1min Snip
- Time 0:01:26
-

(highlight:: Treating Difference as a Resource for Innovation
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And there was one, you know we're people are bringing their different proposals like I think we should do we should go to the stock market and we should pick up the stock market and like All these really boring ideas are coming up. And then there was like a six year old kid who's like we should have a parade. And everyone like immediately can censor that and it's like that's a genius idea. And just seeing seeing how when you listen to everyone you get good ideas from anywhere. And that actually a lot of the people who excluded from the conversation have the most add and treating everyone with that basic dignity and respect the bank. It's interesting. Some of your ideas are not going to be great but your ideas are still worth being heard. Just seeing that time and time again that good ideas would come. Either they'd come from the margins from places you never would thought of or they come from the interactions between different people where the best idea was something that no individual Could have had. You had to have like the conflict of different perspectives coming together and then you're like, well if we really go at this and turn it around until you know if the objective is how Do we grow as much shared understanding of. And how do we treat difference as a resource you know and really listen into what people's concerns are with enough patience and enough trust and a good process you can come up with proposals That are really incredible that really satisfy a lot of different concerns.)
- Time 0:09:19
-

(highlight:: Traditional Hierarchy was Created to for a Good Reason: To Facilitate Coordination
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The reason that we structure our organizations in this way with like, you know, carrots and sticks and so on, is because coordinating is hard, and we've figured out that using this hierarchical Model is a kind of stable pattern. No one thinks it's well, most people don't think it's the best idea ever, but they're like, at least this works. And so if you're going to reject the traditional hierarchy and go a different way, you're going to have to do a lot of R&D, you're going to have to figure you're going to basically encounter A lot of challenges along the way, like, you know, how do you do decisions without spending hours and hours and hours on the most mundane stuff? And where does accountability come from if you don't have a boss that is can threaten you with punishment, you know, those are real difficult questions in my travels were encountering Lots of decentralized groups, I found them all, like we did with Lumio, like, I will throw out everything about organizing and say everyone in the past was wrong, we're going to invent Everything from scratch. The problem with inventing everything from scratch is that there's a whole bunch of organizing challenges, which each any one of them is big enough to completely destroy your enterprise. Like, if you don't have accountability, or if you don't know how to make decisions, or if you can't manage conflict, or if you can't manage your cash flow, like, there's a bunch of these Topics that if you don't get it right, you've got to die, your organization's going to die. So innovating on all fronts simultaneously is not very likely to succeed. And so what I was trying to do with my book, Patterns for Decentralized Organizing, is to say, look, these are sort of like the top 10 challenges that all decentralized organizations Face. And these are some of the things you can do about it. And I can't prescribe to you exactly like, you should just do this, you know, you should just structure your organization in this way. But these are the kind of the tools and the practices and the frameworks, you know, like the mental models that have made a difference for other organizations, you can try them out.)
- Time 0:30:42
-

(highlight:: Agile Decentralized Organizing: Prioritize creating "Good Vibes" and Continuously Iterate
Transcript:
Speaker 1
To get to the principles part, I think where I've landed is basically that, I guess one piece, this kind of maybe two, one piece is prioritise the vibe, like vibes is king or queen, monarch, Meaning the social fabric, the sense of connection, the sense of belonging and purpose, that is the thing that you can't do without. Like, you can run out of money, you can completely miss your product market fit, you can have a really difficult conflict or severe disagreements and all that sort of thing. But once you run out of trust, and once you run out of respect for each other, like, you're dead in the water, there's no coming back from that. And so the priority is how do we look after our relationships? How do we create working culture that feels awesome where people are respected and they know they're going to be taken care of? And if you prioritise that, then I believe that really good work happens as a result. So that's the first principle, prioritise the vibe. And then the second principle is just to iterate a lot. And not just like people are familiar with this and start up land of like, you do like agile product development. And so you make a rough prototype, and then you show it to some customers, and then you improve it a bit, and then you just keep looping and looping. It's basically applying that process to your organisational design, and saying like, okay, for the next month, we're going to do decisions in this way. And then at the end of the month, we're going to stop and review and iterate and say, well, what did we learn from that? And what's a little tweak that we could do for the next iteration? And when you have the first principle of like good relationships, and like a lot of trust and a sense of safety, where people are going to be transparent with each other, they're actually Going to communicate with candor. And then you run these iterative loops on how can we improve our ways of organising? Pretty quickly, you get into a self-correcting evolutionary pathway, you know, where the group can just kind of adjust its posture to meet whatever the challenges of the day. And it has just incredible resilience and flexibility.)
- Time 0:33:39
-

