Welcome to The Bureau Briefing, our community podcast. Be sure to find us on iTunes or Google Play!
Adam Fry-Pierce, Director, Design Community at InVision
Community is a powerful force for good, both from a leadership growth perspective and from a business standpoint. As leaders connect, collaborate and learn from one another, they gain invaluable insights and connections that help to advance their craft, teams and organizations.
At InVision, they have a unique vantage point that they’re leveraging to benefit a growing design leadership community. With more than five million customers at tens of thousands of companies, including 100% of Fortune 100s and brands like Airbnb, Amazon, HBO, Netflix, Slack, Starbucks and Uber, they have an in-depth understanding of patterns of collaboration, delivery best practices and shared challenges.
Adam Fry-Pierce, Director, Design Community at InVision, joins us to talk about initiatives including DesignBetter.Co, InVision’s Design Leadership Forum and InVision’s partnership with the Bureau. Listen in for insights on scaling tribes, connecting people around a shared goal and achieving work-life balance.
Carl: Hey everybody and welcome back to The Bureau Briefing podcast. Today we have got the Director of Design Community at InVision, a pioneer of partnerships, part of the team that launched DesignBetter.co, and the Design Leadership Forum, but most importantly, a Washington State cougar, and lover of all things that is Gardner Minshew. It's Adam Fry-Pierce. How are you Adam?
Adam: It's good. It's good. You are a hundred percent correct. Total fan of Gardner.
Carl: Did you like how I said cougar?
Adam: I did. I did. You did it the right way too. There was enough respect there and playfulness. I liked it.
Carl: All right. Well, I appreciate it. Wait, I just want to dive in. We both run communities, right? There's something inherently wrong with us mentally that we say, "Let's try to keep thousands of people in a good place moving forward together." So to get started, can you just share with everybody listening a little bit about how you got to this place? What is your background?
Adam: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So the very quick story is I studied advertising back at Washington State and one of my biggest life hacks coming out of school, like so many of us, we had no idea what we're really doing, didn't really know what to do with the knowledge, or how to implement it.
Adam: So I immediately went out to the community and I lived in Seattle. There was a good design and advertising community here and that was just one of my life hacks, right? Is I would just go and talk to people that I wanted to be like, and just ask them questions. And I wasn't bashful about asking very vulnerable questions often.
Adam: And so, that theme carried with me all the way to today. Still, even though I'm in a community organizer position here, whenever I can, I try to just get out with people that think differently than I do and learn how they do what they do.
Adam: So back from the very beginning, it was a very selfish motivation. What I ended up finding out is that being in the community didn't only expose me to new ideas, it also exposed me to new potential business colleagues and new ways of even being able to perpetuate business and intention back to some of the work that I was doing.
Adam: So I learned the flywheel of what it meant to be part of a community and also to be organizing a community really early in my career. And I had just continued that wherever I could. So moving into when I was an entrepreneur, we immediately started a conference company just so we could have a good pulse in the industry. Right?
Adam: And from there that ended up, again, turning the flywheel of our business. And when I came to InVision, they share that same value position of, "Hey, if we can give value to the community, we will be able receive value back as long as we be a force for change it in the best way." And so, that's how I got here in a really messy, fuzzy way.
Adam: And the reason why it's still something that I do today is that our CEO, Clark, that was his vision from the very beginning is, let's be a force for good in the industry by investing in the community, trying to make it a better place. And it goes along that idea of if we can help rise the tide we'll be one of the ships on the surface and we will rise with it.
Carl: I totally agree. And it's interesting, we were both advertising majors. I didn't realize that.
Adam: I didn't know that either.
Carl: So I was theater and advertising. And it's interesting because also coming into your own, when you're working for somebody else or start working for yourself, there's so many skills that you learn and so many things that you learn not to do, mainly based on your fellow students and you're watching them going, "That's no good."
