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Nov 28
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820: How to Embrace Tensions for Better Decision-Making with Marianne Lewis

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Marianne Lewis shows how to turn tensions into opportunities for growth.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why to never ask yourself “Should I…?” 
  2. How to find and benefit from the yin and yang of everything
  3. The three steps for better decision-making 

About Marianne

Marianne W. Lewis is dean and professor of management at the Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati. She previously served as dean of Cass (recently renamed Bayes) Business School at City, University of London, and as a Fulbright scholar. A thought leader in organizational paradoxes, she explores tensions and competing demands surrounding leadership and innovation.

Lewis has been recognized among the world’s most-cited researchers in her field (Web of Science) and received the Paper of the Year award (2000) and Decade Award (2021) from the Academy of Management Review. She enjoys her three children and two grandchildren from her home base in Cincinnati. 

Resources Mentioned

Marianne Lewis Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Marianne, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Marianne Lewis
Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. We’re talking about Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems. I like so much those words. So, can you kick us off with maybe a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about problem-solving from all of your research and teaching here?

Marianne Lewis
Pete, I’ve been studying tensions, competing demands, that tug-of-war we feel in our hearts, whether it’s dealing with strategy, dealing with our lives, dealing with teams, for about 25 years. And I think the big aha and the reason I spent two-plus decades doing this was early in my career when I realized that our default is to this either/or thinking, that we get into this challenge, and we say, “Geez, do I spend my energy on work or life? Do I think about my performing and hitting my current targets or do I need to step back and learn and look around?”

And in this either/or approach, we weigh the pros and cons of these two sides and we make a choice and we think we can move on. Sometimes that can work if these are really simplistic issues but most times, either/or thinking is really limiting. It’s, “Are we really limited to only two?” Or, worse, when you start to kind of play that out, you go down this rabbit hole of saying, “Well, wait a minute, if I put all my energy into hitting my current targets, that would be great. I would excel, I would have lots to show on my resume, I would’ve proven my worth. But then life could change around me and I wouldn’t be ready. I’d be flatfooted.”

“But if all I did was…” So, let’s go to the other one, “If I really focus on learning, and I’m in higher-ed and I love learning, but if that was all I did, would I really make an impact? Would I make sure I’m applying what I’m learning in process?” And so, you get into this, you get stuck because what you really need is you need both. And so, what my work originally kind of focused on and the aha was we’re limited in our thinking, in our default. The good news is there’s a better way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is good news. And so, if that is our default, I imagine it’d be quite possible that we’re doing it and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. That’s what often happens with defaults.

Marianne Lewis
That it’s really automatic.

Pete Mockaitis
So, could you maybe give us a few rapid-fire examples to shake us out of it a little bit? It’s like, “Here’s what I mean by both/and versus either/or, and just notice that there might be more to things than first meets the eye.”

Marianne Lewis
Yeah, I’ll give you a classic example. We talked to people who’ll say, “Boy, I’m not crazy about the work I’m doing right now. So, do I stay or do I go?” And you’re kind of seeing a little clash as you’re thinking about that. But, again, you don’t really have to decide black and white, “Do I stay or do I leave this job?” You could also say, the both/and approach is, “Well, what do I like about what I do? What do I not like about what I do? Are there ways that I could either, personally and/or with my supervisor, talk about I need more of this and less of this? And how do I have those kinds of conversations?”

Or, vice versa, if I say, “Boy, what I don’t have this in job is what I’m starting to realize is what I truly want in life.” Well, it’s not just then going. It’s getting much sharper about what you want. If not, you’ll be in this grass-is-always-greener. You’ll get there and go, “How did I get…? Wait, this isn’t it either.”
And it’s kind of a constant flipping.

So, to us, both/and is about really diving into both sides of the equation, and saying, “At its best, what does each side bring? And at its worst, if that was all I did, what’s the problem there?” Because it’s through that kind of thinking you realize, “Okay, I could get more creative here.” And now it’s not a stay or go. It’s, “Let’s really dig into what do I want in my work.”

So, I use that example, Pete, because I think we’ve had, in some ways, kind of a global existential crisis during the pandemic. We’ve got a lot of people thinking, “Is this really what I want to be doing?” and questioning, and sometimes questioning in two simplified a way of, “Do I just leave?” you know, the Great Resignation. And then you find, I mean, we’re seeing this already in research that the Great Resignation has a lot of people not any happier in their second one because they haven’t thought through that fully what they want and what they don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you, that’s powerful, Marianne. And I was just about to challenge a little bit in terms of, “Well, ultimately, aren’t you either staying or going?” I mean, you could, of course, optimize, and finetune, and change, and have some good conversations about how to improve where you are, although that’s sort of a subset, I would say, if we’re going to nitpick about definitions of staying. But I guess what you’re putting forward here is, just by framing it that way, you’re missing out.

Marianne Lewis
Yeah, I think framing, that’s what…Wendy Smith is my co-author in the book and long-time research colleague. We think framing is hugely important, and it starts with really both/and thinking, starts with changing the kinds of questions we ask. That classic either/or question starts with, typically, a word like “do,” “Do I…?” “Do I stay or go?” versus a more typical both/and question that starts with “how,” “How would I make the most of what I like and where I am? And what am I missing? And how would I find a new combination?” because there are lots of combinations possible.

And you’re right, it still could sound like stay or go, but let me give you a couple of examples because Wendy and I worked with a variety of people who have gone through this one. It could also decide, “Well, maybe what I’m going to do is I’m going to stay for now, and I’m going to build a three- to six-month plan so that leaving means a much better view of what do I really need. And how do I leave in a way that doesn’t leave my team in a lurch or feel like I’ve been disloyal?”

If you unpack that stay-or-go challenge, you find that there are lots of other challenges within it that are going to make us lean towards one side or the other, and we’re going to have to deal with those if we’re going to really make a decision that has some lasting power and some creativity to it, for that matter.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really powerful because I think we could really feel the urgency and the, well, tension associated with, “Oh, well, I need to reach a decision, and, ultimately, these are the only categories that we could fall into.” And, yet, by taking that pathway of either/or, we miss out on surfacing what’s really most important, what are some cool options beyond that, and then how do we get there.

So, I really like that notion of just check yourself if you’re asking a question “Do I…?” as opposed to “How…” that puts you down some different pathway. So, can you expand upon those in terms of what are some either/or-style questions or things to be on the lookout for and their both/and counterparts?

Marianne Lewis
Well, I’ll give you an interesting version of this. Sometimes people can ask, “Do I focus on the financial benefits of my job or the work that I’m doing, like grow the money, grow the profit, grow the margins, or do I focus on the social responsibility, my impact, how do I better the world?” Do you have a business school? I can’t stand that question because they should be synergistic and we’ve seen amazing leaders learn how to do both. But they changed that question to, “How can I grow my profits through social responsibility?”

That was a question posed by Paul Polman when he was turning around Unilever, and his goals were to double the profits while having their environmental footprint, and people said, “You’re crazy. That’s not how it works. The bigger you are the more damage you do.” And he said, “No, we touch two billion consumers a day at Unilever. We can’t afford that.”

And I actually just had an executive in my office who ran Gerber clothing, for children’s clothes, and he said, “Clothing is notorious for being unsustainable. We throw away billions of pounds, let alone tons of wasted clothing.” Unilever and Paul, who’s such a both/and thinker we study and write about him in the book, but this leader was talking about at Gerber, too, is you start to realize, actually, by being sustainable, you reduce wastes, you’re more efficient. By the way, that means you reduce costs which increases profit.

And, by being socially responsible, you have a whole host of customers who say, “I have choices,” and you will have customers say, “I’m going to choose, I would rather choose a firm that’s sustainable.” And, by the way, as we’ve seen from lots of these same firms, we actually have investors who will eventually, and this is happening increasingly, say, “I actually want to invest in more sustainable firms.”

And so, here are these questions of, “Do I focus on the financial and my social responsibilities?” and maybe not as quickly as we like, but it is becoming a moot point. The leaders of Toyota were saying this with quality and costs. In the ‘80s, they practically put the American auto manufacturers out of business because we were sitting there, going, “Oh, no, it doesn’t work that way. The higher the quality, the higher the costs.” And they said, “No, the higher the quality, the lower the rework, the more efficient,” right? And then you see Toyota and Honda take off.

I just gave you two strategic examples but we ask those similar types of questions in our lives, both in our work and our decisions about the work that we do in our own values. And I’d like us to open our minds a bit and reframe, as you said.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, when it comes to our minds, you’ve got an interesting term – the paradox mindset. What is that and how can it help us?

Marianne Lewis
Yeah, a paradox mindset. So, when we think about either/or, we think about tradeoffs. Picture, like, a scale, and you’re doing this weighing between the sides. When we think about a both/and thinking, we put those opposing decisions into a Yin-Yang, which is such a beautiful symbol of paradox. So, if you can picture the Yin-Yang, you have kind of a black-and-white sliver, and so you’ve got two sides to this. But there’s also this dynamic flow between them where you see that they actually define each other. It’s only together that you see this whole of the circle.

And if you can kind of picture the Yin-Yang in your mind, as you move higher into, say, the dark, there’s actually a pin prick of white. And the view is, as you get higher and higher into one side, you actually feel more pull in this ebb and flow into the other. This is night and day. It’s love and hate. It’s trust and distrust, self and other. I’m being more philosophical here, but those play into the way we think about challenges.

Why is a financial responsibility and social responsibility opposites on a scale versus Yin and Yang? And how could they work together more synergistically? So, that was a way of sharing. The reason we use the term paradox is to start to change our views from a tradeoff to this Yin-Yang mindset. And a paradox mindset means two things, we have two dimensions, and we’ve measured this now over thousands of people. It’s in multiple languages.

We started in three. We started in Chinese, Israeli, and then in the US, an American. I guess I did geography. This is where we did the study. But what we found is there are two dimensions. One is some people are more sensitized to see and feel tensions. Now, that could be because you’re in a particularly stressful conflict-laden time so there are a lot of tensions around you, and it can be you’re somebody like me who sees them in their sleep. I pick them out very quickly. And the more you practice paradox thinking, actually, the more sensitized you become regardless of your work.

So, there’s the, “How much do you experience and see tensions.” And then the other side is, “How much, when you see them, do you see tensions as just a problem to either ignore, work through, and move quickly? Or, do you see them as an opportunity that in that tension there is this creative friction and an opportunity to learn, innovate, grow?”

What we found is people who have this paradox mindset, they see tensions as opportunities, they think about them as this Yin-Yang, are much more likely, according to their supervisors, to be more productive and more creative, and, according to themselves, to be more happy, to be more satisfied. So, what we’re finding with the paradox mindset is, especially if you’re dealing with tensions, that ability to move into them, seeing opportunity, benefits for learning, and working toward a both/and, will pay off in really powerful ways for you as an individual and probably for your organization given those benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us several examples of individuals who, they saw some tensions and then they considered them with a both/and perspective, or paradox mindset, and cool things emerged as a result?

Marianne Lewis
Yeah, I’ll give you a few of some leaders that I’ve enjoyed studying over the years. Muhtar Kent is fascinating. He was the CEO and chairman of Coca-Cola, which is an interesting example because one of the tensions we see quite a bit is global versus local. And you could think about this also as kind of centralized/decentralized is another way to think about it. But Coca-Cola is actually the best-known image in the world, even better than Mickey Mouse. People just know the red can anywhere.

So, you have this huge global reach and scale. Scale provides you incredible opportunities, really well-coordinated impact, reach, etc., and you’re talking about Coca-Cola. You’re talking about something you drink, taste, as differentiated locally as imaginable. And so, Coca-Cola, and particularly Muhtar, would always say, “Look, we have to be the best-known global brand, and leverage that scale, and have this tremendous value appreciation tapping into those local differences as possible. We have to be both if we are truly going to be a global brand.”

And if you go to the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, you will see they have lots of variations based on local differentiation of taste. So, even as a global brand, it also has local differences. Even that it has a global reach and scale of like the Walmarts and Amazons of the world, they also are really good at tapping into very local supply chains, retailers, because, depending on where you’re going, sometimes big boxes, let alone Amazon, they’re not there. So, that’s just a different kind of view of the global/local.

Another one I would share is a fun discussion I’ve had recently with Rocketbook. We wrote about it in Fast Company. But Rocketbook is dealing, like everybody else, with hybrid work, what do you do home versus away. And one of the reasons we started working on this with Fast Company, and we ended up going at Rocketbook, is that people might think that hybrid work is a win-win, but most often, it’s actually experienced as a lose-lose because you’ve lost the boundaries between work and home.

So, you go into work and you’re sitting on Zoom calls. That doesn’t exactly feel like a value to me. You’ve just on the commute and everything else. Or, you’re at home and you still got all of life and home, family, other things distracting and challenge around you, and you’re feeling like you’re really not at your best in either location.

So, talking with Jake and Joe, the co-founders of Rocketbook, Rocketbook does sustainable notebooks. They do reusable notebooks. It’s a really cool technology. I highly recommend it. They said, “Pre-pandemic, we were already hybrid.” And I said, “Well, why?” And they said, “Because we believe in the power of work-at-home, or work-non-office, as deep work, that work that you really need solitude, focus.” And they have a lot of designers, engineers, and they said, “We want them to have that opportunity to be at their best selves.”

And, on the other hand, we knew, and we still believe this wholly, that the best creativity will always happen around a table with a whiteboard, with all these, and that takes in the office. And so, because they had already believed in the power of hybrid work, they came out of COVID really strong because they kind of perfected why you come in, when you come in, how you come in, and when you would work at home.

And they learned this creative way to be both/and, to think about those synergies in ways that made people keep the differences, value separation, they used lots of cool ways to use technologies that we all use, like Outlook and other platforms, to respect people’s deep-work time and, while they’re at home, also have times that you say, “Now, I’m going grocery shopping.” They really got creative in how they use both.

But I think that’s a very different way than a lot of firms saying, “Is it three days or two days?” There’s a very basic approach to hybrid that isn’t how are you deeply making the most of the time together and the time apart. So, I would note those two because I love both options, and I think we’ve lived them in our lives, not just at an organization level.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, the Rocketbook parameters then, for whether you work from home or from the office on a given day, is not just blanket two days, three days, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, but rather, “What is the nature of what you’re working on, and then, please, freely come into the office so we can do that better, or stay at home so you can do that better?”

Marianne Lewis
Yeah. And the other way I would say that, Pete, is we talk about in the book one of the key assumptions to moving to the both/and mindset is moving from thinking about your resources as scarce to abundant, and that an abundant mindset matters. And so, it was interesting talking to the folks at Rocketbook because time is a classic resource.

And so, you could say, “Well, yeah, but there are only 24 hours in the day, or eight hours in a workday,” whatever. And what Jake and Joe would say is, “Yeah, but every hour isn’t created equally.” Like, I’m a morning person, I like it super early, okay, then I’m going to work from 5:00 till 10:00. It’s going to be my deep-work time. I don’t want to be bothered from 5:00 till 10:00. But I want you to know I’m on it. And, by the way, I’m then going to take a break because I’m going to be really low, and then I’m going to come in for a few hours.

And so, they figured out ways to make that, and then, at the same time, they have people who are super late-night owls and they’ll even have office times, like at 11:00 o’clock. But my point with the abundance mindset is it’s not that they’re using more time or less time. They’re using time better, and they’re using it in a way, to your point about, yes, it’s the home versus work, but it’s also time that they’re playing with, to say, “What is the kind of work you’re trying to do? When are you at your best?” versus, “When do we get people together, whether it’s on Zoom or in the office?”

It’s a more nuanced approach than the, “Is it three days or two days? And, by the way, is it 8:00 to 5:00?” And I like that. I think that really is empowering to people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, tell me, Marianne, anything else you want to make sure to mention, any top do’s or don’ts about both/and thinking or embracing creative tensions we should cover before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Marianne Lewis
I think I would just, as a key takeaway, and, obviously you can do dive deeper in the book, we talk about kind of three key steps. You need to change the question you ask from this either/or to an “and,” “How do I accommodate my opposing, my competing demands?” The second piece is, instead of just weighing the pros and cons, and we say, “You need to separate and connect. You need to pull apart that Yin-Yang, think about really what you value on both sides, and then think about how you’re going to hold it together with a higher vision and some key guides.”

And then the third piece is you start to change the way you think about your solutions. Because, again, with either/or, the end result is a single choice. But with a paradox, when you’re dealing with these kinds of tensions, they don’t really go away. I might decide today between work and home, but I’ll have to decide again tomorrow, or I may have to decide between, “Am I really going to focus on current targets or learning for the future? But I’ll have to make that decision again.”

So, we think about one of the most kind of key decision-making modes that we see of people who are really good at both/and thinking, is think about it as tight-rope walking. You’re continuing to move forward but you’re making these kinds of micro decisions on an ongoing basis between challenges, between work or home, between social and financial, between learning and performing, between self and others, where your focus is.

But you don’t let yourself lean so far to one side that you fall because that’s really hard to get back up, and it takes some intention to know that you are holding them together. You need both elements and you’re moving forward. So, I do think that’s key to think about kind of three steps, in some ways.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Marianne Lewis
A quote that Wendy and I often return to was by Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues at Stanford, they’re psychologists. And the quote is, “The problem is not the problem. The problem is the way we think about the problem.” And, to me, that’s key to this decision-making. It’s actually the way we thought about the problem has limited our solutions.

