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- [00:04]
A
People are more likely to accept what they think is an unfair distribution, whether that's a raise, a promotion, their pay equity, if they believe the process has been fair and transparent. But quite frankly, in most businesses, some of these core components around level compensation performance kind of happen in this black box, in calibrations or roundtables, and then you're delivered an outcome and people don't really want to tell you why or how. And I think if we're truly going to scale fairness, it's maybe looking at the boring, the unsexy things, and then it's really chros working with their board, working with their executive team to say why this is important on a values level, on an ethics level, but also on a cost component level
- [00:57]
B
welcome to the Work for Humanity Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. This is another in my series of interviews with chief people officers who have taken a product led approach to work. Vanessa Monsecara has been on the forefront of the product led people experience movement for years. Ness began her career in change leadership, usually being asked to step in after a company had already chosen a system or strategy and was imposing it on on the organization. That meant that her job was to get people to adopt it. But again and again she noticed that many workplace systems failed not because people resisted the change, but because the system had never been designed with them in mind at all. So, drawing from agile systems thinking, people leadership, and product design, she began treating work itself as something that could be prototyped and improved in partnership with the working customer. Her move from chasing the change to proactively designing for it led to her CPO roles at Miro and Gorilla, where she led product teams that built team health, high performance and fairness through iterative design. Ness and I talk about what it means to design work intentionally, how product thinking changes hr, and which product design tools Ness and her team use to transform work, how to build fairness at scale, why gardening metaphors are better than building metaphors when it comes to work, and how leaders accidentally shape their organizations through their own psychology. We also talk about AI uncertainty and why the future of work will depend less on new tools and more on how thoughtfully the we design for humans. All right, if you enjoy the show, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I'm very pleased to bring you my conversation with Vanessa Moncicera. Vanessa Monsecara welcome to Work for Humans.
- [03:06]
A
Dart Lindsley thank you for having me super pumped.
- [03:10]
B
You're one of the leaders as a chro in the product approach to people as product approaches to Delivering work as a product, HR services as a product. And you're part of a really quite thriving community now. I think that Luco Mani's been developing around PX and Sapienx. How did you arrive at taking a product approach to people?
- [03:41]
A
I always say this dot the chapters of my career have gone between people and culture and the product tech space. And for the longest time I just feel like I'm a HR person in denial that I'm a HR person. So like fraudulent hr, because I never quite felt like I fit in tech or product or the HR space. But that evolution was I started my career in more of the culture, leadership, development or development space that was in London during the gfc. And I moved back to Melbourne, Australia where I grew up and I joined Deloitte at Big four Consulting. On the my first day they shipped me out to a global mining company for a demerger. And I basically had never worked in tech before. I was googling what is wan, what is lan, what are apps? And we had to build the whole tech function. And I just fell in love with technology back to front. But what I found was my role there was doing strategic change management, a lot of the leadership and culture work. And you got to remember we were building a whole tech function from scratch. So everything from infrastructure, apps, all of it. And I had to do the change management. And what I learned was people come up with brilliant strategies and products and tools without necessarily thinking about the end user. But then I had to do the change management for that. And you know, I often, I've worked on a lot of these projects and after the end I'm quite direct. As an Australian, I said I can't polish a turd. Like if you have not built your strategy or your product with and for people and then I have to go make people love it. Through the change comms and training, I just realized it's never going to work. And then I also figured out, I was like, you're doing these large projects and it was on Microsoft project management software. And I just asked the project manager, I was like, how do you know the timelines and when things interlock and when to deliver? He's like, nurse, we just all make up the dates. I was like, this makes zero sense. Because classic waterfall or large scale technology management, you do all of these requirements and I would see it again and again. It becomes obsolete by the time you build and develop and deliver. And so that's how I got my foray into product and tech, by doing the change management and A lot of the leadership work, having to be the face of this technology to frontline employees. And after all, I just got really tired. I was like, I can't keep doing this. I need to be upstream. And luckily, I was chosen at Deloitte as one of 20 people around the country who were natural sort of design thinkers. And my background is as an organizational psychologist. I hadn't heard of design thinking in the early 2012, 1314, but it was the first time I felt like I could breathe in this organization. So it wasn't just spreadsheets and PowerPoint, it was people talking about user discovery and all of these tools and language like, I know we'll talk about design canvases and focal questioning. And I was like, wow, this puts language and tooling around the way I naturally work as a psychologist, which is build with and for people. It's not rocket science if you want better adoption. Build with and for people, it does half of your change management work for you. Fast forward. I worked in this methodology of human centered design. Some folks listening might be aware of the double diamond. And then I would go and see these beautiful ideas go and die because they'd go into these long executions. Lucky for me, I was put on an agile software development project for a large asset management real estate asset management company. And once again I was doing the change in the leadership work, but it was for agile software development. And I drank the Kool Aid hard. So I was like this Agile way of working. You don't have to pretend you have all the answers. You don't have to have full timelines and interlock them on a project plan. You just say, here's what we think is the increment that's going to work. Here's a broader roadmap, let's test it. And the only reason you do Agile, it's not to go faster, it's to de risk your portfolio quicker because you see what works and doesn't work by shipping small increments of work. I was like, this is magical. And so I pivoted hard and became an agile coach and started working in the Agile space. And then that's where I moved into tech consulting at PwC. Because a friend said, hey Ness, I was going to just go in, I quit Deloitte and I said I'm going to just go and do all of this agile work in sustainability circular economy. But PwC was building up their tech consulting arm after they sold it off in the 2000s and we got remit to build the team that we wanted we got an influx of cash. Our only mandate was go and make money, but build the products and services you want. That's quite unheard of in a Big four consulting firm. And that's where I really started looking at more product management, software development. Everyone these days says they're agile, but back then it was still very much in software development with frameworks like Scrum, xp Less and safe. And that was really where I went deep into product and tech.
- [08:47]
B
Well, and something funny has happened to agile along the way is that it got diluted. The truth is, early agile was more truly agile than just the word that's used today.
- [08:57]
A
Today, yeah. And you know what? It was more human. Like, I know if anyone's read xp, the first book, the first page of xp, which is extreme programming, it's all about people and culture. It's not about programming. And I think anything that gets commoditized and done poorly, people like agile doesn't work. It became a dirty word. I use it to this day because it's actually a mindset and a practice from Lean manufacturing in the 1940s. And it works if you do it well.
