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- [00:04]
A
When we relate to a brand, we relate to that brand as if it were a person. When we relate to a company, we relate to that as a person. And when we can't get the things that we want done at work or when bad things are happening to us, we react to that as if we're reacting to a person, which is a thing that sends you into therapy. Because your experience of work is your experience of the relationship that you have to both individuals, the larger collective that makes up this entity called your employer, your job, your company.
- [00:42]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. This conversation with Alder Yarrow introduced Work for Humans to an idea that led to a half dozen other episodes. Work as a Relationship alder has spent 25 years creating customer experiences for some of the world's top brands, including Twitter, Home Depot, Walmart, Tesla Motors, and many more. Alder founded the experience design firm Hydrant and served as chief People officer at Chibo, a brand and customer experience agency that's dedicated to creating winning brands. Alder argues that a brand is the grand total of all the experiences a company creates for you. Every product, every service, every ad, every interaction. I met Alder almost 20 years ago. We worked together on a project in which we went around the world studying the experience of managers. I learned a lot of things in doing so. I learned, of course, about the experience of managers, but more than anything, I learned about how to study experience and how to really understand it. We spend quite a bit of time exploring that topic today. In this episode, we discuss experience design and experience modeling how companies can reimagine their brand experience to understand their customers specific needs. We discussed the challenges in transforming a brand and how we might behave differently if we thought of employees as customers. As always, don't forget to subscribe to Work for Humans wherever you listen to podcasts. And without further ado, here is my conversation with Alder Yarrow. Alder, welcome to Work for Humans. Thank you. Let's say I'm a CEO and I've just learned that I have a new customer. How would you recommend I go about understanding what they really want?
- [02:38]
A
I would say the same way that if you were a young single person out on a first date, you would make sure you got the second date. The only way you make that happen is by talking to that person, understanding who they are, what they care about, what they like, what they don't, and how that intersects with who you are and what you've got to offer the world.
- [03:00]
B
How do you go about that I asked this as somebody who didn't know how to go on a first date.
- [03:06]
A
But really the same way as the date, right? You talk, you talk to that person, you sit down somewhere with them that they're comfortable and that you're comfortable, and you have a conversation with them. And we're talking about an individual customer here. But this can be expanded and extrapolated to customer populations. The way you learn about your customers and what they care about is by talking to them.
- [03:32]
B
And so I know that you've used in the past the term experience design and experience modeling. What is it? I asked this because is it just marketing? Is it just user experience design? Is it something else?
- [03:45]
A
The closest thing to what you've mentioned is user experience design. User experience design is the domain of or discourse associated with the deliberate design of user interfaces that people interact with when they're interacting with a product or service in a technology mediated way. And experience design is somewhat a splitting of hairs from that, which is to say just removing that user prefix and acknowledging the fact that sometimes you're designing experiences that don't have user interfaces and may not necessarily have users in the traditional sense of the word. And so it's a slightly broader catch all that is involved in designing the interaction between a company and a customer, essentially, or designing some sort of transaction between two parties.
- [04:39]
B
I noticed too that in some of the descriptions of companies you've started or founded or a bunch of your different companies, you describe it as brand experience. Why brand? Why not just experience?
- [04:52]
A
Well, because there is this thing called brand that we all talk about and know about and we know exists out there in the world. And what I've been trying to do for my entire career is to collapse the world of brand, which often sits in a very rarefied sort of theory, part of the world which is sort of like, oh, brand is narrative, brand is story, brand is ideas, brand is how people connect to the promise of who you are, right? And all of that is true. But in a very pragmatic sense, brand is experience. Or as I like to say, the experience is the brand. So whatever stories people have about your company and who you are, whatever feelings they have, whatever promise they apprehend or don't apprehend or live out through interacting with you as a company, they do that one way and only one way. And that is through experience. And so I believe the experience is the brand, the brand is the experience. And so what that means is that a brand is nothing more and nothing less than the sum total of all the experiences that a customer has with you and how they feel about that. So my career has been about trying to collapse those two historically separate domains, sort of the design of experiences and the ideas of brand, and say, no, no, no, no. They're the same thing.
- [06:13]
B
And one of the things that does is I think that really broadens the idea of what experience is. And so one of the reasons it's more than user experience is that the experience of a company is more than the experience of whatever technology they're interacting with.
- [06:28]
A
Absolutely. I mean, when you drive down the road and you see a billboard for a company, you are having a moment of experience. Right. It's. It's a moment of communication, of learning. It could be a moment of humor. Right. It depends on what's written on that billboard. But that's a moment in the brand experience of that company. And it needs to be thought about, designed appropriately and ideally, it should be consistent and coherent with who that company thinks they are and wants to be and the rest of your experience as a customer of that brand, or even a prospective customer of that brand.
- [07:03]
B
What's so daunting about that to me, if I'm a leader thinking about managing experiences in my brand, is it's amorphous. So in other words, I'd like to just work on a product. It's a physical thing. I can make it. It's got a shape, it's got a design. Once I've designed it, I can stamp it out. But now I've got this idea. I've got this idea of a brand experience and it's this. It's kind of like, has no edges. I guess my main thought is it's going to take a lot of consciousness from everybody in the company to actually deliver a coherent experience as opposed to just stuffing it into a product, which.
- [07:40]
A
Is why they are so rare. And when they get them right, when a company has actually done that, it's fucking magical, to use a technical term.
- [07:51]
B
So can you tell me a story or an example of tackling one of these spaces?
- [07:59]
A
Sure. A while back, it's a great while now, a financial services company came to us and this is uniquely came to. Came to my agency. And they were sort of a unique financial services agency in the sense that they didn't just sort of hold up a shingle like Fidelity or like Vanguard and try and attract customers, you know, consumers from the broad marketplace. They actually offered their services within the context of a company's 401k. So essentially what they would do is if you worked for a big company and you had a retirement account, they would make an offer to you to help you manage the funds in that account and grow that so that as time went on, you had more money and you made responsible investments as part of your 401 investment philosophy. And so what would happen is these people had two customers, and one customer was pretty easy. They really had no problem getting the businesses, the big huge Fortune 500 companies, to sign up, to allow them to offer their services to customers. Where they ran into problems was getting the individual employees of those companies to both consider, sign up and use their services within the context of those people's 401k retirement accounts. And so they came to us saying, we think we have a problem. We think our brand and our brand experience stinks. And that's one of the reasons why people aren't signing up. And when they do sign up, they don't really use the service and eventually they go away, they stop. And so we said, great, let's figure that out. And so we took the approach that I've taken my entire career when it comes to understanding and designing experience. And we looked at the whole thing, that big, amorphous, scary reality that you were just referencing. We looked at it all. So we sat in the call center and listened to how the people who worked for this company interacted with the employees of these companies and the conversations they had. We looked at every piece of paper that these folks designed and generated and sent out to employees throughout the entirety of the customer life cycle. We looked at every digital interface that they had. You know, sort of this online service that allowed you to sort of view your investment account and manage your investments and stuff like that. And we looked inside of the company, because what a company delivers in terms of experience to its customers is often and only a reflection of the company's internal cultures and processes. And so we looked at, well, how is this company organized? How does a piece of paper go from an idea in some executive or manager's head into the hands of the customer? What does that process look like? And we did a big, long assessment of all that. And we found problems. We found problems where what the company wanted to be and thought they were, the kind of help that they wanted to offer people, was being directly thwarted by the things they designed, the ways that they acted, the words that they used, the interfaces that they presented to customers, and that there were gaps between what they were doing and the help that they were offering and what the customers actually wanted and needed.