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

Marianne Lewis
I think my favorite study was by Rothenberg. It was in 1979, I think, and Rothenberg was studying creative geniuses. He was studying Picasso, Mozart, Einstein, Virginia Woolf, and he was reading all their journals and different things. And what he’s finding was that the genius of these creative individuals came from valuing tensions, seeing them as opportunities; Picasso seeing light and dark; Einstein seeing things in movement and in rest; Virginia Woolf, it was life and death; Mozart was harmony and discord. He called it Janusian Thinking.

That was Rothenberg’s kind of finding. Janus was this two-faced god, looking in two directions simultaneously. But his point was that these creative geniuses found real value in the tensions. They sought conflicts for their greatest works, and I think that is a huge takeaway of instead of viewing these as problems, as in things that we want to avoid, work through as fast as possible, we should seek them out because they have potential, fodder, fuel, for really great creative opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Marianne Lewis
I think my favorite book is probably The Tao of Physics by Frank Capra. This is just a fascinating book. It goes back to Einstein. I really think Einstein and all the individuals that developed quantum physics were in this paradox mindset in a way that was really cool. But The Tao of Physics basically talked about how they turn to Taoism and insights from the Yin-Yang and ancient philosophy because they were literally thinking, “I’m going to go crazy because I don’t understand how something can be a particle and a wave. Which one is it? How can something be in motion or at rest?”

It was just one of those books. I kind of like a book that makes my head hurt sometimes because it’s really straining, and, at the same time, it’s kind of beautiful. And you realize, “Well, yeah, it was rocket science, it was quantum physics.” They went through some very simple powerful philosophy to get through it, keep themselves sane, but also get to a solution that was really remarkable with quantum physics.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Marianne Lewis
Probably my favorite tool is the Polarity Map by Barry Johnson. It’s this really cool, simple approach to when you have a tension, a conflict, competing demands. You put it on this two-by-two grid. And on the one side, you put the highs and lows of that side, like, say, “I love a leadership. I’m a leader and I love to be innovative but I also like to be really disciplined.” Well, at your best, what does your innovative self look like? At its worst, if that’s all you did, like you’re really risky. And then, at the same time, you do, “At my disciplined best, and my disciplined worst, am I a real pain?”

And the point of Barry’s Polarity Map is, “How do you stay in the top two quadrants? How do you let the tight-rope walking? You’re probably not disciplined and innovative at the same time but you’re iterating between the two. And how do you avoid going down into the depths of the negative?” But I love the Polarity Map. It’s just a great tool.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Marianne Lewis
I’m not always good at this but I think meditation is a really powerful habit because I think our minds can get in our way, and meditation is just a powerful practice to just kind of clear out the mess and have some calm so that we might not jump so automatically to a place that isn’t always in our best interest, and listen to the voices that might be taking us the wrong direction in our heads.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Marianne Lewis
I think a key nugget is probably just the power of a paradox mindset, to say, at our best, let’s not get stuck in these vicious cycles of either/or thinking, which we think of as rabbit holes, wrecking balls, interfere, and really look for more creative lasting solutions. And that’s what I’m hoping our work is doing, taking it out of a more academic realm and thinking more about people’s lives and how do you deal with the tensions because they are human. That is what the world we live in, and it’s natural. But I also think tensions are beneficial.

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

Marianne Lewis
I’d point them to BothAndThinking.net. They can find out more about the work we’ve done in media, more about the book, other places to hear and see us, but, also, there are lots of places you can buy it, and so we just try to put it at one-stop-shop over there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Marianne Lewis
Boy, I think this is a challenging time. I think a lot of people are stepping back and kind of saying, “What do I want?” I hope people use both/and thinking to make those decisions because I know we can feel we want impact. We want meaning. We also want flexibility and finances. We want a lot of things from our jobs that can feel like they’re pulling in us in opposite directions. I think this is the time to be more creative and think differently about what we really want and need out of our jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you, Marianne. I wish you much luck and cool results from both/and thinking.

Marianne Lewis
Thank you. I wish you all the best, Pete. Thank you for this podcast.

Oct 17
0

809: How to Make Wise Decisions using Quantitative Intuition with Paul Magnone

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Paul Magnone reveals how to make smarter decisions by tapping into both data and intuition.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you shouldn’t disregard intuition
  2. Why we make terrible decisions—and how to stop
  3. Powerful questions that surface brilliant insights

About Paul

Paul Magnone is Head of Global Strategic Alliances at Google where he is developing a growing ecosystem of partners that will unlock the next generation of business value via the cloud and related technologies. Previously at Deloitte and IBM, he is a systems thinker and business builder focused on understanding where technology is headed and answering what it means for a business. He is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University.

Resources Mentioned

Paul Magnone Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Paul, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Paul Magnone
Thank you for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom but, first, I think we need to hear about your time working as a DJ when you were in college.

Paul Magnone
Oh, geez. Well, this was back before CDs were popular. We actually had a record library. So, this was carrier current radio, I didn’t do parties. It was college radio. And it was just being at an engineering school, it was a very liberating evening, whether it was Mondays or Tuesdays, depending on the semester, very liberating evening to go in there and just go into the record library, and do your thing. And it was me and a friend, Jim, who maybe he’ll be listening to this. I’ll tell him to listen in. And he would go and get every Led Zeppelin album, and then he would say, “The rest is up to you.”

So, depending on what was happening on a given week, I would manage the programming, and it was a little David Letterman-ish on the commentary side, but certainly heavy rock and roll, and it certainly scratched an itch in the midst of all the engineering school.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. Well, when you talked about Led Zeppelin, that reminds me, isn’t that like the quintessential DJ thing to say, “Get the Led out”?

Paul Magnone
There you go. Well, you would go and get all the Led Zeppelin and not care about anything else. So, I said, “Do you like anything other than Led Zeppelin?” He said, “Yeah, absolutely, but you handle all that.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, that’s a great system there for decision-making right there, is that he had a system which was Led Zeppelin, and you had to work a little harder with your music decision-making. That’s my forced segue, Paul. How am I doing?

Paul Magnone
They’re pretty good. Pretty good, yeah. So, it was option one was always locked in, and then it was what was the next option, so.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so you have codified some of your wisdom in the book Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance between Intuition and Information. And, can you tell me, when it comes to this decision-making stuff, do you have a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery that you want to share right off the bat?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think why this is intriguing to people, and we’ve spoken to thousands of executives and probably thousands more students as we teach at Columbia University when I say we, first of, it’s myself and Oded Netzer, who’s the Vice Dean of Research at Columbia Business School, and Christopher Frank, who is currently Vice President at AmEx Market Insights, leading the market insights team there. And we’ve come together over the past seven years, and we teach what we have learned.

So, obviously, there’s a heavy dose of theory here, but we’re practitioners, we’re in the trenches. And so, what we reflect back is “What are the practical tools and techniques that lead to better decision-making?” And you start to discover that it’s a hot topic but it makes people anxious. So, we live in a time today when data is exploding and yet it feels invasive and intimidating. So, for a lot of people, data is just not fun. And other people say, “I love data,” and then they kind of fumble the football.

So, in reality, we’re fortunate to have this staggering amount of information at our fingertips and yet we often hear people say, “But I don’t have enough data.” Okay. Well, maybe you’re not putting things in perspective. And, ultimately, with all this information and all these things that are flowing by, we consistently see poor decision-making and wasted investment, wasted resources at companies, wasted just time and effort and so forth, and we took a step back and said, “Well, why is this? Is it caused by fear, or overconfidence, or bias?”

And we realized that, with some focus and some of the techniques that we talk about, we can build a tribe of better decision-makers and maybe make a dent on all these wastes. That’s kind of our motivation behind it all.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that sounds exciting and I’d love to dig into just that. I’m intrigued then, in your subtitle, you got “Striking the Balance between Intuition and Information.” We’ve got boatloads of information. When it comes to intuition, first, could you define it for us and what’s its role here?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, so that’s a great question. And the fact is where you’re constantly challenged by people saying, “So, you’re going to teach me intuition? Don’t you either have it or don’t have it?” And the answer is, “Well, people often have intuition and they’re not listening to it.” And so, when you look at what’s referred to as the theory of learning, there’s competence and complexity. So, you begin, think as a toddler, you don’t know what you don’t know. And, suddenly, you start to put some things together, you start to hear some things, and you start to see patterns, and you start to learn.

And then, as you start to learn, you realize there are things that you don’t know. So, now you’re at the next level. You’re now conscious about your incompetence. And as you progress up this ladder, and there’s multiple steps along the way, you eventually get to the age of…or to the point of a teenage driver, a driver for the first time. You’re now, hopefully, consciously competent, you know what your limitations are, you know what’s happening around you. And by the time you get to be a seasoned driver, you don’t have to think so much when you’re making a choice.

When you’re driving and you’re a seasoned driver, and there’s a snowstorm, you might turn down the radio a little bit because you want less input signal, but you have a sense, and you’re sensing with your fingers what’s happening, you’re sensing all around you, and you might not even sense what’s about to happen but you see up ahead, “Hey, I remember that when I get to a curve like that, in a situation like this, with the weather this way, I should probably do the following.” So, there’s a sense of acumen that builds up over time.

And the fact is, in a business world, we say, “No, no, I just want the data. Just tell me how much it’s snowing. Just tell me the tire pressure.” Really, is that all you need to know? Or, do you really need to sense and respond in real time, and really get a sense for what’s happening? And really terrific leaders talk about the fact that they have a feel for the business. So, let’s take your question and go ask some business leaders, “What do you mean by feel for the business?” They may have different answers, but, ultimately, it’s some level of intuition about their business, how it’s impacted by the world, how their business impacts the world.

And so, this notion of intuition is the companion to all the data that we dive into or that we think we want to dive into. And so, the notion is we have to balance that. So, rather than make a decision based on just data, or based on just gut or intuition, trust your gut – there’s another wonderful top gut by a colleague of ours – what we’re saying is that balanced view is what’s important, and threading that needle, and building the toolkit for yourself so you can balance the data and the human judgment, that’s the path forward.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And I see additional interplay there associated with intuition. We have hordes of data at our disposal. It can be hard to even know what sorts of analyses to run on that, and intuition can serve up fantastic questions for investigation or hypotheses, like, “You know, I have a sense that maybe this is going on. Now, let’s take a look at data to see, in fact, if it is or is not.”

Paul Magnone
Yeah. And we hear a lot about data scientists, and, “Well, I need a data scientist.” To do what? At the end of the day, there’s a set of people that need to come together to drive a decision. There’s the business leader who should be data-driven, who should be paying attention to the data, but not only paying attention to the data. There is the data scientist, there is the data engineer who brings all the data together, but there’s also a data translator. And that person really ensures that what we’re solving for aligns with the business need.

And we also like to talk about a data artist, because, at the end of the day, we need to tell a story, and you need to compel people to action, and doing that requires you to put all of this in some sort of frame that is understandable and digestible. And so, that’s kind of a team that comes together to say, “Listen, yeah, there’s all these components, but how do I compel people to make a choice and how did we make the right choice?”

Pete Mockaitis
A lot of great stuff there. Maybe to tie some of it together and launch us, Paul, could you perhaps give us a cool story or a case study of a professional who did some great work with both intuition and information to come up with some rocking breakthrough decisions?

Paul Magnone
Well, I don’t know if this was a rocking breakthrough decision, but I will tell a personal story about when I was working for, probably at the time, a Fortune 20, maybe Fortune 50 company. You guys can sort out who that is. And we were investigating whether to work with a heavily backed startup in Silicon Valley, and I was charged with doing the due diligence, the business side of the due diligence, and I had a colleague of mine who was leading the technical due diligence.

And after weeks of investigation, we looked and said, “You know, this is, I think, a fascinating company but we’re not sure even after weeks of investigation,” because when we got to some detailed questions, they hid behind non-disclosure agreements and other issues and so forth. And the technical side we felt, “Well, we could probably recreate what they did but maybe there was something compelling here that we didn’t understand, so maybe we’ll take a flyer on that and give it a shot.”

On the business side, they kept on telling us, “You know what, you’re going to have a wildly profitable business if you base your business on our new technology.” Now, in hindsight, there were some signals that got my attention, specifically, they weren’t answering questions in much detail. And then, finally, after pressing them, their business development lead sent me a spreadsheet, and he said, “Look through this, and you can model out how profitable your business will be based on our technology stat.” And I called them back five minutes later, and I said, “Well, either your spreadsheet is broken or your business is broken.”

And I know I took a provocative approach to my comment there, but that was built on the intuition that we were all starting to build up the perspective that there was something that wasn’t quite right. The spreadsheet, let me describe that for a minute. There was a very large Excel, with one cell that I was allowed to put a number in, and this was a business around computing infrastructure, so servers. So, there 10,000 servers in the cell.

And it showed, when you did all the math, it showed a wildly profitable business running 10,000 servers. And he said, “Put in a 100,000, put in a million. You’re a huge company. You’ll just do more.” So, I put in one server because I want to understand at the atomic level…

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, fixed costs, labor costs, scale.

Paul Magnone
Yeah, what’s granular. One server. Wildly profitable. And I said, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So, I put in zero servers. Wildly profitable. So, either they had some magic or there was something that was wrong. Now, why do I tell this story? At the end of the day, we had data, we had insights, we had spent time with them, but, really, it was that blend as I described before of a lot of information, or seemingly a lot of information, but our intuition telling us, “We’re really not seeing the right information. There’s something they’re not showing us.”

And by pushing on that button right there, it opened up a further discussion. We, ultimately, wound up not doing business with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. So, tell us, how can we become similar Jedi masters, Paul, to get that sense of, “What’s missing? And how do I push on it?” Any key questions or frameworks or tactics that get us to making more good decisions more often?

Paul Magnone
Sure. Sure. So, there are really three fundamental ideas to lean on, I think, behind the book. So, leaders have just an enormous amount of data but we all see it. They’re not making better decisions. So, why is that? So, they’re denouncing the data, or they’re choosing to trust their gut, or they’re spending so much time trying to get a perfect decision. And they think the same data is the new oil so there’s spending as much as they can to build a bigger and better data refinery for that oil.

When, instead, what leads to a great decision is the balance that we’ve been talking about. So, that’s the first thing. Don’t lean in to one side or the other. Focus on that balance. The second thing is you don’t need to be a math whiz to drive great decisions. The smartest person in the room is the person who asks the better question. And that person, that leader, blends information and the intuition and the experience, as we described before, that leads to the better outcomes.

Think about it, you’re in a meeting, and the person who had the factoid, you don’t go up to that person and say, “That was amazing that you had that fact at your fingertips.” But the person that asks the question that nobody expected, that insightful thing that cuts right through, that’s the person you want to go have coffee with, right?

And the third thing is, as humans, we are terrible decision-makers, and, largely because we don’t have our bearings. And so, one way is to really explore what’s happening in the decision and the moment that you make it, and one way to look at it is you’re balancing time, risk, and trust. And if you think about that, “Do I have no time? It’s a crisis, or, do I have a lot of time?” Are you a fireman or are you in Congress? Do you have a lot of time?

Is it a high-risk or a low-risk situation? Are lives at stake? Are billions at stake? Or is it a throwaway decision, and it’s a reversible decision? Some decisions people agonize over and yet they’re reversible. And then the last part, trust, do you trust the data? Do you trust the person that gave you the data? Do you trust the organization that stands behind that data?

So, as you triangulate all those three, that in itself is a framework that should help you make some better decisions. Ultimately, we pull all this together and we refer to all of this as quantitative intuition, which is intentionally an oxymoron because you’re bringing the quant side with the intuitive side. And we define that as the ability to make decisions with incomplete information, and you’re using three techniques: precision questioning, contextual analyses, and the synthesis to see the situation clearly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you perhaps walk us through an example in which we’re applying these principles to an actual decision?

Paul Magnone
Sure. So, let’s talk about a day in the life of one of your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Paul Magnone
Because you love your listeners, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
We sure do.

Paul Magnone
There you go. So, your leader comes in on a Monday or a Tuesday, and says, “How do we react to this headline from the competitor?” Or maybe you’re beginning a planning…yeah, right? I mean, it’d never happen.

Pete Mockaitis
My first question is which headline and which competitor?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, yeah, right. But everybody at this moment is thinking this just happened yesterday. Or, maybe you’re beginning a planning cycle for a new product launch. Or, maybe your business is in decline and you’re trying to decide where to place the resources that are scarce. So, in each case, regardless of your role, if you’re in product or sales or marketing or manufacturing, everybody’s taught like a bias to action, so they start to jump in, “What? Let me go dive in.”

And what you should be doing is defining what problem you’re solving first. So, put that problem in context, “Here, our competitor announced this. Here’s the headline from our competitor. Let’s zero in on that one.” Well, put it in absolute terms, put it in context, absolute terms. Look at it over time and relative to what’s going on elsewhere.

So, the competitor said, “I just sold 100 shovels yesterday.” “That’s awesome. I sold 200 shovels yesterday.” Or, “I sold 200 and the competitor sold 500.” While you’re busy high-fiving that you sold 200 shovels, your competitor is walking all over you. By the way, why did that happen? Well, there was a freak snowstorm in July. Okay, so were you going to base your business and change your strategy based on an anomaly? No.

So, what are the assumptions that are going into that decision? Do you believe those assumptions? Is that true? And is it maturely important to your business or is it a blip? These are kinds of the things that you need to think about, those parameters, so we can go through any number of examples. But I think your listeners are probably living this every day.

And through this all, they need to synthesize all these different datapoints. So, we preach a lot about synthesizing. What happens most often is people are in meetings and you’re summarizing what you already know, or you’re summarizing to get to a point that you think the boss has already said because they’ve already anchored you somehow with one of their early comments. So, synthesize the datapoints and then go to the data after that. Then go to the data, right?

