December 25, 2024 • 34 mins
**BEST OF**
The way we work has never changed quite as much as it did during the pandemic. Sure, you probably knew a couple of people with home offices or flexible hours, but after lockdowns, remote work went from a rarity to the new normal. When everyone was suddenly forced to stay inside, we all realised we could get by with tools like Google Docs and Zoom.
But what if we were wrong?
Adam Nathan, the co-founder and CEO of Almanac, worries that where we work has changed, but how we work hasn’t caught up yet. We’re using tools created for a different time, he says, and simply updating the tools won’t do the trick.
Adam shares Almanac’s ‘modern work principles’, and explains why addressing our workflows and strategies is the key to keeping up with the pace of change.
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn, read more about The Modern Work Method, or try out Almanac for yourself
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Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au
Credits:
Produced by Inventium
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How I Work is having a little break over the
festive season, so I've picked a handful of my absolute
favorite episodes from the last eighteen months to play for
you in this best of series. I hope you enjoy,
and I'll be back with new episodes twice weekly from
January twenty eight.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Do you remember when working from home was a rarity.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Maybe you knew a couple of contractors who had a
home office, or you'd heard of a few companies with
pretty flexible working arrangements.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Then all of a sudden, it seemed like almost.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Everyone started working from home thanks to the pandemic, and
things changed for good when we all realized we could
get by with things like Zoom and Google Docs.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
But what if we were wrong?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Adam Nathan is the co founder and CEO of Almanac,
which has structured collaboration software for remote teams. Worried that
where we work has changed, but how we work hasn't.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
So what needs to change?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Well, it all starts with Almanax principles of modern Work.
My name is doctor amanthe Immer. I'm an organizational psychologist
and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this
is how I work. A show about how to help
(01:30):
you do your best work. So if you visit Almanac's website,
as well as learning all about the software, there is
a whole section dedicated to Adam and his team's thinking
about how teams, and especially teams that don't work in
the same location five days a week, can think differently
(01:51):
and a whole lot better about work. And I was
keen to know why did Adam even create these principles
in the first place.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
We started the company off the pretty simple thesis that
where we work has changed, but how we work hasn't.
And I think anyone who's lived through the past three
or four years knows what I mean. But just to
put some data on it, before the pandemic, about twenty
two percent of at least white collar professionals in the
United States worked remotely or in some kind of distributed
context to the numbers closer to seventy percent, so you're
(02:23):
seeing something like a four or five x increase in
remote work. And the number has actually grown since the
end of the pandemic. And I don't love the I
don't love the phrase remote work. I'd rather call it
internet work, because what I think is really happening here
is this broader shift from working in the office to
working on the internet, and this has happened in phases
over time. Even before the pandemic, a lot of people,
(02:44):
even if they went into an office, were working in
Google Docs, communicating on Slack, meeting on Zoom. A lot
of large companies were distributed. Before was cool because they
had offices across different cities and even countries. But remote
work is the pandemic was really a one way door
inter remote work for a lot of people, and it
(03:05):
was obviously a surprise and overnight people couldn't go into
their offices anymore. And it turns out that we could
kind of get by at work with the basics of
creating and collaborating with the tools that we had. But
what happened also during the pandemic is that indicators around
things like burnout and job satisfaction and management efficiency started
blinking red because we were still all working online as
(03:29):
if we were in an office from nine to five
in the same place. So meetings and messages started to
become overused as tools of getting stuff done when people
couldn't be around their colleagues anymore. Things like trust and
connections started to decrease precipitously, and so people started to
burn out at work and become very dissatisfied, and even
(03:51):
when before the pandemic that wasn't happening. And we think
the root cause at Almanac is that we've now changed
where we work, but we haven't actually evolved yet how
we work. And so this mismatch between kind of the
context in which we now all work and live and
the way that we're doing our jobs is causing a
lot of pain and frustration to extent that some people
(04:13):
quit their jobs or take themselves out of the workforce,
which is obviously not good for them, but it's also
not good for our economy.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
It's not good for businesses.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
There's actually been a slowdown in innovation over the last
twenty years, where a lot of the growth we're seeing
today is actually a byproduct of fundamental innovation that was
created before nineteen seventy. And so I think in order
to keep keep our planet spinning and making sure that
we're solving our greatest challenges and reaping our biggest opportunities.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
That requires great collaboration.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
It requires teams to work well, and that means we
need to figure out how to work together in this
new normal. And so when we started the company, we
weren't just trying to build a better tool. In fact,
there's I think nothing wrong with document editors like Microsoft
Word or Google Docs. It's more that people are are
trying to use a tool that was designed for a
(05:03):
different world for something entirely different.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
And what we.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Think people really need is a different way of working,
not just a different tool. And so when we started
the company, we didn't just sit down and start coding
away based on philosophy found and other products. We went
first to talk to the best teams on the Internet,
people at companies like Amazon and Apple and Netflix and
get Lab and do is to understand, like how they
(05:28):
were working so well. In many of these cases, they
figured out how to optimize their processes, their management styles,
their norms for the Internet way before the rest of
us did. And so we've done over five thousand interviews
at this point with people from these super high performing
teams to understand, like, how did you figure out how
to work, what was the initial insight, how's that evolved
(05:49):
into a best practice, And what we did from there
was kind of abstract away from specific instances to broad
generalizable principles that anybody can use, regardless of their company
or context, to work faster on the Internet.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I love the depth and the research that went into
creating these modern work principles. I've read through them all,
and you know, when I was preparing for this interview,
I thought, I'll just I'll pick up my favorites, But
really I've picked out most of them because most of
them are my favorites. So I want to go through
a few of them because what I'm really interested in
(06:23):
is what does that look like in practice. So let's
take principle two, which says the best managers focus on
outputs and outcomes instead of hours worked or messages sent.
So I don't think you get much argument from you know,
forward thinking leaders about that. I feel like a lot
of leaders and managers say, you know, it has to
be about outcomes and not ours, but they don't necessarily
(06:47):
behave in that way when they're, say, evaluating their staff.
So I want to know, how do you do this
practically speaking.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
And just for some context here, if you think about
historical management theory, modern management really came about with the
advent of the modern factory in the nineteen thirties and forties,
and the job of a manager there was to measure outputs.
And the outputs in this case was like stuff coming
off the factory line, and some managers could sit above
the factory floor and you know, look at like reports
(07:19):
essentially of outputs and see how the factory was performing.
And in that case, workers were kind of like cogs
in a machine, you know, they were sorting stuff and
doing specific, single oriented jobs, and so management was I'm
sure it wasn't simple then, but it was pretty straightforward.
