How to Move Fast and Fix Things

LinkedIn: [00:00:00] Linkedin presents.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:12] So how do we build a future of work that moves fast, that makes amazing things happen, yet is also more humane, one where care and well-being and innovation can actually coexist. Today's SPARKED guest, Anne Morris, believes that this is very possible. Anne has spent 20 years building mission-driven enterprises and worked with organizations globally on leadership, culture and change. She serves on nonprofit boards, co-hosts The Fixable podcast from the Ted Audio Collective, and is the author of Move Fast and Fix Things The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems. And today we dive into the often brutal state of workplace culture, how it celebrates pace and drive, but so often at the cost of humanity and sustainability. And we talk about how we can continue to move fast and do big things, as all businesses must, but also do it in a way that respects the person along the way and offers some really powerful and specific insights on driving urgency while avoiding collateral damage to people. So let's dive in. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:29] Hey, before we dive into today's show, we've learned that a lot of our listeners are sort of at this moment where they're really exploring the notion of work in their lives and their next moves in their careers. And if you are in that place, we talk about the spark and the sparketypes a lot on this show, this body of work that we've developed to help you really identify what makes you come alive and how to apply that to the world of work. We've heard from a lot of folks that they would also love some help along that journey. If you're curious, you can also find on our website a directory of Certified Sparketype Advisors who know this body of work and can really help coach and guide you through it. So we'll drop a link to the show notes in that right now. And if it feels interesting to you and you just like somebody to help guide you through this next part of your career or work journey, take a look and see if somebody resonates. It might be the perfect fit to help you along this next leg of your journey. Again, that link is in the show notes now.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:38] When you look at the culture of business, I want to say over the last probably decade or two, especially, any business associates itself with the idea of fast growth, innovation like rapid progress. This mantra sort of evolved, and I think it came largely out of the startup world, but then it became sort of dogma in much bigger cultures, which is move fast and break things. And along the way, it seemed to have worked to a certain extent in the very early days for certain companies. But now I think what we're realizing when we zoom the lens out is that there are problems with that, and some of the fundamental assumptions are deeply wrong, and some of the things that are actually getting broken along the way are the human beings. So you've sort of taken a look at this and said, what if we question this? But at the same time, we don't necessarily have to throw out the move fast part. So take me into your thoughts around this.

Anne Morris: [00:03:33] Yeah. Well, I do think Facebook kind of and Mark Zuckerberg kind of made the phrase at least super visible. And if you watch the evolution of the way this mantra has changed inside Facebook, I think it gives you a clue to how the world has evolved alongside it. But, you know, he started out with move fast and break things. At one point was move fast with stable infrastructure. So, you know, even the culture at Facebook started to challenge some of the implicit trade offs built into the original jumping-off point. It's now move fast together, which is one of their core values. It did take them a decade to get there, and I think the premise of our book is, is this idea that I think what the world internalized when we got in touch with the collateral damage of Move Fast and Break things, was okay if I want to not break things, if I want to take care of my stakeholders along the way, then I need to slow down. And a big part of the reason we wrote the book was to challenge actually the reaction more than the jumping-off point, which is that, you know, in our experience, speed is actually quite a critical variable to change leadership. So how do we continue to move fast, but do it in a way where we're breaking fewer things and even building trust as we go? And we were seeing so many examples of effective leaders who were doing that. And so we wanted to see if we could codify it, celebrate it, give people access to it, and actually increase the metabolic rate of problem-solving inside organizations of all sizes. And because we were seeing a lot of cultures where the biggest problem is the ones that were really affecting employees and customers in particular, these problems were festering, for lack of a better word, and not being solved at the metabolic rate that they deserved.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:41] Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, right? Because as you describe it, the first response very often is, well, let's slow down, okay. Let's let's look, that's the thing that we can manage. You know, that's the thing that is the real problem. And in fact that is something that you can do. But is it actually going to solve the problem and it causes other problems. You know, in a world where you wake up and you blink and the rate of acceleration of everything just keeps increasing and increasing, it's increasing. It's not a bad thing to be intentional, but at the same time, there are big problems that need to be solved, and the quicker we can solve them, it's not just better for business, it's better for everybody. It's better for humanity, for culture. So it is interesting that a lot of the focus first shifted to that is the reaction to the move back fast and break things. And now you're offering this other thing saying, no, no, no, let's let's keep moving fast because that actually matters. Yeah. And let's focus on the other side, on the human side to a certain extent. So talk to me also, I'm so curious how you see the last three years affecting this formula and the assumptions that have been made underneath it.