Carl: But I love this idea too, InVision started with the community mindset and you see so many companies now that are trying to bolt on a community aspect, and I hate to say it's insincere, but it's just hard. If you don't have that inquisitive nature, much like you're talking about, if you don't have that honest desire to help people, at the very least find them help, it's really difficult, especially if you have some agenda with your community versus just trying to move everybody forward.
Carl: And to your point, it's no different than, say, Google. People used to say, "Well, I don't want to take them away from my site." All Google did all day long was send people away. But they kept going back because they went to a good place.
Carl: And it's the same thing with the community. If you can continuously show people a better way, or not even in the answer, but maybe just a path to find an answer, they're going to keep coming back.
Adam: Right. And a lot of the times that path isn't towards necessarily a destination or information. Sometimes that path is to another person. Right? So we decided that we wanted to not just be power connectors with our huge customer base, and that's not some weird flex on InVision, but rather to illustrate a point which is we do have a unique vantage point as to, our audience is product designers, we work with a lot of different product design teams all over the place and, over time we start to see what some of the best patterns and practices are to how those teams operate, to how they deliver work, how they collaborate with other people.
Adam: And we can share that information, but we can also be more than a power connector. We can actually end up becoming a maven of the industry, sharing those practices, but also totally connecting people so that they can have more contextual conversations. They can go down in altitude from best practices underneath a certain vertical all the way down to asking each other very, I'll say, vulnerable questions at a really, really intimate level.
Adam: And so, we've invested quite a bit into things like one too many vessels, like you mentioned, like DesignBetter.co. We've also invested into one on one or one to few vessels where people can get into really, really small tribes. And it's our job really just to be the arbiter of that space and be the shepherd of the space and the steward.
Adam: But to your point with Google, we're not trying to keep people here, we're just trying to add as much value here as possible. And we experiment with that often and at the end of the day, we would ruin the entire thing if we tried to create what I call timeshare moments where we're going to make this a transactional moment, but in reality, we're just trying to give value and that's going to be subjective to whoever's here. Sometimes they want a connection. Sometimes they want to ask us a question in a safe space, but yeah, that's why we do it.
Carl: Oh man, you just punched me in the gut because for four of the worst months of my life I worked for Hilton Grand Vacations.
Adam: Yeah. Not trying to... Oh yeah, I forgot. We have a big audience here. Nothing against anyone who's in timeshares.
Carl: No, no. It's crap. It's total crap. I still remember proudly writing the line. "Would you like the vacation of a lifetime or a lifetime of grand vacations?" Anyway, with all of my brain totally wiped out now because of that, I just, first of all, what you said was right. There are no timeshare moments. In fact, you even have to be weird, you don't have to be weird, you have to be careful of things feeling weird.
Carl: If you're in person, if you're having one of the, say, the Design Leadership Forum dinners and you really want to capture a photograph of it, you also have to make sure that that photograph is something that feels right in the moment. You know what I mean?
Adam: Oh yeah.
Carl: It's like every aspect of it, anything that takes away from the sincerity of the moment starts to make it feel forced.
Adam: Yeah, yeah. There's a fine line between being authentic, and I keep coming back to this word of transactional, right? Everyone has different reasons why they show up to those dinners. And for context for anyone listening, what this is, is we curate very small groups of people from similar backgrounds. So in this case it would be design leaders within enterprise environments, and we very carefully handpick who's going to come to a specific dinner depending on the objective that we're trying to accomplish.
Adam: And that's never, "Hey, let's try and sell a bunch of software." It's, "Hey, let's have a conversation about something that would be a shared challenge between everyone who showed up." So bad version, but an example would be like, let's take a bunch of design executives from finance and tech and at those intersections and bring them together and just talk about like, "Hey, what are you dealing with in the year ahead?"
Adam: And we don't take notes, we're not trying to take account notes so we can sell you some software. We're really just trying to figure out, what is the actual root reason why you're here? And a lot of the time it's people just have really wicked questions that they can't ask their peers. They're expected to have the answers. So if we give them a space to ask those questions amongst each other, then we've done our job and we look like rock stars, honestly, if we can bring together the right group.