- [09:26]
B
When did you first apply agile to people practices? And what I mean by that is designed and delivered something for a people team. Team? Well, it could be a people team, but it's probably for the founder, the COO or something like that. But it's a people service.
- [09:44]
A
Yeah, well, I think initially at a large scale it was for a big telco in Australia. We won a huge project, but really where rubber hit the road was Miro. So most people will know they're a digital whiteboard company. Early in 2020, during the pandemic, they reached out to me in Sydney and they said, hey, we like your background in tech and product as well as the people and culture space. Will you come build culture as a product? Because Asana had written a blog around that, around 2019, 2020, and I said to my husband, look, random digital whiteboard companies reached out in Amsterdam. He's like, yeah, take the interview, the rest is history. Two weeks later I'd signed and we now still live in Amsterdam. And that was the first time where my remit. It was quite rare, perhaps back in the day, they were like, will you come build this? So it wasn't. I had to push for it. I didn't have to convince anyone. That's what I was hired to do. So that was the first time I actually led a team of agile coaches and learning experience designers. And our team was called People Solutions Design how do we build people solutions? So I really had to go from teaching these team members who hadn't necessarily worked in Agile or used human centered design, some of the basic building blocks. Luckily they wanted to do that, they were hired to do that in first how to think in this way. Because everyone, agile people as a product is less about doing and more about unlearning your thinking in how HR can work. So how do you think in this way? And then how do you start building the basic practices of going, what's the true problem we're trying to solve for employees? What is the data telling us from engagement surveys, from qualitative conversations? And then how do we quickly and roughly prototype, which is hard in hr because a lot of people are expecting us to have the solution as well as ourselves in hr, but a lot of our customers, as in the executive team, the board and employees, are expecting us to have end to end solutions because that's what's always been done. But I had to unpick their thinking and just prototype something quickly and just go and test it with a bunch of folks before we do this at scale. So what our main areas were were for onboarding because we grew from 350 to 1,000 people in 12 months. So we had to quickly prototype different onboarding solutions, both from a soft skills perspective and a hard skills perspective. And the second area that we really worked hard on was what we called empowered teams. So Miro, our vision and mission was to empower teams to create the next big thing. So the CEO wanted to really embody that and say, how do we have empowered teams? So then with the Agile coaches, I would look at the data of what teams were in the red in terms of engagement and performance, which teams were in the green and how do we help the team struggling and how do we amplify the teams growing and then we would prototype different solutions based on that data and go and do interventions with those teams. After three months of coaching and interventions where we empowered managers and teams, we'd have 20% increase in team health and 8% increase in team impact and performance.
- [12:59]
B
There's a few things I want to dig into here. One of them is that the thing about Agile is you don't build airplanes with Agile. And the reason is you can't handle the risk, you know, you can't handle iteration. So when you're building an airplane, you model, model, model, test, test, test, model, model, and then you fly it and it's safe. How risk tolerant are people? Practices like onboarding probably pretty risk Tolerant. But do you find that most are risk tolerant enough for an agile approach?
- [13:32]
A
I think every single people process can be designed to some agree as a product, it's a product and agile is just the methodology to get there. Plus human centered design doesn't matter about the frameworks. You can call it whatever you want. The question is are you asking what the user need? Is are you creating some sort of draft that you can test and then are you delivering and learning? Who cares what the methodology is called? So I think where it's we need to be a little bit more risk averse, if you like, is compensation and reward because you don't wanna go, oh, okay everyone, here's our new comp bands and process. Oopsies, that didn't work, let's redesign that. But what we did in my last role was we said to people when we designed both performance and compensation, they're the ones where I think you have to be a little bit more risk averse. Cause no one comes to work for free. Quite frankly. They do want a transformation which you and I talk a lot about, but they're there to be paid and they're there to grow and feel a sense of efficacy and learning. And so they're the ones that hit people on the heart level the most is their compensation, their performance. So how we looked at is where do we have to be more compliant and regulatory, where do we want to be fair in these areas? However, once we deliver the first version that we think is a little bit more robust rather than, if anyone knows the term sfd, shitty first draft, those you don't want it to be too shitty first draft, you want it to have a level of refinement that you've thought about different levels. So we did that. But when we announced it to the organization, we said just like the product that our technology and engineering and product team ship, this is our first version of compensation philosophy and processes at this company. We also put a little product roadmap on our notion page so they could see different iterations that would come to the compensation philosophy. However, it was an end to end sort of product, if you like, that could stand alone. It wasn't a small increment. So I'd say they're probably the two areas. And maybe the only area that you can't really call a product is employee relations. And here I do love Jessica Svan's work in Built for People. I know she's rethought the naming convention, but she calls it human operations and then people operations. So people Operations is where you can build product and solutions. Human operations is our more classic one to one non scalable work that probably can't be productised. However, what I would coach all of my people, partners in any role or company I've led is find the data and the patterns from the human operations. Because often there is a product and solution underlying those repeated use cases.
- [16:19]
B
There's a pattern that I'm seeing in the series of conversations that we've had with Chros who are taking a product approach. And one is that the organizations they work for were born with a huge degree of design in them. So let's take Miro for example. You say a little digital whiteboard company. That's not how they appear on my radar. The way they appear on my radar is as one of the most beautifully designed products. It's a wild thing using Miro because it has features where when you use them you're like, oh, I never noticed that. I'd been annoyed my whole life at how other products do that. And this product, you know, you have to learn a little bit. But it's beautifully designed. So I assume it's led by designers, by people who really understand the design process. And so I'm curious what you learned in particular about empowered teams and the kinds of interventions and it's important on a lot of levels. Why would Miro care about empowered teams? It's partially because if you're a product organization, the product leader needs to be quite empowered.
