← Work For Humans
Work For Humans
Designing Your Life: How to Use Design Principles to Get What You Want in Work and Life | Bill Burnett, Revisited
01:01:14
Loading summary
Transcript92 lines
- [00:04]
A
We tapped into a deep, deep human need. It started with how do I get a job? But that's just the presenting question. The real question is how do I design a life that's got some meaning and purpose in it? And how do jobs fit into that? How do relationships fit into that? Once you start thinking this way, people report themselves as being unstuck. They report themselves as feeling like they have some self agency. Instead of just being bashed around by their job or bashed around by their future. They report that, yeah, I don't have any control over what good things or bad things might come my way, but I have a lot of control over what I choose. And that changes everything.
- [00:46]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Every so often I bring back an episode that changed my mind or the direction of the show. These are the episodes that I quote all the time. We often say on Work for Humans that managers and teams co create the experience of work. Well, that means that we as workers need to have a mindset and the tools to contribute to that co design. Bill Burnett is the voice I turn to about about how to approach the co design challenge. Bill is an award winning designer, New York Times best selling author, adjunct professor, and the Executive Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. Throughout his career he has designed everything from the first Slate computer to Hasbro Star wars action figures and has advised Fortune 100 companies and startups alike. Bill is one of the authors of the best selling book Designing youg Life and more recently published Designing youg New work life. Over 350 universities use his life design curriculum. In this episode, Bill and I discuss the essential elements of adopting a design mindset to create the life and work you want, including reframing problems, using curiosity and collaboration to find new solutions, and avoiding limiting yourself to a single goal. We also explore the sunk cost fallacy at work, the false dichotomy of work life balance management, advice for hiring, and other topics.
- [02:30]
C
All right, if you enjoy this episode.
- [02:32]
B
Show your support and subscribe to Work for Humans wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I bring you Bill Burnett.
- [02:41]
C
Welcome Bill Burnett to Work for Humans.
- [02:44]
A
Thanks for having me on. This is going to be fun.
- [02:46]
C
I have known about your book, the book that you wrote with Dave Evans, since I think it was first published. In fact, I looked at my Amazon history. I first bought it in 2016 and since then I have bought it about five times because I keep giving it away.
- [03:01]
A
Well, thank you.
- [03:02]
C
Because there are so many people who I feel would get benefit from that book. And so when I set this interview up with this conversation of, I wasn't actually thinking about your most recent book because I didn't know it existed. I was thinking about designing your life. So then I found out that you'd recently written a book which is designing your new work life, which is even more specific to what the show is doing. And so I'm so happy to have you on the show to talk about it.
- [03:30]
A
Yeah. You know, after the first book came out, it was. And we were surprised at how successful it was. We got together with our. A wonderful editor, a woman named Vicki Wilson at Knopf, and we brainstormed a bunch of different books. But. But she was really thinking about, okay, work is the thing people do the most of. We've got it. We've got. We've got to address this problem because, like, like you, we're really committed to healthy, you know, thriving, creative workplaces. And we talked to lots of companies and done workshops in lots of companies, and we've noticed just how bad it is. You look at the Gallup poll, 67% of workers are disengaged. 20% are actively disengaged. 47 million people quit their jobs in 2021, another 50 million in 2022. Our thinking is it wasn't necessarily that the pandemic suddenly made everybody unhappy and they decided to quit their jobs. It was. They had been deeply unhappy for a very long time. In the pandemic, it was just the straw that broke the camel's back. And they're like, I'm not going to put up for this anymore. It's a real problem.
- [04:29]
C
And 60% of those people who quit their jobs quit without another job lined up.
- [04:33]
A
Just really unprecedented.
- [04:35]
C
If you look at work as a product, that's the kind of product it is. It's the kind of product where you're going to say, well, I'm just going to stop having a car. Cars are so bad that I'm just gonna. I guess I'm gonna walk.
- [04:47]
A
Well, and, you know, I'm kind of an old, you know, designer, engineer, and manufacturer. I was a manufacturing engineer in one of my. My early, early jobs. And you think about, you know, factories have a certain output and they have a certain defect rate. And then you work on closing the defect rate to have zero defects. Right. If I had a fact. If. If jobs were a product that was, you know, being manufactured in a factory and I had 67% defects, I just shut the factory down. It's not worth fixing Normally you think you, you 2%, 3%, 1%, 5% if you. And when you get to volume, those percentages matter. Apple made 96 million iPhones last quarter. Okay. There's about 90 working days in a Chinese factory in three months and that means they made about a million million one iPhones a day. A 1% defect rate means there's a pile of iPhones over in the corner that don't work. That's unacceptable. And it's astonishing. These, this Data's been, is 20 years old. It's, you know, 60, 70. 60, 70%. In the book we talk about in Japan, I think it has the worst engagement of any industrialized nation. 93% of Japanese workers hate their job. 93%. People talk about it as this enormously efficient and well planned economy. It's a disaster.
- [06:08]
C
You mention in the book that the Japanese have a variety of special names for these extra miserable jobs.
- [06:15]
A
Yes.
- [06:16]
C
And there's actually a whole vocabulary around it. It's sort of like Eskimos with snow. Seven different kinds of snow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Corporate livestock is one of the words. Corporate slave worker is a word dog of the company. I thought that was a good one. I like that one. And there's a word for death by overwork.
- [06:36]
A
And it's funny in some ways and it's incredibly tragic.
- [06:39]
C
Oh, I know, it's. I agree.
- [06:41]
A
Human capital is being squandered in this way or abused in this way because. Well, first of all, you know, we're life designers and our theory is you gotta design a good life with a job in it. It's not the other way around. You don't design jobs and then try to figure out how to fit em into your life. And that's the fundamental mistake most HR teams and talent teams make is we're gonna have this amazing, you know, personal development program or something. Something, something. And all we're gonna talk about is how to optimize you for Google. We're not going to talk about how you and your life create the conditions by which you come to Google and, and do something wonderful or come to Facebook or, or Apple or whatever. And so it's amazing how much we know about what doesn't work at work and how persistently we continue to pursue things that make it worse.
- [07:30]
C
I have a theory about that. We may discuss it. But first, and I want to talk about the backstory behind designing your life and how you arrived at it.
