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Why Work Should Be a Product—Not a Job w/ Dart Lindsley

• Francesca Ranieri

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What if we stopped designing jobs like checklists—and started designing them like products employees want to buy?

In this episode of Your Work Friends, we talk with Dart Lindsley, CEO and co-founder of 11 Fold, the creator of Multi-Sided Management and he's the host of the Work for Humans podcast, Dart breaks down why it’s time to stop treating employees like “inputs” and start treating them like customers—with all the same thoughtfulness, strategy, and design we use in product development.

We explore:

  • Why the “job description” is the most broken tool in HR
  • How to redesign work so it actually meets people’s needs
  • What leaders get wrong about performance and retention
  • How managers can become designers—and what that looks like in practice

If you're a manager, HR leader, or ambitious professional who wants to shape the future of work—not just survive it—this episode is a must-listen.

🔗 Connect with Dart Lindsley: 11fold.com and the Work For Humans Podcast
💬 Join our community: yourworkfriends.com

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

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Speaker 1:

And so then I said if employees are customers, what are they buying?

Speaker 2:

Welcome to your Work Friends. I'm Francesca Ranieri and I'm Mel Plett, and we are breaking down the now and next of work. So you get ahead, mel. Have you ever been on a chairlift?

Speaker 3:

Yes, and I am terrified of chairlifts Terrified. Last fall I went to the mountains in Massachusetts. We decided let's have a scenic view of the foliage on a chairlift. I literally was shitting bricks, white, knuckling it, holding on to the side, terrified, while everyone else is like what a view, what a beautiful view.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, don't not a fan, yeah, yeah you listen, I grew up in illinois like ski hills were landfills that had whole tugs. So, like I've been on chairlifts before, there's nothing like going on a chairlift where I'm like, oh fuck, I forgot, I, I'm afraid of heights. We were in mount hood this weekend and did the chairlift up to the 7 000 foot mark on mount hood. Oh my god. It's also a little different when you're with a seven-year-old new, new fear of heights realized and you're like where's the seatbelt on this thing? No shit, where's the seatbelt? Yeah, I'm automatically being like there's about 72 ways I'm going to die today. Yeah, understood, oh my God.

Speaker 3:

Listen. We met with Dart Linsley, who is awesome. He's the CEO and co-founder of 11 Folds and the creator of Multi-Sided Management. He's the host of the Work for Humans podcast, which is rad and you should listen to it, and he's an author and a speaker. And he wrote an article in Harvard Business Review back in 2024 talking about reimagining work as a product, which immediately piqued my interest because I'm like, all right, we're hearing a lot about gig economy, portfolio careers, what are we saying? What are we saying here? And he's really developed a system to help develop work as a product, which I found interesting. I don't know.

Speaker 3:

I loved this conversation. I think it's fun to think through some of the concepts that he shared with us. Here's a couple of things that stood out to me. One, work as a product that employees buy into. Start thinking about your employees as customers, which you and I talk about often for good employee experience, and then organizations getting more clear about the jobs that actually need to be done. That, to me, is huge, because we have a lot of erroneous job profiles out there or job descriptions that are just for compliance but don't really talk about the actual work that you're being hired to do, and that's a real big gap in my mind in the workplace experience. What do you think?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love this because it really does challenge some of the default assumptions about corporate life. We historically have treated employees as inputs instead of people with their own goals and needs, and so if we're not even assuming that people have their own needs, their own wants coming to it, and if you aren't even clear about the product you're creating, it's always going to be a mismatch. Getting really clear on what is the product, or the experience we have here, can only be better for both parties, especially now when most organizations really need to be thinking about what does work look like, especially with AI and AI agents. This is the time where everyone gets a clean slate. We're all redoing this together. Think about your jobs as products.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, dart's been able to create something that measures this in real time and it's really powerful With that. Here's Dart. Dart, it's so nice to see you. How have you been?

Speaker 1:

dart, it's so nice to see you. How have you been it? I've been super busy going around the world talking, and I'm very happy to be sitting back in my own office drinking my own coffee and talking to you very nice thanks for being with us on your return, and nothing like being in your own bed, right like just unbelievable space. Yeah, much betterarts.

