Andy Polaine: Hi, welcome to power of 10. A podcast about
design operating at many levels zooming out from thoughtful
detail through to organisational transformation, and also changes
in society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I'm a
service design and innovation consultant, leadership coach,
trainer and writer. My guest today is stages Chakravarthy, an
operational consultant that focuses on people process and
technology in that order. Currently, he says he has his
hands full as the full time CEO of one company and C suite
consultant for another. His primary focus is on how we can
make work cyclists on to that end, he spent 15 years designing
instructional systems, the last five years expanding into
operational systems, and wrote brushfire and the flywheel and
the lever phages. Welcome to power of 10.
Thejus Chakravarthy: Thank you, Andy. And I can't help but blush
every time I hear that intro because it makes me sound a lot
more together than I feel.
Andy Polaine: That's the secret of my coaching experiences.
Everyone thinks that. So we connected online, and then we've
had kind of back and forth mostly sending each other
articles. But if I can't believe this, you know, a new piece of
research that confirms something we've known all along, right.
But before we get to the work bit, I want to ask you this. So
how did you start in designing instructional systems lead to or
maybe help you think about what you're doing now?
Thejus Chakravarthy: Oh, well, that's actually it's kind of a
weird trajectory. So my undergrad was psychology because
I was always fascinated with, you know, what's going on inside
people's heads, because I couldn't figure out what was
going on in mind. And so I started going down, like courses
and taking classes, I never really had a specialisation
during my undergraduate. And then I happen to take a class in
industrial psychology. And I thought, hey, I'm a really bad
counsellor. Because I have this tendency to simply say, Well,
why don't you just do this? And that's not at all what good
counsellors should be doing. And they're supposed to help guide
you. And as a coach, and you know that, yeah, you're not
supposed to tell somebody what to do. They're supposed to come
up with the answer themselves, and you're supposed to guide
them to their personal answer, and I'm terrible at that. But
industrial psychology was the opportunity to basically say,
oh, no, you should do this. But why? Because I say so. And
because we'll make more money. And who are you going to argue
with? But it turns out that that's the Yeah, that was that
was in college. I didn't know any better. But one of my
professors actually said, you know, what you might be
interested in Instructional Systems Design. And I said,
Yeah, Scooby Doo voice. But she actually pointed out that one of
the biggest challenges in business is changing behaviour.
And a lot of people in businesses don't realise that
the only way to change somebody's behaviour is not by
like penalising them, or firing them or yelling at them, or, you
know, giving them taking money away from them, it's actually by
altering their behaviour, or altering the environment in
which their behaviour occurs. So I went down that rabbit hole,
and going down the Instructional Systems Design rabbit hole
taught me things like oh, well, there's actually certain
parameters and certain ways to be sure that you're altering
behaviour in a way that you won't. And of course, as is
often the case, eventually, I got to the point where I was
altering behaviour against the system. So there was the
hierarchy, there was the business process in place, that
was the Oh, we've always done it this way. And my counterpoint
was, well, why are you making me build a training class, when all
we have to do is change the size of an icon to reduce the level
of the number of errors we're seeing? Because that icon is too
small, and most people are missing it? I can't teach people
to see better. But you can just change the size of the thing.
Why are we talking about this? This is a non issue. And that,
of course, is the reason why it took me 15 years of just banging
my head against that specific kind of problem before
eventually said, You know what? Maybe I'm done fighting it from
the instructor side. Maybe I need to switch over to changing
the systems themselves, rather than continually having this
argument because training departments tend to be sucked
under HR departments and HR departments tend to be
marginalised when it comes time to talk about business process,
because the assumption is the HR person is not thinking about it
in terms of cost benefit analyses. They're not thinking
about it in terms of what what's the overhead of this, what are
the knock on effects of making this business change, right? Are
they there to look at HR, they just do you know, sexual
harassment training, and that's it, onboarding, yay, and 401,
k's and Retirement and Pension planning, not, hey, wait a
minute. If we change this business process, we actually
save money and save time in all these other attendant business
processes. So that's what eventually got me to looking at
operations and for the past five years that's it's kind of been
like, the last 15 years have been a nightmare and I've woken
up. Of course, now broken up into brand new nightmare. which
is operations? And as we both talked about over the last
couple of years or a year, has it been a year? It's been about?
It's been about a year. Yeah. Yeah. With just oh my god, have
you seen this thing? Oh, my God, I can't believe this thing. I
can't believe somebody would do this on purpose. Did you read
this thing about Northrop Grumman? Did you read this thing
about Raytheon? Wait, did you know about this thing about
mackynzie? I had no idea. And just, you know, so that's that
we tried and, you know, talk this out over a podcast, rather
than continuing to scream at each other in, you know, in our
own private internet problems.
