Show Notes
In this episode of the Tactics for Tech Leadership podcast, the hosts, Andy and Mon-Chaio, explore the concept of removing punishment from organizations. They discuss the implications of eliminating punishment, the role of corporate culture in employee motivation, and the potential obstacles such as untrainable employees and economic downturns. Through a philosophical lens and practical frameworks, they aim to spark thought on how organizations can be more humanistic. Not to be confined to just one experimental format, they also have recorded this episode as a video, so you can watch Mon-Chaio and Andy furrow their brows as they think deeply about these issues.
References:
- Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheTTLPodcast
- Toyota Kata: https://public.websites.umich.edu/~jmondisa/TK/Homepage.html
- Social Control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_control_theory
Transcript
Andy: Welcome to another episode of the Tactics for Tech Leadership podcast. This time we are experimenting in two ways, Mon Chaio. We are experimenting with video. So if people come to our YouTube channel, they can find us in full Technicolor and they can watch the whole episode. And see
Mon-Chaio: Which honestly is pretty boring because it’s just
Andy: two heads,
see two talking heads.
Mon-Chaio: right? And
Andy: I don’t think we’ve done one quite to this extent before. But this one, this one’s going to be really a thought exercise about the idea of punishment. And specifically removing punishment, not adding punishment. And so, so what we’re going to be playing with Mon Chaio is what does it look like?
And is this a desirable thing if we fully removed punishment from an organization?
Mon-Chaio: I think the first step there is maybe why are we even talking about this? We obviously must think that we should or should not remove punishment from an organization, but is it even an interesting topic? Like why, why do we want to do a whole thought experiment on this?
Andy: I’m interested in it because I’m actually not decided whether or not I fully want to remove it. And so I want to explore that question. I want to explore what would it take? What would it look like? What other things would happen? And then I think we’ll also get a little bit into philosophical side of it is, is this even possible?
Mon-Chaio: I would say that it wouldn’t be controversial to say that most of the corporate world this day is built on the concept of rewards and the other side of it, punishment. that’s the method we use to drive compliance, to drive performance, to drive almost anything that happens in a corporate setting. But there is research out there that says you know, that’s not really the best way to motivate people. And so as we talk through it, it becomes interesting to think about is it actually possible to motivate people the way research says people is people are able to be motivated or is that kind of a
pipe dream? And not really achievable So that’s I think what
interests me Yeah
Andy: by, just trying to agree on what we mean when we say remove punishment. We’ll probably leave that a little, a little unclear. Just because kind of until you get there, you don’t really know what it is.
But then our thought exercise, I’m going to, I’m going to take a page from the Toyota Kata and I’m going to say, let’s try to approach this a little bit like the Improvement Kata and the Improvement Kata, for those who don’t know what it is, we can go look it up, look for Mike Rother and the Toyota Kata.
The Improvement Kata is this basic approach for how you resolve problems. And you start from being clear about your current condition, you understand your target condition, what’s the next close step that you can kind of imagine that you could get, you work through what obstacles stand in your way, and then you experiment to try to get rid of them.
Now, of course, during this episode, we don’t have an organization to experiment on in tight cycles. So this is all going to be kind of thoughts and ideas about what could we do. And okay, let’s say we did that and that removed that obstacle. What’s the next obstacle? Are we there yet? That kind of thing.
And so, so we’ll, we’ll see if we can structure a little bit in that way, see how many iterations of that we get through. But we need to start out with what direction are we trying to go. What does it mean to say that we’re going to try to remove punishment from organizations?
Mon-Chaio: I’ll take a first stab at it. I think, to me, the clear idea would be the negative punishment term. that is inflicted upon folks or that organizations use to drive compliance with folks. So some examples of that are, are lack of promotion, perhaps using promotion, pay increases as
Andy: Right, so like withholding,
withholding
rewards.
Mon-Chaio: Now we can argue about whether withholding a reward is really punishment because it’s not removing something that somebody actually has, but I actually do believe that that’s a form of punishment. Layoffs I think are a big form of punishment or firing people. Let’s call it firing people. We can talk about layoffs because the whole idea of layoffs or redundancy is supposed to be that it’s not punishment, right?
That it’s a necessary thing for the organization. Things like putting people on undesirable projects, um, or shelving them away into areas that are less desirable, or don’t match what they want to work on, I think is a type of punishment. Putting them under managers that they don’t enjoy working with, or this concept of layering, right, which is also kind of this, anti promotion thing. Oh, well, you were going to have this much scope, but we brought in a new leader and we layer you under this person. Uh, and this person has the same title as you. And so I think that can be a form of punishment. A lot of these things don’t have to be a form of punishment, but I think that often if we’re true to ourselves, they are.
