Aaron Dignan | How to Speed up The Organizational Decision Making Process

Srini Rao

 Aaron, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Aaron Dignan

Sweet.

Aaron Dignan

Let's do it.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, thanks for having me back.

Srini Rao

It is my pleasure. So you're here for a second time, which to me, anytime we have somebody back for a second time, it's because the first interview was awesome. So no pressure at all. But we had you here when you wrote this book called Brave New Work, which was all about sort of thinking about the future of work and designing organizations for the future of work. So I thought I would start with a fitting question, and that is, what was the very first job that you ever had, and how did that influence where you've ended up and what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

Aaron Dignan

Hahaha

Aaron Dignan

Mmm.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, well I have the honor of holding many, many terrible hourly jobs in my teens and early 20s. And the first one was a busboy at 15. So I was a busboy at Ruby Tuesdays and, you know, taking down the salad bar at midnight, all that stuff. So even before I could drive, cleaning up food and honestly, all those hourly jobs, they affected me quite deeply actually because

Srini Rao

I can relate.

Aaron Dignan

I already had a sense even at that age that I had ideas about what we could do differently and how we could run the business in ways that might serve the customers better or innovate in some way. And none of that was welcome at all. So I was basically a machine to them, a robot. And so I think I started to have a chip on my shoulder pretty early on.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I mean, food service is such a humbling experience. I mean, shit, I worked at McDonald's. You know, you talk about the most humbling experience. And I think that to me, the big takeaway was just how privileged of a circumstance that I was coming from compared to a lot of the people who work there. It made me sort of appreciate them. I mean, I'm curious, what are what are the lessons in social dynamics you took away from being in a place like that? Because I'm guessing like you go into Ruby Tuesdays, you know, the middle of the afternoon, you'll be served sometimes by like a 60 year old woman.

Aaron Dignan

Yes.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I think that the reality is that hourly work attracts a really weird cross section of society. Some people that are upwardly mobile, some people that are, you know, going back to work or finding something else or something part time, some people that just, you know, haven't figured out exactly what they want to do or how to do it. There were a lot of hopes and dreams in a place like that.

And in a way it does form kind of a little bit of a group identity. I had a lot of good friends that I worked with in those settings, but I also had people that I just really didn't understand and frankly people that I didn't feel were qualified to manage me in those settings because they had kind of Peter principled into that location and that slot and I was a guy who just needed, you know, 10 bucks an hour, a couple hours after school.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you talked about this idea of upward mobility. And I mean, I kind of know your background from you telling me a little bit about what your parents did for work last time. I mean, I'm the son of a college professor. I think you and I are born into circumstances where upward mobility is pretty much a guarantee, as long as we take the opportunity that's given to us and do something with it. But when you look at society at large, do you think that we're designing a society? Because we can talk about organizational level design all we want.

Aaron Dignan

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

but if you don't design a society where you maximize outcomes for everybody and don't act entirely in self-interest, how does that work? From your perspective, from seeing this, from the perspective of what you've learned from organizational design, can we take these ideas and how do we create a society where upward mobility is more of a meritocracy?

Aaron Dignan

Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. I think it's quite significantly broken. And I think that one of the weird things about being a parent right now, I have a nine-year-old son now, is just noticing that I don't feel necessarily that the world is going to be a better or more optimal place in the future for him like I did when I was hanging around in the 80s. I mean, it was sort of just written on the wall in the 80s that if you work hard and kind of apply yourself and you kind of...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

you know, live in the right place, man, you are, you are set to go. And now it feels like that a lot of those social contracts have been broken or disrupted, um, in part, because I think we, we really have seen the economy shift in terms of what it rewards. And, and also because I think we've seen that some parts of the game are.

are rigged to benefit certain people, people that look a certain way or have certain things. And it's not working well at all. So I do think from an org design standpoint, it's turtles all the way down, right? It's fractals. And so the society that we live in, the way that it runs, the way that we choose to operate in a capitalist socialist.

economy, like all those things really matter. And unfortunately, unlike in an organization where you can do a lot of parallel experimentation and, and use your values and your principles to drive outcomes as a founder, uh, as a member in, in a much bigger society that runs on a government that was designed 200 years ago, uh, it's way, way harder to exact that kind of change. So I actually spent a lot of time thinking about and being frustrated by that.

Srini Rao

So you mentioned that you have a nine-year-old son. So two questions. When you were growing up, what was the narrative around your house about education and making your way in the world? And what is it going to be, do you think, when your son is at that point in his life where you have to give him guidance about how to make his way in the world and think about the future of his education?

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, I mean in some ways I think I was...

I was part of the transitionary generation, or at least I played that role in my family, because my parents both went to school. My dad has a degree from UVA, my mom has a master's degree in special education. They were definitely people that believed in liberal education. And the message, the narrative from them was basically like, you need to do well in school so that you unlock opportunities and you need to learn how to learn so that you can kind of do whatever you want to do. And they exposed me to a lot of different extracurricular activities and ideas.

and just their theory was like throw everything with the kitchen sink at this kid and see what sticks and make sure that you know bring home a good report card. But over the course of my educational history with them I became more and more resistant to the bureaucracy and the ridiculousness of modern education which is basically designed to you know to educate people who will be the children of farmers.

and work on a factory line maybe as we transition to city states. And so I just, I really felt, and I know we were talking about Seth, Seth Godin before this podcast, but his view of education is very much my view that it is a fundamentally broken system. So I started to kind of tune into that and resist that. And by the time I was in high school, I was basically doing

You know, the minimum to get by so that I could focus on what I actually cared about and really lean into that. And then ultimately I dropped out of college, three credits shy of a psychology degree to start my first business. And here we are, you know, five businesses later. So I was, I was very much kind of bucking the message and the trend that was there. And ultimately what was great is that my parents really supported me in that. As soon as they saw the results of my effort outside of the academic context, they were like, all right, you know, you

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

You can do whatever you want. And that was really nice that support level. Now, when I look at my son, I mean, my wife and I talk openly about, you know, will he go to college, what will he want to pursue? How will he pursue it? Because the reality is that the line in goodwill hunting about you got an education that you could have got for a dollar 50 and late fees at the public library. That's true, but just replace library with internet. I mean, what, what can't you learn how to do? What can't you get close to with just.