(highlight:: The Partnership-Domination Spectrum: A framework for thinking about group dynamics
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So one of the frameworks that has really helped my way of thinking is this idea of the partnership and domination spectrum from Leon Isla. And it's this idea that, like, it's an oversimplification, right? But it kind of says any human relationship, either between peers or like between countries, you know, at any scale. It can either, you can relate to someone as a partner or in the sort of domination submission relationship. So it's like either horizontal or vertical and into spectrum. So you can be more or less, you know, you can be like a little bit domineering or like a complete fascist, right? So there's a spectrum of options there. I think the vast majority of organizations that we see visibly through especially like the last sort of five or six thousand years of human history have scaled the domination model. And that's about really clear chain of command, really clear hierarchy. But a lot of that has come partly that's like a cultural thing and partly a psychological thing and a trauma thing. But it's also just information theory, you know, like when information was expensive to move around, it kind of made sense to organize everything into these departments and to have A really clear like information goes up, decisions come down that kind of made sense. But we're living through a transition now where networks are actually much more efficient than institutions. Information doesn't cost anything to move around. Everyone kind of access to everything. And so just that basic information theory side of things changes the game entirely. And like, yeah, you can talk to like activists and radicals like me and my friends, but you can also talk to the US Army, right? Like, I really recommend this book, Team of Teams by General Standing McClip McChrystal. And he explains like how big chunks of the US Army now operate on a completely decentralized model with like the smallest amount of hierarchy they can get away with. And it's all about pushing information and autonomy out to the edges. And the job of the people at the top of the hierarchy is kind of like spotting where the gaps are and asking good questions and making sure that things are not falling through. But they're not really calling the shots, it's like people on the edges are calling the shots because they have the best access to information. So like, I think just on that pure almost like computational layer, this kind of concrete, how does the information flow? How do we make good decisions? I think because of the way information technology is changing, we're going through a transformation and what's possible for different modes of organizing. So it's one dimension, but I guess the side that I've become more interested in is this like cultural psychological level, you know? So I'm definitely coming with a bias that I think this domination submission pattern is inferior to the partnership pattern. Like I'd rather be surrounded by peers who respect me. You know, partnership for me means we're different, we're not equal, we're not pretending to all be the same. We've all got different competencies, different strengths, different values, different perspectives. And partnership means that those different characters come together in a spirit of like mutual curiosity, mutual respect, spirit of exchange, and like, what can we learn from each Other? Whereas the domination submission model is like, you just rank who's the most important or who's the strongest or who's the richest, and you give the power to the people at the top of The ranking. Yeah, I just prefer, and I think a lot of people would prefer to be surrounded with partnership relationships rather than domination submission ones. And I think it's like the kind of common stories we tell about human history are all focused on this domination side of the spectrum. But I think there's pretty compelling evidence that it's not the only way that things have been done.)
- Time 0:38:02
-