Carl: I mean, people will thank you. And this is the thing that gets me every time. When you get into one of those conversations or somebody reaches out and says, "Hey, I'm looking for a person who's had this experience.", and you know that person or you know a couple of people and you say, "Hey, let me just make sure they're cool with it and I'll connect you up.", and then it's like, that is that rock star moment, right? That's that opportunity where they're just like, "Whoa, I can't believe that worked." And then, you hear them out there saying, "I love this community so much."
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned something earlier, which I want to circle back to, and that's a lot of companies are slapping on community as if it's going to a hedge and, and de-risk their longterm survival. I want to back up and clarify something too. And that's that I think a major trend that you're going to see in the next one to five years is going to be that more tech companies realize just how fast the landscape is, how somebody can, in their garage or up in their spare office room with their spare time come up with potentially something that could totally compete with an organization's core offering.
Adam: And a way to differentiate the brand is to be a strategic partner to their customers outside of just the tooling. So what I like to do is I like to see the world, every business, in something called the three Ps. And that's the value that you offer through your people, through your practices, and through your platform offerings. And that three P, essentially every business has one of those.
Adam: And most businesses look at their offering is just the platform, right? Something that is great, not to make this a huge InVision plug, but something's great about InVision is that we realized a long time ago that if we were going to succeed, that we needed to really focus in on all three of those areas, right?
Adam: So yeah, we make money through our platform and we can offer value through our tooling, but we can also use our wide audience base to understand what the best practices are. Share those out with people. And we can also be that power connector for different people, that third P.
Adam: And so, I think for a lot of organizations that don't realize that, that they can actually build a strategic moat around their business by investing into community in the right way. And I'm not just talking user groups, I'm talking about everything the community could be, connecting into customer data. You'll end up keeping people in orbit longer if there's a particular year where maybe your core platform, your core tools, maybe lag a little bit and it will give you time to catch back up. Right?
Adam: And there's a bunch of different reasons why that could happen. Something terrible could happen to the core visionary, to one of the core product team. Somebody could just totally come out of left field, a competitor and just offer something better, and you'll need time, and this is what a good community investment, and a good community practice, and a mature community practice can do for an organization.
Adam: It's just, you can provide that strategic moat so that the brand can be a little bit more sustainable and it helps see that longterm strategy through
Carl: Oh, without a doubt and especially just being involved in the conversations of what's challenging the people that you're trying to serve. You get to be on the front lines of them trying to figure it out, especially as their role evolves, as their needs of their organizations evolve. You're there on the front line so you're not waiting to see what happens. You're part of the conversation on what's going to happen. That becomes the critical part.
Adam: Yeah, 100% agree. Yeah. Just the trend for spotting, and the trend sighting, and trend spotting, whatever you want to call it, that position alone, if well-connected, if your community strategy is well connected to your product team, that can be a huge advantage.
Carl: Now, I want to shift gears for just a second because I think I was realizing this. We're going through similar growth, in terms of the number of people in the community. The Bureau started in 2012, and now, 2020, we're just over 8,000 people. So roughly a thousand a year, not quite. And then, when we look at Design Leadership Forum, tell me if I'm wrong, but it started somewhere around late 2017, early 2018.
Adam: Early 2018 yeah. February, 2018. 12 founder members.
Carl: Yeah. And so, and then now I think it's 2,400.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. It's just about there.
Carl: So how much has your team changed in those two years? Because one of the things, and you and I, we've talked a few times, but scaling intimacy becomes the biggest challenge. When somebody is part of a group that's 20 or 30 or even 40, it's one thing you, you feel like you are part of this amazing thing that's evolving.
Carl: But once you get over a hundred and a thousand, and then 2000 it feels like, for me, that's when the work starts, that I have to really make sure it still feels, not just special but intimate. I mean, that's the word, for me. So what's changed for you from when you were that original group to now?