Srini Rao

I'm sorry.

Aaron Dignan

some, uh, some drive. And so I think a lot of what we focus on with him is not academic excellence, but actually, uh, grit and, and learning how to pursue something that you're passionate about and knowing that the rest will kind of take care of itself.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So.

A couple of things, you know, I've had a couple of conversations with Seth about education and This always comes up anytime I talk to you know, anybody who is a parent and anybody who I know is an educator I've talked to Cal Newport about this Every professor I've ever talked to I always ask them this But he said parents are the ones who really are the ones that have the power to change it But I don't think all of them one have the kind of platform that you do or are not as a vocal And so I would ask you a question that I realize there's no

Aaron Dignan

Hehehehe

Aaron Dignan

Of course.

Aaron Dignan

Uh-huh.

Srini Rao

answer to but if you were tasked with redesigning the education system from the ground up let's say tomorrow you are the new Secretary of Education you get to fire everybody and your job is to redesign our entire education system from K through 12 through college what would you do?

Aaron Dignan

Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, I wish someone would hand me this baton. Yeah, right? I mean, it would be such an exciting opportunity. Yeah, well, I mean, I hope she already does. My sense is that what we need to do is effectively two things. One, there's a little bit of a quadrant in my head about solving problems alone, solving problems together, creating new things alone and creating new things together.

Srini Rao

You and me both.

I mean, Betsy DeVos would hate us, but who cares? Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

And that becomes kind of like the curriculum surface for what do we actually need to learn how to do? And I think those are the four things that we need to learn how to do. And the way that we need to learn how to do them is by looking at cross-functional or cross-disciplinary challenges that feel more like a story, a video game, an immersive experience and less like math, science, reading.

You know, et cetera. There are moments for learning that very like subject matter oriented material, but they are fleeting. It's much more interesting to learn what you need to know in order to accomplish what you want to accomplish or, you know, beat, beat the aliens or whatever the case may be. And my wife and I both share a memory, which is when we were kids, we went to something called young AmeriTown, which is based here in Colorado. Um, and it's, it's actually part of a banks educational nonprofit. And what they do is every year students from all around the state spend a week

preparing and learning about money and the economy and jobs and how to be an adult in society and then they go to this micro town that's on a floor of a building and it's a miniature town and they take on different jobs. People are elected mayor, people become doctors, people become lawyers, people become package delivery folks and food service folks and they run this town for a whole day.

Spending money managing their managing their accounts, you know making everything happen And I got to tell you think back on something like that So fondly because you learned an enormous amount about money in the economy and yourself But also you had a lot of fun and it felt like this very immersive experience So as I see my kid play with you know Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, I'm thinking

He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game. There's a missing piece here in education where we're like, all right, back to reading this paragraph in social studies about an event no one cares about instead of thinking about how do we put these kids in situations where they have to solve problems and create new things together? And in order to do that, they need to learn all the things that they need to learn. That's what I would try to bring to the table.

Srini Rao

Well, I want to bring back a clip from a conversation I had with Dan Pink about sort of what drives motivation and then really looking at the education system. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

What do you make of that?

Aaron Dignan

I mean, he's dead on. I think this is something I talked about at length in Brave New Work, but the idea that complicated problems are fewer and fewer right now and complex problems are all over the place. There's a lot more intractable, interesting, social, multidisciplinary problems than ever before, or at least we're noticing them more maybe than we did before. And, and yeah, I think he's absolutely right. It requires a completely different approach. And instead we're teaching kids to like study for a test. They'll never have.

when they don't know how to write an email and learn how to do calculations that unless they're going to, you know, solve the world equation, they're never going to use again instead of actually dialing into like, how do you manage conflict with another human being? How do you manage your checkbook? How do you know what your credit score is? There's a million things we don't teach that you actually need and most of what we teach you really don't.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

It's funny you say that. I co-host this weekly segment with my best friend Gareth called the Unmistakable Creativity Hour and we were talking about learning and we talked about memorization. So I'm sure you probably had this experience. You remember when you take geography when you're a kid and you have to memorize the capitals of like the states and the cities. So, you know, do you remember the capitals of like all 50 states if I asked you just at random what one of them was like, do you know what the capital of Iowa is?

Aaron Dignan

Yes.

Aaron Dignan

Absolutely.

Aaron Dignan

uh, Sioux City, Iowa City, something like that. I could probably do like 40 of them.

Srini Rao

Okay, that's pretty good. So we were, you know, it's funny because I lived in Texas. All right. And I didn't know, I couldn't remember that the capital was Austin. And I lived in Colorado for two years. I had no, I the entire time until one day I dropped a friend off in Denver. I was like, Denver is the capital of Colorado? I'm like, what the hell? But it just goes to show that this sort of rote memorization is utterly useless. You know?

Aaron Dignan

Right, right.

Aaron Dignan

at the Capitol Building.