(highlight:: Trauma from Dominant Organization Patterns Takes Time to Unlearn
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And I come from a loving family. It's great. I love my parents that love me, you know, it's not like I'm showing up with this like terrible story or something. But still, I was trained to obey. And sometimes that kind of parenting was completely focused on my growth and development and safety, and like they were putting boundaries in place because that's what kids need, You know, to be safe and to to grow healthy as they need some boundaries. But also sometimes it was just easier for my dad to say, well, I'm the boss, we do it my way. You don't get a say. And not just my dad, right? Like my teachers, the people in church, like my interactions with the state was like everywhere that I looked was there's someone else out there who calls the shots who tells me what I have to do. And if they are in a position of power, I can't disagree with them or else I'm going to be punished. And I think that leaves a significant amount of trauma on people. I think a lot of people are traumatized by having to go to school and having to ask to use the bathroom, you know, like what an absurd, what an absurd concept that I have to put my hand up and Say, Miss, I need a P, can I please, you know, and that's the norm. I'm not talking about drastic events that, you know, it's not like a was zone where you expect people to get PTSD. It's like just normal everyday life, I think is still traumatizing people. And so when people try and step out of that dominated mode where they say, okay, we're not going to do that, we're going to be more like democratic, more inclusive, more partnership oriented. We've still got all of our conditioning, all of our patterns that we learn, like I was basically trained to submit some of the time and then look for the opportunities where it's my turn To dominate. And that's like something that I learned since I was a baby, you know, it's not something that I can just switch off because they say, Oh, I'm in a co-op now, I'm going to stop doing that. It takes a lot more than that.)
- Time 0:42:56
-

(highlight:: Strategic Intervention in the Current Business Environment
Summary:
The current business environment is moving towards an increasingly atomized, financialized, and precarious world of work.
However, there are other currents pulling towards a more positive direction. It is essential to strategically intervene in the system without getting distracted by wishing for a different world or a different game.
This approach involves playing the game on its own terms, bringing in additional values, and reflecting ecological values to own a corner of the market.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
How do we jump into that system and do something that's so excellent, that plays the game on its own terms and also brings in a bunch of other values so that we own a corner of that market And it reflects ecological values. I think that's just like, such a great way of thinking about it, that there is a current, you know, that Western society at least is going in a certain direction, probably not just Western Society. And how do we intervene in a strategic way without wishing, you know, like getting distracted by wishing the world was different or wishing that we were playing a different game with Chess than we're currently playing. So that was inspiring for me. So I do think we are going for this thing, increasingly atomized, increasingly financialized, increasingly precarious world of work. And there are other currents happening at the same time, which pull much more towards the happy end of the spectrum. So like, when we were starting Lumio, it was kind of right as the wave of agile methodology. It was just starting to crest where all of the organizations in the know knew that they needed an agile coach and they needed an agile transformation. And a couple of years after we started, it really reached the saturation point where the market was just like overrun with shysters and people that were saying they knew about agile, But they didn't understand the first thing, they just read a few books. And now we're in this kind of, I guess the trough of disillusionment where a lot of people hear about agile, but they just associate it with the worst kind of management speak and it doesn't Work and it sucks.)
- Time 1:03:30
-

(highlight:: The Evolution of Agile and the Rise of Wellbeing
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And a couple of years after we started, it really reached the saturation point where the market was just like overrun with shysters and people that were saying they knew about agile, But they didn't understand the first thing, they just read a few books. And now we're in this kind of, I guess the trough of disillusionment where a lot of people hear about agile, but they just associate it with the worst kind of management speak and it doesn't Work and it sucks. And, you know, now I think there is something really profound in the agile manifesto and it's hard to scale and it's really nuanced and it comes from experience. But yeah, the market went through its hype and disillusionment cycle as it always does. Now, I think it's there's like another wave that's coming after that one. And I might be just like wishing this into existence, but it's what I see anyway, is that now people are talking about wellbeing and about mindfulness and about psychological safety. And it's really, there's this trend of paying attention to people's interior experience, which is quite new. I mean, the pandemic has been a big part of it as well. It's like suddenly everyone's working habit has been interrupted and it's like, oh, most of our staff have children and they have to deal with that. Like we've just ignored that and we've had these traditional gender roles that have made it easier to ignore that. You know, you just say, well, all the men will go to work and all the mothers will stay home and then we don't even think about it.)
- Time 1:04:35
-