As work. A lot of work moved from blue collar
work to white collar work, from kind of factory work
(07:40):
to creative work. You couldn't see the output of individual
employees anymore. In many cases they were complex or creative,
and so the job of the manager short to evolve
to managing presence, which is to say, did the employee
show up at a specific time, were they in the
office to another time, did they attend meetings? Even things
like how how good of a communicator are they, how
(08:01):
good are they appearing to collaborate, And a lot of
that I think has been kind of parodied and reviled
in modern media around kind of how a name that
is because even in the office, just because you showed
up wasn't necessarily correlated to whether you were doing a
good job. But it gave managers the same kind of
control I think as standing above a factory floor used to.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
And now in modern world where we're not.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
In the same place at the same time, we've removed
the ability for managers to manage my presence, which I
think is a good thing because it allows us to
fill it in with something better. But to your question,
how do we give managers tools to actually manage outcomes
rather than just presence? And I think the key to
the insterercomes down to transparency. And so if you think
(08:45):
kind of about a spectrum, in order to get to outcomes,
you first have to measure outputs, because somebody can't be
doing a good job if they're doing no job at all.
And so I think the core form of this is
to actually just look at tasks of the things I've
asked you to do, did you actually do them? If
you haven't done them, there's no way that you did
any any job at all. You could do a good
(09:06):
or bad job, you've done nothing. And so creating transparency
around kind of the basic collaborative tasks that people do
every day, I think is the foundation to starting to
measure outputs and outcomes instead of things like presence and
so in our tool in Almanac, we have a concept
call request, where you can ask someone for feedback or approval,
or to complete something, or even just to read a document.
(09:28):
And this is really similar about how software engineers have
been working largely asynchronously for twenty years, where even when
they're on the same place as software engineer, through tools
like GitHub, can ask another engineer to review their code
or approve something. And in GitHub there's basically like a
lot like ann activity feed from Facebook where you can
actually see did the person first like see my request,
kind of like a red receipt in I message, You know,
(09:51):
have they looked at it? What comments have they made
that they're attached to the request, What metafeedback have they given?
And so there's a lot of clarity around like where
the request is improp And if you think about like
even basic task management tools from the office culture era,
you may ask somebody in an office to do something,
but even then you really have any clarity like where
(10:11):
is this work with Susan?
Speaker 4 (10:12):
You know digjo complete the task.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
And so I think for managers to start to manage
by outcomes, you have to dis understand is your team
doing the things you ask them to do, and that
starts to get you a sense of kind of quantity
of output, and then you can start to layer on quality.
And I think ways to measure that are to look
at again through transparency and analytics. What was how many
(10:37):
comments did people put on their work? How many comments
did they put in other people's work? How do you
did people react to those comments? Where their threads, where
they're things like reactions. If you think about kind of
the consumer world as a parallel for enterprise, if you
go on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, you can generally
tell the quality of a post by the amount of
reactions that it's getting, the number of likes, amount of
comments that engagement in other words, and I think starting
(10:59):
to apply a lot of the same principles to enterprise
collaboration on comments and tasks and reviews, and then aggregating
those analytically so that a manager can see how did
Adam actually do this week? Did he complete his tasks?
Did people think they were good? Was he responsive to
what other people on the team need you can start
to get a picture of kind of quality and quality
(11:19):
of output.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
By individual, and.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
That starts to give managers the tools they need to
understand is the team doing their jobs?
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Is the team moving the needle?
Speaker 3 (11:30):
And that I think in the end builds trust and
a sense of connection between managers and their teams, because
even if they're not in the same room, the manager
is a sense of is the ball moving forward, who's
contributing to the work, who's falling behind? And I think
that lack of that lack of trust that exist today
for a lot of teams comes from a lack of transparency.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
It's interesting, like the distinction between outputs and outcomes. And
I know at Almanac you use okay as so objectives
and care results.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
That's correct, isn't it, Adam, We built our.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Own system because I think all cars can be kind
of like a dark art or r magic for a
lot of teams where they're actually quite I think they
take a lot of work to implement, and many teams
don't do them very well. So we've actually designed our
own system at Almanac that's largely based on setting a
strategy every quarter, translating that down into goals per month
(12:26):
than to goals per week, so that everybody understands how
we plan to get to the long term place we
want to go. And then having individuals in their work
streams list their own goals for the week in a
public document and at the end of the week grade
themselves and if they got that work done, and so
on this output point I was talking about before, understanding
(12:46):
like did you do the thing you said you were
going to do? We built a system at Almanac largely
based around these weekly tasks just to understand like are
people doing their jobs? And you know there are cases,
of course where people are doing their work but it's
not very good. But there's a very strong correlation between
people who aren't completing their task and people who aren't
producing outcomes in other words, moving the needle on an
(13:09):
important project.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
The outcomes almost like the quality and outputs sort of
the quantity or is that simplifying it too much?
Speaker 3 (13:20):
It's basically it's about impact on the spectrum, and so
outputs I think of as a as something that happens
as a direct result of your activity.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
And so if.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Let's say we're playing a sport and we're playing baseball,
and output is you know, the number of times that
I am batting and I swing and I connect with
the ball. You know, it's a verifiable activity where my
action led to a direct result. Everybody can see it.
It's pretty easy to measure whether or not I'm hitting
the ball. How is how much is that correlated with
(13:54):
my team winning the game?
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Who knows?
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Probably not that much. I think about an outcome though,
as my team winning the game. You know, it's something
that happens that I'm contributing to, but it's not a
direct result of my activity. And so out outcomes for
businesses are things like we want to grow this quarter,
or we want to improve profitability, or we want.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
To produce new products. An output might be if.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
I'm an engineer, you know how many lines of code
I've written, if I've completed a feature. If I'm a marketer,
you know how many ads I've released or how many lines,
how many.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
New tweets I've sent.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
If I'm a you know, salesperson, it's the number of
calls I've made or number of demos I've booked. Just
because I've you know, done it a bunch of demos
doesn't necessarily mean that the company will grow, but they
are correlated, and so there's this relationship between the work
that I'm doing, how much of it I do, the
quality that I do it at, and the long term
goal of the company that many people are contributing to
that is also affected by outside factors. And so outcomes
(14:54):
are often what companies say their goals are. And the
trick is how you tie that to the actual work
people are doing every single day.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And so is what you're saying that the goals that
individuals are setting, they're the outputs, and then they ladder
up to company outcomes. Yes, okay, interesting, And so in
the language of okas, the outputs the key results like
the quantifiable, measurable things that the people are ultimately assessed on.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
So in ok ours okay stands for objectives and key results.
An objective is kind of a qualitative big idea, something like,
you know, this quarter, we'd like to grow the business,
and a key result is attached to that objective. That's
a quantifiable metric that will help the team understand if
they achieve that objective. So, if our goal is to grow,
if our objective is to grow the business, a key
(15:45):
result might be, you know, revenue increases fifty percent within
three months, and so you're measuring the key results to
understand if you've reached the objective, and then those often
ladder down. If that's, for example, a company goal, those
could ladder down to team goals. So product team is
thinking about how do we build new features, the sales
team is thinking about how do we sell those features.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Marketing team is.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Thinking about how do we increase top of funnel awareness,
and that can let it down even further to individuals
objectives and key results. So the system is meant to
scale from what a company sets all the way down
to what individuals are doing every day, so that there's
broad alignment and clarity through the organization.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
One of my other favorite principles, As I said, they're
all kind of favorites, but I really like this one.
