1176: How to Stay Effective Amidst Chaos with Melissa Swift

Pete Mockaitis
Melissa, welcome!

Melissa Swift
It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about “Effective: How to Do Great Work,” you know, being awesome at your job, being effective at your job are kind of similar, and we could debate the distinction. But could you maybe kick us off with a definition of effectiveness here?

Melissa Swift
Yeah, so I think effectiveness is getting done the things you really need to get done. There’s a ton of literature on kind of productivity that you can do all the things. And I don’t think effectiveness is about doing all the things. It’s about doing the things you really want to do to the standard you really want to do them and to the standard that others are happy with as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess I would imagine there’s also, perhaps, a dimension of, in a way, that doesn’t leave you bitter, burnt out, exhausted, furious, frustrated.

Melissa Swift
Absolutely. Because if it takes all of your energy to be effective for this period of time, what about the rest of the time?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I’m eager to get into the particulars of the how this is done. But could you perhaps kick us off with a cool story of someone who thoughtfully applied some of your insights and really cranked up their effectiveness?

Melissa Swift
So one story that I absolutely love, that, actually, I talk about in the book is the CIO of a company called Ferrovial. They’re doing the, I don’t know if you’ve flown through JFK Airport in last, you know, a year, a couple years, right, but there’s this massive renovation of JFK going on. And Ferrovial’s doing it.

And Dimitrius Bountolos, who’s the CIO of Ferrovial, one of kind of sort of his key pillars for dealing with chaos, which is a topic I talk about in the book, and I talk about the strategy, is this idea of, “What activities do you need to protect in a chaotic environment, right? What can you let go and what must you absolutely protect?”

So, you know, for instance, right, it’s been getting fairly hot here in New York in the summers, one activity they need to protect is they absolutely have to make sure, they’ve got like little mini data centers running as part of this massive renovation project, they have to make sure the air conditioning stays on.

And I love that simplicity and clarity of, “Okay, crazy environment, 20 zillion things going on, large-scale capital project at a live airport, and you know what we need to do? Air conditioning.” That level of focus and that level of clarity, I think, is really powerful.

And that’s what’s enabled them to keep the lights on during, again, a project at a complexity and at a level of stakes that, I think, many of us would be very intimidated by.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I was intimidated just imagining, beginning such a process or program.

Melissa Swift
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And that is a key thing, keep the air conditioning going. I suppose what might be harder for some is identifying, “Well, what can they really let go of?” “Yes, we have to have the air conditioning and the catering and the hydration station,” you know? So do you have any pro tips for how folks think through, well, what can they let go?

Melissa Swift
I think this is a good kind of role for scenario planning, to be honest, you start to just think about it, like, “Okay, that’s critical, that’s critical, that’s critical.” Okay, well, scenario plan it out.

Let’s say you let this piece drop. What’s going to happen? What might happen? What is not just what you think is going to happen, but what are a few different scenarios that might happen? If you really pressure-test all of this stuff, you might say, “Well, okay, if I don’t do that initiative, oh, my gosh, this very senior person is going to get angry at me.”

Or, scenario two, they might not notice. Or, scenario three, somebody else might notice that you appropriately prioritized the task they were advocating for, etc. So just doing that kind of pressure-testing on different scenarios of how things might play out, I think, sometimes helps us, like, overcome our anxious mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So the scenarios you’re imagining are, “If this element just disappeared, got no love attention whatsoever, what are the consequences?” And sometimes you see, “Well, the consequences are absolutely catastrophic,” versus the consequences are, “Oh, someone is a little bit miffed.” It’s like, “Hmm, okay, well, that one is much more severe than the other.”

Melissa Swift
Absolutely. And our psychology plays tricks on us, right, especially if, you know, I talk about people having kind of different things that might make them effective, in the book. So if the thing that makes you effective is dealing with people, you might intuitively have this response about, “Oh, gosh, I cannot get people mad at me, right, because my human connections are so important.”

