This week I have a very special episode for you.
Last week I got to attend the Culture Impact Lab in Chicago, a delightful conference I highly recommend, AND, surprise surprise, my longtime friend and co-conspiring organizational rebel Josh Levine was there! He and I met each other almost exactly 10 years ago, and neither of us had any clue the other was going to be at this thing. A delightful moment of serendipity.
Josh is also a podcast host — he actually has two: one called Great Mondays and one called The Job Sh*tshow, and I highly recommend them both — and he had the idea to do an interview while we were together.
We cover a wide range of topics in this convo, here’s the top 3 I think you will enjoy:
- How one economist’s paper from the 1970s broke work,
- Why we gotta stop trying to out-robot the robot, and
- Yes, we are in a moment of job crisis, but this moment is NOT unprecedented.
Huge thanks to my friend and colleague for his beautiful and important work in the world.
Without further ado, please enjoy this conversation between me and the amazing Josh Levine.
If you’d rather WATCH or LISTEN TO this, you can!
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JL (00:00)
Hey everybody, we are doing a live conversation here. I’m Josh Levine.
JAD (00:06)
I’m Josh Allan Dykstra.
JL (00:07)
And we have both been talking about organizations change and how to make work better for people for a long time. And we happen to be at the same conference at the same time. And so we’re taking the opportunity to have a live conversation about the state of play within organizations. And I’m thinking about it, like we are in the moment. And if you are in an enterprise organization or any business, it kind of feels like a crisis. So it’s almost like the organizational crisis moment. Josh and I were talking last night during our happy hour, our first evening here about what does it mean to be in this crisis and how we might get out of it. Josh, one of the things that I thought was really interesting was that one of the speakers brought up the article that popped up in the 1970s. about the mandate, it’s like the only job of business, the social good of business is to make a profit.
JAD (01:06)
Yes, Milton Friedman.
JL (01:17)
Milton Friedman. So this was kind of the start of the, I don’t know, modern philosophy of business. I always saw that as that kind of kickoff moment where, then the speaker hypothesized that after that, everybody just sort of ran in that direction of maximizing profit at all expenses. Do you have an observation about that in your 20 years around companies doing that kind of thing? Do you agree with my hypothesis that that’s really where we started to see, let’s say started this crisis just to stick with this kind of anchoring point.
JAD (01:47)
Yeah, it does. Yeah. To me, it does seem like an inflection point at least to where a lot of people did jump on a lot of leaders kind of jumped on that bandwagon, I think in the seventies and then into the eighties, we got the “greed is good” kind of… Yeah. Okay. Then it became a bit of a flashpoint that leaders adopted that mindset of that paper that that Friedman put out, then the inevitable road of that thinking kind of got married with the ideology of neoliberalism as well. So this kind of like “privatize everything”…
JL (02:27)
Business will solve the world’s problems.
JAD (02:29)
Yes, that arrived at a moment in the 70s when the system was really being questioned. And so we were starting to get a lot of the instability of the 70s, this kind of cultural revolution of the seventies. And then we got the economic shock of the late 70s around the stagflation and the oil crisis that happened then. And so this ideology arrived at a really convenient time and I think made a lot of sense at that moment in history. It was like “We need to do something different.”
JL (03:01)
It was clarifying. You don’t even need to read the article. You just know what it’s about. A powerful idea.
JAD (03:05)
It was an idea that made sense in the context of a world, a system coming out of World War II that wasn’t making sense anymore. And so now it was like, okay, we need to do something different. And this [Friedman article] arrived and was like, “Yeah, maybe the private market can do this better than government.” So I think it arrived at a moment when it felt like it was helpful. And I just think what we’ve seen now is 40 to 50 years of that thinking has led us to a place that actually turns out isn’t all that helpful. It’s just exacerbated the inequality of things to the point inside organizations and out where we’ve got, just… it’s created another Gilded Age, really. And it’s not sustainable.