(highlight:: Iterating on Bullshit: The Shift from Agile Management to Human-Centered Management
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Now I think there is something really profound in the agile manifesto and it's hard to scale and it's really nuanced and it comes from experience. But yeah, the market went through its hype and disillusionment cycle as it always does. Now, I think it's there's like another wave that's coming after that one. And I might be just like wishing this into existence, but it's what I see anyway, is that now people are talking about wellbeing and about mindfulness and about psychological safety. And it's really, there's this trend of paying attention to people's interior experience, which is quite new. I mean, the pandemic has been a big part of it as well. It's like suddenly everyone's working habit has been interrupted and it's like, oh, most of our staff have children and they have to deal with that. Like we've just ignored that and we've had these traditional gender roles that have made it easier to ignore that. You know, you just say, well, all the men will go to work and all the mothers will stay home and then we don't even think about it. But obviously that has been disintegrating for a long time as well. So there's like these different currents in society that are forcing us to consider the whole human being, not just their professional personality and this like small, smaller persona, Who is this human and what are they experiencing? Like on the inside as they go to work. And you have things like, you know, Google's Project Aristotle, which is this massive study of what makes an effective team. And the number one thing they can point to is what they call psychological safety, which is building on Amy Edmond's work from Harvard, which is like psychological safety is a shared Belief that this is a place where it's safe to take risks, like interpersonal risks, where I can be vulnerable, I can be real, I can be honest about what's going on. I can disagree with you, I can bring my ideas. There's like space to be different without losing my place in the team. Those kinds of qualities are all very sensitive vibes, equalities. And it's Google of all people saying, like that's the thing that makes the difference. That's how you build a high performing team. So I think that's the kind of, that could be the thing that comes after agile is the way that I frame it is think everyone kind of learned the lesson from agile, which is that iterative development Is the way to get good stuff cheap. But most organizations are iterating on bullshit because they have a culture of withholding and a culture of fear. People are not actually exchanging honest information with each other when they're going through those iterative looks. They're like butt kissing and butt covering and hiding as much as they can get away with. And so you're iterating on bullshit, it doesn't actually work. And so you need to be doing this iteration on top of a culture of honesty and safety and candor and mutual respect and so on. So I'm optimistic that there is, you know, like the next big wave in organizational thinking is all about how do we cultivate decent relationships where people come together as adults, You know, as peer to peer adults that they come in the spirit of partnership.)
- Time 1:04:59
- psychological safety, culture of fear, human-centered management, agile management, gartner hype cycle, organizational culture, humanocracy, culture of withholding, team culture, teamwork,

1min Snip
- Time 0:01:26
-

(highlight:: Treating Difference as a Resource for Innovation
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And there was one, you know we're people are bringing their different proposals like I think we should do we should go to the stock market and we should pick up the stock market and like All these really boring ideas are coming up. And then there was like a six year old kid who's like we should have a parade. And everyone like immediately can censor that and it's like that's a genius idea. And just seeing seeing how when you listen to everyone you get good ideas from anywhere. And that actually a lot of the people who excluded from the conversation have the most add and treating everyone with that basic dignity and respect the bank. It's interesting. Some of your ideas are not going to be great but your ideas are still worth being heard. Just seeing that time and time again that good ideas would come. Either they'd come from the margins from places you never would thought of or they come from the interactions between different people where the best idea was something that no individual Could have had. You had to have like the conflict of different perspectives coming together and then you're like, well if we really go at this and turn it around until you know if the objective is how Do we grow as much shared understanding of. And how do we treat difference as a resource you know and really listen into what people's concerns are with enough patience and enough trust and a good process you can come up with proposals That are really incredible that really satisfy a lot of different concerns.)
- Time 0:09:19
-

(highlight:: Traditional Hierarchy was Created to for a Good Reason: To Facilitate Coordination
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The reason that we structure our organizations in this way with like, you know, carrots and sticks and so on, is because coordinating is hard, and we've figured out that using this hierarchical Model is a kind of stable pattern. No one thinks it's well, most people don't think it's the best idea ever, but they're like, at least this works. And so if you're going to reject the traditional hierarchy and go a different way, you're going to have to do a lot of R&D, you're going to have to figure you're going to basically encounter A lot of challenges along the way, like, you know, how do you do decisions without spending hours and hours and hours on the most mundane stuff? And where does accountability come from if you don't have a boss that is can threaten you with punishment, you know, those are real difficult questions in my travels were encountering Lots of decentralized groups, I found them all, like we did with Lumio, like, I will throw out everything about organizing and say everyone in the past was wrong, we're going to invent Everything from scratch. The problem with inventing everything from scratch is that there's a whole bunch of organizing challenges, which each any one of them is big enough to completely destroy your enterprise. Like, if you don't have accountability, or if you don't know how to make decisions, or if you can't manage conflict, or if you can't manage your cash flow, like, there's a bunch of these Topics that if you don't get it right, you've got to die, your organization's going to die. So innovating on all fronts simultaneously is not very likely to succeed. And so what I was trying to do with my book, Patterns for Decentralized Organizing, is to say, look, these are sort of like the top 10 challenges that all decentralized organizations Face. And these are some of the things you can do about it. And I can't prescribe to you exactly like, you should just do this, you know, you should just structure your organization in this way. But these are the kind of the tools and the practices and the frameworks, you know, like the mental models that have made a difference for other organizations, you can try them out.)
- Time 0:30:42
-