Andy Polaine: Yeah, inflict it on everyone else. I guess we
come at this from different perspectives in some respects,
but it's also very the same. So I generally come at it from
outside of the operations perspective, in the sense that,
you know, I'm trying to kind of, well, I mean, my main focus now,
especially in the coaching is to make people's work lives much
more humane. And for people to actually resolve the dissonance
between the role they're playing at work and who they actually
are, that's ultimately kind of want to try to do, where I think
we overlap a lot is, you know, and you're obviously kind of
looking at that for the internal side of things of operations as
of getting inside the machine. In a way I think we're big
overlap is our interest in, in systems thinking and seeing that
as a systems dynamic, you know, that we are, I am trying to kind
of help people resolve that dissonance often, while they're
very workplace, their reading is trying to create more
dissonance. And obviously, you're trying to kind of do what
you said, which is, hey, you know, I can't just train people
out of a structural problem.
Thejus Chakravarthy: And I think that that's why we were put in
touch with each other. Because we were both attacking, what is
sort of a fundamental problem in work and a fundamental problem
that people are grappling with and have been grappling with
since basically the beginning of the industrial era, to be
completely honest.
Andy Polaine: Well, yeah. And so we it's hard to get to this and
actually talk about some of the stuff you're just talking about
with that kind of behavioural change and stuff without getting
into Taylor, and without why later on in Gilbert, and some of
your writing you then talking about in a milligramme, and also
the Prison Experiment. So where to start. So I might ask you
about bushfire brush, fire, sorry. And the flywheel and
lever which one of those did you write first?
Thejus Chakravarthy: Oh, so I released them Brushfire, then
Lever and the Flywheel. But I actually wrote all of it at
once. And then then I kind of looked at and I said, "Okay,
this is a lot to just cram into just one." Calling it a book is
generous. I prefer the term screed or treatise or pamphlet,
maybe...
Andy Polaine: White paper. Yes. pamphlet is probably the is a
good template. Kind of where you would you'd be in some of your
own printing press, you know, Town Square handing these out.
Yeah. Alright.
Thejus Chakravarthy: Soapbox screaming sandwich board, the
whole thing.
Andy Polaine: I have to stop you there though, because they are
not they're not soapbox screaming. They are actually
also practical, I think. And that's, that's what's good about
it. You actually don't just say, hey, look, here's the problem
and scream. You're actually provide a way of approaching
these things. That's why I was interested because I felt like
if anything, brushfires is a little bit more of the kind of
what as the name suggests, burn it all down, is a little bit
more so boxy, or a little bit more squiddy than a flyer,
another lever, which is much more kind of operational. Right.
Thejus Chakravarthy: And that's why I had to split them out.
Because I realised that were brushfires more of a
philosophical understanding of, well, why do I have a problem
with this? And why is there a problem? And how can we approach
this from a mental sort of emotional, psychological, okay,
I was gonna say spiritual, but I don't mean spiritual, but sort
of approaching it from what's going on inside in those few
pounds of putting that rattling around in your skull. And maybe
there's some thought processes that you can quickly lock into,
and just keep in your head to help you deal with everything at
work. But I had that folded into well, here's some basic steps
that I think could help make a workplace more efficient, that I
think could streamline some general business processes from
a very fundamental level. So we're not talking about like,
well, what software should I use? Should I use NetSuite?
Should I use this? Should I, you know, talk to somebody at
Blackbaud? No, I'm not talking about that. And I'm not talking
about, like, how do I integrate Microsoft Teams into Google
documents or something like that? That's irrelevant. What I
mean is, well, what is your process? How are you rewarding
your employees? How are you tracking success or failure are
using metrics? And what are those metrics actually measure?
And I figured by separating the two of the sort of internal
aspect, and then the here's the playbook. By separating the two,
it would be easier for people to pick up whichever side of the
coin they landed on.
Andy Polaine: Yeah, so one is the gateway into the other.
Thejus Chakravarthy: Yeah, exactly. And so I figured, well,
let me put up the one that I feel most concerned about first.
So I felt most concerned about the brush fire book because I
felt that Okay, wait, maybe that's a little that's a little
hand wavy. It's a little You know, a little too. It wasn't.
Here's a, here's a series of steps that I think if you try,
you'll see benefits too. And then you can try the more
complicated steps but it's Lagos, you can build whatever
you want. But I felt like brushfire was more like here's
some paint in here's a canvas. And we're going to talk about
impressionism now.
Andy Polaine: So what's your central thesis? Or could you
summarise kind of brush fire? Because there's actually there's
a little bit I'd like to read out first because there's it's
on like page two I think was which is probably actually page
one of it or page, you know. It's right down the bottom, we
say, and it resonated with me an awful lot, which is wasting an
investor's money isn't a crime. wasting an employee's time is
for every team spending hours to do something that should take
minutes. There's a child wondering if they'll see mom
today, for every shipped product that is just managed to hit the
deadline. There's a young man trying to keep his hands from
shaking, because hasn't slept in 48 hours to start from this
very, very human point of view. But what is the what is the sort
of fundamental thesis of brush fire?