But you have to be able to take that step back and say, “Well, what are the actual other scenarios, and might there be some where it’s not just about people feeling bad, it’s like there are concrete bad events that might result?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s great in terms of we go from the general to the specific. And I, too, really like my relationships and good agreeableness. And every once in a while, though, I encounter a situation where it’s like, “You know what? Even if this relationship were utterly destroyed in the course of this series of conversations, I would be okay with that if I got what I want. And even if they were to scream that they hate me every time my name is uttered in their presence.”

Now this is, again, is scenario planning. It’s extreme. I don’t think this has ever happened to anybody, and rare, but it’s good to take that stock of, in this particular circumstance, perhaps the people relationship-y matters are not the number one consideration.

Melissa Swift
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you’ve got four areas, and before we sort of tick into each of them, could you share with us kind of your big message of Effective? How do we do great work in a fast changing world?

Melissa Swift
I think it’s two things. I think, number one, understand what makes you good at your job. And those are the four things that we’ll get into in a second. But this fundamental thing of, “What actually makes me decent at the work I do?” I think it’s gotten really lost in our contemporary context that it’s all like, “You must have these 20 emerging skills and these 17 things,” and it’s exhausting, it’s overwhelming. It’s like, “No, basic, basic stuff. What makes you good at your job?”

And then, number two, I think you need to know what you’re up against in contemporary working contexts and just have some plans, have some strategies. So I talk about chaos, which we already spoke about.

Hyper transparency is an interesting one. There’s all this information floating around organizations and like, “What do you do?” Work intensification. Work has simply gotten more overloaded in recent years. And then also work has gotten very emotional as well. And I hear a lot from people who are really grappling with that.

And so if you know, “Okay, this is kind of the current set of stuff we’re up against,” and you know what makes you good at your job, a lot of the battle is fought, you know? It’s not everything, but day to day, you’re kind of like, “All right, this is what I got to amplify, and this is what I’ve got to combat.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well said in terms of fast-changing world chaos, yeah. And not to be the introduction to every business book ever, “But today, everything is different and it’s so hard.” And so, yeah, I mean, there’s certainly truth to that with new technologies and AI and yada, yada. Tell me about work becoming more emotional in recent times. What’s this about?

Melissa Swift
This is an interesting one. I think some of it is, and a big theme of the book, honestly, is that, I think work goes through cycles and we’re just at kind of like a tricky point in a cycle right now. And a lot of it relates to technology, and this is a good and a bad thing, you know?

And the good part is we have these amazing technologies and they, like, save people’s lives and they enable us to do all these incredible things, but technology, also, is gumming up the works in certain ways.

And a big part of where it’s gummed up the works is kind of in the communication realm. I mean, I quote some crazy stats in the book that something like 85% of emails contain some form of misunderstanding or miscommunication. And that’s nutty. That’s just absolutely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

But what happens when we have all this sort of weird electronically intermediated communication, the emails and the Teams chats and the texts and the pings, and a lot of crossed wires and misunderstanding is it ends up, there’s this weird paradoxical thing where all of this flat electronic communication, people get really stirred up and emotional.

And then you combine that with, again, some stuff, like the world is at a weird cycle point, too. You know, we’ve got a lot of sort of political polarization, a lot of geopolitical conflict, a lot of, you know, again, the environment is going through kind of a weird moment by certain measures, we’re at a moment equivalent to like the late ‘60s or something. There’s a lot going on.

And put those two trends together, and you’ve just got these very emotionally stirred up workplaces. And it absolutely takes a toll on people. I mean, again, this is one I just hear about a lot. And I think it’s worth consciously taking a step back and saying, “Okay, well, I do feel like I walk into an emotional house on fire every day. What am I going to do about that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, what do we do about that and doing great work, in general, in this chaos?

Melissa Swift
So, number one, part of what we need to do to kind of minimize, like, the emotional load in the workplace is very, very simple. I interviewed a professor from UVA, Jim Detert, who’s an absolute guru to me, and he studies civility in the workplace, how we actually get along in sensible ways.

