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Garrick van Buren: How we can work together
Garrick van Buren joined as a guest with Joshua Wold and Lance Robbins as co-hosts.
We asked Garrick about how decisions should get made in the workplace, how we can handle async vs synchronous communication, and how a simple backyard game changed how he thought about work.
Shownotes and links we referenced:
Welcome, Lance, and welcome, Garrick. We've got a friend of ours here on the show today. We've been chatting for a long time, and Garrick has given me advice and frustrations over the years that generally, after I think about it for a bit, I appreciate and come back around to. So welcome, Garrick. Good to have you.
SPEAKER_02:Wonderful to be here and chat with you and Lance as well.
SPEAKER_01:What are you most excited about right now, Garrick?
SPEAKER_02:Most excited about right now is the Minnesota State Fair. It is the second largest state fair in the nation as I understand. It may be the first. I believe there's a battle with Texas that is ongoing. Historically, I have only been a participant And there's lots of delightful events to share with your 100,000 favorite Minnesotans. But this year, I have gotten aggressive in terms of my participation, trying to master a bread recipe, have some photography entered in the juried photography exhibition. And of course, I have a number of beers that I am both bottled and in different stages of planning. Wow, you're
SPEAKER_01:all in on this. How long have you been going?
SPEAKER_02:I've been probably entering and judging the homebrew competition for 10 years. I have been going for 30. Do
SPEAKER_00:you think there's a scenario where Texas concedes that it's not the biggest?
SPEAKER_02:Just a matter of time. Really. They just need to realize. And I think this is the thing. Long ago and far away, a decade ago, I helped maintain an international leaderboard of competitive Koob players.
SPEAKER_01:What is Koob? I've just got to ask.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, okay. So Koob is a... game where you throw wooden batons at wooden blocks and you make them fall over. Games can last anywhere from 90 minutes to five minutes. It's delightful. I wrote a book about it about eight years ago and how it changed my life the first time.
SPEAKER_00:Can someone buy that book today? Can we put that in the show notes?
SPEAKER_02:100%. You can totally put that in the show notes. It's on Amazon. It's called Rebuilding Blocks. You can also buy sets. What's unique about Koob is it is one of the few pastimes where there is almost no defense, though you are playing against an opposing team. There's one very small... almost insignificant action that the defense has. And so it's really about how much do you yourself cause your own problems. So the book is turning that sort of game philosophy, like how do you extrapolate that into a life philosophy. Anyway, I got super geeky on it. A friend of mine and I, a teammate of mine, used Microsoft's Xbox algorithm to create a leaderboard for Kube internationally. And I got a very nasty email from the Germans one time asking why they were not number one. They had won all of the competitions in Europe. Why were they number two? While the leaderboard was interspersed amongst all of the competitive players, there was a very distinct US universe and European universe that were just meshed together, but there was never any interaction amongst them.
SPEAKER_01:Are you still doing that today? Are you kind of running and managing that?
SPEAKER_02:No, no, no. My level of obsession on Koob has fallen just a little bit.
SPEAKER_01:And I'm guessing from the way you're describing it that you still would recommend it. I remember seeing your post years ago. Oh,
SPEAKER_02:yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It sounds interesting.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Those sets will, yeah, it's 100 bucks, maybe 120 these days. I haven't bought a set in 10 years. They'll hold up. The very first set that I ever played on back in 2011 is still going strong. And the specs are widely published. So if you have even just a little bit of woodworking ability, it should be well within your grasp as a beginner.
SPEAKER_00:That's cool. That's cool. So maybe there are extrapolations from Coob, without borrowing too much from your book, but are there any lessons there that you would apply to the pros or the cons, going on my own or taking a job somewhere as an employee?
SPEAKER_02:I've given this a lot of thought as of late. I really like, and the way I would connect it back to Coob is to say, when you're on your own, there's very little defense. And your ability to succeed is all within your hands, your abilities. Some of the more experienced players here have coached me on, you will lose based on the weakest part of your game. If you are on your own, the success of your business hinges on the weakest part of your business acumen.
