Experience Strategy Podcast: How to Drive Business Success Through a Culture of Collaboration

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In this episode, we sat down with Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations to understand how he has driven Menlo Innovations to success through teamwork and innovation. Tune in to this episode to discover:

• Actionable strategies to transform your workplace into a hub of teamwork and innovation.

• Insight into Menlo Innovations’ collaborative approach and how you can apply similar principles to boost efficiency, quality, and innovation within your workplace.

• Real-world examples of successful collaboration across various industries.

Voiceover: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast, where we talk to customers and experts about how to create products and services that feel like time well spent. And now, here are your hosts, experience nerds, Dave Norton and Aransas Savas.

Aransas: Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast. I'm your host, Aransas Savas.

Dave: And I'm Dave Norton.

And today we are joined by Menlo Innovation CEO Rich Sheridan. So, Rich became disillusioned in the middle of his career in what we are all pretty well familiar with, I imagine by now, as a chaotic tech industry. And he became distracted by a thought that maybe, just maybe, things could be better. What if they could be much better?

What if our workplaces could be filled with camaraderie and human energy and [00:01:00] creativity and productivity that was authentic and sourced from within the humans who are powering the organization? Well, ultimately, that led Rich to co found Menlo 2001. His goal None too lofty was to end human suffering in the workplace and his unique approach to custom software creation is honestly so surprisingly different and really was so refreshing, especially at the time that still to this day, 3000 people a year travel from around the world.

just to watch his team work. And he is also the author of chief joy officer, which teaches others to do the same and proves not only that it can be a positive experience for employees, a great workplace environment. Can I know radical concept. Actually be good for business . [00:02:00] So Rich, thanks for joining us today.

We're so excited to hear how you do what you do. And I know you've been at this a long time, but I suspect right now as the workplace has shifted so radically over the last few years, you've been learning a lot too, and can. Share some important perspective on how we should be thinking about the future of workplaces given your experience so far.

So thanks for joining us.

Rich: Great to be with you both. Looking forward to the conversation.

Aransas: So what makes Menlo so special? How do you do what you do?

Rich: You know, we, as you mentioned in the introduction, just have this different approach, and we want to end human suffering in the world, particularly as it relates to technology, because that's what we do for a living, uh, and we centered [00:03:00] our culture on an unusual word in the context of work.

We wanted to produce joy. Joy for the people who do the work, joy for the people who use the work, and quite frankly, joy for the people who pay us to do the work that we do. Uh, we are not perfectly successful at that, but, uh, uh, we've been in business for 22 years. We just had our best year ever last year, and this year could possibly eclipse that.

Uh, we can talk about the pandemic year as well and how difficult that was. Ultimately, what differentiates us and what creates this environment is a Uh, very intentionally joyful culture that, as you mentioned, thousands of people a year want to come see it. They want to, uh, experience, uh, this joy that they read about, that they hear about at Menlo.

They want to come visit. They spend anywhere from a day to a week here just learning about how we do what we do. And what they see [00:04:00] is... Very different and happy to dive into those details. But I'll stop talking here and see which direction you want to go.

Aransas: I want to hear the details. Tell us about what does it look like?

Rich: Yeah, you know, it's not. To a typical from a tech firm. It's a wide open space. There's no cubes, offices, walls, or doors. My co founder and I sit out in the room with everyone else. So it is one of those open office environments that quite frankly, in my industry is typically vilified. Uh, I remember one time somebody called this kind of environment, an idea born in the mind of Satan in the deepest caverns of hell.

Um, and so, uh, um, uh, but. Uh, for us, what you experience when you walk in is literally that first impression that I hear on almost every visitor who walks through our door is, wow, because they can actually feel the human energy of our team. It's a [00:05:00] vibrant workplace. We are working, and this is the part that blows people's minds.

We're working two people to one computer. Those pairs are assigned and we switch them every five working days. So literally two people sitting at one keyboard and one mouse collaborating together to produce work product on behalf of our customers. That construct alone produces a tremendous amount of human energy in the room.

