Speaker 1: Hello there. This is Smart Talks with IBM podcast from
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. I Heart Media and IBM about what it
Speaker 1: means to look at today's most challenging problems in a
Speaker 1: new way. I'm Maltain Glombwell. Today I'm chatting with Adam Grant,
Speaker 1: an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School and
Speaker 1: author of one of my favorite books, Think Again. He's
Speaker 1: a longtime friend and I love to disagree with him. Well,
Speaker 1: I hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially right,
Speaker 1: which is as much as I can never acknowledge around
Speaker 1: you being right. But uh, you always challenge me to
Speaker 1: think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. This chat was a
Speaker 1: part of ibm s Think Conference, where leading innovators talk
Speaker 1: about technology that makes a difference and other intriguing conversations
Speaker 1: with global perspectives. Let's dive in. You know, I are
Speaker 1: going to have a conversation today about this moment that
Speaker 1: we're in, about whether something transformational has happened in the
Speaker 1: way we live and work and do not expects to agree.
Speaker 1: We disagree on virtually everything, but it's always with an
Speaker 1: undercurrent deeperfection. Adam, welcome, thank you. I don't know if
Speaker 1: we actually disagree on everything, but I kind of like
Speaker 1: the sound of that. It's always important to start on
Speaker 1: to acknowledge the fact that there may be major riffs.
Speaker 1: So you're so Canadian, but keep going. I am very Canadian.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to confess that I may I would
Speaker 1: describe myself as a pandemic skeptic. And I was a
Speaker 1: pandemic skeptic at the very beginning of the pandemic. And
Speaker 1: I'll define what I mean by the skeptic. At a
Speaker 1: moment I wavered in the middle, and now I'm a
Speaker 1: skeptic again. By pandemic skeptic, I mean I do not
Speaker 1: expect the pandemic to radically change the way we work
Speaker 1: or even live our lives. I think it's all going
Speaker 1: to go away. Do where whe would you? Where would
Speaker 1: you stand on that? On the continuum of radical transformation
Speaker 1: at one end, radical skepticism on the other. Well, I
Speaker 1: hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially ripe,
Speaker 1: which is as much as I can never acknowledge around
Speaker 1: you being right. But uh, you always challenge me to
Speaker 1: think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. I think you know
Speaker 1: that I've already started to see some real changes, right,
Speaker 1: So let's go back to winter. I went to a
Speaker 1: bunch of CEOs and startup founders and said, I think
Speaker 1: the future of work might be hybrid. Let's do a
Speaker 1: remote Friday experiment where people have one day a week
Speaker 1: to work from anywhere. And every single leader I pitch
Speaker 1: turned me down. They said, we don't want to open
Speaker 1: Pandora's box. We think people will procrastinate constantly and our
Speaker 1: culture is going to fall apart. And a lot of
Speaker 1: those CEOs have started rethinking, right. Some of them announced
Speaker 1: they're going to be permanently remote, many others are at
Speaker 1: least rolling out hybrid plans. And so I don't think
Speaker 1: the flexibility is going away, right. They've realized now I
Speaker 1: can hire anywhere, I don't have to maintain a really
Speaker 1: expensive giant headquarters office necessarily. And I've got to imagine
Speaker 1: that some companies, especially when you look at the National
Speaker 1: Survey data suggesting that most people are expecting to work
Speaker 1: two days a week from home, and most companies are
Speaker 1: encouraging that. That seems like something that's going to change,
Speaker 1: don't you think, well? I yes, and no, um I
Speaker 1: feel like there was obviously a steady push in that
Speaker 1: direction over the last fifteen years or so. But my
Speaker 1: I have some specific questions. So the first will be
Speaker 1: young people. My sense from the young people who work
Speaker 1: at my company and my memories of my own thinking
Speaker 1: when I was in my twenties was that going to
Speaker 1: the office was the single most exciting thing in my week. Right.
Speaker 1: I wanted to meet, I was new, I wanted to learn.
