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Work For Humans
Stories Over Surveys: Unlocking Human Truths About Work and Life | James Warren
01:11:56
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- [00:03]
A
When you ask people to tell you what's important to them about their experience versus asking them a scripted five or 10 questions, they tell you so much more. They unleash what they've been holding in, and you'd be like, why did you have so much to say? And they're like, because nobody ever asked. And they literally mean it. Nobody ever asked me what I thought. And that, to me, is a huge opportunity and travesty.
- [00:26]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. A lot of us turn to surveys to understand what people are experiencing at work. But surveys that generate summary ratings and averages can tell us what people think in the aggregate, but they rarely tell us what it really feels like to be a human at work. Stories do stories connect us capture nuance, emotion, and the why behind our choices in ways that numbers just can't? My guest today is James Warren, founder and CEO of Share More Stories, a company that helps organizations see their employees and customers more fully by giving them opportunities to share their complete, lived experiences. James founded the company in 2014 on the belief that everyone's stories matter, that by learning from stories, companies can do better and be better. Today, Share More Stories combines human expression with digital tools like its Seek platform to help organizations uncover deep human insights and turn them into better decisions, better relationships, and more growth. In our conversation, James and I talk about why stories reveal truths that surveys simply miss, how prompts unlock vulnerability, and how personal narratives can be transformed into organizational change. We also explore the role of vulnerability in leadership, why being heard is often the most powerful outcome of all, and what it means to flip the script, recognizing that your employees are not inside your company, your company's inside your people. All right, if you haven't already, hit follow so you don't miss future conversations like this one. All right, let's get to it. Here's James Warren. James Warren, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:23]
A
Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.
- [02:26]
B
You have built your practice, which you can correct me, but I see it as an experience design practice anchored very strongly on the idea of story, and especially story as a way of understanding the experiences of people. I'm very interested in learning more about that, and so many of us historically have turned to things like surveys or ways of collecting and understanding the experience of people in our organization and also of our customers that are numeric or that are averages. And I've always felt that that just hides all the important information. But I've never heard of anybody really anchoring on story as the tool. So first of all, would you say that you're an experienced design firm? And then the second thing is, how did you arrive at Story as one of your principal tools?
- [03:19]
A
Well, it's interesting. I think the application of our work, the use case of our work, is often experience design, experience improvement. If you had asked me this question, say, three years ago, I would have said our job is to give leaders, brand managers, product managers the insights about experience that they need to make it better. Then if you had asked me about a year ago, I would say no. We're in the experience improvement business and we're using these stories and insights to do it. But I will tell you, this year that has continued to iterate. And what I really have learned is that our customers are really valuing this as a way to increase the impact of what they do through the brand, through the product, through the organization. It is still, for me, deeply rooted and grounded in stories as a way to understand people's experiences. That's literally what we built. And I don't consider myself an experienced designer, but I've been known to play one on TV from time to time. Jokes aside, some of our best partners are really expert designers who take these insights and these stories that say to us things like, this is what I've been looking for for the length of my practice is this kind of really rich, emotional narrative insight into how people are experiencing what we built and giving us insight into what really matters to them. What part of the experience is working so don't screw it up, and what part of the experience is broken that those other tools you talked about just don't reveal? It's an interesting space we find ourselves in where we're really at an intersection between consumer research and sometimes employee research and experience management. We're sitting at that sweet spot, which is still somewhat to be defined, but that's why we're there, because we like the undefined things. It's a little bit more interesting and curious to be there.
- [05:04]
B
So in your research, how did you arrive at story? What brought you to that? And when did you realize this is an incredibly important tool for understanding humans in context?
- [05:21]
A
I think on some level, if you were to hear my mom tell it, she would have said that I was telling stories from the age of three because my parents would bring me out in my pajamas to tell stories during their cocktail parties. And I guess that was my shtick early on. That explains a lot. Why I wrote a lot when I was a kid and wrote a lot through early adulthood because I Just I loved writing either short stories or a lot of personal narrative, a lot of personal essay type stories. And when I started the company, that wasn't actually the first idea. The first idea was, we need a better version of Facebook. So what I was trying to figure out was what would provide a more authentic and engaging way of people connecting with each other, where it wasn't this 1% of platform users are creating 90% of the content. What would be more of a true person to person type of engagement? And that as I started thinking about my own life, my own experiences, what I'm passionate about, talking to friends and advisors, I realized some of it was staring me in my face. It was the idea of stories and personal stories in particular was the thing. And at the time I wasn't even thinking of a competitive landscape or anything. I was just like, what am I craving? I'm craving less opinion and more experience. And that became like an early truth for us, that the idea of opinions, we've all got lots of them. And that tends to be where we find ourselves in disconnect when we are really focused on expressing and making sure our opinion is heard. But what I really was curious about is, well, one, I want to know what's underlying that opinion? What has led that person to have that opinion? What is the actual experience that they've had that might show up that way? Because my early, early hypothesis was we probably have more opportunities to connect just as humans through really understanding and valuing one another's experiences than we ever have the hope of if we're just trading opinions. And I felt that for a very, very long time, at least the last 20 years of my life, I believed that. And so, you know, and I started iterating in the early entrepreneurial journey, figuring out, well, what are we going to make and how would this solve a problem? The idea that I'd worked a lot with brands and a lot with large organizations, and this deep desire to understand people's stories, my curiosity about their stories, those were the things that really started to merge into this concept of sharing people's stories. And the first version of it, I thought was actually going to be a writing platform for people who were frustrated. I called it the frustrated writers Platform. That didn't have so much of an opportunity ahead of it that I could easily define and pursue. But as I started to learn more about where people in general felt unheard or why they felt unheard, and where people were struggling to understand other people, this was even before I thought about it as research, story Kept coming up. And then I'll tell you, the funniest thing happened. And it's a story of my own that I share from time to time. I was at a conference in New York, Future Storytelling. They don't do their annual conference anymore called the Fost Summit, but it was brilliant. And I think it's led by Charles Melcher. And they would bring together the kind of people you and I have been around and are ourselves technologists, creators, innovators, media and all around this exploration of the role of story in our media and tech today and what it might be in the future. So I went to my first or second conference there and I was volunteering to help in a workshop. And there was a person in our session and she happened to be a global insights head at a major consumer packaged goods company. And she said, I'm looking for a different kind of insight. I'm wondering, like what we could learn from people's stories. And I had that thing, that moment where you go say something. Well, that's what we're building at, share more stories. And all I had was an idea. At the time we didn't have the thing. So she said, I'm really interested in that. And something said, get her card and give her your card. So I did those things. And she really helped us define the problem from the perspective of a brand leader or an organizational leader or an insights head. What was missing in what they understood about their consumers and their constituents today. And the biggest thing that was missing was the why layer. They had plenty of tools that would say who, what, where, when, somewhat how in the qualitative space. But they really struggled to understand why. And she gave us such a specific use. She said, when we are trying to innovate new products or build new brands, we're sort of trapped by what we know from the past. And that is very, very limited in terms of what might make this person shift or what might make them really consider this or contemplate a replacement or a substitute or even just something that's a new category. And she really co created the idea that the story could answer that for us. So I came back and got with my dev team and we got in the lab and we started playing with it. And that's what gave us the early working prototypes behind what we have today.
