BS At Work with James Healy: designing work that works for humans. Rethinking culture, change and human behavior.

Ever felt like so much of what happens at work is utterly meaningless, wasteful and backwards?

You're not alone.

In this eye-opening conversation with James Healy, founder of Behavior Boutique and author of "BS at Work," we dive deep into why modern work often feels like bullshit.

What if the biggest problem in modern work isn’t lack of effort, technology, strategy, or "better humans" but the simple fact that we keep designing for humans as if we were some logical machines… instead of messy, emotional, social creatures we are?

James reveals the fascinating disconnect between how organizations design systems and how humans actually operate.

We've built workplaces on the false assumption that humans are rational, logical beings making careful calculations, when in reality we're "social, emotional, tribal storytelling animals" who often make decisions based on context, ease, and what others are doing.

Take modern communication crisis. The average worker now faces 153 Teams messages and 117 emails daily, with interruptions approximately every two minutes. This constant barrage prevents deep work, destroys focus, and fuels burnout. And with AI potentially supercharging this problem.

But there's hope.

James offers practical principles for creating more human-centered workplaces.

What you’ll learn:

• Why burnout is 100% preventable if we stop treating humans like machines.
• The shocking origin stories of tools like Myers-Briggs and DISC (and why they’re no more valid than a Harry Potter quiz).
• Why e-learnings and endless policies fail.
• How context, not individual willpower, drives behavior change at scale.
• Why sometimes the most effective solution is illogical, creative, or has to do with removing, not adding things.
• The power of storytelling as a leadership tool for influence, motivation, and culture change.

... and so much more!

👉 If you’re a leader tired of wasting energy on initiatives that don’t stick, this conversation will show you how to make work more human and more effective.

Ready to question the workplace BS you've accepted as normal?

Listen now and discover how behavioral science can transform your work experience from meaningless to meaningful.

___________________

👤 James Healy is a keynote speaker, executive advisor, and author passionate about using behavioral science to build better organizations. He is the Founder and Managing Director of The Behaviour Boutique, has led transformation projects in 60+ countries, and previously co-founded Deloitte’s Behaviour First offering.

James is the author of The Future of Change Management, Adopting AI: The People-First Approach, and BS at Work, and hosts The B-Word podcast, featuring leading voices in behavioral and social sciences.

Connect with James:

• Website: thebehaviourboutique.com
•  LinkedIn: James Healy
•  Podcast: The B-Word
•  Book: BS at Work: Why so much of modern work is bullshit and how behavioural scie

Transcript

Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina. I'm your host. I'm your partner in change transformation and someone who is so obsessed with the right kind of change when we are getting better, getting closer towards our future aspirations in a way that works for humans as we are. Messy, emotional, social, not all this logical at all, but very effective nonetheless. Today, guys, I'm so very excited to share with you a conversation that we had with James Healy, founder of Behavior Boutique, keynote speaker, advisor, podcaster, and the author of his recent book, BS at Work. Why so much of modern work is bullshit, and how behavioral science can make it better. On today's podcast, um guys, we talk about things like why so much of life in companies and organizations is built on false assumptions about human nature, and how that drives burnout and waste and bullshit work and just utter dissatisfaction with what we do, how we do it, uh, and that feel that often feels very meaningless and like a lot of bullshit. Uh with James, we're gonna talk about how leaders can design workplaces that align with human behavior, with human nature instead of fighting it. So we thrive at work, so we love going to work and we deliver great results. We're gonna talk about why we should be more skeptical of tools like mandatory e-learnings, uh, different personality tasks and different uh learning and development and interventions at work. Not that they cannot work, but it's just the way they designed right now don't work for us humans as we are. We're gonna talk about the surprising role of subtraction, doing less, not more, the surprising role of designing the context in which we do our work and which often influences how we do that work and how we feel about doing that work. We're gonna talk about the role of storytelling in cutting through complexity and unlocking human performance and thriving. But also a little bit more about James and why you should listen to today's podcast and our conversation. James has led cultural and behavioral transformation projects in 60 plus countries in across six continents. James co-founded Deloitte's Behavior First, offering blending anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to solve organizational biggest challenges. Also, James written three books tackling the future of work, AI adoption, and why so many systems we take for granted at work as they are simply don't work for humans. James also is a host of Be Word Podcasts, which I highly, highly recommend. It's James has this ability, and you'll understand what I'm talking about, to tell amazing stories that fascinate, but also delivering some facts and solutions that are very practical and applicable to real worlds. And James is an amazing storyteller. On his B Word Podcast, James explores uh what it means to be human and how organizations can better understand and direct human behavior again for all of us to thrive and deliver more positive impact. So without further ado, please tune in our fascinating, practical, insightful, entertaining, and just joyful conversation with James Healy. James Hilly, welcome to Change Wired Podcast. So excited to have you here for this what I think is gonna be a really fascinating, interesting, and applicable conversation to you, everything that our listeners care about. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_03 4:41

Well, good morning, good afternoon. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Yes, where are you connecting from, by the way? So listeners have a little bit of background.

SPEAKER_03 4:50

So I'm in Perth in Western Australia. Although if listeners don't already know, they will pick up quite quickly. I'm not originally from here. I am from the UK, but I've not lived in the UK for gosh 14, 15 years now.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Yes. So the James connecting from the from the land down under. I'm sort of somewhere there as well from Cape Town. And we are connected to talk about what I believe, I don't know, one of the most interesting topics in the entire world, human behavior. Which uh yeah, we happen to be both passionate about. James, can you give our listeners a little bit of background? What do you do in the world and what you're passionate about? What do you maybe your vision, whatever feels fit the story?

