Strengthening Collaboration and Leveraging New Technologies with Dr. John Boudreau
Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group. And today, joining me from Santa Fe, New Mexico, we've got Dr. John Boudreau. John's got some cool work that he's doing around the future of work, disaggregation of work. And he's got a title of senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations, which is part of University of Southern California. So welcome to the show, John.
John Boudreau: Thank you, Dane. Well done on that introduction.
Dane Groeneveld: Thanks. Yeah. It was a mouthful, as you said. But it was exciting, just connecting a little bit before we pressed record here today, to talk about how you should really be retired by now, but you're in this realm of exploration and possibility that really has roots going back earlier into your life experiences, with your father's profession. So maybe you could share a little bit with the listeners about how you came to be doing this really important and impactful work.
John Boudreau: Oh, I'm happy to, Dane. Thanks for the opportunity. And let me thank, up at the top of the hour, Alicia, who has been so helpful with background support, and Kevin Oakes, my good friend and colleague who apparently had the idea to recommend me. So thanks very much to all of you. And so yes, I stand here in Santa Fe, in my Santa Fe, New Mexico office, having retired my professorship at University of Southern California. That was a 15- year professorship, and director of research for the Center for Effective Organizations with many good colleagues, like Ed Lawler, Sue Mohrman, Alec Levenson, Chris Worley, et cetera. And before that, I was at Cornell University for 22 years, one of the top places in the world to train future human resource leaders. An entire school devoted to industrial labor relations, as they call it, primarily the work relationship. So I've had a very charmed life, Dane, with mentor after mentor, and amazing student after amazing student. And I get a chance to interact with folks like you, who are brilliant, and hopefully make a humble contribution to some of that debate. So it's a pleasure to be here. And your question about how did I get here is an interesting one to me. If you had asked me that question before about 2003... And remember, I started at Cornell in 1981, and got interested in this field probably in about 1975. And I would've told you... I don't know. I went to business school and I read all these books and articles about the Japanese management system in the'70s, and giving frontline workers more agency and more voice. And it just intrigued me. And got great advice to go get an MBA at Purdue University, and that was on the way to the PhD at Purdue. So it would've been a fairly typical... Cornell gave me a job offer. To be honest, it was such a great institution that I was pretty sure I'd wash out well before tenure. And as it happened, I forgot I had enough talent to actually get tenure there, and eventually full professor with the center. So about 2003, I was actually working with the Navy. I was teaching as part of an Executive MBA program for captains and commanders, people who command carriers and squadrons and that kind of thing. Great fun. And I had a handler, Admiral Phil Quast, who had been all over the Navy in his career, and knew a thing or two about asking good questions. So I did my first seminar and I called my father, because my father had been in the Navy, and said, " Hey, I'm teaching the captains and commanders of ships like you were on." Came back into the bar, and over a beer, Phil said, " Tell me again why you got into this." And I said, " Phil, I'm reminded of a story about my dad." My dad was a worker in the'60s for IBM. And in the'60s... Many of you will recall those black and white photos of a computer that filled a room with tape drives on the wall and blinking lights everywhere and a console in the middle. Well, my father and his team were the people who fixed those computers. And Dane, as you observed, there are legends that a computer could go down because of an actual insect in the wiring, now called the bug. And that maybe the origin for the word bug. Well, my dad was a bug fixer with his team. So Friday night comes along. He's putting his tie on at 8: 00 or 9:00 PM, because he's off to fix a computer, and he says, " Do you want to come with me?" And I say, " Sure." So we get in the car, and we start driving way out in the desert. Think Hotel California. And after a drive of about a half hour in the dark, we finally see a light in the distance. We go through a checkpoint, and we're in a cinder block building filled with a computer. A computer that happens to track missiles at the White Sands Missile Range. My dad and his team pull up the floorboards, pull down the wall boards, pull down the ceiling boards, and it is nothing but wires. And they go to work with their wire testers. And they work all night, and they finally fix it. So we're driving home. Sun's rising. Very thoughtful moment. I said, " Dad, do you like your job?" And he said, " John, let me make clear. IBM is an amazing, wonderful company. I'll have a full pension, medical benefits, your mom is taken care of. As you know, John, they have Christmas parties for the kids every year." He said, " It's an amazing company with amazing leadership." And he said, " There's just one thing." And I said, " What's that?" And he said, " I just wish that in IBM's policies, they knew how much it would mean if our supervisor was authorized to take our team out to dinner with our wives when we complete a big repair job, like the one we just did, in the same way that the sales team is authorized to take their people out for a dinner with their wives when they beat the quota." And it just stuck with me, that there are so many instances where these frontline workers, who we now know as heroes... I hope that stays. If they just had a little more voice. If someone just knew a little bit more about what would make for a great work experience, that things might change for them. And so in my mind, Dane, I like to think that maybe an idea I write or a comment that I make or a course I teach or an executive I work with... In a small, humble way, those people who do brilliant work may make the work experience a little better for someone like my dad.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's a great genesis story. And I think you're absolutely right, which is we're living in this time where things are changing, through technology, socially, the pandemic. And just one small soundbite, one small story could encourage a team leader, a functional manager, a executive of a small business to venture out, try something different, and have huge impact, because we're living through this talent shortage. There's a lot of change in the market. And I think that teams and the companies that go that step further, particularly for some of these undesked workers that tend to get overlooked, could really reap huge rewards for their people, for their customers, shareholders, for everyone.