- [11:18]
B
Now, how much time did you Spend in that particular exercise with the people who. With the actual customer, the people who might make a decision to invest or not to invest.
- [11:28]
A
Well, when you're a consulting agency, you never have unlimited budgets, so you always have to sort of time box these things. So we spent three or four weeks talking with customers. We spent three or four weeks talking internally and exploring internally in the company itself, interviewing people, and a few more weeks making assessments of all those different moments of experience that the company was generating for its customers. So this is a few months project.
- [11:55]
B
So we talked about this before this interview, which is that when the first time I think I ever met you, and this was, I will admit, 20 years ago, it was because your company at that time was sapient. And it was explaining to my company, which at that time was Cisco, what experience modeling was. And I want to tell that story because when I told you this, when I said how great that was and how important that was to me, you said no particular recollection of that pitch. So I'm going to tell that pitch here and we can talk about it. Which was. It was the American Cancer Society. And the American Cancer Society had wanted to know, are we creating, are we giving people who have been diagnosed with cancer and are being treated with cancer the right experience throughout the life cycle of that disease? So in that particular case, the company embedded itself with people who were going through that experience, interviewed them at every phase, and because of, I think, practical considerations, had to interview people at different phases, as opposed to one person through every phase. And one of the key findings was that there were different kinds of information being given to those patients at different phases of the experience. And that at the beginning phase, they needed medical information and they were getting personal information. And then when they really needed personal information, they were getting lots of medical information. And so an example is there was a moment when they had to ask themselves, how do I talk to my family about this? And there was a moment that's personal information. And they were being given medical jargon, and there was the practical consideration of how do I buy a wig? And at that moment, they were being given information about chemotherapy. And then there were other moments where they needed lots of medical information and they were getting personal information. And so throughout that life cycle, there was this need to balance what they were being given. And it was a complete revamp in this case, I think it was of a website, but I think it was also, it might have also been of how doctors spoke, you know, to them.
- [14:02]
A
Yep.
- [14:03]
B
Does that ring a bell now?
- [14:05]
A
Now it Rings a bell.
- [14:07]
B
So when you go in and you start talking to customers directly, is this context of this idea of in context studies, what does that mean and why is that important?
- [14:20]
A
It means that you go to where the customer is rather than bringing them to you. Right. So in the traditional marketing world we hold focus groups and things like that. You bring people out of their lives into sometimes a nicely designed room, often with no windows, two way mirror in the room, and you ask them a series of questions. They sit in uncomfortable chairs and they know that their job in that moment is to help you and please you because they're getting paid to do so. That puts people in a very different space. They literally say different things, think different things, act differently than when they are in their lives. And so in context research is about saying, well, we don't want to pull people out of their environments because when we do so we lose an incredibly rich amount of information that just isn't available when you pull somebody out of their context. Instead we want to go to where people are into their homes, into their workplaces, into their lives, on vacation with them, wherever they are, experiencing their lives as they would experience them originally and have conversations with them there or even just observe them there because there's so much to learn about what actually matters for them and what they're actually experiencing that you never get when you pull that person out of context.
- [15:44]
B
And I remember experiencing this. So the project 20 years ago, I'm just going to, I'm going to describe that briefly for the audience, which is that we did something that was called the manager Work practice study and Cisco hired Sapient to go around the world and do in context studies of managers and their experience. And it was their experience of HR practices, of finance practices and facilities practices. I think it was all three. Although primarily we focused on HR with a little bit of finance.
- [16:16]
A
Yeah, I mean basically what it was to be a manager when you weren't actually like creating something or doing work, but you were actually managing people, what is that experience like?
- [16:25]
B
Yes, and we would go in and we did it from a bunch of different angles, but we would go in with a camera, a script of questions, a note keeper, and we would see them in context and we would talk to them. So what are the steps like that was like? For me, that was the event. The event was actually being in there. But what were the steps to actually setting up a project like that? Executing the project. And then what I'd say is the biggest part is making that project matter to the company.
- [16:55]
A
Well, those are big questions. But you set up the project by first figuring out what question you want to start with. And it's not always the question you end up answering, but it's the question that you start with, which is, what does it mean to be what do managers do at Cisco? And how is that experience for them? And what was in back of that. Right. Was how can we be helping them do that better? How can we be making their lives easier? And what things do they need that we might not be providing? I don't know if you would add anything else to that characterization, but that was sort of the hypothesis for that particular project. So you start with that question, and then you need to figure out, well, who are the customers or who are the folks that you want to research? And so in our case, you can't boil the ocean. So we had to choose a specific segment of our employee base that we wanted to look at. And we tried our best to make that as representative as we could, given the realities of time and budget and things like that. Right. So I can't remember how many countries we explored.
- [18:04]
B
Maybe you do, yeah, six countries.
- [18:07]
A
Yeah. Managers of a couple different levels across six different countries, across several different divisions or roles and functions within the organization, Some managing people working on product, some managing hr, some managing in it, technology, services, et cetera, et cetera, to try and get a reasonable, but not statistically valid, necessarily sample of that customer. And then we figure out where we want to encounter them. That was easy. We wanted to encounter them at work, in their offices and their cubes on the floor doing what they do. And then we wanted to figure out what questions do we ask them to try and understand the totality of their experience. And so you mentioned the phrase experience modeling before. This was an experience modeling project. And what our goal was ultimately was to come up with some sort of model for what that experience was like, something that we could use to interrogate, understand, diagnose, identify issues with the experience of being a manager. And so we had to come up with a set of questions, a set of inquiries that we thought covered the scope of their existence as managers. So we wanted to ask them questions about the tools they used, we wanted to ask them questions about the processes that they engaged with. We wanted to ask them questions about the policies that drove all of those things. We wanted to ask them questions about how they use their time, et cetera, et cetera. And so we come up with a whole bunch of questions, and we filter them out and figure out which ones we think are the Most powerful. And then we recruit those folks, get them to agree to let us follow them around for a day. And we go out, we start asking those questions in context. And we do so, though, as good researchers, knowing that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy, which is that you can have a whole list of questions. And then you get out there and you're sitting in somebody's office and you see they've got this weird ass chart on the wall that you didn't have a question about, but you're like, well, what is that chart all about? And all of a sudden you spend two hours learning about how they have figured out how to organize their lives because the company isn't doing it for them. So they created this chart to help them make sense of all the shit that they had to get done as a manager. And then there you are in the gold mine. You're discovering things about the experience that are different than what you thought. And that's the whole point of doing that kind of exercise.