And one of the things he said was, by the time somebody’s upset or yelling or emotional or crying, they’ve usually tried to express that message before in a quiet and calm fashion. And you know what happened? When they did that originally, is nobody listened.

So if we can do a better job at listening to and picking up on even messages we don’t love to hear, right, or bad news, disconcerting stuff, stuff that you might want to brush away, that minimizes the number of people who will, then, end up coming to you really emotionally stirred up.

Again, it doesn’t solve for everything, but I think there are some of these little tips and tricks that if we took a step back, and the first time somebody tries to deliver a message, really heard them and said, “Okay, I hear you. I’m going to do X, Y, and Z,” didn’t dismiss them, then we get hit with those emotional aftershocks a lot less.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, okay. That’s great for the emotional side of things, is if we are proactively listening hard, we are less likely to encounter subsequent blow-ups. That makes sense. Can you share with us the overarching approach you recommend for being effective in the fast-changing world?

Melissa Swift
So, number one, know your job. And it sounds silly, you know, okay? When you signed up whenever that was five minutes ago, five years ago, fifty years ago, you know, you got a job description. Those job descriptions, A, are usually not that fabulous in the way they’re written.

But, number two, they change in real life, in real time. And, again, especially with a lot of technological change in the equation a lot. And then you get things like mergers and acquisitions, company restructurings, re-orgs. Our jobs change.

So, number one, take a second and think through your job from the point of view of all the different people who encounter it. So what does your boss think your job is? What does your customer think your job is? If there are people who are your peers, what do they think your job is?

Are there people who are doing the same job as you completely differently? Which happens a ton, especially in large organizations, but honestly in every organization. So, number one, do some thinking about what your job is.

Number two, what makes you good at your job? So is it knowledge, right? Do you just have this amazing kind of storehouse of facts and insights in your head? Is it methods? Are you like a great operator? Are you just great at operationally putting all this stuff together and getting things done?

Are you great at relating to people, right? Are you good at managing people and navigating stakeholders, all that stuff? Or are you great with technology? And, you know, most of us are some combination of those four things, but you know, we pretty much all have one kind of bigger spike.

So once you know, “Okay, this is my job, this is what makes me good at it,” and then those four forces we talked about, the chaos and the emotion, blah, blah, blah, “What is potentially impeding my effectiveness?” And again, different workplaces, some workplaces might be very high on chaos. Some workplaces, honestly, hyper transparency might be more of a struggle.

And then you get effects between those, that sometimes hyper-transparency, if everyone talks about everything all the time and nobody knows the quality of each other’s information, that can cause chaos, for instance, but it’s kind of that multi-step.

And then, finally, the sort of the fourth step that I talk about in the book is there may be times when you cannot be effective at your job, and then you have to figure out what to do from there. And there are a zillion pathways there, starting with, talk to your boss about how your vision of your job might differ from theirs.

Talk to a mentor. Seek out other roles in the same organization. There’s a lot of different non-dramatic ways that, if your job is truly one you cannot be effective in, and I’ve list a whole set of criteria for that, that you can kind of change the game there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. There’s so much goodness here. I’m intrigued by the notion of what makes you good at your job. And you’ve proposed four elements. I’m imagining, in so far as you have the, assuming, equal levels of enthusiasm, drive, motivation, hustle, like hours to pour into something, assuming that those are constant, you know, between two different people, yeah, I mean, it feels pretty good with regard to, “These are the four superstructure, macro categories by which we could be effective or ineffective.”

And I think, maybe, individual people come to mind with regard to, “Well, that person has high knowledge, they’ve got low knowledge. They’ve got high-people ability, they got low-people ability.” So could you elaborate upon, for a sentence or two or three, each of these elements what precisely do you mean by it? Like, how is knowledge different than methods, for example?