- [07:39]
A
Well, you know, I work, I work in the design group at Apple. Yeah, I mean at, I was at Apple, but now I'm at Stanford. 2006, David Kelly had just gotten the money to start what we call the D school, the Big Design Institute. And he called me up. I've been teaching part time for a long time. And he said, hey, listen, you ever thought of doing this full time? And I thought about it, I thought, yeah, this could work. It made me a wonderful offer, 40% of what I was making in industry. So I became an academic. And then in 2007, Dave Evans and I had lunch and he said, are you. I've been teaching a class over at Stanford, helping kids find jobs. Are your students struggling with that? I said, yeah, it's terrible. They don't know. They're really smart, but they don't know what they're doing. So he and I put together just a really couple of simple little workshops and things, and then that turned into a class. And then the Career center found out about it and they said, could you do it for all the seniors? I said, no, no, no, that would cost a fortune. Because the way you get people to not do things at Stanford is you tell them it's expensive. I gave him a number I thought was ridiculous. He said, sure, I can do that. And then. So we ended up creating a class for seniors. And then the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education heard about it and he said, I want something for all this. I want all the freshmen to really dig in and really design an amazing Stanford experience. I don't want to just do it like they did high school. We have a term for vice provost office had a term in those days where they called the ballistic student. I come in, I declare computer science, I take computer science classes, and I leave. And I never experienced the amazing academic culture and of Stanford. And I never asked the big questions and I'm never reflecting. So we. I said, no. It was Harry Ellen at the time. He's now the, I think the president of one of the Claremont Colleges. And I said, harry, that's impossible.
- [09:12]
C
We.
- [09:12]
A
That would cost a lot of money. All the freshmen. That's a lot of money. And he said, I got. I got the money. So David Kelly, who I worked for, who hired me at Stanford, jokes, he calls it the success disaster. I'm supposed to be teaching design classes to design students, undergraduate and graduate students. At the time, I was actually running the program as the executive director. This was just a little palliative thing I was doing on the side to help some students who were struggling. And it became now five classes at Stanford. Then after the second Book, the first book came out. A lot of universities called and said, hey, could we teach this class? And so we said yes, I got permission to give the class away to any university that wants it. Now 350 universities, over a thousand educators are trained on DYL curriculum and have our curriculum and they're spreading it all over the, all over the country, all over the world. We started an institute in Asia and Singapore to kind of hold all the IP and spread it out over Asia. I'm, I still teach design classes. I don't do have any executive duties anymore. I just want to focus on this. So I run the Life Design Lab. An amazing staff. Kathy Davies is a phenomenal human being who is the managing director. I've got amazing fellows who teach the classes and we're all over the place now. We're all over Stanford, we're all over, all over the universities. The person who used to run our career center, Stanford Academy in Fruit Day, took all of these ideas, collaborated with him and he's now the head of the career center at Johns Hopkins, except he calls it the Life Design Center. They built a new building, he's got Life Design, he's got all the undergraduate, you know, like special programs like going overseas and summer jobs. So he's integrated as a, as a complete, you know, wraparound set of services for undergrads because he said you shouldn't just go to the career center the last quarter of your senior year to look for a job. You should be integrating work and life from the moment you get here. It's been quite an interesting ride. And I'd have to say almost every step I was under serving the demand. I was joking with another friend of mine who's a serial entrepreneur and I've done, I've been an entrepreneur twice, started companies, raised money. I said, you know, this is the first time I had a, I have a, a product that everybody wants and I haven't designed it yet. That's only sure what I'm doing, you know, like, I don't know how to do a thing for, for freshmen. They're not like seniors. I don't know how to do. I'm, I'm currently teaching the class for PhD students. I don't know what PhD students need, you know, so like it's been a really fun process. But what, what it proved to me is that we tapped into a deep, deep human need. It started with how do I get a job? But that's just the presenting question. The real question is how do I design a life that's got some meaning and purpose in it. And how do jobs fit into that? How do relationships fit into that? How does what I learn and how do I continue to learn fit into that? It validates the fundamental idea of human centered design or design thinking. And that's that when you tap into really almost primitive archetypal needs, a need for meaning, purpose, community, you know, relationship, you're working an area that's rich and full of possibilities.
- [12:26]
C
I love the, the phrase a ballistic student or a ballistic career. It's a really nice counterpoint to what I think is the central theme of designing your life, which is the ballistic career is I'm going to focus on nothing except the goal that I'm trying to achieve in 10 years from now, which is to be an MD. I've never actually rapid prototyped any experience related to being a doctor. I'm not going to look at any doors to the left or right as I'm going because that would be not focused. Right.
- [12:57]
A
Well, I might find something I don't want to know.
- [13:01]
C
Yeah, right. And then I'm going to get there. I will have all this sunk cost in time and money. You won't be able to escape. And that's exactly what agile design practices are meant to resolve. And so what is interesting to me about both books is that they are so much about the design mindset, which is that it seems like the native mindset is especially of people who have have ended up at schools like Stanford, is a much more of a waterfall approach. And so what are the big mindset set shifts that are design mindsets that apply to life and work? Because it's not just a toolkit. This is what's so important about it, which is that there are lots of design toolkits out there. You can just get them online, they're fantastic, they're useful, but it's a mindset. And until you get that right, the tools don't do it.
- [13:56]
A
Yeah, exactly. You know, a ballistic career. I'm just going to be an investment banker. I don't even know what money is, but I'll study econ and this is. Or I'm going to be a lawyer. Why? Because my mom and dad are a lawyer or my uncle's a lawyer and somebody told me you can make a lot of money being lawyers. So my dad's generation, my dad passed away a couple years ago in his 90s, but my dad's generation was, you know, go find a big company, do a good job, work for them your whole life and all will Be good. In fact, when he came back from the Korean War on the GI Bill, he went to San Jose State and it took him about five or six years because he already had me and my sister. But he did industrial engineering, which is sort of like, how do you make factories work? Cause we still had factories in the 50s. And he had a summer job at a little startup up on Page Mill Road, and they made him an offer and he worked there his whole life. It was called Hewlett Packard. And he was at Hewlett Packard when Lucille Packard brought your birthday cake to your desk when it was your birthday. And he worked for Bill and Dave. The real Bill and Dave. Yeah, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard. And so for him, it was, it was a well organized world for my students. You know, they're going to have 17 different jobs over two or three different careers. There is no, there is no straight line to whatever retirement or whatever it is. But this planning mentality, this let me just find the right thing and everything will be okay, is still pervasive. Their parents tell them, you know, just pick a good major and then just do that. As if your major determined. Like what you pick at 18 is having to have anything to do with what you do at 40. By the way, the data is 10 years out of school. Less than 20% of people are working on anything that has anything to do with what they studied in college.
