Intellectual Territory

What are you known for? Is it what you want to be known for? And how much control do you have over either?

In this episode of the Testing Peers, Chris Armstrong, Russell Craxford, Dan Ashby and Tara Walton explore intellectual territory: the ideas, problems and patterns of thinking we repeatedly return to.

Against a backdrop of AI, changing roles and questions about future relevance, the Peers discuss whether intellectual territory is something we choose, discover or have placed upon us by others.

They explore identity and perception, the opportunities and limitations of becoming known for something, and whether being a generalist makes territory harder to define. They also consider how territory can evolve as careers, interests and contexts change.

And it doesn't require global recognition. Your intellectual territory might simply be what colleagues come to you for, what your team associates with you, or the perspective you consistently bring to a conversation.

Exploring Your Intellectual Territory

Chris introduces seven questions for exploring your own intellectual territory. The fuller prompts are below.

The aim is to uncover something durable: not trendy topics or surface positioning, but the patterns of thinking that are consistently yours.

1. Across your past work, talks, writing and decisions:

• What recurring tensions do you return to?
• What problems do you seem unable to ignore?
• What assumptions do you frequently challenge?

2. Where do you consistently add value?

• Do you clarify?
• Reframe?
• Simplify?
• Expose risk?
• Connect systems?
• Interrogate signals?
• Something else?

3. What irritates you professionally?

• Vanity metrics?
• Superficial optimisation?
• Incentive distortion?
• Performative confidence?
• Something deeper?

Irritation often points to intellectual territory.

4. What do you believe that is both:

• True across contexts, and
• Uncomfortable enough that not everyone agrees?

5. What is the mechanism behind your thinking?

• Do you operate through empiricism?
• Through systems thinking?
• Through cultural observation?
• Through risk framing?
• Through interrogation of assumptions?

6. If you stripped away job titles and trends, what lens remains?

7. What capability would organisations strengthen if they deeply adopted your way of thinking?

As you explore them:

Challenge where you generalise. Push yourself to be specific. Avoid buzzwords. Avoid praise. Articulate patterns, not slogans.

The questions aren't intended to produce an immediate answer. There may be a difference between the territory you believe you occupy and the one others place you in. You cannot completely control what sticks, but you can reflect on it, reinforce it or choose to move towards something different.

References and Mentions

The episode references Simon Sinek and Start With Why, Brené Brown's work on vulnerability and leadership, April Dunford and positioning, DORA metrics, Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory and agile testing, and Dan Ashby's continuous testing/DevOps model.

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Transcript

0:10: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Testing Piers. 

 0:14: My name is Chris Armstrong and today I am joined by one Russell Craxford. 

 0:19: Hello. 

 0:20: Dan Ashby. 

 0:22: Hey. 

 0:23: And Tara Walton. 

 0:25: Hello. 

 0:27: Today we are going to be talking about intellectual territory, but before we dive into that, Tara has got for us some banter, Tara. 

 0:38: All right. 

 0:39: Question I have for you guys today is, what's the weirdest food combination that you secretly really enjoy? 

 0:48: I probably can get to this one quite quick. 

 0:52: Sausages and salad cream, I don't know why ever since a child I've loved sausages with salad, so a sausage sandwich with salad cream on it. 

 0:59: Beautiful. 

 0:59: Does Tara know what salad cream is? 

 1:02: I don't. 

 1:03: I don't know what it is technically. 

 1:04: It's a, it's like a ketchup but without tomatoes, it's salad cream, it's just another Heinz-based product. 

 1:12: It's a white condiment that isn't mayonnaise. 

 1:16: Yeah. 

 1:16: It's like a dressing that you're supposed to put on a salad though, right? 

 1:20: I would have thought so, called salad cream, so it's like a creamy substance to go on a dressing sound delicious. 

 1:27: I, I don't have any idea. 

 1:29: Plus this way, it's not meant to go on sausages. 

 1:32: It's not really meant to go all by itself, Russell. 

 1:34: Yeah, so I have salad cream on sausages, that's my weird combination. 

 1:39: It's beautiful, you should try it before you judge. 

 1:42: It does sound quite appealing actually, weirdly, yeah, mine's, I'm like, don't judge me. 

 1:50: I was gonna say like pineapple on a pizza, but I'm not cos I don't want that much hate. 

 1:57: But don't judge me on this one, it's like jam and cheese. 

 2:02: So if you've ever had a cheese sandwich, just throw some jam on there, so it's really delicious. 

 2:06: Which jam? 

 2:08: Like a, a, a strawberry jam for example, it's the normal jam. 

 2:12: Most people might put like some kind of jam on a cracker with cheese, so it's not that odd, if you think about it, to have a sandwich with cheese and jam in it. 

 2:24: There's a lot of prefacing our things with don't judge me. 

 2:29: so I'm gonna just say, feel free to judge me, it's fine. 

 2:33: ever since I was a kid, whenever we got Chinese takeaway, and regardless of what, what we got, it could have been egg fried rice, it could have been chow mein, it could have been. 

 2:45: sweet and sour chicken, anything, I, would throw a little bit of tomato ketchup in there and just. 