Aaron Dignan

Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's again, like it's rooted in a time. I think the biggest problem with, with our social systems is that they tend to be filled with organizational debt. And it's rooted in a time when there was no internet, there was no way to find out that information and, and a basic knowledge of civics was important to participate in society, but, um, but yeah, nobody needs to know the capital of, uh, Iowa for a bunch of reasons. Um, but, but for starters, cause it's very findable.

Srini Rao

Well, speaking of systems, I think this will make a perfect segue into the things you're working on now. So I want to revisit a clip from the conversation you and I had before. Take a listen.

Aaron Dignan

Sure.

Srini Rao

So let's talk about that. Because it sounds to me like what you were actually talking about there is being able to simultaneously do what's needed in the present while also considering what might happen in the future.

Aaron Dignan

Absolutely. Yeah, it's effectively like a barbell investment strategy where you need some sure things and then some wild swings that might pay off.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

It's funny because my dad, because he's a professor, he has a budget for a new computer and he was looking at the new iMac yesterday and he was hesitating to do the memory upgrades and all this other stuff. I said, dad, you know what? Don't think about what this computer is gonna be useful for now. Think about how you're gonna use it a year down the road. I was like, you're about to have a grandchild, which means that thing is gonna be filled with video and pictures. You and I both know that. I'm like, and there are gonna be new apps that come out that are more memory intensive

Aaron Dignan

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

Hahaha

Srini Rao

and if you skimp on it now, then you're gonna have to go back and fix what you didn't do right this time. So let's talk about this in terms of, you know, sort of organizational workflow and organizational design. I mean, you know, you made this transition from, you know, what you were doing before to something new called Murmur. So talk to me about, you know, what led to the thesis? Like, what was it that prompted your sort of next chapter?

Aaron Dignan

Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, so hang on, it looks like there's a massive truck driving by. Um, all right, I'll pick this up here. Um,

The company that was behind the book, Brave New Work, is called The Ready. And The Ready does consulting work with organizations big and small around the world, including people like the Fed and the CDC and Johnson and Johnson and Boeing, and you know, the list goes on. And it's great. I mean, it's really fun to get into businesses and play with removing that org dead and replacing it with better ways of working that really serve people. However, there are issues with scale and there are issues with visibility.

So if you go into an environment and you're like, hey, let's do experiments where we change the way we work and we'll do some safe to try, safe to fail stuff and scale what works and ditch what doesn't. That's great at a scale of a hundred people or 500 people or a thousand people. But at 80,000 people, there's no way to deploy that. We don't have the staff, they don't have the budget. The capacity is not there. And even in the case of a few hundred people experimenting with their way of working and really

making agreements to change things, to try things. How do you keep track of all that? And how do you actually scale what works when it really comes down to it? And so we felt that pressure for a long time. We've always kind of had this belief that organizations have code just like computers do. And there's a GitHub where you can share and fork and borrow and iterate on code for software. But there's no GitHub for agreements at work, for ways of working, for working agreements.

And so we had our eye on that for a long time. And then suddenly during the pandemic, I noticed that there were.

Aaron Dignan

four plus billion people that had moved to remote work overnight and really had to like evaluate and possibly change the way they work and make decisions and allocate resources and collaborate. And we also had a great resignation underway. People were kind of fed up with the status quo of work. And we had a resurgence in the DEI movement at work. And we had this web three thing going on with, which was really about an ownership economy and a different way of building organizations and corporations. And we just looked at all that and we're like, man, that's a

That's a lot of wind behind our backs on this idea. And so we spun out this company, Murmur. And the idea behind Murmur, the purpose of Murmur, is to make work wonderful. And the way we think we do that is by helping teams make decisions and agreements collectively, collaboratively with consent, and even being able to do that asynchronously without a meeting. So you can think about it as the rails for the trains that are

different experiments and agreements and decisions that we need to make, now we can see them, we can track them, we can share them, they're transparent, we can see why we did what we did. We can borrow someone else's great agreement about a vacation policy or a hiring process and put it to work in our own team or our own organization. So we wanted to kind of create that ecosystem and now we're pushing up on two years since we started that and we've learned a lot about what's easy and what's hard about building.

software for things that are very complex and very human.

Srini Rao

Well, speaking of sort of pandemic and how it changed work, I think that what's funny is this is one of the teasers that I pulled from your old conversation. In fact, it was the actual opening that we used to your old conversation with. I think it will sort of frame how we talk about murmur perfectly. You said the following about meetings. Take a listen.

Aaron Dignan

Hehehe

Aaron Dignan

Hehehe

Srini Rao

Josh, make a cut on the music there, please. So let's talk about murmur in the context of what you just said there, because I think anybody listening to this was like, yeah, like I can tell you this, I'm literally the most impatient person in the world when it comes to meetings. And the beauty of running your own company is I can tell people, by the way, my attention span is done. So get to the point.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah

Aaron Dignan

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

And I remember yesterday I had a meeting with you know our ad sales team at a cast and I created an agenda I said these are the things I want to cover and after this we're done There's nothing else to talk about and even you know when I had a team member. I was like this is what we're gonna Do on Monday. I'm like I want to know you know what have you done since I last spoke to you What do you need help with and what are you gonna do next and I don't want to talk about anything else and yet, you know meetings still somehow go off the rails like I

Aaron Dignan

Hehehehehehe

Srini Rao

I will avoid them at all costs. And to your point, sometimes I don't even know why we're having a meeting. So let's, let's talk about how something like murmur can help us, you know, rewrite this whole idea of meetings. I think are a great place to start. Um, because everybody fucking hates meetings.