Anne Morris: [00:06:49] Meaning surviving a pandemic?

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:51] Yeah.

Anne Morris: [00:06:52] Yeah, yeah, it's I think it I think the last few years have changed us as individuals and as organizations in really profound ways. I think we in general are not yet in touch with all the ways we've been changed by this shared experience. You know, I think, for one, what we have learned in the last three years is how to survive a pandemic. We haven't run really thoughtful experiments in work from home or the future of work. We really just figured out how to stay alive and also keep the economy going. So I do worry a little bit that we are actually trying. To pull insight out of this shared experience that isn't isn't particularly useful. I think it's only now that we're seeing really thoughtful experimentation around these models, and what one of the good things that came out of the last three years is a willingness to challenge some of these assumptions about how we work together. And what's exciting about challenging assumptions is you can't contain them to one experiment. And so we're seeing a lot of exciting experimentation in lots of different functions.

Anne Morris: [00:08:12] At the same time, you are seeing Gen Z show up in the workforce with some momentum and a point of view. I think that's in many organizations. That's it's it's a volatile but also exciting combination. But when we think about increasing the rate of problem-solving, that willingness to get into the sandbox and play, that willingness to fail intelligently, that willingness to push back on things that don't make sense. I think one of the byproducts of our lives being so disrupted by the last three years is that we're willing to do all of those things more willingly, because all of the sacred cows of the last three years, or many of them. I'm going to butcher the metaphor. So I'm not even going to try to finish that sentence, but have been sacrificed put out to pasture. I don't even know where we Jonathan, where we go with that one. But the core structures that were immovable for decades, like where we work, are now on the table for discussion. And I think I see that as fundamentally optimistic.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:22] Yeah, I so agree with you. And I love the point that you make about, you know, we haven't actually figured out how to now live in a changed way or work in a changed way. We've just figured out how to really respond to a global crisis and somehow sustain at a baseline level for three years, but that is also forced us to start to reexamine all the fundamental assumptions. So now we're starting to run the experiments, probably going to be another two, three, four, five. Who knows how many other years until we actually start to really figure out, okay, so what makes sense based on the doors that have just been opened to to try a thousand different variations, that really kind of brings us to the roadmap that you offer at like if we're going to move forward and say, well, speed still matters, let's still move fast, let's still innovate progress. It's got to be centered, but we need to also factor in humanity and well-being and all of these things along the way. You lay out sort of a five-step playbook and the first element there is kind of what you just started talking about, which is let's actually identify the real problems here and what are the assumptions underlying that. I'm curious, when you look at the world of work right now, what you're out there on a consulting basis, on a regular work with a lot of different sized companies and leaders. What are you seeing as the most common quote, real problems that need to be dealt with right now?

Anne Morris: [00:10:48] Yeah, I think at the top of the list is companies ensuring that the contract they have with their employees, both the explicit contract. So kind of the fundamentals of exchanging my labor for some kind of financial reward, making sure that that works, but also making sure that the implicit contract works. So if if I'm showing up in the workplace, I'm also showing up because I want to get better at my job, I want to increasingly contribute to something that's meaningful to me. I want to have a real voice at the table. I want to co-produce the way work feels for me, all of these things that were kind of below the table and I'm going to credit Gen Z with this are now on the table. And I think it's what companies are coding as a problem in kind of having to deal with an activist workforce is, of course, also an opportunity to redesign the future of work and ultimately the future of the economy in a way that's going to work for everyone. I think that's, again, we're optimistic about this because in part, having lived through the last three years, that just the when there is this kind of pressure, human beings evolve. And complex systems like organizations evolve. And so I think there's a lot of pressure on this core stakeholder relationship with employees right now. And the organizations that are getting it right, I think are going to see really fast progress.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:28] Yeah, I so agree with that. It's funny you brought up Gen Z for a while now, a lot of senior leaders who came up with a completely different set of assumptions and. Occasions have been like grumbling, sometimes quietly, sometimes really vocally about that quote Gen Z and now, three years in, everybody has been dropped into some level of existential crisis and started to say, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Purpose matters to me. Meaning matters to me. Energy and excitement matters to me. Well-being and boundaries matter to me. It's not just Gen Z, it's not just millennials, it's Gen X. It's. And people in the highest levels of leadership are now saying, oh wait, we're actually all in this same questioning of what do we really need from this thing that we call work back, not just what are we going to contribute to it based on assumptions that we thought really could never change? It's such a fascinating window, because now we can't just point to those young rabble-rousers. We're all in this same question together, and we're realizing maybe they actually had something. And we just like our eyes have been opened to the fact that we should all be re-examining these things. It's such a fascinating moment.