John Boudreau: Yeah, I absolutely agree.
Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. So talking about frontline workers, I know you were sharing beforehand that you are seeing some evidence out there. I heard a story that CVS, at some point in time, started offering some of their workers up in the northeast the opportunity to schedule and go and work in a store down in Florida in the winter months. So that's one way that you can take someone who's often on the shop floor, and give them some flexibility, some agency, some voice. Are there other sort of key examples that you've seen, through your research, that kind of light up a bit of a spark of inspiration?
John Boudreau: Yes. In fact, there are a great many of them. And let me give one more shout- out to my good colleague and friend, Ravin Jesuthasan, who's now a principal at Mercer. Ravin and I have written the last five books together, along with David Creelman. And across those books, I think we see a number of themes. One book was kind of about the principles of transformative HR, and then there was a book about workers beyond the employment contract, gig workers, contractors, et cetera. Then a book on automation, and now the latest book, Work Without Jobs, which is about deconstructing work into its elements, and workers into their elements, and matching those rather than matching it to job and job holder level. So across all of those, one of the themes that comes up is just how creative work design can be when it's approached as an experiment, when it's approached as something we apply... Agile design principles, in the same way that we might apply agile design to a product or software. The idea of learning from the users, the idea of perpetual upgrading. Every technology you own is perpetually obsolete and perpetually new, because it's being upgraded almost constantly. And I like to think about work that way. And it's true for desk workers, for sure. But frontline workers, we see immense developments in scheduling. That's often where it starts. And with the help of machine learning, AI, and algorithmic optimization, you can actually have a platform that could offer those workers work in Florida in the winter. Unheard of in the past. But with cloud grade systems that are all integrated, we see evolution in the world of automation. One of my favorite examples from our book is when you automate an oil rig... Means you take the people off and you let robots do the maintenance. The people don't go away. The people end up in a control room. In a safer, more climate- controlled space. And the interesting thing... And this runs across so many examples. If you have someone who's good at diagnosing what's wrong with the oil rig, kind of like my dad and his team with computers, that person is no longer stuck on one oil rig. You can move them virtually now, from rig to rig to rig. And they can work on any rig that has a tough problem. And so you see that with bank tellers. A number of my CHRO colleagues, during the pandemic, transformed their frontline store associates. As physical store traffic went down with the pandemic, online traffic went up. Well, they figured out a way to send their folks home with a virtual call center in their home, and have them join the call center teams that previously were located in one place. So the mind boggles. And it will just get more mind- boggling as we continue with the advent of generative AI and other future developments.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I agree. I think remote control rooms, virtual call centers... They have huge leverage for a lot of people that have often been overlooked, because they had to work in a physical location because of the tools that they were using. So that's a great example. Great story. And it sparks, in my mind, this concept of... Not only can Bob or Jenny or whoever it might be do more of the work they're great at, which is a big benefit of this disaggregation of tasks and ability to serve multiple sites at once... But it's got to have a massive knowledge transfer, training impact too, I would imagine. Just intrigued, when you are seeing the use of technology to allow someone to jump in and out of multiple operating environments, virtual or physical, how are some of those customers perhaps embracing the training opportunity, the knowledge transfer that that creates?
