Why Disruption Does More Harm than Good with Ashley Goodall, Author & Executive

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to author, consultant, and executive Ashley Goodall about his latest book, The Problem with Change. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) Can you believe it's been four years since we've got to talk last? That's a time.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:20) It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:21) It's been fast. Yeah, it really...

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:23) Yeah, but then again, what has that time contained? It's contained a lot of stuff that scrambles brains. So it's sort of not surprising, but it's like, did that go by really quickly, or was it really long, or was it both? It feels like both.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Raising the kids. I've got three kids under seven now. And I go back and forth between life is really long and life is really short constantly.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:48) Isn't that funny? Yeah. And I think the answer is yes. It is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) Yes. The answer is yes to both. Yeah. Life is long and life is short.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:55) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) Yeah. Well, one of the reasons why I was excited to talk with you again was I was looking back. I'm coming up on ten years and a thousand episodes. Good lord. I know. So I was looking back at my favorite episodes that I had done, and your name was on the top of that list.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:13) Well, now. So you're telling me the only way is down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) Yeah. The only way is down. Right.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:18) Right. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) So I went back and looked at our conversation. And then through that, I saw you had a new book coming out. I was like, this is perfect timing. Great timing. We just did this exercise. You have a new book. So that's where I want to start. I want you to tell me about your new book.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:35) Well, the book is called The Problem with Change, and so the clue to its subject is right there in the title. And it's a, I hope, a fresh look at the topic of change. Now, if you think about the received wisdom of change, it's sort of like the more the better. I mean, change is a good thing. Change is how the world improves. Change is the state of evolution. Change is we should all be very keen on change. We should all be enthusiastic supporters of change. And that certainly is the sort of management received wisdom. You know, when I was in business school, one of the definitions of a leader was, or the job of a leader was, to create change. Leaders are to make change. That's what we sent you there to do. But if you look at the experience of being on the receiving end of change, it's a very, very different set of experiences and circumstances and psychological reality. Because as it turns out, when you find it, well, when you ask people about it, when you say tell me your stories, they're not happy stories for the most part. And then when you look at the psychology going on, what happens to the human animal under change, you find out that too much change harms people. So the book is an investigation of this sort of dichotomy or tension between probably one of the most prevalent management truisms—your job, you were sent here to make change—and the reality of that on the ground, which is that too much change makes it really hard for people to actually do their jobs. It's not just, you know, people don't like it. It's this makes it hard to do my job. So we need to sort ourselves out on this topic, I think. Because if you have a management philosophy or a management idea that is actually harmful to people, it's not gonna end so well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:40) How do you know when to use it? Like, let's pretend it's music. Right? It's like a note. If you're just always C, C sharp, if you're just always hitting that same note, if you're always hitting the change note, it's not gonna be a very pretty song. Is it a tool that you use at a specific time? Like, when would you use this tool of change?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:03:58) Well, I think the first thing to get clear on is that change is slightly the wrong term for what we're after. What we really want is a thing called improvement. And so you have to go, well, not all change leads to improvement. All improvement comes from change. Gotcha. But it doesn't always work the other way around. So, you know, when I was researching the book, I reached out to people about their change stories. And I said, just, you know, I want to speak to people. Tell me your stories of change. And dozens of people reached out to me, and I spoke to as many of them as I could. And their stories were of being on the receiving end of a reorg or a new strategy, or a new leader who was changing all the positions in the organization, or a new technology, or a new policy, or a new office floor plan, or a new, I mean, everything. And you took a couple of things away from these conversations. Firstly, this is absolutely continuous. The nature of work today is to be, as I call it, in the blender. To be living life in the blender. And it's really hard on people. The second thing was that I also said to people, I would say to somebody at the end of a long recitation of and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened—and people were telling me that they were burned out, that they were exhausted, that their souls were crushed. Someone said, this is soul crushing. And so I go, oh, so I'm guessing you think change is not a very good thing then. And they were gonna, well, no. I believe in change. I'm a fan of change, because change is possibility, and change is potential, and change is all that the future offers to us. If it doesn't offer change, then what's it all about? And that's the dichotomy. Right? So no one wants to play C sharp for fifteen minutes in a row. No one wants a monotone song. But at the same time, the song that's a fusillade of random notes, and you can never ever shut it off, and you can never make sense of it, and you can't hear a melody in any of that, wears people down. So what people are looking for is the song, I suppose to just torture the metaphor a little bit, the song that they want to sing. The song where they know what the harmonies are gonna be and they're gonna do the jazz improv on top of it. So there's some sort of—I mean, you know how jazz works. You've got a jazz standard, and there's a chord sequence, and it's a 12 bar or a 16 bar or whatever. And then there's, beyond that, there's no score for the musicians. Most of the time, people are making it up in real time. So they're creating change on a basis of stability. And it's that that people want. They want to be able to riff in a way that for them feels like possibility and hope and improvement. But if the world is just firing notes at you at random, there ain't no tune there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:18) What do you do if you find yourself in a blender? You can't orient to anything. You're just being shaken up. What do you do?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:07:28) One of the great lessons of looking into all of this was that small is beautiful. And most of our sources of stability in life, in work and in life, are close at hand. So team at work is a great source of stability. Even smaller than team, we always used to talk about work spouses. If you heard the concept of a work spouse, it's the...

