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Work For Humans
Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do | Daniel M. Cable, Revisited
01:09:15
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- [00:04]
A
What we've done for whatever 150 years almost is created KPIs and measures in order to control the system. Now, when we used to start doing this, the world didn't change as much. And so, yeah, that worked. We're now in a world where it changes a lot more. So if we set the KPIs in January, by June, they're kind of extraneous. And by next January, when we go to check, we're running a different business model. It's a really hard game to play. And the pressure that that puts on people is I know that I should be trying this new approach that customers want, but I'm getting rewarded for this other thing that I was told to do last year.
- [00:46]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. This conversation with Dan Cable changed the direction of Work for Humans. Dan's research has proven that people perform best when they're given the freedom to bring all of their unique self to work. My takeaway was that many of the things we do to make people more uniform, like give giant groups of people the same title and then identify what skills are required to do that job and then tell everyone to look more like that. In other words, to look more the same is a problem. I realized that it's something we do to make complicated situations more legible and for our own convenience, not because it's actually good for our companies. As a researcher and professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, Dan set out to figure out what makes us light up when we're given the right challenge. By exploring the neuroscience behind thriving at Work and conducting true controlled experiments inside top companies, Dan found the key, and he's used it to unlock employee passion at companies like Coca Cola, Twitter, and more. In this episode, Dan and I talk about Dan's book Alive at Work, the research in neuroscience behind enthusiastic and proactive employees, common practices that suffocate employee energy, and what we can do to set them free. An experiment that Dan ran in which a tiny intervention in onboarding helped a company lower turnover by 30%, how managers can use employee strengths to create teams of leaders, and other topics. When you enjoy this episode of Work for Humans, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now my conversation with Dan Cable. Dan Cable, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:36]
A
Thank you, Dart. Glad to be here.
- [02:38]
B
As you might imagine, I read a lot of books about work and about business as a part of human running this podcast and what I really liked about Alive at Work and I'm so interested in is so much of the research in. It is your own research. And so I found it fascinating and I want to dig into it in a couple of different ways, which is everything the book says and also probably some things about the research. Can you just start off by saying what is the seeking system in people and why should leaders care about it?
- [03:11]
A
That's a good question. To say it as quickly as I could, it seems that there is an evolved part of our brain that urges us to explore. And it makes sense. It just makes sense because the environment doesn't just hand us resources, we have to go out and seek them. And so there is something innate, meaning hardwired, that a three month old would have. When you show a three year old something new, it doesn't run away, it moves toward it. And you could say, well that's dangerous, it might be a dangerous thing. And it's like, yeah, well, what's more dangerous is not learning. So we're going to have to take our risks for that. So that's number one, I'd say the evolved innate brain stuff that neuroscience is important. I think number two is it's also neuroscience. But when we follow that urge to learn and grow and try to figure out new things about the world, the body seems to reward us for that. So it uses one of these neurotransmitters called dopamine and that feels good and it helps us learn. So it just seems like it's chemistry now we're moving out of biology and into chemistry because we're creating a loop. We're incentivized to do more of that. And then another thing I'll just throw in for the fun of it. When we get that dopamine flow and the seeking system is activated, life feels better. There's just more positive emotions. There's more curiosity and enthusiasm instead of anxiety and fear. There's so many things to talk about there. But if I had to summarize it quickly, those would be the things that I would say to somebody that's never heard about it ever, and why would.
- [04:44]
B
Businesses care about it?
- [04:46]
A
Well, get this for real. Let's just go with the three things I just said. If there is a hardwired bit of biology and chemistry that makes people enthusiastic and want to learn, that's kind of what companies need these days. Say there was a button you could push that would make people enthusiastic about learning new things and then adapting, trying new things and then adapting, gaining new skills and then adapting. Say there was a button you could push. You'd probably push that button. If you could pay for that button, you'd probably buy that button. Turns out we all have that button. It's just that most big companies are set up to shut that off instead of switch it on. Listen, Dart. When I learned that quote unquote, because I'm not a neuroscientist, I'm more of a psychologist, but when I learned that about ourselves, I thought this is what leaders need to hear about because it's like this system's waiting to serve them and we just need to figure out what the conditions are to switch it on.
- [05:42]
B
And there's a bunch of things that I want to part out in there. Because you made some distinctions in the book and the book. Everybody is Alive at Work is the title of the book. You made some distinctions in the book about the things that we do that lead up to something and the things that happen after. And so there's rewards, maybe that happen after an event and then there's the things we love to do leading up to that event. There was a couple of different important words in there. And one of them was the difference between hedonic well being and eudaimonic happiness. What are those distinctions?
- [06:20]
A
Hedonism or hedonic satisfaction is when things feel good, like let's say a massage. And there's not really a point to it. You could say it's not like it's purposeful or it's going to make the world a better place or anything like that, but it just feels nice. Chocolate for some people just feels nice. You could kind of think of that as being a positive psychology, but you could call it shallow. It's nice, but it's kind of shallow. You know, maybe it's the feeling of a new car smell. This eudaimonic satisfaction is more purposeful. A quick way to describe this, which a lot of people don't like, but I do, is the difference between like having kids and not having kids. A lot of having kids basically sucks. For like six years they don't even say thank you. And four of those years they're just crying and, you know, you got to change their diaper. And it's just pretty annoying. But somehow it feels meaningful. And lots of people are even drawn to have a second one. There's an idea that it feels purposeful and meaningful and it gives you a joy. But you wouldn't call it superficial joy because most of it sucks kind of, and you need to grid it out. You just have to persevere through A lot of the eudaimonic satisfaction. But guess what? Even though happiness might be lower overall, meaningful joy might be higher. You might die happier having done all this really bad stuff. A lot of times when I'm at my best at work, it actually isn't that easy. It's not just a walk in the park. It's not just the light, warm breeze blowing across my face. A lot of times I'm up against what I don't really understand. I'm trying to take people in a place where maybe they don't fully want to go. It's a little uncomfortable knowing if I'll get them there, I might fail. That feels kind of risky, but kind of exciting. And so that concoction of joy is just a lot more meaningful. And if I get it right, something beautiful explodes as opposed to then a massage. Oh, that's kind of nice. Or if you get to the end of a chocolate bar. That's nice.
- [08:20]
B
It's interesting. It aligns very much with something. Somebody I interviewed recently, Bill Hurst at Cambridge, is a political scientist. I asked him the question about his work and he said that there's this two by two where one axis is difficulty and the other axis is tedium. And he said difficult and not tedious is great. That's his favorite thing in the world, difficult and tedious. Doing taxes, for instance, or filling out forms. He says that's horrible. And so you're doing a different kind of two axes, which has to do with the. With how rewarding something is and kind of the richness of the rewarding that you get with difficult.