 2:51: Mix it all up. 

 2:53: I like beef and black bean sauce, a little bit of ketchup, delicious. 

 2:57: my my friend Rich calls it a kiddie condiment and he tries to make you feel bad as an adult to, to have ketchup, but I sort of lean into it and go, do you know what? 

 3:11: give me some kiddie condiment with my thing. 

 3:12: Now out of context, that doesn't sound great, but in context, ketchup and Chinese food, delicious, no. 

 3:19: Why do the Chinese never think of it, I wonder. 

 3:21: when I was a kid, I did used to have ketchup on everything, and I will never judge pineapple on pizza because that is my go to order. 

 3:32: But I think one of my favorite things I've picked up from baking is peanut butter and bacon, and I don't even like peanut butter, so the combination of those two is pretty good. 

 3:44: It's pretty good, yeah, especially when you throw it like on top of a cupcake. 

 3:50: So I think I had it on pancakes with bacon and peanut butter and things like that, and it was amazing. 

 3:56: Oh, add a little bit of maple syrup in there. 

 3:59: Yes, that was there too, yeah. 

 4:00: It was heavenly and about a billion calories, but I wasn't counting. 

 4:06: I wasn't counting. 

 4:09: There's a really good coffee shop in Cambridge that do like maple pancakes with bacon and eggs, so eggs. 

 4:18: We should just talk about food today. 

 4:21: We might all be just a little hungry. 

 4:24: I was gonna say, have we eaten today? 

 4:27: Last time we had an episode that was all centered around food, David and Beth nearly had a very big fight, over omitting a mashed potato from the Christmas dinner. 

 4:39: Mash gate as it were, and it was. 

 4:45: Terrific format and you don't know the conflict resolution that we had to go through to. 

 4:49: The grievances, the whole thing was a lot of effort. 

 4:54: That's insane. 

 4:55: Who would have mash for their Christmas dinner? 

 4:58: Oh my gosh, and you've been collaborating with Beth in the Piers Con program committee. 

 5:04: I don't know how this is, this has happened. 

 5:06: This is troubling to me. 

 5:08: We, we need to get everybody a different like badge or sticker. 

 5:13: For safety badge, yeah, which team you belong on Team mash, mash or roast, yeah, that has to be roast. 

 5:21: It's crazy. 

 5:22: But Beth, Beth isn't, Beth isn't mash or roast. 

 5:24: She's mash and roast. 

 5:26: Oh wow, that's just worse. 

 5:29: I'm getting, but there is common ground, Chris. 

 5:33: Like I've known people that it actually does quite taste quite good having, tomato sauce. 

 5:41: On a roast dinner. 

 5:43: My children do that. 

 5:44: And I judge them every time. 

 5:47: And you let them every time, just saying. 

 5:51: It's, it's not worth any, any alternatives. 

 5:55: Anyway, oh, let's do a forced segue into the main topic of the episode. 

 6:03: Friends, I. 

 6:05: Decided In the last couple of weeks, after a few conversations with folks, where we've sort of talked about the future, not the far future like when we did our episode of testing in 2030, but in the near future, next 18 to 24 months. 

 6:23: What the hell are we going to be doing? 

 6:25: How are we gonna be applying ourselves, how are we're gonna be. 

 6:31: Relevant How are we gonna be able to take what still remains an applicable skill, something that we think is legitimate, something that we believe in, something that is, Our passion, our career, and still have that applicable in a world where, frankly, AI has disrupted the business in a way more than I think I certainly anticipated. 

 6:57: And yet I'm probably a part of the problem, let's be honest. 

 7:01: So thanks for the nod, Russell, yeah, I see. 

 7:05: I see you. 

 7:06: Anyway, so friends. 

 7:09: I'm borrowing a phrase from a colleague of mine, and I, I told the group here that I'd been. 

 7:16: Noodling on something that I was told is called intellectual territory. 

 7:21: Now if you Google, not noodle but Google intellectual territory, it starts to think about intellectual property. 

 7:28: So I wanted to frame it for you to say we're not talking about what we own. 

 7:33: But something different, and I have to say I was, I was reminded, Dan, last year you spoke to me about the whole what's your word thing, and you got was going back and forth for a while on ideas, and I felt like in that, what my word was, I felt like connected was quite a good word, but intellectual territory is something that's a bit broader than that, something that's a bit, Themed something that positions us in a place, it's not a product, it's more of a narrative frame that you consistently articulate. 

 8:05: So we've talked about brand before, but this is a bit broader than brand, it's, it's framing the spaces you want to be in, the conversations that you want to be a part of and, That ultimately starts as the foundation for where you would want to position yourself, who would you want to talk to? 

 8:25: What would you want to talk to them about, what do you want people to think of you about? 

 8:29: And the examples we've got here is like Simon Sinek is the start with Y, which in my book is, you know, a fancy word for context. 

 8:37: Brene Brown's vulnerability in leadership. 

 8:40: April Dunf's positioning clarity. 

 8:44: Dora's 4 key metrics. 