- [10:33]
B
Right out of the gate, how did it work and what didn't work that you revised.
- [10:40]
A
Right out of the gate. The thing that worked was if a person submitted a story on our website in a given project or collection, a Theme, a community, a titled section. If they submitted a story on that site, we could go into the backend, press a button, and run emotional analytics using IBM's Watson tools. So at the time, IBM had just bought a AI startup that was based out of, you know, I think they were in Toronto, and they were going further at the time than most other companies were. They were going beyond the obvious sentiment, which is pretty basic. They were looking at things like values and needs. And we thought that was really, really interesting. I'm like, that's the kind of stuff that I'd be interested in. I want to just make a complicated product that tells people what they already know in terms of sentiment. So we could press that button. We had installed those services on our website. We could run it behind the scenes, and it would produce an Excel sheet with a lot of numbers for that individual story. It would quantify those emotions for that single story. What didn't work is I was literally looking at an individual spreadsheet for every story and pulling those into Excel and running some quick and easy macros to aggregate them to then create averages and try to paint a picture of whether it was ten or a hundred at those times. That was pretty much the largest we'd see. What is the emotional map of these people, of these people related to this experience? I'll tell you the other thing that did work, and another thing that didn't work. What did work was this idea that if you set the stage right, if you set the context right, you could get a person to share a surprisingly emotional and vulnerable story about their experience. Either working for a place or consuming or buying a brand or navigating an issue in society, you could get them to really go deep into their own experiences. What I also learned that didn't work so well is we thought that to capture the broadest range of people and their stories, our prompts needed to be really broad, like almost just a subject. And we learned immediately and paradoxically, the more specific we make the prompt, the easier it is for the people who fit that characteristic to actually write and share very, very deeply. And that blew me away at first because I really did not think it would happen. It was a nice intellectual debate on the team as to whether or not more specific prompts would be easier or harder. And I'm like, it's going to box them in. They're not going to be able to. But it's that old creative truth. The creative wants the box because they want to push against the edges. They want to know what's My container. And so does the person who doesn't do this for a living, who's. You're asking them to bear some small part of their soul, some window. They're like, well, what's the frame of the window? Give me the frame of the window and that's what I'll focus on. So that was interesting.
- [13:43]
B
It's very interesting. I had Stacy Barton on the show. She's a Disney immersive experience designer. She does the story part of if you have an extra $500,000 and you would like your grand niece to have a bespoke experience at Disney, she designs that. And I asked her what she wanted from her job and she said, I hire my job to give me constraints. She says, they are absolutely critical to my creative process.
- [14:11]
A
Yes.
- [14:12]
B
And so it's very aligned. On the other hand, you don't want to lead the witness. In your case, you're trying for the most grounded information you can get. In fact, I have one of your questions, and I don't know if it's actually one of your prompts, but it's a question that you asked in a chat. Can you think of a time when you felt unwelcome or that you didn't belong? What was the situation? What did you perceive the signals to be that led you to believe you didn't belong? And how did that make you feel? Is that an example?
- [14:42]
A
It is. It might be half of the prompt, because we've used a prompt around belonging that starts with, tell me about a time where you felt like you really belonged here or you didn't. And then we unpack what might be examples of you belonging and what might be examples, like the piece you have of not belonging. And that is one where, when we are designing our prompts, especially now that we don't facilitate them in a workshop. In the early days, everything was workshop based, right? So we'd go in, we'd have a workshop with 25 people and our clients would be like, you can't do a focus group with 25 people. And I'd say, well, it's not a focus group, number one. Number two, much of what's happening in the room is them connecting with their own memory, their own experience and with each other. And when they write, they're going to write individually. And it worked. It worked really, really well. But also was hard to like, offer that to organizations and clients that wanted to hear from many more people. Or it was hard for participants who couldn't make a thing at a time and a place. And as with most businesses, when Covid came, we almost went away. But we had one client who said, well, if you could figure out how to do the workshop online. And that was back in the day when very, very, very few people were doing things like that online. I was like, well, let's figure it out. We started micro testing. We did it with five, then with seven, then we had a Zoom with 30 people. And it worked, and it kept working. So we knew we had something, at least in terms of the process and the experience. But eventually we had to put that into a platform that people could access on their own without us bringing them along. And that meant thinking really hard about how those prompts would, to your point, give the participant enough context to access their memory, enough trigger to go to maybe the right altitude of their memory and not coach them on their story. And so we found the best way to do that is to try to paint. Unless we're literally looking for the most enjoyable experience you've ever had or the best of something. If we're looking to just identify the experiences, we deliberately frame it as, it could be this or it could be that. It might be this and it might be that. Because we want them within that box to actually not say, I'm supposed to be stuck in the lower right pane, or I'm supposed to be stuck in the upper left pane. We want them to see the whole window frame is theirs, wherever they choose to go with that. All we want is to not really think about their story and their experience. And so that's why we'll often frame a positive quote, positive, negative, in the same prompt to give them that emotional room to go there.
- [17:17]
B
What counts as a story? You've almost said it in that last prompt, which was, what counts as a story is an event, for instance. But you could also ask questions about what's the story of your life? Or what was the story of walking in that door? They could be giant, or they could be small.