Adam: Yeah, it's a great question. It's going to sound like a cop out answer, but it's really not.
Carl: Come on, Adam. People want to know.
Adam: I don't think anyone knows.
Carl: Tell the people, Adam.
Adam: But I still think it's day one because, to your point, as you cross these thresholds, you almost have to restart the work, right? At the very beginning it's so, easy is the wrong word, but it's a little easier, in terms of volume and really what you're having to weigh against whenever you're, even something like a, trying to figure out a new feature to speak to some problems that your community offering just doesn't quite support at the time.
Adam: So, in terms of the actual team change, to answer your question directly, it's still the same. There's still just me and I've got people around who are total supporters and advocates. You've got folks like Mike Davidson, and Steven Gates, and Emily Campbell, and Katie Baker. I mean, you've got great people here who weave in and out of the program as the years go on.
Adam: But really, the core team hasn't changed too much. The scope of what we're trying to accomplish has changed. For a while, we wanted the DLF to be a place where this was where design leaders can go wherever they were in the world. You didn't have to just be in San Francisco or New York City. You could be in Singapore or Bali, South Africa. You could be anywhere. And that was the charter for a long time.
Adam: But now, to your point, because we are larger, the thing that I'm really spending a lot of my time thinking about is, how can we scale tribes? At first, we were a tribe. Now we are a state, so now we're having to create cities within that, and then neighborhoods within that. And that is where, to your point, that's work. That's difficult to be able to figure out how to curate meaningfully when you have a huge audience.
Adam: And I think, as we grow that, that answering that question is going to become more and more important because the alternative is that people just self-organize and maybe that's the solution.
Carl: Yeah. Well, and self-organizing is not bad. Self-organizing actually, I would say, is probably the goal of most communities.
Adam: Yeah. Oh yeah. If I do my job right, eventually I'm out of a job, right? Like that's the goal.
Carl: You and I can go and just laugh. Hopefully we'll still be getting paid somehow. But to me, when I see in the Bureau community, a group say, "We need to get together." Right? I love that. At the same time, I do have this momentary panic of, "I don't want to get left behind." You know what I mean? And this is just complete honesty and everybody in the Bureau that's listening, I love it when I see a group that's saying, "We're going to have this meetup." Or, "Let's have this call."
Carl: And I know, just looking at Slack, right? We have thousands of messages that happen every week. A majority of them are DMs.
Adam: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Carl: So that means there's so much great organization and support going on, and as exhausting as it can become to try to keep your inbox managed because you have thousands of people now that are wanting you to help them out, not all at once, but hundreds at a time. It's wonderful to see it, but at the same time, there's almost this sense of, I don't want my little baby to leave the house. I don't care if you're 18, right? I want to be a part of your life. Let me know what's happening. Do you ever feel that or am I just a nut job?
Adam: No, no, you're definitely not alone. I think really what you and I are doing, another title for it is, we're product managing a service, right? And so, I think every product manager everywhere in the world, maybe not, this is a huge generalization obviously. I think that most product managers don't like the idea that their work's ever going to be done. There's always more to do with the work.
Adam: And something that is different about our service that we're offering is that if we really do a good job, we'll have to be a little bit more out of the weeds, right? As it grows, both laterally, and laterally is not the right word, but as it grows both the in like width as well as height, your position is likely going to continue to stay up top of figuring out, how can we make the best possible customer experience that we can?
Adam: And at some point you are inherently having to be dragged out of the weeds. And so, I think that that fear is not only justified, and I can totally relate to it because there's times... We started off, again, with 12 members and it was a dinner series essentially. And we weren't talking, there wasn't a Slack group, there wasn't anything like that.
Adam: So the time where I would connect with these people is at the Slack groups and these are all friends now. I love how they think.
Carl: My best friends come out of the community.