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) I don't agree with it. But, yeah, I've heard it.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:07:58) Okay. I've experienced feeling somebody is like, oh my god. You're my work spouse. Okay. I'm, you know, and it's a team of two at that point. And that's nothing but a source of stability and belonging and sort of orientation. Obviously, family is a source of stability for us. So the small groups where we get, obviously, social contact and belonging, but also our sense of meaning, our sense of identity. I know who I am in a group because the group sort of defines me, but then I can define myself also as how I'm distinct from the others in the group. Like it's a multi-layered locating thing. So there's probably a long list of things to do if you wake up one day and you're living life in the blender. But I think the first thing to do is reach out to the people you're closest to. Reach out to team, reach out to family, reach out to spouse, reach out to work spouse, because those are the people who know you best. Those are the people who know you for what you can do. Those are the people who locate you in the world, and those are all great sources of stability for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) Have you ever gotten to hear Dr. Jordan Peterson talk?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:09:17) I have not. It's on my list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:19) I got to meet him Friday. So I got some more time. Yeah. I'll send you, I'll text you a picture. But, yeah, me and my wife, we went, we heard his talk, and then we got to hang out with him a little bit after. Fascinating. He's doing a new talk right now called We Who Wrestle with God. He's touring all around. He's in New York tonight. But, yeah. In his talk, and I won't go too into detail, but I'm connecting a little bit of his talk with a little bit of what you're discussing. A key point he makes is aim. Have your aim, have your focus, your character is in a story. Know what that aim is, and then look at life to, for the objects in life to orient itself towards and point at that aim. Right? So this isn't just a microphone. This is something that's helping me achieve my aim. Right? And your perspective of when you have your aim, you can let everything around you orient. You can make decisions on if this opportunity path is going to help me achieve it. And that as stress is created, as you have too many opportunity paths, you have too many options, and you have to reduce those and align them with your aim. Well, I can, when you're discussing and talking about change here, I could see how if people keep changing the aim and you don't have control...