- [15:32]
C
And I would even argue that they're pro like me. They're probably working on in a job that didn't even exist when they left college. Like it's a whole new category.
- [15:41]
A
Yeah, certainly now. I mean, all my students were like, maybe I should be a CS major. Five years, 10 years ago, I was going, when the AI comes, it's going to write all the code. You don't want to be a CS major. Now, how many jobs will disappear in the next five years and how many new jobs will be created? If you look at any of the predictions, McKinsey or anybody else, World Economic Forum, a couple hundred million jobs will disappear and a couple hundred million jobs will be invented. And don't you kind of wish you're going to be doing something that hasn't even been invented yet 10 years from now, you sure you want to be doing the same old thing anyway? So, yeah, the mindsets shift from this sort of planning or I'm going to get every. I'm going to figure it all out to the recognition that the future is unknowable. It's going to be a little bit of A wild ride or certainly it's not going to be a straight line. So if you want to have a resilient strategy, learn from people who design new things that have never been done before, all the time called designers. I wasn't an Apple when they did the iPhones, but I was on the team that did the first laptop. The very, very first laptop. Nobody knew what a laptop was. We built 300 some prototypes, and they came up with this. A guy named John Krakauer actually came up with the idea of putting the keyboard in the back and the trackball in the front and kind of organizing the whole thing. But before, before we did it, we didn't know what it was. So you couldn't spec it and then build it. You had to invent it. And the way you invent it, the way you invent futures that have never been created before, is you go deep dive on empathy. What. What do we need? What's. What's the fundamental problem? And then you zoom back out, you reframe it, you build lots and come up with lots of ideas, build lots of prototypes, and eventually you build your way into this future. And then you recognize it, you go, wow, that's the thing we should make. And everybody gets it. And then you make it. So also been on lots of engineering teams where marketing handed us the specification. This is what the consumer wants for the next iPad, the next whatever. We used to call them speed bumps. We got the laptop. Now we put in bigger hard drive, bigger, you know, bigger screen, bigger bubbles. Just a speed bump. Spec it. You built a spec, you go. But when you're making something that's never been done before, none of those, those engineering or planning tools work. Any design tools. So the mindsets start with curiosity. If you don't know what the future is, what are you even analyzing? What. What is this? Data. Those analytics people do a lot of analyzing where they just make up data because it makes them comfortable and they get an answer which makes them comfortable, and it has no, no connection to what's actually going to happen. So start with Curiosity and explore the. The possibilities of the future. You. In this case, we're not making a new product, we're making a new you. Explore those possibilities with Curiosity and do them in the world. Radical collaboration. The world is where the action is happening. That's where you're going to discover what is next. Because when you go out in the world and you talk to people and you collaborate with people, there's this prop, this thing psychologists call narrative resonance, when they're when something about another person's story creates a resonance in you, you're like tuning forks are humming on. You know, I hit this one and this one starts ringing because of the same frequency. That's narrative resonance. So get curious and go out in the world. Radical collaboration. Talk to people and then try a bunch of stuff. Because you can prototype anything. And it's interesting. We use the term prototyping a very special way. So sometimes you think about Pro like, I've got this design, I'm an engineer, I got a design, I'm going to build a prototype to prove it works. That's a completely valid form of prototyping. What we call it. Prototyping is. I don't know where I'm going. Let me try some stuff and see what happens. Because it's very interesting in product design. If I show you a prototype and if Dart, I go, hey, we talked about cell phones. Here's the one that you said you wanted. It's got more batteries and this and that and the other thing, blah, blah, blah. And it's got a screen that's holographic. And as soon as I hand you this prototype and you go, oh, is that what he's talking about? Wow, that's really cool. You know, I don't really want this. I know I said I wanted it, but now that I see what you've given me, I'll tell you, you know what I really want? I want ba ba ba ba ba. Because at the moment I show you a prototype, the world changes. Your. Your expectation of what's possible changes. And now when it's really working in human centered design, a new need is revealed. A need you didn't even know you had. Cause you didn't know it was possible. So every time I build a prototype, I change the world. It's possible. Same thing with life design. I go talk to somebody. I've never done podcasts before. I met this guy, he does podcasts. What's it like doing podcasts? You tell me. And I go, oh, that's not what I was expecting. Thank you for the information. Now I'm more curious. I've got some other things I want to try. So curiosity, radical collaboration, prototyping are the things people tell me when they think about the book and they read about the mindset. So those are really big changes from. I'm going to plan and execute and just go forward to, like, no, I'm going to be comfortable with ambiguity. I'm just going to get curious. I'm going to do Lots and lots of collaboration in the world because that's where the action is. I'm really going to build. I'm going to build lots of little experiences for myself, sculpting prototypes to learn. Because I don't know if I want to be a doctor. I don't know if I want to be a lawyer. I don't really know. Right. I'm just making it up. Then the really big power tool is then reframe. I don't have to take the problem. It's given. I can change the problem. You know, the classic, classic, classic example that we use in a million, you know, design thinking classes. Howard Schultz, the guy who started Starbucks, was in a cafe in. In Italy on a trip, and he noticed how wonderful the cafe was and the smell of the coffee being brewed in the espresso machine steaming, and everybody standing at the counter talking and having this incredible community and art on the walls. And he said, why everybody? You know, in those days, when he started, cup of coffee was 75 cents, and he wanted to charge three bucks. But he realized it wasn't about the coffee. It was not the product so much as it was about the experience. And if you've ever been to the first Starbucks in Seattle at Pike's Market, it's this really funky kind of European. It's different now, but it was a very funky kind of European experience. So it's not about the coffee. It's about the community, the experience, the smells, the smite, the smells, the sight, the sounds. And he went from 75 cents to $2 for a cup of coffee. And now you regularly spend six or seven dollars for crazy cup of coffee with stuff in it. It's this idea of stepping back and going, what's the real need here? Or what's the real problem here? It's not just getting a cup of coffee on your way to work. It's having a little touch point, a little moment of human connection.
- [21:57]
C
There's so much I want to unpack in there. And so, first of all, key idea is that how you imagine the world to be is not as specific or as accurate as how the world is. And so it's not until you are engaging with the world that you can see the complete texture. And that's especially true of career, where the different kinds of work that are available. A lot of times we have one title for work, PGM Project Manager, Program Manager. But the truth is that's hiding an enormous amount of detail of what's actually possible within that space.
- [22:30]
A
Oh, and even More confusing is what you call a product manager is now what they call a product manager down the street from you.