unknown 5:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 5:41

Well, um you've already given a bit of a spoiler alert. I am fascinated by humans and human behavior. And I've always been fascinated by those things, and we'll talk a little bit later about some more of my story and how I got to where I am. But today I am a keynote speaker, I'm a podcaster, I'm an author, and I'm a consultant and executive advisor, focusing on the application of insights from social and behavioral science to organizational problems. So I like to say I work with forward-thinking, innovative organizations to solve problems like culture, well-being, technology adoption, AI, cybersecurity, really all manner of challenges because ultimately, I'm not going to say everything that organizations do, but so much of what organizations do comes down to influencing human behavior.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That's how I learned about your work, being uh curious and passionate about human behavior as well. But I so agree with you on that point that I don't know, I I'd agree as well, like almost everything, if if not everything, is about changing human behavior and understanding it and figuring out how to influence it in an effective way for specific outcomes, right? Whether that's for internal challenges in the company or for challenges customers facing. Almost everything has to do with human behavior. And I was uh when I looked you up some time ago before this podcast, I was so fascinated by the work you do. A, I want to do something similar to you do, probably not just in in you know the same way, but just was fascinated with the books that you write. The podcast, by the way, I'd like listeners to definitely check out the B word. The last one I listened to was Faster Horses, and it was about AI, right? And how applying more AI without strategy might end up just being a lot more mess than we already have. So the podcast is amazing, and then the book that we're gonna be talking about, BS at work, why so much of modern work is bullshit and how to make it better. To cut the long story short, I am so fascinated with your work, and that's why I wanted to have this conversation, and I'm just super excited for listeners to be on this podcast as well. I think I want to talk more on this podcast. Can you uh jump in, James, and tell listeners more about you, like where it started? How did you get to do the work that you do and writing these books and doing the podcast? I don't know, maybe as early as childhood, or where you think it's a good point to start.

Why Modern Work Is Bullshit

SPEAKER_03 8:43

So the way I usually tell this story, and I do tell this story in the book. I started out at the university at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and I was studying a joint honours degree in philosophy and economics. And about two-thirds of the way through my first year, my economics tutor took me on one side. Now, I should say I was finding first year economics pretty straightforward because I had done high school economics, and this was really just a bit of a a bit of a retread of of that, but with a bit more maths. And my tutor, who I always got the sense didn't really much like me, and looking back, probably with good reason, because I was not particularly uh studious at that point because I was finding it very easy. He took me on one side and he said, James, there's something that you need to know. Oh oh yes, what is that? He said, You need to understand that while you are going to sail through first year economics, you're going to fail second and third year economics. Unless unless you stop thinking about what people do and start focusing on the equations and the graphs. Economics is a mathematical subject. Now, he was far more astute than I had realized because what he had picked up on was that I am not, was not a particularly good mathematician. And rather than doing what I was supposed to be doing, which is moving IS and LM curves around diagrams and figuring out where on the where on the graph things were and what was going to happen, I was essentially using my knowledge of basic economics, supply and demand, to figure out what people would do. So if interest rates go up, well, what's going to happen? People are going to save more, companies are going to borrow less, you know, what impact is that going to have. And I was then reverse engineering what would happen to the maths based on my intuition. And what he said to me at the time I took to be a bit of a damning indictment of me as an economist. And I actually failed my my first year maths exams at the same time. So I ended up dropping economics and studying philosophy. Now, the postscript to this story is that five years later we had the Lehman Brothers collapse, the global financial crisis, and the question that everybody was asking, and famously Queen Elizabeth actually asked on a visit to the London School of Economics was why did nobody see this coming? And the answer I think is because everybody was far too focused on the equations and the graphs and lost sight of what people were doing. And it's a it's a fairly common phenomenon. This idea that sort of began or or came to prominence through classical economics, this idea that humans are rational and logical, this idea that the world is mathematically predictable, the world is rational and logical, has absolutely taken over. And it underpins so much that we take for granted in our organizations and our societies. And it's flawed. That's not how humans work.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

I remember reading this part about how we for like again for many reasons came to this conclusion or decided to believe it, that we are separate from animal kingdom, that our bodies are separate from our minds, that we are these rational agents making logical decisions and operating on logic most of the time, instead of irrational beings with emotions and like motivation that goes up and down like all the time. Somehow we decided to just believe in that. And even though we never had really good evidence for that, we just committed to designing a lot of systems based on that, which because it is not reality, often means that those systems don't work and have this like outcomes that nobody can see coming, right? And that made me think of just a small example. For my personal coaching practice, I often uh work with people going through burnout, right? And the reason why they never see that coming is because somehow part of them made to believe that they're these machines that they can operate without proper rest, recovery, and that their work and their thinking, their emotions are not a factor, and also their decision making is not a factor and like burnout 100% preventable if you understand that you are human, and it happens so often because we operate on a different set of beliefs, like we are some sort of machines, right? Uh can you maybe jump in into how did you come to that to understanding that most of the world functions with this on these false ideas about humanity?

SPEAKER_03 14:26

So again, another story, and this is actually the story that begins the book. It starts with an e-learning. It starts with I remember that a mandatory e-learning. Everyone listening to this is familiar with mandatory e-learnings. We've all we've all, I'm sure, if we've worked in big organizations, we've all had to do them at some point or another. And they all follow the same format. It's some hypothetical work-related situation, it's some terrible hammy dialogue, some totally unbelievable characters. It might be photos, it might be videos, it might just be description, but it's always the same kind of thing. It's a terrible narrative. The ending is completely predictable. You can definitely see, you know, you can definitely it's like watching Titanic. You know the iceberg is coming and you can very much predict when it happens. It's all been designed in such a way that you can't fast forward it, you can't stop watching it, you have to try and pay some attention to it, and then when you get to the end, you have to do some terrible multimedia, multiple choice exam to prove that you've completed it and understood it.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:42

I've done hundreds of these things. I worked in banking for 15 years, I worked in consulting before consulting for six years. I've done hundreds of them. This particular one, the subject of this mandatory e-learning was how to do mandatory e-learnings. You have the correct response. And it's very easy to look me up, so I don't need to I don't need to camouflage this fact I was at Deloitte at the time. Deloitte has 400,000 people across the globe. 400,000 people had to do this. Think about the people that had to put this together. Think about this was someone's job for a while. And I'm I'm looking at this and I'm asking myself a question that I have asked many times in my career in big organizations. And the question is this Does anybody actually think this is going to work? And there are only two possible answers to that question. One, yes, somebody somewhere at a reasonably senior level thinks this is going to work, and therefore it's a thing, and we're all doing it. The other answer is no. Everybody knows that this is a complete waste of time, but we're going to do it anyway. I have never worked out which of those answers, yes or no, is a more depressing indictment of large organizations.

The Origin of Personality Tests

SPEAKER_01 17:27

I I just wanted to add that I think what what I learned is that I and you also mention it in your book and in your in your work that for some reason for humans maybe thinking process seems so difficult and challenging in some way that we just opt in for more doing instead. Even what the doing doesn't make any sense just to avoid thinking what actually must might be worth our doing. And you have this beautiful phrase, you know, about thinking also, or quote, that thinking for the human brain is like swimming for cats, that they know how to do it, but they prefer not to.