Principle seeks collaboration should always start with a document instead
of a mating and I feel that that is completely
conjurary to how most organizations run things. So can you
tell me if it starts with a document, what does
(16:45):
that document look like?
Speaker 3 (16:47):
That's a great question, and I agree with you that
it sounds simple write everything down, but it's very unintuitive
to a lot of people and not often followed in
practice of what to write down. I think the best
practice here is to use templates. And so if you
think about every document, not as a lot of people do,
(17:09):
as kind of a place to store like a final
version of a contract or an agreement, something that happens
at the end of a largely informal process that's being
conducted in meetings, but really as the process itself, as
the place where you write down the initial idea, where
you get feedback on it, where you get formal approval,
where you then distribute it as knowledge to the rest
of the team, even something that then gets updated over
(17:30):
time into future versions. The document isn't just kind of
like a piece of paper that goes in a filing cabinet,
as we used to regard them, but really as the
core collaborative surface for the team. And so the best
way to kind of codify a process so that people
follow it is to use a template. And so I
think the best practice here is to have document templates
for different types of processes. So, for example, a PRD
(17:53):
is a great template use for creating and aligning as
a team on product requirements for a new feature. Using
a sales template is essentially a form of starting a
process where you go through negotiation with a potential customer,
agree on terms, get them to sign it, and.
Speaker 4 (18:12):
Then distribute it.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
And so.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
The simple but hard answer is that creating good templates
for the key processes that your company is doing is
the best way to make sure that those processes begin
with a document rather than a meeting, And by starting
with basically like a plug and play document, you can
actually not just reduce the number of meetings, but reduce
(18:38):
the amount of hours you're spending on the work, because
most of what companies are doing every day aren't like
totally new creative processes. Even if the point of a
process is to come up with a creative idea, the
process itself is often codified and structured in some ways,
and what a lot of companies are spending time doing
is reinventing the wheel on the process itself, and templates
are a great way to prevent.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
That from happening.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
We will be back with Adam soon where we talk
about what actually deserves a meeting at Almanac and what
is best done asynchronously. If you're looking for more tips
to improve the way you work can live. I write
a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that
have helped me personally. You can sign up for that
(19:24):
at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com. So at Almanac,
what deserves a meeting?
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Yeah, I think there's two types of meetings that I
have found really valuable. One type of meeting that we
have often that I think is worth the time is
when we have a problem to solve that is a
complex problem that has a complex answer, where you can't
just send a document to somebody and say.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
Do you approve or not?
Speaker 3 (19:55):
And to be clear, there are a lot of processes
where there are simple answers, simple questions that can be
automated and completed asynchronously. And so you know, things like
approving marketing copy or redlining contracts or getting feedback on
new product proposals. Those are all things we don't have
meetings for out Almanac. But when we're, for example, trying
(20:18):
to figure out, you know, what's our approach to AI
or what should our growth goal be this month? Those
aren't things that are easily done asynchronously. They often require
lots of input from diverse stakeholders. A bit of conversation
where I think the conversation can lead to a better
outcome or answer than we could ever get to if
we were just communicating linearly and for example at comments thread.
(20:41):
So those types of complex problems with complex answers I
think require a meeting. I think a second type of
meaning that we have that's helpful is something that's urgent,
where you actually just need to get something done now,
and we often that's where often people are in slack
or another communication channel and we're just getting on the
(21:02):
phone can actually get to an answer faster. And the
third important type of meaning is to create a sense
of connection and reinforce the culture of our team. And
that's less from like we have a business objective to
complete and more we're a bunch of humans working together
every day and spending a majority of our working hours
together and recognizing that we are people.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
And that we need to connect with each other.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
And part of the joy of work is working with
is getting to spend time with people that you like
and respect and trust. And I think a great way
to reinforce that is through meetings where you get just
so much more information by seeing somebody their body language,
how they react to what you're saying. And we actually
spend a lot of time in our kind of weekly
or even daily stand ups starting with a kickoff question.
(21:50):
We have a whole library of them at this point,
like a thousand questions that we figured out over time,
things like what did you want to be when you
grow up?
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Or what you're perfect Saturday? Or you know, what do
you serve.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
On Christmas Evening? That help people understand more like who
they're really working with, because we're all so much more
than our jobs, and I think spending synchronous time to
get to know each other and build culture ultimately leads
to better work, more satisfied teams, and faster business value.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
I want to talk about principal seven, which is the
more you ask for feedback, the better your end work
will be. I've got a few questions around that. Firstly,
when do you ask for feedback at what point in
a project?
Speaker 3 (22:37):
All the time, And we've learned as the principle has
gone it and we should have learned this sooner, judging
from all the researchery done where people talked about the
importance of feedback that you know, essentially you know if
you think about I think one a lot of the universes.
Compounding that progress over time becomes greater and greater because
(23:01):
you're actually just building on the progress of the past,
and so that it turns into a log curve, which
looks like you know, technology growth, but that's also how
growth works for people and their behavior and teams and
their actions. You know, it often starts looking pretty incremental,
but over time that that reaches an inflection point. And
so if you believe in compounding, what that means is
(23:21):
that you know, in a given period of time, if
you were to only iterate once, let's say you you know,
your version was so good that it was twice as
good as the thing you did before, then now you
have a two x improvement. But if in that same
period of time you were to iterate let's say ten times,
but each of those times only make like ten to
(23:41):
twenty percent progress, you'd end up with a byproduct at
the end of that.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
That's something like eight to ten x better.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
So what matters, just based on kind of math, is
not like how good you are a version of a
version on something, but really the amount of times you try,
and by trying me the amount of times you put
something out there and get feedback on it. And I
think that's true for basically every function. The amount of
times you show a prototype or a new feature to
(24:08):
customers and get their feedback. Often people want to hold
it and try and make it perfect, but it's actually
better to get it out there get feedback, because you're
going to learn so much more about what's good and
what's bad and be able to improve on the good
things and get rid of the bad things. It's true
in marketing where you're testing copy. It's true in sales
where the number of times you kind of pitch something
(24:28):
to potential customers. It's true in management, where you're asked
feedback from the team. People don't like asking for feedback
because it's really uncomfortable to expose yourself and to potentially
be wrong and to hear things you don't want to hear.
But I think that's if you can learn how to
do that and be comfortable with the discomfort, you end
(24:50):
up gaining so much more and you end up winning
so much bigger because the end result is so much
better than anything you could have done in the echo
chamber of your own thought.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Some Beliefs Principal three says creating a calm, sustainable team
culture with no surprises and few fire drills leads to
faster velocity and better work. I feel like in like
all the different organizations that I've worked with in terms
(25:21):
of clients of Inventium and even within Inventium, you know,
I can I can think of so many surprises and
things that come up that you just could never have
planned for, like that are outside of our control, like
a client requesting something at the last minute, or a
supplier changing the terms of a contract or something like that.