- [22:36]
C
No, absolutely right.
- [22:38]
A
Walls are completely different and the, and the interactions are completely different. And so my students get all hung up on these job titles and what's the job title? I said just go find out. Find out what they, what is. Particularly things like product manager, project manager, blah blah blah. They're just all over the place.
- [22:53]
C
It's true. In fact, moving from company to company, I have to completely redesign all of my vocabulary of what everything means because everybody's using these terms differently. And then the second thing is you never know how a product is going to interact with its environment until it's in the environment because the environment is, is so dimensional. And so there's a couple of special challenges though to designing one's life versus designing a product. One of them is if I'm designing an app, I'm going to use an agile methodology, but if I'm designing a Boeing 747, I'm going to use a waterfall methodology. And the reason is it's okay to iterate on an app, but I shouldn't be iterating on a 747 because I'll be saying things like another one crashed, let's notify the next kin and iterate. And so I think it's very tempting for us to think of our life as a 747 kind of problem, but this year is an app kind of problem. Like I can experiment on this year in ways that I might not be able to experiment on my whole life.
- [23:57]
A
Well, yeah, and I mean, it's an interesting analogy. I'm kind of, I'm trying to think of whether my life is really a 747 because I started out it was a 747. It turned into a small Learjet, then it morphed into a hot air balloon. When I finally landed, I was in a time machine.
- [24:15]
C
That's a good point.
- [24:16]
A
You're getting to the core thing here. It's like that people think the investment in something I've got, doctor, lawyer, engineer, software, blah, blah, blah. And the sunk cost. Wow, we spent all this time doing this. I'll tell you the saddest people. I mean people really in a lot of, you know, personal existential pain. I'll run a workshop for mid career people 35, 45 years old, roughly. I'll go, who's unhappy? Raise your hand, raise your hand. Because they came, right? They need, they want to, they, they're intentional about making A change. Who's unhappy, I'm unhappy. And it'll be lawyer, lawyer, doctor, doctor, private equity, private equity banker, banker, banker. And they'll be top of the, you know, one woman I talked to a program in New York, like, went to Stanford because it was the hardest school to get into. I went to Yale because it was the hardest law school. Got the job at the Smith, Smith and Smith law firm in New York. Biggest law firm on the planet. Hardest thing. I'm first woman to make junior partner. First woman to make partner. I'm on the management committee. I'm the first woman to run the firm. I hate my life. I have no idea how I got here. And, I mean, it's obvious how she got there, right? I mean, you know, it's just like, show me a brass ring and I'll go get it. Show me a hurdle, I'll jump it. Never asked yourself, did she want to be a lawyer? Doesn't want to be a lawyer. Never asked yourself whether any of the rewards, which seems like she got them feel good, but then they immediately the. The pleasure disappeared and the pain returned. But you just kept going. Because she's smart and resilient and hardworking. Well, you can change, you know, you could. You could just decide to do something different. She says, no, no, no, you don't understand. Everybody tells me my life is perfect. Oh, that was interesting. And how do you feel about that? Well, everyone tells me my life is perfect, but. But I know deep inside it's a disaster. I said, so, you know, how's it going? She says, well, it steals a little piece of my soul every day when I go to work. I said, how much of your soul you got left? She says, not very much. There's a woman who's probably gonna, you know, it's got a $600,000 base salary with a 4 or 5 million dollars bonus every year. You know, a house in Manhattan, a house along the. On Long Island. You know, she's got the kids in private school, the trophy husband. And I work with people who, you know, work at McDonald's, and they believe they can change their life and make it better. And she believes she's stuck, truly stuck. And we finally got down to it. I said, you know what? Why do you. You have a lot of resources. You're a smart person. And, you know, some of this, maybe you go to a therapist and talk to about some of this, you know, might be a life design thing. She said, if I. If I were to change my life at this point, I would have to admit that everything up to now was a fraud. There's a sunk cost here and I'm not willing to write it off.
- [26:48]
C
It's a business fallacy too, which is the sunk cost fallacy.
- [26:51]
A
Yeah, I think you're right. People approach this kind of thing with some fear and that's reasonable. By the way. We're not saying design your life. You know, like I'm not counseling that this high powered, really smart lawyer person should just quit her job and become a dive instructor, you know, in the Bahamas or something like that, or, or leave her family or abandon her husband. I was like, none of this. That. It's just like, can you have some agency in your life? Can you recognize that the model you had about planning everything didn't work? Okay, fine. But you did acquire skills and your. And resources along the way. Awesome. Now can you. And if you accept that the future's unknowable and you need a design approach rather than a sort of engineering approach or planning approach, then you open the mindsets of curiosity, radical collaboration and reframing. What's the problem I'm trying to solve? I'm not trying to change my life. You'll notice in the second book we hit the theme of set the bar low and clear it really hard. Because the way you make changes in your life isn't making grand proclamations and then failing. You make changes in your life, making small incremental steps towards your goals. Right. So anybody has access to their own internal creed. The other thing that's true about, I don't know about the book reading. Reading the book itself. If you read the book itself and do all the exercises, you'll probably get the same result. But if you take the class that we have, or one of the classes that we have, we've done peer reviewed research, you double, you double what psychologists call novel ideation. You double your ability to have ideas. You used to come up with one or two options for everything. Now you can come up with twenty or fifty or a hundred. And there's a lot of research around. You know, when you pick from an ab, you know, binary, it's a zero sum game. And you, you always subop, you know, 70% of the time your decision is suboptimal. I teach at Stanford. I can't make this stuff up. I have to have research. If it's not our own, it's somebody else's. So like, it's based on positive psychology. It's based on research operations, you know, research and other things about decision making. We're trying to help people use the best science we know about how to make good decisions or how the, how the brain works or how modulating your attention changes your mood. These are all things that are proven and we just make them more accessible through, through a design lens. But once you start thinking this way, people report themselves as being unstuck. They report themselves as feeling like they have some self agency. They report instead of just being bashed around by their job or bashed around by their future, they report that, yeah, I don't have any control over what good things or bad things might come my way, but I have a lot of control over what I choose. And that changes everything.
- [29:20]
C
There's two things in there. There's agency and stuckness. Let me start with the stuckness one. You have two different traps that you name in the book.
- [29:29]
A
Oh, gravity's anchors.
- [29:30]
C
Yeah. What are the two traps that you described? There's gravity and there's anchors.