Anne Morris: [00:13:36] I totally agree. I mean, I think the other variables, I think the rate of technological change, I think AI is a real disruptor. There's a quote from the great evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson that I think about every day in our work. And it's it's some variation on the problem with humanity is that we have prehistoric minds, medieval institutions and the technology of the gods, and that our technology is getting more godlike every day. And yet our institutions continue to be to have dynamics that Shakespeare would recognize. And we're all still making decisions with brains that evolve to deal with existential crises all day, every day, and to treat threats to our status as as life or death, which which they were when our brains evolved. So I think where we have part of why we do this work is because that middle variable, those institutions have a tremendous opportunity to evolve in our life, our brains. We're going to have to wait millennia. I would argue, you know, some technologists would disagree, but we can make fast progress on organizations and try to keep up with the rate of change of technology with intention. Yeah. We would roughly put this all under the category of leadership, which we think can come from anywhere in the hierarchy. But that's the that's the challenge. And the payoff is extraordinary. I mean, if you just you look at the variance between organizations that are well led, what it feels like to show up in those organizations and organizations that aren't it's just it's extraordinary. And to us, it feels like clearly the path to our species getting through a lot of the problems that are continuously hold us back.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:35] Yeah, it's such an interesting frame to sort of look at and say, okay, so the human being, your brain isn't going to evolve very quickly, but there's this one thing in the middle, like there is this one institution which has kind of been the same it's been for a long time. But that is the thing where biology is not limiting the pace of evolution with that. Like this is completely about preference and behavior and choice and that we can flip very quickly. And I agree, I think we're already seeing that there are going to be clear leaders who emerge and, and organizations that kind of stay dug in. And I think the pain is just going to increase and increase and increase because there is no resisting what's happening right now. You're either, you know, there's no middle. You're either disrupted or disrupting. And I think a lot of folks are trying to really just assume that there's a middle, and we can just keep on keeping on. And I don't see that existing anymore. Maybe it was an illusion that it ever did, but I think now clearer than ever, it's just, you know, that middle has become almost it's shrinking. If it even exists anymore, it's shrinking by the day. You know, one of the other things that you speak to is the notion of trust. And this is something where I think a lot of people are revisiting trust on multiple levels in the context of the work that they're doing. Leaders are revisiting it, and a lot of people are looking at institutions now and saying, why? Like, why should I actually why should trust even be involved in this? Because I feel like it's been absent from the conversation for a long time now. And yet being able to actually move quickly and do big, amazing things requires it to be centered in a way that maybe we haven't really been paying enough attention to. Yeah.

Anne Morris: [00:17:16] I mean, the way we think about it in, in our work is that the two essential variables you have in a changed leadership context are trust and speed. And there is a relationship. Essentially, the more trust you build, the faster you can go. But speed there is a sequence. Speed is a payoff. Speed is a payoff for your ability to build trust. And so when we think about it, we get playful about this five-step process. We assign each step to a day. So speed is Friday and Friday. Get to go as fast as you can, but it's really what you earn for having built trust. Monday through Thursday. Finally, on Friday, you get to sprint. Move fast and break things. Is trying to jump to Friday without doing the work to invest in healthy relationships with your stakeholders along the way.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:08] Yeah, when you think about how we build trust in modern organizational culture these days, is there any one behavior? Is there any one? Because I feel like there's a lot of trust signaling almost on level of virtue signaling trust. And people see that. And you just read through that in a in a hot second. Yeah.

Anne Morris: [00:18:30] Even our prehistoric brains can sniff this one out.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:33] You know, to genuinely build trust. Do you see any 1 or 2 actions or behaviors that really tend to show up as like, oh, these are actually really moving the needle?