SPEAKER_03 18:15

That's that's Daniel Kahneman, noble, noble laureate. Uh rest in peace. Yes, it's a brilliant quote because it it really sums it up. We can think humans are capable of incredible insight, incredible logical thinking, but it's really hard, and it is not our natural state of being. And we have to really, really try to weigh things up logically. And I'm sure listeners, if they stop to think about this for a moment, will recognize there are certain life decisions, there are certain career decisions that are really big and really important and really strategic and really difficult, and you do weigh them up and you do mold them over and try and process them logically, and it takes a long time, and it's really tiring, really tiring. Listeners might also recognize that most of the time that's not how we do things, and the example I always use for this is eating lunch or buying lunch, and you know it depends what your routine is, but often, often you just have the same lunch that you always have, or you have a small number of options of places where you go that are near where you work or whatever and it's a very easy decision. But just occasionally you get paralyzed and you end up standing there and thinking, Well, should I have this? Should I have that? Should I have this? Most of the time we make these kinds of decisions instinctively without any real conscious awareness of why. We don't stand there and weigh them up. And when we do, actually it can be paralyzing. And what it illustrates is making decisions automatically is a really, really evolutionary adaptive trait for humans. We've we've evolved to make decisions quickly and automatically for good reason. Decision making thinking uses lots of energy, and we try and minimize that. And so rather than solving a difficult problem like what should I do in a particular situation, we often solve a simpler problem instead. What do I normally do? What's the easiest thing to do? What's everybody else doing?

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Yeah. And here I want to just jump in and emphasize this for listeners as well. Knowing that we would often, most often, go for the easiest option, options that others choose. Shouldn't we be designing for that? Like making the easiest option, the option that we would want to take in our best thinking, right? Or surrounding ourselves with people and systems that will prompt us toward the choice that we would be happy if we made.

SPEAKER_03 21:44

And by the way, one click will buy you BS at work by James Healy. Go do it. But Amazon don't do this to make it convenient for you because they're nice people, they do it because they want you to do one thing, which is give them money. So they make it as easy as possible for you to give them money.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Yeah, that's why I deleted it actually.

SPEAKER_03 22:08

Right. And if you think about from a work from a work context, the number of times we tell people that we want them to do something, and then we make it really, really hard for them to do that thing. And then we wonder why are people not doing this? We put them on a training course telling them how to do this. We've got posters on the wall telling them that we want them to do this. Why aren't they doing it? They're not doing it because it takes some 73 clicks in your terrible system.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Yeah, not even speaking about the language, the wrong incentives, and uh, so many things that are designed against this idea that human beings do the easiest thing, need clarity, need emotional incentive more than anything, like emotional payoff, right? And yes, and also in fact that we know that we need about 10% knowledge and about 90% on how to actually like putting it into work, and then we reverse engineer it and do the exact opposite, giving people like books of knowledge and almost no time and resources for implementing.

SPEAKER_03 23:22

One one of the stories I I tell in the book is about Bayer, the the big German pharmaceutical and agricultural conglomerate. So Bayer, it's probably 12 to 18 months ago now, launched a huge transformation program. They have a new a new CEO. And there's many arms of this transformation program, but it is basically about massively simplifying Bayer, reducing bureaucracy, reducing layers of management, empowering people to make decisions. And the Bayer, see in his big speech when he announced this transformation program, says that the Bayer employee handbook is 1,370 pages. 1370 pages. And as he puts it, which is brilliant, it's longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and a lot and a lot less exciting.

SPEAKER_01 24:22

I I you know I did not hear that uh first hand, so to speak. Uh but did he really say so and about it yes, apparently he did.

SPEAKER_03 24:32

He made the he made the war and peace comment. And and the point and the point is this like who can possibly read that? Who can possibly read an employee handbook? Who can possibly remember any of it, let alone, let alone put it into practice?

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 24:53

But the standard playbook in organizations, the standard playbook in much of society, to be honest, is to give people information and assume that they will process it the way you want them to, they will understand it the way you want them to, they will remember it, and then they will action it. And it doesn't work.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

Yeah, and it never worked. And you know, you mentioned also in your book like all these agreements or you know, compliance thing that we need to sign or accept that are many, many pages long, like from any software or app to yeah, different protocols in our companies. And somebody thinks it's a good idea to have as much of that as possible. And with hoping for, I don't know what outcome, to be honest.

SPEAKER_03 25:44

Well, one of the one of the scientific studies that I mentioned in the book is on that very topic, and it's a brilliantly named study. It's called The Biggest Lie on the Internet. And it's from about I think it's about eight, nine years ago now. But these two psychologists set up this study very cleverly, and they told the participants that they were going to be taking part in a study of how people use social media. So they set up a fake social media network. That that was sort of the the story that was told to the participants. And before they could start the experiment, the participants needed to read the terms and conditions and tick the box. Now, unbeknown to the participants, there was no social network. The study was actually just about whether or not they read the uh they read the terms and conditions. And I don't have the exact stats in front of me, they are in the book. But essentially they knew how many words were in their terms and conditions, they know what the average reading speed is, and therefore, you know, it should take the average person like an hour to read. The average person clicked the button within 60 seconds, and hidden in the terms and conditions were a couple of interesting clauses. The payment for using this system was to sacrifice your firstborn child, and you accepted that any data that you put into this system would be shared automatically with your employer and with the US national, the the NSA, like the electronic surveillance agency. And of course, 99% of people didn't notice these clauses. How many times do we all do this? Do we all buy something, order something, sign up for something? There is this vast document that pops up. Nobody reads these things, nobody can read these things. If you did read them, all you would do in your entire life is read these things.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Yeah. You know, an interesting question though that just popped into my mind about the I. Sometimes I'm thinking, well, maybe I will help us. Uh like, or what I do when somebody sends me like some non-disclosure agreement, I give it to AI. Like, is there anything I should be aware of? Are there like different certain clauses that I might be you know against of uh etc. And they just put the you know the whole document there. What do you think about this type of I guess processing of all the documentation that we humans can't possibly process?