JL (03:52)
That’s a fair comparison. Well, so one of the points or one of the threads that I want to connect is the drivers of or the way that organizations attempted to achieve or put into place that philosophy. So we are talking about the drive and this is reflected in culture as well, which is this drive for the ultimate idea is efficiency.
That is the that is the virtue that is the business virtue is efficiency and maximizing productivity and giving the putting that responsibility on the individuals within the organization I will add this this sort of classic American idea of the individual as the hero and what that has caused is the kind of absorption of that idea where I can just sit here for another hour and get more done. And even if I’m not being paid for it, we’ve been able to deliver on that increased efficiency through technological advances.
And we have that, we’re like, okay, great, we’re implementing our CRMs and our ERPs and now we don’t even have to go onto emails. We can do Slack. We can message. We can communicate. We can actually do work at all hours of the day. And the system that started being created then is rewarding that behavior. How do we become more busy as a symbol of the output?
And that I think is what brings us to today’s moment. And you can’t see it, but I’m using my hands to describe… it’s almost like a funnel. And we started very wide and there is this, I don’t even know what it is the funnel is made of, but there’s all these pressures. It’s what the funnel is being formed by all these pressures to do more, to add more priorities, to add more features, to add more hours, to do more things. And that becomes this background for the crisis that I think we’re entering into.
JAD (06:14)
Yeah, it’s a continual kind of nonstop pressure to efficient-ize everything. We like to productiv-ize everything. Make things faster, cheaper. It’s a race to the bottom in a lot of ways. And I think that’s what people are feeling. I think right now it’s showing up in the compression of our emotional capacity, our ability to focus, our ability to be resilient, right? I think we’re all feeling the squeeze even if we didn’t have language to identify why we feel that way. I think a lot of people feel it.
JL (06:59)
I think the thermometer of the moment is the burnout. You and I were talking last night about our own podcasts and creations and whether we should continue them or not. And our conclusion in the moment was the algorithm wants what the algorithm wants and you’re never going to satisfy it. So that to me is sort of the epitome of the ideology of both the society inside and outside of organizations.
JAD (07:29)
Well, it creates this effect that you can’t ever stop. We don’t feel like we can stop.
JL (07:35)
That’s right. But if we allow computers to dictate that, we can’t stop.
Enter A.I., which is not causing the problem, but exacerbating it to such an extent that we can no longer pretend. And this is where, this is where my idea is that we’re in a A.I. crisis or a company crisis, an organizational crisis where we are continuing on this same path towards the sort of monomaniacal path of efficiency and productivity. And here enters A.I., which can be more efficient and more productive. Faster, longer. And because we’ve been doing this for 50 years, our only response is to sit and make things go faster, to try to chase that as humans and what I hope we are realizing and why this crisis is coming to bear and why this crisis is actually a good thing is we can’t. We are incapable of trying to out efficiency-ize the machines.
JAD
Yeah, Kali said this yesterday: “We will never robot the way the robot does.”
JL
That’s right. We’ve been so in fact, this is a great way to articulate this right — that idea of “maximize” in the title, right? Maximize shareholder value, maximize compute, like we were trying to become the machine. We say, “Aw man, you’re a machine!” And now we have a technology that really can outperform us on those metrics and people and organizations are breaking. Yeah. Or will break very shortly, I believe.
JAD (09:36)
Yeah, I think so. Especially if we try to out-robot the robot, right? Like that, I think that’s the move that feels like we need to do it, but we can’t. We just, A) we physically can’t, we emotionally can’t, we can’t keep up. So the move, I think, is to become more authentically human.
So what’s really interesting about this moment, right, it raises some really interesting inquiries about what does it mean to be human. How do we actually stop being so robotic? I think, to again reference back to Kali’s talk yesterday at this conference, there’s this “switching places” that we’ve done. We’ve become more and more robots over the years. I just love this point that Kali made. We’ve turned into robots. Right? Our work has been robotic… roboticized.