- [29:35]
A
The classic anchor problem we used in the book, it actually came from Dave. Dave wants, Dave's a sort of weekend sailor. He likes to go sailing on the, he lives, you know, up by your Santa Cruz Santa Santa Bay. So Dave's anchor problem is I want to go sailing every weekend, but I can't afford a boat. How do I find a, how can I afford a boat? So he's framed the problem is I need to buy a boat. But actually that's just he's an accidentally embedded a solution, a preferred solution to the problem of how do I go sailing every weekend? Once you release the anchor and say, well, you don't have enough money to buy a boat. So let's just, let's forget that for a second. Let's put that aside. Now. How could you go sailing every weekend? Oh, well, there's a dozen ways to go sailing every weekend and not buy a boat. In fact, probably even better than buying a boat because you could join a club that has five boats. You could just go down to the dock and say, I'm an able bodied Salem and sailor. Anybody have a guy didn't show up today for your crew? I'd love to sail. I mean there's a hundred ways you can go sailing. Once you let, let l let go of this anchor by a boat, you can reframe the problem and, and there's hundreds of solutions. So a lot of times people come to us in office hours with something like that. Well, I really want this. I want to do something but it's too late. So I have to do this other thing. How do I do this other thing? And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's go back. What are we. What's the problem we're trying to solve here? Let's get rid of the. Rid of the boat buying and the. And the something, something, something. A classic one. And this actually came up at a workshop we once did at a big company in the Valley that does search. And it was like, you know, I want to move my career ahead. I want to have more influence around here. I need to get promoted to director. But, you know, the company's not growing as fast as it used to, and we've got kind of a hiring freeze on right now, and they're not going to make any new directors for at least a couple more years because it's just. It's just not going to happen. And by the way, there's a line. It used to be when we were doubling every six months, you could, you know, like, hey, you've been here longer than a month. Good, you're the manager. Hey, you've been here six months. Good. You're the senior director. You know, blah, blah. But it's not moving that fast anymore. In fact, there's a line out the door of people who want to be directors, but I want to be a director so I can have more influence around here and get more done. Bill and Dave, can you tell me how to jump the line and get past the hiring freeze and become a director? And we say, no, that's a gravity problem. Gravity problems are either a situation that can't be changed, I. E. Gravity, or a situation that is so difficult to change or so entrenched as a situation that you're not willing to do what it would take to make the change. And a classic example of that is, okay, I'm a woman. There's systemic sexism in the workplace. Women don't get promoted. Listened to everything. It's all true. It's been proven. Proven. There's research data about it. But we're. Now, we're talking about your career, Sally. So do you want to be. You want to change your career and become an advocate for women in corporations and fairness, or do you just want to get promoted? Because if you want to work on the women's problem, then it's not gravity. If that's not the problem you're going to work on, and it is true in your organization, there's going to be some sexism. That's just gravity. You're going to need to accept that, then figure out how to neutralize that and then move forward. But you're not changing it for all the other women. So gravity problems are a circumstance that cannot be changed. And therefore it's just a circumstance. You have to accept it. You can't. Because what I see a lot of people doing is they're fighting city hall ineffectively and then claiming it's the reason they can't have what they want.
- [33:01]
C
Yeah. It's a specific example of a boiling the ocean problem, which is the trying to change the whole system simultaneously as opposed to trying to, to change in a local.
- [33:13]
A
So the reason we named those two particulars, that they show up all the time in office hours and in other work we do, I'm stuck because until we solve systemic, you know, sexism in the workplace, I can't be happy. It's like, well, I guess you're not going to be happy for a very long time. I really want to get this damn boat. How do I get this boat? Bill, come on. You go, help me get the boat. I go, what's the boat for? And what happens is once you, once someone groks the reframe, okay. And gravity problems accept that gravity exists and running up a hill is harder than running down. Got it? Now, how do I run? Is a completely different question. Except that there's you. That you don't have enough money to buy the boat, but enjoy the fact that there's a hundred other ways to be a sailor. And what happens when people actually grock it and they. And they release from the anchor or the gravity problem? There's so much freedom.
- [34:04]
C
Yeah.
- [34:04]
A
There's so many solutions that were standing right there they couldn't see. And once they get there, they're like, this is amazing.
- [34:11]
C
I had no idea reading the book. It came to me for the first time a central dynamic in companies, which is that vertical growth, by which I mean career growth up the ladder is a win lose situation, which is that it's competitive, it's a fixed number of resources. But horizontal opportunities, collaboration opportunities at your level, a win win.
- [34:33]
A
And they're relatively infinite. There's so many of them, you couldn't get to all of them.
- [34:37]
C
There's so many. If you fixate on the vertical opportunity at the. Especially at the cost of the horizontal opportunity, it's a tragedy, it's a waste. But a part of that ballistic career, it only can focus on that. It just sees that. That's why ballistic is such a good name for it.
- [34:56]
A
Up is tied to more money. Up is tied to more positional Authority up is tied to status. Hi. At the cocktail party, what do you do? Oh, I'm a lowly coder, making things down in the boot ROM or I'm the vice president of software. Like everybody goes, ooh, vice president of software. That must, that must be cool. It's also, you know, when I'm talking to people and they say I used to be really happy and I'm not happy anymore in my career and I go, tell me what happened. And most of the time it is, it is the sort of Peter principle thing of like, I was really good at this, then they made me the manager of this and then I became the manager of managers of this and now I direct the whole thing. And I'm supposed to be talking about strategy and all I really want to do is go back and make some products. Yeah, it feels like a one way street because I don't want to give up the money. I don't want to give up the positional power, the ability to move, you know, pieces around on the chessboard and say, you're working on this and you're working on this and you get money and you don't. So I like all that. I just don't like the fact that I, it feels so remote to me that I no longer inhabit my own job. We gotta fix that. Because the up up being the only thing that gives you money and status is, is, is part of the reason many people are unhappy.
- [36:11]
C
There's three steps I want to go in the conversation. One is I want to talk about empathy and then I want to talk about how companies can design an environment in which one can design one's life. And then we'll do some other stuff. Empathy is such an important design tool. It's such an important design capability. But what's weird about this particular case is that normally empathy is supposed to be about being able to get into side inside other people's minds. But this is an empathy problem where people are failing to get into their own. And so it's a surprising empathy problem. They don't understand what they actually want or the things they want are mutually exclusive. And that's certainly possible. You can't get everything in one product.
- [36:58]
B
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.
- [37:19]
C
Alive and engaged instead of dead and dull.
- [37:24]
B
So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com, that's 111F O L D dot com.