So those would be some of the things that come to the top of my mind. Am I missing
Andy: Things I think of, I would think of those, but I also think of, this idea of social control. So in the anthropology, sociology literature, there’s this, this constant idea of social control. And it, early on, it was actually almost anything.
And there, forms of social control are ostracism, gossip, um, uh, you, you have kind of the more criminal type things where they get, punished by having something taken away, so, uh, those kinds of things.
But, being removed socially from a, group or gossiping about a person are other forms of social control and punishment.
Mon-Chaio: Going back to our last episode, right? There are more hierarchical controls, processes, and whatnot. And then there’s more of the relationship based punishments, if you will. I do think that’s interesting, um, to think about. I wonder if it’s less actionable simply because I think, it’s less in the front of people’s minds when they do those things.
Those may be secondary punishments, where they don’t realize they’re doing it, they don’t like a person, or they’re just speaking about them, gossiping about them at lunch or whatever. But I think we’re talking more about, as an organization, how you run an organization, um, the, I think we are really talking about the more hierarchy parts of it, the more process oriented parts of punishment. So I think we might be able to
get into that, um, but At first blush, it doesn’t seem as, uh, as interesting to me,
Andy: So, so what we can say though is those are the kinds of things of that long term vision. The thing we may never get to but seems like it might be nice. So let’s do something much more immediate for our target condition.
Mon-Chaio: Okay.
Andy: Let’s say, um, uh, our first target condition is we’re not allowed to take someone’s job away.
So our current condition, pretty straightforward. Depending on the jurisdiction you’re in and all of that and a little bit of cultural stuff, I can fire someone or I can lay someone off. I can make them redundant. If you’re in the U. S., often it can happen within a few days.
Mon-Chaio: yeah!
Andy: you’re in the U. K., probably more along the lines of a few weeks or months. So, so let’s say our first target condition, that can’t happen. As the organization, we cannot decide to take someone’s job away from them. All right. What, what stands in our way? What are our obstacles here?
Mon-Chaio: Well, to me, there’s two big ones that come up in my mind. I’m surprised we started with such a meaty one. But, uh, this might take us all the way to the end, I suppose. I think the first thing that comes to my mind is the individual side of it. Which is, how do you fix, quote unquote, fix a non performer? Somebody who’s a drain on your organization. Somebody who isn’t being compliant. Somebody who isn’t doing the
Andy: So we have that, we have that first obstacle of
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: resource consumption, resource drain. Well, you have to pay the person if, if, if you’re not taking their job awAy. Okay. So the obstacle we’re taking is, the work that you’re producing no longer, outweighs the amount that we’re having to pay you.
Mon-Chaio: Right. Right. Or it could be even something along the lines of, um, we have limited spaces for people, and, uh, you no longer know how to do, you don’t know how to do AI, for example. Right? And we really need a lot of AI work done, and, uh, we can’t just continue to pay you this money if you don’t know how to do AI.
Andy: Right. So, so the, the work we need is not the skill you have. All right. But that also, that, that right there. shows a possible way of overcoming this obstacle. Retraining.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.
Andy: We say, okay, you can’t get rid of people. What you have to do instead is retrain them. Does that, does that overcome our obstacle? Are we done with that one?
Mon-Chaio: I don’t think so. I think that’s part of it. And I really do believe that, uh, most companies training programs should be bigger because exactly of this. But I think the obstacle to that obstacle is to say it’s fine that we should train people. But, right, and the two things that come to my mind are one, there’s a cost to training people, which a lot of times you’re saying, look, I’m already putting money into this person and it’s already too much.
So why am I putting more money in terms of training and time into this person? The second thing is this concept of, is this person even trainable?
And I think, especially when you start to look at underperformance cases, not the absence of skill necessarily, but underperformance cases, oftentimes those come with a PIP, right?
And it is a document that says if you don’t get through this in 30 or 60 days, then we have the right to terminate you. And a lot of people who run those PIPs would say that, well, this person isn’t fixable, or at least did not in that time frame.