Anne Morris: [00:18:46] Yeah, we see three actually. I mean, in our work we have seen a pretty stable architecture of trust. It actually goes back to Aristotle's Logos pathos ethos. So you are more willing to trust me as an individual and then as an organization. This works for teams. This works for organizations. If you believe that you're seeing the real version of me, if I'm not bullshitting you, if my actions match my words, match my beliefs. So we call that authenticity. You're more likely to trust me if you believe that I care about you, and I care about your success in the workplace, I'm willing to factor you in your needs into my decision-making. So we call that empathy. And then you're more willing to trust me if you think that I'm competent. So if I'm providing as a company a competent product or service that's relatively reliable, if this is a relationship between you and me, employer to employee, that if my basic needs of employee are met, I think that's that's part of the discussion. You know, younger workers are really pushing companies to have right now. And we call that logic. We call that whole bucket logic. So I think you're competent. I think you care about me and I think you're telling me the truth. And if all three of those things are firing at once, then I am willing to trust you. I'm willing to be guided by you if you are in a leadership role. Now, what we see with both individuals and companies is that we all lose trust some of the time. And by the way, we're constantly losing trust some of the time. And rebuilding. We think of trust as this like Faberge egg, you know, in fact, it's something that we're constantly working with.

Anne Morris: [00:20:32] We're picking up those pieces and putting it back together. But the pattern we've seen that's really interesting is that when you lose trust and we call it a trust wobble, you know, it's it's an accessible word. It reinforces that this is a temporary condition. When we lose trust or wobble on trust, we tend to get shaky on one of these three pillars again and again. And you can see that pattern for yourself if you just we just think back to the last few situations in your life where you failed to earn as much trust as possible or you lost it for some reason, it's likely that you'll see a pattern you got wobbly on empathy or authenticity or logic. The reason it matters is that if you're wobbling on logic, no amount of empathy. Doubling down on empathy doesn't make up for it. And that's what we see companies do all the time. So they're they're getting wobbly on the logic of their relationship with their employees in the sense that the core, their core basic needs are not being met by this employment relationship. And then they put extra snacks in the break room to try to signal how much they care. And that disconnect does not get healed until we start having a more honest conversation. But that's why it's in our experience. It's often quite worth it to put some energy into going one layer deep below this kind of esoteric idea of trust to figure out, okay, mechanically, what's going wrong here? Because depending on the answer, the solutions are quite different.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:10] Yeah, that makes so much sense. And it's interesting the way you describe, you know, let's let's add more snacks to the break room or like free lunches. It's like people can often.

Anne Morris: [00:22:18] Yoga at lunch.

Anne Morris: [00:22:20] Right?

Anne Morris: [00:22:20] They're like, yeah, well yeah I want a promotion.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:23] Right. It's like, yes, and okay, I'll take it. But that's you're almost I almost wonder if it makes it worse because it's almost like saying leadership realizes  there's a problem with trust here. And rather than actually being. Willing to deal with the real issue and step into it in an engaged way. They're trying to mask it with like just little tokens of we're taking action on it. And I almost wonder if it worsens the problem because people see through all of these things. I mean, you like the perks, but at the end of the day, that's not what you really want or what is going to keep you there.

Anne Morris: [00:22:59] I can tell you from the front lines of these conversations, it does make the problem worse. And even and often they come from a very good faith place. It's not that companies are trying to kind of mask the problem, but they're solving the wrong problem. And that's why we start our process with figuring out what your real issue is and then solve for trust.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:19] Yeah, that makes so much sense. You also speak to the importance of having diverse perspectives in the mix and the conversation. And it's interesting now because as we have this conversation, I feel like this is a pendulum that swings and has swung fairly violently from one extreme to the other, and I'm not entirely sure where it is right now. You know, I feel like a couple of years ago there was a huge focus on yes, we understand we actually really need to expand, you know, like all of the different people, the points of view, the history, the culture that people are showing because it's important. And then I feel like in the last year there's been a receding of a lot of that and an under-resourcing of it, because people are kind of like, oh, maybe people aren't looking as much at this anymore from the outside, and we don't have to continue to resource it, not realizing that this is not a PR issue. This is a fundamental like how do we actually function at the highest level and serve at the highest level thing? And you really speak to that and the importance of it?