SPEAKER_01:How does getting in the way fit into that? The idea is you get out of your own way. Where does that match in?
SPEAKER_02:And I would take it like maybe one step further and say that there is, it's a practice. And there are a few things in this world that we, as a group, as a society, understand as an ongoing imperfect practice. Yoga. Law. Like there are very few at the professional level, free throws and basketball. And I would say Coop is a practice of meditation. I consider Coop and meditation a very close related practice. Being able to consider it a practice, being able to say, here is the process, here are the steps I'm going through. I expect an outcome, but it's more about going through that process and being able to, in some way quantify, track, success. That's how I would tie it back to entrepreneurship, working for yourself is you can't, you have to trust that the things you are doing are going to get you the outcome and focus on doing the things and be less concerned about the outcome because the outcome is outcome. It's not the input. It's not the leading indicators. It's a success metric.
SPEAKER_01:And that's something we've talked about where you've asked me hey, can you look and see what's been happening and use that to see where things might go instead of purely basing this off of feelings and the rollercoaster of emotions of being on your own. It sometimes takes that external view, either from a friend or from a spreadsheet to see what's actually happening in my business. And this is something Lance and I will often just call each other to like, hey, this good thing happened or this bad thing happened. I've noticed that sometimes months still keep chugging along and things still work out even regardless of my emotions as long as i figure out those practices to keep running through each day at some level
SPEAKER_02:yeah and savor the savor the wins savor the successes and shake off the the rough parts and hold to doing the thing Whether it be the practice of landing and closing customers, whether it be the practice of delivering whatever service you say you're going to deliver, all of those are going to be imperfect in some way across every iteration you do. And you need to be like, oh yeah, this one is imperfect in this way. It's different than the other one. I got better about fixing that imperfection. Now, what about this one? And putting together the systems and the processes to incrementally increase your quality.
SPEAKER_01:When I'm on my own, decision-making is relatively straightforward. based on how I'm feeling, remove my feelings, decision-making straightforward, but I know you've worked within organizations on your own in many different ways. How do you believe that decisions should get made in the context of a workplace with other people? If you're gonna advise a team, what's an approach that you take to, should we do A, should we do B, should we do C? I
SPEAKER_02:will say that in my experience, potential set of options considered is always narrower than I think should be. So first off, what can you do to broaden the potential decision set? If only that is by one, because there is always implicitly a scenario where you don't do anything.
SPEAKER_01:So it's not just A or B, sometimes it's nothing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. And beyond that, i have found great comfort over the last decade and change in having a north star an overarching metric of success you can do only so many things you have only so much capacity and energy surprisingly less than you probably might account for because life but be able to say across all of these potential things we could do, which one gets us closer to that North Star faster with our available resources, capacity, energy, all of those things. Too often, I think teams don't have that reference point or don't have a compelling reference point to be able to say, this one will get us here in this way, this one will get us here in that way, this one will avoid tolls and highways.
SPEAKER_00:I've been shocked by the number of organizations that I've worked with who have grown to hundreds or even thousands of people. And if you were to ask, what's the mission of the company? It's either there is one and we don't know, or just flat out there isn't one. You kind of operate under this assumption that organizations do that very early on and they're clear about it, but not always the case.
SPEAKER_02:And it changes and it's going to change with each sort of step. size difference in an organization, the mission of an overall company may stay persistent while the strategies to achieve that may change annually, seasonally, every few years. And all of those things aid in the decision-making and help. The intention is that those things make the decision-making faster. because everyone has a shorthand for what is desired. And so the question becomes, of all of these available ones, against our intentions, against our mission, which ones are most in line with and consistent with like both the how, where are we going to go and how are we going to get there? That presumes you've got some reference point.
SPEAKER_01:You wrote about obsession as a founder. I think it can kind of tie into this. Your obsession for something can kind of determine whether or not you'll make time for it, whether you'll prioritize it. How does that work when maybe I'm an employee or a mid-level and I'm not necessarily obsessed with what the leader is doing like how do you fit all that together or maybe you don't
SPEAKER_02:you know if we if if you could allow me to mix my metaphors or at least change my metaphors think of the difference between employment and being on your own is the difference between a bond and an equity and it's like literal equity as well right like josh you own all of your business you have unlimited upside in how big, how successful, how that business compensates you. And so that's like inequity on the stock market. It can always go up. It also can always go down.