- [17:38]
A
Sometimes the project that we're working on with a given customer defines a lot of that. But to answer your question first, in terms of what defines or qualifies as a story, we're asking people to reflect on and share an experience in their life. We're asking them typically to think about if it's a macro experience like parenthood, we're asking them to think about one or two times that stand out relative to what we want to know. It might be something like, tell us about one of the most challenging experiences you've had. Being a parent Right. So parenthood is the big context. And they might have 10,000 stories, maybe a hundred thousand memories, but we got to have them pick one. And they also might be something really, really specific. Like, tell us about the most frustrating time you've had shopping in the health and beauty section, accessing health and beauty products, something really that sounds almost functional and technical and unemotional. And yet, surprisingly, they might have lots to say. So the range is either is sometimes a very, very narrow context or a large macro context that we have to help them drill down on. But what we want them to do in response to that prompt are a few key things. Think about and describe the key moments of that experience. We encourage them to use their sensory recall, and the platform steps them through that. So ask them, what do you remember seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing. Because when they access the sensory memory, they bring up the emotional details. How I felt when that experience happened. And so when they do that, by the time they start writing, they're really primed. And even if we have a simple one like it might have a word count minimum of 150, they'll write 500, 700 words, easy. That was another interesting paradox. When we lowered the word count threshold, people's completion rates went up and their average words stayed about the same. Fascinating. It's almost like if we ask them, you have to do 300 words. They're like, I can't do it. I'm like, yes, you can, because you used to write an essay in high school in 45 minutes and it was 500 words. They don't always buy that coaching tip.
- [19:45]
B
I hated essays in school. Are you kidding me?
- [19:47]
A
Well, that's the point, right? I'm like, yeah, and I don't want. I didn't like doing it. And so when you lower that barrier and yet you focus more on the invitation and the benefit, they seem to overcome it more on their own. But we asked them to think about that moment or those moments. We asked them to describe it. And we might say, if you're stuck, think about who was there? What were you doing? What was happening? And then we asked them two reflective questions to either literally weave into their writing or for the more. Some folks would just sort of answer it as they get to the end of their submission. It might say things like, how does it make you feel? And they're very, very responsive to that question. And the other question we asked, which sometimes people really, really attach themselves to, and sometimes they don't. Of all the possible things you could have shared, why did you share this particular memory or experience. And that's helpful when we're talking about those bigger ones, like parenthood, because it actually forces them to go a little bit deeper into why that story matters. Because, well, you know, I'm really thinking a lot about what's happening in my role as a parent these days. Or my kids are growing older and my oldest just had my first grandchild and I'm realizing what I regret about how I parented that child when they were younger. So it's like, ah, we still haven't had the moral of the story until you push a little bit further into that space.
- [21:03]
B
That makes a lot of sense to me. After college, I spent six years as a criminal defense investigator. So my job was to interview people about incidents. And we used to win cases because we would find more witnesses than the other side. And the reason you can win a case that way is that there's so much variation in what people remember from something that we could just pick from the larger bell curve and craft a better story. But what was also really interesting about it was that what people remembered depended very much about the actual incident, on what they remembered about that particular incident was very influenced by what they had seen just before. So there was an incident just before the main incident where people had a chance to form an opinion about the defendant and if they had seen that totally different story. And so there's this thing, it's actually, it's a challenge with, I think, all reporting and collection of information. It's sort of like the, say, do gap. It's the remember happened gap. And does it matter what really happened in your data collection or just what people remembered happening and the charge that they came out of it with?
- [22:19]
A
This is great. So my partner Andy and I, we think about this and we talk about it a lot because at the end of the day, especially when we are say, comparing or competing with more traditional research, truth, integrity, accuracy, the hallmarks of research. And we're also pushing because we're saying, imagine if you could have a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand conversations one on one, how would you process those conversations? You would process those conversations if you were talking to people. You don't necessarily, unless you have reason to believe they're not telling you the truth about a thing, you become quickly more focused on connecting, empathizing, listening and learning versus, again, unless you have reason to believe that they are habitually dishonest. Fact checking, now that might be different in the broader societal lens when we're talking about issues and having Debates about our opinions of those issues. But even in those contexts, we say, well, before we get into like that, tell me what happened to you. A shift occurs in the person telling and in the person listening. And so, yes, they might leave certain pieces out. That's the story of life, though there are always pieces that we are recollecting and discarding. And I think about our brains as ram, old school hard disk and cloud, and the speed and the urgency with which we access those memories, depending on the jobs to be done at this day, at this season of my life, or whatever's going on. And so oftentimes I will revisit my own experience. I mean, this happens in therapy all the time. I might revisit an experience. And it's not that I was wrong the first time, it's that there are additional pieces of insight and story this time. And so to make that applicable and useful for a CMO or a CEO who wants to understand their culture or their brand, or somebody who wants to understand an issue in society, we do need to get the person to at least think about. This is less me being a reporter and trying to say, I think I've cataloged all the events in the right sequence and this is more about, Yeah, I mean, I had an experience. My experience was interacting with people in a customer support role and this is how it made me feel and this is why. Or I had an experience when I went shopping and I was going to buy this car, but something about this car in the dealership lot next to me as I drove by just caught my eye and it brought me in. Okay, well, it's not enough to just say people were attracted to the shape of your cars. Let's go deeper. Why? What is it about that car as you drove by that caught your eye? And by asking them to think, to recall, to go to their senses, was it that you felt you were about to play it safe in buying this particular model and that little glimmer caught your eye and you're like, you know, I'm working through my 40s or 50s and I kind of want to have one last attempt to reclaim my youthful freedom. Maybe that car is a better fit for me. So it's little things like that that I think are cues. And it's less about asking them to. The standard want them to hold themselves to is their own standard of how they recall that experience making them feel the most important thing they can tell us is not these are the 10 things that happened in order. It's describing the experience in General and saying this is how it made me feel. Because that's really where the insight comes from on an individual level. And then in the aggregate it's also.
- [25:41]
B
Where a lot of the effect on your brand is. The effect on your brand is not specifically what happened, it's what people remember happening.
- [25:48]
A
Absolutely. And it's not even always rational or logical or sequential. Which sometimes is why I think everybody's attempt to. Not everybody, but a lot of marketers attempt to really reduce everything that they do in marketing and in brand to performance based metrics. Misses a lot because you are identifying what you believe are indicators of behavior based on how it looks in a trailing basis, which that's not useful. It's just that there are other things that are deeper that often maybe trigger that behavior in a way that you don't have the pattern for it, that you don't see that you'd be like, why would you behave this way? There's a simple thought experiment. Take two people who both used a Mac. You look at them, you're like, yep, demographics are similar, behaviors are similar, and that's why they both use. That's the mistake when I assume that the demos and the behaviors are the reason instead of just a sometimes incorrect predictor. And when I think about those two people using it the same, exhibiting similar outward characteristics, I might continue to make my marketing bets based on that. And that's a reasonable assumption. But if I don't know why each of them does it, if I don't know why person A's motivation for using it is specific and unique from person B, then when person A's context changes, their decision is likely to change. And so that context might be. I was frankly just waiting for a phone or a tablet that delivered this part of the experience more seamlessly than an iPhone. And now I've got a Galaxy, whatever number it is. And then they'll switch. People say no. People hardly ever switch from Apple to Samsung or Apple to PC. And I'm like, I know plenty of people who do. And what they do is they've always been waiting to switch. They just didn't have a strong enough reason to. So if you don't know their reasons for using your product, you won't really understand their reason for leaving your product. And that's what the feeling level gives us. As much as people think it's soft and squishy, it's knowable and it's measurable to an extent. And it gives you one more really, really important piece to the puzzle. Not just what they're doing or when they're doing it. But why? Because if I understand your why, I'm likely to better understand what I need to continue to do for you to stay. And I might. If I've lost you, then at least I'm not sitting there scratching my head, like, how could we lose them? They exhibit the exact same behaviors as this person. Their why was different.
