The Exchanges

Q And was it Frederick Taylor who came up with this sort of, like, method of organization?

A I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, I actually have his, uh, original book, uh, right here on my shelf, um, The Principles of Scientific Management. Yeah, he was one of that generation. There was a whole generation of folks, actually, That, uh, that saw the opportunity to help apply the principles of science and numbers and analysis and stopwatches to the way we work in order to make those factories and those businesses that were, you know, focused on scale really work. And so he was a guy who would literally spend his weekends figuring out what is the optimal number of pounds of coal in a shovel that would give you the maximum amount of shoveled coal in an hour. And then he would go back to the factory and actually say, Hey, I'll make you a deal. I'll give you a small raise if you agree to shovel exactly how I show you. And so this whole idea of the one best way was really born with him. Um, and, and the idea of like best practice and that, that infected the mindset of, of workers everywhere. He also really gave birth to the management class for the first time because they're, they were charged with ensuring that stuff.

AI assessment note: “this whole idea of the one best way was really born with him.”

Q Are there sort of benefits to this higher article management? You know, we've all seen these org charts and I know we're going to talk at length today about some of the disadvantages of this, but like, are there advantages to sort of organizing a workplace that way? Like, why is this lasted?

A Yeah, it works so well for certain things. And I think that is really the, the crux of it is recognizing that there are different contexts and different problem types that we encounter in the world. If somebody says I've got 40 pounds of, of pasta in the basement and I need to get it out to the truck as fast as possible. There is a Taylorific way of doing that. That's going to be optimal. You don't want a bunch of people brainstorming about how to do that and think about it for six hours and then try five different ways. Like you really just want to get the stopwatch out and, and basically make a line, uh, do a factory line and hand the, hand the pasta up. So I think there are problems in contexts where hierarchy makes sense. There are problems in contexts where you actually need command and control because of the nature of the environment. For example, in a fire environment, In a, in a chaos issue where you're dealing with some immediate emergency, there's no time for consensus. There's no time for let's all sit in a circle and talk about our feelings, right? We need someone to say, all right, whether I have it, you know, through virtue of power and position, or because you gave it to me, I'm the one that everyone's going to turn to in this moment, and I'm going to say we're going to go left or we're going to go right. And that way we can actually move as one and, and, and act…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it works so well for certain things.”

Q But has grown and evolved and nobody wanted to remove anything. How do we lose our way?

A Essentially, we lose our way because we believe in a false choice. So most people believe that the pattern of organizational evolution is from chaos to bureaucracy. So you start in chaos with a startup. You have a handful of people around the kitchen table or the kitchen door in the case of Amazon. And everybody's doing a lot of different things. It's, there's no clarity about roles. There's no clarity about what we do for a living. We don't have product market fit yet. Everything is about search and figure out an experiment and try. And so the, the level of chaos is quite high. And some people are, you know, kind of off put by that, but a lot of startup folks are like, that's what I thrive on. I thrive on that energy of like all hands on deck. And then you figure something out usually, otherwise you die, right? So either you go out of business and that's that, or you figure something out. Oh, people like it when we do this. Oh, we have, we have 10 engineers. We better have somebody to manage them. Oh, we have, you know, a process that's starting to emerge. How do we hire people? We better figure out a hiring process. And as you figure things out, you dial them in because you think I want certainty. I want control. I want reliability. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to nail this stuff to the wall. So like, this is the hiring process. This is the, you know, business mod…

AI assessment note: “Essentially, we lose our way because we believe in a false choice.”

Q become uncompetitive and lose their place. Not only that, it's no fun to work there. The problem isn't the people. The problem isn't the lack of communication or no one knowing the corporate values. This episode looks at what's keeping us from doing our best work and what we can do about it. It's time to listen and learn. Work isn't working. What's stopping us from doing our best work?

A Well, I think the problem with work is that most of the way that we work is inherited from the generations that came before us. And the way we work today, when you think about hierarchies and bosses and managers and boxes and lines and Gantt charts and schedules and quarterly plans and budgets, all that stuff came about Roughly 80 to a 120 years ago, and it came about in the time of the factory floor, when we were trying to make sure that size nine shoes fit the same across the country and cornflakes wouldn't kill us. And everything was about reliability and consistency and scale. And so that entire, what I call operating system, that way of working was born for that purpose. And now here we are a hundred years later. Most of the problems we solve are not cornflake problems, and so there's a huge disconnect between the way we work today that we think is normal, that we think is kind of inevitable, and the reality that we actually get to choose how we work, and how we make decisions, and how we organize, and how we allocate power and resources, and we don't. We generally don't.

AI assessment note: “most of the way that we work is inherited from the generations that came before”

Q of the other things you mentioned that I thought was powerful was sort of habits as a counterbalance to some of these things where we can use culture or rituals to counterbalance some of our maybe instincts. Like making the default Slack conversation open, um, by, by all of these other things. Are there other ways that you've seen sort of habits and rituals have positive effects on an organization?