- [37:39]
A
We say, you know, in every other product design, we start with empathy for the customer. But in life design, we start with empathy for myself. Who am I? What do I want and need? Not, not about jobs, but about every. About life and things. What's my worldview? What's my, my work view, Right, my life view and work view. But then it's also empathy for what the world needs. Cause this whole follow your passion thing is bullshit. Just because you want to do something doesn't mean the world cares or needs it or whatever. So you've got to match what I need to what the world needs, you know, writ large. And the problem, like you pointed out, is most people haven't stopped and asked themselves, well, what America? What's work really for? What am I, what am I trying to get out of this? Am I trying to get meaning and purpose and, and some kind of a inner calling, you know, resolve through work, or am I just trying to get money? What am I trying to do? And then making that coherent with, well, what's my view of. What's my. What's the big picture? Why are we here? What's life for? Is there a God? You know, blah, blah, blah. If you just stop and, and answer two questions, what's worked for? What's life for? You start to find form, at least a little bit of a, of a lens that you can look at all this stuff that's coming at you from the future to say, well, that might be important, that probably isn't. That's probably important, that probably isn't. And again, our model is you design a life with a good job in it. So you have to have the life conversation. You can do it simultaneously, but you kind of have to frame the life conversation first. Because you're right. When I ask people, the people, I can easily articulate why they're unhappy, but they have a really hard time. They say, okay, I got it. This job isn't working out for you. Or this, this situation isn't working out for you. What do you want? What would you want to have happen? What would a good job look like? And they don't know, what is the health?
- [39:25]
C
Because I think it's related to this. The health. Work, play, love, dashboard.
- [39:30]
A
Yeah, we have a. In decision making, this idea of a false binary. It's either A or B. And the work life Health Play dashboard is, is the antidote to the work life balance problem. Bill, I've got a work life balance problem. I spent too much time working and not enough time at home with my, my kids and my family. It's, or whatever the balance is. So I said, really? So it's, it's a work life. So if I get more work, I get less life. Get more life, I get less work. And the optimum situation is mediocre life. Mediocre work. Because there is no thing if, if it's a false, if it's a dichotomy. There is no, I'm thriving in all aspects of my life. And by the way, there is no such thing as work life balance. There's just life, life, life when you're in the office, life, when you're home, life, life. So we went, we said, look, we're going to blow up all these false dichotomies. The money versus meaning, one is another one. It's just, there's no trade off between money and meaning. That's the wrong way to think of it. And so we wanted to make it more than a, a binary. And then we were looking at the work of Martin Seligman and he wrote a book on thriving and flourishing. And he has a mod. It's a great model. It's a little complicated. So we just sort of simplified the model down to, well, you gotta be healthy both mentally and physically and spiritually. Otherwise, you know, you, you can't perform. You gotta have work and work in some way enough of it so that you're satisfied. Play. Because humans are wired for play. And it's how we learn. It's how we engage the world just for the purpose of being fulfilling our intrinsic motivations. And then love. Because if you look at the Harvard study of Adult Development, the most important thing that predicts longevity and health and everything else is love, relationships. Who do you love? Who loves you? What do you do in your community? Particularly, what do you do for people other than yourself? It's every wisdom tradition on the planet starts with compassion and love. And people are under invested, certainly in Silicon Valley, under invested in their relationships, under invested in play. And typically, work is making them unhealthy. And it's a dashboard because Dave and I like cars. And you can have all the oil, all the gas, all the, you know, all the amps in your battery. I mean, there's, there's no trade off. And so you set those dials to like, I think I've got enough Work. I'm feeling really good about work or I'm playing way too much work. You know, that's, that's, that's bad. I'm not playing at all. I, you know, I'm not taking care of my health, or I am or I'm not. And you just assess where you're at and then you go, whoa. I like to change. And what small prototype could I run to to add a little more play to my, to my week? And it's really on a week by week, granular basis. How do you adjust the dials to keep this, you know, this, adjust the dashboard to keep this car running? And it's not a binary. If you have more play, it doesn't take away from work. If you have more relationships, it doesn't take away from work. And by the way, balance is also balance over time. Everybody thinks, well, balance has to be like, I mean, perfectly in balance every single day of my experience. Unless you are a Dalai Lama or a Zen monk, I don't think it's possible to be perfectly balanced all the time. You know, I have busy days and I have some days where I build in some slack over my course of my week or the course of my month. I'm balanced. But, you know, it's week 8, it's, we're heading into week 8 of the quarter. 8, 9, and 10 is when all the projects wrap up, all the grading happens. I got to organize juries, I got to get all this stuff done. I like them balanced in the next three weeks because it's finals time, it's crunch time at Stanford. But you know what? I've been, I've been doing that week 9 and 10 for 35 years. And I know what it feels like, and I know how to organize my life so that I can sprint and then rest. And that's balance. There's two things built into any model. One thing is what are the assumptions the model makes? And when you hear work, life, balance, you. You're making some assumption that it's possible to achieve some kind of equilibrium that's perfect, which is bullshit. It's also assumes the equilibrium is static in time versus, like, well, sometimes I'm sprinting, sometimes I'm resting. That's not in the model of work, life balance, right? So you blow up those assumptions and you change the model, you change what's possible.
- [43:33]
C
There's one really overarching theme in your most recent book, I thought, which is there's a kind of absolutism, this sort of absolutist thinking that people get into, which is my job, is bad. And I must leap to a categorically different thing somehow. And I can't, because I can't jump over the Atlantic. And in fact, in the history of, in Silicon Valley for a long time it was like, well, we need to be innovative. But that's innovation is like jumping the Atlantic. But design thinking is like teaching people how to swim. And so one of the key ideas is, you know what? I'm okay right now. This is a moment when things are good enough that I don't have to jump the Atlantic this instant.
- [44:20]
A
Right.
- [44:21]
C
I'm trying to remember exactly how you phrase that, but it was things are okay.
- [44:26]
A
No, you've got it. Exactly. It was the good enough for now.
- [44:28]
C
Good enough for now.
- [44:29]
A
I mean, if, you know, zoom way back, we are in the top 1/2 of 1% of the wealthy nations, well fed, well with medicines and everything else on the planet. We are not living in, you know, rural Myanmar trying to figure out if we're going to be shot today because we're the wrong, you know, wrong ethnicity. So if you zoom way back, we're all good enough for now. And then you start to say, yeah, but there's a couple things that are irritating or not optimal. Could I, what Could I change a.