Speaker 1: When I was at the Washington Post, I was ten
Speaker 1: ft from Bob Woodward, the greatest reporter of my generation,
Speaker 1: was ten ft away. I knew nothing about reporting. He
Speaker 1: knew everything. And I used to sit and watch him
Speaker 1: and listen, and I learned so much from that. Next
Speaker 1: to me was a guy named Michaelisakoff, another legendary investigate reporter.
Speaker 1: He was next to me. I would sit and listen,
Speaker 1: and I understood that the only way I would get
Speaker 1: I would learn that way was to go to the office, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, there was just no reason not to go
Speaker 1: to the office. No, do I feel the same way now?
Speaker 1: It kick me seven, No, I don't. But if you're
Speaker 1: a company that employs young people, can you really hire
Speaker 1: the best and brightest young people by saying we're going
Speaker 1: to have you work out of your apartment or a
Speaker 1: Starbucks seems nuts to me. No, I don't think you can.
Speaker 1: But I also don't think you're gonna get the best
Speaker 1: and brightest young people by saying you have to be
Speaker 1: in the office every day and we're going to measure
Speaker 1: not your results, not your contribution, but the amount of
Speaker 1: FaceTime that you contribute. That seems ridiculous. And I hope
Speaker 1: that that's one thing that the pandemic erased. I think
Speaker 1: you know we I guess we have precedent for this
Speaker 1: in some ways. So think about what Ricardo similar did
Speaker 1: at Semco as an interesting example, right, originally in Brazil
Speaker 1: now in Twentiesome countries, very traditional manufacturing company. They say
Speaker 1: we will let you buy back one day a week
Speaker 1: for ten percent of your salary. And they're thinking, this
Speaker 1: is an early retirement move that will, you know, appeal
Speaker 1: to the baby boomers who say, all right, I want
Speaker 1: to enjoy a day a week of retirement before I
Speaker 1: get really old. But no, it's most popular among their
Speaker 1: youngest employees in their twenties and thirties, who want that
Speaker 1: day of freedom. And I think this is gonna be
Speaker 1: a competitive advantage for companies moving forward. Right, the organizations
Speaker 1: that are willing to give you that little bit of
Speaker 1: flexibility are going to do a much better job attracting, motivating,
Speaker 1: and retaining people than the ones that say you have
Speaker 1: to be here all the time. Well so, but there's
Speaker 1: two things we're talking about here. One is workplace flexibility
Speaker 1: and the other is dislocation, right, remote work, And they're
Speaker 1: very they're quite separate. So I am quite in fact,
Speaker 1: I practice flexibility, have been breaxting it for years and
Speaker 1: years and years. I love the oppoe. I don't go
Speaker 1: into the oppice every day, nor do I expect all
Speaker 1: of our employees to come in every day at the
Speaker 1: same time. For certain key events, like in my for
Speaker 1: a podcast, The crucial moment in the creation of one
Speaker 1: of my episodes of the Revisionist History is the table read,
Speaker 1: where we reenact the podcast that we're working on. I
Speaker 1: read the narration and we play the tape. I have
Speaker 1: a team of six people and we've been doing those
Speaker 1: on zoom and I'm sorry it doesn't work on zoom
Speaker 1: And I actually said and to our staff, the minute
Speaker 1: we're all vaccinated, we are meeting again in person. Because
Speaker 1: this is creative work. It can't be done. I need
Speaker 1: your feedback in the room. I doesn't work on Zoom,
Speaker 1: so that you know that idea. I don't mind the flexibility.