So I think the untrainable part of
Andy: And the thing is, is across the pond here, uh, that is the, I don’t know if, I think it’s legally mandated process that you follow. You can’t just get rid of someone, you have to say, you have to show that you have done those things, and it does work best if you go into it with the idea of we will come out of this, you know, in a state where we can keep going. Does that mean that that’s the solution? We’ve got training, we’ve got these improvement processes, but it still sounds like that’s maybe not really resolving the obstacle. We still have this problem. I mean,
Mon-Chaio: Well, I’d Right, I don’t think we have resolved the obstacle. Um, if I say that the obstacle is an untrainable employee, or an unfixable employee, how can I say that training
Andy: yeah.
Mon-Chaio: that obstacle? My
Andy: I guess then the question is, does an untrainable employee actually exist?
Or is it that maybe it’s, they exist where they’re unable to be trained to that particular skill, but not to another skill that you need? So we have to think much more broadly about what to train people into.
Mon-Chaio: I think they do. But, but. I think that if you have an untrainable employee in your organization, that’s kind of your fault, not
their
Andy: Yeah, I think that’s going to come down to a, that’s what we’re going to come down to a lot of times on these things, is it’s kind of your fault that this got there. Now, people can change, though. They started out okay, everything was good, and then something happened.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I mean that’s, that’s, they absolutely can change. This is a tough one for me.
Andy: I think that an implication about the untrainable employee. Like, I think, I think there’s enough out there to say that everyone can be trained to some, to something. But the big question really becomes, does your company have enough breadth for that? And there’s many cases where a company doesn’t have enough breadth to find that other thing.
And some of it probably comes from just, you know, the kinds of things that they do. But some of it also comes from things like what that company does itself and what it outsources to another company. So you’ve got these organizational boundaries.
Mon-Chaio: Mhm.
Andy: is, is another approach to this to say, we have to look beyond this company?
And it’s, and it’s that you can find someone another job somewhere else.
Mon-Chaio: Mhm.
Andy: So to say like, look, it’s, it’s not working here, but Here, we’ve, we’ve worked to find these other jobs for you. Would that still fit our thing, our, our target condition if we said we’re allowed to move someone to another organization where there is a job for them?
Mon-Chaio: I think it can. It can if there is non coercive agreement from the employee themselves. Now, saying you’re going to be fired, that’s one way to talk to an employee. Another is to say you’re going to be fired unless, right? And a lot of organizations will say you’re going to be fired unless you accept the
severance package. Uh, the very common way, uh, is probably illegal. I don’t know. Uh, but I’ve seen it in many, many companies. So I’ve seen many times this, here’s a 30 day PIP. You’re unlikely to achieve this based on work we’ve done in the past. If you fail the PIP, you will be terminated. But you, one option is to not fail the PIP by not taking it on in the first place and taking this package and leaving now. So that to me is. And agreement, but it is fairly coercive insofar as there’s a huge power dynamic imbalance between the two parties, right? And so when we talk about moving somebody to a new company or a new job, if it is, well, you’re going to be terminated, but here’s a crappy little job that I found for you. A job is better than no job, right? I feel like that doesn’t really fit the target conditions, but if it’s a little bit more equal than I think it could.
Andy: Right.
So, so not taking a software developer and saying, look, you’re, you’re not, you’re not great at this. You were great at Perl, but we don’t do Perl and you haven’t been able to learn Java. So, uh, we don’t do, we don’t have our own facilities team, but here’s the janitor service that we use. We got you a job there.
That, that would, that wouldn’t quite fit.
Mon-Chaio: Not quite. Not quite. Right. So I do think that, uh, if we were to move into like kind jobs or ones where there was mutual agreement, that could very well fit.
But I think there’s a even more challenging discussion here around retraining, um, specifically around your point, Andy, that people change. I think it’s really easy if we come to say people don’t change.
We just say, look, you hired this person. They were who you hired. You take on full responsibility for them because you hired them. But yeah, people do change. And this starts to get maybe a little bit philosophical here, but I’m of the opinion that we need to take a look at why people change. And what was the impetus of that change? And only then can we start to talk about whether We can start to re home them, or re train them, or whatever the case may be. Because I think a lot of the times, the reason that they change is because you changed them. Your organization changed them.
Andy: You burn them
Mon-Chaio: a great
Andy: they just can’t do this
Mon-Chaio: you Exactly. Or, um, you gave them a grand vision of something they were to achieve, but then you never allowed them to achieve that vision. Perhaps you brought a manager on and you told them, look, your scope is to expand the service in the UK. We really want to get to this new market. But then every sprint, any UK expansion plans were always put on hold because, well, we have these important US customers we have to serve. Right? So you hired a person and they changed.