- [17:28]
A
Yeah, I think the first note that you know a lot of these organizations, I know some organizations that aren't design led wanting to do people as a product because it's more the people leaders and the founders that are excited. But I think design minded people who are delighted by beautiful experience in design are more attracted to this way of working. And in Miro's case, like I mentioned, it was the vision and the mission of the company. It was a commercial piece as well, to empower teams to do the next big thing. Where I joke that they were unknown whiteboard company. They were at the start of 2020, but the reason they reached out to me in Sydney is they were going to scale from 350 to a thousand in a year. We were the second fastest growing company in the world after at one of the Amazon business services because everyone needed a way to work together and I'd never entered a company at that point. Like obviously cultures change as you scale, but where the culture was so exciting and the dogfooding of us using our own product like you didn't have to do always external user testing, it was internal. And so that idea of we love our product, we want to use our product was there. However, we faced the same issues as any organization that scale scales, which is as you scale, how do you keep team performance and keep teams empowered. And that was really one of the ethos of the CEO and some of the founders at the time. So the idea was like, we want to do something around this empowered teams, figure it out. And so what we ended up proposing was a two speed solution. Like they can be just quick interventions that anyone can pick up as like self service, a lot of agile ways of working, or like having a team canvas, having retrospectives, like five core exercises that helps your team connect better and figure out what you need to do. And then we had a second speed which was these deeper coaching interventions. And I just think of the juicy budgets we used to have in 2020 when capital was basically free and we got these free funding rounds and I got to have this team of just really world class agile coaches. What we did was we thought, okay, we think the two components of team, high performing teams or empowered teams is team health and team Impact. So we had a different sort of baseline pulse check of how we calibrated a tool around team performance. Team Impact took that at time zero. And then some of the interventions we had were like I said, some of the five basics, like have a team canvas, make sure you're doing retrospectives, making sure that you have a clear visible roadmap. So these were some of the basics. And then when an agile coach went in and worked on that team, they would actually look at the dynamics between the leader and the team members and then build different workshops and interventions. Initially the agile coach would do it for the team, but then it would enable the team and the leader to do it for themselves after that three months to ensure that was self sustaining. And we were really measuring psychological safety, trust, communication, all the foundations. If you look at Lencioni's pyramid of high performing teams, like those bottom layers of foundation, and then yes, we would look at do you have clear okrs and KPI's, does that trickle down from a company level into your actual day to day work in your roadmap and then have interventions to help leaders make that clear. Because the biggest assumption in businesses is we have OKRs and KPIs and that somehow trickles down through all of the work and we're all hitting it where we know that's far from true. So that would be the work of what are some standard practice, we call them Miro ways of working that everyone would do. And then what were these intense practices where teams were crucial to the business in go to market, in engineering, in sales, where we would assist those teams to go further?
- [21:26]
B
What I'm always listening for, and I just heard it, is some people organizations focus 100% of the product design activity on people services, like, let's say, performance management or something like that, which I know you have done, but what you were just describing is designing the work itself, how people are getting work done. And so this is how teams are going to function. When I join a team, this is the kind of experience of work I'm going to have. It's going to be safe, there's going to be trust, we're going to communicate clearly. We're going to have alignment to an outcome. And so this thing of designing those teams, were you able to perceive a difference in how people liked it? Because you can measure sort of the subcomponents. Do I feel psych safety? But then beyond that is like, no, I like my job.
- [22:25]
A
Yeah. Initially, my guess is what it's like to work at Lovable at the moment at Miro, at that time, we would just get fan mail like, we love your product. It's such a great environment to work in as an employee. I'm not gonna lie. We worked my minimum hour day was 12 hours, more like up to 16 hours. But then you get like this mail where just everyone loves your product and what you do and even the customer service complaints are nice enough. Do you know what I mean? So I think that also helps the employee experience because it's a virtuous circle where customers love it, you love what you're doing. I'm not saying it wasn't hard. I'm not saying we didn't have architectural problems, but people loved that. The second component we did is, like you said, we were designing the work. When I first prototyped this, I just prototyped it with my team because I'd entered this random Aussie coming to the Netherlands with a team across the globe. And then I said to the head of growth analytics and growth marketing, hey, they joined the same time as me. Can I just run these workshops with your team? And they're like, yeah, let's do it. And then it scaled company wide from there. And so that was one way of, hey, how do you not just keep it in HR and then convince everyone? How do you get advocates for. That was the first piece. But your question was, did people like it the way it became more sticky, if you like. I'm not saying it was perfect in the scale, but the way it became more sticky was I said to these leaders and team members, like we are scaling from 350 to a thousand in a year. If you think about the number of people you're onboarding weekly, that's insane. And then you give everyone got a Miro board as an onboarding, like so you knew who the executive team were. You get your 30, 60, 90. I said, what a gift that you give someone the team charter and they don't have to guess how this team works. They've got the team's goals, they've got the team's values and behaviors, they've got the team's ethos on psychological safety in that team. So then it became sticky because people had a way to play. And what I want to be really clear on is there might be some people at Miro now going, I don't see that things don't live on for multiple years, just like the Spotify model didn't live on. But for that beautiful moment in time, there was a piece where that really did scale. Because people could see the efficacy of offer not just like a frictionless onboarding in all your documents are done and you understand the company, but it's that next layer of team level belonging and getting up to speed quickly that are like, you know, that onboarding metric from product, the onboarding efficacy and speed to value. How do you do that in a very human centric way where you show people the unwritten rules of what the work is, the workplace and the work product is.
- [25:12]
B
You raise an interesting topic of what I might call change decay, which is especially with a smaller company, you can implement real transformations in how things operate. But as companies grow, it becomes harder and harder and harder to do. You add new people, it dilutes the previous change. And I often say that change, real change in an organization happens face to face. And yet we don't really scale face to face change efforts because that's hard to do. There's a story there. I think it's a story for another podcast about how to set up a system, which I think is the next topic we want to talk about. Well, actually before we get to that, you've advocated for a set of tools that leaders can use when they're taking this approach. One of them that I'd like to dig into is the MVP canvas and your people edition of the MVP canvas. What is the MVP canvas?