Uh, it is filled with the vibrancy of. People talking with with one another, problem solving together, standing at whiteboards together, uh, and, uh, these days people are shocked at how many of us are back in the office, uh, you know, that's been a big topic these days. Uh, people calling me up and saying, how are you getting people back into work?

And, uh, or back, I should say everybody's been working, uh, but, uh, back into the office. And, uh, that's been a big part of our history. Uh, we've certainly learned some [00:06:00] flexibility over the last three years that, uh, we will never forget. And, uh, I think that has added to the culture rather than taken away from it.

Aransas: How have you shifted things over the last three years?

Rich: Yeah, you know, obviously we, like everyone else, uh, during, uh, you know, March 16th of 2020 and beyond, it was like a fire drill. Get out of the building, get out as quick as you can, go home, set things up, let's get working again. Uh, and it was a remarkable, uh, transformation, remarkable in that how fast it happened and how well we adjusted to it.

And so all of the constructs of Menlo. Pretty much continued this idea of two people working together, but they were working in a video call, a zoom call or a Google meets call, but still pairing together, still seeing their pair partner all day long, still collaborating with one another, uh, creating code together, doing designing together.

All the things we did as Menlo, [00:07:00] uh, certainly had to adjust radically in an instant and. And it, it worked. Uh, I was, quite frankly, I was probably the most shocked, uh, by how well that worked. But over time, we started to notice that there were some, uh, cultural hiccups along the way. Uh, as we added new people, they weren't getting our culture as well as the old timers were.

And, um, Uh, we knew that onboarding new people, while still pretty easy in a paired environment, uh, was still getting harder and harder to teach our culture. Uh, there were certain elements of our culture that weren't working nearly as well as they did when we were all in the room together. Uh, one of the things my co founder and I talked with the team about was the idea that in The room when we're together, help arrives without it being asked for because people can see you need help, they can hear you need help, harder to do in a completely virtual environment.

And so, uh, [00:08:00] over time, we started, like many companies, started encouraging our team to come back. We were pretty gentle about it, but I would say that what we've also learned is that this idea of flexibility of the ability to work from home from, uh, for, uh, Pretty much in our entire workforce from time to time is actually, uh, a great benefit to employees when they have something going on at home that needs attention that they can't give easily from being in the office.

And so, uh, we've learned a flexibility that we won't unlearn. Uh, and in the. realm of the experience part of MEDLIN. One of the things we learned was how to give tours, uh, virtually, uh, something we had never done pre pandemic. And by the time, uh, you know, we've gotten through a year and a half or so that we had visitors, thousands of visitors, visitors from 77 countries and 44 U.

S. States that just clicked on a button and they were here and clicked on another button and they were back home. So this [00:09:00] idea of, uh, Touring and teaching virtually, uh, was born. And again, it's something we won't forget now that we're mostly back in the office. Can

Dave: I ask, um, why pairs of two and why the same computer, but two keyboards?

Rich: No, single keyboard, single mouse. Oh, single keyboard, single mouse. Yeah. Yeah. So, this idea was born out of a concept that came out of a book I read in my trough of disillusionment days, uh, called, uh, Extreme Programming Explained.

Aransas: Okay, wait, we have to stop on trough of disillusionment.

Rich: Yeah, you don't need to absorb that one for a second. You know, when I was, uh, a kid, I started playing with computers and, um, uh, and they were fun and it was enjoyable and I found out I was pretty darn good at it and eventually got a couple of degrees in programming [00:10:00] and then launched a career in programming and then all of a sudden realized, holy cow, we're producing crappy work.

We're missing deadlines. We're blowing budgets. Everybody's unhappy, including me. And, uh, and that's what I was thinking. There's got to be a better way to do this. And so I became a student again. I started reading, but not books on, uh, technology because quite frankly, what I learned was technology is trivial compared to how do we organize the humans more effectively.