- [28:15]
B
There's three things in there. One is, a lot of the research that I've done in regards to what people want from work is jobs to be done theory, which is very much what you're describing, which is understand what people want to get from your thing. The second thing is there's a lot of variation in the job that people want to get done. The third thing is it's largely contextual. It's not a personality trait. Sometimes it is, but it's also, I hire my job right now because I have kids going to college and I need to pay the bills or some other thing. In fact, Clayton Christensen, in talking about job to be done theory, he was very specific that psychographics and understanding the attributes of people like age, they may be predictable, but they don't tell you how to design. In other words, they may be predictive, but they are not. There's a better word than predictive. It's not coming to mind for me right now.
- [29:08]
A
No, I know exactly what you mean. Because if our goal is to. And I think part of it's the reason, it's like, why do you want to see it that way? And if your innate motivation as the brand or the organization is to say, I'm trying to avoid understanding people as specifically as they want to be understood, I'm trying to aggregate them. That shows up in the missteps we have as marketers, as organizational leaders, as brand leaders. If my goal is to say, well, I know I can't literally talk to all million of you, but I really wish I could. And the next best thing is for us to focus more on what you want to tell us. That maybe we don't hear all the time than what we want to know or what we seek to validate. And just that subtle shift, yes, you're still going to do it at scale. You're still going to be efficient. But when you ask people to tell you what's important to them about their experience versus asking them a scripted five or 10 questions, they tell you so much more. They unleash what they've been holding in. And you'd be like, why did you have so much to say. And they'd be like. Because nobody ever asked. And they literally mean it. Nobody ever asked me what I thought. And that, to me, is a huge opportunity and travesty.
- [30:14]
B
Now, this is a really interesting point because I wrote down here. Is being heard and being seen one of your deliverables? So creating the. The experience of being seen. And then my next. And you're nodding. So then my next question is, does it work? Not in person.
- [30:33]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love this. Let me go back for a second. So when we would do the workshops, you know, like anything else, the first time you do it and you have no idea if it's working, I'd be like, sweating, shaking. I'm like, I hope people don't think this is crazy because I'm asking them to sit at their table and write a personal story on demand, on call, on time. And I've got a two and a half hour workshop to get through. In fact, that's not true because the first workshops were like four hours long. I don't know what we were thinking then. Then they got shorter to two hours, and then they got two hours online. But there was this moment that I really, really just emotionally connected to. It was almost like the universe saying, you were doing the right thing. You're doing a good thing. There would be a moment when we'd say, okay, everybody walked you through the prompt, helped you understand why your stories matter, explained my role in this process and your role, and now it's time to write. And sometimes they'd look around and be like, you know, we're going to write, like, right now. And like, yep. And they'd either have a notepad or laptop or whatever they wanted to use. And some would jump right in, a handful would jump right in. The majority would take a couple of minutes of thinking, looking around. And then there'd be a few that were sort of laggards, like, I can't believe, like, we're actually doing this kind of thing. But they would do it. And it was my earliest magic moment, because the silence would descend on this room. You'd have a bunch of adults writing about something in their life or their experience. Every time I think about that, I would feel like I'm in the right place, I'm doing the right thing. This is the right thing to do. This is a good thing to do. And so when we started moving that gradually online, my biggest personal fear was that we would lose that impact, that impact that I cared so deeply about, which was for the participant to feel Seen and heard to connect with themselves in a deeper way. You know, yeah, we might be talking about an issue. We might be talking about travel, healthcare, work, banking. We might be talking about anything. But I really wanted them to go deep. And something funny happened when we built the platform again, another one of those holding tightly moments. But when we did our first project in the new platform, it was with a management consulting firm, and we were doing, of all things, they wanted to study imposter syndrome in their organization, which was fascinating. When they all started the project, it was, we're not going to have everybody in a room on one day. So it was like, we'll kick it off and then we're going to collect over next days, and then we'll get people back together and share what we learned. Well, the first story that came through, I was like, okay, yeah, it worked. Then the second, then the third. And so, okay, the initial fear of like, will it work? That was over. But the next fear of like, will they write things that are emotionally resonant, meaningful, Will they be vulnerable? In this app, the thing that blew my mind is they were more vulnerable. The thing in the room that was for me, very precious, which was the group sensibility had built some built in huge benefits, but also barriers. So the question was, which balance net is better? Right. Writing by myself, on my own time in this app, where I might not benefit from the collective experience, but I don't have to worry about judgment, fear, vulnerability. I can just express myself, or I'm drawing maybe some creative or emotional energy from the other people in this room and still writing on my own. And I don't think it's either or. But I will tell you, I was greatly and pleasantly surprised and relieved at how much more they wrote that they didn't have to worry about a clock, that they would save their progress and come back later. All the things you would kind of expect, but I just wasn't sure. We weren't sure how that would impact their reflection, recognition of their memory and writing it. And so it worked. And now we're exploring other mediums. We're doing testing with audio as we speak. We're going to hold off on video for a while because I've seen too many examples of solicited video storytelling that turns into. It becomes way too performative, too focused on how do I look? And I don't like the way I. I look and, oh, I didn't like the way I was looking. And they lose their focus on their story for that context, if they're Making content great. But we're asking them to focus on an experience in a memory and that's distracting. Audio gives them a way to sort of lose themselves in their story, just like they are when they're writing. They are different. We get a different response, but both of them are really hold up to what we need to learn from an insight standpoint.
- [34:59]
B
Yes, there may be people who you just couldn't gather information from if you just asked them to write it.
- [35:06]
A
That's right.
- [35:07]
B
And vice versa.