- [20:37]
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 alive and engaged instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com. that's 11F O L D dot com. Yeah. And I remember we actually did in context in at least four different ways. When I think about it. One way was sitting and interviewing people with structured questions, recording it and then extracting the information. The second one was shadowing, following people into their meetings, watching them at work, not saying anything necessarily, taking notes. I didn't do that. That was anthropologists who did that. I was more of a note keeper at the time. The third way we did it was we sent to for all those locations we couldn't go, we sent people packets with cameras.
- [21:49]
A
Yeah. Journaling study.
- [21:50]
B
Yeah. What is that?
- [21:52]
A
That's where when you have a population that maybe you can't get to or group that you want data from, you basically have them keep a journal. There are various different forms of this back in the day. This will date me a little bit. They used to be called pager studies. And what you do is you actually send somebody a pager, an Instamatic camera, one of those disposable cameras or if you had a lot of money, you'd send them a video camera, but you basically have the pager go off at various times of the day. And whenever that pager went off, they would need to take a moment or at least remember, and if they couldn't immediately in that moment, write down what they were doing and what they were experiencing and all sorts of stuff like that to sort of remember that. And then at some point during the day, you were supposed to write in a journal and say, hey, when pager went off at 10:12am I was busy arguing with my boss because he said I should be doing this thing. And I said, I should be doing this thing. And we had a disagreement about whatever. And people would take pictures and then we have those photos and we have those journals, and they become, you know, sort of another piece of data in this kind of study.
- [22:57]
B
Yeah, I remember one of the findings there that one of the questions was, how do you consume information? Or how do you, like, take a picture of your office or something like that for managers? And some managers had tons of paper and they had books and shelves, and other people took pictures of these empty shelves because they didn't touch paper. And so if I was somebody who was trying to create an information environment for managers, basically I had two major Personas there, which was people who use paper, people who don't. And that was one of the things that really popped from that journaling study for me anyway, for sure. And then the fourth way we did it, and I can't remember if this actually worked honestly, is that we put. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was flags in system. So somebody would be going through and doing something in a system and it would pop up a survey, or it would. It would track their activity and. And pop up a survey. It was something like that.
- [23:52]
A
Yeah. I don't have a strong recollection about how we were doing that.
- [23:55]
B
It didn't sing. That's the main thing. That's why we don't recollect it very well, because what really, really sang was seeing people in their life. And I agree. That thing you said about somebody, you find out somebody's building. There was one organization that had completely reproduced a human resources tool because they didn't like the data model. And so what they had done is they had completely reinvented it and recoded it and were running their own system for that process. It was the performance management process. And then they would load the data from it into the HR system.
- [24:33]
A
Yeah, One of the Greatest things that you find when you do these in context interviews is broadly falls under the category of workarounds. Like as humans we find ways to do shit in ways that make sense to us. And that's like us as individuals or us as groups. Irrespective of what the world presents us, irrespective of any other organization outside of us, we figure out ways to do things in ways that make sense to us. And so seeing those is one of the greatest sort of gifts of in context research. And whether that's like the classic post it on the side of somebody's computer monitor telling them the three steps because they can never remember the damn way that you've designed the particular digital tool they're supposed to be using, or whether it's something as incredible as, yeah, we just, we built our own piece of software to do this thing because the way you guys do it doesn't make any sense.
- [25:30]
B
Yeah, I've launched whole projects as a, a leader of a process organization to essentially design documentation to cope with other organizations processes you actually need an encyclopedia to get through. I remember when IP phones at Cisco were first being rolled out. It was a change of model for everybody, which was. It used to be that your phone number was associated with the jack in the wall. So if you took a telephone and you moved it and plugged it into that same jack, it would be, it would be that telephone number. But when IP phones came out, it was an attribute of the phone, the actual handset. Well, the problem was that the phone, when you actually went out and looked at the phones in context, people had taken magic. These are these really lovely European design phones. You know that Cisco developed the first generation of IP phones and everybody had taken Magic Marker like Sharpies and written the phone number on the outside of the phone because the phone display didn't tell you what the number was.
- [26:29]
A
Perfect example.
- [26:30]
B
And so what I used to do is I'd call people and say, excuse me, can you tell me what my phone number is? Because they could see it in their display, but I couldn't see it in my own display. Actually there was another really interesting one there, which was those phones. When you picked up the phone, there was no static on the phone. It was dead silent. And so all of us kept saying, hello, are you there? And you say, yeah, no, I'm here. But we were so accustomed to analog phones.
- [26:56]
A
Yes, silence actually has a sound. Except on an IP phone.
- [27:00]
B
Except on an IP phone. And so the engineers put in static so that you knew that you were on the phone?
- [27:06]
A
Yes.
- [27:06]
B
Yeah. I mean, going and watching people and what they're actually doing is unbelievably revealing. And what is grounded theory? Because I think the first time I ever heard that was in that project.
- [27:18]
A
So grounded theory is a way of doing primarily qualitative social science research, and it hinges on the premise that you don't necessarily know the right questions to ask. You have to ask a question to get started, but you don't know what you're going to find. And so unlike truly scientific method, which is where you're testing a very rigorous hypothesis within a specific designated framework of knowledge or domain of science, grounded theory is more about emergence, which is to say, something launches you out into a realm of inquiry. And you ask a lot of questions, but you don't necessarily focus on a narrow thing. You gather as much data as you can surrounding that area of inquiry in the zone that you're looking to answer questions, and then you look at the data and you see what emerges from it. I don't know where the term grounded theory actually comes from. Maybe it comes from the idea of background, but what you're doing is you're building a background of knowledge, knowledge. And from that background emerge concepts and ideas. So you interview 30 people, you take photos of all their workplaces or something like that, and you sit there and you read the interviews and you look at the photos and you're like, huh, look what's going on with people's filing cabinets. People are doing something different with their file. What is that? And you dig into that and you're like, oh, people are all rearranging their filing cabinets from the way that they're delivered to them. And so, okay, now we've got a concept, or now we've got an idea around filing and information organization. And so that sort of emerges from that background. And so then those concepts then gradually solidify into knowledge and into answers to questions, some of which you may have had, some of which you may have not.
