Season 1: Recent Episodes

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Today I’m imagining a world where our leader said something like…

Strange as it might sound, our species has been given a kind of cosmic "time out"

Our doctors and scientists need time to create a vaccine and we’re going to give it to them. It's a crazy time, I know, but no one has to worry about money or healthcare — moments like this is what government is for and we’re prepared

Everyone who needs it will get a basic income so you don’t have to stress about bills

Landlords will take a pause on charging mortgages and commercial rents so no one will have to worry about a place to live or a place for your business

We’ve done away with healthcare being tied to your job — that was never a very good idea, so now if you need care, you can just go get it

We all have different jobs, and in a time like this we will see just how important — essential, even — some jobs are.

And they’re probably going to be jobs you didn’t pay much attention to before.

This is an opportunity for us to learn more about the kinds of work that make our world work.

And it’s a moment for us to be extra kind and show gratitude for all the many flavors of work that allow things to keep moving.

Vital things will stay open and we will focus intently on keeping those people safe and healthy. And we will hold them in our deep gratitude.

Those of us who can stay home will.

This will be disruptive but remember we’re doing this because what happens to you happens to me — we are all connected.

The people who matter to you matter to me.

Now is not the time to rush back into life as we knew it.

We don’t need to push to reopen things before we are ready — money is a construct created to serve people and we’ll do our best to make sure this doesn’t put any small businesses out of business.

Some of the big conglomerates… well, this will likely be a great reset for them. They can get smaller and become more local again, and we will actively help support local cooperatives to buy things like movie theaters so we when we can go back, money spent there will actually flow through local economies instead of just being siphoned off to make a small group of already rich shareholders even richer.

This is a pause.

In music we’d call it a rest. And rests are necessary because without them, music would just be noise.

Most of us aren’t very good at rests. We’re better at playing notes. Notes notes notes, all the time.

But let’s be honest — during this time, some of us will get more time to rest than is comfortable

And some of us will probably never work harder.

It all depends on what your work is — this is fine too. Different notes are played at different times.

Before this, life was a bit of a cacophony — in many ways, we have been given an opportunity to learn

To actually stop

And pause

We have been given a moment to reflect and do something different, to explore how our ways of living and working were or were not working before

I know it’s scary — the unknown always is, and something like this is a vast unknown for everyone alive today

Let me say again…

We will not rush to reopen things before we are ready.

Someday soon we will go back to movie theaters. But not today.

Someday soon we will go back to our churches and concerts and bars and dance clubs and business conferences.

But not today.

And it’s OK.

We will be OK.

This will not last forever, and if we do our best to focus on how we are helping each other, it will be easier — it still won’t be easy, but it will be easier.

Be patient

Be grateful for your fellow humans who are helping by doing jobs you don’t do

Take care of yourself

And take care of others

We will get through this, and we will learn some powerful and important things from it.

When we arrive on the other side of this, we won’t be the same people we are today.

But if we can tap into the best parts of ourselves — our compassion, our hope, our love — we will be BETTER people.

Reach deep and find the best part of you, and hang on to that.

This will be hard, but it won’t feel so heavy if we all carry a little piece.

I am right here with you, and we can carry it together.

Keep the faith, my friends. See you next time.

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Almost exactly one year ago, a group of 180 CEOs from some of America’s largest companies, called the Business Roundtable, got together and announced that they were moving away from “shareholder primacy” as the purpose of business.

I talked about that idea in the last episode — it essentially means that a business exists to make the company’s owners more money.

Instead of doing that, these CEOs were committing the purpose of business moving forward to delivering value to ALL stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, communities, AND owners, too.

Of course, last fall nobody had “global pandemic” on their 2020 roadmap, nor did we know the massive impact — negative or positive — a pandemic like this would have on some of our largest organizations.

But it’s fairly safe to say that, at least so far, the promises made by those CEOs last fall haven’t amounted to much.

In the last 365+ days, owners have gotten much, much wealthier and millions of others… got unemployment.

This isn’t exactly the kind of change we’re looking for.

As I’ve discussed fairly relentlessly across this season of Work Revolution, the way we work is being re-engineered in real time, right now.