Speaker 1: But if someone said to me, I'm in Denver, Colorado,
Speaker 1: and I'm your producer and I'm going to work from
Speaker 1: Denver for now, and I say you can't work endever,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, you can't. You need to be unless you're
Speaker 1: willing to fly in two days a week and then
Speaker 1: fly back, fly into New York and fly back. It
Speaker 1: doesn't work. Malcolm Gladwell, you are one of the smartest
Speaker 1: and most creative people I know, and yet you can't
Speaker 1: bring yourself to imagine doing a table read for a
Speaker 1: product that's audio only without seeing people's faces, when you
Speaker 1: yourself wrote in talking to Strangers that we overrate seeing
Speaker 1: people's faces. No, no, no, I don't interesting interesting. Why
Speaker 1: do I need them in the room when I'm doing
Speaker 1: a table read? I need them in the room because
Speaker 1: it's imperfect. So I'm creating a product for audio, but
Speaker 1: I'm only in round one of what will be four rounds,
Speaker 1: and I mean I'm handing in something that is very
Speaker 1: much your work in progress. I need immediate, high quality
Speaker 1: feedback B. I have found I also need my entire
Speaker 1: team to pipe up. And I have found that people's
Speaker 1: responses are inhibited online and that doesn't work for me.
Speaker 1: I need everyone I want to say, I want to
Speaker 1: I keep telling them that this, even dumb comments are useful,
Speaker 1: and I feel, I feel maybe this is incorrect. I
Speaker 1: feel that on Zoom people are editing themselves more and
Speaker 1: even one when I'm doing a table read, one comment,
Speaker 1: even a dumb comment, can be transformational in the final script,
Speaker 1: so I can't afford closing their mouth when they should
Speaker 1: open it. I accept the whole premise. I think all
Speaker 1: of it makes sense, except the basic idea that you
Speaker 1: can't create the psychological safety you're looking for, that freedom
Speaker 1: to take risks and point out problems and that ideas fly.
Speaker 1: That you can't create that in an online environment. So
Speaker 1: let me throw out a couple examples of how I
Speaker 1: think this works. First of all, adm Adam position healed myself.
Speaker 1: Are you trying to tell me that you're gonna give
Speaker 1: up on teaching in person now that you so in
Speaker 1: love with online that Wharton is gonna go going to
Speaker 1: turn into a digital platform. Is that what you're saying.
Speaker 1: That's exactly where I was not going, but sort of going.
Speaker 1: Let me say a couple of things here. The first
Speaker 1: one is that I just came from a table read
Speaker 1: a work life episode that we did over zoom, and
Speaker 1: I got better feedback than we did when we did
Speaker 1: these face to face, because we know that you you
Speaker 1: know the science of brainstorming right in group brainstorming, and
Speaker 1: this is true in group feedback too. You run into
Speaker 1: production blocking where we can all talk it once and
Speaker 1: you lose ideas. You run into ego threat where people
Speaker 1: are worried they're gonna get judged and we lose ideas,
Speaker 1: and you run in into conformity where the hippo that's you,
Speaker 1: the highest paid person's opinion. As soon as that's known,
Speaker 1: we all jump on the bandwagon. And we know that
Speaker 1: if you can give people multiple channels for voicing their
Speaker 1: independent ideas, they're better off. There is a chat window
Speaker 1: and zoom. I don't know if you're tech savvy enough
Speaker 1: to have discovered it yet, but I will tell you
Speaker 1: that I have had both in teaching online and also
Speaker 1: in the group table reads of my podcast and in
Speaker 1: actually getting feedback from my students on the early drafts
Speaker 1: of Think Again, I have had more honest and more
Speaker 1: i would say, diverse comments than I've ever gotten before
Speaker 1: because there are all these people who would not speak
Speaker 1: up out loud, but we have this very the active
Speaker 1: chat window going, and it allows me to get everybody's
Speaker 1: participation in. So, no, I don't want to leave teaching
Speaker 1: online only, but I would sure love, like I've been
Speaker 1: able to do online, to call on someone who's gonna
Speaker 1: bring up a relevant point or debate me on something,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the random hand that happens to be
Speaker 1: willing to speak, which is usually a white male extrovert
Speaker 1: and least likely to be the person that I want
Speaker 1: to learn from. Uh you know so, No, No, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm saying you and I are probably an agreement in
Speaker 1: the sense that I have that mode as well. So
Speaker 1: as we go through the drafts of my episodes, we
Speaker 1: move from an in person to an online thing and
Speaker 1: people weigh in editor's way, and it's a it's a
Speaker 1: Google dog. People can make all the comments they want
Speaker 1: and they do, so I have that I'm just saying
Speaker 1: there's a particular moment in the creative process where the
Speaker 1: room and the energy in the room is important to
Speaker 1: measure and to feed off. But wait before you leave that,
Speaker 1: Before you leave that, I think, I think that's an
Speaker 1: important distinction to make here. Um. I think, so you're
Speaker 1: talking about what Anita Wolley would call it burstinus, right,
Speaker 1: that sense that the room is literally bursting with energy
Speaker 1: and ideas. And I don't know how to recreate that online. Right.