SPEAKER_03 28:30

So I think as an individual, it's not a bad strategy. It's certainly better than my current strategy, which is go, yeah, this probably is going to be okay, and ticket. You know, it's not fail-safe, but giving it to AI is better than what I and I suspect most listeners already do. My concern is bigger picture here, and it is if you look at what generative AI is really good at, it is really good at creating content and summarizing content. And I suspect that what will happen in time is if users start using AI to summarize AI, summarize terms and conditions, providers will start using AI to create even lengthier terms and conditions, and you essentially end up in this arms race. And if my AI writes a document which you then use your AI to read, what was the point of any of it? Have we communicated? Like and and I think, and this is a bit philosophical, but I think language is a tool that humans developed, and there's various theories about how and why language developed, but language is a tool that humans developed to communicate. And I'm going very deep here, but essentially we are all these brains started. In the dark, in our heads, trying to make sense of the world around us. And at the heart of the human condition is trying to understand other humans and other humans' motivations. And language is the tool, imperfect though it is, yeah, that we have developed to do that. And so communication is a really profound part of being human. If I use AI to write you an email and you use your AI to read and respond to that email, have we communicated? I'm not sure that we have.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

Probably not. And then you for sure start questioning what is it all for?

SPEAKER_03 30:46

What is the point?

Communication Overload and Burnout

SPEAKER_01 30:47

Yeah. Which is, you know, this the question of why and what's the point you bring up in the book of in the final chapter for when you give the practical advice, you know, how to approach this world of work with a lot of bullshit, or like generally the world where we have a lot of this bullshit as well. But before we jump into these practical solutions in the book, I'd like also to touch upon this topic that I found to be very fascinating as well as well, and very practicable and applicable to our lives, is that we often use things without understanding of this, like why they were created, by whom, the context, thing, and we just use them to then solve problems, and then they don't really get solved because the solution was never meant for that, or was it developed by people who you know didn't have uh enough even knowledge to develop these solutions. But anyhow, so what I'm talking about, yeah, this idea that things like change management that you talk about, or uh what was it, e-learning, right? And uh different personality assessments. Like we a lot of us use them in workplace, they're used by millions of people, probably by billions. And leaders don't really understand where they came from, what they're based on, what they might be good for and not good for, and how to actually use it, and should we use them in the first place? Like, can you speak to these ideas that you wrote about in the book?

SPEAKER_03 32:25

Yes. So the first part of the book, the first eight chapters, is essentially asking that question over and over again about different aspects of work. Where did this come from? Why is this so widely accepted? And the the answer usually, and there's some wonderful, crazy backstories in there, and I'll touch on one or two of them in a moment. But the the answer is really a good one. It's and and I think what it illustrates is something really fascinating about work, which is that for the most part, for most people in most jobs, no one ever really teaches you how to be at work. So much of what you learn, you learn just through observation, whether consciously or not. And you essentially end up doing things the way they've always been done because that's how everyone else does them. And it happens to us all, you know, as we go through our careers, when we start our careers, we know nothing about work and we're profoundly influenced by the people around us and by the ways of doing things in our first employer. But if we change jobs, if we move companies or we move departments, we move countries or whatever, it happens again and again. And you will often see, and perhaps listeners have had this experience themselves, you have a certain time period within a new job where you are still an outsider and you're still new to the job or to the company or to the team or whatever, and you still question the way that things are done, even if just to yourself, just to try and understand, okay, well, why are we doing this? And after a certain period of time, and obviously it varies depending on the situation, you're just used to that being the way that things are done. And most people then never question again. So I'll talk to a couple of examples from the book in a moment, but one really, really silly one is meetings. Has anyone ever told you, has anyone ever taught you how to run a meeting or how to be in a meeting? Probably not. You just kind of picked it up from you know the way that things are done. But almost all meetings, sometimes they overrun or they finish short, but almost all meetings are scheduled to be 30 minutes or 60 minutes. Why is that? Well, basically it's because Microsoft Outlook sets that as the default. Like yeah, I know you can change it, you can manually change it, but going back to the point that humans do the easy thing much of the time, ah, it's 30 minutes. We'll we'll we'll just have a 30-minute or a 60-minute. And it's a very trivial, but I think very powerful example of we just go with the flow, we don't question it. Some more, I guess, profound and perhaps funnier examples. You talk about personality tests. I talk in the book about Myers Briggs and about disc, and the origin stories of these are fantastic. So Myers Briggs, Myers Briggs, which is again, I've got the stats in the book. It's it's a multi-million dollar business. It's used by organizations like the Pentagon, various major banks. I suspect many listeners, if not most listeners, will have done Myers Briggs at some point. Well, the creators of Myers Briggs were a mystery novelist, and I think it's fair to say an erotic mystery novelist, and her daughter. And the origin is the daughter came home from university. This was the US in 1917. The daughter came home from university and introduced her new fiance to the family for the first time. And the mother was appalled. She really didn't like this guy. He was just, he was a very different personality type to the daughter and to the rest of the family. And this was the inspiration for her to develop what became the Myers-Briggs type indicator. She had read some of Young's work. She had tried to get in touch with Young, he had completely ignored her. But essentially, this is it. It's a mother-in-law who didn't like her prospective son-in-law. There's no scientific basis to it. It's predictive of nothing. If you do the Myers-Briggs test twice in the space of five weeks, you have a, I think, a 60% chance of getting two different answers. So it's not predicting anything. It's not, it's not predictively valid. It's not a valid, you know, it's not a valid psychological construct. All of the different types are framed positively. So there is no way of doing Myers Briggs and getting the answer, well, actually, as it turns out, you're a bit of a jerk. They're all very positively framed. And so, much like a horoscope, you read it and you go, Oh, yeah, okay, well, yeah, this sounds good. They're also very vaguely written. So you read it and go, Yeah, well, that definitely applies to me. Disc, which is another very popular personality test, and it's been rebadged in recent years in a very popular, globally best-selling series of books, surrounded by idiots. For some reason, it's in every airport bookshop I ever go in. Well, Disc was created by the same guy who, and I'm not making this up, the same guy, William Moulton Marsden, who created the Wonder Woman comic book character. And Wonder Woman was a composite of his two wives. They had a very unusual three-way marriage, which was somewhat frowned upon in the US in the 1940s, and they wrote a book together called The Emotions of Normal People, which, among other things, is something of a justification for their alternative lifestyles. Now, I'm not judging their lifestyle, whatever people want to get up to is up to them. But this was the origin of disc, and the D and the S in DISC originally stood for dominant and submissive, which I think gives you something of a clue as to where they were going with this. Again, it's predictive of nothing, results are totally inconsistent, the categories overlap. It's utter nonsense. But yet there are major organizations out there using this stuff for hiring decisions, for promotion decisions. And it's it's, you know, I get that it's a bit of fun, but it is as useful and accurate as one of those online tests, which Harry Potter character are you? Imagine if you didn't get a promotion or you didn't get a job because you came out as the wrong Harry Potter character in one of those quizzes. People would be appalled.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Yes. And what I loved about you know this part in your book is that it's not that no, I don't believe in anything and I think that you know every assessment is bullshit and we shouldn't uh even try to do any work like that. But what I took away from it is that, well, before you apply anything to your life work, especially the important stuff, maybe do a little bit more investigation. What's the origin? What it was designed for, where the author is coming from talking about this stuff. How much of legitimacy does this thing really have, right? And so I actually looked into my favorite assessment, Clifton Strengths, and um I also looked in some of the change management uh uh theories and methodologies. I'm like, yeah, I wonder where they came from, right? And uh it was an interesting discovery and just thinking process. And now every time that I hear some advice or read something, I'm like, huh, you know, I wonder where this is coming from and where is this applicable, right? It's the same also reminds me, like I spent quite a lot of time in nutrition and health and fitness coaching. And you know, keto diet at some point was like such a thing of I don't know, everyone was talking about, and I think even now, like so many people are trying to do it. And very few people know that originally it was developed for treating epilepsy patients. And when they talked about things like burning fat, they were talking about burning fat in food, not in the body. And you know, and and then people try to apply it to become some sort of superhuman. And I'm like, don't even know what it's designed for.