SPEAKER_01:That never happens.
SPEAKER_02:Never happens. But somewhere in between, hopefully, and hopefully long-term trajectory continues to go up. Whereas a bond has a limited downside. and a limited upside. Actually, it has a limited upside, but infinite downside. But the point is it sort of locks in at a level and continues to throw off a dividend on a regular basis. You're not gonna skyrocket, but you're also not gonna fall much further. And if you do, it's gonna be more slowly. And so I would think about that metaphor, like which one do you want to do right now? Do you need to protect your downside or do you need to amplify your upside?
SPEAKER_01:And stage of life determines that, multiple stages of life.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I would say both stages of life and also there is an argument that says if you are going to dramatically change the industry that you serve or how you serve it, being an employee for a while is a reasonable way to immerse yourself in that world in a way that might be more difficult to do just on your own.
SPEAKER_00:I'm thinking about the equity comment and it's easy to think about finances, but there's a lot of other things too that end up being ownership of, like I'm thinking about intellectual property and thought leadership and content, right? Like leaving my last employer, I see all my work on their blog and it's over there, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And like you were generous enough to develop all of that for them. at that time and like how they they have decision rights over how they leverage it if they leverage it at all nice of them to keep it on the on the website you lance in this position have an opportunity to create your own ip deploy it how you wish and have it maximize your upside in the ways that that you want. You've got more responsibility because you've got to do all of those things. You also have more leverage and more capability to make those decisions and send them in the direction that you want.
SPEAKER_00:Joshua, maybe help me out with this question a little bit here. The question is hybrid versus remote work or even in office, right? What are you seeing working well in one area versus the other? And is there a case where just straight up in office work survives?
SPEAKER_02:This is a fantastic question. The more I think about it, the more it absolutely has very little to do with specific geography. What I think it has to do most with is do the people who are collaborating, do they have a sense of urgency? Do they trust each other to be competent? Do they trust each other to understand context of the situation? do they trust each other to move the ball forward with some urgency, to make progress on whatever they're collaborating on with some urgency? None of that has really anything to do with where they're collaborating.
SPEAKER_00:Do you have any insights on how urgency can be generated for people that are completely disconnected in terms of location?
SPEAKER_02:have an understanding of deadlines, make them unreasonably short, make them important enough for everyone to want to contribute to. And I think that's part of it as well. That relies on context and leadership and communication of what we're doing and why and common goal. For example, if the three of us were running a business, And we were all in our respective geographic locations, and we were having a problem with landing a specific client. We would not insist upon finding a time on our calendar to get to a common office space to whiteboard out what the problem was with this prospect. We would be on a phone like we are now. We would be constantly emailing one another, IMing one another on a group chat, and we would all be contributing with things that we think are going to change this or change that and things that we would agree with or not agree with and come to some consensus. A huge chunk of that's going to be asynchronous, but it's going to be happening over a shortened period of time because we all have a common goal we want to get to. as quickly as possible. None of that, we could do that all together, but we will get to an answer faster asynchronously, counterintuitively.
SPEAKER_01:That leads into my next question, which I am expecting Lance will have opinions on as well. What recommendations would you give for thinking asynchronously when that should happen versus thinking synchronously in a team? What are your barometers for encouraging teams to pick one over the other?
SPEAKER_02:I think that in a async default culture, the level of communication, the level of preparation is amplified as a baseline. And that seems baseline better than a synchronous culture where it doesn't exist. And so to communicate to the person whenever they're available to read your message and respond in the shortest amount of time, You need to lead with the message. You need to lead with your concern. You need to set up as much context as possible, articulate the problem, articulate what you want from them and why it's them you want it from in the entirety of the message versus what I've seen in some other cultures is the default is, oh, I'll schedule a phone call or an in-person meeting with that person. And now you've got to navigate calendars and it's, In my experience of my career, it takes two weeks to get on somebody's calendar. So that's like communicate clearly and ask them the question right now and know exactly what the question is you're asking, what you want from them or wait two weeks and hope they show up. Like it's to me, it's clear. Like if you want to move the project forward, async.
