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Lessons from the Nomads · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Paul, I know you were recently speaking at a conference on digital nomadism in Morocco.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Is that really still a thing?
• 0:12
  unknown: Hey Matt.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everybody.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, Morocco's awesome.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: So if if people haven't been, they should go.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like my new favorite, uh my new favorite place.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, uh it is.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and for those people that sort of are not really kind of familiar with with the definition, what we really mean by digital nomadism, I'm gonna butcher the official definitions here.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: But what we really mean is that uh people are combining work and the rest of their lives, and uh they are typically um living and working in one spot and then migrating to another spot, living and working there and rinsing and repeating.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and they can do so because of what's happened to the world of work, right?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because the fact that we don't have uh typically to be stuck in one physical place to do it.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: They've looked at that and gone, you know what?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: That points out a new kind of lifestyle for me, and I want to take advantage of that new kind of lifestyle.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: It absolutely is a thing.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there are millions of people worldwide that do it.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the number is growing.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um in the US in particular, uh, there's a lot of interest in the topic.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like in any survey that they do on it, large percentages of people say that they're attracted by the digital nomad lifestyle, that they that they like the idea.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, part of that is due to things like, you know, Instagram influences and things like that that really uh that really push the concept.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: But none nonetheless, it is something that um that that really appeals.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: One of the great things about the conference is I got to meet, you know, these weren't fictional people, right?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: I got to uh meet a bunch of real people that are really living the lifestyle, talk to them about the uh um what's easy about it, what's hard about it, and uh, and get a lot uh get a bunch of learning from it.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And do you take away that it's thriving uh in danger, somewhere in between?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's uh short term.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's um it was obviously something that really, really took off as an idea among a certain number of people around the uh around the time of the pandemic.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: There are definitely individuals that are really thriving associated with it.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: There's an activist kind of community associated with it as well, people that that you know really love the idea of a you know of global um of global visas that would allow them to be able to easily work everywhere.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Even things like uh global safety nets.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's an organization called Safety Wing that is putting together kind of like a global safety net that you can use as you're uh as you're traveling from one spot to another.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of interest, lots of investment um uh that is associated with it.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there are also some things that, you know, some some clouds on the horizon, I think, associated with it as well.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one good example of this would be that uh many of the jobs that digital nomads typically do, although it varies a lot, um, but they'll often do uh sort of gig work type economy stuff.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there are some people, I think I would be one of them, that are kind of looking forward maybe four or five years and looking at the jobs that are most likely to go to AI first.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the jobs that are gonna go to AI first are almost certainly gonna be the ones that are easy to define.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, gig work by definition, you kind of have to define it upfront.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so you can see a scenario where um, you know, as a manager, you're thinking, I've got to get rid of some people, I could get rid of the people that I sit in the office with every day, or I could get rid of the people that I never see.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, those people I can define their work fairly easily.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: So why not have why not take those elements and just get AI to do bits of it?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then the people that I see every day are get them to do the rest of it.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: So there's some concern associated with with whether the lifestyle is sustainable in terms of the work uh that people are doing.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think the nomads will figure it out, they'll start doing work um that is more um that is more sticky, but right now um there is a challenge associated with that.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so you've worked with it quite a bit uh with the nomads.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh is there skills that you notice that they bring to the table, things they're really good at good at that the rest of us could learn from?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I and it kind of reminds me, Matt, of um of something we talk about a lot, which is that when it comes to durable skills specifically, the best mental model to think about with regard to durable skills is them as being a muscle.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: So so in other words, if you're if you do something repeatedly, you tend to be good at it.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you do something less often, you tend to be less good at it.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, that's where durable skills training can come in, because it allows you to be able to practice those things that you do less frequently.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um but um what we've seen with regard to the nomads is that unsurprisingly, um they their lifestyle, just the lifestyle itself, allow requires them to be pretty organized, right?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm gonna move from one country to another every couple of months, I've got to be reasonably organized to uh to allow that to happen.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they're very uh they're pretty adaptable.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Again, they've chosen a lifestyle whereby, you know, one month they're in Portugal and the next month they're in, you know, a state in the United States or whatever it happened to be.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: So so they aren't afraid of differences and change or anything like that.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So so those core skills that we talk about, like the adaptability, the resilience, and uh that are really, really necessary for the future of work, they kind of have them, right?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the one area where they uh where they um struggle a little bit on the flip is that they're incre because they're incredibly self-directed, um, because they're used to sort of like receiving work, doing, doing the work and then handing it back, yeah, often they're not as good at collaborating as some of the um as some more traditional employees.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: That makes sense, I guess.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um okay.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Turning to managers, what have the best nomad-friendly companies learned about supporting performance when the team might be scattered across you know multiple countries?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think I think as we've you know, we we have digital nomads that are a good proportion of the um of the people that do our programming, and we have um people that that work remotely, um, people that work in hybrid scenarios, um and of course managers of distributed teams.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the things that really struck me is that when it came to the actual sort of set of skills and and how you build them and the policies that you need, supporting nomads is not that different.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that different to uh to the idea of having a highly distributed team.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you think about it from the from the being the perspective from the perspective of a manager, the moment that you yourself are physically separated from members of your team, even if that's one member of your team or two members of your team, you are now managing people across space and time.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you have to adjust uh how you work.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're effective, you'll do it in such a way that the people that are remote from you are not disadvantaged uh in any way.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so, really, what this is really about as a manager is becoming highly adept at managing a distributed team.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if you do that, you can support uh you can support nomads in that in that framework.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing I want to point out critically, and we've you know, we built our leading distributed teams program a couple of years ago, and it was very clear in the research that we did for that that management techniques, to be a great manager of a distributed team is a different set of uh techniques that you need for a than you than you need for a team where everybody's in the same room.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so managers need to be getting good at that anyway.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh when they do, they'll be really good at supporting distributed teams uh that include digital nomads.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if if a company is, you know, even at this stage just dipping their toe in a in a work from anywhere scenario, uh, what first infrastructure or policy steps do you think make the biggest difference before splurging on you know exotic offsites and stuff like that?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think uh I think the key thing is that um it's almost like where do you start, right?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: So where people got kind of go wrong with this, uh with the stuff is they look at what they do, what they did, what they did in a you know, a scenario when everybody was in the same room, and then they and then they replicate that, right?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: These these horrible, you know, virtual happy hours that uh that companies had, or these very fake sort of like virtual coffee meetings and things that people did.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: The reason they did it was because they're like, well, we used to have a physical happy hour, now we're gonna have a virtual happy hour.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was like it was such a literal translation of one uh of one point of view to the uh to the other.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: So don't do that, right?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Go back to what are the actual needs that humans have in your uh in your organization.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: And those are pretty simple, right?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: People need to be able to uh work well individually, well uh collectively.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: They need to be able to um to be able to do asynchronous work well and synchronous work well, they need to communicate uh asynchronously, they need to communicate synchronously, they need to uh have written and verbal communication skills.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is almost like a set of capabilities that need to exist at an individual level and a team level.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Look at that set of capabilities, figure out how to build those uh that set of capabilities well and consistently across your organization, and focus like a laser on retaining trust in that team.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because when people are invisible, the idea of retaining trust when you don't see your colleagues every day is hotter and it needs to be approached deliberately.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Very interesting stuff, Paul.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Another great episode.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you in the next one.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Meal.
• 10:43
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• 10:47
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• 10:49
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