- [45:02]
C
Sort of a hill climbing attitude, which is, you know what, I'm actually pretty high up the hill right now. But you know what, that hill is sloping up a little bit more over in this direction. Let's climb that way.
- [45:13]
A
Yeah, and I'll bet the view might be even a little better over there. But you know, if you're constantly thinking that the next view is going to be better than the one you have, you don't enjoy the fact that you're halfway up the mountain and you can see the whole valley and it's beautiful. And maybe when you're a little higher up, you'll be able to see over the valley to the ocean. But, you know, one enjoy what you've got. And we have a lot of, we are also very careful in all of the chapters. Say, look, work is what you spend most of your time doing. If you're in a toxic job, if you're being abused or, you know, assaulted or people are being inappropriate or it's toxic in any way. You don't deserve that. You deserve, you should leave as soon as you can. But there's economic realities, there's social realities and stuff. So, you know, let's do this. Well, no matter where you are, you have some Social network. And those people will be the people you rely on for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So build that social network well, and recognize that you are somewhere halfway up the mountain and that small changes from here. And sometimes all it takes is to take one little bit of step and turn around and you realize, oh my God, the view the other way, it's amazing. And it was right there. You weren't paying attention to that. You were paying attention to how unfair your boss is or how crappy your co worker is or something. So, you know, design thinking starts with, I always say design starts in reality. Where are we right now? What are the pain points? What's working? Okay? A design is an inherently optimistic philosophy. Like, we can make it better. Nobody ever starts. Nobody says, hey, let's make the next product worse than the one we already did and charge more for it. That's a great idea. Nobody does that. So we're trying to make the world a little better. We recognize that if we focus on the important things. My partner Dave was a major on the majors. Start with relationships in life. Because if your life isn't, isn't coherent, satisfying, whatever, doesn't matter what your job is, you're going to bring an unhappy person to a good job and that's going to make a good job bad. There's a thing called the new year, new you season, which is January through March, when everybody buys their self help books and their diet books. And so you wake up and you go, I'm going to run a marathon this year. And then, you know, within 90 days, I can predict that you will have failed. Because there's no way that you can do anything in the next five days that looks anything like a marathon. You can barely get to 10,000 steps. And so on the way to a marathon, all the early steps are going to look like failure. If you frame it that way. If you say, overall, I have a goal to maybe run a marathon this year, but I realize I got to break this into really small incremental wins. I checked your phone dart. You're, you're doing about 6,000, 6,500 steps on average. Let's get that to 10 and let's do that for three weeks. That's walk in. Now we're going to try to run five. Walk five. Okay. Now we're up to, you know, we can do a couple of a 1k, a 2k, a 5k. That's how you get to a marathon because you have to set up incremental wins.
- [48:13]
C
Friend of mine, Betsy Burrows, describes minimum viable habits. A minimum viable habit is I'm going to put on my running shoes and my running clothes and I'm going to walk out the front door every morning.
- [48:22]
B
That's it.
- [48:23]
C
And I'm going to do that every day. And that's success.
- [48:27]
A
Exactly. I love that. Minimum viable habit.
- [48:30]
C
Minimum viable habit. Betsy Burrows is somebody I'm working to get on the show. So I want to switch the conversation because I realized something. So, you know, my work is primarily about how do companies design better work, which is I frame work as a product that companies are building and selling, and this changes my ideas a little bit. That's a nice, simple framing. Right. It makes it easy to think about it as a different kind of problem, which is now it's a product problem. But if I'm designing a company for somebody who's gone through your course, I want to sort of ideate around what that company might look like, because what that company looks like to me is more like a workshop. It's more like one of ido's. I don't know what they're called, work studios or whatever they are. You can move the tables around, there's whiteboards every place. There's lots of toys to play with. So I'm not designing a job for you, I'm designing a workshop in which you can design a job.
- [49:28]
A
Yeah, I'm training managers and people who are kind of organizing these activities around the things you can actually manage, which are giving people opportunities to engage their intrinsic motivations. What we call the, you know, it comes from social determination theory. People are naturally curious and want to learn. They don't need incentives to do that. People are naturally relationship oriented and want to be on teams. You don't need to give incentives for that. In fact, there's plenty of evidence. If you give incentives for. For intrinsic motivations, you ruin the motivation. Lots of experiments on that. There's lots of things that I would do to train managers to recognize that their employees are growing and developing. That's a good thing. They will change their objectives as they work. That's a good thing. We want to encourage mastery. One of the things I'm noticing with my younger students when they go out in the workplace is they're hooked on novelty. I did this job, it was really cool, and then I quit because then I didn't want to do it again. Then I did this other job and it was really cool. And then they wanted me. I was really good at it, so they wanted me to do it again. So I did it the second time and then I thought, I don't want to keep doing this. And then I went to another job and I said, well, when are you ever going to get good at anything? I mean, you're smart, so you can sort of be kind of good the first time. But trust me, there's a long ways between novelty and mastery and mastery is the 10,000 hour thing. So I would set up systems that allow people to realize their own objectives aligned with the objectives of the organization. When I ran my own consulting company, I followed a guy named Dee Hawk, who's the guy who started Visa. He was essentially the guy who invented the credit card. And he had a management philosophy that you can't change certain things about people. So stop pretending you can interview for the things that are unchangeable because experience and everything else is easily taught. And the three that I picked were integrity, capacity and motivation. Integrity. If your parents didn't teach you to do what you took to be in a a person with integrity, I can't fix that capacity though. You walk in the door with a certain IQ and a certain ability to learn. I can't change that. And motivation because I don't believe I've ever motivated an employee. But I've taken a motivated employee and said, hey, do you want to paint this fence with me? So if you don't interview for experience because what's the point? I mean experience is just, do you do the work, do you do the workflow? We do figma to, you know, to something. To something. To something or you know, SolidWorks to something. To something, to something. It's like, yeah, but in six months we won't be using any of those tools, we'll be using chat. So why, why are we asking people if they know how to use tools? That's a silly thing. I should find out if they're smart and motivated and they have integrity. If they have that, we'll make great teams. So you know, it would be a place where we recogn and we say lifelong learning. Great. So stop interviewing for experience. Interview for the ability to learn completely different thing. We say that, you know, we need employees that are self motivated. Great. Then stop crushing their intrinsic motivations to, you know, autonomy, relatedness and connected and relatedness and capacity. We know so much about how humans are motivated. Stop creating systems that demotivate them and recognize that money, particularly in the economy in Silicon Valley is the least motivating tool you have in your toolbox. You know, the whole Google people ops Thing where they publish their results and they thought it was going to be about IQ or red, you know, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Turns out now it's about, you know, psychological safety, having my back and the manager's not changing their mind all the time. Duh. Took all that research. Yes, but any competent manager already knows.
