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Work as a Product with Dart Lindsley · Disengaged

• James A. Seechurn: Hello and welcome to another episode of the as discussed podcast. Today I had the pleasure of being joined by Dart Lindsley. Dart has his own podcast, Work for Humans, and he has nearly 200 episodes at this point, think, which I really recommend listening to. He's had some very interesting guests. And recently, he founded the company 11 Fold Before that, he worked for Cisco and Google. And before that, he spent nearly 20 years in the literary arts a writer, editor, and university instructor. Now, Dart is one of a growing group of people that you might have come across recently that uses the phrase work as a product. the idea that the work that we offer to our employees is a product that those employees choose whether or not they want to buy. And through his company, 11 Fold, he works ⁓ his clients to try and redefine the work in that way to make work more ⁓ and engaging for the people that do it. So we talked about what that means, an explanation. If you're unfamiliar with the term work as a product, we spent some time discussing what it really means and the practical applications. And talked about how that stems from the jobs to be done framework and ⁓ practically ⁓ you can about taking that mentality ⁓ and applying to a company. what needs to be dismantled in order to make that work and some of the preconceptions about work and the history that's defined the modern concept of the workplace that in some degree stands in the way of that. also talked about his ⁓ attempt to climb the Golden Gate Bridge. I it really interesting. So I highly recommend listening this full podcast if you have the time. This is, like I said, a growing area and there are various people that you can find on LinkedIn that are talking about this concept to try and improve the work and make companies more productive ⁓ while simultaneously making the work more enjoyable for the people that do So without further ado, I give you Dart Linsley. ⁓ You mentioned you made coffee and... Dart Lindsley: like pitcher of coffee, it's not just coffee. James A. Seechurn: So did you use the AeroPress and the spoon that you redesigned because you weren't happy with it, Dart Lindsley: I did. I did. James A. Seechurn: I thought that was hilarious. Dart Lindsley: worse. way worse than that. This was designed by my by my daughter's boyfriend, ⁓ and it is specifically to fit the AeroPress XL. And ⁓ and ⁓ it's because you turn the XL inside out and fits inside so it nests. It's got just the right size. So ⁓ anyway, ⁓ I custom. have custom AeroPress coffee gear. James A. Seechurn: All right. Mm-hmm. Nice. Dart Lindsley: know, Luke, when I spoke in London, he at the end, gave me a gift and he gave me the grinder that we talked about on the show, which I would never buy because it's $280 hand grinder. It's the, I have a fellow grinder. He has a Commodore. It's a Commodore. James A. Seechurn: ⁓ that was the fellow grinder. Mm-hmm. Dart Lindsley: It's a hand grinder. Yeah, so now I have one of those too. James A. Seechurn: That's a nice gift because you spoke with him about coffee on your podcast, right? So you and he, I think probably more than me as well, both love coffee. So that's a really nice gift. Dart Lindsley: He always talks... a really ⁓ gift. He knew the way to my heart. James A. Seechurn: so I'm really to talk to you because you've had a really interesting career. So ⁓ I really want hear about your journey, if that's right. You've worked at Google and Cisco ⁓ and before that spent 20 years in the literary arts ⁓ as a writer, sounds like a really fun journey. So I would just love to hear a bit about, there's not your conventional career path to finding your way to your own company, advising ⁓ on work. and design. And I'd just love to hear a bit about the moments that maybe created your current set of beliefs around work and people and how to get the most out of them. Dart Lindsley: So. Let see where to start. I mean, the thing is, I've been thinking a lot lately about why I ended up with different ideas about management and management philosophy than others. And I realized that there were just a whole lot of things when I first entered into corporate life that ⁓ over time didn't add up. And that I... I always felt uncomfortable with them, but the more that they added up, the more I noticed that there was something really wrong. And so, because I was writing about this recently, I went back and I looked at one of the earliest indications that there was something wrong with work. And it was the day I started working at a large corporation. I spent, like you said, I spent the first 20 years of my career working outside of large corporations. And I did everything because I was a, ⁓ you know, when you're an artist, you, do the work that makes the money. So you have time to do the art. I was a criminal defense investigator. I was a caretaker for a polo club. was a construction worker. I was a parking lot attendant. I did all sorts of different things. I was also an editor and a university instructor in writing and other things. Waiters on wheels. My wife and I agreed that we would never talk about that again. ⁓ But, ⁓ ⁓ One of the things that happened was that while I was in university, ⁓ I climbed the Golden Gate Bridge with some friends. And I know this sounds like it's not aligned to this topic at all, but we snuck onto the bridge at night and we walked up one of those long sweeping cables up to the top of the bridge. And it was... In some ways it was an experience just like what you would think, which is it was very, very scary ⁓ because it's 700 feet down to the water. And it was beautiful, which was a bit surprising because it has this vast view of San Francisco. But ⁓ it also taught me something else. And it made me recognize a pattern that I had seen before and that I would see after, which is human-made objects not built for humans. that it was so massive. And of course we were using it inappropriately. It's built for cars. It's not built to walk up these cables. But it was this massive human-made object that was not made for humans. And I realized I'd seen it before because when I was ⁓ in college, I had hitchhiked a lot. And one time I walked across the bridge across the Columbia River in Portland. and it has no sidewalk and it was just terrifying. But it was another huge human-made object not made for humans. Or walking around a clover leaf, if you've ever tried that, something hitchhikers do but nobody should do. Touring the Hoover Dam. Well, I had this idea in my head of human-made things not made for humans. ⁓ And ⁓ the first time I walked into a corporation, I met that. the exact same thing. It was a sea of cubes and everything was painted beige and everything was uniform. you know, it wasn't just that people were trying to do things cheaply because there's lots of ways that you could design that in ways that were the same price or less that would be more human. But here was a corporation that was that was building a space for humans and yet it didn't feel human. So I of filed that away in the weird folder and I started to develop ⁓ this sort of file of weird that had to do with work. And thing that happened was that ⁓ a few years later, this... It didn't take me very long to find my way into operations ultimately. And a few years later, I was responsible for the investment portfolio at Cisco systems for ⁓ all of HR. And I I found myself having this choice. Should I ⁓ invest in something for the workforce or should I ⁓ invest in something else. And because we were aligned to shareholder value and because employees were framed as the way they are, ⁓ I could never actually in good conscience make an investment in employee experience because cost cutting is always a more surefire way to affect the bottom line than investment in the experience of the people at work. ⁓ And I saw that people at work were not happy. They were making tons of money. This was the dot com bubble and people were wealthy, but not happy. I happened to interview a number of ⁓ senior HR leaders when they were as part of their exit interview and they were bitter. They were embittered. The main thing I got off of them was that they felt that they were that their career had been wasted. So these things were kind of stacking up. Something wasn't right with work. And a few years later, I was the head of business architecture at Cisco Systems for Human Resources. so what that does is, business architecture is a planning function. When a company's going into a new market, ⁓ or they have a new route to market, the question is, what are all the things that need to change in a coordinated way inside the company to actually go into that market? And to do that sort of planning, we had to develop these ⁓ abstract models of how the company functioned. And they're super abstract in the sense that, you know, if you used one of these models to describe a mouse, you could describe an elephant because functionally they're mostly the same, except around the nose, a little difference. And so, was while developing these models that I found a little doorway. It was another weird thing, but it was a doorway into a different way of thinking. ⁓ And it was that the history of management has framed the workforce as inputs, factors of production, ⁓ means to an