Thejus Chakravarthy: I think, if I had to, and again, I'm
terrible at this sort of thing. That's why it took me years to
work through the books and edit myself down as most of my
friends will tell you have a tendency to wax rhapsodic, who's
a nice way to friends that we just talked too much as a better
way to say that. So brush fire is sort of me trying to grapple
with this almost unmanageable level of rage I feel when
talking to people who just are trapped in a cubicle, like I
cannot rationalise, like that sort of dehumanisation. I cannot
rationalise the kind of just when people are products and
people are cogs in the machine resources, resources, right. So
I grew up in India, I was, you know, I was a child, when I saw
like, I was maybe four when I saw my first dead body for God's
sakes, which now when I tell my American friends are like, Oh,
my God, that's so horrible. Meanwhile, when he talked to my
Indian family, like Yeah, and they go on with their day, I
just have to do these things. But I remember very clearly,
watching some a child my age, have to go into the trash and
pick up garbage and then carry, you know, scraps of tin to
somebody to some other slightly older child and sell it to
another slightly older child until eventually, they could
sell all the tin to some tinsmith and make a little bit
of money. And then I was like, Oh, my God. And so when we came
to America, that, you know, oh, my god, we're in the land of
plenty. We're in a place where this is not like, we don't see
that sort of reduction of a human being to a cog in a
machine. And then I started working in an office. And I saw
it again, except I saw, like, you know, somebody who was
getting close to retirement like a 65 year old, who's cubicle was
decorated with pictures of their grandchildren. But they'd been
there for so long that they'd worn parts of the desk away from
where they left their hands, it turned to human being into veal.
And then once I learned that what they were doing was simply
automatable. Simply something that computer could have been
doing something, you basically turn to human being into George
Jetson just hit this red button. And that's your job, except you
didn't let him do it at home. And he wasn't there with you
know, with his dog, Astro. And Jane, his wife, he was trapped
in a box smashing a button, as though that was the true
expression of a human being and that, that that that still
pisses me off. So I wrote a book about it. So basically, I wrote
brush fire from the perspective that if you ever are in a job,
or you have the luxury of dictating what a job will look
like, for somebody else, and you don't start from the perspective
that human beings are capable of a lot more than you think they
are, and are capable of breaking your expectations, then you
failed horribly. And so you have to have a framework to harness
what is in effect a random variable power source, which is
what people are a constant power source, something like a
gasoline powered engine or a turbine is very easy to manage.
You know, Henry Ford proved that, you know, everything was
powered by one, you know, turbine, but variable forces and
variable abilities like human beings don't work in one
straight line. They work in multiple dimensions and multiple
timeframes. So if you can't harness every aspect of a
person, then you've basically failed as a business, you're
kind of curtailing their abilities and thereby curtailing
your ability. So it's a failure on both sides. You've reduced a
person to a resource, and you've prevented your ability to use
that resource by simplifying how you use people. And that's all
Yeah, it's it's inefficient on both sides. And that's what
pisses me off. And that's why that's why I wrote brushfires at
the very least, this is a philosophical or mental model,
the structure of mental models that should allow you to
understand or allow you to see that it isn't as simple as you
know, sit in your queue. You push your hit the buttons and
you do your job. It should be a let's talk about this.
Andy Polaine: So you've got this metaphor and that of the brush
fire of it kind of burning through a forest. It doesn't
burn the canopy, it just kind of burns through this lower level
of the forest. And that clears away a lot of undergrowth or
overgrown forest floor, making space for new growth to happen.
And you know, it's it you state very clearly, you know, this is
a violent process. Why does it need to be a violent process?
First, the first start is because, you know, I can see
that I'm and I can understand it. But I can also imagine
people saying feeling that oh, that's not for us. That's too
extreme.
Thejus Chakravarthy: Ryan, right? I think. So my stance on
it being a violent process is, it's hard for people to realise
how hard change is, if that makes sense. Like it's changes.
I mean, by its very nature, human beings were very change
averse, like we're risk averse, or change reverse. It's
something that people have to warm up to, it's something that
people have to be brought into. So I've known a lot of addicts
in my life. And you know, some of them have had their moment,
call it a moment of clarity or rock bottom. And then after they
have their moment, they have now this urge to change, they now
have this desire to be different. But you can't let a
company that is the livelihood of hundreds or even dozens of
people hit rock bottom before you make changes. So you have to
make the change. Before there's a taste for it before there's a
desire for it. You have to make the change as fast as humanly
possible. Because you're literally changing the basic
fundamental nature of a company. And people don't like to think
of it this way. But luckily, I mean, one of the silver linings
to the to the somewhat dark cloud of the lockdowns, plural,
and hopefully we won't have another but case counsel looking
funky. The thing is that people realise that, wait, I don't have
to be physically in my office to do my job. Well, you actually
never had to be. I mean, we've had the internet for a while
now. We've had smartphones for a hot minute. What made you think
your job requires you to be in an office? And in fact, some
people are like, Oh, we're more productive when we're not in the
office? Yeah, yeah. A lot of people have been making that
arguments.
Andy Polaine: Oh, we're more productive when we when we do go
in. Because there's a very specific thing. And it's sadly
precious time.
Thejus Chakravarthy: And so right now, there's a lot of
companies who have inadvertently, you know, kind of
fallen into the fallen into my lap into my evil plan, where
basically, they've somebody, somebody, somebody throw a match
in their, in their, in their in their forest, and now it's on
fire. And a lot of them are like, Oh, my God, how do we save
all of the underbrush? We want you back in the office? Well,
but, but why? Well, because we need to manage you will. But
we're still having the same outputs that we needed to. So
why are you Why do you need me here?