A “next normal” is being birthed by all of us, collectively.

But it’s becoming quite clear that there isn’t a roundtable group that’s going to swoop in and save us.

The revolution needs to come from us.

A huge number of us don’t want to go back to what we were doing before.

Commutes feel crazier than they used to.

Strict work hours and dress codes feel sillier than they used to.

All the time spent in airports feels a bit more wasteful than it used to.

For those of us with kids, I suspect many of us will be quite happy when we can take “teacher” off our resume — but at the same time, it’s hard to imagine not having our kids around this much.

Have you looked back at your calendar before the pandemic? For me, at least, it’s STRIKING how many events I went to and how much travel time I spent getting to them.

Life feels SIMPLER now, in many ways.

And I know this isn’t the case for everyone. 



But could it be??

Could those of us who see systems, who have privilege, who have the time and freedom to listen to a message like this, do something NEW that would benefit EVERYONE over the long-term?

Awhile back, I listened to some inspiring interviews with a thinker and author named Rutger Bregman who wrote a book you may have heard of called Utopia For Realists.

Now, he offers many ideas I think are worth pondering — I’ll put a couple links in the show notes — but one point he made has really stuck with me.

He says we humans, we have plenty of dark, dystopian visions of the future.

These pictures where an evil artificial intelligence tries to extinguish the human race and so on — we have plenty of visions of possible futures we definitely DON’T want.

What we’re lacking is visions for the future that we DO want.

If there’s one idea I’d love for you to take away from this first season of Work Revolution it’s probably this — that the future is whatever we make it.

Our words create worlds — or as I recently heard said by the 14th-Century Persian poet Hafiz: “The words we speak become the houses we live in.”

Language is a powerful form of art, and it’s perhaps THE dominant way we humans construct reality.

So how are you speaking about the future of work?

We’ve also talked a lot about systems this season.

Every system we see in the workplace today was built by a human being just like you or me.

And systems exist for one purpose: to serve people.

Sadly, a lot of our systems weren’t designed to serve ALL people, but a small subset of people who looked and talked like the people who built them.

Beyond that, most of our systems now are decomposing — they are outdated in their understanding of the world, they’re behind in their usage of technology, and most are flat-out breaking down.

When systems no longer serve humans — or don’t serve as many humans as possible — they MUST be changed or dismantled entirely.

And this is where we are.

Almost every system around us needs to be reinvented.

But this is the great joy of a time like this!

We have an opportunity to create something FAR better than what we’ve had.

None of us could lift this alone, but together it’s actually not so heavy.

If enough of us want a work revolution, it can’t NOT happen.

So…

Keep crafting a better, more just, more inclusive, more loving world with the words you use.

Keep looking for ways to impact our systems wherever you can.

We’re in this together, my friends. This is a long game, not a short one.

Keep the faith and thank you for everything you’re doing. I’m so honored to be in this work with you.

See you next time.

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Today I want to talk about the purpose of business, which I’m going to talk about synonymously as the purpose of work.

For a few solid decades at least, and quite possibly much longer, we’ve collectively viewed the purpose of work as one thing:

To make money.

Look a little deeper at this topic and you’ll find some embedded academic thinking that takes it a step further and clarifies who business is supposed to make money FOR — this is captured in the thrilling phrase “maximize shareholder return.”

If you don’t speak “finance,” this just means the people who own the business — work exists to make more money for them.

It doesn’t exist to make more money for the people actually doing the work, but for the owners.

Now whether you agree with this or not, practically speaking it’s how the system works.

We’re getting a front row seat to watch this right now as billionaire shareholders get richer while millions of workers file for unemployment. At the time of this recording, the actual figure is $637 billion dollars — this is how much money U.S. billionaire shareholders have added to their fortunes just since the beginning of the pandemic.

By the time you listen to this, that figure WILL be larger.

Is this the purpose of work? Simply to make a small group of people more wealthy?

Whether you like it or not, right now, this IS the practical purpose of work in reality... but, of course, I don’t think it should be.

And I’m guessing you don’t either.