- [29:10]
B
One of the hardest things for me, and one of the deepest learnings I think, of that particular project, was how to go into a situation and not know any. In other words, I always think I know something. And so to go in and convince myself that I knew nothing, that I had no hypothesis, and just because I've always thought grounded theory, the name came from, you're on the ground learning, like, it's funny, who knows? I don't know. But it's this idea that you go in with a know nothing attitude and you let the knowledge emerge. And the patterns emerge from the environment, and you try to perceive them without blocking them with your presuppositions.
- [29:50]
A
It's very Zen.
- [29:51]
B
Yeah, it is, actually. And it's one of my favorite things to do, actually, is just to observe and to learn.
- [29:59]
A
It's pretty magical when you sit there and you watch and you watch and you watch and you watch and you realize, oh, my God, this thing is happening. And I didn't know this thing existed. And it's real and it matters.
- [30:13]
B
I'll tell you one that I got on that study, which was I learned that managers spent most of their time. They thought management was administrivia, which is this thing that was so important to me. It was the center of my study. Right. The whole study we were doing was about how important this thing was. And for them, it was a trivial 5%, and they wish it took 2%. That was a huge aha. And then. And yet also, we're building these enormous coping tools to deal with it. So can you just. Are there, like. I don't know which ones you can talk about because so much of what you do is confidential. But are there any, like, particular ahas that you remember in that just pop for you as, like, the perfect example?
- [30:56]
A
So once we were helping this really large European technology company introduce a new product into the United States. It's a product that had been launched in Europe and very successful in Europe, and they wanted to launch in the United States. And essentially their customers were electricians. So this was sort of a B2B2C thing, where basically their channel to market was electricians, individual electricians. And so they had to treat those folks very much like customers. They had to sell to them, convince them to buy their products instead of competing products, et cetera. And they thought that they understood how to sell this product to electricians. And it turns out that they knew that, but that European electricians were wildly different in how they thought about the product and how they made decisions about which product to buy. And so in Europe, there was an awful lot of sort of hierarchical information dispersal that was bolstered by brand reputation and allegiance to organizations. Right. So if a guild of electricians in Europe that all sort of communicated together and worked together, said this product was good, then people would just be like, great, I'll take it. I'll install it. It'll be great. And the number of choices in the marketplace for the end consumer were much fewer. And quite often those electricians were in the position of the customer saying, I need a product that Does X for me in my home. And the electrician would say, okay, it's this one. And the customer would just trust the electrician to install that. And so the whole process of electricians adopting and then selling this product to their customers in Europe was vastly different from what we discovered in the United States. What we discovered in the United States is that electricians were all more like ronin samurai. Right. They didn't have allegiance to particular organizations or particular guilds or anything like that. They were largely all out individual folks with their trucks. And they relied heavily on their own knowledge and experience. And so the very first thing that they had to be is convinced that this was actually a good product. And so there was a whole level of education that had to happen around, what does this product do? How does it work? Why is it better? All the things required to establish and credentialize the product with the electricians. And then that was only half the battle. The other half of the battle was, okay, fine, yeah, I get it, this might be a good product, but how the hell am I going to sell it to my customers? Because they are understanding the incredible variety of things that are out there. And so what electricians in the United States needed was a whole set of sales tools and help making the sale of that product to their end customers. That absolutely was not necessary in Europe. And so this was like a total light bulb moment for the European electronics company who were like, oh, my God, we have to completely rethink this. We have to develop materials that didn't exist before. We have to develop narratives that didn't exist before. We have to go to market and sell differently than they did before. And so that means a hugely valuable use of that kind of inquiry.
- [34:19]
B
What's so interesting about that is that it has nothing to do with the product.
- [34:23]
A
Nope.
- [34:23]
B
It has everything to do with the route to market. And so sometimes what you find in context research is you could have pulled people in and said, how's this product? And everybody would have said, this is a great product. Doesn't matter because they can't get it because the way you delivered it doesn't work.
- [34:41]
A
Yep.
- [34:42]
B
So this is actually a good transition point to start talking about employees. So as we talked about ahead of time, this CEO that we're talking about is somebody who's realized that employees are customers. Here's how I would say it. Employees, as a customer are buying something that's one of the biggest products in their world. It's as big as their house, potentially it's bigger than their car. It may be more like a marriage. It's a very, very significant part of their world. And it's quite multidimensional as a product. It has product features and it has a route to market as well. But I mean, considering that this is the kind of product it is, are there any special considerations for how I might go about understanding this particular customer.
- [35:27]
A
At an essential level? No. You have to treat them like any other customer of a transaction, which is to say, what are they buying, why are they buying it, what are they going to do with that thing once they've bought it? And how do they experience that thing that they're buying, that experience that they're buying, or that product, if you want to call it a product. And so the methods of inquiry, the way of answering those questions, the need to answer all those questions and to design that experience, experience of being a customer of work is exactly the same as any other customer. I think what's different about it is that it's a fundamentally more complex transaction because the relationship that's established between the customer and the provider is deeper and longer lasting and ongoing in a way, at a level of intimacy that very few people have with companies they buy things from. It's also the transaction is made in a different way fundamentally than other purchases in the marketplace because we are transacting directly with help as opposed to using money on both sides of the equation. So what I mean by that is when we go out and we buy a toaster, we have this thing called money that we give somebody and we give us this product in return. And that money is actually a symbol. It's a symbol for a certain amount of help. It's a stand in for effort and for value that somebody generates in the marketplace. And most of the time when we're buying things other than work, we're using money to substitute for our work. But in the case of your job, you are literally transacting with help. There are two customers to any transaction. And out there in the world of consumer products, the customer who is the seller gets the money in exchange for the thing that they give away in the transaction, that is work. The customer gets the help, the actual real help, the day to day effort, skill, knowledge, ideas, the ability to be productive, the production capacity of that person. They get that instead of money. And the worker in turn gets the money and some other things besides which we can talk about that make this transaction a little more intimate and deeper. But that changes the equation slightly when it comes to this kind of transaction and the experience that is work. Because as individuals, we think differently about providing help, using our bodies and our brains than we do pulling money out of our wallet to buy something. Like a toaster.
- [38:24]
B
Yeah. There's a lot of things in that which I'm going to drill, I'm going to go back through, because there's a whole lot of important points, I think, in there. First of all, in terms of the. What kind of a product is this? It's a weird product in the sense that it's not something you hold in your hands, it's something you climb inside and inhabit. So it's not something outside of you, it's something that surrounds you. And so I think in context, studies are incredibly important because there's nothing but context in this particular thing, because it's all around you.
- [38:53]
A
We were talking a bit about user experience, design versus experience. Design experience. Design looks at moments of experience that are outside the context of an individual product or use. And work is very much that. It's an endless series of moments of experience.