end. I need to pay people because work is a negative good. So I'm gonna ask them to do something they don't want, and I'm gonna pay people to come and do something for me. So that's the whole model. ⁓ And so in our models, the workforce showed up as inputs to production, but they also showed up in the models as customers. And at the time, I thought maybe this is a glitch in the modeling that we're doing. ⁓ Or maybe, maybe mostly I thought that would be difficult if that were true. at first I didn't really understand how could be possible. ⁓ When employees showed up in these models as ⁓ it ⁓ struck me as ⁓ really interesting, I know what to with it. But a ⁓ little bit later, I working on a patent that involved ⁓ a new business model for the exchange of Internet of Things data. And it was a multi-sided business model. And I realized that if employees are not simple inputs, but if employees are in fact customers, that that's the shape of a multi-sided business, which is that multi-sided businesses always have two customers. They have the regular paying customer and what I now call the working customer. A working customer is somebody who comes to work for you. Customers choose to exchange value with your company. That's what they choose to do. And not what kind of value do they exchange with your company, the kind that if your company doesn't get it, your company can't ⁓ survive. And the workforce absolutely does that. So that's when I started down this path of really thinking about ⁓ people at work as customers. That was a long story, longer than you wanted, probably. James A. Seechurn: Well, it's a great story and I'm not going to let you skip past the fact that you climbed the Golden Gate Bridge without asking some more questions about this. So first of all, my number one question is, were you tethered to the bridge in any way? Okay. Okay. Dart Lindsley: Okay Yes, we took harnesses and we tethered ourselves in and, and, ⁓ know, the bridge is not trying to kill you. It's intensely neglectful of your safety. And it's important because that's a part of what I learned about this sort of thing, which is that... ⁓ neglect is a neighbor to harm. And that what the history of work has to is it has neglected what ⁓ people at work want from work. And that's a neighbor to harm. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, and I think the roots of that go back, I think, to scientific management. And I think that's got a lot to answer for, for the modern workplace, because still so much of that factory style work, if indeed that was ever the right way to get the most out of people, has still persisted in the modern workplace. Dart Lindsley: Yeah, in fact, let me say where the mistaken mental model came from. Management theorists and the leaders who hired them stood back from production lines and said, the thing that we're trying to optimize here is a production line. And what do we need to make that production line work? Well, we know we need raw materials. We know that we need capital equipment. We know that we need real estate and we know that we need people. And so it was very natural to start to identify people as inputs to production given that position. And in fact, that position is an, you know, the position of leadership is a very disadvantaged position to see the work itself. James A. Seechurn: you Dart Lindsley: I've experienced this. When you work in a big enough company, you can see the people around you and they're humans. Your team is made of humans and your peers are made of humans. But you get to about a hundred people and you start to lose detail. You get to a thousand, you lose more detail. And pretty soon, the only way that you can think about the people at work is by simplifying, radically simplifying. turning people into numbers, ⁓ classifying them, categorizing them, and trying to ⁓ make them something that can be comprehended for purposes of management. And so it's because of that position at a distance from the problem space that we classified people as inputs and started managing, scientific management is, well, let's figure out, you know, what's the math of this problem that we have. And so... ⁓ So it's a mistake, but it's a mistake that's still happening. And why does it still happen? I mean, let me say what kind of a mistake it was. ⁓ In philosophy, it's called a categorization error, which is you take the other inputs to production and you say, are the attributes of those that makes them an input to production? Well, we need them to get stuff done. They have no first-person experience. If we buy them, we own them, and they do what we want, ⁓ and they're not alive. And you say, well, that describes raw materials. That describes capital equipment. That describes real estate. But then you look at people, people do have a first-person subjective experience. They do have the ability to choose every day whether or not they're going to exchange value with your company. James A. Seechurn: Hmm. Dart Lindsley: ⁓ And that's what describes a customer. And so we misclassified the workforce. And ⁓ in philosophy, when there's a category error, every bit of reasoning that follows ⁓ is prone to error. It's such a fundamental kind of mistaken thinking that you can't think right after it. James A. Seechurn: So why did it take such hold then? Why has it persisted for so long? I struggle with this as well. When you kind of, like you and I have been on parallel journeys in a way, I also began embracing this idea of pay for performance and what Alfie Kohn described as pop behaviorism, do this and you'll get that model of management essentially. I that's probably the best summation of that thinking, do this and get that is essentially what we're saying to people. But there's so much research. to show that that's wrong. And whenever we look at the biggest breakthroughs, they don't come from this model. They come from places that allow people to be a good customer of the work. And the amount of people that go home every day and say, ⁓ my boss just doesn't understand what I'm doing. They don't get it. not close to the point. don't understand. Engineers that complain about micromanagement, the boss doesn't understand. It's so common, yet also this model of management is so persistent. Why is that? Why is it so stubborn? Dart Lindsley: Yeah, that was actually one of the mysteries, is that was in my little folder of weird stuff. It's that we have stacks of research that support the idea, that establish the truth that when people like their work, companies do better. We also have stacks of research that show we don't have the ability to create likeable work. And so it's like, what is going on? Why is it that we... I don't know how to put it exactly. We can see the donuts in the donut case, but the glass, we can't get to it for some reason. And my... My main belief is that And the way to think of this is that management theory has advanced. ⁓ Management practice has not. And I really believe it is because of the disadvantaged position of those writing the checks. So ⁓ people far from the work, allocate money and power, and From that position in the system, it is like an information hazard, an intellectual hazard that you start to see people as things, as not whole people. You can't possibly think about 10,000 people, each one as a whole person. Your brain can't hold it. And so the frame becomes, you know, what can I do to you, y'all, because there's 10,000 of you, to get you to give me what I want? And, you know, it's interesting. I think about sort of the life of the ecology of ideas and how One of the things that I'm trying to do is I'm trying to change the ecology of ideas. I'm trying to release a new idea into the wild that can out-compete other ideas and create a system, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, recognizes employees as customers and all companies as multi-sided businesses that can out-compete the inferior species of company. which is the ones that treat people like things. But like any species of idea, ⁓ the old ideas self-replicate. So they keep copying themselves. So here's the loop that happens. ⁓ Leaders from that disadvantaged position ask they will create a department that's going to deliver the workforce as an input to production. that starts to happen. The HR department starts to exist. Management practices start to exist. Universities see it and they say, well, this is what we need to be able to teach people how to do. So they set up departments of management, which are now going to create, you know, and amplify the ideas that were naively created by people in the organization who are not well positioned to really understand the large systems that they're responsible for. And so then what happens is the parts of the organization that serve that model ⁓ get paid more. They get budget because they're flattering the mistaken ideas of that disadvantaged location in the system. And they get power. And they then become ⁓ a force that has figured out how to win budget. And universities feed people into that who have those ideas. And so in fact, it's super interesting that management as a discipline, if you look through most of the literature of management, it still has control as its main feature. ⁓ Even the humanist, ⁓ you know, ⁓ management theorists, were asking the question, what state of mind do I need to get you into to give me what I want? ⁓ James A. Seechurn: Right. Dart Lindsley: I want to contrast that with how you approach customers. You you approach customers with, I'm not trying to put you into a state of mind to give me money. If I want you to give me money, I need to figure out what you want to buy. And I need to build the thing and the product or service that you're going to find attractive. It's not about changing you, which is the way tradition, even humanist management theory thinks. It's about creating a product that people actually want. James A. Seechurn: which brings us very neatly onto this concept, this wonderful phrase of work as a product, which I think a lot of people still wouldn't have heard yet because this is a relatively emerging concept and you're one of a handful of people, think, trying to think about things differently based on that, what you just described, based on the idea that your employees, whether you like it or not, choose the work, much as a customer chooses their product. So I'm not, this is my pop version of it, but I'd love for you to talk through how you see in your own words, work as a product, what does it mean? And for those that might be hearing this for the first time, practically speaking, how they might be able to apply some of this thinking. Dart Lindsley: Yeah. So once I realized that work was a product, I mean, sorry, once I realized that employees were customers, the very next question. And that the idea that employees or customers would solve all these weird things in the weird file, right? Would make sense of those things. And in many cases might lead to solving those things. The very first question you have to ask with any customer is, what are they buying? What are we buying when we go to work? What are you buying when you go to work? And so I set out to do market research. Okay, there's a step in between. So I said, well, I think people are buying the work itself. They're buying their job. They're buying a job is what I said. So I started asking people marketing questions about job. I said, what job do you hire your job to do for you? So I used Clayton Christensen's, actually Bobby Moesta's, ⁓ know, jobs to be done theory to really start understanding what people wanted. And I started getting answers that were different than anything I had heard before. So when the question is, what state of mind, so I'm a psychologist and I'm asking the question, what state of mind do I need to put you in so that you'll give me what I want? ⁓ A couple of things happen. They probably went out and interviewed people, but then they needed to roll it up into a generalizable theory. And the generalizable theory was people want ⁓ mastery, purpose, and autonomy. That's the sort of thing. It's always a list of three or four or five. ⁓ That's not what I got when I started asking people this question. And over time, I've now asked thousands of people this question. And the answer that I got was, some of them you just expect. I hire my job to give me money. But you do a little bit. You say, why do you need money? I need money to take care of my family. If you could take care of your family without the money, would that be fine? And they said, yeah, it's not about the money. Or I need money just to... ⁓ to buy other experiences or I need money to take care of myself in retirement. So there were these second order things that people wanted from the money. Weirdly, ⁓ I hire my job to give me money to keep score. The money ⁓ is a scorekeeper. And people also say I hire my job to learn. We'll talk more about that. But they also say I hire my job to give me interesting puzzles to solve. ⁓ I hire my job ⁓ to give me a worthy opponent or I hire my job ⁓ to gain independence. And the first time somebody said that, thought they meant ⁓ financial independence. So I joked a little bit and she said, no, I come from a country where women are daughters or wives. And she says, I don't want to be either of those things. I want to be my own thing. and my job helps me to do that. Or I hire my job to pay my debts to the people who got me here, my parents, to show them that I have arrived where they wanted me to arrive. ⁓ I hire my job to discover the unknown or to invent new things or to work with teams. And you can drill on that one and people will say, you why do you want to work with teams? And one of them is a learning thing, which is I like to work with other smart people because I learn a lot. But then other people say, work with teams because it amplifies me. You know, some people say I hire my job to help others. And the team is a way to help more people. ⁓ And the help others has some detail, which is I hire my job to ⁓ help individuals. I can see that I'm helping them and they can say thank you to me. I'm giving them a meal, whatever it is. Or, I hire my job to make the world work better for people. It's a systemic thing. So I end up with 35 different things. ⁓ So I'm somebody now who was thinking about how do I design work that people that is going to get the job done for people that they want to get done. And I'm getting 35 different things and I'm still getting new things. I hire my job to see others shine. You know, I keep there are new, I hire my job to ⁓ help me live where I want to live, either sponsor my visa or, or, you know, just, you know, make it possible for me to work remote. So there's all, this is a very complex product and there's a, so a lot of things start to bother me about this, which is if I'm designing a product and everybody wants something different, what am I going to do? So put that off to the side. I started asking another question along the way, because I realized I was missing something really important. I, jobs to be done theory is great. It tells you a lot about the value people get from something, but it doesn't tell you about the cost. And so I started asking, what does your job cost you? And people would say almost as many things as they say when you ask them what they hire their job to do for them. ⁓ My job costs me social anxiety, status threats, my commute. ⁓ My job forces me to think analytically and I want to think creatively. So it's actually forcing me to think a way I don't want to think. My job... ⁓ gives me ⁓ empathy burn. I'm seeing people, I'm a doctor, I see people die, it hurts me. Actually, that's why I stopped being a criminal defense investigator, ⁓ is because of that. ⁓ you know, it causes me moral injury. I am forced to treat my team a certain way, or I'm creating a product that I think introduces harm into the world. Or, and this is a thing, something I didn't talk about, this one goes both ways. I hire my job to make me look good at parties. And, you know, when somebody says, what do you do? I get to say, well, I'm the head of business architecture for Cisco systems or something like that, whatever it is, you know, fancy title that I made up probably. but there's a flip side to that, which is a cost, which is, you know what, my job, it just doesn't go. with the rest of my outfit. And so I don't really, I don't think it's a good look. I would like to, and I swear to God, I have turned jobs down that offered me a lot more money because I just didn't think working for a hedge fund went with my look. And it wasn't a job I could bring home to my parents and introduce them to. James A. Seechurn: Hmm. Dart Lindsley: And I didn't, you so there's all these, this complexity around this. And yet psychologists are telling us it's autonomy, mastery and purpose. They're saying is everybody wants the same thing. James A. Seechurn: Right. Dart Lindsley: ⁓ Why did that happen? That happened because we were trying to find the formula to hack the workforce to give us what we want. And we needed to roll it up into something generalizable or you can't publish. You can't publish unless you can say these are the three things people want. But if you're designing a product, especially the word purpose is a real problem in those models because my research shows that purpose is 30 different things. And so, If it's 30 different things and you tell me that there's one word to describe purpose, ⁓ I can't design with that. That's not a design tool anymore. That's a ⁓ hindrance to design. Okay, so now you've got this thing and I've done the research. If you ask a thousand people what they hire their job for and what it costs them individually, you'll get a thousand different answers, collectively. And by the way, why did I look at cost? When you buy a product, you always think, this product going to do the job I want done? And can I get it at a reasonable cost? And so looking at whole cost and whole value of job is what we do when we're shopping. And it can be shopping for a new job or it can just be shopping for the next hour of work. You know, this next hour of work, is it going to be any fun? Is it going to be rewarding to me? And what's the cost? So. Then the question becomes, and this is where it starts to become action, which is if we have the research that says people, ⁓ when people like their work, companies do better. We have the research that they don't like it. And now we have the information about the design attributes that people want from work. ⁓ And we also are now in a position to say, How do we deliver that product? A product where everybody wants something different. And this is where we get to action. James A. Seechurn: It's very interesting. There's so much in there that's