to the abstract and I always go to the whiteboard, and I would say that one way for sure to know that tension's got out of whack in your shop is if the meeting rooms are empty and the whiteboards are clean. If that's the case, no one's talking to each other.

Patrick Emmons:

Yeah. Oh, man, I love it. I think is definitely a trigger for me of we need to move that to I know, how do we get to I know?

Adan Pope:

I know, yeah.

Patrick Emmons:

And the worse one than that is, I think is okay, I hope is the worst.

Adan Pope:

I hope is not a plan, absolutely.

Patrick Emmons:

Right, totally. Again, we're part of a new business, and I was having a conversation and I said, "So what is this?"

"Well, we're hoping..."

I'm like, oh, boy. Do I create tension here?

Adan Pope:

Yeah, you should.

Patrick Emmons:

Is this the moment?

Adan Pope:

You should say, "Hmm."

Patrick Emmons:

But I do think the tension, not to get too sidetracked, but I do think some of the reasons... These additions, the acquisitions or divestitures, it's the relationships that are missing. You've grooved some things together of, hey, I understand, appreciate that tension, now I've injected this other thing that doesn't have respect for the tensions because they don't know the relationships.

Adan Pope:

It's true.

Patrick Emmons:

Adan Pope:

Totally. And that's that Monday morning quarterback thing, isn't it, too? It's like you bought this business and the business is smaller and it had these objectives and it had these limitations on investment, had the people that they had, they had their own things. And then, the executives, they made a lot of money and they got out of the business and they sold their business. And now, you're left with the second level of the organization who lived through that map of objectives and tensions and investments and all that stuff. And then, the new boss comes in, and they may be less humble than maybe we want them to be, and they say, "Why did you do this? Oh my gosh. How could you have made that decision?"

And then, as an employee that's now in the company that's just been acquired, you're like, "But you don't understand. Joe told me to do this. Patrick was a tough guy. He liked friction. He told me to go build this thing and didn't care about how long it took, make it happen."

And then, that makes you defensive. So I like the, "How might we?" As an opening question in those environments, "How might we create this thing," whatever it is, "Value with what we have, and what would we need to do to make it better?" Versus, "Why did you?" That's going to create a little friction.

Patrick Emmons:

Totally, totally. And as a dad-

Adan Pope:

"How could you?" Way worse.

Patrick Emmons:

As a dad, how many times have I deployed that with no effect?

Adan Pope:

Right.

Patrick Emmons:

"What were you thinking?"

Adan Pope:

Exactly. Sometimes I ask that to myself, "What was I thinking?" That might be later.

Patrick Emmons:

Totally, and that's okay.

Shelli Nelson:

That's okay.

Patrick Emmons:

That's a full-fledged adult who does that.

Adan Pope:

Yeah.

Patrick Emmons:

Adan, thank you so much for being on the show. Before we wrap up, I want to know, where can people find your books? How do they connect with your work? How do they connect with you?

Adan Pope:

Yeah. Our books are on Amazon. They're also on Lulu, recently added to lulu.com, that's another self-publishing place, and they're on barnesandnoble.com. And we also have a website, taraxalabsllc.com, where we blog and we try to promote our work there, and there's links to a lot of other things we've done. We did a TEDx speech for IIT last year, that's on there. There's a number of other speaking opportunities we've done.

And again, you don't make money on non-fiction books, let me put that out there first of all, you just don't. If you break even, you're doing well. And so, the reason why we do it is we have something to say and we just want to say it and we want to spread that knowledge the best we can. So any interaction is actually the best part, the reviews I get on books way are better than any money that I would make on the book, and so please engage there, engage on our blog. I'm also on LinkedIn, just to try to be there in the internet Ethernet.

Patrick Emmons:

Awesome.

Shelli Nelson:

Awesome.

Adan Pope:

Thank you all so much. It was great to meet you as well. I hope to be connected with Patrick and Shelli going forward.

Shelli Nelson:

Absolutely.

Patrick Emmons:

Absolutely, yeah. Well, we also want to thank our listeners, we appreciate everyone joining us today,

Shelli Nelson:

And if you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, you can subscribe by visiting our website at dragonspears.com/podcast, or find us on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Patrick Emmons:

This episode was sponsored by DragonSpears and produced by Dante32.