Speaker 2:

You've said that we need to stop designing jobs like tasks and start designing them like products, and I'm wondering what's the origin story for you with this work?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the origin is I spent 10 years after college in the literary arts and so I was an artist, and then our twins were born. I started working for corporations and I always felt a little bit like I had to hold them in tongs a little bit away from me, so I always stayed a little bit distant and tried not to be absorbed by them too entirely. When I started working in HR organizations and I thought that the main job of human resources was to get the talent necessary for the company to achieve its strategy, and to simplify that problem, we framed it as a pipeline problem. Essentially, we turn HR into a procurement and maintenance function of an input and we use words like assets and human capital and resources. And all of the early management thinkers did exactly the same thing. And it was when I was working as the head of business architecture for Cisco Systems that, first of all, I was seeing that things weren't working very well. I was doing this work in business architecture, and in business architecture you build these giant models that describe how the company works, and employees kept showing up in two places. And they did show up internally like an input, but they showed up externally as a customer. I don't want to geek out on it too much, but it explained why employees were showing up as a customer, that we've framed employees as inputs to production.

Speaker 1:

But inputs to production it's basically it's a category error, and that's a really big problem. Category errors are errors we make that are so fundamental in our reasoning that all our reasoning that follows will be flawed. And here's the category error. Inputs to production are inanimate and they have no experience. Employees are alive, they have subjective, first-person experiences and they are free to stop working for us at any time. They are free to stop exchanging value by not taking the job, by leaving the job or just not paying attention to the job, and that's so different from an input to production. What is it? It's a customer, and that opened up all of the research that I've done since then, which is really digging deeply into what it is that people want from work, so that we can design it better. We're good at product. Look around. Just if you look around, you'll see that we've made a million products. We know how to do it. So that's when it happened. It happened over a decade.

Speaker 2:

One of the things I'm wondering about is that they're a customer and they're buying work. Not to be totally esoteric, but what is the work they're buying?

Speaker 1:

Expand on that, because that could mean a couple of different things.

Speaker 2:

Do you find that everybody has the same definition of work?

Speaker 1:

I find that nobody has the same definition of work.

Speaker 2:

So this is what's interesting, because when I think about a customer or even like a product journey, when we're like doing product development and you're thinking about a consumer lifecycle, taking them from awareness all the way through loyal, coming back into the cycle, all this could just like you're talking about it feels like what they're buying is stable, right. In a way, it's like they're buying the Sephora summer Fridays lip gloss or something of this sort. How do you design for that when everybody has a different definition of what?

Speaker 1:

they're buying. The question I asked that opened up a lot of doors, and then let me say how people answered it and then what some of the patterns that emerged were. If that's okay, yeah, please. So the question I have asked many hundreds, probably almost a thousand people is what job do you hire your job to do for you? And people say what? And so I say, yeah, your job hires you to do something for it. What do you hire it to do for you?

Speaker 1:

And this is a product marketing question that was developed by Clayton Christensen and Bob Mesta at Harvard, and what it does is, instead of asking people like, how do you want me to design this cup, ask them what they want to do with the cup, and you'll be able to find innovative solutions for what they really want. And a lot of the ways people answer is very unexpected, which is I hire my job to pay the bills. I hire the job to take care of my family. I hire my job to learn. But they get more and more. There's 35, 40 different things that people answer when they answer this question. I hire my job to give me interesting puzzles to solve or to give me a worthy opponent. I hire my job to pay my debts to my family, who got me here to show them that I have achieved what they worked hard for me to achieve. And the thing is that these might sound close to each other, but from a designer's perspective, they're actually distinct. I hire my job to invent. Some are simple I hire my job so that I can live where I want to live. Sometimes they're sponsoring my visa, or sometimes it's just I go, I want to live near the beach. I could go on and on with these, but what's important about them? I'll just tell one more story, which I tell all the time, because it's one of the surprising ones.

