When my task list feels overwhelming, I notice that my motivation is to avoid pain, which is a negative motivation. It’s obligation, away from. Instead, a good purpose or vision at the micro level moves towards something positive, like our sense of creativity, play, our potential, or how we can make a positive difference, even a small one, that day.
Are you looking at your task list today and dreading it a bit? In this replay from the October 2023 Humanizing Work Meetup session, Richard and Peter share three recent situations when they were feeling a little burned out, and what they did to fix it. They walk through a process to think and communicate about Purpose and Vision at the micro level. That process took them less than five minutes in their examples, and energized them to make their work meaningful that day. Learn how you can do the same thing to tackle the day with energy, even when the tasks aren’t something you’re looking forward to.
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Episode Transcription
Richard Lawrence
Welcome to the humanizing work show. In this episode, we’re sharing the recording of our October 23 community meetup session, where we talked about mission, purpose, and vision, what makes them good, and how to apply them as a daily practice rather than just a big thing you do every year or two and then forget about.
Peter Green
In the meetup, Richard and I share three real examples of recent situations when we were feeling a bit burned out, both at home and at work. These weren’t big, lofty projects or initiatives. We’re talking about chores and repetitive work in these examples. Then we show the process we use to think about and communicate about the purpose and vision at the very micro-level.
It takes less than 5 minutes, and in each of those cases, those few minutes helped us get more energized to make our work meaningful that day. And you can do the same thing if you’re looking at your task list today and dreading it just a little bit.
Richard
We also show how daily purpose and vision don’t just help with individual engagement. They also make a huge difference for alignment when people need to work together to make meaningful progress at the daily level. We host these free live community sessions on the third Thursday of every month. If you want to attend future sessions where you can participate in the live chat and Q&A, sign up at humanizingwork.com/meetup.
All right. Welcome. Today we’re talking about reimagining purpose and vision from grandiose to daily practice. We work with a lot of companies, teams and individuals around purpose and vision. And often the first thing we do when we’re working on that is normalize– kind of level set around how people feel about that kind of work; writing purpose, mission, vision, statements, going into the session.
So we give everybody a sentence stub: “Writing purpose and vision statements feels like…” And then on a frame in miro, we invite them to share any work appropriate image that captures what it has felt like in the past when they’ve participated in this kind of work. Now, we’re not going to do that here, since we’re not working in miro together.
But imagine what image you would drop on there for the mood board about what does it feel like to do mission, vision, purpose, statements. We often see bored emojis, heads exploding, dumpster fires. Occasionally we get the light bulb or lightning or something exciting. But most of the images express boredom, confusion, frustration, a sense of “Why are we doing this?”
It doesn’t seem to work, so why do we bother, over and over again, in organizations, doing this kind of activity, if that’s what it feels like to do it? And I think the answer is because when you get it right, which we do occasionally– when their purpose and vision are done well– they create alignment and engagement. Even in a world that’s rapidly changing and unpredictable and complex in a way that just backlog items or to do lists or exceptions criteria can’t. It helps us understand the why and get aligned around that.
And then as we respond to a changing world, we can keep trying to achieve the same way. So today we’re going to look at how to do those things well, but more than that, how to do it every day at a variety of scales.
Peter
So before we dive into that, we also want to invite you to make it as practical and applicable as possible. And so we’ll invite you to think about some places where alignment and engagement would help in your work and some kind of prompts for you to ponder here as we get into the content, which is “What’s a recent example of something that could have benefitted from greater alignment between you and maybe the folks you are collaborating with or doing the work with?”
Second question is “What’s a recent example where you knew you had to do a thing but you didn’t feel inspired or engaged in the work?” And Richard and I might just share an example of what we spent doing the last few hours before this session, which we have looked forward to. And then the third question topic to ponder is “What’s a current or an upcoming initiative that you can influence that might benefit from greater alignment and engagement?”
So those are the things to be pondering as we get into the content. Let’s start off by talking through how we think about purpose, mission, and vision and how those are sort of distinct. So let’s start with purpose and mission, and we like to clarify these. Those two things are (a) pretty related–purpose and mission–the way that we see these used and used well, are very similar, but they’re why we do the work we do; why the work matters; what difference we’re trying to make in the world.
So they’re the big whys, why do we even do this stuff? And so a purpose is, you know, “we exist to” and mission is a little bit more action oriented. Often our mission is to do this thing.
Richard
And what we’ve found is that different kinds of things are best described in one way or the other. The purpose is kind of focused on the outcome you’re trying to create; a mission is more focused on what you’re doing; and the “why” is sort of secondary. But they’re both a what and a why in some way. Let’s contrast that with vision.
Vision is when we’re successful, having done that, or we’ve done that well, what does the future look like? And that includes the sense of seeing like vision. I’m seeing a thing. What am I seeing? I’m seeing a better world at some scale because I’ve done my mission or I’ve achieved my purpose.
