Speaker 1: How I Work is having a little break over the
Speaker 1: festive season, so I've picked a handful of my absolute
Speaker 1: favorite episodes from the last eighteen months to play for
Speaker 1: you in this best of series. I hope you enjoy,
Speaker 1: and I'll be back with new episodes twice weekly from
Speaker 1: January twenty eight.
Speaker 2: Do you remember when working from home was a rarity.
Speaker 1: Maybe you knew a couple of contractors who had a
Speaker 1: home office, or you'd heard of a few companies with
Speaker 1: pretty flexible working arrangements.
Speaker 2: Then all of a sudden, it seemed like almost.
Speaker 1: Everyone started working from home thanks to the pandemic, and
Speaker 1: things changed for good when we all realized we could
Speaker 1: get by with things like Zoom and Google Docs.
Speaker 2: But what if we were wrong?
Speaker 1: Adam Nathan is the co founder and CEO of Almanac,
Speaker 1: which has structured collaboration software for remote teams. Worried that
Speaker 1: where we work has changed, but how we work hasn't.
Speaker 2: So what needs to change?
Speaker 1: Well, it all starts with Almanax principles of modern Work.
Speaker 1: My name is doctor amanthe Immer. I'm an organizational psychologist
Speaker 1: and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this
Speaker 1: is how I work. A show about how to help
Speaker 1: you do your best work. So if you visit Almanac's website,
Speaker 1: as well as learning all about the software, there is
Speaker 1: a whole section dedicated to Adam and his team's thinking
Speaker 1: about how teams, and especially teams that don't work in
Speaker 1: the same location five days a week, can think differently
Speaker 1: and a whole lot better about work. And I was
Speaker 1: keen to know why did Adam even create these principles
Speaker 1: in the first place.
Speaker 3: We started the company off the pretty simple thesis that
Speaker 3: where we work has changed, but how we work hasn't.
Speaker 3: And I think anyone who's lived through the past three
Speaker 3: or four years knows what I mean. But just to
Speaker 3: put some data on it, before the pandemic, about twenty
Speaker 3: two percent of at least white collar professionals in the
Speaker 3: United States worked remotely or in some kind of distributed
Speaker 3: context to the numbers closer to seventy percent, so you're
Speaker 3: seeing something like a four or five x increase in
Speaker 3: remote work. And the number has actually grown since the
Speaker 3: end of the pandemic. And I don't love the I
Speaker 3: don't love the phrase remote work. I'd rather call it
Speaker 3: internet work, because what I think is really happening here
Speaker 3: is this broader shift from working in the office to
Speaker 3: working on the internet, and this has happened in phases
Speaker 3: over time. Even before the pandemic, a lot of people,
Speaker 3: even if they went into an office, were working in
Speaker 3: Google Docs, communicating on Slack, meeting on Zoom. A lot
Speaker 3: of large companies were distributed. Before was cool because they
Speaker 3: had offices across different cities and even countries. But remote
Speaker 3: work is the pandemic was really a one way door
Speaker 3: inter remote work for a lot of people, and it
Speaker 3: was obviously a surprise and overnight people couldn't go into
Speaker 3: their offices anymore. And it turns out that we could
Speaker 3: kind of get by at work with the basics of
Speaker 3: creating and collaborating with the tools that we had. But
Speaker 3: what happened also during the pandemic is that indicators around
Speaker 3: things like burnout and job satisfaction and management efficiency started
Speaker 3: blinking red because we were still all working online as
Speaker 3: if we were in an office from nine to five
Speaker 3: in the same place. So meetings and messages started to
Speaker 3: become overused as tools of getting stuff done when people
Speaker 3: couldn't be around their colleagues anymore. Things like trust and
Speaker 3: connections started to decrease precipitously, and so people started to
Speaker 3: burn out at work and become very dissatisfied, and even
Speaker 3: when before the pandemic that wasn't happening. And we think
Speaker 3: the root cause at Almanac is that we've now changed
Speaker 3: where we work, but we haven't actually evolved yet how
Speaker 3: we work. And so this mismatch between kind of the
Speaker 3: context in which we now all work and live and
Speaker 3: the way that we're doing our jobs is causing a
Speaker 3: lot of pain and frustration to extent that some people
Speaker 3: quit their jobs or take themselves out of the workforce,
Speaker 3: which is obviously not good for them, but it's also
Speaker 3: not good for our economy.
Speaker 4: It's not good for businesses.
Speaker 3: There's actually been a slowdown in innovation over the last
Speaker 3: twenty years, where a lot of the growth we're seeing
Speaker 3: today is actually a byproduct of fundamental innovation that was
Speaker 3: created before nineteen seventy. And so I think in order
Speaker 3: to keep keep our planet spinning and making sure that
Speaker 3: we're solving our greatest challenges and reaping our biggest opportunities.