Andy Polaine: Yeah, and this has been the interesting thing, I
think of a lot of this, you know, and I guess also underpins
the great resignation. You know, this idea that most of the
arguments for why people need to get back in the office are from
managers who feel they need to control yeah, there's, you know,
there are reasons for getting together. It's not that kind of
offices are de facto a bad thing. But it's kind of, I mean,
if you actually one of things I do with in coaching is say to
people like, Okay, can you remember, a really good day, you
know, or a week, we had springiness step afterwards? And
what were you doing in that day a week. And then that's the kind
of thing to focus on, because that's what energises your mind.
And it's different, for example, exactly. But you know, and some
of it might be a while we were actually kind of really up at
the whiteboard and collaborating. And it's really
great. For other people, it's like, well, you know what, I
actually got the time to sit on my own and think about this
thing very deeply and focus for
Thejus Chakravarthy: a few days. And what's fascinating is the
same person doing those other tasks, like the person who says,
I had a great day, because we got up on the whiteboard and
collaborated, or I had a great day because I had time to
myself. You could reverse them. And they could say the exact
same thing. They could say, well, usually I like to have
time to myself, but today was better because I got a chance to
work at a board. And then maybe they their energy was drained
because of something else. And then they say, Oh, well, I'd
rather have a date of myself. And in a workplace that rigidly
dictates, you have to be in the office, you have to be at this
whiteboard. You have to sit down and think to yourself, no matter
how you structure that it's still a failure, because it
doesn't it can't function in a rigid structure. Yeah. Because
everybody every moving part and everybody is going to be a
little different every day. And again comes back to a few
homogenised people then you make a mistake.
Andy Polaine: Yeah. Which, you know, this this comes back to
this thing wherever we've talked about quite a lot. I've also
talked about it before on the podcast of you know, management
practices being predicated or basic just copying Industrial
Age factories, right? Taylorism and Taylorism, which is, you
know, this idea that people are inherently our employees are
inherently dishonest and lazy. And that's the first sort of
fundamental kind of idea of that. And then the things that
we're doing a complicated rather than complex and so we can break
those down into small parts. And then unskilled labourer can be
told to do that small piece of work over and over again. And
then ask smart kind of manager people managing
Thejus Chakravarthy: this, aren't we? Aren't we such a
wonderful people here, the one
Andy Polaine: we're the brains behind it are going to put it
together. And we're the ones who have integrity and stuff. And so
it's obviously heavily I mean, you know, Industrial Revolution
in England at the time, and it's heavily heavily influenced by
the class system to plus, as we know, Taylor fudged his data,
Thejus Chakravarthy: Oh, God, so much of his data was fudged. I
right?
mean, it's it's almost, it's almost a running joke. And at
least it was when I was doing it in my undergraduate, which at
this point is, is roughly 20 years ago, because I'm elderly.
But it was it was almost a joke where we would say things like,
Okay, well, we're going to start studying at the beginning of the
semester, these theoreticians, we're going to read their
papers, we're going to read their books, we're going to
study and dig into their work. And then by about after the
midterm, when we just finished passing an exam, proving that we
understood them, the turnaround would be like, oh, yeah, by the
way, here's why all of them are wrong. Just like literally, with
around ran through. Exactly. It's like you studied all this,
you memorise all this, we're sure that you understand this
great. Now, here's how all of this is wrong and horribly,
horribly inaccurate. And here's the new research that shows that
that it's actually in a completely different direction.
It's Lou. It's so annoying.
Andy Polaine: So that was 20 years ago, right? So yeah. So
why does work still suck?
Unknown: Oh, well, if I had to put a word to it, I'd say it's
because there's more money and more safety and more security in
maintaining the status quo than there is in reexamining things.
So even when you look at software startups, my favourite
example is to look at something like Google or any of the fangs.
Right? So they started off as a relatively small company, but
because of the nature of the internet, because of the nature
of scale, without cost, without additional overhead, or minimal
overhead, because servers are cheap, and people are not. They
managed to reach critical mass where they could when they had
to start asking questions like, Well, how do we motivate our
programmers? Well, when it was five guys, and you gave them
shares in the company, they had a literal vested interest in the
success of the company. But now you're people paying people a
salary, and all of a sudden, you're like, well, they don't
seem nearly as motivated as the guys who had shares. So we have
to find different ways of motivating them. Well. Guys,
you're just like, did you not see how that math didn't work
out? Okay, well, then how do we manage these people? Well,
here's a stack of management books written by people going
all the way back to Taylor, here's Good to Great, it's
totally work for you trust me, you know, do Nielsen ratings,
this will work, trust me. You know, here's stacks, and stacks
and books of how to manage people. Here's a Harvard
Business Journal article about management, here's people with
MBAs in management, and they're just going to keep maintaining
the status quo, even in a digital brand new company, and
then just recapitulate the problem all over again. And I
think the issues are really apparent when you start looking
at things like the CEO, Dan price, who's hilarious and
wonderful in my eyes. He's the one who said, I gave all my
employees 75k. And every employee at his company makes I
think, like, 75k. And he makes not that much more. And at the
time, people said, Oh, my God, how could you possibly run a
company like this? Oh, turns out he's got incredible, great
retention. He's got incredibly, like his employees are willing
to bend over backwards to help him. They've done incredibly
well. And he hasn't changed his policies. It's just like, yeah,
no, we're gonna pay you what's considered a pretty decent
living wage, and we're just going to, you know, empower you
to do your best. And that simple dynamic. If you tried to do that
at Amazon, I'm pretty sure Bezos would catch on fire. Yeah, and
I'm pretty sure that you know, you'd see you'd see Elon drop
dead in his tracks, if he even considered the idea of, oh,
well, maybe I should treat all of my employees as well as I
would like to be treated. So I think the main reason is power
control and the safety that comes from being rich and
powerful. You don't want to unnecessarily rock the boat by
saying, well, all my employees are as good as I am and I am no
different than they are. Because that requires a certain level
of...