John Boudreau: It's an interesting one. I suppose one of the most vivid examples of knowledge transfer, I think, is when you have an expert who's available virtually through augmented reality. And it's only one, but it's kind of a good extreme one, where the expert can literally look through the goggles. Whether it's a physician, whether it's a repair person. And they can see what the person in the field sees, what the physical person sees. What that does is it allows you to probably move the worst of your repair people. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I just mean there is a distribution, maybe based on experience or whatever. And you're going to have people that... It's their first time. And they'd get better, I guess, if they got a hundred tries at that repair. And now, with the goggles on, they've got someone who's done it a thousand times, who can not only say, " Do this," like an instruction manual, but can explain to them why, in real time, in the flow of work. And I think if we start there, Dane, we can work backwards to more traditional kinds of knowledge transfer. I know a number of startups that are working on the concept that generative AI may be the gateway to capturing much of the knowledge in a team or in an organization, and making it accessible in a conversational way. So again, the development... The knowledge transfer idea. What do we mean by knowledge? Could we actually tap the quote- unquote" knowledge" of all the workers that we have access to, that either work for us or are on contract? I think about my dad. And I haven't thought of this before, but in today's world, he might very well have almost a direct voice to someone who could change the policy, power the systems we have today.
Dane Groeneveld: No, I agree. And you used an interesting word that I've not heard referenced. So you said to make this knowledge transfer accessible in a conversational way. So could you expand a little bit more on what a conversational way is?
John Boudreau: Some of my colleagues... A number of them, really, have coined the term, in the flow of work. That's been around for a while. The idea that... Not on everything but on many things, we will learn best when we're in the moment, and we're trying to figure something out, or we have it right in front of us. And that's the moment where our bodies, our minds are really ready to learn. And frequently, that moment hasn't contained much learning opportunity in it. You were so busy trying to get things done that you really didn't have time to learn. Learning happened in a training course or something like that. And so that notion of... I guess conversation is the right word, that you can be having a conversation with a knowledge holder at that moment, where you can really use the knowledge. I suppose if we extend it, Dane, we see this in a lot of the early stage... And even now, very mature companies, that offer what we might call nudges to leaders, supervisors, et cetera, where you get a ping. Obviously, Microsoft systems, Workday systems, all the big ones, you get a ping that says, " Hey, you haven't checked in with this team member for a while. And by the way, I've noticed this team member has been working long hours lately. You might want to talk about that." I mean, it's just amazing how this kind of knowledge can be provided exactly in the moment when someone needs it.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No. That makes a lot more sense. And actually, we've got a founder series that we've just recently shot with a few different founders. And all three of them, with their emerging new technologies, are using that nudge concept. So when you tie that to conversational access, I totally get it now. So thank you for sharing that. And it is exciting to think... Again, you said that these people have often been stuck in the flow of work, and not been able to learn in that flow because they were taken to a classroom. So if this is a digital access, even in a operating environment when you're on a machine or something like that... If it can be coming in through glasses, through a headset, on a screen, that's opening up so many doors of opportunity.
John Boudreau: Yes, it really is. And of course, the algorithms that direct the learning to you are getting better and better. Building on that, I suppose algorithmic engines, like the ones that show us products... We're all mystified by how our web feed shows us things we talked about to our spouse last night but haven't typed in yet. And I think we can think, in the most positive way, about knowledge being that way. As the system watches us work, it will actually begin to be able to make judgment about what it is we might need, without a lot of human intervention.
Dane Groeneveld: And if it's anything like my household, if my wife's looking at lamps or lampshades, then when I go into my social media feed... Because our IP address is obviously somehow connected, I'm getting lamps, too. So it's not always... I might be getting nudged by something not that I'm looking for or needing, but something that one of my team members is looking at. So best practice dissemination has got to be pretty interesting in that environment, too.
John Boudreau: Yeah. Probably a few glitches here and there, but I think that parallel to the marketplace... Pick whatever search engine you like. Amazon's a good example. Netflix, Google, anything that can read what you're about, and then offer suggestions. I know some of the people in AI, even a decade ago, were saying we're beginning to get to a point where it'll be cheaper for an Amazon, a Netflix, et cetera... Pick your search engine, to send you the product or service and let you refuse it, because it's so likely to be what you want. So it'll arrive on your doorstep, your lamp.