So, start with those first principles, “What is it that we really know? What problem are we solving? Do we really want to grow a product line, or are we stable, or are we under attack?” And then make a recommendation after you’ve set the frame for the problem, and then interrogated the data. So, this is what we refer to as being a fierce data interrogator, not a random data interrogator.

So, ultimately, we think of this as jazz. It’s not waterfall because a lot of the behaviors in these different disciplines – products, sales, marketing, manufacturing – tends to be rigid, it tends to be a waterfall, and they don’t read and react – to borrow a term from sports – they don’t read and react in the moment. And, ultimately, it needs to be jazzed.

You know the theme of your business, and you may go often at different directions but you’ll come back, and the drummer is going to go and do something, and, hopefully, it fits in the context, and you’re going to come back. So, it’s jazz. Go to the question, go to the technique that’s valuable in that moment, and don’t just rely on kind of the rigid thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you talk about jazz, I’m imagining it like, for marketing, “We launched a campaign, and then we see how it did, and then we interrogated, in terms of we get some contexts. Like, how well is that campaign performing based on general benchmarks, or historical other campaigns, or competitors, if we can know that?”

And then you say, “Oh, wow, that’s awesome. Let’s double down the budget in this channel with this messaging to this segment,” or, “Uh-oh, that’s very disappointing. Let’s perhaps reallocate budget in a different vibe.” So, it’s like jazz in that something happens and we respond in flow to it as oppose to, “Nope, it says in this quarter we’re spending $50,000 on Facebook ads, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Paul Magnone
Right, “Let’s go to the spreadsheet and say what I’m permitted to do.” That’s not thinking. That’s reacting. And that same marketing lead, marketing team, what you described is Monday morning. Wednesday morning, they have a different headline, and their competitor just announced something that’s shocking. So, in one scenario, they’re being proactive on a product launch and seeing the results, and then doubling down, as you said. In another scenario, they’re suddenly under attack, and that was all in the same week. So, how do you make decisions in those different situations, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, I want to talk a little bit about your phrase quantitative intuition. It sounds like you described a bit of that. But how do we get better at that in terms of this number feels high, wrong, low, crazy? Like, how do we know that or get there?

Paul Magnone
Right. Well, we try to not say crazy but, yeah, it’s really those three dimensions that I talked about at the end there. It’s precision questioning, contextual analyses, and syntheses. So, let’s break all those down. Precision questioning, as I said before, we tend to kind of react to the factoids and not take a step back, and say, “Well, listen, let’s put all this in context. What are the first principles? What are the fundamentals of our company? Am I reacting to an anomaly? Or, am I really making a decision based on a thought-out element?”

And precision questioning is really a technique where you will ask, “You know what, I want to understand what to do with a millennial audience.” “Great. Could you say more?” “Well, I want to understand how to sell this product to a millennial audience.” “Any millennial audience?” “I want to understand how to sell this product to a millennial audience that has this kind of budget.” You’re asking more granular questions until you get to an atomic level that people say, “Oh, what you’re really looking for is this well-defined decision, this well-defined task.”

And most often, we don’t spend the time to get granular. And one of the techniques that we talk about to do that is, we call it an IWIK framework, “I wish I knew,” and just the nature of that question implies permission, “What is it you want to know? What is it you know about a millennial?” So, spending the time, it requires a little patience. But spending the time upfront to do that precision questioning to narrow and get clear about it, to get concise about the thought, is critically important. That’s the first piece for precision questioning.

The second piece is the contextual analyses. So, as I said before, look at everything in context. What is the situation in absolute terms? What is it over time? What is it relative to what else is going on with my competitors, with other divisions in my company? And as you look at that context, you’ll come to the realization, “This is important to my business or not. Is this a blip? Or, this requires us to really consider a change to our strategy.”

And then the last piece is the syntheses, which almost no one does. Everyone summarizes and gives you every piece of information. Some of this is pride, “Look, I spent three weeks putting together 47 incredible spreadsheets and reports.” “That’s awesome. Put that in the appendix and tell me what you’ve learned from that. Tell me what’s surprising you in that. Tell me what is crystallized that you, as a smart person that we hired into this company, believe based on what you’ve just interrogated.”

Most of the time, people bring that to their leader, and say, “Look at all this work that I’ve done.” And the way we like to think of syntheses is everybody is the director of a movie. If you look at a movie, maybe an hour and a half, two hours, there’s what? Hundreds of hours on the cutting room floor because you don’t have to tell every detail. You can put all that in an appendix, but focus on what’s critical and what matters.

In journalism, they talk about not burying the lead, being very critical about what is the most important aspect. And we get away from that in business. So, you pull all that together and that’s what we refer to as quantitative intuition. And so, we talk about a set of techniques to go through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, I’d love to hear, do you have some super favorite questions that you’ve relied upon and you find super valuable in many different decision-making contexts?

Paul Magnone
So, yeah, it’s a great question. And we’ve talked before about putting things in context, which I think is one incredible pillar. But one of my favorite questions is a very short question, which is, “What surprised you?” Real simple. And the fact is if anyone has ever gone to a party, what happens when you leave the party? The people that you’re at the party with don’t talk about, well, yes, they had enough drinks, they had enough food, but that’s not the conversation. It’s what surprised them about the interaction between people, what surprised them about a particular situation.

So, in our personal life, we make the space and we give ourselves permission to have a conversation about surprise. But in the business world, no, no, no, the boss wants to talk about this, “I have a sneaking suspicion that we should be interrogating this other dimension but I’m not even going to bring it up.”

So, if you make the space for surprise, if you have the courage, or, as a business leader, you ensure that your team feels empowered to say, “Yup, we’re going to do the analyses that was asked for, but I’m going to make the space for surprise, and say this is an outlier that doesn’t make sense. This is an outlier that I think we should interrogate more. Or, really, we’re investigating the wrong thing, and the surprising thing is here’s a critical issue.” So, be open to that surprise and make the space for that conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that question. Please, Paul, more like that.

Paul Magnone
Yeah, we talk about IWIKs, “I wish I knew,” that’s probably one of the most critical techniques that we talk about. And, really, as I said before, you’re going back and forth between these various techniques, and you may find something in the surprise. This gets back to the jazz. When you have that surprise conversation, people can then say, “Oh, you know what, I want to go back and redefine the problem. I want to go back and maybe do a different set of IWIKs to explore an area, explore an adjacent area, explore a different area because, now, I’m tuned a little differently.”

So, really, it’s a lot of back and forth with these techniques. We also talk very much about guesstimating because, at the end of the day, what we’re taught from grammar school and up is “What’s the answer? What’s the number?” And mathematical precision matters, I’m an engineer by training. Everybody of the three authors were all technical, but guesstimating is really helpful.

So, the classic problem is, “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” Well, you don’t need a census to go do that. You can figure that out on the back of a napkin. And the majority of people are asked on a daily basis to provide an estimate on the back of a napkin, “Well, what do you think? What’s in the zone here?” because we can course-correct once we know that we’re in the zone. And they’re at a loss for, “Well, how do I guesstimate?” So, we talk about a series of techniques around guesstimating.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re bringing me back to my case-interview days, Paul.

Paul Magnone
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Good times. All right. Well, so lots of good stuff. Could you bring it together in a cool example in terms of a person or a team used a number of these techniques from beginning to end to reach a fantastic decision?

Paul Magnone
Sure. One other company, this is one of the other authors had this direct experience, so we will again mask the company to protect the innocent or goofy, either way. But there was a question around what was the performance in a region of, again, a Fortune 100 company. What was the performance in a region?

And there were about 47 markets in the region, and looking through the region, they did the analyses. They practically looked at IWIKs, and said, “Here’s what’s important in the region. Here’s what we’ve discovered,” and made their quarterly business recommendation on where to put more investment, how to align the team, and how to allocate the resources.

At the end of the meeting, the senior leader said, “This is terrific. We really have our bearings here. Is there anything that surprised you in what you’ve seen so far?” And this was Chris, Chris Frank, said, “Yeah, what really surprised me is there are 12 of the 47 segments had a sharp rise in customer satisfaction, and I can’t explain it.”

So, what he did is he buried it in the appendix because it wasn’t terribly clear. And after a lot of time doing the correlation and the analyses, there was no answer to why, and so they were just outliers. So, the leader said, “So, read off what those 12 markets were.” And as he read through them, they mapped one for one with a pilot program that the company had in those 12 markets, and they intentionally didn’t tell anybody because they didn’t want to bias anyone doing the analyses.

And because of leading into that simple question, “What surprised you?” the whole room had a revelation that, “Oh, this is really a better way to engage our customers,” and that led to a multimillion-dollar investment in a customer engagement program that didn’t exist. So, the data was all there but they weren’t looking for it the right way, and they didn’t have the insight from their leader to ask the right question.

Now, if you used these techniques proactively, you would say, “You know what, I’m going to spend 45 minutes on here’s our quarterly business review, business report. I’m going to spend 10 minutes on here are some anomalies and surprises that I think we should investigate more.” So, as a practitioner, as a business person, and you want to be awesome at your job, make the space for that. Insist that, “You know what, you hired me for a reason. Here’s something that I think we should really look at.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, tell me, Paul, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think that the last piece is about as simple as it gets. When you’re bringing people together, you need to tell them before they even get in the room, “Am I informing you of situations, so everybody’s up to speed and has a common knowledge base? Or, am I compelling you to action today? Am I asking you to make a choice? And then, have I armed you on your team beforehand with everything to make that choice?”

I don’t know how many meetings I’m in where partway through the meeting, because everybody texts during meetings, people are texting each other, “What is the purpose of this? What are we doing? Didn’t we already have this conversation?” So, being very deliberate is very much appreciated, and having a conversation for awareness is fantastic. But setting people up for a decision, and bringing everybody along, that’s really important because decisions are team sports. Bringing everybody along the right way really matters.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, this is a favorite quote, I use it all the time, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” And so, that’s from H.L. Mencken, who’s a journalist in the early 1900s, and to me it speaks volumes of what we see today, where people have their fingertips on data and yet are just grasping at what seems to be the very first thing that they can answer with, and they’re not spending the time to dive in to the detail.

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

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think I’ll share a book, which feels like a study. It’s Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. And so, in some ways, our book Decisions Over Decimals echoes and builds on the system-one and system-two thinking, and we’re providing practical tools and techniques that balance the data and the human judgment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Paul Magnone
I’d have to go with The Road Less Traveled, the first version. I think he redacted or refuted some of what he said in his second version. But it’s very much about understanding yourself and how to solve problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Paul Magnone
Well, I’m partial to the Google tools, and then, of course, the techniques and frameworks that are in this book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do that makes you awesome at your job?

Paul Magnone
I’m not a practitioner of meditation but I think it’s really important to get centered and take a step back, and say, “What’s really happening?” And I try and make the time to do that, ideally, on a weekend, and really gather and reset. So, however people do that, whether it’s meditation or a night out dancing, whatever works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Paul Magnone
I’m not sure it’s retweeted but I often say you can have your own opinions but you can’t have your own facts.

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

Paul Magnone
Well, our website is DOD, which stands for Decisions Over Decimals, it’s DODTheBook.com. You can reach out to myself or Chris or Oded on LinkedIn. And, obviously, in addition to everything else that we do, we teach at Columbia, so multiple ways to get a hold of us.

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

Paul Magnone
Make the space to share what you really think. As I’ve said multiple times, synthesize, don’t just summarize, and create that space to have real dialogue on the issues. So many times, that’s what we want and that’s not what we’re doing. And be brave and bold and make that space.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paul, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you many wise decisions.

Paul Magnone
Thank you very much, and to you as well.

Aug 01
0

788: Roger Martin Shares How to Make Better Strategic Choices By Rethinking Your Models

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Roger Martin reveals how to identify the unconscious mental models holding you back from more superior management effectiveness.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why people will resist correcting outdated models 
  2. Powerful questions to dismantle outdated models
  3. The simple word shift that makes you more strategic

About Roger

Professor Roger Martin is a writer, strategy advisor and in 2017 was named the #1 management thinker in the world. He is also former Dean and Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada.  

Resources Mentioned

Roger Martin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Roger, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Roger Martin
It’s great to be here. I’m looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. Well, so I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom. Tell us, what’s the big idea behind your book A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness?

Roger Martin
The big idea is you got to be careful to not get owned by thinking models. You get told, “Oh, this is the way you should think about this problem.” If it doesn’t work, don’t go back and say, “Well, because people say that’s the model that should be used. Keep on using it.” That’s being owned by your model. Instead, you need to own your models. They need to work for you. And if they don’t, you need to change it. That’s the big idea.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Makes sense. Now, the word model, I figured we’ll be saying it a lot. So, could you give us maybe four or five examples of models that professionals use just so we have a real clear sense for what we’re talking about there?

Roger Martin
Sure. A model would be, in order to align the interests of management with shareholders, you should give them stock-based compensation, and that will create alignment. Or, you should always make decisions based on data. That’s the only good decision, that’s a decision made on data. That’s a model. The job of a corporation is to make sure it controls and coordinates the various businesses underneath it. That’s its primary job. That would be a model.

Another model would be customer loyalty is the most important thing about customers.

Roger Martin
Those would all be models that we use that then guide our behavior. So, if you say, “Oh, I must align the interests of management and shareholders with stock-based compensation,” you will have a stock compensation plan that’s based on the performance of the share price as a key feature of executive compensation. So, these models drive behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
So, is there any distinction, not to play too much of the semantic wordplay game, between a model and a rule or a principle?

Roger Martin
Not really. I guess what I would say is a principle tends to be a portion of a model. So, our principle is alignment, and the way we’ll make that happen is through stock-based compensation. So, you’ve got a principle that informs other aspects of a model. That’s how I would distinguish them. You could call a model and a rule kind of relatively similar.

I just think of a model not in a better way but it’s a slightly more comprehensive than either rule or principle. It’s a set of things that we will do because we say if we do those things, it’ll get the result we want.

Pete Mockaitis
And is it possible that we operate from some models that we’re not even aware of?

Roger Martin
In fact, we do that all the time. Let’s say you’re a CEO and you kind of walk into a retailer that sells your product, you don’t like how it’s merchandised, let’s say you’re a fashion line.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m fashionable. Okay, I’m with you.

Roger Martin
Yeah, exactly. Like you, Pete. And you go to the people who are running the store and say, “You, people aren’t following the corporate guidelines on this. I’m outraged, dah, dah, dah.” That’s a model. It’s a model that says it’s their fault, not yours. Your instructions weren’t confusing. Or, your way of merchandising actually doesn’t sell stuff. It’s, “You’re morons,” or you’re not so much morons, “You’re insubordinate,” in some way, “in not following it.” Your model is you have to observe when people are being insubordinate and not following instructions, and chastise them for doing so, and that will improve things.

Pete Mockaitis
And that we know best in terms of the optimal approach for merchandising versus that you may be in a surprise, like, “We tried your way but this way is 30% better, so we’re going that way.”

Roger Martin
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that executive probably wouldn’t have articulated that in the corporate jet on the way to visit the retail outlet, “My model is to make sure they’re obeying and to chastise them if they’re not.” But, in fact, that’s what naturally flows because, in fact, that is his or her, probably his, managerial model.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you say that folks have a tendency to double down under existing models even if they’re not working. What’s behind that?

Roger Martin
It just seems to be, Pete, a human tendency from what I can tell, which is we like to have models because, otherwise, you have to think about everything from first principles. So, you have a way of doing things, so there’s affinity with the idea of a model. And then there’s sort of social adoption. So, if everybody else is doing it, if everybody else is doing stock-based compensation, and there are stock-based compensation consultants who come and tell you how to do it, and the board gets evaluated on the basis of whether it’s got stock-based compensation, all that stuff.

If that becomes the standard, it’s easiest, that’s because we’re sort of social human beings to say, “Having a model is better than thinking from first principles and I might as well adopt the model that’s the one that’s being used most because that’s probably a good idea.” And so, you’re a plumber in ancient Rome, and all the other plumbers are saying, “This great material, lead, is really malleable and makes for good water pipes and so let’s do that, too.” And because, boy, it seems to work, ten years later all the people die from lead poisoning, but at the time it seemed like a good idea.

So, I think those two things cause people to feel a certain level of concern, anxiousness, outright fear when they have to do something other than the existing model.

Pete Mockaitis
What you’re saying there is in contrast to first principles really resonates. I’m thinking about when I was just getting my start, I’m thinking, “Okay, you don’t want to do the speaker-author, guru biz in terms of, ‘Oh, yeah, you got to have Twitter, you got to have a blog.’ Okay, so this is what I do.” And I didn’t really find those to be especially effective tools, versus reasoning it from first principles would suggest, “Okay. Well, fundamentally, what is my offer?”

“How is it distinctive from alternatives and competitives available? Who is my customer? What do they want? What are their preferences? How can I make my prospective customers aware?” And so, that is a whole lot more work than, “Oh, you got to have a Twitter, you got to have a blog.”

Roger Martin
No, no, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
But it would’ve served me better.

Roger Martin
And that, if I can go on that, that makes for a very interesting case. What I’d say is you took something that maybe would’ve been a model that a consumer package goods company would utilize and ported it over to another domain rather than accepting the domain’s kind of model. And that I find is kind of interesting.

A similar story, as you may know, I was dean of a business school for 15 years, and that was my first academic. I was never dean before. And all the development people, the fundraising people came to me, and said, “Well, this is how you do it. Get a list made of all the rich people in the country, and rich graduates, and then you go ask them for money.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, “This is your job now.”