In our business culture today, we have a relentless focus towards more — buying more, selling more, having more.

We’ve even codified this unending expectation into our work lives in the form of things like “quarterly returns.” The explicit and implicit expectation set upon our most public organizations is unending growth, quarter after quarter, year after year, forever and ever.

More, more, more.

But we live on a planet with finite resources. Why do we think infinite returns are even possible, much less sustainable...?

There’s something deeply unhealthy about this, and we can see this more clearly when we look for a parallel in the biological world.

In the natural world, there IS something that provides unending growth and ceaseless consumption of resources: we call it cancer.

I’m going to say that probably isn’t the example we should be modeling our work after.

To help us put things into a better perspective, I want to offer this analogy…

Profit is to business as oxygen is to life.

No sane person would argue that oxygen isn’t important — vital; essential even — for life.

But oxygen is not the point of life. It’s not the purpose of life.

In fact, if someone were to get confused about this and start living as though the accumulation of more oxygen WAS the point of life, we’d likely help them seek immediate medical attention.

You see, with this warped perspective, they would start building bigger and bigger tanks to store extra oxygen, and when local limitations would prohibit more biggering, they’d find ways to store their oxygen in tanks overseas.

The laws of the land would eventually prohibit their ever-expanding storage habits, so they’d hire lobbyists to change governmental laws so they could go get more.

Eventually, they’d try to steal (in “legal” ways, of course) oxygen market-share from smaller or unwitting “competitors.”

And then, to top it all off, the people actually building the bigger tanks would be given just the bare minimum amount of oxygen they need to keep building. It’s fine, they can gasp for air while constructing the storage tanks to hold the thing they need to live just so the owners can have a larger oxygen portfolio.

In short, these oxygen tycoons would structure their whole lives entirely around the pursuit of more oxygen… but

FOR WHAT?

No one needs all that oxygen.

A person couldn’t breathe all that oxygen if they lived 10 lifetimes.

When people endlessly collect things we label it a psychological disorder called hoarding.

When business owners and shareholders do this with MONEY… we put them on magazine covers.

Right now the purpose of business is to make more money, and not for everyone, but for a very small group of people.

It shouldn’t be this, but it is.

It’s completely nonsensical. It’s a made up game that serves literally almost no one.

I truly believe future humans will look back at the money hoarding we are doing right now as a form of insanity.

The point of life isn’t to collect oxygen.

The point of work shouldn’t be collecting money.

If you agree, please share this message — the more of us who understand this, the faster we’ll see a work revolution.

See you next time.

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Today I want to start with a little story.

This happened a couple years ago, when my kids were a little younger.

It was a morning like most weekday mornings — which is to say everybody in the family was running around trying to get ready to leave the house… get the kids to school, get the adults started with work, you might know the drill.

If you do have kids, you know some mornings are better than others when it comes to the kids listening versus the kids procrastinating.

This particular morning was crazy stalling, and I was getting annoyed.

During a moment when the kids were presumably in their bedrooms getting ready — but who knows, really — I turned to my wife and I said, “Is it all children that can’t listen unless they are threatened with negative consequences, or is it just ours?”

To which she replied…

“It’s all children, I think — and then she said — and adults seem to be the same way.”

This comment really stuck with me. I’d certainly seen evidence of this in the places I’d worked over the years.

As I pondered it more, I realized this was actually one of the most common challenges I’d heard from leaders about their workplaces, even though the exact complaint came in a variety of flavors.

Typical comments sounded like:

“People just don’t do what they are supposed to do.”

or

“We have an accountability problem.”

or

“I don’t WANT to ‘manage’ people, but I feel like I HAVE to.”

You ever heard any of these? Or said them?

Well, I’ve come to believe all these comments are like a runny nose and sneezing — they’re symptoms of an underlying problem, which is that you have a cold.

In a workplace, the above “lack of accountability” problems are symptoms of something I call Neverland Disease.



You remember Neverland, from the story of Peter Pan — it’s a place of eternal youth, for kids who don’t want to grow up. Neverland has a LOT of similarities to our workplaces.

