38. Damon Kornhauser on experience mapping and building resilient work cultures

Speaker A: Today I'm pleased to introduce you to Damon Kornhauser. Damon and I worked together at Campus, an edutech startup. I think it was maybe two years ago, something like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, sounds about right.

Speaker A: Uh, Damon did something there that I just totally found fascinating called experience mapping. And so, uh, we agreed to talk about that today. I wanted to hear a lot about your thinking and experience with that type of work. Then I think we're also going to talk about the topic of building resilient work cultures. Um, Damon, to start, do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background and how you got into this space?

Speaker B: Happy to. Um, and again, thanks for having me on the podcast. Um, my origin story stretches back into a really long career in the hospitality industry. Um, I, interestingly enough, started off that was also the seed of learning and development. In one of my first early waiting tables jobs before I moved to New York, I was tapped to build our training program. Um, and so it was from a pretty early date that I started to correlate, uh, learning and development and how teams learn with the performance and the culture of that team, both customer facing and internally of what it was literally like to come to work every day. Um, and so that really planted the seed. And then I moved to New York, uh, to study what I thought was going to be arts administration. I thought I was going to get out of school and run, run arts organizations. And so I was very grounded in narrative and had a chance to go to what I like to call the choose your own adventure school of NYU Gallatin, which is extraordinary if anybody wants to carve their own path. Um, and what I created there was a program, uh, grounded in narrative anthropology, which was a Damon special, um, which to me was the story of, um, what story do we tell, how do we tell it? And how has that story changed over the course of human history? And mostly through a lens of performative, um, but also through an organizational lens of, uh, what does it mean? What are the stories that we're creating organizationally? I had a really wonderful opportunity to work for some extraordinary and dysfunctional companies here in New York, um, that are not on my cv. So don't go looking. I'm not going to embarrass anybody, um, but really wonderful organizations. And it blew my mind. Ah, the question of how can such great producing organizations be so dysfunctional inside? And it really came down to not just culture, but what story and the mental models that were being created inside. Um, and I got out of school and realized that it's really nigh impossible to pay your New York City rent, uh, in the arts industry and ended up like so many back in the restaurant world and was extraordinarily lucky early on to work with some really spectacular companies here in the city, um, that really forged how I thought about experience and about service and about hospitality. And I realized that those two sandboxes, the narrative and storytelling and the performative and the restaurant industry were really doing the same thing. Um, and that a restaurant is nothing other than an experience lab that is, you know, cranking 300 people through the room at night. And that's a huge opportunity to play with service and to play with experience Design, um, and I had an amazing career doing that, um, in leadership and in consulting and working with some great brands, um, asking the question, which is one of my favorite design thinking or design questions, um, what do you want it to feel like? Um, and then designing experiences based on, you know, what the brand wanted. Um, and so in about 2016, like, like so many people in the restaurant industry started getting a little existential about it, um, and decided to triple down into the education space, um, and had a chance to work with some really great companies both from, uh, you know, event design, um, innovation programming, building partnerships between higher ed and enterprise, um, and then just kept diving further and further into the more focused education space, um, which is where I am happily waking up every day now.

Speaker A: Wonderful. So you and I worked together when I joined campus for a while as an interim, um, I think my role was, let's see, I was interim VP of Engineering. I think that was my title at the time.

Speaker B: I remember cto, but sure, it might

Speaker A: have been cto, um, I don't quite remember but um, you kind of embarked on this um, project and pulled in people from across the company in this um, experience map project. And I thought it was totally interesting and really, really valuable. Can you describe a little bit of like what problems you were seeing or what, um, what made you pull the trigger on that and think, okay, in my busy day this is like, this is, I'm going to actually wrangle this and make this happen?

Speaker B: Well, like so many cross departmental initiatives and projects, um, this one started with, as a brainchild of um, a member of the C suite at the time, um, who I think had a sense of a potential problem opportunity in the organization and wanted to tap somebody to go look into that for me and come back and tell me what you see. Um, the problem that we were wrestling with was so many different pieces of data and touch points of our, quote, customer, which in that case was a student, so user. Um, but our students, we were trying to collect so many different pieces of information across so many different platforms, some of which are legally required as, you know, a Pell grant dispersing organization, um, and as a regulated educational company, um, while also trying to make sure that students were staying inspired and wanting to show up on the first day of school, um, and sharing all the relevant personal information about their hopes and their dreams, um, and enrolling in classes. And so every department had their finger in this pot of, um, I need to know this, I want to find this out. We also want them to complete this. Um, we want them to feel this way. And so, you know, between academics, student success, uh, financial aid, et cetera, et cetera, there were a lot of different parties trying to engage with the student with their own needs and wants and dreams. Um, what I think the conversation was born out of was realizing that we weren't necessarily thinking of it from the student's perspective that everybody was berating, and that one of the reasons that students were not showing up on day one was because of the. Not the desolation of contact, and we just weren't leading them properly, but too much contact. And so I think, to put it succinctly, the problem we were trying to solve is how do we actually simplify all of these touch points and engage with them with more intention, um, both in terms of the meaning of each touch point, um, but also placing it within a larger narrative, a larger story, um, that ultimately is built around the student, which is the best way to get them to show up anywhere, um, is to make it about them. And so the question that I was charged with is identifying, um, how we could start to approach, um, streamlining all of these different touch points and all these different data points, um, into one simple, cohesive thread, which is never going to be simple and never going to be cohesive. But let's see if we can get a little bit further. The second problem was the visibility of each of those departmental engagements to the other departments. Um, it was really hard to understand that, oh, financial aid is already asking them for that, uh, or they're going to do this touch point here. And so there was no coordination. You know, from my perspective, I'm financial aid. I'm only reaching out four times to get four different forms filled out. Well, every department is doing that over the course of however many weeks. And so they're getting emails every day, twice a day. And, um, so let's just get In a room, let's see how each one of us is engaging. Naturally, let's put that on the timeline just to see how overwhelming the student might be. And then let's move with some intention towards refining that and, um, bringing a better design level to it.

Speaker A: Um, so as the representative of engineering at the time, I found this totally interesting because engineering was also doing the same thing in that, uh, we had all of our, you know, user experience, um, ways we were influencing the user experience, and we were totally blind to what everybody else was doing. And when, when we kind of mapped it out, it was, it was a little bit shocking. It was like, oh, no, what have we done? Like, all of us were locally optimizing, but we weren't actually designing it or like integrating our experience. Um, can, can you tell me about what that experience was like? What was, what was hard about it? What, what that experience felt like, putting it together?

Speaker B: Yeah, happy to. Um, I, I decided to not try to fix anything out of the gate. Um, really step phase one was just figuring out what steady state level setting was. Where, where are we even starting from? Um, and for better and for worse, that really ended up constituting the bulk of where we took it to. And we can unpack that in a moment as well. Um, and so really I just started with departmental discovery interviews. Um, I sat down with a representative of each department, ideally somebody pretty senior. Um, and I basically wanted to be like, talk me through, share me on, let me see every document we share, every email that goes out, um, what data we're collecting, what are the fields that we're collecting, and then also just kind of, you know, humanly riff on what that means and what do you want that to mean? And I was making just copious notes pretty early. Um, I'm trying to remember actually how I started wanting to capture the data, um, you know, beyond my notebook. Pretty quickly it became apparent that this was an opportunity to not just capture the data points of a student, but also to capture the data points that represented, um, the intention, uh, or the experience of each touch point. M. An example there might be. We're sending out the email from student success, um, to talk about career aspirations. How are we capturing that? Or they are, they are, um, enrolling in classes. How are we capturing what classes and what the learning outcomes are of those classes are. And so it ended up going pretty deep into, um, the functional data that was getting requested and shared back, um, the experiential data and then also the learning data. Because ultimately the way that I wanted to Approach. This was. This is a learning journey. How do we trace everything, everything that we're asking back to their. And this is a big, uh, campus word is purpose. Um, and how do we continually remind the student that this is driving their purpose forward? And that is why we are asking and engaging in these questions. Nothing should ever be asked or requested in a. What is this for? I don't get it. Why am I filling this out? Um, but rather creating this continual, um, culture. And we can talk about sort of building the cultures of these things. Things too. Um, but making sure that the student always understands the journey that we're asking them to come on and why they, um, are coming on it.

Speaker A: Yeah. What I remember was that after a few phases, we ended up with kind of a shared notion doc. That was pretty complicated.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I tend to be a very visual person. And also, um, as I think about things from that narrative arc standpoint, um, it made sense that some form of a timeline was the best way to display this. Um, and taking advantage of the technical tools that we had, what was in our SAS playbook, I tagged. I think I ended up using notion, um, in the Gantt, effectively the tablegant function of Notion. I originally thought I might do kind of a systems map, um, in a, In a Google Slides Figma style. And that just got way too complicated way too fast with as many different types of data points as I wanted to be collecting, um, financial aid information, curricular information, etc. And so what the what doing it as a, As a relational database set me up to do is be able to compartmentalize each of those categories of information and then to display it and filter it and sift it in any way that we want it. And so when we all gathered around the boardroom table, what we were looking at was effectively a Gantt chart of, uh, each department, every touch point that they're having mapped against every other department. And so you can see, and a good context actually for the, for the whole project is to. Is to remind that the, um, scope of the project was from application through the first six weeks of enrollment. That was the, the timeline that we wanted to start looking at. Um, rather than biting off the entire two years plus all of the months leading up to their first day of class. So it was a presumptively narrow scope that became pretty quickly, pretty fast or pretty, pretty complicated pretty fast. Um, and so what you ended up seeing was every department and mapping out all of their touch points above and below every other department mapping out those touch points and so you could go at T minus four weeks and see all of the different touchpoints that were competing effectively. But when we started to map out the different data points that we were asking for, let's just put it in the context of career aspiration. Student success is asking that. Academics is asking that their application is asking that. You, you start to ask the question of, well, why are we asking this question three different times, at three different times and what is that translating from the, to the student in terms of our ability to understand what information they're sharing back? Why are you asking me this question three times? Who is it getting to? And that, you know, I would say is one of the simple desirable outcomes is ask a question once, make sure that, that we are communicating competency by getting it to where it needs to go. Um, much harder said than done. Um, especially if you want to act on that information. But um, that was the intention. We all basically have this beautiful complicated, um, multi vertical Gantt chart, um, that enables us to start to map and even nudge things around. Especially once we started to play in, um, dependencies of uh, oh, I need that form before that happens. That then starts to open up these conversations of how we might move things around, um, to make a better experience and also to better move the information around the organization.

Speaker A: I just loved what this made possible. Um, and I guess my experience has been with this type of cross functional work, it's often really hard to fully land it as much as you would like, um, because people are just pulled in so many different directions and often something like this, um, it can be hard to get everybody fully using something like this as a source of truth. And so I guess I'm kind of curious like what impact you felt like it had, what were missed opportunities and what would you have done differently? What, what, um, what was a smashing success? Like just kind of reflect on that a little bit.

Speaker B: Um, you know, I joke, uh, I joke that I am a really very good over engineer. Um, I can certainly overwrought any system you can, you can throw at me. Um, and so I think people got into the room and really appreciated the complexity of what we had intentionally and unintentionally built as a company. Uh, the way that the whole system worked. Knowing where to stick your finger in the wall or which of the first, first levers to pull is a challenging prospect. Especially when you effectively are a startup and are moving so fast already and so many changes, changes are being made quarter over quarter by the learnings that you are generating every quarter that Adding in another layer of iteration is very challenging. Um, and I think, as I imagine, as many of us know, for any systemic change to happen, there has to be leadership buy in through and through. And so the moment attention gets drawn off of an initiative like this, there's no charter to move it forward. It becomes a really interesting artifact. And that was a great learning. Um, but in the measure what matters kind of world, um, it's really, unless somebody's asking the question, nobody's going to volunteer the answer. Um, and I think, you know, to put it really simply, um, to have had, um, a requirement of walk out of this room with one thing that you can change would, um, have been great. The problem with that is that what we were shining a light on was that no one department can make any one change. It was actually showing the complexity of the system and that required very coordinated response. Um, and so when you're basic, when you're still just trying to, you know, carry water, chop wood and get students to show up and make sure they do their homework and get the financial aid forms filled out on time, um, something's got to give.

Speaker A: Yeah, that was kind of my take on it as well. I felt like it was an incredibly valuable exercise to run and that something like this is, is really challenging to like, weave into the, the fabric of a company unless you have some sort of mechanism for it. And that, um, you know, that wasn't at the time, maybe the, the priority. But, um, it seemed like an incredibly high leverage way of like problem solving. The, essentially the, the product that you're offering your customers are, the experience you're offering to people. Like, it just gives you so much more leverage and so much more ability to shape that experience.

Speaker B: I think you touched on something that it might have actually grown out of. And I know that I've thought about this before, which is so many of our orgs, especially in the education space, um, are built on multiple platforms that are not necessarily communicating with one another. And so we can't just press a button and see all the engagements on a dashboard. Um, and so the necessity, quote unquote, of me doing what that project was trying to do grows out of that disconnect of across our SaaS, um, and is trying to create visibility into the uninteroperability of all of these systems. Um, and so I think, to your point, yeah, if you could just generate the overarching single solution system that is already mindful of the entire journey, um, then it might solve that, Might solve that. Um, but right now, historically we're trying to, to piece that experience across all of the different systems we're using.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Have you done this exercise at other companies? I believe you had done something kind of similar or earlier, like variations on this before, and if so, can you kind of tell me a little bit about that experience?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Um, and I might actually touch on before and a little bit of after as well. So this grew out of, um, a model, a template that I took and made my own over the, over years. Um, listen, like, experience design is not a, is. It's been around for a second. Um, but what I enjoy doing is taking the fundamentals of service strategy and experience design, um, and bringing in some creative design style thinking and exponential thinking. And so thinking about a touch point, to me is a really great opportunity to make sure it kind of traces back to the plans, uh, are useless. Planning is indispensable. Quote. Um, and so it's a great opportunity to ask the question, what does the user really want? What does a win look like in this touch point? What does the loss absolutely look like? And let's make sure that we're not accidentally building towards that. And then what does a 10 times win look like? And then what is the functionality of this touchpoint? What do they have to accomplish? And, and so some of this is sort of the business model canvas. You know, what's the pain point, what's the game, what's the job? Um, but then also using that as a creative launching point, the thing that I also love to do when I used to do this in the hospitality industry is make sure that every touch point is mindful of all of the ones that have come before and everything that is coming after. And that goes back to that, building a narrative. Because we might not be thinking about the other department and their touch points and their engagements, but the user certainly is. And they know that when they get the email on day 34 that they're thinking about all of the ones that have come before and what is the arbitrary experience we're accidentally creating. Um, that's an opportunity to bring some attention. Um, and so what I would say is Campus was certainly the most complex version of this I had done to date. Um, because of the application across so many different departments and with so many legally required touch points. That was fascinating to me. Um, of what we're asking when because we have to, and then what are we asking when because we want to. And then putting all of that through the lens of, uh, what feels best

Speaker A: to the Student Sometimes I think a lot about things like organizational design and uh, it's, you know, it's almost a truism in leadership circles that you, your work product and what you present to customers is often more reflective of how you're organized than how you're trying to design for the customer. And I guess what I love about this is it's kind of a counter pressure to that. It's a uh, it's a way of kind of forcing your organization or helping your organization design experiences around the actual needs of people rather than just the needs of the, you know, people doing their job within a company. And it's totally logical that we will produce these like actual terrible experiences for people because we're doing what is naturally, we're optimizing for our own job. And um, it's so interesting just like the dynamics of how this is just totally logical that we would end up with these bad experiences.

Speaker B: Yeah, I actually think that um, the reservation company OpenTable, um, and I haven't been in the industry in a decade. Um, but one of the brilliant things I think that they did was there were in any uh, in any guest profile in the system. There were restaurant notes and there were guest notes. Guest notes traveled with the guest to any restaurant that they booked through the open table system. So things like likes allergies that became visible to everybody. Um, and it was such a delightful way of being able to, to make really important information portable. Um, and to not have to repeat yourself every single time. Or even better for a restaurant to bring some initiative when the reservation is made and say oh by the way, I do know. I see in your notes X, Y and Z. And the guest is like I've actually never booked with you. How did you know that? And you're like because that's what we do.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, you can be like, oh, I just wanted to let you know we do have a gluten free menu or um, we do, you know exactly what whatever your needs are. That's, that's really amazing.