- [39:08]
B
Yes. And the second thing is, in terms of the intimacy, there's no other product in the world that ever made me see a psychologist. No toaster has ever made me see a psychologist, but my job has. And so there's a mortal seriousness to this particular product.
- [39:26]
A
One of the reasons for that is that the product is not just a product, it's a relationship. And relationships are what send us to the therapist because they're about the interplay of concerns between two individuals, or in the case of what's always individuals at the end of the day, but an entity that is made up of individuals, that is the workplace and specific individual. But relationships are very real and very powerful things.
- [39:55]
B
Yeah. And these are some of the deepest, most. I don't know. I don't want to say threatening rel. They can be threatening relationships. And so in a second, I'll talk about that cube study I did, and we can parse that. But actually, let's talk about this part about the exchange of what's being exchanged, which is that if I'm an employer and you're an employee, I'm giving you money on some other stuff. And in return, you are giving me the currency that you buy that with is attention, labor skills, passion.
- [40:28]
A
To me, it all boils down to one word, help.
- [40:30]
B
I agree. It's help. And so one of the issues that I think is a mistake that many companies make is they think that once I've paid you, I'm done. And this is not a conscious thing that happens in Companies I've paid you, therefore you're owned. And it's this accident of mental habit. Right. And the idea is that dollars is 90% of what you want. But the truth is there's this very wide range of things beyond dollars that people want from this product, and it hasn't been treated as a product. And so what people do historically, and I want to contrast this with the real user research, with real experience research, which is that they often look at what makes people productive. They look at the attributes of productivity, and then they say that's what people want from work, or at least that's what I'm going to give them because it makes them productive.
- [41:27]
A
I think that's driven largely out of the culture that came from the Industrial revolution and the mechanization of factories and the transition from the industrial economy where people were productivity to a knowledge economy. But we haven't transitioned so much the idea of people not being productivity, which is to say efficiency, inputs and outputs. And so those ideas still carry over in a way that's really inadequate and quite damaging in some cases.
- [41:59]
B
Yeah. And the cube study that I was going to describe is that on a weekend I went into the office and I cataloged everything in everybody's cubes. And what I was looking for was in the same way we were talking about the IP phone and how people scrawled the number on it. What I was looking for is how do people modify their environment? That might show me how the out of box experience of work is insufficient. And the first things I found are sort of physical, which is that people were tearing down the walls of their cubes so that they could get some light.
- [42:30]
A
They don't like the box itself.
- [42:31]
B
They don't like the box. They don't like it. And the second thing I found was that especially when people were in. Were close to hallways and stuff, is they were putting up soji screens because they wanted some privacy. So they wanted privacy and light. And then you see people putting on headphones because they're trying to cut down the noise. And then you see. But then more deeply than that, everybody had certain things on their desks. They had pictures of family, which leads me to believe that the out of box experience of work is. Doesn't have enough family in it. They had status symbols, which led me to believe that there were status threats in the environment. They had things like diplomas and they had plants. So I went through and I found a whole bunch of things that I thought were fairly damning to the out of box experience. And what you said when we were talking about this was ahead of time is you said, no, that's the out of box experience of life. That's not just the out of box experience of. So I guess what you're saying is methodologically you can't just take it at face value that that's a problem with work.
- [43:33]
A
No, no, no. Well, and there are various tips and tricks, the five whys. Ask why five times or things like that. There's always layers of the onion to peel back. So it's the people's behavior in a given situation could be the direct product of that situation. It could also be the product of something deeper and more fundamental. And so sometimes it's really nice to cross reference behaviors or things that you find in a particular context in some other context entirely. And my reaction when you were describing that thing in the cube was, yes, there's a way of reading that which is like, work is horribly alienating. It separates you from your family. It's a status game and blah, blah, blah. And what I found myself listening to when you said that is sort of like, well, yeah, but people care about status outside the context of work too. And so that might just be a human thing, not a work thing. Which is to say if you and I are going to have an interaction, whether it's in the hallway of work or at a bar or in, in the context of something else, status comes into play. There's all sorts of cues and things like that that happen out there in the world for us to establish relative status to each other so that the transaction is facilitated in a way that works for both of us or the way that one of us wants it to work. So it might not be unique to work, but there are layers to peel back there for sure.
- [44:58]
B
Well, and it's this sort of thing which is that if I see people wearing heavy jackets at work, I might say, well, that's because work is cold and I go out and they're wearing heavy jackets everywhere. It's because everywhere is cold. But it's still true that if I can make a workplace that was a little bit warmer, they'd like it better. So even if it is a, it's an ambient thing that they're having to cope with, it is, it may still be true that I might be able to create an environment that alleviated that and made, and made my product a better product for them for sure.
- [45:28]
A
You just have to watch for those moments where the jackets are actually a status symbol and basically everybody's wearing them. For a reason other than what you think. Just as an example, a lot of.
- [45:39]
B
My research has been asking people this question. I've been using job to be done theory. So job to be done theory being for people who haven't heard of it before. It's a method of market research that was popularized by Clayton Christensen, who wrote, among other things, Innovator's Dilemma. He was a Harvard marketing professor. And so I've been using that approach, which is to ask people, what job do you hire your job to do for you? And I've been getting lots of answers. I've been getting way more answers than money. And even money is not money. It's I want to take care of my family.
- [46:12]
A
There are those layers of onions, right? There's a job to be done, but there's a job within that job within that job within that job. It's jobs all the way down.
- [46:20]
B
Yeah, that's right.
- [46:21]
A
Well, I guess maybe until you get to the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. But yeah, well.
- [46:26]
B
And so I have some doubts about this approach. And a part of the reason I doubt this approach is because it's mediated by what people are willing to say. And so it's quite different from actual in context studies. What do you think about that as an approach to understanding what people want?
- [46:41]
A
Well, just quickly, do you remember we talk about, in ethnographic and qualitative research, we talk about the say do gap, which is that there is a gap almost always between what people say they do and what they actually do. And so in context, research is about finding out about the do rather than just the say. I think it is very difficult to get at people's motivations. What we're talking about here in a lot of ways is seeded in psychology and the ontology of individual beings. How do they become who they are? And that doesn't. I mean, it always manifests in what they do, but not in a way that's clearly readable. Right. Like you can't watch what somebody's doing and know why they're doing it all the time. I think the more their actions are driven by deeper things within them that than real surface needs, the harder it is to get at those just by observation. So you do have to talk to people and you have to ask them the kinds of questions like you're asking, what do you hire your job to do? And try and get them into a place of reflection where they can be as honest as they can with you. But we also lie to ourselves. That's one of our Great skills as hairless apes. And so there's always probably more than you're going to get by what people tell you.
