Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences)

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

Evan LaPointe is the founder of CORE Sciences, which teaches companies and individuals how our brains work and how that translates to improved collaboration, better products, faster decision-making, and more growth. Previously, Evan was the co-founder of Satellite, the fourth-largest analytics product on the internet today (it mostly runs behind the scenes, and pretty much everyone listening will have used it today without knowing it), which was acquired by Adobe, where he later ran product strategy, innovation, and long-range thinking for Adobe’s digital experiences business. In our conversation, we discuss:• The three different systems of the brain• How knowing this can help you become more influential• How understanding different brain states will help you increase productivity and creativity• How to improve your vision and strategy skills• How to design a work environment that fosters innovation• How to build better relationships at work• Much more—Use discount code “LENNY” for $5 off the CORE Sciences personality profile: https://www.core-sciences.com/new-core-identity—Brought to you by:• Webflow—The web experience platform• Explo—Embed customer-facing analytics in your product• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments—Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/understanding-your-brain-evan-lapointe—Where to find Evan LaPointe:• X: https://x.com/evanlapointe• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanlapointe/• Website: https://www.core-sciences.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Evan’s background(02:37) Understanding the brain’s complex systems(07:17) The three core brain systems: safety, reward, and purpose(11:03) Applying brain science to team dynamics(14:27) The role of personality in team performance(17:27) Creating effective work environments(23:16) The science of meetings and decision-making(29:35) Enhancing strategy and vision(54:46) Understanding personality traits in strategy and vision(58:58) Tactical tips for increasing openness(01:05:46) Building influence and effective relationships(01:21:17) The importance of trust and appeal in relationships(01:36:47) Creating a positive organizational habitat(01:50:35) Enhancing focus and productivity(02:00:58) Practical tips for deep work and gamma time(02:07:11) Lightning round—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much. If you instead send things to the kind of the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, you get dramatically better answers. I know you have a bunch of awesome advice on becoming more influential. It's almost like you're playing like Eldon Ring or some video game. The starting point is to choose your character. Hey, I'm the devil's advocate approach or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy.

Your personality kind of has a natural. fit. How do we create better relationships within our teams? It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job? How much do I know? How critical am I to this process? But am I a miserable experience? And if the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first. I am really excited for this episode. I think it's going to be unlike any other conversation I've had on this podcast. And then here's the surprise ending. Today my guest is Evan LaPointe. Evan is the founder of core sciences, which teaches companies and individuals how our brains actually work, and through that lens, how to more

effectively work with other people on teams, how to build better products, how to grow your business, and how to make smarter and faster decisions. Evan is a four-time founder, including founding a company called Satellite, which is the fourth largest analytics product on the internet today, which was acquired by Adobe, where he later ran product strategy and innovation for Adobe's digital business. In our conversation, Evan shares a simple way to understand how our brains work and through that framework how we can get better at vision work, influence, running meetings, having more focus and building better and more productive relationships with our colleagues. This conversation is a beautiful mix of science,

theory, and also a ton of very actionable and concrete things you can do to be more effective in your work. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Evan LaPointe. Evan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for having me. I'm excited to share some stuff with people. I am really excited for this episode because, one, I think it's going to be unlike any other conversation I've had on this podcast. Two, I think it's going to really stretch our brains as we learn about how the brain works. And three, I think it's really going to make an impact on how people

work and how they relate to other people and work with other people. I thought it'd be great to start by laying a little bit of foundation for people to get a sense of just what they need to understand about how the brain works before we get into how we can actually apply some of the stuff. So could you just share some of the stuff that is really important for us to know about how the brain works? The brain is like a big galaxy. I mean, there's a national geographic quote that we throw up in all of our programs that when we train teams, for example, that says the brain is more complex than any known structure in the universe. And it's easy to read a sentence like that and just run straight away from the problem.

And I think that's important for people to not run away from this problem, but more run toward it. And it's our job to kind of translate the complexity of the brain into really simple, straightforward systems that you can remember. And the three or four main systems to stack on top of each other, like layers, start with it, the fact that the brain has systems, like different. I kind of think of it like the brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. And your brain has a science department responsible for open-minded experimentation. It has an art department in it responsible for creative kind of boundless thinking.

It has a history department designed for looking stuff up that you already know. And if you think about sending your thoughts to the right department on the campus or just different departments, you're going to get super different responses back from your brain. And where we're stuck largely is most people rely on their history department way too much. And that's because the brain is actually built to conserve energy. And that's the lowest energy form of generating an answer to a question that the brain can pull off. But if you instead send things to kind of the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, the humanities department of your compassion, et cetera,

you get totally different answers. And certainly if you ever build products as a company or offer service. is those departments are going to give you dramatically better answers than the reference material just in your history department. This episode is brought to you by Webflow. We're all friends here, so let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be a static asset. It should be a dynamic part of your strategy that drives conversions.

That's business 101. But here's a number for you. 54% of leaders say web updates take too long. That's over half of you listening. right now. That's where WebFlow comes in. Their visual first platform allows you to build, launch, and optimize web pages fast. That means you can set ambitious business goals and your site can rise to the challenge. Learn how teams like Dropbox, IDEO, and Orange Theory, trust WebFlow to achieve their most ambitious goals today at webflow.com. This episode is brought to you by Explo,

a game changer for customer-facing analytics and data reporting. Are your users' craving more dashboards, reports, and analytics within your product? Are you tired of trying to build it yourself? As a product leader, you probably have these requests on your roadmap, but the struggle to prioritize them is real. Building analytics from scratch can be time-consuming, expensive, and a really challenging process. Enter EXPLO. EXPLO is a fully white-labeled embedded analytics solution designed entirely with your user in mind.

Getting started is easy. connects to any relational database or warehouse and with its low code functionality, you can build and style dashboards in minutes. Once you're ready, simply embed the dashboard or report into your application with a tiny code snippet. The best part, your end users can use Explos AI features for their own report and dashboard generation. Eliminating customer data requests for your support team. Build and embed a fully white-labeled analytics experience in days.

T-P-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-L-L-E. So that's kind of the first thing is that the brain has these departments and systems in it. It also has pathways. And the pathways thing is really important to understand because there's a likelihood that thought will go down certain pathways in each of our brains. Some of that has to do with personality, which kind of sort of predisposes us to have a higher anxiety or a lower anxiety response or a higher creativity or lower creativity response. But you can also be more intentional with these pathways. And that's a big component of self-awareness is to kind of know what are my preferences.

And then am I actually letting those preferences take over in the situation or am I being more intentional steering down the pathways to activate these best regions and systems of the brain? And the simplest way to keep track of the systems is there's three. there's three really big ones. There probably are more than three that you can learn about, but the ones we want to have everybody learn about are your safety system, your reward system,

and your purpose system. And out of those three, two of them sound really real and one of them sounds like fantasy, to most people. So, yeah, the safety system is pretty obvious to most people. When we're scared, afraid,

uncertain, we have doubt, we're resentful, angry, apathetic, etc. This system of our brain is like trying to restore our standing in the universe. Like, I need to get out of this stress, out of this danger, out of this anger, et cetera. And you have an objective that that part of your brain, that system

sets. And you go chase that objective. Like, I want to get safe. So if you're in a meeting, you know, practical everyday situation, you're exposed to a statement that makes you feel unsafe. Your objective now actually isn't to contribute to the meeting productively anymore. Like your brain's objective is to get back to safety. And the same thing of rewards that if somebody says, you know, you'll get something if you do this, which is the opposite of safety that if you don't do this, something bad will happen, then yeah, your brain gets into this kind of pursuit, desire state, which seems great and can be great in a lot of cases, but also can be pretty narrow.

So when you hear people say, that's not my job. That's actually the reward system speaking, saying, I get rewarded for the things in this list, and this thing that you're talking about is not on my reward list, and I therefore am not interested in it. I have a easier time pushing away from it because the reward system of the brain is more transactional in a conceptual way. And then you get to this vague and ridiculous-sounding purpose system, but until you realize what purpose is, and we've all felt it, if you understand the impact of the thing that you're doing,

and you understand and care about the people that are impacted by your actions, those are the conditions for purpose. And that can be really big, like curing cancer, I understand the impact and the people. That's huge. But it can also be like, I'm writing an email. I understand the impact of this email and the people affected by it. You can feel purpose at this tiny little grain of sand level of your life, not just at the whole, you know, beach and shoreline level.

And we teach people that that's super important. So that's kind of the foundational layer. And then on top of that, there are a few layers that have to do with your focus because the brain can dramatically shift focus from like open-mindedness to deep, deep focus. And then there's kind of the final layer of ability, which is less like sciencey, you know, less neuroscience and more just practical that your ability is regulated by how much reality you know. Like, do you have the context for the decision or you just know you're supposed to make the decision? people with context have higher ability than people without.

And the same thing with imagination and logic, that if you push those boundaries in your mind further, your ability increases almost disproportionately to how much you've pushed. So these layers just kind of stack on. And I think that's kind of, it's approachable, it's simple. It's like we can all understand, is my safety, reward, or purpose system active right now? What is my level of focus?