Speaker B: And then tracing it back to education and touching on some more recent conversations. I do find it fascinating that there are variations of this conversation I've had with multiple organizations. There's an ongoing wonderful org I've been talking to. Um, and they are highly functional. Um, they collect a lot of data, they bring incredible intentionality. I think their students would say that they feel seen and heard. And um, and yet the leadership team of that organization wants to do better. And so what they have articulated is that they don't feel that the student as a holistic being is the mental model that everybody on the team is engaging with, that still the instructors are doing their thing, everyone's doing a great job, but that there is still an opportunity, um, to make the student the center of the experience. And, and how might we leverage technology to do that and data? Um, and I think, you know, I think their experience of the opportunity or the challenge of that is because of the fractured systems that we use. Um, and so the desire to see, you know, I don't know that I've really thought about it before, but does it really come. Does our. Does our technological craving come from our human side of, uh, we want to see a person as a holistic being in front of us. We just can't get the tech to do it for us. Um, and so that's a really kind of delightful, uh, craving that we're trying to. An itch that we're trying to scratch with our tech that just isn't there yet.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Um, so I really love this practice. I love this type of thinking. I think it's, um, actually something. I can't think of a company that wouldn't benefit from this type of thinking and this way of organizing around customers. Um, I mean, sometimes you do see certain roles that will naturally take on some of this. Like, you'll see product management that is like thinking about the whole customer experience or something like that. But it's. It's rare for it to be this coherent. And I like the idea of this map as a way of kind of bringing cross, functional, partner people together to partner and kind of, um, have a source of truth of what the experience is like. Do you have any, um, advice for anybody that is thinking about, uh, engaging in some sort of an experience map?

Speaker B: I think my first answer might be a little philosophical, but I go back to an early theater professor of mine, um, who, when we watched any play or read any play or talked about any story, um, always asked the question, what is this the story of? And it was not a, you know, chicken crossing the road is not the answer. Um, creature forging out against adversity across seas of. You know, it's however we want to define that. Um, and so however you can inhabit the. The customer, the user's experience, understand what their overarching experience is with your brand. Um, you know, even in the, in the hospitality industry, one of the things I used to drill in was, was that an experience starts when they become aware of your brand, not even when they make the reservation. And so everything is contributing or detracting from that story, um, including your competitors opinions of you should that become part of the narrative. Um, but as much as possible, really try to understand your users experience of your brand, um, through their experience from start to finish and how that gets layered and layered and layered. Um, everything is an accumulation of the touch points that have come before. That's um, number one. Um, and then ask questions. Um, you know, try to break it. It is very, it is too easy to get overwhelmed with this stuff. Um, so pick a few touch points. Pick five, you know, one in the middle, one in the beginning, couple at the end and, or just ask the question, what are the most important meaningful moments of you know, obviously, what's the call to action? What's the conversion? Um, where is our predominant drop off? Where is attrition happening? Um, you know I worked for a brand. This is such a lovely sentiment. I worked for a brand that, that, that programmed that using the tools at our disposal. Um, realized when a customer was engaging for the second time. That, and that became the most important touch point because that is when somebody becomes a regular or decides if they're going to become a regular, singular or not. Um, so like that. Pick your, pick your starting touch points. Ask the question what is the function of this? What is from an organization standpoint, what does the customer need out of this? What do we need out of this? And are we just even at table stakes delivering on that? And then ask the question of what would be five times better? Um, and this is where I love to play with lo fi exponential thinking is going back to the actual emotional experience of that touch point. What is this supposed to feel like? And then what would it look like five times better, five times better than that. And if you can isolate and define what that moment could feel like with 10 times the resources, you can almost always figure out a way to do that in a really simplified way. Um, and that is the secret of like surprise and delight. It does not have to be expensive, it does not have to be ornate. Um, there are really lovely simple ways to express concern, recognition and consideration. Um, in a touchpoint. Um, and so start there, um, and talk to everybody else in your org. Um, I would say that the biggest challenge I have seen with initiatives like this um, is that they're very hard to make organizational wide because everybody's telling a different story. Um, and so to put the student at the center of the experience is really hard. Um, and does require C suite level buy in and continual reinforcement. Um, it's, you know, I'm a big lover of templates because if you give somebody the template of what they have to fill out on a daily, weekly, whatever basis, then those are the questions that they're thinking through. And, um, so you have to hardwire it, or at least softwire it, um, into the general cadence of what we're talking about. What are we thinking about? What behavior is getting rewarded.