- [35:08]
A
Although I will say we are aware of that and we are humbly defiant of it. Because what I like to say is, yes, I realize you don't like to write as much today as people did X years ago. And if I were to show you all the things you write, you write a lot. So it's not so much the writing that you don't like. It might be the context or the use or is that the perfect medium for memory recall? To me, writing is writing. And I don't mean that in the literal sense, but I mean, if I'm comfortable writing my personal expressions, it matters less to me personally if I'm doing that in a notebook. Although I hardly ever write longhand anymore. I almost write everything I can. Even if it's reflections during the day, I'll write it in my phone. But I've learned a lot about other people, that all things don't work for all people. And so you do have to give them different on ramps and also encourage them to maybe sometimes work through that. Because as long as they're focusing on their own experience and we tell them a lot, this is not a we story, this is a me story. And leaders really struggle with that, by the way, because leaders always want to tell their stories as a collective. And I'm like, no, you gotta get really focused on you and vulnerable and not in an ego driven way, but in a very humility driven way. And that's hard for a lot of leaders, but when they do, it is transformative for them and everybody who works for them. Just one act of vulnerability, of reflecting on their experience can sometimes break something open that allows more to happen. It's fun thing to watch, especially with senior executives.
- [36:44]
B
Do they need to share with each other for that to happen? Or can it just be a personal exploration? Hey everyone, I want to let you know about some upcoming speaking events. If you happen to be in the Great lakes area on September 30th. I'm keynoting the HR track at the UWEBC 27th Annual Emerging Best Practices and Technology Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The conference pulls in some fabulous speakers to discuss topics across all of business, not just HR. Also in Oakland, California, September 17th and 18th, two of our past guests at Work for Humans will be speaking at the Responsive Conference. Brie Grof will be talking about her sparkling new book Today Was Fun. And Simone Stolzoff will be talking about his next book. So check it all out@revolutionive.org use promo code 11fold. That's 11fold to get a substantial discount. All right, hope to see you there.
- [37:48]
A
Today. In our platform, it is a personal exploration that is guided by what we've learned in these large group facilitations. And so the app experience will say things like, you sign in and you have a prompt, but before you start writing, we'll encourage you to think about yourself and your experience. And sometimes I told you about those sensory pieces. It really takes them into a place of remembering and recalling deeply. We actually have the equivalent of a virtual notepad because they have to take notes before they start to write, and they don't see writing and note taking as the same thing. So here's your notepad. Jot down a few thoughts, and then we bring you through to the place where you write. And it's really simple and easy when they get there. I will say that we're exploring ways to help for those who want it to realize that you're not alone in this. There's a collective experience similar to yours happening around you. From a research standpoint, that's not the priority. But I would say from a broader now you've learned. How do you engage? How do you connect with this group? I think that's where it could go because we've seen that happen in the groups and workshops. There's a beautiful moment in our exercises, right, where we say, here's the prone in a minute, you're just going to take a few notes on what you think it might be. Then we bring them back. Then we say, now what I want you to do is spend time in this little exercise called story collab, where you just share the bare bones of your story with one other person. And they're not going to judge, comment, react. They're just going to ask you questions to help you pull more of your memory out. So they are functioning as we function in the app. Hey, well, what do you remember? Smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, hearing. What do you remember? Who else was with you? Just helping that person think a little bit more about their experience. But no matter how you frame that, every single Time those two people discover something about the other that they had no idea they had in common. It is yet to fail us. And this is over thousands and thousands of times doing it. It doesn't mean they shopped at the same place last Thursday. But they find these almost incredibly obvious big human connectors just lurking beneath the surface that they get to access in real time. And they're like, oh, oh, oh, oh. So that happens in the workshop, and it doesn't happen for the individual in the moment that they're writing. But what does happen when we zoom out and pull that together as insights either, especially on the organizational level, because at that point, they usually are sharing back with the organization what they've learned and that you can see that same thing happen, because then those employees will say things like, that totally relates to me. I could see myself in that. That's my experience. And so they are connecting to something bigger than they would otherwise. We have to figure that out on the consumer side, because more often than not, there's not a closed loop back to the consumer to say, this is what we learned, and these are some of the big themes. And you could see yourself in it. But we're playing around with some things in the app that will show them you have an experience that is actually part of this larger experience set. Here's where you are compared to the rest of that.
- [40:53]
B
There's two areas where this makes me want to explore more of my own work. One of them is when you ask people what job they hire their job to do for them. There's a very broad range of responses, but there's a handful of them that I call narrative experiences, which is, I hire my job to solve puzzles. Well, there's a narrative arc to solving a puzzle, and there's a handful of other ones like that, which is, I hire my job to solve puzzles, to invent, to discover, to tidy messes, or to compete. And I think they share a structure. And it'll sound familiar to you because you've studied writing, which is there's a not at the beginning, which is there's something that's a thing that has to be fixed. And then there's the denouement, the untying of the knot at the end. Well, in the middle, first of all, there's a wager that you place either ego or something else at the beginning that you're going to be able to succeed. There's the hurdles that along the way, which are really narrative and nice. And then there's the getting through. And then there's the celebration afterwards, like at the end of the Lord of the Rings. So although I know that I have never actually asked people tell me the story of solving that puzzle. What was it when you started? What were the steps along the way? What were the high points, the low points? And actually understanding what makes that tick I think could be very powerful.