JL (10:28)
Are we surprised that now the excuse because the frame that we’re coming at this with is that we have emulated the robots. Are we surprised then that the excuse the story is: “I can replace workers with A.I.” And I think that is the false premise.
Now I think we’re moving into the second. What I’d like to do is to articulate the second half what so we’ve gone from where we came from to where we are in the moment and now I’m going to create the inverse of that funnel… so it’s almost the the totality of the shape is a is an hourglass so our job now is to Understand or think about or imagine ways to create more space
JAD (11:21)
To re-broaden.
JL (11:23)
This, I think, will also use the kind of most immediate example is one of the common gripes that I am seeing and hearing personally and on social media is our leaders are giving us A.I. and saying, I don’t know, just experiment with it. And everybody’s going, with what time? organization is a system that has been created to force and reward efficiency and now we’re asking people to experiment which is the antithesis of efficiency and that I think is where it becomes very evident to the individual and hopefully to the manager and hopefully to the leaders That we’ve been moving in the wrong direction… we’re using humans in the wrong way.
JAD (12:18)
Yeah, it becomes a very existential question. So much of our work gets overlapping with our identity. And so when jobs get unbundled into tasks… So this is kind of what’s happening, right? Is what we’re… I think this is actually a more constructive way for people to think about it.
If we unbundle; right now your job is a bundle of tasks that kind of assumes all of those tasks go together. But if we unbundle those tasks, we can start to see more easily that these certain tasks actually are performed better by the robot versus some of these other tasks can never be ostensibly performed by a robot; those are the things that we need to get humans to do.
But I think to your point, A) there’s not enough slack in the system anymore for people to have any space or bandwidth to actually like, do any unbundling because that requires you to step outside of your daily task list and who has the time to do that!? But then B) also it needs… really a lot of thought, but it requires a lot of wisdom and intentionality. And these are not things that business is optimized for. We’ve optimized all of that slack out of the system. And now we’re asking people to do it. And it’s like, yeah, I think that’s where the tension comes from. It’s like, I don’t know how to navigate that because I have no time.
JL (13:41)
And I’ve never practiced it totally and to me the let’s look at the let’s look at the kind of an analogy or kind of an opposite in antonym analogy or something where we’re seeing A.I. being used in really interesting new to create new interesting productive ideas and executions in other arenas that aren’t business. So for example, project Alphafold where we’re seeing scientists using A.I. to invent and create new proteins that could have never been created before. The whole premise of research is that space to experiment. The whole premise of creating a container within a university and having these tenured professors be responsible for doing these research is to create new knowledge. That is the opposite of what business has been doing, but now we’re saying, “Hey, you need to do a completely new thing” and we don’t have that space for it. So that’s the crush of the kind of the black hole of the zero point of where we are.
JAD (15:01)
Yeah, I’m afraid that we’re not to the zero point yet, right? That actually gets a lot more crushing before it gets better. But I hope that, in my happy dreams…
JL (15:13)
When I have them, every once in a while.
JAD (15:16)
Every once in a while, when I have them, this is a moment, it’s a watershed moment for us to really take a look at what work is and what we want work to be in our lives. Because if we have the option of automating all the crap that we don’t want to do, let’s frickin’ do that, right? That there’s so much drudgery in work. Let’s let the robots take it.
JL (15:37)
I just did an interview about the bullshit work like defining what the bullshit work is my base. Let’s do it. But what is left? And this was a question that has come up multiple times at this conference… what is left? There’s a speaker that said it’s an identity crisis.
And so, in your happy place, you know we have to recognize, or really start to create a moment to explore what it is we’re trying to expand into what is possible.
JAD (16:15)
Yeah, that’s going to be essential. That’s why I obsess over this “optimistic future” idea, because I think more of our visions in society right now are “dystopian future,” right? Plenty of movies. We’ve got lots of Terminators in our brain. That version of the future is much easier to conjure.
So the practice, I think, for us to be optimists and say, “What would we actually want?”