interesting to me. To your point, I think autonomy, and I want to come back to action as well. I don't want to lose the thread, but there's a few things now I want to dig into. So to your point, autonomy mastery purpose, I think was Daniel Pink's sort of summary of a bunch of concepts. I always go back to self-determination theory, autonomy, ⁓ competence, and yeah. Dart Lindsley: Mastery. Relationship. James A. Seechurn: and relationships and you're absolutely right in they're too abstract to do anything with like if you're trying to design around but everything you've mentioned falls in there somewhere but in the abstract it's just a bit too vague to work with so what you're doing almost everything is there anything that doesn't you don't believe fits into that okay Dart Lindsley: Almost. Yes. First of all, autonomy is not job to be done usually that people ask for. And the reason is it's not the value we get from work. If you want autonomy, you don't go to a job for autonomy. It's the cost of work is lack of autonomy. And so people are saying when they say autonomy, a part of what they're saying is at a reasonable cost. So that's one thing. But the second thing is, yeah, there's James A. Seechurn: Mm. ⁓ Dart Lindsley: There's all sorts of stuff ⁓ that falls outside of those boundaries. I mean, you could say, ⁓ by purpose, I mean that. But ⁓ I hire my job to get out of the house. Or I don't need to get out of the house, but my spouse needs me to get out of the house. ⁓ I hire my job to structure my life. I like to get stuff done, and I just wander around and play video games if I don't have a job. James A. Seechurn: All Dart Lindsley: you know, that sort of thing. I hire my job to forget. This is, this is what I learned from my dad, which is that when my mother died, he, ⁓ he dove into work incredibly hard. Why? It's because it was the only thing that could, that could absorb his brain enough. ⁓ Let's see if there's any other, autonomy, mastery and purpose. ⁓ One person said to me, and I talk about this one a lot because it was such a surprise to me. He said, I hire my job to pretend. And I didn't understand what he meant. And so I said, what do mean you hire your job to pretend? he says, well, I like to go to work. I like to pretend I'm a vice president. I pointed out to him that he was a vice president, that in fact, he was a vice president at a Fortune 100 company. And he said, no, I'm a jazz musician. He says, but I learned to like the stage and I like an adoring audience. And so I like to dress up in my vice president costume and I like to get on stage and I like the lights and I like to be adored. Well, is that purpose or any of those things purpose? A lot of times when people are talking about purpose, they're talking about the purpose of the company, not the purpose of I just want to get out of the house. Maybe we can expand the definition of purpose to include that. So, autonomy is a cost. Now, mastery is ⁓ learning. And the thing is that, ⁓ so using Joe Pine's taxonomy, some things that you get at work are simple services. ⁓ I get benefits or I get money is probably a commodity. It's just, know, the money one company can give me is the same as the money any company can give me. It's a commodity. But a lot of these things are experience offerings. And those are, get to go to work, I work with the team, we win the contract. I love that feeling of winning. We have a cast party afterwards. That's an experience offering. But a lot of work is transformation offerings. And Joe Pine just came out with his book, The Transformation Economy. And transformation offerings are things where when you consume them, you become something different. ⁓ It can be, I consume working at Cisco, now I get Cisco on my resume. Or I work as a business architect, now I have developed mastery and understanding of how the business fits together. ⁓ Some people say, hire, and this is interesting, I hire my job to become a better person. So the transformation they're looking for is closer to spiritual. It's not mastery, except it might mean self mastery. ⁓ it's something else. And I've also recognized just recently reading Joe's book is that ⁓ many of the costs of work are transformations. It's making me into something I don't want to be. And so there's the transformation economy in terms of the value that I get from work, but there's also the transformation economy in terms of the cost of work. so mastery is a thing. ⁓ I think transformation might be a better ⁓ term than to roll a lot of these things up into. ⁓ James A. Seechurn: On transformation as well, you mentioned negative transformation. I think a lot of people will be familiar with that. Everyone at some point, well, not everyone, but a lot of people at some stage will have contorted their behavior in a way they don't like in order to do the thing they're being asked to do. And it feels terrible. You see yourself becoming something that you kind of swore you'd never be, but you felt you ought to, you felt you had to because that was the right thing to do in that company. And it's incredibly... ⁓ energy sapping and when you find yourself in them Dart Lindsley: It is. And you might be different afterwards. And in fact, I don't tell this story very often, but when I was working with my father on that paper that he was writing, the experiment that he was doing to forget that my mother had died, ⁓ I built these museum quality Excel spreadsheets. I literally they should be in a frame. They're unbelievably complex things. I completely modeled the development of a fruit fly from embryo and how all the DNA is like crazy. And I used to solve Excel problems in my sleep. And what that implies to me is that I have a Microsoft product installed in my subconscious. I did not sign up to have a Microsoft project in my subconscious and yet I have been transformed to have that. Is that worth knowing? So, yeah, negative transformations. ⁓ My employer might value that transformation, but I'm not sure I want that. James A. Seechurn: I kind of like it, so I'm kind of sad that it feels like Excel skills might soon be a thing of the past just based on what AI can do now. Like that old fashioned ability, I used to go onto those websites of MrExcel and everything to try and understand functionality and things, and you build up this wonderful arsenal of ability. I'm kind of concerned that maybe that's not gonna be worth much by the end of the year, given the rate of progress and that, but anyway, we'll see. ⁓ Dart Lindsley: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. James A. Seechurn: You know, as we're talking, I want to talk about action as well. I'll get back to how you practically speak and do this. But I was just thinking, you mentioned video games. I almost think one of the best designers of work is the video game industry because video games are work and they are unpaid work. In fact, actually cost you. have to buy the video games and the consoles to play them. But I play video games and it strikes me that the more I learn about things like self-determination theory and these motivation, human motivation, the more they give you everything in those categories, you can do it when you want, how you want, for as long as you want. You constantly have this sense of progress through upgrades and level ups and skills that, literal skills that you unlock and get to when you get this little micro endorphin rush, when you get that skill that you're trying to get. You have camos and outfits and all this kind of thing. And there's community as well, because it's all online and you do it with other people as well. if you're looking to the best people that can design work, I just wonder if you've ever thought about hiring a video game designer to work with you to design the work that you do for your clients. Dart Lindsley: Yes. ⁓ that's a really, ⁓ I have thought about this a lot, but I hadn't thought that last thing about hiring a video game designer. think it's super, it's super interesting. The there's a couple of different things. I've always, I see work as rapid prototyping for work. see games as rapid prototyping for work. And it's interesting. I hire my job to build things. Minecraft. ⁓ you know, I, I hire my job for a worthy opponent. ⁓ I hire my job. to earn money to keep score. These are things where you're actually seeing that you can learn a lot from video games. Recently, I interviewed... somebody who has a PhD in leisure studies. what he pointed out was that ⁓ leisure is one of ⁓ most exciting design problems because you're going to ask people to pay you ⁓ just ⁓ for the just be there. It's totally voluntary. ⁓ Nobody ... people might have to buy a computer or a phone, but they don't have to buy leisure. And so you're going to design something that people are going to pay top dollar for. ⁓ And it's going to be, so it's got to be enticing. So leisure studies, leisure design, game design, things we do ⁓ because we enjoy doing them are all great. Great examples. James A. Seechurn: So I'd love to now get on to how you take this problems. think a lot of people at this point will understand the logic behind this way of thinking. But is it idealistic? How do you take a company that might be doing just fine and say you need to redesign your work? And practically speaking, how do you do that in a way that to your point, doesn't cost anything because I'm assuming that want to get