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Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
69. Why your company needs new rituals w/Shishir Mehrotra (YouTube, Coda)
69. Why your company needs new rituals w/Shishir Mehrotra (YouTube, Coda)

69. Why your company needs new rituals w/Shishir Mehrotra (YouTube, Coda)

Masters of Scale with Reid HoffmanGo to Podcast Page

Reid Hoffman, Shishir Mehrotra
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32 Clips
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Aug 18, 2020
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Episode Summary
Episode Transcript
0:00
We took the executives out.
0:03
We took the red couches out to the parking lot and we had red couch races.
0:11
So two people would sit on the couch like two people would push them.
0:20
That's George Campbell co-founder of the D school at Stanford University. Couch racing may sound like a stunt from Georgia student days, but it's actually one of the many rituals he helped develop as a co-founder of the world famous design school and those couches were from more than just high speed high Jinks
0:39
but iconic part of the classroom is red couches on wheels that you could Circle up and have a human debrief or very human conversation because you weren't behind a desk.
0:50
your hour and a human setting
0:56
George and ideal founder David Kelly set up the D School in 2003 its aim to nurture Innovation and creativity across all disciplines including high-speed Furniture faceoffs the D schools makeshift Origins and entrepreneurial Spirit were on display right from the start in their first digs a trailer on the edge of the Stanford campus.
1:19
You can almost think like at elementary schools when there's a space shortage. They just throw like a temporary single slung thing. It looks sort of like
1:26
But imagine a lot older.
1:29
That far out location gave them the freedom to try far out things
1:36
because there's on the edge of Campus. It was under the radar and so not everyone was inspecting whether or not I was being done, right?
1:47
Which allowed us to bend and stretch?
1:51
The rules to find new territory about how learning habit and how teaching happened.
1:59
Among the rituals they developed was their own spin on the graduation ceremony. There was no diploma.
2:08
So imagine a little red pin about the size of a pencil eraser and it's made of silver metal and inside the embossed red and each one of us has a symbol
2:23
And
2:23
there was no commencement speech and no Dean to give it
2:27
so everyone would stand in a circle and we would talk a little bit about what this medal of honor meant. We pass out the pins, but we say don't don't put them on hold them and you just reach in and you grab a pen. We say it's like the Harry Potter like the wand chooses the wizard. You don't have to overly analyze it.
2:50
Just reach out and you know, you're going to get the right one.
2:53
And then you hold it until everyone has one and then because Innovation is such a shared responsibility, we have everyone turned to the person next to them and then they pin each other. So it's not like some status or authority imbues them with this type of commissioning. It's something that they self commission into
3:18
It's just one of the many rituals the d.school established reinvented rituals. Like the DC school's graduation ceremony helped Define an organization's character and create a sense of community for the team by KO defying what the organization values they also play a larger role than you may think and how companies succeed that's why I believe you should purposely design rituals. They can evolve with your company fail to do this and rituals May emerge that hold you back.
3:51
You got to have incredible Talent at every
3:53
position. There are fires burning when you going home.
4:03
There are so many easy
4:04
ways. So so so I have no idea. What's
4:06
going. Sorry. I made a mistake. Would you have to time it right?
4:21
This is masters of scale.
4:27
We'll start the show in a moment after a word from our sponsor Capital One business.
4:35
It was a quintessential New York moment sitting on the stoop outside their office on a quick lunch break from work talking about this new business idea. They
4:43
had that's jengar Bach Capital one's head of business brand and marketing and that business idea was shine a mental health and wellness app that started as a daily text Founders, niomi hirabayashi and Mara lady didn't plan on being entrepreneurs, but their subscriber base was growing and their mission was
5:01
calling Naomi and Mara felt that their needs weren't being served.
5:05
These Wellness apps that painted a utopian picture of how perfect everything was like meditating in a forest and drinking your green juice. So many women of color couldn't see themselves in that experience. Their goal was to really shift representation and inclusion mental health by creating a product that makes managing your emotional health as easy as talking to a
5:27
friend but the pandemic and the Nationwide protests around racial Justice changed the conversation Naomi and Mara knew they
5:35
had a responsibility to help users meet this moment.
5:39
They really saw an opportunity to help a broad spectrum of users engage in the topic of social injustice and helping people who seek that
5:48
support. How did shine like the way through this difficult time? We'll hear about that later in the show. It's all part of Capital One businesses. Look at entrepreneurs who are leading through this crisis with courage and innovation.