Adam: Yeah. I love being... There's so many layers to this thing, right? This is not only my work and something that I'm incredibly proud of, but I feel super-privileged to be surrounded by people that are much smarter than me and have some incredible experience that I'm also able to learn from. So as the program has grown and I've gone to less and less of those in-person meetups, and my position has then become more as a business owner for this product. Yeah, I'm not losing touch, but the volume has just changed.
Adam: Where I spend my time as so much more on systematic solutions rather than these awesome get-togethers. And every one of them are awesome. Mike Davidson, who helps facilitate a lot of these dinners with me, at the end of every one of these dinners, we usually raise a glass or laugh about how this is just the best job in the world.
Adam: And I'm sure you feel the same way after retreats or meetups. That's the good stuff. How lucky are we to be in that position? And yeah, just as time goes on, as the program grows, it comes down to a timing issue. There's only so many hours in the week and certain things need to get done, and you can't fly at all the dinners anymore. So...
Carl: And you get to this point, at least I do, where I feel like I'm as much air traffic control as I am consultant or a therapist. And, for me, when I get into those roles, and you mentioned systems, right? Putting in place systems, and I really know we have to do that, but it also becomes one of those things that worries me because I don't ever want it to feel automated or insincere.
Adam: Right.
Carl: And I think people understand. When I talk to some of the old guard from those early events and the early conversations, they get it. They still don't like it, but that becomes part of the challenge is, how do you stay sustainable? It's different for InVision, right?
Carl: I mean, you have a core product that's awesome and it's helping two words, residual income, baby, and we don't have that. So that's, I guess, one of the differences is, for us, we're trying to be a self-sustaining community through partnerships like we have with InVision, through events, through other things where we get people together. But either way, it becomes really stressful, I think I would say for both of us, to try to find ways to keep things moving. So I'm curious, how do you unplug from the community?
Adam: I want to loop back to this in a second, but you just said something that was so interesting. I have to touch on it. And that's that your business is the community and InVision's business is community, and the difference there is that yeah, you're having to figure out a way to scale and still continue to focus on the wellness of you and your employees while also maintaining the quality, and also what's sacred about the group that you've been able to curate.
Carl: Yeah.
Adam: InVision has followed a similar trajectory, but the difference is that because the residual income difference, if we wanted to, I guess at one point we could have changed the scope and made it smaller. It's just interesting. I'm just thinking about that of yeah, there is an inherent difference there and I think it all comes down to the intention of what you're trying to produce.
Adam: That's a tough one. I feel for you. I used to be in that position. That's a very difficult place to be. As much as some of your core customers and some of the OGs, as you had put it, get it, that's still so difficult. How do you maintain intimacy at scale? Okay? So you had just asked another question, and that was, how do you disconnect? Was that it?
Carl: That was it. Yeah. How do you unplug from the community? That's one of the most difficult things for me.
Adam: How do you unplug from the community?
Carl: It's not healthy to stay connected all the time. You have to have some down time, and family time, and friends time.
Adam: Right. The way that I've tried is just turning off Slack notifications. Feeling like the thing is I have no email. This something that Aaron Walter is great at. He was my first boss here at InVision and I think I was so fortunate to be able to work underneath him because he just has very clear lines of balance, right? It's not like work-life separation so much as, what's the healthiest way to use your mind throughout the day?
Adam: And Aaron just taught me really early like, "Hey, the work's going to be there in the morning. If it's an emergency, someone will text you." That's typically what I've done is like, "Hey. The phone is here for emergencies."
Adam: And I turned off notifications. There did get a point though where I don't know what happened. I got a new phone or something and I have notifications back on. And your question that you just asked is my reminder of, what are you doing? Go back to the way that it was. It was fine. Yeah.
Carl: That's awesome.
Adam: Because I don't think that I disconnect as often as I should. And I think it's something that a lot of people in tech, my observation is that pretty much everybody in Seattle that I know is always getting notifications. All my friends, if we go out for happy hour, or whatever, it's like the Slack messages, the emails are still popping up. I think we all need to be better. Myself, mostly, need to go back to the way that that Aaron taught me. I've since forgotten apparently.