Dane Groeneveld: That's amazing.
John Boudreau: And your wife will say, " I can't believe this. This is just what I was hoping for." And the idea would be that it's a better bet that you'll keep it than that you'll return it, because they can be that accurate. And imagine if we could be that accurate with things like training and career advice and offering a task or a project or a next job, a pathway to a career goal, that kind of thing.
Dane Groeneveld: When to call a customer, when to go and walk over to a team member's machine, and look at what they're doing or help them with a problem. I mean, it really unlocks a lot of the gaps that are naturally being created through imperfect information flow.
John Boudreau: Yeah. It's kind of management by walking around taken to a next level, where the cloud becomes the place you walk, in a way.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. And one of my questions, that we were talking about before we came to the show, was not only how do you see the AI changing the workplace, but how do companies prepare for those changes? So with that construct, that concept, are there particular tools that you are seeing companies jumping into? Are there particular roles that they're creating within their organizations to be starting to assess the tools and the business practices that might create a bit more awareness to jump on these opportunities as they emerge?
John Boudreau: Well, I absolutely do think so, Dane. And let me have a bit of a disclaimer, because I know a lot of your listeners are brilliant folks that are operating startups in this area, and all that. Like I said... I don't know if I've said it here yet. I have an amazing job, which is that I get to talk to brilliant people like you, like the people on this podcast. They tell me their stories. Perhaps I offer a humble idea that may help direct them. And then I write all that down in a book, and they say, " Boy, that John is really smart." And I've managed to keep that career going for 40 years. So I want to give all due respect to the folks that are listening, and I'll offer my own humble observations. I guess I would say that... And let me give one more call- out to my colleague, David Creelman, who's also a co- author. We're working on an AI presentation to some HR folks at the Doctors Without Borders organization, where I work on a innovation committee. And one of the things that David said, as we were working, was it may be a bit early to actually jump to the applications and the products themselves. There's certainly a real role for vendors and others to play in demonstrating the development. However, I think the fundamental mindsets of things like work being perpetually obsolete and perpetually upgraded... The mindset that we approach work as a constant agile design exercise. So we fail fast, we do scrubs, we test features, and we do it with the same rigor that we would with a product. You don't just throw out the entire product with service. You experiment with features, and you do it in a way where the risk reward is likely to be high. I'd love to see organizations begin to adapt that perspective to work. And then I think you have the environment in which you have the trust and the collaboration of the people that really matter, which is the frontline workers, and hopefully their trust in helping you redesign work, as things like AI evolve. A quick example, and I'll let you get a word in here, Dane... Ellyn Shook, the head of HR at Accenture, wrote an open letter to her people. Her employees, I guess, for the most part, and said, " We'd like to invite you to help us understand how to automate your job. And we will... It won't guarantee you lifetime employment, by any means." I don't remember precisely the arrangement, but the idea was we are going to also then work hard to make you prepared for that automation future. My colleague, Ben Schneider, and I have developed an instrument to measure the climate for work automation, that measures whether workers are afraid, whether they believe their supervisors are capable, whether rewards are tied to automation. Ben Schneider is an icon in the world of things like climate for safety, climate for service, and has been doing that research for decades. Number one, I think, before we jump to the applications... It's great to step back and ask ourselves what is, almost, our attitude, our culture, for want of a better word, to use Kevin's term, about the nature of work. Does it tend to be a rigid one, where people are in jobs and those jobs are expected to be stable, and we ask ourselves, and we react to automation, and say, " Oh my goodness. I guess it's come to take your job." Versus the other extreme, where we say automation is one of many ways that we're going to co- create work constantly. If you think of it that way, then as something like generative AI emerges, there's a space to begin to have trusting, hopefully very positive conversations about how it should and how it shouldn't be automating work, and combining with the human workers.
Dane Groeneveld: That excites me, because there is a lot of unknowns. There's a lot of fear around... Is my job going to become obsolete? Is my skillset going to become obsolete? And the example you share there, from Ellyn Shook at Accenture, which is inviting the team to be part the definition of problems to solve, and the assessment of tools that may be out there. Making it a cultural initiative, a team initiative, a core objective for business performance, that's powerful, because... To your point, as well, on who starts it and when they start. Everyone can access that in their own small way or big way, depending on the organization that they're fortunate enough to be leading.