Peter
So let’s take each of those, purpose and vision, and let’s share some “good example– bad example.” These are real world examples we found that are on websites or published in articles that we think do a nice job of distinguishing between what makes a really good one and maybe not so useful one. So for purpose statements, my favorite example– this is actually framed as a mission statement– is from early Tesla.
It’s one of the clearer mission statements we’ve ever seen. And Tesla in about 2010, I think is when this one came out, was shared more publicly is that the mission of Tesla motors is “to accelerate the mass market adoption of sustainable transportation.” What’s one of your favorites, Richard?
Richard
I really like S&P Global. You know, the people that do the S&P 500 and various other things for investors. They describe their purpose as “We accelerate progress in the world by providing intelligence that is essential for companies, governments and individuals to make decisions with conviction.”
Peter
Apparently, good purpose or mission statements are about accelerating something right?
Richard
That’s true. You definitely see, if you look at these over time, you’ll see sets of buzzwords at different times that show up a lot. And we live in a time of accelerating, apparently.
Peter
There’s one that you shared with me, Richard, recently that I was a little bit on the fence about. And that’s Ralph Lauren, the fashion brand. Do you remember what exactly it said?
Richard
Yeah, I’ve got that one handy. “Our purpose at Ralph Lauren is to inspire the dream of a better life through authenticity and timeless style.” I’ll say what I like about it, and you can say what you’re comfortable about with that. I think sometimes it feels like if you’re going to have a good purpose, it has to be some kind of highly consequential, world changing, important sort of thing.
And you see brands sometimes try to do this with products that aren’t actually doing that and like some of our bad examples, we’ll get to in a minute, kind of claim too much like I’m going to bring out Coca-Cola as an example of this, “Refresh the world and make a difference.” They’re trying to sort of echo purpose statements like Tesla’s that are like, “we’re having this consequential effect on things like climate change.”
And I mean, Coca-Cola makes sugary drinks so their “make a difference,” it doesn’t ring true. It feels like it’s trying to claim more than it does. And so the thing I like about the Ralph Lauren one is that their brand really is this kind of dream associated with a certain style. And it doesn’t try to be bigger than it is.
It is an aspirational fashion brand and it’s honest about what it’s doing. And I think that creates consistency through the brand in a lot of ways.
Peter
Yeah, I think when you first shared that with me, the thing I was uncomfortable about with that, is that I don’t think of clothing as like “inspiring a dream of a better life,” for me.
Richard
It’s not your better life, your definition of better. Yeah. So these are written for a particular context. And I think if you know your customers, you’re going to have one that resonates with them and may not resonate with people outside of your target customer.
Peter
Mm hm.
Richard
All right, Let’s talk about the ones we could agree were bad.
Peter
Okay. What’s funny is the first one of these showed up on two separate lists when we were researching this a while back as both a great example and in another list as a terrible example. And I think we fall pretty firmly into the second list as far as our opinion goes. And that’s Hershey.
Richard
Yep.
Richard
Hershey makes chocolate. Yeah. And you know why they exist?
Peter
Well, according to Hershey, they exist for “undisputed marketplace leadership.” That’s the purpose of Hershey. Undisputed Marketplace leadership
It’s kind of like Pinky and the Brain, out in the yard. Do you remember the old Pinky and the Brain cartoon? “What are we going to do today?”
“The same thing we do every day. Try to take over the world.”
It is marketplace leaders. So hopefully we won’t have many folks from Hershey’s executive team here. But, you know, we have to we have to cast some differences here and we’ll explain.
Richard
And you know what? If somebody from Hershey’s is listening, let’s talk about how to make your purpose statement better.
Peter
Totally. Totally.
Richard
Let’s look at two more examples we don’t love. And then let’s talk about what makes a good one. Good. Okay, we’ve alluded to it, but let’s get into it. So another one of my favorites, Advanced Auto Parts mission, is– their purpose is to execute our mission, “passion for customers, Passion for yes.” you know, that says everything.
Yeah.
Peter
You know, those dumpster fire emojis sometimes we see? I think sometimes when you’re trying to get a group to write together and agree on a thing, that you end up with kind of a lowest common denominator thing that says nothing. And some of these are falling into that category for me. They’re not really telling me anything useful, and I wonder if these are the result of kind of a group collaborative writing session where we said, “All right, can we all agree on this? Yeah, okay.” We already mentioned Coca Cola. CarMax is another one– is “To drive integrity by being honest and transparent in every interaction,” which sounds much more like a value than a purpose.
Richard
Mm hm. And the pun– I struggle with that– it doesn’t really say what they do, but they drive integrity. Yes.