 8:47: They're just like named lenses throughputs that you think will enable folks to associate with you and perhaps you've been known, like Dan might be known as the testing and DevOps guy. 

 8:59: He's had that image that one or two people have attributed in over various different times. 

 9:05: We see it, Tara might be the Dungeons and Dragons speaker. 

 9:10: Russell might be the pedant Yorkshire in the room. 

 9:14: Might be, there might be lots of things, but, but is that lens that you are today. 

 9:21: Is that what you want to be in the future? 

 9:23: Is there an opportunity, are we in this moment right now when we have a chance to pivot, start to look about where we're gonna focus our attention, what we're gonna talk about and to whom we're gonna talk about things, not only in order to, you know, in the most, Post-apocalyptic dystopian future that we look at and say in order for self-preservation, but also to be relevant. 

 9:46: And to still speak truth to the industry in which we reside. 

 9:51: I've got a different perspective. 

 9:55: So I love everything that you were saying there, Chris, but there's a bit of a lens on it that you put around where do you want to be, where are you traveling towards, what do you want to be known for, sort of aspect, but I'm wondering if there's something much more. 

 10:12: grounding in this, cos I've never heard of this term before today, right? 

 10:17: and I've done a little bit of research on it, but I can't help but feel it's like something that you perhaps are naturally gravitating towards rather than intentionally. 

 10:28: It feels like the way, there's a description that I heard of it where it's the conceptual ground where you do your best thinking, right? 

 10:37: So in that context, in that sort of definition space, is it something that you are still moving towards, or is it something that you keep coming back to? 

 10:47: All the above, isn't it really? 

 10:49: It's, it's a good point and I would just say it's, it's, it's, it's, it's also, it's what interests you, it's where your passion lie. 

 10:57: You can't just suddenly turn up one day and go, I'm a DevOps guy. 

 11:02: Or I'm this, like, I think the way you think about things can change and and maybe where your home returns to does change. 

 11:11: Yeah, but, but you do get people changing careers, right, and you do get people like changing certain decisions that they've made, perhaps they've made the same decision all their life and they just want change, so they're technically they're navigating towards a different territory there, right? 

 11:28: So, it feels as if it could be changeable, but how much is it tension, and then coming back to that, the, the theme of the conference, right, with, The universality of things, what the territories that we've been in in the past, I imagine are quite useful to guiding the territories that that we want to go to as well, but I don't know, it's still all clicking in my head, and I'm struggling to find my own territory. 

 11:54: You mentioned that DevOps model, but oh my God, I need to get away from that. 

 11:59: But some of it's not your choice though. 

 12:01: I think to your point, Dan, it's not always about deliberate, that you aren't choosing how someone's using your model or how someone's portrayed you. 

 12:08: A lot of these things are lenses that other people have placed upon your content, your work like Sieven Simon Sneck and The Why. 

 12:18: Yes, he created it, but then it's also actually about the people's perceptions of that book, how it got adopted into culture. 

 12:25: How it became a thing, that's not so much deliberate, but the deliberate act was writing the book. 

 12:31: The deliberate act in your case was drawing a model. 

 12:34: It doesn't necessarily have the outcome that he was expecting, but actually it does create this kind of thought leadership, territory type thing, sometimes because of perception. 

 12:45: Rather than reality. 

 12:46: Now if you go and compound it and write a follow-up book or write 3 or 4 more other models on it, then actually that's where people, kind of collect into that space and start to believe, start to portray you as the expert or as the knowledge base or the thing. 

 13:02: So I think there can be some deliberateness to it, because you start out with, An idea, a purpose, a point, but you don't necessarily expect to become known for it, and I don't mean just to be reputationally, but just like referenced. 

 13:16: You know, Lisa Crispin, I'm thinking about agile testing and all the rest of it. 

 13:20: Those are names that just connect instantaneously in my head. 

 13:23: My synapses go ping, and I kind of recognize names for certain things. 

 13:27: And it's just the way that I think we connect things and we have to give things a place. 

 13:32: So to your point. 

 13:33: Yeah, it's not always deliberate, but I think someone writes a book is deliberate, someone who draws a model, someone who does a talk at a conference. 

 13:42: I remember Lee Rathbone and always talking about mobiles and like learning and the blue pill and the red pill, those things became synonymous to me, and a lot of these things I think it links to in my head, how you can become. 

 13:56: I guess known for something, and it's not your choice, but you can either pursue it or you can kind of move away from it. 

 14:03: You can try and fight it or you can try and embrace it, and the deliberateness I guess goes into those aspects, because a lot of times we don't start off with a plan to become someone referenced for, I don't have a plan to become known for AI for example, and if that ever did happen, wow, weird, but. 

 14:22: It can happen if I start writing some content on that and then I start evolving that content and then start publishing that content. 

 14:28: You've generally got to get your information out there for it to happen. 

 14:33: It could be podcasts, conferences, books. 

 14:36: You generally need some sort of, I guess, third party awareness, I guess from what I'm thinking, from what I've understood of it anyway. 

 14:44: So it does take some deliberateness, but you can't predict. 

 14:48: It's what's the right word for it? 