- [08:58]
A
There's another thing that's running right under the surface here. It's a line, but not identical, which is. There's apparently. Again, I always have to say the apparently thing because I'm not a neuroscientist, but there's apparently different sorts of drugs that are released when you accomplish a goal and you sort of thought you'd do it. And then you get there and then the body will reward you with that versus when you're seeking, when you're wanting something, you haven't accomplished it, but there's this desire and there's this sort of almost reward. In the pursuit.
- [09:30]
B
In the book you quoted, I think it was a Professor Baringer.
- [09:33]
A
That's it. That is his work I'm talking about.
- [09:36]
B
He talks about. Dopamine has an animating effect, whereas opiates induce a happy stupor. Dopamine is more complicated than I thought it was. It's closer to that seeking Center. So a lot of what this show is about is how we might design work better. And so what I want to talk about is I want to talk about what lights up the seeking system, and in particular, how do we light up the seeking system at work? And then on the other side, I want to talk about some of our traditional practices that do the opposite and why they do that. So let's start with what lights up the seeking system.
- [10:12]
A
Well, the first thing I always like to say is there might be lots of things, but there's three that are really evidence based, and I pounced on those three. Sometimes I'll just give you like a little allusion to something else. Sometimes I think what might light up the seeking system is being around people that share core values, that share a mindset of similarity on what matters in the world. And sometimes I think that might provide a sort of a safety that makes us sort of more prone to explore ideas and chat without worry. I bet you I could probably support that. However, the three things that we're going to talk about are pretty solid. And so let me just run through those real quick and then we'll unpack them. The first one is this idea about prompting this seeking system through experimentation and play. The word play. I got to tell you, dart play is the right word. It's just that in organizations, many leaders are turned off. They think it's frivolous. That's wrong. But true that they think it's frivolous. It's like they hate the word failure. Of course, all learning involves failure. Learning feels a lot like failure in the middle, but leaders hate it. These are words that I've almost pruned out of my vocabulary because I spend a lot of my time giving keynote addresses to leaders that I want to change. And as soon as you throw play out there, it's almost like an allergic reaction. Now, if you talk about experimentation, you talk about a sandbox to learn, then they're there. So it's vernacular, but that's definitely the first one, and we'll talk a lot about that. The second one has to do with this personalizing purpose. It's the idea of knowing what your impact is, knowing how when you do X, the world responds with Y. So we're talking about purpose. We don't have to mean curing world hunger. That'd be nice if you could do that. But really, the kind of purpose I'm talking about is the seeking system stuff, which is it's looking for cause and effect in the world. If I roll over this log, are there maggots and grubs under there that I could eat? Or if I climb over that hill, is there a lake where I could get fresh water? It's the exploration, because you never know when you're going to need some resources. So that's number two, and that's that feeling of cause and effect and understanding our impact in the world. And then number three is this idea that we have some strengths that are unique to us, we have some values that are unique to us, and when we put those out into the world, we seem to get this buzz. The first two are pretty directly tied to, like, why do we have a seeking system? Well, to find and secure resources and look for impact in the world. The third one is a little weird. It's like of all the species, we're this species that really wants to be unique and we want to dress in a certain way and be known for who we really are. That seems to somehow be tied to dopamine.
- [13:04]
B
I have a hypothesis on that.
- [13:06]
A
Let's do it.
- [13:07]
B
So I interviewed Susie Wise, who wrote a book called Design for Belonging. And what we both realized in that conversation was that our ability to contribute unique value, even if we weren't sure people were recognizing it, it made us feel like we belonged. Having that unique value that you can bring to, to that group, it's a reasonable explanation. I mean, obviously unsupported by evidence.
- [13:31]
A
As I tell some leaders, I don't know why it works, but it does work. And I've done a lot of, as you know, firsthand research suggesting that there's ways to provoke the seeking system by letting people highlight and play to their strengths. And it's like an energy source that's right under the skin. You just need to plug in. But so many organizations are set up to the opposite. It's to make people into numbers, it's to make people feel interchangeable. Because originally we're going to talk about that later. That's how we set up management in the 1890s is make people into robots and don't make them think they're so important. And if all of a sudden there's a unique thing you bring to the party, well, then that's threatening our business model. If I can't fire you tomorrow and replace you in a day, that's not a very good robot. So let's make sure that we don't overemphasize any unique traits of anybody and make the job very standardized so we can just slot in humans.
- [14:23]
B
I see these forces at work in business. I see them inside the companies I work for the forces of control and uniformity and then the forces of individuation. Could you talk about the Wipro experiment that you ran?
- [14:38]
A
Totally. And what I like about that is just so the listeners can be on board here, we're going to start with the third one. We'll start with the one that in a weird way is kind of the least understood other than Dart's theory. Capital D. Dart. Capital T theory. Dart theory, exactly. I like it. Okay, so what happened? I'm going to summarize it and then we'll dig in. Is people were quitting in this call center at Wipro like crazy. And their customers weren't really being made that happy on a one to ten point scale. They were being made like a six happy. And Wipro wanted to be more like an eight. So they let us experiment with a bunch of people, about 700 people, and we just put them into different conditions. And based on the conditions, we watched them for six months. And that meant that we could infer that our conditions caused them to stay longer or shorter or made the customers happier or less happy. And the conditions were the following. There are three of them. One, pure control. Just do it like you always do it. One where we had them meet with a boss the very first hour, the very first day, and the boss tried to talk about Wipro values and what he's seen. And then they all talked about why they're proud to work at Wipro and what values they're proud of. And in the third condition, they got to meet with a boss that started off by saying, I want to know more about you. I want to know who you are when you're at your best. And because that's the very first hour of the very first day, you could say this is like a different style of onboarding. One is job based, one is pride based, and one is called individualized based or it's strengths based. It's who you are that's unique. And then they got to introduce themselves to their peers. And long story short, we were able to reduce quitting by over 30% in that third group. And we were able to make customers 11% happier in that third group. And the power in this is that we didn't change pay, we didn't change technology, we didn't change the call center rules, we didn't change same script, didn't let them. I mean, to be honest, it's the same job, just randomly assign people. But the power of being recognized for Your strengths on that first day, switch something on. And I could talk about that at length, of course, but that's for, you know, if the people listening have to run out the door right now, that's the thing they need to hear.
- [17:00]
B
That's super interesting. I think we might come back to that a little bit when we get to crafting narratives about purpose. Actually, there's a way in which those two are related. So let's go to the first two that you were talking about. One of them is experimentation and serious play and creating the conditions to expand freedom and creativity. Tell us more about how to create the conditions for experimentation and why.