- [42:22]
A
It's a fascinating point of, to get to another level of for them really self clarity. Because often what they'll say at the end of these things is I didn't realize why I act this way or think this way or do this until today. Or I had no idea that that was still in me or important to me. And again, we might be talking about brands or work or community. Even when they are not even remotely that emotionally invested in the topic. There's a certain level of I can't help but realize these things. There was one workshop we did, it was one of the first ones I'd ever done. So I was facilitating it and There was about 70 people in this workshop and there was a man in the front on my right and he just kept giving me this grimace and I was like, he doesn't want to be here. And I just couldn't look at him because I could feel his, this is ridiculous. You're a fraud and I don't want to be here. I kept hearing those three daggers coming at me in real time as I'm feeling, I'm like looking at him and he's just scowling at me. I'm like. At one point I almost felt like overwhelmed by nerves because it was I think the very first big one with this group. And for some reason it seemed to go well enough because I said, well, would you come back to the year long program? Would you come back in six months and four months and help the group work through their stories if they haven't done so yet? I was like, sure. We didn't know what we were really signing up for. But I said yes. Came back this time they were at a retreat center and that same guy was there because of course he was part of this year long program. I happened to make eye contact with him and it gives me that scowl look again. And I'm like, what is this dude's problem? Why is he so enraged by this? Like if he doesn't want to do it, he should just like not do it. But he doesn't have to give me the looks. And finally, fast forward a few months later, it's the end of the program and I came back and Just reported out the data. Now, this was our very first year, so we literally didn't have a time limit or a deadline. Some people wrote their stories in that September, some wrote them over the holidays. Some people wrote them like that March. And in that May, I shared insights from all of those stories. There was a pretty narrow context and they were looking across time. So it wasn't a recency issue. It was more a understanding and depth issue. So in any way, by now I'm feeling a little bit more confident. I'm facilitating. And I did ask the group, do you have any feedback from me or this process? He shoots his hand up and I'm like, oh God, why did I say that? And he says, you know, I just have to tell you that when I came in the first time he started, I thought this process was going to be ridiculous. And I'm like, yep, I get that. And he said, but something really weird happened to me that first day when I started writing and the days since, he goes, I can't put my finger on it. I don't know how you got this out of me, but you made me think about my dad in a way that I haven't thought about him as long back as I can remember. And when I left that first opening weekend, this was in Williamsburg, Virginia, about 50, 60 miles east of Richmond. In the other direction is Charlottesville, where UVA is. That's about 60 miles west of Richmond. He said, I left to go home to Richmond. And I was so engrossed in my story that I drove straight through Richmond about halfway to Charlottesville before I realized I'm past home. I don't know how you did it and I don't know why it happened, but you know, I just couldn't stop thinking about my dad after that. So when I hear those kinds of things, I mean, I don't think everybody has that depth of an experience, but I know everybody has the potential for that. That's the promise that I hold myself to, that we hold ourselves to is this is a two sided experience. Yes. We're trying to help these companies better learn and understand their experiences. We're also trying to give them the gift of understanding their own experience a little bit better. And so I think to your point, when we ask them to tell us the story about something that they consciously know, they're already wrestling with or debating the value of or understanding the place of it in their lives. I think in those cases, the context for reflection is already heightened. I think there's so much to plumb There, I think it's such a deep well to say you're already thinking about this thing, like why do I work here? As you say, why did I hire this job? And those are deep questions. And when you give people a place to explore deep questions, surprisingly they do. And when they do, you learn a lot.
- [46:43]
B
It's one of those things that a checkbox or a Likert scale is just not going to give you.
- [46:48]
A
You said it.
- [46:49]
B
Yeah, right. A, it's not going to give you that, but B, on the other end, you're not going to get the richness of information. But it begs the next question, which is you talked about sharing out. I have found that to be an incredibly challenging moment. You as a researcher have really plumbed some depths and you've identified this is something we haven't said completely out loud, but you're really focused on feelings. You're really focusing on how people feel at different moments in different contexts. Now your job is to translate the deep understanding that you have developed into something that others can consume and will change their actions. And by that I mean the designers of the experience or others. I have two questions there, actually. One of them is how do you do it? And the second thing is, especially when it relates to the experience of work, who catches it? Who's the person who picks it up and carries it forward? But let's ask the first one first. How do you get across something that you've understood so deeply?
- [47:55]
A
A big part of that is even before we knew what it really meant. We said in the beginning we were about human plus digital. It became catchy and fun and cool to say, but it really did become our ethos. So everything we were building with tech before the phrase the human at the center, keep the human in the loop, we knew no other way. We didn't have the resources to build eye popping, mind boggling tech right out the gate. So it had to be human led and it had to be human centered. And that proved to be part of the secret sauce because we're talking about people and their feelings in a deep way. We also knew we wanted to scale that, make that more accessible to people, more accessible to a customer base. And so one of the things we started doing, like I said, we were playing with IBM in the early days and then at some point IBM said, you know, we don't make enough money off of this service so we're going to cancel it. And we were like, what are we going to do? We'd been in IBM's Global Entrepreneur Program for A year and a half and we were like, huh? And I turned to my partner, my cto, and he was like, well, normally it would take three or four engineers and a year to figure this out. And we've got at the time a fractional cto and six months before it shuts down, let's give it a go. We had no other choice. So he had just stumbled on the rise of large language models and what you could do with that technology with transformers and classification and really understanding sentence syntax and understanding words in context of other words. That is one of the under appreciated benefits of LLMs is their ability to make sense of words based on the words around them and to produce words in generative ways based on assembling them in a pattern that makes sense. So we were able to use that instead of having to build our own technology from the bottom up. With millions of dollars we didn't have and dozens of engineers we didn't have, we were able to create an instance, if you will, of what? We've analyzed all of these stories for emotion and we've created data, emotional data, about those stories. Let's use those to train our own model derived from the LLM. So that's what we did. And what that means is it says that every time somebody shares a story in the platform in real time, we score that story for about 55 different attitudes, values, needs, some personality trait facets that are descriptive more than they are. You are in the 90th percentile. It's very low, low, medium, high, very high. So it's more human. But in that you still can put a mathematical value against that, so you can do averages and weight things. So part of it is helping to educate the person. We're talking to, the designer, the brand leader, the organizational leader, on what does emotional data look like paired with story data? Because most cases they haven't really spent much time with either. And you have to do a little bit of education.
- [50:58]
B
The biggest challenge there, by the way, though, it seems to me, is that the story is emotive and saying this person feels love, does nothing. In other words, talking about the feeling. That's why we don't write stories that way. We write stories by telling the story.
- [51:18]
A
Yes. And so we sum it up like this. What we'll tell you in our analysis and reporting is what kind of experiences are people having with you? How do those experiences make them feel and why does that matter and what should you do about it? That's our three act play. What are they experiencing with you? How does it make them feel and why does it matter and what should you do about it? And so by anchoring to that, we know that they want to get to an outcome. What should we design or build or deliver differently or what should we keep than what we've designed, built or delivered? Or what should we create that we don't have today based on either an experience gap or a really, really deep experience alignment between what you want them to experience, what you designed for and what they're actually having. And so if they know that's what they're going to get up front, that initial intellectual barriers kind of overcome. But the bigger barrier is really do they care about it? That's the bigger barriers. Are we talking, do we have we identified leaders who care about this kind of insight. And so part of our challenge is moving back and forth through this and learning what language works and what language doesn't work and who gets stuck here and who doesn't get stuck there. But one thing I would say that remains true for us is if we're not working with leaders who a appreciate the value of experiences and want to understand the emotional layer, the why layer, if we don't have that, we can't really meet their expectations. And so there's leaders today who, they don't know it, they've opted out because they don't value that yet. I would say that if you look at it through the lens of like research, the fastest growing segment in the market research industry is qualitative because we have invested so heavily in quant and analytics and data lakes and all these things for the last 15, 20 years. And a lot of big companies have started to realize we might be missing some things in the understanding layer about our consumers or employees. So they've started to invest in tools and platforms and systems that in their mind trigger the comfort of this is a process, this is quantified, this is a system. But we want to apply that to things we don't ask about today. And we say, well, that's part of it, but the other part of it is to almost put that system to the side and ask, what would it look like again if you could talk to every one of your employees and ask them to describe their experiences with you, Would you want to? And if your answer is no, well, then you're probably not for us. But if your answer is I wish I could, that's just not possible. Well, okay, great. Now we can show you how we can listen for you at scale, how we can help you activate your empathy for your customer or your employee at scale, because you can't do it one to one, but also you can't do it with a survey. And so that's also our challenge is figuring out how to not only identify the right folks in our target audience, but also be able to quickly educate them and then walk them through their journey.