SPEAKER_02 41:34

It might not be a great idea for everyone, especially like if you have certain goals.

SPEAKER_01 41:39

But but the the the point is like look into things that you are applying to your life, to your work, things that matter deeper before applying them.

SPEAKER_03 41:49

Absolutely, absolutely. Ask why, and that's that's one of my that's one of my recommendations. Why is this a thing? Why are we doing this? Why is this being recommended? And it is amazing how often we don't do that, and we just uh it's just it's just it's just the way we do things around here. We just yeah, this is what we do. Okay, must must make sense. Often it doesn't.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Yes. One more example from my life, you know, when I went into corporate, I'm probably one of those people who actually never really worked for a big corporation. I just worked for them as some as an outsider. But one of the reasons why I quitted after half a day in corporate is because I came to my workplace after finishing university, like oil excited, and I saw all of these people doing uh like what's seemingly really nonsense, and I tried to ask why, and nobody could give me an answer.

SPEAKER_02 42:48

And I'm like, there is no way I'm gonna be sitting here for even till the end of this day. So I spent half a day left and never came back.

SPEAKER_03 42:58

It's and one of the deeper themes in the book is about how much of corporate organizational life is ultimately nonsense. And the title is obviously it's a play on on BS. BS can be bullshit, but it can also be behavioral science.

SPEAKER_00 43:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:18

But uh essentially, if you look at if you look at what's happened to work over the last hundred, hundred and fifty, there's obviously been very significant technological improvements in that time. But basically the working week has not really changed very much in about 100 years. And if you look at the data, and there's a lot of data available on this, which you can find online, working hours, total working hours have decreased slightly over the last hundred and hundred, hundred and twenty years in most countries. But that's predominantly because people now get more holiday. And the actual working hours per working week has not really changed very much. It's officially somewhere around 40 hours, or you know, depending on which country you're in, it might be 35 or 37, whatever it is. But productive activity, because of technology, the productive activity of most organizations is done a lot faster. So essentially, what we have done, if you look at it at macro level, is find more and more bullshit to occupy the time. And then over the last 15 to 20 years, most of the technology improvements have been in communication. And so I am old enough that when I just as I entered the workplace, I remember doing recruitment exercises that included a physical intray. So actually, you were presented with a literal intray, a you know, plastic thing with various printed documents in, and the test was basically they all seemed like they were urgent, but you had to figure out you know which were the most urgent.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

Yeah.

Principles for Better Work Design

SPEAKER_03 45:13

That's only 20, 25 years ago. There were no Teams messages, no WhatsApps, no, you know, video calls back then. In the 20 years, 25 years since the internet, we've had smartphones, it is now so much easier to communicate with each other. Essentially, much of what we do, uh what many of us do in the workplace is just communicate with people. Is it productive? Is it useful, or does it just lead to burnout? This doesn't make it into the book, it's very recent, but Microsoft published a report about two and a half months ago. It's called Navigating the Infinite Work Day. And their stats, and they pulled these stats together using all of the metadata that they have from you know from all of the millions, billions of Microsoft subscribers around the world. The average worker receives 153 Teams messages every day, 117 emails, and is interrupted approximately every two minutes. Yeah, when does the work get done, right? All right, and bear in mind these are only the Microsoft numbers because Microsoft don't have access to Slack, to WhatsApp, to SMS, to phone calls, to knowing when people walk up to your desk or stick their head in your office. Essentially, for so many of us, if you work in an office, you're completely distracted constantly. You are unable to focus, you are unable to think, you're unable to do anything that requires concentration, and you have to do it out of hours.

SPEAKER_00 47:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:10

And we what and we wonder why there's a mental health crisis.

SPEAKER_01 47:28

And what came up is the sense of progress towards meaningful goals is what m makes people the most fulfilled, right? And then happier in life in general. But the thing was those, you know, messages and all that stuff. A, you don't understand what's actually meaningful, B, you don't really have time to do anything meaningful. And all these messages, they don't give you a sense of progress. It's like, yeah, by the end of the day, I sent another, I don't know, 100 messages.

SPEAKER_02 47:55

So is it meaningful progress? I doubt it.

SPEAKER_03 48:00

And and you asked before about AI, and my big fear with AI, you know, there's a lot of talk that there's a lot of hype about AI, both positive and negative. And, you know, depending on who you read or who you listen to, AI is going to end jobs, which will enable infinite leisure for all of us. AI is going to end jobs, which will create a societal cataclysm. AI is going to go rogue and destroy humanity. I don't believe any of that. My fear, honestly, is that we use AI to supercharge communication. And we end up looking back on 2025 as the good old days when we only got 150 Teams messages and 117 emails a day because now we get 15,000 or 15 million. We're solving the wrong problem. We've we're deploying AI to enable more and faster communication. I think we need less communication. I think we need to subtract rather than add. And we need to understand that using computers to optimize isn't always the solution.