Aaron Dignan

Absolutely. Well, and also they're a microcosm of the enterprise. So like, if you want to know what your company and your culture is like, just go to a meeting because everything is happening right there. It's like a little micro version of it. Yeah, but most of them are. I mean, for starters, one of the things that we talk a lot about at the ready is that there's an obsession with like, let's have a pre-planned agenda.

Srini Rao

Yeah. And 90% of them are unnecessary.

Aaron Dignan

But actually what's missing is not that. There's many meeting types that we host that don't have a pre-planned agenda. What they have is a structure and a type. And so what type of meeting is this and what is the structure that goes with that is critically important. And for the vast majority of meetings in the world, there just isn't either of those things. So when you do go to like a proper Agile retrospective, you're at a retrospective meeting.

and there is a structure. We're gonna collect these insights, then we're gonna group them, then we're gonna talk about them, then we're gonna create actions. That's what we do in this type of meeting. We don't do other stuff. And there are actually a variety of different meeting types that are valuable if you choose to run a synchronous organization. However, you can also choose to run an asynchronous organization with members all around the world where a meeting is not the most convenient way to do that coordination. And when you choose to do that, or when you choose to reduce the number of meetings that you have,

to try to make things more manageable and get more deep work done to Cal's point, you need a way to move into a more asynchronous way of operating. And that's where something like Murmur comes in because the vast majority of meetings that happen in our experience are because people need a decision to be made or they need permission to do something. And they're seeking that through a face-to-face interaction that is live and synchronous. And that means they might be waiting one, two, three, four weeks for that audience with whoever has power in order to make that decision

answer or whatever the case may be, it's incredibly wasteful. And so with Murmur, the idea is like, don't ever have a meeting about a decision again, unless you've already tried to make that decision asynchronously and failed. And so the idea is, you know, you, instead of waiting three weeks for a meeting, draft up a little proposal in Murmur. I propose that we have summer Fridays in August, send it out to the people that have decision rights on that decision, the leadership team, whatever the case may be.

And let them go through a structured asynchronous decision process that basically has three parts One the first part is understand which is questions and answers The second part is improve which is suggestions and edits and the third part is decide which is do we consent or do we object? You can do that and the average we find is people spend somewhere between like five and fifteen minutes on the entire decision across three different bytes Instead of an hour in that dumb meeting

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

So we find it both saves time and also accelerates things, even though in the moment it can feel like, oh, I'm going through this multi-step asynchronous process. Isn't this slower or less efficient? The answer is no, it's actually, it's better in both directions.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Srini Rao

So one thing I want to talk about is the

volume of information that you sort of include in an asynchronous message. Because I remember trying to use a tool called ZipMessage where I had a six minute video explanation of something and one of my team members was like, my brain is fried from trying to watch this. This is too much for my brain. And I thought it through and at first I was like, why are you so slow? Why can't you process this? Now we can avoid 30 minutes. And then I kind of thought, okay, maybe she's right. Maybe there was too much in that.

Aaron Dignan

Oh yeah.

Aaron Dignan

Sure.

Aaron Dignan

Mm.

Aaron Dignan

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

So talk to me about that. I mean, I'm guessing that she was actually the person who was right there, that I kind of overloaded it. And, you know, so how do you, you know, use sort of what Tiago Forte might call intermediate packets, like, that are more digestible in this process? Because I think she was right. Like, you know, it's like a seven minute, like, you know, video diatribe of, you know, a bunch of bullshit, I think could be very like that probably was like, oh, my God. You know?

Aaron Dignan

Mm.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah.

Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

Well, I think what smart people tend to do is they are working on multiple levels at the same time. And when they do figure something out or finally have conviction, they have a lot to share. And a lot of that is context and background and connections, et cetera. But what is also true is that someone really smart once said, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. And I really do believe that when you understand something really, really well and really deeply, you can actually summarize it quite.

Srini Rao

Uh-huh.

Aaron Dignan

you know, lean and quite, excuse me, you can actually summarize it quite quickly. And the idea here is that we talk about atomic agreements a lot at Murmur, where the idea is, how do we take four or five things that ultimately are gonna be stitched together and are gonna be, you know, combinatorial, and process them one at a time?

Srini Rao

Uh huh.

Aaron Dignan

And what I see with a lot of DAOs happening actually lately is they will start to put together like a constitution of how they work and they'll propose one 6,000 word proposal and be like, vote on it. Yes or no. And it's just, you're just cramming too much into the pipe, right? And actually when we get things more modular, we benefit from the specificity, from the focus, from the clarity. And then when we do stitch them together, they create superstructures.

that are wonderful and those meta agreements, those meta spaces are awesome, but I don't recommend that somebody try to process something that's longer than, I don't know, two thirds of a page at any given time, like one piece of the puzzle at a time here.

Srini Rao

Uh-huh. Yeah.

Okay, let's talk, let's use a very concrete example so that I, you know, I can see how this might apply to my own life. So right now, you know, we've been airing this new podcast, this podcast series of old episodes called the wisdom series. And one of the things people will probably have heard it by the time they hear this conversation.

Aaron Dignan

Sure.

Srini Rao

we're doing is we're basically creating this sort of NPR style episode where we weave together a bunch of old clips, you know, and it's basically called the hero's journey to becoming wise where we, you know, overlay old content from the podcast and different clips using that hero's journey structure. Yeah, I'll send it to you when it's done. It will be very cool. And the thing is that the first thing I did was I knew that the hardest part was going to be thinking through the structure. So I imported all my transcripts into mem, which is like

Aaron Dignan

That sounds cool.