- [17:26]
A
One of the most important things is that people feel like they can try something without getting hurt if it doesn't go perfectly. So Amy Edmondson would call that psychological safety. And that concept is finally making the rounds. Psychological safety has been in our literature for about 30 years. Amy at the head of that. And it just. It's now a penetrating organizational life. So most of our listeners probably would have at least heard about psychological safety. But it's just this idea that I feel safe expressing something about myself that's unique and trying something that I don't know if it'll work perfectly. So that's one of the most important things. I think a second thing is the idea that you have some inkling or some goal of what might work better, almost like a hypothesis in your own brain. You don't have to call it that, though, because I'm a researcher. I think of it that way. But you just might have this inkling that. I bet you this would work better if X An example of that in my own world would be. A lot of professors stand behind the desk when they teach. And I think it's like a way of creating safety for themselves by putting literally a physical structure between you and the audience. But some of us, for me for sure, started to experiment with that. And it is a little risky because you sort of are putting yourself in ours. Like, then you're in kind of like a pit, and there's people all around you, and you're in the middle. And that's a different feeling. It feels a little less in control. And so to do that would take a bit of an inkling that I'll bet you, that would bring me closer to people. That might make me a little more approachable or something like that. It might resonate better. And then the experiment, and if you will, the play is just going out there and trying it and seeing what you learn and seeing what Feedback comes to you. That's a really, really basic idea, but it's an important part of it is having that inkling or that thing that you want to test. A third thing that I want to put out there is that you can bring in other tools. Those tools could be as simple as prototyping materials of boxes and tape and markers, where you build a prototype or like a minimal viable product and you just kind of like mess with it a little bit rather than just think about it. And the Spaghetti Tower is a real classic example of that. People will probably know about where give people some spaghetti and some tape and a marshmallow. And you say, just kind of put this thing up. And if they think about it really long, they do really badly. And if they just get in there and start messing with it, because a lot of people don't understand the tensile strength of spaghetti and how you can use the tape until you mess with it. And once you start messing with it, then you realize, okay, okay, that won't work. At the minimum, I got to blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, oh, of a sudden you're making progress instead of just thinking. In the book, I actually mentioned one of these things about using Legos. It's LEGO Serious Play. And this was a white goods manufacturing plant in Italy where they wanted to teach lean manufacturing. And just telling people that stuff is pretty hard to do when they've spent a whole career doing it another way. Instead of lean manufacturing, they were doing individual based, push it out. As long as you do your little bit with quality, you get paid. And there's this new approach called lean manufacturing. It's not new anymore to us, but it was new to them, which is don't give them the little piece you made until they ask for it. So what they did is they just created a safe place to play by getting outside of the factory and not building washing machines and dishwashers, but instead building little LEGO cars. And what they were playing with was lean manufacturing techniques. The principles of lean manufacturing is the way they built the cars. But rather than like scratching a dishwasher or putting in the rotor wrong, we put the chassis on wrong on a little piece of Lego. And it, it's actually kind of fun, you know, because you can laugh and you can learn. So those are a couple of ideas.
- [21:28]
B
So one of the things I learned in reading that section was the low risk environment. And also that a problem where you fail quite frequently is actually pretty rewarding so long as it's low risk. And so like, let's Take the game of solitaire. The game of solitaire, I think if you're playing it strictly, you lose 10 out of 11 times. But it's very low risk and people will come to do that for fun. So creating an environment in which there is less risk. And I like the LEGO example because you could actually take it off the manufacturing line and you could play and you could make that into a play situation where nothing bad was going to happen. Although those folks actually thought they might lose their job in that story. So there was something a little bit serious in the background. Can we talk for a second about traditional performance management systems and the degree to which they encourage or defeat the sense of risk?
- [22:23]
A
Well, Dart, I want to first highlight. This is the bane of the seeking system. This issue that we're going to talk about right now is the stumbling block. It all comes down eventually to the fact that there's a limited number of raises and a limited number of promotions. And so what we've done for whatever 150 years almost is created KPIs and measures in order to control the system and to keep track of, of who's adding and who's subtracting. That may sound really logical and rational. There's nothing wrong or evil or immoral about doing that. A scaled up organization needs controls. Unfortunate side effect of having KPIs is at least two or three. But I'm just going to name a couple. One is you have to kind of set those up in advance. Now, when we used to start doing this, the world didn't change as much. There's that quote out there, that Henry Ford. It was one color for 13 years. There was one way to make the Model T in one color. And so there wasn't a lot of change going on in terms of the same thing. And so if you could just set a production quote of put this screw on that lug net 333 times. Either you did or you didn't do that. And then if you're at 220, you're fired. If you're at 360, you get this bonus. And so, yeah, that worked. We're now in a world where it changes a lot more. So if we set the KPIs in January, by June, they're kind of extraneous. And by next January, when we go to check, we're running a different business model. We've had Covid and there's been two spinoffs. It's just like it's a really hard game to play. And the pressure that that puts on people is I know that I should be trying this new approach that customers want, but I'm getting rewarded for this other thing that I was told to do last year. That's one problem. Another potential problem is how companies maximize on efficiency. So once we know that there's 333 lug nuts to be turned, or 19 presentations that can be done in a month, or whatever number of papers you need to be able to grade in a day, once we sort of really maximize that, we get people up at the red line. Peak performance. Playing takes time. Learning something new takes energy. Who has that time? A lot of us go to sleep with 19 emails that we haven't answered. We sort of like we can't quite get to the KPIs, even if that's all we do. And so the idea of shutting down the line and going to play with Legos for a week, yeah, that sounds great on paper, sounds really fun. It's just that we won't get our bonuses, we won't hit our KPIs because, like, we're at 99.6 at the end of each day. And that some of those problems are what makes traditional setups of organizations not have a lot of taste or room for that inefficiency of learning.
- [25:22]
B
Yeah, reminds me a little bit. I don't know if you've run across this. Was it, I'm going to make this up, I'm going to get this wrong. I think it was Berta Lanphy who came up with the idea and systems of the law of requisite variety, which is any system needs to be able to have enough variety inside it to be able to deal with the variety of the environment in which it. It exists. And so one of the things about just focusing on sameness and efficiency is that you lose the variety of the system. You get it so tight that any external variety makes it just fail.
- [25:59]
A
There's this phrase that says efficiently building what nobody wants anymore. Insert Kodak. You know, sort of like sometimes we get so good and efficient at doing something that we act like it's right. And so we get so good that we forget to watch the world as it moves away from us.