What level of connection with reality, reason, and imagination? do I have right now? And then there's your output as a human or as a team. And all these things are like levers we can pull, which is super fun. Amazing. So just to summarize here, so we have these three systems, safety, reward, purpose, then our level of focus. And then there's the ability. Like, are we able to actually do the job. Those are kind of the puzzle pieces. Okay. So where I want to take this is when we work with other people, working with other people is very hard. And some of the struggles people have at work in building product, in running a company, and building teams, hiring all these things is, they often get really frustrated by the way other people operate. Some people want to just start building a thing. Some people want to really think about it. Some people are very customer qualitative, anecdote focused. Some people are very metrics focused. Some people are very collaborative, want to work in groups. Some people are very, I want to work alone. So I guess just, just, First of all, we just talked about, here's how the brain works.

And then there's this idea of people work very differently. Can you just talk a bit about just like this idea of people are very, why people behave so differently in an effort to help us learn to work better with people that are just like, oh, that's so strange this person wants and just they're building. You know, maybe one of the worst pieces of propaganda that people walk around with in their minds is the phrase, we're more similar than we are different. And my theory on why we walk around with that phrase or why we're told that phrase, if we zoom in on the situations where we hear that, is that we have this theory. It's easier to get along with people that are like us. So if we fantasize that this person is like me, then I might get along with them better. When in fact, we should probably be building the muscle that we have the capacity to get along with people that are extremely different than we are. And that fourth piece that we talk about in like our coursework, you know, when we train managers, for example, is personality.

So we talk about your brain systems, your brain focus, your brain's ability, which sort of paints the picture that humans might be similar to each other. And we can activate these things kind of like unilaterally. But then we have to drop this bomb at the end, which is, and here's why that doesn't work consistently across different types of people. So I know you took our profile, our Big Five-based profile, and that's just one tool out of many that can help a person understand where on these various spectrum of personality traits and motivations they sit. We often use the metaphor of in our training of like culinary school that we're more culinary school for human performance instead of cooking class. And that helps people kind of conceptualize that I'm used to going to cooking classes in my training. like here's how to do a one-on-one, here's how to offer feedback, here's a framework for generating product ideas through to like prioritization and backlog. But we're kind of like, well, what's going

on beneath the surface? What are the underlying principles and forces at work that all that kind of comes to, all the stuff that comes to life on the surface really originates from? And in this culinary school metaphor, one of the things that's really important for a chef is to actually understand what are my preferences, what do I like to eat? Because if I don't know what I like, then I assume, everybody else likes what I like, then I'm not going to be a very dynamic chef. I'm going to be like, everybody likes lots of salt and acidity in their dishes. And then you're going to go to Germany and open a restaurant and be like, that is absolutely not what we're looking for, you know, in this cuisine. So self-awareness is a really important step, not just of culinary school, but like for everybody.

And you sit somewhere on a spectrum. Your brain has these pathways and these kind of like traffic cops directing traffic in your mind. So you have to start with, you know, square, one with yourself and understand, am I, like, prone to try to say things politely and so that they're received well? Or am I prone to be super blunt and direct and maybe even mean and harsh? Am I prone to, like, sit back in conversations and let things happen or am I prone to take over? Am I prone to go to, like, intellectual, abstract thinking and try to kind of, like, deconstruct ideas, or am I prone to stay very pragmatic? And if you don't know who you are and you think that, like, the universe resembles you, then you're going to get super lost in that, in that broader

spectrum. So I think the, the big five, I mean, there's a bunch of models. You have Myers, Briggs, disc, et cetera. They're just all imperfect ways of measuring personality, but just, but also useful despite the fact that they're imperfect. And especially useful if you kind of take a growth mentality instead of a justification mentality to reading them. Like if you say, okay, I'm low in politeness. I'm super direct. Your justification mentality of that would be like, yeah, am right. Like, I'm awesome that everybody knows what I really mean and how I really feel versus the growth thing, which is like, well, maybe there are situations where I can try a little harder than 0% to phrase things in a way that, you know, if we work backwards from the outcome we want to choose

our actions right now, like, would these actions so direct actually increase or reduce the probability of that outcome? And that's when we become like more dynamic chefs, more dynamic people. But yeah, personality is a broad spectrum. And self-awareness is like the starting point for the whole thing. The Big Five model gives you a really good list of attributes to kind of scan yourself through. And then you should be making a game plan for how to do that. And then you can turn your attention to the network of humans you're a part of and say, okay, well, in what ways because I'm me, am I so different than these other minds?

And how can we kind of create a mesh mentality where thought shifts among the group to fit most naturally. And in product work especially, whether you're a founder, entrepreneur, kind of thinking about product at that level and your team at that level or you're in the thick of product work

pushing your mind and other people's minds to get this right, then you're going to benefit a lot from understanding these traits and these differences. So I think the big unlock here for a lot of people

is that the reason you are struggling getting something done, working with someone being successful at your company, with your manager with a partner in your team is they have a very different way of their brain operating. And so they think in a very different way. They react in different ways. And you may think the entire world thinks the way you do, but they don't. And these tests help you see that. To make this super concrete for people, are there a couple examples or wins you often find that you can share

just like ways to use this to become better in your job, say this week, like whether with meetings or convincing someone of something, anything along these lines? Yeah, I mean, I think one more layer would be helpful to this, especially if you're a leader or manager, which is the business world is just, isn't just hand-to-hand combat between a bunch of individuals on like the blank matrix loading screen, right? Like, you're actually in a habitat as a company. And your team is like a habitat. I think of companies and teams almost like little terrariums that we're inside of. And is this terrarium set up with, you know, sand and. to heat lamp and we're a bunch of frogs, like we're going to turn into frog bacon,

simply because we're in this habitat. So a lot of it is you want to actually create a habitat or an environment that's kind of predisposed to high functioning thinking and high functioning interaction between people. Because if the habitat's working against all of you to begin with, then all the hand-to-hand combat that's going to show up is actually largely a function of you just being in this, you know, heat lamp, dry, devoid of life, kind of devoid of, you know, places, productive ways to grapple, right? And that's where a lot of teams and companies sit today,

especially like more established teams. They've, they've either lost their way in the habitat and haven't really set the scene for good kind of thinking and interaction, or they just never had that to begin with. And some of this stuff, like when you've talked to a couple other people in the past, you know, your conversation, the Canva conversation, the Figma conversation, both come to mind as like, it is super obvious the energy that has gone into the habitat to predispose people to high function. Like you're referring to my interviews with the folks from Figma and Canva. Exactly right.

I see. Oh, say more about that. I mean, so you think about the, even in the, in the Canva context of like coaches instead of managers. Like that is a you're looking at so so I love this. Let me back up for just a second. There's a great quite. I think Dan Pink has summarized the problem better than anybody when he said there's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

And in that gap, it kind of says like, well, what is it that business is doing that science knows better? And you can kind of almost look at this as an equation of science knows minus what your business does equals dysfunction. Right. Like that's, that is a pretty crystal clear thing. So if you take this like managers versus coaches, they're taking intuitively, I think. I don't know if they're neuroscientists, but like, intuitively, I think a lot of great founders understand humans don't work a certain way. And this whole paradigm of managers seems to be failing a lot. And this whole paradigm like mantra like

fail faster seems to be failing a lot. And like mission statements seem to fail a lot. So you look at this science knows business does as like a lens to examine yourself through and stuff that fails very often is kind of worth a look and when you look at like okay do we really want managers because that seems to fail a lot or is there something that is there a paradigm that works better for human beings that activates more human potential and they hit the nail on the head so if you kind of do the math of canva what science knows versus what canva does whether they know they're doing it scientifically right or not, the math equals zero. Like, there's no difference between what science knows and what business does in that case.

And also the Figma conversation, I loved the phrase from that conversation. Imagination is a hypothesis generation engine, I think, is what the word was. Yeah, chat with Dylan. I loved that idea. Because when we talk about imagination as a part of ability, we talk about imagination's capacity to generate. alternatives for you. Like that's its purpose. It's not just to doodle in the margins in the middle of boring meetings. Like that's part of it. It's a side benefit. But when you look at imagination's purpose, if you have a great imagination, you always have a lot of choices in life.

Like Mickey Mouse was a choice. It was like a new alternative way to send messages through a talking mouse. That's okay. That's interesting. But what's the other part of the hypothesis generation engine that we focus a lot on is it's not just the ability to generate choices and hypotheses, but it's also the ability to kind of load them into your Oculus headset and walk around a world in which that choice already has been executed. That's kind of akin to vision in a sense that do you have a really good ability to load that one branch of this imaginative tree, this one hypothesis, into a simulation, and then explore what the world looks like with this and And if you look at this coaching thing at it's going on at Canva instead of managing,

like you load that in the simulator and like, boy, this, this looks pretty nice. This is a, this is a higher performance thing. Like we've advocacy instead of, you know, regulation. We have growth. There's like a whole bunch of aspects that are inherent in that approach where science, and if you ask a neuroscientist, would that work better? They'd be like, oh, hell yeah, that would work way better. because it activates this in the brain.