Anne Morris: [00:24:25] Yeah, I do feel like one of the things that's getting lost in this moment where the pendulum has swung, swung back to, I think, a skepticism of DEIB work in many organizations is that inclusion done correctly. And that's a that's a big caveat, because I think there are relatively few organizations that have really gotten this right. But when you really get this right, it is an extraordinary competitive advantage. And so when we talk about this in the book, we start off with some just gentle reminders. You know, there's been some great research done to really try to nail this down. And the, the, you know, whether it comes to retention, creativity, workforce resilience, problem-solving, any indicator you can think about when you both have diverse points of views, diverse life experiences, and you have created a space where people can contribute their unique perspective and information. Like, I mean, it's just the performance upside of that is quite extraordinary. What we see happening is people. The underside of that is if you create a diverse environment but do not embed that diversity in a culture of inclusion, those teams actually underperform. Teams that are less diverse. And so we really want to encourage people to keep going on this work. Everything looks like a failure in the middle. As our colleague Rosabeth Moss Kanter has said, Kantor's law. But when there is something really beautiful at the end of this rainbow, but you've got to do the hard work of creating an inclusive environment first.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:15] Yeah, it's such a critical distinction. I mean, the notion that representation is not by default inclusion, I think is something that a lot of us miss. A lot of it's like, okay, it's yes, that's step one, really important. But if you don't create the safety and the environment, the culture where everybody can actually really bring everything they have to offer to the conversation, it's lip service. You know, it's just it's you're kind of like sugarcoating the issue.

Anne Morris: [00:26:39] Yeah. Back to our prehistoric minds. We default to what we have in common and we have much less in common in those environments. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:46] Yeah, absolutely. You also speak about the importance of telling a story around this. As somebody who's been fascinated by storytelling and its role in every part of human culture, but also work. I thought this was a really interesting also. And there are you really identify like there are critical pieces of the puzzle that you need to actually include in the story. If you want this story to have the effect of being able to actually have everybody say, yes, we're going to work hard, we're going to show up, we're going to do amazing things together, and we're going to center well-being and all the other good things along with that. Like there's there are t's that need to be crossed and i's that need to be dotted in this story.

Anne Morris: [00:27:24] Yeah. 100%. I mean, it's one of those steps. I mean, all five of the things we talk about in the book, but it's one of those steps that people often forget is so critical in really solving for the most important metric in leadership, which is our other people willing to be guided by you. And, you know, as humans, we think in stories and metaphors, you know, that that research is really compelling and clear. And so a fundamental leadership question is what is the story you're telling about the future you're creating. And in our experience, you've got to hit a couple of points for your audience to be willing to be guided by. You have to honor the past, both the good stuff and the bad. You've got to give us a really good reason to change a clear and compelling change mandate, and you have to create a picture of the future and how we're going to get there. That's both rigorous and optimistic. You got to tell us what it's going to feel like, Jonathan, when your story becomes my reality and when we see leaders get that right, you know, we're we're building up to this opportunity to start sprinting. There are so many beautiful rewards, including the ability to move faster.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:39] Yeah, it's I mean, you think back just through human history, there is not any major change that I can even begin to think of, whether it's in work, in culture, in anything where a story, a really powerful and compelling story wasn't at the center of that, you know, to move people on that level, there's got it's got to be there, or else there's no narrative that people step into, and then it becomes dueling narratives or conflicting narratives or people make up their own narratives, and then all you get is fragmentation of effort and dysfunction and futility and people walking away or feeling like they're burned out and they're just everything kind of collapses. And yet often I feel like this is the part that we give the least effort to because we're like, oh yeah, yeah, we need to actually let's, let's talk to comms about like, how do we tell this story rather than. No, actually, what is the real story here? Yeah. Like what is the real deep and compelling story here? What is our why? What are the beliefs? What are like where are we taking people and how do we own the past? And the fact that, like there were missteps and there are things that we need to move away from, rather than just let's get somebody to write up some copy.

Anne Morris: [00:29:56] Right. Right.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:57] Like we can circulate it around because that's that's going to be the press release. It's so central. And yet I often feel like it gets the least amount of attention. Is that been your experience?