SPEAKER_01:Why do we not? think to do that by default. It took me a while to train myself to start doing that. But by default, I never grew up in that kind of a culture.
SPEAKER_02:It's more work on the initiators part. And you saw at some point, one of my kids walked behind me, right? And I have sensed them behind me when I was writing out one of these messages within the last couple of weeks. I don't know if it was an email or like a Slack kind of message or whatever, but I probably rewrote it three times and I kept saying to myself, how do I phrase this to make it easy on them? It shifts because what the answer, the question comes down to a number or a binary yes or no, or go talk to this person or like it's, if you can boil it down to exactly what the thing is that you want, it relieves a lot of, labor and guessing on the part of the recipient.
SPEAKER_01:Which requires a bit of certainty and comfort in who I am as a person to initiate the question. I remember early on, I would hem and haw and the ask I had, I felt incredibly uncomfortable to actually make that ask. Maybe it was a client about closing a sale. And so I much preferred to just like, can we kind of figure this out or have a bunch of in eloquent ways of going through it versus if I'm like, I know what I want, I'm okay if they say no, I'll put it out there, see how they respond. So that does require a certain level of confidence in my capability.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And I think the key thing, one of the key differences that you highlighted in your comment is the time savings, the time difference. You figuring it out and getting confident with your ask on your own Maybe that took an hour, right? But you didn't have another person on the other side of the table going, what is Josh asking me? I don't understand why we're in this conversation. And then on, you know, hour, minute 59, you're like, and this is the question. And
SPEAKER_00:they're like,
SPEAKER_02:oh, right. You've, you've like, you haven't required them to spend that hour with you.
SPEAKER_00:There's a quote, I think it's attributed to Mark Twain, that I love. It's, I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one, which I think captures the idea, right? We can have this, we can get in a room for an hour and go round and round, or you can put in the effort that you referred to, Garrick, and put a really pointed, meaningful question out that doesn't take someone else's hour.
SPEAKER_02:And like, that doesn't... That skill and that capability is valuable, whether you're in an async or synchronous culture. And so that's what I think is so amusing. All of these cultural and communication and collaboration shifts, they help collaboration in both contexts, but they're driven by an async default culture.
SPEAKER_00:We lost the dependency on proximity. It's forcing better work habits, more efficient work habits.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And if those, those async work habits are in the synchronous culture, like I can only imagine how happy everyone's going to be.
SPEAKER_01:I've gotten the line from a couple of bosses over the years, thankfully a while ago, where you just get a single text message that says, Hey, we need to talk.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_01:Right? Yeah. And the emotions I go through for hours, maybe days, until we get that call, maybe one out of every 20 times it's actually something bad, but the rest it's not, but I don't know that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, right. You could, in retrospect, take each one of those scenarios, and then at the end of it, you know what the situation was, what the question was, what the thing was you needed to talk about, and you could rewrite that initiating message. And if only... they had done the work at the front end to say, A, B, and C, question mark.
SPEAKER_01:The one that cracked me up the most is someone I worked with that would always just say, hi, and they would leave that there until you answered. And then they knew that as soon as you answered, they would then engage. And this actually wasn't, it was always kind, positive messages from this person. So it was never negative, but it was always like, okay, I'm here now. You can see I'm online.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Two thoughts that are like, one, in this day and age, you'd assume that it was chat GPT that reached out with that kind of message. But two, the metaphor in that context that I like to go to is just, you know, go back a hundred whatever years. Imagine that exchange happening over telegraph. It's going to take forever to get. Or Pony Express. Oh, that was great.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Talk about a failed communication protocol.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, have you seen the, I'll put this in the show notes, have you seen the knowhello.com? It's been up for, what's the original date on this thing? I'm seeing 2013, but maybe even older.