Speaker 1: I feel like we're violating one of the laws of
Speaker 1: thermodynamics every time I have a zoom session where I
Speaker 1: put in a ton of energy unless comes back. And
Speaker 1: I think that part is very hard to replicate in
Speaker 1: the online environment. But I think sometimes the flow of
Speaker 1: ideas is still worth it. Yeah. The second and more
Speaker 1: important point, though, is about fun. So I have had,
Speaker 1: You've had more conversations, but I've had, you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of conversations with college kids over the last year,
Speaker 1: and I have yet to find a single college kid
Speaker 1: who found the last year more pleasurable than the year
Speaker 1: before it? Right? Or high school kids? They all hate it?
Speaker 1: Why do they hate it? Because it's not as fun now?
Speaker 1: I just the same is true of employees. Sure, even
Speaker 1: if you convinced me that Zoom was a more efficient
Speaker 1: way to get feedback from my employees. You cannot convince
Speaker 1: me that they're enjoying it more. And ultimately, if they're
Speaker 1: not enjoying their jobs, we're doomed as a company. As
Speaker 1: simple as that. The whole point, the founding principle of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries, from the moment this company was I'm now
Speaker 1: talking about my company that I started two and a
Speaker 1: half years ago. Jacob and I when we sat down
Speaker 1: to start the company, we were like, we're gonna make
Speaker 1: cool things. Number two, We're going to have fun, right
Speaker 1: and if everything is online, it's not fun. And as
Speaker 1: far as I'm concerned, we've failed. I want to have fun.
Speaker 1: Is that wrong? Why are you? Why are you standing
Speaker 1: in the way of my enjoyment and my employees enjoyment.
Speaker 1: I'm standing in the way of your enjoyment because you
Speaker 1: would never be allowed to run a company. Can you?
Speaker 1: Can you imagine Malcolm Gladwell, see, yeah, like you know what,
Speaker 1: we're gonna make cool stuff. It almost as important as
Speaker 1: we're going to have a lot of fun. That would
Speaker 1: never work. Well Street would laugh you out of your
Speaker 1: job in a day. Wait, wait wait, wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: hold on, hold on, Adam, in the course, don't count
Speaker 1: pandemic here in how many years have you been teaching teaching?
Speaker 1: I don't know, fifteen maybe, Okay. Do you have fun
Speaker 1: doing it? Of course that's part of the fun. Hold on,
Speaker 1: hold on, hold on. If you didn't have fun doing it,
Speaker 1: would you have left your job as professor by this point? No,
Speaker 1: because I think it's meaningful and I'd rather bet on
Speaker 1: purpose than pleasure. You would have gritted it out for
Speaker 1: fifteen years, even though it's like every morning like, oh
Speaker 1: do I have to do this again? And you would
Speaker 1: have like looked at your wife and she said, Adam,
Speaker 1: there's no way around it. Just grab your hard hat
Speaker 1: and go off to the salt mines. Please, I'm not
Speaker 1: buying it. You would have got because a million other
Speaker 1: things you could have done that that could have made
Speaker 1: you a good living, that you could have found fun.
Speaker 1: You would not have stayed a professor. It wasn't fun. Okay.