Speaker 1:

One person I interviewed and, by the way, I've never interviewed somebody where they gave me an answer and I never heard that answer again. I always hear it again this person was the first person to say I hire my job to pretend. And I said what do you mean? I hire your job to pretend? He says yeah, I like to go to work and I like to pretend to be a vice president. And I pointed out to him that he is in fact a vice president. He's been a vice president for Fortune 50s and he says no, I'm a jazz musician for Fortune 50s, and he says, no, I'm a jazz musician. He says I spent my 20s and 30s on the stage and I learned to love an adoring audience and so I like to put on my vice president costume and I like to get up with a microphone and the lights and I like to be adored, to be adored.

Speaker 1:

So there's a lot of different answers, and not only are there 35, 40 different things that people want from work, they want them in combination. On average, most people want eight, some people want as many as 20 of these things, which may be impossible. Many of them are mutually exclusive. And the second question I started asking more recently is what does your job cost you? Because when you buy a product, you want it to get the job done and you want to buy it at a reasonable cost, and there is as much diversity almost in terms of what work costs us as what the value is that we get out of it. Okay, that's a problem. If you're a product designer, how do you design a product that's different for every single person? To some extent, it's a scale problem. Like, how could I possibly scale to that? And I'm going to say, first of all, we have the means to scale in managers, so the means to scale is already in place.

Speaker 1:

There are businesses out there that do this Doctors Doctors deal with a hundred different kinds of things that people need help with, and they do a diagnosis and they customize it for each individual person, and so it's not impossible to do this.

Speaker 1:

There are businesses that do this. Physical therapists do this, sports massage people do this, but changing the role of managers it is, and also, to some extent, employees. It's very possible for managers and employees to co-design work. That is way better, and what it takes is it takes mindfulness. The manager changes their role from being a top-down controller of an asset, so the org chart shows them above with boxes down below, and instead we're going to flip the org chart. They're going to be in a support role, and they have two big roles. One is being a broker between two markets now, so they're orchestrating the value that flows from their employees, from the team, to the traditional customer, but also the value of the work that flows from the traditional customer to their team, and so they become conscious of two flows of value and are working to optimize both of them, and they become designers, which is that they now need to be able to do need finding with their teams, understand their differences and teams and managers together work to build better work.

Speaker 2:

I love this idea of kind of product design because when I'm hearing two things and it's interesting we talked to Bob and Michael about their book Job Moves and the work that they're doing, especially around interviewing your go-to organization and really figuring out what you want, and then is it a fit, and what I'm hearing you talk about is you're a product designer, you're product designing your career by getting very in touch with what do you want personally, your eight things around work. But I'm also hearing that managers are now product designers for their people and being that broker between the work that needs to be done and the ecosystem that they need to do it in.

Speaker 1:

That's correct I know we want to, oh, go ahead.

Speaker 1:

And I was going to say and I love what they're talking about. In my experience, you cannot discern from interviewing a company whether they're going to give you what you want, because it's much more fine-grained than that. And so what you want is a company that consciously allocates work based upon your interests and who will work with you over time as your interests evolve. So it's one of the things about jobs to be done. Theory is that many of the things that people want are not even an attribute of them. It's an attribute of their situation, and so when I had little kids, I needed one kind of work and I had one risk profile, and when they were in college, I had a different risk profile. And now that they're self-supporting, I have a different risk profile and I have different things that I can actually open up my work to do for me. I think it's incredibly hard to tell before you go to a company whether or not they're going to be able to really give you what you want.

Speaker 2:

Oh, to your very good point on the premise that this is a living, breathing organism not only in and of ourselves, but also in the relationship and the work that needs to be done. The name of the game is it's ever evolving. It's not static, so you can't. I know. We want to talk about the employee as a customer a little bit more in depth. I'm very curious, though, and I want to make sure we get to this is we're designed right now for very static. Hr is driving all of this world, so what happens to HR? What happens to HR? What happens to HR? Do?

Speaker 1:

we blow up? Do we blow up? It's a bi-directional. The thing about a two-sided business is it has two flows of value, and one flow of value is still an input to production flow of value, which is that you need to find the talent, the people who can get the job done. So recruiting is still really important, but now recruiting changes. So what's going to happen is that there's a lot of traditional things that we do as practices and services in HR that will still be there because they with the skills that we want you to have.