It reduces cortisol. It does all these things that science knows work much better. So, like, there's a whole list of stuff. I mean, from very deep to very tactical of things we can do differently that reduce the gap between what you're doing and what science knows. And the dysfunction just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks as you do those things. Are there things that you've found people can change in the way they work based on the way the brain operates,

whether it's run better meetings, be better at influence. Like, what are some things people can try to do this week that will make them more successful at their work or working with colleagues? In the list of what science knows and what business does,

like everything's in there. Culture's in there. Meetings are in there. Goals are in there. Deadlines are in there. Team dynamics, you know, all this stuff is in there.

So we'd probably just pick a few things out of that very long list. Meetings are a good one. You know, meetings, I forget what the statistic is, but it's some insane like 12-figure amount of, no, not 12, nine figure, no, 12-figure, hundreds of billions, right, amount of waste is caught in meetings. I mean, we spend gazillions of dollars on waste of time and meetings. And for us, like in our programs, the average delta is between 10 and 20 percent.

So people save anywhere from a full half of a day to a full day per week. of work as a result of just cleaning up the way they're using meetings. And some of that is just the design of meetings, like treat meetings like a product and, you know, treat them like workflows that should be organized and use, you know, intentionally. But a lot of it is inside the meeting. Like, what's the, what's the tactic? So here's something super tactical, which is meetings, generally speaking, are a combination of priming and decision making.

Like, if you look at meetings through the lens of like the phases that they are. And a lot of meetings kind of skip the priming step altogether. They launched directly into decision making. And it would be safe to skip the priming step if we began the meeting under the assumption that everybody here is on the same page, has the same information. And generally speaking, intends for the same outcome. I think that's a ludicrous assumption for most meetings. And yet most people are actually shocked.

to find out that we're not on the same page, even though we literally never have been. And as long as you're on day two plus of working together. So it's a crazy thing that we don't do priming. And priming can be simple. It can even be done in the invite. I mean, one of the things that's crazy about Outlook and Google is you can put a very terrible, useless meeting into Outlook. And it will never look at it and be like, this is probably useless.

just like you can go into like Trello and put the dumbest project in the company's history into Trello. It will ingest anything you put into it without any discernment as to its value. Now imagine we're going to have to do this ourselves for now until like a better calendar comes out. But imagine if Outlook or Google Calendar or, you know, Cron, which now is part of an ocean,

would just be like, uh-uh, uh-ah, you know, like, what is the point of this meeting? And you could say, okay, this is here, like this meeting is about the generation of options. It's or creative problem solving or very tactical problem solving or efficiency seeking or like, what is the category of conversation we are about to have? What are some of the basic principles that should apply? I mean, are we, are we honoring sacred cows or are we eating sacred cows in this meeting? Like what is the, what is the mode mentality, the priming?

Like, how can we all kind of say this is the mindset in the ultimate purpose that applies to the meeting? And you can write that and you can read that in under three minutes. So it's not some arduous process. Amazon does it like in an arduous process, right? They're kind of known for that. But that's wisdom to know, like, we need priming. They're wise enough to realize the need for it. They make that a very robust execution.

It doesn't have to be that robust. So skipping priming is pretty bad. Other meetings get the priming and the decision making backwards. So we start to open the meeting. You've heard of like diamond-shaped thinking. Let's open the meeting with kind of expansionary thought and let's end the second half of the meeting with convergence. Well, we start the meeting instead with convergence, realize that we can't reconcile

the various party in the room, their needs for convergence. And then you might hear in the middle of a meeting like, well, let's start over again and remember why we're all here. And we do the priming in the second half of the meeting just in time for the meeting to end. So that's a super kind of like obvious thing that people can do, but that people very rarely do in priming. And I'm happy to generate like a list, you know, so we don't have to talk through everything. But maybe make some little PDFs or something that people can download that say, here's what great priming looks like. And then when you move to the decision making, here's what great decision making looks like.

And that way you can have like a little bit of a guide. And again, do your own math, what science knows, what we're doing in this meeting. We're skipping a bunch of steps. That's growing the probability of dysfunction or things going wrong. And let's shrink that probability instead of growing it. Amazing. Yeah, that'd be sweet if you have that. We'll definitely link to that on the show notes.

So the advice here is make sure when you're starting a meeting, running a meeting, prime everyone around. The problem we're trying to solve or trying to get out of this meeting, the context, versus just diving into decision making. And very notably the principles that apply. I think that's really, really important, not just like what we're here to do, but like how we can think about this best. And you can even have a debate about the principles.

And it's way better to have a debate about the principles than it is to have a debate about the tactics that are rooted in the fact that you have super misaligned principles. So if somebody's trying to make the decision, you know, with speed in mind, and another person is trying to make the decision with accuracy in mind, it is completely inevitable that they're about to have a catfight in the meeting. And it's not resolvable until they come back and revisit the fact that deeper down,

we are approaching this in a completely different mentality with completely different objectives. Awesome. Okay. If you end up having these PDFs of ways to prime success for sure. We'll do. Okay. Okay. Okay. Other things that people can do to work with vote, I know you have some advice on how to influence more effectively. I know you have some advice around strategy and vision. So maybe we go into those two directions. Let's start with strategy and vision because I think it's nice to be better at strategy and vision before you start influencing people. So what you'll what you'll encounter in life in your mind is ideas are swirling, whether you're generating those ideas or other people are, is your brain is going to sort those ideas into

believed, believable, kind of conceivable and inconceivable. And you can, I mean, you can come up with your own words for that, but that's kind of like a starting point, which is, if somebody says something you've already experienced, it's something that is believed to your brain. Right. So if we said we should implement an OKR framework and you've experienced it in a, in a prior workplace, or you've read it all about Google doing it, then you're going to be like, yeah, we should. It would clean up a lot of junk around here. And okay, great. So it's a, your brain's kind of already in a yes. If it's believable, maybe you're reading Harvard business review and you're kind of reading about things that your business has never done that

you've never done. But there's all this evidence that it works and it makes sense to you mechanically. So you're kind of like, okay, yeah, I find that believable. And now we're kind of leaning toward yes or we're still in the yes bucket. Now we get into kind of these like unbelievable, yet may be conceivable. So these are the things that seem to be far-fetched. And going back to the Canva conversation, the conversation with Uri, right, that you had, most of the things that are totally believed by these leaders

are unbelievable to most other leaders. Like, we don't need managers. That's, I don't believe it. So there's like, now we've shifted the mind from inbuilt kind of tailwind to inbuilt headwind. And this is why mind struggle with strategy and with vision is that every mind based on like personality we talked about earlier, that line of demarcation between like believed, you know, we all have different light lived experience. So the more experience you have, the more believed you have. And then the believable and then the unbelievable but yet conceivable, like these lines shift a life live. lot from person to person. So an idea that totally makes sense to hurry, he's probably been in

a thousand meetings where other people are like, that'll never work. Even though obviously science knows, for example, it totally will. One of the great benefits of science and culinary school is, well, let's not reinvent ideas that are already proven. So we already know that certain things activate people's purposeful state and the full brain that seeks comprehension, seeks deeper problem solving seeks human connection. Those are known things. And the same thing as like the debate about the value of design sits in the strategy and vision. Like how do we know there's an ROI to a better design here? Well, if you could disprove that instead of proving it, because the last million people who asked this question proved it, if you could disprove it, you'd probably win a Nobel Prize for being the

first human to disprove something that is like ironclad. Like we're done. We're done with this debate. So that I think is what we have to recognize in ourselves. Big part of self-awareness is where our like unbelievable threshold begins, where our believable threshold ends. And then the inconceivable is like, get out of my office level stuff. And a lot of the vision kind of thinking and dialogue that happens inside of businesses directly activates people's inconceivable response without, any self-awareness, that that's a personal problem, not a objective problem.

And I think that's like, it's a really, really important thing for companies and individuals to invest in themselves to kind of say, do I have the capacity to recognize the situation that I find inconceivable, but that could be totally wrong? And then we can avoid the months potentially of arguing that sit between us in experimentation. So I think that's that's the starting point for that. And if we were to kind of do paint by numbers on that, you know, what dominoes do you want to knock down?

Know your personality. What you're looking for in the Big Five model, which we lean into is openness. If you are low in openness, your brain essentially has abstract, creative, intellectual, complex thinking wired to the pain systems of the brain. Right?

That's like how you're, wiring is. As soon as things get abstract, not only you're like, I don't like this, you have a much more visceral negative response to these types of ideas. And you are now going into your pain cave, right, while somebody else in the room may have all that abstract, creative, exploratory thinking wired to their reward systems. So that's something to really know. And vulnerability is kind of the best approach to this? Because if you think about your, you know, the domino two, once you kind of know this stuff, then the question is, how do we socialize this knowledge, you know, in a team? Let's say it's a C-suite, a leadership team, a founder and co-founder and, you know, the rest of leadership

team. And we work a lot with like YC companies on this here because it's super important. As they hire people, they, every incremental hire is an increment of psychological diversity. And it changes everything about how these conversations go. So knowing this, okay, what are our to socialize this knowledge. Vulnerability is the best option. But, you know, like Bray Brown will kind of sell vulnerability for its own sake. Not everybody buys selling vulnerability for its own sake because it's a scary thing. But it gets a little less scary when we consider how much scarier our alternatives are.

