48. Office Politics: The Fun and Frustration of Palace Intrigue

Summary

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Podcast Summary: At Work with The Ready

Episode 48: Office Politics: The Fun and Frustration of Palace Intrigue

Hosts: Rodney Evans & Sam Spurlin
Date: May 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Rodney and Sam dive deep into the dynamics of office politics—why they emerge, the strange satisfaction we get from them, the frustrations they bring, and how organizations can shift from personality-driven politicking to healthier, more sustainable ways of working. They share personal anecdotes, observations from years of consulting, and practical strategies for reducing the drag of organizational palace intrigue, while keeping the episode lively, self-aware, and candid.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Pattern: Lack of Explicit Ways of Working Breeds Office Politics

[03:08-04:06]

• In environments without clear protocols, people defer to the preferences of the most powerful.
• "In the absence of clarity, the preferences of the most powerful people are what we work to. And essentially we get into this cycle of politicking and trying to navigate... the unwritten rules of the hierarchy." (Rodney, 03:08)
• This creates fragility in the organization, making success depend on relationships instead of robust systems.

2. The Double-Edged Sword of Relationship-Based Work

[05:16-08:11]

• When things are good, personal connections make work feel easy and informal.
• However, this is fragile and non-transferable—success is rooted in pleasing individuals, not building transferrable skills.
• "You are building a skill. You're building expertise... in the preferences of a specific person, which is maybe not the most generalizable skill to have in an organization." (Sam, 07:48)

3. Performance Feedback is Often Just Pandering

[08:11-09:28]

• Organizations often prize "emotional intelligence" because it's really about being attuned to powerful people's needs.
• “It’s basically pandering to people with more power than you have, which is an insane skill to have be so highly valued at work. And yet it so much is.” (Rodney, 08:48)

4. Leader Preferences vs. What’s Best for the Work

[09:00-15:04]

• The distinction between a leader’s preferences and effective work structures is rarely called out.
• Great workplace facilitation requires setting expectations early and being willing to stick with a process to the end, not shifting in response to one person’s discomfort.
• “We did end up doing a different version of it afterward that was what the CEO wanted. And my personal opinion is that the first design was better.” (Rodney, 11:33)
• Contracting with leaders upfront—agreeing to try unfamiliar methods—helps guard against derailing group process.

5. The Allure and Cost of Office Politics

[17:03-19:25]

• Politics can be fun, tapping into our love of intrigue, alliances, and “Game of Thrones” fantasies.
• Ultimately, building cultures focused on personality-based navigation is “junk food” compared to the “vegetables” of clear, sustainable systems.
• “Potato chips taste better though, right now. Having salad instead is gonna feel better. Long term.” (Rodney, 18:34)

6. Fragility and Turnover: Politics Don’t Scale or Last

[19:25-22:07]

• When leaders leave, so do the preferences and unwritten rules—often causing chaos.
• Organizations with strong, explicit routines withstand turnover far better.
• “Learning how a leader works rather than clarifying how an organization works, it’s so fragile because like then they leave and then what are you left with?” (Rodney, 21:53)

7. Politics Consume Valuable Attention

[22:07-25:09]

• Huge amounts of time and energy are spent catering to individual whims and decoding unwritten norms.
• This attention would be better applied to value creation, innovation, and long-term goals.

8. Cathedral Building: The Importance of Long-Term Vision

[26:59-30:35]

• True, purpose-driven work takes focus on the long term—what Sam calls “cathedral building.”
• "I just feel like the world would probably benefit from more organizations that could build cathedrals... and not just, like, kind of crap out another SaaS app.” (Sam, 00:00 & 27:10)
• Organizations rarely make space for this ambition due to constant short-term firefighting and politicking.

9. The Hierarchy of Decision-Making: Strategy, Operations, Relationships

[31:32-33:03]

• Rodney shares a helpful framework (from Andrea Robb):
  1. Ideally, work is organized around clear strategy.
  2. If not, people fall back to formal operations.
  3. If operations are unclear, things default to relationships/politics.

10. Relationships: Additive, Not Mechanistic

[33:03-34:20]

• Relationships should enhance collaboration, not be the only way work gets done.
• “The benefits of really strong relationships is that we can disagree better. ...But if we operate in an environment where my relationship is the only thing that I have for getting things done, it's a very surface level sort of relationship.” (Sam, 33:36)

11. Politics and Narrative: The Power of (Mis)communication

[34:20-40:59]

• Organizational mythologies form around the supposed preferences of powerful people, often out of context or outdated.
• These assumptions create inertia and prevent open, productive conversations.
• Sometimes, pushing a leader for clarity—despite their resistance—yields huge breakthroughs for the work.

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Practical Strategies & Solutions

A. Multi-Threaded Sponsorship

[41:32-43:34]

• Long-term or cross-functional projects should have multiple champions, not just one.
• “The fragility of an individual champion is bad design.” (Rodney, 43:14)

B. Leverage External Facilitators

[43:34-46:31]

• Outside facilitators question implicit norms and help the group separate work priorities from personal comfort.
• Observing an outsider break a “rule” without repercussion often demystifies hidden norms for internal staff.

C. Create & Maintain Artifacts

[46:31-48:35]

• Decision logs, case studies, playbooks, and other artifacts outlive individual leaders and anchor the organization in something more lasting than memory or hearsay.
• Also increasingly important as organizations use AI.