- [48:26]
B
Yeah, the say do gap. I mean, the thing, the particular challenge about the se do gap is that people are always making, always articulating to themselves why they made a decision that was made before. That was made before they actually had a consciousness of the decision they were going to make. So, yeah, I think observation is you can start with this, but then I think you have to test.
- [48:47]
A
Yeah. And you have to triangulate. At the very least, correlate.
- [48:51]
B
The other thing I've noticed about it as an approach is that it doesn't call out. And I'm going to have to create a whole new set of questions, I think, which is, what does it cost you to go to work? Because the what job do you hire your job to do for you? Gets at the value that people get. But I'm noticing it doesn't get very much of what it costs them to get that value. And it can cost a lot more than money. It costs time. It's opportunity cost. It can cost status.
- [49:19]
A
Yeah. I like to think of value as a framework of three things. Importance, utility, and worth. Importance being the impact or the scale of change or of importance to the concerns that you have as an individual utility, which is sort of like, well, what concerns do I have as a being that are being taken care of by this thing? And then worth is, okay, what do I have to give up to get it? What's the time, energy, money, lost opportunities versus the kind of return that I get from it? And so that value framework, I think, helps me look at any transaction from a lot of useful angles.
- [50:09]
B
Yeah. What's important about that is that I think the utility piece is addressed by what job do you hire this thing to do for you? But it may not, for instance, get at the importance or the worth.
- [50:19]
A
Yeah. You might take a job because it makes you feel good about yourself. And that might be very important to you. That might be not so important to you, but useful.
- [50:35]
B
Right. I want to ask some questions about the practical integration of this with an organization. So I'm imagining, here's an HR department, here's a CEO that are starting to see this. The employee is a customer. They know that they can do this research and that they could, through this research, they could understand that customer better and create a better product. But there's still challenges. One of the biggest challenges I found with the study that we did of manager experience was the people who did the Study got it. They got it to their bones. I mean, it changed how I think about stuff for the rest of time. Incredibly hard to change other people's minds with it. And there's this translation moment where you've got the research team and then you've got the people actually have to change their behavior. I don't know how to bridge that. The other thing that's a challenge about this is that we faced organizational change. And the problem with organizational change is that this kind of effort to actually transform your brand is something that might take generations of leaders to actually achieve. So there's a translation thing, There's a fact, this is a strategy thing.
- [51:37]
A
Yeah, well, so the best research in the world is only worth as much as the story that gets told about what you learned from it. And so I think one of the powers of the configuration that I've tried to bring through my career, and certainly that we had when we did that work with Sapient, was the combination of storytelling and strategy wrapped around that research. The people who are really good at research are not always the ones best at selling the results of that research. Make no mistake, it absolutely must be sold. And so that's tip number one is that you got to remember that you got to spend as much time and energy selling the research as you did doing it. And then the question is, well, who are you selling to? And that's crucial for success. It's infinitely easier to have a study commissioned by the chief executive of an organization and to come back and convince that person of the results of your study than it is to start at a mid level of the organization and with a set of results that say, hey, we have to change a whole lot of stuff about what we're doing. And it's going to cost money and time and it can take a long time. Right. Getting selling that up through layers of a large organization is all but impossible. And so that sort of C level, executive level buy in from the beginning and thinking of that person as your primary customer to convince and to sell on the change is absolutely crucial to getting anything out of larger scale, complex initiatives like this.
- [53:19]
B
I think that's really right. One of the disadvantages of the project we did with Cisco and Sapient, it was run out of it. That's good in some ways because if it is not on board, we were looking a lot at creating products that were going to mitigate some of that experience, but it had to be sold then also to hr, finance and facilities. And because some of the changes were not actually it changes. And that was not an easy transition.
- [53:46]
A
Either because at the end of the day, a lot of these things are tied to the purpose of an organization. What are they really trying to do in the world? What are they trying to accomplish? And the CEO holds that purpose. I mean, that's in some ways the definition of the job is to constitute and hold that purpose and to organize the enterprise around that purpose to achieving that objective. And so a lot of times we're dealing at very fundamental levels like that in the organization. And you can't mess with that without the leader driving it.
- [54:27]
B
Yeah, I agree. Obviously the change I'm arguing for is that we change the whole business model of companies to recognize themselves as a multi sided business with employees, as a customer that can't start from anywhere except the CEO or the board. And it's an enormously long commitment. So you said a little bit about this just now. And this is again, this is why I'm asking. This is, I'm asking what kind of people am I going to need in my organization to be able to run this kind of ongoing work? And you mentioned the storyteller we fielded to do the managed work practice study. We fielded several anthropologists, a filmmaker, which was you, and I suspect also the storyteller, which was you, a visual artist to help us who went around the world with us, who actually helped us to transform the grounded insights into visuals that we could use to explain it. A project manager. First one question is, is that team inside my company or do I need to get it from outside the company? And a part of the reason I ask is, is this an ongoing activity or is this a one time activity?
- [55:31]
A
The answer is that it can be either. There's always cost benefits and institutionalization of knowledge benefits to having it be internal to the company. But companies have to get to a certain scale before they could contemplate having an internal research team. And the scale of the company and the scale of that team and the cost of that team to the enterprise will also dictate the degree to which it can be an ongoing thing. A lot of companies can't justify that cost. And it is, if they're really forward looking, they would look at it as a cost. But for a lot of people it's just an expense. They're not sure what they get out of it. They think it's something good, but you got to pay the salaries of a bunch of people. And they're not creating product, they're not doing anything. Hopefully you have the vision for that. They're Impacting the experience in ways that translate into business results. But there's quite a few steps of remove between what they're doing on a daily basis and those business results. And so it requires vision to see that and to invest in it at a large enough scale. An organization could in fact support an ongoing process where you have teams going out and looking at first this question, then this question, then this question, then the next question on an ongoing basis at the level of depth, like you and I experienced when we did that project together at Cisco. And there are plenty of companies that do that. Autodesk is one of those companies that just does that. They're just always deeply researching their customers, what's going on in their industries, how they, you know, how they're using the product, blah blah, blah, blah. And there, there are plenty of other examples besides. But some organizations can't do it at that level of depth and scale. They might do a big project to start with that would gain them set of insights and then they're going to do ongoing, much smaller inquiries and validations over time. So you sort of scale the activities of that organization and the depth at which they work depending on the resources available to you and how much you're willing to invest.
- [57:42]
B
And if I'm somebody who's bringing this kind of talent into my organization, here's what I'm imagining. I'm imagining a B2B company. So it's a company that has not necessarily thought of itself as having a B2C model where all of a sudden they have a customer. So this is really a new kind of organization to them potentially. Although it's interesting, so many of Your examples were B2B customers who had to think about the customer beyond the bee. Right. Nonetheless, I have found creatives to be very hard to manage. I just find them to be delightful, human, intelligent, wonderful people, but also very high maintenance. But on the other hand, the team that came with Sapient was, although they were creative, were not actually that. At least I couldn't tell that they were that personality type. So any special considerations to managing creatives and does this involve creatives?
