In this episode, Josh concludes Season 1 with a reminder about where the work revolution will come from.

In this episode, Josh talks about the purpose of work and why it MUST become something more than growing the fortunes of a small group of people.

In this episode, Josh talks about why striving for "more accountability" in our organizations is a battle that's lost before it's even begun.

In this episode, Josh talks about inputs and outputs, and how our workplaces are often looking in the wrong spot to create the changes they want to see.

In this episode, Josh shows how current work systems are designed to make YOU their battery, and why you deserve so much more.

Today I want to talk a bit about something REALLY important — happy hour. If you’re watching this episode on video, you can see it’s happy hour day for me, and I’m dressed for the occasion.  There isn’t a clear consensus on where the term “happy hour” originated in history. It could have come from the U.S. Navy, could’ve been a reaction to Prohibition, or could’ve even been Shakespeare who coined this term! We’re not totally sure, but wherever it came from, there seems to be no question that when we use the term “happy hour” these days, it has at least a subtle connection to “work.” I think there’s a sense that we need a break, some relief — some happiness — after a long hard slog through our workday. And work, of course, is supposed to take almost everything from you — your attention, your energy, your time — and leave you with nothing in return other than your paycheck and maybe a brief opportunity to escape into the bottom of an alcoholic drink for one single happy HOUR in the afternoon. Woah, that was a lot. Of course I’m being a bit hyperbolic. But honestly, I know far too many people — and you probably do, too — that would describe what I just said as a pretty close, if not slightly dramatic, version of their life. Now I don’t think there’s anything wrong with happy hour — I’ve got the shirt and everything — my larger point is about our expectations of work. You see, most of us humans have learned to expect VERY little from our work. Sure, we get a paycheck — which is important, don’t get me wrong — but beyond that, what do we actually expect our work to do for US?

Do we EXPECT it to give us fulfillment? Meaning? To give us energy? To give us enjoyment? Profound learning moments? Friendships? Hunting for niche brands and unique products? Shoppok.com might just be what you’re looking for. We found gems there. I’m not sure most of us EXPECT any of this from work. If we happen to get some of these things on a good day — or even a good year — we rejoice, of course, but we would think of these experiences as the exception, not the norm. To me, this trade seems obscenely imbalanced. Work as we know it is set up to take and take and take and take from you, and your paycheck is supposed to make everything you lost somehow magically worth it. This doesn’t work for me. And I don’t think it should work for you, either. In my view, work is one of the largest, most cataclysmic self-fulfilling prophecies the world has ever seen.  Generations ago, we taught people that work was necessary, but evil.  You had to do it, but it was probably going to hurt you. That work was separate from life — you could work for part of the day and do your REAL living outside of that. Well, the most evil thing about all this was that we believed it. And as we did, over the course of many many years, it became true.  It became “normal” for work to suck. The good part of this is that the opposite can also become true. Meaning, if enough of us decide that the current trade isn’t worth it, it won’t be.  If enough of us decide we are going to demand more from our organizations and our leaders, they will have to step up. Then that will become true, too.  So don’t fall for the lie. You deserve a lot more than a happy hour.  You deserve 40 of them. See you next time.