D. Make Preferences Explicit—Write Them Down!

[47:45-48:35]

• If you must operate around an individual’s quirks, at least document them—turn unspoken expectations into explicit (even if silly) SOPs.
• “It’s the user manual to me thing, which I know we’ve talked about.” (Sam, 48:35)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “In the absence of clarity, the preferences of the most powerful people are what we work to. And essentially we get into this cycle of politicking...” (Rodney, 03:08)
• “It’s basically pandering to people with more power than you have, which is an insane skill to have be so highly valued at work.” (Rodney, 08:48)
• “Potato chips is like, let's go talk about how Dave is so shitty and he's such a diva. ...Yum, yum, yum. So salty.” (Rodney, 18:34)
• “Everyone likes to think that they're the one who's going to ...navigate this crazy environment and come out on top... It's the same experience as to why everybody thinks they're above average driver.” (Sam, 19:04)
• “Learning how a leader works rather than clarifying how an organization works, it's so fragile because ...then they leave and then what are you left with?” (Rodney, 21:53)
• “[Cathedral building]... All of us working on it right now probably won't be around when it comes to fruition. And I just feel like the world would probably benefit from more organizations that could build cathedrals in whatever it is that they're doing and not just, like, kind of crap out another SaaS app.” (Sam, 00:00 & 27:10)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:08 – Defining office politics as a result of unclear systems
• 08:48 – Emotional intelligence as a form of workplace pandering
• 17:03 – Why politics is "junk food" for organizations
• 19:25 – The fragility of politics when leaders depart
• 26:59 – The “cathedral building” metaphor for long-term organizational vision
• 31:32 – Hierarchy of organizing principles (strategy, operations, relationships)
• 41:32 – Strategies to reduce politics and enhance robustness

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Practical Takeaways

1. Document, Document, Document: From major decisions to quirky preferences—if it matters, write it down so it can be challenged or improved.
2. Contract Up Front: When trying new ways of working, set expectations and get collective buy-in before you begin.
3. Reduce Single Points of Failure: Avoid building big bets (or entire approaches) around individual leaders who may soon be gone.
4. Bring in Outsiders: When possible, leverage external facilitators or consultants to break through entrenched and unhelpful social norms.
5. Focus Attention on Value Creation: Every minute spent decoding political landmines is attention not spent creating value—design systems that free people for the real work.

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Overall Tone & Feel

Sam and Rodney keep things light with humor (“Can be bought with a donut.”), honest self-reflection, and the kind of candid exasperation that comes from years in the trenches of organizational change. They respect the human desires lurking beneath office politics while firmly advocating for structures that let people focus on meaningful, lasting work—if only we could stop eating so many potato chips.

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Transcript

[A]

Like, I'm thinking of it as, like, cathedral building. A project that is so big and it feels audacious, especially if we're in the early stages of it. All of us working on it right now probably won't be around when it comes to fruition. And I just feel like the world would probably benefit from more organizations that could build cathedrals in whatever it is that they're doing and not just, like, kind of crap out another SaaS app.

[B]

Hey, everyone. This is At Work with Ready a podcast about working design and how organizations can make change work in their favor. I'm Rodney Evans and I'm here with my co host, Sam Sperlin.

[A]

Companies are facing more change than they were built for, and the problem is organizations are still running on management ideas from a completely different era. Rodney and I work with leaders and teams who are redesigning how work actually gets done so change becomes fuel in the tank instead of sand in the gears.

[B]

On this show, we share patterns. We're seeing inside organizations, what's working, what gets in the way. Today we are talking about all office politics. I can't believe we've never done this show before. But first, we will check in, because how you do something matters just as much as what you do. Sam, what you got?

[A]

Well, Rodney, I have a completely from left field check in question for us today. What's a skill you have that you rarely get to show off? Oh, party trick, maybe?

[B]

Okay, I think you should go first. And let me think for a second.

[A]

Okay. I have just the stupidest, the stupidest thing that I can do. I, under some conditions, can make a saliva bubble come off of my tongue and float through the air.

[B]

That's disgusting.

[A]

I learned how to do it in French class in high school because a kid that I thought was pretty cool was able to do it. And then I. He taught me how to do it. And that's the main thing that I gleaned from four years of French class.

[B]

I feel like I knew this story, which is disturbing.

[A]

I maybe have told it on the podcast before. I apparently am impressed by myself.

[B]

I can't imagine why. Okay, this is a skill I don't use very often because we're adults now. But when I was younger, I made really, really excellent sandwiches. Like, I would put unexpected ingredients in sandwiches. And my mom loved my sandwiches. And we were like a big picnic family. A big picnic family of two. My mom and I like sitting on the ground and eating sandwiches. But now it's like when we have people to lake house and stuff, we Just put everything out on the counter. Cause people want to make their own sandwich sandwiches. So I don't get to, like, exercise. And my husband is just like, there's a professional in the house. Calm down.

[A]

Yeah, he's a bit of a food guy.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. So I only really get to make them some occasionally for myself.

[A]

Okay, you calmed. You calmed me down. I was getting ready to fight you that as an adult, that was no longer a relevant skill to have. But I understand the caveats now.