And, um, and so, uh, I was drawn to books by Tom Peters and Peter Senge and Peter Drucker, uh, and then eventually, uh, read this book by a fellow programmer named Kent Beck on something called Extreme Programming, which introduced a lot of concepts that are present here at Menlo. But one of the most jarring was this idea that Dave was asking about of, wait a minute, two programmers?

At one computer working together all day long. I mean, how could [00:11:00] that be more productive? Well, we experimented with it back at my old company, and it has been a stalwart of Menlo since the beginning in 2001, because the results were so dramatic. They couldn't be denied quality sword. Uh, we had no longer had a single point of failure in any team because people were sharing information.

It trivialized the onboarding of new talent. Uh, it produced not only better quality, but just better ideas because, you know, the old adage, two heads are better than one absolutely applies in this case. And you're catching mistakes kind of as soon as they happen, because you're having to think out loud.

Well, your peer partner is asking you questions along the way, and so the, the, the problems that can occur in software, and there are many of them, uh, were being fleshed out and flushed out, um, almost instantly. So rather than putting [00:12:00] a bug in and waiting for three months for it to be discovered downstream at a customer site, you were finding it.

The second it was born and eliminating it and quality just soared at that point. And quite frankly, what soars then is when you start doing better work, guess what? Morale increases, people are coming to work with more energy because they're not being reminded 50 times a day with, you know, fire drill phone calls coming in from angry customers that the work you did in the past sucked.

And so now you had a chance to work with pride. On the work that you did, and you weren't getting reminded all those times per day that work you did three months ago was poor quality work and, uh, you know, and defeating a tower of knowledge problem. You know, the one person on your team that knows everything about a particular system.

Nobody else knows what you know. It's a huge step forward for everybody, including the person who was the tower of knowledge. You can now take a vacation without [00:13:00] taking his laptop with him or her lap.

Dave: That was actually one of the things I was wondering about is like, if you have two people who are working side by side, they can share the load a little bit as well.

Rich: Is that true? Am I? Absolutely. I can. And, and the other thing is, and this is the beautiful part of it, is remember we switch the pairs every five business days. And the effect of that is that there's constant cross training, mentoring, knowledge transfer going on. And the beauty of that is, let's say I have four people working on a project and suddenly a client, and they often do, come in and say, I need you guys to go twice as fast.

Well, you now have four people experiencing the project. You bring four new people in. Guess who you're going to pair them with? You're going to pair them with the four who know something. And within a couple of weeks, suddenly that team is producing nearly twice the output of the original team without overtime.

And overtime is... A huge [00:14:00] issue in the software industry, you know, uh, 24 seven was actually birthed in the software industry as a work schedule and it wasn't three shifts. It was the same humans. Oh geez.

Aransas: It's terrifying when you think about the cost of that, not just in terms of the products that are, that are being launched.

Uh, the human cost of it, and it's so interesting to hear you reflect back on the impact of this work on your employees. Dave and I and our team just did some research into employee experience, um, unsurprisingly to you, I'm sure, but surprising to many others is that. The effectiveness of the work I do, the impact of my work, ranked only slightly below getting paid in terms of [00:15:00] satisfaction with work.

And it really is, I think, so aligned with what you're saying here. I, I enjoy coming to work when I know that the work is good, right? And that, that matters to me as much, almost, as the foundational, functional aspect of just being able to survive, right? And I think that is just so important for us to understand as we think about that question you pose in your second book about the profitability of workplace experience.

I'm excited to hear how you have started to prove out the business value of working in this way.

Rich: Yeah. You know, uh, if you had asked me on day one, Hey Rich, what are you hoping to accomplish with this crazy new way of working? I might have said [00:16:00] something akin to, uh, you know, if we could get a process down to two emergencies.

Yeah. Per day, that would be unbelievably awesome because my life up to that point had been filled with Firefight after firefight and angry phone call and just pulling all nighters trying to solve a customer's problems all that sort of thing If somebody had pushed me in those early days to say come on rich set your sights higher than that.