(Ashley Goodall at 00:10:41) Of the changes it for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:42) Someone changes it for you, and you have no control to set that aim. You have to go with whoever, and they're constantly changing it. You will never be able to align everything you're trying to do, and then you'll get, you'll get, what is the right word? Demoralized? I don't know if that's the right word, but you'll lose motivation and interest, and you'll just, you'll feel like there's no winning. And when you get to the point where you feel like there's no winning, you are doing the worst possible work you could do.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:11:11) So the psychology name for I feel like there's no winning is called learned helplessness. And there are studies on this going back to the seventies. And they've studied it in dogs, in rats, in people, in birds, in every sort of mammalian creature. And what they found is that if you teach a creature that nothing it does can make any difference, it quits trying. So you can teach somebody to essentially phone it in if you like. It's related to what you're saying because what you're saying is that if I can't adjust my aim, if I have no control over my aim, then what happens to me? Sooner or later, the answer is you learn that nothing you do makes any difference at all to anything, at which point you phone it in. And, just to translate back to the world of work for a second, there are some recent synonyms for phone it in. One would be quiet quitting. One would be lazy girl jobs. One would be coffee badging. Another would be the great resignation. I mean, these are all things where people have gone, you know what? I've tried. I have tried. But this environment is so hard to navigate. I don't know where my aim is. I knew where it was last week. I don't know where it is this week. And I don't know where my potency is. I don't know if, if you keep changing context, the things I'm good at doing, are they valuable here or not? They used to be in the old, are they valuable in the new world? And I'm not sure what it all adds up to. I'm not sure that this is a coherent world that I'm living in. So that's and that leads to people essentially going, listen. I'm helpless here. And all I can do is wait for this to pass. And if you go and talk to people in large companies who are going through the nth reorganization or reshuffle or transition or merger or spin-off or whatever, the ones who've been around the track for a few times will go, you know what? I'm just waiting for this to go. I'm just waiting for this to pass.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:36) Oddly enough, we have, you know, we sell production services. Like, we make shows for other companies, not just our show. There is a big mega corp that we're working with for the past two years. They've been in our sales pipeline. And this poor girl, like, the leader of some division in there, in marketing, that's trying to get this podcast to happen, she, they have had like seven leadership turnovers. It's like every quarter, there's a quarter, there's a new leadership turnover, and she's at the point where she's just like, look. I mean, I've been telling you every other quarter. I was just, I've tried and wait for this to get, like, settled out. But every three months, there's a new person in here with a new plan, and there's a new reorg, and people get fired, and teams get moved around. She goes, I'm just hanging out until the dust settles so we can actually get something done.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:14:20) So then you zoom out and you look at the discussion of economic productivity and how's the economy doing, and how is it to be in the workforce today, and are we doing well, and where does more productivity come from, and how can we continue to grow the economy. And you have to go, well, if there are people in organizations going, I'm just sitting around waiting for this to go by, that doesn't sound an awful lot like productivity. That doesn't sound an awful lot like innovation. That doesn't sound an awful lot like growth. And so to a certain extent, you know, there are many things that would explain the sort of flattening off of productivity growth that we've seen in the last ten years or so. But I think one's got to be we're doing it to ourselves. Because we are not providing an environment where humans can thrive, can give us their best stuff. And you would think it was kind of an obvious prescription for work: Create a place where people who you're going to hire at great expense can do their best work. Go out of your way to do that. But when it comes to change, we're sort of doing the opposite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:32) Well, it's popular. Disruptor, I want to invest in the Silicon Valley disruptor. I want, let's go change everything. And, you know, it's like, well, how much disruption? You know?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:15:45) It's also to mistake disruption for... So here's the story. I mean, disruption goes back to a guy named Clayton Christensen, who wrote a book in 1997, I think it was, called The Innovator's Dilemma. And he looked at industries, a few industries in tech and outside tech manufacturing as well. And he discovered a little pattern. And the pattern was that the big established companies in those industries had customers, and the customers expected basically a certain product for a certain price. And you couldn't then say, well, the price will be much more for more features maybe, but you can't suddenly turn around and go, I'm gonna charge more for my product. At the same time, they have certain economics in their organizations. So they're sort of very customer following. And then you find a bunch of upstart organizations that maybe have venture capital backing or early stage investors or people with a very long time frame horizon. And these companies come along and go, listen, we can make something that's suckier, but cheaper or suckier but weirdly more expensive and over time improve it and improve it and improve it and improve it and improve it until we can eat the lunch of the market incumbents.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:17:04) And so Clayton Christensen sees this dynamic, and this is what disruption used to be. It used to be the new entrant coming in and changing the market dynamics in a way that the incumbents couldn't respond to. Now, some people heard "disruption" and didn't listen to the rest of the sentence. And all of a sudden, it's disrupt yourself and disrupt this and disrupt that, and any sort of change must be a good thing. But if you actually look at what Clayton Christensen said at the end of his book, he said, "Here's what you should do."

