“You need to get beyond the instruction manual to play the game”
Sam Spurlin talks about the importance of experimentation, meetings, leadership in self-organized organizations, and having a growth mindset.
Hi Sam! I’ve been following you for a while on the internetz so it’s great to finally meet. Could you tell me a bit more about what you do?
Haha, likewise! My background is in psychology and I have a master’s in Positive Developmental Psychology. Right now I’m working on my PhD in Positive Organizational Psychology where I’m looking at self-management and self-leadership in highly autonomous organizations and what skills and abilities employees need to be successful in those types of organizations. While doing that I’m also working as an organization designer at The Ready.
Nice, could you tell me more about what it is that you do at The Ready?
I highly recommend looking through our Medium publication to get a sense of what we do. Essentially we’re helping companies think about and take steps toward working in a more self-managed way. Every project is very different, but how to make organizations better is at the center of what we do. We spend a lot of time at work and it’s kind of tragic how terrible that is for most people.
What’s The Ready’s perspective on the future of work?
Our take is that there’s three main forces that organizations are going to have to deal with now and in the future.
- Exponential technology (like AI and deep learning)
- Complexity
- Humanity (the expectations around how companies treat their employees and also how organizations are members of a community)
The extent to which you deal with those forces will determine how well you succeed
So, since you have a background in psychology I’m guessing you’re more interested in the human element?
Yeah. I’m really into the positive psychology movement which started around the year 2000. Prior to that there was no explicit and widespread focus within psychology that was looking at positive things, like happiness and meaning. And that really reflects back on the way we look at organizations and leadership.
What’s your take on leadership in self-organized organizations?
I think it’s an interesting time for leadership. If you accept the hypothesis that organizations are moving towards this self-organization, you have to ask where are the leaders in that? Because self-organizing almost implies that there are no leaders, right? But I think it’s an arena for true leadership to come through since leadership in this context can’t rely on my job title or how long I’ve been there. It relies on how good my ideas are and how well I’m able to communicate and rally people around a cause. That’s what it means to be a leader. And that’s a skill that can be learned. But organizations need to figure out how to train people to be self-leaders, to be self-managers, and most organizations have no idea how to do those things particularly well.
Traditionally leadership is a lot about power. How does that come through in this type of organization?
The power is instead coming through the quality of their ideas, how they actually treat people, or how they’re perceived among their colleagues. It’s scary that you’re losing power connected to your job title. But it doesn’t mean you don’t have other sources of power or you can’t have any influence. Most of the resistance to this type of working comes in at the middle layer of leaders don’t have enough power to not worry about losing the power connected to their job title and aren’t low enough in the hierarchy to be excited by the mobility promised by greater self-management. They can have such a hard time releasing that. Moving toward self-management helps to shine a light on the organization, both good and bad because suddenly there’s nowhere to hide.
It sounds to me like the concept of the growth mindset is really present in these ideas of the future of work.
Growth mindset is a hugely important concept and in the beginning of most projects I lead I try to do anything I can to prime people to have a growth mindset. Throughout a project I’ll listen to people’s vocabulary and if they use words that are connected to a fixed mindset I try to catch them and make them aware of that and help them change their language (and hopefully their mindset). Because if you have a fixed mindset no change is going to happen. You’re just not going to learn. If you have a growth mindset anything is possible.
Nobody who goes to the gym has a fixed mindset about their body, right? So why is our brain any different? Why do we think that we can’t get stronger by regularly working on our brain? We all show growth mindsets when it comes to working out and our brains are a part of our bodies, too. There’s a lot of research and evidence out there that if you use your brain in certain ways it gets stronger. Just like any other part of the body. It’s a powerful concept.
So it’s about rewiring our way of thinking?
Yeah. Much of it is just learning new ways to think about work and a new way to play the game basically. If you’ve every played a really complex board game, the first one or two times you play all you’re doing is reading through the instruction manual. Over and over, trying to figure out “Can I do this thing? Am I breaking the rules here?”.