What about? To a month, to a quarter, to a year, uh, wouldn't you hope for that? And I'd say, yeah, but that isn't realistic. This is the software industry. Well, I'm happy to report after 22 years in business, we've had two. software emergencies in 22 years. The effects that it has. It is. It's crazy. My team will actually like, try and take my legs out from under me when I keep saying that in talks I give around the world on this subject because they're like, you're gonna jinx it.

Stop [00:17:00] saying that. Um, but, you know, it's just proven itself out year in and year out. We, we have Obviously, if you only have two emergencies in 22 years, I could tell you there's 20 years in our history where we had zero emergencies. No, I'm not saying we're bug free or air free. What we are is we are emergency free.

And, you know, people, well, what do you mean by emergency? Well, we were working on the organ transplant information system for a large healthcare system, and a kidney came available. And, uh, The medical professionals could not find the patient who needed that kidney. That is an emergency. Our team came in on a Saturday.

They hand went through the Walk through the database and found the patient delivered that information of the client all went well But those are the kind of things that happen all the time And you know and a lot of people think [00:18:00] really software emergencies that happens a lot. Yeah Let's just look recently when a tired programmer made a server update error and it shut down the U.

S. air traffic control system for like two or three days. The first time since 9 11 that that happened. So software is that important and software controls so much of our lives and sometimes those emergencies spill out all the way into society.

Aransas: I do think to the definition of emergency is probably part of the success of your work because I think in a lot of organizations everything feels like an emergency and it becomes a boy who cried wolf design and engineering and so everyone is sort of on high alert all the time and unsure what to respond to as a result.

Rich: Absolutely, you know, and [00:19:00] while the pairing part of Menlo is what sort of captures people's attention immediately because it's so obvious, the planning part of Menlo is actually probably closer to the secret sauce and because Ultimately, what you're describing, Aransas, is that, um, uh, if we don't have any other way to prioritize work, then me pounding my fist on a table or lighting things on fire, and then it gets resolved, is the definition of planning.

And so all of a sudden, you're, you're setting everything on fire, and everything's an emergency. And, uh, And we don't, we don't have that here. We have a very simple, straightforward, uh, tactile planning system, uh, that, um, identifies what's in the plan, what's not in the plan. Most planning systems, uh, are reasonably good at defining what you are going to do.

Ours is excellent at also defining. What you have decided not to do, which [00:20:00] is critical to success in planning projects. Tell us more about that.

Dave: Yeah. Let's, let's hear more about your planning process.

Rich: Yeah. So, uh, again, hearkening back to that extreme programming. Book by Kent Beck back in the late nineties, early two thousands.

Uh, one of the things he advocated for was a tactile visual tactile planning system, uh, and introduced this concept of what's called a story card where all work is first described on a handwritten index card, which we still use to this day, 22 years later, people think we're nuts, right? We're a software company and yet we're using handwritten index cards.

And, um, so no work can get done at Menlo. Till, unless and until it's first handwritten down an index card describing what that work could potentially be estimated in hours by the people who do the work planned at a planning game, which is an interesting tactile experience for our customers. Uh, [00:21:00] imagine these little index cards photocopied onto pieces of paper, the index card.

It's a five and a half by, uh, eight and a half inch index card. So you can imagine what this looks like. We. Write the number of hours on the photocopy of the index card as to what we think it is, and then we fold the card to the size of the estimate so that a two hour card looks half as big as a four hour card, a four hour card looks half as big as an eight hour card, a sixteen hour card is unfolded, and a thirty two hour card is taped to a eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper.

So, right there, imagine that as you're looking at potential units of work, you can actually feel. The cost difference between them, the effort difference between them. Then, as they pick up these little folded tokens of planning, these story cards that are folded to this size, they're laying them down on a tabloid sized sheet of paper that has a defined box on it that can hold up to [00:22:00] 32 hours.

of these story cards folded to the right size. So you get four, four, you can get four eight hour cards, you can get eight four hour cards, you know, and so on. It's so, then we lay out these planning sheets in front of the customer that define their entire timeline and budget and team size and the customer's picking up these folded pieces of paper and laying them down on these, uh, these empty boxes that represent the capacity of our team for their project.