Like, I can pretend to hide this. That's my other option. Or I cannot hide it, be a Tasmanian devil and then be unapologetic. So, like, those are your three options. And when you realize, like, I can be vulnerable, I can attempt to hide it, or I can be unapologetic, those other two options are ruinous compared to vulnerability. The thing you said about openness and not being good at big vision, brainstorming super resonates with me because that's exactly me. So I took your test. What does it call?

What do you call this test, by the way? Core identity is what we call. Core identity test. Okay, cool. And we'll link to it in the show notes. So I took it. It's basically the big five. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness, and formerly known as neuroticism now called need for stability. And I'm looking at it right here. And I'm actually, and I knew this about myself, I'm pretty low on openness, which I don't like to see. But it very much aligns with exactly what you said. I'm not great at big vision thinking at super.

like when people propose, say, a designer, my team proposes this whole redesign, big vision, rethink of the way we've been like, oh, it's my pain cave, like you said. And that's exactly what this test reflects. So I think it's a really powerful example of just understanding this is the way your brain is going to respond to things that are, say, totally out there, inconceivable or how would you call it somewhat conceivable? but not necessarily believable. And that being aware that that's how your brain works is really powerful. Being aware other people have a very different experience with that is very powerful. And your advice here is one, this combination of this habitat, create this habitat, where you have kind of all these versions of people's ways of thinking,

where some people are in their happy cave when they're thinking big. And then along those lines, your point about being very vulnerable, like vulnerably sharing, hey, this is me. I am low in openness. People need to understand this on my team. And let's work together to not use, not let that hinder us. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because if you think about these ideas as pegs and we're going to take a creativity shaped peg and try to put it through a more pragmatic shaped hole, that there's like a translation problem there. And that's a It's a huge burden. Like if the team actually needs to be innovative,

it's a huge burden just in terms of time spent on that, you know, translation to translate the visionary strategic ideas that are accurate but are inconceivable into ideas that feel believable for those who kind of need that more grounded thing. And, of course, the most common scenario here is ROI, which is, you know, the classic question to ask about any idea. What's the ROI? Well, if the idea is inherently generating endth order effects instead of first order effects, like, what is the ROI of having fresh flowers in the lobby of a four seasons hotel?

There's two possibilities for the four seasons. They either have an answer to that question, which satisfies the pragmatic shaped hole, or they have said in their habitat, we don't ask those types of questions because they're a huge waste of time. And if you're thinking about a competitive market, you know, like most of the people that you interview are in highly competitive markets,

the team that spends less time translating satisfactory language before they move, which inevitably they'll move. And sometimes they'll move, because the market forces them to, right? They spend so much time locked up in the ROI conversation or the justification, the translation conversation, that eventually customers start leaving, employees start leaving.

And they're like, oh, okay, it's becoming more believable now. Well, because it's moved out of the realm of ideas into the physical world that we can see, like, right in front of us. And that team, because they got stuck in the translation phase instead of the experimentation phase, has a huge disadvantage in the market. And if you're competing head to head with one team, like, this is what I loved about, you know, the Figma conversation, that habitat inherently is built for speed because the habitat itself, words are tattooed to your brain that are like, we will not spend time in the translation phase. We will not spend much time.

And we see this a lot kind of in the interplay between finance departments, product departments and things like that, where, you know, an overpowered CFO, can start asking questions for which there are no answers that kind of just we're dragging the team into a different language that is much more literal than the more experiential language of the business. So you can kind of see this play out all the time. But I think vulnerability is great because if you are sitting in a meeting, you Lenny, and you say, this is not my thing. Basically, everything you're saying is inconceivable.

Now I'm being honest with you. nobody's going to hate you for being honest. They're actually going to be glad that you are honest about the gap instead of glad that you are super certain that you are the right human to index off of in the decision making process. And the thing you recommend being open about is this is my personality. Like this is my core identity. Like I don't know the language you'd use, but it's not, I think all this is inconceivable. It's I think all this is inconceivable because this is the way.

Absolutely. Yeah, unpack the detail, for sure. Got it. Yeah, I mean, tell people this, this takes my brain, all this abstract and kind of creative, future-centric thinking that's not rooted in the concrete is where my brain goes, you know, alarms go off, and I'm like, I need something concrete.

So if you can give me something concrete, I'm more comfortable. But at this point, I have to maybe move into a lot of trust. And like, trust may be my alternative to, like, agreement, right? Yeah. And there's also, I imagine, part of, like, what I always do is I recognize, hey, I'm not amazing at this. Let me push myself to be more open to these things and find partners that are really good at this and let them kind of drive the ship more. Yeah. And it's great. You know, one of the things that's so cool about like the YC teams that we work with is they're so sophisticated and it's so smart. So even though they might run into this roadblock, A, they're going to do exactly what you just said and they're going to push themselves. You may notice in your profile, the dot that you scored is surrounded by rings that represent how hard it is for you to push yourself to think in different ways, to think beyond kind of the home base way of your brainworking. Now, at a certain point, your brain breaks and you move into foreign

territory. And there's a level of, I mean, if you are a very conservative person and somebody is like, let's go to Burning Man. That will break your brain, right? You don't go all the way to the other side of the spectrum. For the record, I've been four times, even though I'm apparently low in openness. Perfect. There's lots of reasons to go. Got married and Burning Man.

Yeah. Makes me feel better by my low percentile. But you're pushing your brain, you know, and I mean, Burning Man is actually a great example because there are a bunch of different reasons you might go. And if you go for one reason, then you're exposed to the other reasons. And that may be interesting. And you may kind of venture closer to those other reasons. You may be like, I'm going to stay in my reason bubble within the greater context of this place.

So like there's a whole bunch of, you know, business is no different that you can kind of say, okay, I'm going to push myself. And I may get into these kind of places that go beyond my brain's flexibility, like where the elastic band kind of reaches its limits. And then from there, I'll trust people and I'll have people, you know, what I was going to mention about the YC founders is so many of them are so smart that they're really able to efficiently translate what they see beyond where your band stretches into the language you feel comfortable with quickly. Other teams do that really badly and they just like accuses, oh,

can't you see this? And it's like, then you get even more stuck. How much shift have you seen in people say they take this test and they're like, as I am, 23rd percentile in openness? Do you see people move meaningfully across this if they work on these sorts of things or is this just like here's who you are you're not going to change significantly personally i'm more concerned with the effect on teams than on people because if you look at this through the like i've been a four-time founder and if i look at this through like how is my company working how are my teams working um i don't need all the individuals to get to perfect i i need especially in cases where there's like this translation issue where a team is working on something and some some part of that team is

saying like let's stop here and let's stay let's dwell here if they can move enough that the team the effect on the team is now freed up that's what we really feel as a business and so the answer to answer your question directly people can move a lot especially through that the first three rings of that range that we depict like really really really well. Self-awareness is actually kind of the key. And self-awareness and self-consciousness, the difference here is that self-awareness is simply being intentional with your brain, whereas self-consciousness is being worried about your brain. We don't want people to be worried about their brains and, like, insecure. We just want you to say, this is a situation in which my brain

can work this way. And this is a situation where I want to push myself. And this is, so it's like being intentional. And we talked a little bit before this episode about kind of this instinct versus intellect duality in the mind. And essentially, you're just using your intellect to either verify or improve your instinct, you're always going to have instinctive responses about risk and fear and uncertainty and doubt and need for data and all these types of things. But then your intellect can come in and like watch that part of your brain thinking and say, you're super worried about the risk of this, but it's actually pretty low stakes

for us to jump in and try. so your need to stabilize that is a little misplaced. And your intellect, that's really what you're doing is saying, like, how much do people change? I don't really worry too much about how much they change. It's more about how much they can spot with their intellect something that's misfit to the situation and then take what they're motivated to do and what they choose to do and separate them. Right? Like, that's the, it doesn't matter if we change your motivations.

if your choice of behavior and your underlying motivation can be different from each other, that's awesome. Those people are super. And we all know people like that where you're like, I know this person is uncomfortable right now, but they're totally making it work. And I really appreciate that. Yeah. Part of the reason I ask is like, I was talking to you about this before we started recording.

I want 99% tell at all these. I just want to nail this. And I know that's not how it works. I know it's like you have strengths, you have weaknesses. You can be amazing and everything. But it's funny where mine goes there. just to close the loop on this advice around getting better at vision and strategy, if I were to reflect back what I'm hearing,

it's be very self-aware about what you are not strong at, say, openness. Is that specifically the one to focus on if you're trying to get better vision and strategy? So there's a whole bunch of stuff. Well, let me try to make the list simple. Openness is the biggest one because it is essentially your tolerance of vision and strategy. And the lower that is, the lower you will tolerate the abstract pieces of the puzzle, for sure. The outlandish and kind of like purely creative and rules-breaking components of strategy and vision, lack of precedence, those types of things.

Now, the other thing to look out for is as your conscientiousness rises, which is essentially your desire to be efficient, effective, busy, you know, not waste time. I'm hand that one. structured, yeah, structured and organized. That is another contributor in the negative, which is it's objectively great to be conscientious person. Like there are so many benefits until we have to waste time productively. And then, or we have to break order in organization.