Srini Rao

taking Bible at this point, like it is my second brain and the coolest thing ever. Like I told, I mean, I've said to the product team, I'm basically the unofficial spokesperson for the cult of Mem. I mean, I have a YouTube channel where I do tutorials for this software because it's been invaluable to me because it's the closest thing I've found to a true second brain where everything I need is aggregated into one tool. And it takes us into a whole conversation about network thinking. But the thing is that, of course,

Aaron Dignan

Hehehehe

Aaron Dignan

Nice.

Srini Rao

moving parts because I have to create the narrative structure. And that's what I used Mem for because I was like, OK, if I do this in this script, it's going to be really slow. Let me figure out what I want the actual structure for the writing to be first, because I can do that a thousand times faster in writing. And that also requires coordination with my sound engineer to, you know, adds in music to sections who, you know, really gives it the tone that we're trying to get to, you know, and that requires, you know, descript, you know, conversations in Slack.

Aaron Dignan

Right.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Let's say we brought you in and said, all right, Aaron, redesign this process for us using what you talked about. How can we do this asynchronously in a way that is not, hey, I'm checking Slack in the morning to see if Josh in South Africa has done this, blah, blah. If you were leading this project and you're like, all right, Srini Rao , do your one thing that you only do well, which is writing the narrative and choosing the clips and let me take over managing the project, how would you do it?

Aaron Dignan

Hehehehe

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing to say is that Murmur's goal is not necessarily to eliminate all of that interaction.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

We have lots of occasions to slack with each other or have conversations or do work together that we enjoy. Those are fine. But when it comes to any decision that needs to be made by more than one person or any commitment that needs to happen about how something will be done and that we want to constrain behavior, that's where murmur would come in. So I think the first thing I would ask is like, does this process by which you do this, is this documented somewhere? And then you would say, oh, you know, it is or it isn't. And if it isn't, we might start there.

I'd say, how's it going? How's it serving you? Are people showing up to that and doing it the way we expect? And if the answer is it's going perfectly, then we would move on to the next tension. But if we said, oh, actually this part's unclear and this role is unclear and we're not sure who can decide this or that, we would make micro proposals for those.

for those specific issues. So we'd start with, here's a proposal for the process, here's a proposal for the roles that we each play in that process, and let's all consent and agree to that, and let's set an expiration date where we review how it's going in the future so that we're actually iterating and moving towards a better and better way of producing this show.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Okay, so stop there because I want to talk about process in a bit more detail. So my friend Gareth runs a company called Gap Consulting where he helps people and companies. No, no. Yeah. Full t-shirts. Yeah. So they basically build complex automations to automate repetitive tasks. And his biggest challenge. You're talking like huge, huge companies like Disney level, you know, Showtime.

Aaron Dignan

Yes.

Aaron Dignan

Fold t-shirts.

Aaron Dignan

Uh-huh.

Srini Rao

Every time he gets a client, the biggest issue he runs into is the fact that they don't even know their own damn process. And he said, how can I automate a process if you don't have one? And the funny thing is, even when he builds things that are automated for me, he said, I promise you if you fuck something up, it's on you, not because of the process I built, it's human error. And he's always right. And it just got me thinking. Our podcast workflow, today was the first time, I normally would not have emailed you,

Aaron Dignan

Yup.

Aaron Dignan

True.

Aaron Dignan

Right?

Srini Rao

using our standard workflow, which is completely automated. But I'd never thought to document it, because we do these narrative episodes like once in a blue moon, but this is the first time I'd ever thought we should actually have a re- like a documented process for this. But I want you to emphasize the importance of this to people, because I have hammered people on this, whether it's content creators. I was like, process, you know, is mind-numbing. Victor Chang talks about this in Extreme Revenue Growth.

Aaron Dignan

Sure.

Aaron Dignan

Hmm.

Srini Rao

to consult with a company and take them from a million to 25 million in revenue, the first thing he has them do is document the processes for every task. And he's like, it's boring as shit. There's a really cool company called Scribe How, or Scribe, that literally lets you just do screen by screen captures to document process. But...

I want you to really emphasize why this is so important because I don't think people realize how much time they waste reinventing the wheel for shit they've done a thousand times because their process is not documented.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing we always talk about at Murmur is if it's worth arguing about or explaining, it's worth writing down. And the reason for that is simple. You can't actually improve something methodically and at scale with multiple people without clarity about what the hell it is. And so even though you can kind of socially and emergently find your way to a better path, if somebody quits or somebody leaves or a new member joins the team or somebody changes their role, that all gets borked.

And if you actually have crisp, clear agreements about this is how we do things, this is what the stop points are, this is how we make these decisions, this is the roles that are at play here, it becomes incredibly resilient, number one. So it's very easy to like slot somebody out and somebody in to a role and all the expectations and all the connection points are there. And it becomes really easy to improve because now you can stop.

two months in and say, hey, look at this thing. A, are we doing it? And that's what we call follow through. Are we doing what we said we'd do? Which is a huge gap for most teams. And then B, is it serving us? Is it going well? What's our NPS on the way we're doing this? And just those two questions can't be asked if you don't have clarity on what that process is. So I strongly agree with that quote.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, let's continue with this podcast example. So, you know, we agree that we will document the process for these narrative episodes going forward now that we know how to do it. It's funny because we've done it a few times and the first few steps are the same every time.

Aaron Dignan

Sure.

Srini Rao

But then comes this sort of dynamic part, right? Where we don't know what our decisions are gonna be. So the example I'll give you is Josh goes in and he picks different tracks, you know, where we're gonna use music and he'll give me, you know, two samples of things. He'll give me his feedback on, you know, what could be better. I'm really fortunate because I can give him a ridiculous answer, like, I don't know, bring the audience to tears and he'll know exactly how to do that, which is why I love him. Like, you know, he's a godsend.