You see, whenever we complain about something like “accountability,” it’s actually almost never about the people — it’s about the set of expectations our workplace systems have put on people.

And all this has a lot to do with how we treat children, and what it means to grow up and become an adult.

Let me explain…

Accountability is needed when I don’t do what I said I was going to do. If I honor my commitments, you don’t ever need to “hold me accountable.” It’s irrelevant.

But if I don’t do what I say I’m going to do, then what?

Then I need accountability.

So you see, the whole construct of accountability is based on an assumption that you AREN’T actually going to do what you said you would.

And that, my friends, is literally childish behavior.

I can’t trust my kids to get ready in the morning even though I’ve asked them about a bazillion times to do it and they’ve agreed. They don’t follow through. It’s childish.

And so, when we set up workplace structures for “accountability,” the baseline assumption of you is that you are going to act like a child and not follow through.

Now, I don’t actually believe you’re a child. I believe you are a wise and powerful adult.

But if we’ve learned anything through all these episodes, it’s that the system almost always wins.

And our systems are designed to treat us like children.

We can’t treat people like children and expect them to act like adults.

This isn’t how it works.

If we treat people like children — assume they need accountability — they will act like, you guessed it, children who need accountability.

This is another one of these work practices that I believe isn’t done intentionally — it’s just how work’s been done for so long, it feels normal.

So what do we do instead?

Well, we need to create a work environment where it’s expected and required for everyone to behave like an adult at work.

Our expectation needs to shift from one of accountability to one of support.

Unlike accountability, which assumes you won’t do what you said, support assumes you WILL.

My full assumption about every single person in my team is that they are going to do what they say they’re going to do. And then it’s my job to simply support them in reaching their goals.

Taking this approach is all about learning to think differently about the nature of work.

It’s a mindset upgrade.

Practically speaking, our thinking needs to be upgraded around decisions — specifically, how they get made and who gets to make them.

Isn’t decision-making the hallmark of more maturity? As we are able to trust our kids to make more decisions, we see they’re growing up.

It’s similar in our workplaces. Until people have the authority and autonomy to make their own decisions, they will forever be children in Neverland.

To make this work without it feeling like anarchy, we install a simple decision-making process that everyone follows. If you want to see our process at Helios, you can download our CultureBook — I’ll put the link in the show notes. At the time of this recording, it’s Principle 17, starts on page 35.

Creating a workplace that’s NOT Neverland isn’t terribly complex or complicated — in many ways, it’s much simpler than the way decisions get passed around in a hierarchy — but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy transition to make, because it really does require us to think very differently about the way work happens and who should be making decisions.

But believe me, it is well worth your time and effort to be able to work with adults who act like adults. That’s just more enjoyable for everybody.

See you next time.

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Today I want to talk about another element of work that gets confused a lot.

For the past 15 years or so, I’ve been working in a space that’s often called “Organizational Development.”

This is a large, somewhat vague, term that applies to how organizations work… or in many cases, don’t.

In Episode 10, I talked a lot about organizations, and how they are actually a lot like organisms — they are living systems.

And in systems of all kinds, living or mechanical, there are inputs and outputs.

In other words, we put things into a system, and based on whatever the system is designed to do, it produces something else on the other side.

Think of it like an orange seed. Inside the orange seed is an entire system designed to grow an orange tree — the whole thing is built to produce that result, and it would be crazy to expect it to do something else, say, grow an oak tree.

Let me give you some other examples…

We put our kids in a traditional education system and they come out with a clear understanding of obedience — raise your hand, ask permission for everything, and so on.

We give our bodies food and rest and we feel re-energized.

We put generally honest people inside Enron, Wells Fargo, or Boeing and they hide things they shouldn’t.

Systems produce what they are designed to produce. And systems have inputs — the things we put into them — and outputs — whatever the system creates.

Well, in the world of work, there’s a bit of a marketplace oddity that’s happened, because there are entire industries that focus almost entirely on outputs.

For example, there are some very large businesses built around things like recognition, engagement, and inclusion.

All very important things — and all outputs.

These things are all outcomes of systems that are designed to produce them.