- [58:33]
A
There are creatives that are artistes and those are the hardest ones to manage because you're dealing with ego and senses of self actualization and things like that. There's a whole realm of designers, design professionals that understand business and work in service of business that are much easier to manage. Those are the kinds of people that we tended to hire at Sapient and that I've tried to hire in my career PRAGMATISM being a key attribute to that kind of person, but also somebody that understands how business works, which you don't get necessarily as part of your average design education or anthropology education, or sociology education, or some of the disciplines that obviously bring with them the skills to do this kind of inquiry and effort. And so you either need to find people who have exercised those skills in a business context successfully, or those who are inherently open, amenable and understanding of the pragmatics and mechanics of business. The most frustrating experiences of my life have been dealing with, I should say from a business perspective, as a manager, as a leader, as a consultant have been dealing with people bringing an academic mindset into the business world. It just doesn't work. And so you really got to hire for, find, organize, train for, and really align around an understanding of the pragmatics of business as opposed to the theory of qualitative in context research. We can be very pure Margaret Mead anthropology and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is help a company perform better in the marketplace, which means save a bunch of money, make a bunch of money. And that comes with a set of exigencies that are real.
- [60:37]
B
That's so funny. This was one of my most vivid memories of the Manage Work Practice study, which was just a little artistic moment, which was we were working with somebody who had a very large forehead. His hair didn't hang down in front of it and he was standing in front of a projector and the projector projected across the front of his forehead the word no, I will call myself out. I want to know stuff. It's somewhat, it's a bit of an academics perspective. I want to know. Once I know I don't need to do anything about it. Not really. I'm happy just to know. It's a discovery attitude. And I think that is an academic attitude. So two more questions, but they're both big. When we talk about employee experience, we've talked a little bit about this, but what is the material of the experience? What's it made out of? And I'm asking this question because if I'm going to change the experience, what thing in the world am I going to be manipulating?
- [61:37]
A
So an experience, every experience is made up of moments. A moment is a period of time, a short period of time in which an individual takes action and sees the result of that action. They can do that through speaking, they can do that through physically moving their body. They can do that with using a tool. They can do that on their own they can do that interacting with another person. But at the end of the day, it's taking an action and seeing the result of that action. And it can be as subtle and small as observing something and learning from it, or observing something and making an assessment based on that. So you can't always see them when you're looking at them, but could just be. If you were to take a video of it, it would be a person literally sitting in their chair staring into space. And that would be a moment. But it's nonetheless real and describable, designable, measurable. Sometimes, not always. And so that's what an experience is made up of. And that very quickly throws you into that horrible amorphous blob that you began this conversation with. Because it's sort of like, well, shit, that's everything. And the answer is yes. And the answer is also, well, yes. And you can't design everything in every moment. Don't even try. So the question is, which ones matter the most? Which ones are the most meaningful? Which ones are the most impactful? Which ones are the most powerful and valuable, both to the person experiencing those moments and to the person providing those moments. And that's what you focus on.
- [63:20]
B
That actually changes my whole concept of what experience is. It's so funny because I think of experience as a surface that I'm surrounded by, but it's not. It's actually, it's a system that I'm testing. It's like echolocation, where I send out a signal, I get back a signal. And so I'm constantly experiencing the soul of the corporation that employs me by testing it. And so then if I send out a signal and I get back a signal, there are certain things that are going to change the signal I get back. One is policy, for example, which is if I say, hey, I'd like to change jobs. And somebody says to me, well, the policy is X. You can't change jobs for three years. You know, that's the rule. Well, okay, I've just sent out a signal, I've gotten back a signal. There's short signals which happen instantaneously and then there's the three year long signal, the five year long signal that I might get from my career ambitions and how that's panning out.
- [64:17]
A
I go back to the very beginning of this conversation. It's like a date. This is the. What we are talking about is the fundamental substance of human interaction and relationship. And we are incapable as biological beings of having relationships and interacting with entities in the world, except as other individuals. So when we relate to a brand, we relate to that brand as if it were a person. That's one of the basis of brand strategy. When we relate to a company, we relate to that as a person. And when we can't get the things that we want done at work or when bad things are happening to us, we react to that as if we're reacting to a person, which is a thing that sends you into therapy. Because your experience of work is your experience of the relationship that you have to both individuals and the larger collective that makes up this entity called your employer, your job, your company. Those signals that you're describing, just like the ones that we're trading right here in this conversation, what are your facial expressions? How are you acting to me? What's your display of status? What's your emotion? What environment are you in? Are you listening to me actually? Are you hearing what I'm saying? I'm getting all these cues and signals about that and then I'm watching, like, how are you going to act? I just told you this thing about myself. How are you going to hold that? Is that going to be in confidence? Are you going to do what I asked you to do? All the. It's just human beings interacting and relating.
- [65:57]
B
Yeah. That's very interesting. When I think about the signals I send to my company, so many of them are mediated by my manager. I remember there was a study with Starbucks. They said, well, what talent are we going to invest in in our company? Should we invest in leadership? And they said, no, because no customer has ever met our leaders. They said, the talent that we need to invest in is baristas, because that's the place of interface. And it's interesting because a manager is an interface to a company, but to some extent is also representative of the policies of those companies or steward of the policies. And so. And the culture and absolutely the culture. So what that means is that the design of experience, which I've never thought of it this way before, is one of the, you know, it's call and response sort of thing. And it's. Is my response always appropriate to the situation and how do I manage that? That's a really interesting thing, that. It's not a static thing. It can be. It's what echo am I sending back.
- [66:59]
A
It's a relationship. And a relationship is, in fact, two parties that understand and hold the concerns of the other, and they are aware of that fact about each other. So the question is, when I do something, I'm doing it in care of that relationship or not. I mean, I could be damaging it. Let's stick with this idea of this care. And the question is, do you see that as the recipient of that care and acknowledge that and then does that acknowledgment make its way back to me? And that's the basis of human transaction. We as individuals have a set of concerns that range from very pragmatic to very existential. And whether we know it or not, whether we do well at taking care of them or not, we are always taking care of all of those concerns. That's what it means to be human. And some of those concerns are taken care of by our jobs. Not all of them, but a big chunk of them. And the quality of the care of those concerns that we get from those jobs, as well as maybe the breadth of the concerns that those jobs take care of, dramatically change how we relate to that career, to that employment, to that job, to going to work every day.