more out of what they into it than when they started. So ⁓ practically how does that redesign happen in a company? Dart Lindsley: First of all, people are experiencing the cost of this. Companies are experiencing the cost of it all the time. And we're so accustomed to it that ⁓ we don't notice. ⁓ All turnover is expensive. Turnover is more expensive than it looks because you lose all the... Not only do you lose all of the social network that the person had, but frequently they pull more people over into the next company. I've done research into that, which is... which is that you lose one good person, they will pull all the other good people. ⁓ So there's turnover. But also, a lot of our measures of turnover are flawed because turnover fluctuates over time. And we say, ⁓ we're doing really well right now, look at the turnover. Or we're doing not as well right now, look at the turnover. Well, most of that fluctuation is driven by the economy. And when people feel free to leave, and they feel optimistic about the economy, they leave. That means that when they're not leaving, you just have trapped customers. And trapped customers, is that really what you want in your ecosystem? What you want in your ecosystem is customers who find the work rewarding enough that they're excited to do it. And ask yourself, we don't even have to look any data, do you ⁓ bring more of yourself to the work when you find the work rewarding? Everybody will say yes. And yet, we've got this long history in economics of framing work as a negative good, we don't expect it be any good for you. And so we don't make it better. so anyway, there's a lot of pain and it's the same pain that I was describing before when HR people are embittered because they've gotten to the end of their career and they don't feel like they've gotten anything done. ⁓ So. So how, so first of all, you might have to convince companies that that's the case. There are a lot of companies, well, James A. Seechurn: It shouldn't be difficult. Given the engagement surveys and everything, shouldn't be difficult to convince companies. That's the amazing thing, isn't it? Dart Lindsley: ⁓ Yeah. Well, and honestly, there are a lot of... We have a caricature of leaders in many cases, of executives in particular. And a part of that caricature is that they just care about profit and it's really not accurate. The real truth is most executives want to build a healthy company that's going to create profit for a long time. They're building the company and they want the company to be healthy. so, ⁓ and many feel ⁓ a moral and ethical responsibility to creating the kind of work experience that people want. It's why there's 10,000 B corporations and some of them are huge. They're not like all making granola. They're, you know, enormous companies that have decided that that people at work are a part of their objective is to create that kind of experience of work. ⁓ there's now there's exchange traded funds that are springing up, which just measure the performance of how people feel about the work at the company. And then if you invest in those companies, they outperform the rest of the market. so, yes, exchange traded fund. Yeah. James A. Seechurn: Really? that a thing? Exchange rate of... Dart Lindsley: Yeah, Irrational Capital is the name of one of those funds. You can look it up. Yeah, yeah. I had Bart Houlahan on my show. He invented ⁓ B-Lab, but he also is now a partner in that, in ⁓ Irrational Capital. So, in other words, it's important not to oversimplify the motivation. So, on the one hand, I really believe that James A. Seechurn: Fascinating. Dart Lindsley: ⁓ leaders are in a disadvantaged position to understand how their company functions. But in terms of objectives, absolutely some just want money, but a huge proportion consider it a moral responsibility and want to do better. So there's that. But now the question is, how do you do it? And ⁓ the, so. Let's look at the landscape of the jobs to be done and the costs of work. ⁓ How do you deliver a product where everybody wants something subtly different, sometimes wildly different? Well, first of all, there's a set of things that everybody wants in common from work. Those can be delivered from the center of the company. Everybody wants their pay to be accurate. They want payroll to be accurate. They want their pay to be fair. ⁓ everybody wants their benefits to be reliable and they want their benefits to provide enough coverage that they're not afraid. So there's things that you serve from the center of the company because everybody wants those in common. Interestingly, those are not really great differentiators of your product because all companies have those things. It's sort of like if you surveyed a bunch of people and say, what do you want from cars? And you found out that everybody wants wheels. Well, All cars have wheels. That's not a differentiating feature. ⁓ But as we get into the things that are more and more specific to the person and more, you uniquely qualified, first of all, we're to have to deal with reality. We can't provide everything everybody wants from work. In fact, nobody expects products to satisfy every need in normal life. In normal life, you know that when you buy a product, you have to make trade-offs. Am I going to buy the backpacking tent that's lighter or the backpacking tent that's better in bad weather? You're accustomed to that. We're all accustomed to shopping that way. And many of the things, when people want lots of things, on average people want eight to 10 things from work up to 20. Well, it's reasonable to know. Some features are antagonistic to each other. You can't get all those things. But we as a company are going to try. We're going to try to do that. Well, who's close enough to the customer in this case to understand the customer need? ⁓ It's not gonna be somebody at the center of the company. If everybody's different, we're trying to satisfy the unique need. It's gonna be the manager themselves, team lead, and the person. And so to deliver against this, you push a lot of the design work and the delivery work out to managers and teams to team leads and teams. Managers become something different. So in the history of management, because management's been a control, a discipline of control, managers have been controller of an asset historically. And ⁓ by the way, managers hate that because companies ask them to treat their teams like things and they can see right there that their teams are people and part of the moral, you know, injury that managers get is having to treat their people like things. Managers don't like that. Instead, what are managers? Managers are brokers who are optimizing the flow of value between two customers, the paying customer and the working customer. When those two things are optimized, the third customer, which is the owner of the company, will have residuals that James A. Seechurn: Mm-hmm. Dart Lindsley: make better profit. But if you as a manager can ⁓ optimize the flow of value that happens right at the moment of work, where the work is what creates value for the working customer and for the paying customer, that's what success is. So ⁓ we have big engines to understand what the paying customer wants. We've got all of product design over there. Those are pre-existing. ⁓ We do not have all the disciplines for, I mean, we need to borrow it from product to help managers to be able to deliver a quality experience of work. ⁓ so managers become brokers optimizing that flow. And a part of that is becoming a designer and ⁓ being the kind of designer who can co-create with each member of the team, the kind of work that they want to experience. And it sounds impossible to many people when I say that. Like the constraints of work are too great. We can't possibly, you know, create, we can't scale bespoke experiences for every employee. But actually it's quite feasible. And here's an example. This is what ⁓ my company, is one of the things we teach teams to do. ⁓ On ⁓ periodic basis, we take a look at how we've been allocating our attention as a team. We take that data, we turn it into a bubble chart. And one dimension of the bubble chart is ⁓ how important it is to the company, which is the the paying customer. ⁓ One dimension of the bubble chart is how important is that category of work to ⁓ how uniquely qualified are we as a team to deliver that work. Because many of my teams have been quite expensive. And if we start delivering work that is lower cost to lower value of the company, we should be doing something else. ⁓ The size of each bubble, so that's the XY placement, the size of each bubble is how much of our attention is going to that work. And the color of the bubble is how rewarding is that work to the least rewarded person. So, we've got a lot of dimensions and it's interesting because, ⁓ you know, my teams were process teams for a lot of years. A lot of what process design is, is visualization. James A. Seechurn: So you've got four dimensions going on. Dart Lindsley: 30 % of your brain is visual processing. And so you're taking four dimensions, you're putting it on this chart, and you have a conversation about it. And it's complicated. ⁓ But if a bubble turns a color you don't like, let's say it turns yellow. The team says, what's going on? You know, Greg, why is that? What's going on with the work that you don't like it as much as you