Yeah, but you changed them by not delivering on your promise. There also, I think, are definitely employee changes, and I think those are the tougher ones to talk about. They’ve lost a family member. Uh, their wife became unemployed. Um, something along those lines. Which I think are a little more tricky, and maybe those are more interesting to talk about. So, I don’t know which direction we want to go in here, but I think both of those are obstacles.
Andy: So I will say for listeners, this is something that happens with the Improvement Kata. As you go through it, you find more and more obstacles. Some of them are real in getting to the target condition. Some of them seem really real, but maybe you don’t need to address them. Um, and, and you, you can almost kind of leave them and figure out what happens if you don’t address them.
So it doesn’t seem like we’re finding a way through the obstacle. We’re finding more obstacles. Is, is there, is there an obstacle that we’ve identified where there might be a quick win? Where we can say, look, oh, here’s how you address it. And, and it, it does seem to get us closer.
Mon-Chaio: Well, I actually think, I disagree with you, Andy. I think we might be closer than, than you think we are.
Andy: All right.
Mon-Chaio: I think that’s as easy as don’t change that person.
Andy: Right. So, So, so, so it’s like, work with them with what they have from the beginning,
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: burn them out, don’t push them away, don’t do those kinds of things, but work with what they have from the beginning, and you should be able to then keep that person around, because you’ve got that constant relationship of working with what they’re able to do.
Is that, is that where you’re going with that?
Mon-Chaio: I think, in my mind, the way to get around that obstacle is better hiring practices to make sure you bring on the right person. You hire for adaptability, right? Remember your goal is to never take someone’s job away from them. You know that things change in the world. Uh, the world is not static. Right? And so you have to hire the adaptable, you have to identify the adaptable, and so you need better hiring practices, and then your organization needs a employee training program, um, that’s actually big and valid and, and
works in order to be able to adapt these folks as markets change. Now, there may be a new obstacle there, uh, I think the argument will be, well, We can never do that because it’s impossible to hire that way. How can you identify the right person in the hiring process? Um, we can talk about that, but we could also move and think about the other part maybe, which is the unmovable obstacle, which is what if people change due to personal circumstances, right?
Then you feel like maybe employee training and development programs aren’t going to put them back in the right place. So, so then what? And maybe that’s the big unmovable, uh, that we can really easily say, well, no, because of that, you must always be able to get rid of employees.
Andy: Well, and, and there, there are things already in place that, that try to address that. So in the U S you have, um, some of it covered with things like workman’s comp. Um, and in the UK you’ve got things like, uh, statutory sick pay. So, and those cover in the U, in the UK that covers all sorts of different things.
And so there, there is stuff, but I think at that point, the resolution to it is beyond that single organization.
Mon-Chaio: Interesting. You think because it involves the government and labor unions and whatnot,
Andy: I think
Mon-Chaio: of stuff?
Andy: those, those institutions exist for things that are beyond what a single organization can handle, that are beyond what it does. Which is why things like, retirement funds historically were, well, when they worked well, they were, they were pan organizational. And, and so we’ve, we’ve found mechanisms for handling those where the, the company is supported in helping the people and the people And the company supports that wider organization, that wider, uh, uh, group, in order to help people as well.
So, so, but I, I have a particular thing in mind when I’m thinking of this. Someone getting sick. So someone gets cancer and they’re unable to work. Um, in the UK, there is a long term, uh, sick leave that you can have. Um, a colleague of mine was on it for four years. So. So I, I think there are actually things that address that obstacle.
Maybe not completely, but some.
Mon-Chaio: Okay, I can get behind that. I’m going to try to flesh it out a little bit more, which is all the companies who are competing with each other They still, right, and they’re competing fiercely with each other for market share, for customers. They need to have a true cooperation with each other about employee health, such that they can say, look, I am in a, I don’t know what the word is, a conglomeration, a union or whatever, such that when you don’t fit here, and we agree, there are many different places that I can reach out to where you may fit. And I think this works really well when we’re in an environment where there’s more jobs than people, and that might be the next thing we talk about, which is what happens when we’re not in that environment. But oftentimes we’re in that environment, and I think, um, companies need to be able to agree to that, even when they’re fiercely competing. So, I think, and then of course the government regulation and support on top of that. So, I think that’s the model in my mind that makes not letting go of people or not taking people’s jobs away work. From the personal underperformance or people change side. Now, we could say that there’s no way that that model would ever happen because there’s obstacles to that model. Uh, but that’s
it in my mind.
Andy: Nice. Let’s say we’ve overcome that, that, uh, uh, all those obstacles. We’ve hit our target condition. We’re in this amazing world where, we don’t have to fire someone for underperformance or for various other reasons that are in terms of their personal performance.