Speaker 4: That requires great collaboration.
Speaker 3: It requires teams to work well, and that means we
Speaker 3: need to figure out how to work together in this
Speaker 3: new normal. And so when we started the company, we
Speaker 3: weren't just trying to build a better tool. In fact,
Speaker 3: there's I think nothing wrong with document editors like Microsoft
Speaker 3: Word or Google Docs. It's more that people are are
Speaker 3: trying to use a tool that was designed for a
Speaker 3: different world for something entirely different.
Speaker 4: And what we.
Speaker 3: Think people really need is a different way of working,
Speaker 3: not just a different tool. And so when we started
Speaker 3: the company, we didn't just sit down and start coding
Speaker 3: away based on philosophy found and other products. We went
Speaker 3: first to talk to the best teams on the Internet,
Speaker 3: people at companies like Amazon and Apple and Netflix and
Speaker 3: get Lab and do is to understand, like how they
Speaker 3: were working so well. In many of these cases, they
Speaker 3: figured out how to optimize their processes, their management styles,
Speaker 3: their norms for the Internet way before the rest of
Speaker 3: us did. And so we've done over five thousand interviews
Speaker 3: at this point with people from these super high performing
Speaker 3: teams to understand, like, how did you figure out how
Speaker 3: to work, what was the initial insight, how's that evolved
Speaker 3: into a best practice, And what we did from there
Speaker 3: was kind of abstract away from specific instances to broad
Speaker 3: generalizable principles that anybody can use, regardless of their company
Speaker 3: or context, to work faster on the Internet.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: I love the depth and the research that went into
Speaker 1: creating these modern work principles. I've read through them all,
Speaker 1: and you know, when I was preparing for this interview,
Speaker 1: I thought, I'll just I'll pick up my favorites, But
Speaker 1: really I've picked out most of them because most of
Speaker 1: them are my favorites. So I want to go through
Speaker 1: a few of them because what I'm really interested in
Speaker 1: is what does that look like in practice. So let's
Speaker 1: take principle two, which says the best managers focus on
Speaker 1: outputs and outcomes instead of hours worked or messages sent.
Speaker 1: So I don't think you get much argument from you know,
Speaker 1: forward thinking leaders about that. I feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of leaders and managers say, you know, it has to
Speaker 1: be about outcomes and not ours, but they don't necessarily
Speaker 1: behave in that way when they're, say, evaluating their staff.
Speaker 1: So I want to know, how do you do this
Speaker 1: practically speaking.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 3: And just for some context here, if you think about
Speaker 3: historical management theory, modern management really came about with the
Speaker 3: advent of the modern factory in the nineteen thirties and forties,
Speaker 3: and the job of a manager there was to measure outputs.
Speaker 3: And the outputs in this case was like stuff coming
Speaker 3: off the factory line, and some managers could sit above
Speaker 3: the factory floor and you know, look at like reports
Speaker 3: essentially of outputs and see how the factory was performing.
Speaker 3: And in that case, workers were kind of like cogs
Speaker 3: in a machine, you know, they were sorting stuff and
Speaker 3: doing specific, single oriented jobs, and so management was I'm
Speaker 3: sure it wasn't simple then, but it was pretty straightforward.
Speaker 3: As work. A lot of work moved from blue collar
Speaker 3: work to white collar work, from kind of factory work
Speaker 3: to creative work. You couldn't see the output of individual
Speaker 3: employees anymore. In many cases they were complex or creative,
Speaker 3: and so the job of the manager short to evolve
Speaker 3: to managing presence, which is to say, did the employee
Speaker 3: show up at a specific time, were they in the
Speaker 3: office to another time, did they attend meetings? Even things
Speaker 3: like how how good of a communicator are they, how
Speaker 3: good are they appearing to collaborate, And a lot of
Speaker 3: that I think has been kind of parodied and reviled
Speaker 3: in modern media around kind of how a name that
Speaker 3: is because even in the office, just because you showed
Speaker 3: up wasn't necessarily correlated to whether you were doing a
Speaker 3: good job. But it gave managers the same kind of
Speaker 3: control I think as standing above a factory floor used to.
Speaker 4: And now in modern world where we're not.
Speaker 3: In the same place at the same time, we've removed
Speaker 3: the ability for managers to manage my presence, which I
Speaker 3: think is a good thing because it allows us to
Speaker 3: fill it in with something better. But to your question,
Speaker 3: how do we give managers tools to actually manage outcomes
Speaker 3: rather than just presence? And I think the key to
Speaker 3: the insterercomes down to transparency. And so if you think
Speaker 3: kind of about a spectrum, in order to get to outcomes,
Speaker 3: you first have to measure outputs, because somebody can't be
Speaker 3: doing a good job if they're doing no job at all.