Speaker A: So in the past, you and I have talked a bit about building resilient work cultures. Can you tell me a little bit more what you mean by resilient work cultures and building those into your organization?

Speaker B: I, uh, didn't write this line down, but it's occurring to me now, which is how an organization navigates failure, I think is a really great starting point. Um, when. And it doesn't have to be big failure, it can be, man, we just didn't land that, that project. We didn't land that presentation, whatever it is. Um, is it a culture of recognition, iteration, rapid learning and moving on? Um, or is it one of, um, retribution, punishment? You know, how do we fail? How do we fail together? Um, and that, I don't necessarily mean that in an overly, um, touchy feely kind of way, but I think what it does is it speaks to, okay, what do we care about? Do we care about identifying, um, where our failures were rooted from a human standpoint or from a systems and process standpoint? And so how we ask that question, um, enables how far. I mean, let's use the definition of resilience, right? Like, how far can we bend the reed before it breaks? Um, and so resilience has to do with how well you adapt to the winds that are impacting you. Um, how adaptable are you to whatever's coming out? I think that how we implement the systems of continual learning and improvement, um, and communicating how, what the impact. What are the consequences of failure or lack of performance or what have you?

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker B: and to me, so much of it does come back to trust. Um, and not just. I don't mean trust necessarily in a, oh, he's going to deliver on time. Trust is about understanding and accepting the consequences of anything, of knowing what will happen, um, and being able to operate in that system without having to burn gray matter in uncertainty.

Speaker A: Um, that's a good way of putting it.

Speaker B: Yeah. And so resilience is about, oh, like, I, I'm not afraid. I mean, that's really, at the end of the day, we're talking about how is fear manifested in your organization? Are we using energy? Um, to play defensive ball, um, whether it's departmental against the customer or individual fear for what happens if I don't nail this, this project.

Speaker A: What are some things that leaders can do to help their organization embrace change?

Speaker B: There's an interesting parsing of the question apart between how can leaders do that and how can organizations do that? That from a leader standpoint.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: It reminds me of how many managers and leaders I've worked with, um, who are committed to the, to the way it needs to be done and what it needs to look like when it is done. Rather what is the output and the outcome need to look like, what are the conditions of success and whatever you want to do that achieves that within the resources and the culture and the experience that we've all committed to. This is actually one of the reasons why I think experience design is so critical, because it answers the question what you want it to feel like. If you can do that, then you can re. Re. You can reverse engineer the things that need to happen to get you there. That then becomes a really wonderful brief to hand to your team and say, these are your resources. This is the project constraint. This, these are all of the data schemas that you need to be able to plug into um, and extract from the experience. Um, have fun, like go have it. Um, um. And for them to know that there will not be punishment for an iterative process that comes out of that, or be clear about that, say we're going to go through two rounds of revision, bring to me your rough draft, I'll give you notes back. Um, and so a lot of it becomes about how a leader communicates the adaptation as a collective experience rather than as a, well, you better get it right, you know, you're on your own. Um, and I've got the answer upstairs. So you know, it's going to be Friday at 5pm and don't let me down kind of situations. Um, but then I think on an organizational side, um, the way that organizations share failure, lowercase f, um how they learn, how they disseminate the learning of failure across um, I think might be one of the denominators of organizations that can adapt to change really, really well versus the ones that can't. Um, are our failures put in a closet and never seen again and never talked about, um, or do we try to amplify them and turn them into teaching moments?

Speaker A: Uh, one of the challenges I've personally had as a leader in some organizations is that there might be competing models for how to respond to failure where uh, I am trying to build m more appreciation for failure as a source of learning and um, perhaps other leaders are a little bit more blamey or maybe they would say they're more focused on accountability. I guess what has been in your experience kind of navigating, um, doing that at kind of a system wide level when there's actually a lot of different varying levels of um, support for that type of like what desire to build resilience within the organization. Like does this need to come from the top? Can it, can it be done in local bubbles? What is your thought about that?