(Ashley Goodall at 00:17:36) He did not say disrupt everything. He said, "Here's what you should do. Take a small group of people, send them off somewhere, give them their own building or their own office or their own warehouse, give them all the resources they want, give them complete freedom to innovate, get out of the way, and wait and see what happens." So what he actually said was give people stability. Give them a place, a mission, an aim—to use your phrase, or Jordan Peterson's phrase—an aim, a sense of where they are, a sense of stability, a sense of support, a sense of belonging.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:18:14) Give them those things, and innovation may well come out of that. So we've gotten it 180 degrees the wrong way around is what I'm saying. What he was arguing for was you have to create innovation in small and outside of the economic status quo that you have in your organization. We've turned that into, "We should upend the economic status quo the whole time, all the time, and then good things will come of it." And they haven't, and they're not about to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:49) Is there anyone who writes deeper on how to actually structure that team or execute on Christensen's ideas?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:18:56) Well, I think it was a whole bunch of research. I mean, I've done a lot of it back when I was at Cisco. Gallup company is probably the anchor tenant in the team research world. Marcus Buckingham has done a bunch. Other companies have done some.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:19:14) And what you find out is that a team has to essentially solve for three things. It has to solve for an individual, for the team itself, and for the connection out beyond the team to the rest of the world. So when you solve for an individual, what you're trying to do is have each person feel that they know what's expected of them, they get to do their best work, they're recognized, they have a chance to grow. Those are very sort of one-to-one things, if you like. Now the next thing the team has to solve for is, do we have a shared identity, a shared understanding of what good work looks like?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:19:57) Do we feel we support one another? And then the third category is, how does the experience of my work on the team connect to something beyond the team? We can call that "company" if you like, but company is actually very vague and abstract. It's sort of really, who else who's not on the team is my work helping? What you find out when you look at the research is that each of those three things—the individual stuff, the collective stuff, the beyond-the-team stuff—varies depending on the team that you're on.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:20:29) So your sense of individual utility and growth and contribution varies by team. Obviously, your sense of whether you're on a supportive team or not varies by team. Your sense of the world outside your team varies by team as well. So those are all massively interesting things. And then you dig into that and you go, well, what are the subjects inside each of those things?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:20:55) And, of course, the subject of the individual elements of being on a team—the subject is agency and contribution and growth. Those are all sources of stability. The subject of the collective bits of a team are belonging and support. Those are sources of stability. And the subject, if you like, of the stuff that extends beyond your team out into the world—who else has my work made a difference to?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:21:23) That's the source of meaning. So there's all sorts of work been done on what are some of the things you can do to achieve those. But I think it's, you know, back to when you asked, if you find yourself living in the blender, what's the first thing you should do? And I was like, you know, look to the left and look to the right. Those are the people who will be most helpful to you.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:21:48) This gives you a little bit of the "why" of that from all the research that's been done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:54) So I pre-ordered your book on Audible because that's my preferred method of consumption. Did you narrate it, by the way?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:22:02) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:04) Nice. I love it. But the book to me looked like it was laid out where you listed the problems of change, and you went through them by order and chapter of the book. Can you just touch on a couple of the problems of change?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:22:19) Yeah. I grouped them into five headings. That's not like the official grouping. That's me doing a bunch of research and reading footnotes a lot and saying, "Listen, what are the shapes here?" So the problems with change from a psychological perspective—we can start off with uncertainty.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:22:41) So when you get the memo that says, "Hello, everybody, there's about to be a reorg," in an instant, you are visited by uncertainty. Because, you know, the communication—the email, or whatever—will tell you some things, but it won't tell you all of the things. And very often, by the way, it's preceded by the rumor of the thing, which tells you there's a thing coming, but you don't know what it is. So uncertainty is very hard on humans.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:23:05) It causes us stress. It causes us all sorts of physiological trauma—like beyond high blood pressure, it causes increased mortality. So uncertainty. We don't want uncertainty. Uncertainty bad.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:23:20) So that's the first one. Second one, we touched on it—learned helplessness or the lack of control. When somebody announces the change, the second thing that strikes you is that you didn't announce the change. Somebody else did. And you're not in control of what's going to happen.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:23:37) That again is very hard on us from a psychological perspective. The third problem is, or the third challenge with change is that so much of our structures are social, and so much of our source of stability is social. And so when you shuffle all the teams, you reshuffle all of our other human support structures in a work environment. And so you ruin our sense of belongingness, which is a super important part of how we actually get done what we do. The fourth one—if people are tracking along, four out of five.