Roger Martin
And I was thinking, “Okay, like I know a lot of rich people, and let’s just put me in their shoes and say, ‘How appealing would that be to me?’ So, you’re going to come and see me because I’m rich, no other reason other than that, and because, apparently, I should want to give you money. All you have to do is ask and I’ll give it to you.”

And so, I said, “I guess you could do that but it doesn’t seem like a good idea. How about this as an idea? I find people who have means and have something that they’re really interested in that the school is also interested in, and let’s get them involved in that because they care about it and they want to be involved in that. And, in due course, they will say to us, ‘Can we support this cause in a greater way?’”

And all the fundraising people said, “Well, what does this guy know about fundraising? This guy is crazy.” Well, on the basis of that, we got the University of Toronto, which is a big gigantic university, have been running forever. University of Toronto is only a six-figure unsolicited gift ever, where it was not asked for. Its first seven-figure unsolicited gift and its first eight-figure unsolicited gift. Literally, one guy, he was into real estate and got involved…who didn’t think there was nearly enough good real estate courses producing the people, and Toronto is a big real estate town, producing the real estate folks. I said, “I agree. We need to serve the community. Would you be willing to teach a course if we got you the appropriate help?”

He did. He loved it. Students loved him. He started hiring all sorts of students from it. We hired other real estate professors. We got to a point where we were one of the best two or three business schools for real estate in North America. We then built a new building. And he came to me and said, “You probably need somebody to give you the cornerstone gift for this, the building, right?” I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Here’s eight figures.”

So, that was a different model, a completely different model than the dominant model because, in that case, I wasn’t even prepared to sort of spend my time on the dominant model because it just seemed silly to me. But you’re right, that requires thinking from first principles, which is not as straightforward. And if my approach had failed miserably, rather than succeeded, they would’ve said, “Yeah, he is a nut.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think there’s one reason right there, is it’s riskier to do something novel and different. And I’m thinking the old saw, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Like, “Yeah, that’s the thing. Yup, IBM, they make the business machines, that’s their name so buy them from there.” And so, I guess that’s one reason why folks might double down.

Roger Martin
It’s a perfect metaphor, “Nobody got fired, nobody ever got fired for using the dominant prevalent model of the day.” Full stop. So, absolutely. And that’s why I’m not saying to people in the book, “Whatever the dominant model is,” I don’t say reject it.

I say, “I could understand you trying it but just make sure you kind of write down, ‘What I expect to happen when I try this model,’ and then check what actually happened. And if there’s a big negative delta there, then here’s what I’d encourage you to do. Don’t just keep doing it because everybody else is doing it. That might be the time for you to think about, ‘Is there another way to think about it?’”

So, if the dominant model is working, keep doing it, is my view. It’s just when it doesn’t work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I was about to ask, how do we know if something isn’t working anymore? Are there any indicators or telltale signs it’s time to shift away? It sounds like one master key is simply write down in advance what you’re hoping the thing will do, and then check later, “Did it do the thing?”

Roger Martin
Yes. And that may sound kind of trivial but it doesn’t happy very often, Pete. And that leads to sort of…there are a bunch of human dynamics problems that you have to take into account. One human dynamic problem is human beings have an infinite capacity for expose rationalizing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Roger Martin
Right? You can expose rationalize anything. And we know this in a sad, sad, sad sort of way from war crimes trials, where often somebody is on the stand and who’s committed just a horrible, terrible crime that they know is horrible and terrible, but they rationalize it in saying, “Well, I had no choice.” So, you can rationalize anything.

And so, you have to help the mind not rationalize. And the only way I believe you can do that is by writing things out because, otherwise, if you say, “Oh, well, we’re going to build a new factory. And with that new factory, it’s going to cost $100 million but we’re going to increase sales by 50% within five years, and that will pay for the factory and a good return on our $100 million investment.”

If you don’t write that down, five years from now when sales are up 35%, you’re going to say, “Yeah, exactly. This is exactly what we said, sales increased 35%,” and you would never ask the question, “Hey, what didn’t go the way we thought that made it 35 rather than 50, which actually made it a return that’s below our cost of capital, not above our cost of capital?” You wouldn’t do that because it’s sort of lost in the mind’s mist of time what you actually thought your model was going to deliver for you.

So, I want you to write it down so that when it happens, you can compare what’s happened to that. And that will give you the information you need, “Did it perform the way I wanted it to perform, that I assumed it would perform when I used it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Is that sort of like the master key or any other key questions or things to do there?

Roger Martin
That’s the master key.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you. Well, so could you maybe tie this together for us with a story of someone who they had an outdated model, and then they made a shift to a new way of thinking and got some cool results?

Roger Martin
Sure. So, I could talk about customer loyalty. So, the dominant model is that the most important factor for you in kind of being profitable is having high customer loyalty. And what that is, customer loyalty, is a conscious act. So, that would be, I don’t know, what toothpaste do you use, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Colgate Total, paste not gel. Thanks for asking.

Roger Martin
Perfect. Colgate Total paste. And so, it’s worked for you in the past, and so you are consciously driven to show loyalty to that brand when you go to the toothpaste aisle. You sort of consciously say, “Hey, I’m loyal to that. It’s worked well. I will do that.” It turns out that all the behavioral science, all that research is telling us that, actually, the much stronger driver of that habit is unconscious.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You’re right.

Roger Martin
It’s actually your unconscious. So, literally, the way the mind works for you, since you’re a Total Colgate paste, if your hand reaches for Total Colgate, or Colgate Total gel, your subconscious starts yelling at you, saying, “What the hell are you doing? The paste. Paste works. Paste is most comfortable. Paste is most familiar. You’re asking me to do something new. I’m worried. I’m nervous.” So, it’s actually an unconscious driver. And Lord forbid that you reach for Pepsodent or something else, then you’ve gone completely off the rocker, “Oh, my God, cats and dogs sleeping together.” It’s going to be horrible.

So, it turns out, the subconscious loves comfort and familiarity more than anything. So, what you want to make sure that you’re kind of not messing with is habit. And so, one thing that companies can’t help doing is refreshing and redesigning. And it turns out that colors and shapes are really important visual cues before you actually can read the lettering on most things. And that would be the case in Amazon when you see the little chicklet there. We first see colors and shapes. And so, when you change the color of something, or change the name of something to, it’s a huge negative for habit.

And so, Procter & Gamble, Tide, unbelievably profitable and venerable brand, have been around for 70 plus years. And what it turns out is that people have a Tide habit more than they are loyal to Tide. And so, when Tide, 40, 50 years ago, when the transition was starting to be made from powdered detergents to liquids, the first liquids came into being, Procter & Gamble said, “Okay, Tide is the dominant detergent, the largest market share, but people see that as a powdered detergent. And so, to make sure we do best in the now nascent liquid detergent business, what we need to do is have a brand-new brand new, it’s called Era, and that will be our liquid and Tide will be our powder.”

The Era launch was an unmitigated disaster. It never got any traction, anything. And then some bright person at Procter & Gamble said, “Hmm, what if we launched Tide liquid? And why don’t we put it in an orange bottle with the same logo, the bullseye logo kind of on it, and call it Tide, and put a little Tide Liquid beneath it?” Blammo, it quickly became the dominant liquid detergent brand and has been ever since. Why? Because people had a Tide habit, and they had a habit of buying the laundry detergent that was in orange with a bullseye on it, with four letters on it, Tide.

Then, as time went on, Tide did smart things like when they figured out how to put bleach in the Tide itself, in the detergent itself, so you didn’t have to have a separate bottle. They had learned their lesson. And guess what they called it?

Pete Mockaitis
Tide with bleach.

Roger Martin
Yes, that’s very good.

Pete Mockaitis
And then a Tide Pod.

Roger Martin
And a Tide Pod. But, every once in a while, they forget. And so, when they came out with the innovation of how to have a Tide, a detergent wash as well in cold water as in warm water, forgetting the lessons that they learned, they said, “You know, orange is a warm color, perfect for Tide. But cold, we need a cool color for that.” And so, they came up with a cold-water Tide, in what? Blue bottles. Guess how that went?

Pete Mockaitis
Not well.

Roger Martin
Not well. Disastrously bad. What was their incredibly insightful fix for that?

Pete Mockaitis
Go back to the old color.

Roger Martin
Put it in orange bottles, then it became the dominant cold-water detergent. So, that would be an example of a company that began to really understand at a deep level the power of habit over loyalty. Does loyalty matter? Yes, it for sure does. Having a warm feeling, a conscious feeling about it is good. But if you interrupt habit, and interrupt the subconscious, it overwhelms loyalty. Like, think about it, it’s amazing, at least to me. When you think about it, everybody who loved Tide, when you come up with Tide in cold water, which is an added feature that should make your Tide better, it flops because it’s in blue bottles? Holy smokes.

So, the dominant model tends to be, with marketers, “Oh, we have to refresh. Our logo is looking dated. We have to have a new logo. We have to have a new modern color scheme. Maybe we’ll even change the name of it.” All of that stuff is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad but it’s done all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess, in terms of if habit is driving your beautiful market share position, then, certainly. I guess if you’re an upstart and there’s not very many people who’ve got the habits, and your colors and shapes aren’t nailing it amongst the consumers, well, then sure, have at it. But, yeah, I could see how it’s costly to shift there.

Roger Martin
And can I give an example on that, Pete, because it’s good? Myspace versus Facebook. Myspace, of course, was the dominant first kind of social media site, and, actually, in its peak year had more traffic than any other site of any sort, Google, anything. But if you look at the history of Myspace, Myspace kept, from day one, completely changing its look and feel so that there was no consistency, no consistency in the way things were presented, new features that were put on it. It was referred to in the press as a dizzying array.

Think then about Facebook. Like, it has utterly consistent look and feel from the word go, even when they made their painful transition where there was the only real dip in Facebook’s history was when they made the transition to mobile. Mobile looked just like look, feel, everything. Facebook understands habit. Myspace didn’t. Myspace is gone. Facebook is worth a trillion. It is so important. If you’re a startup, you must establish a look and feel.

Netflix did a good job of that. They changed their underlying product entirely but they kept as many other things consistent as possible that helped people kind of feel comfortable. And, again, it’s an issue of you feeling comfortable and familiar, not being upset. And for what it’s worth, this relates directly to RTO, return to office, because, in essence, you could argue that COVID was the greatest force habit break since at least World War II and maybe the Great Depression, where lots of habits just had to be broken.

And one habit that was broken was, people like you and me, and tens of millions of others, waking up every morning, getting in the car, or getting on public transit, and commuting to an office, and working all day in an office, and then commuting back at night. That was the habit. And this was a habit that had a bunch of negatives to it, especially if you lived in the greater New York area, greater Chicago area, greater L.A. area, it would be a painful long commute, but it became the ingrained habit. It was just you did it unthinkingly.

And then what happened was a force majeure break of that habit. You couldn’t blame your company on the habit being broken. It was the government saying, “You must do this.” And so, you had to adopt a new habit, which was painful. For many people, they said, “Oh, my God. Kind of working from home, I had a setup, I had to seize the guest bedroom, or seize the sun porch, or the kid’s basement play area, and turn it into my kind of Zoom office, instead of I couldn’t talk face to face with my managers and my employees, and, dah, dah, dah.”

But what happened after probably six months? It was your habit. It was like, “Oh, roll out of bed, make your coffee, go to the guest room, sit in front of my computer and do Zoom calls.” So, that became the new habit. So, that was first called working remotely and then became the new habit. Then, two years on, companies say, “You must return to office.”

They thought of it, these companies thought and still think of it as getting back to where we were, going back to what is standard, you being at the office. That is not, at all, what the subconscious thinks. The subconscious says, “Oh, my God, they’re making me do a brand-new thing. They want me to work remotely.” The office is the new remotely, and can you see, what happens with the habit?

The way to think about habit is that whatever you’re doing, your habit, so for you it’s Colgate Total paste, that’s your habit, and the alternatives are Crest and Pepsodent and Colgate Total gel, which apparently is abhorrent to you. And so, every time you have a purchase occasion, there’s a race and it’s a hundred-yard dash, and Crest and Pepsodent and Colgate Total gel are at the starting line, and Colgate Total paste is on the 90-yard line. And the gun goes off, and guess who wins?

If, for some reason, Colgate were to say, “You know, we’re totally tired of that Total name. We’re going to call it Colgate Fantastimo, and we’re going to change the paste. That paste is dull and old. And we’re going to make it sort of something that’s a combination of paste and gel, like in a twirl.” What they’ve done for Pete is moved the thing he automatically bought from the 90-yard line to the zero-yard line along with all the other alternatives. And you’ll win some of them because it’s a fair race at that point, but it goes from being a profoundly unfair race in your favor, if you’re Colgate, to a fair race. That’s what’s happening with the return to work.

Your job, which you had comfort and familiarity going for, that was Zooming from home and not doing the commute, that was on the 90-yard line, just got back put back to the zero-yard line, to be compared with, “I’m going to quit for a year. I’m going to find a new job out here in the burbs, or I’m going to change to a company that continues to allow people to work from home.” And so, it’s just massively destructive for the companies asking you to return to work.

And they think it’s disloyalty, “Pete is not loyal enough to come back to the office.” No, it’s habit. It’s Pete just has this visceral thing that he can’t necessarily even understand fully that says, “You know, Pete, it’s time to think about doing something else.” So, this misunderstanding, loyalty versus habit, is going to cause big American employers who are asking you to come back to the office massive turnover. The stats are 67% of people who are being asked to go back to work are considering alternatives.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a great metaphor with the race and having a huge head start because it’s like, “Huh. Okay, so I have to do something different. Do I want to do that? Well, let’s look at all the options.”

Roger Martin
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to, “Just keep doing what you’re doing, and don’t ask any of those difficult questions, employee, and don’t just rock the boat.” Okay.

Roger Martin
And I can give a personal example. So, I’m a big of a sportsaholic, and I had a go-to sports app. It was CBSSports.com. I don’t even know why I started using it but it was the one I went to. And I put up with CBSSports.com IT people deciding that they would do refreshes and updates to make the site better and work better and everything. But then they came up with a total redo that they were exceedingly proud of. They sent me messages about, “Hey, get ready for the brand-new site. This is going to be awesome. The navigation, everything, was completely different. The look and feel, completely different.”

And after it being, I don’t know, seven-year a constant user of it, I just said, “Oh, okay. Now is the time to test out all the sports sites and see which I like best.” And now, on the first page of my iPhone is ESPN.com, and CBSSports.com has lost me, not forever. They’ve lost me until such time as ESPN screws up in the same way as CBS Sports did.

For the subconscious, possession is way more than nine-tenths of the law. I am an ESPN.com sports app guy now. And that game is over, it’s on the 99th yard line.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, rest in peace. You’ve got a chapter I find intriguing when it comes to strategy. You say, “In strategy, what counts is what would have to be true, not what is true.” And that is one of my favorite things to teach, so I want to hear you take the floor. What do you mean by this question, “What would have to be true?” How do we apply that when we are doing decision-making effectively?

Roger Martin
Yeah, most of strategy is about analyzing, doing analyses to come up with your strategy, a very analytical exercise, and most people who are going to strategy are kind of analytically inclined. Kind of the problem is, by analyzing what is, you’re never going to find out what might be. You’re never going to create the future, lead the future.

And so, rather than focusing on that, “What is true?” which will direct you towards what is and focus your mind on what is, if you ask the question instead, “What would have to be true?” you can imagine possibilities. You can say, “Here, I’m going to imagine we do this rather than what we’re doing now.” Now, if you just do imagination, you’ll come up with all sorts of crazy things that are just dumb ideas. But if you say, “What I’m going to do is ask, ‘What would have to be true about the industry? What would have to be true about the customers? What would have to be true if there’s a distribution channel, about our capabilities, about our costs, about competitors, for that to be a great idea?’”

Then you can create a logic structure that says, “If those things were true, that would be a great idea.” Then you can imagine another possibility, and say, “What would have to be true for that one? Well, if these other set of things were true, that would be a great idea.” You can do another one, A, B, C, you’ve got a third one, “What would have to be true for that?” Then you can ask the question, “Of those things that would have to be true, which are we least confident are true?”

And then we can focus our efforts on saying, “Well, if those things would be necessary for this to be a good idea, but aren’t true today,” sort of like we’re Steve Jobs, and it’s like, “Here’s an idea. Why don’t we sell people an MP3 player that is three times the cost of price of the best MP3 player out there? We’re going to make it white and have a wheel on it. How about that for an idea?” What would have to be true is people want to kind of throw money away, like they get three times X for an MP3 player with no greater capability than anybody else’s new technology anymore.

What would have to be true though would be, “This would be of greater use because they would be able to more seamlessly download songs in a more user-friendly way onto that machine. They can’t now. But how about we do this? How about we go to all the record companies and arm-twist them into selling single songs for 99 cents rather than an album, and we’ll put it on a site called iTunes and make it super easy for them to pay and super easy for them to download?”

So, he asked, “What would have to be true?” You’d have to have something special, then you go and figure out, “Can you make it true?” You figure out that you can, then you go do it. And, sure enough, you start selling the dominant market share of MP3 players, expanding the MP3 player market dramatically, and doing it at 3X the price.

That’s the power of saying not what is true but, “What would have to be true? And can we make it true?” And by asking, “What would have to be true for it?” you can focus your efforts on the few things that aren’t true now that you’d have to make true to create a great strategy. So, that’s why, “What would have to be true?” is way more powerful than “What is true?”