[B]

You know, somebody is like, I don't like mustard. And you're like, you know what? You just do it yourself.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Here's the pattern for today. It's a short one, and I think it will be recognizable to anyone who's ever had a job. I first experienced this as like a camp counselor when I was 15. So in the absence of clear ways of working, or call them what you will, standard operating procedures, protocols, rules, whatever, in the absence of clarity, the preferences of the most powerful people are what we work to. And essentially we get into this cycle of politicking and trying to navigate and maybe even influence based on the unwritten rules of the hierarchy. And it is the worst kind of organizational design and also makes for a terrible working experience. And so today we're going to talk about why that is funny examples from our past and what to do about it.

[A]

I just had this, like, moment of clarity as you were saying that, which was like inhabiting somebody who doesn't know who we are or what this podcast is or what this world of kind of org design is at all. And them just being like, well, yeah, of course, of course. Like, that's what organizations are. That's why I busted my ass for 20 years to be the leader. Like, yeah, people. People bend their will to my desires because what else even is there? And I.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I take a lot for granted being in the world that we are in right now, thinking about, like, operating systems and there are other ways of doing things. And I think, yeah, I think there's a large body of people out there who says, like, this is just work, yo.

[B]

Like, we're like, yeah, no shit. Yeah. Yeah. That's such a good point. I mean, for so many. So many years of my career, this was the how of work was like, however Dave wanted it. Like, that's how that was that. Yeah, that's so interesting. Okay, you want to take a first. First swing at this?

[A]

Sure. I mean, I think the main thing that I was thinking about as preparing for this is that Essentially, we're talking about work being anchored in personal relationships and that kind of the positive spin. Like, we only get things done because we are in relationship with each other. You owe me favors. IOU favors. There's this like, web of relationships in the organization, and that is an incredibly fragile way to think about how we get work done in the organization. It's, it's fragile by design. But I do think there is this paradoxical, paradoxical thing to it, which is that it can feel, feel good. Like when it is going well and you have good relationships with people, right? It's like, yeah, we don't need to write things down. We don't need to have a process. Rodney and I get along great. We see things eye to eye. We've got relationships with these other people. Like, we can just work together as humans and make things happen, which is sometimes possible. And. But I think it's probably not as common as we like to think it is.

[B]

It's so true. And it's interesting even just hearing you say that, Sam. Like, I'm thinking back to jobs that I had where learning the person, learning what Elisa's lunch preference was and that she preferred things emailed to her as PDFs rather than as PowerPoints and that she liked things printed two sided. I also, to be clear, I was not an administrative assistant in this scenario. Was like the job that was like a big part of the job. And there were like 10 Elisas who were more senior than me, who I

[A]

had to keep, who all had different preferences, right?

[B]

Who all had different preferences, had to keep this minutiae in my brain that had nothing to do with anything, just so that they didn't have to conform to a clarified and consistent way of working. And to your point, it really did feel like winning to be better at that than other people. Like, it felt like I must be really good at my job if all of these people are happily receiving the work that I am providing to them. And I'm not like getting yelled at or getting in trouble in the course of a week like the woman sitting next to me.

[A]

Yeah, well, as annoying as it is, at least it's clear, right? And there's like kind of clear criteria about whether you're doing it well or not.

[B]

Clear feedback loop.

[A]

Very clear feedback loop. Wrong attachment. Idiot. Like, all right, I'll remember that for, for, for next time. And, but I mean, there is something, I mean, to your point about it, like, kind of feeling like you are building, you are building a skill, you are building expertise. It's just in the preferences of a specific person, which is maybe not the most generalizable skill to have in an organization.

[B]

You know what? This is so fun, Sam. That's. None of. This is what I thought we'd talk about, but I'm realizing now also how much feedback around performance does have to do with this particular kind of emotional intelligence. And I think a lot of times, especially in larger organizations, when people talk about cultivating relationships and ability to influence without authority, barf and high emotional intelligence, they're talking about developing this skill, which is basically. What's the word? I'm pandering.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

To people with more power than you have, which is an insane skill to have be so. So highly valued at work. And yet it so much is.

[A]

Yeah. I thought you were gonna go down the route of feedback. Feedback often just being feedback on opinion or opinion masquerading as feedback, which is like a flavor, I think, of the same thing that you're talking about here. Totally. What I'm. What I'm. What I'm curious about is, is it wrong to have an opinion or a preference as a leader? Like, if you prefer to have an email one way or another, or this sort of document over another sort of document, can you not express that to your team?

[B]

I mean, I think that's sort of at the core of this thing, because the first principle that we're circling around here is, is it what's best for the work or is it what's best for me? And in most organizations, there's an assumption that those are the same thing, but they're really, really not very true. And I was in a strategy session that our colleague was leading with a client, and it was one of those things where the way the information was being organized on a mural board by a pretty large group of people was not logical to the CEO. And he was like, we need to organize this differently. And he was like. I mean, he wasn't like an asshole about it, but he was just like, this doesn't make sense. But there were actually a bunch of people there who were like, no, it does make sense. Like, this is actually the only time it's ever made sense. And it's just one of those interesting things where it's like, the way that our colleague was doing it was very much in service of the work. It was like, going to put all of this out. We're going to decide what the prioritization criteria is, and then we're going to visually move the work along the matrix of this criteria that we've decided and then we're going to move the work around in discussion about outcomes that we've determined. Like, it was a very work designy way of doing this. And the CEO, whether it's because of habit or because of how his particular brain works or his learning style, was just, no, this is not it. And it's just, it's an interesting thing because I actually, in that situation, it's like, well, if it doesn't work for him, it's probably not gonna work over time. And. But if it works for 16 other people who are like sort of understanding the full domain of work and how it is relatively organized and prioritized for the first time, that seems worth the discomfort of one person who's like, this is how my brain works. But your point is the one that now I'm sort of wrestling with, because in that situation, we did end up doing a different version of it afterward. That was what the CEO wanted. And my personal opinion is that the first design was better.