Things like recognition, engagement, and inclusion are results that ensue from a workplace operating system that builds psychological safety, has good communication habits, and fosters mutual respect.

For example…

It’s not hard for me to recognize you if I like you, if I respect you, if I appreciate your uniqueness. In that environment, I don’t have to be coerced to tell you that I see your greatness… I just want to.

Likewise, it’s not hard for me to be engaged if my workplace operating system consistently pushes me to do more work activities that align with what energizes me.

And it’s also much easier for me to be more inclusive if my organizational culture actively practices appreciating differences of perspectives — that we don’t just defer to people with the biggest title, largest paycheck, or the most seniority.

And this has gotten VERY confused in the way we “develop organizations.”

Oftentimes, we think we can get more recognition by deploying cool recognition software, or we can get more engagement by doing an engagement survey, or that we’ll encourage more inclusion by hosting a D&I workshop.

But working on outputs doesn’t change the system, so, though we mean well, and could see a short-term benefit, at the end of the day nothing is actually meaningfully, sustainably different until we find a way to impact the operating system itself.

To do this, we need to do things like implement better guiding principles, intentionally inject new language into the way we talk to each other, and start new practices that can build new habits.

None of those things are terribly sexy — they all require some intentional, thoughtful work.

But there’s really no way to get the outputs we want unless we create systems that are actually designed to produce them.

Until we do this, we’ll just keep being forever disappointed that a system designed to produce oranges doesn’t make an oak tree instead.

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A couple months ago, my friend Kibibi posted a comment on an earlier Work Revolution episode that’s really stuck with me.

She said: “Without a healthy workforce, the workplace has no life, and the work cannot come to life.”

So simple.

So straightforward.

So true.

And yet, so… unpracticed.

By almost every measurement, we are a deeply UNhealthy workforce — and this has been the case long before the pandemic.

We can look at almost any human-related metric — burnout, passion, disengagement, mental health, depression and anxiety, inequality, or even being bullied at work… every one of these items has been documented with abysmal statistics within the last few years.

Intellectually, I think we know Kibibi is right — that without a healthy workforce, NOTHING good happens — and yet…

The hard reality is that turning our organizations into places that heal us is a VERY big shift.

It’s not at all what most of us have right now.

Our workplace systems are optimized to do a few things — primarily make money — but almost without fail, what they’re NOT optimized to do is help you get healthy or stay healthy.

In many cases, it’s actually the opposite.

Work systems aren’t built to recharge you, but to drain you.

There’s a powerful scene in a film you might remember called The Matrix where Neo wakes up in the real world and we get to see that the robots have created a gigantic “battery farm” out of the human race.

Well, our current companies are actually kind of a lot like that — they’re designed to make YOU the battery.

The system feeds off your life energy to keep the machine running.

And I’m going to guess that “being a battery in someone else’s machine” isn’t what the child version of you said they wanted to be when they grew up.

“Without a healthy workforce, the workplace has no life, and the work cannot come to life.”

Being a battery is not the life you want.

It’s not the life you deserve.

And what’s the point of all this living, really, if not to have a better quality of LIFE!?

We are in a moment right now where our choices have never been clearer.

We can continue down the path we’re on, but we know exactly where it leads because we’ve already lived it: more burnout, more mental illness, more greed, more inequality.

This pathway inevitably leads to collapse.

It’s not really a mystery — it’s more or less the story we’ve seen with every human civilization that we know of.

OR…

We could turn this around — I’m thinking something like a revolution — and we could choose something different.

I don’t know about you, but I’m on Team Life, and if enough of you are too, we can and WILL turn this thing around.

See you next time.

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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?

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.

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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!

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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 people do not have the ability to simply look away.

As I talked about in Episode 10, our lives are in large part dictated by the systems we’re in.

And oftentimes these systems have codified injustice, so a great many people have to stare into the face of an unfair political system every single day.

They don’t get the option to look away.

Which leads us back to the topic of “politics.”

In one of my favorite podcast episodes of all time — I’ll link to this too — a thinker I very much admire named Rob Bell explains the origin of the word “politics” — I’ll do my best to quickly summarize.