Carl: Well, I think it's funny. That reminds me of something I heard Megan McInerney say once. Megan runs operations at Clockwork, this great shop in Minnesota. And I remember she said, "Don't worry about the dumpster fire. It will still be burning when you get back."
Adam: Oh yeah.
Carl: I'm like, "Oh my God, that's so true."
Adam: If it's mission critical, someone will find you.
Carl: She was like, "Go to lunch, enjoy lunch. You don't have to stay here and work through lunch because you're not going to get this solved. You're not the one who lit it."
Adam: Yeah.
Carl: And not community and dumpster fires are the same thing, but it's that sense of it's addicting, right? And it's nice to feel needed, and all of that type of stuff, but at the same time, I think that's why you want communities ultimately to be self-sufficient. So, oh man, so many things. So many things.
Adam: Yeah. There is something I'd like to poke at really quick, which is the reason that this became... I made fun of it. There was an update somewhere, but as the DLF grew to be international, there became this thing about time zones where it's like, "Hey, I'm going to have somebody doing something at a time where I'm supposed to be dead asleep.", and there's a very specific case that I'm thinking of where I thought, "Oh my gosh, it was really good that I had my phone on because there were people that were locked out of a building." Right?
Adam: They just needed to get connected to the host who was running the event. The host did not know that there that they were locked, and I was the person that they called. The thing that I learned is that what I need to do is I need to set up a better system. I just needed better lines of communication so that I was super-replaceable.
Adam: That since has happened to where now I have no reason to leave the Slack notifications on, but there was a time where it was like, "Ah, thank God that I had it that way." Or else, who what would have happened? These people might have just had a terrible experience and then peaced out forever. But yeah, I get it.
Carl: That's an excellent point, especially once you get into multiple times zones, and I think we have, we were looking at this the other day, something like 31 countries represented in the Bureau community. They're not that active. They aren't that large a part of the community. It's just a few individuals here and there, but it's still that sense that if we're putting on an event that's an online event, or something of that nature, there's no way you're ever going to figure it out the right time zone. It's just not going to happen.
Adam: How do you choose if you want to do a retreat in a certain market? Is it total heat mapping of where members are? Do you look at places maybe where your competition is not? How do you prioritize markets of where you're going to go and offer an in-person experience?
Carl: I'll be honest, I look for places that I want to go. It sounds super-selfish, but I need some of that. And then, we also, with all of our post-event surveys, we ask people where they'd like to go next. So we'll look to see what that grouping is. But normally it's the time of year, and then we look at where's the best weather that time of year.
Adam: Yeah. Smart.
Carl: It sounds a little simple but it works really well. And then also, recently we found what can be great is if you're going to have something in a major market, have it end on a Friday so somebody can stay for the weekend, right? Do a workshop on a Friday in New York. People will use the company dime to get there, and then their own money to stay, or bring their family with them.
Carl: And anytime you can do something that feels like I don't have to explain to my family why I'm going, I can take them with me, if you make it family friendly. Right? All of those things work really well, but honestly, there's some places we get back to. Design Leadership Camp in Palm Springs was one of the best venue experiences we've ever had. They are definitely going to be back in 2021. We'll definitely go back there.
Carl: So that's the other part, but generally, and I'm sure you do the same thing, we have a list of places that we think would be great, and then we lean on the community and ask them.
Adam: Yeah, yeah. I did have a question that I had been getting recently that I wanted to take this opportunity to ask you.
Carl: Yeah.
Adam: And then, hopefully, the audience will find value in it. But I've had a lot of members approach us lately and say, "Hey, we are trying to create a stronger culture within our product design, marketing team,", whatever it is. "And we're really interested and exploring community practices." And so, I get this question a lot, which is, "Hey, how would you start it if you were me? What would you tell yourself back on day one."