Speaker 3: And so I think the core form of this is
Speaker 3: to actually just look at tasks of the things I've
Speaker 3: asked you to do, did you actually do them? If
Speaker 3: you haven't done them, there's no way that you did
Speaker 3: any any job at all. You could do a good
Speaker 3: or bad job, you've done nothing. And so creating transparency
Speaker 3: around kind of the basic collaborative tasks that people do
Speaker 3: every day, I think is the foundation to starting to
Speaker 3: measure outputs and outcomes instead of things like presence and
Speaker 3: so in our tool in Almanac, we have a concept
Speaker 3: call request, where you can ask someone for feedback or approval,
Speaker 3: or to complete something, or even just to read a document.
Speaker 3: And this is really similar about how software engineers have
Speaker 3: been working largely asynchronously for twenty years, where even when
Speaker 3: they're on the same place as software engineer, through tools
Speaker 3: like GitHub, can ask another engineer to review their code
Speaker 3: or approve something. And in GitHub there's basically like a
Speaker 3: lot like ann activity feed from Facebook where you can
Speaker 3: actually see did the person first like see my request,
Speaker 3: kind of like a red receipt in I message, You know,
Speaker 3: have they looked at it? What comments have they made
Speaker 3: that they're attached to the request, What metafeedback have they given?
Speaker 3: And so there's a lot of clarity around like where
Speaker 3: the request is improp And if you think about like
Speaker 3: even basic task management tools from the office culture era,
Speaker 3: you may ask somebody in an office to do something,
Speaker 3: but even then you really have any clarity like where
Speaker 3: is this work with Susan?
Speaker 4: You know digjo complete the task.
Speaker 3: And so I think for managers to start to manage
Speaker 3: by outcomes, you have to dis understand is your team
Speaker 3: doing the things you ask them to do, and that
Speaker 3: starts to get you a sense of kind of quantity
Speaker 3: of output, and then you can start to layer on quality.
Speaker 3: And I think ways to measure that are to look
Speaker 3: at again through transparency and analytics. What was how many
Speaker 3: comments did people put on their work? How many comments
Speaker 3: did they put in other people's work? How do you
Speaker 3: did people react to those comments? Where their threads, where
Speaker 3: they're things like reactions. If you think about kind of
Speaker 3: the consumer world as a parallel for enterprise, if you
Speaker 3: go on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, you can generally
Speaker 3: tell the quality of a post by the amount of
Speaker 3: reactions that it's getting, the number of likes, amount of
Speaker 3: comments that engagement in other words, and I think starting
Speaker 3: to apply a lot of the same principles to enterprise
Speaker 3: collaboration on comments and tasks and reviews, and then aggregating
Speaker 3: those analytically so that a manager can see how did
Speaker 3: Adam actually do this week? Did he complete his tasks?
Speaker 3: Did people think they were good? Was he responsive to
Speaker 3: what other people on the team need you can start
Speaker 3: to get a picture of kind of quality and quality
Speaker 3: of output.
Speaker 4: By individual, and.
Speaker 3: That starts to give managers the tools they need to
Speaker 3: understand is the team doing their jobs?
Speaker 4: Is the team moving the needle?
Speaker 3: And that I think in the end builds trust and
Speaker 3: a sense of connection between managers and their teams, because
Speaker 3: even if they're not in the same room, the manager
Speaker 3: is a sense of is the ball moving forward, who's
Speaker 3: contributing to the work, who's falling behind? And I think
Speaker 3: that lack of that lack of trust that exist today
Speaker 3: for a lot of teams comes from a lack of transparency.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, like the distinction between outputs and outcomes. And
Speaker 1: I know at Almanac you use okay as so objectives
Speaker 1: and care results.
Speaker 2: That's correct, isn't it, Adam, We built our.
Speaker 3: Own system because I think all cars can be kind
Speaker 3: of like a dark art or r magic for a
Speaker 3: lot of teams where they're actually quite I think they
Speaker 3: take a lot of work to implement, and many teams
Speaker 3: don't do them very well. So we've actually designed our
Speaker 3: own system at Almanac that's largely based on setting a
Speaker 3: strategy every quarter, translating that down into goals per month
Speaker 3: than to goals per week, so that everybody understands how
Speaker 3: we plan to get to the long term place we
Speaker 3: want to go. And then having individuals in their work
Speaker 3: streams list their own goals for the week in a
Speaker 3: public document and at the end of the week grade
Speaker 3: themselves and if they got that work done, and so
Speaker 3: on this output point I was talking about before, understanding
Speaker 3: like did you do the thing you said you were
Speaker 3: going to do? We built a system at Almanac largely
Speaker 3: based around these weekly tasks just to understand like are
Speaker 3: people doing their jobs? And you know there are cases,
Speaker 3: of course where people are doing their work but it's
Speaker 3: not very good. But there's a very strong correlation between
Speaker 3: people who aren't completing their task and people who aren't
Speaker 3: producing outcomes in other words, moving the needle on an
Speaker 3: important project.