- [26:19]
B
Yeah. And also on one end of the performance system you have rewards. On the other end of the performance system you have the stick, which is if you fall below a certain level of performance, you're going to get fired. And so on that end you have fear. And one of the sentences in the book that I liked a lot is that fear is the Kryptonite of the seeking system.
- [26:41]
A
Yeah, it's also really fair to say that bad is stronger than good. It's really powerful. And sad to say this, but there's like Kahneman and Tversky have shown this risk aversion because, like, finding 10 pounds or $10 feels great, but it doesn't feel as great as losing $10 or 10 pounds hurts. Or like, another thing is it takes a long time to build trust, but you can destroy it in just a minute. And the bad and our sort of brain stickiness to negative, to fear, to threat, to worry, to anxiety, those loom pretty heavy and large. Whereas curiosity and enthusiasm are great. Once we're safe. Once we're safe, we can play. And now we just come full circle around. So anytime that there's this threat or this specter of not, by the way, I just want to say this. Yeah, losing our job, because right now that's real contemporary. Google's never done this before. There goes 12,000 people. Disney, hey, why not jump on the bandwagon? It's time to fire people. That's going to create an enormous amount of threat within those organizations that they won't bounce back from very quickly. I hope they don't need a lot of innovation anytime soon, put it that way. But it's really interesting how being fired is a problem. Yes, but so is not being seen as a player anymore. Kind of not really on the inner track of the sort of who's going to get promoted, who's the fast trackers, who's getting kind of ostracized, so not quite fired, but just losing some reputation and status, that's painful stuff. And then there's the idea of if I get a raise or a bonus enough times, simply not getting it is now a stick because we tend to live up to what comes in. There's punishment feelings even in rewards that we don't get. That's a really weird thing about the human brain.
- [28:36]
B
I happen to have worked for companies where everybody except me, I think have always gotten straight A's. And so you get into a population where you're going to get a B and it feels like. I'm not sure if it's a threat exactly, but it's. Or a punishment, but it doesn't feel good. And it can definitely have a negative effect. And I'm not sure B's getting a B gives you fear, but it's definitely a diminution of what you hope for.
- [29:03]
A
And maybe some of that is due to social comparison because we look around to judge ourselves. And maybe some of that is an anxiety that I could be more or I should be more. But I agree with you that it's not a good feeling to be sort of the smaller fish in a bigger pond can leave us feeling like we got to catch up all the time. But I just want to reiterate that this whole topic of how we judge performance, there's no easy answer. There really isn't an easy answer as long as that we need controls and we can't manage through trust. For instance, say it's 1800 and you have a cobbler who made shoes and it's basically three people working there and they're related. You can kind of see each other all day and you all watch the customer come in and you all make the shoes together and you all hand them. There's a sense in which you don't really need KPIs, because people are right here. The KPI is trust. And so once you don't have Trust, instead of three people, you have 30,000 people. Now you need some rules and some policies and you need some controls. You need to be able to know who's helping and who's hurting. As long as we're into the game of scale, I don't know a way around it. There's a couple of key rules that seem to work better with this eking system. But I haven't met the organization yet. That is like killing this. Just got it perfect.
- [30:26]
B
Yeah. I'll tell you, having run portfolios, so project portfolios, one of the things that they tend to do is you tend to invest in certainty. And certainty is always easier on the cost side than it is on the value side. So one of the things that portfolios do is because why would you invest in something that has that's risk adjusted value is variable. And also dollars are so much easier to count than utils. I'm going to make up. Right.
- [30:57]
A
I've never even seen a util.
- [31:00]
B
I know. And so what kind of leadership is necessary to create an environment in which a seeking system thrives?
- [31:10]
A
The quick word is humble leadership. That's the sort of the phrase that pays these days. But a humble leader is one that doesn't start with the assumption that he or she has the answer or knows the best way to produce the right outcome, but is prepared to set mission and develop common sense of purpose that we're moving towards something we all care about, but then is better at listening to. What do you think is the best way to get there and what resources do you need in order to get better at what you do? And are there ways that we could try a new way and maybe learn how to optimize this for the purpose and not optimize it for the metric? And they're also more curious so that it's not like they're playing a game and saying, I'm going to act like you're empowered because then I'll get your trust and then you'll do what I say. There's more of a curiosity that I wonder if it actually will work better. Let's try it. And there's also a greater vulnerability in a humble leader, because a humble leader doesn't think they always get it right. They are pretty aware of and are willing to talk about times and when they stumbled on reality and had to catch themselves and adjust. And so they're willing to share that. And that's called normalizing learning. You normalize learning by showing that even the leaders have to do this and that it's just what humans have to do in order to learn is stumble. There's a really good stream of evidence now, say 1820 studies suggesting that these leaders build teams and organizations that are more adaptive and that win. They build mindsets within the team to sort of go for the gold rather than play it safe. And so across time, these are the leaders that you'd want to bet on because they build teams that become winning machines. They pursue excellence and relevance rather than KPIs that we came up with last year that that may not actually solve business problems anymore. I was just going to throw out a phrase called discretionary effort. And I know you know it. Discretionary effort is one of the most valuable goods or qualities within an organization because it means that the individual employees are willing to try even though they're not told. They're willing to try to help the organization win, even though the leaders might be telling them to do something that they can kind of see as hurting the organization. And a good soldier will just ignore reality and hit the KPIs, but they'll be destroying organizational value even while they're getting their stock price appreciation and their bonuses. A worker that's willing to almost be an entrepreneur, some people call this innovation in every seat, any place. It could be a line worker or a call center operator, or it could be a middle level manager. But in all these different roles we can watch the world and say, I can kind of sense that that direction is better. And they're willing to sort of speak up and take the risk. Of disturbing the normal in order to create progress toward the right mission or the right goal. And I call that discretionary effort.
- [34:24]
B
Yeah. And there's something. Something my team does, which is that I feel like we're always trying to invent or redefine extraordinary. Like, what does it mean? So the team is involved and. And so it's not a KPI, it's like. But it's also not a fixed thing. We are not completely stable on what extraordinary is because part of what we're inventing is our definition of extraordinary together. Is there a bias against creativity?
- [34:52]
A
It's such a great question. I almost hate that question, but it's so relevant. So it appears that in our human brains, creativity sometimes gets bound up with not trusting it. And there's a series of research studies that suggest that we, especially as leaders, kind of penalize the new and we worry about lack of control and we lose control. And yeah, that's kind of a painful truth in a way, but like a quick way to say it is. The first person that said that the earth is not the center of the universe wasn't treated real well. When you're saying things that are outside the box of normal thinking, even if you're right, you're not always carried on the shoulders across the finish line, or you might even be beheaded.
- [35:39]
B
Yeah. And it's easy to see as a leader. It's easy to see somebody on your team who's doing something creative or suggesting something new as a critique of your past leadership. Right.
- [35:49]
A
That's right. That's a painful one.
- [35:51]
B
I'm not sure if that's the source of it, but it could be.
- [35:55]
A
So those are two right there. Those are two really good reasons why creative new approaches or innovative new methodologies might get a person hurt and why in a lot of organizations, the response is to kind of COVID your ass. Just wait to be told because then you can just blame your boss. That builds an organization that's a bit lethargic, you know, that builds an organization that doesn't adapt as quickly.
- [36:24]
B
And it also built an organization, something I experience all the time, where innovation is something you sneak around to do, which is you can make it low risk by just not telling anybody about it. And until you actually have evidence that it's going to be successful. Hi, everyone. Here are some gift ideas inspired by guests on Work for humans. For the people in your life who like a challenge, try the exquisite puzzles of Stumpcraft's Jason Robillard, who told us all about the essentials of great puzzle Design for something seasonal. You might like Mistletoe Market, but my favorite is called Queen Bee. If someone you know is taking work way too seriously, help them to lighten up with Greebroff's shiny new book. Today was fun. If you have a friend who's at C in the pace of change, I recommend Embracing Uncertainty. It's the latest book from Margaret Heffernan, in which she tells us the techniques that writers, musicians and artists use to thrive in an unpredictable world. And the one that I'm definitely going to put in my own stocking this year. Joe Pine's new book, the Transformation Economy, is now available for pre order.
- [37:47]
A
Yeah, there's something nice about that though. You know, there's something nice.
- [37:51]
B
It's fun.
- [37:52]
A
If we wanted to turn that around and make it legitimate, it's almost like build your prototype during bootleg time.
- [37:59]
B
Yeah.
- [38:00]
A
And if you say you're a leader, you might even be able to get your team to try new approaches without asking for permission first. And if they're on your side and they're kind of willing to learn along with you, maybe don't open up the full transparency until you have something half baked.
- [38:17]
B
Right. And by the way, being subversive is a part of the game and it can actually be a lot of fun. It's actually more fun sometimes to be subversive with a good idea than it is to be to be upfront with it. Partially because if you're upfront with it, people might say no, and then you have an official no. Whereas if you're subversive about it, nobody can say no to you if they don't know about it. And so that's in there.
- [38:38]
A
There's a middle ground here. At least I think this is a middle ground. Once upon a time, I was talking with somebody at intel and they told this incredible story. This was an old timer that had joined from Hewlett Packard and when they joined the organization from hp, it was very key performance index driven. And did you hit your metrics? And so on. And he said when he got to intel at the end of the year, first year, he'd hit all of his metrics and he thought he was doing really great. And his boss was like, what happened here? And he was like, oh, I worked really hard, I hit my metrics. It went pretty well, I guess. He's like, yeah, but you did what you said you were going to do. He was really confused. He's like, yeah, but isn't that the thing? He's like, well, sounds like you didn't really learn anything this year. He said, if we as a company perform the way you perform this year, our stock price wouldn't move, would it? You kind of have to go above and beyond. You got to step outside the box and try something and learn. And it seems like all you did was hit what you thought you could do. And he said his head was just swimming because this is like a new company culture that he didn't really fit into yet because he was thinking you just had to hit the metrics.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah. You sort of have to go back and say, excuse me, who wrote these KPIs? Why wasn't there something here about that other thing? But that's right. Right. Which is. I hate all the boxes that happen in companies. One of the worst boxes, by the way, I think, is role profiles, which is we're going to define what your job is as a role profile. We're going to reward you for the better you are at working, doing what's in the box. If you do something that's outside of that box, we can't really see that that's not legible to us. And so we're not going to reward you being bigger than your role. And not only that, we're going to reward everybody for getting more the same because we've set this one definition of what this role is. Yeah, it's incredibly limiting.
- [40:24]
A
Once upon a time, I did that to myself. Mm, really weird to talk about, loud out loud about. I think I made myself into my own robot once where I figured out a way of teaching and a way of publishing, and then I was getting rewarded for that. So I just did more of that for about six years in a row. And I became really. I think I shot off my own seeking system, basically. I think that I made myself an efficient but very dull version of myself that didn't strive, wasn't pushing boundaries, wasn't really learning, but looked great on paper. So it's not just something companies do to us. I think it's sometimes we do to ourselves once we see a line of best fit.
- [41:06]
B
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
- [41:08]
A
I have to be really careful these days, and I am not to do that again. So I'll start up new classes. Just kind of like last year, we just started up a new class called Business Resilience just out of the blue with two other professors. And it's a lot of work. To come up with a new class is a lot of work, but it also helps you learn and it doesn't go as well. The first time because you haven't got your jokes down and your patter, but at the same time you're sort of breathing in fresh oxygen.
- [41:34]
B
Right.
- [41:34]
A
So you have to kind of push yourself.
- [41:37]
B
You're going to need to have a lesson in there on the law of requisite variety. I think it's in there. I think that's a part of the class, right?
- [41:44]
A
Yep.
- [41:44]
B
Let's talk about purpose.
- [41:45]
A
Yeah.
- [41:46]
B
I will admit I really agree with the idea that purpose is a part of the seeking system. I feel like it's been a little bit overused lately and in part because it asks our job to be religion. And if it's taken too far, like we all have to have the religion of the purpose of our company or something like that. So I want to talk about it and I want to poke at it a little bit. So how does it play into the seeking system?
- [42:09]
A
Great. And this one does feel pretty direct to me, which is just if there's this innate drive to learn from the environment and look for cause and effect. When you're a human, all mammals would have that.
- [42:22]
B
Flatworms have that.
- [42:23]
A
It's like a bear that was well fed and had a cave and they were dry and they didn't need anything. They still go out ambling, they still go exploring the water, they'll, like I said before, they'll turn over a log and just go exploring. But for a human, we have all these words, we love a good story. And maybe for a human being, cause and effect turns into this concept of impact. We want to have an impact on the world. I don't know that, by the way. Of course it's untestable, but that's my theory. And what we're really looking for, it seems, is a story about how we have an impact on the world. And the way I like to think of it, which I think you align with is there was a study that was done by Ryan Buell at Harvard University where, and I don't talk about this in the book, but he did this thing where he went to 100 different short order chefs, 100 different sort of cafes, and half of them he put in an iPad at the cook station so the chef could see who he or she was making food for. They just ran a camera in those half of the restaurants, the chefs liked their job a lot better. They liked their job like 18% better. Because even though the pay was the same, there's this non financial reward of seeing your impact. You know, you're making breakfast for them, you're Making pancakes for that person, that may not seem like it matters. It just does. Humans like it. And then the second thing is they started making the food better and more customized so that the customers became 13% more satisfied with the food. That was published in Management Science. That's a really, really well done study. Like one of the things they found that they did for breakfast time, for example, is rather than batch process eggs, where they know there's going to be a bunch of eggs, so you start cooking eggs and as people order them, they slide them onto the plate. What they started doing is they would hear the way they wanted it cooked and then make it over easy or over medium.