Adam: And I realize this is super-contextual, right? This is going to vary if you're an enterprise with a thousand designers versus a smaller agency with 15 people, but what is, if you could go back and give yourself advice from day one, what did you say, 2012 was day one?
Carl: Yeah, 2012 was when I got called about going to the first event.
Adam: If you were able to give yourself some advice that was universal for anyone else that's considering owning community practice within their organization, what would that advice be?
Carl: I would say find the biggest point of pain that's shared across your organization, and it could be something that's not talked about. It could be personal insecurities, it could be a challenge within the org. It could be not being business people. I mean, the number one reason the Bureau started was because none of us went to school for business and we were all running businesses. Honestly.
Carl: I mean, like I said, I was a theater major with an advertising minor. A lot of people were musicians who built websites for their bands that found more money there than in music. You have a lot of writers, you have a lot of people who left advertising, but none of them were business people. And so, they were scared they were doing it wrong all the time.
Carl: And to sit in a room full of other people who were scared they're doing it wrong, and then you realize, "Oh, we're all just figuring this out.", but you can figure it out together and move forward together. That's it.
Carl: So I would say, really, find what that shared difficulty is that isn't ego-based on either side. It's just a challenge everybody shares and say, "Hey, we're going to get together and we're going to talk about this, and we'd love for everybody to participate." And those that don't participate, make sure they at least understand what happened and that they're welcome to come in later. I think that's really it. Making sure there is no agenda other than solving a problem that everybody seems to be facing.
Adam: So you just mentioned something else. I'm going to drill you for a second. How can you create an inclusive work stream without creating something that is so heavy that it will not be able to progress? So it's the balance between an effective squad versus death by committee. And this is the why underneath a lot of the questions, and I've asked, why are you coming to me? And this is ultimately the thing that people are trying to figure out. It's like, "Hey, if I'm trying to run this, how can I be inclusive but also exclusive, so that we can actually be-"
Carl: Well that's it. See, this becomes one of the biggest challenges and I remember, there's this huge difficulty, and Greg Storey, who's at InVision, and was actually one of the two people who invited me to that first Bureau event in 2012. I remember him saying, "You have to make sure things stay special. You have to make sure that it feels like somebody was invited because they're special."
Carl: At the same time, I'm trying to build an inclusive community. How you exclude someone from saying he's supposed to be special, but if you get the wrong person in a group, and not based on their background, or heritage or anything, but just... There are people who show up negative in life.
Adam: Yeah. There are jerks.
Carl: Exactly.
Adam: It's a real thing.
Carl: Exactly. And so, that becomes a big part of it is making sure that you're curating the group, which by definition means it's not truly inclusive. I don't have a dictionary with me. Maybe I shouldn't have said by definition, but it's a great question.
Carl: Honestly, we've only had, that I'm aware of, out of everyone we've had come to events and do all that kind of stuff, we've only had a handful, maybe 10 people, who were, people call them bad actors. Right? Which I hate because I wanted to be an actor. I was a bad actor, but I wasn't a bad person. Okay?
Adam: Yeah.
Carl: I didn't want to be on a cruise ship acting. That was what a bad actor did, not somebody who was a jerk in public. But so, these people who've not been great. You know what? You don't invite them back. That is for sure. You make sure that they understand. But that's a great question and I don't have a really smooth answer for you.
Adam: You touched on it, which is my answer. It's not necessarily the answer, but it's anything that you make is designed, and therefore has an intention, and therefore it has things that it's trying not to be as well as the things that it is trying to be. So there's naturally going to be an inclusive element for everything that's at the center of the scope of what you're trying to accomplish.
Adam: But there's also going to be a fence that's built around that and anything that doesn't belong in the fence shouldn't be there. You mentioned something else. It's just, okay, well, let's say that somebody fits all the criteria and it seems like they're going to be great person. Yeah. They could just show up and just not be their best self or that's just who they always are. It's rare, but somebody can just show up and totally wreck the entire-
Carl: Yeah. I saw Aaron Walter punch a guy once. He was just having a bad day.