Peter
Yeah. Which, you know, you and I can both appreciate a good pun. If any of you were to listen in on any of the Humanizing Work meetings, you would see a high percentage of time spent with Richard and I trying to get Angie to groan with our terrible dad jokes and puns. So we love a good pun, but it’s probably not the right place for it.
Richard
Maybe not in the purpose statement. All right. So three things that make a good purpose statement good. We’ve looked at a lot of these, and I think the things that show up over and over again are three C’s: First off, consequential. It feels like it matters that we’re doing the thing. It has consequences usually that’s something related to service, connection, relatedness.
So if we think about the motivation factors, autonomy, mastery, purpose, we’re going to see the purpose kind of motivation here: consequential. Now, as we noted earlier, it has to feel realistically consequential. I think the “make a difference” from Coca-Cola didn’t quite ring true because it feels like it’s claiming too much for sugary drinks.
Peter
I think it might be useful to distinguish something like a purpose statement and what it’s trying to do from advertising, because you could see Coca-Cola’s advertising as doing a nice job of creating a feel associated with the brand, and that’s different than the purpose of it. Like the iconic “I’d like to teach the world to sing” ad was a really effective advertisement, but that’s not the purpose of Coca-Cola, is to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, right?
So I think it’s useful to distinguish what a purpose statement is meant to do and what an advertisement is meant to do. And I think sometimes those get mixed up when companies or teams are trying to come up with a good purpose statement.
Richard
I think they actually could have built that in if they had emphasized in their purpose creating connection between people as they share good drinks and like this is already a thing around, say, wine or coffee in cultures for centuries. And they could have picked up on that as close to their purpose, and that would have been a difference It felt like they could have made. So yeah, consequential.
Second one is challenging, and this is about emphasizing competence and growth. It’s the mastery set of the motivation factors.
Peter
Right, Right. And if we look at the Hershey one– undisputed marketplace leadership– that might feel consequential to some people, but it’s probably a pretty limited number of people; like the executive team and the board of directors would really get fired up by undisputed marketplace leadership, but not very many other people. And so it’s certainly not speaking to the consequential part of it, like undisputed marketplace leadership in service of what outcome?
Richard
And then finally, clear is the third C. So consequential, challenging and clear. And the thing that we’re looking for when we look at examples of this is that it actually says what we do in some way, it’s “we exist to do something and produce some outcome by doing that something.” And that should be clear so that we can see alignment from different people involved in making the purpose happen.
Peter
All right. So to recap, a great purpose statement is consequential. It’s challenging, and it’s clear. And those don’t just roll off the tongue, right? It takes work, takes drafts, it takes feedback, it takes sleeping on it, running on it. Right? All the things that we know, because purpose, mission and vision are all creative writing, is how I think of them.
They’re creative writing assignments. You’re writing good prose, typically, when you’re doing this, maybe a little bit of poetry when you get into vision, but good prose takes editing and revision and feedback in order to get it right. So if you’re if you’re thinking, “Wow, writing a good purpose statement, I don’t know if I could do that without Seth Godin on my team,” right?
Well, you can, but it would probably take drafts.
Richard
And, by the way, one way to get at that is actually starting from these three things and answering the questions: What is consequential about what we do? What is challenging about what we do? And putting it really clearly, what do we actually do? There’s probably a sentence in there. We exist to do this thing that has this effect.
Peter
Yeah. Good. And then it’s really just editing, right? It’s editing to get it tighter, editing to get it clearer, more challenging or clear what the challenge is, more consequential or clear what the consequences are. Right? Let’s shift to vision. What do we see when we’ve done that purpose well, Richard?
Richard
Six attributes of a good vision. And then let’s look at a couple that display those attributes pretty nicely. So the first attribute of a good vision is that it vividly describes the future. The bad ones feel a lot like these vague collections of buzzwords, and sometimes they’re even tangled up with “What are we doing or what are we building?”
The good ones actually paint a picture of the future, which is why Peter says they’re creative writing. You’re telling a story about something in the future. So that’s number one. Vividly describes the future.
Peter
The second one then is it uses concrete language and not corporate speak. And we were reflecting on this earlier this week because my old company, Adobe, is having their big annual creativity conference, the Adobe Max conference, and Adobe’s corporate communication style is riddled with corporate speak: “seamlessly, easily do this.” Those adverbs just drive me nuts because I guess my ears are tuned to listen for those these days.
And even when I was there, it drove me a little bit nuts how we describe these things, but “seamlessly” doesn’t really tell me anything useful. It’s just a filler word when we’re trying to vividly paint a picture. Instead of telling me it’s seamless, paint a picture for how it’s seamless. So we want concrete language. It’s very similar to what we teach, like Richard in product owners when we’re doing like, Here’s a user story– now give me examples.
I don’t want an acceptance criteria to be, “It’s easy to use.” I want you to tell me an example of what somebody does and make it concrete that way.