6:06
I'm Reid Hoffman co founder of LinkedIn partner Greylock and your host and I believe you should purposely designed rituals. They can evolve with your company failed to do this and rituals May emerge that hold you back in a company the processes you follow our like rituals you have specific ways that you meet all-hands meetings stand-up meetings and annual company picnic. You have specific ways, you set goals and measure progress. You might have a favorite bar to go to
6:36
When it's time to see a colleague off on a new Tour of Duty the right rituals in the right places will help you build your culture. Go here your team and achieve your goals building. Your own rituals is as important as building your product. But if you aren't intentional about the rituals you create you may find that rituals spring up on their own like invasive weeds in a garden left unattended and those unintended rituals can hold you back.
7:05
I wanted to speak to share my rotor about this because it's widely known in Silicon Valley that he helped YouTube scale to what it is today when she joined YouTube in 2008 it had around 350 million visits per month by the time he left they had more than a billion and she sheer help to drive that growth with new rituals that kept the team focused on that audacious goal.
7:30
She's here. Then brought his ideas about creating rituals to his new startup Coda. Kota. Lets users create a completely new kind of document with app like elements. It's a bit like a mash-up of a text document a spreadsheet and your iPhone will get to Kota a bit later in the show.
7:48
But first let's rewind a bit in shears life straight out of MIT sheer co-founded sent rata a cloud computing startup. Then he joined Microsoft in 2002 and worked on office among other things in 2008 shishir moved to Google taking on a role. That's a bit of a head-scratcher. He was head of TV at Google but very soon. She was working on Google's new acquisition. It was a deal that raised a lot of
8:18
Browse YouTube was not obvious at the time you to was in fact many people looked at it as Google's first mistake. They just spent one point six billion dollars on a company that was known for grainy videos. Big lawsuits copyright issues cat videos. It seems hard to believe now, but at the time the acquisition of YouTube was seen as Google's Folly YouTube had only just launched and she assures moved.
8:47
To YouTube was also met with raised eyebrows. Most people thought you did primary competition was a company called Myspace and a company called Flicker. And so the idea of me getting up and comparing YouTube to ESPN and Disney and so on just sounded stupid and crazy. She sure sounded crazy to some but he was right I end up using this phrase that ended up being my calling card for the next few years was that online video would do to cable what cable did to broadcast broadcast was three channels?
9:18
Cable was 300 channels and my view is that we're going from three to three hundred to three million channels. This is just history repeating itself to sheer. It was obvious that YouTube had the wind that it's back but that was not necessarily a good thing in his book when you have a tail when a couple good things happen, you get this amplification effect. So everything you do all of a sudden just seems genius and better than you would have expected. The other thing you get is it covers tons of mistakes when the winds at your back you sort of don't have to hit the inside straight.
9:47
In order to make things work, there's a word for relying on your tail win coasting coasting. You just idle along doing the things you're doing because you seem to be winning. But Meanwhile, your competitors are experimenting with new ways to do things. And before you know, it they'll pull ahead shishir new YouTube had to stop relying on that tail went alone to keep ahead. And once we realize that hey this tail when the tail when we have is online videos going to do it.
10:17
Able cable to the broadcast and here's this trend that were writing. Now we had to take every philosophy and every system and lean into it Tailwinds really matter. And once you recognize it you got to reshape your whole organization towards it. However, some of shears team wanted to follow the lead of YouTube's new parent the simple framing of it was you come to YouTube at the time and you search for something we would return all the results we could on YouTube and that was that if we had it we had it if we didn't we didn't there was a part of the team.
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That was very focused on hey, we're not owned by Google we should just give people the right results. Modern Family is hosted on abc.com, which is tell people to go to abc.com the marketing and content Partnerships team said look if you keep sending all that traffic off of YouTube, then I'm going to come back and we're never going to get that content on YouTube. If we just direct people to it shear and his team took an in depth. Look at the new rituals users are creating not just around watching videos, but around search in general to work out how they should proceed.
11:18
And one of the observations we had with Google had a competitive property called Google product search. It started as a property called Frugal and Amazon was kicking its butt and every logical explanation said that should never have happened. Google products are should obviously have one because it's a super set of Amazon an indexed everything on Amazon and the rest of the web. If you ever searching for a product, why would you ever go to Amazon when you come to Google products or at least that was the theory but clearly and even at that time it was obvious Amazons.