- [68:21]
B
I mean, I have to think about that a long time. That's a super interesting and deep direction. The last thing I'll say on that is that I have one colleague who is going down a path of what I would call trauma aware management. The philosophy is, and I, I'll probably have her on the show because I want to talk about this, is that we all have trauma and the trauma makes us respond in ways to each other that are not always healthy. And that if we can get down to identify and disarm some of that trauma, that we can actually have a better relationship as managers and employees.
- [68:57]
A
This immediately recalls to me the famous emotional vulnerability study that Google did that got a lot of publication, a lot of press a while back. It was based on this particular manager's experience communicating and managing. And basically it ended up being an investigation into what was behind good leadership and high performing teams. And essentially what it boiled down to was emotional trust. And there were teams that were capable and did create a space in which there was vulnerability and consequentially emotional trust. And there were those who did not, and those who did vastly outperformed those who didn't.
- [69:44]
B
Sounds a little bit like that, like Project Oxygen. I should have access to people who conducted that study. So I'll look into that. It's always the last question of every interview, which is, I normally ask what job do you hire your job to do for you? But I'm not sure you have a job.
- [70:03]
A
I have a career in as much as I'm a professional consultant, but at the moment I don't have somebody sending me a paycheck. So.
- [70:11]
B
So. But I know you have enormous work that you do. You have enormous work.
- [70:16]
A
You can ask the same question about my customers. What do I hire my customers to do as a consultant? They end up being my employers, but because I'm an individual consultant, I think of them as customers. But for the time that we are engaged, they are my employer for all intents and purposes. So what do I hire them for?
- [70:36]
B
Yes. And just for anybody who doesn't know, you have one of the largest wine blogs in the world, phenography. That's also a part of your work. And so let's expand it to both of those things. What do you hire your work to do for you?
- [70:49]
A
So let's see. Is there an answer that spans both of those things?
- [70:54]
B
It doesn't have to. One might be a product that you hire to solve one problem, and one might be a product you hire to solve another.
- [71:04]
A
As I think about it, there's probably a way for me to characterize what. What both do for me, because I think the way that I would express my answer to this question is to try and get deeper into that hierarchy of jobs to be done and get more fundamental. So what I hire my customers or my work or the things that are my career in this world is for the opportunity to express my innate personal ability and capacity to think and design. So thinking and designing is something that this organism does and I've figured out does well. And the act of doing that fits with who I am and consequently gives me pleasure. So I am a thinker, I am a designer. I am a strategist. And in the same way that some people are singers, I'm a writer, too, as you note. And my work is an opportunity for me to exercise that muscle and to do so repeatedly. One of the reasons why that is pleasurable to me and one of the reasons why I keep exercising that muscle is because it provides help to other people. And that also gives me that dopamine reinforcement. I like helping other people accomplish what they're trying to accomplish, which is this nice virtuous loop that shows me that I'm good at what I do, and what I do is an expression of me and what I like to do.
- [72:37]
B
In terms of helping people. Are there some people who it's more rewarding to help than others? And it's because a fair number of people do say they want to help people, but I'm not sure that's one thing.
- [72:52]
A
There are good customers and there are bad customers in A transaction between a buyer and a seller. We all know what it's like to be a good customer or to have a good customer. Not everybody who buys what you're selling, treats you very well or even fulfills the obligations they have as the purchaser on the other end of the transaction. Pay the money, receive the goods, acknowledge the criteria and standards that we set up before we did the transaction about what delivery of the good is. That's your responsibilities as the buyer, as the customer. Not everybody's good at that. Some people receive help better than others. Some people appreciate help more than others. Some people can do more things with the help that you provide than just the help that you provide. And it's really rewarding to give somebody a help to solve a problem for them and to see that that unlocks an incredible array of accomplishments and actions and things that they can do next, as opposed to somebody who just takes the help that they asked for and leaves it at that.
- [74:05]
B
You know what's interesting about this, in the context of what you said about the material of experiences, this signal reaction sort of thing, is that I hear a life cycle in what you're talking about, which is that somebody needs help you observe and discover, which is discover insights. That is, for me, anyway, that's where I get most of my reward, is discovering the insights. And then you're able to critically think about that and then tell a story about it. Because actually, when I look at, for instance, your wine blog, your wine blog's sort of about wine, but it's much more about the experience of Argentina. And I had a really nice Malbec or something, and I was sitting on a balcony and I was over. You know, it's like it's got this whole context to it, and it's storytelling that makes the wine live. And I think that it's very similar when you tell a story about this is what. This is what your customer is experiencing. And then to get the. The signal back from your customer that they've been helped, which is a. They hear you and that you get detect, which is not only that you helped them, but you helped them. They helped themselves, you helped them help themselves. They take it even farther and you see all the downstream effects and that there's this life cycle to that where each part of it might have its own. Its own rewards. I think you must like also selling it up front.
- [75:33]
A
Yes. Because at the end of the day, the first thing that has got to be valuable to somebody is the idea of the help. And so them buying that Is the very first signal, the very first response that you get that they are willing to be helped, which sort of takes you down that path. That's selling as a consultant, which is a very different kind of thing right there. It's not traditional sales and marketing. Right. Which is, you know, convincing somebody that they need something that they don't really need. What I do is I try and understand people, companies, and they come to me because they have a problem or an issue that they're trying to solve. And so the sales process is understanding, well, what kind of help do they need really, and then figuring out whether the help that I have to offer is one that can actually help them or not. Which is very different than my razor has five blades and they're made out of titanium. This will make you more of a man. Go buy it.
- [76:33]
B
Right. One of the things that some people say that they hire their job to do for them is to give them a stage and an audience. Oftentimes when I see people who are good with a stage and an audience, I think that maybe they like that. Is there some of that in what you hire your job to do for you?
- [76:50]
A
For sure. And I mean, I think that's maybe a different facet of that. First thing I said, the opportunity to express what my organism, what my body, what my brain can do, the opportunity for me to think and design. I do that in a very public. Is maybe not the right word to say, but in a public way, in the context of business, I have to stand up in front of the room and talk to C level executives and convince them that they have problems they don't know they have or tell them what I think the solutions are to the problems that they do know that they have. And so that's very. It is a performance, It's a performative act.
- [77:25]
B
Great. Well, thank you. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. It's always great to see you. And I was really pleased that we got the go ahead ahead of time to share the manager work practice study. I reached out to Cisco and said, hey, can we talk about this? And they said yes. So neither of us broke our NDA. Broke our NDA. Exactly. Broke our NDA. So thank you, Cisco. I think, Cisco, you should be proud of that work. That was really visionary work to actually take the time to think about how managers are experiencing their lives. So just thanks to Cisco too. Thanks, Alder.
- [78:00]
A
Absolutely. Dart. This was a lot of fun.
- [78:05]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, Believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.