Melissa Swift
So knowledge, it’s really about the stuff behind the stuff. So I’ll use a concrete example, right? So you could have two chefs, and one has got this incredible knowledge of, like, the chemistry behind cooking, right, like molecular gastronomy and oil’s boiling points and stuff like that, right?

Another one is just really good at kind of intuitively figuring out when things need to sort of like shift off the burner, how to do kind of the mise en place, so like the timing is right. It’s all of these kind of very, like, operational elements. And they could both be great chefs, but their source of greatness is wildly different. And, oftentimes, great kitchens will have a mixture of those archetypes.

I quote in the book, I quote a scene from “The Breakfast Club” where it’s, I forget, it’s like the criminal guy and the nerdy guy. And they’re arguing, about the nerdy guy is complaining that he got an F in a shop class because his lamp wouldn’t, like, turn on, right? It’s the only bad grade he ever got, you know?

And so he’s explaining to, like, the criminal guy, he’s like, “Do you understand how much the theory of electricity and the trigonometry that, you know, blah, blah, blah goes behind, you know, that without all that, there would be no electricity?” And the criminal guy goes, “Well, without lamps, there would be no light.”

And those are kind of the two different archetypes, right, between knowledge and methods. The knowledge people understand the electricity and the atoms and all of that, and the methods people are good at making lamps, and you need both.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, while we’re talking about recipes, and I’m thinking about “Breaking Bad” as I often do, you know, and there’s one scene where – I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but it’s been a while for a while, I’d recommend it. It’s the best.

So our protagonist has deep, profound knowledge of chemistry, and he’s making meth. And then he thinks that he’s, like, irreplaceable because of his tremendous knowledge. And then this guy who’s just been watching them in the meth lab for a while just starts doing it. And he’s like, “It’s a recipe.”

So that’s what’s crystallizing for me – crystal, ha, ha – between knowledge, you know, Walter White versus method, “Hey, just follow the recipe,” that difference there. And, I guess, in some ways, to be effective or awesome, these things really do flow into each other. You know what I’m saying?

Like, your knowledge can be translated somewhat into methods, which can be transferred somewhat to people, and a portion of which could be transferred into software or technological incarnations of that. So there’s a bit of a fluidity interchange among them.

Melissa Swift
Absolutely. And some of it is, like, you don’t want to get too intellectualized about it. What I recommend in the book is, “How are people interfacing with you?”

So, for instance, there’s actually, this is hilarious because researchers have documented this. There’s a phenomenon of becoming the informal IT person for your office, right? You are not in the IT department, you are not the help desk, you are doing some totally other job, and you become the de facto IT person.

And it’s, oftentimes, in the research, they describe it as well, it’s like, you know, it’s that like Alaska, remote Alaska office, and there’s no one else. But it happens in a lot of, like, big complex offices, too, in far less remote locations. And so that’s when you got to say, take a step back, and say, “Okay, well, you know what? I might be good at technology.”

And it’s a funny one because, a lot of times, people will not describe themselves as being good at technology. And then you say, “Okay, well, have people ever treated you like IT support?” And they’re like, “Yeah, all the time. All day long, everyone’s bugging me, ‘How do you use this? How do you use that?’”

Well, you have some chops that you may not have given yourself credit for. And that’s why it’s important to kind of look at, “How is the world interfacing with you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I’m thinking that’s so true that, often, when it comes to strengths, we undervalue them just because they’re easy for us, it’s just like, “Well, I don’t know why everyone else is just such an idiot when it comes to their laptops?” It was like, “Hint. Hint. You have a strength, a gift, some talent in the zone of technology ability, and you didn’t even know it just because it seems pretty easy to you. You don’t even know if you would call it that.”

And what’s funny, I’m thinking about my buddy Kwame, who’s been on the podcast a couple of times, says, “I buy what Pete buys because I know Pete has done an outrageous amount of research on any purchase that he makes.”

And so it’s a joke, but he’s done it again and again and again. And so in that zone, I suppose it’s a bit of knowledge, it’s a bit of methods in terms of, my method is I obsessively research a thing in tremendous detail. And by doing so, I acquire knowledge and I say, “This is the thing I love.” And then Kwame just takes the shortcut, and says, “Okay, I’m buying it.”

Melissa Swift
That’s what my late father used to do that with ordering off the menu that I had. In general, I’m a knowledge person, but when it comes to menus, I’m very intuitive. I’m just, like, I can spot descriptions of things that are going to taste good. I don’t know, it’s in a different part of my brain.

But my dad used to just, yeah, whatever I would order, he would order the same thing. I think it was after, like, years of him just eating my food off my plate and me telling him, “You got to order your own thing,” and it evolved into that. But, yeah, same approach, right. The world is giving you feedback about something you’re doing well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So when we follow these broad steps, hey, we know our job and we know it, not just what the original job description said, but in terms of how our boss would describe it, how our peers would describe it, what it’s looking like right here and right now. I’m curious, do you have any pro tips on knowing better what your job is, if you have perhaps made some assumptions?

Melissa Swift
Yeah, so the interesting thing is the federal government actually maintains a database of all jobs called O*NET. And there’s, like, a certain fraction of, I’ll say O*NET to an audience and occasionally somebody will, like, sit up in their seat, right, because it’s a really cool database. It contains, basically, every job, you know, “What does this job do?”

So one thing you can do is go into O*NET and, literally, if you’re having one of those, “Am I losing my mind? I feel like this job is the weirdest version of this job possible,” you can actually look at, like, the government account of your job and say, “Okay, well, all right, this sounds nothing like that.”

I’m also a big fan of the talk to your peers, talk to the extent that you can do so without giving away trade secrets. Talk to your peers at other organizations. That can be very telling. Organizations can get super idiosyncratic about what it means to be a financial analyst or something that sounds completely generic.

Within a particular organization, they can end up with a strange version of that. So, again, don’t give away any trade secrets, but talk to people at other organizations. You can go back to the job description you were hired to.

Now, do I think that will be a useful conversation where you march into your boss’s office waving your job description? Like, no, of course not, but it can at least give you some language to say, “Okay, well, you know, is this aspect of the role being neglected or something like that?”

It’s just giving you, I think, the key thing is just have something to hold it up against. You need some alternate version of something to make the comparison, because that’s where we go wrong. We start to ruminate about, “Is this the right way to…oh, I just don’t even know.”

And the second you start comparing it, either you’ll say, “Okay, well, no, you know, the federal government, I don’t agree with this version of the job, right? I think the way my company does it is better.” Or, “OSomebody working for my competitor is working half the hours I’m working because they don’t have all this weird stuff loaded in, you know?”

But it gives you something to react to. Basically, you have to go out and find some account of your job, either through a person or in a documented way, to at least start just making comparisons. And to do that, by the way, you also have to be honest with yourself about what you do all day, which is something that many of us struggle with.

And to do that, you almost want to do your own little time and motion study, right? These are the famous, you know, from like the 1800s of like, “Okay, then the factory worker puts like the brick here,” or whatever. Just write down for a day what you do. Do that across a week.

I think many of us would be shocked, and there are some good effectiveness insights just from doing that, because you may say, “I thought my job was this, but actually, I’m spending my time on this, and I forget any other accounts of the job. I don’t think this is what I should be doing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, no, we love time diaries here. Laura Vanderkam has been on the show a couple of times talking about it, loving it. And so that’s good. So we had a really clear sense of what is the job, and I think within that, we want to get a sense of, thusly, “So what does good look like? And what does bad look like? And what does, like, okay look like in practice?”

Melissa Swift
Yeah, absolutely. And, again, separating that from our own emotional constructs around that, because I think sometimes what trips us up is the things that feel good to do aren’t necessarily the things that really hit outcomes properly.

So, for example, I think many folks in managerial roles, it feels good to overload yourself because you’re like, “I’m busy. I’m really busy. I’m doing all the things. I’m, like, in it to win it.” That feels good emotionally. I mean, of course, until it doesn’t, until you burn out, you’re exhausted, you can’t do anything. But until that point, right, to a lot of people that feels great, “I’m crushing it.”

Whereas, what would actually drive outcomes is to say, back to our discussion about, “What are the activities I absolutely must protect?” is to say, “Okay, well, you know, these three things are the core of what my next six months are about. And I’m just going to really lean into those. I’m going to let some other stuff drop.”

And you have to live through that moment of, “Ugh, that doesn’t intuitively feel good to me, but I’ve made this agreement with myself that these are the outcomes I’m seeking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s nice. Okay. Well, so in the midst of the fast-changing world, can you give us the quick rundown of work intensification, emotional inflection, hyper-transparency, sheer chaos? What’s the deal there? And what are your best tips on how we can keep our cool?

Melissa Swift
Well, I’ll start with work intensification because, probably, out of those terms, that’s one of the ones people will be less intuitively familiar with. Although, once I describe it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

So work intensification, there was a great study out of the EU a few years ago that defined it, and it defined it in three pillars. First pillar, too many tasks in too little time, right? We have all been there.

Second pillar, excess interdependence. And I love this one because I think it’s an addressable lever both for individuals and for the companies they work for. But we often don’t, we just sort of don’t think about it this way. This one was a big aha for me.

So interdependence is when you depend on too many other people to get any one thing done. And I did some research last year, and people actually feel more effective when they can work with a smaller circle of people on any given task. And sometimes that’s not always within your control. I don’t want to pretend that’s always within your control, but sometimes it is.

And it’s great to look for those opportunities where, if you set as your mental goal, “My goal is actually to work more independently,” which, again, that might feel weird or countercultural, or like we’ve all been beaten over the head to collaborate as much as you can.

You say, “Actually, I’m going to prioritize independent work because I know I’m already at a very high level of collaboration.” That can be really game-changing for that excess interdependence one.

And then the third pillar of work intensification, which I actually treat separately in the book because it’s got its own ball of wax, is just excess emotion at work. And that can show up a lot of different ways.

You could be at a tech company where teams regularly bicker with each other, or you could be a frontline worker in a healthcare environment where patients routinely yell at you, right? There’s a lot of different ways to be emotionally saturated. So that kind of covers those two.

I think chaos is fairly self-explanatory. In the book, I do talk about two types of chaos, that there’s just the natural chaos of the world, right, like, Komodo dragon exerts a breath and a volcano goes off halfway around the world, kind of stuff. That just is. That’s just a part of life.

And then there’s actually chaotic ways of operating, which you employ different strategies to defend against, right? So for the chaos of the world, you might say, “Okay, I’m going to figure out my activities to protect.”

When people are operating chaotically, you might say, “I actually need to protect my personal boundaries. So I’m going to do things like if I have a coworker who I know is totally chaotic, and meetings always go upside down with them. You know what? That coworker is no longer allowed to meet with me on Friday afternoons because I am emotionally exhausted at that point, I don’t have anything left to give. And, by the way, I need to, deal with family dinner at 5:30. So if the meeting goes on forever, right, that’s going to mess up my whole work-life integration.”

So that’s the chaos one. And then, finally, hyper-transparency is just an interesting consequence, again, of a more data and information-driven world. That if you think about it, if you were a CEO in 1955, a lot of how you sort of had control over your corporation was you had this giant information advantage. You knew so much that your workers didn’t know.

Today, not as much, that a lot of times, especially within a particular team, the workers on the team, like, will know more than our bosses know, because, you know, there’s 20 zillion data feeds coming in, 20 zillion dashboards, everyone’s on Teams pinging each other, everyone’s texting. We’re floating in information.

And, in general, a lot of that’s good. It’s good to have more information, except sometimes you learn things you didn’t want to know. So look at what’s happened with pay transparency, right, that you know, “Okay, oh, my gosh, they just posted for a job similar to mine, and the pay is twice what I make,” you know, things like that.

And so it’s emotionally tricky to live in a more transparent work world. You might find out things about your boss on social media. You don’t necessarily want to know all this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, no doubt there, it’s a tricky world and these things are happening. So tell us, what do we do about it?

Melissa Swift
Well, I think, for hyper-transparency, one of my big tips is just kind of be a fiend for the truth. And you can’t stay completely out of that information soup. It used to be, you know, it was like, “Well, I’ll stay out of office gossip.” And I would say, you know, to the extent possible, but also you might miss key information if you’re not communicating with people.

But being a little bit intense about, “Okay, you just told me something as if it was a fact. Where did you get your information from? Okay, where did that person get their information from, right? Is this written down anywhere?”

So just being a little bit obnoxious about whether the facts and data that are coming to you at work are actually facts and data, “Okay, well, look, this dashboard says you’re down 17%.” “Okay, well, what’s the source of that data?” I’ve been personally in situations.

I once had someone have to call me up and apologize and say, you know, “We just tried to hold you accountable for the entire performance of the Atlanta office, and you only have three team members there.” It’s like, “Okay, you know, fair enough. Thank you for that. But, you know, it was at the time in the meeting, it was, ‘This is the data, Melissa. What are you going to do about it?’” And I think we all have a lot of those moments.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we can all see that. Okay, so when you say be a fiend for the truth, tell me more about that. Because at times, I find, for me as a super curious individual, that’s been suboptimal in moments of, for example, with the news.

I hear something that sounds not quite right. And, by golly, I’m going to get to the bottom of it. And I’ve done this many times. And so it’s like 40 minutes later, I feel like I have a deep, thorough, nuanced understanding of the matter.

But it’s like, “Wait, who cares? Why? Why did I invest that time in doing that?” So this, I’m a fiend for the truth at times indiscriminately, not a selective fiend. So tell us, how do we apply our truth fiend tendencies and how do we not?

Melissa Swift
I think some of it is just having kind of, if your standard basic question is, “Where did that information come from?” you know, a lot of times that’ll cover it, and you don’t have to, to your point, go down a 40-minute rabbit hole, you know?

Because the part of it is you’re trying to drown out some noise that organizations today, there’s the possibility to, like, really swirl on things because, again, of just the constant chatter that, if you’re in a group chat with dozens of people, which is not uncommon at this point in history, and people are constantly like coming at you with, “Ooh, this is going to happen, this is going to happen, and did you know this was going on?”

And some of it is you need to know what to just absolutely ignore and not think about again. And, to your point, save yourself some time with the rabbit hole. So just being able to pick your rabbit holes, you need kind of a screener question. And my screener question is always, “Where did that information come from?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. And I’m finding that more and more. I am getting a bit more, shall I say, assertive in my decision-making even though no one else is around. I’m looking at, like, a headline or a YouTube title thumbnail, it’s like, “I definitively choose not to care about that at all. Next.”

Melissa Swift
Same. I do the same thing. I do the same thing, “I’m just going to scroll right on by that one, as triggering as it is.” But I think that’s what you have to do in that. Part of what what’s going on here is the world is designed to trigger us more.

And at work, we’re all kind of trying to get each other’s attention all the time, and we’re all trying to interrupt each other all the time. That’s one of the most interesting facets of, especially, modern knowledge work to me.

You don’t get this dynamic in a warehouse or a manufacturing plant. They’re not all trying to interrupt each other, right, because that would be actually physically dangerous. But in knowledge work, right, we are just constantly, “Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, let me interrupt you. You interrupt me.”

And some of it is, in the book, I actually talk about, there’s an emergency room physician, Dr. Rebecca Parker, who I interviewed, and she talks about, she had to get good at being interrupted. That was an actual skill that she developed. And for her, it was just about knowing the points in a task when you can and can’t safely stop.

So if somebody interrupts her before she’s written down all the notes from the patient she just saw, she’s just like, “Nope! Whoop! Nope! Don’t talk to me yet,” finishes the notes, “Okay, now you can talk to me.”

And I love that because, you know, that’s sort of the nature of the modern workplace. And the more we have strategies like that, the more we can feel like we’re just in control of what’s happening with us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, could you give us your top most favorites, strategies, tactics, approaches that make a world of difference?

Melissa Swift
I think another strategy I really like, on the hyper-transparency front, is just being a bit simple about things. So think about a wall in your house. If it’s super minimalist, there’s one painting on it, it’s pretty easy to keep clean, right?

If you got shelves of knick-knacks, right, you’re dusting, you’re doing all this stuff, it’s the same with when transparency happens. So if you’ve got all this complex, weird stuff going on behind the scenes at work and you got all these little intrigues and office politics and you’re doing strange things, and then somebody finds out about it, because people find out about all kinds of stuff at this point in history, it’s a lot to explain.

So just having less to explain, I think, is a powerful strategy because it works well for hyper-transparency, but it also works well for chaos and work intensification and all that. Just being like sort of, “I’m going to Marie Kondo my work life.” That one, I just think, has a lot of power across a lot of situations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Melissa Swift
So I’m not going to get it right verbatim, but there’s a quote from Dr. Richard Feynman, who is this illustrious physicist who was the part of the Manhattan Project, and he talks about the diabolical thing with computers. And remember, he’s talking about like punch card computers at this point, right? This is like mid-20th century type computers.

It’s like, “The diabolical thing about computers is you play with them, it’s intriguing with the ones and the zeros.” And what I like about that quote is he’s talking about enjoying technology, which is something we could stand to do more of at work.

And we would also just get a lot more done and be a lot more effective if we could get back to that place of, “I enjoy the technology I work with.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Melissa Swift
There’s a study out of Germany that talks about different kinds of systems. So they talk about naturally occurring systems, and that’s, like, the water cycle, like actual things in nature. And those just work. They’re amazing.

And then they talk about engineered systems. Those are the systems that, you know, humans build, right, the interstate highway system, you know, something like that. And then they talk about, and this is very common in organizations, slipped systems. So you built the system to do this, but actually it’s kind of not doing that. It’s doing something else.

And so I always mash that up with the Stafford Beer systems thinking, you know, the purpose of a system is what it does, right? I think about how many organizations are dealing with slipped systems that, “Okay, performance management is supposed to operate this way and we’re all supposed to be doing this, but we end up doing this because it kind of pushed us in the wrong direction,” or something like that.

And I think it’s a great insight, again, to have as an individual is, “Okay, I’m dealing with a slipped system.” And that gives you that nice moment of awareness of, “I’m going to stop thinking that, like, I’m the problem in every possible way. And I’m going to start saying, ‘Okay, how do I better grapple with a system that’s not perfect?’”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Melissa Swift
I’m going to forget the author’s name, but The Warmth of Other Suns, which is about the Great Migration, and I love it because, in some ways, it’s about kind of individual worker agency because it completely reshaped the American economy. Completely. But it was a bunch of individuals saying, “I don’t like how I’m treated in this society. But a lot of times, I don’t like how I’m treated at my job. And I’m going to make changes that are going to make my life better.”

And, for me, that’s a big theme, and it doesn’t have to be that you leave that job and you move geographically. It can be really micro stuff, but having that moment of agency and saying, “I want my life at work to be different than it is exactly right now,” that’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Melissa Swift
So you can find me on LinkedIn where I’m very active. You can find me at my company’s website, AnthromeInsight.com. I have a small presence on Instagram and a burgeoning presence on TikTok as well. But first line of contact, LinkedIn is always fabulous.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome or effective at their jobs?

Melissa Swift
Figure out what you’re great at and lean in on that and ignore some of the rhetoric about kind of, like, “Oh, human workers are very endangered these days,” and just figure out what you’re amazing at and be in that space. That’s a great starting point for anyone.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Melissa, thank you.

Melissa Swift
Thank you.