The word “politics” can be traced pretty directly back to the Greek word “politikos” which means “of citizens” and “pertaining to public life.”

So, even though the word politics has been deeply corrupted — I think “politics” is seen as a kind of “dirty word” in most circles these days — as Rob puts brilliantly, we need to reset our understanding of what this word is actually about.

Because in truth, politics are about how we citizens arrange our common life together.

And that is a powerful and beautiful idea.

How do we, together, arrange the kind of fair and just life we want to have?

And now, I think we can go back to the Tattered Cover story, because I think we can learn something important from this bookstore.

Essentially, we can live our lives as though nothing is politics except maybe a certain set of jobs concentrated in government buildings and in Washington D.C.

As if politics are something separate and avoidable and we can somehow “stay out of it” and “remain neutral.”

OR we can live our lives as though EVERYTHING is politics.

That our citizenry is the thing that connects us all — it’s our shared common life together.

When we take this perspective, when we learn from the bookstore, we can see more clearly that opting out ISN’T an option, because many times the decisions that are being made in the “political” space are the very things that are hindering social mobility for so many.

The American Dream isn’t happening because we — me and you — have largely abdicated the role each of us — you and me — need to play in politics — as citizens who genuinely care about how we arrange our common life together.

Who care about building systems that lift up ALL of us, not just some of us.

When more of us see that politics isn’t something reserved for a select few but is the ongoing work of ALL of us who call ourselves citizens, I think we’ll start to see some real, lasting change.

And now is definitely the moment for that.

See you next time.

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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 — 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.

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 most normal thing in the world.

But it’s NOT normal for you to be handled like a horse at work.

I’m going to switch metaphors here, because the other way to see this is through the lens of our own species, just much much younger.

You see, this is also how we treat children. They don’t get to make decisions until their brains are developed enough to make good ones.

A standard rite of passage as we move from youth to adult is getting to make decisions.

Well, this hallmark never comes to pass in the old organizational operating system, because your handler always makes the decisions for you.

And we have decade upon decade, generation upon generation of people who have experienced this madness as “normal.”

A big part of the undercurrent struggle with the work from home transition brought about by the pandemic has been that people, overnight, were being required to instantly become self-managing, autonomous adults inside organizational structures that have treated them like children for their entire lives.

Here’s the really big problem...

If an organization’s operating system is any version of a fiat hierarchy — also known as “command and control,” or uses “people managers” in any fashion — remote and distributed work lies almost directly at odds with that operating system.

Because, as my friends at Corporate Rebels said, the best work from home “policy” is just three words: WE TRUST YOU.

But if you have a handler, it’s because we DON’T trust you.

These two things are fundamentally incompatible. “Distributed work” is software that simply won’t run on the old hardware.

THIS is why this transition has felt so hard for so many.

Command and control isn’t leadership, it’s management — it’s people handling — and it’s NEVER truly worked.

Coercion may get someone’s attention for a short time, but it never wins hearts.

And the battle for people’s hearts is what will define the next economy.

Now is the time to do something VERY different. It’s time to upgrade the operating system.

See you next time.

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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.

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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.

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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 can create it

See you next time

UPDATE JULY 8, 2020 — There's a new video on this topic from WEF right here.

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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 end of this tunnel of death... but we have to go through it to get there.

And the work we do in this particular tunnel is to essentially reinvent every human system on the planet.

This isn’t a small task, but I know that together we humans have the creative resources to pull it off.

I talked about this in my book years ago — almost every system in the world today is somewhere on the spectrum of collapse and rebirth.

Education

Finance

Government

Media

Transportation

Healthcare

The way we think about public safety, law, and criminal justice

The way we think about food & food production

The way we think about national borders

The way we work

The way we think about capitalism itself

We’ve been watching a system-level unraveling play out in various forms for well over a decade already, and probably much longer.

Do you remember when the music industry was imploding because people were sharing mp3s?

Feels like a millennia ago.

So to go back to my very first question... when I say system, I mean these things — these big institutional organisms that take on a life of their own and actually fight for their own survival.