[A]

I was getting curious about how it went because I think there's a, this is an interesting potential opportunity for this team, not knowing their specifics at all, to see that their CEO has a different preference, which is noted and totally fine. And there's probably, if you, if it's just a matter of like, cognitively how you like to see information, there's probably a couple other people who maybe fall into that camp too. And also we are not going to massively pivot what we have planned to do based on just kind of a minority preference for a different way of organizing. And that feels very normal to anything that we are facilitating. Like, we're generally not cowed by a senior leader being like, actually I want this slightly different thing, but I think no external facilitator in a room doing this just with. Within an organization, I think it's a very rare organization that's like actually noted. And we're going to like keep going down the path that, that we're on. And of course we can circle back around later. We can figure out, I think a lot of times we get to the end of it and the CEO who had an issue early in a process is actually like, oh, actually it's totally fine because we had like thought through an entire experience. So yeah, it's just, it's just interesting to see how that shook out.

[B]

Yeah. So we got to like a reasonably good stopping place in that session and the next session that we did. The rule that we agreed on actually was like, we're not going to discuss the premise of the exercise before we've tried it.

[A]

That's something we've made for ourselves at the ready before because we love to facilitate each other 100%.

[B]

And it was one of those things where, to your point, I think that if like he had sort of seen it through and wasn't doing the cognitive work of trying to figure out a different way at the same time as being there, he might have gotten what he wanted out of it the first time. Yeah, but I think that's a real thing. People get like, this is confusing or this is uncomfortable or this isn't how I would have done it. And then they take themselves out of the experience and they don't necessarily allow the possibility that it could work because they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, timeout, we gotta fix this. And we used to do this shit at the ready all the time. And what I think we have all learned is like, even if ultimately the way that we did something, anything, was unsuccessful, it's better to get to the end of it, reflect on it and fix it for next time than try to fuck with it mid flight, which almost never, which almost always gets you nothing. You like, neither get a new design nor do you get the outcome of the original design. It's just noisy and ultimately pretty frustrating.

[A]

Everyone feels bad. The person designed the plan. They're like, part of them is like, yeah, you see, you see, we didn't do my thing and we didn't get to a spot that felt good. And everybody else is like out of the, out of the experience of being a participant. And now they're off. Yeah, it's a mess. It is better to go all the way to the end and then make different choices coming out of it from there.

[B]

And so I think, like, in this case, I think his feedback ultimately will make it sharper. This is a meeting that we're going to do like at least once a quarter, like a prioritization meeting in line with their six month strategy. And it would have been easier and better to just play through the first time. But I think this is what happens, right? Because again, like talking about politics, that guy in that situation isn't trying to be a dick. What he's feeling is, I don't know if this is gonna work. I don't know, I don't under. This doesn't make sense to me. This isn't, this isn't how I would do it. And as the leader, he feels ultimately responsible for all of these people having a good experience. Yeah, he feels responsible for the work getting prioritized. He feels responsible for the fact that we're there to begin with. And he feels responsible for this team to, like, not be annoyed and frustrated. Even if he's like projecting frustration onto them, that's not really there. So it's sort of a perfect storm, you know, And I think, like, my takeaway from that, because I haven't honestly had an experience like that in a minute. I just like so many of my clients I've worked with for a long time, and they just sort of buy into the fact that, like, I have a plan in my head and we're gonna get there, and they just kind of like, let me do my thing.

[A]

Do your thing.

[B]

I haven't been in that situation for a long enough time that I'm like, actually the miss was on us for not contracting around it beforehand and saying, this is gonna feel weird. Are you willing to just let it roll? We'll talk about it afterward and figure it out. And to bring this back to the larger episode, I think that is how you get out of designing for preference is by doing some of that contracting upfront to be like, this is not going to feel like your preference and is it safe to try anyway and can you just let it unfold and then can we talk about it afterward and if you can't stand it, we'll change it.

[A]

Yeah, totally. Okay, so I want to throw another idea at you just about the broader kind of postulation that politics is rife in our organizations. And I think it's because politics can be more fun than the somewhat boring stuff of building a good os. It is more fun to build coalitions and build alliances and build relationships and view all of that as the scaffolding for doing kind of cross cutting, important work. And everybody likes to kind of feel like they're in Game of Thrones. And a lot of organizations, I think, design themselves to allow people to feel that way.

[B]

Yes, I think that's right.

[A]

As an org designer, yeah, it breaks

[B]

my heart a little bit, but it's true. I mean, to gossip is to be a human being. And I do think palace intrigue is fun. And it takes a certain set of experiences to realize that having really clear and explicit ways of working to replace political navigation ultimately feels better. But it really is the difference between, like, junk food and vegetables. Yeah, it really is. Like, potato chips taste better though, right now. And it's like having salad instead is gonna feel better.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Long term, later in an even in an hour, it's gonna feel better. Than having half a bag of potato chips. But right now, potato chips. Potato chips is like, let's go talk about how Dave is so shitty and he's such a diva and he's always asking us to do dumb shit the wrong way. Let's go talk about that. Yum, yum, yum. So salty.