Andy Polaine: humility.
Thejus Chakravarthy: That's a good way to put that.
Andy Polaine: Yeah. It doesn't. It doesn't necessarily go
together with what is considered the correct characteristics of
an entrepreneur, right? They're not known for their humility,
right?
Thejus Chakravarthy: Red in tooth and Fang, you have to be
able to fight And I mean, you destroy your competition.
Andy Polaine: Yeah. And so I mean, that's the other thing I
saw that sort of language around that of kind of destroying and
crushing and killing it...
Thejus Chakravarthy: Hyper masculine. It's exhausting.
Andy Polaine: So listen, you know, on, you've got that kind
of very human side in the Brushfire, although you've also
got it in the Flywheel and the Lever, but explain what the
flywheel and the lever are, because you quote Donella
Meadows in there as well. And few other well known in the
system's thinking world. You approach this from a systems
perspective. So you know, what's, what's the kind of
thesis behind that? And what is the flywheel and the lever.
Thejus Chakravarthy: So I'm glad you mentioned in Atlanta Mattos
because my god, I love that woman's work. I recently
recently just got a hard copy, not just digital copy a hard
copy of the limits to growth. I think it's like the third
edition. And it's without sounding too nerdy. It's
basically my soaking in the tub read like it is, it is the book
I read. When I'm like, Oh, I've got some time to myself, I'm
gonna let some candles I'm gonna put on some soft music. I'm
gonna cuddle, you know, snuggle into bed and read this this
glorious book, which is, you know,
Andy Polaine: I mean, the only thing that I get with it is, you
know, someone was writing about this in the 70s, while she
wasn't late 60s and started to this late 60s was the first one.
And it's, and here we are, you know, just thinking.
Thejus Chakravarthy: And, yeah, I think Did I say I don't know
if I did. But there's a there's actually a recent paper, I want
to send the last six months, where somebody basically took
the exact framework that they did for the first edition of the
book and updated with modern with modern datasets, and said,
Yeah, remember how they said there was like six potential
branches, we're down to three, two of them suck. And one of
them, if we work really hard, we might be able to pull off in
terms of how things might turn out in terms of how the limits
to growth, kind of like tape around sort of plateau. And I
was like, oh, Kay, I'm gonna need to read that third edition
because I read that first edition. I don't know how many
years ago, but when I read it, I just said, Okay, I'm gonna go in
the corner now. And I need a minute to myself. But after
reading that most recent paper, I was like, Cool. You know what
third edition, I gotta catch up. Anyway.
Andy Polaine: So I want to capture that. So that's that
fear of I want to get in the corner. I mean, part of me wants
to just sort of go in the corner and cry and give up, right?
Because you kind of think, well, this is the district describe
the kind of the complexity and the system's nature of it. But
also they describe the dire nature of, of what's going on in
the world. And it kind of very quickly hits that thing talking
about behavioural change where this is too much. This is beyond
one, my one single person's perspective, what can I do about
this? So I'm not gonna do anything? That's obviously the
problem that we kind of raised with? Well, almost everything in
the moment. Yeah, everything in life. Yeah. So I'm gonna go onto
social media and just rant about it. And that's it, you know,
Thejus Chakravarthy: which is great. I mean, some people like
like, standing on their soapbox in the middle of the town square
and screaming, but I don't find that to be necessarily useful,
right.
Andy Polaine: But in the firewall in the lever, it's,
it's quite practical in that sense. And that's why I sort of,
I think what's interesting about you and your work is you're
coming from it not from sort of hand wavy stance, but there is,
you know, coming from from this operational perspective. And so,
I will get you back on to what is the flywheel and what is the
lever.
Thejus Chakravarthy: So starting from my understanding of
instructional systems, I eventually reached the point
where I realised that instructional systems follow
certain protocols and follow certain rules of thumb. And so I
said, Well, what other systems design is there. And so I got to
lean manufacturing certification, because I want to
learn how lean manufacturing work, because hey, that's
another system. And that's another way to approach how
things connect, took a bunch of other courses, a bunch of other
classes, and then eventually, kind of tripped over my own feet
into Donella Meadows work. Basically, I think the route I
took was by way of Banerjee and two flows, work on poverty and
economic and the economics trap, which is fascinating reading.