- [26:13]
A
So I think a lot of times there is a. If people might be aware of strategies that are in different canvases, like a business model canvas, like how do we build a full business model? It was actually that I was at one of Luke Omani's PX immersive sessions, the one where I first met you Dart in Amsterdam. And as I was going through the session with awesome facilitators, I kept thinking to myself, oh, I keep talking to my team about building the MVP and looking at the minimum viable product or the minimum lovable product and helping them understand do they just want a skateboard or the bike, if anyone knows that analogy. Are you trying to build a motorbike or a car? Generally go for the skateboard first just to get from A to B and test your idea. What I realized is we actually need a canvas around that for the people space. Because whilst a lot of product principles and building principles, when, when we say people as a product, we also mean engineering because we don't just design, we don't just have product management, we also build the product as engineers. There wasn't that full place to help convert those ideas and make them practical in a people space. So I think the canvas was my attempt with the ideation, the ideas and inspiration from that sort of immersive few days to help my people team understand what the problem they were actually trying to solve for. And when I say MVP and you say mvp, we often aren't on the same page. So how do you actually dot vote that actually my MVP for this performance process or this empowered teams is actually more like the scooter or the bike as opposed to the skateboard. Why that's important is because I'd say more so in HR than the other areas. I've mentioned this. There is an inherent fear that if we do not get it right that the leadership team is not going to be happy with us. That employees, because people expect product to develop and iterate, they still the expectation is not there from the HR team. So what I was finding actually a pattern in HR teams is they themselves are scared. So I've done it as well. Like I'm like, okay, I'm just doing an mvp, but I can't stop myself from putting more polish on it. So then that canvas helped me go, okay, I think I need to build and have a conversation with my team that this needs to just be a little bit more premium like MVP2 or like a bike instead of a skateboard. And then we would say very clearly what will be in this mvp? What won't be in this mvp. And then the canvas has a challenge space as well. So you can either do this asynchronously or synchronously. Because the issue with a lot of these canvases and tools is they look like beautiful end products. And the only reason that we use a tool, if we go back to agile, is that we have people in interactions over processes and tools. You only use a tool, so it enables an interaction and a better people conversation. And what I found is a lot of canvases are missing a really clear designated challenge space and ideation space. So that was more of the flavor of what are we trying to build? To what level are we trying to build that? What's in, what's out. But importantly, HR has been trying to legitimize itself for years as a strategic commercial function. So I was like, why don't you just build that into the canvas and get your team members to think about what is the true business value here, what is the cost of operation and build it all into the canvas where it gamifies it and makes it fun. And you're not telling people to be more commercial or strategic, you're just baking it into a simple process.
- [29:50]
B
So I want to describe for people listening what one of these MVP canvas looks like. So first of all, we'll link it in the show notes. There's a publicly available MVP for People canvas that Ness has created. And what it looks like is it looks like a big chart with sub components and each subsection has a title. And one of them is called the DVF framework, which is what's the desirability, viability and feasibility of this particular product or service. There's a section on jobs to be done, which is what's it for? What do people use it for? Stages and scope. MVP estimate. The fidelity scale. I don't really understand what that is.
- [30:37]
A
So I think for us, the fidelity scale, it's kind of the same as will it be a scooter or a skateboard or a bicycle? It's like, to what level of fidelity do we need this?
- [30:48]
B
Nice.
- [30:48]
A
Because when we say any of these terms, two people don't have the same reference in their head. So it's kind of like, how do you vote? Or put a number on that.
- [30:57]
B
I'm sure that the fidelity scale is in part what do we need to create to test our hypothesis that this is going to be a good thing. And so there's probably a lot of discussion about that. The next section is about MVP in out, which is okay to have a Skateboard, you really don't need a motor. So that's out. Right. We're going to say that AI on automation is one. I'm going to come back to that. Challenge zones. So risks and dependencies makes a lot of sense. Cost and constraints and success measures. What I can imagine happening here is that this brings into focus the multi sided nature of work. And you know my argument, which is that all companies are multi sided with employees forming one side. And so when we start looking at jobs to be done, I can imagine that you had multiple stakeholders or customers who had different jobs to get done that needed to be brought together here in this space.
- [31:55]
A
Yeah. So what we would do is we'd have like, cause it's only small canvas, little brainstorm after that and we'd say who are the different customers of this? Because if you just looked at the employee, two different Personas are a manager and then an employee. Like they have different profiles and needs. Sometimes we would look at if it was necessary, maybe like a board member compensation work. Like the board always wants to know what's happening there. So then we would look at the different levels and put different sticky notes for the different customers and then say what the jobs to be done were there and they'd be really crucial in ourselves. If we only have two weeks, four weeks, one quarter, what can we actually do in each of these spaces as well? And then what helped was anyone who has used the double diamond. So you go through a process of what do we need to solve for and then how do we prototype it and deliver it. I'm a big believer, especially in startups and scale ups. Sometimes you just need to shove in the second diamond. You don't have time for user experience and discovery because you're moving at scale. So you've got to know when to just shove in the second diamond and when you're going to do a full experience. So on my last role for compensation, we didn't do a whole discovery around what people thought around pay and transparency. I had to get job architecture and comp in. So we just shoved in the second diamond and then we put a product roadmap in where we would go and do the full end to end design. So that's also something that really helps you as a team work with different stakeholders and manage expectations of what level of fidelity you'll build this to. But you also have a narrative because you use this tool together to have a discussion and debate around this.
- [33:37]
B
And this is not something that you build in a back office. It's something that you build publicly. Everybody has input, it brings people together in terms of what you're trying to
- [33:45]
A
do and the change adoption so much easier. So when we built a performance product, it was the full double diamond. I went and talked to a whole lot of people, frontline managers, executive team to get all of their different thoughts built into Personas. So when we launched the product launch, just like, you know, take the best of whether you like them or not, Apple do good product launches. So taking inspiration there, we launched it as a product and we said this is the performance product. And we showed new parts of every new feature that would be in there. The thing I did was I named and famed at least 20 employees out of 100 employee company who had helped design, build and do the user experience. I also did unit testing between a manager and a leader and two employees on the actual UX experience, on the technology, not just the design. So we were able to help the company adopt this because they saw it wasn't built by hr. We were the conduits putting the frame together. It was actually their peers that had built this and it was built around the voice of people. So the change adoption we ran, some people still didn't like the process. You're not going to get a hundred percent of people on board. Where we did get a hundred was in two full cycles. We got 100% completion of all performance review within the cycle time.
- [35:09]
B
Do you think that this approach fundamentally changed performance management or rebalance it in some way to satisfy more stakeholders?