That is the process of learning and it’s a matter of getting through that to the point where you don’t have to keep looking at the instruction manual and you can just play the game. That’s when people really start to see the benefit of working in a new way.
If you never get through that phase where you’re still embroiled in the instruction manual the change can really stall and people feel like they’re not getting any better. And my job is to make sure we can get through that process as quickly as possible so you can just play the game and have fun.
That’s such a great metaphor for it. Thanks for sharing that.
Haha, no problem.
More than getting people through the instruction manual-phase — what do you think your main job as an organization designer is?
I think 90% of my job is introducing new habits into the organization we’re working with. And also new ways of thinking and new ways of behaving. If we’re doing a full self-management transition introducing things like not needing to ask for permission, or using the advice process, or getting to a point of consent instead of consensus, or holding meetings in a new way. But if you know anything about habits you know they’re very hard to build.
Yeah, that whole thing on consensus is interesting. Being from Sweden we have a really cultural thing about building consensus in the organization.
It’s such a built-in habit in a lot of cultures. But looking at it from the perspective of consent and getting to a point where you think “Okay, this is safe to try,” knowing that you can get back to the decision immediately if you need to, that’s much more powerful.
If you’re making it a matter of consent you can move much quicker, make things happen, and get data on how that decision is going and then we can use that data to make a better decision later.
Consensus takes a lot of time and energy, which means a longer time before you have your data which will inform your next decision.
Speaking of culture. What do you think drives it?
Definitely behavior. The way you act is the culture. And it’s more than just the explicit behavior — it’s every behavior. For example how people respond to feedback and how feedback is given. How we start and end meetings. How we treat each other throughout the day. It’s everything. All of these tiny little things add up into your organization’s culture.
Sounds like modeling is a great driver in this.
It is and I think a lot of it is to get people with power in the organization to show the behaviors that are in tune with the culture you want to set. And because culture is affected by everyone I think everybody can do their part to model what they’d like to see in the organization, it’s not only up to the people with power. But as a leader you have more of a responsibility when it comes to asking people to go out on a limb and try a new behavior and make sure that nothing or nobody responds in a way that could be counteractive or counterproductive to that opening up of a person and a new way of working. Because you’re fundamentally asking someone to do something uncomfortable and risky. If someone gets punished for doing that, in whatever minor way that may be, they will never do it again and everybody who sees that happening will never do it either. So it’s important for leaders to be really aware of that.
Where do tools come into play in this?
I think having tools that allow you to do what you want to do and coincides with your beliefs and values is really big for building habits and behaviors. For example, we see a big hurdle in our clients when it comes to sharing things before they’re “ready” and we are big proponents of showing and sharing works in progress. Because you need feedback from people to iterate on your idea. So if you want to open up the process and be more collaborative in your organization using tools that allow you to simultaneously edit a document (like Google Docs) is a nice way to do it. Everyone can go into the document and edit or comment and this ties the behavior to the belief you’re having.
What are some of the cultural or tactical behaviors you use at The Ready?
We do a weekly tactical meeting that comes out of Holacracy. It’s a 45–60 minute strict process with a facilitator and a secretary where we go through what’s happening that week in terms of work and figuring out what we need to unblock. I look forward to that meeting every week because I always leave it with everything I need to go do a week’s worth of work. It has a purpose and is very on point the entire time, which is very helpful.
That’s interesting because most people absolutely hate meetings.
Haha, yes. I think that’s because most people don’t have the habit of asking what the next action is in meetings, and in general. A lot of teams can get to the point where talking about the work feels like doing the works, which are totally separate things. You need to think about what type of meeting you’re having, because there are different kinds:
- Tactical, getting to the bottom what the work is that needs to get done and unblocking people
- Doing the actual work
- Making a major decision
If you muddle those together, most people feel “bleh” and you usually go out of those meetings asking yourself “So, what are we doing again?”. And that’s what a good facilitator does, keeping the meeting on point. A lot of teams don’t have that muscle built yet so meetings just feels like a lot of talking and not a lot of getting work done.