Well, guess what? Eventually. All the empty boxes fill, but there are still folded pieces of paper waiting to be put on the sheets of paper, but there's no place to put them. So that you get prioritized out. Yeah, so now somebody picks one up and says, But this one's really, really, really, really important.

You know, when you get to five reallys, it's really important. And, uh, you say, great, how big is it? They say, well, it's four hours. Okay, find one on this set of sheets that's four [00:23:00] hours or more and replace it with this one. Oh, but these are more important. Really? Because, you know, nothing ever gets done in the history of mankind unless we actually prioritize it.

A business defines itself as much by what it chooses to say no to as much as what it chooses to say yes to. And the fact of the matter is, there is never enough time to do everything. So we have to choose. And this doesn't mean we'll never do it. But not now, not in this phase, not in this budget. And so we don't have to lose it.

Uh, but the thing this system beautifully takes care of, and the reason we were talking earlier about setting things on fire, pounding fists on tables, yelling in meetings, as the typical prioritization mechanism is, what it defeats is what I call hallway project management. Which is, you know, imagine you lay out a beautiful plan like I'm describing, but three feet out of the room.[00:24:00]

As I'm walking down the corridor, somebody comes up behind me and says, Great planning session, Rich, but just one more thing. And that's the hole in the bottom of the planning boat. As soon as you allow one more thing to fit in outside of a system you have for planning, the whole plan is useless. Things are being set by priority by people screaming in meetings and you find out The people who scream the loudest get the most attention that teaches the rest of the organization Oh, I get it.

You light things on fire. You scream about them. That's what gets things done in our world. It doesn't, it rewards bad behavior, really reinforces it and actually defines the system at that point.

Aransas: The other thing I love about this is that I think in so many organizations, prioritization happens in terms of number of engineers assigned to a project, right?

So you might be realistic about. Like the the humans assigned to it, but beyond [00:25:00] that it's really about Does your project matter to the company or not? instead of this highly tactical hour by hour process, which I think is just incredibly smart and Educational for both the clients and the team the And then the other thing I want to double click on here is how smartly this is set up to accommodate and celebrate different learning and thinking styles, which I assume It leads you to a more successfully diverse team than many companies, especially in this field that, that tends to attract, um, a pretty homogenous learning and thinking style historically.

Rich: Yeah, you know, I think the typical picture of a tech firm is you walk in and it's, you know, in the old days, at least it [00:26:00] was a sea of darkened cubicles. Now all the cubicles are empty and everybody's at home, uh, but lights are down low. It's library quiet. You know, people come in at weird hours and then later lament, uh, that, uh, the team lacks interpersonal skills.

Um, and, uh, yeah, it's like, really, you think it's because you've isolated them? Well, no, this is what they need. Well, you know, what we're doing is setting clear, simple expectations. And when you do that for humans, it's amazing how adaptable they are, no matter where they fit on the extrovert introvert spectrum or the...

Uh, quiet versus talkative spectrum. Um, and yes, uh, our team is, uh, not only, uh, uh, diverse on, on those spectrums, but also just in terms of their backgrounds. We have a very unusual interview practice that's intriguing enough that people come to actually. Watch us interview.

Aransas: I’m so interested to hear that.

Dave and I just wrote an article for Quartz about the [00:27:00] five questions that you should ask to understand if a company is a good fit for you. So what is your interview process look like? How do you and your, uh, your future potential employees know whether or not this is a good fit?

Rich: Yeah. So, um, we make it an experience.

Uh, and so we have an interview process where we don't actually ask any questions. Just crazy. Um, people often wonder like, well, how can you an interview without questions? Well, if you make it an experience, uh, you can actually give people a chance to show off their skills, uh, in a real work environment.