Speaker 1: Maybe it depends on how you define fun. So I'm
Speaker 1: thinking now of Dan Coyle's distinction between deep fun and
Speaker 1: shallow fund, and when you stay fun, I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: shallow fund, which is you know, we're going to go
Speaker 1: and party and we're basically going to revert to our
Speaker 1: college selves. That is not my idea of fun. My
Speaker 1: idea of fund is deep fund, which is we're working
Speaker 1: on hard, interesting problems. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we're you know,
Speaker 1: we're really puzzled and confused, and we're trying to get
Speaker 1: to the bottom of an important question. And I think
Speaker 1: you can have that kind of deep fund in a
Speaker 1: virtual world. In fact, it's the same kind of deep
Speaker 1: fund that I have when I'm writing books, and I
Speaker 1: think you have it too. Isn't that fun? Are you
Speaker 1: saying that the time you spend sitting in front of
Speaker 1: your computer writing New Yorker articles and best selling books
Speaker 1: is not fun? It is. It is fun, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot. So let me tell you about a conversation
Speaker 1: I had this weekend with an old college friend of
Speaker 1: mine who's now uh he's a senior this trade or
Speaker 1: a big hospital system, very large hospital system, and he
Speaker 1: was talking about what the last year has been like
Speaker 1: and also every time I've seen him, but over the
Speaker 1: last five years he has registered a long complaint about
Speaker 1: electronic medical records, which are part of this conversation, right
Speaker 1: so as his rule has gotten more digital. He will
Speaker 1: tell you he's now in charge of he's the chief
Speaker 1: well being officer for his hospital system, and they have
Speaker 1: a serious problem with morale in their ranks. He will
Speaker 1: be the first to tell you this. Why do they
Speaker 1: have a serious problem with him? Among other reasons, because
Speaker 1: the people entered the profession to do something and have
Speaker 1: an experience that they're not having anymore. My friend can
Speaker 1: decontrack when people are online late at night doing their
Speaker 1: electronic medical record and they're they're logging on eleven at
Speaker 1: night two and it's just not He's like, that's the
Speaker 1: death of I'm not gonna be able to retain those people.
Speaker 1: They're not going to do good work. They're gonna turn out.
Speaker 1: That's the daily reality of his job, is that they're
Speaker 1: trying to do something very important in society, and the
Speaker 1: people who are charged with doing that are not enjoying themselves.
Speaker 1: What do they enjoy? They enjoy sitting down and getting
Speaker 1: to know a patient. That's why they became doctors, right,
Speaker 1: and so this last year when everything's been done really
Speaker 1: has been hell. Correctly, that's not why they became physicians.
Speaker 1: So like, they're not gonna want to do we want
Speaker 1: to continue this for them. No, there'll be no one
Speaker 1: left in the hospitals to cure patients, give them their
Speaker 1: patients back, because that's the deep fund is gone when
Speaker 1: they're on computers all their love. Yeah, I think we're
Speaker 1: in strong alignment there. I definitely do not want to
Speaker 1: take somebody who got into a profession to help people
Speaker 1: and say you're going to spend of your time entering
Speaker 1: information and electronic medical records. But I think that's the
Speaker 1: presence of an unpleasant, pleasant task, right, not anything inherent
Speaker 1: to working electronically or virtually. Um. I think there. I've
Speaker 1: met surgeons over the past year who said, you know what,
Speaker 1: going remote has been the best thing I've been able
Speaker 1: to do because I can spread my expertise around the
Speaker 1: world more efficiently. I don't have to travel to go
Speaker 1: and do a grand rounds. I can reach patients who
Speaker 1: you know, otherwise wouldn't be able to benefit from my care.