SPEAKER_02:And so the counter to the hello is you're going to be writing three sentences. You're probably going to need to rewrite those a couple of times, but at the end of it, you're going to have a question.
SPEAKER_01:Something that helped me when I, as let's say an employee, requesting something of a boss and really nervous about it, what I started to do was say, hey, I'd like to do this. I'm okay if it doesn't work out and it needs to look like this. And it often softened my ask to make me comfortable enough to put it out there.
SPEAKER_02:Let's tie this back to the beginning of the conversation. Sometimes unnecessarily, we restrict our decision set. To me, the easy answer here is always have at least three. primarily because that's what I was taught in art school. You have three options. They are widely different, not slightly different, widely different. And in the case of like, you know, so then you can have a discussion over which of these three helps go after the goal based on our appetite, our capacity, effectiveness, all of those things. helps be creative. But the nervousness, the anxiety, I think, is most concentrated when it's a binary decision. Are they going to buy this thing or not? Well, let's expand that out. Give them three options, all of them different, all of them addressing their goals, and say, so which of these are you gonna buy? And they're distinct across price or they're distinct across intervention or they're distinct across some other spectrum, but it's clear that they address the goals and the problems.
SPEAKER_01:Some advice I've heard is they don't have to be directly comparable with each other. It's okay if, and you've talked to me about this as well, it's okay if they look and feel different, but do they help the person accomplish what you understand to be their North Star?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely that. I mean, here's a super small example of that. We've got, I mean, as I hope you all have a small town festival that you're super excited about every year. We have one of those. I volunteer on it. My oldest daughter and I, we do a little, we do the t-shirts designs together every year. Every year, we send out three t-shirt designs to the planning committee. Why is it three? It's three because it's not a yes or we do because we want to minimize the like, no, not that. We want to give them an options. The challenge with that is you always have to, I mean, it's not the challenge with the t-shirt one specifically, but at all of these, right? You need to be happy with all of those options you are proposing. Do not propose something you're not happy with.
SPEAKER_01:I've done that before. And the look on my face when they said they wanted the bad one and they were dead serious about it. Yes. I thought I was steering them away from it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Learn that lesson in one. Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, we've talked about fares and kube and writing and a ton about remote and asynchronous stuff. So what is it that you actually do in your day-to-day work and how did you get into this? You're a renaissance man.
SPEAKER_02:Primarily my day-to-day work is asking questions to get people to understand how close to the North Star they are. and then if they're ringing their hands and hemming and hawing we can have a conversation about different interventions to get you moving in that in the direction of your north star but yeah we need north star we need to have confidence in it and we need to have some understanding of how far away we are in it oftentimes this is in the this work is in the context of uh nascent startups nascent product owners those kinds of things we want to get a new thing into the world. And we've declared what the goals of that new thing are. We've declared what success looks like for that new thing. And now it's a question of how do we head in that direction and measure our progress in this direction. So I ask a lot of questions and I ask a lot of questions in email and in Slack messages. And I say, where can I find this? Sometimes I need to ask awkward and uncomfortable questions. to get to some of those answers. Josh, you may have referenced that in your intro. I had a really, really good graphic, a number of very, very good graphic design professors. And a lot of these principles that they instilled in me, I have paid dividends. And while it's not ostensibly graphic design, I am doing creative business design, creative product design, clarifying strategies. those kinds of things uh to trying to be in trying to like as you mentioned earlier lance like trying to be empathetic with the person i'm working with on what their capabilities are what their uh capacity is to be able to make progress against whatever the goal that they said was important to them
SPEAKER_01:do you have books that you absolutely love or like to recommend that you often find yourself talking about or giving away? I'm a huge reader. I love books. I'm curious. Yeah. For yourself.