And here’s the craziest thing about these systems.

Many people — perhaps MOST people — don’t see them at all.

Oh, they know they exist, that they’re “out there” somewhere, but they don’t realize something very important about them:

That people just like you and me created the systems.

And more importantly, people just like you and me made the rules that govern them.

All the governance and structure inside these different systems has been completely made up by people no smarter than you or me — and many times, those people just didn’t know things we now understand.

But I’m convinced that the vast majority of our fellow humans don’t actually see systems as fungible things — as structures that were fabricated by humans, and therefore completely changeable.

In fact, I think most people don’t see them at all.

Instead, they simply live their lives at the affect of the systems they choose, oftentimes not even realizing they’re not actually making choices anymore.

I think this is one of the most important things I’ve noticed over the years — it’s that we humans like to think we make choices.

But we actually make FAR fewer choices than we think.

What actually happens is that we choose systems and then they make choices for us.

For example, take education.

If I choose to go to a 4-year university, that choice is probably mine, but after that choice — I’m going to UCLA! — my choice-making grinds to a halt.

Now I have to attend certain classes at certain times of day and I have to keep my grades at a certain level to stay enrolled which means I have to spend time studying and I also have to buy books so I need to get a job…

You see my point? None of those decisions were mine. They were all dictated by the system I chose.

AND — many systems are actually forced upon us, like healthcare.

Depending on where you live in the world, you will have a VERY different experience with very different healthcare systems.

And here’s the really big challenge with all this.

Because most people don’t see the systems, they can’t actually fix the real problems.

Instead, they treat symptoms.

Unless we fix the system, we’re just prolonging the problem.

It’s like having a problem with your computer’s operating system — the screen keeps flickering, let’s say — and so you just keep installing different apps to fix it. Does it work?

No, of course it doesn’t — the problem is in the system — but all that app installing sure does keep you BUSY.

And this is what’s happening out there in most of our outdated systems — a whole lot of app installing. This is why we’re all VERY busy, but nothing ever seems to get better.

For the most part, we are simply treating the near-endless set of problems that the old system created.

We need more upstream solutions that can actually fix the bigger problem, which is the system itself.

I understand these questions are harder — they’re bigger — but they’re the only questions that will provide a way out of the mess we’re in.

There’s an very important role for you and me to play in fixing these systems

And for our kids and grandkids, we NEED to.

So here’s the catch...

If you know what I’ve been talking about — if you see in your mind’s eye the picture I’ve painted about these systems — you can see them, too.

And in my humble opinion, that means you’ve opted in to help.

Humanity NEEDS you to help, in whatever way you can.

Don’t get distracted by the other stuff — there are some big hairy symptoms out there, for sure, and some of it is important, but there are others working on those things!

Not everyone can see what you see.

The world needs YOU to help fix the systems.

How do you get started? I recommend finding the system that makes you the most angry and flip that emotion around to let it become the passionate fuel you’ll need to work on that wicked problem.

Yes, almost every system right now is fractured. But the thing about cracks is they let the light in. Unless something breaks, the light can’t get through.

My suspicion is that if all of us who can see systems decide we’re going to help build new ones, we’ve got a real shot at getting this train moving a little faster so we can get to that light on the other side of the tunnel and experience the beauty of the rebirth that’s coming.

See you next time.

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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.

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 fellow humans as anything other than EQUAL for something we just ARE.

And then… and then…!

We’ve gone and made it even worse, because we’ve literally codified privilege for some and inaccessibility for others directly into our systems.

Things like housing, education, and incarceration, and probably many others I’m not thinking clearly enough to remember right now, have been infiltrated by this toxic and literally deadly injustice.

At one level, I suppose we shouldn’t really expect anything else from a country who’s founders were somehow able to navigate the frankly insane psychological dissonance of holding “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in one hand while clinging to slavery with the other.

Our history IS inequity.

Our history IS inequality.

And this is something we need to look squarely in the face and deal with.

So where do we go from here...

In our work we talk a lot about the notions of “ME” and “WE” and I think both of these apply here.