could? Yellow is sort of meh. It's not just not great. It's yellow. ⁓ Well, that happened on a team and the team members said, well, look, this work is in a time zone, you know, that's taking me through breakfast with my children. And he said, I have, you know, I'm the person who makes breakfast. And so this work is costing me more than I want. And so somebody in Singapore on the team, it's not the manager's job all alone to solve this, it's the team is working on co-designing work. Somebody in Singapore says, I can take that work. And they swap projects and the work goes green. ⁓ And there's a series of these examples and they're gonna get a little bit more and more challenging. James A. Seechurn: yeah. Dart Lindsley: This was one on my team. This was a very super interesting one in retrospect, which is that somebody on the team, their work went red. I said, what's going on? And they said, the client is bullying me and it's making me miserable. And so... that's a case where the team can't solve it. I have to solve it as a manager. So I went and I spoke to the person who was bullying my team member. I said, you really need to stop doing that. And then I started going to the meetings for little while to make sure that it did stop. And here's why this story goes on. Last year was in Stockholm giving a talk and... ⁓ somebody came up to me from the audience and it was the bully. And she said, look, I was, when we met, I was having the worst year of my career. I, my own manager was impossible and I was under enormous pressure. And she said, and, ⁓ and I'll tell you what my first year at that company was terrible. And she said, you were the only kind person I met in the first, in my first year. And I just wanted to thank you. And I, so, What's surprising about that story to me is I don't remember being kind. It doesn't totally surprise me, but I don't remember that interaction very well. But the really important thing is that by identifying that this work was costing my team member too much, it actually identified that it was costing the other person's too much. And by intervening and working on it, we solved it. But sometimes it's a lot bigger than that. Sometimes it's... ⁓ James A. Seechurn: You Dart Lindsley: You know, some team members come and say, look, this job simply cannot win the kind of work I want to do. This team can't win the kind of work I want to do. So as a team, we get together and we say, what are the adjacent kinds of work that we could stand up that might expand the scope of the team to win that kind of work? So I had an analytical team. This is another one of mine. I had an analytical team. These folks wanted creative work. We said, let's find out if there's a market internally for ⁓ employee experience research. So we put up a sign saying we could do that. We didn't even know if we didn't know how to do it to see if there was a market. People started showing up. So we said, well, okay, we got to learn how to do this. We learned how to do it. started delivering that service. And one of those people spent the rest of their career in leading the employee experience design service inside the company. The, so what does this require? Well, it requires, so the, first of all, why does this even work? A part of the reason it works is that if everybody wanted the same thing from work, work allocation wouldn't improve anybody's job, but because everybody wants something different, ⁓ how much does it cost for me to know that one person on my team likes little mathematical Rubik's cubes kinds of puzzles. And this person over here, like Greenfield, Solve World, Hunger, Puzzles. There's an economy of puzzles that are flowing through the company and that flow to my team. And if I allocate them among my team members without consciousness about what kind of work they find rewarding, half the time I'll get it wrong. But if I do it consciously, has it cost to the company anything? It's free. It's free to the company to allocate work mindfully. And... ⁓ and everybody wins. So this is just one of about 50 things that you think about differently that turn into different kinds of execution and operationalization when you start thinking about work as a product. Here's another one. When you recruit people, today, almost all of our recruiters, do you have the skills to give me what I want? It's about your attributes. we should be going to market with. Look, this is the kind of job where you're going to solve puzzles ⁓ and you're going to get to be on stage. And what kind of puzzles are there? These, there are these kinds of puzzles. know, and you hire not just based upon what the person can do for you, but whether or not you have the product that they're going to find rewarding. And sometimes you will not hire people who can do the job, but actually won't like it. And so it changes how recruiting happens. It changes performance management. ⁓ James A. Seechurn: Mm-hmm. I would imagine that onboarding is one as well. your recruiting example is one thing. Onboarding has historically been so unilateral and it's all about what you need to know to do the work that I'm gonna give to you rather than why don't you look at the work we do and figure out how best to get it done. And that's a mind shift. That this way of thinking allows you to make that mind shift. I think that's the big leap for me. By thinking of work as a product, you're now recognizing that work is something that can be reshaped, redesigned. Dart Lindsley: Yes. James A. Seechurn: rethought out rather than a static concept that you're fitting people into. Dart Lindsley: right, that you're shoehorning people into. One of the ways I say it is that the way we've thought about work is, especially with these big autonomy, mastery, purpose concepts, ⁓ I'm a shoe designer and manufacturer, and I'm going to go out and I'm going to interview everybody about what they want about shoes. And I'm going to find out that on average, they have a size eight and a half foot. On average, most people want sneakers. That's the most common shoe sold. On average, half want black, half want white. So I'm going to, ⁓ James A. Seechurn: Mm-hmm. Dart Lindsley: sell you eight and half sized brown sneakers and that's all I'm going to sell. And you're say, actually, it's really uncomfortable. It doesn't fit my foot. It doesn't make me look good. You know, all these different things. And you're like, what do you expect? Right. That's sort of like, that's the mindset. And also there's this weird thing that happens. There's this moralistic layer, which is James A. Seechurn: That's how companies think about work. Dart Lindsley: ⁓ Especially after COVID when everybody was like, wow, everybody quit. And they'll say things like, you know what, young people these days just don't like work. Or, and there's this blaming, which is people, this idea that people who don't want your work are lazy. That's not what you do when you're selling a product. If people don't want to buy your product, you don't blame the customer. You ask, what's wrong with my product? And how am going to build it better? James A. Seechurn: hate that so much. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Dart Lindsley: to meet the market. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, I completely agree. so we go back to this. In order to do it, to your point, it requires a degree of decentralization. And it requires what I always think about a lot is the participative workforce. It means that you're all together trying to figure out how to do this. And this dovetails very nicely with the concept of work as a product. But I imagine the resistance comes back to control. To your point, it requires loosening the grip and allow Dart Lindsley: test. James A. Seechurn: and employees to figure out how to get things done. That's kind of in a nutshell what we're trying to do here. Is that an obstacle that you meet with or do you generally find that you already have enough of an identified problem to really get that moving? Dart Lindsley: It is a problem. mean, there's sort of layers of challenges in there. One challenge is, so ⁓ an example of a policy that you might need to change is if you have a policy that says, you know, people can only move internally every three years. You need to be three years in a role. Well, you know, ⁓ what you really want to do is you want to give people enough freedom to get to the work that they're going to find rewarding. so giving freedom to move is the kind of loosening of control. that you might want to have. In general, at the center of the company there will be something which is a, ⁓ it could be called product ops. A part of the job of that function is to ⁓ get the skills and to equip the field with the ability to do this kind of design. But it's also to equip the field with enough freedom to take action. on their designs. And so you can't hold it with the tight grip because the, in fact, this is true for all product, by the way, product managers are very autonomous. They need enough freedom to act. And that's why, you and you're going to find the same thing here. The people who are doing the design need the freedom to act. But one of the barriers is managers, many managers ⁓ simply cannot, ⁓ let go of their belief that they are not free. ⁓ And that's a challenge. the longer somebody's been a manager, and in fact, also true, the longer in many cases somebody's been a leader, the