11:47
You'd better Amazon's approach evolved a centuries-old ritual going to the store to buy Goods sure. It was an enhanced online 21st century experience, but at its heart it was consistent with a ritual everyone knew and practiced.
12:05
In contrast Google's approach was out of whack with a shopping ritual it gave people too many choices. It was to comprehensive Amazon focused on consistent over comprehensive. And what did that mean in practice it meant that when I bought something from Amazon or just when I went to the site reviews were all structured the same way. I understood how the return policy work. I understand how shipping work. And yeah, I didn't have everything at a lot of things. It's close enough to having everything but I would rather have something that I trust in this sort of consistent over.
12:34
Comprehensive Google was beholdin to the search ritual. It was after all the thing that had made the company wildly successful, but trying to enforce that same ritual at Frugal had held it back and she sheer believed it would do the same with YouTube the YouTube team decided against the search ritual of showing comprehensive search results and to say it worked is an understatement YouTube quickly cemented itself as the go-to site for videos and not just grainy cat.
13:04
Videos and copyright infringement whole new type of user quickly emerged users who are making their own content and winning Legions of subscribers shishir calls them makers everybody's presumption at the time was the only way that you can build and make interesting content was to live in Hollywood pay for very large budget Studios. So on and that's how you make content and people really underestimated what this group of people would do the maker.
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Help create a whole new set of rituals around how interesting creative content could be made distributed and discovered. She's sharing his team made sure. They supported these rituals by 2011 YouTube already felt like they had one no other video platform at least in the Western World could touch them. They were in danger of coasting. We are still scaling really fast, but we're just kind of lost you're out in front now and you don't quite remember. What are we doing? Why how do we push ourselves?
14:04
To keep you two out in front shishir started to imagine an entirely new way of defining success for the company. I have no idea if this is folklore or not, but I like it. Apparently there was some board meeting at Coca-Cola where somebody said every single board meeting was oh we have X percent share versus Pepsi and it's 52-48 or so on they went back and forth back and forth. Like is this really the game where in and somebody said are we just competing for who can own the brown Water Market in this telling the board members were locked into the ritual of obsessing over the brow.
14:34
Water market share and trying to get a few points up in the brown Water Market. One of the board members said what if we thought about this differently, what about we thought about our goal as something like percentage of stomach and they ended up broadening their view to whole lineup of drinks and now they make water and they make all these other drinks and so on and reshape their Market breaking out of this ritual opened a whole new range of opportunities for Coca-Cola and sometimes breaking out of an old ritual that is holding you back is as simple as a
15:03
Asking yourself. Is this the game or really in?
15:08
There's another question that sheer ask himself constantly, which he took from Britain's Olympic rowing team at the 2000 Olympics. They came up with this Mantra which was they would make every decision based on a single question, which is will it make the boat go faster and every decision. So as should this person sit in the front of the boat to the back about well, will it make the boat go faster. Should we have Italian for dinner? Well, will it make the boat go faster? Um, should we go to this Regatta? Well, we'll make the boat go faster. It seems like an obvious question asked.
15:38
Will this make us go faster, but sometimes we can focus on the wrong thing. Maybe you fixate on the shape of your sail and end up neglecting the direction of the current for YouTube. The vix ation was the number of video views, but she sure knew this metric had outlived its usefulness. He wanted to change the ritual of what they measured and how I set this goal for the team that in four years. We would aim to have a billion hours a day of watch time on YouTube if you're having trouble visualizing what this means
16:07
And you're not alone and like many of your listeners. My team had no idea what an hour watch time was at that point. YouTube was dominated by you counts. Like that's all people knew is that videos watched a billion times? That's what people understood when it comes to Old established rituals people often follow them without question just like in families and communities rituals are passed down in companies through the generations only rarely do we stop and think how does this thing? We're doing? Move me?
16:38
Sure to my true objective. It's a common problem and I love the way it was broken down by one of our previous guests Shopify founder Toby Luka. I'm a very strong believer that all companies are part of some kind of family tree of businesses. If you build a company in a place where a lot of people are building companies and there's a lot of cross-pollination between people into the got
17:00
started by people from Fairchild semiconductors and every company's
17:04
influences each other in Silicon Valley.
17:07
Both Intel and Fairchild semiconductors are part of Silicon Valley history and lower but is Toby points out. They may also be part of your company today Fairchild introduced an iconic approach to measuring success. Okay ours or objectives and key results and it's stuck because of his family tree of companies. Basically every company in Silicon Valley runs on something that looks like okay are so it's sort of a Fairchild semiconductor
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In a right? This is a good organizational Principle as a
17:42
good way to organize but the problem is it forces a metric
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Obsession which blinds people to large opportunities.