- [44:14]
B
Got it.
- [44:15]
A
The purpose that I'm bringing up there is not like the purpose you'd put on the masthead of a website or on a coffee mug. We deliver exceptional human health. And that's Starbucks or something. You know what I mean? The purpose here is I see my impact on the world. I see that that person, I'm making breakfast for them. I've got lots of studies and lots of stories to talk about there. Now, that's not to say that those can't align, but sometimes that corporate purpose, the one that you said is getting a little overused right now. Sometimes people have a very hard time aligning with it right now. One of my clients is Rolls Royce and one of their missions, one of their purposes is to be carbon neutral by, I think it's 2043. And one of the worries is they make airplane engines. A lot of the people that make airplane engines are like, well, we don't know where this leaves us. I once did a bunch of work with Rabobank Netherlands Cooperative Bank. They do banking for food because they come out of an agricultural farmer kind of cooperative model. That's like their origins as a bank. And so, yeah, banking for food sounds great. Eliminating world hunger, it sounds great. But a lot of people that work there, they're like, but we're investment bankers. That sounds great. I just don't do that. How do I fit in? And I think the missing link here is this concept of personalizing the purpose so that people have a line of sight on what they do eight to ten hours a day. And the effect on the world on other people.
- [45:47]
B
Yeah. So in terms of design of work, I think this is a really important one, which is making visible the effect. And I've spoken about this on other interviews, but there's, there's this idea in design of a detect, which means that you've completed the task successfully. And it can be very small, which is that this pen, if I put the cap on it and it goes click, the click tells me I've completed the action. You have a pen that doesn't do that and you don't like it.
- [46:11]
A
It just kind of squidges on.
- [46:13]
B
If it just squidges on, you know, because am I done? I don't know. But if it goes click or if your phone goes click when you push the button on the camera and makes a little shutter sound, you know, it's worked. And so I did a cube study where I went and I looked at people's cubes with the idea that what are people doing to modify their environment? That shows me what the out of box work experience is failing to do. And one of the most common things that we found in the cubes was thank you notes, especially ones signed by multiple teams, like multiple team members. And that for them was something that they wanted to hold up as the, as the detect that they had succeeded at their purpose of helping others.
- [46:55]
A
And that's the pen click. I like the pen click analogy, by the way. And I also think that the idea of reminding ourselves of our personalized purpose, of the impact that we've had on. And then the reminder might be these thank you notes that I, you know, I did that. Or it might be, it might be, like I said, to have a screen that allowed you to see the people that you affected. Here's another example. Once upon a time I was working with the Pentagon and there was an accounting part of the organization. And we were trying to figure out how they could become more streamlined and kind of like a value add. And so I was working with them and I asked them, well, who uses this? Who actually uses these reports you put together four times a year? And they said they didn't know a bunch of stuff they had to do and tables and table contents and pretty pictures and graphs. I said, well, I think we better start there. So it actually was not totally easy to find them because a whole different part of the organization used those as decision making tools in next quarter's budget. So I just brought one of those people in and that already started kind of good because now we're putting the people who do the work with the people that use the work. And they're just having a conversation about that. There's this one thing that he's talked about, there's one table. He's like, this is really valuable. This table essentially tells us what we're going to be doing next time. And so it's really, really valuable. Here's how we use it. And then they were kind of warming up as a group and one of them says, what about this one? This is a really good table. And the decision maker said, I don't know, we don't use that one. What do you mean you don't use it? We spent two weeks on that. And he said, well, yeah, that's just not something we use. We don't know why you do that. And then they were kind of getting a little surly and they said, well, then we'll just stop doing it. Then you're like, okay, that's cool. Because none of us have ever looked at it. It probably was just some little table that 17 years ago some four star admiral said, I want to take a look at this. And then it became locked in as part of what we got to do. But unless you're in direct connection with the people that you serve, how would you know what your impact is? You just throw a quarterly report out into the world. And so it sounds so simple. This took no money at all, but they were able to trim like 35% of the work out because nobody was using it. It was just busy work. It was just busy, empty work. That ended up being a big thick folder that they just had to page through to get to the couple of things they actually used. I've just got so many of these sorts of examples. Some are actual studies published in top journals that are peer reviewed. Other ones are just experiences that I've had, like out working with pharmaceutical companies that bring in patients, that kind of stuff.
- [49:33]
B
I now have a bunch of loose questions that are not structured.
- [49:37]
A
Good, let's do them.
- [49:39]
B
What does it mean to have work feel like real life?
- [49:42]
A
The quick answer is that it matters, but that's not helpful. I understand, but just not a bullshit job. A lot of people feel like they have a bullshit job, which would mean kind of unnecessary, but it pays well. Yeah, I like how quickly you accept that too. Don't.
- [50:00]
B
Oh yeah, I accept that immediately. Absolutely. But there's also a friend of mine said about performance management, he says, you know, 11, 11 months out of the year I'm trying to solve hunger and then one month out of the year I'm trying to game the performance management system. And he said these two things are completely disconnected and the real life part of that system is the one where he's trying to achieve the purpose. And then there's the measurement of the system, which doesn't feel like real life to him.
- [50:33]
A
Yeah, something about Work that can feel artificial in terms of your behaviors or being watched and judged for something different than is valuable. And you can know that, but you also can know that money's important. So I'm just going to do the thing. And I think all of us can identify with those moments. But then there are other moments when, at least in my job, you really can feel from a feedback loop that you're doing something valuable and important, like a couple of ones. Everybody has their own. But in mine, when I publish a paper in a journal that nobody reads, Journal of applied psychology, 99% of the world will never even hear of that journal, much less my article. You could say that doesn't matter. But then over 15 years, it might get cited 3,000 times, and then people might use the scale. And so I watch that. I watch my sort of Google index and nobody else does. I mean, it's just like. But I notice I do it because that kind of helps me see that it matters. And If I've got 30,000 people that have read my articles and use them, that somehow shows me that that is not an empty cycle. Another one, obviously, is grading. That's like bullet to the heart kind of feedback. When I'm in the room and it's going well, you're almost floating on a cloud. The intensity of the learning exchange, it's sublime. It's artistic. I would pay for it. I would pay for that feeling. But then when it's not going well, it really is corrupt. You know, it's sort of like when I'm being boring and two or three people are already asleep and nine others I can kind of see around the room are buying their airfare and I've just lost them. It is just. It's nearly debilitating. And so that feedback of like, I'm not accomplishing my mission of putting more living into life at a broad level, but helping these people become better leaders in a more specific level. It is. It almost makes me ache inside. And I have to look for those elements of my job because those aren't how exactly how I'm rewarded or evaluated. I'm evaluated on whether I get a publication this year. I don't really get a reward if that's cited in the next 20 years.