more baked are we are into the old model. Younger generations of workers are expecting something different. I am also seeing that ⁓ newer to business are wondering why the hell it works this way and can we get it to work better? And so yeah, there's a lot of muscle memory and I'm so practiced at thinking this other way. I'm always surprised when I see the muscle memory, but there's a lot of muscle memory there. James A. Seechurn: Ha ha ha. Yeah, and this is where we were intersect quite a lot and behaviorism is so entrenched in business. ⁓ is a lot that needs to be undone before I think the way you're describing work to be done can be done that way. For example, we have taught people to work through career ladders for progression for economic events that they essentially require in order to make enough money to survive because they're starting pay is so low that the only way they're going to get to a point where they can send their kids to college or cover the medical expenses or or retired at decent age requires progression and the architecture of so many Western organizations is such that you have to go through these motions. And that's why so many people become managers because comes with a pay rise. Many of them don't really want to be a manager, but they kind of feel obliged to because it comes with pay. So as long as those economic distractions are there, I imagine that's going to be a bit of an obstacle to this because to your point, you need that freedom. You need people to be free to go and find the work. Dart Lindsley: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: that makes sense to them and it all brings you back in the direction that the organization needs to be fairly flat to allow for that. Dart Lindsley: Yes. So first of all, there's a different kind of career conversation that you have when work as a product, which is the career conversation doesn't become, how do I get to the next step of the ladder? It becomes, what job am I trying to get done here? And it's interesting because when you start to do that, when you design a house, let's think of that promotion as being a doorway into another room. ⁓ You don't design a house, the experience of a house around what it's like to stand, to walk through the doorways. What's it like to be in the room? And so once you start having a conversation about what's the in the moment experience of work that you want to have, a lot of people say, actually, I don't want to be a manager. I do like the in the moment experience of solving puzzles. don't, or, know, director, if I'm a director, I don't want to. spend my life building decks to show to other directors. And so that's one thing, which is that career, they're probably not even called career discussions. They're something else, which is let's co-design your experience of work. ⁓ But also there's this, if what you say is true, which I believe, you know a lot more about compensation than I do. ⁓ you know, it's going to have to be flatter. I mean, I come from a world where individual contributors, software engineers get paid enough to get by. And so most of my companies have been in high tech and management's not the only path, although directorships get paid so much, you know, generational wealth in some cases that that there's a big incentive to go there. James A. Seechurn: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Dart Lindsley: There's another thing that I think is a real challenge, is that ⁓ especially people who have been very good at school, and a lot of the companies I've worked at are full of people who are very good at school. That's how they got there. ⁓ They want a grade. So performance management solves something for them. And they see themselves as competing toward promotion and toward performance reviews differently. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, I remember I think it was in the knowledge, the knowing doing back, the knowing doing gap by Jeffrey Pfeiffer, I think, and I think Sutton was the other author. He mentioned the problem of picking people up from higher level education is that they are come pre-entrenched with a lot of those reward systems are trying to dismantle in this kind of hierarchy. But there was one other thought I had when you're speaking. it was the, mentioned lot of people don't want to be a manager. I think they don't want to be the version of the manager that we've been selling people for a long, long time. ⁓ I think being a manager, true manager, someone that's there to help and get the most out of people is incredibly rewarding, but I think people perceive that role ⁓ as a controlling figure. And that old school factory manager they don't want to be. But I do generally think a lot of people, if they get exposed to true managerial responsibility, people management responsibility, I think most people do enjoy them. Dart Lindsley: Yeah, it's true. The one we're talking about is a very creative act. And it's how do I create benefit for everybody around me, as opposed to how do I extract ⁓ value at cost. James A. Seechurn: I did want to ask you a question. is a pushback that often comes when you have a new way of doing something, any new way of doing something, is why bother? The US is a successful country. It's the largest economy on earth. American companies are among the most valuable in the world. GDP per capita is among the highest of the developed companies. Why fix what isn't broken? Dart Lindsley: A. It's broken. In other words, in other words, ⁓ James A. Seechurn: Ha Dart Lindsley: Companies, you have a hole in your pocket, you're putting money in it, and it's falling right out. And you're so accustomed to it, it's almost like you've had this pain in your shoulder for so long that you don't even know. So that's one. The second reason, and... This one's a harder pitch, ⁓ but many, many leaders do feel this already. It's wrong. It is wrong to treat people as a means only. ⁓ James A. Seechurn: Hmm. Dart Lindsley: people like things ⁓ is a moral hazard. you ⁓ people like things ⁓ is a moral hazard. you ⁓ look at the history of wrongdoing, human rights violations. It is often preceded by the ability to see other humans as less than human. look at the history of wrongdoing, of human rights violations. It is often preceded by the ability to see other humans as less than human. And so I'm saying that sounds wow, like how can you say we're doing that? The Romans called slaves in Latin instrumentum, means tool, less than human. The British during the potato famine called the Irish beasts, it's less than human. Today we call people assets. We call them human capital. And we have talent acquisition, which is about buying and owning people. We're still in the tradition of... The Romans called slaves in Latin instrumentum, means tool, less than human. The British during the potato famine called the Irish beasts, it's less than human. Today we call people assets. We call them human capital. And we have talent acquisition, which is about buying and owning people. We're still in the tradition of... James A. Seechurn: Mm-hmm. Dart Lindsley: treating people as less than human. ⁓ treating people as less than human. ⁓ What kind of future do you want to contribute to? What kind of future do you want to contribute to? James A. Seechurn: ⁓ think that's a strong argument. ⁓ pushback some people might say is, that sounds terribly anti-capitalist. Dart Lindsley: ⁓ yeah, there's nothing more capitalist than a multi-sided business. Let me just be clear here. mean, first of all, multi-sided businesses are ancient. I all ad-based media, newspapers, 200 years old, are all multi-sided. It's a capitalist thing. ⁓ The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, it's 500 years old. It's a multi-sided business with shopkeepers and ⁓ shoppers. ⁓ James A. Seechurn: you Dart Lindsley: All of the entrance into the Fortune 50 in the last 20 years have been multi-sided businesses. so there's nothing, it's so funny. We get this a lot about Silicon Valley in general. ⁓ you Californians, you're lefties. Have you looked closely at this place? Talk about cutthroat capitalists. It's capitalist. ⁓ It's just, is being nice to customers is actually really providing value to customers? Socialist? It's not. was, ⁓ there was a priest, ⁓ a priest who said, you know... can't remember the quote. but it was basically... I'm going to have to look it up. But it was basically when I tried to do good for the people in one case, ⁓ people called me a saint. When I tried to do it in this case, they put me in jail. And it's this idea that the idea of treating people at work like humans is politically charged ⁓ is Fascinating, but it is. Well, so I know somebody who works in EdTech and teaches different school districts around the country ⁓ emotional intelligence. And ⁓ Texas has outlawed empathy in the curriculum. ⁓ My first thought is spoken like an oil economy. Over here, we're not an oil economy. Empathy is a part of our business. James A. Seechurn: And the idea that you should separate emotion from business as well as this terrible, terrible myth about how the human brain can work. There's a great book called Descartes' Error, which is about the fact that you cannot separate emotion from reason. And he pointed out that there isn't two things there. We use emotions to make decisions. When you're on an airplane, you want the pilot to care about the lives that