The toughest problems in engineering leadership have nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with the humans building it. The technical skills that earn an engineer the promotion can be adapted to produce great leaders, but only with the right translation layer. Without it, leaders default to instincts that work on technical systems but fail on human ones. This workshop installs that translation layer.

Most advice about difficult conversations starts too late. It assumes you already know which conversation you need to have. But what if you're debugging the wrong problem? Robert Harris draws on 25 years of engineering leadership — and an earlier career in psychology and anthropology — to examine the human systems underneath the conversations leaders avoid, mishandle, or never realize they need to have. Using real stories from his career, from a production outage to a board asking, "How many developers do we need to fire?", he'll show why the conversation that looks obvious on the surface is often very different from the real one underneath. Because before you can have the difficult conversation, you have to find it.

What happens when a self-taught programmer with a background in anthropology ends up leading engineering teams? Robert Harris traces his path from BASIC on a Commodore 64, through a decade in archaeology and the social sciences, to running software teams - and the lessons that came with becoming a manager by accident and a leader on purpose. The hardest problems he ran into weren't technical. They were human. So he went back to his training as an anthropologist to solve them.

Engineering culture is not created by values statements or team rituals. It emerges from thousands of small signals - who speaks, who hesitates, what gets reinforced, and what quietly disappears. Across years of observing software engineering organizations, one pattern appears consistently: when teams go remote or hybrid, culture doesn’t disappear - informal signal flow does. The hallways where trust, learning, and psychological safety once formed are removed, and nothing intentionally replaces them.

When the pressure is on, your team stops listening and starts watching. What they see is your operating system under load. Human hardware runs emotion before logic finishes loading, so under stress even smart, decent leaders fall back on factory defaults: ego, fear, fight, flight, freeze. Add AI-accelerated output that moves faster than anyone can fully audit, and you get asked for answers you don't have yet, at the moment your defaults are loudest. Some days that's exhilarating. Other days you wonder whether you're still the right person to ask.

When the pressure is on, your team stops listening and starts watching. What they see is your operating system under load. Human hardware runs emotion before logic finishes loading, so under stress even smart, decent leaders fall back on factory defaults: ego, fear, fight, flight, freeze. Add AI-accelerated output that moves faster than anyone can fully audit, and you get asked for answers you don't have yet, at the moment your defaults are loudest. Some days that's exhilarating. Other days you wonder whether you're still the right person to ask.