Speaker 1:

That's actually not how you sell products. If Amazon came to you and said I'm going to just advertise the currency that we take and how you can pay for this thing that we're going to give you, that's not how products are sold. Products are sold by telling you, describing the product, showing you specifications, and those specifications are going to think this is the kind of puzzles we're solving here. This is the kinds of messes we're tidying. We're going to give you a stage or we're not going to give you a stage. It's describing the actual product that is available to you if you come and work for us and I did this, in fact, I've done this multiple times and some of the managers that I've taught have done this.

Speaker 1:

I had somebody. I needed a Six Sigma black belt, a master black belt, and I found one who was just fantastic. And I interviewed him and I asked him what do you want to get out of this job? And he says I want to build the best process design learning education system in the world. And I said you know what? Right now I'm not sure I have the budget to actually set up a learning organization around process design. And so I said right now I don't have a product I can sell you that I think is going to satisfy your needs. I said, as soon as I do, I will come back to you because he was perfect, he was everything and I wanted, so I didn't hire him just because of what he could do for me. I held off and three months later, when I knew I had the budget, I called him back. He joined my team and he designed the best process design curriculum in the world for my company.

Speaker 1:

And so the whole that's like an example no-transcript. I'm going to give you a job role and I'm going to have you be in that box and I'm going to tell you what skills you need to have, at what level, to perform in that job role, and everybody in your job role. I'm going to tell the same thing and I'm going to measure everybody against the skills and capabilities in that job role and essentially, what I've just done is I've told everybody I want you all to be the same, I want you to aspire to be identical to each other and if you do things that are above and beyond your job description, I can't really see that it's hard for me to reward that. But the more you become this model that I have in my head of what that role is like everybody else. Thinking. Thinking.

Speaker 2:

For the kind of naysayers out there I will say, or just for someone that's incredibly numbers driven how do I make money? How do I make sure people are bringing in if it's like a salesperson that they're bringing in 200 million dollars in sales because they have to and be their best self?

Speaker 1:

sales people are a good one to pick because they're right there where the dollars are, yeah, and so that's the definition of performance for them is that they're winning those dollars. Let's pick somebody deeper in the organization. The truth is so. First of all, one thing before I go on multi-sided businesses are totally common, and it's totally common for one of the customers in a multi-sided business to not be revenue generating. Let's take ad-based media. There's the advertiser, but then there's the reader, and the reader's acquired at a loss.

Speaker 1:

And how do you measure your readership? You measure them in part, by and by the way. That's nice, because they're subscribers and employees are subscribers to the job work. So what you're looking at is you're looking at customer measures and product measures. Are we successfully selling this product into the marketplace? What does it mean to sell this product into the marketplace? What it means is people are paying us for it, but employees don't pay with money. Employees pay with attention and labor and wisdom and creativity.

Speaker 1:

And in fact, just lately I've been on a rant about discretionary effort. Discretionary effort is I want you to work a longer day. What we're talking about here is if you are finding the work really rewarding, you're going to bring more of yourself to the work and that's the kind of contribution that you want from this particular customer. So you have customer measures and product measures, just like you would anyplace else. It's just they're going to be. You're going to have to live with the fact that some of them are not going to be denominated in dollars, other measures of performance, and the thing is that this whole thing about profit profit is a lagging indicator of a healthy company, especially a healthy multi-sided market, which is that you can actually squeeze money out of a company in the short term, but if you're not feeding the people who work there and if you're not creating customer loyalty in your traditional customer, it's just a matter of time before you falter. And so a lot of this is not about the quarterly revenue. It's about one or two years revenue.

Speaker 3:

Actually, the boss-employee relationship is actually a really good use case there, as you're speaking. When I think of a performance indicator for a leader, that comes down to retention, how is your team growing? There are very different things that you would measure in this case.

Speaker 1:

And one of the things that the teams that I teach measure is how rewarding is the work this month and if some category of work for a team member goes into the red or the yellow, what's the time to resolution of that?

Speaker 3:

What are some of the mindset shifts that have to happen within organizations to get them to start thinking of employees like a customer?