I borrow a lot from the world of Appreciative Inquiry. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about that directly, but the idea in Appreciative Inquiry is that humans move towards our picture of the future, whatever it may be.
And so for us to create a future that we actually want, we need to imagine a better one. Otherwise we can’t move toward it.
And so that’s why this muscle I think is really important for us to work out, which is, I understand… it’s really remarkably hard at this moment when everyone’s crushed, like we’re all feeling crushed.
JL (17:14)
By pressures. We’re making decisions from a place of fear.
JAD (17:19)
It’s remarkably difficult, I think, to be an optimist in this part of the cycle of history. But I think it’s so vitally important because otherwise we can’t actually move towards something better.
JL (17:32)
If we don’t know where we’re headed. So then let’s spend a few minutes discussing how we might start to create more space. So you’re starting with this big concept that then you would advise folks to at worst cope with and at best kind of aspire to a more positive, what it might look like. Yeah. So talk to us for a minute or two about what you know about how to imagine an ideal state, a more optimistic future.
JAD (18:08)
Yeah, I think one thing I would recommend is to just understand where we are in the cycle of things, because what’s happening right now is very similar to what happened in the Great Depression and the World War II era.
So pre-New Deal, we’re looking at a world of crisis when government seems incompetent and largely is incompetent, where our social structures don’t seem to hold up anymore, where we don’t have a sense of social cohesion anymore. That time period was actually remarkably similar to the time period before the Civil War.
Also, right there, we’ve got a period of massive industrialization. the technology, very similar to now, right? There’s a technology displacement as well right there, it’s just steam engines and railroads, where it’s A.I. now, of course. But like, again, a very similar time period. So another speaker said yesterday that these are not unprecedented times.
JL (19:05)
They’re precedented times.
JAD (19:06)
Very precedented. Look at those seasons of conflict. I think what we see is that we’re in another one now. And so if we recognize that, we can say, “OK, this is where we are in the cycles of history.” And the cool thing about being in a “season of crisis” is that it can push us to actually innovate. So much of it has to do with our orientation to the conflict, to the crisis.
But if we can say, “All right, this is what this season is and it’s actually what it’s for; there needs to be a season of decay and death of the old system for the new thing to be born” then I think we can actually get some juice from it to the point where we can say, “OK, now I can start to imagine a world where I get to work on things that I actually want to work on” or “have an economy that I can actually have a say in” or “have a government that’s actually doing things that matter to me and my family” or… on and on.
JL (20:02)
In the parlance of innovation, it’s a burning platform. We’re not going to leave where we are and about how it is unless we’ve burned the ships. We don’t have an option forward. That’s what this season is. I read something about the “Terrible 20s.” It’s like we’re in the 2020s and it’s like it is just hit after hit after hit. I do think that we have, we are in the middle of a decade of this shift and this, like you said, decay or destruction.
OK, so we can imagine this moment as an opportunity for something different. And we talked a lot about, yesterday we talked, there was a conversation about the impossible and embracing the fact that you don’t just shy away from the impossible challenge, because that is really where the richness is. That’s what we want.
And so here it is, Josh is channeling this permission to embrace an impossible opportunity of seeing that future.
Let’s get more practical. Inside of an organization, some manager is listening to this now, some leader. Let’s just talk through some small, tangible things that we can do inside of our own teams to muscle and create, push back against that system just at least now until the system collapses. What can we do today?
JAD (21:47)
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, Josh. I think it’s a really good inquiry. So here’s what comes up for me, and then I want to hear what you think about this. What comes up for me is a couple of things.
First, I think we need to protect our energy. Through a crisis, you need to be able to keep yourself afloat. So wherever your place is where you go to replenish yourself, A) figure out what that is and then make sure you get it through this time of crisis and make sure you can do that actually inside your workplace. I think that’s the harder part because a lot of us can say, yeah, I can go to the beach or I can go to the golf course, but like you’re not actually gonna spend most of your life on the beach or the golf course. You’re gonna probably spend it in your work. So you need to find ways to replenish your energy throughout the day at work as a practice. Yeah, so I think that’s a first one. Do you wanna add anything to that?