SPEAKER_01 49:18

Yeah, we first need to think about what are we optimizing for? And does it even need to exist before optimizing? When I talk to a lot of leaders, I always say this the same sort of thing. Like if you automate and scale the thing that shouldn't exist in the first place, all you get is a lot more mass, waste, and and that pretty much it. It's you know, if you have a lot of bullshit at work, you're just gonna have a lot more of it with AI.

SPEAKER_03 49:56

And that's my big fear. That is my big fear about AI. We use it to do the wrong things, we use it to accelerate things that should be slowed down or indeed stopped. And we supercharge the burnouts, supercharge the overwhelm.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

For exactly, you know, that's exactly the point. In order to burnout is again 100% preventable when we accept our humanity and when we use the systems to help us do the work that truly needs to get done, eliminating the work that doesn't need to exist in the first place. But that being said, you know, I wanted to actually jump into practical advice you give in the book, uh right? BS at work, uh, why so much modern work is bullshit and how to make it better. So at the end of the book, you have this chapter of prescription, it's called about how to perhaps try to make work less of a bullshit using behavioral science and better thinking in Daniel. So could you perhaps maybe go through the points that you have in this chapter? It starts with why, right? And yeah, please do speak to that. And if there are any great stories, then please do tell them as well.

SPEAKER_03 51:17

No shortage of great stories. So, yes, the chapter, the final chapter is called prescription. Now it comes with it comes with a big disclaimer. One of the key themes of the book is that humans easily seduced by simplicity. We are all suckers for a silver bullet. And so much that's wrong in organizational life is we've been sold these silver bullets, whether it's technology or personality tests or whatever it is. There's so many silver bullets. Humans are complex. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, 85 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses connecting those neurons. An organization is multiple humans, multiple human brains. It's complex. So I wanted to finish the book with some recommendations, but they are very much framed as principles. Now, there are 10 of them, but I'm very clear. They are 10 principles, not ten commandments. They need to be tailored to your specific context because context is key. And they are designed to be a bit of a pick and mix. So some of them will work well together, some of them will not work well together. Two of them actively contradict each other, and that's very deliberate. So, with the legal disclaimer out of the way, the short one. Which everyone has fast-forwarded and tick the box if they've read. The first one we've already talked about. It's Ask Why. And I quote David Attenborough, the legendary wildlife presenter. And if you hear him interviewed, he's often asked, How did you maintain your childlike curiosity about the world? And his response is always, How did you lose yours? Be curious, ask why, ask where things come from. The second one we've also talked about a little bit, or at least implied, do less. We tend as humans, particularly as humans at work, to want to add. So if we have a problem, we have an opportunity, we have a challenge, whatever it is, our response is to add something. We'll add a process, we'll add a policy, we'll add a training program, or a project, or some new technology, or some new headcount. Sometimes the right thing to do is to subtract. Sometimes, although it's counterintuitive, we need to remove something to make it better. And any of the listeners who are creative, whether musically or artistically or in whatever medium, I think will know this quite instinctively. It's not about just adding more and more and more. You get to a point where actually you need to cut some things. You need to cut that section of the book or cut that section of a song, or you know, remove remove the paint from that part of the painting. We need to apply that principle in the workplace.

SPEAKER_01 54:39

Yeah, can I also jump in here? Uh for me, less also means you can now dedicate a lot more your energy, your cognitive resources to fewer, more important things, that usually means you deliver more quality, right? Or also, like when you have fewer projects at work, then you have less work around work, and the project that you actually decide to do, they end up being something valuable, something that changes things, something that you can be proud of instead of you know 150 or 200 emails every day.

SPEAKER_03 55:18

Right. And the extreme version of this, or the more extreme version of this, is just working less. And I am a huge proponent of the four-day week movement. And if you talk to anyone who's been involved in that movement, and I have some quotes in the book. What's magical about moving to a four-day week, and just to be clear, for if listeners aren't aware, the four-day week movement advocates maintaining pay at the same level. So you get paid for five days, but you only work for four. The real magic of doing that is that it forces people to cut 20% of the bullshit. And if any of the listeners are or or have at different points in their lives been working parents or have worked with others who are working parents, you have seen this in action. The parent who needs to leave at three o'clock every day to go pick up a child from school is absolutely laser-focused on what really needs to be done and will not take any extraneous stuff. On a more one-off basis, if you've ever had to leave the office for a really hard deadline, like you've got to catch a flight, you just say no. You just say no, I can't do that. I'll do that when I come back. Or that's not a priority. Get someone else to do that. The mere act of condensing the time forces people to make hard choices. And I suggest no matter how efficient and focused you think your organization is, it won't be very difficult for people to find 20% of bullshit that they can cut out.

SPEAKER_01 57:11

Yes. And then also additional benefit, obviously, when you have more time off, you recharge more, and the quality of the work that you do do become again becomes a lot better, and you have more like joy and fun doing it. There's an idea.

SPEAKER_03 57:35

Apply science. And the book is underpinned by science. There is an entire section of the book outlining the latest thinking from anthropology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, psychology, sociology about what makes us human. But don't just take my word for it, don't just take that at face value. The thing about science is it is a process, it is not some fixed body of knowledge that never changes. What we believe now to be the most cutting-edge science will probably be looked upon as hilarious ignorance in a hundred years. So try to use the best of what's out there in terms of scientific knowledge, but be aware that it will change and be very, very suspicious of anyone who says to you, This is based on science. This thing that I'm selling is underpinned by science or is based by based on scientific studies. Often that is a convenient crutch that causes people to suspend their curiosity, retain your curiosity, but also think of the scientific method method as experimentation and try things because whatever you're doing in your organization, it is already an experiment. We don't know how the future will pan out, we don't know how things will work in your context, but rolling out a training program or bringing in a new hire, they are experiments, whether or not you think of them as such. So start to think more proactively about the things that you're doing as experiments, and think about how you measure success. So often, so often in organizational life, we don't measure things, particularly things about humans.