 14:50: It's kind of like problems when something goes like viral. 

 14:53: You can't kind of control that, you can move towards it. 

 14:57: So I think that's where this kind of, it gets complicated. 

 15:00: But can you steer towards, can you increase your chances? 

 15:04: Perhaps. 

 15:05: Can you do it with what was it, intent? 

 15:08: Perhaps. 

 15:09: So if I can turn about all of our newfound prompting skills around, away from an LLM but towards yourselves, I've got 7 prompts for you to try and think about when exploring. 

 15:25: Your intellectual territory. 

 15:27: Can I put these into an AI? 

 15:29: You could put them into an AI if you want to, but I doubt that would be more about your intellectual territory. 

 15:35: But by all means, Russell, you don't have to share your screen. 

 15:37: This isn't one of those interviews. 

 15:39: Here are your seven questions. 

 15:41: Think about it, chew on it, noodle, if you will. 

 15:46: So across your past work, your talks, your writing, your decisions, what recurring things do I boomerang to, to Dan's point? 

 15:57: What problems do I seem unable to ignore and what assumptions do I frequently end up challenging? 

 16:04: That's prompt one. 

 16:05: I hope you're writing these things down. 

 16:07: Prompt 2, where do I consistently add value? 

 16:11: Prompt 3. 

 16:12: What irritates me professionally? 

 16:16: Giving Tara a bit of time to breathe on that one. 

 16:19: Yeah. 

 16:22: Number 4, what do I believe is both true across contexts? 

 16:27: But also uncomfortable enough that not everybody agrees. 

 16:33: 5. 

 16:34: What is the mechanism behind my thinking? 

 16:39: Number 6, if I stripped away my job titles and my trends. 

 16:45: What remains? 

 16:48: And number 7, what capability would organizations strengthen if they deeply adopted my way of thinking? 

 16:57: OK, you went way too fast there, Chris. 

 17:00: That's a lot of questions. 

 17:01: I will drop these things into the chat for you. 

 17:03: Thank you. 

 17:05: And I'm sure in the show notes. 

 17:07: In I've got a broader one in the show notes that I'll share. 

 17:10: I'll put the whole broad picture cos I paraphrased. 

 17:13: I, I think for most of those questions, I can come back to some root values that mean the world to me. 

 17:21: They don't necessarily fit all of those questions, of course. 

 17:24: I don't know that anything. 

 17:26: Would ideally answer all, you know, 7 questions, but I, I know in all of my work I come back to the difference between accountability and ownership. 

 17:35: Those are like the two things that I fight with, where it's either, you know, bringing in appropriate team members so that they can be accountable for their work, communicating that, you know. 

 17:47: Things like that. 

 17:48: And so regardless of if I'm talking about Dungeons and Dragons, or if I'm just training somebody on a new software, I think I always come back to those values, and I would like to think that if my organization anywhere that I'm working for adopted them strongly, that it would be better for it, but that might just be bias talking. 

 18:10: like we could play some elevator music whilst people are thinking through what I just, there is a lot to think about. 

 18:16: Yeah, I'm, I'm still struggling with this, like with the, the seven questions, right, there's things that I can touch on but I feel like I'm a bit too generalist, and I think especially, this is where I, I was kind of half joking earlier around this, this is, there's a potential for this problem to almost kind of cause some midlife crisis for me here, Chris. 

 18:41: You're in your 40s now, right, so, I know, mental health danger sort of feels like that there's a bit of a headspace that could be quite fragile, to be honest, because there's this aspect of feeling generalist in this, and you know me like with this, what's your word, like I found my word and I was really content at finding a word that fitted, but I feel like in my situation there was a bit of a drift away from the testing and quality communities. 

 19:11: Cos I moved into engineering leadership, right? 

 19:14: But then when my role was affected last year. 

 19:17: I didn't really have enough gravitas to continue in engineering leadership at that senior leadership level, the director level, right, so. 

 19:28: I feel like there's a bit of a gap there where I'm, I'm still breaking into those levels in that community, cos I didn't really, well after COVID I didn't really invest much time doing the, the blogging and the talking and the writing and all that sort of stuff. 

 19:43: So really I feel like I'm stuck in that sort of generalist land that I can't pinpoint where my territory is, even with these questions, there's certain things that I would say, well there's this as an example of that as an example, right? 

 19:58: And what recurring things have I worked on? 

 20:00: Well, for the past 5 years I did something different to what I did 20 years before, right? 

 20:06: So, yeah, I'm, I'm struggling with this one really. 

 20:08: Do you think that's pretty common with the way that the tech industry is right now, though, I feel like all of us have mentioned that we're kind of in this in-between space of, I don't really test anymore, I'm not technically in a leadership position. 

 20:24: I'm kind of Sidelined to a bunch of different things. 

 20:31: And I love all of them, but I don't really like get the time and energy to focus on any one thing anymore, much less dive in head first and really do nothing but create content or crank out test cases or whatever the case may be for any measurable period of time. 

 20:49: 100%, and actually you just saying that it's kind of, in my head I was, I was trying to map this as a 2D model, but Tara, you've just turned this into a 3D model for me in my head. 

 21:00: Which is also kind of what Russell did earlier. 

 21:03: But yeah, I think actually with what you said there, and also like the, the state of the industry right now, there's still mass layoffs everywhere. 

 21:12: AI, the rise of AI, but I actually think AI is going to be beneficial for QEs and testers, but that's another thing that we can touch on. 

 21:21: But actually if I'm thinking more like a a developer, for example, and if their territory is that land of programming, right, some of the stuff that agentic AI can do around the development side. 

 21:37: That then yes, if you're, if you're stuck with that as a territory, then that could potentially be terrifying and maybe a generalist view as maybe an advantage in that sense, so. 

 21:48: That's a really good point, Hannah. 

 21:50: It is hard because even a lot of the people we talked about, we've given them examples, we talked about Simon Dick and all the rest, we've given examples of something. 

 21:57: It's one very, very narrow thing and they do a lot of other things. 

 22:00: It's not the actual whole person, and this is what it makes this quite hard to do because you can we're all quite, as you point, generalists, we're looking at a lot of different things. 

 22:12: To pigeonhole yourself is very hard into one aspect. 

 22:16: Careers change, lives change. 

 22:18: So it's very hard to do, but if you go and ask someone else what do they know us at for or, I think you would get quite more narrow answers perhaps sometimes. 

 22:29: Again, depending who you ask, so I think it is incredibly hard to do reflectively on yourself. 

 22:34: And if I was talking about like we were asking about what would you do, and some of these questions, the answers are very different to me, but when I'm starting to think about what would I like it to be, I lean towards something we talk about a lot on this podcast, people and context. 

 22:50: It's those two things in a very different forms, but it's understanding people and it's trying to help them understand context, and it's by doing that, you help them be better, you help them do things, you look at metrics, you look at biases that we go and we talked about biases briefly just before. 

 23:06: You talk about DevOps, there isn't one problem domain. 

 23:09: Good leaders in my head, don't stay within one domain. 

 23:13: I don't want to be famed for mobile testing or web testing or cloud testing. 

 23:19: There's perfectly valid reasons to be great for those things, but that's not my cup of tea. 

 23:24: I want to be there to help people, I guess is ultimately my point. 

 23:28: And to do that, it's problem solving using context, using people and knowledge of psychology, people in general. 

 23:36: Those are my things. 

 23:38: How that would get framed from others. 

 23:40: Is Russell's helpful, Russell's annoying, it's things like that. 

 23:44: It's, it's interesting, isn't it, because that whole point about, if somebody tells you what they think of you as, and you don't like it, that's where I think I was coming from, that, that pivoty kind of point, because. 

 23:56: You might be known for a bunch of stuff that you don't actually want to be known for. 

 24:00: You might be Billy Joel who hates the Piano Man song. 

 24:03: And you've just said I'm from Yorkshire and I can't change that. 

 24:05: There's some things you can't change. 

 24:07: You can't change that, but what you can do, like Simon Sinek has done other game, other games. 

 24:11: The Infinite Game was where I was going. 

 24:12: He's, he's done other books since that with why, but that's still the primary thing. 

 24:17: Donald Rumsfeld did other things about apart from known knowns and unknown knowns. 

 24:23: But that's kind of what he's known for. 

 24:25: Yeah, no, no, and you can't always control those things, but if something, if there is an uncomfortable sort of feeling with what you're known for, if you're Dan Ashby, you don't want everyone to use that infinity symbol with you contest everywhere here. 

 24:39: Never heard of it. 

 24:40: You, you've got to take it with a, you, you know, he could be very angry and cross and, and go around throwing things about. 

 24:45: I don't think Dan's gonna do that, but he can say. 

 24:49: Yes, and all this other stuff and use that as a door opener into I might be known in this space for these things. 

 24:56: And then then use that as leverage. 

 24:59: To lean into more things. 

 25:02: You know, we can't change who we were, but we can change who we are and who we want to be, and that framing can be quite interesting. 

 25:09: Put other information out there, can't we? 

 25:10: Yeah, we can try and change the narrative. 

 25:13: It's very enlightening too when you get a chance to ask other people what they think of you, what they associate you with. 

 25:21: I belong to a woman in tech group that in our very first session, that's what we did was we listed, you know, what do you know about each other and how do you view each other. 

 25:30: And other people are generally so much kinder than you are to yourself, but they also give you this perspective. 

 25:38: So when you sit there and say, wow, OK, the only thing I'm known for is D&D, I probably should let people understand that I, I know a little bit more about testing than how it applies to a tabletop game. 

 25:53: I, I can put my expertise out there and, and be a little bit more broad in what I'm presenting to people. 

 26:00: So I have a question then, right, around what is the Impact of discovering your territory, if you can't really control it as much or if you try to influence it in certain directions, but what does your territory actually influence, rather than you try and influence it, what does it it influence for you? 

 26:24: Cos initially when I was thinking about it, I was thinking about things like career direction and leadership style, decision making and growth plans and all this kind of stuff, but actually, I don't know if that's, does it? 