John Boudreau: Indeed. Indeed. I think so. I think there are... Once you step back and say, " What if work was the subject of agile design the way our products are?" I have a few companies interested in this experiment, Dane. So far, it's a thought experiment. But what I'd love to do, and what I've written about, is to imagine that we're... Let's say we're face- to- face, and we have a whiteboard. And what I'd love to do is have a leader identify those people in their organization who are already good at agile design, or whatever you might call it. Service- oriented design, lean, et cetera. And they're probably working on products or software or services. And I would say let's bring them in a room and say, " Okay. Bring all your tools. And I want you to go through and word- substitute the word work for the word product, and the words worker and manager for the word users or customers. And let's just see what your tools look like." And then engage them to say, " Okay. What's your best advice on how we treat work like the products who already design in an agile way?" And I've got a couple of companies that are just about ready to let me work with them as they do that experiment. But that, to me, is the most inaudible-
Dane Groeneveld: It makes total sense. No. It makes total sense, John, because... We had Kurt Landon from Enspira, who's a former chief people officer, now founder of this emerging HR consultancy search practice. And he was talking about how 30 years ago, when he started, it was still called personnel, right? People were personnel, and there was no real consideration of employees as customers or users. It was like, " Hey, how do we protect ourselves legally, and manage these personnel?" And one of the key things that Kurt shared, which is in his profession... Chief people officers, chief human resource officers, we're now seeing a very interesting shift to bringing in outsiders to head the function. Someone from operations, someone from finance, someone from product. And your story about product management, product development in that agile capacity, that's a skillset that I think... People already have a way of doing things, so why not let them loose on some human elements?
John Boudreau: Exactly. I wrote a book some time ago, called Retooling HR, which was kind of my contribution to the analytics debate about... Gosh, it's probably about 10 or 12 years ago. And the reason it was called Retooling HR was... What I tried to do is provide examples, like we've just done, where you can take a framework that leaders already know well. Let's say portfolio theory in finance, supply chain optimization in operations, inventory management, risk management, in the world of pharmaceuticals or something. And this one would be agile design. And you'd apply those frameworks to work or to HR. So for example, I find that leaders outside of HR think in a much more sophisticated way about things like recruitment, selection, retention, and development when I frame it as a pipeline of talent moving through the organization. And then we can talk about bottlenecks. We can talk about inventory. We can talk about pivot points. And they've already got a smart brain that does that. They're already so good at it. And I find if I don't do that, to be honest, they come at the people stuff with very simplistic ideas. We have to recruit for-
Dane Groeneveld: And personal.
John Boudreau: Yeah, exactly. Personal experience. Whatever fad I've heard. A good one is we've got to be recruiting new people at the very best universities in the world, because we want the very best. And I'll say, " Possibly. What if I told you you're only going to order from the vendors that are the most expensive, but that produce the very, very, very best quality possible?" And they would say, " Well, wait a minute. John, that would not be a good general rule. Sometimes we can recruit..." And it's just interesting how quickly their brain... I would love to put almost a brain scanner on, and watch this exchange from the first incidence of just recruit the best people everywhere to... Oh, wait a minute. If I thought of this as a raw materials procurement, then I'd say, " No, no, no. I've got a great nuanced model for when we might take, let's say, lower quality, but more likely to join us. And someone we can develop."
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's extremely powerful. I've heard... And we've had guests talk about humanizing processes to make it more accessible, but this is almost the opposite. It's like dehumanizing the HR, and using the process mindset to just unlock some of that thinking.
John Boudreau: I think that's right.
Dane Groeneveld: That's neat.
John Boudreau: And with that in mind, I'll make one distinction, and it's meant in no negative way. What we often see as agile HR is agile tools applied to HR processes. So making our learning system more user- friendly, making our career development system, our recruiting... And you can apply agile tools to make those things faster, more user- attentive, et cetera. And that's a good thing. There's been a lot of progress that way. What I think I'm talking about is applying those agile tools to the work itself. To the work that is, in a way, the target for all those HR processes.
Dane Groeneveld: Got it. And there's another factor there that comes up. BHP built a foundation in Houston before they divested that asset. And the foundation still exists, naturally. But they were talking about some of their oil and gas assets, where there were people out there right now who were working in a facility that was going to become demand. They were going to use those control rooms, like you referenced. And it was going to impact communities. And their concern was how do we invest into these communities and our people, so we continue to have a license to operate, and allow them to transition into other industries? So that construct that you just talked about, applying it to work and the disaggregation of work, could help a lot of companies with assets that are either decommissioning or heavily transitioning into digital or virtual... To be bringing their team into other roles in the communities, other ways of creating businesses, other ways of creating services that may be offered elsewhere in the organization. They've got other assets. Those people could be valuable if they were re- skilled, retooled.
John Boudreau: I absolutely agree. And we saw some examples of this during Covid. We saw worker swapping across very different organizations, to create a supply chain that went from automobiles to personal protective equipment. Often required that two companies that had never worked together, didn't even know each other, began to share workers. We saw an initiative by a number of my HR colleagues, Ellyn Shook among them, to open up a platform where industries with excess workers could see the openings in industries that needed more of them. So I absolutely agree. You mentioned BHP. And in another project on the future of work, with my colleague, Jonathan Donner, and Kat Brune with Executive Networks, we are talking with HR folks about the future of work. And one of them was from a mining extraction company. And he said, " I came back in with a future of work deck and my CEO basically said, " I want something more comprehensive," I guess I'd call it. And he went back and he thought about it, and he said, " We need to even get beyond the license to operate. We need to commit to making the society that we are in more capable of sustainable work for as many people as possible." And just as you said, that would mean supporting businesses that may have nothing to do with your license to operate. Supporting education initiatives with the idea that we'll be regenerative. When we decommission, we'll have left the place better, even beyond our license to operate. I think that's a very potent idea. Very futuristic. And very interesting way to frame the start of a discussion of the future of work.
Dane Groeneveld: It is. And my brother's actually a development economist consultant back in Australia, and does a lot of sustainability work. And one of the stories he would use as part of his executive education, when he was working with a new customer, is if you think you can just demand your operations and continue selling products, who's going to be buying your products? Because if they don't have incomes, if they're not part of a meaningful community near your supply chain, then how much damage are you doing to the end market that you serve?
John Boudreau: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Raises both wonderful opportunities and challenges, about where the boundaries are now. What do we really call the organization? What do we really mean by the workforce?
Dane Groeneveld: Yep. Yeah. No, it's exciting. So we've talked about some opportunities and challenges there, but we haven't... And we talked about some examples of distributed teams, as the world becomes more digital. But what about the skills? What are the essential skills, do you think, that individuals should be focusing their time on, so that they can play in some of these experiments, and some of these emerging best practices of what is work, how is work defined?
John Boudreau: Yeah. I think what we're seeing, Dane, basically is the acceleration of a drumbeat that we've seen for decades and decades, which is that... As I said, I think work has been constantly upgraded for a long, long time, whether it's by automation or the availability of workers who work in a different way than an employment contract, or any number of other trends. So I think we've seen kind of an evolution. How recently was it that we were talking about getting everybody coding skills? And now, it looks like coding is going to be something you prompt and get back. Generative AI is a coding tool, and it's an image- creating tool. It's a writing tool. And so I think that's going to continue. Not that I anticipated ChatGPT or generative AI, but I think the best skills are going to be those that support agile experimentation in the work relationships. So openness to learning, curiosity, adaptability. All those things where we put in our minds, the idea... What if the work you're doing is going to change constantly, but very, very tangibly, maybe every year or two years? And what would it take for you to be informed about that, be ready for that, and be in an organization that can sustain a relationship with you, even if you leave and come back, through that? So all of those things. I think the idea of anticipation. I think many organizations... Not all, but just to take an extreme case to make a point. I think in many organizations, it's still a matter of waiting until the automation or the new development arrives. I've talked about this with executives for probably 30 years, about layoffs. Why did you wait until the very last second, when doing the layoff was extraordinarily powerful? Again, not that I presume to be able to do their job better, but just as a question I ask. When did you really know that this plant was headed for closure? And they'll often say, " Two CEOs before me knew we were going to have to close the plant, and they all just kind of avoided it until it was right in front of us." And so I think that idea of honest anticipation, where you say... Something like today. I can see ChatGPT writing draft articles for reporters. Let's call in all the people here who do writing, and let's honestly put that on the table and say, " Well, how soon do we think it'll affect your work? And if it did, what would that effect be? And how would you want us to partner with you?" Something like that.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. That takes a lot of honesty. It also takes a lot of courage.