There's also a free course of it on edX, which I highly
recommend. It's because it's free, and why not? If you've got
time, might have to learn it. So once I started thinking about it
in terms of okay, this is this large problem, work sucks.
Nobody in their right mind says, Oh, I love my job 100%. So why,
and what about that framework? Can we look at and say, Well, if
you change, if you move this parameter over this way, or if
you change this workflow in this way, if you tighten the spigot
here and open it up over here, then the flows of everything are
such that it should clear out this problem, just by its very
nature. So without any additional human effort without
having to have a policy without having to have a hey, let's all
get together and do a ropes course together or let's have a
company meeting where we sit down, you know, in a big
conference table We talk about your problems. Well, why don't
we just change the business process so that it prevents the
bad things from happening and supports the good things. And so
that's where it came from. It came from this idea that and so
the flywheel is what I call, just basically having a process
that develops and maintains momentum, and inertia. And the
lever is the term I use to basically describe the processes
you have in place to tighten or loosen parts of your flywheel.
So I think of the lever as the intervention. And I think of the
flywheel as the company. Because if you do it, right, and if you
do it, well, there will be times where you're wasting energy. In
the sense of, we're, we've got all of these people, and we've
got all these outputs, but they're basically hanging around
doing nothing. And that's fine. That's great. Because when you
think they're hanging around doing nothing, that's the time
when people are the most creative. Like people are
creative as hell in the shower when they have space. And
exactly when they've got space to think and space to breathe
and space to conceive. And maybe, if you've if you've got
enough downtime, and people are people like, oh, well, you know,
we don't really have any deliverables this week. No, we
don't. We've got a bunch of them next week where you're caught
up. Yeah, I'm caught up, we got some breathing room. Hey, you
know, that was his problem. We were running in, like over here
in this other part of the company. I think we can solve it
and probably only take us a week. Oh, well, let's go. Let's
go take care of it, that everybody wants that. That's
like the thing that businesses say, Oh, we so desperately need
people who can do that. We want our employees to take the time
to do that. Well, but you're also giving them very
restrictive, like 40 hour week timelines and flooding them with
50 hours of work. When are they going to find the time you want
them to just stay up late? Yeah, you want them to stay here
longer. They've got kids, or, in my case, they've got a dog.
Right? They've got pets, for God's sakes. But so the flywheel
would be once you started, once you start getting a pace in the
company. You can just like a bicycle, you can take your feet
off the pedals, and you bicoastal go, and then maybe put
your feet back on the pedal, and you put a little harder for
little sprint, and then you're let go, and you're still
travelling faster. It'll take you a little bit of time to
decelerate, but you're still moving fast enough. And that's
what a company should be. It shouldn't be, we're going to be
going going going all the time. Well, that's how people burn
out. And that's how companies burn out. And that's how you
waste Money and waste time. And if you waste an investor's
money, fine, you'll get more than me, you'll be fine. But if
you burn out half of your staff to meet a deadline, why do you
think you'll be able to meet the next deadline without burning
out your staff again? And how many times can you burn out a
human being before they go? Oh, yeah, I'm not coming back.
Right.
Andy Polaine: So a mechanical flywheel is something that evens
out. Energy. Really? Yeah, spikes and dips. Yeah, it's it's
a big weighted thing. Normally a very heavy flywheel that,
usually I mean, it's a very industrial age metaphor,
actually, isn't it, but usually it you know, as it's turning, it
starts to gain momentum. And you can add speed to it or break it
or, you know, slow it down. But it's got a smooth kind of
rotation all the time, which is very systems thing, right, this
idea. And then one of the things that I thought was brilliant in,
well, in all of that work, Donella Meadows describes it
very well as his ideas you can, you can push on a lever, you
know, and achieve something like do the example she gives, like
GDP growth. You know, that improves lots of things. But if
you keep pushing on that lever, you know, it goes in the
opposite direction that you start ending up, actually, you
start doing harm, but because you've seen it do good, you just
keep pushing in the same direction, Kenny, we need more
of a more of and obviously, you know, growth is is the biggest
problem. So how does this manifest in in workplaces that
you because you're talking about the necessity for this feedback
loop?
Thejus Chakravarthy: Well, I think that what you and I think
it's sort of a matter of experience. I've been lucky
enough. And I chalk this all up to just hideous luck. Over the
decades, decades is right? I've worked in a small startup
software company, it was one of five people in a guy's basement,
we made our own beer in the fridge. That's how small the
company was to working for the US Coast Guard, which at the
time, I was managing the learning management systems for
127,000 Coasties, out of the headquarters in DC. And I've
seen scale. And I've seen I've worked at a law firm. I've
worked in a medical insurance company, Medicare insurance
company. I've worked in all of these different verticals. And
in almost every I work for nonprofits, and in almost every
case, the issues that I see are that there isn't enough upward
communication, in the sense that upward communication is valid.