And then that strength that, you know, four days a week or 28 days a month is great for you, on those days where we go and have the offsite and say like what if we blew it all up to your example of like new design new website blow it all up start over again different direction that's where the conscientiousness is going to be like why are we doing this why are we having this conversation what's the need this is inefficient i could be spending my time doing something else and sometimes that'll express itself even in meetings of uh i was in a meeting one time after we were acquired this is you know eight or nine years ago now and when you're a founder and you get acquired, there's a new flavor of habitat that you find yourself in with very new

rituals. And one of the rituals that I find myself around a lot was the ritual of saying, we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives. And we would be about six minutes into a meeting when somebody would drop the, we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives line. And I would look at my watch and be like, I didn't realize that you were terminal. And you, I mean, why are you even in this meeting if you're about to die? Like, because we are, my take on this is we are super far away from the rest of our lives right now. Why are you saying that we can't talk about something for six minutes

when the diminishing return of added information in the priming of this meeting, you know, to use that again, you knowing X quadruples your decision quality. And you are resisting knowing X. Now, we're going to hit a point where you knowing Y, Z, et cetera, we've hit a diminishing return. And now I'm improving your decision quality by 1% instead of by 4x. But we haven't established like any sensitivity in this room to the diminishing return

curve of incremental thought and incremental information. And this is like a new habitat. I'm like, in this habitat, do people really hate thought? Do people really consider themselves to be like the, the police that watch the mean streets of intellectualism for any activity like it's like it's just kind of crazy but yeah that's that's kind of the practical side of this is you got to watch out and you got to be careful and that's why I say habitat's such a big deal because that's a perfect example of a well-intentioned room with mostly people that are you know there for the right reasons and

the right outcomes but where this normalness of saying a phrase like that or saying like, I disagree. Same meeting. The person goes, I completely disagree. And I was like, with everything, no, absolutely everything. And I go, so let's look at the meta, you know, the overhead camera of this meeting. This was the initiation of combat, right? That's what the brain is seeing. All the brains in the room are like, oh, fight, right?

So, and now what are our objectives? My objective now becomes when their objective because they've taken a huge, risk of saying I disagree with everything becomes when and because they are disagreeing with a lot of stuff that they don't understand the inevitability is they're about to be annihilated in this room where they have both said we can't talk about this forever and now put all of their chips onto the table to say I completely disagree instead of I have a question or can we pull that thread or I don't see how these dots connect so that's that on the super tactical level there's things we say that activate the amygdala, the combat mode of the brain,

versus a different choice of phrase, which is going to activate the prefrontal cortex, which is like, hey, Lenny, you're connecting these two dots. I'm not seeing how they're connected. Logic. Like, now let's activate the prefrontal cortex with this sentence instead of Lenny, that's dumb. I completely disagree.

Let's activate the amygdala instead. I want to talk about this habitat point you're making, which I think is really important. But just to close the loop on the strategy vision piece, So just to give people some very tactical advice is basically understand your personality, maybe take this core identity test or something like that. Understand if you're low in openness and high in conscientiousness, maybe you're not amazing at vision.

And it's going to be hard for you to think big and think of it. Yeah, your brain is just going to like feel agitated when you're around vision. But, I mean, you can still do it, right? You can still ask people to translate. The key tactic is, okay, it's not this. you're predestined to suck. It's more if you're low in openness, especially if you're also high in conscientiousness,

then recognize your native language for ideas is a mismatch for the native language of vision and really, really good strategy. And then you can be open about that and you can ask for some translations. And you can ask for, I mean, trust doesn't have to be non-participation. You can actually say, like, it would help me trust if you could explain this gap.

Like a great example would be a second order effect. Like, why should we have awesome documentation? How are we going to make more money if we have awesome documentation? Ah, great question. Don't be hostile in the way you asked it. But like, just help me understand. What thread are we pulling? Well, we're pulling this thread of customer satisfaction, retention,

recommendation, et cetera. That, you know, stripe is really good at this, right? Especially from the early days. That great documentation justifies all sorts of second order effects that then will lead us to this. order effect you're asking about. Awesome. Okay. That's really great. And I was going to go one direction, but I want to talk about this real quick.

Something comes up a lot on this podcast is the power of leaning into strengths and not feeling like you have to be amazing at everything. And that in this example, say, I have a low, openness, high conscientiousness. I can still be very successful in the role by, in my opinion, leading into things I'm actually really strong at, say, conscientiousness. And I'm also high and agreeableness. I don't like the sound of that. Thoughts on just like, it's okay if you're not amazing at vision because your openness is low, but you can be better at other stuff. And together, you end up, you can be really successful no matter how your personality. Absolutely right. Yeah. I mean, the truth is we look at, I mean, taking that Canva example

of coaches and managers, not only does that change the way an employee feels about the way this connection they have is invested in them. But it also changes inherently a lot of the meeting dynamics and teaming dynamics from like, okay, hierarchical feeling things manager to more mesh-based intellect, right? And within the mesh, you don't have to worry too much about the hierarchy anymore. You can kind of say like, this is the nature of my contribution. So even in the vision and strategy piece, maybe your contributions to idea generation, they're going to, they're going to be some and they're probably going to be good. But those are not ideas to protect in the state that you brought them to the table. Their ideas to set on the table so that people

can surround them and improve them. And then as other people contribute ideas that aren't as natural to you kind of just realize we're not in the phase yet of judging and ranking and prioritizing these ideas. That's not where we are in the overall storyline. So let it happen. And then if you can improve those ideas, improve them. And once ideas kind of have, that early stage, that kind of like what Johnny I've described as like the infancy of an idea when it's really weak and delicate and susceptible, if you can nurture that idea to kind of adolescence where it has a little bit of ability to defend itself, then now you're in a situation where your conscientiousness can start to think about things like, how would we

resource this? What sequencing makes the most sense? What is the ROI of these things relative to each other? And consider the second and third order effects and so on. And what would the project plans, and to your point of being both conscientious and agreeable, you are this master of coordination and alignment naturally. So like when that phase of the project begins, and we have to get people bought in, high functioning together, you know, getting on the same page, staying on, you know, staying focused, getting the project done. Like all of the people that were good at the beginning with all the vision and strategy,

they are just a complete disaster in that face. So, like, that's just how things really work in the real world. And I think we're so, again, focused, like we talked about at the kind of at the beginning, we alluded to the fact, like, there's, you have to unpack enough complexity. I love the Einstein quote, make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. And we've made things way simpler than possible in business by saying, like, this is the right way of doing the whole thing. It's like, no, no, no, the whole, if you've ever lived a day in real life, building a

real product, the dynamics shift a lot throughout the course of, you know, product life cycle as an example, or really any life cycle as an example. And the peak humans as the dynamics shift are very different. Peak humans. Lenny is awesome here. Contributes here 10% contributes here 98%. Evan contributes 98% here. Please get Evan out of the room when it comes to these meetings. Like that's great. And yes, we should lean into our strengths, but not so much that we don't know our weaknesses. Because another human strength on your team is the patch for the bug of your weakness. And we run buggy software and companies and we say, oh, I'm leaning into my strengths. I don't need to worry about my weaknesses.

Well, then you become the person who needs everything translated into your language because when your weakness flares its head up, it slows everybody else down. So it's really, just from an operations business fluidity perspective, a team that is highly unaware of its weaknesses is going to have a lot of slowness and a lot of problems as a result of that. They don't have to fix all their weaknesses, but be aware of them and know who is a patch to your weakness. Evan, this is so interesting. I love that they were digging deep on this. Is there one tactical thing you could recommend for someone to become better at openness in, say a brainstorming experience when they're doing vision or when they're low at this,

save me. I think the best exercise for a conscientious person, especially, to feel more open is to become obsessed with reverse engineering. And it's to say there's two forms of reverse engineering that I think are really helpful here. Number one, it would be reverse engineering against a desired outcome to truly understand the inputs that generate that outcome. And if we think about that at a big level, like, okay, we want to win a market. What are the real inputs to deconstruct that outcome and understand what our strategy

should look like to attack all of the most relevant inputs that generate that outcome? I think that's the specific form. And then at a super tactical level, like if you want to give feedback to somebody, and let's say, you know, like for me, I'm low in politeness. You're probably much higher in politeness than I am. and I struggled for years with feedback to generate the intended outcome. Like, I delivered the feedback, but the delivery wasn't the intended outcome. And the way that I delivered it actually reduced the probability of the intended outcome

because I was being too impolite, to direct in many cases, too harsh. And what does harshness do to the brain? Well, that's crystal clear. So what I was doing and what science knows were very different things. and that's why I failed in those cases. But as soon as I started closing the gap and realized I need to try harder to think about the story arc of this feedback,

that becomes clearest to me how to do it when I have the intended outcome in mind for the feedback. Like I really would like this person to start turning the corner on this particular way of thinking. Like if you and I worked together and it was about openness, it would be like, what are some things that I could do right now to increment and set the stage for a big shift in open? as time goes on that you are bought into. And that's a very, if I'm impolite and be like,

Lenny, what's your problem? Why can't you do this? Everybody else can do this. Your willingness to start turning that corner. I mean, it may be there because the safety system is active. They're like, oh, bad things can happen if I don't do this. But like, I don't want your safety system to motivate this change. I mean, in most cases, that's an optics based change instead of a material change that will occur. And that's why a lot of people, they're like, accountability is a great example. Asking for accountability is the best way to not get it. Because asking for accountability activates people's safety systems.