Speaker 1:

So where did this come from in the first place? The idea that employees are inputs. Where it comes from is what I'm going to call situated reasoning, and situated reasoning I'm abusing the term because situated reasoning is supposed to be the wise reasoning that we do in context and I have to tie a knot. But it's contextual because I know that it's raining and that's what it's supposed to be, but I'm using it another way, which is situated reasoning. We work in large companies. All of us work in a piece of the large company and within that piece of the company we have local incentives and we have local information.

Speaker 1:

It's always incomplete, no-transcript, which is I turned. It's impossible to see everybody as a unique human being. So you turn them into numbers, and that's what I did, and so that's what leaders have asked HR to do and that's what we have done. So the real problem is, and the real change is, getting away from the situated reasoning and standing above the problem space and recognizing it, not with this, what I consider to be a naive perspective of how the company runs, but actually a holistic perspective, which is to say it's that the exchange of value is much broader and deeper than a simple purchasing transaction of employees. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

What do you say to those leaders that are still in the old mindset of you're lucky to have a job here. They're not willing to do this. What message do you have for those folks?

Speaker 1:

It's interesting because I've heard it in a couple of different ways. One is people who work here are so entitled. What message do you have for those folks? It's interesting because I've heard it in a couple of different ways. One is people who work here are so entitled. I give them all this stuff and they're not thankful and they quit.

Speaker 1:

And so one of the things I say there is you would never say about a customer they're not buying my product because they're lazy. You'd say about a customer they're not buying my product because something needs to be improved in my product. And, in fact, this idea which I love, which is you should work for me and my objectives, even if you hate every day. Who's entitled in that statement? No shit. So that's one thing. Yeah, no shit. And we're not. Yes, I do think it's a moral question whether or not we work this way, but beyond that, it's the health of your business and the long-term health of your business. And in fact, I had Bart Houlihan on my podcast Work for Humans, and he's the person who founded B-Lab, among other things, but he also has now founded an exchange-traded fund that invests in companies where the employees hit certain measures of finding their work rewarding and those companies do better over time.

Speaker 1:

And in fact, there's a giant stack of research that shows that companies do better when the people who work there like the work, and it's really just, it's a naive perspective to think that people don't have to like the work.

Speaker 3:

We couldn't agree more with you on that, because we talk about that all the time, dart. It seems like with every study that just continues to drive home this same message.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

But then you then see the headlines right, even though we know RTO, no one wants RTO and they want flexibility. But you have these leaders, and it's not just I don't know if they have earplugs in. I always think of the wedding crashes where they're like earmuffs. They're just earmuffing it, not listening. How do you get through?

Speaker 1:

How do you break through? It is the frame. Yeah, and this is my fundamental belief. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

That until we destabilize the frame as employees as inputs and replace that with employees as customers, the frame of employees as inputs will always tend to underestimate employee agency, underestimate employee complexity. It will at every single point try to simplify the problem by turning people into numbers and by trying to get everybody to be better inputs. And better inputs means more the same, more uniform, and we just buy them and then we're done, and then we're done, and so that whole mindset is an absolutely blinding mindset.

Speaker 3:

It is it makes you dumb. It's so interesting because I, as someone who I have a strong background in talent acquisition right. So I've spent many conversations with candidates between hiring managers and you're in a unique role because your good recruiters are understanding what the business needs, but also what the individual needs, because you might make a bad hire if it's not a match. So that's your kind of job, like. I see recruiters at the heart of helping turn this shift, because they're already in a space where they see talent as customers because they're selling them this opportunity, but they also need to really, if they want talent that stays right or that really aligns with the business goals, they need to understand what the talent needs to thrive as well. And so there's almost like this unique it sounds, and you tell me I'd be curious to hear what you think there's a real opportunity where talent acquisition can start the shift.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, talent acquisition gets it more than any other function because they are there at the point of sale, and so they get to be face-to-face with individuals as opposed to seeing them far away as numbers, and they see what people want. Now, they don't actually necessarily they have a tendency to go forward with here's the pay, here's the job, here's the title, here's all this stuff. Not what job do you hire your job to do for you, and things would be better if we did that. But there's another piece to this, which is there's sales, which is recruiting. You're selling this product or you're selling subscriptions to the product actually, and then Theodore Leavitt said that sales' job is to get rid of stuff the company has, and marketing's job is to make sure that they have stuff they can get rid of.