SPEAKER_02:Depending on like where you're like, if you are say stuck on, how do I close this deal? How do I talk to this prospective customer? If it's sort of that side of the business world, anything by Alan Weiss, absolutely anything. Million-dollar coaching, million-dollar consulting, anything by him will cover this. Million-dollar proposals. If you're stuck on what delivery looks like, if you're stuck on I'm feeling insecure and inadequate about my offering, I don't think it's valuable or I don't think anybody likes it, anything by Eric Meisel. In fact, I hired him to help me write my book because... I couldn't envision the story. I couldn't envision the work to manifest the book. And he was hugely helpful in both getting over the hump of here is how to get over myself to tell a compelling story, but also to envision what that artifact looked like. To just set some overall perspective, what if we're wrong by Chuck Klosterman? While largely the book is... a discussion of popular music artists and which ones are timeless. It's really about how do you think about making your contribution to the world.
SPEAKER_00:I think we might be coming down to our last question here. So this one is super important to me. You and I talked about this months ago, but what's your best piece of advice for a first-time marathon runner who's scheduled to do their first marathon distance race. It's a mountain trail run with over 7,000 feet of elevation, and it's 10 days from now, assuming that there has been some training.
SPEAKER_02:I think the question is different for whether or not, have you gotten above 20 miles?
SPEAKER_00:Yep, I hit the 20-mile mark.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, have you done it more than once?
SPEAKER_00:No, so I've got 18, 19, and 20.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, good. I would probably say... You should not have any expectation of time. Just don't even consider the clock. It's going to be beautiful. So enjoy that. Enjoy being in a new place and new scenery. Do take advantage of the water stops. Do give yourself, I don't know, what is it like? Let's say it's five miles. Grab some water. Enjoy the view. Nutrition, if you have it. The wheels are going to come off at 18. And that's why I do marathons. The wheels are going to come off in a weird way, an unexpected way. The world will be different at 18 and a half than it was at 18. While you did, you got to 20, you're going to be like, oh my God, 6.2 more to go. And it's going to be amazing at the end. It's just that, I mean, the whole, the first 18 miles, our preparation for the last 8.2.
SPEAKER_00:Can't wait.
SPEAKER_02:Here in the Twin Cities Marathon, there was one year where, let's say New Balance, somebody like that, had a contest that said, if your 18th mile, which on the, if I recall correctly on the Twin Cities course, is coming up into St. Paul from the base of the Mississippi River, If your 18th mile is your fastest mile, you win a new pair of shoes.
SPEAKER_00:I think they need to sweeten that deal a little bit more.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. A friend of mine entered just for that. Did he win? Did he get his shoes? He's got his shoes. But you need to sacrifice your first 18 miles to do that. Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_01:My first marathon, I decided to be dead last because I had so much uncertainty. There was nothing pretty about it, including diarrhea for the last 10 miles, but it felt so good to get through that last step. It was one of the most, and you're a couple days away from this, Lance, like, I can do anything. I've done a marathon. If I train for four months and try, nothing can't be done at this point. That's how I felt. And I was also very hungry.
UNKNOWN:Awesome.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. Deep in, deep in, I mean, that doesn't need to be just at the end of the marathon, but like deep into marathon training season, I never, never been so hungry. Yeah. I love it. These, you're going to learn a lot about you. And I think maybe the key, the key thing to remember, it was really helpful for me a few years back. This is part of a class of sports called endurance sports. You are an endurance athlete. You've done 20 miles. You are an endurance athlete. The root word of endurance is endure. Any minor discomfort, anything that's just a little bit out of place is going to irritate you, right? Your job is in this trail marathon is to endure.
SPEAKER_00:The blisters, the chafing, the hunger.
SPEAKER_01:I love that.
SPEAKER_00:The weather.
SPEAKER_01:The chafing. Oh, my last tip is do not be shy about putting Vaseline everywhere. Yeah, 100%. That helped. I just took that and lathered it all over. And that's something I picked up from, oh, she won Kona several years in a row for Ironman. I'll, I'll, it'll come to my mind, but just great. And anything we haven't covered today that you want to mention?
SPEAKER_02:No, I think maybe the last thing is to try to increase the clarity and quality of your asynchronous communications just by, just by 8% this week.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. Where can people learn more about you? Follow what you're doing?
SPEAKER_02:You can find me on LinkedIn and you can find me at garrickvanburen.com.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Garrick. Thank you so much, Garrick. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks, Josh. Thanks, Lance. Talk soon.