Speaker 1: The outcomes almost like the quality and outputs sort of
Speaker 1: the quantity or is that simplifying it too much?
Speaker 3: It's basically it's about impact on the spectrum, and so
Speaker 3: outputs I think of as a as something that happens
Speaker 3: as a direct result of your activity.
Speaker 4: And so if.
Speaker 3: Let's say we're playing a sport and we're playing baseball,
Speaker 3: and output is you know, the number of times that
Speaker 3: I am batting and I swing and I connect with
Speaker 3: the ball. You know, it's a verifiable activity where my
Speaker 3: action led to a direct result. Everybody can see it.
Speaker 3: It's pretty easy to measure whether or not I'm hitting
Speaker 3: the ball. How is how much is that correlated with
Speaker 3: my team winning the game?
Speaker 4: Who knows?
Speaker 3: Probably not that much. I think about an outcome though,
Speaker 3: as my team winning the game. You know, it's something
Speaker 3: that happens that I'm contributing to, but it's not a
Speaker 3: direct result of my activity. And so out outcomes for
Speaker 3: businesses are things like we want to grow this quarter,
Speaker 3: or we want to improve profitability, or we want.
Speaker 4: To produce new products. An output might be if.
Speaker 3: I'm an engineer, you know how many lines of code
Speaker 3: I've written, if I've completed a feature. If I'm a marketer,
Speaker 3: you know how many ads I've released or how many lines,
Speaker 3: how many.
Speaker 4: New tweets I've sent.
Speaker 3: If I'm a you know, salesperson, it's the number of
Speaker 3: calls I've made or number of demos I've booked. Just
Speaker 3: because I've you know, done it a bunch of demos
Speaker 3: doesn't necessarily mean that the company will grow, but they
Speaker 3: are correlated, and so there's this relationship between the work
Speaker 3: that I'm doing, how much of it I do, the
Speaker 3: quality that I do it at, and the long term
Speaker 3: goal of the company that many people are contributing to
Speaker 3: that is also affected by outside factors. And so outcomes
Speaker 3: are often what companies say their goals are. And the
Speaker 3: trick is how you tie that to the actual work
Speaker 3: people are doing every single day.
Speaker 1: And so is what you're saying that the goals that
Speaker 1: individuals are setting, they're the outputs, and then they ladder
Speaker 1: up to company outcomes. Yes, okay, interesting, And so in
Speaker 1: the language of okas, the outputs the key results like
Speaker 1: the quantifiable, measurable things that the people are ultimately assessed on.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So in ok ours okay stands for objectives and key results.
Speaker 3: An objective is kind of a qualitative big idea, something like,
Speaker 3: you know, this quarter, we'd like to grow the business,
Speaker 3: and a key result is attached to that objective. That's
Speaker 3: a quantifiable metric that will help the team understand if
Speaker 3: they achieve that objective. So, if our goal is to grow,
Speaker 3: if our objective is to grow the business, a key
Speaker 3: result might be, you know, revenue increases fifty percent within
Speaker 3: three months, and so you're measuring the key results to
Speaker 3: understand if you've reached the objective, and then those often
Speaker 3: ladder down. If that's, for example, a company goal, those
Speaker 3: could ladder down to team goals. So product team is
Speaker 3: thinking about how do we build new features, the sales
Speaker 3: team is thinking about how do we sell those features.
Speaker 4: Marketing team is.
Speaker 3: Thinking about how do we increase top of funnel awareness,
Speaker 3: and that can let it down even further to individuals
Speaker 3: objectives and key results. So the system is meant to
Speaker 3: scale from what a company sets all the way down
Speaker 3: to what individuals are doing every day, so that there's
Speaker 3: broad alignment and clarity through the organization.
Speaker 1: One of my other favorite principles, As I said, they're
Speaker 1: all kind of favorites, but I really like this one.
Speaker 1: Principle seeks collaboration should always start with a document instead
Speaker 1: of a mating and I feel that that is completely
Speaker 1: conjurary to how most organizations run things. So can you
Speaker 1: tell me if it starts with a document, what does
Speaker 1: that document look like?