All right.
Excellent. We’re in a much better world already. Maybe. We’ll find out. It’s one of those things. It’s a wicked problem. And we’re trying to treat it a bit as a tame problem. Let’s take that next one. Redundancies. Layoffs. Economic downturn,
Mon-Chaio: Mhm.
Andy: you don’t get, get, you don’t have the choice, you don’t have the option of getting rid of people.
Mon-Chaio: Mhm.
Andy: What do, what are the obstacles to to, to getting to that point?
Money-based economy.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, um, Star Trek says we can get to a non money based economy, right? As long as we
Andy: Yeah. Infinite
Mon-Chaio: energy.
so maybe
Andy: I’m, I’m reading the culture novels right now. They’re, they’re the same thing
Mon-Chaio: infinite energy? Hehehe. But yeah, I think this concept of economic downturn, uh, we don’t have as much money coming in as we did, and therefore we can’t pay people the way we need to, and therefore we need fewer people. That’s, I think, a very tricky problem, and this may be the unmovable
Andy: because you, you have it not only from economic downturn, you also have it from, hey, we’re in the tech world. We’re, we’re all about the, the, the startups going really fast. And most of them don’t make it.
It’s, it’s that the company itself really kind of ceases to exist.
Mon-Chaio: hmm. And I think that’s actually a bigger problem in my mind. Is kind of the way that we think about this, because I think our value exchange here between, let’s call them Silicon Valley startups. They’re by no means the only ones that employ this practice, but they sort of made it famous in my mind, uh, at least in my generation.
So I’m going to use that as the moniker. The value exchange between the Silicon Valley startup and the employees that they employ. Right. Because they’re aiming for that top 1%. Right. And so everyone’s going to operate in this hectic style so they can select out that top 1 percent and the trade off that they give is they say, look, come work for me. And yeah, there’s a ton of risk and I might let you go and your stock options might be worth nothing. You might’ve worked five years for 0, but man, if you hit that top 1%, you’re going to be golden. But I think that promise is. hollow, and I think the power disparity is too big for that to be anything viable. In the States, at least we talk a lot about people voting against their own interests. And we like to say, ah, those are dumb voters. How can they vote against their own interests? But the fact of the matter is people aren’t completely logical. And I think that’s what ethics is here to protect, which is when people aren’t completely logical or can’t completely come into it with the same power dynamics and mental balance or whatever, how do we make sure that the exchange is not overwhelmingly favoring one side, right? There’s always going to be favoritism, that’s fine, but when it’s overwhelmingly favoring one side for a long period of time, personally I find that to be very problematic for people and for society.
Andy: So we just have a small obstacle here, which is the entire funding and business development model that Silicon Valley has created for us. All right. All right.
Actually though, is, is there.
Is there some sort of like utopian approach to this? Where we say, uh, a way of addressing that obstacle is people are no longer employees of a particular company, but we’re, this is going to be way out there.
Mon-Chaio: This is what we’re here for.
Andy: And I think this is kind of what the UBI is almost about, Universal Basic Income. But what I’m going to say is,
people aren’t, aren’t employees of any particular one of these attempts, one of these startups, but they associate themselves with one of them. And at the same time, they’re part of a larger group.
I mean, in the past, these have been things like unions or guilds or something like that. Some, some sort of like trade group that provides them a bit of that support. And so you almost get get around this problem by you’re never an employee. You are. You are an associate of working on this kind of thing for a while.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: you almost get rid of that employee relationship. And, and so there isn’t a layoff anymore. There’s just, oh, that thing didn’t go anywhere. Um, I’ll go find something else now. But we’re not, it’s not that we’re really taking away that employment. It’s just more of like a free association type thing. I think, I think I’m getting probably into like anarchist or such thought with this.
Mon-Chaio: I don’t think that’s so far removed from what we talked about in the other case, where you have these companies fiercely competing, but they’re also working together for the better of the employees, right? That their employees are their second customer, or even their first customer, if we wanted to be truly egalitarian. So I don’t think that’s way too far off. I think the central tenet in my mind, Andy, is that everybody involved in the venture takes the same amount of risk.
Andy: Yes. And that’s basically what this would be doing, is every, assuming that everyone has that basic level of what they’re getting that they can live off of that, and that this venture is where they’re putting their effort, in some ways the risk that everyone is taking who’s going into this, some people will take a bit more because they’ll do something else related to this or something like that, but the risk that they’re taking is the use of their time for something that doesn’t end up working out.