JL (22:34)
No, no, no, that’s great.
JAD (22:44)
Next one I would say is learn to practice restraint, because restraint is the core of wisdom. So no matter what kind of spiritual or philosophical tradition you look at through the history of human culture, if you look at the tradition of wisdom, at the core of it is the idea of restraint. It’s what we don’t do. It’s what I make space for. It’s what I stop from happening. That is at the core of the idea of wisdom. And so I would say, this is a skill you can practice.
And this is something the machine can never do, right? This is something the robot can never do is actually restraint because it’s built around the optimization of speed. So the more we practice saying no, the more we practice our boundaries, the more we practice saying like, this is the space I need to protect my energy… I think that’s another really, really big, big…
JL (23:35)
Yeah. one of the lessons that I learned early as an entrepreneur is because business is so unpredictable, you need to be really diligent about feeding yourself and around the other things in life. And so always like just making sure that you prioritize your physical wellness, right? So whatever your exercise regime is or you know, always be really diligent about that and that lesson is now something that people inside of organizations need to take on because the organization and we see all sorts of ways that this is happening. It’s no longer taking care… is no longer protected space. It used to be, that was the role of the organization. That was the social contract. You sign up to become an employee, you get health insurance, you get time off, you get security. That’s no longer the case. And so as individuals and humans, we need to establish our own practice. And I almost feel like this, there’s kind of this sort of Millennial / Gen Z backlash of saying, “Well, the company… you don’t have to take care of the company, the company is no longer taking care of you” kind of attitude. And I think that is an expression of that. And so instead of saying, “I’m just not going to do my most here,” i.e. quiet quitting, turn it into the practice of blocking off your lunch and saying, “I cannot make that meeting.” You have to then be your own infrastructure.
That then leads me to… because we can refill fill our own cups, but what we know now is community is going to be more important than ever in order to create resilience through this destructive time.
So before… “What do you do for work?” Your work is your identity you had that community and you can… I guess my statement is really… how do you find the people that you find energy with, that you can rely on, that could be your team? And as a team leader, you can foster and facilitate that. You can even protect the team from the worst impulses of the organization and the system and take it on yourself.
You need to start as an individual showing up regularly to create some sort of community because there will be a day a week a month a year where you don’t have the internal capacity, no matter how many glasses of water you drink and how fit you are, to be able to continue to thrive on your own and we need others. So that might be a spiritual or religious institution that might be extended family that might be support groups that might even just be a regular group, you know getting together with friends.
JAD (26:59)
Yeah, I think and I think that’s actually very historically precedented too, right? So what we see in these cycles is we come out of a very individualistic kind of time period and now we’re moving back more into a communal focused time.
JL (27:14)
We should we’re not in a moment. Yeah, but that’s going forward. That’s where it’s going.
JAD (27:19)
In the next decade, right? I think we’ll see a lot more of what you just said of people recognizing that they need that.
JL (27:25)
They do. I think we see little snippets of that now and it’s couched as a rebellion against social media. So the decline of the dating apps, the increase of the in-person events. And that’s, that’s wonderful to me. That’s a good symbol for that.
I think leaning into those things and present experience included… this year, one of my commitments was to show up to more places to conferences that were of, you know, high value, high integrity. And this, you know… I show up here in Chicago, you show up here in Chicago. We’re both from different cities. I’m from Portland, Oregon. Josh is from Denver, Colorado, and we’re showing up and having this happy collision. I haven’t seen Josh in person in a couple of years. And so now we have this opportunity.
So, making the effort, putting the energy in… it is so easy to sit at home, be on your phone, order DoorDash. And we need to put in the effort.