SPEAKER_01 59:50

And I remember it if you don't mind if you you had such a great call, scientific approach to human uh matters. I love this phrase.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:04

Right? When we do measure things, we often measure the things that are easy to measure. And they're often the wrong things. So we take it back to one of my favorites, to e-learnings. We've got a problem, we have decided wrongly, usually, that the solution to this problem is an e-learning. Because the problem is that people don't know how to do something or don't know that we want them to do something. So the solution is an e-learning. How to measure how to measure the success of the e-learning? Well, I know. We'll measure how many people have completed it. We'll measure how many people have got eight out of ten or whatever the pass mark is. Are we really measuring success? Have we really changed people's understanding? Will we change people's behavior? Or are we just measuring whether people have clicked to the end and then got eight out of ten on the incredibly easy multiple choice that we made really easy so that we would get a 99.8% pass mark? But we are able to put those measurements in a PowerPoint and report back to someone, uh see, we've got data. Not all measurements, created equal.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:23

Yeah, that also brings back this idea of why, right? Asking why are we doing this in the first place? Obviously, for the people who manage this e-learning process, their incentive, as you mentioned, to get a report, to get certain evaluation of their work, and that's where you see for whom the process makes sense. But outside of that, does it make sense for the organization?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:51

Usually not. Usually not. But this idea that humans are rational, logical, processing machines hinges on the idea that we're all individuals and we all make our decisions in a vacuum. It's absolutely not the case. Humans are social, we are tribal, we are profoundly influenced by other people, but we are profoundly influenced by our context. And we often default to imagining a problem is an individual problem. The reason we have this problem is because individuals don't know what they're doing. The solution is to give those individuals training. The solution is usually, like the problem, much more complicated than that. And I actually have a cartoon in the book which I reprinted.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:57

Yeah. But the forest and the koalas, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:01

Uh so it's a brilliant cartoon. It's one of my favorites. It is a picture of the remnants of a forest. It's a load of tree stumps. The trees have all been cut down. And there is a very, very sad-looking koala clinging to one of the tree stumps. And there are two people in the picture. One's got a clipboard, and they're saying to each other, This young koala has a mental health problem. And I love this cartoon because it sums up so much of what's wrong with organizations and societies. We cut down the trees and blame the koalas for being sad. Does the koala have a mental health problem or did we destroy the koala's habitat? Is it something in the context? And we need to think about context. We need to think about what are the complex systemic factors that are influencing this situation, whatever the situation is.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:01

Yeah, you know, I always like to say that humans are like plants with legs. If you put the human into the good environment, like gives him some water and sunshine, then it's gonna flourish.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:14

If you put it into some, I don't know, dark dark area with uh dry soil and no water, probably not gonna be that happy.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:24

Right? Every organization is a factory. It's another Daniel Kahneman quote. Every organization is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions and behaviors. Think of your organization as a behavior factory. And if you're a leader, a huge part of your role is figuring out which levers you want to pull in that behavior factory. How do you create the conditions? How do you create the context where people will do the things that you want them to do and not do the things that you don't want them to do?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:56

Yeah, taking into account that human beings are those irrational beings with civil power who can get tired and get emotional and like a lot of things, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:06

Correct. Humans, and I use this line repeatedly through the book humans are social, emotional, tribal storytelling animals.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:17

Yes, and that's what we are. And although we have all these irrationalities and emotions, etc., seemingly hard to predict, but surprisingly, when we actually design for those, things turn out to be a lot more predictable than we think they might be.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:34

Right? If you try and understand people as they really are, not this myth of rational logical calculation machines, you're gonna get better results.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:52

So the next one, logic, embracing and abandoning it.

The Power of Storytelling

SPEAKER_03 1:05:57

So look, you've already you've already used the the Kahneman quote about humans being like cats. And this next one is all about that. Humans can think logically, but we don't like to. So don't assume that it will happen by accident. Think about, think very carefully about how you can create the right conditions for people to make logical decisions. And that might mean taking steps to prevent groupthink. So, for example, getting people to provide their views individually or anonymously on a particular topic, not in a big room full of all of their peers and their superiors. It might mean something like the pre-mortem, getting people to think forward about what's going to go wrong with whatever it is that we're planning. And the premortem is a very specific technique where rather than asking people, hey, what's going to go wrong, you ask people to imagine themselves in the future at the end of this project or this acquisition or this product or whatever it is. And imagine themselves in the lessons learned session looking backwards. And it seems, and nobody really understands why, but it it seems like the act of almost mental time travel and putting yourself in the shoes of your future self makes us better at understanding and predicting than if you say to someone, hey, what do you think is going to go wrong with this? So it's a very subtle framing. Another technique is red teaming or black hatting, which people might be familiar with. So you just set a particular individual or particular group of people, and their job is essentially to poke holes in whatever it is that you're planning. And again, for various fairly complex social reasons, I think people are then liberated to really poke holes because they're not going to be seen as trouble causers because they've been given the job of being trouble causers. Yeah, various other techniques. But I guess the lesson with that is if you want people to be logical, you really need to make an effort to set the conditions so they can't be logical.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:18

Yeah, it's like, you know, yeah, I just wanted to add, it's uh the same, you know, when what I do with my coaching, whenever we set a goal with the client and it requires, you know, certain behavior, etc., I always ask, like, okay, what do you know about yourself? How how did you fail in the past? And what can we put in place to prevent this from happening or give you a hand, support you in that same situation? Right. And that produces a lot better, more consistent results than any sort of uh optimistic uh planning, like I'm just gonna do my best, right? Or is it that's gonna be different this time.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:59

Absolutely, absolutely the opposite can also be true. And those are some tips on how to embrace logic and and make more logical decisions, but actually, often we need to take less logical decisions, we need to stop trying to apply logic in every situation, and we need to accept that sometimes the last thing you would think of doing is the thing that you should do, and so much of organizational life, and I quote at length here Rory Sutherland, uh, the Oakal V vice chairman, who's a pioneer of sort of applied behavioral science. But Rory and others point out so much of organizational life is retrospectively justifying what we've done. And we often make decisions in organizations based not on what is the best solution to whatever problem it is that we're we're trying to solve. What will retrospectively sound the most logical? What is the thing that will prevent me getting fired? For example, nobody ever got fired for suggesting a mandatory e-learning. They should have done, in my opinion. But you will never be fired for saying we should put people on a leadership training course, or we should have a mandatory e-learning, or we should write a new policy. That's how you end up like Bayer with a 1370-page set of employment policies because it's never a bad idea. It always seems logical. Sometimes the right solution isn't logical. And sometimes the right solution is creative, sometimes it's counterintuitive. Give yourself, give others a bit more permission to have crazy ideas.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:04