Speaker 3: That's a great question, and I agree with you that
Speaker 3: it sounds simple write everything down, but it's very unintuitive
Speaker 3: to a lot of people and not often followed in
Speaker 3: practice of what to write down. I think the best
Speaker 3: practice here is to use templates. And so if you
Speaker 3: think about every document, not as a lot of people do,
Speaker 3: as kind of a place to store like a final
Speaker 3: version of a contract or an agreement, something that happens
Speaker 3: at the end of a largely informal process that's being
Speaker 3: conducted in meetings, but really as the process itself, as
Speaker 3: the place where you write down the initial idea, where
Speaker 3: you get feedback on it, where you get formal approval,
Speaker 3: where you then distribute it as knowledge to the rest
Speaker 3: of the team, even something that then gets updated over
Speaker 3: time into future versions. The document isn't just kind of
Speaker 3: like a piece of paper that goes in a filing cabinet,
Speaker 3: as we used to regard them, but really as the
Speaker 3: core collaborative surface for the team. And so the best
Speaker 3: way to kind of codify a process so that people
Speaker 3: follow it is to use a template. And so I
Speaker 3: think the best practice here is to have document templates
Speaker 3: for different types of processes. So, for example, a PRD
Speaker 3: is a great template use for creating and aligning as
Speaker 3: a team on product requirements for a new feature. Using
Speaker 3: a sales template is essentially a form of starting a
Speaker 3: process where you go through negotiation with a potential customer,
Speaker 3: agree on terms, get them to sign it, and.
Speaker 4: Then distribute it.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 3: The simple but hard answer is that creating good templates
Speaker 3: for the key processes that your company is doing is
Speaker 3: the best way to make sure that those processes begin
Speaker 3: with a document rather than a meeting, And by starting
Speaker 3: with basically like a plug and play document, you can
Speaker 3: actually not just reduce the number of meetings, but reduce
Speaker 3: the amount of hours you're spending on the work, because
Speaker 3: most of what companies are doing every day aren't like
Speaker 3: totally new creative processes. Even if the point of a
Speaker 3: process is to come up with a creative idea, the
Speaker 3: process itself is often codified and structured in some ways,
Speaker 3: and what a lot of companies are spending time doing
Speaker 3: is reinventing the wheel on the process itself, and templates
Speaker 3: are a great way to prevent.
Speaker 4: That from happening.
Speaker 1: We will be back with Adam soon where we talk
Speaker 1: about what actually deserves a meeting at Almanac and what
Speaker 1: is best done asynchronously. If you're looking for more tips
Speaker 1: to improve the way you work can live. I write
Speaker 1: a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that
Speaker 1: have helped me personally. You can sign up for that
Speaker 1: at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com. So at Almanac,
Speaker 1: what deserves a meeting?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there's two types of meetings that I
Speaker 3: have found really valuable. One type of meeting that we
Speaker 3: have often that I think is worth the time is
Speaker 3: when we have a problem to solve that is a
Speaker 3: complex problem that has a complex answer, where you can't
Speaker 3: just send a document to somebody and say.
Speaker 4: Do you approve or not?
Speaker 3: And to be clear, there are a lot of processes
Speaker 3: where there are simple answers, simple questions that can be
Speaker 3: automated and completed asynchronously. And so you know, things like
Speaker 3: approving marketing copy or redlining contracts or getting feedback on
Speaker 3: new product proposals. Those are all things we don't have
Speaker 3: meetings for out Almanac. But when we're, for example, trying
Speaker 3: to figure out, you know, what's our approach to AI
Speaker 3: or what should our growth goal be this month? Those
Speaker 3: aren't things that are easily done asynchronously. They often require
Speaker 3: lots of input from diverse stakeholders. A bit of conversation
Speaker 3: where I think the conversation can lead to a better
Speaker 3: outcome or answer than we could ever get to if
Speaker 3: we were just communicating linearly and for example at comments thread.
Speaker 3: So those types of complex problems with complex answers I
Speaker 3: think require a meeting. I think a second type of
Speaker 3: meaning that we have that's helpful is something that's urgent,
Speaker 3: where you actually just need to get something done now,
Speaker 3: and we often that's where often people are in slack
Speaker 3: or another communication channel and we're just getting on the
Speaker 3: phone can actually get to an answer faster. And the
Speaker 3: third important type of meaning is to create a sense
Speaker 3: of connection and reinforce the culture of our team. And
Speaker 3: that's less from like we have a business objective to
Speaker 3: complete and more we're a bunch of humans working together
Speaker 3: every day and spending a majority of our working hours
Speaker 3: together and recognizing that we are people.
Speaker 4: And that we need to connect with each other.