[A]

Yeah. Not to squeeze this metaphor even further or spoilers for Game of Thrones, I guess.

[B]

Never stop.

[A]

Basically. Basically everybody dies in Game of Thrones. Everybody likes to think that they're the one who's going to like, deathly navigate this crazy environment and come out on top and find themselves sitting on that comfy throne. And it's the same experience as to why everybody thinks they're above average driver. The math just doesn't work out that way.

[B]

Absolutely. And this ties a couple points together that we've been touching on, which is, first of all, doing this kind of work feels like you're doing something important. But ultimately, leaders come and go. And I think part of the reason that it's very hard for people when a leader goes, that they feel like they've cultivated a lot of goodwill with and they feel like they've really learned is because they know that they're just gonna have to start over again. And that ultimately, like, that's not really a skill. I mean, it is a skill, but it's like a skill that someone shouldn't have.

[A]

And it's not a skill pointed at like the purpose of the organization. Like building a skill.

[B]

Exactly. It's not a skill like pointed at creating value for a customer or something like that. Yeah, I was, I was actually talking with other Sam about this on Friday and I was talking about organizations that appear to have no ways of working that have been in business for a long time. And she comes from more like mid market companies. And she was like, yeah, that's because people leave and they take their ways of working with them and nothing is documented and everything is based on their preference. And like a CMO at most mid market companies is there for 18 months and then they go and they just start over. And I was thinking, obviously the Ready is not like a normal organization, but I was thinking about like how hard it would be to break routines at the ready no matter who left. Right. It's like if Ashley and I both quit tomorrow, it's not like people would be like, well, now we're just going to have status meetings where one person comes in. Like, it would make no difference. Like the ways that we work are so entrenched in the organization. But I think that's very unusual.

[A]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say even though in some ways I was known as the action meeting guy at the ready, the fact that I no longer work at the ready probably doesn't mean that action meetings no longer exist.

[B]

Has literally no bearing.

[A]

You're still, you're still doing those meetings, right? Who cares if I'm there or not?

[B]

Right.

[A]

I don't think that's necessarily true. In a lot of our clients. For example, you know, we work with somebody for a while, they end up leaving and all the things that we were doing with them as kind of our key champion is now it's gone. Or they've just. The more charitable interpretation is they take that to whatever their new, their new role is at a new organization.

[B]

Absolutely. But yeah, I think that this idea of like learning how a leader works rather than clarifying how an organization works, it's so fragile because like then they leave and then what are you left with?

[A]

Yeah, this is making me think a lot about just the finite nature of attention and what we choose or what we have to spend that attention on in the day to day of our organizations. And I do think there's a zero sum nature to it. And if we're spending our time and attention kind of navigating the palace intrigue or building these kind of surface level relationships in order to get anything done, that's not attention. Going into figuring out how to, how to create value, how to make our product better, how to make our services better, figuring out how to just make things better. That is, we're just, we just have less freely available attention to, to do that.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And you know, I, I'm. Before we started recording, I was trying to think of like some examples from my past around this. And it's like the amount of time that I spent trying to figure out what was allowed, what was acceptable because stuff wasn't written down or a version of it was written down as like a corporate policy. But actually the leader did a different thing. It was like a phenomenal amount of my attention to your point. Whether it's like that this person likes things printed out double sided and like sent as a pre read, or this person likes to have the reading done in the meeting or this person likes to like read it out loud in the meeting. Like I actually spent calories understanding and catering to those whims and like, and it, and it was everything. It was like, you know, I worked at a place where we traveled A lot. And it was like, this leader doesn't believe in like flying home on a Friday, so you have to take the red eye on Thursday night. And like, that wasn't written down anywhere, but like, the expectation was like, be in the office on Friday. Incidentally, I thought that that was other utter bullshit. And I didn't do it one time and no one ever said anything to me. So like, I don't know how, I don't even know how real that was, but 50 other people did it that way because someone sometime said that that's how they thought it should be. It's like there are a million of these examples. And they're so insidious, but they're so expensive in attention of an organization.

[A]

Yeah, the triviality. Taken alone, they seem trivial, but pile a lot of trivial things on top of each other and suddenly we're not talking about a trivial amount of time and attention. And I suspect in these organizations, yes, there are the trivialities, but I bet you there are some deeper things as well. Such as this leader thinks of strategy this way, and this leader thinks strategy is actually just implementing a roadmap. And we're using the same words to mean different things. And that speaks to a much larger kind of talking past each other and needing to figure out like, well, when leader A says strategy, they're really talking about this. And leader B, when they say strategy, they're talking about this other thing. And my job is to like, make those line up. Like it's not just the, like, you know, sending the right attachments.

[B]

Right, Absolutely. And I think so many times, like, how many times at a client have you seen the we don't have a strategy excuse or not excuse? I guess just tension reason.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then you talk to a leader and they're like, we absolutely do have a strategy. We talk about it all the time. We literally went through it in a town hall last week. I don't know what they're talking about. And it's like, okay, well, you have a different idea of what a strategy is than this person. Or maybe they just weren't listening, I don't know. But either way, it didn't penetrate into their brains. And so having a definition of what strategy is. And honestly, Sam, I've had this tension at the ready at various periods where it's like, since I've been stewarding the ready, we've never not had an essential intent, We've never not had half year outcomes, We've never not had even overs at the organizational level. Like, we have never not had these things. They have never been done in a, a totally centralized way. They've always had organizational input and yet there have been various periods where people have this craving for something else and have been like, I don't feel like we have a direction or I don't feel like we have a vision or. And I have like, I mean ironically now I feel like because we do have that and it looks really different than anything we've done before now I understand what they meant, but at the time I was like, what else do you want from me? Like Jesus Christ, it is written down. This is it. This is all we know right now. What the fuck? But this is where the implicit nature of what comprises strategy is often not pinned down.