I like the idea of assigning someone as a meeting facilitator.
Yeah, without someone with a role to explicitly lead the meeting leaves a power vacuum where, depending on the personalities of your team, people will try to step into it and assert power or dominance over the team. A facilitator’s role is to purely hold the process sacred and it’s specifically designed to give everyone a voice and to keep the team moving. And having an objective facilitator that isn’t really interested in the outcome of the decision or the meeting (because they are outside the team), but just making sure that we’re sticking to the process is such a powerful thing. This sounds terrible, but I view a facilitator as pretty much a very strict computer program that won’t let you get out of the process, which you need in a certain type of meeting. Having a facilitator helps in making the meeting valuable and fills up that power vacuum by having a strict process in mind and everybody is equal in sticking to that process.
So, I’m curious to know more about how you work on your own culture at The Ready?
We do quarterly-ish Strategy Meetings where we come up with some statements that we want to help us prioritize our work over the next quarter. The way we structure those statements are “Good thing X” even over “Good Thing Y”, because for something to be a true priority you have to choose between good things.
And one of the things we’re focusing on now is that we want to work on creating deliberate cultural rituals even over spontaneous excellence. We’re thinking about how we build our culture as we grow as an organization and we know that the only way to build the culture that we want is to do the behaviors that we want. So we’re trying to think about what sorts of rituals we want to engage in to elicit those behaviors. Like how do we share learnings across projects? Do we have a weekly sharing ritual? Do we do a weekly lunch? Things like that. We’re trying to be very deliberate about this so we can ensure we are creating the culture we want and not just leaving it up to chance.
I was talking to Tabea Bork the other week and she mentioned that a company is part business and part social experiment. What are your thoughts on that?
Oh, I 110% totally agree that it’s a social experiment. Every good organization is actively running some sort of experiment on itself, and probably a lot of them. You need to have that mindset if you’re ever going to get better. As a PhD student I’m a big believer in the scientific method and in an organization that means you’re testing ways on how we could work together better. And they don’t have to be super-invasive or troublesome. But having a hypothesis on how things could be better and then testing it and then looking at the data, for me it feels like common sense. I know that’s not necessarily the case for most organizations, but my hope is that the work we do is making it more okay for organization to always be experimenting with itself.
How could you start starting that conversation around that type of behavior in an organization?
Well, I believe people should always have some sort of hypothesis on how they could do something better, feel better, or be more productive. Whatever it is that they care about. I think it comes down to just showing and teaching individuals a really basic process and try to get them to think about “What question do I have about myself?” and “What data would tell me if I’m getting better or not at that?” “How do I get the data I need?”.
And then set up a little one week experiment where you do a thing, get the data at the end of the week and see what it tells you. If what you test is true then do your best to make that a habit. If it’s not true, discard it and test something else.
And on a team level I think it’s basically the same thing. Get the team together and make the space for going through what’s working and what’s not. And the thing that’s not working, have some kind of idea on how that could be better and think about how you know you’re getting better. What is it that you can change? Then decide to try that out for a period of time. See how it goes, reflect on your experience, and try something new.
In both cases the larger psychological thing is teaching people to be okay with failure, not deep-seated crushing failure, but just the idea of that it’s okay to do a thing where you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Because not doing something because you’re not sure of how it’s going to turn ensures a complete lack of progress.
I like it being more data-driven, but in an experimental and reflective approach that seems more human.
Yeah, human beings are actually really bad at thinking. Our cognitive biases are crazy. I mean, just look at Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s an entire book about how naturally terrible we are at thinking. If you introduce data to a situation, assuming it’s well collected without lots of biases, then it can give you a new perspective on things that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
Thank you so much for your time and insights Sam! How can people get in touch with you?
My pleasure! I’m available on Twitter if anyone wants to talk more. And make sure to check out The Ready’s Medium publication.
I’m researching culture building in startups for my MA in Digital Media Management at Hyper Island. For more info: http://bit.ly/building-startup-culture