What I mean by that is far more likely than not, especially in a
western maybe just American I could be wrong could just be
only in America problem. The top down mandate of what you should
do is sacrosanct. Whether or not it's followed exactly, is where
the trouble kicks in. So even with the military, if a captain
said to a lieutenant, I need you to do this, the lieutenant would
then possibly do it, or possibly follow the word like the, the
literal letter of the of the order, or possibly delay it,
because they don't think it's as important. That's military.
Yeah. And that's true in, you know, and God forbid, you're
talking about a corporate situation where some VP and
another VP have a problem with somebody else, like, pretending
that they're better than me and taking my resources and making
me look bad from the CEO. And then the CEO gives gives both of
them the same order, like, hey, we need to do this. Okay, great.
Now they're going to fight at cross purposes, and there's
going to be all this other problem. But going down the
chain, those VPS will tell their managers and those managers will
tell their line staff, you just have to follow what we were told
to do. But if the line staff if the people who are literally at
the bottom of the company, because if we're talking about a
hierarchy like that, they see it as the item at the bottom of the
company, they're not thinking about it in terms of, well, I'm
the base of this company, if I don't work, nothing else
happens. So they just feel like well, I'm being told what to do.
I'm getting pressure from on high. And then I have to deal
with customers who may not appreciate or may not like what
I'm doing. And I gotta deal with that. And so they're sandwiched.
And I think the core problem of that feedback loop is, those
people aren't given enough authority, autonomy or
accountability, to push back up the chain and say, Hey, VP, so
and so you wanted us to do A, B, and C, if we do A, B, and C, it
will cause these problems. So we're not going to do it. Unless
you can figure out a way to bypass these problems. Here's
all the documentation, here's all the here's all the valid
arguments, here's our reports, here's our datasets show us
where how we can improve this, or push it up to their manager
and say, Hey, we're not going to do this, because this will
negatively impact all these other things, or we need to talk
about this more thoroughly. You're asking us to do A, B, and
C, but the CEO is unaware that C is actually contradictory to the
efforts of this other department. That's doing one,
two, and three. And he may just not know, and just be be unclear
to him. So I'm not saying that it's necessarily Malicious from
top down, I'm saying it's an issue of focus, it's an issue of
understanding a CEO should not be concerned with what the
hourly, day to day efforts of the person answering the
customer service line is. But they do need to know that if
that person says hey, the policy you just put in place has pissed
off 80% of the people I talked to, they need to know that. And
they need to change their policy.
Andy Polaine: So if you're, you know, in many respects, because
the ones at the top, I guess have the power to kind of
address the structure more than anyone else. But if you're
someone a bit further down, you know, and in that scenario that
you've described, not necessarily the person on the
front line, but certainly the kind of middle manager rank or,
you know, kind of VP level where you often hear yes, yes, yes.
But we just need to do this, it just needs to get done right
now. And just, you know, it has to be done by this ludicrous,
arbitrary deadline, or, and then the return comment is, well,
okay, well, which one of these is a priority? They're all
priorities, which means nothing is obviously, what can you do
when you're at that level, because I imagine some of the
people listening to this, you know, a lot of designers, a lot
of design leaders and managers and people like that, who are in
that position where they are under enormous pressure to hit
velocity, water to run out of velocity, have usually far too
much stuff on to actually do the stuff that they really should be
doing and give it the focus again, and often seems to have
those conversations are going, you know, I think this
particular conversation that design people have with certain
business people if I can kind of make that crass, which, because
design, people tend to see things not always but often see
things a bit more systemically or at least questioning the
question behind the question. Right, and say, Well, you know,
actually, but this doesn't make sense why we're doing this,
right, and then met with that kind of fairly hard answer about
Yeah, just needs to be done. Just do it. This is this is what
I've decided, or this is what someone else, you know, someone
else has decided is the thing to do. You know, what can you do at
that point?
Unknown: So I tend to look at those kinds of situations the
same way I look at puberty, okay, you know, in the sense
that you do what your parents tell you, and then when they
say, Well, you will do what I say, as long as you live in this
house, or you will do what I say as long as I'm, you know, I'm in
charge. And then you go through puberty, and during that time,
you're yelling, you're screaming, um, I can't, I can't
think of a single person who went through their own
adolescence without lashing out at their parents because that
person is probably a psychopath. Because that's I mean, that's,
that's the nature of that's the nature of adolescence. You're
supposed to get mad at your folks, which is something I keep
reminding my friends who now have adolescent kids, I'm like,
no, no, no, you're you don't remember what it was like when
you were their age. Do you think we were terrible people? But the
reason I bring that up is when you're in a workplace scenario
and you're in a workplace situation, you you're being
given a mandate, and you're being told you need to do these
things, because I told you so I think that none of people take
that moment where they realise, hey, you're a self actualized
person, you are your own person, what's the worst they can do?
fire you. Okay? Is there only one job in the world? No. So the
problem is that it's this, again, going back to the fear of
change. And I've been in that position that you just described
several times. And rather than just saying, I'm just not going
to do it, fire me, if you have a problem, which to be FERS
needlessly aggressive, and needlessly confrontational, I
usually point out what you just said, which is, well, which of
these is priority will all of them are priority, you do
realise that's a, that's a logical, I need to know which of
these I need to prioritise. and in what order because we only
have a finite amount of resources that we need to deploy
appropriately, here are the resources I can deploy. And one
of the challenges are that if you try to approach a
operational argument, from a systemic perspective, and you're
dealing with somebody who doesn't see the system, you
can't make them see your point of view, it's just impossible.