Aaron Dignan

Hehehehe

Nice.

Srini Rao

of 50 people at NPR does. He's like, you write the story, he's like, I'll take care of the sound design. But that's the part that is very back and forth. So let's say, for example, he sends me, we've done the introduction to sort of this Hero's Journey episode where we've kind of said, okay, here are four different potential pieces of music you could use. So talk to me about how we would think through this if you were in charge.

Aaron Dignan

Amazing.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, well, I mean, for starters, I think it's worth pointing out that what you're doing is making art. And, you know, it's not called the unmistakable robot. I think creativity is real and I think, you know, creative collision and dialogue is important. So Murmur's goal is not to eliminate that. It may well be that a piece of the process is these two people go back and forth and make creative decisions together. And maybe we have to document what happens if they disagree.

Srini Rao

Heheheheh.

Aaron Dignan

automate the entire set of interactions. For one thing, it probably wouldn't make a better piece of art. And for another thing, I don't know that it'd be that enjoyable. To me, one of the things I kind of have a bit of pause about is when people are so anti-meeting and so pro-automation that they end up alone.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Aaron Dignan

And I don't want to be alone. I actually like being at work with other people. I like hearing other people talk and think and feel and emote. And, um, and I don't want to get rid of that. So I want to get rid of the nonsense. I want to get rid of the, you know, the bitching and the moaning and the debates and the bullshit that is like just in the way, but the really fruitful, creative collaborations and collisions. Those are, those are magic and I enjoy them and they make better work.

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that more or less describes my injurious process for this in a nutshell.

Aaron Dignan

Nice.

Srini Rao

So, you know, I mean, I think in the wake of the pandemic, there's this sort of, you know, what they call Zoom fatigue, which we've never even had that term before. But there's a grain of truth to that. You know, like, I mean, shit, look at what happened. I mean, Jeffrey Toobin, a longtime CNN correspondent, loses his job for masturbating in a Zoom meeting. Like, I don't know if I don't know if that's if there's any more clear indication of the fact that meetings are this big issue.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

Amazing.

Srini Rao

you know, constant remote work where, you know, VR is around the corner and I still am convinced that we're like very, very close to mass adoption and people don't believe this because they find the experience frustrating. I've been in VR meetings and half the battle was trying to teach somebody how to use the damn software. But

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Dignan

for sure.

Srini Rao

there was something about it that I was like, yeah, this really could actually create a very different meeting experience. But when you think about sort of the future of remote collaboration, I mean, how do we do this in a way that allows us as both organizations and individuals to make progress on the things that matter and accomplish our goals?

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, well, a little bit back to your point about meetings, if we don't have clear meeting structures and we don't have clear roles and decision rights and responsibilities and structures around teams, etc. We're going to need a lot more meetings than we ought to have. And usually when you see someone that's in eight hours of back to back meetings, they're either a therapist or they have a broken operating system at work.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

And so, you really have to question like, do we need to be doing these things live and synchronously? And then for the things where we do, I think the goal should be to have the best, highest fidelity, most supported experience possible. What's interesting to me about most of the organizations that I've studied and I would consider the ready part of this group that work remotely, primarily, they still have occasions every year where they get together in person, because they've realized that there's value in that kind of

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

you know, maximum fidelity communication. Um, and they have, uh, really, really good tooling and really, really good habits about how they communicate and take notes and, and become cultures of documentation, loom cultures, et cetera, where they can make the most of, of what they need to get across without necessarily bringing everyone together in real time. So at Murmur, for example, we, we have a, an agreement that is, uh, a ritual, essentially it's a norm.

that at the end of the day, if you have time, you just make a one minute loom of what'd you figure out today? What did you learn? What'd you try? What did you do? Anything that you think is interesting enough that it merits sharing. And you know, one half to two thirds of the group will do that on any given day. And that eliminates the need for like a standup or for checking in on people or for asking the question. It's just happening organically and without a meeting. And if you wanna watch it, you can. If you don't wanna watch it, you don't have to.

And so I think a lot of these systems, there's a question of push versus pull. Do we wanna push communication, push information, push meetings on people, or do we wanna create pull resources where if I wanna watch, I can, if I need to know, I can go look, if I'm curious, it's transparent, if I wanna show up, I can show up, but otherwise I can sort of do what's best for me and my role. There's no way to have that kind of a system with that level of trust if we don't have 100% clarity about what roles does Aaron hold, what are their purposes, what decision rights does Aaron have?

and what's expected. And then we can actually have a lot of those things and we can kind of have our cake and eat it too. You know, if you're doing more than 10 hours a week of meetings in a system, unless there's very specific contextual circumstances, you probably can lean in harder on that stuff and find a way to clear the decks.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, you know, I can tell you, you know, when I do surveys of our email list, one problem comes up over and over again, and it's time. Really, I don't have time to sit around and just think or have white space on my calendar. I'm like, you know what? That's nonsense. Jeff, you know, Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, creates white space on his calendar. Yeah. And so I'm always baffled by.

Aaron Dignan

100%.

Aaron Dignan

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

The fact that when people tell me they don't have time for something like the there are two things that come up for me. One is what Laura Vanderkam says. She's like, if you say you don't have time for something, then it's not a priority. Like you'd never say I don't have time to feed my kids. Yeah. And then, you know, the other is that you're just not managing the time you do have well.