(25:43):
How again, how does this actually work in practice at Almanac?
Speaker 3 (25:48):
I think if I were to boil the modern work
method down to six words, it would be more structure,
more transparency, I fewer meetings. And with this idea that
a lot of the work that humans I think are
meant to do should be creative work. But we are
spending a lot of time on repetitive processes that aren't
(26:12):
at all creative, and we are dedicating time. We are
treating things that happen continually as if they are creative processes,
as if they're new phenomena when maybe it's near the
first time it happens, but if it happens a second
or third, or tenth or thirty at time. It's something
that we have seen, it's something that we have done.
We may have been good at solving it or bad
(26:32):
at solving it, but we certainly have experience, and so
we can start to codify a process around it, learn
from what happened, and if we apply structure to it
and intentionality to it, we can take it from something
that takes creative brain power and turn it into something
that's more automated, something that we don't need to meet
about or talk about, but something that just runs smoothly
in the background of the organization. And so I think
(26:56):
a lot of what we are advocating for is even
things i'd be surprises upfront or things that.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
Might be unpredictable, and when they start.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
For at Almanac, it's things like customers filing tickets for
bugs or asking for future improvements, or the site going
down god for a bit. You know, those aren't things
we can predict. But everything that happens after that moment
is something that we can handle. And even we can
design a system to account for the unpredictability and the risk.
There's that something humans do all the time with systems design.
(27:27):
Every system has a bit of ambiguity in it, and
so there are ways to mitigate or plan for that
that uncertainty. And the way he started just by recognizing
their's uncertainty and talking about it and coming up with
a process. As I'm sure you have an inventium on
things like you know, customer fire drills. I think where
(27:48):
a lot of teams go wrong is they don't something
happens the first time and it is truly a fire drill,
and then it happens the second time, and they treat
it as if the first time didn't happen, rather than
after it happens, doing a quick retrod and saying.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Hey, hey, what what just happened? How did it go?
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Like?
Speaker 4 (28:07):
Do we think it's going to happen again?
Speaker 3 (28:08):
And you know, should we build a process for it?
And I think the more structure you have and how
your team works, the more fire drills don't have to
be fire drills, and you can spend that time instead
on creative and meaningful work that is really moving the needle.
The reasons people actually wake up in the morning to
do their jobs and the reason the company exists, which
is to serve customers and add value.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
I'm reflecting on the last couple of weeks that Inventium,
where I feel like we have had fire drills in
the form of consultants or inventeologists who were booked into
deliver workshops. One got COVID, another got really sick with
a flu like bug, and they were down and we
(28:52):
were like struggling to find replacements.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
And I kind of I look back on.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
That now and it's like, that is happened many times
in the sixteen years that I've been running in Ventium.
We've never actually sat down and said, Okay, what is
our process for when this happens, despite the fact that
it has happened many many times in the time that
I've had this business. So it's yeah, for me, that's
(29:20):
really interesting hearing you, because I'm like, yeah, what about humans.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
You can't predic humans, But it's like, no, you can
predict that.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Humans will get sick and they will need some sort
of a replacement in the thing that they were meant
to be doing that week.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Yeah, you can certainly account for the uncertainty. There's whole
industries around this management.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
That are about that.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Most of our legal and governance systems are really about
accounting for risk and uncertainty and just two anecdotes for you.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
One.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
When we started this work, I used to think that
people got satisfaction from work, from spending time on deep work.
There's whole books that are really great written about this,
and I thought it was all about flow and focus
and that's where people find meaning. And when we talked
to these amazing professionals, what people evaluated whether a week
(30:09):
was effective based on if they got stuff done on
their to do list. And the enemy of getting stuff
done is a fire drill, and so what people hated
them most wasn't that they sometimes are just processing cast
but it's when something got in the way of them
being able to cross stuff off their to do list.
So it shifted our thinking from how do we enable
(30:29):
through our tool time for people to do deep creative work,
to how do we help people just get through their
to do list faster so that they can and get
done with their days get back to other things that
might matter them. Because everybody hated ending a week feeling
like they weren't able to get important work done for
themselves and their teams, and so this idea of minimizing
(30:50):
fire drills became an important principle to this end, because
it's not just about something that makes the team faster,
but it's also directly correlated to people feeling like like
their week was a success and getting meaning and value
from work. The second idea to your point is that
we love this slogan from the US Marines. Slow means
smooth and smooth means fast. Where a lot of teams
(31:12):
go wrong isn't that they had to respond quickly to
a new event that they've never seen before.
Speaker 4 (31:20):
It's that they.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Don't stop afterwards, take a breath and say, like, what
just happened, how did it go? How do we make
sure that the next time this happens that we have
some smoothness in how we respond. Because this, when you
have calmness and order and structure, it's not just a
more enjoyable experience, it actually increases business and team velocity,
(31:44):
and so you can actually go faster while it feels
like everybody is moving at a sustainable pace. If you
look at paddling races, what you'll see is that the
teams that win aren't the teams with the strongest men.
They're the teams that are putting their paddles into the
water at exactly the same time, because when everybody is
(32:06):
moving together, you get more momentum behind the boat, and
that's much more important than just like chaotic strength throwing
stuff into the water that actually ends up working at
cross purposes. And so what's critical is that a team
is working together with some structure, with some transparency, so
that in the end everybody feels like they're doing work
that's sustainable for them, but the whole boat is moving
(32:28):
faster as a result.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Adam, For the listeners that want to connect with you,
what is the best way to do so and also
to connect with Almanac.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yeah, So if you're interested in everything we've talked about today,
go to Modern work method dot com. I think we
have hundreds of free templates on there that help you
take a lot of these ideas and turn them into
practices your organization can use now. And if you're interested
in actually adopting a lot of these behaviors, the whole
point in building Almanac is to make a seen less
(33:00):
for your team, just to start to work faster and
better without you having to spend time on it. And
you can get a demo and try the product at
almanac dot io and I think.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn at Adam p Nathan Adam.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I have loved this chat.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
I feel like I've had quite a few penny drop
moments that's really making me rethink how we do things
at Inventium.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
So I just want to say thank you for.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
You for putting such deep thought into how work can
be done better in this new world.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Of work that we're in.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
I've personally just found our chat so incredibly valuable, So
thank you well.
Speaker 4 (33:41):
Thank you very much. This has been fun.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
I hope that you got as much as I did
from this chat with Adam.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I know that it gave me so.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Many ideas to think about how we work at Inventium,
where we've been a remote first organization since twenty twenty.
