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Professor Game Podcast
Why "More Effort" is Ruining Your Team (And How to Fix It) | Episode 452
00:33:02
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- [00:00]
A
Was I couldn't step away from the job until my team got better. But at the same time my team couldn't get better because I wouldn't step away. I was just, you know, in this kind of, you know, feedback loop where I really couldn't, you know, get out of it. And what I realized over time was that the fix wasn't more effort.
- [00:21]
B
Hey engagers, and welcome back to the Professor Game Podcast. As you know, we are the number one gamification podcast where we talk about how games, gamification, game thinking and behavioral design help us boost engagement, multiply retention and build much stronger and more powerful products. And I'm Rob. I'm the founder and coach at Professor Game and I'm also the head of engagement strategy at the Octalysis Group, the leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy and in Professor Game. And I'm a professor of gamification and game based solutions at multiple business schools around the world and other global institutions like IE Business School, efmd, EVS University and many others around the world. And before we dive into today's conversation, if this is something that you know rings any bells, things like struggling with retention, adoption, churn engagement in your product, service or business and of course you're interested in turning that around, look at our core Drives in the Wild Free guide. You just click on the link in the description and you will get it directly on your email. You'll see how real business are successfully or unsuccessfully using these motivations in business situations. So just go ahead and click on the link in the description. And today we have Michael Lukic. Is that a good way to say it?
- [01:33]
A
You got it, Michael.
- [01:36]
B
Welcome to the show. We need to know though, are you prepared to engage?
- [01:39]
A
I am. I am. Yes.
- [01:41]
B
Let's do this. Because today we have Michael Lukic who has built a career at the intersection of data, teaching and strategy, always circling the same question, how do we make better decisions amid a complex reality? And over 20 years in consulting analytics, analytics has taught him to think in systems. Five years as an adjunct professor taught him to make those IDs accessible. And nearly 25 years as a poker player taught him how to think clearly under uncertainty. He is a creator of the Stoic Systems Thinker newsletter and@stoicsystemsthinker.com and is the author of the Stoic Systems Thinker, to be published by manuscripts Press in May 2026. When you see this episode, this is probably going to be already launched. He lives in Ann harbor in Michigan with his wife and two daughters. So Is there anything we're missing, Michael, from that intro?
- [02:30]
A
I think you covered it. Thank you.
- [02:32]
B
Brilliant. So Michael, let's get started with the most basic question. What do normal regular days or weeks look like with you? What are you doing these days?
- [02:41]
A
Well, so I wear a lot of hats. As you mentioned there. I'm juggling a lot of things right now. So currently from a professional standpoint, I run marketing analytics for a major marketing agency in the U.S. we are the marketing agency of record for one of the luxury major auto automotive companies in the US So a lot of my job with that function is helping to provide the intelligence to our creatives, our marketing strategists to help them ultimately move populations of consumers through funnels. I'm designing measurement frameworks, helping, helping them to decide kind of where they're placing their bets across the brand journey and ultimately getting people to buy more vehicles for that, that particular company. So, so that's what I'm doing. I'm running a team there within, within that function. You know, obviously have my parenting duties as, as a dad of two young daughters. And then I, I've spent the last year writing a book on systems thinking. So trying to codify a lot of the systems thinking techniques and tactics that I've learned over, over the course of my 20 plus year career. And I'm looking at it through a different vantage point. I'm trying to overlay that with, with Stoic philosophy because I actually believe that the two of those are somewhat intertwined. I believe that actually if you look back and read a lot of, you know, ancient Stoic philosophy by, written by these great, you know, great thinkers of 2000 years ago, a lot of what they're saying are, you know, really systems thinking concepts. I think they were some of our earliest systems thinkers 2,000 years ago. And we, we're just kind of taking this ancient philosophy and we're modern, modernizing it and applying it to, you know, the modern problems of our lives. So, so that's kind of, the, those are the, the three main kind of hats that I'm wearing, you know, on a day to day basis in terms of just a regular day itself. You know, I, I've spent a lot of time over the last few years and I dive into this a lot in my book, trying to take the specific concepts that I've learned and apply that to, in my opinion, the most important system of all, which is the systems of our own lives. So I'm trying to design, you know, essentially design my own life around these concepts to Optimize for, for what I find as kind of the, my end goal of what I'm trying to optimize for, which is living a productive and meaningful life and spending time with my family and really just getting the most out of, out of a, out of a fulfilling life. So, so that's one of the things we talk a lot about in systems thinking, is that the behavior of an overall system really comes. It's an emergent property of the small individual, like day to day, you know, minute things that you. That kind of make up the system at the ground level. So a lot of my individual days are designed to, you know, focus the daily habits, the, the weekly habits on ultimately supporting my, my broader vision of living a fulfilling life and being the, you know, best dad that I can to my kids.
- [05:44]
B
And Amazing, amazing. Love that. And, you know, with this whole perspective, you know, as I mentioned in the intro, it's, you know, systems thinking stokes philosophy. You're also very much into marketing, which is something we work on as well in gamification. But you're also a poker player. So, you know, there's many things that are sort of intertwining there with this whole vision, perhaps through systems thinking and so on. Is there a time you would call your favorite failure or first attempt in learning, as we like to call it as well? And this has to do a lot with the way that we tend to think in games as well. You know, you're playing the game. Mario is the T shirt I'm wearing today. But, you know, when you start, you just go around and you hit this mushroom and it kills you, right? Oh, next time I have to do it different. So you come back and you jump and you kill the mushroom or just step over it or whatever. How does that, you know, how does that hit you? Is there, is there a time where you can tell us a story about this, the situation? And of course, no NDAs need to be broken.
- [06:42]
A
No, of course, of course. I mean, I think I have a couple and, you know, I'll give kind of a more personal one first and then I can kind of give a broader one of my favorite, like, industry failures from a marketing lens. Maybe, you know, personal one first. And I wrote about this a little bit in my book. I, I distinctly remember the first time as I was progressing in my career, the first time I was promoted into a management role. And, you know, I, I went from, you know, being this individual contributor to, all of a sudden now I had a, a team of, of four people. And I'm Trying to manage other people's, you know, resources, other people as resourcing as well. And you know, I, I obviously jump in and my obvious next move is to try to delegate, right? I'm trying to delegate to the rest of my team and you know, that's, that, that's my first step and I, I tried and the work comes back wrong, right? So I, I come back and I have to redo the work. I try leaning into coaching and I'm frustrated because they're just not, I'm not getting the same quality that I'm used to providing myself, right? So I ultimately leaned back to, well, the work needs to get done. So I just go redo the work myself and next thing I know I'm working 75 hour weeks. Hey, I distinctly remember coming home and you know, not myself at the dinner table and you know, I'm seeing relationships that are, you know, I'm struggling a little bit outside of my, my work life and my personal life. I eventually convinced my boss to, to get it to, to bring in a senior consultant to help us out. But three months later, my calendar still looks exactly the same. It took me longer than I would have liked to admit that what I've ultimately built was this closed loop system with like zero exit in play, right. I couldn't step away from the job until my team got better, right? But at the same time my team couldn't get better because I wouldn't step away, right. I was just in this kind of feedback loop where I really couldn't get out of it. And what I realized over time was that the fix wasn't more effort, it was how do I ultimately redesign this loop. Acknowledging that, you know, the work that I was going to get was probably 70% of what I might have produced myself. But I needed to let my team learn through that the hard way. And that was the only way that they were ultimately going to get better. I needed my team to feel the consequences of their own decisions and ultimately replace my hovering with more of a review cadence. That helped me coach them and helped me teach them. Turning more into a player coach instead of kind of being this like real time micro level macro man, micromanager in there. So you know, that, that was, you know, really ultimately what I came down to was, was the most highest leverage move that I had at that. In that case there was removing myself from the loop there. And, and you know, I, I ultimately I faced that, that case where it's like when do you stop optimizing, you know, for that Experience and ultimately try to build that system where my individual team members can actually like self improvement which was, you know, kind of where I ultimately landed. But it took me a long time to get there and that was, you know, a hard earned struggle to learn.
- [09:45]
B
Just saying exposed sounds easy, right? But it's, it's like when you see it, right, and you say, well it's like pretending to be. And you can take this for almost any team sport saying, well, I'm the manager of the team, but then I'm also talking about soccer. I'm also going to be the goalkeeper and central defense and the right wing and the left wing and you know, the mid, the central midfielder and the advanced midfielder and you know, the attacker. Well, you just can't do that. Like no matter how good you are in every single one of positions, doesn't matter if you're better than every single one of your teammates, you just can't do it. There's no way that you can do that. You have to accept the fact that they'll have their talents and their shortcomings as well. Maybe you can swap players here and there like in the company, maybe there was a chance for that. But you know, when you see it like that, it's like, but that, that, that just makes sense. But of course you're in the midst of it and it's like, no, I can't, can't do this, you know, the client and all that. So you know, it's, it is, I understand it is a struggle.
- [10:42]
A
It's really hard to see a system when you are in the weeds itself. You have to oftentimes kind of rise above. Right? And you know, I go back to, this is where the stoic philosophy I think comes in and is really helpful because I think back to stuff like this often. You know, Marcus Aurelius would talk about in Meditations how he would love to kind of think about how he would see the world from the stars and look down on it from above. And if you don't have, have that perspective kind of looking down on things from above, it's hard to, it's hard to make decisions and kind of, you know, when you don't necessarily see that whole map. I think another example though, this is, you know, kind of when I think back to the failures and this is kind of more of a marketing specific example. But I think about this a lot of how the marketing industry has evolved over the years. And I'm going to give a framework here which I want to give credit to a company that I used to work for, for called MarketBridge. They were, you know, a former colleague of mine there was super smart and you know, came up with this framework and I've been carrying it around for years because the diagnosis only gets more relevant over time. And it's was the, if you really go back to, to marketing back in like the 1990s, there was a very limited, or even before there were a limited number of channels through which you could actually talk to people, right? So you know, you might have had TV or direct response mail or you know, prints, but it was a manageable number of channels. And then as you kind of got to the 2000s and digital really started exploding, you started having, you know, hundreds and thousands of channels. And a lot of times alongside with the digital explosion, we got a lot more data. And that was exciting for me as, as a data person, what you started to see was you'd have these conversations with chief marketing officers and one of these credos came up often which was if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. And inherently things like digital channels, there's a lot of data, it's a lot easier to measure those channels. It's a lot harder to measure the, these upper funnel TV channels, you know, the brand channels. So at a lot of organizations you'd see siloed teams, a team responsible for email, a team responsible for digital. They're all competing for budgets and they're all trying to tell their best measurement story. They're all going to the cmo, the CFO with the data, trying to prove the worth of their individual channels. And money ultimately flowed to the channels where it's easiest to actually measure, you know, those, those particular channels which, which ends up being those lower funnel channels. So investment gets funneled down to the bottom of the funnel. You're neglecting the top of the funnel channels and as a result you end up with a top of funnel. That's very, very leaky because no one could really defend upper funnel spend in a boardroom meeting. And the fix here isn't necessarily more measurement, it's actually just redesigning the whole system. Understanding that we shouldn't be measuring, you know, channel by channel on an individual basis. We should be looking at that whole system as a, as a, as an entire system, looking through things like multi channel attribution, using tools like mixed models to actually measure the entire system according to a goal, as opposed to falling into this trap of sub optimization where you're optimizing individual channels to the detriment of the entire goal.
- [13:54]
B
That sounds amazing. In fact I have have trying to remember which episode it was where I'm talking about now I work at the OSIS group and I can talk more openly about the OSIS framework. And one of the things that I was initially because I've been a product manager as well, not in the marketing but in the product. Product perspective. And of course I've been in gamification for a while and there's some things that are kind of irreconcilable between the two. And one of the bigger issues with product management as it's seen and this is very modern and it's very good, it has many advantages over sort of traditional product management. In fact I. I teach it at the university. I think it's. It's an improvement from what we were doing in the past. However, there is an issue and it's an overarching issue. You know the Japanese call talk about Kaikaku and Kaizen, right? Kaizen, these small improvements is 1% and it's a brilliant concept. Don't get me wrong. Works for many, many things. Small improvements versus Kaikaku, which is radical innovation. Right. The problem is when you see it only through the eyes of Kaikaku or these incremental changes or looking at feature by feature, looking at the data. Oh yeah, how did this problem is. There's two problems, main problems. The one is you can end up very easily with a Frankenstein. All those silos start doing their own thing all over the place and you don't have a coherent story. You can't look at the whole picture. And of course that makes you not optimize for what is ultimately more important, which is not which is the best channel, but it is where do you get the overall best results if that means this channel is going to perform worse and this one, which is very small, is going to perform better. But that means that you overall get more clients. Well, that's a good thing, right? You. You think about it in systems, right? So that, that's one thing when you don't think in systems, you get Frankenstein's and the other thing is that there's this whole issue with data. Data tends and there's a, a good example of this Zynga games, right? You, you probably remember some of these, they over relied on data and yes, you know, they. Oh, you do this feature. It gets people to come back more every day this month. Fantastic. Put in the feature. Another feature, another feature they had. They managed to keep this manageable outside of the Frankenstein, but they were over relying on what we call black hat core drives, which is things that drive urgency, scarcity and make you feel as a player, as a user, out of control. Because that's what data gives you immediate results. Right? It says, oh, did this work? The A B testing, which one is better, this or this? Well, of course, if you measure in a week, it's going to tell you what performs better in a week. Do you do AB testing for two years? No one does A B testing for two years. And not YouTube, not anybody. Right. Because that doesn't make sense. The problem is you're not thinking of how does that perform as a system and sometimes in the long term makes sense. So, so that's one of the things that we found is very challenging of that approach and it's where definitely I think that product management can, can benefit from having a vision of oh yeah, I have this feature works better. But how does that affect the system where motivation has to be considered not only in the immediate urgency, but also with higher black hat things that make you feel better, make you feel in control, although they don't drive the urgency as a black hat. How do you combine these two things and then extrinsic and intrinsic rewards? It's a whole deep topic, but it definitely reminded me of that very, very much. I love that. Good stuff, Good stuff. So Mike, with all your experience and all the stuff that you've been doing in terms of, you know, seeing that, you know, it seems like systems thinking and the way you approach it has lot in common with, with some of these, at least overall, with these philosophies. What would you say is a good practice? When, when looking at a project, looking at a marketing campaign or a marketing strategy. What, what is a good practice? Like maybe do this and you'll, you'll definitely get, get better results. No silver bullets, that's, that's usually not, not the case. But is there anything that you would say goes in that direction?
- [17:40]
A
I think in general I try to kind of frame it. I try to, I live a lot more with, with frameworks. Right. And I don't think there is, you're obviously like what you said there, there's no kind of magic silver bullet that's going to be, you know, do this and you are obviously guaranteed towards success. But it, it's you one, I think you, you want to be hyper focused on what is the desired action or what's the desired goal. Right. And you need to be crystal clear on, on your, what it is that you're trying to Optimize for, right, because obviously like you're not gonna be able to optimize for something unless you've got, you're very, very clear on, you know, we want one metric or one, you know, KPI that we want to, you know, as our, as our number one. And maybe there are multiple KPIs or multiple metrics. I mean oftentimes there are and you know, that's tends to be one of my biggest challenge on a day to day basis is working with exec, with other executives or clients or whatnot and they want to try to optimize for too much. And you know, we can have multiple priority metrics, that's, that's fine, but we need to have some sort of prioritization, right? So which one is the most important, which one's the most important and so on and so forth. Knowing that when there are conflicts between those two, what takes precedence over one, right? So there's having some very, very clear clarity as to what it is that you're trying to accomplish. I'm a big fan of mapping systems, which sounds simple, but it's just drawing out the components. Right. And I, we, we talked about this briefly before we actually started the recording here, but systems thinking, one of the. There are two of the people who I came across a lot in my research to my book. They're system scientists out of Cornell. They're names of Derek and Laura Cabrera, their husband, wife, team, and they're both system scientists. They wrote a couple books, they've authored a bunch of papers. But they believe that the foundation of not just systems thinking, but all thinking comes down to these four rules, which is distinctions, systems, relationships and perspectives. And they call it dsrp. And you know, distinctions being that something is, is an identity or another. Right. We have to actually define something and name something A systems be meaning that systems are made of parts and wholes. And even when we dive into those, those parts are also systems of themselves or wholes of themselves that are made up of parts themselves, right? So understanding that relationships, each of these parts have, have influence over each other. So understanding those, those relationships and how, how those things interplay with one another, what are the feedback loops involved and so on and so forth and then the perspectives. Meaning that we can look at the same problem or look at the same view through multiple lenses. Right? You may see something different than the way I see something, which may be different than the way a different potential user sees something as well too. But with these four components or these four building blocks, we can Map out essentially any system. And I'm a big fan of just getting out whiteboards and drawing out systems and really defining out, you know, with a nice drawing, what does the map or architecture of a system look like. And then from there it's, it's, it's trying to identify where can you have like, where are your biggest leverage points? Where is a move within the system that can have the biggest outsized effect? It, it, it often comes down to where is the bottleneck, right? So where are you, you know, leaking the most users? Where are people spending the most time? Where's the most friction? What's the biggest problem? But that tends to be the biggest opportunity where you can spend time on trying to improve that system. And then from there it's making decisions and executing. And I guess the last thing I'll just kind of bring in is I think any good process needs to have some sort of review or iterative mechanism in place to continually try to make sure that you are aligning back to what your overall goal is. It's, it's easy to the example that you just brought up. It's easy to fall into some sort of sub optimization trap, right? Where you're optimizing for a small component of the system, not the system as a whole. That's okay. That happens to us all the time, whether it's in, you know, marketing, whether it's in our own lives, right? We, we do this all the time where we try to optimize for something, you know, you know, you go to your own life, right, and you talk about, you're trying to be, you get on a fitness plan and you're like, I'm gonna, you know, go work out six times a week. And then next thing you know you're exhausted and you kind of overcorrect the wrong way and it spills out into rest of your life. So we, we fall into these sub optimization traps all the time. It's important to make sure that we have regular review cadences to kind of reset us and make sure that we are always pointed to our North Star. Our overall goal that's going to kind of like lead us to the, you know, where we want to ultimately strive towards.
- [22:24]
B
Love it. And I'm sorry, but I have to bring a couple of things back as well to you know, one is on the strategy dashboard as we, as we call it. We always like to have the business metrics. And you said about prioritization, that's one of the rules. Like you can have a hundred things that you want to measure, but you have to have them ordered and especially the top three, maybe top six. And some clear examples that, you know, when you, we talked about desired actions before the interview. It's when you go to a web page, right, you know what they're prioritizing for at the moment. Not just, you know, accept cookies or don't accept cookies. You should be able to clearly distinguish, even if it's in a different language that you're able to understand what it is that you want them to do. That should happen in a marketing campaign, that should happen in an app, that should happen in a webpage. That should happen when you enter an experience. It should always be very clear and that clear prioritization. If it's done well, it should be aligned to the overarching top business metric or, you know, next most important business objective. If you cannot impact number one, then fine, that's good. How does it positively impact number two or worst case, number three? Like there's no if it doesn't, it doesn't belong here. You completely need it to go for sure. So love that, Love how you, how you put that together as well. And you know, it all comes back, you know, the system thinking and having that North Star, always making sure that everything you do is always hitting on that business metric direction. And we call it business metrics. But this also applies for NGOs, this applies for education, this applies for many other things as well. It's just a title that we gave it, but that's very, very crucial to the way we work. And Michael, with what we've been discussing and part of the perspective you've seen both you describing and me sort of replying to you and getting back with some other things that come to my head. Is there anybody that you would think, oh, I'd really like to listen to the perspective of this other person answering these questions as well.