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It's so easy to do the wrong thing by hyper optimized for one metric.
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I love this idea of a family tree of companies it explains so much of why we mindlessly adopt certain rituals and why it takes a particular presence of mind to snap out.
18:07
Out of the spell as a leader. It's your job to know which rituals continue to hold meeting and which should be cast aside. And if you want to establish a new ritual you need to show exactly why it's important. This is what she sure did by the time we were doing 100 million hours a day or so and watch time and I rattled off a few other properties google.com was about the same but it made no sense for Google account because the goal was get on and off the property physical is roughly double that at the time but the big stat
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Television was washed about five and a half billion hours a day. So that was kind of the percentage of the stomach. What is the bigger picture that we're going after and so I said, okay, that's our goal. We're going to billion hours a day watch time a billion hours a day a bold objective that shishir Illustrated was important and inspiring in fact and inspired us to practice one of our rituals here at masters of scale occasionally in the middle of an episode we break into song.
19:10
Do you need a new metric to change the game when you're counting use your boundaries? Are you sure enough? The chain six week is the new time frame.
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Malcolm it needs a hundred percent back on track and the ritual sake we lies that I suggest the country to try the bit longer and user engagement stronger. We doing rituals help to pave the way to
19:57
now the overall goal was set but she sure knew that wasn't enough. He had to make sure the new ritual of checking success against this unfamiliar metric matter to everyone across the YouTube team. We had a bunch of other goals. We could have said and just a bunch of teams there whose first question would be why is that matter to me? Billionaires are they watch times that mean just search and Discovery team is all that matters and its internal this goal actually reshapes how we think about the property more broadly, but
20:27
He saying a goal is important isn't enough. You need to paint a picture of why the goal is important and how your new strange rituals will get you there. So Shear tried to project what it would mean to get to that goal of a billion hours a day. It would mean that when YouTube got to that point we would have about double the traffic of the entire size of the internet at the time. So look at my networking team and said, hey, this goal is not just for those discover guys. You gotta go rethink everything.
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And rethink how we stream video and so on. This wasn't the only ritual and tech company DNA that shishir changed remember those okay ours objectives and key results. They had made their way to YouTube as well for people who aren't familiar. This is built in the Google culture pretty early on but it came from Intel John doar brought it over as part of his coaching at at Google. The basic idea is pretty simple. Every quarter you sit down and say these are our goals at least a Google one of the common techniques.
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You're supposed to set your goals of the begin the quarter grade them at the end. The established ritual was to review your okay ours at the end of every quarter. If you'd hit 70% of them you were deemed to be on track on to the next corner, but there were two things in particular about this long-held tradition that sheer questioned the Cadence felt artificial quarters a long time, especially fast moving product. Think about the years 52 weeks 13 weeks is a pretty long period your ability to predict at the beginning that quarter where you're going to end up is not
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Ticularly good, then the second part of it is the 70 percent rule you say I want to aim for 70% The spirit of that is really good stretch. Your thinking aim a little bit higher song is really good shishir knew they had to let go of both these long-held rituals and practice what it ended up meaning is you could set goals that were intentionally padded or unrealistic in particular when you had teams collaborating they could make false commitments to each other. It's the beginning of January.