- [52:50]
B
That's interesting. That certainly results in the whole sort of. The whole sort of publishing mill out there for logging credits. Well, this is actually a good time to ask this question, which is, what do you hire your job to do for you?
- [53:03]
A
I was thinking about that a little bit. First answer is it's such a good way to ask the question that I'm almost confused by it. But I can tell you that one of the things I know I use my job for is to give me fresh thoughts, because I know, for instance, I was with a group called Sage. They do kind of accounting software and so on, on Tuesday. And they were so with it, so on it, so smart that as we were talking about the stuff that I apparently know a lot about, because they were here at London Business School, I felt I was learning a lot. I felt like the rapport was good enough that they were feeding me ideas and books that I might want to read. And it was a really great exchange. And I walked out of there with a couple of books I'm going to read and a couple of ideas that I didn't already have. I think that that's one thing that happens, and I don't know if that. Why don't you give me some feedback? Is that sort of what you're asking, or can you sharpen me a little bit in terms of answering better?
- [53:59]
B
Well, sure. I don't want to lead the witness here, but yeah, I mean, in other words. So you just described something that I would call part of the seeking system, which is that you're out there and you're harvesting ideas and you are assembling those into a more and more robust worldview, and that is something that compels you. And so it's a part. It's a design. I'm thinking of it as somebody building a product. If I were building a product for you, it would involve that, and I understand it deeply because I do a podcast for exactly that reason, which is it's a way for me to read books I like and then reach out to people who fascinate me and talk to them and actually ask them all the questions I have related to their. Whatever they've written. So, anyway, yeah, I totally get that one. But there might be other things. An example is you've already said is I hire my job to see others shine. So this was one I heard fairly recently. So it's close to what I thought you were saying when you said, I can go into a classroom and I can light it up and it's magic and it's art, or I can go into a classroom and it's dead. Well, there's something there that you hire your job for, and I don't know what it is, but that thing is something that you get from work that's beyond pay or anything else.
- [55:23]
A
Absolutely. And there's two things right there. And I've got one more idea for you. There's two things, though, in the thing you just said. One is that I hire my job to give me that feedback about what lands. So best way to know if a book is going to come out of an idea or an HBR is going to come out of an idea is if I can get people writing and looking up at me and being kind of lean into it and as opposed to just waiting for that next. And so it's almost like a comedian testing material. I think I would hire my job for that feedback about how good the ideas are. And that's one thing. And I would also say that in my other part of my job, and this is the sort of academic writing, not the book writing, but the academic writing, I would say that I hire my job to keep me abreast of changes in that literature, because I don't. This is so. I would not read those articles unless I needed to. It's just. Just like everybody else in the world. They take a long time and they're dry. And I probably would just read a book, but because I have to really understand exactly where that literature is in order to add to it, that keeps me right at the cutting edge. I need to be reading this stuff as it comes out so that I can stay in front of it. And so that if I stopped publishing, I would stop. That level of relevance, that sort of.
- [56:43]
B
Heightened level of relevance, that's a tricky one, right? Which is that. I don't know. I'm not sure I've run across that one before, expressed in that way. Which is I hire my job to keep me relevant. Which is. Which is in there, right?
- [56:57]
A
Yeah, for sure.
- [56:58]
B
Which is I'm at the forefront, I'm in the gang, I'm a player. You mentioned that earlier, falling, you know, losing your. Your position as a player. And I've run across a couple of different things that might be adjacent to that, but I think that's a little bit expressed a little bit differently. And you did also mention something that as a design attribute of your work, maybe your school already does this, which is that if it could bring you fascinated students who love your subject as much as you do versus students who are just who are getting a grade or something like that, easy to light up. What does your job cost you?
- [57:36]
A
Well, if I'm not careful, I think it's more almost like if I'm not careful, it can cost me because I'm like in the mafia. When you get Made. It feels like once you've sort of become a full professor, you almost feel like you're made. So it is pretty psychologically safe that way. But I would say that if I'm not careful, I do repeat too much, like I was alluding to earlier. And then it costs me excitement. It costs me, for example, if I teach the same class in the same way, say, the fifth time, it costs me in the sense of having to jazz up for it almost to go in there and make a show of it for whatever reason, that makes me upset somehow. It's hard to explain, but it feels like a cost. Almost like surface acting. Dart. Rather than me having that smile and sort of being drawn in and being emotionally involved, I have to act that way. I know it's what students want. It's more work. I go home. Ugh. My jaws are a little more sore. I notice that I. Yeah, there's just certain signals that I can feel that that wasn't maybe as authentic of a performance. I've done that one one too many times.
- [58:49]
B
You're a method teacher, like a method actor.
- [58:52]
A
I think that's right. Hey, Dart, I'll give you a personal, I mean, a real, real time example. When you asked me about the wipro, I went through that real quickly. That ordinarily would have been 10 minutes, but I've talked about that one so many times that I'm happy to. I'm always happy to unpack when asked. But the just pitching it, I didn't want to fall into that exact trap.
- [59:16]
B
Right. It's easy.
- [59:17]
A
In a minute or two, I'm happy to talk about it. And then any question you ask that's authentic. But to take 10 minutes and really play it out. And I know the things that would really make people lean in, it's just. I've done them one too many times. I need some new stories.
- [59:31]
B
Here's a question I have never asked before, and I just decided to start asking it. What medium do you work in and why?
- [59:39]
A
I'm going to say human emotions. I work in the medium of human emotions. I have learned that learning does really well in an environment where there's laughter and trust and freedom, a feeling of freedom. It is a psychological safety brought into the university and into my classroom so that rather than feeling judged and evaluated, I want people to feel kind of liberated and free. And I somehow do that through emotions, just like in the book. I have ways of prompting and provoking curiosity and enthusiasm. And some of that is modeling some of that, as you said, it's method teaching in the sense that I, by bringing that into the room and being that I am modeling and, and creating a contagion.