A Yeah, I love it. I mean, change, change the system, not the people is definitely our battle cry. And it's, it's my favorite example of this is probably in the DEI space where you see a lot of people talking about, uh, inclusion and share a voice and bias and things like that. And it's like, We got to make sure that we, you know, give a, give part of the stage to other people and people that don't look like us. And what is so challenging about that, if you think of it from a change the people side is you're like, okay, great. I'm just going to go coach Shane and Aaron until they stop talking so much and stop, you know, jumping in front and having ideas and whatnot. And the, and the reality is like, if you've done that before, good luck. Like it, it works okay for a minute when you're being watched and when you're reminded of what's happening, but you go back to your natural way of working real fast because it's hard to hold all that in your brain and still execute at the same time. It's like when you're trying to Change your golf swing or how you're jumping on the trampoline with a technique. Only in the moment of holding it in your head can you really do it. But, but we have this, um, practice that we use on the podcast and with clients and in our own organizations that is called the check-in round. And we do it at the beginning of, of every major meeting and of every podcast w…

AI assessment note: “we have this, um, practice that we use... that is called the check-in round.”

Q So if we get out of the org structure or the operating system and go down to the individual level, where is it that you see people make mistakes in decision making at that sort of micro level that are correctable or predictable?

A Well, I think the first, the first place that we make mistakes is perhaps not understanding our own freedom. So in systems like that, what tends to happen is people are hesitant to make a decision because it doesn't feel like I should be able to. So there's a lot of blaming the system and a lot of looking for guidance and permission and all that kind of stuff that still exists when it's like, you can just go do what you need to do. You can go, you can go play and you can deal with the consequences. So that's one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is that we're not great. At telling the difference between type one and type two decisions, the, the kind of one way door, two way door metaphor that people use just on balance. Folks struggle a little bit with like, how would I roll this back versus how is that something I can't roll back? We like to believe that every decision we make is like the end of the world. And it just really is not, you know, even things that feel really final are just not final. And so I think getting into that iterative mindset around decision-making is important. And then the last thing is we just don't have a lot of, uh, practice or experience with decision science. And so we, we haven't spent a lot of time learning what makes a good decision or a bad decision, how to think about building context, how to think about risks and assumptions and alternative…

AI assessment note: “the first place that we make mistakes is perhaps not understanding our own freedom.”

Q You just asked my question for me. How do we do that?

A So there's a lot of, uh, arguing and thinking going on about this right now. Um, Amy Edmondson kind of coined the term psychological safety that was then used in the Google project, Aristotle research that like teams that have psych safety tend to outperform ones that don't. And psych safety was defined essentially as you can take interpersonal risks at work without fearing for your very existence, fearing that you'd be, you know, unduly criticized or even, or even let go. So it's about people taking risks. And the way we tend to do this is by recontextualizing failure. So failure is, as you know, and you've talked about it on the show quite a bit, actually, um, failure is perceived as this like real death of the ego. Like it's a toxic, terrible, scary thing. Horrible thing, and nobody wants to fail. But then whenever you hear anyone who has achieved anything, they always talk about learning and failure and how they go hand in glove and how important that is. And so you have to have a culture where failure, we call it noble failure, is, is understood and appreciated as a necessary ingredient in learning. And you have to have a culture where the Idea of what it means to be a leader is not about ensuring perfect execution, which is what that Tayloristic version of management was. That was you ensure perfect execution. That is your job. And now the idea is I want you to ensure con…

AI assessment note: “And the way we tend to do this is by recontextualizing failure.”

Q What insights into decision-making do you have that you think other people miss?

A Um, that's a great question. And how long have you had, how long do you have? Um, I think the first thing about decision making is actually to talk about what kind of decision making culture you're going to have, what kind of agreements culture you're going to have, and there are effectively two options. You can have a permission culture or a constraint culture. So a permission culture is a culture where, you guessed it, you have to ask permission to do anything. So the, the default assumption is you can't do anything until you're told that you can. So the bathroom pass that you had in school, perfect example of a permission culture. You can't even go to the bathroom without asking. That's how badly we're going to drill that into your head. And so that way you understand that that's how the world works. And there are so many examples of this in the form of instructions and protocols and guidelines and manuals and all that. And permission can come in many forms. It can come in the form of like a promotion. Like now you're the head of marketing. So now you get to make choices about what we invest our money in, but that's still a form of permission. It's still me giving you this position that I, that I have deigned to like put you in. And permission cultures tend to have a problem, which is that they then have to define everything. Because to your point earlier about judgment, the…

AI assessment note: “You can have a permission culture or a constraint culture.”