[A]

Yeah, there's something about this topic that feels really important to me and I'm not sure if I'm putting my finger on it quite right. But the idea that I think the most important work for I would probably argue most organizations is probably quite long term and is a big swing and is going to require more time than any one of us are going to be here in this organization. I'm thinking of it as like cathedral building. Like I'm. And remove all religious connotation to it. I'm just talking about a project that is so big and it feels audacious, especially if we're in the early stages of it. All of us working on it right now probably won't be around when it comes to fruition. And I, I just feel like the world would probably benefit from more organizations that could build cathedrals in whatever it is that they're doing and not just like kind of crap out another SaaS app that totally. And I'm not even like, I'm not shooting on SaaS. What's the cathedral version of what you are building? Software wise? What is the cathedral version of anything that we're doing? And I think in a lot of organizations we don't even let ourselves ask that question because it seems utterly absurd that we could build something like that. That because of our day to day just chaos, nobody's thinking about the 10, 15, 20 year version of what we're trying to build. And it's just the next quarter. And yeah, maybe some of that is just the system that we're in. If we don't hit the next quarter, you know, we're all out on, out on the street on our butts. But I don't know, there's something, there's something there that I, I wish we could do more of in our organizations.

[B]

I really love this metaphor, and I feel like we should do a whole show about it. We have only in the last six weeks, like, figured out the Reddy's Cathedral. And it's one of those things where it was like, as it started to become clear, it was like, this is it. All of the other hypothesizing that we've done, the reason that it didn't stick is because it wasn't it. And now this is it. And now it's just like, all the tumblers have fallen into place, and it's like the universe is just, like, pushing us toward this new and somewhat different future. I did a lot of work on this, and it's been so interesting to me because to your point, most businesses, and I'm around a couple of them right now, most businesses need that. Most businesses are trying to figure out. This is very dual transformation, but they're trying to figure out how to survive in the core. And what they really need is the big idea for the future. And they don't have it, and they don't know how to get it. And having been through this myself and watched, like, what are competitors are doing and being like, ugh, not that I don't want to do anything like that. And being offered opportunities to do other things that, like, feel intuitive, like writing a book and being like, no, that's not it either. It's really hard to have the pressure internally of, like, what is the big bet and the big future. None of us know it, but we want it. And the world being like, these are the logical paths. And to sort of sit in like, no, I'll know it when I see it, and this isn't it. And I'm gonna keep saying no until it becomes so stunningly clear that I can't stop thinking about it. That shit is hard to do emotionally. But I think to your point, that is what cathedral building should feel like. And when it does, it's pretty exciting.

[A]

Yeah. And the only way to have the time or space to really do that is to have an operating system that doesn't consume every free iota of attention, dealing with kind of just the. The palace intrigue stuff. And we can put a lot of things on autopilot that should be on autopilot so that things can exist for longer than a quarter, that I don't have to spend my time kind of navigating the intricacies of other people's preferences. And we can focus on. On doing the work. And, of course, the future that I'm painting here is not this, like, ultra rational. We never have human conversations or conflicts, but those are rarer and more kind of pointedly focused at specific aspects of our strategy or the work that we're trying to do and not just the ambient feeling of being in the organization.

[B]

Totally. I think that's exactly right. And I'm going to draw something. I'm going to draw something and show it on camera. It's going to be very simple. Someone showed me this a long time ago. I think it was Andrea Robb. Do you know her?

[A]

I know the name. Why do I know the name?

[B]

She's an org designer. She used to work at Airbnb. That's when I knew her.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Anyway, we were having this conversation. So there's three. Wait, there's three sort of like arcs. So if you think about this as a hierarchy, her point was the most evolved organizing principle is strategy. But if the strategy and the direction isn't clarified, you demote to operations and just trying to like, be rigorous in execution and planning and moving. And if the operations aren't clear and functioning, you default to relationships. And that's how. And basically she was saying that's what we're talking about. This is how things get done. And in the best case scenario, they get done based on strategy as the organizing principle. And in the worst case scenario, they get done based on interpersonal connection and influence, which to your point is not to say we don't want to have interpersonal connection, but it shouldn't be the vehicle through which work can happen.

[A]

Yeah. It should be adding to the work that we're doing. It should be adding fuel to it and not being the only way that we can get stuff done and hopefully

[B]

making it fun and making it fun and fun and exciting and making it lower. Friction and whatever. Rather than being the actual mechanism, which is like, I gotta call Joe. Cause Joe's the only one who has the password to press the button that my boss wants. And the SOP says it's 48 hours, but my boss wants it done by noon. So Joe it is. And like, I'm gonna buy him a donut in the morning so that he'll do it again next week.

[A]

Am I Joe? I'm Joe in this, aren't I? I can be bought with a donut.

[B]

Yeah, he's donut operated, folks.