Speaker 1:

Recruiters are put into a position where they have to sell a product that they actually don't know very much about the specifications of that product, but also they don't have any control over the quality of that product that they're selling. And so there needs to be a much better link between the sales team and the marketing team, and there needs to be a marketing team, which there really isn't. What the rest of HR is doing is essentially treating workforce as things, even though and let me just say something I'm HR, so when I throw rocks at HR, I'm throwing rocks at me. But the thing I want to say is every person in HR knows people are people and knows people are humans. We have built a system that treats people as things and we have to function within that system, and it actually causes us moral harm, moral injury, for us to do that in any cases.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, do you think AI is going to exacerbate this?

Speaker 1:

Yes. So let me say the two different mindsets are going to apply AI very differently. The two different mindsets are going to apply AI very differently. The mindset of employees are inputs to production and I wish they were more like things is going to be delighted by replacing them with actual things. And I think it was who said that improved means to unimproved ends doesn't get you a better outcome. And in employees or customers model and work as a product model, we're going to look at AI very differently.

Speaker 1:

So one of the things I've done is I've interviewed a lot of people about what is your favorite tool of the trade. Tools play a very interesting role in work, which is there's the work, there's me doing the work. And then I had this mediating thing, which is the tool I'm using. And so I was interviewing my barber because nobody gets away from my interviews and I said what's your favorite tool of the trade? And he said it's these Hanso shears right here. And I said why? And he says clippers are way faster, they're really good at doing hair fast, but these Hanso shears help me to express myself better, I can be more expressive, I'm more in control of what I'm doing with these. And he says, and I'm willing to pay a lot for them. They're $1,800 and I have 12 different pair and he says they fit just right in my hand and they help me to be the creator that I want to be.

Speaker 1:

That's what AI is in a employees or customers world, which is are we giving you the tools to to amplify yourself? Now you're bringing your whole self to work. Are we giving you the tools to help you to be more expressive, to get the outcomes that you really want, and do those tools fit your hand in a way that is ergonomic for you? So it's not replacing inputs with dumb machines, it's amplifying whole humans. So do I think we're going to get this wrong? Yes, yeah, you're seeing it every day. Right, we're going to get it wrong. It's part of the reason why I always argue put the capability to use ai in the hands of the people and they will build the tools that they need to fit their hand and and satisfy their needs and that's what we're hearing left and right.

Speaker 3:

Those conversations are not happening. One of the things, dart, that really struck me in your article from a almost a year ago now right, was that bubble chart, because you showed something that was very tangible, right in the hands of a leader to be able to support some like their team, being a customer, like in real time, and you can make real-time changes. Can you share more about with our listeners about that bubble chart and how this is possible, so they can get a picture of how you can operationalize something like this?

Speaker 1:

The bubble chart first asks where's your attention going team? So what are all the categories of work that are in your portfolio? And most organizations have approximately 20 different categories of work that they do. The size of the bubble on the bubble chart is an indication of how much of our attention is going to track your hours. We're trying to track your attention. If it's keeping you awake at night, that counts. If you're tucking your kids into bed and you're thinking about it, that counts. So it's attention. That's.

Speaker 1:

The size of the bubble is how aligned is that category of work to the purpose of the company? How much is it contributing to the purpose of the company? The vertical axis is how much is this contributing to the purpose of the team? So what we're really looking at there is that your team can do a lot of different kinds of work and some of it you're uniquely qualified to do. That's the highest margin work that you can do, and if you start being asked to do work that you're too expensive to do or you're not as good at as other teams, it's lower margin work for you and you should really consider whether or not you should be doing that work. The color of the bubble is how rewarding is the work, particularly to the person who is finding it the least rewarding? And on a monthly basis, the team gets together and looks at this Are we doing stuff that's aligned to the purpose of the company? Are we paying our attention to that? Are we paying attention to stuff that is really our unique value, and is any of it not rewarding for us? And the whole team works together to resolve a category of work that goes into the yellow or red and it's perfect.