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Here you can get this done. You say well at 13 weeks away. Maybe the incentive is yeah, I'll stick you on my own cars and then we'll get to week 12 and say I didn't do your thing, but I had 70% So I feel pretty good about it. It was a clear example of a ritual that on the surface seem productive, but in fact masked a lot of wasted opportunity and so we made two tweaks to it. We basically took that system move from a 13-week system to a six and twenty six weeks system every six weeks. We did a version of
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okay ours. It was only six weeks and it was meant at a hundred percent commitment does meant as we really expect you to do this in six weeks out is about the time frame note that she's sharing his team didn't throw out the Ocala ritual entirely instead. They kept what was good about it but updated so they could reach their billion our Target and that for your timeline and the six-week review for this ritual wasn't arbitrary six weeks was picked. Mostly because that was the cycle it took to get to the app store's a dynamic of
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To those little bit different was that the mobile centricity of what we were building in six weeks you could predict if I tell you this is going to be done in six weeks and I don't hit it. I screwed up notice how she ran his team. We're tying their new ritual into YouTube's biggest area of growth mobile with this new ritual in place. The team was setting and achieving more ambitious Targets in shorter time frames and this meant there was more accountability, but they also wanted to make sure they weren't stifled by this new ritual how to do
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that with another ritual that keeps you honest every 26 weeks or twice a year. We would do much bigger planning and that are we would set much loftier goals. Here's the big things we want to accomplish, but that way you got one period that was hundred percent commitment the other period that was go be Visionary go think about things that are Broad and open and so we had to build new systems to do that and ended up with a very interesting Network or spreadsheets to do it setting up these rituals. Let the YouTube Team develop a range of tactics focused on achieving that
24:27
Billion our goal they made it more likely that longer videos will be promoted in the rankings. They added more clickable links in videos and autoplay features. They added a personalized landing page keyed to each individual users interests. They worked more closely with the YouTube creators and the most famously used a i to suggest videos to users more users flock to the site and so did more content creators making
24:57
Tube what it is today? And of course this had some huge downsides The Runaway success particularly of YouTube's video suggestion algorithm has also played a part in spreading disturbing and hateful material. It's something shishir has thought about deeply so I set this goal. We're going to get to a billion hours a day and have this very big positive rallying factor and everybody feels like that's a big goal. And if you ask anybody at Google in that period and said, hey, what are you two guys working on they probably say, oh they're working on this crazy building our thing, and it was good it was
25:27
Well branded, it was understandable. It was specific you can make decisions based on it and so on but I had an obvious flaw is it actually a good thing for people who watch a billion hours a day of YouTube and we ask this question very regularly. It's a question YouTube is still grappling with today and it's a clear example of how quickly rituals can have unforeseen outcomes. And when that happens it's time to reassess them. There were other rituals that shishir promoted at YouTube including one.
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I urge all startups to adopt it was inspired when she visited YouTube's office in Zurich typically on such a trip. She would have a parade of staffers present to him. But this time was different the person that ran that office guy Oliver Heckman. He said we're going to do it a little bit differently. What we're going to do is instead of sheer sits in one room and gets lots of presentations. We're just going to walk around to different deaths and everybody is going to talk about what they're working on at their desk and the dynamic
26:27
Is totally different all of a sudden I show up at an engineer status. They have 20 tabs open. Here's the thing. I'm working on. Here's what I built because we're all standing around his desk me and a bunch of the other leadership. We pay a lot of attention and we get a real sense for how the teams working the team felt much more involved in the process. And honestly, it was significantly less prep for either side shears expanded this Dynamic ritual to his board meetings the idea of a walkabout board meeting. I thought was interesting and I wanted to try it.
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And thankfully I had a board that was including yourself who is willing to try these crazy techniques and it seemed to work pretty well. Well, it's one of the things that I love about learning new things and I thought that was something that I would then start nudging other startups that work with in that direction. Yeah, it requires a dedication at transparency that is very high. I think it leads to significantly better storytelling your own show for the own company in addition to the board. And so I find it to be an amazing forcing function for the company to tell the best possible.
27:27
Version of what worked and what didn't work not necessarily positive but what's really happening on a topic these Dynamic board meetings accomplish a lot. They make the board feel like part of the team. They connect the team to the board. They make the whole work seem alive and that you're doing it together not just in this isolated discussion reporting on governance in a board meeting, but in the actual work itself and the actual development of these new rituals.
27:56
We'll be back in a moment after a word from our sponsor Capital One business.
28:04
When we first started shine we put a black woman on our website and we got a couple emails that said is this only for women is it's only for black women
28:15
that's model ID co-ceo of the mental health app shine Mara and her co-founder Naomi hirabayashi created Shine for people who felt alienated by the wellness industry today the app supports four million women and men in a hundred eighty nine
28:30
countries. It's so funny.
28:32
Because so much content we consume every day is created voice-acted performed by white people and by white man, especially and no one asked them if the product is only for white men
28:44
who gets to represent a product that's for everyone shine has been challenging the defaults of the past. So when black lives matter led the call for justice Mara and Naomi leaned into their founding Mission, they commissioned content addressing topics like allyship and representation
28:59
burnout.
29:01
This moment in this movement for racial justice has only helped us to be more specific and to amplify the work. We were already doing by focusing on marginalized communities. You make your product better for everybody because everybody will be using content that is more cognizant of the intersectionality of a lot of different people's experiences. It makes us the best experience out there in the one that we believe will scale the most and have the most
29:25
impact.
29:27
Capital one's. Jengar Bach commends Shine for supporting all of its members during this challenging
29:32
time. They're really doubling down on their mission their focus. Not only on closing the Gap in access to mental health care, but also in creating really inclusive and specific content that is actionable that will really help people during this
29:45
time shine is taking care of its users. But how are Mara Neo me taking care of their employees will find out later in the show. It's all part of Capital One businesses Spotlight on entrepreneurs.
29:57
We're Paving the way and changing the conversation.
30:05
Before the break we heard how she sheer reformed the rituals at YouTube which helped the company smash through that billion our Target in 2016 shishir had become fascinated with the process of creating and scaling new rituals at YouTube, but often new rituals were created and tracked using honky methods reams of confusing spreadsheets and plan documents that all too often slowed the new rituals down. This was the problem shishir wanted to solve
30:35
With Kota the company he co-founded with Alex De nuit in 2014. The core idea of Coda anyone can make a dock as powerful as an app is based on this philosophy that most of the applications out. There are built as one size fits all and they end up being one size fits none. There was another problem shishir wanted to address those documents hadn't changed in 40 years. There's a running joke at the company if Austin Powers popped out of his freezing chamber, you wouldn't know what music to listen to we wouldn't know what
31:04
clothes to wear but didn't know how to work a document a spreadsheet and presentation because they're all basically the same as they were in the 1970s that image of a freshly defrost at Austin Powers being able to mail merge in Microsoft Office 365. It haunted shishir. So he asked himself a question. What if we started from scratch answering it lets you share and Alex to their founding idea this sentence what if anyone could make a dock as powerful as an app clicked at that point? I just couldn't stop thinking about
31:35
Every other idea seemed small few people including yourself nudge me to no. No, you should really do this. I remember that conversation creating a word or Google doc is a ritual repeated millions of times a day across the globe, but it's not suited to some Modern Problems. We've already seen how overhauling your existing rituals can benefit you. But with Coda people could easily set up their own rituals suited to the precise aims and culture of their organizations design your team.
32:04
Teams your rituals your systems designed them like you design your apps think about every application has a set of incentives. It encourages certain Behavior discourages other Behavior. What do you want to encourage or discourage? These are exactly the questions. You should ask when you design rituals for your company. What do I want to encourage? What do I want to discourage? But you also need to ask who am I encouraging and who am I discouraging?
32:33
Company rituals can have the unintended consequence of excluding people. I wanted to understand more about how this happens. And so we reached out to dr. Aquila code a founder of the diversity consulting firm change today, and we started a conversation on how rituals can support a diverse organization.
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So in order to talk about how diversity anti-racism works well and the workplace you have to talk about how it typically does not work. Well
33:01
Akeelah helps.
33:03
His route out rituals that exclude black indigenous people of color women and other underrepresented communities, like people with disabilities Aquila has plenty of examples of companies with rituals that accidentally exclude
33:19
and so example I have of that is a client that I had a few years back a big tech company. They were willing and ready to work on diversity Equity inclusion belonging. And of course, this is before the
33:33
murder of George Floyd and so I came in and I do what I normally do which is have a facilitated meeting or workshop with those who are involved leadership or diversity committee or combo of those individuals. And so this particular group served as part of the diversity committee and all of the heads of HR and people so all the way up to Global the highest HR person was there
33:59
this established company had already built up a set of rituals around there.
34:03
Versity efforts which they breathlessly listed off to akela
34:06
when they're telling me the things that they were doing and planning on doing and what they thought was a effort to start or increase diversity in the workplace. They started how they were doing a million things for women's history month. They were having politicians coming in Olympians panels Tops food me at like all of the above whole month of activities and I was like, that's great. I
34:31
love I love that you're
34:32
supporting
34:33
NG women that's fantastic. So what are you doing for? Black
34:36
History Month their response was unfortunately shocking
34:41
and the highest level person said when's Black History Month I said right now, it's February 8th and he looked at me and was like, oh, yeah, we don't have time to put anything together. And I said you have 20 days to put something together whether you know, you have a lunch and learn or you bring in a speaker you could also bring in me.
35:03
To talk to your companies like yeah, we just we just couldn't we can't do that? And I said, okay. Well, this is where you're drawing the line for what diversity means for you. So you need to change your diversity strategy to say that all you really want to do is support women, and I'm all for supporting women. I'm a woman myself, but if you are saying that you want to work on diversity Equity inclusion and belonging for everyone then you have to do for everyone if you don't want to do that be clear with your
35:30
message.
35:32
This company had drawn a line around what diversity meant to them and this was reinforced by a hollow ritual that paid lip service to the idea.
35:42
That company had set up a series of processes that had the apparent aim of increasing diversity and awareness. But these processes had become embedded rituals that in fact held the company back from achieving those goals at times like this. You might need someone like Aquila to show you how your rituals are leading you astray, but it's up to you to change them and this isn't easy, especially when it reveals something about yourself that you don't want to see
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when it comes to the idea of rituals leaders have to get to the point where they brush their teeth they put on their deodorant and they understand their privilege. There are aware of their privilege. So they're actively checking themselves. This is really hard for white leaders because they think and feel and are always told that they're right because of the power they have think about the CEOs. Think about the VCS.
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It's a hard shift and a hard hard Dynamic to have but if they don't get to that place there further adding to systemic and institutional racism. So that ritual is brush your teeth. Do you odorant aware of privilege self check with privilege.
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Once you have identified the rituals that are actively harmful you can tear them apart and put new ones in their place when it is an area as important as diversity and ending systemic racism. You should look to experts like, dr.
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Day and though you want to make sweeping changes your new rituals can start out small. They will set the tone for how you intend to grow them and that brings us back to shishir and a small ritual. He's created a structure Coda meetings with a special code a dock.
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One of the things we do is inside of every meeting is done in a coda doc, but there's a section of recorded doc. That's usually two part one is a Q&A section.
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Where everybody adds questions and then they up vote each other's questions.
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Is another part that is what we call sentiment tracker where everybody has a space where they add say. We're trying to decide should we launched this feature? It says everybody puts in one to five stars. I think we should or shouldn't I don't know comment. The key is it's hidden from everybody else.
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In this meeting, everyone does that process then we unhide it and we see here's what everybody thinks. We remove a lot of groupthink out of that process. Then we go to the questions in order. If you think back to the incentives of most teams and meetings is loudest voice wins.
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In this way you give a chance for everybody's voice to be heard.
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It forces you to talk about the things that are most important. It also gives you a sense of
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accomplishment
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you leave this meeting and you say we didn't answer every question, but we answered every question that had at least three episodes.
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You're actually really pulling the room for the good ideas making sure the important subjects you get the wisdom of the team going and that participation actually is to some degree encouraged in the right way versus the I just feel vaguely disconnected and I don't know how to get my voice in here. I don't know if it's welcomed. You change all that with the work process and with the tool. That's right.
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At the start of every meeting they open that document and start filling it out. Everyone knows what to do, but most importantly everyone knows what they get out of this ritual rather than drudgery of the PowerPoint presentation this ritual brings excitement and results for George Kimble co-founder of Stanford d.school meetings are a prime example of places where we can establish more thoughtful
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rituals. How do you order the human element as much as the technology?
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Is this ailment in something as simple as a meeting and we'll have what we call a check-in and check-out that's it. It's not just like the Icebreaker like well, how was your weekend? It's a little bit more like say anything. We recognize anyone comes to a meeting and they're carrying whatever they were carrying before. We don't know like their father just was diagnosed with cancer or their kid was sick all night. They didn't get sleep or their partner just got into graduate school and it's literally like a minute each. You just say anything just so you can arrive in the safer the place you create a
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You start to commit to creating a culture of emotional safety and psychological safety is some people might call it then people were able to really put out on the table. What's really there and it Honors that and then we'll do a check out. The enemy will leave five minutes or like okay just say anything and it could be I'm excited about going for a swim now that I'm done with my meetings or it could be like I'm so energized about what we just came up with about implementing. It could be
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anything another ritual that helps meetings along is one George calls. I like I wish
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Most like scaffolding for a way to give critique because if you ask people what do you think usually two things happen, even if they want to be nice, so they just give positive things that actually doesn't help they're trying to be careful with the other human did not be too offensive. So you just get nice things and you don't really know what it doesn't work or they really go straight to the jugular like well this this doesn't work and that stupid and then all of a sudden you get to the truth, but you can't receive it because it's not human and so we found like how do we actually create a safe place where you can get the real feedback?
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And so we scaffolded that with a ritual of I like I
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wish but what about one our rituals the ones that do work are disrupted by outside forces. This is something that nearly every company has experienced as part of the covid pandemic many of May the sudden shift to remote working without having the time to establish rituals around this vastly new way of doing things. This is something she really thought about
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one of the sort of common things you'll hear is so if you're distributed, then you lose out on water cooler talk my view of that is if your company is making major decisions and so on on water cooler talk and it's probably not that good and lots of lots of bad behaviors can happen out of that and you know means that that presence and physical locations on all that starts to dominate decision-making which exacerbates things like groupthink and so the behaviors
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That you're forced to put in with a distributed team are a lot better note that she sure isn't saying that chatting with your co-workers at the water cooler or the coffee maker or in the corridor is a Bad Thing indeed. I'd bet the countless great ideas or breakthroughs have been made during these informal chats, but she sure is pointing out that we can put rituals on a pedestal and then use this to convince ourselves. That making any change is too risky.
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So how does Kota replace that water cooler ritual? So as to maximize its good aspects and minimize the bad humans need a certain level of mutual trust before they can give everybody the benefit of the doubt and so you need to find ways to do that and getting them together is a good way to do it. There's lots of other casual ways. You can do it to just encourage people to get to know each other better company. We work closely with called zapier has this tool that we've mimicked where they do this matchmaking process where you get a match with someone and you do
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A coffee chat with them and just kind of find ways to make sure people form bonds. The other one is it really pushes on over communication? And so as an example, one of the things I do I started doing it YouTube and I still do every Sunday night. I write a mail to the whole team. It's my in my own word summary of what how I feel about what happened the previous week and what I think is happening the next week often full of a little bit of you know personal take on things that you know this thing.
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Opened and I thought this was great and I really want to celebrate it. This thing didn't or recontextualization of things. Hey, we just had this major event happen. Here's what you should take away from it. It's an example of how you can create rituals that reinforced company culture and identity as you scale. Historical context is lost very quickly and you just presume we've been there for a long time. Everybody must know all these different things and then the N plus first person that comes into the company has no idea about all those things and I think it's a good example of I
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Should probably be doing even if you're not distributed but few are distributed. There's extra reason to do it. Our company's rituals are vital to our success, but they can also keep us locked in the past which is why we need to constantly ask ourselves. What rituals are we following that are holding us back and what new rituals can we create together that will be inclusive empowering and keep us all accelerating forward. I'm Reid Hoffman. Thank you for listening.
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And now a final word from our sponsor Capital One business.
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We always wanted to create something that didn't assume that you had to decouple kindness with success. In fact, we see those two things highly connected.
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That's Naomi hirabayashi co-ceo of shine. We were just hearing from her co-founder Mara lady about how their mental health app has helped users impacted by the pandemic and social unrest for their employees. That's meant taking care of each other as well.
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Weekly reflection we share one pride and that can be a shout out to the team something that you did one learning to encourage always growing and it's a way to essentially practice what we preach because you can sometimes forget to take care of
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yourself shines weekly Reflections help the remote employees connect with each other. I need shine saw in their users as
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well. We saw that there was a massive Spike 300% in community discussions, and that's where we came up with this idea of shine together where people can come together around specific.
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Prompts or experiences to share advice around how to better take care of their mental health. We have therapists to help guide the conversation which is almost emotional
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networking. Jengar Bach commends Naomi and Mara for supporting their community and their team through this challenging
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time the work that Naomi and Mara are doing with shine as just incredibly inspiring the world is recognizing the need for not only these resources but these voices this perspective the authenticity
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that they bring to the table and Capital One business is committed to supporting and highlighting black business owners during national black business month now and throughout the
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year as with every ad on Masters of skill the entrepreneurs you just heard from more real and unscripted Capital One did compensate them for participating in this campaign masters of scale is a wait what original the show is recorded remotely with sanitized audio gear. Our executive producers are June Cohen and daren't ref our
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As a producer is Jay Punjabi. Our producers are Chris McLeod Adam skews Jenny Cataldo, Jordan MacLeod Catherine Clark gray Hallie Bondi, Christina Gonzalez and been Manila. Our editor large is Bob safian original music and sound design by Ryan holiday and Daniel nissenbaum audio editing by Keith Jay Nelson mixing and mastering by Brian Pew special. Thanks to Chris Shea Eliza Schreiber David Sanford side.
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Itís Epi Eva Adam heiner Emily McManus Kelsey Capitano, Tim Cronin, Sarah Sandman Charlie Meneses and call Howard visit Master scale.com to find the transcript for this episode and be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter.
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