Speaker B: Well the unfortunate thing about failure is it doesn't keep the lights on. And so we still need to deliver the thing by the date.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Um, at all costs. Um, and if you have the resources to fail a few times and still show up to the church on time, um, then I think your Runway is longer. And the need to embed that culture in the broader organizational culture is probably a little looser. Um, I would say that high functional, adaptive organizations have figured out how to talk about goals and to talk about resources. Um, and honestly also to be more agile capital a work in sprints so that we can make corrections along the way. So that um. I'm intentionally going to leave this as a dangling, dangling paragraph. Um, I was talking to a very, very well known firm once and I asked them how they dealt with um. Uh, I'm trying to remember exactly how I phrased it. Um, how do you deal with a project when it goes off the rails? I believe is exactly how I phrased it. And their response was that doesn't happen here. And I thought that was incredibly arrogant. But also based on who they are and their prestige and their reputation, um, probably not that far off the mark. They have institutionalized ways of main, of measuring and tracking and making adaptations along the way in a way that nothing ever implodes. Customers never experience failure. We're going like we operate as a collective, uh, being that can adapt to sparks and fires that are going to happen, um, so that they never get out of control. Um, those are sort of answering my own question. Like those are the organizations that turn into hundred year companies, um, of how they do that.

Speaker A: You can still have like very high standards and be uncompromising and like no, everything has like we have to offer superior experiences and hold yourself to a very high standard. Learning is not actually counter to that at all. It actually is how you get there and, and it's. So there's a way in which um, that's kind of a false Dichotomy. It's much more about, like, we want to be the best we can be. We want to offer the best experiences we can. So we're going to learn from our failures because that's the richest source of learning, and we already paid the cost of it. We might as well accrue some of the benefit.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. And you sort of hit it with the dichotomy piece too. Right. From the street, it's a big glass building that looks austere and sterile and a behemoth. Um, but inside, you know, everybody's. Everybody's flowing like water. And that's what enables them to gain reputation. And that's it. Like confidence. Right. It's like, how do you. We're gonna actually. I'll trace it back to trust. Like, you're building a trustful organization that is, um. The resilience grows out of, um, knowing what to expect.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I don't know if this really gets back to the experience design, but, um, there's a way in which I've also seen learning as a. And holding yourself to high standards and so on. Like, there's a way in which that actually makes the experience of failure very different for employees, where it's like, wow, we really screwed up here. And let's make sure we do better and we get better as a result. Um, it feels way better than just, we screwed up.

Speaker B: Yeah. It reminds me of the I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Uh, line. I remember somebody once shared with me, uh, somebody, a former employee, once shared, that that was, um, a collective emotion that the team had. And I like to think that. That the team was. Had extraordinary affection for me. Um, we got along great. We were. I would consider us really high performing, but I. I had no idea at the time that there was also this underlying fear of, like, you don't want to disappoint Damon. Um, and it wasn't about anger, because I never got angry. It was. It was like, about what we. That's not true. There's a couple moments I get angry. But, um. But I. It's so interesting because I think that also reveals the. Are we all trying to tell the same story? And so in the moments of, quote, failure, um, it's. It's not that I didn't submit the form or do the functional thing. It's that I poked a hole in our story. And that is a crime. You know, if. If you fracture the illusion, um, you know, if. If you can see behind the curtain, um, of whatever it Is, um, then the magic is. Is lost a little bit. And that, you know, if you can make that a collective investment by your team, uh, to want to continually tell the story, um, if it's a good story and it's a, you know, it's an honorable story, um, then that's a. That's a pretty good organizational, uh, keystone to try to keep in place.

Speaker A: It's also like, one of the best things that I think humans do is, like, when we create something that is so valuable that people relate to it and, like, you've created something really, like, amazing. And it's so hard to do that with a group of people, um, and like it. It's actually totally magic when you're part of an organization that's operating that way. It's just the best thing in the world. Um, Damon, this has been so much fun. I.

Speaker B: Just a delight.

Speaker A: It was so much fun. Um, yeah, totally a delight. If people want to reach out to you, um, what's the best way for them to find you on the Internet?

Speaker B: Um, I welcome email from, uh, anybody.

Speaker A: Damon.

Speaker B: Uh, D, A M M o n.applied humanity.com. um, is my, uh, my personal brand. Um, and then where else am I? I'm on LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect there. Um, I'm not as consistent on the social, uh, channels as I aspire to. Um, I'm coming. Um, and then, yeah, it's a good place to start.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thank you, Jade. Pleasure.

Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Decoding Leadership. As always, I welcome your questions and feedback. And if you're looking for coaching or advisory help, you can contact me@rubik.com. see you next time.