 26:37: It's more like the doors it opens and the opportunity it might give you from connections, things like that seems to be like, How many times have you read articles because of someone's background or their sort of territory of their knowledge, you kind of, you know, you get onto the news even because you're known for being an expert in this sort of thing. 

 26:57: It kind of seems more like you get opportunities, you get asked to keynote at talks, you get more people reading your blogs, you get more eyeballs on these things. 

 27:07: It kind of creates. 

 27:09: And I said opportunity is the best way I can frame it. 

 27:11: It creates bias, it creates problems, it creates all sorts of things as well, but it's kind of, it's something that you can embrace or you can try and redirect, to Chris's point, I think. 

 27:23: It can help shape your career, because it can open that career opportunity to go and work for someone if it's, say, you know, DevOps related. 

 27:30: People can come and speak to Tara about other games, Warhammer and how that relates to testing. 

 27:35: You know, things like that can happen. 

 27:37: You may not want it to, it's one of the key things because yeah, it can sometimes feel like you're being typecast in many ways, but it can lead to conversations, it produces, I guess it makes you available to somebody, not always in a positive sense, it opens you up to criticism as well as kind of collaboration. 

 27:55: But those are kind of the ways I see it, you know, it gives you opportunity. 

 27:59: I will say it has been an opportunity for me to become a really good salesman for myself as well. 

 28:06: When I first joined the tech space, I wanted to stay as far away from testing as humanly possible. 

 28:13: I'd I'd come from health insurance and I knew. 

 28:17: Everything you needed to know about health insurance in America. 

 28:21: And because of that expertise, they actually had me testing their systems. 

 28:26: And that was my first foray into testing was, well, you were the end user, so tell us how this works and if it works correctly. 

 28:34: Being able to use a different skill in a new context or to bring my expertise into a new team has always been something that I've considered very helpful, but selling that to people and telling them this is why it's still applicable. 

 28:49: Has usually been the hardest part. 

 28:51: It's the thing that our friend Vernon Richards often says is. 

 28:57: As testers. 

 28:59: Who need to thrive, we need to be good at selling and selling ourselves perhaps is The wonderful humble beings that we are, we find quite uncomfortable. 

 29:10: I certainly find it quite hard to sort of tell everyone how wicked awesome I am, but if I have thought about it. 

 29:19: If I have spent time reviewing what I've done, what I've achieved, and I can actually convince myself that I'm not always the impostor, that I have actually achieved some things, that helps to reinforce within me. 

 29:33: Because the whole point of this intellectual territory piece is not to just reinvent literally everything, we're talking about stuff that we're already grounded in where we're already kind of operating, but how can that maybe be reframed, how can that maybe go through a different lens or for a different audience or to pivot in those things. 

 29:51: It's very reflective at the beginning, sort of I'm reflecting on who I am, what drives me and what I likes me, what, what likes me, what irks me. 

 30:03: And, and what motivates me, Where are my passions? 

 30:06: What do I want to be doing and spending my time on? 

 30:11: And then how can that be something that I can then translate into a market that has been heavily disrupted? 

 30:20: Seems a lot like, I guess, your intellectual identity. 

 30:24: For want of a different way of framing it, it's all about the certainly the questions that you were asking before are all about trying to help identify. 

 30:31: yourself and things like that, and I think it is always interesting to get that reflection from others of what they think, you know, about you and what they think is your territory, what do they think your knowledge area is or something of that fact, and it's learning what those sticky factors are. 

 30:47: If you learn what sticks, what people connect with or catch on with, to go to your point about selling, if you find out what's something that can actually help you transcend. 

 30:58: Different groups of people, I think that sticky factor helps because actually you can learn a concept or an idea or an intellectual, you know, construct for want of a better word. 

 31:07: If it's got resonance, if it's got that sticky factor, it's got value, and it's got something you can sell, and maybe yourself, maybe the idea, but you're still trying to kind of, Use that kind of sticking factor, be it, you know, test everywhere and things, be it, you know, Chris's context, be it, being, not doing, whatever it happens to be. 

 31:29: Having that something there is, I think it's something that you can learn from and use that to kind of, I guess, drive, to emphasize, to push an idea a bit forward, to sell it better or to know what not to sell. 

 31:42: If you do two different things and one works and one doesn't, I know we're in. 

 31:46: Ask yourself some uncomfortable questions about what, what do you want to put your name to? 

 31:51: Do you feel dirty? 

 31:53: Well sometimes that can happen, yeah, but I guess I feel like we're conflating two things though, when we, when we talk about it from that perspective like because there's a difference between what you can do, which is ultimately what you would try and sell, but as a service, for example, but, I think what we're talking about is when you're talking about like intellectual identity. 

 32:16: Is that associated to what you do or is it more where you're. 

 32:20: Your mind lives and is, is happiest, or, or maybe even, I don't know, is your territory actually a happy space? 

 32:30: Or, or not, like there's another thing that we could touch on there cos, like there's a lot of stuff that we've discussed about being uncomfortable perhaps, right? 

 32:39: But it depends whether you determine your territory or if someone else does, I guess. 

 32:44: The examples we gave, I would say that we've determined people's territories. 