And if you know someone who's currently in the process
of maybe rethinking how they approach their work, maybe you
might want to share this interview with them to help
spark some thinking. Thank you for sharing part of your
(34:12):
day with me by listening to How I Work.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
If you're keen for.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
More tips on how to work better, connect with me
via LinkedIn or Instagram.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
I'm very easy to find.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Just search for Amantha Imba How I Work was recorded
on the traditional land of the Warrenery people, part of
the cool And Nation. I am so grateful for being
able to work and live on this beautiful land, and
I want to pay my respects to Elder's past, present
and emerging. How I Work is produced by Inventium with
(34:45):
production support from Dead Set Studios.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
The producer for this episode
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Was Liam Riordan, and thank you to Martin Nimba who
did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than
it would have otherwise.
How I Work is having a little break over the
festive season, so I've picked a handful of my absolute
favorite episodes from the last eighteen months to play for
you in this best of series. I hope you enjoy,
and I'll be back with new episodes twice weekly from
January twenty eight.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Do you remember when working from home was a rarity.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Maybe you knew a couple of contractors who had a
home office, or you'd heard of a few companies with
pretty flexible working arrangements.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Then all of a sudden, it seemed like almost.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Everyone started working from home thanks to the pandemic, and
things changed for good when we all realized we could
get by with things like Zoom and Google Docs.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
But what if we were wrong?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Adam Nathan is the co founder and CEO of Almanac,
which has structured collaboration software for remote teams. Worried that
where we work has changed, but how we work hasn't.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
So what needs to change?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Well, it all starts with Almanax principles of modern Work.
My name is doctor amanthe Immer. I'm an organizational psychologist
and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this
is how I work. A show about how to help
(01:30):
you do your best work. So if you visit Almanac's website,
as well as learning all about the software, there is
a whole section dedicated to Adam and his team's thinking
about how teams, and especially teams that don't work in
the same location five days a week, can think differently
(01:51):
and a whole lot better about work. And I was
keen to know why did Adam even create these principles
in the first place.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
We started the company off the pretty simple thesis that
where we work has changed, but how we work hasn't.
And I think anyone who's lived through the past three
or four years knows what I mean. But just to
put some data on it, before the pandemic, about twenty
two percent of at least white collar professionals in the
United States worked remotely or in some kind of distributed
context to the numbers closer to seventy percent, so you're
(02:23):
seeing something like a four or five x increase in
remote work. And the number has actually grown since the
end of the pandemic. And I don't love the I
don't love the phrase remote work. I'd rather call it
internet work, because what I think is really happening here
is this broader shift from working in the office to
working on the internet, and this has happened in phases
over time. Even before the pandemic, a lot of people,
(02:44):
even if they went into an office, were working in
Google Docs, communicating on Slack, meeting on Zoom. A lot
of large companies were distributed. Before was cool because they
had offices across different cities and even countries. But remote
work is the pandemic was really a one way door
inter remote work for a lot of people, and it
(03:05):
was obviously a surprise and overnight people couldn't go into
their offices anymore. And it turns out that we could
kind of get by at work with the basics of
creating and collaborating with the tools that we had. But
what happened also during the pandemic is that indicators around
things like burnout and job satisfaction and management efficiency started
blinking red because we were still all working online as
(03:29):
if we were in an office from nine to five
in the same place. So meetings and messages started to
become overused as tools of getting stuff done when people
couldn't be around their colleagues anymore. Things like trust and
connections started to decrease precipitously, and so people started to
burn out at work and become very dissatisfied, and even
(03:51):
when before the pandemic that wasn't happening. And we think
the root cause at Almanac is that we've now changed
where we work, but we haven't actually evolved yet how
we work. And so this mismatch between kind of the
context in which we now all work and live and
the way that we're doing our jobs is causing a
lot of pain and frustration to extent that some people
(04:13):
quit their jobs or take themselves out of the workforce,
which is obviously not good for them, but it's also
not good for our economy.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
It's not good for businesses.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
There's actually been a slowdown in innovation over the last
twenty years, where a lot of the growth we're seeing
today is actually a byproduct of fundamental innovation that was
created before nineteen seventy. And so I think in order
to keep keep our planet spinning and making sure that
we're solving our greatest challenges and reaping our biggest opportunities.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
That requires great collaboration.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
It requires teams to work well, and that means we
need to figure out how to work together in this
new normal. And so when we started the company, we
weren't just trying to build a better tool. In fact,
there's I think nothing wrong with document editors like Microsoft
Word or Google Docs. It's more that people are are
trying to use a tool that was designed for a
(05:03):
different world for something entirely different.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
And what we.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Think people really need is a different way of working,
not just a different tool. And so when we started
the company, we didn't just sit down and start coding
away based on philosophy found and other products. We went
first to talk to the best teams on the Internet,
people at companies like Amazon and Apple and Netflix and
get Lab and do is to understand, like how they
(05:28):
were working so well. In many of these cases, they
figured out how to optimize their processes, their management styles,
their norms for the Internet way before the rest of
us did. And so we've done over five thousand interviews
at this point with people from these super high performing
teams to understand, like, how did you figure out how
to work, what was the initial insight, how's that evolved
(05:49):
into a best practice, And what we did from there
was kind of abstract away from specific instances to broad
generalizable principles that anybody can use, regardless of their company
or context, to work faster on the Internet.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I love the depth and the research that went into
creating these modern work principles. I've read through them all,
and you know, when I was preparing for this interview,
I thought, I'll just I'll pick up my favorites, But
really I've picked out most of them because most of
them are my favorites. So I want to go through
a few of them because what I'm really interested in
(06:23):
is what does that look like in practice. So let's
take principle two, which says the best managers focus on
outputs and outcomes instead of hours worked or messages sent.
So I don't think you get much argument from you know,
forward thinking leaders about that. I feel like a lot
of leaders and managers say, you know, it has to
be about outcomes and not ours, but they don't necessarily
(06:47):
behave in that way when they're, say, evaluating their staff.
So I want to know, how do you do this
practically speaking.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
And just for some context here, if you think about
historical management theory, modern management really came about with the
advent of the modern factory in the nineteen thirties and forties,
and the job of a manager there was to measure outputs.
And the outputs in this case was like stuff coming
off the factory line, and some managers could sit above
the factory floor and you know, look at like reports
(07:19):
essentially of outputs and see how the factory was performing.
And in that case, workers were kind of like cogs
in a machine, you know, they were sorting stuff and
doing specific, single oriented jobs, and so management was I'm
sure it wasn't simple then, but it was pretty straightforward.
As work. A lot of work moved from blue collar
work to white collar work, from kind of factory work
(07:40):
to creative work. You couldn't see the output of individual
employees anymore. In many cases they were complex or creative,
and so the job of the manager short to evolve
to managing presence, which is to say, did the employee
show up at a specific time, were they in the
office to another time, did they attend meetings? Even things
like how how good of a communicator are they, how
(08:01):
good are they appearing to collaborate, And a lot of
that I think has been kind of parodied and reviled
in modern media around kind of how a name that
is because even in the office, just because you showed
up wasn't necessarily correlated to whether you were doing a
good job. But it gave managers the same kind of
control I think as standing above a factory floor used to.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
And now in modern world where we're not.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
In the same place at the same time, we've removed
the ability for managers to manage my presence, which I
think is a good thing because it allows us to
fill it in with something better. But to your question,
how do we give managers tools to actually manage outcomes
rather than just presence? And I think the key to
the insterercomes down to transparency. And so if you think
(08:45):
kind of about a spectrum, in order to get to outcomes,
you first have to measure outputs, because somebody can't be
doing a good job if they're doing no job at all.