(highlight:: Agile Decentralized Organizing: Prioritize creating "Good Vibes" and Continuously Iterate
Transcript:
Speaker 1
To get to the principles part, I think where I've landed is basically that, I guess one piece, this kind of maybe two, one piece is prioritise the vibe, like vibes is king or queen, monarch, Meaning the social fabric, the sense of connection, the sense of belonging and purpose, that is the thing that you can't do without. Like, you can run out of money, you can completely miss your product market fit, you can have a really difficult conflict or severe disagreements and all that sort of thing. But once you run out of trust, and once you run out of respect for each other, like, you're dead in the water, there's no coming back from that. And so the priority is how do we look after our relationships? How do we create working culture that feels awesome where people are respected and they know they're going to be taken care of? And if you prioritise that, then I believe that really good work happens as a result. So that's the first principle, prioritise the vibe. And then the second principle is just to iterate a lot. And not just like people are familiar with this and start up land of like, you do like agile product development. And so you make a rough prototype, and then you show it to some customers, and then you improve it a bit, and then you just keep looping and looping. It's basically applying that process to your organisational design, and saying like, okay, for the next month, we're going to do decisions in this way. And then at the end of the month, we're going to stop and review and iterate and say, well, what did we learn from that? And what's a little tweak that we could do for the next iteration? And when you have the first principle of like good relationships, and like a lot of trust and a sense of safety, where people are going to be transparent with each other, they're actually Going to communicate with candor. And then you run these iterative loops on how can we improve our ways of organising? Pretty quickly, you get into a self-correcting evolutionary pathway, you know, where the group can just kind of adjust its posture to meet whatever the challenges of the day. And it has just incredible resilience and flexibility.)
- Time 0:33:39
-

(highlight:: The Partnership-Domination Spectrum: A framework for thinking about group dynamics
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So one of the frameworks that has really helped my way of thinking is this idea of the partnership and domination spectrum from Leon Isla. And it's this idea that, like, it's an oversimplification, right? But it kind of says any human relationship, either between peers or like between countries, you know, at any scale. It can either, you can relate to someone as a partner or in the sort of domination submission relationship. So it's like either horizontal or vertical and into spectrum. So you can be more or less, you know, you can be like a little bit domineering or like a complete fascist, right? So there's a spectrum of options there. I think the vast majority of organizations that we see visibly through especially like the last sort of five or six thousand years of human history have scaled the domination model. And that's about really clear chain of command, really clear hierarchy. But a lot of that has come partly that's like a cultural thing and partly a psychological thing and a trauma thing. But it's also just information theory, you know, like when information was expensive to move around, it kind of made sense to organize everything into these departments and to have A really clear like information goes up, decisions come down that kind of made sense. But we're living through a transition now where networks are actually much more efficient than institutions. Information doesn't cost anything to move around. Everyone kind of access to everything. And so just that basic information theory side of things changes the game entirely. And like, yeah, you can talk to like activists and radicals like me and my friends, but you can also talk to the US Army, right? Like, I really recommend this book, Team of Teams by General Standing McClip McChrystal. And he explains like how big chunks of the US Army now operate on a completely decentralized model with like the smallest amount of hierarchy they can get away with. And it's all about pushing information and autonomy out to the edges. And the job of the people at the top of the hierarchy is kind of like spotting where the gaps are and asking good questions and making sure that things are not falling through. But they're not really calling the shots, it's like people on the edges are calling the shots because they have the best access to information. So like, I think just on that pure almost like computational layer, this kind of concrete, how does the information flow? How do we make good decisions? I think because of the way information technology is changing, we're going through a transformation and what's possible for different modes of organizing. So it's one dimension, but I guess the side that I've become more interested in is this like cultural psychological level, you know? So I'm definitely coming with a bias that I think this domination submission pattern is inferior to the partnership pattern. Like I'd rather be surrounded by peers who respect me. You know, partnership for me means we're different, we're not equal, we're not pretending to all be the same. We've all got different competencies, different strengths, different values, different perspectives. And partnership means that those different characters come together in a spirit of like mutual curiosity, mutual respect, spirit of exchange, and like, what can we learn from each Other? Whereas the domination submission model is like, you just rank who's the most important or who's the strongest or who's the richest, and you give the power to the people at the top of The ranking. Yeah, I just prefer, and I think a lot of people would prefer to be surrounded with partnership relationships rather than domination submission ones. And I think it's like the kind of common stories we tell about human history are all focused on this domination side of the spectrum. But I think there's pretty compelling evidence that it's not the only way that things have been done.)
- Time 0:38:02
-