Speaker 3: And part of the joy of work is working with
Speaker 3: is getting to spend time with people that you like
Speaker 3: and respect and trust. And I think a great way
Speaker 3: to reinforce that is through meetings where you get just
Speaker 3: so much more information by seeing somebody their body language,
Speaker 3: how they react to what you're saying. And we actually
Speaker 3: spend a lot of time in our kind of weekly
Speaker 3: or even daily stand ups starting with a kickoff question.
Speaker 3: We have a whole library of them at this point,
Speaker 3: like a thousand questions that we figured out over time,
Speaker 3: things like what did you want to be when you
Speaker 3: grow up?
Speaker 4: Or what you're perfect Saturday? Or you know, what do
Speaker 4: you serve.
Speaker 3: On Christmas Evening? That help people understand more like who
Speaker 3: they're really working with, because we're all so much more
Speaker 3: than our jobs, and I think spending synchronous time to
Speaker 3: get to know each other and build culture ultimately leads
Speaker 3: to better work, more satisfied teams, and faster business value.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about principal seven, which is the
Speaker 1: more you ask for feedback, the better your end work
Speaker 1: will be. I've got a few questions around that. Firstly,
Speaker 1: when do you ask for feedback at what point in
Speaker 1: a project?
Speaker 3: All the time, And we've learned as the principle has
Speaker 3: gone it and we should have learned this sooner, judging
Speaker 3: from all the researchery done where people talked about the
Speaker 3: importance of feedback that you know, essentially you know if
Speaker 3: you think about I think one a lot of the universes.
Speaker 3: Compounding that progress over time becomes greater and greater because
Speaker 3: you're actually just building on the progress of the past,
Speaker 3: and so that it turns into a log curve, which
Speaker 3: looks like you know, technology growth, but that's also how
Speaker 3: growth works for people and their behavior and teams and
Speaker 3: their actions. You know, it often starts looking pretty incremental,
Speaker 3: but over time that that reaches an inflection point. And
Speaker 3: so if you believe in compounding, what that means is
Speaker 3: that you know, in a given period of time, if
Speaker 3: you were to only iterate once, let's say you you know,
Speaker 3: your version was so good that it was twice as
Speaker 3: good as the thing you did before, then now you
Speaker 3: have a two x improvement. But if in that same
Speaker 3: period of time you were to iterate let's say ten times,
Speaker 3: but each of those times only make like ten to
Speaker 3: twenty percent progress, you'd end up with a byproduct at
Speaker 3: the end of that.
Speaker 4: That's something like eight to ten x better.
Speaker 3: So what matters, just based on kind of math, is
Speaker 3: not like how good you are a version of a
Speaker 3: version on something, but really the amount of times you try,
Speaker 3: and by trying me the amount of times you put
Speaker 3: something out there and get feedback on it. And I
Speaker 3: think that's true for basically every function. The amount of
Speaker 3: times you show a prototype or a new feature to
Speaker 3: customers and get their feedback. Often people want to hold
Speaker 3: it and try and make it perfect, but it's actually
Speaker 3: better to get it out there get feedback, because you're
Speaker 3: going to learn so much more about what's good and
Speaker 3: what's bad and be able to improve on the good
Speaker 3: things and get rid of the bad things. It's true
Speaker 3: in marketing where you're testing copy. It's true in sales
Speaker 3: where the number of times you kind of pitch something
Speaker 3: to potential customers. It's true in management, where you're asked
Speaker 3: feedback from the team. People don't like asking for feedback
Speaker 3: because it's really uncomfortable to expose yourself and to potentially
Speaker 3: be wrong and to hear things you don't want to hear.
Speaker 3: But I think that's if you can learn how to
Speaker 3: do that and be comfortable with the discomfort, you end
Speaker 3: up gaining so much more and you end up winning
Speaker 3: so much bigger because the end result is so much
Speaker 3: better than anything you could have done in the echo
Speaker 3: chamber of your own thought.
Speaker 1: Some Beliefs Principal three says creating a calm, sustainable team
Speaker 1: culture with no surprises and few fire drills leads to
Speaker 1: faster velocity and better work. I feel like in like
Speaker 1: all the different organizations that I've worked with in terms
Speaker 1: of clients of Inventium and even within Inventium, you know,
Speaker 1: I can I can think of so many surprises and
Speaker 1: things that come up that you just could never have
Speaker 1: planned for, like that are outside of our control, like
Speaker 1: a client requesting something at the last minute, or a
Speaker 1: supplier changing the terms of a contract or something like that.
Speaker 1: How again, how does this actually work in practice at Almanac?