[A]

Very true. The one last little bit I'll add to that is that the benefits of really strong relationships is that we can disagree better. Like, if you and I have a strong relationship and I feel like If I bring something to you that is counter to what you wan or whatever and that's not going to harm our relationship, then I am more likely to do it. But if we operate in an environment where my relationship is the only thing that I have for getting things done, it's a very surface level sort of relationship. It's how do I keep this person happy? Not how do I. I'm going to use the word use, but it makes it sound worse than it is. How do I use our relationship to have deeper conversation and deeper insight about the thing we are trying to do together?

[B]

Right, Absolutely. The other thing I wanted to talk about because we both had a sticky actually related to narrative. I think politics shows up a lot in how we talk about work and what we say and what we don't say.

[A]

And so yeah, say more about that.

[B]

I mean, when I'm working with an organization I definitely will hear like, oh, this leader doesn't like, blah, blah, this leader doesn't like agile. Don't talk about it that way. This leader doesn't like process, so don't talk about it like process. This leader, whatever the thing is like these, these preferences sort of get out of control and, and a lot of times, and I have a really good, very recent example of this, but a lot of times I don't even think the leader in question knows that it's happening. Like maybe once upon a time they made one one off comment that was like, I think that these guys from this agile consulting company are butt heads and that like the safe framework isn't working for us, which it doesn't as an aside. So that person's right in this case. But that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is a lot of times people take even a one off comment like that and turn it into a rule for everyone for all time and actually create like a bunch of overhead because they believe that this is an explicit norm that they need to adhere to.

[A]

Yeah, I was just gonna say when I have investigated those preferences where it's somebody telling me about somebody else's preference and I go and talk to the person, the actual person, there's usually either, it's either sometimes 100% wrong, which is very interesting because maybe it was a preference at one time and it's not now, or there's like a nugget of truth in it, but this whole like mythos has been crafted around it and that can have such a skewing impact on, on the organization.

[B]

Totally. Well, and I think What I'm realizing in this conversation is, like, so much of this is just about making powerful people comfortable. And we make them comfortable because they are responsible for our livelihood and for our reputation and for our sense of belonging in organization. Like, there are very human, very valid reasons for why we want, like, the pack leader to have the best. I was gonna say the best bone. Like the best stake bone. Like a dog.

[A]

You talking about like a wolf. Yeah. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, you get it. And also. And this is where I have, like, a sort of funny example. I think these assumptions get us into so much trouble and ultimately create a really bad cycle of mistrust. I was facilitating an off site very recently, and I happened to know the leader quite well who was not in the off site. I was working with people who work lower, quote, unquote, in the organization. And throughout the off site, there were elements of the new sort of strategy and direction of the organization. And that came up as being unclear. Now what I interpreted from this is there's been a lot of change. A lot of this is new. People just haven't like, fully processed the information yet. And the leader was going to come in for part of the off site. And so I said to the person who was the leader of this group, we should let them all ask their questions about this and get clear on what it is, because I'm sure she's clear on it. And if there are these, like. Essentially a lot of the questions were like, we should be making these decisions based on the larger strategy, but there are things about it that we don't yet understand. And I was like, what a great opportunity to sort of clear this up. And the immediate response that I got from the leader in the room was, I understand why you're saying that, but if I were her, I might feel like I've said this a lot of times and I've repeated myself a lot and like, why don't these people get it? And I don't want them to, like, look foolish or inattentive or frank. Like, the undertone was like. Or to piss her off, right? And I was like. And I was basically like, okay, let me. Like, I know. I know her well. Like, let me handle it. I say this as preamble because I go to have this conversation with the leader and say, look there, there are still questions about this. I know you've been talking about it and the questions exist, so who cares? Why don't we do this? And her immediate response was, I've been talking about this ad nauseam. I don't understand. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Now the politics move from there is, okay, done, conversation over. We're moving on. We will not do this session of dialogue around the strategy. My conversation was like, I'm sure that's true. And it doesn't really matter if they don't get it yet. So no matter how many times you've said it, I think you need to say it again. To which she was like, fine. And it's like, when you're inside of a system where you want to make that person comfortable and where you can feel their frustration and you want to respond to it because you're a good employee and also probably, like a person who wants to stay in relationship, it's really easy not to push. But this was a moment where I was like, this is about the work and what this group is trying to do and what they need to do it. Regardless of how many times she said it, regardless of how clear it could be, it's not. So, like. And also, she's wonderful, and she's the kind of person who's like, fair enough. I'll be there. And then came and did an amazing job, and it was a great session, and everybody thought it was a highlight. So, like. But it's like, usually we don't even push because we just feel that little bit of, like, I don't really like this. And we just go, okay, okay, forget it.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And, like, we have to at least check in with ourselves to be like, am I doing what's right for the work right now, or am I doing what will make both of us in this slightly awkward situation feel more comfortable as soon as possible? And if it's safe enough, we should pick the work thing. It's the potato chip, right?

[A]

It's the potato chip. Am I gonna eat this potato chip now, or am I gonna have this salad? Okay, fine.

[B]

Okay, fine. And look like we all eat the potato chips sometime. It's not always worth it, but it's worth at least stopping to consider for a second.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, totally.

[B]

And, like, as it turned out, like, we ate the salad, and it was great.

[A]

It's a great salad. Salads can be great.

[B]

And we came out of that all feeling really good. And, like, we had really, like, made a lot of progress in a short period of time. But these are the moments that I describe them as being politics. And what they are mostly is just, like, personal preferences and humans being humans and a leader expressing frustration, which is perfectly, perfectly normal, and then doing something anyway because it's right for the Work and like we can have more of that. Like we can have more salad.