Speaker 1:

I actually have a really good story I'm super excited about Like sometimes it's super simple which is something goes a bubble, goes into the yellow and we say what's going on. And the person says you know, I'm working in a time zone on this project that takes me through breakfast with my kids, and he said I'm the person who makes breakfast and so that's a hardship in my family. That work is costing me. I like the project, but it's costing me more than I want to pay. And so somebody on the team who happens to be in Singapore says, oh, I can take that work, it's a lot closer to my time zone. I'm really interested in that project. They swap projects and it goes green. It's a perfect example of a team acting real time based upon local information and having the freedom to do that. But here's a deeper story, and I just got the rest of the story this last week Somebody on my team, their bubble went red and that's serious.

Speaker 1:

Red is bad. We call that walking on glass, and that's serious. Red is bad. We call that walking on glass. And she said Mike, the client is bullying me, common, yes, and so I. This is a case where the team can't solve that. I'm the only person who can solve that. So what I did is I went and I spoke to the person who was doing the bullying and I said let's work out a way that you can communicate differently. And I attended meetings for a little while to make sure that it got better. So that bubble went green.

Speaker 1:

So I was at a conference in Stockholm last week. And who walks up to me? The bully? And she said and honestly it brings tears to my eyes, I swear to God. She said look, you talked to me about one of your employees a number of years ago this was eight years ago and she said I want you to know I was having a really hard time. I was new to the company and I was having serious mental issues right then, which I get because I was too. I was new to the company too and I was too, and she said you were the only person who was kind to me at that company at that time and you really helped me to find a way forward by being mindful about what was going on and intervening. Everybody got better.

Speaker 3:

And you had the real-time data to help you do that. To facilitate.

Speaker 1:

It's just by paying attention. You didn't know that politics are a cost to some people. And somebody's bubble goes red because, oh, this is a really political product project and that's. I hate that. Okay, let's put that on the list of things that are a cost for you and let's see what we can do to resolve it. And it's not always just move off of the project. Sometimes it's why do politics trigger you? Could you potentially find a way to grow and learn to move in a political space? And those are complicated conversations and most of the time you don't want to say the bubble went red and it's because of you. You want to say let's figure out how to fix it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the beauty is that it facilitates either a coaching conversation, it facilitates team camaraderie, it facilitates the relationship between the boss and employee and having healthy conversations and discussions for development and growth. There's so much, and then ultimately, that trickles out throughout the organization, right? Because if everyone's bought into this and they're supporting each other, you're really just continually, in this design space, helping work to be better for everybody, which leads to better business outcomes ultimately.

Speaker 1:

And what's beautiful about the bubble chart to me is that it is an absolute manifestation of the multi-sided business, of a multi-sided management system. You are asking are we doing the highest margin work that we can do? And you are also asking are we adequately serving the needs of the employee, customer?

Speaker 3:

Listen, we're going to jump right in. How do you feel about doing a quick, rapid round of questions?

Speaker 1:

Let's do it Okay, let's go.

Speaker 3:

It's 2030, dart, what's work going to look like?

Speaker 1:

Can I pick 2035? Because I do think it's going to take a little longer In 2035, in many ways things won't have changed at all, but a large proportion of companies will start recognizing employees as customers, and that's what the path that I'm on, and I think it'll take a little while and all sorts of things change when you do that, and maybe we'll talk about some of those today.

Speaker 3:

Sounds good, and employee as a customer is on one of my first questions for you, so we will. What's one thing about corporate culture you'd like to see just die already?

Speaker 1:

Framing employees as inputs to production. Not only do I think it's something that's not effective, I've come to believe that it's immoral to treat people as things. That's, in fact, my whole motto, which is ending work that treats people like things.

Speaker 3:

I love it. Yeah, there's a lot of dehumanizing language that's used to refer to people within organizations, it seems at times.

Speaker 1:

Yes, it's absolutely the dominant metaphor. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

What's the greatest opportunities that most organizations are missing out on right now?