Richard
Number three, a good one describes the experience of people and the people are usually customers and our employees; often both. So when we’re talking about especially big visions, so bigger scale, we’re talking about the vision for a company being successful or a vision for a major product being successful. There are often two sides to it. Why the future is better for our customers, but also why the future is better for us, why we want to be a part of that.
And we’ll see that actually in one of the examples that we share in a moment.
Peter
Next to, or very similar to what we talked about in purpose; So we want to include these attributes as well, which is that a good vision statement is challenging, it’s aspirational. It again emphasizes those things like competence and growth. We’re going to need to grow and expand and get better at things in order to accomplish this vision.
So there is an aspirational nature to it because it challenges us to do things we’re not doing today and then inspires, right? So both of those very, very similar to the consequential and challenging parts inspire us. Again, that emphasizes the service that we’re being in the world in some way or the connection we’re creating. So those two motivation factors come up again here in the vision statements.
Richard
And then finally, the sixth one is good vision differentiates us. It feels like it’s uniquely ours in some way. One of the patterns we noticed when we looked at bad visions (and there are a lot of them in the world), is that they could apply to almost any company, often not even within a category–they could apply to any organization.
When we’re done, we’ll have made a difference in the world. Okay, what kind of difference and why you? And so I always like to see something in a vision where it says, this is the unique mark that we’re leaving on the world, and it mattered that we were here doing this thing.
Peter
All right. So let’s share a couple examples here, and I’ll share one that I like and you can share one that you like. And the first one of these that I came across– this was years ago when we were trying to pin down what does a good vision statement look like. And I just was reading blogs and articles and websites and books about this.
And I came across this vision statement from the original Ford Motor Company. This was all the way back in 1905. So like pre model T launch, I think, if the timeline is right– or right around the time they were launching the very first Model T, and I’ll preface this by saying it is a statement of its time that it would probably be edited a little bit to make it a little more inclusive these days, but it’s even inclusive for its time.
So Ford in 1905, the vision statement was “We will build a motor car for the great multitudes. It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one and enjoy with his family the blessings of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces. When we are through, everyone will be able to afford one. The horse will have disappeared from our highways and the automobile will be taken for granted.”
Richard
I love that last sentence. That is a vivid picture of the future. The horse will have disappeared, and the automobile will be taken for granted. It was successful, so it’s almost hard to imagine how big and vivid that was to claim. That’s like “wheeled vehicles will have disappeared from our highways” or maybe less ambitious, “internal combustion engines will have disappeared from our highways.”
It’s that kind of aspirational, vivid concrete. Here’s one that I really liked. So Sony was founded just after World War Two in Japan, and the original Sony vision, (this one actually is a little bit like purpose and vision stuck together. But it’s got some of these vision elements in it) says “We’ll create products that become pervasive around the world.
“We will be the first Japanese company to go into the American market and distribute directly. We will succeed with innovations like the transistor radio that American companies have failed at. 50 years from now, our brand name will be as well-known as any on earth and will signify innovation and quality that rivals the most innovative companies anywhere. ‘Made in Japan’ will mean something fine, not shoddy.”
Again. Like Ford, they finished strong.
Peter
Yeah, exactly. I was thinking the same thing. They both finished really strong. And that’s a great example of meaningful not just for customers, but for us internally. As we talked about it, it makes a difference for customers, but that’s one that really is– I can see getting fired up to go to work in the morning at Sony, if my goal is to change the perception of what “made in Japan” means, right?
Living in Japan, especially post-World War two. Right? There’s a lot going on there psychologically in that vision statement.
Richard
The other thing I like about this one is the transistor radio as an example. I think a lot of good visions have this pattern of an example that really illustrates a larger category of things, because this isn’t a feature list that says we’re going to do transistor radios. This is “even transistor radios–the thing the Americans are struggling with. We’re going to get that and maybe even we’ll get it first or we’ll get it better.” And that’s powerful. And so I’ve seen this sort of thing where you have a foil in some way in the vision. I think an example of a thing like we’ve used this with Amazon or Netflix or some familiar brand and kind of use that as an example.
I remember we wrote one for when we were first starting out with online courses. We had something like “Our customers will anticipate the next course, like people will wait for the next episode of their favorite series on Netflix,” and then five years later, somebody actually said that unprompted in a conversation with us. Yeah, it was fantastic. “I just want to binge the whole course like on Netflix!”
Peter
“Oh! It worked!” All right. So both of those visions seem pretty old, right? 75 to 120 years old. And there’s a little bit of survivorship bias in the picking of those two. I’m sure there are lots of really vivid, inspirational vision statements that we’ve never heard about because the company went out of business and so it’s not like purpose and vision will make or break the company.
What it does do, I think, is fuel the fire– really increase your chances of staying motivated, like all of the psychological reasons that we want to really knock it out of the park when we’re leading a team, when we’re leading an organization, it just improves our odds of being successful. And this all kind of makes sense to us.
Like we’ve done this. I’m sure everybody on the call has been involved with some kind of discussion about purpose, vision, or has at least thought through it or maybe if you’re like me in past companies you have been critical of our company’s purpose and vision and wished that we got a chance to take a stab at improving it.
And so, at the big picture, 20,000 foot view, purpose, vision seem like, all right, we need to do those things. But what happens when, as I come into work this morning, I’ve got a task list that has me dreading getting started. Like, “Maybe five more minutes on this New York Times crossword puzzle before I get started.” Right?
And then the other challenge that I find with this sometimes is that it feels like a thing we do once in a while. But the thing I’m focused on today or this week or this month is like the features on my sprint backlog right now, kind of losing the forest from the trees is one challenge and then kind of feeling demotivated, when my to do list today is full of what feels to me like busywork that I know I need to do, but it’s not particularly something I’m looking forward to.
So shifting from company vision, product vision to how do I apply this no matter what my role is? Because I think we’ve all experienced that– the losing the forest for the trees– and yeah, I get that we’re trying to make a big difference, but my to do list doesn’t look that inspiring today.
Richard
And so that’s the big idea we want to explore today. We’ve noticed that the same things that make good purpose and vision at the large scale are actually really useful at the small scale, but we often don’t use them there. There’s this switch when we get into the small scale to tactical, but even if you’re still beginning with the end in mind in some way, to use the Stephen Covey phrase, it’s like, here’s the acceptance criteria, here’s what done looks like.
And I think there’s an opportunity to get the benefits of purpose and vision at the smaller scale. So let’s look at some examples of that. I’ll share a story of where I used this in the last week and had an unexpected positive outcome. So my wife and I went on a trip this last weekend out of town, which meant that some of the chores that needed to happen on Saturday at home that I would normally do weren’t going to get done unless I asked one of my adult sons to do it for me.
Specifically, we have eight ducks that live in our backyard and ducks make a mess. And their little kiddy pool pond gets pumped out a couple of times a week, including on Saturdays. So they have fresh water to play in. And then you have to add new bedding to their run. And there’s various things that need to happen. And I normally do that on Saturday mornings, but I was going to be gone, so I wanted my son to do it and we’d done it together occasionally.
He knew some of the tasks; and I could have given just tactical like, here’s the to do list– the things that need to be done. But instead I wanted to try something different. So I painted a picture of what does it look like when we’ve done this successfully? What am I trying to do on a Saturday when I’m out there? And we talked about how entertainingly happy the ducks are when you change their water– like they’re splashing around and playing and they don’t mind nasty water, but they really like it when it’s fresh and they like throwing it all over the yard to make more mud, to make it dirty again.
And we just talked through our vision for the yard, and I went away and came back and everything had been done really well. And he reported that it was more fun than he expected. He wasn’t really looking forward to it before this, but was willing to do it because he’s good about his responsibilities. But yeah, and another outcome was happy ducks.
So it was meaningful for employees and customers, as it were. And produced a good outcome. Now, the unexpected outcome of this was on Tuesday morning when I got up to do the second round of this for the week like I normally do, I still had that vision in mind and even though I ran into an issue with my pump getting clogged and it was taking longer than I wanted, I still had that vision in mind, and that kept me engaged through a kind of frustrating version of those chores.
And then when the ducks were happy at the end, it’s like, “Oh yeah, this is why I do what I do.” And they upped their egg production this week from 5 to 7 every day. So I think maybe the vision has also improved our outcomes beyond just psychological.
Peter
I can totally see this as Richard the farmer’s KPI like “Increase duck egg production by 28% or whatever it” is versus just leading with vision; and it creates a pull instead of a push towards that.
Richard
I am kind of looking forward to doing it again. Yeah. On Saturday.
Peter
That’s fascinating. This is like brain hacks for how to get us to do things that we’re not looking forward to in some ways. Because as you describe this, I mentioned—before this call, Richard and I are currently simultaneously doing three different cohorts of our A-CSPO program. So A-CSPO is our advanced products owner course. And it’s not just a two-day class.
It’s every Friday we meet for 90 minutes. We have homework participants, then do the homework so they can actually play with the information, apply it to their real work, and then they submit the homework during the week. And then Richard and I grade it, and then we collect themes and questions from the homework, and then we kick off the next Friday session with that, which has never been too onerous a task to grade that stuff.
But I think this is the first time we’ve ever done three cohorts at the same time, and they’re all offset like one started on this week another one started a couple of weeks later, another one started a couple weeks later. And so there are six weeks in this beta.
Richard
It’s worse than that, Peter. We’re actually grading for four right now and finishing up the tail end of–
Peter
The tail end of that last one.
Richard
So today it was four.
Peter
We have these grading assignments and I and I feel a ton of empathy for teachers today who are constantly grading tons of homework. And for us, it’s just scattered across six different topics and four different cohorts and after lunch, which is when we had slotted to knock a bunch of this out, you know, I finished my lunch and I was in that (uhhhhhh) mode.
And so because we had primed ourselves to think about this a little bit for this meetup session, I thought, okay, let me do the work here. What’s the purpose? What’s the mission behind the A-CSPO program and what is the impact we’re trying to have? How is this challenging to us and to our participants? What does “great” look like?
What’s the vision behind a great program? And I started to realize I had this very concrete picture of my early days of Scrum and thinking if two weeks into learning about Scrum, I had been able to send something to Jeff Sutherland or to Mike Cohn or Alister Coburn or some of the early folks that had taught me these things and get their actual feedback on it, what would that have felt like for me to get a note from Alister saying, “Wow, this is really well thought out,” which is one of the things we do when somebody gives us a really nicely done assignment or, “Hey, it looks like you assumed we meant this when we did that. What we’re actually thinking about is this. Could you make an edit on this and improve it?” Even that would be super useful to me so I don’t go too far down the wrong path before I get course correction and not to put myself on the same level as those folks who have been doing this a lot longer than we have and I consider some of my heroes. But with any teacher getting a little bit of kudos, getting a little bit of feedback in my life has been really meaningful to me. And I thought, “Okay, let me let me switch this from ‘I got to knock out all the grading’ to ‘Let me be of service to the people in these cohorts and give them some feedback’” and a little bit of vision around “Won’t it be cool when like all of these are graded?” so there’s a little bit of a short term one. We have a Slack channel where these come in as people submit them and we use some signals to do that with that. Won’t it be cool when it’s all green checkmarks in the Slack channel? And that was motivating.
And so even just thinking about outcomes and thinking about vision and purpose for that was really useful. And you know, I put down the crossword and got to it.
Richard
And so that was about a three-hour task. So we’re not talking about 18 to 24 months or 50 years or the scale we normally think about these being useful tools. You applied it to an afternoon of work.
Peter
Yeah.
Richard
To create engagement. Likewise with my duck chores. That was a couple of hours of work to create alignment and engagement for a small number of people. So this stuff scales down really nicely.
Peter
Those are both ones that we’ve done recently, Richard. Let’s talk about one that we probably need to do.
Richard
Okay?
Peter
And that is something where Richard and I occasionally have a bit of tension around this topic. So all of our websites run on WordPress. There are multiple plugins on various sites that we manage.
Richard
So many plugins.
Peter
So many plugins. PHP revisions happen, Stripe updates things, themes get updated, our forms–like all these things change all the time. And Richard is sort of the owner of this– you know, he manages the hosting service. Richard has more experience than any of the rest of us with, you know, doing this type of work. And so any time I feel like we ought to update all the plug ins, update all this stuff on WordPress, I sort of have to poke at Richard a little bit and say, “Hey, I’m getting these red warning flashes like on the admin page, the dashboard. Do you think maybe we ought to update the website now?” And Richard’s response is very similar to I think what my response was when I was thinking about having to grade the homework.
Richard
Yeah, there’s always a lot of other things to do. Yeah.
Peter
Yeah. Is this really the highest value for the use of our time?
Richard
I was just reading because it never– just it’s always Whac-A-Mole where “Yeah, some plug in interacting or some other plug fails to upgrade.” And I have to figure out why and then I get to the end of it and it feels like I’m in the same place I started. In a way, there’s no new capabilities on the website or anything, right?
I’m just waiting until it has to happen again. So I don’t feel a strong sense of purpose around this. That’s what you’re getting at?
Peter
Yeah, well, and I think I do, but I’m not the one to do the work. And so I think that creates a little bit of tension–like a mismatch. And if I felt really confident that I’d be able to do all that stuff competently, I would just dive in and take the lead on it. But I think this is a good example of, yeah, Richard’s like, “Here’s the training course, Peter, go after it,” right?
But there are certain things that I think you’re uniquely good at. Like I, I don’t know. There’s probably some ways to do some automated testing on that and automated updates with smoke test. And those are things that would take me years to get good at where you probably could do that half asleep. So yeah, and to Michael’s point, Michael’s point in the chat, Michael mentions that maybe we could buy our way out of it.
I think there are lots of different ways we could address this, every once in a while, I think, “Yeah, maybe we ought to just get off WordPress. There are all kinds of things that we could do. But you know, we’ve made the choices we’ve made and the cost of switching is probably high enough that that would be an even bigger burden.
So it’s not like Richard and I are fighting, but there’s some tension around it. And I think this is a good example of when we are collaborating with other people, we don’t always have the same incentives. We’re not always fired up by the same things. And so it’s really useful to recognize that pushing harder doesn’t make it better.
Like me just nagging Richard or bribing him or cajoling him or shaming him or whatever I could pull out of my manipulation toolbox from being a parent for 24 years– It’s not going to be useful here. But what might be useful is what we’ve talked about here, which is, is there a purpose, a vision that we could get aligned on that would create a pull for both of us around this?
And so maybe it would be useful to– I’m going to tell you, Richard just slacked me to poke at me a little bit, “Like putting a meeting on my calendar?” because that’s the last thing I did. I just put a meeting on the calendar that said “Update the website.” Behold the tension, right? Okay. So let’s see if we can get alignment on it.
We’ll do it live, Richard, if you’re okay with that.
Richard
All right. Bring it on.
Peter
All right. So let’s talk about purpose. Like what’s concrete, what’s consequential, what’s clear related to the websites. So when you think of it that way, what is the purpose of (and this is specifically narrowly focused on keeping their websites always up to date. Yeah).
Richard
Yeah. Because I can articulate purpose for each of the websites. So we have to have the marketing site, humanizingwork.com. The purpose of that website is to help the right people find us and find our products and services so that we can have a meaningful impact for them and help them do their work better. And so that’s the purpose on that one.
And the other one is the learning system, learning at humanizingwork.com where people take online courses. And I think the purpose of that one is that people actually learn useful concepts and skills that they can apply to their work. And there’s an internal purpose for that one, I think, that people can do that while we’re doing something else and not teaching them live.
Yeah, so I see the purpose for those.
Peter
Mm hmm.
Richard
And I think if I were to try to articulate a purpose for the plug in update extravaganza, it’s something like what we would talk about is an avoid costs benefit. It’s that there could be an interruption to the purpose of those websites as there’s a security hole that gets exploited or a plug in that no longer works or something.
And so the purpose of the plug in updates is the continuing experience of the purpose of the websites.
Peter
Yeah, I just want to point out that you just hit on the thing that causes this to be meaningful for me, which is, when I see those warnings, I start to worry like we’re vulnerable now. Not only are we vulnerable, but potentially our users could be vulnerable, right? If people on the learning site, you know, have personal email, they have log in info on there, like if something got hacked, if there was a security vulnerability, that kind of freaks me out.
And then anything that interacts with Stripe, which is payment processing, kind of freaks me out as well. Every once in a while, I get “Hey, Stripe is doing this, you better update these plug ins.” I think. Aargh!. So framing that as an avoid costs like we keep all of those things from happening is interesting because it is a negative framing. It’s like avoid pain.
Richard
It is.
Peter
Versus create positive outcomes.
Richard
But I think that is for just manually doing the updates. I think that is the honest statement of purpose. And vision is like avoiding this negative future. And if we were to try to frame it in a positive way, it would probably feel as disingenuous as the “make a difference with sugary drinks.”
Peter
Yeah. And so let’s go to vision, because I can see vision being maybe even a more useful tool here about what it’s like when (and I think this could be longer term), “What’s it like when plug in updates always happen regularly?” And give me some ideas. Like in fact let’s use– there’s one of these; there are a couple of different patterns for writing good vision statements that we like; that we teach.
One we call “how, now, wow.” So “how” is, you know, how–and you describe the current crappy situation. Well, “now,” here’s the new thing and the “wow” is…
Richard
A better future.
Peter
Yeah, here’s the better future, right? Like, here’s what people say about it. Isn’t that cool? So if you were to give me like a “how now wow” around plug in updates, what would it, what would it sound like?
Richard
You know how every month or two we have to have this conversation about how out of date the plug ins are getting and then spend a day slogging through fixing it? Well, now the updates happen automatically and a little bit at a time. And we have confidence every morning that it worked because we see the results of the smoke tests that ran right after every update, and it rolls back if they don’t pass.
Peter
Here’s why starting with the vision statement is so much more powerful than just a checklist– because we have checklists right now and, you know, we have some tools to just make sure that this happens on a regular cadence. But when you described it that way, Richard, I started to think, well, maybe there’s a different way we could approach this rather than just slog through the whole checklist again.
Richard
And I have mixed feelings about that because that was not really me creating a vision for the work that was sitting in front of me.
That vision caused me to imagine a whole different batch of work. Yeah. Around– WordPress actually has auto update, so I could turn that on– but it was the confidence around the automatic updates. That is the part that doesn’t exist. And so that implies a whole different piece of work.
Peter
Yeah.
Richard
And maybe that’s fine, but this didn’t actually motivate me to do the manual updates and the testing.
Peter
So I’m wondering if just like we would do with a real product backlog, if we know there’s a better architectural way to do something or a better process we could use, it’s not to try to boil the ocean and say, “Well, it’s always going to be manual and painful until we invest a week to create this new system.” Is there a small slice of that that we could build the next time we do it that gets you more motivated?
Richard
Yeah, it turns out I wrote a book on test automation, and there’s a piece of a chapter that talks about exactly how to solve this problem. Retrofitting tests on old code.
Peter
So do your children have shoes, Richard?
Richard
Which they actually say we should do–
Peter
Yeah.
Richard
So maybe the next time I do this, I start reproducing issues I run into using automated tests and slowly grow the tests over the riskiest parts of our website until we have that body of tests that I trust. And me and Laura and Angie don’t have to go through and manually test everything every time.
Peter
What else would make it– I don’t know. Do you feel like that’s sufficient?
Richard
I think it is. And I want to resist the temptation to go too big on this, because I think the point here is that we can do vision for small things and it’s going to be a future that is better in small ways. And the feeling that a vision has to be big and change the world in order to be useful is not accurate.
Peter
I noticed a change in how you were describing the work from originally, like when you were describing how we do it now, the manual “uh, uh, uh” to “I wrote a book about this. This is an area of high competence for me.” Like there was a real change in your tone and how you were talking about it. And I’m wondering if it felt different and if so, what felt different about it.
Richard
I feel pulled by that work in a way I never do by the manual updates. Like, I’m kind of interested in doing it, both because I think it would produce a better outcome, and I think I would enjoy doing the work more. It would be what we sometimes call play. Like the work itself would be enjoyable because I don’t get to do automated tests all that often, and I actually rather enjoy doing that work. That’s one of the reasons I wrote a book about it.
Peter
The book didn’t wholly kill the joy?
Richard
I wouldn’t use Cucumber for this. So if anyone is familiar with the book, I wouldn’t totally do what is in the book. But I would probably still use Ruby and Web Driver, and it’d be a place where I have some confidence from having done it before in other kinds of work.
Peter
You mentioned play and you know, when we were talking about motivation factors earlier with purpose and vision. We focused on the other two– kind of competence, growth, purpose, connection. And we didn’t talk much about autonomy because it doesn’t seem to play into this very much. But play comes from the book Primed to Perform, and they’re describing the same research that Dan Pink described as autonomy, as play.
And I think when we’re thinking about purpose and vision, play is probably a much more important thing than autonomy or agency. So that just occurred to me when you mentioned play, that’s a good way to think about good purpose. Vision should tap into play, purpose and potential, which is the three P’s as they describe those three categories. That’s nice.
The other thing that occurred to me as we were doing this, Richard, is that Chris Avery has this –basically his book is called The Responsibility Process– and it’s really a book about how we show up and especially about how we lead. But The Responsibility Process is kind of how we react to a situation all the way from “Why do we do what we do?” I do it out of shame, I do it out of obligation– And he says the goal is to get to responsive ability, meaning I’m choosing how to respond to this. And as you talked about finding the play motive in this work, it felt like you switched from shame because I haven’t done it or obligation because I have to do it and to responsibility.
Like I’ve found a way to respond to this in an effective way.
Richard
I think that’s true. I feel like that’s a thing I could choose to do rather than a thing you just put on my calendar for me.
Peter
Right. You’re welcome. All right. So that’s kind of how we would want to use this on a day-to-day basis. It helps us get out of the forest for the trees problem, which really this was a little bit of that and a little bit of just the obligation of “I got to do it: dreading” part of it. And what we’re going to do next is, in a moment, we’ll cancel the recording and we’ll invite anyone on the call to share any of the following in any order that occurs to you.
So as we’ve walked through how we think about these things, if you want to ask questions to get clarity on any of the concepts we’ve talked through, if you want to share any ideas that triggered for you and talk through those and we can learn together, or if there’s a particularly tough one–a situation, you’re in; an initiative, you’re working on; the thing that’s on your calendar that you’re looking forward to with as much excitement as I was looking forward to grading or Richard was looking forward to updating the plug ins, we’re happy to talk through that together. So those of you that are watching the recording, thanks for tuning in and you can send us those questions, I guess, to mailbag@humanizingwork.com. And we’ll see if we’ve got an answer for you there.
Otherwise, thanks for tuning in and we will cancel (stop) this recording. Thanks for tuning into this week’s humanizing work show. We don’t rebroadcast the Q&A from these meet up sessions just to keep things private for the community members. But if you want to participate live in future sessions, you can sign up at humanizingwork.com/meetup.
Richard
If you like the humanizing work show, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the show on your podcast app or on YouTube. Leave a review and comment, and of course share links to specific episodes on your social media accounts.
Peter
You can also send us questions you want us to answer or episode ideas to mailbag@ humanizingwork.com. And you can subscribe to our newsletter in the footer of any page over at humanizingwork.com to get more free weekly content from us. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time.
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