So what we do is, uh, because we work in pairs and we know that's weird, different, and not many people would have experienced that before they come to Menlo. We actually invite a group of people in all at once. We pair them during the interview with another candidate while they're all in the same room together.

So it's kind of simulating the work environment [00:28:00] and it looks like speed dating. If you were watching it from afar, we literally pair one candidate with another for 20 minutes and we have them work together, sharing a single task, a piece of paper and a pencil. And then we give them the weirdest instructions they'll ever hear in an interview.

Your job. is to get Dave a second interview. Make your pair partner look good. Help the person sitting next to you succeed. And then 20 minutes in, we switch the pairs. Why? Because that's the way we work. So now you get to work with a different human being who maybe has different communication styles and different communication preferences.

So, you know, you're, you're giving us a chance to see how do you respond to different kinds of people. We do that three times and then we send you all home. That was the first interview. It takes about two hours. And. If you pass that level of tests. Now what's happening is there's a Melonian sitting across from you, simply taking notes about the behaviors they're witnessing.

Uh, but the weird thing is we've told you what [00:29:00] failure looks like before you start. And what I tell people when they come here, cause I usually introduce this to the people who are visiting, uh, to interview with us, I say, look, we're trying to weed you. In not weed you out, which again is very unusual for an interview process.

Most interview process trying to weed people out. We're actually trying to teach you our culture and we're going to see how fast you can adapt to it. Tell you failure modes. Don't grab the pencil out of the other person's hand. Introduce yourself when you sit down. Um, you know, make eye contact with the other person.

You know, talk through things. Make your peer partner look good. If they're struggling, help them out. If you know something, they don't share it with them. These are the things we're looking for in the interview and we tell people ahead of time. This is what we're looking for, uh, but then they get lost in the work and they revert to behaviors that aren't necessarily very acceptable in our culture.

And that allows us to make a determination [00:30:00] on who's in for the second interview and who's out. Second interview, I actually have somebody doing it here today. They come in for a day and they pair in the morning with one person. They pair in the afternoon with another. Now this time they're pairing with Menlonians and they're doing real work on a real client project.

We're paying them. Now, they can ask us all kinds of questions during this time. Uh, the team will take, uh, the candidate out to lunch as well to give them a chance to ask a lot of questions. But if that day works for all three people, people they paired with and for the candidate, then we will bring them in for a three week paid trial if that works in their life and, uh, gives them a chance to do deeper work.

But they're doing real work and, quite frankly, by the time we're done with that three weeks, If it's successful three weeks, they've also already been onboarded.

Dave: Incredible. Very interesting. So I just have to ask a question. Do you, these are really, really simple, but powerful [00:31:00] techniques. Do you see these techniques translating to other industries or is this?

Particular to a skill based type of, um, business model.

Rich: Well, you know, a lot of people ask, let's, let's go to pairing, for example, you know, where, where else is there evidence of pairing out in industry? And there's lots of it. Uh, for example, you probably would not agree to fly in a commercial airline unless you knew the pilot and the co pilot were up front.

You know, the pilot gets on the microphone and says, Hey guys, just want to let you know my co pilot called in sick today, but I got it. I was up a little late last night with my two year old, but, uh, I'm, I'm on my second cup of coffee. I think I got this.

You'd be like, okay, how does the emergency exit work and that sort of thing. Um, so, you know, so [00:32:00] we're very used to it in certain contexts and often it is context where people's lives are at risk. Uh, I know, I remember one time, uh, we were called into question by that same healthcare system when we were using pairing on the organ transplant system.

And she called, the contract administrator called me and says, why are you doing that? That's too expensive. I want you to stop doing that. And I looked at her, I said, I'm doing it for the same reason your healthcare system does it. She says, what do you mean? I said, well, my daughter just had surgery here, complex surgery on her wrist for a broken bone.

And I said, every time a professional showed up, whether it was the nurse, the anesthesiologist or the doctor, the pair nurse, the pair anesthesiologist and the pair doctor showed up. And she looks at me and says, well. Your daughter's life is at stake. That's why we do that. I said, well, if we get the tissue type wrong in the organ transplant information system, we could kill the patient.