Speaker 3: I think if I were to boil the modern work
Speaker 3: method down to six words, it would be more structure,
Speaker 3: more transparency, I fewer meetings. And with this idea that
Speaker 3: a lot of the work that humans I think are
Speaker 3: meant to do should be creative work. But we are
Speaker 3: spending a lot of time on repetitive processes that aren't
Speaker 3: at all creative, and we are dedicating time. We are
Speaker 3: treating things that happen continually as if they are creative processes,
Speaker 3: as if they're new phenomena when maybe it's near the
Speaker 3: first time it happens, but if it happens a second
Speaker 3: or third, or tenth or thirty at time. It's something
Speaker 3: that we have seen, it's something that we have done.
Speaker 3: We may have been good at solving it or bad
Speaker 3: at solving it, but we certainly have experience, and so
Speaker 3: we can start to codify a process around it, learn
Speaker 3: from what happened, and if we apply structure to it
Speaker 3: and intentionality to it, we can take it from something
Speaker 3: that takes creative brain power and turn it into something
Speaker 3: that's more automated, something that we don't need to meet
Speaker 3: about or talk about, but something that just runs smoothly
Speaker 3: in the background of the organization. And so I think
Speaker 3: a lot of what we are advocating for is even
Speaker 3: things i'd be surprises upfront or things that.
Speaker 4: Might be unpredictable, and when they start.
Speaker 3: For at Almanac, it's things like customers filing tickets for
Speaker 3: bugs or asking for future improvements, or the site going
Speaker 3: down god for a bit. You know, those aren't things
Speaker 3: we can predict. But everything that happens after that moment
Speaker 3: is something that we can handle. And even we can
Speaker 3: design a system to account for the unpredictability and the risk.
Speaker 3: There's that something humans do all the time with systems design.
Speaker 3: Every system has a bit of ambiguity in it, and
Speaker 3: so there are ways to mitigate or plan for that
Speaker 3: that uncertainty. And the way he started just by recognizing
Speaker 3: their's uncertainty and talking about it and coming up with
Speaker 3: a process. As I'm sure you have an inventium on
Speaker 3: things like you know, customer fire drills. I think where
Speaker 3: a lot of teams go wrong is they don't something
Speaker 3: happens the first time and it is truly a fire drill,
Speaker 3: and then it happens the second time, and they treat
Speaker 3: it as if the first time didn't happen, rather than
Speaker 3: after it happens, doing a quick retrod and saying.
Speaker 4: Hey, hey, what what just happened? How did it go?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 4: Do we think it's going to happen again?
Speaker 3: And you know, should we build a process for it?
Speaker 3: And I think the more structure you have and how
Speaker 3: your team works, the more fire drills don't have to
Speaker 3: be fire drills, and you can spend that time instead
Speaker 3: on creative and meaningful work that is really moving the needle.
Speaker 3: The reasons people actually wake up in the morning to
Speaker 3: do their jobs and the reason the company exists, which
Speaker 3: is to serve customers and add value.
Speaker 1: I'm reflecting on the last couple of weeks that Inventium,
Speaker 1: where I feel like we have had fire drills in
Speaker 1: the form of consultants or inventeologists who were booked into
Speaker 1: deliver workshops. One got COVID, another got really sick with
Speaker 1: a flu like bug, and they were down and we
Speaker 1: were like struggling to find replacements.
Speaker 2: And I kind of I look back on.
Speaker 1: That now and it's like, that is happened many times
Speaker 1: in the sixteen years that I've been running in Ventium.
Speaker 1: We've never actually sat down and said, Okay, what is
Speaker 1: our process for when this happens, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: it has happened many many times in the time that
Speaker 1: I've had this business. So it's yeah, for me, that's
Speaker 1: really interesting hearing you, because I'm like, yeah, what about humans.
Speaker 2: You can't predic humans, But it's like, no, you can
Speaker 2: predict that.
Speaker 1: Humans will get sick and they will need some sort
Speaker 1: of a replacement in the thing that they were meant
Speaker 1: to be doing that week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can certainly account for the uncertainty. There's whole
Speaker 3: industries around this management.
Speaker 4: That are about that.
Speaker 3: Most of our legal and governance systems are really about
Speaker 3: accounting for risk and uncertainty and just two anecdotes for you.
Speaker 4: One.
Speaker 3: When we started this work, I used to think that
Speaker 3: people got satisfaction from work, from spending time on deep work.
Speaker 3: There's whole books that are really great written about this,
Speaker 3: and I thought it was all about flow and focus
Speaker 3: and that's where people find meaning. And when we talked
Speaker 3: to these amazing professionals, what people evaluated whether a week
Speaker 3: was effective based on if they got stuff done on
Speaker 3: their to do list. And the enemy of getting stuff
Speaker 3: done is a fire drill, and so what people hated
Speaker 3: them most wasn't that they sometimes are just processing cast
Speaker 3: but it's when something got in the way of them
Speaker 3: being able to cross stuff off their to do list.