And so I think the core form of this is
to actually just look at tasks of the things I've
asked you to do, did you actually do them? If
you haven't done them, there's no way that you did
any any job at all. You could do a good
(09:06):
or bad job, you've done nothing. And so creating transparency
around kind of the basic collaborative tasks that people do
every day, I think is the foundation to starting to
measure outputs and outcomes instead of things like presence and
so in our tool in Almanac, we have a concept
call request, where you can ask someone for feedback or approval,
or to complete something, or even just to read a document.
(09:28):
And this is really similar about how software engineers have
been working largely asynchronously for twenty years, where even when
they're on the same place as software engineer, through tools
like GitHub, can ask another engineer to review their code
or approve something. And in GitHub there's basically like a
lot like ann activity feed from Facebook where you can
actually see did the person first like see my request,
kind of like a red receipt in I message, You know,
(09:51):
have they looked at it? What comments have they made
that they're attached to the request, What metafeedback have they given?
And so there's a lot of clarity around like where
the request is improp And if you think about like
even basic task management tools from the office culture era,
you may ask somebody in an office to do something,
but even then you really have any clarity like where
(10:11):
is this work with Susan?
Speaker 4 (10:12):
You know digjo complete the task.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
And so I think for managers to start to manage
by outcomes, you have to dis understand is your team
doing the things you ask them to do, and that
starts to get you a sense of kind of quantity
of output, and then you can start to layer on quality.
And I think ways to measure that are to look
at again through transparency and analytics. What was how many
(10:37):
comments did people put on their work? How many comments
did they put in other people's work? How do you
did people react to those comments? Where their threads, where
they're things like reactions. If you think about kind of
the consumer world as a parallel for enterprise, if you
go on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, you can generally
tell the quality of a post by the amount of
reactions that it's getting, the number of likes, amount of
comments that engagement in other words, and I think starting
(10:59):
to apply a lot of the same principles to enterprise
collaboration on comments and tasks and reviews, and then aggregating
those analytically so that a manager can see how did
Adam actually do this week? Did he complete his tasks?
Did people think they were good? Was he responsive to
what other people on the team need you can start
to get a picture of kind of quality and quality
(11:19):
of output.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
By individual, and.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
That starts to give managers the tools they need to
understand is the team doing their jobs?
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Is the team moving the needle?
Speaker 3 (11:30):
And that I think in the end builds trust and
a sense of connection between managers and their teams, because
even if they're not in the same room, the manager
is a sense of is the ball moving forward, who's
contributing to the work, who's falling behind? And I think
that lack of that lack of trust that exist today
for a lot of teams comes from a lack of transparency.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
It's interesting, like the distinction between outputs and outcomes. And
I know at Almanac you use okay as so objectives
and care results.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
That's correct, isn't it, Adam, We built our.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Own system because I think all cars can be kind
of like a dark art or r magic for a
lot of teams where they're actually quite I think they
take a lot of work to implement, and many teams
don't do them very well. So we've actually designed our
own system at Almanac that's largely based on setting a
strategy every quarter, translating that down into goals per month
(12:26):
than to goals per week, so that everybody understands how
we plan to get to the long term place we
want to go. And then having individuals in their work
streams list their own goals for the week in a
public document and at the end of the week grade
themselves and if they got that work done, and so
on this output point I was talking about before, understanding
(12:46):
like did you do the thing you said you were
going to do? We built a system at Almanac largely
based around these weekly tasks just to understand like are
people doing their jobs? And you know there are cases,
of course where people are doing their work but it's
not very good. But there's a very strong correlation between
people who aren't completing their task and people who aren't
producing outcomes in other words, moving the needle on an
(13:09):
important project.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
The outcomes almost like the quality and outputs sort of
the quantity or is that simplifying it too much?
Speaker 3 (13:20):
It's basically it's about impact on the spectrum, and so
outputs I think of as a as something that happens
as a direct result of your activity.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
And so if.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Let's say we're playing a sport and we're playing baseball,
and output is you know, the number of times that
I am batting and I swing and I connect with
the ball. You know, it's a verifiable activity where my
action led to a direct result. Everybody can see it.
It's pretty easy to measure whether or not I'm hitting
the ball. How is how much is that correlated with
(13:54):
my team winning the game?
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Who knows?
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Probably not that much. I think about an outcome though,
as my team winning the game. You know, it's something
that happens that I'm contributing to, but it's not a
direct result of my activity. And so out outcomes for
businesses are things like we want to grow this quarter,
or we want to improve profitability, or we want.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
To produce new products. An output might be if.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
I'm an engineer, you know how many lines of code
I've written, if I've completed a feature. If I'm a marketer,
you know how many ads I've released or how many lines,
how many.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
New tweets I've sent.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
If I'm a you know, salesperson, it's the number of
calls I've made or number of demos I've booked. Just
because I've you know, done it a bunch of demos
doesn't necessarily mean that the company will grow, but they
are correlated, and so there's this relationship between the work
that I'm doing, how much of it I do, the
quality that I do it at, and the long term
goal of the company that many people are contributing to
that is also affected by outside factors. And so outcomes
(14:54):
are often what companies say their goals are. And the
trick is how you tie that to the actual work
people are doing every single day.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And so is what you're saying that the goals that
individuals are setting, they're the outputs, and then they ladder
up to company outcomes. Yes, okay, interesting, And so in
the language of okas, the outputs the key results like
the quantifiable, measurable things that the people are ultimately assessed on.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
So in ok ours okay stands for objectives and key results.
An objective is kind of a qualitative big idea, something like,
you know, this quarter, we'd like to grow the business,
and a key result is attached to that objective. That's
a quantifiable metric that will help the team understand if
they achieve that objective. So, if our goal is to grow,
if our objective is to grow the business, a key
(15:45):
result might be, you know, revenue increases fifty percent within
three months, and so you're measuring the key results to
understand if you've reached the objective, and then those often
ladder down. If that's, for example, a company goal, those
could ladder down to team goals. So product team is
thinking about how do we build new features, the sales
team is thinking about how do we sell those features.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Marketing team is.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Thinking about how do we increase top of funnel awareness,
and that can let it down even further to individuals
objectives and key results. So the system is meant to
scale from what a company sets all the way down
to what individuals are doing every day, so that there's
broad alignment and clarity through the organization.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
One of my other favorite principles, As I said, they're
all kind of favorites, but I really like this one.
Principle seeks collaboration should always start with a document instead
of a mating and I feel that that is completely
conjurary to how most organizations run things. So can you
tell me if it starts with a document, what does
(16:45):
that document look like?