Or especially saying, I'm going to hold people accountable. Then everybody's like, oh, great, we should set up a whole movie set of facade houses that pretend everything's great with no substance behind them. And that's why so many companies end up that way. But yeah, I would say that's kind of the tactical. The second thing to understand about openness and reverse engineering is just situational awareness. Very few conscientious people spend, in my opinion, as a very open person, enough time immersing themselves in the reality that is everyday situational awareness necessary to do their job.

Simplest example of this is how many executives have ever talked to end greater than five customers? you know like that is a because well I'm busy I got a lot of stuff to do I can't I don't have time to go take a world tour which is a lot like we don't have the rest of our lives to talk about this I'm not asking you to take a world tour I'm asking you to stuff into your brain enough situational awareness that the decisions you make every day that affect all those people you're not talking to are considering those people that you're not talking to so it less about an intended specific outcome in this case and more about do I I really know that I would kind of think about this as like if we think it, think about like aeronautical engineering, like, do I actually have an understanding of the conditions, the flight conditions that I'm in every day in order to fly really well? And the answer to that for a lot of people is no. So reverse engineering is like probably the whole category. I don't know if that makes enough tactical sense.

I'm happy to be more descriptive. But like that's the category, I think, is like. Like, have you reversed engineered how to get outcomes and have you reversed engineered to predispose your mind to come up with really good ideas and good decisions as opposed to come up with decisions that are super disconnected from reality? Great example being like PLG. I mean, if you haven't done enough situational awareness work, you have no idea if PLG is a remotely viable strategy for growing your business.

It's remotely relevant strategy for growing your business. And company after company after company has leadership team obsessed with this concept that in principle, we should be able to let people just sign up and swipe a credit card and onboard and great. No, we have a hyper-technical solution. Like, that is never going to happen. Or it's like, that's not the way they do budget. Or like, there could be any number of ways that that's, you know, not going to work out. And those are just some concrete examples.

This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo. Epo is a next generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Muro, ClickUp, and Draft Kings

rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does.

When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more, with advanced statistical methods that can help you shape weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing.

Check out Epo at getepo.com slash lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's get ePPO.com slash lenny. Feels like there's a fractal of stuff we could talk about in this endless threads of things that I want to dig into. Let me shift a little bit to influence. We mentioned this a little bit earlier. I know you have a bunch of awesome advice on how to build your skill at becoming more influential. That's something a lot of listeners of the podcast for product managers, also founders need the skill. Who doesn't need to become better influence?

What can we learn about how to become better influence? We'll probably unpack a second topic and open up an off ramp here right at the beginning. But there's two things. There's influence itself and then there's relationships. We should probably talk a little bit about relationships. trying to exert influence through a dysfunctional relationship is not going to go great. And most human beings, especially when they go to work, are pretty out of sorts when it comes to relationships. And you even hear crazy mantra like we don't have to like each other to work together,

which are like, good luck with that. I mean, just watch a text message, pop up on a first. phone of a person who doesn't like you and watch their response time to the text message or their slack message or whatever. I mean, you're talking about you've built in a multi-day, at least multi-hour delay into responsiveness purely because the relationship isn't good. And then you compound that effect over whatever size your company is. That's, you know, that's massive operational inefficiency just because I don't want to respond to Evan right now. Right?

Like that's, so that's the one piece. Now, assuming the relationship is in place, and we'll come back to that and talk about that because that's a whole very actionable framework to unpack, assuming the relationship is good. I think the starting point for influence is to choose your character and choose your mode. It's almost like you're playing like Eldon Ring or some, you know, video game and you're going to be like, am I going to influence him this way as like the hero? or the kind of like the exemplar of these things,

or am I going to influence through back channels? Or am I like, what is my character? And everybody for your personality kind of has a natural fit for like the character you're going to select as this mode of influence. And then you're going to pick a speed of influence, which is slow, moderate, or fast. And the habitat can help a lot with this. It's like if a founder is listening to this

and you haven't created a habitat where, fast influence is easy and the permission isn't there, then you're slowing the company down inadvertently by just not kind of clarifying this with the team. So slow influence is kind of the we'll let them find out the hard way influence. Like they're going off a cliff. We know they're going off a cliff. And a lot of times we find ourselves in what's called the Abilene paradox. And the Abilene paradox is where everybody in the room knows it's a bad idea, but we're all like, we're in. And the classic Abilene paradox kind of, if you look up memes on Google, it'll be like, the dad thinks that the kids might want to go camping.

Mom doesn't want to go camping. The kids don't want to go camping. Dad also doesn't really want to go camping. But everybody's like, dad probably wants us to go camping. So let's give it a go. And they all go and don't enjoy it. So that's, and we see that play out, you know, all the time. And a lot of people will just kind of say, I can't do anything.

I don't have any influence in this case. We're just going to let him fail and they'll learn. Or this impolite person like me giving feedback the wrong way years in the past. Like, you know, I'm not going to sit Evan down and talk to him about this. He'll figure out on his own through failure that this doesn't work. And that can take months. That can take years. That can take a lifetime for people to learn this low way.

And it is a form of influence, right? Like you are being intentional to say, I think the world will create enough failure that adaptation will occur. That is a form of influence, just the slowest one. And a lot of people listening probably realize, oh, that's what I'm doing. How can I go way faster than just letting things fail? So that's where moderate influence comes in. And a great book to read for moderate influence is the Challenger Sale. And in the Challenger's Sale, what we're looking at is the concept of teaching

people something, and then when they live with this new knowledge, they'll see things that they weren't seeing before. So for example, in the feedback example that we can kind of keep using over and over again through this is, hey, Evan, you might want to notice people's body language while you're saying these things. And here's some signs to look out for that when you've done this and you get this, that's probably a sign that people are bought in and still with you. And when you see this, that's probably a sign that people are pushing back. And you can ask this question in that moment. And you'll probably hear answers like this.

So you're like giving somebody a tool that their future is going to unpack. And the Challenger sale kind of assumes a long enough sales cycle where you're not going to land the sale in the meeting. You're not trying to close them right there. You'll teach them some stuff. And you'll say, hey, if you see this stuff, that's a pretty clear sign that you need to take action. So why don't we call you in 30 days? And 30 days later we get on foot. Have you been seeing this?

And they'll go, everywhere I look. I can't not see it now. And that's how you influence a person in a few days, a few weeks, maybe a few months at worst, way faster than letting them fail. We actually had, I don't know if you know this. We had the author of that book on the podcast, Matt Dixon, I think is named. Yeah. And yeah. And the Challenger's sale, the idea there is like challenge their perspective and

view on what is actually real about the market and what they need. Exactly. Yeah. And I think it's, and I think yes, there's the challenge component to it, but I think the underappreciated piece of that methodology is that you're still letting that person see the world,

but you've given them new information that is breaking some calcification in their brain. It's not the challenge. It's not the moment of the challenge where all the magic happens. Like there's moments that occur later, they continue kind of putting that, you know, calcium, lime and rust melting formula on this, on this expectation or this kind of decision in their mind to the point where sometimes they'll turn around and be like, thank you for even telling me this. So the advice here is, if you're trying to influence someone, try to figure out what they don't know. Like find information that you know that they may not know because once they know that, they may be like, oh, wow. totally see what you're saying. Yeah, exactly right. And let them know it and let them live with it.

Don't, don't cram it down their throat and make them accept it. If they live with it just a little bit, even just a couple days, that might be enough to come back to a much softer conversation. Does this connect to what you said earlier, which I love this idea of pick a character, like how your influence, like pick your influence style based on your personality, whether it's back channeling. And that makes me think of a very specific person who's like, he's coming on the podcast actually. He's like this Jedi that just gets people aligned, but very behind the scenes,

very like the meetings before the meetings. So that's one character or it's just like telling a compelling story probably in a deck or there's other character, I guess, yeah. Is that this idea of sharing information? Is that like a type of character? Is that just something that like everyone should just do because that's a really

effective strategy? I like the idea of intentionality and just about everything. Like are we are we letting trade wins push us into certain things or are we actually making choices? And I think that step of being intentional about your style and this kind of notion of a character is a wise step to take so that you can kind of have some guardrails as you go through this and some consistency, right? It helps other people understand the role you're playing in influence. If you are consistently kind of coming from the same place, you're articulate about that style.

like I want to try to influence this organization by doing this this way. And you're going to see that from me over and over and over again. You've kind of given yourself a little permission. And also you can get some buy-in from people. If you do want to be more the barbarian, you know, kind of approach, you can say, hey, I'm the devil's advocate approach or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy. Is it okay if I do that over and over and over again?

and now you've bought future you, the permission to approach things in certain ways that would yield meaningfully different influence outcomes, right? Like meaningfully different. Like I was able to do this and it accelerated something. So the way I am hearing this is there are many ways to get what you want. Think about your personality style and find the path that is most aligned with the way you operate. Exactly. Whether it's behind the scenes, whether it's a compelling story. Awesome.