That's why we do that. She never asked me another question about it again. [00:33:00] Wow.

Dave: Part of the reason why I'm so interested in the pairing part is because it was, it has been a core principle of Stone Mantle since the beginning. Most projects we do in teams of two, maybe three, um, that we have a larger team that may be coming in and doing different parts.

But there is a, in almost every case, there are two people that are involved and um, So, it's fascinating because it's something that I have believed in for 20 years, uh, as actually much longer than that. The reason, uh, you know, I don't think I've ever shared this before, but I learned about pairing. as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.

You see those missionaries walking down the street, they’re always in twos. They always walk in pairs, right?

Rich: Right?

Dave: They get rotated out every two, [00:34:00] every six weeks. They might have a different companion. There's a rotation that's kind of going on. But you get a chance to work with somebody, be accountable with someone, learn all kinds of different skills.

And, um, We had a, um, uh, we had someone that we were talking to about employee engagement just recently and I told them this idea of the idea of pairing and they said, Yeah, well, you're a small organization, therefore you can do it. But we're a large organization and we can't do it. And I just I have to think that when it comes to remote work, yeah, exactly.

Well, exactly. I mean, you know, like ones and twos, uh, you know, are zeros and ones, you know, that you pair those up and you've got software, but anyways, whatever.

Rich: Um, yeah, it's interesting. You'd think it'd be easier for a large organization than a small one, [00:35:00] but you know, that might be just my weird thinking.

Uh, so interesting.

Aransas: I think change is harder for large organizations. There you go.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, a lot of times I deliver messages and people say, well, this is really cool, but it never worked for us because we're too and fill in the blank. We're too big. We're too small. We're too old. We're too new. We're too regulated.

We're too unregulated. Like, yeah, we can all, we all look for a way to let ourselves off the hook when it comes to change.

Aransas: Well, I just, I think too, I mean, I have worked in behavior change in my entire career A behavior change standpoint and from a motivational strategy standpoint. It, it's brilliant because it plays to so many of our basic human needs and it fundamentally sets us up to be more motivated by our work, uh, through the accountabilities that it creates through the [00:36:00] relational benefits there.

I could go on and on about this. We could do a whole separate episode just talking about the motivational component of this. But I, I will say that I think it's, you're probably the biggest force against this is just that other companies don't do it already, right? It feels, it feels foreign and it hasn't been acculturated.

Where have you So, seeing this be incorporated outside of Menlo, I know you teach a lot about it, um, so who's adopting?

Rich: Yeah, you know, I, I, I'm always careful when people come in and visit, uh, we never adopt the attitude that says, Hey, we've discovered the one true way of working. You should make your organization look like ours.

No, our simple statement is. This is a living, breathing cultural experiment that you can come in, [00:37:00] look at, observe, question, interrogate, spend days, spend weeks here. We've had people spend weeks here. Analyze and take anything back you want. Ask us about why we do things the way we do them and then run your own experiments.

And so we have seen people use pairing strategically, but not necessarily all the time like we do. That's okay. We're not saying we've. Again, you know, we never adopt this attitude of like, you should make yourself look like us. That's never been our spirit. We always just simply say, come and see it, ask us questions, take home what you want to experiment with.

Some people like the visual management systems I described. Some people want to use pairing for onboarding new people, but they don't necessarily use it long term. Some of them choose to use it on the hard tasks, not the easy tasks. I can give, you know, my own opinions about all those things as to where you might struggle defining hard versus easy and that sort of thing.

[00:38:00] But I like the people who just simply take the attitude of, okay, let's run the experiment. Let's try a few new things. Let's see how they work. Eventually those things can catch on. And then I also become a collector of just. obvious, um, places where this has worked decades or centuries. You know, you think about, uh, you know, police and firefighters and ambulance drivers.