Aaron Dignan

Sure.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, well, I mean, I think I think there's a third possibility as well. I think it's definitely true that there's a question of priorities. I think anyone who's read 4,000 weeks can really get into that. We had Oliver on our show recently and it was a blast talking about, you know, what really matters. I do think that there's a question of using our time well and back to school. We don't really teach healthy personal productivity in school. It's not it's not something that we that we prioritize as a culture.

Srini Rao

Uh huh. Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

But the last possibility and the one that I'd like to point to just to give people a small break is if you don't have a lot of power in your organization, if you're not Jeff Wiener.

If you're someone who works for someone that is an absolute taskmaster and a monster, um, it's very easy to end up inundated and overloaded with a bunch of bullshit work that serves a bureaucratic God that nobody fundamentally believes is important, but that just has to get done. And I've seen that in systems time and time again, where people are essentially having their time wasted for them by the bureaucracy and they lack.

You know, there are ways to make noise. There's certainly you can choose to quit or if you have the privilege to find another job, but there's a lot of situations where people feel pretty stuck and we have to help them walk back. All right. What can we do? What do you have control over? What experiment could you try? Who else can you align with to start to unwind this thing? Because it gets to be a pretty nasty ball of yarn, uh, particularly in larger, you know, more legacy organizations.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, it's one of those things that I run into over and over again. This is why I don't thrive in large structure organizations. Because I mean, you're basically what you're talking about where David Draper calls bullshit jobs. Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, nobody does. Exactly, yeah, I love that book. I love that book.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, and there's so many of those. And one of my favorite books of all time is Scott Belsky's Making Ideas Happen. That is like my Bible, so much so that I've templated the entire book in all my project management tools. I use that system for everything. And there's one huge thing that he says that I think people don't quite get, and it's to prioritize by economic and strategic value. Man, like when you, one, that forces you to slow down,

Aaron Dignan

Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

Hehehe

Aaron Dignan

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

and not just run through a list of tasks because, you know, we did an episode the other day on Creativity Hour, which, you know, at this point, people have heard it, but we're like, there's this huge difference between productivity and effectiveness and people confuse them. And it's like, productivity is not about, you know, productivity is all about inputs, effectiveness is all about output.

Aaron Dignan

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the, a lot of what Scott's building on there, and by the way, my, my wife, Britt worked with Scott building B hands for a while. Um, so, so we go back, but the, the thing that is interesting about that model is it almost speaks to the Eisenhower matrix of what is urgent, what is important, and, and how do you then characterize what to do with it? And, and what is interesting is in the systems that I work in and, and try to coach.

Srini Rao

Okay.

Aaron Dignan

The only box that doesn't exist is that delegate box where you can just make somebody else do something that you have deemed not important and not urgent. Um, actually, you know, nobody in our organizations has that box ideally. And we're all collectively deciding that the things that are not important and not urgent just don't have to happen. And the things that are urgent or important, they happen. And so I think it's a collaborative and collective ideal to, to sort of have that matrix as a system or as a team rather than as an individual.

Srini Rao

No. Well, so, you know, I think the other frustration I think I really faced with the world of corporate America, especially as somebody who has ADT, was that eight hours in one place just seemed wildly inefficient. I was like, do I really need to be here? I don't do a damn thing for the last two hours. I just pretend to look busy. And there's something you said in our previous conversation that I want to revisit and talk about in the context of the eight hour workday. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

All right. I don't remember. So when did Brave New Work come out? It was probably what? 2018 when you and I last spoke. Twenty nineteen. OK. It's three years later. Have you seen this change? I mean, yeah, the pandemic got us out of having to be in an office.

Aaron Dignan

2019. Yeah, February of 2019.

Srini Rao

And I can tell you this in my own life. It, you know, when you first start doing your own thing, it's actually hard, even though you're free to spend your time, however you want to break the structure of working eight hours a day, because you're so conditioned to work in that 90 to five window that even when you do your own thing and you no longer have a 90 to five, you still work 90 to five. And. You know, we've got this, you know, operating system for work that's clearly antiquated and broken.

Aaron Dignan

Yes.

Srini Rao

You know, how in the world do you get rid of an eight hour workday when it's such an institution?

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, you know, interestingly, I've seen more movement on this than I expected in the last three years. So there have been some pretty interesting...

groups of organizations that have agreed to experiment with the four day work week, for example, or more flexible hours. I think the pandemic has shocked the system a little bit in the sense that people were able to, in some, not all, but in many organizations, they were able to kind of rewire their workday a little bit to be able to interact with family and deal with kids at home and education and things like that. So it just kind of broke loose a little bit of what maybe was calcified there.

And I think that the data is suggesting, and we've known this for a long time, but the data is suggesting that what you felt intuitively is accurate, which is we actually can't do eight hours of deep, productive work every day as people. Our brains are not built for that. Or we certainly can't do it in one sitting. And so actually what we need to do is figure out how to optimize for the kind of work that we're doing.

And those expectations that go along with that about what we're paying for and what we're getting are what are being challenged and disrupted. And in many, many organizations, the belief with leadership still looks something like, I'm paying you for time. And so I want to see my time. And the more time we spend, the better we'll do. And actually, if you talk to any entrepreneur worth their salt, they'll be like, hmm.

I'm paying for outcomes and skills and effort maybe a little bit, but mostly I'm paying for outcomes. I want something to happen as a result of you working here. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I was like, I don't give a shit how much time it takes you. If you do this, you know, I was like, I don't care if you're out all night doing cocaine and, you know, getting wasted. If you get me what I need, that's your business, not mine. I'm like, not that I would hire somebody who's a cocaine addict, but you know.

Aaron Dignan

Totally.