Speaker 1: And that's been a really meaningful changed my job. And
Speaker 1: so what I want to do is I want to
Speaker 1: I want to keep that connectivity and meaning, and I
Speaker 1: want to subtract out some of the things that are
Speaker 1: clearly a source of burnout and a chore for too
Speaker 1: many people in too many jobs. So look, wait, let's
Speaker 1: let's talk about your job for a moment. We alluded
Speaker 1: to it earlier. But so you're at a school which
Speaker 1: is very selected and which charges a lot of money
Speaker 1: right for presumably because of an expectation of a certain
Speaker 1: kind of experience. So what do you do? What do
Speaker 1: you guys do next year? In the year after, do
Speaker 1: you do you cut your tuition and a half and
Speaker 1: go zoom classes or what are you gonna do? I
Speaker 1: don't know yet. I think it's an open question. I
Speaker 1: think the first thing we should be doing is running experiments,
Speaker 1: which you know, look, I'm obviously, like everyone else, devastated
Speaker 1: by the pandemic, but given that we're stuck with it,
Speaker 1: it has been a good excuse for us to do
Speaker 1: a lot of rethinking and experimentation. So I mentioned the
Speaker 1: chat window earlier. When I started teaching online, some colleagues
Speaker 1: and I said, all right, we're gonna use hashtags, and
Speaker 1: we had students put in hashtag question if they had
Speaker 1: a question, hashtag on fire if they had a burning
Speaker 1: question or comment. And that means if I see on fire,
Speaker 1: I will literally stop in mid sentence, floor is yours?
Speaker 1: And that way you know you can jump the line um.
Speaker 1: We had had then added hashtag a ha if you
Speaker 1: had a Eureka moment, which helped me track what people
Speaker 1: were learning. And sometimes I realized I hadn't got my
Speaker 1: point across. Other times I saw that I clearly made
Speaker 1: a point that I didn't even realize that would making
Speaker 1: was making. And then in some cases too, it was
Speaker 1: kind of a guide for students to track the learning
Speaker 1: that was happening as it went. My favorite thing that
Speaker 1: was hashtag debate, where if somebody wanted to disagree with
Speaker 1: me or one of their classmates, I could get them
Speaker 1: into the conversation UM. And I think that it's such
Speaker 1: a small innovation, right, but I don't want to lose
Speaker 1: that when I go back into the classroom. I want
Speaker 1: to keep that dialogue going. I don't know what that's
Speaker 1: gonna look like yet, but I wanted to happen. And
Speaker 1: then the other thing that that really opened up that
Speaker 1: I've never been able to do before is we brought
Speaker 1: guest speakers from all over the world. Instead of just
Speaker 1: asking the people who live in or near Philly, I
Speaker 1: was able to go to people in multiple countries, on
Speaker 1: multiple continents, um in lots of interesting places, and say, hey,
Speaker 1: would you come to class for half an hour? I
Speaker 1: think I might go guest speakers fully and permanently remote now,
Speaker 1: because it means we can all go on zoom and
Speaker 1: we can have an awesome conversation with somebody who would
Speaker 1: never show up in my class. So I want to
Speaker 1: see us do more of those kinds of experiments. But
Speaker 1: I don't want to give up on the burstinus or
Speaker 1: the connection that happens in the physical classroom. Is that fair? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I did it, It's fair. I would a couple of
Speaker 1: caveats here, which is that, Um? I wonder whether there
Speaker 1: isn't a great deal of nuance and variability in different
Speaker 1: audiences responses to digital environments. So I need an as
Speaker 1: to a question. Suppose I have a room full of
Speaker 1: kids in a economically disadvantaged neighborhood there in fourth grade. Um,
Speaker 1: how much what is the right what is the right
Speaker 1: mix of online and in person for that group versus
Speaker 1: your students are not only are they much older, but
Speaker 1: they are you know, the best in the broadest, So
Speaker 1: the cream of the crop is it? Does that make
Speaker 1: a difference. Are they are is a more mature and
Speaker 1: disciplined and um intellectually engaged group of students better suited
Speaker 1: for online experiences than kids? You know, I think both
Speaker 1: of us have suspicions about the answer that question. But
Speaker 1: I wonder whether we need to get a lot more
Speaker 1: nuanced in what mixes worth work best for what kinds
Speaker 1: of students and what kinds of situations. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's such an important point. I haven't seen good data
Speaker 1: on it yet, but I had the same intuition that
Speaker 1: tech savvy and also some degree of intrinsic motivation is
Speaker 1: a huge set of contingencies for determining whether online is
Speaker 1: going to be even remotely engaging no pun intended. I
Speaker 1: also think the type of work and the type of
Speaker 1: learning we're doing really matters. So in general, I hate
Speaker 1: sports metaphors when applied to work, but I'm gonna use
Speaker 1: one here. Normally, I think, Okay, we haven't agreed on
Speaker 1: how to keep score, we haven't agreed on all the rules,
Speaker 1: and we don't have a referee. We're also leaving out
Speaker 1: maybe half the population. But this is a rare exception
Speaker 1: where when we study independence and organizational psychology, we distinguished
Speaker 1: between pooled, sequential and reciprocal independence. Say that five times fast.