Speaker 3 (16:47):
That's a great question, and I agree with you that
it sounds simple write everything down, but it's very unintuitive
to a lot of people and not often followed in
practice of what to write down. I think the best
practice here is to use templates. And so if you
think about every document, not as a lot of people do,
(17:09):
as kind of a place to store like a final
version of a contract or an agreement, something that happens
at the end of a largely informal process that's being
conducted in meetings, but really as the process itself, as
the place where you write down the initial idea, where
you get feedback on it, where you get formal approval,
where you then distribute it as knowledge to the rest
of the team, even something that then gets updated over
(17:30):
time into future versions. The document isn't just kind of
like a piece of paper that goes in a filing cabinet,
as we used to regard them, but really as the
core collaborative surface for the team. And so the best
way to kind of codify a process so that people
follow it is to use a template. And so I
think the best practice here is to have document templates
for different types of processes. So, for example, a PRD
(17:53):
is a great template use for creating and aligning as
a team on product requirements for a new feature. Using
a sales template is essentially a form of starting a
process where you go through negotiation with a potential customer,
agree on terms, get them to sign it, and.
Speaker 4 (18:12):
Then distribute it.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
And so.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
The simple but hard answer is that creating good templates
for the key processes that your company is doing is
the best way to make sure that those processes begin
with a document rather than a meeting, And by starting
with basically like a plug and play document, you can
actually not just reduce the number of meetings, but reduce
(18:38):
the amount of hours you're spending on the work, because
most of what companies are doing every day aren't like
totally new creative processes. Even if the point of a
process is to come up with a creative idea, the
process itself is often codified and structured in some ways,
and what a lot of companies are spending time doing
is reinventing the wheel on the process itself, and templates
are a great way to prevent.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
That from happening.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
We will be back with Adam soon where we talk
about what actually deserves a meeting at Almanac and what
is best done asynchronously. If you're looking for more tips
to improve the way you work can live. I write
a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that
have helped me personally. You can sign up for that
(19:24):
at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com. So at Almanac,
what deserves a meeting?
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Yeah, I think there's two types of meetings that I
have found really valuable. One type of meeting that we
have often that I think is worth the time is
when we have a problem to solve that is a
complex problem that has a complex answer, where you can't
just send a document to somebody and say.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
Do you approve or not?
Speaker 3 (19:55):
And to be clear, there are a lot of processes
where there are simple answers, simple questions that can be
automated and completed asynchronously. And so you know, things like
approving marketing copy or redlining contracts or getting feedback on
new product proposals. Those are all things we don't have
meetings for out Almanac. But when we're, for example, trying
(20:18):
to figure out, you know, what's our approach to AI
or what should our growth goal be this month? Those
aren't things that are easily done asynchronously. They often require
lots of input from diverse stakeholders. A bit of conversation
where I think the conversation can lead to a better
outcome or answer than we could ever get to if
we were just communicating linearly and for example at comments thread.
(20:41):
So those types of complex problems with complex answers I
think require a meeting. I think a second type of
meaning that we have that's helpful is something that's urgent,
where you actually just need to get something done now,
and we often that's where often people are in slack
or another communication channel and we're just getting on the
(21:02):
phone can actually get to an answer faster. And the
third important type of meaning is to create a sense
of connection and reinforce the culture of our team. And
that's less from like we have a business objective to
complete and more we're a bunch of humans working together
every day and spending a majority of our working hours
together and recognizing that we are people.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
And that we need to connect with each other.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
And part of the joy of work is working with
is getting to spend time with people that you like
and respect and trust. And I think a great way
to reinforce that is through meetings where you get just
so much more information by seeing somebody their body language,
how they react to what you're saying. And we actually
spend a lot of time in our kind of weekly
or even daily stand ups starting with a kickoff question.
(21:50):
We have a whole library of them at this point,
like a thousand questions that we figured out over time,
things like what did you want to be when you
grow up?
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Or what you're perfect Saturday? Or you know, what do
you serve.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
On Christmas Evening? That help people understand more like who
they're really working with, because we're all so much more
than our jobs, and I think spending synchronous time to
get to know each other and build culture ultimately leads
to better work, more satisfied teams, and faster business value.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
I want to talk about principal seven, which is the
more you ask for feedback, the better your end work
will be. I've got a few questions around that. Firstly,
when do you ask for feedback at what point in
a project?
Speaker 3 (22:37):
All the time, And we've learned as the principle has
gone it and we should have learned this sooner, judging
from all the researchery done where people talked about the
importance of feedback that you know, essentially you know if
you think about I think one a lot of the universes.
Compounding that progress over time becomes greater and greater because
(23:01):
you're actually just building on the progress of the past,
and so that it turns into a log curve, which
looks like you know, technology growth, but that's also how
growth works for people and their behavior and teams and
their actions. You know, it often starts looking pretty incremental,
but over time that that reaches an inflection point. And
so if you believe in compounding, what that means is
(23:21):
that you know, in a given period of time, if
you were to only iterate once, let's say you you know,
your version was so good that it was twice as
good as the thing you did before, then now you
have a two x improvement. But if in that same
period of time you were to iterate let's say ten times,
but each of those times only make like ten to
(23:41):
twenty percent progress, you'd end up with a byproduct at
the end of that.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
That's something like eight to ten x better.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
So what matters, just based on kind of math, is
not like how good you are a version of a
version on something, but really the amount of times you try,
and by trying me the amount of times you put
something out there and get feedback on it. And I
think that's true for basically every function. The amount of
times you show a prototype or a new feature to
(24:08):
customers and get their feedback. Often people want to hold
it and try and make it perfect, but it's actually
better to get it out there get feedback, because you're
going to learn so much more about what's good and
what's bad and be able to improve on the good
things and get rid of the bad things. It's true
in marketing where you're testing copy. It's true in sales
where the number of times you kind of pitch something
(24:28):
to potential customers. It's true in management, where you're asked
feedback from the team. People don't like asking for feedback
because it's really uncomfortable to expose yourself and to potentially
be wrong and to hear things you don't want to hear.
But I think that's if you can learn how to
do that and be comfortable with the discomfort, you end
(24:50):
up gaining so much more and you end up winning
so much bigger because the end result is so much
better than anything you could have done in the echo
chamber of your own thought.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Some Beliefs Principal three says creating a calm, sustainable team
culture with no surprises and few fire drills leads to
faster velocity and better work. I feel like in like
all the different organizations that I've worked with in terms
(25:21):
of clients of Inventium and even within Inventium, you know,
I can I can think of so many surprises and
things that come up that you just could never have
planned for, like that are outside of our control, like
a client requesting something at the last minute, or a
supplier changing the terms of a contract or something like that.
(25:43):
How again, how does this actually work in practice at Almanac?