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:24:13) The fourth problem is what I call displacement. We interact with our environment in a series of fairly specific, and to me, quite beautiful ways. Place is something that we become attached to, and so our workplace is one category of things that we become attached to in the world. And the way that we become attached to place is in our habits and our rituals that link us to a place. So in your house, you'll have a morning ritual.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:24:45) That's the thing that connects you to a house in a way. And people have rituals at work as well. And so rituals embed us in a certain place, in a certain context, in a certain social group. And again, if you blow up all the rituals—if you, you know, a lot of the rituals exist on teams—so if you blow up the teams, you're blowing up a lot of rituals.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:25:05) That makes it very hard for people to find their bearings. And then the last one we've touched on as well, the loss of meaning. It's hard to figure out what your aim is. It's hard to figure out where you're heading towards if the context keeps changing. But even before that, the first thing I discovered in researching all of this is that actually we tend to think of meaning as—as you said before—aim or mission or purpose or sort of daylight things, aspirational things, up into the right things.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:25:43) But the first meaning of meaning is actually where the stuff makes sense or not. And it can't be aspirational if none of the parts make any sense at all. Things can't cohere to a beautiful picture until they cohere to a picture. And one of the most pernicious things about change is that the world stops making sense. I spoke to somebody who had gone from one leader to another and could not figure out what the next leader, the new leader, was trying to do.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:26:16) She said, "None of it makes sense. I don't—there was—I understood where we were before, what we were trying to do, how I fitted into that. I understood what the projects were. I understood what the team was. I understood what the language was. All that's gone away. None of it makes sense anymore." And so she lacked meaning in her work, but not because the work pointed in a way she didn't find inspirational, but because the work didn't point anywhere at all. So those are the five, if you like—the top five that I would sort of use to frame the challenge of constant change for human beings. It's uncertainty, it's lack of control, it's unbelonging, displacement, and loss of meaning, which is, you know, a fairly depressing list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:01) But once we name them and can discuss them, we can overcome them and provide the antidote and move forward.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:27:09) And we can honor the value to humans of their opposites, right? We can honor certainty. We can honor control. We can honor belonging. We can honor the value of place for us, and we can honor people's need to derive meaning from what they do every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:28) And I want to talk about this video clip from South by Southwest where people booed the clip. But one last question, just maybe wrap this section up. A lot of our conversation has been geared towards, you know, I'm a team member on a team within a company. However, it seems to me that the market itself can do this at large, making—if you look at the company like an individual, and they exist within this market, I am the company, I am the individual. I'm at the top of the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:01) And then the market does this thing that's outside of my control, and now I'm forced to respond to it. And then it's almost like a chain reaction of disruption. And so I see AI doing that. When you talk about loss of meaning, displacement, and uncertainty, I'm like, that's how I feel when I'm looking at the technologies that are emerging—the deepfakes, the digital twins, like me making a digital twin of myself, knowing if that's authentic, when will I be replaced by AI-generated video? All of this stuff creates this weird sense of, you know, where will humans even be if AI can be better humans than humans?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:43) You know, where's that meaning? If they can share all the best knowledge and push entire industries and markets forward and do all of that by just GPT-prompting itself and having human representation, they could have meetings with each other. It creates this lost sense of meaning. So it makes it hard to navigate in that. Have you—to bring it down to the question you could answer—have you thought about it at all in the context of the market creating the change and the company responding to it?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:29:11) Well, I think the first thing to say is once you understand how hard change is on people, you probably should look for opportunities to do it less rather than opportunities to do it more. And you should acknowledge that there's a whole bunch of change in the world that we're not actually individually or at a company level able to do very much about. Which is to say that on Monday morning when you show up at the office, the change counter for the week is not at zero. It's already at a million billion.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:29:56) Because AI, because climate, because politics, because—name your thing—because pandemic until very recently. And so when you as an organization set out to create some sort of dislocating change for people, or change—because it's all dislocating—you're adding to a pile that's already a very big pile. And so you shouldn't be surprised if that's the thing that sort of tips people over the edge. The second thing to say is that sometimes the market applauds these sorts of things because the market was taught the same. But who is the market? The market is analysts and investors and venture capitalists and activist investors and so on and so forth, who went to the same schools and read the same books and went to the same classes as the CEOs who are creating all the change in the first place.