- [35:22]
A
I think so and here's why. It's not because I just said, oh, I don't know, people are obsessed with performance. I think you and I have seen that. Dar, like nearly every HR conference, people just want to talk about performance management. The reason I did it is not because I was like, oh, let me work on performance. It's because I saw a true business problem. And that business problem was that we weren't seeing business outcomes and business performance. And when I looked at the data before I came in around the performance reviews, this company to their credit did have performance reviews from 50 people. But they did it every quarter on Google forms. And there were three ratings and those ratings were off. Solid and exceptional. And in the first quarter I joined, I reviewed the data and 97% of the company were solid and exceptional. And I was like, there is a big divide. And I told the CEO between what's happening in the performance review and the quality of the feedback where people are having just a lot of warm and fuzzy Conversations and actual cut through in performance that it is building product, shipping product and reaching business targets. So that was why I tackle this. It wasn't just because it's. You do this as a HR thing, I don't have time for that in a scale up. It's got to business impact. So what the change was there as well. We designed different features around soft calibration where we had the compensation. And what I can say is we moved the company from 97% of people being solid and exceptional. If 97% of people were solid and exceptional, I'm not going to force you into a Gaussian or a normal curve. You can deal with that. We should not be forcing people into those curves if there's top performance there. But there wasn't. And so it was a way of empowering at the same time as designing performance. I said to the CEO I need weekly training with managers on managerial ops. Not leadership training, not pie in the sky. The things you do not get taught around compensation, performance feedback, how to have conversations, all the layers that we skip but they are the reinforcement mechanisms. And often you'll find in organizations it's managers fear of not being liked. It's managers and leaders inability to lead self that actually blocks business performance. Because it's that ability to give real feedback in a way that sticks and lands and putting your feelings aside because you actually, if you care about that person, you can give them true feedback that's going to unlock them, help them grow in the business. And so it was a duality of not just designing performance, but designing the managerial behavior to unlock performance.
- [38:07]
B
And if I remember correctly, you made it a much more strongly a development focused process. And it's interesting because that makes teams a transformation offering the kind of transformation offering that many people really want. Yeah, help me become better. And it's not always comfortable.
- [38:33]
A
What I found was that was the goal and I'm going to be perfectly transparent. We didn't fully knock it out of the park, but I think the language matters. We call the whole performance process the performance pause. That came from the discovery interviews where people actually, I don't know why, they loved performance in this company, the whole process. So they're like, I love pausing and thinking about it. So we called it the performance pause. Go fast to go slow. And we had the performance retrospective looking backwards. But we do that so we can have a performance futurespective which is your growth and impact plan. I think that was the hardest part was actually getting people to use the growth and impact plan. We ran different training sessions for managers, we ran training sessions for employees. Cause it's also up to you to create that transformation. And my two cents, my hypothesis is that companies have spent so much time on performance management looking backwards so they can do reward, recognition pay that employees and managers actually don't know how to do growth impact plans in more of this startup scale up environment. My time in big four consulting, it was very well baked in but I think people are not sure actually how to coach for that, how to create that transformational offering. Some leaders have it naturally, but at scale this is a huge opportunity. But we're so focused on fixing past performance that you know, as we've talked about, I love gardening analogies is looking at leader as gardener. How do you know for that employee do you need to repot them in a different team? That person just needs a different environment, different soil, that's a different company. And if you've got a performer, how do you give them more sunlight to grow? And I think those questions, our leaders are moving so fast and the leaders don't like performance because they have to write multiple reviews. They have to think oh shit, what did that person do for the last six months? And so I think they're all fed up with the retrospective that the future spective. Everyone's like I don't have time for this, I've got to make sales and I've got to build and ship product. So I think there's a piece here. If we could get performance to be a little bit more monthly and continuous which is what we developed is like do a monthly check in because then it's going to cut your bias, it's going to make the performance process easier but then it's also going to have more growth conversations. So I think it's just a very, very underdeveloped muscle. And that came out by building the prototype. It's what it actually helped us uncover as opposed to we built it and we knocked it out of the park. We didn't.
- [41:10]
B
You're very passionate about AI.
- [41:12]
A
Yeah.
- [41:13]
B
And I think my first question is there's a lot of reasons to be passionate about AI. What's yours?
- [41:21]
A
I move between extreme passion and glee in using these tools and existential dread. So let's not go into the dark space yet. But when I use it, I don't feel passion when it's taking over our thinking and our writing. But I can use it to help me learn how to do something in tech that I wouldn't have been able to do. I'd always have to ask an engineer. So whether that's vibe coding, whether that's understanding the code, whether that's helping insecurity I have about building automations and I can just be like, hey, how do I do this? Take me through step by step. My background is in leadership and learning and development. When I worked in HR and my passion, my goal over the last 15 years was imagine if you had individualized learning pathways scaffolded around every employee and that is now possible. Whether they use the AI and build it around themselves, whether we have learning LMS tech around that. It's like imagine at an adult level, let alone what happens for children. Now think about people's children, nieces, nephews, when we were kids, some people are ahead of the curve, some people are behind the curve, but everyone gets taught the same thing. And I was like, wow, imagine that future where people get to go at the pace they want to learn, they get curiosity and they're able to go in this space. So I think one is the learning capability and how it can augment our learning. And I think the second piece is just the actual glee and some of the user experience of these tools. Like I'm a nerd, just the user interface, how it interacts with you and particularly why I'm passionate about this is for people from marginalized communities and I particularly talk to a lot of women of color. What can we build? Because now it's getting. I'm not saying tokens are cheap and AI is free or cheap, but we can build things because we don't need to worry about having a whole engineering team. We can vibe code tools that talk about culture and heritage or we can build businesses without huge operating expenses because you can code it quickly. How might this change microeconomic services for people from marginalised backgrounds and countries? I can only hope so. That's the absolute delight. I can also take you into the dread because it's obviously not a one sided story.
- [43:49]
B
Before we get to existential dread, riffing off of the future orientation of the performance management that you created. There's a kind of learning that it's been important for a long time where learning and invention or learning and creation are the same thing. And the reason is that the thing that you need to learn does not yet exist. And so it's not like you can open up a book in the library and find what you need to learn because the thing does not exist yet. And at the pace of change that's happening all the time. So one of the things I use AIs for is I did an analysis of my complete prompt history for 2025.
- [44:35]
A
Interesting.