- [54:16]
B
So there's people who care about it, and then in an organization there's somebody who can own it. And many of the people I know who gather research about the experience of work, there's nobody like a product manager, like a product manager who owns the product work. And so first of all, very hard sometimes to find budget because there's no structure to actually care about that thing and have budget. And then the second challenge is maybe you find budget, you do the work. Who's going to carry it forward? What kind of roles are you seeing are most able to do that?
- [55:00]
A
Because this is still a relatively new and novel approach. And the platform of course is brand new to people. 99.999% of them haven't heard of it yet. So there's education, there's awareness building. We are targeting that. And we've had our most success really looking at executives who either run a brand, a product, a sizable department, or they're in the C suite. I desperately want us to move that further down throughout the organization. But the best way that happens is actually inside the customer. So we tried it the other way. We tried working with people who really understood it and got it and wanted it and didn't have the influence or the authority to make a decision big enough to say yes or to influence people to participate. You know, we tried. It just didn't work. And so we've had more success identifying executive leaders who do believe in this. The power of experiences to drive brand loyalty, consumer experience, organizational culture and employee engagement. They believe in that they're growing up in that economy. That experienced economy is no longer one or two years old, it's 10 to 15 years old. So there's now some mature mid level and upper level managers in that space. And it's not only the C suite. And so now you have some dynamics happening, right? So it might not always be the C suite. It might actually be a managing or exec director in a place that that's the right position because they've already put infrastructure in. If they have a chief experience Officer or a VP of Experience, they are already 75% of the way there in terms of being an organization that would value this. Sometimes that means they've actually already spent a lot of money and experience management tools and tech and that you have to actually convince them that some of what they want to understand is not being surfaced through those tools. But you don't have to convince them of the value of experiences and understanding them. If we don't have that, we're finding the Chro or the Chief Product Officer. Rarely are we getting it through chief growth officer or things like that. We might get it through the CEO themselves or their designator. We might get it through like a Chief Strategy Officer. CMOs also get it. So that's where we spend our time is people who have an experience department named in their culture and their org charts. They get it really, really quickly and that means that they have an infrastructure for both leading it and owning it. The champion might be the executive or they might have a five person team and they'll put somebody on it who will run it day to day. I would also say that the best case scenarios where we get to engage that leadership team in some form or another. It's a large company, we're not meeting their whole elt, but we might be actually working with their CMO and their CMOS leadership team. Or the CMO might say, I want to bring in some of my peers from the business. And when we facilitate them through what we've learned, that's where we can really look to see where people are at in their own journey. How much of this do they really, really get or value or both. And sometimes we've started sessions where maybe we expected a certain degree of skepticism. We've started our report outs by saying things like we'll put the prompt to them. And I'm not asking them to go into writing mode, but I'm asking them to go into reflection mode to soften them up. We had to do a project once for a state tourism agency that was really focused on travel and in particular travel for black people, other people of color. In some of their experiences, the brand was totally on board. We did a lot of great work with them. But they said wisely, this isn't really just about us. We've got to get all of our partners across the state to sort of embrace these insights the same way they do our trends on hospitality or this or that or the other. We got to get them to bring this in. So the best way we can do that is can you guys facilitate some sessions? And these sessions were with the presidents of all the top destination marketing organizations in the state, the top sites and attractions, the top hospitality Associations, lodging. And we'd ask questions like, what's your familiarity with this? How much have you studied this on your own? And most of the answers were kind of like, not a lot. So first thing we did was we came up with a frame on tough issues that said, everybody's on a journey. You are at a certain place in this journey. And that's just what it is. That's not good nor bad, because we have to let people know that we accepted them in the moment of, you're human too. In this process. You are where you are. It doesn't matter if your brain or company could have done more, didn't do more. I need you to know that we see you as a human individual in this process, and you're going to have to get vulnerable. So we say, you're on your own journey. That's number one. Number two, I'd say, can you think of a time when you felt that's maybe where you got it from, where you felt unwelcome or that you didn't belong? And I'd ask them, these executives in the room, and you could immediately see them going like, oh, that's what we're talking about. And some of them. I remember one person said, I gotta say, I can't think of a time where I never felt I didn't belong or that I wasn't welcome. And now I realize that's the point. I've never had that experience. And if I want to serve more people who have had that experience, I'm going to have to better understand this. That's how we can get those little moments of transformation, like vulnerability. That's why I say impact starts with a leader who's vulnerable. It's the opposite of the projection of strength and the accumulation of tons. And it's about starting from a place of leadership vulnerability. Because the impact you seek is actually going to require you to get in places that you're very, very uncomfortable with, starting with yourself. Those are the kind of things that help us navigate groups or teams that maybe want to do it but don't know how to do it, or groups that have said, I know what this is about, but I'm not sure if this is for us. Well, let's do a little test. You know, have you ever experienced this? And if you haven't, the question becomes, do you care about consumers who do? Because if you care about consumers who have experienced it, you have an understanding gap, and we can help you close it by listening to their stories. And that's how it'll unfold from there.
- [61:07]
B
I ask everybody on the show, what job do you, James, hire your job to do for you?
- [61:13]
A
Well, for me, it is I hire a job to do the job of helping me express my calling, my reason for being, which is I want people to experience more hope and I want people to experience more revelation. And I don't mean that in the religious or biblical sense. I mean seeing things that they didn't realize were there in themselves and the people around them, in the world around them. That's why I do the work I do, because it's a chance for me to express that in myself and to solve that, if you will, to do that job of letting other people experience hope. Hope could be. Oh, there's more to this experience than I thought hope could be. There is something really meaningful and deep here in my own experience. There is something valuable. In my lived experience. There are people who care what I have to say or think or feel. And the revelation is a little bit more literal in that the story reveals things in us and about us. The process of exploring the stories reveals something in me, in the group, in our team, in their team. I can't think of a single engagement that we don't leave somewhat individually changed ourselves because we're constantly taking in other people's lived experiences. And it's what gives me so much hope, because I see the potential we have as humans to be a better version of ourselves every time we do a project. So that's the deeper, personal part of it for me. And that's what makes me show up to this work every day.