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:30:46) So there is a little bit of a flywheel effect of all of this stuff. You can look at Meta, for example, which laid off a whole bunch of people last year and called it the "year of efficiency," which is to my ears somewhat foreboding. I'm not sure I want somebody to tell me, "Ashley, efficiency is coming your way." It doesn't sound very pleasant. And, you know, started this year by firing a few more thousands of people.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:31:18) And the stock goes through the roof. And the stock goes through the roof, I don't know, for a number of reasons. But one surely must be that it looks like change is at hand. And there are a bunch of people evaluating the stock, whether professionally or amateurishly, who have been taught that change is always up into the right, and change is a good thing. So there is a sort of echo chamber thing in the market as well.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:31:43) And then to your point, there's some change we can do very little about. So I think we should probably focus on the stuff we can do something about, which is why I think, again, the small and the local and preserving teams and preserving relationships is a super important thing for any company to try and do today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) I do think Zuckerberg—I'm not pro or con on Zuckerberg, because I don't know him personally—but what I did see was those videos emerging of the people that are waking up at noon and going to have a mocha, doing five minutes of work, and then they'd go viral on TikTok, and they were a product manager at Facebook making $500K a year or whatever the absurdity was. And I think that the way that he responded to that was pretty well. Because if you see the whole market start seeing a trend of viral videos coming out of your company of people that don't do any work—did you see those, by the way, when you were part of that? Or you didn't?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:32:43) Uh, you know, I wrote an op-ed in the Times—New York Times—a couple of weeks ago, and it got a lot of comments. And one of the themes in the comments was, "People just aren't trying at work." And, you know, my thought is, well, I'd like to meet them. Because most people I've met at work are trying to do a decent day's work.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:33:11) Again, because that has some psychological value to a human. We want to feel like we made a decent effort. And if you get too many days without a decent effort, that begins to look an awful lot like depression and mental illness and distress. And so, you know, the human being intrinsically wants to make a difference. So does this mean there are no people phoning it in at Facebook? Of course not. But there's a difference between viral and widespread.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:33:38) And so you've got to be careful. I think you've got to be very careful about these things. It seems that when it comes to our workforce, we are very slow to believe the best possible of people and very quick to believe the worst possible of people. And I wish it were the other way around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:56) One of the things I have learned in the past ten years is that by default, I see people like me. And that's a problem because they're not like me, they're themselves. And so I have my work ethic, my drive, my motivation, my outcome-oriented focus, my desire to grow and improve. And I, when I meet people, I just assume that they're like that. And I consciously remind myself, let's judge a person on who they are and what they present, not what I'm looking through my lens.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:34:26) But there's—do you know—have you heard of a thing called the extrinsic incentives bias?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) No. What's this?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:34:32) Oh, this is a lovely, lovely piece of research that was done by a guy named Chip Heath. Again, I think late nineties. And so there are roughly speaking two groups of incentives for a human. There are the intrinsic incentives, which is to do stuff that feels important to me, to do stuff that makes me feel good about the world. And then there are the extrinsic incentives, which are sort of pay and title and promotion and private jets, and those things.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:35:04) So the extrinsic you could see by looking at somebody from the outside, as it were. The intrinsic you can't figure out until you know what it's like to be that person, to feel from the inside. Well, those are the two things. And Chip Heath did a series of experiments, or certainly writes about a series of experiments, some he did, some others did, where he says if you ask us about our own, if you ask us to rank our own incentives, we will put all the intrinsic ones at the top of the list.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:35:23) You go, okay, once I'm paid enough to put food on the table and pay the mortgage, then actually what I care about is work that lifts me up, that makes me feel good, that makes me feel like I'm making a useful contribution to society and growing my ability to do those things. That's what matters most. But if you then say, great, what do you think motivates those people over there?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:36:00) And then what do you think motivates those people even further away from you? So people you know a little bit and people you know not at all. And the greater the distance of familiarity with somebody, the more extrinsic we assume their incentives are. So we look at ourselves and we go, listen, I'm lifted up by a whole bunch of stuff that's fundamentally noble and good. But if you ask me about Joel, well, we've been talking for a little while and we met a few years ago.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:36:30) I don't know Joel quite as well, so he's probably got some goodness, but there's probably a little bit of base. He's really interested in prestige and funny type fun titles and stuff like that. And if you ask about Joel's dad, who I never met in my life, Joel's dad is only in it for the money, isn't he? He's got to be because I don't know him at all.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:36:52) And so that's a measurable bias. Now put that inside a company and go, what do you think of your employees who you never met? And the answer is they must be motivated by money. They must be coin operated. And coin operated was an actual phrase that an executive used with me once.