(highlight:: Trauma from Dominant Organization Patterns Takes Time to Unlearn
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And I come from a loving family. It's great. I love my parents that love me, you know, it's not like I'm showing up with this like terrible story or something. But still, I was trained to obey. And sometimes that kind of parenting was completely focused on my growth and development and safety, and like they were putting boundaries in place because that's what kids need, You know, to be safe and to to grow healthy as they need some boundaries. But also sometimes it was just easier for my dad to say, well, I'm the boss, we do it my way. You don't get a say. And not just my dad, right? Like my teachers, the people in church, like my interactions with the state was like everywhere that I looked was there's someone else out there who calls the shots who tells me what I have to do. And if they are in a position of power, I can't disagree with them or else I'm going to be punished. And I think that leaves a significant amount of trauma on people. I think a lot of people are traumatized by having to go to school and having to ask to use the bathroom, you know, like what an absurd, what an absurd concept that I have to put my hand up and Say, Miss, I need a P, can I please, you know, and that's the norm. I'm not talking about drastic events that, you know, it's not like a was zone where you expect people to get PTSD. It's like just normal everyday life, I think is still traumatizing people. And so when people try and step out of that dominated mode where they say, okay, we're not going to do that, we're going to be more like democratic, more inclusive, more partnership oriented. We've still got all of our conditioning, all of our patterns that we learn, like I was basically trained to submit some of the time and then look for the opportunities where it's my turn To dominate. And that's like something that I learned since I was a baby, you know, it's not something that I can just switch off because they say, Oh, I'm in a co-op now, I'm going to stop doing that. It takes a lot more than that.)
- Time 0:42:56
-

(highlight:: Strategic Intervention in the Current Business Environment
Summary:
The current business environment is moving towards an increasingly atomized, financialized, and precarious world of work.
However, there are other currents pulling towards a more positive direction. It is essential to strategically intervene in the system without getting distracted by wishing for a different world or a different game.
This approach involves playing the game on its own terms, bringing in additional values, and reflecting ecological values to own a corner of the market.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
How do we jump into that system and do something that's so excellent, that plays the game on its own terms and also brings in a bunch of other values so that we own a corner of that market And it reflects ecological values. I think that's just like, such a great way of thinking about it, that there is a current, you know, that Western society at least is going in a certain direction, probably not just Western Society. And how do we intervene in a strategic way without wishing, you know, like getting distracted by wishing the world was different or wishing that we were playing a different game with Chess than we're currently playing. So that was inspiring for me. So I do think we are going for this thing, increasingly atomized, increasingly financialized, increasingly precarious world of work. And there are other currents happening at the same time, which pull much more towards the happy end of the spectrum. So like, when we were starting Lumio, it was kind of right as the wave of agile methodology. It was just starting to crest where all of the organizations in the know knew that they needed an agile coach and they needed an agile transformation. And a couple of years after we started, it really reached the saturation point where the market was just like overrun with shysters and people that were saying they knew about agile, But they didn't understand the first thing, they just read a few books. And now we're in this kind of, I guess the trough of disillusionment where a lot of people hear about agile, but they just associate it with the worst kind of management speak and it doesn't Work and it sucks.)
- Time 1:03:30
-