Yeah, like I love this idea of shitstorming, right? Instead of brainstorming, give yourself permission to create a bunch of bad ideas.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:12

Shitstorming is the best activity. It is so much fun, it is so subversive, and it is very effective. If so, for listeners, the idea of shitstorming is it's the opposite of brainstorming. In brainstorming, you sit there in a room and try and come up with good ideas. In shitstorming, you sit there in a room and try and come up with the worst possible ideas that you can. And this has a number of impacts. Firstly, the enemy of brainstorming is that little voice in your head that says, Oh God, I can't suggest that. No, no, no, my boss is here. No, people will think, no, people think this is silly. No, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say it. And so sadly, often in a brainstorming session, you end up with just really boring and banal and vanilla suggestions. We'll have an e-learning, we'll write a policy. Shitstorming creates psychological safety. Because if the objective is to come up with bad ideas, no one is going to laugh at your bad ideas. And often, once you've done a shitstorming session for a bit and you've got a list of bad ideas, you can just reverse them because the opposite of a bad idea is often a good idea. But just occasionally, that thing that is the stupid idea that is the last possible thing that you would ever do, when you say it out loud, this magic happens and someone looks at someone else and there's a raised eyebrow, and it's you know what? Actually, that might just work. And the other ben and the other benefit, particularly if you're doing this with your boss or or or more senior people, or you're doing it for clients, depending on what you do, is there is often this horrible but very powerful moment when someone in the room looks at the list of terrible ideas of of how we could solve this problem and says, Oh god, that that's pretty much exactly what we're already doing. That that describes the current state. And that moment of recognition is is very useful and very powerful.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:39

And such a powerful idea again, back to this, like have a process, right? For things like that. So it's not just happen, doesn't just happen randomly, but you have it, I don't know, on your schedule to do so so people have permission to uh give those bad ideas.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:59

And one of the examples I use in the book, and I use this example all the time. If we have any listeners who are fans of boxing, they might be familiar with this. Now, in the build-up to the Rio Olympics, uh, the amateur boxing association that runs Olympic boxing was presented with the latest in a long series of studies that showed that amateur boxing had a very significantly worse safety record than professional boxing, significantly higher instance of head injuries. And various studies have been done, and the results were very consistent. And so I want the listener to imagine the meeting. There must have been one, there were probably several, where the bigwigs at the amateur boxing association sat around and worked out how to make amateur boxing safer. And somebody eventually suggested the craziest idea. And that idea was to remove the headguards. Because one of the major differences between amateur boxing and professional boxing is in professional boxing they don't have headguards. But in amateur boxing, for a long time, they had headguards. And there are various explanations for why the headguard might cause more head injuries. Perhaps it's something to do with the way force is distributed. Perhaps subconsciously you're less likely to duck or get out of the way if you've got a headguard because you feel safer. Perhaps subconsciously you hit harder when the other person's wearing a headguard. Nobody really knows the reason. But the data is very clear. Wearing a headguard increases your chances of a head injury. And so they did the unthinkable, they took them off. And it's a very specific example from a very unique context. But I think the lesson is broadly applicable. Imagine suggesting that the way we make this safer is by taking is by reducing the amount of safety equipment. It's a crazy suggestion. But sometimes the crazy suggestion is the right thing to do. Sometimes less control is the answer. We have this tendency to try and control, to try and understand, try and impose controlling solutions. Sometimes the answer is to just let go a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:51

Yes, but you know, losing control, it's just I think when we believe we have more control, we tend to think even less, and that's why shit really might happen.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:11

The final principle, the final recommendation, and I hope I've lived this recommendation through this conversation, and I hope readers find I've lived this recommendation through the book. Tell stories. Humans are storytelling animals. There is an entire chapter in the book on the neuroscience of storytelling. It's one of my favorite chapters in the book. I will confess it's a bit like being asked who's your favorite child, but that is one of my favorite, favorite parts of the book. There is a whole lot on the neuroscience of storytelling. Humans are storytelling animals. Every known human culture, past or present, tells stories. We all make sense of the world by telling stories. Whether or not we realize it, we experience the world as a story in which we are the hero. Tell stories. If you want people to remember things, if you want people to understand things, tell them stories. For better or worse, the most successful politicians in the world are great storytellers. All of the religious prophets who you've ever heard of were brilliant storytellers. Plenty of gurus and charlatans are great storytellers. Stories motivate people, stories help people to understand. So in your organization, in your work, if you want to influence people, tell them better stories.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:46

Yes. You know, better stories, I just like to also highlight that notion that we each other we tell the stories to ourselves all the time. And the reason why we do things, because there is a specific type of story behind that. Whether we're trying to do something in personal life or in relationship at work or you know with our health and fitness, there is always a story. And sometimes we get, well, actually, the the reason why we sometimes get the bad outcome is because the story actually doesn't lead toward the outcome that we actually want. And the solution is not to someone try to discipline ourselves into indifferent doing, but very often just tell yourself a different story.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:32

Completely. Completely. Humans are storytelling animals.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:40

And James, uh so we summed up this chapter prescription. Someone talked about a lot of ideas in the book, even though the book is so deep in like story and just fascinating ways of looking at the reality of things and perhaps giving you ideas how to look at it better that in the way that serves you. In conclusion, uh, what would you like our listeners to take away from this podcast? Like maybe some thought and maybe some way of doing things better. How would you conclude this conversation?

SPEAKER_03 1:20:20

Humans are fascinating. Humans are complex. Humans are social, emotional, tribal, storytelling animals. And if we want to make our organizations better, if we want to make our societies better, we need to reject the caricature of humans that we've been given by economics. We need to regain our curiosity about each other and about ourselves. And we need to redesign work, we need to redesign societies for humans as we really are, not as the economists and the management theorists wish that we were. So you can find me on LinkedIn, James Healy. You can find my website, thebehaviorboutique.com. The book is BS at Work, Why So Much of Modern Work is Bullshit and How Behavioral Science Can Make It Better. And the podcast is The B-Word.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:47

Yes, I'm gonna link all of this in the show notes, and I invite listeners to check out all of the links and follow you on socials to think better, tell ourselves better story to ultimately have a more fulfilling work and life experience. So thank you so much, James, for all your work and this time together. And I'm looking forward to see what are the things that you come up with in the future.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:14

Thank you. Thank you for having me, and thank you for listening.