Adam: I've seen him roundhouse somebody. Yeah.
Carl: So rude.
Adam: Hey, they don't call him the enforcer for nothing. Please cut this part out.
Carl: He's going to kick my ass now. I'm in a lot of trouble.
Adam: Please cut this out. But yeah, I think it's just comes down to, this is the role that you are supposed to play, which is curator, and it's our job and in every community organizer's job, to figure out who's actually going to contribute to the goal, contribute to the spirit versus the detractors.
Carl: Well yeah, and there's one other thing, it's almost an advantage that I have in a way, in that most of the times when I'm curating a group, it's going to be a group that's meeting in public. And because those meetings are part of what sustain us, there is a monetary component to getting together with the Bureau. And it's not inexpensive.
Carl: So when we have a camp and somebody is filling out their application for why they want to be there, I'm going to go and look and see, how does this person on social, how do they handle themselves? Are they positive? Are they negative?
Carl: Not what their affiliation is with religion, or politics, or any of that stuff, but just, are they a positive person supporting their viewpoint or are they exclusive to all other thoughts? Are they just going to say, "This is it." We call it from the mountain, right? Are they just going to come down and say, "This is it." And then also, you can pick up really quickly if they're looking to share or if they're looking to lurk, right?
Adam: Yeah.
Carl: And it's really easy for me looking through the surveys, right? The applications. And then, I can go back and say, "You know what? I don't think you're going to get the value out of this, and here's why." And I tie it back to the amount of money that they would spend. And just to say, "You're not going to get the value, and this is why."
Carl: And a lot of times it's because you're looking for these things, that's not what you're going to get or you're worried about sharing these things. And normally people thank me. So it's totally different from when you are in an environment of a product-type company, right?
Carl: Because you don't want to exclude people. You can set criteria for who somebody is that can come and, and you can do other things. But for us, it's really easy for me to tie it back and just say, "Based on you're looking for this outcome, this is your goal in attending, I don't think you're going to get it. I don't think you're going to get what you're looking for."
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. That's great advice. And I think I'm going to borrow that and forward it on to the right people.
Carl: You do that.
Adam: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Carl: You do that Adam Fry-Pierce. Also, you have a really cool name.
Adam: Thank you.
Carl: Did you make that up? Did you make that up?
Adam: I didn't. My mom gave it to me from the early days so I'll let her know you like it.
Carl: Do that for me. Let her know, and also let her know that if she ever wants to apply for an event, I will reject her immediately.
Adam: Okay. She actually might be one of the people that you'd want at your events, so reconsider the last part but yeah, I'll connect you guys on LinkedIn.
Carl: I appreciate it. Well Adam, thank you so much for being on the show today. I did find this in something that you wrote that I thought was amazing. I'm not sure if you wrote it or if was part of the team, but it basically, I think it was part of the Design Leadership Forum, and I just loved it. "Here's to leadership growth and shaping the future of design together."
Carl: I just want to end the episode on that and say, "You know what? Good on you, man." You've been doing some great work over there and I appreciate it and you know you can steal from me anytime you want because I've been stealing from you for years, brother.
Adam: There's a lot of this I'm going to splice up and send out to... Like I said, there's a couple people who have been really, really stressed about how to do this. It's funny. This is something that I think for, for both of us, we really enjoyed doing. And then, there's other people that just feel the problem so much within their organizations that they're willing to step outside of their comfort zone.
Adam: And I'm going to raise a glass and cheers them from Seattle because it is an admirable problem to try to solve, especially if it's not something you've done before. But thank you so much for sharing the knowledge. I'm going to forward it on.
Carl: You are welcome. And from the land of Minshew in Jacksonville, Florida, I raise a glass to you, my friend.
Adam: Awesome. Happy Friday.
Carl: Happy Friday. To everybody listening, thank you so much, and we'll be back next week. All the best.
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