John Boudreau: Indeed.
Dane Groeneveld: Particularly for smaller businesses that don't have the pipeline of talent. They're like, " Well, if I start having that conversation, they might leave, go and work for a bigger company that's more likely to have other roles for them." So it's a tricky one, but it is a conversation that needs to be had.
John Boudreau: It is, Dane. And again, I'll put something in that's a little bit radical, perhaps. But when I'm in those conversations, one of the things I think of, and often talk about, is the idea of this organization boundary. And it goes down almost to a kind of existential question of what does it really mean if someone leaves? Well, in the past, we said that means they don't have an employment contract. They don't work for us. Maybe at the extreme, we thought they were disloyal. And I almost want to say, " Well, let's think about your boundary as permeable. Let's think about that entire world of workers as the workers you could engage with. And let's ask ourselves what kind of an ambassador might your people be to other workers that might come in, or maybe borrowing from the organization they joined, because they know you so well?" Now, most systems aren't set up for that, but I think there is a position to be taken, that leaving doesn't have to be the same zero- one variable we've traditionally thought.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's a good call to action, John. I don't think it's radical, either. I think we're seeing some good evidence of that in a number of organizations. Heather McGowan... I don't know if you've done any work with her, but she's a brilliant speaker. She just put out a book, The Empathy Advantage.
John Boudreau: Yes. inaudible.
Dane Groeneveld: And she talks about... It's great. She talks about organizations in the past having hoarded talent. Hey, we trained you, you've got institutional knowledge. We're going to hold onto you. And how damaging that can be to some businesses, because that individual could actually be 10x what they are now, if they went out and had experience and came back. They could be a great ambassador. And then sometimes, you need someone to come into the team who there isn't going to be a 40 hour a week job for, or a longterm position, but they need to come in and do something very important, and help the team and the company along. So I like that permeable wall analogy. I think that's really smart. When you do start to think about those skills, curiosity, adaptability, learning, coaching, problem solving, some of those more human connectedness skills, which will allow people to be on multiple teams, adjust as technologies change... And you come from the world of academia. How do you think we bridge that, from early education to continuing professional development? They're not necessarily skills that the corporate training environment spend a huge amount of time or money on.
John Boudreau: I think that's right. And you do see initiatives. Let me start generally, and work inward. I'll just do a quick walk through, Dane, of this. Some of the central concepts in the book that Ravin and I wrote most recently in 2022, called Work Without Jobs... And our title doesn't mean that all work is going to be disassociated with jobs. In fact, most work probably is going to be perfectly handleable by the traditional job system. However, at what I would call the edges, where automation is happening so fast that you can't really write the general descriptions quickly enough... Where, as you said, there are terrific workers out there who would be willing to work on what some are calling a fractional way. I'm hearing a lot about fractional consulting, fractional CEOs, fractional CFOs, where they come in without 40 hours a week to help out. So all of these things push the boundaries of a job- based system, because one of the things Ravin and I discovered, writing the books about automation and non- employee work, was that they often happen at the task level or the project level. And indeed, if you look at all the research on automation, you'll see that the first thing the researchers have to do to answer the question... Let's put it this way. Will automation take my job? The first thing they have to do is break jobs into tasks. And some of the tasks are automatable, and some of them are less automatable. And then they were, for a while, using arbitrary rules to aggregate back up. If 80% of your tasks are 50% likely to be automated, I'm going to say your job is in danger. I've been delighted to see lately, with generative AI, that they're starting to report it like this. In 80% of jobs, at least 20% of the tasks will be affected by generative AI. And I think that's a better way to think of it. So I think in a world like that then, we need basically to be disaggregated. We need to be willing, at least as an exercise, to essentially snip apart a paper job description into its elements, to snip apart the individual, and look at the whole individual, in terms of what I like to call their capabilities, what they can do. That's related to skills. And skills are an example of disaggregation. So we can say, " Okay. Let's try disaggregating the work, and let it coalesce in whatever way is best, even if that's not always a job. Let's disaggregate, and also complete the worker. Let's look at all the capabilities they have beyond just the job or the job sequence, and ask ourselves how those capabilities match with the disaggregated work in a kind of melted soup that can reconfigure back into something." I think of it as melting ice cubes. And then, to your education point, I think education disaggregates from degrees into... Or learning, we might call it. Disaggregates from a zero- one degree, like a nursing degree, to a set of elements, a set of classes, a set of qualifications that could also now be matched with these. And I think that's a pretty tectonic... I think it's necessary. At a lot of these edges, we see a lot of exploration of this kind of thing by really good people in education. And I think that's a bit where we're going, is to look almost, as you say, at the start of education. And start to say, " How does this contribute to maybe a disaggregated element of work, like creating something, like making a judgment call, or maybe something technical."