Speaker 3 (25:48):
I think if I were to boil the modern work
method down to six words, it would be more structure,
more transparency, I fewer meetings. And with this idea that
a lot of the work that humans I think are
meant to do should be creative work. But we are
spending a lot of time on repetitive processes that aren't
(26:12):
at all creative, and we are dedicating time. We are
treating things that happen continually as if they are creative processes,
as if they're new phenomena when maybe it's near the
first time it happens, but if it happens a second
or third, or tenth or thirty at time. It's something
that we have seen, it's something that we have done.
We may have been good at solving it or bad
(26:32):
at solving it, but we certainly have experience, and so
we can start to codify a process around it, learn
from what happened, and if we apply structure to it
and intentionality to it, we can take it from something
that takes creative brain power and turn it into something
that's more automated, something that we don't need to meet
about or talk about, but something that just runs smoothly
in the background of the organization. And so I think
(26:56):
a lot of what we are advocating for is even
things i'd be surprises upfront or things that.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
Might be unpredictable, and when they start.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
For at Almanac, it's things like customers filing tickets for
bugs or asking for future improvements, or the site going
down god for a bit. You know, those aren't things
we can predict. But everything that happens after that moment
is something that we can handle. And even we can
design a system to account for the unpredictability and the risk.
There's that something humans do all the time with systems design.
(27:27):
Every system has a bit of ambiguity in it, and
so there are ways to mitigate or plan for that
that uncertainty. And the way he started just by recognizing
their's uncertainty and talking about it and coming up with
a process. As I'm sure you have an inventium on
things like you know, customer fire drills. I think where
(27:48):
a lot of teams go wrong is they don't something
happens the first time and it is truly a fire drill,
and then it happens the second time, and they treat
it as if the first time didn't happen, rather than
after it happens, doing a quick retrod and saying.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Hey, hey, what what just happened? How did it go?
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Like?
Speaker 4 (28:07):
Do we think it's going to happen again?
Speaker 3 (28:08):
And you know, should we build a process for it?
And I think the more structure you have and how
your team works, the more fire drills don't have to
be fire drills, and you can spend that time instead
on creative and meaningful work that is really moving the needle.
The reasons people actually wake up in the morning to
do their jobs and the reason the company exists, which
is to serve customers and add value.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
I'm reflecting on the last couple of weeks that Inventium,
where I feel like we have had fire drills in
the form of consultants or inventeologists who were booked into
deliver workshops. One got COVID, another got really sick with
a flu like bug, and they were down and we
(28:52):
were like struggling to find replacements.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
And I kind of I look back on.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
That now and it's like, that is happened many times
in the sixteen years that I've been running in Ventium.
We've never actually sat down and said, Okay, what is
our process for when this happens, despite the fact that
it has happened many many times in the time that
I've had this business. So it's yeah, for me, that's
(29:20):
really interesting hearing you, because I'm like, yeah, what about humans.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
You can't predic humans, But it's like, no, you can
predict that.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Humans will get sick and they will need some sort
of a replacement in the thing that they were meant
to be doing that week.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Yeah, you can certainly account for the uncertainty. There's whole
industries around this management.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
That are about that.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Most of our legal and governance systems are really about
accounting for risk and uncertainty and just two anecdotes for you.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
One.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
When we started this work, I used to think that
people got satisfaction from work, from spending time on deep work.
There's whole books that are really great written about this,
and I thought it was all about flow and focus
and that's where people find meaning. And when we talked
to these amazing professionals, what people evaluated whether a week
(30:09):
was effective based on if they got stuff done on
their to do list. And the enemy of getting stuff
done is a fire drill, and so what people hated
them most wasn't that they sometimes are just processing cast
but it's when something got in the way of them
being able to cross stuff off their to do list.
So it shifted our thinking from how do we enable
(30:29):
through our tool time for people to do deep creative work,
to how do we help people just get through their
to do list faster so that they can and get
done with their days get back to other things that
might matter them. Because everybody hated ending a week feeling
like they weren't able to get important work done for
themselves and their teams, and so this idea of minimizing
(30:50):
fire drills became an important principle to this end, because
it's not just about something that makes the team faster,
but it's also directly correlated to people feeling like like
their week was a success and getting meaning and value
from work. The second idea to your point is that
we love this slogan from the US Marines. Slow means
smooth and smooth means fast. Where a lot of teams
(31:12):
go wrong isn't that they had to respond quickly to
a new event that they've never seen before.
Speaker 4 (31:20):
It's that they.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Don't stop afterwards, take a breath and say, like, what
just happened, how did it go? How do we make
sure that the next time this happens that we have
some smoothness in how we respond. Because this, when you
have calmness and order and structure, it's not just a
more enjoyable experience, it actually increases business and team velocity,
(31:44):
and so you can actually go faster while it feels
like everybody is moving at a sustainable pace. If you
look at paddling races, what you'll see is that the
teams that win aren't the teams with the strongest men.
They're the teams that are putting their paddles into the
water at exactly the same time, because when everybody is
(32:06):
moving together, you get more momentum behind the boat, and
that's much more important than just like chaotic strength throwing
stuff into the water that actually ends up working at
cross purposes. And so what's critical is that a team
is working together with some structure, with some transparency, so
that in the end everybody feels like they're doing work
that's sustainable for them, but the whole boat is moving
(32:28):
faster as a result.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Adam, For the listeners that want to connect with you,
what is the best way to do so and also
to connect with Almanac.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yeah, So if you're interested in everything we've talked about today,
go to Modern work method dot com. I think we
have hundreds of free templates on there that help you
take a lot of these ideas and turn them into
practices your organization can use now. And if you're interested
in actually adopting a lot of these behaviors, the whole
point in building Almanac is to make a seen less
(33:00):
for your team, just to start to work faster and
better without you having to spend time on it. And
you can get a demo and try the product at
almanac dot io and I think.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn at Adam p Nathan Adam.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I have loved this chat.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
I feel like I've had quite a few penny drop
moments that's really making me rethink how we do things
at Inventium.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
So I just want to say thank you for.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
You for putting such deep thought into how work can
be done better in this new world.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Of work that we're in.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
I've personally just found our chat so incredibly valuable, So
thank you well.
Speaker 4 (33:41):
Thank you very much. This has been fun.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
I hope that you got as much as I did
from this chat with Adam.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I know that it gave me so.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Many ideas to think about how we work at Inventium,
where we've been a remote first organization since twenty twenty.
And if you know someone who's currently in the process
of maybe rethinking how they approach their work, maybe you
might want to share this interview with them to help
spark some thinking. Thank you for sharing part of your
(34:12):
day with me by listening to How I Work.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
If you're keen for.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
More tips on how to work better, connect with me
via LinkedIn or Instagram.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
I'm very easy to find.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Just search for Amantha Imba How I Work was recorded
on the traditional land of the Warrenery people, part of
the cool And Nation. I am so grateful for being
able to work and live on this beautiful land, and
I want to pay my respects to Elder's past, present
and emerging. How I Work is produced by Inventium with
(34:45):
production support from Dead Set Studios.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
The producer for this episode
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Was Liam Riordan, and thank you to Martin Nimba who
did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than
it would have otherwise.
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