From the “ME” perspective, as individuals, people who look like I do simply must learn to see how the impact of our privilege has lifted us up while at the same time kept others down.

We need to see it and we need to own it as the truth of what’s happening.

This awakening won’t happen overnight, but my hope is that perhaps this fresh perspective on privilege can help you like it’s helped me.

Then, from a “WE” perspective we also MUST fix our systems. This won’t happen overnight, either, but I suspect as we’ve seen with other movements, systemic change can happen more quickly than we think when enough of us get involved and try to help.

So for all of you who watch this video, I want to close by asking your forgiveness.

If my privilege has in any way kept someone else down while it’s lifted me up, I am sorry.

Also, it’s quite likely I messed up some of my words here, or left something out, or didn’t say the right thing. Maybe I even flat-out offended you. If that’s the case I’m sorry for that, too.

AND, at this moment, it frankly seemed more important that I say SOMETHING,

to try my best in my own awkward way to let you know that while I don’t know exactly what to do, or what to say, or how I can even best help, I am here and I am with you.

On behalf of people who have privilege, I want you to know I see mine, and I will do whatever I can to keep listening, keep learning, and make a positive impact to change things in my sphere of influence.

If you are a human being, I am on YOUR team and for whatever it’s worth, I personally won’t be satisfied until all of us are seen as equals — and until our systems provide us ALL with equality, as well.

Sending you my love...

See you next time.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Today I want to talk about the word “revolution”

Depending on our life story, or where we are in the world, we might have very different associations with this word

So it’s important to know that when I use this word, I never, ever mean the violent kind of revolution

Whenever I use this word, I mean it literally — as in, the earth does a revolution around the sun once a year 

It’s a complete turnaround.

And this is what we need from work, a complete turnaround

Right now, no matter what human metric you look at, the way we work is a mess

Almost 90% of us are not passionate about work

2/3rds of us experience burnout at work 

Over 80% of us say stress impacts us negatively at work

94% of us say we’ve been bullied in some fashion at work 

ALL these numbers need a complete turnaround 

THIS is the revolution I’m talking about

Here’s the thing…

Humans just like you and me designed the way we work now

So let’s design something different

Right now is our moment 

We can remake the world of work in a way that’s more fair and just, more transparent and loving.

See you next time.

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Hello my friends. I’m Josh and today I’m launching a new show called The Work Revolution. 

If you’ve been following my work, you know this isn't exactly new — it's an idea that’s captivated me for nearly a decade.

In these videos we’ll explore what it means to be part of this work revolution and why it’s literally one of the most important things we must do to ensure the survival of our species.

That sounds dramatic, but I am more convinced than ever that it’s also true.

The serious topic aside, as you can see, this will be a casual conversation — today I’m parked here in my basement in front of a bunch of artwork made my my kiddos, and that’s intentional.

If we’ve learned one thing from the current health situation, it’s that all the nice containers we used to have are now shattered.

Perhaps we’d put our kids in a school container and then get in a quiet car container and drive to an office container… maybe your life looked totally different than that, but whatever your containers were, I’m betting they don’t exist in the same way anymore.

Everything is just all mashed together, and we’re all trying to figure it out.

My bet is that we can do this better if we do it together.

The thought I want to offer today is this…

The work revolution I’m talking about is already underway, and it has been for quite some time, well before this global pandemic.

But what the current health situation is doing remarkably well is exposing all the cracks. 

It’s exposing the cracks in the way we think about about work and the true value of all those of tidy containers.

It’s exposing what we know about what kind of work is essential and what really isn’t. 

It’s exposing the massive disparities in pay — especially stark when we look at what we pay those Essential people.

It’s exposing the catastrophic effect of a global economy based on a ridiculous notion of endless consumption. 

It’s exposing the life-or-death gravity of leadership. 

It’s exposing the fragile interconnectedness of our systems.

All these fractures were already there, of course — now we can just see them all in a different, more vivid, light.

So right now, we have a moment to do something different. 

And do something different, we must.

Sorry, I’ve been watching a lot of Star Wars in the evenings.

The time is now. This is our moment. And it will take all of us to make this happen.

See you next time.