Anne Morris: [00:30:07] Oh yeah. And you know, it's some of the favorite stories that we, we told in the book were leaders who got really creative about that storytelling stuff. And Jan Carlzon, who was the CEO of SAS Airlines and led arguably still in the 80s, the most magnificent business turnaround, certainly in the history of airlines, if not management, period. One of the things that he did was to create it was a complex story about deregulation and, you know, the segmentation of the market changing and competitors behaving differently. And so he really just sat down and simplified it, and he ended up making a cartoon, essentially a comic book that centered the story of a very sad plane that by the end of the story becomes happy. And when he talks about it, he said he was he was really nervous to share this with his team because he had this very like, cerebral, cerebral Scandinavian workforce. And he was like, okay, this is this, no pun. This is not going to fly. And so he gave it to a couple of his colleagues and they were like, oh my God, you got to give this to the whole company. Because now we get it. We get the story. We get why we're here. We get where we're going, we get our place in it. And to this day, they called it the Little Red Book because it just had a little cover with cover with the plane. It was on everybody's desk, it was on everybody's desk. And it was a beautiful tool in this change management journey. That to me reinforces the point here, Jonathan, which is that it's all about the story. Yeah. Like, we need the story to make sense of the change and to find our place in the script of it. And it's our obligation as leaders to give people that script.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:59] Yeah, I love I love that story also, and I love that it centers simplicity. Yeah. As a key element of this story, because we have such a tendency to say like, but this and this and this and it's like this just pile on complexity and complexity and complexity and then wonder why somebody looks at it and just completely taps out before they even get two pages in. It's because we've just given you the S-1 of the story. It's like, no, actually, nobody reads any of that stuff because it's just too opaque. And so I love the notion of centering simplicity in this as well. So it's not just having the key elements, but also we've got to distill it down so people can just grok it quickly, own it, and just and be emotionally installed in that story. Super powerful.

Anne Morris: [00:32:44] I love that emotionally installed. Yeah, we call it deeply simply storytelling. So understand deeply so that you can describe simply, ideally in as short a story as you as you can come up with. When John Legere turned around T-Mobile, he was able to distill it down to one word that he essentially made up, which was un-carrier. And everyone got it. And the past, present, future. At the time, if you recall, we were all being trapped into these awful contracts and counting minutes. And, you know, there were these punishing fees if we if we got them. Math wrong and he just showed up with his team and said, we are going to be we're going to do everything differently going forward. We're going to be the uncarrier.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:32] Yeah.

Anne Morris: [00:33:32] And it worked.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:34] It's like the George Costanza opposites like approach, like you can do everything opposite of all of my natural instincts.

Anne Morris: [00:33:41] That was a strategy. That was a strategy.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:44] I love that.

Anne Morris: [00:33:44] And it came out of him being on the front lines and listening to customer calls, and he was like, oh my God, everybody hates us. And we have all earned that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:54] Yeah, no, I love that. And I love the fact that he just owned it also.

Anne Morris: [00:33:58] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:58] And that kind of brings us to step five or day five Friday in your, in your week-long map of things, which is I almost feel like it's less a step and it's more like, this is what you've earned.

Anne Morris: [00:34:08] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:09] This is about now we actually have built the structure, the scaffolding to be able to actually step into that pace, that urgency, but in a more functional way.

Anne Morris: [00:34:19] Yeah, we have a lot of fun with Friday. It just gets very tactical. You know, here's another way to go fast. Here's another way to go fast. You know, one of my favorites is, you know, coming up with a way to fast-track projects that really matter inside your organization. So at Etsy they call them ambulances, which is an unfortunate metaphor, but it makes the point you really want to create a way that the projects that matter most to the business can speed ahead and get the attention and resources they deserve. And we see that kind of a strategy work in smaller startups, but also in big, massive organizations with a lot of bureaucracy. Arguably, those are the organizations that need them even more. You know, things like resolving conflict can make a huge difference in speed. We tolerate a lot of what the organizational team expert whom I adore, Leanne Davey, calls conflict debt. You know, the concept of tech debt is well understood. But conflict debt, which is just hanging out and holding us back unless we take the time to resolve it. And so we'll see organizations, L'Oreal is one great example of actually investing in training team members to resolve conflict, because it has enormous organizational payoffs, and speed is one of them. It's just not what we usually think about.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:41] Yeah. No, I love that. And that concept of oh, so debts can actually accrete in areas that we don't realize they're creating and have these like sand in the machine type of effect without us really understanding what's happening. It's fascinating. It makes you want to just kind of look at all the different places and ways that maybe you haven't focused on, say, huh, is there some form of dysfunctional debt that's accruing here that's actually causing issues with us? Which kind of loops us back to day one, to be honest with you. Like maybe this is one of the real problems, right, that we need to revisit you. You don't end on Friday or on this. You also you plug in one more thing that's really, really important here. And that is in the week-long metaphor. Take the weekend off and the bigger notion of like, well, what about rest and recovery?

Anne Morris: [00:36:27] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:27] And I think if there's anything that actually people have become awakened to the importance of in the last 3 to 5 years on an individual level, because we feel it so deeply individually and because rates of burnout are off the charts. Now, this is one of the things where people are saying, oh, actually, this has to be a part of the work experience these days.