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that. That’s fun in a creative invention, being ahead of the game, sort of a way. I’ve often asked myself this question just in terms of, “What would have to be true for this option to be worth picking?” and then sort of list those out, and say, “Okay. And then how can I test that?” And it’s amazing how you can figure out things to do and not to do.

One time I was trying to promote a book and I saw this publication that was distributed to a bunch of producers for radio and TV shows, and it was kind of expensive to be included in this, but I thought, “Okay. Well, this would be really cool if I got on a few shows, get the word out. This is probably a worthwhile investment.”

It wasn’t, I regret spending that money. But then, months later, someone called me and said, “Hey, Pete, I noticed that you were advertised in this publication. How did that go for you? Was it worth it?” I was like, “Wow, if I had followed my own sort of teachings, I would’ve done exactly what you did. What would have to be true? It’d get you a lot of bookings and sell a lot of books. How can you test that? Call some people who bought it and see if it worked out that way for them.”

Roger Martin
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Of course.

Roger Martin
Yeah. And then this is what we did with the re-launch of Olay, creating this sort of masstige positioning of it, where you had a prestige, like a Nordstrom’s first floor or Macy’s, whatever, experience in your Walgreens or your Target. And it wasn’t true that there was such an experience, nor was it true that retailers would say, “Yes, that’s a great idea.” But we went to Target, did an arrangement with Target where we helped fund a transformation of some stores to test out the idea. The product flew, I mean, flew off the shelves in the test, and then the rest is history.

Target said, “How fast can we do all the rest of the stores?” and then everybody else said, “Why are you, bad people, just doing something with Target and not with us?” And we said, “Well, because they said they would do it. Are you saying you’ll do it?” “Yes.” And, blammo, it turns the seventh-, eighth-place skincare product into the number one skincare brand on the face of the planet massively profitable. But it was asking, “What would have to be true?” and then figuring out a way to test that.

You’re not going to test it by launching a product nationally everywhere where you don’t have the experience. You work and spend some money. You spend some money and time with Target to figure out if you could make it true. Would it succeed?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Well, Roger, tell me, anything else you want to put out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Roger Martin
No, I think you’ve done a really nice job of talking us through the core essence of the book, so, no thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. All right. Well, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Roger Martin
I guess I would go all the way back to JFK, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country,” because it is consistent with the advice that I give all my students and proteges, “I follow the doctrine of relentless utility. If you’re just relentlessly useful, good things will happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a particular favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Roger Martin
The favorite piece of research that I ever did in my entire career was in ’89 when I convinced somebody at Procter & Gamble to do a study that they didn’t want but that I knew there was something we would find.

The question was, “How should Procter & Gamble think about its customers?” Now, they consider you, Pete, although you don’t buy Crest, they consider you a consumer, and they consider Walmart, Walgreens, etc. customers. And at that point, they said, “Well, we’ve got mass merchers like Walmart and Target, drugstores like CBS and Walgreens, and supermarkets like Ralph’s, Kroger’s, Whiteman’s, etc. and we’ve got C stores.” And it just struck me that that wasn’t the right way to think about it.

And so, I just started looking at their top hundred customers, and trying to figure out whether there’d be a better way to think about it. And one day, it struck me that maybe a better way to think about it is, “What is the merchandising philosophy of the customer base?” because what was emerging then, because Walmart was still very small then but growing quickly, was this notion of EDLP, every day low pricing. And Walmart, and a bunch of other chains were doing EDLP, and everybody else was what was called high-low. They have things that are high price most of the time, and then have it on deals for part of the year.

And the entire CPG industry was set up, including Procter, was set up to support high-low.

The idea at P&G at the time was, “These high-low people are more like us, like Whiteman’s and Ralph’s, they’re differentiated. And these EDLP guys, like Walmart and Foodline and a few others at the time, they’re sort of these big brick warehouses and cinder block kind of warehouse look and places, and they’re down and dirty. And so, they’re not really like us.”

So, anyway, did the study and looked at those two segments, and came to the relatively stunning conclusion for Procter & Gamble, that the same store sales growth in high-low, all of their high-low customers together, the same store sales growth of their customers was zero. The same store sales growth in EDLP was 7% a year, compound. The growth in stores in high-low was net zero, and it was 7% compound annual for EDLP.

And then what I discovered was our market share, cutting category, I just added them all up, our market share in EDLP was higher than our market share in high-low.

And on the basis of that, and probably other stuff, Procter & Gamble was the first CPG company to flip and orient all of their systems to serve EDLP, and that got them a jump in their north American sales growth in the ‘90s, which was, especially the first half. It was phenomenal because, while everybody else was sticking with their sort of high-low focus, they were EDLP, and that’s when they created the Walmart team that put a whole bunch of people that enabled to kind of work closely with them.

So, that’s my favorite piece of analysis I ever did because it helped transform the way Procter thought about its customers in a way that it almost benefitted them for a while. Now, everybody else figured it out in due course. They had to move on to what the next thing that’s going to move the needle but I always liked that and I liked it because it was so hard to convince anybody there to let me do the study.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Roger Martin
They’re sort of nerdly but probably John Dewey’s Art as Experience. That was life changing for me. If you’re less nerdly, Lord of the Flies, my favorite fiction book, William Golding. And the best I’ve read recently, though it’s an old book that just came to my attention recently was the Social Limits to Growth by a guy named Fred Hirsch. Fantastic book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Roger Martin
I guess it’s my relatively new MacBook Pro 13 inch.

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

Roger Martin
To my website. All my writing is organized on that, and that’s www.RogerLMartin.com. And you got put the L in or it’ll take you to a real estate broker in Houston, who’s very nice. Roger Martin is a very nice guy. He sends me all sorts of emails that come his way. I send him my books. He likes my books and reads them, and so we have a good friendship but it is strained by the number of people who forget the L. So, RogerLMartin.com or @RogerLMartin is my Twitter handle.

And I write a, web is increasingly popular, weekly piece on Medium, if you’re a Medium person, called Playing to Win Practitioner Insights series, 89-long, 90th the coming Monday. So, those would be the places to find me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Roger Martin
Yeah, relentless utility. Think first about, “Am I being useful? Can I say from other people’s perspective I am providing utility?” And if you do that, good things will happen to you. Don’t sweat anything else. Just be relentlessly useful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Roger, thank you. it’s been a treat. I wish you much fun and interesting new ways to think.

Roger Martin
Terrific. Thanks for having me.

Mar 21
0

752: How to Reframe Rejection, Beat Burnout, and Get Unstuck with Lia Garvin

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Lia Garvin talks about the mental shifts that are crucial to moving forward at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Key phrases to avoid at work  
  2. The questions to ask when you’re stuck
  3. How to overcome impostor syndrome 

About Lia

Lia Garvin is an operations leader, speaker and executive coach on a mission to humanize the workplace, one conversation at a time. She has nearly 10 years of experience working in some of the largest and most influential companies in tech including Microsoft, Apple and Google to explore the power of reframing to overcome common challenges found in the modern workplace. She is a TEDx speaker, presenting a talk at the 2022 TEDx Conference in Boca Raton, and will be featured at the SXSW Conference in Austin in 2022.

Through her writing, leadership coaching and program management skills, she helps teams examine the challenges that hold them back and focus on what matters. She was recognized by the National Diversity Council as a 2021 DEI Champion. She is also a Co-Active- and ICF-certified professional coach with a certification in Hatha yoga. She lives in Corte Madera, California.

Resources Mentioned

 

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Lia Garvin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Lia, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Lia Garvin
Thank you so much. Excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to discuss getting unstuck. But, first, I think we need to get to the bottom of is it true that you are descended from one of the 300 Spartan warriors?

Lia Garvin
Well, that’s what they tell me. So, my mom’s family is Greek, from Sparta. We’ve been there. We’ve seen it. And when the movie 300 came out, my mom was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s us.” And I said, “Okay, I don’t have any historical documents to prove it.” But, one day, I was heart-set on figuring out that 300 ab-training workout that all of us did to prepare, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
There were impressive physiques in that.

Lia Garvin
Yeah, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sure a number of personal trainers had a lot of work associated with making that movie.

Lia Garvin
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, so tell us, you’re an expert on getting unstuck, and you wrote the book called Unstuck. Can you start us off by sharing a particularly maybe surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about why it is so many of us find ourselves stuck?

Lia Garvin
Yeah. So, I think one of the main reasons I’ve found myself getting stuck and other people getting stuck is because we keep approaching a situation through maybe we try things a little different but we’re still tackling it from the same perspective or the same way. Or, we adjust something small but if we took a step back, we realize we’re actually still doing the same things.

And so, reframing, which is the central theme of my book Unstuck is about looking at a challenge or situation through a whole new perspective, something that we haven’t tried before, and then seeing all that’s available there. And when we look at something through a new perspective, needless to say, new things become possible.

And I would say one area that I think so many of us get stuck around is feedback – feedback at work. Thinking feedback is a criticism, feedback is someone coming to me to tell me all the things they don’t like about me, or someone picking on me or pulling things apart. I think when we get positive feedback, people can also have a little bit of trouble with that even, like, “Okay, they’re happy with this now but what about next time?”

And so, I think, especially things around feedback, all of these beliefs that we have get us really stuck in this narrow way of thinking. And, really, a surprising discovery I had around something like feedback was it’s actually an insight into what the other person, what the feedback-giver believes, and what they want and what they’re comfortable with. It’s really not about us.

And, recently, I had a situation where I was changing roles and I had said I was moving on, and the manager I was working with, we had a good relationship. He was disappointed but supportive of that, and then he said, “Hey, before you go, let’s have a feedback conversation,” and my stomach dropped, and I was like, “Why do I have to have a feedback conversation with someone I’m not even going to work with anymore?” And I went really negative with my thought process, like, “Oh, my God, is he going to tell me all the things he didn’t like about me or all the things I did wrong?” And I went immediately into the dread zone.

And, first, I tried to reschedule it and not have the meeting at all but he ended up rescheduling it, so that was out of the question. And then when it was leading up to the conversation, I was thinking about, “Okay, it’s going to be a two-way street. What should I share? I want to bring in empathy and be specific, all the things I know about feedback,” but still I was really, really dreading it.

And then we had the conversation and he ended up sharing a piece of feedback that just really made me laugh and proved that it was all about my perspective. And that was he had said, “Sometimes when you deliver a piece of work, it looks really done and really polished. I’m not sure how to give feedback. Like, is it in progress or is it super final?”

And I laughed to myself because, well, I had done work that way because of other feedback I got from other managers that said, “Hey, I want something final. It’s got to be polished. I just want to sign off.” And I realized, like bringing…kind of being trashed by different pieces of feedback, and that it wasn’t about me. It was just about how this particular person likes to work or how they like to engage with work.

And when this example hit, I realized it is so not about who we are as a person, what we bring. It’s about getting on the same page with someone else around shared expectations. And that has made me a lot more comfortable with having a feedback conversation because, first, I can level-set and say, “Hey, what are we talking about here? What does success look like?” And then we can sort of word-off future feedback by getting really aligned upfront.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a really cool example in terms of your book, the subtitle there is Unstuck: Reframe your thinking to free yourself from the patterns and people that hold you back. And feedback is a really great area where we can have patterns and associations. And if you avoid it all the time, that’s sure going to hold you back, like, “Oh, I feel so uncomfortable. They’re going to judge me. They’ll tell me all the things I’ve screwed up. I’m not into it.”

Versus if you have a different…reframe that perspective, you’d be like, “Okay, feedback is not so threatening, and, thusly, I’m able to go get more of it, and, thusly, I’m able to align on expectations, and, thusly, people think I’m amazing, and then promotions and good things can flow from that.” So, that’s cool.

Well, so then I’m curious, so that’s a cool example. Was that what you would call the big idea behind your book Unstuck that there are some key things to reframe that will unlock a lot of goodies? Or, how would you articulate the main idea or thesis here?

Lia Garvin
Yeah, I’d say the main idea is when we find ourselves stuck, to reframe the way that we’re looking at that situation. And by reframing our perspective, we unlock a new set of possibilities. And I take that reframing thesis and apply it to 12 different challenges that show up most commonly in the workplace. So, we talked about feedback. Another one is articulating your impact, like talking about your work in a way other people understand that doesn’t diminish the importance of it, that really demonstrates the work you put in.

I talk about negotiation, another really tough subject for a lot of us out there, decision-making, comparison, and 12 challenges that I think most of us get stuck with in the workplace, things that can be particularly fraught for women in the workplace because of all of the expectations and biases and societal norms and these sort of narratives that we often hear throughout our upbringing that we start to attach to or believe with feedback, sort of having to be perfect or that everybody has to like you, or some of these things that many of us might believe from our upbringing can make it even harder to hear feedback.

With an example like talking about your work, some people have trouble talking about themselves at all, and then talking about our work and why it’s awesome and why it’s important and why it should be noticed, that can be really, really difficult for people. So, the reframing, it’s couched in the acknowledgement of these biases and double standards, and how our inner critic really attaches to these, and make these challenges even harder.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love it. It’s so powerful that in each of things, like I can see how you can have a mindset, a frame of perspective, that is troublesome like for articulating impact. Your frame of perspective might be, “Oh, I don’t want to brag. I don’t want to be seen, like, ‘Oh, he or she thinks that they’re just all that, like they’re so special.’ I don’t want to be conceited. I don’t want to be that guy or girl, who just makes it all about them, and it’s just really, really unattractive.”

So, that can be a frame of perspective you have. And if you have it, you’re not going to be articulating your impact and then, unfortunately, some key decision-makers who can have some keys to your fate with regard to promotion or opportunities just won’t know that you’ve got the goods and may very well be ready for a cool new thing if they never heard that impact that was never articulated.

So, I love this, how we’ve zeroed in on a tool that has a whole range of impacts – reframing. So, help us out here. Maybe let’s talk specifically about articulating impact, and then maybe zoom out a little bit in terms of, okay, when we need to get our reframe on, how do we go about doing that?

Lia Garvin
Yes. So, articulating your impact, this is a funny one because this is something I struggled with a lot in coaching and in working with folks internally, especially in larger companies where you have to do things like performance reviews. I saw this just being a huge struggle that folks dealt with, really no level of seniority they even were in an organization.

And when I think about articulating your impact, I look at it in a few ways. First, it’s about really shaping the narrative around your work. And this means not talking about our work in like, “I do these set of things,” like a bulleted list of random tasks or ideas. But figuring out what is the arc across your work, what is the why behind it. And then, most important, how to connect that why to what your organization cares about because that’s where…

Like, you talked about getting in front of decision-makers, people that hold the keys to things you want to unlock in your career. If we don’t connect the dots there, we’re leaving it someone else to figure out the why it matters. And we are always best equipped to talk about why our work matters. And, yes, it’s helpful to have other people championing us and sponsoring us and bringing visibility to our work, too, but we have to have that story figured out.

So, my first step there is to really understand what you do, why it’s important for your organization, the goals that your organization has, and connecting the dots there, and then to be talking about it, not shouting over the rooftops everywhere all the time but making sure that that’s known by decision-makers, by people that are responsible for making decisions related to your career and what kinds of projects you work on, things like that, so that they know and can propose you for projects or opportunities.

The other piece around impact is really getting more precise with some of the language that we use when talking about our work. And one phrase I ask people to strike from their lexicon completely is helping out. Like, no one’s helping out. We’re at work. This is our job. It’s our careers. And I think we can get in the habits and trying to sound collaborative, like a team player, using words like helped out, pitched in, worked on. And, like, worked on, what does that mean? Are you owning this whole project? Did someone like send you an email that you read about it? What does that mean?

And so, getting really specific and owning the verbs. I coach folks around performance reviews. Authored, led, drove, facilitated, brought to light, there’s a lot of really powerful verbs we can use that weren’t helping out, was in a volunteer project. And so, that’s where I always start. And then, also, removing we. I think this is the trap a lot of “us,” a lot of people can fall into is saying we, when really, “I did it.” And, again, there’s a way to talk about being a part of a group and a collaborator without making it really unclear what your individual impact was.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, there’s so much good stuff there. When you talk about owning the verbs, I’m thinking about this Onion article about verbs on resumes, and they were just absurd, like, decimated, whatever. Hey, talk about Spartans, huh?

Lia Garvin
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s very specific in terms of, okay, when it comes to articulating impact, it’s not about, “Hey, you’re bragging, you’re selfish,” but, rather, we’re informing people and we’re just getting clear in terms of we didn’t just help out or worked on something. What that even means is pretty fuzzy. So, as we get specific, folks understand really what you did and, thusly, what maybe skills, experiences, and opportunities may just make a lot of good sense for you.

And so, I’m curious, you’ve shared right then and there, “Hey, here’s a great perspective to have,” as opposed to the, “Oh, no, I don’t want to talk about myself.” How do you recommend that we, generally speaking, if we find ourselves stuck somewhere, how do we know that we’re stuck? And then how do we go about getting to a better frame?

Lia Garvin
Yeah. Well, I think one way to recognize we’re stuck is when we keep running into the same outcomes that’s not what we wanted. And one example is with, let’s say, we keep asking our manager for new projects or a promotion, and we keep hearing, “It’s not time yet. You’re not ready yet.” Or, another is, “I applied for many years to work in tech, and I kept sending the same kind of resume, and I didn’t get there.”

And, for me, personally, it took a lot of stopping and examining my approach. So, I think, first off, it’s about recognizing, after one or two or maybe three times of hitting this wall, and pausing, and asking ourselves, “What is the approach I’ve been using?” and then the question, “What else can I try?” And the real reframing question is really, “How else can I look at this approach?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about reframing rejection, and an example, applying to work in jobs in tech for a number of years; sending out the manuscript for my book to many agents and publishers and not getting a yes; applying to do a TEDx Talk for several years, not getting yes. These are three things that I had done over and over and over and kept getting nos. And it was in these moments, instead of saying, “Screw it. I give up. No one wants me. No one likes me. My work sucks. I don’t care. I give up,” saying, “Huh, I’m getting a signal, and now I have to shift how I’m approaching this.”

And the shift in the approach is the reframe. And with a job, maybe you look at, “Okay, I’m going to try a different way of writing an email when I reach out to a recruiter, or changing out my resume, or share it with a friend to look at, like, ‘Hey, is something we missed here?’” With my TEDx Talk, I found a coach and I worked with someone that was able to really help me unlock how to tell my story in a better way. And with my book, continuing to reframe, “Is it my proposal? Is it how I’m pitching it? Is it this?” because the reframe is really about shifting and not just doing the same thing over and over.

And I think the definition of stuck is when we aren’t able to do a new thing, is when we’re not seeing that we have to shift that perspective. And it does take being a little bit intuitive, trying to be more self-aware. And so, like kind of a quick tip I would say is checking in with ourselves when we’re feeling really down or we’re feeling frustrated, and saying, “Hey, what’s going on here? Am I falling into the same patterns? Have I got a second? No. Did I really shift my approach or did I kind of just sent out the same cover letter because I didn’t feel like writing a new email?”

And being really honest with ourselves on, “How far have I shifted the approach to really get in the zone of newness where I can say, ‘Yeah, I really did give this a new…I really did try this through a new lens.’”

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess it’s also I really like your perspective about working with a coach there in that sometimes we might not know what results are good versus not yet. For example, let’s say, I don’t know, if someone is like new to sales, and like, “I don’t know, man. I’ve called like 50 people. I’ve only made six sales.” And it’s like, “That’s fantastic. You’re doing…”

Lia Garvin
Yeah, that’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re like, “It’s like almost 90% of the time, they’re just like bail on me.” And so, I think it’s so good to get some perspective, whether it’s like there’s some published benchmarks or figures or you just talk to someone who’s gotten the result that you want, or someone who’s got a whole business around coaching or providing expertise on a matter, can really be handy.

And then I’m curious, when it comes to the approach and the shift, I guess I’m thinking about almost like the reframing in terms of our internal beliefs and emotions about a thing. Like, even if someone tells us, like, “Oh, this is how it’s done.” You’re like, “Oh, I don’t know if I like that. Well, that still feels uncomfortable to go get that feedback.”

I remember, for example, I was reading a book, I think, it was about nonprofit fundraising. It might’ve just been called Asking, it might’ve been by Jerry Panas. It might not have been. But he had a reframe in terms of it’s not that you’re hounding people for their money because that’s no fun for anybody. What you’re doing is, in fact, it feels great to give to a cause that you believe in, that you support, and then you see some cool results or social good unfolding from, “Ooh, I had a little part in that.” That feels great as a donor.

And so, as an asker, what you’re doing is you are inviting people to a party, and they’re like, “You know what, that’s not my style of party. I don’t really like horror movies. I don’t like costumes,” whatever. You’re inviting them to a party, and those to whom it’s a good fit will accept the invitation and be so glad that you did. And so, that really worked for me and I got a lot more comfortable asking people for money after that.

And so, I’m intrigued about sort of like the mental-emotional game and how we work on that before, if we need to, before we’re comfortable shifting tactics.

Lia Garvin
Yes, so I love that. And I think that example is the…it’s about that perspective mindset shift. And so, recognizing what’s actually kind of at the base of what you’re trying to do, and a lot of that can connect to, you said, “What is the why behind what you’re doing?” This is about connecting people to something they enjoy. For example, feedback is about getting insight into how you’re being perceived. Talking about your work is about bringing visibility to like the output that you have.

Negotiating is about ensuring that you are getting sort of the right, fair, equitable outcome, maybe it’s financially, maybe it’s not, like for whatever you want it. It’s typically can be mutual beneficial, and I think it’s depersonalizing from all these things because when we attach, like, “I don’t like to ask for money,” you’ve sort of made it about you when the whole thing has nothing to do with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. It’s for the children or whoever the beneficiaries are for the organization.

Lia Garvin
Right. And so, I think it’s the first step in that mindset shift is to detach, and I have a chapter about reframing the ego because a lot of this is an overidentification of, like, “I’m at the center of whatever it is going on.” And when we can get some space there, we see, well, first of all, everybody’s at the center of their own universe, and so we’re not alone there. But it actually is somewhat of an ego issue of seeing ourselves. And having ego, sort of overinflated ego, if you will, it doesn’t mean that we think we’re the greatest person on Earth, but we’re looking at things from a me-centered approach is what that means, and from a me-centered lens, I mean.

And so, to recognize, “Hey, I’m making this about me and what I want and what I think and what I worry.” And so, I’ve been saying, “What is this really about?” that’s how we start to shift that perspective. And I would say that’s the first place to start is when another signal beyond feeling stuck and kind of generally crappy, it’s like, “Ooh, all this is leading to me and I need to get a little distance,” and then we can start to see what else is there.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot with the me-centered lens because I think with negotiations, it’s like, “Oh, no, I don’t want them to think that I’m greedy, I’m not satisfied, I’m entitled, they think I’m just all that.” But, again, that’s all me-centered, like, “I’m worried about the judgments they’re making on me.” But if I shift that perspective on negotiation, it’s sort of like, “Well, no, if I bounce six months from now because someone else pays me a lot more and kind of has more cool things that I’m looking for and opportunity, they’re going to be bummed.”

And like, “Oh, man, we’ve invested all that stuff into Pete and now he’s gone, and I got to go through this whole hiring process all over again.” So, if I shifted from me to them, it’s suddenly like, “Well, no, it’s in their interests to give them a package, for them to provide a package that makes me go, ‘Sweet! This is a good deal. I like working here.’” Well, so far, hopefully, you know the people all around.

Lia Garvin
Exactly. You’re ensuring you have a mutually beneficial agreement that everybody is satisfied with. Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Well, not to bounce around too much, but you mentioned a few key reframes, and I love decision-making so much. So, Lia, we got to hear what you have to say about that.

Lia Garvin
Well, decision-making is one I struggled so much with that that’s actually what my TEDx Talk was about. That’s going to be coming out in a few weeks. And I have a couple of reframes. One with decision-making is about reframing the finality of decision-making. We can’t predict the future, so when we think about decisions as, “Oh, my God, if I decide this, then, then, then, then, then,” and we cascade down this sort of spiral of what’s going to happen. We’ve, essentially, decided we can predict the future, and we know exactly what’s going to happen. And so, I think reframing and realizing, decision-making is about finding the right decision for right now. We can start to feel a little space and freedom from having to have every decision be perfect.

Now, the second reframe on decision-making, in the same similar vein, is to look at where our confirmation bias is landing. Now, we typically have confirmation bias around the decisions that we make, and for a lot of us it’s negative. And if we’re agonizing over a decision, and we have a lot of doubt about it, we can think, like, “Should I buy this thing? Should I take this trip? Should I order this dinner?” whatever. We can start to fixate on, I think, depending on how uncertain we are, if it goes wrong and we don’t like it, it’s all, “I knew it, I shouldn’t have done that,” and we’re looking for all the reasons why we knew we were going to be wrong, and we’re wrong, and it sucks, and it’s bad.

And my challenge to people is to test out, try on a positive confirmation bias. And, instead of saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t have ordered that burger. I should’ve gotten the salad because now I have a stomach ache,” or whatever, we say, “That was awesome. I got to try something new.” Instead of saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t have bought that,” “Hey, I really wanted this thing, and I was really happy to be able to get this for myself.”

And then when we change that mindset from looking for all the reasons it was bad and we were wrong and we’re bad decision-makers, looking for some of the signals why it was good or positive or we made the right call. Because, again, we have just as likely the ability to predict if it’s going to go poorly with a decision that it’s going to go well, yet we attach the negative. And then when we think it was going to be bad, we’re going to want to believe that because our brain likes to be right. And so, I challenge people to try to be right in a way that doesn’t make them feel terrible, especially with the pretty trivial day-to-day decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, yeah. So, feel right, feel good. And then I’m thinking we’ve had Annie Duke on the show, the professional poker player who writes about decision-making and such, and some other decision folks, and they’ve talked about keeping a decision journal, and like, “What was I trying to think through and how did it go?” And so, that’s sort of a different goal, which was improving the skill of decision-making, which, in a way, takes a lot of the sting out right then and there. It’s like, “Well, yeah, I expect I’m going to miss some, so that’s fine, and here’s what happened.”

But if it’s inconsequential, yeah. Go ahead and feel good about it. No need to analyze, and, “What should I have asked the waiter so as to not have gotten this tummy ache?” That’s probably not worth your mental energy and angst. I also love that take about for right now. And sometimes I find when it comes to like starting and stopping subscription services, I don’t know why I get really frozen sometimes, in terms of like, “Oh, I don’t know. I might use it any day now, so I don’t really want to cancel it.” And I’m like, “Well, Pete, you haven’t used it for the last two months, so you’re just kind of burning money. That’s silly.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, but I think once this process gets set up then it will just be perfect.”

And so, the notion of for right now has saved the day a number of times. It’s like, “Well, hey, this month, I want to use the thing, so let’s pay for it. And if I don’t think I’m going to need it next month, I’ll cancel it. And if it turns out I was mistaken, I can un-cancel it.” It’s fine. It’s not like, I don’t know. I’m thinking about like flip-floppers. Like, in politics, we shame the flip-flopping candidate or job hoppers, on HR it’s like, “Ooh, hmm, I don’t know about this trend. It seems like you’re just hopping around and not committed.” Like, there’s no tribunal judging us about our subscription membership or what we get on a menu or any of this stuff, it’s like, “For right now, does this maybe work for you or not?”

Lia Garvin
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Well, let’s talk a little bit about some emotional stuff when it comes to the inner critic and impostor syndrome. How do we wrestle with that? And what can we do to feel more confident?

Lia Garvin
Yeah. So, inner critic, I think that’s another one where we need to build some tools around how to recognize when it’s the inner critic talking versus our regular rational, risk-deciding or navigating mind. And I think one signal that the inner critic is talking is when we’re talking absolutes, when we’re saying, “I always,” “I never,” “They always,” “They never,” and that’s really a quick signal to see if, “Are we in this sort of negative space or the inner critic?”

I think when we’re noticing that we keep running into the same sort of outcomes with the conversation we’re having with people, with the approach we’re trying, again, I think it’s when we’re stuck in this judgment zone. And one tool that I learned that I think is another really simple shift is reframing the questions we’re asking ourselves from why to what. When we’re stuck in this self-judgment shame spiral, a lot of times we’re asking, “Why did they do this to me? Why did this happen? Why me?” And these are all just iterations of, “Yeah, why me?” in different flavors.

And when we’re in “Why me?” zone we are not going to get out. We’re not going to be able to see what’s possible. We’re not going to be able to see other perspectives because we talk about reasons for why everything is bad. Now, if we shift the why question to what, “What happened? What might be going on with the other person?” ideally, that we say, because we can bring some empathy into the mix, then we start to see, “Okay, there’s something outside of me that can get me out of this spiral with the inner critic.”

For example, if a coworker sent us a sort of, what we feel, is a passive-aggressive email, we say, “Why did they send that to me? Why are they always doing this to me? Why are they always picking on me?” We’re just going deeper in the reasons why we hate this person. But if we say, “Gosh, what might be going on with this other person?” we might realize, “Okay, well, they’re under a lot of pressure from their boss. They’re under a big deadline.”

Or, “Gosh, their kids are at home for like COVID school closures, and they’re really stressed, and they’re just trying to fire off a quick email between meetings so they can get back to whatever they got to deal with.” We start to both have empathy, we start to, again, make it less about ourselves, we talked about ego, and just be able to see that there’s more besides the conclusion that it’s “Because everybody hates me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. You know, it’s funny, I don’t know, this is almost passive-aggressive the way I’ve done this at times but I remember I got an email that made me angry, and I really tried. I was like, “Okay, try some compassion, think about the other person.” I was like, “You know what, it must be really hard for that person living their life as a stone-cold jerk, all the relationships and friendships they’ve missed out on.”

And so, in a way, I don’t know, it’s a little…I don’t even know about myself how authentic I’m being, like, “Am I still just trying to judge them, and be mean, stick it to them?”

Lia Garvin
Well, you made it not about you. So, you made it not about you.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t make it about me but, it is true. Like, at times, that does work in terms of mustering some genuine compassion and empathy for, “Yeah, maybe they’re just busy when they dashed off that email that was kind of rude. Or, maybe this is just sort of a blind spot in terms of their skillset in general. Or, maybe they’re under a particular acute stress.” But in any of those circumstances, you could find some compassion for, “Oh, that’s tricky.” And sometimes it might start a little bit barbed, like, “Oh, it must be so hard to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder to then being someone a bit more genuinely authentically passionate for that situation.” That’s good.

Lia Garvin
Yeah. And the last thing you asked about impostor syndrome, and I think the related piece there is impostor syndrome is, “Everybody’s watching me, waiting for me to mess up,” feeling, it’s back to this that everybody’s watching us. It’s back to that sort of over sort of like heightened sense of ego that everybody is watching and waiting and looking at everything that we’re doing.

And so, again, this getting a little bit of space from our ego is a really powerful tool for overcoming impostor syndrome because we can realize that it’s really likely not everybody’s watching, waiting for us to mess up because, again, everybody is focused on their own stuff. And if people are nitpicking mistakes or kind of being hypervigilant on our work, that’s a separate thing that we can tackle but it’s not about…but it’s different than impostor syndrome, because impostor syndrome or experience is really like believing that without a ton of evidence.

And so, again, I think this distancing ourselves from the “I” and the “me” and the ego is one of the most powerful tools I’ve found for overcoming impostor syndrome, and saying, “Hey, I’m not in the center of the universe, and that is amazing and liberating, and I like it.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is powerful. My mom said one of her favorite quotes, I don’t remember who said it, was, “We wouldn’t worry how much other people…we wouldn’t worry what other people thought about us so much if we realized how seldom they did.”

Lia Garvin
Yes, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Zing. You’re right, they’re not thinking about you that much. That’s good. Well, Lia, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lia Garvin
Yeah, to check out Unstuck. It comes out April 5th, available for preorder now. And I would love to hear people’s reframing stories, too. I know I’ll have a plug at the end but I think there’s a lot there that, once we start to explore, how to shift that perspective, that folks find possible. So, please do get in touch, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, a reframing story that came to my mind, it’s so funny, I remember back when I was dating and all the perils emotionally that come with that and being dumped and such, I remember my reframe was, like if I was blown off or whatever, I wouldn’t say, “Oh, she doesn’t like me. There’s something wrong with me.”

I would say, “Well, this candidate has been disqualified because she has not met the key criterion of crazy about Pete Mockaitis. So, it’s unfortunate we’re going to have to pass on her because she doesn’t check the boxes.” So, I don’t know, it helped me feel less but, again, that is me-focused, I guess. Maybe there’s an even better reframe, Lia.

Lia Garvin
I think if you took a similar parallel to not getting picked for a job, like maybe it’s something you’re really excited about, you feel like you did a great job in the interviews, and then in the last stage you didn’t get it, you didn’t get picked. Instead of believing, “Oh, God, I must’ve misread the interviews. I must not have been qualified. I’ll never find a job,” and going through these sort of doomsday scenarios, and saying, “I’m really proud that I got that far. Like, I got to practice. I got to really practice and see, ‘Hey, like I’m really good at these conversations. I can get to the final stage.’”

And I think, again, not thinking in terms of absolutes is just another way to reframe the situation. It’s like, “I had a fun experience on that date. This person is not going to be forever but I was still able to get out there and see what’s out there.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lia Garvin
Yes. A favorite quote I’d say, in the spirit of reframing, is, “When you change the way you look at things, the things we look at change,” by Wayne Dyer. When I saw that, I was like, “Oh, my God, it’s the definition of reframing,” but that’s what this is all about, is seeing how much is possible when we look at something through a new lens. Because when we look at things the same way, we obviously keep…typically we get the same results. We’ve all heard that quote. And so, shifting the way we look at things, it starts to give us a completely new way of…everything around us starts to change, unfold, be different, be new.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lia Garvin
My favorite is good old Amy Edmondson’s psychological safety. I do a ton of work inside companies around helping build effective teams, and psychological safety is at the base of that. And I think it’s so exciting to see that more and more understood and celebrated. I think it’s going to be the foundation to really getting people, potentially that have left the workforce as a part of the Great Resignation, to be back, to be reenergized.

And I think establishing psychological safety and really fostering that is going to help us move into whatever the next phases of work. Is it hybrid? Is it more distributed? Whatever it looks like. And so, that, I think, is some of the most important work around workplace dynamics that we can learn from.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Lia Garvin
Favorite book is The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, or Dan Coyle. And this book dives into kind of in the spirit of psychological safety. It examines teams of all different disciplines from MBA to military, to restaurants, and what are the building blocks for why those teams were effective, and the kind of cultural pieces. And I think it has a ton of great strategies that any team can apply to helping create a greater sense of belonging. And it’s just super practical, has great stories, really inspiring, and also informed a lot of the work that I do with teams to be more effective and inclusive.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Lia Garvin
It’s got to be spreadsheets. And this is such a boring example, I know, but it can be Excel, it can be Google Sheets, it can be anything. If it has cells and I can type things in, I love it. I manage everything I do in spreadsheets. I find them very easy to use.