- [60:25]
B
First of all, I'm so surprised you could just answer that question since I never asked it. Sometimes I think, wow, that might be a real stumper.
- [60:31]
A
Well, it might be for other people, but I think, I think about that sometimes.
- [60:35]
B
Yeah. And where I hope to take that eventually is like why is one medium better than another? But, but before I do that, what's your intellectual frontier right now? What's beyond your knowledge? What's just out of reach that you're reaching to understand right now?
- [60:54]
A
Well, that's great. One of them is going to be a little woo woo and we'll start there and then one of them is a little bit more refined and defined.
- [61:02]
B
I just want to say that's a, it's a disclaimer you have to make when you're, I think when you're in academia.
- [61:08]
A
I think that's right. And a bit of a evidence based scientist. Well, for me I think an awful lot these days about contagion. And we now know there's about 25 years of evidence that there is emotional contagion and that exists. Sometimes it feels to me that it doesn't have to just be in the room. And by that I don't mean using zoom and other mediums and mechanisms. Sometimes I almost feel like it's in the air and maybe there's a zeitgeist or something that's happening in the community or happening almost like emotions have a way of charging electrons in the actual space and that different people feel that it's not that you've watched the person, it's that you're just part of that environment. I'm intrigued by it. That's all I can say. It's plausible. But it also is quite woo woo because we don't have the maths or the sort of technology or even the mindset to think of the physics of emotions. And it could obviously just be coincidence and coincidental kind of things. But sometimes a person that I'm very close with will feel something that I feel around the same time. And she's in Kentish Town and I'm here at London Business School. And it just seems like. Here's another thing though, that's right in between those two. I've learned recently that dogs smell sadness and they understand there's a chemical around sadness. And so I'll be up in the bedroom and say a daughter of mine will be having A hard time. The dog will kind of come up and check us out to make sure it's going fine and that sort of a thing. I'm intrigued by the frontier of what we learn but don't know we're learning. It's the equivalent dart of looking at somebody for an authentic smile through these Duchan muscles that crinkle. But you don't have to know the phrase dushan muscles and you don't have to know you're looking for it, but you are. You're judging a person's realness based on factors that you don't know are existing and they're operating at a subconscious level.
- [63:11]
B
Yeah, I just used the phrase this last week that emotions are contagious. And it's important when a company's going through hard times to recognize that they are. And then the question is how you show up as a manager to help with those contagious emotions. That has to be method, which is you actually have to don't come along and just pretend something. You actually have to figure out a way to feel positive about the situation that you believe. Because otherwise the desean muscles, which I've never heard of before, are not going to be firing, they're going to be.
- [63:46]
A
Crinkling the right way.
- [63:48]
B
Right. And so yeah, I mean that I get that. And there's another person that I've worked with, Shalini Verma, who she speaks on the podcast about trauma informed management and how much of how we respond to things around us is driven by trauma. But then when you can get away from that, you get enough, you can get more signal in and you can use intuition in ways that you might have not otherwise been aware of. There's definitely something there. That's an interesting space.
- [64:19]
A
There's just enough evidence that it's not all woo woo, but it is not certainly understood yet. And this across time and space element is almost like mirror neuron kind of stuff. It's almost like what we're learning about that doesn't seem plausible, except it works that way. It's almost like quantum mechanics. It can't actually be that way, except it is. Sometimes I think that there's stuff like that around human psychology and human emotion reading that we're just not giving ourselves credit for yet. We can't see it because we aren't willing to admit that it could work that way.
- [64:55]
B
Well, that's true. And there's also a possibility that you're being exposed to the same news. You're essentially being that you share in common experience even Though you're not sitting right next to each other.
- [65:08]
A
That's right.
- [65:09]
B
Okay, what's the second one?
- [65:10]
A
Second one's a lot closer to my own job and evidence based stuff. But it's essentially the personalization of work. I mean job crafting around your strengths. I mean the idea of personalizing your purpose and your sense of meaning and what matters to you, the idea that you're working from home a lot more days now, the sort of just crafting work around your lifestyle and your strengths and so on, and then scaling that up so that the organization is thriving, you're necessarily giving up controls. There's less standardization of job. If standardization is lower, then how do the KPIs look? If we don't know what the KPIs are comparable, how do we give people raises and bonuses? It's that tension between scaled up and personalized. But trapping the energy that's unleashed. You're unleashing human potential, you're unleashing energy because people just care a lot more and they like it a lot more and they're more authentically involved in it. So there's all this energy, it's unleashed. But then there has to be a way to scale that by capturing it and aligning it.
- [66:17]
B
Yeah.
- [66:18]
A
And I don't know that we have the organizational form. At the beginning you said you might mention like humanocracy and that may some of that stuff, ambidexterity and all this, that stuff aligns with it. But I still don't know that we have the organizational form to scale that. Okay, four minutes, solve it, go.
- [66:39]
B
Four minutes. No, I mean that's what this show is about. It's about creating that organizational form. And actually one of the resistances that comes with this is if you say, look, we're personalizing stuff for the workforce in particular. And then I say there's about 30 different things that people hire their job to do for them now. 32. Thank you. And so people say, you know, how can we possibly scale personalization? And my answer is, you've already got scale in place. It's management and maybe it's leadership.
- [67:09]
A
Right.
- [67:10]
B
And managers are in a position to have the level of sensitivity and to design an experience of work that is quite personalized if they are equipped to do it.
- [67:19]
A
It's a great answer. If you think about management as a technology, then it just works. You could even say that's how they earn their money. And then the whole thing just works. Absolutely. And maybe for whatever reason I'm tripping over it, Because I know this is like a 1950s distinction, but it's that leadership versus management. It almost feels more like what's needed is leadership instead of management. But those are just probably artificial distinctions, if you know what I mean.
- [67:44]
B
Yeah. Or management that creates leaders of every individual.
- [67:48]
A
That's the best. That's that leadership in every seat thing. That's really, really good.
- [67:54]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So just this week I saw a presentation which was that the purpose of our management training was to help managers drive performance. I was like, we've got the wrong verbs in here. Driving performance is probably not the right word. So thank you very much for coming on the show. Where can people learn more about your work?
- [68:17]
A
I use Twitter to some extent. AnCable1. And I just do like one thing a day about a book or a TED talk or an article. My website is dan-cable.com that's got lots of my talks and things like that that people can go and watch. So I think those are probably two good ones.
- [68:34]
B
Great. Thank you very much.
- [68:35]
A
That was a joy. Thanks for the time. It was great talking with you.
- [68:41]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.