Aaron Dignan

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I'm concerned about this person, but I but I do think, yeah, it boils down to what you can do for what value. And so we've been talking a lot about this at the ready lately, actually, about the difference between paying for time versus paying for outcomes versus paying for what we're calling like reputation or NPS. Like, how does everybody feel about Jim?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Dignan

And and what does that mean in terms of how well he's doing and in the roles that he's in and so I think I think Every organization needs to have that conversation which is like let's stop for five minutes and talk

What are we paying each other for? What does it mean to work here and to show up? And if we don't have clarity about that, it can create a lot of that confusion and a lot of insecurity, I think, in leaders who are like, since I don't really know what to measure and I don't really know what we care about and I don't have clarity about process or outcomes, I guess I'm just going to try to zoom monitor everybody and just beat them into submission by making them be on camera eight hours a day. So I'm not afraid that they're playing with their pets or something. And it's totally broken.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Now, what it...

Well, it's funny you say that because it makes me think of it some sort of the perspective of, you know, the entrepreneur or freelancer who is notorious for thinking about how they charge for their services based on time. Like even thinking about, you know, I do consulting for people, you know, in building knowledge management systems. And I was like, you know what? It's not the time. I mean, I could do some of this stuff in 30 minutes. It's the outcome you're looking for. And it makes me just think it was like, Oh, I should charge based on value and I should charge way more. Like I, I had a friend who emailed me because I was looking at

Aaron Dignan

Yes.

Aaron Dignan

Absolutely.

Srini Rao

him to help me with something and he sent me his prize and my first instinct was like shit I don't charge enough for the things that I do.

Aaron Dignan

I'm sure many of your listeners have heard the story of the Picasso drawing and it's going to be 10 grand or whatever and the guy's like, what? It took 60 seconds. He's like, no, it took 30 years. I think that is so true in a lot of these fields, especially complex fields, right? Where you build mastery and intuition over many, many patterns and repetitions. And you're like, look, I can come in and I can break this down for you in really short order because I've done so many of these. And that's what you're paying for.

Srini Rao)

Yeah.

Aaron Dignan

or you're paying for that practice in the same way that you'd pay a lot if you were like, hey, yo ma, come play a cello solo at my daughter's wedding. It's five minutes, guess how much it's gonna cost? Yeah, and it should because the dude has played so much cello.

Srini Rao

a fucking fortune. I only know this because

Srini Rao

Well, I mean, I don't know if you know who the Ambanis are. They're Indian billionaires who you'll never believe who they hired as the entertainment, unless you happen to be up on this, for their daughter's wedding. Take a wild guess. Not even close. Think even more famous.

Aaron Dignan

Oh god, please tell me. I... Stevie Wonder.

Aaron Dignan

Michael Jackson? Beyonce, perfect, yeah!

Srini Rao

Beyonce.

Yeah, you know what I mean? Beyonce herself is a billionaire. Yeah, so we're paying.

Aaron Dignan

I love it. I love it. What's that check gotta be? Yeah.

Srini Rao

Oh, a lot. But it just, you know, it just makes me think it's like, wow, we really don't charge enough. I had a podcast listener who sent me a message on Facebook. She's like, Hey, can I ask you some questions about podcasting? I've had friends from college who were like, Hey, you know, would you like to make a new friend? I was like, listen, I don't even need any new friends enough. I said yes to requests like this. I'd still be living at my parents broke as shit. I'm like, and this one friend was like, I thought you'd do this for free because we're Indian. I was like, that's precisely why I won't do it for free because we're both Indian.

Aaron Dignan )

Mm-hmm

Aaron Dignan

Exactly! What are you talking about? That's amazing. Yeah, I just think we hide behind effort sometimes. And frankly, I think it has connections back to school. This episode is quite networked. But in school, a lot of it is like showing up, putting in the hours, putting in the effort. That's what tends to be rewarded. And it's rare that just the test score is all that counts for the grade.

Srini Rao

You, you of all people should know that.

Aaron Dignan

But in actuality, in life, it's just the test score. I mean, we don't do tests, but the test is, can you get the outcome? But I think a lot of people who aren't so sure they can deliver the outcome actually, enjoy hiding behind the hours, right? I'm putting in the hours, I'm doing my best, and that should be enough. And the reality is, it's, you know, that's a...

That's a pleasant fiction that we all operate under, but in the end of the day, unless the job is about being somewhere for a certain amount of time, like a toll booth collector or something, the job is actually about an outcome. And the time you're spending is really about building your mastery. It's not about the value to the organization at all.

Srini Rao

Wow, I feel like I could talk to you about this all day. Well, I have enjoyed this conversation so much. I know we've gone in a bunch of different directions. So I want to finish with my final question. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Aaron Dignan)

Likewise.

Aaron Dignan

Sure.

Aaron Dignan

Well, I think in some ways connected to everything we've talked about, it is about going a different way. There's so much status quo behavior and mimicry in the world that I think I do believe, and I know you talk about this a lot on the show, but I do believe being unmistakable is just about.

Zigging and sagging, right? It's doing something different and thinking for yourself. And so much of org design, as I've talked about in the book and the previous interview, it's like, let's just do it the way everybody else does it, because that must be the right way when the actuality is 80% of our work practices are bullshit born on factory floors. Don't add up to anything. Don't don't add to the human flourishing and the eudaimonia of everything. So yeah, just think for yourself, stop, stop doing what everybody else does. And.

Do what you feel in your gut is right.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your insights and stories and wisdom with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work and everything you're up to?

Aaron Dignan

Yeah, well I'm on Twitter at Aaron Dignan and theready.com and murmur.com are good places to go have a look.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.