Q What have you learned from doing so many retrospectives? Like, what makes for a good retrospective versus a poor one? What should companies track at the moment they're making a decision to make it easier to look back and do a good retrospective?

A I think there's probably three things about retrospectives that are interesting. It's the before, during, and after aspect of it. So the before aspect is, if you don't have a culture of communication and authentic communication, what, what Jim would talk about, right? Like, really, you know, Jim Dethmer talking about, like, Being conscious and authentic and being in that kind of connection. If you don't have that, then you can show up to the, to the retro and everybody's clenched. Everybody's tight because we haven't, we have no information essentially about how we did. And so we're just waiting to see like what, what negative or fearful or challenging or threatening things might come up. But if you have a culture of fleet of feedback and constant flow, if you have, we, we do, um, my, my cohost Rodney talks about him as hot washes. Like a hot wash after every engagement, every major milestone, you sort of say like, Hey, what, what did we notice? What stood out? What would we do differently next time? Just micro retros. Then when you get to the big one, it's kind of like a little bit of the airs out of the balloon. And you have a little sense of like where your colleagues heads are at and where you're at. So now it's safe. And now it's like, all right, let's actually make sense of this thing. So that's the, that's sort of the before aspect is coming in with a little bit of flow …

AI assessment note: “It's the before, during, and after aspect of it.”

Q Two rabbit holes there. One, sort of going back to biology versus sort of what's been, um, socialized in us. Is, is one way to assess the difference than what exists across all animals? Like, self-preservation sort of exists across every animal.

A Sure. Sure, yeah. I think biology is a good, uh, a good place to look for lessons, and in fact, that's one of the places that I went when I first went down this whole rabbit hole on, um, Self-management and self-organization is looking at complex adaptive systems like ants and bees and fish and murmurations and neurons and immune systems. And they all have a ton to teach us about how to organize to solve problems. But to your point, certainly we can also see just by looking at mammals that we're going to react in, in fear and scarcity when we feel threatened. And so the job of the organization designer or the founder is actually to focus on the don't feel threatened part, not the human nature part. Like, let's just let human nature be what it is and say, if people don't feel threatened, they won't go into fight or flight. So how do we actually create an environment where the threat level is different in nature than the traditional system where it's kind of like, if you don't do this, you're fired.

AI assessment note: “I think biology is a good, uh, a good place to look for lessons”

Q Have you seen examples of that where it's like five percent, they've sort of changed the org culture from the bottom up and it's been sustainable?

A Yeah. I mean, I think you see, you see a combination of things. Number one, you see what's possible when the leader gets on board, which is hard enough. Like, you know, the example of like the transformation at hire in, in China, um, Um, is a super profound one because it was a traditional system and it became non-traditional. And that was, that was wild and super hard at that scale, 60,000 people. Um, but by the same token, you see little changes every day in the companies that we work with. So, I mean, we work with everybody from the CDC to the Fed to Lockheed Martin to Boeing to GE in the past, et cetera. And, you know, you, you never see the whole system change on a dime. Of course, it's never, you never stand back two years later and you're like, wow, a 100,000 people work differently. But what you do see are entire functions change. So as an example, we worked with a company called Blumen Brands. They're a restaurant chain that owns Carabas and, and, um, Outback Steakhouse and those sorts of companies. And, um, Working with, uh, their support team, their technical support team in house. One of our teams was in there for a while and really just, you know, kind of button button up against it. It's not, not immediately obvious that it's going to work, but People were kind of into it and that maybe the, you know, the top leadership was not aware or totally supportive of what …

AI assessment note: “we worked with a company called Blumen Brands... technical support team in house”

Q What is the psychology behind people not wanting to take risks in an organization? Is it simply loss aversion where I stand to lose more individually than I gain if I'm right? Is it something else?

A I think it's a combination of things. I think number one, there's just an emotional, like lower brain component to this that has been beaten into us over the years. You get F's in red in school, you get punished, you get sent to the corner, you get sent home. Um, you don't get a trophy. There's just a lot of things that, that are reinforcing the importance of winning in a young person's life. And so I do think you come with baggage day one, but then there's also just the incentive side of the game. And I can't remember the name of the guest, but you had someone, I was talking about this not that long ago, which was like, when you, if you, if you play by the rules, if you don't take a risk and you, and you don't fail, you know, the, the consequences are X, but if you, but if you take a risk and you fail, the consequences are much, much higher. And so you end up just The odds don't work in your favor in a system that doesn't recognize this principle, and you end up in a scenario where you're the rogue or the vanguard, and those people often leave. They either get fired because they're too radical, or they leave of their own volition because they're like, I can't make the kind of bets here that I want to make in my career, so I'm going to go to a place that is willing to take bets and, and, and try to actually change things. It's a, it's a talent leakage. So I do. Yeah. I think it…

AI assessment note: “I think it's a combination of things. I think number one, there's just an emotional”