[A]

Yeah, agreed.

[B]

In our day.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. So Sam, why don't you give us your first idea for what to do to deal with this stuff?

[A]

Yeah, so I was, for this one, I was thinking in the, in the context of, you know, politics in terms of getting things done, especially like long term initiatives that are cross functional. Because often, you know, the transformation work that the READY has, has traditionally done, it's touching lots of parts of the organization. And I see there is this way of thinking that has good reasoning behind it around having like a single champion for a thing. Because there is like that person probably cares a lot. That person can like, if they have actual authority, they can like go make things happen. Like there are reasons that dri, you know, directly responsible individual. Like these things exist within oss and I think that tees you up for a more political environment than you would want to actually have. So I like the idea of trying to build multi threaded sponsorship into kind of the cathedral building sorts of projects, these long term things. It should not be any one individual's responsibility because if they leave, it's gonna crumble or it's going to spin up some crazy internal politics that is just going to consume a lot of attention. So how can we not have a committee? And I realize that multi threaded sponsorship is maybe just another way of saying committee. I don't think I'm saying that. But how do we create groups of folks who care about these things so that they are resilient beyond any single one of them? That's, that's my first kind of provocation.

[B]

I love that. And I mean, committee is another word for a team. I think that like even committees can be great if they're structured and well run and they have actual work to do. But I think you're absolutely right. Like the fragility of an individual champion is, is bad design.

[A]

Yeah, it's tough.

[B]

I love that.

[A]

It's a lot of pressure on that, on that person as well too. Like it is generally. Yeah, generally it. I think on good days you feel empowered and energized, like make things happen. On bad days you're like, holy. This whole thing really rides on my shoulders and that is crushing.

[B]

Totally. I totally agree. My next one is going to sound self serving, but it's not. I think that especially in group dynamics, hiring someone external who does either is not beholden to any one executive or has such a good relationship with the executive buyer that they like sort of have free rein to do what they want can be so powerful. And it can be a facilitator, it can be a coach, it can be a consultant of some kind. It's not necessarily, like, a work designer like Sam and I. But the thing that I. That I personally notice is how just because of, like, information asymmetry and my own naivete, I have a lot of freedom to question implicit norms in a group that other people don't feel like they have. And it's like a way to sort of model doing what's right for the work rather than doing what's right for a person. Because I don't know what the individual people like or want. Like, I'm coming with a design or a agenda or a whatever to in service of what they've told me they want. It usually doesn't really take individual preference into account at all. And I. And I've seen a lot of moments, I'm sure you have too, in groups where, like, I'll ask a question or say a thing. I can tell that I've kind of, like, hit a tripwire. A bunch of people in the room are like, oh, shit, what's gonna happen? And the leader, they think is gonna have a reaction doesn't either because it wasn't really a tripwire to begin with, or because it's not my job to make them feel comfortable. That's not what they're paying me to do. And so they let me get away with it. It either way. Like, it's like you're shattering the illusion that has potentially persisted for, like, years. And it frees people up behaviorally to be like, what other myths aren't true, like, what other implicit norms are bullshit. Like, I just watched Rodney get away with this thing that I thought was verboten. Maybe there's other stuff that isn't verboten. Maybe I can just, like, maybe order the sandwiches without asking six people first, you know? Like, I just. I think. I think having a third party of any kind really in. In the action of a team's dynamic can shift it in a way that, like, you just never will. Only with people who are on the team.

[A]

Yeah, totally, totally get that. My last one is so. Because I think politics thrives in a kind of an oral tradition. If we're not really writing things down and we're just kind of talking about stuff, I think that that is kind of the perfect environment for a more political OS to emerge. I think it is really powerful to create artifacts that outlive any individual leader or that. That just put down into writing things that we think are true so that we can talk about that and not just the ephemerality that we hold in our head. So I'm talking about things like decision logs, like what decisions we made when success metrics and the kind of historical data behind them, case studies, testimonials, playbooks. I think all of this even becomes much more important too, as AI pervades more of our organizations. If we want the AI tools that are existing within our organizations to work well, they need to be looking at the. The artifacts that represent the work that we are doing. And if it's purely in our heads and purely in the conversations that happen, then I think we're leaving a lot of useful information on the table.

[B]

Yeah, I totally agree. My last one was very similar. And I think that this is also where a fun little hack, a fun little political hack is like, to the extent that we are working based on a leader's preference, at the very least, write it down. Like, write down the preference as an SOP and at least let's confront the truth of like, you know, Rodney doesn't want anyone to make direct eye contact with her before 11 o' clock in the morning. Just write it down. Just like, let's write it down and let's all just like, be honest that this isn't actually a preference. It's a rule. Even if it's insane. Like, this is. Again, it's just like these are small things that it's not any different than like keeping a log of everyone's dietary restrictions because we have dinner together a lot. It's like, just, just write it down.

[A]

It's. It's the user. User manual to me thing, which I know we have talked about.

[B]

Absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome.

[A]

All right, well, I think we've. We've put this one to bed. So as you always know, we are looking for new topics for the show at all times. So if you have an organizational pattern that you are having trouble changing, shoot us a [e-mail] this show is edited

[B]

and mixed by Taylor Marvin at Coop Studios and produced by Jack Van Amberg. At Work with Ready is created by the ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you so much for listening.