they're looking after. When you go to a doctor, you want that doctor to emotionally care about how well you recover. We're just very, very selective about how and when and it will obviously massively crosses gender lines as well when a man in the workplace is emotional about their work, they're perceived as emotionally invested in caring about the product and then a woman says the same thing that's considered emotional and negative way. So this idea that we should take emotion out of business is such a myth. And again, it kind of comes back to the idea of treating people as assets, which is where we really started. Dart Lindsley: Yeah. That's right. That's right. mean... James A. Seechurn: I did want to ask you as well actually one more question. know it's been speaking one and a half hours. It really doesn't feel like that by the way. That's impressive how quickly that time's gone. But scale. Now again, whenever we talk about doing things in a new way, a lot of the time people say, that would work at a small company. You could do that with 20 people, 50 people. But how could you do that with a big business? And you've worked at Cisco and Google. You know what big business is like. And I think we've already touched on the solution to some degree. Dart Lindsley: ⁓ yeah. James A. Seechurn: What is your response to that scale objection? Dart Lindsley: Okay, so there's transforming and then there's doing. Doing is totally feasible at scale for large companies. And ⁓ there are lots of large companies that deliver very bespoke offerings. ⁓ Hospitals. Every patient is getting something quite bespoke and these can be very large and you you respond to the customer need, which in this case is that this person broke their ankle and this person has a fever. And so, you know, it's totally possible to do that. It's possible to sell shoes that have a ⁓ large variety of styles and sizes and have a route to market that gets those onto the feet of the people they're going to fit. So it's feasible to do. That's different from saying, How hard is it to transform a company from one mental model to another? ⁓ Transforming an entire company, ⁓ the question always is maybe companies that are able to do this need to be born. And I run across this fairly often, which ⁓ everything from, you know, James A. Seechurn: Hmm. Dart Lindsley: how AI works and I interviewed ⁓ Sandra Loughlin at ⁓ EPAM about their data architecture and how it supports AI. Well, the answer was they got it to work, but you can't as a company because that company was born with a data architecture that they've been able to maintain to this day. But if you built a company on a fragmented data architecture, you're doomed. there are lot of things where the company may just have to be born right. And the bigger the company, the broader and deeper the mental, ⁓ you know, the, but let me just say one other thing about that, which is that business architecture is all about that. So business architecture starts from the assumption that if you're, that your company can go into a new market. that your company can have a new route to market and that you can... ⁓ Cisco Systems successfully did this. And this is why business architecture existed there and why I got to have that job. Because they were going from selling boxes of hardware to companies for on-prem installation on a one-time sale. which is going to say the box once, then you own it. They switched to software as a service, ⁓ not necessarily on-prem ⁓ and with a subscription model instead of a one-time sale. That's an enormous transformation and ⁓ Cisco successfully made that transformation. So it's possible to do, but man. It had to be an existential threat in their case. James A. Seechurn: I think that's it, isn't it? The existential threat. There's nothing like an existential threat to cause a company to change how they think about things. And I think one of my favorite case studies is that of Semco in Brazil. And that was a huge turnaround from a autocratic top-down organization to one of the best documented examples of a truly participative flat open company financial employee ownership cultures. And it did take change. ⁓ Ricardo Semler's accounting of it, talks about how painful it was at times and how much distrust there was pushing back to something that should have been a good thing. there's so much entrenched suspicion when company comes along with a new idea. A lot of people react and say, they're probably just trying to find a new way to squeeze a bit more effort out of me for less money. And that's difficult to work with them. Dart Lindsley: Well, and so one of the things I've done on my show, Work for Humans, is... I've interviewed people about big paradigm shifts of history. And one of the big paradigm shifts was that I interviewed a medical historian about the switch from germ theory, from miasma theory of disease to germ theory of disease. Well, what's that? It was a, there was a handful actually. It was one of the things we learned is that it's never one person and it's never all at once either. So new ideas, James A. Seechurn: Dr. Semmelweis, wasn't it, I think? Is it Dr. Semmelweis, right? Hmm. Mm, right. Dart Lindsley: like germ theory with lots of great evidence, Louis Pasteur was very big in it. Koch was very big, Semmelweis, ⁓ Lister, names that you know of, but you forget why. ⁓ So even with great data, it takes 10 years to get people to stop. But why does it take so long? Well, part of the reason in that case was that we were that ⁓ Louis Pasteur and the others were telling doctors, you've been killing your patients. ⁓ And nobody wanted to believe it. And so they kept killing their patients. ⁓ They probably killed ⁓ President Washington. They definitely killed another president in the United States. ⁓ Buchanan maybe, ⁓ because they didn't listen. Lister. so one of the things somebody said is, new paradigms arrive one funeral at a time. And so a generation of doctors had to be replaced to actually introduce all of these new ideas. James A. Seechurn: Excellent. Well, we've gone, we've gone for 90 minutes and I really appreciate your time. I did want to ask, well, for anyone listening, I highly recommend listening to your podcast because I've listened to about six of those episodes now and you have some very interesting guests. If we had more time, I'd have loved to hear a bit more about your kind of intellectual journey on your podcast. Has been doing that for what? How long is that now? Four, four years? Three and a half years. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's so much good stuff there for anyone that wants to listen. I'd also recommend anyone listening. Dart Lindsley: Three and a half years, 190 episodes. James A. Seechurn: to listen to the PX Espresso podcast. I think you're a guest on that with Luke O'Mahoney as well, where you talk a bit more about your model. But if anyone listening is curious about all this and people experience and work as a product and everything we discussed, is there any other resources that you think that are worth people for? Dart Lindsley: Okay, so ⁓ my company's website has some resources. We're having more and more actually. So it's 11fold.com, which is the numeral 11 F-O-L-D.com. ⁓ We're starting, first of all, we started a community there, ⁓ which is a Discord community. You might have to ask me to get into it because we don't have it published yet and we're gonna curate who's there, but it's people who really care about this exchanging ideas. ⁓ Also at 11fold.com, ⁓ we have created an AI search where you can ⁓ delve into past episodes of the podcast. So we've taken all the transcripts, we've put them into a notebook LM, and so it's possible to dive in there, find ideas and the episodes that they were in. 190 episodes is unmanageable because it's unindexed. But with this, you can actually find them and do a compare and crest. Yeah. That's the best way. So also reach out to me on LinkedIn at just there's not that many people named Dart Linsley. So. James A. Seechurn: That's a good idea. I have to ask, is Darlan a nickname by the way or is that... Dart Lindsley: It's short for Dan Arthur. So my parents said, yeah, there's a lot of Dan's in our family. There's a lot of Arthur's. How are we going to tell this one apart from the rest? And that was a joke. James A. Seechurn: Dan Arthur? Okay. ⁓ But it's stuck. It's got a ring to it as well. It kind of rolls off the tongue, darlings. Dart Lindsley: It did. ⁓ Yeah, Google's better than John Smith. James A. Seechurn: All right, well, that's been fascinating. Thanks so much. It's really interesting to hear your perspectives on all this. And I hope people listening find this interesting as well. But as I do think, there's a growing movement here in this area. And there's plenty of other people. Well, there's not plenty. There's a few other people that are ringing this bell, think, as well, and having us think differently about the work that people do. So thanks so much for your time. And I really look forward to speaking with you again soon. Dart Lindsley: Yes, we will speak again soon. You're be on my show, which I'm very happy about. And I have so many questions about... ⁓ James A. Seechurn: Looking forward to that. Dart Lindsley: ⁓ we think about money and pay at work. So, looking forward to that. ⁓ you. James A. Seechurn: I can't wait. All right. Take care, Dart See you soon.