- [44:36]
B
And I asked what is my intellectual path over the last year based upon this and then based upon that plot out extrapolate to what I should be thinking about this year. And so I used it not as a teach me something I don't know, but identify things I don't know I don't know. Right. It's a completely different way of approaching. And it said, well, you really don't know anything about self determination theory. Absolutely true. So now I have one of the inventors of self determination theory coming on the show. So that's how I learn. So this idea that it's a little bit different than fixing gaps in knowledge, it's much more exploratory, potentially very exciting. On Work for Humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 11fold.com.
- [46:10]
A
I don't know if anyone remembers maybe showing my age here. There used to be those books. Choose your own adventure and you get to one part of the book and you could turn to a different page and choose a different adventure. That's what I feel like AI is it takes me back to childhood, like which adventure will I go on next? And I get to choose. And then you've got this toolkit that can take you on different pathways. Yes, there are issues with the data and where it's taking us. And then it's telling you that you should go in this trajectory, but you have to question it. But the fact that we even have a tool to do that where we didn't have that before, it's kind of like this bird's eye view or that Johari's window where it can help you see blind spots that you can't see based on all of the data, I think that's wildly exciting for people.
- [46:54]
B
And then this other advantage that you're excited about, I really have not thought about that, which is the idea that when the cost of software development falls, we get more and more bespoke solutions and that those bespoke solutions can serve smaller and smaller populations how do you see this manifesting? You mentioned women of color. How is it manifesting in that space? Or might it manifest?
- [47:24]
A
I'm doing more research. I can just give a really practical example. So Lovable has their she Hacks hackathon on International Women's Day and for the first time they made it for every single woman. Unlimited credits, unlimited use for Claude for 24 hours and stripe. So go wild. And for me, I've coded multiple things, but the thing, I didn't even touch a business at first. For me it was a deeper piece and a calling of I am first generation Indian, Australian. I have grappled with my identity, I've grappled with culture and belonging to. So I created a tool called embracing my heritage. For any person, irrespective of gender, to figure out and capture the parts of their history from their grandparents for their own journey, whether they want to share that with their children or for themselves, around different parts of shame, around different stories, around recipes, around where they want to go next and say, I'm ready to embrace my culture. And I think for me that what I was solving as a woman of color is this shared pain and shared joy of being a first, second, third generation immigrant, around being from post colonial cultures. And I was like, wow. And then the response I got was I was overwhelmed. Cause I was like, I'm just gonna share this on LinkedIn. And so many men and women from around the world was just like, this is beautiful, this is helping me. And so I was like, wow, what if that could be a digital archive across time where you looked at security and gdpr, whatever or not whatever. But we'll look at that later. But that helps people have more conversations. Whilst we see global social fabric decay in some parts, how do people through, like you said, the joy of learning and creation help rebuild it through invention and creativity. So that's my version of that journey. I'm seeing other women look at how do they create different businesses as women of color or people of different communities? You know, I've seen beautiful posts as well where there are more black women trying to lead AI and lead in this space. So we don't just have data sets and tool sets and different technology led by dominant archetypes of people as well. So I think they're the journeys that I'm seeing early stage. At the same time, Doug, I'm speaking to different women of color that are like, or just women in general. There's a split narrative. Some women are just like, yeah, we're into AI women defining AI community, women leading AI. And then I speak to another lot of women who are just like this scares me. I don't know if I'm on board with this or I've downloaded the tools and I feel too scared to use them, I don't know how. And so that's now my mission. I was like, oh wow, we can't have this divide of different people from different backgrounds feeling too scared and not empowered. So that's my new mission, is I'm going to be holding space particularly for women to get on the tools in a safe way. Because I don't want that this digital AI to divide, to separate or further the divide in knowledge and technology. So I can see what can be there. But I can also see there's a lot of people who are too scared to use this.
- [50:43]
B
One of the things that this raises for me is the really positive outcome of breaking software development out of giant corporate structures that are enormous filters for what can be. And so just the idea of making this something that can be a folk practice, this is something we do for ourselves, is build things that support us in our own probably non monetizable way. We don't need to monetize this because the cost of doing it, the cost of supporting it has fallen so low that it's something that can be done just locally. That's a big enormous transformation.
- [51:27]
A
That's an enormous transformation part where everyone are builders and when if we take into the enterprise space. So my last company, I let the AI roll out and I'm seeing, looking at that company and looking at different companies, a lot of people like hey everyone, double productivity, more outcomes like hybrid workforces and everyone's putting the cart before the horse in metrics. I think a lot of let's say non AI native companies need to start smaller. And what I did with my team was that sense of playfulness, like experiments within boundaries. Because I know we like we've got to talk about AI token costs and the cost of AI soon. But for a time bound time I was just like just go and play with the tools. Don't put sensitive company data. But what I wanted people to do was play with it for something that is not company related and not HR related. Because there's that axiom or that saying that you'll never solve a problem if you can't have fun with it. And what I want is we know that from a neuroscience perspective when the mind is in scarcity and fear, decision making is poor. So but when that mind is in creativity and you're building something because you're curious, you start building neural pathways and neural networks. So if someone's built a tool for themselves because they were truly curious and they're like, oh, but how do I then put a backend from the vibe coded front end? Because they wanted to build something for themselves, they've built that neural pathway that when they might take that now back into our workplace, they're not feeling that fear, oh shit, I have to shit that in two weeks and I've got to figure out the back end and how do I connect it to the front end? Ui, they've already figured that out in a playful way. We can't just play an experiment forever. There is a cost around this for businesses that most businesses don't even realize yet. And I think putting in strict mandates and productivity where people are so scared that this is going to take their jobs and people are so scared that they're like, I don't know how to use this. And companies think it's all intuitive. It's not intuitive for everyone, for every learner. So I think the more we can have. I called, I've ripped off a little bit Legos, you know, LEGO Serious Play. I called it AI Serious Play Plai like how do you just give it a go and then transfer that learning and that knowledge in more work settings as opposed to everyone start building agents and automations.
- [53:49]
B
You've written a little bit about the difference between a scarcity and an abundance mindset in companies. You just touched on it. But I want to bring it forward. Which is, what is that and how has it created an abundance mindset and why would we create it?