 32:48: Rather than them. 

 32:51: so I think that causes. 

 32:54: A conflict I guess of models, in my head at least, because, you know, you can't choose how someone perceives you, you can only put information out there, whereas, you can, if it's your choice and if it's kind of your identity and all this side of it, that's the other side of the coin, then you can drive that, you can have a plan, you can try and push identity. 

 33:15: to your point about sales, you may not want to sell concept or idea. 

 33:20: It's just about, I guess, all this is about learning. 

 33:23: And if you learn how others see your intellectual territory or identity or those sorts of things, it can help shape how you. 

 33:33: I guess maximize it, minimize it, depending if you like that territory or dislike it, because you might want to reinforce, reinforce it, yeah, you might want to shift away from it. 

 33:43: You're like, you might not want to be the guy famous for creating the testing pyramid or something like that. 

 33:47: You might want to shift away from it because that idea gets some negative connections as well. 

 33:53: You know, there's some things in this life that you become the thought leader of or you perceive to be your intellectual zone, and actually it becomes dead. 

 34:01: Defunct, or so you need to move away from it, so yeah, it's hard, isn't it? 

 34:05: It's two different, it's multiple concepts. 

 34:08: So essentially, what you're kind of saying there is your territory is determined by what you've learned and shared, and then to move away from a territory you learn something new and share that. 

 34:19: Potentially, I think territory is, there's two sides to territory in my head. 

 34:22: One is the territory that you think you exist in and the territory that others place you in. 

 34:28: And they may overlap in a Venn diagram sense, or they may be completely polar opposites. 

 34:33: Like I know I was called pedantal once upon a time, pedantic. 

 34:37: Chris mentioned it earlier. 

 34:38: I am definitely pedantic. 

 34:40: I don't really want that to be my territory, so I would try and move away from it, but it, I can't not be it at the same time. 

 34:48: But I can try and be, I guess, deliberate to shift into something else. 

 34:55: But I can't actually control perception, what's already out there, those things are beyond my control to a degree. 

 35:02: You know, the 140 episodes of me talking pedantically on podcasts. 

 35:07: I can't change them unless I delete them. 

 35:09: so we have some control over our territory, and you said we can learn and we can try and move it and shift it, but we can at least, I guess, take, try and take control of what we think it is. 

 35:19: We can own what we want it to try and be. 

 35:21: We can't own how it's perceived, because that's about kind of obsession, obviously. 

 35:26: but we can change the work we put out there. 

 35:28: If I keep putting work out there about waterfall testing models. 

 35:32: Then my perception's going to likely be waterfall testing styles and ways of thinking and so on. 

 35:37: There's Nothing wrong with waterfall, it's got some good place, but that's what my territory will become. 

 35:42: If I shift towards agile, towards AI, then I've got an opportunity to try and change that territory, but I can't choose what sticks, I guess is the point. 

 35:52: But if I learn what does stick, I can then try and embrace that and use it to kind of. 

 35:57: Encourage further interaction. 

 35:59: I can learn, I can inspect and adapt and all those sorts of things. 

 36:03: A lot of the examples we gave were third parties' view of people. 

 36:08: And if you care about that, that's one angle, but you can take a lot of control over what you think your own territory is. 

 36:14: That's where you've got complete control, but you can't have complete control over others. 

 36:18: But you can do things deliberately to try and shape it, but who knows whether they'll all work. 

 36:23: It's confusing as hell, isn't it? 

 36:25: I'm confused myself, why are they even talking. 

 36:29: I was gonna say, I, I know, Jan, that you have said that you kind of want to move your image away from that DevOps diagram, and I know that that is, that was my first introduction to you. 

 36:40: This is, I think, the first time you and I have ever actually spoken, but like, I've quoted you in conference talks. 

 36:48: but that was my introduction to you, and it was because of that diagram and stumbling across it, and it wasn't accredited, so I had to go find who did it, and then I found your blog, and I read a bunch of them, and now I've quoted you probably more times than you want to know about. 

 37:04: But that was a doorway for me. 

 37:06: And so in my head. 

 37:09: When people go, who's Dan Ashby? 

 37:11: Remember the diagram with the DevOps and then we test everywhere. 

 37:14: Oh yeah, I said, OK, now go read this article that he wrote, or go read this. 

 37:20: Yeah, I mean, it's a good point, and I'm not, I'm not mad at the model, like I actually love the model. 

 37:26: It's just the, the grief that it caused for a period of time when it was stolen by big companies. 

 37:34: Without accreditation, they changed the colors, but they kept my handwriting. 

 37:38: Who does that, right? 

 37:40: It's those kind of frustrations and it was a bit of a running joke with a few people. 

 37:46: But yeah, but yeah, I'm, I'm glad it's been so useful, like, that's the thing, but now like over the past 5 years being in an engineering leadership role, engineers, don't know about it, so it feels so localized to the testing community, right, where I've kind of stepped away from the testing community for the past while. 