Speaker 3: So it shifted our thinking from how do we enable
Speaker 3: through our tool time for people to do deep creative work,
Speaker 3: to how do we help people just get through their
Speaker 3: to do list faster so that they can and get
Speaker 3: done with their days get back to other things that
Speaker 3: might matter them. Because everybody hated ending a week feeling
Speaker 3: like they weren't able to get important work done for
Speaker 3: themselves and their teams, and so this idea of minimizing
Speaker 3: fire drills became an important principle to this end, because
Speaker 3: it's not just about something that makes the team faster,
Speaker 3: but it's also directly correlated to people feeling like like
Speaker 3: their week was a success and getting meaning and value
Speaker 3: from work. The second idea to your point is that
Speaker 3: we love this slogan from the US Marines. Slow means
Speaker 3: smooth and smooth means fast. Where a lot of teams
Speaker 3: go wrong isn't that they had to respond quickly to
Speaker 3: a new event that they've never seen before.
Speaker 4: It's that they.
Speaker 3: Don't stop afterwards, take a breath and say, like, what
Speaker 3: just happened, how did it go? How do we make
Speaker 3: sure that the next time this happens that we have
Speaker 3: some smoothness in how we respond. Because this, when you
Speaker 3: have calmness and order and structure, it's not just a
Speaker 3: more enjoyable experience, it actually increases business and team velocity,
Speaker 3: and so you can actually go faster while it feels
Speaker 3: like everybody is moving at a sustainable pace. If you
Speaker 3: look at paddling races, what you'll see is that the
Speaker 3: teams that win aren't the teams with the strongest men.
Speaker 3: They're the teams that are putting their paddles into the
Speaker 3: water at exactly the same time, because when everybody is
Speaker 3: moving together, you get more momentum behind the boat, and
Speaker 3: that's much more important than just like chaotic strength throwing
Speaker 3: stuff into the water that actually ends up working at
Speaker 3: cross purposes. And so what's critical is that a team
Speaker 3: is working together with some structure, with some transparency, so
Speaker 3: that in the end everybody feels like they're doing work
Speaker 3: that's sustainable for them, but the whole boat is moving
Speaker 3: faster as a result.
Speaker 1: Adam, For the listeners that want to connect with you,
Speaker 1: what is the best way to do so and also
Speaker 1: to connect with Almanac.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So if you're interested in everything we've talked about today,
Speaker 3: go to Modern work method dot com. I think we
Speaker 3: have hundreds of free templates on there that help you
Speaker 3: take a lot of these ideas and turn them into
Speaker 3: practices your organization can use now. And if you're interested
Speaker 3: in actually adopting a lot of these behaviors, the whole
Speaker 3: point in building Almanac is to make a seen less
Speaker 3: for your team, just to start to work faster and
Speaker 3: better without you having to spend time on it. And
Speaker 3: you can get a demo and try the product at
Speaker 3: almanac dot io and I think.
Speaker 4: I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn at Adam p Nathan Adam.
Speaker 2: I have loved this chat.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've had quite a few penny drop
Speaker 1: moments that's really making me rethink how we do things
Speaker 1: at Inventium.
Speaker 2: So I just want to say thank you for.
Speaker 1: You for putting such deep thought into how work can
Speaker 1: be done better in this new world.
Speaker 2: Of work that we're in.
Speaker 1: I've personally just found our chat so incredibly valuable, So
Speaker 1: thank you well.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much. This has been fun.
Speaker 1: I hope that you got as much as I did
Speaker 1: from this chat with Adam.
Speaker 2: I know that it gave me so.
Speaker 1: Many ideas to think about how we work at Inventium,
Speaker 1: where we've been a remote first organization since twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: And if you know someone who's currently in the process
Speaker 1: of maybe rethinking how they approach their work, maybe you
Speaker 1: might want to share this interview with them to help
Speaker 1: spark some thinking. Thank you for sharing part of your
Speaker 1: day with me by listening to How I Work.
Speaker 2: If you're keen for.
Speaker 1: More tips on how to work better, connect with me
Speaker 1: via LinkedIn or Instagram.
Speaker 2: I'm very easy to find.
Speaker 1: Just search for Amantha Imba How I Work was recorded
Speaker 1: on the traditional land of the Warrenery people, part of
Speaker 1: the cool And Nation. I am so grateful for being
Speaker 1: able to work and live on this beautiful land, and
Speaker 1: I want to pay my respects to Elder's past, present
Speaker 1: and emerging. How I Work is produced by Inventium with
Speaker 1: production support from Dead Set Studios.
Speaker 2: The producer for this episode
Speaker 1: Was Liam Riordan, and thank you to Martin Nimba who
Speaker 1: did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than
Speaker 1: it would have otherwise.