Actually, in one of my first jobs, I was working for an executive, someone like a chief of staff, and he said, and I was trying to get something done, I was sending an email out with, like, “Hey, here’s what’s outstanding.” And he said, “If you’re sending anything to a group of people, and something has to get done, put it in a table and it will get done instantly.”

And I took this paragraph and the request that I had, and I put all of it into a table using a spreadsheet, and we said, “Here’s the ask, here’s the owner, and status red…”

Pete Mockaitis
Here it is, yeah, nobody wants to be red.

Lia Garvin
Here it is. Nobody wants to be red. And automatically people were responding, “Oh, no, no, no, here it is. Here, I’m done.” And I just find spreadsheets just, yeah, great, simple, like evergreen tool for getting stuff done.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Lia Garvin
Favorite habit is, call me boring again, waking up early. This is something, in order to do a lot of these things I got going on, and have a toddler and a day job, it involves making more time. And so, I get up early before my toddler wakes up. I have about hour, hour and a half to work on personal projects, be creative, exercise, before the day gets started. And I always, no matter what happens throughout the day, feel like I got that productive time for myself.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really resonates with folks; they quote it back to you, they re-tweet you, etc.?

Lia Garvin
Yeah. So, we talked about impact, and a quote that I like to share is, “Not all heroes wear capes. But when talking about your work, wear an F-ing cape.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Lia Garvin
Wear the cape, let it shine, let it flow because we have to be our own advocates for our work. So, when talking about your work, wear the cape. That’s my quote.

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

Lia Garvin
Yeah, check out my website at LiaGarvin.com. Follow me on LinkedIn. On Instagram, I’m @lia.garvin. I have a YouTube channel called Reframe with Lia. All those places are places to learn more about my book Unstuck, to preorder, to get in touch with me, to learn more about the work I’m doing with coaching and workshops, everything like that. So, I would love to hear from folks.

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

Lia Garvin
Yeah. I would say, again, when you are feeling stuck, when you’re feeling the same sort of outcomes keep happening, pause, and ask yourselves, “How else can I look at the situation?” Reframe because it really is unlimited. There is infinite number of ways we can apply this. And it’s about getting more in tuned with finding that moment when we’re stuck, recognizing it sooner so that we’re not stuck for months or years, but maybe we’re stuck for a week or two, or a day. So, tuning in with yourself, becoming more self-aware so that you can recognize that you’re stuck and ask that reframing question.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lia, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and getting unstuck regularly.

Lia Garvin
Thank you so much. It’s been awesome.

Feb 03
0

740: How to Reclaim Your Time and Calendar with Rick Pastoor

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Rick Pastoor shares his tried and tested strategies for beating the calendar overwhelm so you can get back to what matters.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why your calendar isn’t working–and how you can fix it 
  2. Powerful questions to keep you on track
  3. The simple trick to knocking out your biggest tasks 

About Rick

Rick Pastoor has always liked experimenting at work. He’ll try things out, then keep what works, ditch what doesn’t. Try. Rinse. Repeat. In his time at Blendle, the New York Times-backed journalism startup, Rick steadily refined his methods. That’s where GRIP was born, a flexible collection of tools and insights that helped the team do their best work.

Originally self-published in Dutch in 2019, GRIP became an overnight bestseller in Holland. Rick’s mission today is the same: helping people make smarter decisions about their time. He divides his own time between his young family in Amsterdam, giving talks on GRIP, his weekly newsletter “Work in Progress,” and a new startup, where he’s building a next-generation calendar called Rise. 

 

Resources Mentioned

Rick Pastoor Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rick, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Rick Pastoor
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom and hear about the book Grip and your startup Rise but, first, I think we got to go back in time a little bit. I understand there was a moment in your life when you received a letter from your mayor as a youngster, it made quite an impact. What’s the story here?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, okay, so this story is about when I was…I think I was around six. And on my birthday, on my sixth birthday, I received a letter from the municipality, like the local enforcement. It said, “Thank you, Rick, for cleaning up for us.” So, as I was young, and I still do but I cared about the environment in the city, in the local neighborhood actually. So, I started cleaning up stuff when I saw it and then I brought it home, and then my parents had to take care of it.

And for years, I thought that this letter was real, like it was signed from the mayor. And then at age, I think it was 12 or 13, I once brought up this letter, like, “Hey, it was actually weird. Did I get this letter from this…? How did they do that?”

Pete Mockaitis
How did they know?

Rick Pastoor
And then my parents said, “That was fake. That was something that we made up.” So, actually, I spent years thinking that the people in the city actually cared about this kind of stuff, that they noticed me. And I think the reason for sharing this is that, one, I always have cared about the idea that there are some rules that can be helpful, can be ideas that we should care about to keep things in order, and that brings you something, some idea of like you enjoy being in a space that’s nice and neat. So, that’s one idea.

And the second is that, while this was fake, this taught me that noticing these small things that people do that are working well can have a huge, like years’ long effect, of how they perceive the world, how they think about themselves, and stuff like that. So, since then I have made it a habit to try to notice this stuff and reach out to other people and share it with them.

Pete Mockaitis
So, like, “Hey, I noticed this and it’s really cool. Thank you.” Like that sort of thing?

Rick Pastoor
I think that kind of stuff, and I think that, I don’t know if you’ve ever…of course, you’re producing this podcast and you do other stuff, people think that you get bombarded with messages all of the time. And, of course, you probably get a lot of stuff but, still, I also found that, like the book sold over, whatever, 70,000 copies here in Netherlands, and people think that I have like hundreds of emails.

Of course, that is like the number of well-written and thoughtful emails that you get that someone had researched you or someone that really took the time, I can count on one hand every week. So, it’s really easy to stand out in that sense. And I found that to be true also for the biggest CEOs of the world. So, it has served to me as a trigger to don’t hold back in terms of the stuff that I share, also the questions that I ask to this kind of people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. And you haven’t held back when it comes to discovering and sharing advice for working smart, productivity stuff. Can you tell us, what’s perhaps one of the most surprising and fascinating or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this game since you started looking into it?

Rick Pastoor
So, I think the biggest one for me is that the calendar is a really under-looked aspect for a lot of people, and that has a reason, I think. I’m a huge fan of what David Allen wrote in Getting Things Done, and that’s a big starting point for a lot of people when they think about how to structure their work. I found that in a time where we spend actually a lot of time in meetings still and we have a lot of things going on in the calendar, that sometimes there’s a disconnect.

And that’s where I struggled a lot a couple of years ago when implementing this, and I found a way of working around that but, actually, it starts with the calendar. For me, there was a big shift in terms of the level of sanity that I could achieve while doing something as simple as making sure that the calendar is an actual reflection of how I spend my time. Since then, that has been some kind of a message that I’m trying to preach to people around me and which ultimately led to writing the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, David Allen, for folks who are not familiar, he wrote Getting Things Done, which is fantastic, and we’ve interviewed him a couple of times, including toward the beginning – what a guy – before the show was big enough to be meaningful for his publicity. Episode 15-ish. Thanks, David.

And so, I recommend listeners check out his work. It’s so good and the general vibe being, “Hey, download all the stuff out of your brain. It’s for having ideas, not for holding them. Have them in organized lists. Know what your projects and next actions are associated with those projects and you’ll feel a sense of sort of freedom, and things will become unstuck in.” And it’s really true.

I think about it kind of like exercise. It really works and it’s also really easy to fall off the wagon and stop doing it because, hey, more stuff comes at us all the time, and so you got to be pretty vigilant and pick yourself up when you do fall.

So, when you talk about the calendar and the disconnect, was the disconnect you’re referring to is your calendar is not actually truthfully reflecting or displaying what you’re doing with the hours in your life? Is that the disconnect?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, there’s basically two things. One is that if you have a sense of the project and the tasks that you need to accomplish to get these projects done, there’s two big things that I found that I needed to add to make the system work. And one is to make the connection with when something is going to happen. Of course, what David was saying is that there are a certain set of contexts where a task can be executed well, and then you just start off with this list. But this list is endless, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
It really does get big. I’ve got 1800 items in my OmniFocus inbox.

Rick Pastoor
Exactly. And I have the same, and I feel that, when I was discussing this with people, it gets really overwhelming and it never gets done, and especially in a time where there’s no clear, like, I’m opening the door of my office. I walk in and then I walk out of there at 5:00 p.m. There’s no closure anymore. So, we need some boundaries. And if they are not there anymore in the physical world, we need to build them in our digital world and in our own management of how we manage time. So, the sense of, “When is it done?” It will never get done. Our work is never done.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Rick Pastoor
So, artificially, we need something, and I found that in the calendar. So, that’s one. And, two, I found that there’s a disconnect between where I am now and where I’m going with this. And, for me, that’s like David is describing this in “Getting Things Done” with the different levels of height that you’re looking at your life, like different thousand-foot levels, and I struggle with implementing this.

Like, “How does this link to my day-to-day stuff?” So, you have your weekly review, of course. But how does this map out over the bigger things? And that’s the second ingredient that I added in the second part of the book. It’s basically sharing how I do my quarterly goal-setting, annual review, and stuff like that, how do I keep all this stuff in place. And, again, that’s the link to, “Okay, I know where I want to go but when will this happen?” Well, I’m making the link to time again on this level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s a great point in terms of “When does the work get done? Never because it’s endless.” And I find, maybe just to pause there for a moment, I find that to sort of emotionally that’s difficult because I really like to win and to feel like I’m winning, and I really don’t like to lose or feel like I’m losing. Not that I will bite your head off if you beat me in Monopoly or something but I would prefer to win.

And so, it is even more so with sort of my projects, my goals, the things that I’m trying to accomplish. And so then, I guess I’m curious, how do you know, whether it’s the course of a day or a week or an hour that, “Hey, even though the work is endless and always coming at me, I can declare victory. I have checked the box and kind of call this a successful day or week”? How do you get there?

Rick Pastoor
Well, if you zoom out, I think a big part of the way that we live, the stuff that we run into, is getting comfortable with the fact that the time on this planet is limited. And that means that we will find all kinds of ways to think that we have an endless opportunity to change stuff, to fix stuff, to start with things, to do stuff.

And I think, ultimately, being really aware that this day has so many hours, and, thus, forcing me to, upfront, decide how I’m spending it, and then making sure that that at least happens, will give me – and that’s what I found – this gives me fulfillment because this gives me a sense of, “Hey, I’ve mapped this out and this is what got done.” So, that’s one perspective of looking at it.

So, that’s like mapping it out again onto time, does not only force me to figure out when I’m starting, but also when I’m done. And that gives me this in-between, these small milestones, these small runs, like small days within the day where I can say, “Hey, I made this within the hour. I’m even faster, or I’m a bit slower, so I need to adapt.” So, it gives me these check-in points in the day, so that’s one.

And two is “What’s the alternative?” The alternative is that we assume that we’re not living with the fact that time is limited to us, and we never really get close with this. Well, that gives a false sense of opportunity. And, also, how do you prioritize if there’s no boundaries? So, in that sense, bringing that as close to the day as possible, so not thinking in a year but also in a day, really force me to make the tough decision, tougher decisions, on, “Okay, is this what I’m planning now, is it really worth my time if I look back on this?” Well, most of the time I need to swap things around a lot, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s intriguing. So, that question, “Is this really worth my time looking back on it in the future?” So, in terms of like is there a specific articulation of that question or maybe that’s just it right there? like, I think, “A year from now, will I be pleased that I interviewed Rick in this moment?” So far, the answer seems to be, “Yes, Rick, nice work.” And so, that’s just all there is to it or are there some more nuances or layers?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, I think this is also a part of a habit, and I think you and probably a lot of listeners might be familiar with the idea of doing a weekly check-in with yourself in the form of a review or, like in the book, I call this a Friday recap and expand on that a little bit. But, in a sense, I think it’s key to be aware that, without dedicated moments to sit down and reflect on certain time skills, these insights won’t really appear out of thin air. We need to work on that. We need to spend time on mulling this over and thinking about this stuff.

And, for me, the answer is also a structure where I no longer have to decide that I’m going to do it but it’s part of the structure so it happens. Like, it’s not something that you negotiate with, just like you’re not negotiating the fact that there will be a New Year’s Eve, like this is just what’s there. Like, in that sense, it should be something that’s just part of the deal.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, intriguing, so I like that. So, it’s just there, it’s just in the structure. And I guess maybe, from like a discipline motivation perspective, the first few times probably does require some will to do it, but then it’s just sort of like, “Well, Fridays at 11:00 a.m. is just when the recap happens. That’s just kind of what happens. That’s just it.” And so, is it just that simple after a few reps, then it’s there?

Rick Pastoor
I think, ultimately, there are two ways to look at it. One is there’s the really habit-forming approach where you’re looking at the technical parts of how will habits get formed. And Atomic Habits is, of course, a great book, if you want to dive into a lot of details around how you get to self-motivate instructions. There’s also the other angle of “What kind of value does this bring to my life?” And I think, again, for me, what I’m doing on a quarterly level where I’m taking this is one or two evenings, and on a yearly level, one or two full days to think about “What happened in the last year and how will this next year look?”

Those are the times where the value of this weekly sessions really sinks in but I also see this as if I skip it a week, and then the next week I feel I’m actually a worse person for it if I’m not doing it. And I think that’s where the rubber hits the road, and I experience that, that there’s something lost if I’m not doing it. And that’s where I feel this is not a trick. This is not something that I do because I feel like I really experience that stuff will fall apart if I’m not doing it.

But, of course, there’s also a connection between, “How do you make this super simple?” And we have the tendency to make things more complicated if things are not working, and I get that. Like, we bring in more complicated software if things are not but, actually, what really works is the other way around. If things are not working, take at least one piece of the puzzle out and then try it again. Like, make it simple instead of more complicated.

Pete Mockaitis
That reminds me of BJ Fogg’s work in Tiny Habits, like, “How can I make this easier?” is sort of like the master question. And I think that’s dead-on. Well, so I want to talk about the book “Grip” and some of the productivity experiments, but we’ve already sort of teased a little bit about sort of like the daily plan, the Friday recap, the quarterly, the yearly. Can you just give us a couple kinds of key guiding-light questions that you prompt yourself with at each of these intervals?

Rick Pastoor
Okay. So, on a weekly level, I’m thinking about, “Hey, what happened in the last week? What made me proud? What went well?” And then, “What are some of the things that did not go as well as I thought they went?” But, also, on a weekly level, it’s way more tactical, it’s way more like I’m tapping each item in my calendar to see if there’s any loose ends. Like, I follow the structure that also David Allen brought us, like, “Hey, go over each project and make sure that there’s a next action,” like there’s a basic checklist.

And then if I move to the quarterly level, I’m specific on using quarters because a month is way too short and a year is too long for setting any type of goals, so that’s why I’m using quarters. Also, it links really well with how a corporate structure works so you can also fold in your work plans a lot easier. And then I’m asking questions like, on the level of one goal, “So, how did my goals go? Did I manage them? And if not, why?”

On category level for each quarter, I have a couple of questions around, “Hey, like in my work, what kind of stuff do I actually want to spend my time on if I’m purely reasoning from my own perspective?” But, also, shifting towards more personal questions, like, “Hey, think about your friends, think about your family. How do you evolve in this, in this network of people? And what do you bring to each of these members of your family, friends, and group around you?”

So, going over these set of questions, zooming out on a quarter level and also on a yearly level, you see that gradually, like it moves from more technical to strategic “Where do I want to go as a person?” in a sort of sense.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, so let’s hear, it sounds we’ve already hit a lot of it. But what’s sort of like the big idea or main thesis behind your book Grip, which will soon be released in English to us Yankees? And let’s hear about some of the intriguing productivity experiments that are inside of it.

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, basically, what I’ve done is I brought a guide that I would’ve found super useful if it was my first job, and it contains a structure for having a better week, and that starts with the three components: calendar, task manager, email/communication, and this Friday recap or weekly review. That’s the first part of it.

And based on what I found missing is that there’s a lot of books and ideas that zoom in on one of these specifics and give you a really helpful tool. But how does this fit into the life that I have to manage? There’s a lot of stuff going on. And how does this fit into the Slack channels that are also there and WhatsApp that’s also there? I need to deal with this. How do I make this happen? So, that’s the first part of the book.

And then, of course, the second part builds up on top of that with the goal-setting. Like, goal-setting, to me, is like a lot of people get mad if I start talking about setting goals.

Pete Mockaitis
“How dare you?”

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. They have this instant negative response because people are using goals in a wrong way. Like, they’re used on them, not with them. It’s like something that gets managed for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. “Here are your goals, Rick. For this quarter, you will be doing these goals.”

Rick Pastoor
Exactly. It’s more of a stick. And what I also hear is that it’s something that is spoken about a lot, like you discuss a lot at work, and then, ultimately, of course, a couple of weeks in, you get completely different directions. Like, we’re not able to stick to them as well. So, of course, it brings in a negative response. So, my goal was to give you something that you can actually play with that brings you something as a person.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. And so, you’ve done some experiments, huh? Let’s hear some of the results.

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, one of the things that I love, and this is not rocket science, but one of the things that I’m a huge fan of is “How can you break things down to the point that you do them today?” And this is something that I’ve seen work for a lot of people, but, of course, we have these big dreams and big ideas.