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:37:12) He said, we all know that people are coin operated, don't we?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) Until their need is, the problem with that is there's a bit of truth to it. Like you have to get paid, but you're right. After you get that Maslow's hierarchy of needs, after you're able to get that, then it becomes about purpose, meaning, and those intrinsic.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:37:32) And you know, just to be clear, this executive was talking to me in a company where most people made six figures. So we were hardly dealing with the low end of the pay to put food on the table continually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:45) Well, you actually, that's a realization that I have made as an entrepreneur, is there's a level in which you cannot throw any more money at it. You can't make the person, if you take somebody from a 150, let's just use bigger numbers, you take somebody from 150 and they're doing some type of job and they're in that position, and you think that you can pay them 300k and that they will work harder, you are correct for a short period of time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:15) Because what will happen is they will have this amp up and excitement in work. They will increase their salary and then be excited about the different level of life they can live, but also just work harder because they're pumped up about the raise. But give it three months and their productivity is gonna be about what it was before.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:38:34) Because the assumption behind that, you know, I'll double somebody's pay and they'll work harder, is that they weren't working hard when I was paying them 150. But what happens if a person who you're paying 150,000 is actually trying to do a good job? There's not much headroom left. So it's not like we all show up, again, it's not like we all show up at work and go, alright, my theoretical maximum salary is a million dollars and I'm paid 100,000, so I will put in 10% effort. We don't do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) We don't do that.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:39:07) We don't do that. This is silliness. The science on compensation and effort is that for piecework, so when I pay you per podcast or per book or per whatever the units of your and my work are, that you can see an increase in productivity up until the point where the person's burned out and exhausted. But if actually what you want from somebody is creative work or innovative work or to make new things, which is a lot of work, that relationship vanishes. Again, once you've paid somebody enough to not have to worry about where the next meal is coming from.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:39:47) So, you know, it's a long digression on conversation, but how much discussion of management is actually the discussion of how to incentivize people? There's a huge amount of discussion of if you get the incentives right, then the robotic, humanlike people will go and do the thing that we designed for them in the incentive structure. And it just doesn't work like that. So it's another thing that if you imagine people are automatons or coin operated or any of the other things that we're throwing around here, then you can just visit change on them. You can just say we're shuffling everything, but we'll give you some incentives to be in the new model. And then it's sort of a bit of a surprise when it doesn't quite go that smoothly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:32) Well, for the people that are still listening, thank you for continuing to listen. Also, I wanna plug Ashley's previous book as well, Nine Lies About Work. Did I get the title right?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:40:43) Nine Lies About Work. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:44) So if you go on Amazon, by the time this episode airs, you're gonna be able to buy his new book, which is The Problem with Change, which is most of this conversation. But I got to meet Ashley four or five years ago and read his book and talk with him about Nine Lies About Work. We've got that past episode, but I highly recommend you grabbing the book too. So gotta do some work here, Ashley, right?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:41:07) Yeah. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:09) I really do. Like that's my job. My job is to find stuff that I think is really good and really interesting that way I can be excited about it.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:41:17) Yeah. It's not interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:19) Yeah. So let's talk about this AI video at South by Southwest.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:41:23) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:23) Can you set up the whole story for me?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:41:26) So, firstly, South by Southwest is where all of the innovation crowd goes. All of the tech forward people, all the early adopters, all the people you would think in the world would be pretty excited about, for example, AI. And there was a session at South by this year where they were playing a sort of pretaped video before a live session. And the pretaped video was a lot of leaders extolling the virtues of AI. And as the video continued, the crowd started booing.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:41:59) And if you go on Twitter slash X, you can find the booing. Here we go. "AI suddenly makes us more..." And the bit that gets the loudest boo is "AI makes us more human." It's that bit that you just played. So, you know, there's a lot to unpack there. I think people don't like being preached to by the tech overlords when it's not really clear whether the tech overlords' thing of the week is actually a good thing or not. And people especially don't like being lectured about where humanity comes from and the idea that humanity will now emanate from a machine.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:42:23) So there's a lot going on there, but I think it's a moment where, another moment where our sort of assumption that everything that comes from the world of technology is essentially gonna lift up the human species, there's another crack in the wall of that. Listening to that, I mean, it's...