Speaker 1: I prefer to think about them as individual sport, relay sport,
Speaker 1: and team sport. So if your job or your classroom
Speaker 1: is basically an individual sport like gymnastics, where everyone's gonna
Speaker 1: do their own floor routine and their own bar and
Speaker 1: their own vault um, you don't need that much coordination.
Speaker 1: You can do a lot of independent, individualized remote work
Speaker 1: and learning because the whole will basically be the sum
Speaker 1: of the parts. If you're in a relay sport, though,
Speaker 1: the person who's handing the bason to the next runner
Speaker 1: needs to actually talk to that on her and then
Speaker 1: also the person at the start needs to talk with
Speaker 1: the person that finish to make sure they're going in
Speaker 1: the same destination or the same direction. I think the
Speaker 1: most important context for really getting real synchronization of time
Speaker 1: and space is probably when we're playing a true team
Speaker 1: sport like basketball or soccer. Right, if I'm gonna pass
Speaker 1: you the ball, and then you're gonna send it back
Speaker 1: to me, and then I'm gonna send to someone else,
Speaker 1: and then it goes back to you again, and everybody
Speaker 1: has multiple pairs of eyes and multiple touches on the
Speaker 1: project or the lesson. That's when it's it becomes really
Speaker 1: difficult to substitute for the face to face, in person experience.
Speaker 1: And I don't think we've had enough of these conversations
Speaker 1: in our organizations or in our schools asking what are
Speaker 1: we doing right now? Are we playing individual sport, relay
Speaker 1: sport or team sport? Yeah? Yeah, no, absolutely, um Adam.
Speaker 1: As always, this was delightful. UM. I'm still slightly baffled
Speaker 1: that we seem to have so little to disagree about,
Speaker 1: but yeah, there's always hope for next time. Next time,
Speaker 1: I hope with both of us, are you know, bloodied
Speaker 1: and torn by the end of our encount her, But
Speaker 1: in this case, this is not the case. So but
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us, uh, and thank
Speaker 1: you UM to IBM for for bringing bringing us together
Speaker 1: and sponsoring this lovely conversation. Thank you thrilled to be here,
Speaker 1: this is great fun. Thanks for having me, Thanks again
Speaker 1: to Adam for having a great chat with me about
Speaker 1: the ever present cubicle versus couch debate, and thanks to
Speaker 1: IBM for setting up such an informative conference Smart Talks
Speaker 1: with IBM is produced by Emily Rostag with Carly Migliori,
Speaker 1: edited by Karen Shaker, g engineering by Martin Gonzalez, mixed
Speaker 1: and mastered by Jason Gambrell and Ben Toliday. Music by Grandmascope.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Molly Sosha, Andy Kelly, Nea La Belle,
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, Head of Fane, Eric Sandler, and Meggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: and the teams at eight Bar and b M. Smart
Speaker 1: Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and
Speaker 1: I Heart Media. You can find more Pushkin podcasts on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: like to listen. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, See you next time.