And, ultimately, what I found, one of the first things that I’ve done aside from the main job that I had as a startup back then, is that I found that it was hard to do a specific type of research in a team, and people were always saying, like, “Yeah, we need more time to do research,” and complaining, basically, about, well, the decisions that were made.

And then I thought, like, “So, okay, how can I break this down as much as possible?” We were building a new version of the onboarding of one of the apps that I was working on. And onboarding meaning, well, the pros of signing up and then getting a new account. So, then I thought, “Okay, what can I do every single day? Well, let me review one specific onboarding for another app, and then write a brief blogpost about it, and then post that.”

So, ultimately, after a month, I had quite a collection, actually, of work which were super simple to do. Like, it was precisely in my circles of stuff that I found interesting, that I’m good at, that give me a good feeling, and also had a good mix with, and add to stuff that we were doing at work. So, this is one example, which ultimately led to writing an article for A List Apart, which is one of the blogs that I still am a fan of for years, which I find super exciting.

So, then one thing leads to another. That also led, ultimately, to the second Fuller Project which was writing a newsletter for every single day of, that was, 2016. And that led to, ultimately, writing the book because I had this material. And then, of course, ultimately, people started asking me, like, “Hey, how do you manage this?” Well, then I point back to the starting point, which is just writing for 15 minutes a day. And that, we all have time for. So, I think that was one of the experiments that I started with super small, and then, well, kept on improving and kept on building upon, which is one of the core things that I still do every single day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so fun. And I’m just imagining in your workplace, like, “Oh, boy, Rick is the onboarding expert. Like, he’s the master of onboarding.” And it’s like, “Okay, so I signed up for an app a day and wrote about what happened when I got on board for 15 minutes, and I did that for 20 days, a total of five hours. And now I am like the all-mighty onboarding….” Well, I’m just sort of making assumptions that this…

Rick Pastoor
That is fair. No, that’s basically completely fair but, also, as soon as you start, as soon as you do this yourself, you start looking at the other stuff that gets published, gets written, and people get idolized for with different eyes because, sure, there are some things that are truly a ton of work, of course, but a lot of things are also a culmination of tiny bits and bytes every single day. And if you know that, then you also know that, like if you publish hundreds of podcast episodes, like you did, people start asking you, “How do you actually manage this?” “Of course, one episode at a time.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, yup.

Rick Pastoor
One step at a time. And I think we underestimate what we can do if we do this for a longer period of time, which is super powerful, I guess.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. Well, I would stop myself from ranting about how when you Google something, all 10 results look suspiciously similar often, not always, but often. It’s like, “I know what you’re doing, everybody. I know what you’re doing.” And it irritates me. Anyway.

Rick Pastoor
Are you saying with that that you feel that these types of habits are causing this?

Pete Mockaitis
No. I’m just saying when you look at a body of work with a different set of eyes after producing something, it’s true in that I know that there are SEO articles out there saying, “Google something, look at the top 10 results, and then repackage them. And, hopefully, your domain authority, or whatever, will push you to be on the top results. Now you get some traffic.” Well, thanks, you’ve made the world no better, and I find that annoying. That’s my hot take, anyway. Not super relevant.

Rick Pastoor
No, I get what you’re saying, and I think what is true in that is that if you use any type of these kind of hacks to make yourself do stuff, it also matters what you then do, of course, and the direction matters. And I think this is also why I love the saying of Stephen Covey, “You can run up a ladder as fast as possible, but if these ladders are set against the wrong wall, why are you doing it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Exactly.

Rick Pastoor
“What’s the ultimate perspective?” And I think this is what happens in a lot of stuff that you can just copy and paste tips and tricks. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, well, the combined effort of small steps every day can really surmount to a huge body of work that a lot of people will recognize, but that’s not the goal, that’s not really the goal. The goal is like, “How can you move this mountain for yourself?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I guess, fundamentally, it just feels more generous and loving in the world. Like, you’ve created something that is truly useful as opposed to something that’s just useful for your own sake, like, “Okay, hey, I managed to get some clicks but I’ve made the world know better,” is just kind of sticks me the wrong way.

But, anyway, bit by bit. Also, another thing I want to say about that, I remember back in my consulting days, when we were fresh recruits and we would look at people building these elaborate Excel models, and they showed us an example, like, “Oh, hey, yes, so here’s something I made,” and people are like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s insane. There’s like 50 different sheets and they all interrelate and you can automatically update one assumption and it flows into all these other places.”

And it was just like wildly intimidating but then they always said the same thing, it’s like, “Well, hey, this didn’t start out that way. One day we set out to figure out this one thing.” And they said, “Okay, so we had a very rough one-sheet thing.” And then we said, “Well, hey, actually there are some really dynamic assumptions working underneath it.” So they said, “Okay, so I made two other pages to reflect that, which then linked to the first one.”

And they said, “Well, there’s another section of things.” And so, again, it just sort of builds bit by bit. And then, when it’s unveiled in its entirety, whether it’s a whole book or a glorious Excel model or whatever, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s insane. I could never do that.” It’s like, “Well, no one can in one day. It grows up bit by bit, and then it becomes something awesome.”

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, I do want to add to one of the previous things that you mentioned on “Is it actually worthwhile what you’re doing?” That I do tend to believe that most of these does not happen out of malintent or out of purposefully making something that’s not useful, or just useful for yourself. I think, ultimately, we do want to build or make something, most people, that is, in some way, deeply useful for, one, ourselves, but also for others.

And I think if there’s, in your life, no structure around “How do you gather insights that help you course-correct? Who is your sounding board, in that sense? Who are the people around you that can speak to you about this? Who do you use as a sounding board to reflect on how kind of ethical and moral choices you’re making? I believe that this is also a hugely important part where you can, one, stand out from the pack, and, two, can have huge effects on the direction that you’re following.

Like, if you’re listening to this and you don’t have an answer to this, you don’t have a way to think about this to deconstruct these issues, you’re not course-correcting. And that’s when you’re missing out, I believe.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well-said in terms of if you don’t have something, some guideposts or values or people to bounce things off of, and you just go down an optimizing shortcut-y pathway to maximize something, you’re going to get into some gross results. I don’t know if this is true, but I heard a conversation with Bethany McLean and Seth Godin, and one of them said that, “If you continually split-test A-B, what gets better results and clicks, a website, it will always devolve into porn.”

And I don’t know if that’s true, but there is a kernel of truth, I think, to it in terms of like what’s more exciting, like, “Hmm,” in terms of capturing a click, if it’s more clickbait-y or provocative, it does tend to, in the short term, get more people curious enough to take a look. So, yeah, that’s a great point about zooming out and getting the broad perspective. But I want to zoom back in.

So, with calendars, you noted a disconnect and you’ve taken it to a whole another level here in terms of you’re not just using your calendar a little bit differently. You have raised $3 million, I see – congratulations – to build a full-blown new bit of calendar software. What’s the scoop here?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, if you think about when you do your best work, if you think about when you want to be focused, when you want to have your meetings, you will probably have some idea, and your listeners will probably have some idea, too, otherwise, you won’t be listening to this. But the question now is, “Okay, think about the rest of your team, think about your teammates, think about the people you possibly manage, the people that you interact with within the company, you probably have no idea or maybe you know, “Okay, this guy is working mostly late shifts. This is not a morning person.” Okay, but that’s as far as it goes.

With Rise, what we want to do is not just build the calendar as an Excel sheet that you fill in but, actually we want to fold these signals into a calendar as we’ve actually done in the last year. We built a scheduling engine that takes this stuff into account, so personal profile, but also the meetings and stuff that you’re attending already. And if you request a time, like, if you say, “Hey, I want to meet for one hour with colleague A, B, and C in the next week,” we will schedule that on a time that’s saving as many focused time minutes as possible for the whole team on average.

So, that’s the biggest thing. We don’t just want to build a pretty calendar, which is something that I think we do, but that’s not the décor because the gist of it is we want you to be in and out, but actually want to help you preserve as much time to focus on what actually matters but also actually have better meetings because they are scheduled at times where you can perform at your best.

And that’s something that’s also linking back to the book but also in how you structure your week, is that we arrived at this, in a time where we just assume that we perform on this very same level on Monday mornings as Thursday afternoons, or at least we expect that of ourselves. Well, of course, that’s not true. And the same is what we’re doing in a year, like on a scale of a year. We just assume and expect from ourselves, from our team, that we perform at our best at all times. Well, that’s not how nature works.

So, there are times where we are just not so focused as we could possibly be, there are times in a year where we need to re-energize. And I think those are things that we actually know that are proven by science, that are backed by research, and stuff that we want to fold into this engine to make sure that you no longer have to think about this stuff, but actually have a calendar guide you to having better days and better weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s certainly intriguing. I guess I’m wondering if there are low-importance meetings that you can schedule for people’s least juicy times. Although, I know if anyone hosting meetings likes to think of it as low importance, but sometimes they might. It’s like, “Hey, these are just the updates that we’re obliged to do by law or something.”

Rick Pastoor
There’s one way to think about that, and that is there is no way for a team to set any type of guardrails about how much time you spend in meetings. So, there is basically just saying, “Hey, can we put it in this week or not?” Like, that’s what we are thinking about. So, that’s also hard to think about more weeks because there is just so much data to consider if you think about just scheduling in a meeting.

And you say low-priority meetings, well, like we know this but it’s just too big of a mental hurdle to think about the other possibilities, but that we can do. So, what happens in Rise is if you schedule a meeting, and the meeting loads for a team, it crosses the boundary that you set as a team, it will suggest, “Hey, possibly move this to next week.” And in a lot of situations, that’s fine. Like, there’s a lot of stuff that can wait.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’m curious then, in terms of for our own selves, and maybe Rise does some of this, what are the best times to work? And to what extent are there universals versus individual personal preferences? And how do we masterfully deduce those and work with them?

Rick Pastoor
I think, roughly, there are – and this is not rocket science – roughly, there’s two types. There are the morning owls and there’s late nights, the people that perform better later in the day. And I think if you take those as archetypes, you can split those, again, into two groups but, roughly speaking, there is half of the population that really wants to have their focused time early in the day, and have their meetings maybe a little bit to start around 11:00 in the morning or just after lunch, and then continue into the afternoon.

And there’s another group that prefers to have their meetings in the morning, so to get them done, and have their peak time around 3:00 or 4:00 p.m., and then continues later in the day. And, additionally to this, there’s also a group that is really productive in the evenings, while there’s no distractions, there’s no things going on. What you do see is that you can ask yourself if that happens because of the distractions, or because they are truly more productive at that time.

So, I think that’s an interesting thing that program to impact especially in the next couple of years when people are and will be way more experimenting with disconnecting the work, the usual work times, and figuring out more. But if there’s no construct of an office anymore, and if you can let go of the times more, like you need to appear at 9:00 in Slack and then disappear from Slack at 6:00, what will happen to our productivity if that’s truly possible? But, in a sense, I see two big groups. So, either one in the morning or in the afternoon to focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, can you give us maybe a top do and a top don’t in the realm of calendar, task manager, and communications?

Rick Pastoor
Okay. So, a top do would be, one, make sure that what you do is reflected in this calendar. So, one, that’s meetings, but, two, after that, preparation time, processing time, travel time. Those are three that are very often overlooked. And, of course, you are not the person that is not preparing their meetings, but all the other people are. But we can actually set a good example and make sure that we have the preparation time booked in, otherwise it won’t happen.

And then, connects to that, make sure that what you’re actually working on, so all your tasks, two biggest tasks that need to happen should be in the calendar, that’s what I absolutely believe. That gives a signal to the team, that gives a signal to the people that try to book something in, but also it’s a huge thing for yourself to see a notification pop up and say, “You need to work on this right now because now there’s no excuse anymore.”

So, I’m really saying, make sure that what’s in there, that’s also something that you’re not negotiating with anymore. So, it’s really something that you should actually do. So, that’s really the do part. And the other two parts is what you already mentioned. Like, you should not use your brain for storage. Of course, that’s a mantra that people hear on this channel a lot, but that’s really something that you should not do because you should use your brain as a working memory to focus on what’s at hand.

And then the final one from me would be schedule time for communication, and let that happen at a set time because, one, that’s a skill. Communication is something that we value, like we’re not cutting it out, but very often, what happens, of course, we do our chats and our email while on the go, while we’re, I don’t know, in line in the grocery store, and, of course, we’re not reading things well, we’re not having our full attention. And, of course, stuff runs off the rail with that because we’re not reading. So, I would suggest book off time, like block off time in your calendar to do this communication. If we really value it as part of our work, it should be there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Rick, now, can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rick Pastoor
My key quote that I return to is the one, of course, from old president Eisenhower, there’s stuff that’s urgent but not important. Most of the things that are urgent are not important, and most of the things that are important are not urgent. And I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but that’s something that, like every day, is challenging me so much to really think about. If someone puts something on my plate, is that truly because it’s…like should I accept this because it really fits where I’m going? Or, do I do this because, well, really someone else requests this of me?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rick Pastoor
Okay, so the one that I find really intriguing is still this study that’s about how much time do we need to return to our tasks when we are disrupted by something, or when we’re disturbed by something. And there’s a study that’s often quoted, which is that we need – what is it now? 24 minutes? 23 minutes?

Pete Mockaitis
I was thinking the Microsoft study, 24 minutes. You got something fresh for me, Rick?

Rick Pastoor
No, no. We all talk about this study. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel that I need this amount of time to return to the task, but, still, we talk and think about it, and we use this to, I don’t know, take certain directions in how we shape our day. So, I feel this is something that I hope, in the brief, like short time, near time, we will discover that there’s actually something else happening.

And how can we, in a world where so much is happening around us, and we’re disrupted a lot, can we find a way where we’re not dependent on our own discipline so much to get done what needs to get done? So, there’s these paradigms where, of course, if you look at deep work, for example, where…and actually part of Rise is built on top of that, you need as many undisturbed blocks of time to really do work that’s important.

And that’s the idea that most of us start from. But the question is, “Is that something that…can we invent something that really breaks with this pattern that allows us to combine both the fact that we are available instantly, with the fact that we can produce meaningful work if we are still, like in a way, connected and sometimes interrupted by something?” That’s something that I’m fascinated about.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Rick Pastoor
One that I re-read a lot is one of the earliest productivity books, and that’s How To Live On 24 Hours A Day. I don’t know if you know it. It’s a really thin one and I think it’s 1907, something like that, that it was written. And I love it because he’s basically describing that we tend to focus our work in like eight hours a day, and we have like around eight hours of rest, and then, still, there’s quite a lot of time left.

And he’s basically saying, “Okay, if we can, instead of focusing on how can we make these eight hours at work more productive, if we think how can we meaningfully spend those other eight hours, that’s, of course, a 2X improvement,” which is really hard to do with incremental, really small changes in, I don’t know, our day-to-day software and our to-do list and our hacking our kind of stuff. And I think this is, to me, a really useful reminder that I need to be conscious about, or can be conscious about, this other segment of my day as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, well, the calendar is an easy one for me. Like, for me, that’s something that I begin the day with and end the day with. I’m actually on the first version of Rise now, which is really nice, and I’m connected to that. I’m also a huge OmniFocus fan, so that’s my go-to task manager.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Rick Pastoor
Favorite habits will be, for me, we have been doing a smoothie every single day for, I don’t know, 10 years. Every morning, I make this.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s in the smoothie, Rick? We have to know.

Rick Pastoor
It’s all veggies. And we started off, and I think this is, again, is something that like you have to ease in a little bit because, like I have some friends that drink this stuff that we make, and they’re like, “What are you drinking because this is disgusting?” But I do feel that, while I cannot prove this, that this has a lot of long-term healthy effects on my energy during the day, but also long-term what kind of stuff do I consume and do I get the proper amount of nutritional value in my body.

So, we started off with a lot of fruits, and then, over time, gradually replaced fruits by more vegetables. And that has been something that, I would say, something that the longest running habit that I’ve been doing.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, let’s see, like this morning, what was the recipe in terms of the vegetables?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. Okay, so there is the fruit that is in this is unpeeled bananas, because in the peel of a banana, there is most of the fiber, actually. So, I wash the banana, and then I put it in. There’s – what is it? – linseed, I guess – how do you call it? – in there. There is carrots, there’s spinach, there is kale, there is…let me check. I have to also translate the words in my head so I’m looking. Avocado?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, it’s the same, huh? Avocado, yeah. So, avocado is in there. And for flavor, I use cacao, is it in Dutch?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cacao? Chocolate?

Rick Pastoor
Chocolate, but, of course, the pure biological version, which is in powder. And spirulina.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s something.

Rick Pastoor
And that’s it. And then water, and that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. Cool. All right. And tell us, is there a key nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, what they’re saying is the first thing that they discover when they start to put in the work in the calendar, saying, “I have way too much on my plate. So, how do I…like, give me a tip to compress it all in.” And, of course, the answer is there is no way. Like, there is no way that’s happening, and that’s actually the exercises you should go through because now you start to see that it will never all fit, and you need to make the decisions that matter.

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

Rick Pastoor
I’m quite active in Twitter so that’s where I’m sharing the stuff. So, that’s @rickpastoor on Twitter, and that’s also where I refer to my newsletter and the other stuff that I’m working on, and that’s the place to find me.

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

Rick Pastoor
I would say that being diligent about how you spend your time, not only on a weekly basis, but I would challenge the people, especially from this podcast, to also spend time on the longer horizon, and not just following what’s offered in the workplace, but consciously thinking about what your system, your structure there, because that’s where you find the real impact.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rick, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun with the book and with Rise and all your adventures.

Rick Pastoor
Thank you so much for having me.