Like they don't see that level of scope or scale that you're
seeing as a designer. But what you can do is understand that
what they're seeing is minutia, what they're seeing is their
immediate lane of information, and just use that against them.
Because you can see the bigger picture, you know how to kind of
sidestep the problem and laterally solve it will then use
your skills against them, but in the same skills that they're
used to seeing. So let's use the example of we have all these
priorities, we don't have enough resources, simple, codified our
resources, make a shopping list, these are how many employees I
have, these are how many hours a week they have, these are how
they have divided out their time. And this is this is the
end result, I cannot push them further than these number of
hours, why can't they work overtime, cool, you're gonna
give me the budget for that. What we want them to do this
cool, gonna give me the budget for that, just turn it back on
them, let them fight their own fight, because what you're
dealing with is you're trying to create an environment, almost a
biosphere. For your people, you've been given the probably
the greatest gift, a person can give another person in your
workplace, which is I want you to stand for your employees, I
want you to be the person that protects these people. I want
you to think about these people and what will make them happy.
And that's your job. That's your job. As a manager, your job as a
manager isn't to well, I've finished all these reports. And
clearly we can, we can see an increase of 5% in the
profitability of our department. That's fine, that's a tan wavy,
the thing is, your job is to make sure that they that their
workplace doesn't suck. It's just that simple. If you can do
that, you will have the best functioning team in the company,
I can almost guarantee it. If they don't show up to work
hating themselves, they're probably going to do better. So
protect them by thinking of round your opponents. It's not
chess, it's checkers, they're playing checkers, and you think
they're playing chess, but you're playing chess, just think
around them and solve kind of turning them in on themselves,
Aikido style.
Andy Polaine: That's a pretty good place to wrap it up. I
think it might just made me think that this is one of the
biggest crimes of industrialization was to put the
managers offices sort of not on the factory floor. Right? Yeah.
Thejus Chakravarthy: White Collar, blue collar, that whole
argument,
Andy Polaine: Well also you know, just separating people
from the results of their decisions, and arguably, you
know, I mean, that's also when when the military goes wrong,
the Second World War First World War kind of examples of that
where there's this sort of distance from generals to the
kind of to the frontline water. Yeah, there's I don't in
general, like kind of military metaphors. But I think one of
the interesting things about that was you wrote it in one of
your pamphlets was this idea of what's what's understood at the
centre of that is actually in, in more on the kind of field of
battle, chaos reigns. And so there's this kind of giving up
of the idea of certainty giving up of the idea of clarity, you
know, and the famous plans are useless but planning is
invaluable quip.
Thejus Chakravarthy: And no plan survives contact with the enemy
exact probably my favourite quote from Mike Tyson is
everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face.
Yeah. And, and so to that end, like the thing I find galling, I
guess it's the word infuriating is probably more accurate
because my face turns pinkish, is this idea that generals know
how to win wars will defeat me, may may be able to make that
argument. But the fact is, it's soldiers who win wars, it's
soldiers who win battles and with enough battles won, you win
the war. And I don't like using military analogies either. But
especially after work Getting with the military and realising.
Maybe it's not as clean as I thought it was. But the the idea
that you can pay somebody for their time, right? You're
literally trading hours of their life for a mile. And then you're
going to waste those hours. I can't handle it. I just mentally
can't wrap my head around the cream because right that's just
that's, that's a surefire way to make me just flip a table and
scream at the top of my lungs is just like, oh, yeah, so we have
this person, they push the button. For what? You have to
push the button once a minute, every minute, for eight hours a
day, they take an hour long lunch break, and then they come
back the next day. And they do it again. Five days a week.
Cool. Cool. So how do we burn this building down? Like where's
where do we get the matches? Where to find the gasoline? Like
I can't, I can't. There's no, there's no solution for you, you
horrible people.
Andy Polaine: So listen, where can people find you online or
more of your thinking? Where can they find those two books as
well? Pamphlets?
Thejus Chakravarthy: Oh, I'll give you the links. I do have a
website. It's atrocious. It's just they just see.com and on
there. There's a link to her Sinise and also to some other
stuff. I'm terribly not online anymore. In fact, I don't have
social media to speak of. I'm barely online. My website is in
the drop off, man. Yeah, I, I just I mean, I plan to
eventually change these things. But for right now, it's just
placeholders and stuff. But if anybody wants to reach out to
me, my you know, my email is thejus.c@gmail.com. We'll give
you the links to that as well. And emails, the best way to
reach me anyway.
Andy Polaine: Great. Well, thank you so much for being my guest
on Power of 10.
Thejus Chakravarthy: Thank you so much, Andy.
Andy Polaine: As I'm sure you're aware, you've been listening to
power of 10. My name is Andy Polaine. You can find me at a
plane on Twitter, or plane.com, where you can find more episodes
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links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and see
you next time.