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No. And I like that you're pointing out that it's at the edges, because if you're in the core of a business, and lots of processes and systems, there are going to be so many obstacles and barriers to starting to make that change. But if you learn from the edges, you can probably do things that aren't going to upset your best customer, upset the balance of the team, but be learning and bringing the good stuff in.
John Boudreau: Yeah. I absolutely agree with that. So Ravin and I call this thing the new work operating system. Like a computer operating system, going from batch jobs simultaneously. I don't know if people know, but in the modern PC, the reason it can seem to do 20 things at once is not because it has more CPUs. It's because someone figured out how to divide the CPU work into nanoseconds, and allow the computer to prioritize based on your activity. And so we think about that new work operating system. And what I say is, until the book becomes a really big bestseller, your leaders and your workers aren't going to say, " I want that Jesuthasan- Boudreau work operating system," but they are going to say, " I can't seem to get the work to move fast enough to stay agile. I can't seem to have enough fluidity with my people, to have them move to where they're needed, rather than say, " Well, that's not my job."" As we automate, the automation changes so quickly that rewriting job descriptions and rehiring is just awfully slow. Maybe the symptom is we have a job opening that's been open for months and months and months. And what I say is... I think in those spots, they're already motivated. They already know something's wrong here. And to come in and say, " Perhaps if we loosened up this operating system from jobs, job holders, and degrees, would that give us some insights about how to deal with this edge that you're wrestling with?"
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And I like that that brings us full circle to your dad's story, John, because if you can do that, then you're spending a lot of time on the culture of your people, because you know I value John, or I value Jenny, or Crystal, because they're part of my culture. It doesn't matter what role they're doing now. How am I appreciating them, giving them opportunities to have a voice, to have agency on scheduling, learning? That creates something special for everyone. So I like that that brings us full circle, to serving the frontline workers or the workers that maybe have been overlooked in the initial virtual shift through Covid.
John Boudreau: Indeed. Very well done, Dane. Now I see why you do this so well.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's fun. It's fun. I mean, this conversation's flown by. There were so many great takeaways. I don't think I could summarize them, but you used the word radical. And I don't actually think there's too much radical about this. I think it's futuristic, but you've laid it out in such a way that it is within reach. There's pragmatic ways to start inviting people in and to experiment. So thank you for the work that you are doing. Thank you for the way that you've shared this passion of yours with our listeners today. And yeah, I really appreciate it, John.
John Boudreau: Thank you, Dane. That's very, very kind of you, again. Hopefully a humble contribution to the brilliant work that you and others are doing. And much appreciated. Thanks for the opportunity.
Dane Groeneveld: You bet. And if people want to come and find some of your research, your writing, your books, there's a lot out there. How do they best track down you and your material?
John Boudreau: Well, there is a webpage. It's pretty comprehensive, drjohnboudreau. com. And that's probably a really good place to start. There's also some of... If you go to the Center for Effective Organization's website, that's obviously where I was housed for 15 years. And so they've also got a good collection of things. Yeah. And I'm on LinkedIn, posting semi- regularly, as well. So lots of places to find me out there. Thanks for asking.
Dane Groeneveld: Well, thanks again for your time, John. And I'll definitely take you up on the offer to come visit New Mexico, and try some of those trout streams soon, too.
John Boudreau: Oh, yeah. We'll have to get you here. I'd love to host you when you get here, Dane. Thanks.
Dane Groeneveld: Wonderful. Thank you.
DESCRIPTION
Discover how Dr. John Boudreau revolutionizes work and organizations by strengthening incentives, cultures, and fostering fulfilling and satisfying work. Host and HUDDL3 CEO, Dane Groeneveld, sits down with Dr. Boudreau to discuss the idea of transformative HR, how virtual and augmented reality provides opportunities for people to directly connect regardless of geographic location, and different definitions and systems for work.