Speaker 1:

Allocating work to people in such a way that it matches their passions. We're a lot like a shoe store, where you go in and we just hand people a box of shoes and they don't try them on, they don't look for fashion and they don't even know what size they are, and so they walk away with shoes they don't fit. They don't like them. It's practically free to pay a little bit of attention to how you, to what people want, and then allocate work with mindfulness to that, and and it's just this dumb thing that we don't do.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I remember, does anyone? And Francesca, because you worked at Nike. But remember when Nike first came out with that you could custom design your sneaker colors, features, even down to the laces right, like Dart in an ideal world. Do you see that being like a job thing?

Speaker 1:

Yes, at least let's get shoes that fit.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a good. Let's start there.

Speaker 1:

We'll start with fitting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a good place. All right, we're going to get a little more personal here. Hopefully you don't mind. What music are you listening to? What's on repeat on your playlist right now?

Speaker 1:

I get obsessed with particular bands and right now I am obsessed with a Korean folk pop band called Lee Nalchi L-E-E-N-A-L-C-H-I. Okay, start with their song Tiger is Coming it will blow your mind. I don't promise you'll like it. Is coming, it will blow your mind, I don't promise you'll like it. I've hardly shown it Like I'm so into it and I show it to people and almost nobody likes it, but I just love it.

Speaker 3:

That's what matters, right it's opera, korean folk opera.

Speaker 1:

Okay, with a bass line.

Speaker 3:

Ooh, interesting. All right, I know what I'm doing this afternoon. I gotta go check that out. Now I'm going to go for my why. What are you reading? It could be old-fashioned book, Kindle or audiobook. What's on your list?

Speaker 1:

So I was a literature major and I read an awful lot of very trashy science fiction. But there is a kind of science fiction that I think is that I'm loving, and so it's called it's Hope Punk.

Speaker 3:

I'll check it out. I actually find myself staring away from science fiction because of the experience from the 80s and 90s, where it's just so depressing to me. So I will check it out because I think like knowing that there's hope behind it sounds like a good change.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Check it out because I think, knowing that there's hope behind it sounds like a good change.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's really lovely. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1:

Who do you really admire? I happen to be doing some studies right now of large systems change, and so, because of that, the person who pops to mind right now for me is Louis Pasteur. More than anybody I can think of, he overturned a dominant paradigm and saved billions of lives, and he did it by just doggedly doing the work, and so that's what comes to mind right now.

Speaker 3:

What's one piece of advice that you've received that you'd like to share with others?

Speaker 1:

One of my favorites, especially for people who work in corporations, was, when, in doubt, take the high road. I remember I went to my manager and I said look, I've got these two options I can go this way, or I can go this way, and this way is a little bad.

Speaker 3:

And he said, when in doubt, take the high road.

Speaker 1:

And ever since I have done that. Smart advice, it's nice, it's simple to apply If you've got two options ahead of you and one seems low road just take the high road, Michelle Obama.

Speaker 3:

when they go low, we go high.

Speaker 1:

That's right.

Speaker 2:

Okay, maybe she had the same manager.

Speaker 1:

Dart, thanks so much for joining us today. Where can people find you?

Speaker 2:

11foldcom Work for Humans is where this conversation is going on and so there's 150 episodes there. All right, we'll post all those links so you can like and subscribe to all of DART's places and for the article DART.

Speaker 3:

Well, we're going to include that too. Oh good, people should read it. It's so good.

Speaker 1:

It is good. Yeah, we went deeper into it today than we were able in the article. Thank you for your time. Thanks, thank you.

Speaker 3:

This episode was produced, edited and all things by us myself, mel Plett and Francesca Rennery. Our music is by Pink Zebra and if you loved this conversation and you want to contribute your thoughts with us, please do. You can visit us at yourworkfriendscom, but you can also join us over on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn community page and we have the TikToks and Instagrams. So please join us in the socials and if you like this and you've benefited from this episode and you think someone else can benefit from this episode, please rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friends. Bye friends. Bye friends.

People on this episode

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Francesca Ranieri

Co-host
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Mel Plett

Co-host