Mon-Chaio: You can calculate or you can associate everything
back to time, right? That time means they lost opportunity to do something else. They could have gone to work for another place. They could have taken their family on a vacation.
So, um, I think that that makes sense. Let me, so I was talking to a, another buddy of mine about a similar topic like this. And we were talking about, well, what should public companies do when they fail? Um, so. He was saying, well, you know, like
the banks, right? Uh, should the CEOs be forced to resign? Um, is that the right move instead of laying people off, right?
Instead of laying people off, the CEO should be forced to resign. And one of the things that I mentioned was the We’re talking about punishment and so we’re going to get back into this. I mentioned that the pain that everyone feels at every stage needs to be somewhat equalized. And so when you talk about a CEO getting laid off or resigning, sometimes they go with a giant parachute with a golden parachute, right? But even in the case when they don’t, you know, they’ve made 50 million a 10 years. They’re fine. They could
basically retire, but the person that they laid off can’t go without a job for three months. Um, and that causes severe financial hardship. So in my mind, it’s less about the guild or everything. It’s how do we make it so that succeed or fail when we’re all in this social or not social contract, employment contract together, when it succeeds, everyone gets proportional rewards. And I think we’ve done a somewhat reasonable job at that with this concept of stock options and whatnot. But what we haven’t done a great job at all is when it fails, everyone takes proportional hits. Because we’ve all heard this idea of like a startup failing, but like that founder makes a new slide deck and, you know, a month later has another 9 million in funding and is doing his new thing.
But what about the people that that person employed?
Because the risk isn’t the same as much as from a market economics perspective. We want to say, well, I promised them great riches. If we succeeded. Yeah, that’s true. And they came into it clear eyed. Yeah, that’s true. But because the power dynamics are different, you can never really come into it fully logically and clear eyed. And so, I think that makes it very, very difficult.
Andy: Well, I think we’ve, we’ve gone through a couple things. One is, and we don’t have necessarily solutions for a lot of this, but one, one is, um, about, I had the idea of we, if we, if we disassociate the employment contract so that, so that your means of living isn’t necessarily tied to that, then that kind of gets, gets us away from this idea of when things go poorly you’re, you’re not having all of your means taken away from you.
Mon-Chaio: Mm
Andy: then we had the other side of it, which was to make sure that, that doesn’t just become a license for, uh, uh,
one person like taking all of the gains, and the others just taking all of the, the risk. And, and in the upside as well as the downside, getting that to go, more equitably across all of the participants.
I don’t think we have an exactly clear way of doing that yet, but maybe that’s the, maybe that’s the, uh, the, the task for our listeners is to work their way through that one.
But I think at this point, I’m going to say, we might want to just wrap this up. We’ve, we’ve gone through these two different ways. Um, hopefully people have gotten a sense, not only of apparently our very socialist thinking
and the Toyota Improvement Kata. Um, but also some, ideas that will spark thought and provocative approaches to this in their own companies about what could they do that’s vastly different from what they do right now to address some of these obstacles.
Mon-Chaio: And I think that’s what my hope is. This is sparks and thinking, right? Like we’re not going, I mean, I don’t think any of our listeners, and I think it would be probably pretty irresponsible to go tomorrow to your company, if you’re a CTO or whatever, and say, listen, we’re no longer firing anybody starting today, right?
I think that’s pretty irresponsible behavior, but what I hope to trigger, at least out of this discussion is for people to do more constant thinking about these power disparities and dynamics and about how they really contribute to inequality in, in terms of life, really. And even if you didn’t listen to this episode from hearing all of our other episodes, you know, that we’re kind of, we’re talking about building organizations for people as well as companies.
And that’s kind of our standard trope, right? Of, you know, the people have to be involved. They need to have signed on, they need to have agency. So I don’t think this is necessarily a step that’s unknown, even if people think it’s a step too far. But I would love people to think more about that in all of their interactions.
How do the power dynamics play into this? What can I do that’s vastly different or slightly different that allows me to be more humanistic in the way that I run my capitalistic organization?
Andy: Very nice. I think we’ll leave it at that, Mon Chaio. And if anyone has their own thoughts on that, we’d love to hear them. If you sent us an email at hosts at the TTL podcast. com, or if you want to just get us to come into your organization and maybe give you some provocative thoughts about how to, how to stop firing people in your organization.
Yeah, we can explore the idea together and see where it goes. And, uh, just a reminder, this is our going to be our first foray into a video format. So tell us what you think of that and until next time, be kind and stay curious.
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