- [24:17]
A
On the Professor Game podcast, I thought about this and I. There's a couple people actually. So, you know, one I think would be really interesting is, you know, the massive best selling author James Clear. I think, you know, I think of when I think of like atomic habits, like to me like atomic habits is just the gamification of self improvement. Right.
- [24:36]
B
So like it's a big one, it's a huge one.
- [24:38]
A
Right. But like it's, you know, I would be, I'm sure a lot of what he does, it's the same DNA of everything that you cover. It's just applied to behavioral change. And I think that would be somewhat interesting. But I'm also going to like say this from a more stoic lens. I think Ryan Holiday would be an interesting one as well because oftentimes and I struggle with this a lot as a marketer is as marketers, it's, it's easy sometimes to kind of toe the line. Right. Of, of. Of the ethical side of, of things. Right. And oftentimes for me at least, I think anytime you get close to that line like that's generally too far for my comfort. Right. Like I want to steer towards kind of being, being far away from, from that boundary. But I'd be interested of just a stoic angle, you know, especially as from, from a guy like Holiday who has a marketing background as well too, which is a useful counterweight that kind of grounds engagement design and more of like an ethical frame as well too.
- [25:35]
B
Makes a lot of sense. And keeping up with the recommendations, what book would you recommend these engagers? There is of course next year book which is coming up and will be available and hopefully send me the link so when we launch it, it's there.
- [25:48]
A
I appreciate that. I was not going to recommend my own book, but I appreciate that as well too. I actually the bible of systems thinking is a book called Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. She wrote this, she was a systems scientist, devoted most of her research and work to environmental systems. But again, as we've kind of learned from, from systems thinking, a lot of these concepts apply to systems across all different types in all different domains. And this is just a foundational text that gives the language of systems. It talks about feedback loops and stocks and flows and inflows and outflows, delays. It's a great, great, great book that is really codifies the language through which we can actually, you know, map out all of the designs of all of our various systems.
- [26:41]
B
Makes a lot of sense. And you're talking about feedback loops. That's fundamental. If you're creating gamified systems, people have to receive feedback. If there's, it's only a one way thing, it usually is a lot harder to design around and gives you mixed results. Let's call it in a way in this whole stoic systems thinking and perhaps, you know, a gamification tilt to that. What would you say is your superpower, that thing that you do, you know, it doesn't have to be absolutely unique, but that thing that you do at least better than most other people that makes you stand out?
- [27:08]
A
Yeah, I think for me my superpower is translation and a lot of my job is sitting at the intersection of various kind of domains in the business world. So I, I've, you know, you mentioned this in the intro, but I've worked in, working in, in, in marketing, data and technology for the last 20 plus years or so. I, I've had to jump from boardroom meetings with CMOs straight to meetings with my data engineers, to meeting technical teams to meeting with product managers. And oftentimes I'm having to have similar conversations, but translating that to the various audiences that I'm in in those various meetings, I'm in the CMO CFO conversations. And it needs to boil back down to how are we making money, how are we earning revenue, how are we maximizing our profit? Whereas I translate that back to having a conversation with our data engineers and we need to talk about APIs and data pipelines and how do we transform the data into something more manageable. Our product manager are building dashboards and trying to ship features to various end users. Right. So all of these are, I'm swimming in the same lanes having, you know, similar conversations with the same kind of core set of topics, but having to be able to translate that understanding for each of those audiences what they know already, what they don't know already. And how can I kind of take each of those topics and frame it in a way that's going to not just, just be something that they'd understand, but something that can help them make better decisions and help kind of them to get better, kind of get a good sense of the landscape of the world.