So this character is basically figure out what you're, it kind of comes back to leverage your strengths. What are you good at and use that channel to convince people of the thing you want them to be convinced them? Yep, absolutely. Are there, I imagine, like, my mind goes to what are the list of ways, what are the character options in this list when I'm opening up the game and choosing? Is there any, you went through a few, but just to give people like, oh, okay, I see, I could try it this way. They're like a small list you could share of just like here's ways. try approaching influence.

Probably the dimensions are most valuable to people. I would say one of the dimensions is compassion, which is do I want to influence by trying to help people, by trying to make sure that people, that we get it right and that people get value? And then the permission I'm seeking there is, can I ask questions about why are we not thinking about the user right now? You know, why are we not concerned with the value that they're getting? and challenge us in that way.

I think there are characters based on logic and even belief, which is I would like to be the one to kind of insert more knowledge and insert more kind of causality into conversations and challenge causality in conversations to make us think harder and challenge what we believe and like break up the sacred cows of the stuff we walked in the meeting with so that we feel differently. about things walking out of meetings.

So I think there's a bunch of different, very useful dimensions. One could be very creativity-based. If you follow this Big Five format, they're kind of spelled out for you. Enthusiasm, interesting dimension. Like, I want to challenge us through the lens of what do people get excited about? What makes people feel good? Does this make people feel good? And are there tweaks we could make to the product or this marketing campaign or whatever?

I mean, look at what Siki just did with Runway. I mean, like, I love that guy so much. And there's so many components of his character and obviously the characters he surrounded himself with that contribute to really next level stuff. Right. And they're definitely challenging each other using these dimensions of like compassion to be the, you know,

the character of caregiver or the character of like protector, right? and so there's a bunch of different kind of ways you could turn those dimensions into characters but I think when you see the value of each of those perspectives, especially in product, I'm a really big fan of product. If you have dysfunctionally high compassion,

dysfunctionally high openness, you have internal rewards and motivations to explore regions of product that other minds aren't exploring as intuitively. And you don't have to have the whole debt you know, to be amazing a product. But you have some unfair advantages if you are super prone to reverse engineering just by your nature, you're going to be more situationally aware and probably make a series of vastly

better decisions than the team that has a lot less situational awareness than you do. It's a huge advantage. But when it comes to the concept of influence, yeah, I mean, figuring out these dimensions that define who you are, and then using them to kind of say, I want the permission to ask a series of questions and challenge our thinking through this very intuitive strength that I have. Can we all see the value in that? Or do I need to further, you know, sell myself?

Right. And then you'll find, like, you can take on that character and play that role really well. I imagine the ultimate unlock is that combined with what is that person's personality style and what is the best way they receive information, which is a little harder because you can't force them take some test and you can't tell them, make them, give you the results. But I know a lot of teams do these tests together as a team and share the results. And so it's, I guess, a reminder of just that's really powerful if you and your team,

especially the execs at a company. Yeah, exactly. And when you move into this vulnerability out of your three choices state, we don't need a bunch of data for that to work really well. you know, if you said, hey, I'm not super strong at this, and the rest of the room was like, well, wait, this other person's super awesome at this. Why don't the two of you work together? Then it's like under 30 seconds, we've unlocked potential that wasn't there.

So that's, you want to get business. I kind of think of, I mean, extending the video game metaphor, not only are we choosing our characters or we are a certain character, but the business has a difficulty setting that we chose based on the habitat. And I've worked in and with way too many companies where we are playing the game in nightmare mode. And every enemy takes a thousand shotgun shells to bring down instead of just switching the difficulty setting to easy, which is like the enemies somehow become our friends as we go through this journey.

I mean, it really can be that transformative, especially with a case like yours that you talked about, okay, I'm not as high in openness. I'm very high in conscientiousness. If I can admit this and ask different types of questions, everybody else in the room will be like the difficulty setting of this just went to like zero. And the speed of it just went to way higher than it used to be. And it's, we underestimate this kind of less concrete part of the business world.

And that's, I mean, that's the genesis of this whole business that I, was crazy enough to start after starting other companies in the past, which is like we are underestimating how much of our operational reality is a function of our human reality. And are we doing enough? Are we doing the right things to close the gap between what science knows and what

business does? And do we even know what the science is? Have we educated ourselves to close the gap? And then it becomes super obvious. Oh, this makes a lot of sense to be open and find the patch to my bug. and here we go. This fractal of topics continues to grow. I'm trying to contain it.

There's three things I want to try to talk about in the rest of our chat that stuff we've touched on that I think will be really useful to people. One is relationships. You mentioned there's more to talk about there, just how to build great relationships. Two is I want to come back to the habitat and building a habitat that is very conducive to innovation and speed and success and those sorts of things. And then I want to talk about focus. We talked a bit about just like how important focus. is and how differently our brains operate in different states of focus. So maybe we start with the relationship piece, just because that connects to what we're

just talking about, of how do we strengthen relationships, create better relationships within our teams? Yeah, so we were talking about relationships kind of as this off ramp or this kind of sidecar to influence. And real quickly, the fast mode of influence and relationships goes really well together. So we talked about the slow and the moderate. The fast mode of influence is cognitive dissonance. it's essentially saying in the moment i'm not going to wait for you to to experience anything it's saying

in the moment how does this formula compute explain to me evan how you being too blunt in feedback is going to end up in a human being changing why do you believe that and especially it's that second phrase of why do you believe that like drill below the behavior down into the belief what do you believe that has you doing this and then we can explore how preposterous the belief itself is which then bubbles up to the surface level of this and if in the environment the habitat's a huge component of this as our relationships which is if you have great relationships where people trust each other enough to have this kind of cognitive dissonance conversation and we have a habitat that is very clear that we are free to discuss.

cognitive dissonance and logical disconnects, like that is really important to do. Then you activate fast influence mode, basically. So that's a really important thing. And then as you transition to relationships, well, what are, the question that everybody kind of glosses over, in my opinion, is what is a relationship? I mean, I don't know how you feel about answering that question, but it's a really hard. Yeah, I would just go to chat GPT. What is a relationship?

Exactly. Yeah, at this point we have some help that we didn't use to have. But the other thing that goes along with what is a relationship is like, how good is my relationship with Person X? Like you and I both know Shreus and like, how good is our relationship? I would say it's awesome. Why is it awesome? I don't know.

It just feels great. So let's double click on a good definition and a good framework. because once you actually know why a relationship feels great, like that example, or why a relationship feels super difficult, now we can start to build some strategies, some like actual action plans for them. So what we propose to people is if you take that third component of your brain ability, that is one piece of your relationships, especially your professional relationships. So if you know an engineer and you have an idea of something you want to build and they have

the ability to build it, their ability and their utility to you is a function of your relationship. And it will contribute to the positive or negative force that you feel in that relationship like, wow, this person has a lot of ability. My appreciation is higher. My faith in them is higher. My cooperation with them is higher. If you question a person's ability or they've proven that ability is kind of unreliable, those things start to kind of vector downwards. And we'll pick on Shreyas through this as a good example because I think most of the people watching also know him. What is his ability? What is his utility?

As high as I've ever seen. I mean, it's every conversation he's intellectually, conceptually additive to. Like you're better after you've talked to him every time. At least that's been my experience with him. And we all know people like that, that, you know, with various fields and various abilities. So that's one piece that's really important. And why as an individual, it's so important to invest in your ability because it is so integral to every relationship you have, particularly professional relationships.

And your ability, knowledge, your reasoning, your imagination, your skill set. These are all incremental facets of you. So if it's in, and that's really, really key. Now, here's the plot twist. Your ability is actually not the most important part of a relationship. biologically speaking. There's two more that matter quite a bit more, and the surprise ending is the third one matters the most,

which is scary in some case. The second factor of relationships is trust. So trust in the brain, if we go very primitive, back to the amygdala that we talked about earlier, trust is simply risk, human level risk. And trust can, span from strongly negative to strongly positive in a relationship. And we felt that full range with different people in our lives. Strongly negative trust is the brain saying this person is dangerous to me.

They are very likely to try to undermine me. They're very likely to not deliver something. Personal harm will occur by essentially kind of interacting in this relationship. And then on the other side of trust, we kind of try to create some levels to this to keep clean and you know the fractal continues to grow a little bit but we'll we'll try to keep this simple but i like to think of like trust one two and three three distinct levels of trust and trust one is let's say we're having a cookout uh trust one is lenny could you please bring the chips ideally sealed but it's a it's a delegation of a simple non-critical task knowing that it is likely to get done and get done decently well

But I don't, it's not a, it's not like a huge level of trust. It's the people that we work with where this type of delegation and, especially if people delegate under the thesis of, I want to do the high value work. So let me put the low value work on other people. That's all the low value work that we put on other people. And it allows us to purify our focus on the high value work. And we don't need all the low value work to go beautifully well or be artistically brilliant.