- [53:05]
C
Yeah. So there's kind of two, there's like two sides to this. The fire that we're kindling in this discussion that we're describing, the kindling of a fire. One is quality work. Life is co created. And so a part of what you're saying is hire people who are good partners in that co creation because they're.
- [53:25]
A
The kind because about what they want. It's really hard to do this.
- [53:29]
C
Right. But then the second part is create an environment in which people a have freedom to climb local hills and then be in a constant conversation about what uphill is for each person. So uphill for you on this team might not be the same as uphill for, you know, Natalia or something. And so this sensitivity to, to local hill climbing might be a part of what would be built into the environment. Freedom and sensitivity to gradient.
- [54:02]
A
I like the metaphor of a local hill and takes a little bit of training on both sides. And you know, we have been, we do some work in corporations with HR teams that are trying to improve engagement. Employee engagement's bad, we're gonna improve it. And I tell them two things. First of all, you're gonna have to be willing to have a life conversation because we're not gonna just talk about jobs. And if that's too scary for you, we won't, then you don't, you shouldn't hire us. But also we can, we can show you how to do it. I mean, you're not, you're not someone's therapist. You're not responsible for their life. You're just setting up the conditions to say, here's some local hills and you know, so we can show you how to do that. The other thing is we're going to have employees do three, not one options for their careers because there's always three, not one. There is no linear path. If you adopt a mindset of curiosity, there's more than one of you in there, right? Okay, so we're going to do three, not one. And one of them, by the way, I'm just so you know, will be, what would you do if you quit? And right about that point, the HR guys go, whoa, you want us to hire you? And you're going to let the Bri, the, the brainstorm. Quitting. Why would we do that, Bill? And I say, well, because you really only have two choices. You can be a generative part of that conversation, which by the way, is going on. You have no control, or you can find out why I quit in my exit interview. Those are your only two choices. And if you want to go la la la la la la la, I'm not listening. The Data says that 60% of your employees are looking for a new job while they're on the job. The conversation in the proverbial virtual break room or on Slack or wherever is about quitting. Either get in the conversation, accept it as a grownup, this is part of what's going on, or pretend it's not happening, and then continue to issue your really well designed personal development program plans, blah, blah, blah, talent management plans, to the exact same effect that 69% of your workers think it's bullshit.
- [55:57]
C
Well, that's the most valuable conversation you could possibly be in because that's where you're hearing the design attributes.
- [56:06]
A
Yeah, they're. They'll bitch about their job or the tasks they have to do, or maybe they'll bitch about their boss. But what they're really going to bring to you is how this works for them in their lives. And when you are engaged in that conversation, you're having the conversation they want to have. And if you can navigate that successfully, one, you may come to the conclusion that this employee is no longer going to be productive for our enterprise and they should, in fact, leave. That's a good thing. Let's throw them a big party and wish them well. Because guess what? It's a big. It's a longer game. And six years from now, you and I will both be in a different company. And if I treated you with respect when you came to that point of view, you'll be willing to join my new organization with me. And two, if we have the conversation and we discover another fit for you in the organization, it's a super win because everybody, everybody gets what they need.
- [57:00]
C
I've absolutely found that. Which is that by being sensitive to how somebody's experience work, you say, well, why don't we try this other job? And you try the other job and it's perfect. They love it. Somebody had to do that because it's.
- [57:14]
A
Different and there's lots of stuff to learn.
- [57:17]
C
And also because they're, they're not you and you think this is a horrible job over here. Would you like it? But no, actually, you say, let's Just try it out and they love it. Okay. There's a question I ask at the end of most interviews which is what job do you hire your job to do for you?
- [57:34]
A
At this point in my career, which has, you know, been a bit, I'm really in a privileged place to design jobs that do exactly what I want them to do for me. And at this point, because I'm spending so much time in this, you know, again, this is sort of. David calls it the success disaster. I wasn't planning on being a life design guy or being an expert on, you know, work or any of that sort of stuff. It just happened. But it's happened in such a way that I recognize that there's something, there's something important to do here. So right now I've, I'm designing my job so that I get to travel and go to Singapore and China and places all over the world that I love to do. I'm designing my job to, to challenge my assumptions about how design and human centered design really works. And I'm thinking, I'm designing my job to give me the time to think about, to think very broadly about what, what are the implications, what are the implications for capitalism if we redesign jobs and everyone was productive? What are the implications for resource allocation and resource management of every job was sustainable? The interesting thing I discovered when I went full time at the university is that one of the privileges you of, of the university life is unlike working at Apple where there's a meeting every 10 minutes and there's things to do, blah blah, blah, blah, and it's all about tasks and we got to ship the product and we got to do stuff. There's long periods of time that if you're a researcher you're doing, you're in your lab researching and for me there's long periods of time, you know, writing and thinking about wow. If we could, you know, imagine a world where a hundred percent of the workers said I'm engaged and if I'm not engaged, I know what to do, I know how to re engage with my life because we're, we're heading into a very difficult future forgetting AI and everything else which, which has, will have a catastrophically large, potentially wonderful impact on jobs. But it'll be big, it'll be, you know, it'll be turmoil. But we rewrote the second book to include issues of what we call disruption design. We were writing it in the fires and were burning in Northern California and we were having the racial unrest in America and we had the COVID pandemic and we have climate change showing up everywhere. So it's been a tremendous privilege for me to be able to design the job that allows me to spend time wondering how designers can have an impact on all of those problems and through through the lens of work.
- [60:05]
C
Then where can people learn more about.
- [60:07]
A
You on our website Designingyour Dot life would be where we have put all the stuff when we, when we, when we're on wonderful shows like this or other shows. And we're also, you know, where we, when we publish new, new stuff about either our, our work, our research or new exercises, we give all the exercises away for free. All the workshops and, and the little worksheets and stuff are all on the website. So go there.
- [60:31]
C
Great. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Great to talk to you.
- [60:35]
A
I had a good time. Thanks a lot.
- [60:39]
C
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.
- [60:50]
B
Or not, this really helps us grow.
- [60:52]
C
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.
- [61:07]
B
Google or Cisco Systems.
- [61:08]
C
Thanks again for listening. See you next time.