Anne Morris: [00:36:50] Yeah, yeah. We strongly encourage you to take the weekend off. And if back to honoring our biology, all the peak performance research is actually really clear on this that we are we are designed to move fast. In fact, we are designed to sprint. We're just not designed to do so indefinitely. We're designed to sprint, recover, sprint, recover, sprint, recover. And many organizational cultures still get in the way of that recovery moment. I feel like we have woken up to this as individuals, Jonathan, but not yet as organized as organizations. The organizational movement on this is is still lagging, but as individuals, we have a ton of control over this one. We don't have a ton of control over some of these massive issues, but this one we do. So the small steps you can take to really set boundaries at the end of the day, and in particular, set boundaries at the end of the week to give yourself real space for recovery can have an enormous payoff.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:53] Yeah, and I agree. I think this is something we're feeling individually. And organizations are kind of looking at it but not operationalizing it. But I mean, it's fascinating.

Anne Morris: [00:38:03] But like the four-day workweek is.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:05] Interesting.

Anne Morris: [00:38:06] Really interesting and really encouraging. And I would encourage the skeptics to really dig into the data on this one because it's super provocative. And I do think that it's a structure that honors our biology as human beings. And people are saying really exciting productivity gains when they are really signaling. However, we design this, but the four-day week is a really powerful signal to be sending. We are going to create the space to recover period, and we are going to be better off, and we are going to increase our capacity to meet our mission, whatever it is. In a world where our people are, are resting and getting their life force back before they're coming back on Monday to solve problems.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:58] Yeah, it just makes so much sense. Like you said, if you look at human biology, if you look at athletes like nobody is in peak condition or training like, you know, just on a sustained basis, it doesn't happen in nature. You look at Ericsson's research on excellence and expertise, the best of the best of the best in the world, in every domain. About the most that they can engage in any kind of deliberate practice is maybe four hours a day, and they need to disconnect outside of that in order to be able to actually step back in and perform at the highest possible levels. You know, it's a part of the human condition. And I think the four-hour workweek is such a fascinating experiment that more and more companies are running now. And I'm so like we started in the beginning of our conversation, like we're early in these experiments. Yeah. And I'm really excited about what we're going to start to see from an actual data standpoint coming out of these experiments, and then how we can start to institutionalize some of this knowledge by breaking some of the old assumptions and saying, hmm, we actually can come all the way full circle here. We can do amazing things, move quickly, change the company in the world and the experiences of our customers and our employees, and honor the humanity in the process at the same time. So as we wrap up this conversation, any sort of like zooming the lens out final thoughts that you'd like to share?

Anne Morris: [00:40:19] Yeah, I'll share a couple. And you can take from them what you want, but one is that I think one of the things that's increasingly clear to us in doing this work is that the organism of the organization is much more human in and of itself, is much more human than we would expect given the origins of management science. So I think the things that are fundamentally true for us as, as individuals are also often true for organizations. And this is a great example. Organizations also need to recover. And it's not surprising because, you know, organizations are made up of humans. But we we often forget that when we approach the unit of analysis of a company. And I think it's a big lesson of our work. So it's not a surprise that this process that applies to solving problems for a company also applies to solving problems in our own lives as individuals. And so I would encourage people to really obviously play and try it, but also trust themselves as they think about problem-solving at the level of team and the level of company. That is, if it's not working for you personally, then it's probably not working for others, and it's probably not working for the company as a whole.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:48] Yeah, I love that. It makes sense and it brings it all together. And thank you so much for sharing your insights and your ideas, and to our fabulous listening community. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you all here again next week.

Anne Morris: [00:41:59] Take care. My pleasure.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:02] Hey, so I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Learned a little something about your own quest to come alive and work in life, and maybe feel a little bit less alone along this journey to find and do what sparks you. And remember, if you're at a moment of exploration, looking to find and do or even create work that makes you come more fully alive, that brings more meaning and purpose and joy into your life, take the time to discover your own personal sparketype for free at sparketype.com. It'll open your eyes to a deeper understanding of yourself and open the door to possibility like never before. And hey, if you're finding value in these conversations, please just take an extra second right now to follow and rate SPARKED in your favorite podcast app. This is so helpful in helping others find the show and growing our community so that we can all come alive and work in life together. Until next time. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is sparked. This episode of SPARKED was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Production and editing by Sarah Harney. Special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode.