Andy Polaine: Hi, welcome to power of 10. A podcast about

design operating at many levels zooming out from thoughtful

detail through to organisational transformation, and also changes

in society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I'm a

service design and innovation consultant, leadership coach,

trainer and writer. My guest today is stages Chakravarthy, an

operational consultant that focuses on people process and

technology in that order. Currently, he says he has his

hands full as the full time CEO of one company and C suite

consultant for another. His primary focus is on how we can

make work cyclists on to that end, he spent 15 years designing

instructional systems, the last five years expanding into

operational systems, and wrote brushfire and the flywheel and

the lever phages. Welcome to power of 10.

Thejus Chakravarthy: Thank you, Andy. And I can't help but blush

every time I hear that intro because it makes me sound a lot

more together than I feel.

Andy Polaine: That's the secret of my coaching experiences.

Everyone thinks that. So we connected online, and then we've

had kind of back and forth mostly sending each other

articles. But if I can't believe this, you know, a new piece of

research that confirms something we've known all along, right.

But before we get to the work bit, I want to ask you this. So

how did you start in designing instructional systems lead to or

maybe help you think about what you're doing now?

Thejus Chakravarthy: Oh, well, that's actually it's kind of a

weird trajectory. So my undergrad was psychology because

I was always fascinated with, you know, what's going on inside

people's heads, because I couldn't figure out what was

going on in mind. And so I started going down, like courses

and taking classes, I never really had a specialisation

during my undergraduate. And then I happen to take a class in

industrial psychology. And I thought, hey, I'm a really bad

counsellor. Because I have this tendency to simply say, Well,

why don't you just do this? And that's not at all what good

counsellors should be doing. And they're supposed to help guide

you. And as a coach, and you know that, yeah, you're not

supposed to tell somebody what to do. They're supposed to come

up with the answer themselves, and you're supposed to guide

them to their personal answer, and I'm terrible at that. But

industrial psychology was the opportunity to basically say,

oh, no, you should do this. But why? Because I say so. And

because we'll make more money. And who are you going to argue

with? But it turns out that that's the Yeah, that was that

was in college. I didn't know any better. But one of my

professors actually said, you know, what you might be

interested in Instructional Systems Design. And I said,

Yeah, Scooby Doo voice. But she actually pointed out that one of

the biggest challenges in business is changing behaviour.

And a lot of people in businesses don't realise that

the only way to change somebody's behaviour is not by

like penalising them, or firing them or yelling at them, or, you

know, giving them taking money away from them, it's actually by

altering their behaviour, or altering the environment in

which their behaviour occurs. So I went down that rabbit hole,

and going down the Instructional Systems Design rabbit hole

taught me things like oh, well, there's actually certain

parameters and certain ways to be sure that you're altering

behaviour in a way that you won't. And of course, as is

often the case, eventually, I got to the point where I was

altering behaviour against the system. So there was the

hierarchy, there was the business process in place, that

was the Oh, we've always done it this way. And my counterpoint

was, well, why are you making me build a training class, when all

we have to do is change the size of an icon to reduce the level

of the number of errors we're seeing? Because that icon is too

small, and most people are missing it? I can't teach people

to see better. But you can just change the size of the thing.

Why are we talking about this? This is a non issue. And that,

of course, is the reason why it took me 15 years of just banging

my head against that specific kind of problem before

eventually said, You know what? Maybe I'm done fighting it from

the instructor side. Maybe I need to switch over to changing

the systems themselves, rather than continually having this

argument because training departments tend to be sucked

under HR departments and HR departments tend to be

marginalised when it comes time to talk about business process,

because the assumption is the HR person is not thinking about it

in terms of cost benefit analyses. They're not thinking

about it in terms of what what's the overhead of this, what are

the knock on effects of making this business change, right? Are

they there to look at HR, they just do you know, sexual

harassment training, and that's it, onboarding, yay, and 401,

k's and Retirement and Pension planning, not, hey, wait a

minute. If we change this business process, we actually

save money and save time in all these other attendant business

processes. So that's what eventually got me to looking at

operations and for the past five years that's it's kind of been

like, the last 15 years have been a nightmare and I've woken

up. Of course, now broken up into brand new nightmare. which

is operations? And as we both talked about over the last

couple of years or a year, has it been a year? It's been about?

It's been about a year. Yeah. Yeah. With just oh my god, have

you seen this thing? Oh, my God, I can't believe this thing. I

can't believe somebody would do this on purpose. Did you read

this thing about Northrop Grumman? Did you read this thing

about Raytheon? Wait, did you know about this thing about

mackynzie? I had no idea. And just, you know, so that's that

we tried and, you know, talk this out over a podcast, rather

than continuing to scream at each other in, you know, in our

own private internet problems.

Andy Polaine: Yeah, inflict it on everyone else. I guess we

come at this from different perspectives in some respects,

but it's also very the same. So I generally come at it from

outside of the operations perspective, in the sense that,

you know, I'm trying to kind of, well, I mean, my main focus now,

especially in the coaching is to make people's work lives much

more humane. And for people to actually resolve the dissonance

between the role they're playing at work and who they actually

are, that's ultimately kind of want to try to do, where I think

we overlap a lot is, you know, and you're obviously kind of

looking at that for the internal side of things of operations as

of getting inside the machine. In a way I think we're big

overlap is our interest in, in systems thinking and seeing that

as a systems dynamic, you know, that we are, I am trying to kind

of help people resolve that dissonance often, while they're

very workplace, their reading is trying to create more

dissonance. And obviously, you're trying to kind of do what

you said, which is, hey, you know, I can't just train people

out of a structural problem.

Thejus Chakravarthy: And I think that that's why we were put in

touch with each other. Because we were both attacking, what is

sort of a fundamental problem in work and a fundamental problem

that people are grappling with and have been grappling with

since basically the beginning of the industrial era, to be

completely honest.

Andy Polaine: Well, yeah. And so we it's hard to get to this and

actually talk about some of the stuff you're just talking about

with that kind of behavioural change and stuff without getting

into Taylor, and without why later on in Gilbert, and some of

your writing you then talking about in a milligramme, and also

the Prison Experiment. So where to start. So I might ask you

about bushfire brush, fire, sorry. And the flywheel and

lever which one of those did you write first?

Thejus Chakravarthy: Oh, so I released them Brushfire, then

Lever and the Flywheel. But I actually wrote all of it at

once. And then then I kind of looked at and I said, "Okay,

this is a lot to just cram into just one." Calling it a book is

generous. I prefer the term screed or treatise or pamphlet,

maybe...

Andy Polaine: White paper. Yes. pamphlet is probably the is a

good template. Kind of where you would you'd be in some of your

own printing press, you know, Town Square handing these out.

Yeah. Alright.

Thejus Chakravarthy: Soapbox screaming sandwich board, the

whole thing.

Andy Polaine: I have to stop you there though, because they are

not they're not soapbox screaming. They are actually

also practical, I think. And that's, that's what's good about

it. You actually don't just say, hey, look, here's the problem

and scream. You're actually provide a way of approaching

these things. That's why I was interested because I felt like

if anything, brushfires is a little bit more of the kind of

what as the name suggests, burn it all down, is a little bit

more so boxy, or a little bit more squiddy than a flyer,

another lever, which is much more kind of operational. Right.

Thejus Chakravarthy: And that's why I had to split them out.

Because I realised that were brushfires more of a

philosophical understanding of, well, why do I have a problem

with this? And why is there a problem? And how can we approach

this from a mental sort of emotional, psychological, okay,

I was gonna say spiritual, but I don't mean spiritual, but sort

of approaching it from what's going on inside in those few

pounds of putting that rattling around in your skull. And maybe

there's some thought processes that you can quickly lock into,

and just keep in your head to help you deal with everything at

work. But I had that folded into well, here's some basic steps

that I think could help make a workplace more efficient, that I

think could streamline some general business processes from

a very fundamental level. So we're not talking about like,

well, what software should I use? Should I use NetSuite?

Should I use this? Should I, you know, talk to somebody at

Blackbaud? No, I'm not talking about that. And I'm not talking

about, like, how do I integrate Microsoft Teams into Google

documents or something like that? That's irrelevant. What I

mean is, well, what is your process? How are you rewarding

your employees? How are you tracking success or failure are

using metrics? And what are those metrics actually measure?

And I figured by separating the two of the sort of internal

aspect, and then the here's the playbook. By separating the two,

it would be easier for people to pick up whichever side of the

coin they landed on.

Andy Polaine: Yeah, so one is the gateway into the other.

Thejus Chakravarthy: Yeah, exactly. And so I figured, well,

let me put up the one that I feel most concerned about first.

So I felt most concerned about the brush fire book because I

felt that Okay, wait, maybe that's a little that's a little

hand wavy. It's a little You know, a little too. It wasn't.

Here's a, here's a series of steps that I think if you try,

you'll see benefits too. And then you can try the more

complicated steps but it's Lagos, you can build whatever

you want. But I felt like brushfire was more like here's

some paint in here's a canvas. And we're going to talk about

impressionism now.

Andy Polaine: So what's your central thesis? Or could you

summarise kind of brush fire? Because there's actually there's

a little bit I'd like to read out first because there's it's

on like page two I think was which is probably actually page

one of it or page, you know. It's right down the bottom, we

say, and it resonated with me an awful lot, which is wasting an

investor's money isn't a crime. wasting an employee's time is

for every team spending hours to do something that should take

minutes. There's a child wondering if they'll see mom

today, for every shipped product that is just managed to hit the

deadline. There's a young man trying to keep his hands from

shaking, because hasn't slept in 48 hours to start from this

very, very human point of view. But what is the what is the sort

of fundamental thesis of brush fire?

Thejus Chakravarthy: I think, if I had to, and again, I'm

terrible at this sort of thing. That's why it took me years to

work through the books and edit myself down as most of my

friends will tell you have a tendency to wax rhapsodic, who's

a nice way to friends that we just talked too much as a better

way to say that. So brush fire is sort of me trying to grapple

with this almost unmanageable level of rage I feel when

talking to people who just are trapped in a cubicle, like I

cannot rationalise, like that sort of dehumanisation. I cannot

rationalise the kind of just when people are products and

people are cogs in the machine resources, resources, right. So

I grew up in India, I was, you know, I was a child, when I saw

like, I was maybe four when I saw my first dead body for God's

sakes, which now when I tell my American friends are like, Oh,

my God, that's so horrible. Meanwhile, when he talked to my

Indian family, like Yeah, and they go on with their day, I

just have to do these things. But I remember very clearly,

watching some a child my age, have to go into the trash and

pick up garbage and then carry, you know, scraps of tin to

somebody to some other slightly older child and sell it to

another slightly older child until eventually, they could

sell all the tin to some tinsmith and make a little bit

of money. And then I was like, Oh, my God. And so when we came

to America, that, you know, oh, my god, we're in the land of

plenty. We're in a place where this is not like, we don't see

that sort of reduction of a human being to a cog in a

machine. And then I started working in an office. And I saw

it again, except I saw, like, you know, somebody who was

getting close to retirement like a 65 year old, who's cubicle was

decorated with pictures of their grandchildren. But they'd been

there for so long that they'd worn parts of the desk away from

where they left their hands, it turned to human being into veal.

And then once I learned that what they were doing was simply

automatable. Simply something that computer could have been

doing something, you basically turn to human being into George

Jetson just hit this red button. And that's your job, except you

didn't let him do it at home. And he wasn't there with you

know, with his dog, Astro. And Jane, his wife, he was trapped

in a box smashing a button, as though that was the true

expression of a human being and that, that that that still

pisses me off. So I wrote a book about it. So basically, I wrote

brush fire from the perspective that if you ever are in a job,

or you have the luxury of dictating what a job will look

like, for somebody else, and you don't start from the perspective

that human beings are capable of a lot more than you think they

are, and are capable of breaking your expectations, then you

failed horribly. And so you have to have a framework to harness

what is in effect a random variable power source, which is

what people are a constant power source, something like a

gasoline powered engine or a turbine is very easy to manage.

You know, Henry Ford proved that, you know, everything was

powered by one, you know, turbine, but variable forces and

variable abilities like human beings don't work in one

straight line. They work in multiple dimensions and multiple

timeframes. So if you can't harness every aspect of a

person, then you've basically failed as a business, you're

kind of curtailing their abilities and thereby curtailing

your ability. So it's a failure on both sides. You've reduced a

person to a resource, and you've prevented your ability to use

that resource by simplifying how you use people. And that's all

Yeah, it's it's inefficient on both sides. And that's what

pisses me off. And that's why that's why I wrote brushfires at

the very least, this is a philosophical or mental model,

the structure of mental models that should allow you to

understand or allow you to see that it isn't as simple as you

know, sit in your queue. You push your hit the buttons and

you do your job. It should be a let's talk about this.

Andy Polaine: So you've got this metaphor and that of the brush

fire of it kind of burning through a forest. It doesn't

burn the canopy, it just kind of burns through this lower level

of the forest. And that clears away a lot of undergrowth or

overgrown forest floor, making space for new growth to happen.

And you know, it's it you state very clearly, you know, this is

a violent process. Why does it need to be a violent process?

First, the first start is because, you know, I can see

that I'm and I can understand it. But I can also imagine

people saying feeling that oh, that's not for us. That's too

extreme.

Thejus Chakravarthy: Ryan, right? I think. So my stance on

it being a violent process is, it's hard for people to realise

how hard change is, if that makes sense. Like it's changes.

I mean, by its very nature, human beings were very change

averse, like we're risk averse, or change reverse. It's

something that people have to warm up to, it's something that

people have to be brought into. So I've known a lot of addicts

in my life. And you know, some of them have had their moment,

call it a moment of clarity or rock bottom. And then after they

have their moment, they have now this urge to change, they now

have this desire to be different. But you can't let a

company that is the livelihood of hundreds or even dozens of

people hit rock bottom before you make changes. So you have to

make the change. Before there's a taste for it before there's a

desire for it. You have to make the change as fast as humanly

possible. Because you're literally changing the basic

fundamental nature of a company. And people don't like to think

of it this way. But luckily, I mean, one of the silver linings

to the to the somewhat dark cloud of the lockdowns, plural,

and hopefully we won't have another but case counsel looking

funky. The thing is that people realise that, wait, I don't have

to be physically in my office to do my job. Well, you actually

never had to be. I mean, we've had the internet for a while

now. We've had smartphones for a hot minute. What made you think

your job requires you to be in an office? And in fact, some

people are like, Oh, we're more productive when we're not in the

office? Yeah, yeah. A lot of people have been making that

arguments.

Andy Polaine: Oh, we're more productive when we when we do go

in. Because there's a very specific thing. And it's sadly

precious time.

Thejus Chakravarthy: And so right now, there's a lot of

companies who have inadvertently, you know, kind of

fallen into the fallen into my lap into my evil plan, where

basically, they've somebody, somebody, somebody throw a match

in their, in their, in their in their forest, and now it's on

fire. And a lot of them are like, Oh, my God, how do we save

all of the underbrush? We want you back in the office? Well,

but, but why? Well, because we need to manage you will. But

we're still having the same outputs that we needed to. So

why are you Why do you need me here?

Andy Polaine: Yeah, and this has been the interesting thing, I

think of a lot of this, you know, and I guess also underpins

the great resignation. You know, this idea that most of the

arguments for why people need to get back in the office are from

managers who feel they need to control yeah, there's, you know,

there are reasons for getting together. It's not that kind of

offices are de facto a bad thing. But it's kind of, I mean,

if you actually one of things I do with in coaching is say to

people like, Okay, can you remember, a really good day, you

know, or a week, we had springiness step afterwards? And

what were you doing in that day a week. And then that's the kind

of thing to focus on, because that's what energises your mind.

And it's different, for example, exactly. But you know, and some

of it might be a while we were actually kind of really up at

the whiteboard and collaborating. And it's really

great. For other people, it's like, well, you know what, I

actually got the time to sit on my own and think about this

thing very deeply and focus for

Thejus Chakravarthy: a few days. And what's fascinating is the

same person doing those other tasks, like the person who says,

I had a great day, because we got up on the whiteboard and

collaborated, or I had a great day because I had time to

myself. You could reverse them. And they could say the exact

same thing. They could say, well, usually I like to have

time to myself, but today was better because I got a chance to

work at a board. And then maybe they their energy was drained

because of something else. And then they say, Oh, well, I'd

rather have a date of myself. And in a workplace that rigidly

dictates, you have to be in the office, you have to be at this

whiteboard. You have to sit down and think to yourself, no matter

how you structure that it's still a failure, because it

doesn't it can't function in a rigid structure. Yeah. Because

everybody every moving part and everybody is going to be a

little different every day. And again comes back to a few

homogenised people then you make a mistake.

Andy Polaine: Yeah. Which, you know, this this comes back to

this thing wherever we've talked about quite a lot. I've also

talked about it before on the podcast of you know, management

practices being predicated or basic just copying Industrial

Age factories, right? Taylorism and Taylorism, which is, you

know, this idea that people are inherently our employees are

inherently dishonest and lazy. And that's the first sort of

fundamental kind of idea of that. And then the things that

we're doing a complicated rather than complex and so we can break

those down into small parts. And then unskilled labourer can be

told to do that small piece of work over and over again. And

then ask smart kind of manager people managing

Thejus Chakravarthy: this, aren't we? Aren't we such a

wonderful people here, the one

Andy Polaine: we're the brains behind it are going to put it

together. And we're the ones who have integrity and stuff. And so

it's obviously heavily I mean, you know, Industrial Revolution

in England at the time, and it's heavily heavily influenced by

the class system to plus, as we know, Taylor fudged his data,

Thejus Chakravarthy: Oh, God, so much of his data was fudged. I

right?

mean, it's it's almost, it's almost a running joke. And at

least it was when I was doing it in my undergraduate, which at

this point is, is roughly 20 years ago, because I'm elderly.

But it was it was almost a joke where we would say things like,

Okay, well, we're going to start studying at the beginning of the

semester, these theoreticians, we're going to read their

papers, we're going to read their books, we're going to

study and dig into their work. And then by about after the

midterm, when we just finished passing an exam, proving that we

understood them, the turnaround would be like, oh, yeah, by the

way, here's why all of them are wrong. Just like literally, with

around ran through. Exactly. It's like you studied all this,

you memorise all this, we're sure that you understand this

great. Now, here's how all of this is wrong and horribly,

horribly inaccurate. And here's the new research that shows that

that it's actually in a completely different direction.

It's Lou. It's so annoying.

Andy Polaine: So that was 20 years ago, right? So yeah. So

why does work still suck?

Unknown: Oh, well, if I had to put a word to it, I'd say it's

because there's more money and more safety and more security in

maintaining the status quo than there is in reexamining things.

So even when you look at software startups, my favourite

example is to look at something like Google or any of the fangs.

Right? So they started off as a relatively small company, but

because of the nature of the internet, because of the nature

of scale, without cost, without additional overhead, or minimal

overhead, because servers are cheap, and people are not. They

managed to reach critical mass where they could when they had

to start asking questions like, Well, how do we motivate our

programmers? Well, when it was five guys, and you gave them

shares in the company, they had a literal vested interest in the

success of the company. But now you're people paying people a

salary, and all of a sudden, you're like, well, they don't

seem nearly as motivated as the guys who had shares. So we have

to find different ways of motivating them. Well. Guys,

you're just like, did you not see how that math didn't work

out? Okay, well, then how do we manage these people? Well,

here's a stack of management books written by people going

all the way back to Taylor, here's Good to Great, it's

totally work for you trust me, you know, do Nielsen ratings,

this will work, trust me. You know, here's stacks, and stacks

and books of how to manage people. Here's a Harvard

Business Journal article about management, here's people with

MBAs in management, and they're just going to keep maintaining

the status quo, even in a digital brand new company, and

then just recapitulate the problem all over again. And I

think the issues are really apparent when you start looking

at things like the CEO, Dan price, who's hilarious and

wonderful in my eyes. He's the one who said, I gave all my

employees 75k. And every employee at his company makes I

think, like, 75k. And he makes not that much more. And at the

time, people said, Oh, my God, how could you possibly run a

company like this? Oh, turns out he's got incredible, great

retention. He's got incredibly, like his employees are willing

to bend over backwards to help him. They've done incredibly

well. And he hasn't changed his policies. It's just like, yeah,

no, we're gonna pay you what's considered a pretty decent

living wage, and we're just going to, you know, empower you

to do your best. And that simple dynamic. If you tried to do that

at Amazon, I'm pretty sure Bezos would catch on fire. Yeah, and

I'm pretty sure that you know, you'd see you'd see Elon drop

dead in his tracks, if he even considered the idea of, oh,

well, maybe I should treat all of my employees as well as I

would like to be treated. So I think the main reason is power

control and the safety that comes from being rich and

powerful. You don't want to unnecessarily rock the boat by

saying, well, all my employees are as good as I am and I am no

different than they are. Because that requires a certain level

of...

Andy Polaine: humility.

Thejus Chakravarthy: That's a good way to put that.

Andy Polaine: Yeah. It doesn't. It doesn't necessarily go

together with what is considered the correct characteristics of

an entrepreneur, right? They're not known for their humility,

right?

Thejus Chakravarthy: Red in tooth and Fang, you have to be

able to fight And I mean, you destroy your competition.

Andy Polaine: Yeah. And so I mean, that's the other thing I

saw that sort of language around that of kind of destroying and

crushing and killing it...

Thejus Chakravarthy: Hyper masculine. It's exhausting.

Andy Polaine: So listen, you know, on, you've got that kind

of very human side in the Brushfire, although you've also

got it in the Flywheel and the Lever, but explain what the

flywheel and the lever are, because you quote Donella

Meadows in there as well. And few other well known in the

system's thinking world. You approach this from a systems

perspective. So you know, what's, what's the kind of

thesis behind that? And what is the flywheel and the lever.

Thejus Chakravarthy: So I'm glad you mentioned in Atlanta Mattos

because my god, I love that woman's work. I recently

recently just got a hard copy, not just digital copy a hard

copy of the limits to growth. I think it's like the third

edition. And it's without sounding too nerdy. It's

basically my soaking in the tub read like it is, it is the book

I read. When I'm like, Oh, I've got some time to myself, I'm

gonna let some candles I'm gonna put on some soft music. I'm

gonna cuddle, you know, snuggle into bed and read this this

glorious book, which is, you know,

Andy Polaine: I mean, the only thing that I get with it is, you

know, someone was writing about this in the 70s, while she

wasn't late 60s and started to this late 60s was the first one.

And it's, and here we are, you know, just thinking.

Thejus Chakravarthy: And, yeah, I think Did I say I don't know

if I did. But there's a there's actually a recent paper, I want

to send the last six months, where somebody basically took

the exact framework that they did for the first edition of the

book and updated with modern with modern datasets, and said,

Yeah, remember how they said there was like six potential

branches, we're down to three, two of them suck. And one of

them, if we work really hard, we might be able to pull off in

terms of how things might turn out in terms of how the limits

to growth, kind of like tape around sort of plateau. And I

was like, oh, Kay, I'm gonna need to read that third edition

because I read that first edition. I don't know how many

years ago, but when I read it, I just said, Okay, I'm gonna go in

the corner now. And I need a minute to myself. But after

reading that most recent paper, I was like, Cool. You know what

third edition, I gotta catch up. Anyway.

Andy Polaine: So I want to capture that. So that's that

fear of I want to get in the corner. I mean, part of me wants

to just sort of go in the corner and cry and give up, right?

Because you kind of think, well, this is the district describe

the kind of the complexity and the system's nature of it. But

also they describe the dire nature of, of what's going on in

the world. And it kind of very quickly hits that thing talking

about behavioural change where this is too much. This is beyond

one, my one single person's perspective, what can I do about

this? So I'm not gonna do anything? That's obviously the

problem that we kind of raised with? Well, almost everything in

the moment. Yeah, everything in life. Yeah. So I'm gonna go onto

social media and just rant about it. And that's it, you know,

Thejus Chakravarthy: which is great. I mean, some people like

like, standing on their soapbox in the middle of the town square

and screaming, but I don't find that to be necessarily useful,

right.

Andy Polaine: But in the firewall in the lever, it's,

it's quite practical in that sense. And that's why I sort of,

I think what's interesting about you and your work is you're

coming from it not from sort of hand wavy stance, but there is,

you know, coming from from this operational perspective. And so,

I will get you back on to what is the flywheel and what is the

lever.

Thejus Chakravarthy: So starting from my understanding of

instructional systems, I eventually reached the point

where I realised that instructional systems follow

certain protocols and follow certain rules of thumb. And so I

said, Well, what other systems design is there. And so I got to

lean manufacturing certification, because I want to

learn how lean manufacturing work, because hey, that's

another system. And that's another way to approach how

things connect, took a bunch of other courses, a bunch of other

classes, and then eventually, kind of tripped over my own feet

into Donella Meadows work. Basically, I think the route I

took was by way of Banerjee and two flows, work on poverty and

economic and the economics trap, which is fascinating reading.

There's also a free course of it on edX, which I highly

recommend. It's because it's free, and why not? If you've got

time, might have to learn it. So once I started thinking about it

in terms of okay, this is this large problem, work sucks.

Nobody in their right mind says, Oh, I love my job 100%. So why,

and what about that framework? Can we look at and say, Well, if

you change, if you move this parameter over this way, or if

you change this workflow in this way, if you tighten the spigot

here and open it up over here, then the flows of everything are

such that it should clear out this problem, just by its very

nature. So without any additional human effort without

having to have a policy without having to have a hey, let's all

get together and do a ropes course together or let's have a

company meeting where we sit down, you know, in a big

conference table We talk about your problems. Well, why don't

we just change the business process so that it prevents the

bad things from happening and supports the good things. And so

that's where it came from. It came from this idea that and so

the flywheel is what I call, just basically having a process

that develops and maintains momentum, and inertia. And the

lever is the term I use to basically describe the processes

you have in place to tighten or loosen parts of your flywheel.

So I think of the lever as the intervention. And I think of the

flywheel as the company. Because if you do it, right, and if you

do it, well, there will be times where you're wasting energy. In

the sense of, we're, we've got all of these people, and we've

got all these outputs, but they're basically hanging around

doing nothing. And that's fine. That's great. Because when you

think they're hanging around doing nothing, that's the time

when people are the most creative. Like people are

creative as hell in the shower when they have space. And

exactly when they've got space to think and space to breathe

and space to conceive. And maybe, if you've if you've got

enough downtime, and people are people like, oh, well, you know,

we don't really have any deliverables this week. No, we

don't. We've got a bunch of them next week where you're caught

up. Yeah, I'm caught up, we got some breathing room. Hey, you

know, that was his problem. We were running in, like over here

in this other part of the company. I think we can solve it

and probably only take us a week. Oh, well, let's go. Let's

go take care of it, that everybody wants that. That's

like the thing that businesses say, Oh, we so desperately need

people who can do that. We want our employees to take the time

to do that. Well, but you're also giving them very

restrictive, like 40 hour week timelines and flooding them with

50 hours of work. When are they going to find the time you want

them to just stay up late? Yeah, you want them to stay here

longer. They've got kids, or, in my case, they've got a dog.

Right? They've got pets, for God's sakes. But so the flywheel

would be once you started, once you start getting a pace in the

company. You can just like a bicycle, you can take your feet

off the pedals, and you bicoastal go, and then maybe put

your feet back on the pedal, and you put a little harder for

little sprint, and then you're let go, and you're still

travelling faster. It'll take you a little bit of time to

decelerate, but you're still moving fast enough. And that's

what a company should be. It shouldn't be, we're going to be

going going going all the time. Well, that's how people burn

out. And that's how companies burn out. And that's how you

waste Money and waste time. And if you waste an investor's

money, fine, you'll get more than me, you'll be fine. But if

you burn out half of your staff to meet a deadline, why do you

think you'll be able to meet the next deadline without burning

out your staff again? And how many times can you burn out a

human being before they go? Oh, yeah, I'm not coming back.

Right.

Andy Polaine: So a mechanical flywheel is something that evens

out. Energy. Really? Yeah, spikes and dips. Yeah, it's it's

a big weighted thing. Normally a very heavy flywheel that,

usually I mean, it's a very industrial age metaphor,

actually, isn't it, but usually it you know, as it's turning, it

starts to gain momentum. And you can add speed to it or break it

or, you know, slow it down. But it's got a smooth kind of

rotation all the time, which is very systems thing, right, this

idea. And then one of the things that I thought was brilliant in,

well, in all of that work, Donella Meadows describes it

very well as his ideas you can, you can push on a lever, you

know, and achieve something like do the example she gives, like

GDP growth. You know, that improves lots of things. But if

you keep pushing on that lever, you know, it goes in the

opposite direction that you start ending up, actually, you

start doing harm, but because you've seen it do good, you just

keep pushing in the same direction, Kenny, we need more

of a more of and obviously, you know, growth is is the biggest

problem. So how does this manifest in in workplaces that

you because you're talking about the necessity for this feedback

loop?

Thejus Chakravarthy: Well, I think that what you and I think

it's sort of a matter of experience. I've been lucky

enough. And I chalk this all up to just hideous luck. Over the

decades, decades is right? I've worked in a small startup

software company, it was one of five people in a guy's basement,

we made our own beer in the fridge. That's how small the

company was to working for the US Coast Guard, which at the

time, I was managing the learning management systems for

127,000 Coasties, out of the headquarters in DC. And I've

seen scale. And I've seen I've worked at a law firm. I've

worked in a medical insurance company, Medicare insurance

company. I've worked in all of these different verticals. And

in almost every I work for nonprofits, and in almost every

case, the issues that I see are that there isn't enough upward

communication, in the sense that upward communication is valid.

What I mean by that is far more likely than not, especially in a

western maybe just American I could be wrong could just be

only in America problem. The top down mandate of what you should

do is sacrosanct. Whether or not it's followed exactly, is where

the trouble kicks in. So even with the military, if a captain

said to a lieutenant, I need you to do this, the lieutenant would

then possibly do it, or possibly follow the word like the, the

literal letter of the of the order, or possibly delay it,

because they don't think it's as important. That's military.

Yeah. And that's true in, you know, and God forbid, you're

talking about a corporate situation where some VP and

another VP have a problem with somebody else, like, pretending

that they're better than me and taking my resources and making

me look bad from the CEO. And then the CEO gives gives both of

them the same order, like, hey, we need to do this. Okay, great.

Now they're going to fight at cross purposes, and there's

going to be all this other problem. But going down the

chain, those VPS will tell their managers and those managers will

tell their line staff, you just have to follow what we were told

to do. But if the line staff if the people who are literally at

the bottom of the company, because if we're talking about a

hierarchy like that, they see it as the item at the bottom of the

company, they're not thinking about it in terms of, well, I'm

the base of this company, if I don't work, nothing else

happens. So they just feel like well, I'm being told what to do.

I'm getting pressure from on high. And then I have to deal

with customers who may not appreciate or may not like what

I'm doing. And I gotta deal with that. And so they're sandwiched.

And I think the core problem of that feedback loop is, those

people aren't given enough authority, autonomy or

accountability, to push back up the chain and say, Hey, VP, so

and so you wanted us to do A, B, and C, if we do A, B, and C, it

will cause these problems. So we're not going to do it. Unless

you can figure out a way to bypass these problems. Here's

all the documentation, here's all the here's all the valid

arguments, here's our reports, here's our datasets show us

where how we can improve this, or push it up to their manager

and say, Hey, we're not going to do this, because this will

negatively impact all these other things, or we need to talk

about this more thoroughly. You're asking us to do A, B, and

C, but the CEO is unaware that C is actually contradictory to the

efforts of this other department. That's doing one,

two, and three. And he may just not know, and just be be unclear

to him. So I'm not saying that it's necessarily Malicious from

top down, I'm saying it's an issue of focus, it's an issue of

understanding a CEO should not be concerned with what the

hourly, day to day efforts of the person answering the

customer service line is. But they do need to know that if

that person says hey, the policy you just put in place has pissed

off 80% of the people I talked to, they need to know that. And

they need to change their policy.

Andy Polaine: So if you're, you know, in many respects, because

the ones at the top, I guess have the power to kind of

address the structure more than anyone else. But if you're

someone a bit further down, you know, and in that scenario that

you've described, not necessarily the person on the

front line, but certainly the kind of middle manager rank or,

you know, kind of VP level where you often hear yes, yes, yes.

But we just need to do this, it just needs to get done right

now. And just, you know, it has to be done by this ludicrous,

arbitrary deadline, or, and then the return comment is, well,

okay, well, which one of these is a priority? They're all

priorities, which means nothing is obviously, what can you do

when you're at that level, because I imagine some of the

people listening to this, you know, a lot of designers, a lot

of design leaders and managers and people like that, who are in

that position where they are under enormous pressure to hit

velocity, water to run out of velocity, have usually far too

much stuff on to actually do the stuff that they really should be

doing and give it the focus again, and often seems to have

those conversations are going, you know, I think this

particular conversation that design people have with certain

business people if I can kind of make that crass, which, because

design, people tend to see things not always but often see

things a bit more systemically or at least questioning the

question behind the question. Right, and say, Well, you know,

actually, but this doesn't make sense why we're doing this,

right, and then met with that kind of fairly hard answer about

Yeah, just needs to be done. Just do it. This is this is what

I've decided, or this is what someone else, you know, someone

else has decided is the thing to do. You know, what can you do at

that point?

Unknown: So I tend to look at those kinds of situations the

same way I look at puberty, okay, you know, in the sense

that you do what your parents tell you, and then when they

say, Well, you will do what I say, as long as you live in this

house, or you will do what I say as long as I'm, you know, I'm in

charge. And then you go through puberty, and during that time,

you're yelling, you're screaming, um, I can't, I can't

think of a single person who went through their own

adolescence without lashing out at their parents because that

person is probably a psychopath. Because that's I mean, that's,

that's the nature of that's the nature of adolescence. You're

supposed to get mad at your folks, which is something I keep

reminding my friends who now have adolescent kids, I'm like,

no, no, no, you're you don't remember what it was like when

you were their age. Do you think we were terrible people? But the

reason I bring that up is when you're in a workplace scenario

and you're in a workplace situation, you you're being

given a mandate, and you're being told you need to do these

things, because I told you so I think that none of people take

that moment where they realise, hey, you're a self actualized

person, you are your own person, what's the worst they can do?

fire you. Okay? Is there only one job in the world? No. So the

problem is that it's this, again, going back to the fear of

change. And I've been in that position that you just described

several times. And rather than just saying, I'm just not going

to do it, fire me, if you have a problem, which to be FERS

needlessly aggressive, and needlessly confrontational, I

usually point out what you just said, which is, well, which of

these is priority will all of them are priority, you do

realise that's a, that's a logical, I need to know which of

these I need to prioritise. and in what order because we only

have a finite amount of resources that we need to deploy

appropriately, here are the resources I can deploy. And one

of the challenges are that if you try to approach a

operational argument, from a systemic perspective, and you're

dealing with somebody who doesn't see the system, you

can't make them see your point of view, it's just impossible.

Like they don't see that level of scope or scale that you're

seeing as a designer. But what you can do is understand that

what they're seeing is minutia, what they're seeing is their

immediate lane of information, and just use that against them.

Because you can see the bigger picture, you know how to kind of

sidestep the problem and laterally solve it will then use

your skills against them, but in the same skills that they're

used to seeing. So let's use the example of we have all these

priorities, we don't have enough resources, simple, codified our

resources, make a shopping list, these are how many employees I

have, these are how many hours a week they have, these are how

they have divided out their time. And this is this is the

end result, I cannot push them further than these number of

hours, why can't they work overtime, cool, you're gonna

give me the budget for that. What we want them to do this

cool, gonna give me the budget for that, just turn it back on

them, let them fight their own fight, because what you're

dealing with is you're trying to create an environment, almost a

biosphere. For your people, you've been given the probably

the greatest gift, a person can give another person in your

workplace, which is I want you to stand for your employees, I

want you to be the person that protects these people. I want

you to think about these people and what will make them happy.

And that's your job. That's your job. As a manager, your job as a

manager isn't to well, I've finished all these reports. And

clearly we can, we can see an increase of 5% in the

profitability of our department. That's fine, that's a tan wavy,

the thing is, your job is to make sure that they that their

workplace doesn't suck. It's just that simple. If you can do

that, you will have the best functioning team in the company,

I can almost guarantee it. If they don't show up to work

hating themselves, they're probably going to do better. So

protect them by thinking of round your opponents. It's not

chess, it's checkers, they're playing checkers, and you think

they're playing chess, but you're playing chess, just think

around them and solve kind of turning them in on themselves,

Aikido style.

Andy Polaine: That's a pretty good place to wrap it up. I

think it might just made me think that this is one of the

biggest crimes of industrialization was to put the

managers offices sort of not on the factory floor. Right? Yeah.

Thejus Chakravarthy: White Collar, blue collar, that whole

argument,

Andy Polaine: Well also you know, just separating people

from the results of their decisions, and arguably, you

know, I mean, that's also when when the military goes wrong,

the Second World War First World War kind of examples of that

where there's this sort of distance from generals to the

kind of to the frontline water. Yeah, there's I don't in

general, like kind of military metaphors. But I think one of

the interesting things about that was you wrote it in one of

your pamphlets was this idea of what's what's understood at the

centre of that is actually in, in more on the kind of field of

battle, chaos reigns. And so there's this kind of giving up

of the idea of certainty giving up of the idea of clarity, you

know, and the famous plans are useless but planning is

invaluable quip.

Thejus Chakravarthy: And no plan survives contact with the enemy

exact probably my favourite quote from Mike Tyson is

everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

Yeah. And, and so to that end, like the thing I find galling, I

guess it's the word infuriating is probably more accurate

because my face turns pinkish, is this idea that generals know

how to win wars will defeat me, may may be able to make that

argument. But the fact is, it's soldiers who win wars, it's

soldiers who win battles and with enough battles won, you win

the war. And I don't like using military analogies either. But

especially after work Getting with the military and realising.

Maybe it's not as clean as I thought it was. But the the idea

that you can pay somebody for their time, right? You're

literally trading hours of their life for a mile. And then you're

going to waste those hours. I can't handle it. I just mentally

can't wrap my head around the cream because right that's just

that's, that's a surefire way to make me just flip a table and

scream at the top of my lungs is just like, oh, yeah, so we have

this person, they push the button. For what? You have to

push the button once a minute, every minute, for eight hours a

day, they take an hour long lunch break, and then they come

back the next day. And they do it again. Five days a week.

Cool. Cool. So how do we burn this building down? Like where's

where do we get the matches? Where to find the gasoline? Like

I can't, I can't. There's no, there's no solution for you, you

horrible people.

Andy Polaine: So listen, where can people find you online or

more of your thinking? Where can they find those two books as

well? Pamphlets?

Thejus Chakravarthy: Oh, I'll give you the links. I do have a

website. It's atrocious. It's just they just see.com and on

there. There's a link to her Sinise and also to some other

stuff. I'm terribly not online anymore. In fact, I don't have

social media to speak of. I'm barely online. My website is in

the drop off, man. Yeah, I, I just I mean, I plan to

eventually change these things. But for right now, it's just

placeholders and stuff. But if anybody wants to reach out to

me, my you know, my email is thejus.c@gmail.com. We'll give

you the links to that as well. And emails, the best way to

reach me anyway.

Andy Polaine: Great. Well, thank you so much for being my guest

on Power of 10.

Thejus Chakravarthy: Thank you so much, Andy.

Andy Polaine: As I'm sure you're aware, you've been listening to

power of 10. My name is Andy Polaine. You can find me at a

plane on Twitter, or plane.com, where you can find more episodes

and sign up for my newsletter doctor's note. If you liked the

show, please take a moment to give it a rating on iTunes. It

really helps others find us. And as always get in touch. If you

have any comments, feedback or suggestions for guests, all the

links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and see

you next time.