 38:07: Like Peers Con is the first testing conference that I've done in, in years, which I'm really excited about, right, so I'm fully expecting to go there and no one knows who I am, to be honest, right, which is quite good, and that's where I was kind of meaning around territory changing over time and perhaps it's like, in order for it to remain a territory from the perspective of how people perceive you, you have to keep at it as a, a thing. 

 38:33: Simon Sinek's a primary example, but yes, that was like one of his first books, but he still does talks about start with why, right, he still does consult, consulting around it all, so, I mean he's maintaining that as being his territory, right? 

 38:48: whereas, like I think the last time I blogged on my testing blog was like years ago, you know, so, so I guess that's the challenge, it's about keeping it up, but, In the world of AI now, I feel like I've done a lot more building than I have blogging, right, partly to grow some skills. 

 39:08: Do you not find that all of those years of perspective and model building and talking about risk and all of that, they don't color your building perspective in the way that you lead your team? 

 39:21: Oh. 

 39:21: Of course, yeah, 100%, they'll, they'll, they'll totally impact before I even write a prompt to build something like if I'm vibing, vibing, listen, check me out. 

 39:33: a cool kid. 

 39:34: Before I do that, like I'm building models and I'm feeding the models into the, the, the tools and I'm. 

 39:41: Form and requirements and I'm testing my ideas, right, and I'm going speaking to people, is this valuable idea, right? 

 39:46: So you're not as removed from it as you make it sound. 

 39:50: No, I'm not, I'm not from the doing part, but reputationally, right, and how I'm perceived because I don't, I don't talk about it anymore as much, right? 

 40:01: The blogs that I'm pushing are more trying to focus on leadership cos I'm trying to do this side project with evolving leadership, right, but yes, it's a bit of a strange dynamic to me because the software industry is changing in that regard as well, right? 

 40:17: It's, I face the same problem. 

 40:19: I, I've worked so much in the training and education and enablement now that I actually had a conversation a couple of weeks back where I had to say, you know, pretend like I've been in development and an SSE for the last 15 years because I have, and I do know what you're talking about. 

 40:34: Fabulous. 

 40:35: Yeah, it's, it's never a nice conversation when you have to be like, no, no, I do know this space, thank you. 

 40:42: but it does have to come up occasionally, and I think that's all right. 

 40:45: Just realized something. 

 40:46: I think I might have anchored some of these conversations because we're always, I was talking about external views of you, of people. 

 40:52: Well actually a lot of this is your teams, it's not, doesn't have to be the broader world and perspective like that, it's just like what are you known for in your company? 

 40:59: What are you known for amongst your colleagues? 

 41:02: It doesn't need to be such like, you know, around the world, globally on on BBC News, etc. 

 41:08: It could easily just be your friends, your associates, your your immediate people that you circle around. 

 41:14: It doesn't have to be this big, big thing. 

 41:17: I totally get it, and I was thinking that earlier. 

 41:19: I was just bubbling it up to the context where we are part of a wider community, right? 

 41:26: sort of thinking about it from that lens, but yeah, loads of people don't blog, loads of people don't speak, like, so, like speak at conferences and stuff, so it's like, yes, there is that sort of local context as well, 100%, yeah. 

 41:40: But we could only speak to our own context and things and it's, it's fine. 

 41:44: The, the, the purpose of the discussion wasn't to. 

 41:47: Immediately land on your intellectual territory, but to think about it and think, like to go over these things isn't a case of, let's have a quick, quick chat with some friends. 

 41:59: Or a prompty friend, which isn't gonna really help you to, to uncover these things, it was just to start thinking about it because I think uncovering what these things are, whether you want to pivot or whether you just want to reflect and know who you are, how you're perceived and what you want to be, I think it's an important positioning to have. 

 42:17: Well, I think that I've learned in this. 

 42:18: Conversation too that there are lots of different kind of concentric circles, so it might be worth exploring your immediate context versus the wider circles as you call to challenge yourself to go out and investigate. 

 42:34: I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm seeing the model now with all the different layers. 

 42:38: It's kind of like the core of the earth and then you kind of got the mantle and all these other things. 

 42:42: Yeah, anyway. 

 42:42: Right, we could keep talking about this for a lifetime. 

 42:45: I think there's a lot to digest, there's a lot to think about. 

 42:49: Chris, was it 7 questions? 

 42:51: I think there's a lot that I'm gonna probably have to go away and read and think about and try and maybe have a bit of a deliberate willfulness to try and figure out what I want it to be, what it might be, etc. 

 43:01: for myself. 

 43:02: But it's been fantastic having Tara, Chris, and Dan on the show tonight. 

 43:07: Thank you very much. 

 43:08: You will probably find out that we, I mentioned Piers Con this year already. 

 43:12: There is Pierscon 2027. 

 43:15: Tickets will be available when this podcast airs, so feel free to purchase them early. 

 43:21: If you do have a question, if you can think of what maybe you think our territories are, you can reach out to us and contact us at contact us attesting peers.com. 

 43:31: We're always willing to hear feedback as well, so feel free to reach out. 

 43:35: Thank you once again for listening. 

 43:37: It's been an interesting conversation. 

 43:39: Thank you to all our guests again. 

 43:41: Goodbye.