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:01) Have you seen the e/acc people?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:43:04) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:04) The e, so it's e forward slash a c c. You'll see this on Twitter in their pronoun section and stuff. But it's essentially effective accelerationism, and it's this idea that it's a movement among technologists and advocates for a pro-technology stance. And they look at technology as, like, the Bible had it wrong. We're making the god type thing. And, I mean, I don't know if that's their platform exactly, but that's how they act. They act as if technology is this answer to everything and all of our problems will be solved through technology and to hell with the humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:42) Like humans are just this biological bootloader to the truth of this digital god that we're gonna serve.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:43:53) It's interesting at what stage society is gonna conclude that there's nothing to be learned from history. I think in some quarters we're quite close to saying there's nothing to be learned from history. But I think it's a little bit soon to reach that conclusion. I think there's a lot of human history that would tell you exactly how things tend to go in these sorts of moments in our history, in our society, in our life on the planet. And it seems to me that they're hardly ever completely straightforward or unanimously up into the right, and that an understanding of what the human animal needs is super important to anybody who's trying to think of a new way of doing something or a new technology.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:44:38) I mean, in all the stuff I'm doing, whether it's Nine Lies About Work or The Problem with Change, what I'm essentially arguing for is the primacy of humans in human work. And it's interesting that you can make quite a lot of runway making that argument. It should be the most trivial argument anyone's ever made. What matters in human society? The humans.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:45:01) But actually we keep coming up with ways to marginalize the humans or do away with the humans or create gods to replace the humans. And it's hard to find evidence today that this is serving humans particularly well. Now you can go, obviously, that, you know, the standard of, if you look at the sorts of stuff that Steven Pinker is writing, for example, the standard of living has massively gone up. If you look at life expectancy, that had, until recently in the US, continued to go up. It goes up in the rest of the world still. It's coming down now in the US.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:45:37) So in the macro sense, yes, humans have made a huge amount of progress. But that, of course, doesn't imply that everything humans can think of to do is good for humans. And so again, it's like, be careful which way the arrow goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:54) How do we balance that? Well, some of the technology is good to some of the people, right? Like if I'm a billionaire, which I am not, but if I'm a billionaire and I own a bunch of companies and I can, and it's good for me to pull in this technology that will take what was on the P&L as a $10 million thing and transfer it to a $5 million thing, that's good for me on a business decision on a P&L. But that $5 million is, you know, 10,000 people's jobs or something, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:24) So how do we handle, how do you think it's going to play out? How do we handle implementing technology that automates humans and makes lives better without completely automating out humans? How do we do that?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:46:40) I mean, I'm not gonna answer that question for you today. If I could, this would be a whole very different sort of a podcast, I think. Listen, none of the answers are straightforward, but the better answers will be informed by better evidence. And the evidence that I'm trying to introduce to the conversation here is change is hard on people. You have to put the humans at the middle if you're gonna do things that benefit the humans.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:47:09) We have lost sight of that, and we risk losing sight of it with every successive day and every successive shiny new thing in the world, whether it's AI or some other, you know, there'll be a thing after AI as well. So I'm trying to say, listen, however we go about it, it'll be better if we have a better balance of factors that we're thinking about. How do you improve and how do you do so in a way that honors humanity and human needs? I'm trying to pose a slightly better version of the question rather than necessarily imagine I can just by myself come up with the answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) Well, I love what you're doing. I love the message that you push. The book, I'm very excited because I will get the Audible, I think, in a day or two. Was it a day or a month? When is it coming out? We'll edit around this moment right here, but when is it coming out?

(Ashley Goodall at 00:48:09) May 7th.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:10) Oh, nice. Nice. I love what you're doing. I like the conversation. You, as an author myself, you picked a beautiful thing that people consider to be true constantly and then disrupted it.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:48:29) You're not calling me, have I disrupted change? Does that mean I have to vanish in a puff of my own logic? Is that...

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:37) No, no. You've challenged the idea that change, unadulterated change, is good. And you gave some really good insights and brilliant thoughts. And every time your name comes up, I'm like, I like talking to Ashley.

(Ashley Goodall at 00:48:52) Well, it's lovely to chat to you again. It's been too long. We should do this more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:55) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.