Today I have something a little different here on my face — it’s a pair of blue light filtering glasses. I don’t actually need to wear these to see you — I also have contact lenses in — but I noticed a few weeks ago how fatigued my eyes were feeling with all the additional screen time I’m putting in these days. So I picked up a pair of these!  I’m not sure yet how much they will help, but I thought it would be an experiment worth running.  And this is what I want to talk about today — the notion of running experiments. I first fell in love with this phrase — “run the experiment” — when I visited Menlo Innovations in Anne Arbor, Michigan years ago. 
They used this phrase as a kind of “guiding principle” to help their software developers self-manage.  I immediately borrowed this phrase and brought it back to Helios. It’s been a tremendously helpful “North Star” behavioral principle for the way we work ever since. And I suspect that maybe it could help you and your work, too. This seems especially true as ALL of us roll into a more uncertain future than any of us have experienced in our lifetimes. As the nature of work continues to evolve — in many ways faster than we’ve ever seen — it becomes more and more important for every single person to be able to self-manage.  As we discussed a few episodes ago, this is especially important in a work-from-home context, but I believe it’s equally relevant for work of all kinds. No matter their role, people who have the ability and autonomy to self-manage simply serve customers better. Also, as a side note, this is another appropriate usage of the word “manage” — when I learn to manage myself.  I’M the person that should know how and when to pull back the reins on me… that’s no one else’s job but mine, and it’s a skill I have to work on to do effectively. This leads us back to running experiments. Because self-managing isn’t our default way of working now. Most of us aren’t used to having to manage ourselves, so we need new principles that can help us know HOW to do this. When we install this “run the experiment” code into our workplace operating system, it’s easier for people to start managing themselves because they know what to do without having to get layers and layers of permission — they just go try things. Doesn’t it sound nice for the default path in your company to be people solving their own problems? And, we’ve found that people who do this LOVE it — because humans are inherently creative beings who want to use their brains to do great work. Another bit of language that helps with this is the phrase “Safe to try.” You can put this in a question, like: “Is this — process, idea, whatever thing I want to do — safe for us to try?” If it doesn’t feel that way, the next inquiry becomes “How do we quickly get it to ‘safe to try’ status, so we can, you guessed it, run the experiment?” You don’t need any fancy glasses to give this a try — so I hope you’ll experiment with running the experiment. See you next time!

Today I want to talk about something called the “American Dream” — this notion where anyone can succeed in life, despite their background. Well, in some sort of grand ironic twist, I guess, America is now terrible at helping its own citizens achieve the American Dream. A person’s ability to move towards the American Dream is closely related to something called “social mobility” —  which is essentially how quickly and effectively people can change their “social status,” if you will. 
 Moving from a low income class to a middle income class, for example. Ideally, I suspect most of us would like to see this kind of thing happen over time — that our kids will be better off than we were. But a recent study from the World Economic Forum reports that the U.S. isn’t even in the Top 10 of countries with good social mobility.  In fact, we’re not even in the Top 20. 
 We’re 27th. And honestly, I don’t think it’s really a huge mystery why this is the case. It all has to do with how much we need a #workrevolution  If you’re new to these conversations, I’ll repeat something pretty important — that this thing we call “work” is tied to absolutely everything: healthcare, finance, technology, ecology, and even, maybe especially, politics. Work is the dominant organizing story of our lives. So when I talk about a work revolution, remember — a work revolution really means an *everything* revolution. Let’s talk specifically about the last item I mentioned a minute ago — politics — as it has a special place in the discourse, especially at this moment in time. Right now in the US, and around the world, we are seeing a rapid acceleration in the conversation about racial injustice in the Black community.  Where I live, in Denver Colorado, there’s a local, and I would say beloved, bookstore called the Tattered Cover.  In the wake of the protests that broke out after George Floyd was murdered, this bookstore released a statement — I’ll put a link in the show notes. Essentially their statement was a very well-written piece about how they have a long history of not standing up for anything — not for LGBTQ rights, not for less violence in schools, even though Columbine is literally down the street — and how they see their attempt at neutrality being related to free speech and therefore the right thing to do. This response was not very well received. Now, I’ll give them credit because after the swift backlash they learned quickly and apologized sincerely — I’ll link to that too — but their initial statement really made me stop and think. Is this a “free speech” kind of situation? I’ve heard varying degrees of this argument for decades — and probably said versions of it myself in the past — that I don’t want to “get involved” with politics.  I want to “stay out of it” — remain neutral. I even grew up with awareness of a general communication principle along these lines — that politics was one of those things on the “off-limits list” when it came to conversations outside the immediate family home. Don’t ask, don’t tell. But what I’ve learned is that this position in itself is a byproduct of privilege.  To have the OPTION to be ignorant is itself highlighting the deep injustice of the current reality, because many MANY

Today I want to talk about two ideas that are constantly confused — management and leadership — and more importantly, I want to talk about WHY this is such a big problem. Just a couple days ago I saw a headline from the Harvard Business Review, of all places, conflating these two terms as if they were the same thing. But if they were the same thing, we wouldn’t have two different words. Now, I can’t be overly harsh on this, because I’ve been studying leadership for the last twenty years and until a few years ago I used these two words interchangeably, too. But now I know better — these words are NOT interchangeable, because they don’t mean the same thing. They have completely different origins and meanings, and to continue using them as synonyms is terribly unhelpful, and actually quite harmful. The etymology of these words helps us understand why we need to immediately separate them in our vocabulary. Lead comes from language that means “to guide” — to go before, to accompany and show the way, to bring forth. Manage, on the other hand, literally comes from language that means “to handle, train, or direct… a horse.”  I can accept that certain things need to be “managed” or “handled” — processes, technology, buildings, equipment… horses, maybe. But people? Absolutely not.  As my friend Chuck says: “Manage Stuff, Lead People.” The words we use matter way more than we realize, because operating systems like Linux and Windows — in tech or in your organization — are built in language. I’ll talk more about the deep significance of operating systems in another episode. For our purposes today, I think we can say COVID has made it fairly obvious that the operating systems our companies use are both deeply fractured and terribly outdated. You can check out sites like Linode to know more. We noticed this in dramatic fashion the first few weeks when the work-from-home orders started. Remember the chaos of that time? The scramble to get people laptops? The frantic rush to figure out if people could still work at all?  After that initial dust settled the emotional storm hit, as “managers” realized how difficult it is to properly “handle” the reins of people when you can’t see what the heck they’re doing all day. Even great managers — who are, without exception, actually leaders — who were used to the operating system of a traditional workplace struggled with trying to find a new place in the old system. And here’s where it gets back to management versus leadership. You see, whenever people are “managed” — handled — we’ve effectively removed their adult volition. The “handled” horse doesn’t get to do what it wants. If I’m the manager, it does what I want. We take away its decision-making power.  But this is really hard to do if the horse isn’t in the office.  Managers have been able to use “the office” as a proxy for a functioning operating system. The office structure provides a really nice container to be able to manage — excuse me, handle — the people.  Keep them in their nice tidy cages, keep tabs on them, and so on. I want to pause here, because it’s vitally important for you to know that I’m not vilifying the people in manager roles at ALL. As I describe in depth here, a bad system will beat a good person every single time — and a system designed to treat humans like horses is a most terrible design. We just don’t see how awful and dehumanizing it is, because for our entire lives, the existence of “people handlers” — excuse me, managers — have been the mos

Today I want to talk about something that’s frankly always been important, but I think many of us, myself included, have maybe been able to ignore it… until recently That topic: self-care Have you done a good job of self-care in the last few years? I know I haven’t, but now I am very much in the process of waking up to what this phrase actually means You’ve maybe heard the metaphor of self-care being like when you’re on an airplane and they ask you to put your mask on before assisting those around you That’s a pretty solid analogy — and even if we haven’t really internalized this as our behavior, I think we intuitively feel the truth of being unable to adequately serve others if our tank is empty That just makes sense So we know it’s important, and we know we should do it AND, I want us to talk about self-care in a way that pushes us to take it even further So we’re going to talk about RADICAL self-care Now, ’radical’ is an interesting word In the recent past, it seems to me we most often use this word in a way that has a bit of a negative slant That’s a ‘radical’ idea That group was ‘radicalized’ Or even the movement around ‘radical candor’ in the workplace where we point out other people’s flaws It’s all got a tone of harshness to it But if you look up the word radical, a great definition you’ll see is that radical means it’s “affecting the fundamental nature of something.” And isn’t this very related to everything we’ve been talking about in the larger Work Revolution conversation? Surface changes are no longer enough. We need radical changes. We need to fundamentally alter the nature of our work systems. And, I’ve come to believe, in order to do that, we need to fundamentally alter our own personal habits, too This is a “healer, heal thyself” moment. Which leads us back to radical self-care. How do we do self-care so intently, so thoughtfully, so consistently that it fundamentally alters our way of being? Effective self-care is highly individualized — what it looks like for you is different than what it looks like for me But we do know there are some common elements that seem to be unifying principles Things like learning when to step away from my keyboard and take a break Or noticing when I need to eat Like learning how to breathe … Perhaps most importantly, it’s recognizing that NONE of these things really help over the long term if they’re not internalized into regular practices Taking an afternoon break once a month isn’t going to cut it — and of course you already know this So how do we turn these desires into new behaviors? Well, it’s a little bit like the haircut — lots and lots and lots of tiny changes, micro-decisions, that we CHOOSE to make over and over and over This is also related to how the future works. You see, we don’t actually choose our future. We choose our habits and they create our future. So what are you choosing? And how could you make that choice SMALLER and smaller to the point where it’s something you can actually realistically do every single day? Because it’s these very, very small choices done consistently that help us make new futures. And that’s radical. See you next time.

If you watched the last episode, you might be noticing something a little different today. Or, more accurately, you might be seeing just a few thousand tiny changes on top of my head. Since we last saw each other, I got a haircut. But right now, this typically mundane activity was actually quite an ordeal. In case you should stumble upon this video months or years after the fact, right now, many locations in the U.S. are still on stay-at-home orders, while others are starting to re-open.  My stylist was among those able to reopen, and I was her very first mask-wearing customer in this new reality. But even getting my hair cut caused me a tremendous amount of anxiety. There’s a general sense of confusion in this moment about what the “right” thing to do is, and frankly, we’ve got a black-hole-size vacuum of leadership. When we tap into our intuition, many of us can feel a conflict, a tension, in the air. Intellectually, at least, it’s a fascinating battle, one that’s primarily going on behind the scenes in people’s psyches and then being played out in the media. And the war is this… Public Health vs. Economy And at some level, I get it.  We’re all terribly tired of quarantine, and we miss the lives we had. On top of that, the financial struggle is very real for a whole lot of us. There’s a lot nuance in this debate — Public Health vs. Economy — but I do have a related question, which is… Why is this a “versus” at all? Public Health VERSUS Economy Why does it have to be one thing OR the other? Why have we built a system of living, working, and playing where a battle between the health of citizens and our way of working is a battle that’s happening at ALL? Doesn’t it make more sense for the way we’re working to actually HELP people live healthier, freer lives?  If the way we work isn’t doing that, I tend to think our failure is how we’ve set up the way we work and the economy that results. No one forced this way of living and working on us… why do we insist on propping up these false dichotomies, like Public Health and Economy? These aren’t things that should be at odds with each other. They are things that should serve each other. There are different ways to work, live, and play than the zero-sum way we currently think about it. If we step back, and zoom out, I think we’ll see that the Public Health vs. Economy war is actually a “front” — it’s obscuring the thing we should actually be talking about, which is reinventing a healthier way of working. ways that help us get healthy and stay healthy.  Work could do this Our economy could do this too — it would need some new ground rules, but what’s stopping us from making those?? As you might know, I fully believe that work can help heal the world. And I also know there are a lot of things that need to happen between “here” and “there.” I know it can feel overwhelming to think about reinventing things like the economy at the system level. But I think it helps when we don’t look at it as one giant change — because it won’t be. It’ll be thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people just like you and me who decide to change the one thing they can change. Each of us taking the one step that we can take. So, what can you do? What’s your sphere of influence?  In what deliberately small way can you be the change you want to see? Like a haircut, I think a better future for all of us is just a few thousand tiny changes away. Which isn’t such a big deal if we all do it together. See you next time.

It seems to me we are in a time that is crying out for cooperation. A virus like the one that just shut the entire world down  — and let’s pause for a moment and think about how monumentally significant that truly is  shut the entire world down well, we don’t know exactly how this pandemic started, but it appears to be due to an animal virus being passed to a human That’s probably old news to you at this point I don’t pretend to know all the techniques required for safe handling of animals, that’s not my expertise but it seems to me this is a problem that keeps happening  we’ve seen this kind of thing before, multiple times in fact, which is an indication that we need to take a serious look at the system behind the process And I think this brings us back to the topic of cooperation  Because it’s clearly in the interest of our entire planet to share whatever we all know about how to interact with animals more safely The World Economic Forum reports that animals are the source of over 70% of new infectious diseases in humans And apparently, there are 1.7 million animal viruses that could potentially infect people We KNOW how to take better care of the other species that we share this planet with And now, we also know we NEED to Almost a decade ago in my book Igniting the Invisible Tribe I called out connectedness as an essential ingredient for the organization of the future This word can maybe sound rather pedestrian, but I think our current situation is showing us in real time that this idea is more important than ever When I say connectedness, I mean that what I do truly impacts you, no matter where the two of us are positioned on the globe  and the fact that this is true should now be crystal clear But connectedness also means we understand that NOW is connected to NEXT Today is connected to tomorrow What we do in this moment creates the future of our next moment There are investments we can and must make as a species to prevent this kind of virus transfer from happening again Why wouldn’t we work together to ensure healthy and humane treatment of animals everywhere in the world?  In light of what just happened wouldn’t the crazy thing be to NOT do this?? Well, yes and no. Of course ideologically it WOULD be crazy to not work together to fix these systems But practically, I’m afraid it’s a whole different game To actually do this, we would need an entirely different organizing story than the one we currently have You see, many of the organizing principles we use to coordinate the way we live and work throughout the world have strong isolationist tendencies  We see this in the nationalist and populist political movements that have emerged around the world in the last few years And our separateness — not connectedness — is further reinforced by the undercurrent of competition that runs underneath nearly every business on earth We’re incentivizing ourselves to “win” in a world of finite resources, which means there’s almost always a loser It doesn’t have to be this way, but we’d have to redefine the rules of our game Thus, a new organizing story for humanity What if, instead of celebrating corporate champions, “self-made men,” and the ultra-wealthy, we celebrated things like discovery and exploration? What if we measured ourselves on how much human thriving we could create for each other? All of this is already happening I just want to see it happen FASTER Humans naturally move toward our picture of the future So the more of us that can adopt this mindset, the more rapidly we

In my last video, I talked about systems and how we’ve actually codified into them privilege for some and inaccessibility for others. So today, I want to talk a bit more about the topic of systems.  For whatever reason, I seem to be hard-wired to see systems — it’s apparently how my brain works.  The Helios team has even been joking that we should probably start some kind of drinking game for every time I say the word “system” in our team meetings — we’re just drinking tea, don’t worry! But what am I talking about when I use the word “system?” If we think of organizations as organisms — as a kind of living structure — I think it becomes more clear. When organizations are formed, eventually, their culture — their operating system — becomes relatively fixed. It can take awhile for the norms and values to become stabilized, but this will happen and it’ll happen pretty organically.  In biological terms it’s like the organization/organism is seeking homeostasis — a place where it knows how to maintain equilibrium, or status quo, and it’s determining what things it will need to self-generate to keep things there. The way this happens through the lens of framing stories and language.  For example, if a prison has the operating system where the framing language is to “keep people in” we institutionalize all sorts of stories about the people in there as a result — they’re bad, they’re going to try to escape, they’re likely to revolt, etc. If this is the OS, the organization/organism will essentially assimilate the individual people to work toward this end. And here’s the crazy part — the system will do this to individuals whether or not the people coming in have that perspective to start or not. As Deming said: “A bad system beats a good person every time.” The people inside the organization/organism basically become cells who serve the larger entity. You’ve probably seen this happen… It’s almost like an organization takes on “a life of its own.” Just in the past few years we’ve seen the negative side of this effect happen at companies like Enron, DuPont, Wells Fargo, VW, and Boeing, just to name a few. People start making choices they might not naturally make, but it’s normalized — it’s homeostasis for the system — so people actually end up feeling like it’s OK to go down a path they typically wouldn’t. Sometimes we also see a really dark side of this, which is when the “life” of a system feels threatened. But it’s actually part of the natural evolutionary process for that system to be “naturally selected” out. In other words, it’s time for that system to die — but it doesn’t want to. If there’s some kind of perceived dire threat to the system, the cells (people) start fighting back.  It’s almost like an immune system, but fighting on behalf of a corrupted entity. At a meta level, I believe this is what’s happening with most everything that‘s come out of our current federal administration in the last few years.  The homeostasis of their system is deeply threatened, and for good reason — that outdated, unjust, and non-inclusive way of life is dying,  because it needs to — but the cells in that system are fighting back, trying desperately to cling to the life they once knew. This constant unrest we feel is actually a byproduct of us subconsciously noticing many outdated systems that are in various stages of decay and death right now. This is the natural cycle, and there’s something beautiful in it — the darkness always gives way to the light, every single day.  The death of these systems is necessary so something else — something new, something better — can be born. I promise you that there’s light at the en

Today I want to talk a bit about racial justice. Now, it probably goes without saying that I don’t have a firsthand perspective on this topic — I mean look at me, I practically need sunscreen for the ring light I use to film these things — so I’m not going to pretend otherwise. In fact, my lack of firsthand perspective is exactly the reality that I want to speak to first, because I know a heck of a lot of people who are in this same white boat with me.  I’m a straight white guy, the epitome of something called privilege.  This basically means I get advantages others don’t simply because of how I look. From a language perspective, “privilege” is a word that’s been around a long time — like, 12th century long — and it originally pertained to laws that were made in favor of certain individuals. So, in that way, not much has changed in a very, very long time. And I think one of the reasons this change is so slow and so difficult has to do with something I’ve talked a lot about in the past — invisible things. I want to suggest that this is a big part of what privilege is — it’s invisible.  Those of us who have it don’t easily see that we do, and this makes it hard to change. The word “privilege” actually shares some language roots with the word “private,” and I don’t think we — the people who look like me — have taken this hidden quality into account nearly enough… at least not *here.* Intellectually we may grasp the concept, but do we get it *HERE*… I’m not sure enough of us do… YET. OK, so maybe we accept there’s a hidden element to privilege that’s difficult to notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s IMPOSSIBLE to see.  And this is where privilege is similar to many other invisible things — once we realize its invisibility, we can start looking for it in a slightly different way.

We don’t try to look for it directly, but instead we look for the impact of it.  For example, I think privilege is a bit like the wind — we don’t see it directly, but when we look for its impact, we see that the EFFECTS of it are absolutely everywhere. This perspective has really helped me to understand my own privilege.  When I don’t look for it directly, but instead search for the impact, I can more clearly see the “elevation” kind of impact my privilege has has on me,  AND sadly, it’s probably even easier to see how my privilege has been connected to the subjugation of others. Because far too many times, in our zero-sum way of thinking about life, we’ve put these things together — this idea that for me to go up, you must have to go down.  This way of thinking is, in itself, deeply, terribly, flawed, but it’s an approach that’s been applied to many many parts of life for a very long time. A couple nights ago, I watched an online concert put on by one of my absolute favorite musicians, Brandi Carlile. Between songs, she talked a little about the LGBTQ movement and said that, though there was, of course, great work being done by activists in the LGBTQ community for many years, not enough changed in the system until straight people got involved and fought alongside them. STEM-specific mentors like Kamau Bobb Google are especially important to break down stereotypes about who practices STEM and to demonstrate the diversity in career options. This makes me think it’s time for a lot more people with my skin color to do whatever we can to help with racial justice in this moment. Of course, I didn’t choose my skin color any more than George Floyd did. And in this way, the topic of racial justice feels very similar to orientation — we love who we love. We are who we are. It’s asinine and absurd that we should treat our fello

Today I want to talk about what this time could teach us about our work Obviously the variation in what each of us do for work is enormous, but for many of us I suspect this time is illuminating some important things For example… If you didn’t like your job before you might now realize that you actually hate it It’s possible you had enough things “around” your work that made it bearable before — colleagues you enjoyed, happy hours, travel to cool places, whatever but now, you’re left with just the WORK, so if what you’re working on doesn’t intrinsically energize you and feel meaningful, you could be feeling REALLY drained right now Or — maybe you had a super toxic work environment, or DIDN’T like your coworkers all that much  — in which case you could be much happier now Joking aside, both of these things are red flags — they’re telling you something important about your work This situation hasn’t really changed our jobs, but it is likely exposing some things that were a bit hidden  Likewise the pandemic isn’t changing any of our company’s cultures — it actually amplifies them If you had an intense, hard-driving culture before, that’s still there — and you’re likely seeing senior leaders trying hard to figure out how in the world that approach translates to this new reality The current health situation is putting additional stress on the way we work, from practically every angle And stress is like squeezing a balloon — the same balloon is still there but we’re now seeing the sides, stretched thin and on the precarious edge of an explosion Put another way, the kind of tension we’re in stretches us to more extreme versions of whatever was ALREADY THERE And just like a balloon, this pressure makes everything more translucent, so it’s easier to see what‘s under the surface… good or bad So pay attention to what you see — it’s trying to tell you something important about the work you’re doing, or the company you’re doing it with See you next time

Hello my friends. The other day a friend of mine shared something I found to be incredibly profound. We were talking about resilience — which is, I suspect, something many of us would like more of right now — and he said… We often talk about resilience as bouncing back, right? Well, at its best, resilience actually doesn’t bounce BACK It bounces FORWARD I love this As you know, right now there’s a lot of conversation about the “new normal” And if you watched Episode 4, you know how I feel about that phrase So, in active co-creation of our “next normal,” how can we bounce forward? In many respects, i believe forward is the only option we have  Going “back” is an illusion.  As far as we know, the universe only expands in one direction and that’s forward.  We can’t un-see all we’ve seen during this time. We can’t un-feel what it felt like to have more autonomy and freedom and flexibility  If we’re parents, we can’t forget the moments of joy our kids gave us between our work projects And let’s be clear, those same kiddos also gave us some stressful moments, too But more often than not their smiles lifted me up in a truly powerful way — when I was able to stop long enough to actually SEE them So, if we even could go back, which I don’t believe we can, in so many ways we shouldn’t want to Don’t get me wrong, some things will be wonderful — eating out, and seeing movies, and gathering with friends in the park… all beautiful things, and I can’t wait to do them again. But for so very many of us, when it comes to WORK especially, the last normal was mostly a gigantic existential disappointment When it comes to those things, it would be a tremendous WASTE to go back — we would have gone through this entire experience and have learned nothing from it SO, when we think about going back to normal, let’s be very thoughtful and intentional about which parts of normal are worth going back to. My friend Mark put this quite eloquently — he said, “I don’t want our last normal to be our next normal” WE get to create the future we want, so I vote we make it a better one. See you next time.

The other day on LinkedIn I had a friend ask how we got into this mess. Of course there’s a lot of mess right now — he was referring to what’s been happening in healthcare where the front line experts are being increasingly governed by numbers-obsessed corporate entities. How did that happen, where even our most educated specialists like surgeons are being micromanaged?? Historically its not terribly complicated… Essentially, it’s the increasing commercialization of everything that naturally led us to this point.  We’ve been so hyper-obsessed with optimizing efficiencies for so many decades that there’s no slack or even resilience left in the system.  We’re all deeply interconnected — and at the same time, we’ve left no space for any link in the chain to not be operating at full capacity. If even one thing breaks down, it hurts us all. And right now we’re seeing what happens if MANY things break. And on top of that we have a persistent illusion that there can somehow be unending continual growth in a world of finite resources. So the answer is pretty straightforward— WE have created this way of working. And systems simply produce what they are designed to produce — and complete dehumanization is where the current path leads. This is why the only sane choice is revolution.

Today I wanted to zoom out and offer some thoughts on what’s possibly happening right now at a high level. Many of you might be familiar with a broadway musical called Hamilton. It’s about a time roughly 250 years ago that those of us here in the U.S. call the American Revolution. Maybe you’ve seen the show or listened to the music — and if you haven’t you should! Over the past few years since I saw the show, I’ve often wondered what it would’ve felt like to live during that time. Well, as I ponder everything that’s happening right now, I don’t wonder so much. I think we’re IN one of those times, my friends. I think people will be writing about and discussing the things we choose to do right now, just like we write and talk about the framers of the U.S. Constitution. This is an inflection point, a watershed that changes the direction of the current. And to the extent that we can recognize this significance of this moment WHILE WE’RE IN IT, we will be able to make better choices. It’s very likely that this is a moment that will define the direction our species goes. Will we bend our arc towards more inclusive,  more energizing, more participatory systems that help all of us thrive?  Or will we follow the tragic pattern of past human empires which ALL end in collapse? To quote that musical I mentioned, history has its eyes on us.  In our work at Helios we talk a lot about a “pattern interrupt” — adults, especially, seem to need this type of intervention to stop the inertia and momentum of the status quo, to actually see the water we’re swimming in. Right now, we’ve collectively been offered a pattern interrupt like nothing we’ve seen before.  In the long stretch of time this is just a moment, of course, but for this moment, much of the world is paused. My question is Can we turn this Pause into a Reset? I think we can — if enough of us want it badly enough. WE are the new revolution. See you next time. https://youtu.be/7Ngw4_-u5Gs

Today I want to talk about something that’s on many people’s minds right now… The future. We’re kind of obsessed with “what comes next” — right now the conversation is mostly in relation to the COVID pandemic — but this is always a question we humans have, isn’t it? What comes next? Well today I want to talk a little about this question, because the future actually isn’t what we think it is. I think is important to note that questions like “what comes next?” actually betray a fundamental misunderstanding about the future itself. When we say things like “what comes next” — or phrases like “the new normal,” which I’m hearing a lot right now — in a subtle way we are taking ourselves OUT of the equation. We’re making ourselves observers instead of participants. These questions talk about the future as if it were something that happens TO us, but this isn’t how it works. It’s easy to think about “the future” as some kind of destination point on a map — fixed and certain, and we all just kind of hurtle towards it. But the future isn’t a formed, defined ANYTHING — it’s pure unbridled possibility, and what it will actually look and feel like is something that’s being actively co-authored by all of US, right now. The choices each of us make in this moment — and every moment — create a different future than the one that existed a second before. When I make the choice to exercise. When you make the choice to go out of your way to help someone. When we all choose to stay home to protect the most vulnerable. We change the future. So let’s be thoughtful when we use phrases like the “what comes next” or  “new normal” — because we are actively shaping what those things will be with our words and our choices. The “new normal” isn’t a place we’re going to “arrive at.” It’s something we get to BUILD. Instead, let’s think about it as what what one of my friends called a “next normal” — something we all get to create together, right now. What does happen is that humans naturally move towards our picture of the future — so let’s get clear on the next normal we WANT, and build that. See you next time.

In the wake of recent events, it’s become clearer than ever that the way we work needs a revolution. Let me explain. Work, and the way we’ve been doing it, is the single most dominant organizing story in our lives. It largely determines where we live, the people we interact with most, our primary social status, how much (or little) freedom we experience, and in some countries — like the U.S. — even whether we have healthcare or not. For well over a century, the way we humans have collectively chosen to work has been driven by a set of principles that ensure a near-constant undercurrent of endless consumption and gladiator-like competition, with a single measuring stick: “Who’s got more money.” At the feet of the false god of profit, in big and small ways, we’ve sacrificed the personal health (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) of untold millions of our human brothers and sisters. To a large degree, we’ve even sacrificed the sustain-ability of the single home we all share, our planet. But now, this short-sighted view of work has been laid bare by a genetic organism less than a micron large. The emperor has no clothes, and we’ve all seen his nakedness. Many of the things we thought work was made of — the commutes, the meetings, the dress codes, the strict hours, a clean separation of “business” and “life,” the endless pursuit of another dollar — have been shown to be almost entirely without real lasting value. Furthermore, many of the roles and positions we laud with overwhelming amounts of money have been shown to be literally “worth less” than than the “lesser” jobs we insult with minuscule paychecks. And those jobs — the ones we thought were worth less — well, it turns out they are the Essential ones: the cleaners, the teachers, the nurses, the shelf-stockers, the garbage collectors, the farmhands, the warehouse workers, and so on. They are the ones who actually make our entire society WORK. So today we say… No more. No more endless consumption. No more absurd inequality. No more plundering of our planet. No more stupid workplace rules that don’t add value to our lives. The way we work needs a complete turnaround (which of course is the literal meaning of Revolution). And with that NO, we say YES to a new way forward. We say yes to healthy boundaries. Yes to work that gives us life and energy. Yes to more autonomy, more freedom, and more transparency. Yes to appreciating the delicate interconnectedness of our systems. Yes to leaders that treat our planet as a true stakeholder in decisions. Yes to organizations that welcome the fully human person to work. On behalf of all beings, we say YES to a Work Revolution. I hope you’ll join us.