So I’m going to go right back to efficiency. All of those digital products are created to “relieve” pain and effort. And what we have lost is the most important piece in the pursuit of efficiency. We’ve lost the relationship and we’ve lost our community. So I think this, the real… we need to take it on ourselves. We can no longer in the moment rely on government. We can’t rely on institutions. We can’t rely on organizations.
And so, if you are inside of an organization, you can create that protection. You can create a little bit more space for this. And ultimately it’ll be up to the individual to decide, to choose what to leave behind. What to change. What are you going to change? What practice will you change in order to really survive and prepare to survive the turmoil of this moment and be able to set up to thrive in that next moment.
JAD (29:52)
Yeah, basically, I think what we need you to do is to become more entrepreneurial. Like when I think about a core skill, and sometimes people ask me like, what am I teaching my kids? So they’re, they’re 11 and 13 now, and yeah, what am I teaching them about? What am I thinking about college or something? I’m like… I’m actually not, because what I think about is how to help them have a strong sense of identity and be able to be entrepreneurial in spirit.
So even if you’re in an organization, the things that you’re talking about are these things of self-management of schedule and time and energy replenishment boundaries. We used to be able to rely on our organizations to give us some of those lines.
JL (30:37)
Clock in at nine, out at five.
JAD (30:39)
And yeah, I guess what I’m suggesting to any folks who are in organizations is that that agreement is also going to get unbundled, right? It’s going to get messier. It’s going to get more blurry. And so you need to take it on yourself, even inside a company, I think, to be able to self-manage some of those things. Otherwise, this time period is going to be very difficult, without those skills or practices.
JL (31:08)
So back to the driving force behind this, or at least behind this moment, is A.I.. And this will be the last little piece that I want to dig into, which is, this is undeniably a powerful influence and tool. How might we use A.I. to support our own, this thesis, entrepreneurial recapture and protection and preparation.
JAD (31:44)
I think that’s why I like this word and that framing so much because in entrepreneur circles — the entrepreneur word — because I think in entrepreneur circles, what you’ll hear is that we don’t talk about problems, we talk about opportunities. Constantly reframing: that’s a problem that can be solved with this kind of solution. That’s the entire entrepreneurial brain, really, in a nutshell. So that’s what I’m asking people to do, I think, is to say, “Yes, this is a problem, but it’s also an opportunity.” It just depends on which side of it you’re looking at.
And I think that’s, it’s not easy, right? Any entrepreneur will tell you we’re all a little bit crazy because this is really hard, but it’s also, there’s a lot of joy in it. And there’s a lot because humans… we’re designed to be problem solvers. We’re so creative and resourceful. It’s just that the industrial machine has stamped that out of you.
JL (32:39)
What can we do? How do we get off this chasing of the highly productive machine? How do we step off of that? You only win the race when you stop racing. So I do think that the challenge is going to be rethinking: what is your relationship to this? How do you separate from it? Right now we’re feeling the pain in our own bodies, but let’s, let’s extract.
JAD (33:10)
I think that’s right. I think that’s why we talk about things like unbundling jobs from the tasks. It feels very helpful to me. Or sometimes I talk about the place your job used to be was in the center. It was “making the thing.” But now the A.I. is way faster at making the thing than you or me. So now your job moves from the center to the edges. It’s more like, now your job is telling the machine what to create and making sure it created the thing that you wanted it to build. So your job moved from the center to the edges. It’s different tasks.
But to your point, if we can start to understand that our job isn’t the same kind of cohesive, it’s not a cohesive material, right? It’s not a bundle of one thing. It’s all these other things. I think that liberates us to be able to say, “Oh yeah, these certain parts are actually more energizing for me. I should do more of that and try to automate the crap I don’t want to do.” Let that go.
That’s why I say we’re in a really powerful moment if we can start to shift the conversation from “jobs I have to do” to “meaningful work that I actually want to do.”
JL (34:19)
Josh. Amazing. Thank you.
JAD
Likewise, this is so fun.
JL
Awesome, thanks everybody.