- [62:38]
B
Can you think of a time when you felt like you'd given people hope or helped them to reveal something to themselves? And what was the situation? What did you perceive the signals to be that led you to feel that way?
- [62:51]
A
Yes, I've had that moment and I've felt it in interpersonal relationships and I felt it in the work. In the work. There was one project we were working on, and it was an exploration of midlife womanhood. And I'll say this up front. After going through that project, my wife said to me, you used to know this much, now you know that much. And that's about a hundred times more than most men because you spent some time really keeping your literal and figurative mouth closed and listening. The reason why I felt like I gave hope in that situation or people experienced hope is more so in that project than any other. People were having their own little out of body experiences. They'd write and then they'd like put their own postscripts in the stories. They'd say things like, this process has made me really come to terms with this, or I haven't thought about this experience for a very long time, or this is something I've kept to myself and held inside. And this first time, I really let it out. And they wrote us after the project and they said things like, I really didn't think anybody cared what I had to say about this. And it both made me slightly frustrated. Not slightly frustrated, slightly enraged, but overall much more hopeful and optimistic because a, we had a client that cared about that and wanted to understand what the most influential buying segment in our marketplace with the least designed for experiences, cares about and wants to improve upon. And then it showed me every time I'm able to, like, realize, oh, James, that's a whole lot of stuff you didn't know before. I feel very privileged and humbled. And so that one really, really hit for me. But the other one, that was more personal because I think it's just a little bit of how I'm wired. I remember having a conversation with an individual who was navigating a very, very painful, consuming, like, financially and emotionally caregiving experience. And I was just able to share from some of my own experience. Having been, along with my late sister and my wife, having been caregivers for my mother, I was able to share that ability to relate. I couldn't relate to every part of their experience, but I could relate to a lot of it. And when that happened, I could see a little bit of their shoulders go down. I could see an exhale. I could see a visible exhale because it's that old feeling of I'm not alone. To me, the best way to give a person hope is to show them in your words and your deeds, that they are not alone. And I'm lucky that I get to do that in storytelling. I get to show people that they're not alone. I get to play back to community or society or an organization or a marketplace. This is you. And it's not one of you. It's a lot of you. That's how that makes me feel.
- [65:50]
B
What does your job cost you?
- [65:52]
A
It costs me security for our team and for our customers and for our participants. I have to embody this vulnerability. I have to role model almost daily, all day, a vulnerability that I get kind of used to. But every now and then, I'll feel exhausted by. And so living in that space means I have to have my emotions accessible, which sometimes doesn't feel safe or Secure. It means we're building something that is really hard to build and educate and be purposeful and also attract customers. There's days when that feels great, and there's days when that feels exhausting. So there's a sort of physical security of it. But I'd say the bigger one is just. It's like you start a path and you can't go back from it. I've had many opportunities. I could go do something tomorrow and. But actually, I can't. I can't go do something tomorrow. I don't know where this will get to or how many folks will help and serve. I have aspirations for that. But I also know that if we were the precursor for others to come behind and figure out how to do it better and bigger, and that was our legacy, I know I'd be able to die happy if that were true.
- [67:08]
B
Sort of going backwards from the end of that. One of them is opportunity cost. But the second thing is it's your freedom, your actual autonomy, which is you've built something that you have a responsibility to and you're not free to walk away. That's interesting. The second one is you said security. It was emotional security, right? It was. I don't get to hide in this role. The writing that you put out in the world is actually quite vulnerable. It strikes me that it might be a practice in vulnerability for you.
- [67:40]
A
It is. It is. Some of that's been my own journey of just how I like to express and my creativity. A lot of it's just given some of the challenges we've endured in our lives, it's therapy, it's catharsis. And because I do feel like I'm here for a reason and our team feels that way. I mean, it's not just me who's made some of those sacrifices. The team, you can see it in their journeys and their commitments. They have made those type of sacrifices. And so there is a practice of vulnerability that for me is about getting deeper to how do I really show up as the human that I want to be? I'm becoming more and more convinced, not just in response to the world we live in today, but almost in harkening back to an ancient version of our existence, that earlier versions of humanity were literally in vulnerable states. They lived vulnerable lives. They lived under threat of any kind of catastrophe that could end their life, stuff out their village in a heartbeat. And we're actually all. Not all that far from that. As humans today, we live very fragile lives, but we pretend we don't. And I think it's in the pretending that we don't live fragile lives, that we build up so much stuff that gets in the way of our human connections to each other and to ourselves. So for me, embracing vulnerability, embrace. If I were charting this as my narrative arc and we were looking back at it, the vulnerability is the going through it. And the freedom might be the reward at the end. That might be the coming out of the woods and looking, oh, I've made it. I'm now less worried about what might happen and more embracing of the moment because it's really what we have. And so that's what vulnerability is teaching me, is to, like, go back, get the stuff that's. I call it emotional archeology. Get the stuff that's deep that I need to get out. And surfaced. I'm guided by Dr. Maya Angelou's quote, there's no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. That is the premise of helping people get their stories out is that they have something that they need to say or share and they didn't either realize it or feel they have permission to do it or have the opportunity to do it. That is the deeper reason why we do it. Yes, it's for brands and organizations and communities and cultures, but. But the purpose will never change that. There's people walking around here with untold stories that are crushing them. And if we can help people get them out, we all can live a better life.
- [70:09]
B
Where can people learn more about you and your work?
- [70:13]
A
ShareMoreStories.com is the easiest place to learn more about us, our company and what we do. And as for me, you can find me on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of my time on LinkedIn. That's where I like to engage and converse and challenge. So my LinkedIn handle is James Warren Seek S E E Q. It's an easiest way to find me, but if you find me on share more stories, you can drop us an email there and I'll get in touch.
- [70:38]
B
Well, thank you very much for coming on the show today. I really loved hearing about story and I loved hearing about it, its uses and how it makes us feel. It feels like a very accessible thing to do. Sometimes you hear here's my recommendation. And you're like, that sounds hard or impossible. This sounds deep. It's not easy, but it's. We know, we understand story. And so I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.
- [71:07]
A
Thank you so much. This was an interesting journey for me too. I appreciate this conversation because every time I get to talk about it, I get to reconnect to the purpose and you brought it to a totally different place. So we very grateful for that.
- [71:19]
B
Thank you. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and is 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.