- [28:49]
B
Amazing. Amazing. Thank you very much for that. And now a typical question that tends to be very hard, maybe you already know the answer for you, but it has to do with games. Right? So I would like to ask you, maybe I have a guess at what the answer is, but I would like to know what is your favorite game?
- [29:06]
A
So I've, I, I've, I've been a game, I've been, had a love of games through my entire life. So I've, you know, played. I think it kind of yields to my competitive side of things. My, the answer, I guess came in my, in my intro here, which is I, I've played poker since I was, I started playing poker, you know, right around 2000. Right around 2000. So I've been, you know, 25, 30 years playing poker. To me, poker is the perfect, the perfect game where I, you know, a lot of the analogies or lessons that I draw from life comes from poker. I mean, it has everything in it. There's variable rewards. I'm, I'm trying to make decisions under uncertainty and incomplete information. There's social mechanics there. There's faulty learning loops, right? Like, I. Just because I play well doesn't mean I actually win, and vice versa. Just because I play poorly doesn't mean I actually lose. There's, you know, every, you know, stoic principle that, that I have. You know, there's a perfect analog in poker. Every systems principle. Half the framework in the book, honestly, started at the poker table. So that, to me is my favorite game. But I mean, I actually like. I play a lot of games anyway. I still, you can see the, you know, monitor, double monitors that I have behind me. I tend to play some computer games as well, too, so I love games.
- [30:25]
B
Amazing. Amazing. So, Michael, thank you very much for the time you've invested today with us and the engagers. Is there anything else you'd like to, of course, let us know where we can find out more about you? Your upcoming book, which, again, when you're seeing this, it's already live. I don't know, anywhere you want to lead us.
- [30:40]
A
Yeah, I mean, to me, I just, I wrap it up is, you know, one of the things that I've learned over the course of. Of writing this book over the last 18 months or so, and one of the perspectives that I've kind of had is, you know, while we call it systems thinking, to me, systems thinking is just thinking. It's just. It's thinking in a. In a structured manner and it's applicable to all things. I think there's overlaps or parallels with, you know, a lot of the other kind of, you know, schools of thinking, design thinking, critical thinking. I mean, they all kind of swim in the same pools. But, you know, I guess, you know, just from there, to me, the advice that I always give when people are thinking through, like, how do I kind of get. Get started with systems thinking or whatnot, is just starting. Starting with understanding the map of things and not necessarily the individual mechanics. So trying to find out, you know, and map out what the entire universe looks like and find the individual leverage points that you can make, you know, where you can actually have an outsized impact within those systems. And then the last kind of stoic piece that I would say there is, focusing on the specific things that you can control. Because oftentimes in systems, there's lots of things in systems that are completely out of our control, and focusing our energies and trying to change those things is. Is kind of a pointless exercise. So zeroing in on things that you actually can control and that's where you're going to have the biggest bang for your buck in terms of like just kind of learning more. I mean, my book, the Stoic Systems Thinker, it's going to be published in the upcoming weeks. So, you know, end of May, it might be pushed to early June before it actually gets on Amazon. But you can find out more at my website, which is stoicsystemsthinker.com and I'm on LinkedIn as well too, under Michael Lukic, so people can reach out to me there.
- [32:24]
B
Amazing. Amazing. Thank you once again very much for your engagement, for being here and delivering all your value to the engagers. And remember, engagers, if you are having any of the issues that we've been discussing regarding, you know, systems thinking and how that integrates into an overarching strategy for engagement, for adoption, churn any of these issues that you might be facing. Remember, you have a free guide if you click on the link in the description, which will arrive directly to your email. All you have have to do is click on that link and as we always say before we take off, it is time to say that it's game over.