- [54:06]
A
I think for me, I'm a neuroscience nerd. It's part of my background as well is the area of the brain that fires, if you like, for scarcity. When your brain is in a scarcity, thinking is the same part of the brain or similar part of the brain that fires for decision making. And the brain's not good at firing two things at once. And there's a lot of academic and neuroscience research around this. That's why people who are under poverty struggle to make good decisions for long term financial outcomes. It is well known from neuroscience and research perspective that when we're in scarcity, our decision making goes down. If we take that from anecdotally into companies, we see it when there's bust cycles in businesses where businesses are not financially performing, the leadership team starts to have funky behaviors. Some of the decisions you're like, where did it go from Being this fun company to like fire and Brimstone or why are we making these short term decisions around what we're shipping, what we're not shipping. Why are we making these short term decisions about hiring and firing? The research suggests the brain is not thinking clearly because people are in fear and scarcity. So for me it's very hippie dippy for some people. But this is all physiology, emotions of physiology, the scarcity and neural pathways. It's kind of finding a circuit breaker where you just thinking through the scarcity, whether that's physical movement or whether that's some sort of group session together where you're moving into techniques of change management called appreciative inquiry is kind of thinking about possibility, what could be and rewiring the thinking to abundance. It's really hard to do when you have financial pressures where the cost of capital has gone up, whether you're PE backed or VC backed or you've got shareholders where they're expecting outcomes. And I truly believe 80% of leadership at an executive and senior level is leading self. So if every leader is not going and looking at their emotions, looking at their physiology, looking at their psychology, in my opinion, you cannot lead a business well because everyone wants to look at the strategy and the decisions. All the scientific research shows we are feeling beings that think, we are not thinking beings that feel. And all of the business is built the other way around. So I challenge people. How do you go into that vulnerable space, that emotional space? How do you do the deeper introspective work? Because that will unlock better strategic decisions if you understand your physiology and your
- [56:46]
B
neuropsychology, you've written about scaling fairness as well. Honestly, we could probably have a whole show about that. So we may not be able to really dig into it entirely, but describe that work and what you mean and why it's a challenge.
- [57:02]
A
I had this beautiful advice from a friend who was the VP of diversity equity inclusion at a multinational software company, Gwen Collander. And she said to me, ness, focus on building inclusion through the systems and the processes. Before you worry about diversity and all of the hiring metrics and like all of the employer branding campaigns. And so whilst it might have looked like in my last company, we weren't doing a lot of front end dei, I thought, okay, where diversity, equity, inclusion falls down apart from what's happened in the world is when people come in and they're attracted to the employer branding what they're promised and they're like, oh, but not many people are getting promoted from different demographies in the promotion cycle, what's the internal rate of promotion for women or people of color or people who are queer? And actually I just learned that person X has more junior skills than me and is getting paid more. So it's like all of the core componentry that might be seen as boring or unsexy around performance, reward and remuneration, total rewards, jobs architecture, that's what I decided to really look at and put in first and look at what does fairness look like. So from jobs architecture, how do we have a simple leveling structure and then when we look at salary bands and compensation, what will the board allow me to do and the executive team to do? What do we have funding for? And then how we put something fair in place and to make sure people, irrespective of their demographic background, have clear insights to what the compensation calculator is, what our process is for compensation. That was one area and the same with performance. I'm a big believer and all the research shows that people are more likely to accept what they think is an unfair distribution, whether that's a raise, a promotion, their pay equity, if they believe the process has been fair and transparent. But quite frankly, in most businesses, some of these core components around level compensation performance kind of happen in this black box, in calibrations or roundtables, and then you're delivered an outcome and people don't really want to tell you why or how. And I think if we're truly going to scale fairness, it's maybe looking at the boring, the unsexy things. And then it's really chros working with their board, working with their executive team to say why this is important on a values level, on an ethics level, but also on a cost component level. Because when people find this out, you either have higher levels of turnover and we know that that costs a company anywhere upwards of 50 grand. When you just look at hiring costs and then the lost IP and the time to replace the bigger cost we don't really talk about is when people don't believe things are fair or just it's not absenteeism you can quantify, that is presenteeism. People who are coming in and proverbially like pushing around paper and doing the jobs. And that's where I do like employee net promoter score or employee engagement data. It gives you signal that something is not right in this system. So I think the ability to build fairness is looking at that in the componentry of what you do. And some of the more beautiful models of DVF desirability Viability, feasibility also have sustainability as a fourth part of the Venn diagram. And part of that sustainability includes the fairness as well. So I think that's a beautiful fourth element for teams to think, are we designing this in a fair way? And if we're not, how do we justify that? Because we either design it in or it becomes part of our comms plan so people understand why we couldn't design it in on this particular iteration.
- [61:06]
B
Right. And you know what you're describing. I didn't have the vocabulary for this before preparing for the show, but product led brand versus marketing led brand and the product led brand is you build the brand into the product, the product speaks for itself versus marketing brand, which is you talk about all the things your product has, but it may or may not have them. And so it's, you know, it's brand essence versus brand identity.
- [61:34]
A
Why fairness is so hard is that we have different, just like the MVP canvas, you have different, different versions of what MVP means for us. We do have different perceptions of what fairness actually means for every employee, for every executive team member. I would say most people who come into the HR space want. People don't come in going, I want to do performance management and employee relations cases. Most people say, I like working with people, I like helping people. And most of us who do think very much in systems about deeper architecture of fairness and justice for employees and being the social like the minded conscious as well as being thinking about business metrics. I'm not going to lie, I have a lot of peers who are just burnt out because you keep channeling this drum of fairness and what this will mean. And I know you have a beautiful model around this from a journalism metrics perspective, around in different newspapers how the intermediary metrics or the leading metrics are so valued in certain industries as opposed to just the end metric of the roi, the sales. I think in HR we keep trying to have an end metric that makes sense, but a lot of our work is intermediary metrics which are leading indicators of why we will make money, lose money and it's not legitimate. And I think most of the time most of us are beating the drum around why fairness and justice matters and how that's actually going to have the leading metrics of turnover. Engagement are actually going to impact your lagging metrics around increasing revenue. So I think that's the hard part. We're caught between a rock and a hard place. Until we have more people in the macroeconomic system, in private equity, in vc, in shareholders, having More activism around why this is important. But we're a far, far away from that space. So I think fairness, it's kind of fighting the good fight. And I encourage anyone in any department or function listening to this to just practice self care because it's a long game. So I think I've been through ebbs and flow where I'm like, yeah, I'm on the fairness journey and other times I just need to recalibrate and get that energy back. But hope is not a strategy, but it is a driver.
- [63:56]
B
Tell you one thing aligned to this, I had Bart Houlihan on the show for one thing. He's the founder of B Lab, but he also is now with an exchange traded fund that invests in companies that perform on certain people measures. And so this idea that now it's called irrational capital, that now it's been proven that certain measures of people, I don't know what those measures are honestly. And I think it's partially because it's a secret sauce. And so I haven't been able to like go out and find out exactly what they're measuring. But it is in part employee sentiment about working at a company. So the idea that that becomes an investable advantage, really powerful. So you probably know I ask this question at the end of every show which is what do you ness hire your work to do for you?
- [64:51]
A
I hire my work to be a sidekick in joy. I think for me there's a few of us where there's a really fine line between work being what we need to do potentially for income and our true hobby where there might be blurred lines of workaholism. But for me, I hire it as a sidekick for joy. I get joys from many other pursuits, reading, poetry, exercising. But when you read about the flow state and when I feel it, particularly now in my current new venture in AI and the ethics and the macroeconomics as well as the micro of tooling and learning. It's like it's just a true sidekick. It's kind of like work was my mate. It's like, hey mate, how, how are we doing? Like what? What's bringing us joy together? I sound like Mary Kondo, but what's bringing us joy? So for me at the moment, I hire my work as a sidekick for. For joy.
- [65:52]
B
What do you mean by sidekick?
- [65:54]
A
I think it's a sidekick because it's not all the joy in my life. I have other, like I said, like reading poetry or exercising time with my dog and my husband and family and friends. But work is A huge part of my life. Like, even if I didn't have to have work and money, like there was a monetary source for me. Another work job that work does for me is an intellectual pursuit of problem solving. I love to solve. I was that kid, like, let's do puzzles and problems and it's all like, once again the system's connected. Joy comes from problem solving and doing the different parts. So I think for me that's that piece of. It's not the whole shebang of joy, it's a sidekick. But I also hire it for that, that intellectual depth and creativity that assists other parts, like my reading and curiosity put structure around that as opposed to if I didn't hire work to do a job for me, I'm sure I could do a lot of cool things and travel and just do those things. But it puts more structure around the joy and around the problem solving.
- [67:04]
B
What's the best puzzle that you've ever worked on?
- [67:08]
A
It definitely was like I really struggled at the time, but it was that when I was one of my first ever big projects as junior, we whippersnapper working on this global demerger and actually caught up with the client boss of that mining company. He's started his own AI company eight years ago. We hadn't seen each other for 12 years, but it was like yesterday. His name's Dave Tim. He's just, he's just a legend. And there was so many multiple aspects. It was just like, oh my God, what are these people even talking about? How am I going to do this? But it was one of the first times in my career both Dave and the other CIO at the time, Warwick, were just like, you know, the consulting firm at the time didn't really. They'll just like shipped me out to this client. Didn't care what I was doing or what I went to work on. But they're like, what problems do you want to solve? Like, how nice is that? I didn't even work for them in like their company, but they could see something in me like, yeah, what do you want to solve? And then they were like, quite. You know, whether we like disc or those other profiles, we were all in that kind of like visionary, like kind of crazy space. They were like, oh, cool. Like this company has so much data. Whilst we're demerging the company, let's go to this other university and get grads working on data mining here. It was just this endless possibility. And what I was tasked with in my like mid-20s at that time of a Global demerger and there were 80 people globally on that. Just the it part of the demerger. And my role was building empowered teams through different ways of working in global infrastructure. It was just cool problems to solve. Like I cried, I'm not going to lie sometimes because consulting is quite mean and you work long hours and I was made to use certain fonts and have it in a certain size and I was like what is happening to my brain? But the intellectual pursuit of learning what technology is having a high performance team where I said to Dave a couple months ago in Australia, like I remember that team's vision. Are we now 12 years on keep our people safe and our operations stable on legal day one for mining you don't have that in every project where you're kind of got a chunky budget, you're in a tier one mining and you can just solve problems and do cool things and you have leaders who are just like let's do cool things. It was wicked.
- [69:29]
B
What does your work cost you?
- [69:31]
A
Honestly? Because it's that fine line between hobby, passion and what I need to do. It costs me time with family and friends. I grapple with that and part of it is an unhealthy compulsion, I'll be honest. And part of it's just like it's my joy, it's my love, it's my problem solving. So I'm very conscious of that and reflect on that weekly, if not daily in my journaling. And the other thing it costs me is parts of my sanity. I, I don't speak about this super publicly but I'm not ashamed to say like I am neurodivergent and I think a lot of neurodivergent people are also systems thinkers. I can feel sounds gonna sound so woo woo but the impulses in my brain because like, and that's why I speak so fast. I have a sticky note here saying speak slowly. Things connect so quickly in my brain and then I have to try and like run after all of the thoughts. I often draw pictures of, you know the butterfly net where a kid goes and catches butterflies. But they're my different thoughts and I have to go catch them quickly. So it costs me part of calmness and sanity because it's kind of like I know the young ones would say with Pokemon, gotta catch em all, gotta catch all my thoughts and put them all together in a structure. Honestly, I still wouldn't have it any other way. I love the human brain and I love watching different brains at work, including mine.
- [70:59]
B
Where can people learn more about you and your work. What's the best place to find you?
- [71:05]
A
Best place is probably three. One is I'm quite active on LinkedIn sharing thoughts and different insights there. I am restarting my blog where I used to write about scarcity, thinking and decision making, but it's going to be more focused on AI and actually how is AI changing the brain and how is the brain changing AI so intelligence rewired because our intelligence and cognition is going to change. In the third place is my website www.vanessamonsecara.com okay, there's some tricks here.
- [71:39]
B
Monsecra is not easy to spell. It's got some extra vowels in it. M, O, N S, E, Q, U, E, I, R. And I assume that if somebody goes to your website or to LinkedIn, they can find your blog.
- [71:54]
A
Indeed. Yeah.
- [71:55]
B
Yeah. Okay. That's great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [71:59]
A
Thank you Doc.
- [71:59]
B
Fantastic. It was great, great conversation. Thank you. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us 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.