(highlight:: The Evolution of Agile and the Rise of Wellbeing
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And a couple of years after we started, it really reached the saturation point where the market was just like overrun with shysters and people that were saying they knew about agile, But they didn't understand the first thing, they just read a few books. And now we're in this kind of, I guess the trough of disillusionment where a lot of people hear about agile, but they just associate it with the worst kind of management speak and it doesn't Work and it sucks. And, you know, now I think there is something really profound in the agile manifesto and it's hard to scale and it's really nuanced and it comes from experience. But yeah, the market went through its hype and disillusionment cycle as it always does. Now, I think it's there's like another wave that's coming after that one. And I might be just like wishing this into existence, but it's what I see anyway, is that now people are talking about wellbeing and about mindfulness and about psychological safety. And it's really, there's this trend of paying attention to people's interior experience, which is quite new. I mean, the pandemic has been a big part of it as well. It's like suddenly everyone's working habit has been interrupted and it's like, oh, most of our staff have children and they have to deal with that. Like we've just ignored that and we've had these traditional gender roles that have made it easier to ignore that. You know, you just say, well, all the men will go to work and all the mothers will stay home and then we don't even think about it.)
- Time 1:04:35
-

(highlight:: Iterating on Bullshit: The Shift from Agile Management to Human-Centered Management
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Now I think there is something really profound in the agile manifesto and it's hard to scale and it's really nuanced and it comes from experience. But yeah, the market went through its hype and disillusionment cycle as it always does. Now, I think it's there's like another wave that's coming after that one. And I might be just like wishing this into existence, but it's what I see anyway, is that now people are talking about wellbeing and about mindfulness and about psychological safety. And it's really, there's this trend of paying attention to people's interior experience, which is quite new. I mean, the pandemic has been a big part of it as well. It's like suddenly everyone's working habit has been interrupted and it's like, oh, most of our staff have children and they have to deal with that. Like we've just ignored that and we've had these traditional gender roles that have made it easier to ignore that. You know, you just say, well, all the men will go to work and all the mothers will stay home and then we don't even think about it. But obviously that has been disintegrating for a long time as well. So there's like these different currents in society that are forcing us to consider the whole human being, not just their professional personality and this like small, smaller persona, Who is this human and what are they experiencing? Like on the inside as they go to work. And you have things like, you know, Google's Project Aristotle, which is this massive study of what makes an effective team. And the number one thing they can point to is what they call psychological safety, which is building on Amy Edmond's work from Harvard, which is like psychological safety is a shared Belief that this is a place where it's safe to take risks, like interpersonal risks, where I can be vulnerable, I can be real, I can be honest about what's going on. I can disagree with you, I can bring my ideas. There's like space to be different without losing my place in the team. Those kinds of qualities are all very sensitive vibes, equalities. And it's Google of all people saying, like that's the thing that makes the difference. That's how you build a high performing team. So I think that's the kind of, that could be the thing that comes after agile is the way that I frame it is think everyone kind of learned the lesson from agile, which is that iterative development Is the way to get good stuff cheap. But most organizations are iterating on bullshit because they have a culture of withholding and a culture of fear. People are not actually exchanging honest information with each other when they're going through those iterative looks. They're like butt kissing and butt covering and hiding as much as they can get away with. And so you're iterating on bullshit, it doesn't actually work. And so you need to be doing this iteration on top of a culture of honesty and safety and candor and mutual respect and so on. So I'm optimistic that there is, you know, like the next big wave in organizational thinking is all about how do we cultivate decent relationships where people come together as adults, You know, as peer to peer adults that they come in the spirit of partnership.)
- Time 1:04:59
- psychological safety, culture of fear, human-centered management, agile management, gartner hype cycle, organizational culture, humanocracy, culture of withholding, team culture, teamwork,