And, uh, you know, my favorite, just because it's a sport of mine, is, um. The professional golfer in their caddy, you know, while the caddy never actually picks up the club for the golfer, the golfer is always the one swinging the clubs based on the rules of the game. Whenever they get done with a tournament, it is invariably the case that when the golfer, the winning golfer, is describing the victory, he or she, Always uses the we pronoun and if you don't know [00:39:00] golf, you'd be like, what do you mean we, you're always the one swinging the club.

No, no, my caddy and I, we worked together. We were a pair. Uh, he or she was giving me instructions along the way was questioning my life. Choices was supporting me in a way made me look better because, you know, uh, caddies are kind of a brilliant pair partner because they always have to speak in the positive, not the negative and that sort of thing.

And so there's lots and lots of examples. I always say, you know, parenting of teenagers. You know, I mean, I realize there's a lot of people in the world who have raised teenagers on their own by themselves. But I think there are moments where every parent of a teenager, whether it's a spouse or a neighbor or a cousin or a brother or sister, needs that pair partner from time to time.

Aransas: Or maybe three or four. Um, kitchens certainly are another good example. Yeah, there are a lot of good examples of that. So, as we start to round out this episode, [00:40:00] what What do you believe most companies would benefit from considering given our new ways of working post pandemic?

Rich: Yeah, I keep trying to decide whether we are a quaint reminder of something or whether we're a harbinger of the future.

Because we are like 90 percent in the office every day now and probably 30 percent of our team is in, uh, All five days. And so, um, we are intriguing to a lot of companies who are trying to figure out the work from home versus work in the office equation. But I think the problem for a lot of organizations is they're just simply declaring you need to be back in the office, but they don't have good reason for it.

And I think post pandemic, uh, every one of us as leaders needs to be able to [00:41:00] Articulate, tell the story about why it is we want to be together. What benefits are we creating, not only for our customers, but for our work and for each other. Um, the part I see companies struggling with today who are adopting a closer to 100 percent work from home is they're having trouble figuring out how to onboard new people and onboard them effectively.

Aransas: Boy. Mhm. Yep. That makes sense. And you're so right that it's so much about the storytelling. My kids went back to school today and they have to wear uniforms. And so our house has been nonstop filled with conversation about the rules of wearing uniforms. And it's a, it's a problem to them because they don't see the benefits of them.

And the benefits that are described are not benefits that are meaningful to them. And so I think. That's the case in so many organizations that the rules that are [00:42:00] made. are obvious to the people making the rules, and they benefit the people making the rules, and they're meaningful to them. But if they're not meaningful to the employees, then they're not going to get authentic buy in from them.

It's a great, great point there, Rich.

Rich: The two most common expressions that never work for parents over the long run is, number one, because I told you to, because I said so. And number two, well, that's just the way we've always done it. And those don't work for parents and those don't work for leaders.

Aransas: No.

No, we have to think harder than that. Honestly, those are just lazy answers.

Rich: Uh huh. Yep. And they're, they're answers of hierarchical authority, which I think works less now than it's ever worked. Yep.

Aransas: Yep. Agree. Completely. Well, thank you so much for being here and I, I just want to [00:43:00] applaud again your mindset and approach to this.

Thank you. That really encourages authentic ownership of these ideas by empowering people to experiment. And so to all of you out there listening to this, wondering what this might mean for you, I challenge you to think about how you might run some experiments within your family, within your team, within your organization.

So, better understand what might be possible for you if you were to approach some of your challenges in new ways. If things are working, then maybe no experiment needs to be run. But if you have a hunch that maybe things could be better. That's when experimentation can be so powerful and a data collection that enables you to perhaps look at your ways of working [00:44:00] through new eyes.

Rich, thank you for being here. All of you listening, thank you for listening. You Podcast come to life. Reach out to us. We are on the road for the next year visiting. Lots of different cities. So if you'd like to meet up or like us to come to your city on our tour, please just reach out to us, find us on LinkedIn or the experience strategy podcast.

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