So trust two is when we step up to almost like, I need to do this myself. Is there anybody who could do it as well as me? That there's no risk to me having them do it instead of me doing it. And that's where you get true scalability of teams. So if you can trust people enough, your brain's assessment of risk of giving this task to someone else or giving this knowledge even to somebody else,

that they'll treat it the way you would treat it. It is a significantly higher positive trust that you can feel in a relationship. And then finally, trust three is when we do hit these break points in our brain where we say, the way your mind works is beyond the way my mind works on this topic. So the classic example at the cookout would be if Wolfgang Puck was a neighbor, right? We're going to have Wolfgang Puck do all the most critical stuff. And maybe even set up, you know, the music and the decor and whatever. Or another example would be like when Stephen Spielberg has John Williams score a film,

he's not hoping John will do it as well as Stephen would do it. He's saying, just send me the bill. Try not to go too crazy. But he's not going to sit down with the invoice and be like, why did you need 13 horns instead of 11? Like John just gets to do what John does because there's so much trust in this kind of like beyond my event horizon kind of. kind of risk.

It would be riskier for me to do it than for him to do it or her to do it, right? So that's kind of the level. But that matters more to a human being because the safety system, if it activates, your utility is sunk. So if you're an awesome engineer, but you damage people,

it doesn't matter that you're an awesome engineer. Because in the social network, the mesh of your organization, you are a node that has like a protective covering around it. Information is not flowing to you the way it would normally, and delegation is not flowing to you, and access is not flowing to you the way it would normally. So you are a kind of a protected,

deactivated, sequestered node of the mesh at this point in time. And a lot of people really don't get that. Yeah, that's a really good way of visualizing. Yeah, so, and then here's the surprise ending. The last piece of every relationship that you have is appeal. Appeal is how your brain interprets the shared experiences you have with other people, whether or not you look forward to being around that person, whether or not you like their style, the feel of what shared experiences really are.

And if you think about, let's pick on Shreyas one last time, what is his ability and utility off the charts? to what extent can he be trusted trust three off the charts will he ever damage somebody i mean not to my knowledge he may have some really dark past that we don't know about but as far as i've seen not a lot of damage in his wake and then thirdly what kind of experience is he he's an extraordinarily positive experience so he naturally accumulates great relationship after great relationship after great relationship and again if you're that great engineer with a ton of ability. Now, let's flip one, flip the middle dimension, and we trust you a lot,

but you're a horrible experience. Are you coming to our offsite? Are you in this meeting? No, you're gone, because we don't want you there. You're like a hurricane. So, so biologically speaking, the biggest bug in our programming as we transfer this to the business context is what makes the most sense in business is the most, you know, if it's a meritocracy, the best people with the best knowledge that we can trust should be in the room. And we will fight it with every fiber of our being if they are a terrible experience. And that's a bummer. And what's funny is you can flip it because we all either have friends or know people who have friends that you cannot trust. They have no ability to speak of. But

they're a super awesome experience. What a great friend. So how is it that we get this thing completely flipped? And I think that's the thing is as you parse that list, as you know, anybody listening parses that list, it's critical to ask what kind of experience am I. That is where to start. Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? And if the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first. And to this point of the profile,

as you parse the profile, you'll find things like obviously not a pleasant experience, like being really impolite, obviously not a pleasant experience, being super overbearing and assertive, obviously not a pleasant experience, being hyper low in openness and acting out of that

and telling everybody they're overcomplicating everything all the time, not a great experience for people who are actually well-intentioned trying to get it right. So there's concrete things that you can do with this knowledge in mind. This last piece makes me think about why some of the most effective PMs are the PMs that bring a lot of energy and positivity to the team and just get people excited, which is such a soft skill, but such a powerful thing you can do for your team because people kind of look to you to lead them.

And if you come at it with like, I had a PM I was working with and every meeting he's like, this is going to be awesome. He just like comes right in every meeting. who's ready to make some decisions and it really changes everything and so this is amazing advice. So basically if you want better relationships which will make you a better influence

or start with what kind of experience it might when people work with me, ask me for stuff, ask me questions. And you shared a bunch of specific things you can do. Like something I always tell people is just try to smile. It's just like just look happy. You know, that makes a big difference.

Bring energy, look happy, just try to be excited. Yeah. So think about the, so if you want to build better relationships, which have all these amazing trickle-down effects, your advice is think about the experience you are to other people when they work with you, work on trust. And ideally get to the place that third level of you are doing it better than them. But that's the high bar for old things. And then the last thing is like, are you actually amazing?

Like, is your ability, like inkwork in your abilities. That's kind of the last piece. Yeah, exactly. And it's not that none of these become unimportant because the other ones are kind of the gateways. It's, I mean, your relationships require all three, especially your professional relationships. So, yeah, it's more just like, if experience is the only thing undermining you when you're otherwise very trustworthy and very skilled and able, that's a shame. Just fix it. And there's a whole bunch of ways to go about that. but I like to leave that to people like to explore that creatively.

Like, well, oh gosh, okay, I can change this to this to this, this to this, this to this. On the trust thing, do you hurt people? I mean, that's, that's it. Like, do people have a reason to believe that you are risky or dangerous? And it's, unfortunately, in a lot of habitats, the habitat itself either allows or even rewards people that are super untrustworthy to kind of play the system in advance. answer the system. And as you talk to Jeffrey, right, about the power conversation, like, the worse the habitat, the more his suggestions work. Right? I can see that. And the reason that

he's correct, like he used the phrase, this is how the world always has been. It's how it is and it's how it always will be, right? Well, it's how the normal dysfunctional world always has been is and will be. And if you want people in your organization to rise on merit and for influence to work to generate better decision making, make better products, have a better company, move faster, etc., you need to create a habitat where what Jeffrey's observed about the normal dysfunctional world largely doesn't work within your habitat. So if it's effective for people to harm each other in your habitat, you are performing at a much lower level than if harming each other was extremely ineffective, right? And that's up to you as a leader, as a manager, et cetera. And then, of course,

skill is what it is. Like, it's your ability to convert your intents into outcomes. I'm glad you're talking about habitat. That's exactly where I wanted to go. So just two more things I want to spend our time on. Habitat and focus, how to create more space for focus and get better focused. So you've touched on this many times at this point, this idea of a habitat. I think another way to think about this is like the culture of your company. Is that right? Exactly. Okay, cool. So are there a few things you could recommend to people to create a habitat that is conducive of good stuff. Let's start at the start here. So in the difference between what science knows and business does, let's kind of zero in on the fact that the way most companies approach

culture has a very shaky track record. Like if Mission Vision Values was an airline, you would not allow any family to fly on that airline because it does not arrive at most of its intended destinations. So that is just a super important starting point because I'm going to kill a sacred cow here while we talk about this. And I don't want anybody to feel like I'm trying to be mean or anything. It's just it's worth looking at stuff that doesn't work and wondering if there's something that could work a lot better.

So if we look at habitat and culture, it's really about what people believe. It's what people believe is acceptable, permissible, productive. And the biggest flaw in people's approach to culture, and interestingly enough, even at YC, they talk about like this mission, vision, values, culture stuff, that comes later. Let some stuff happen with the business.

That comes later. They're right to say, that if that's the paradigm you're going to use because it's not going to work either way. So you might as well do it later. But if you're going to do it the right way and investigate human beliefs, and like we talked about priming, for example, culture is just the macro priming of the entire business of what your central belief systems are and then the permission that forms from those belief systems. So if you've done that really well, you should do that right at the very beginning, like, in what way should we approach this company, building this, working together,

et cetera. Like, that would be really, really helpful to get right from day one. And the belief system that people have, there are two approaches to changing people's beliefs. Mission vision values is what we call a performative approach, meaning I'm going to come up with some expression of an inspiring mission, inspiring values, and inspiring vision. And it's going to be performed well enough. Like it's going to be like if we were busking in the in the park, this is going to be a cool enough mission vision values that people throw some change into my guitar case.

And they buy into it. Like they gather around. What I think, and I think that's just completely the wrong approach. Because we're hoping to inspire people. We're hoping to be artistically talented enough to pull that off. The other approach is to be deductive, logically deductive, which is centrally speaking, there is hopefully a market out there that's glad our company exists. Who is glad we exist?

Why are they glad we exist? And that's shifting our mission into something that we call your role, the role you play in the world around you. Who is glad you exist? Why are they glad you exist? And that is a fact. That is not an inspiring idea. That is like, okay, we work with this company that does AI-based optical character recognition, document ingestion, et cetera.

Why is the world glad that they exist? Well, because we get 95% of the documents scanned in into structured data that normally people have to transfer by hand. Like, that's pretty compelling. Why is the world glad Warby Parker exists? Because before you used to choose between looking dumb and it being cheap and looking cool and it being expensive and now you can look cool and it's cheap. Like that's the world's really glad we exist.

Now, that's true. I don't need you to be inspired to believe that that is true. And now everything that we're going to think about for the rest of our beliefs, we're going to deduce from that. So we're just going to use logic to build our culture, not inspiration. So this next thing we need to figure out is, how can we understand the specific value that's created when we play this role in the world? We save people money.

We save people time. We open up markets. we help people explore possibilities and potential they couldn't tap into otherwise right etc so what's the role of core like people are glad we exist because we tap into potential they had no access to before right like and at the team level at the company level that could be a really big deal so we know that and we say okay well gosh that implies so much there's so much we got to do now what value does that produce and then i could say okay once we understand the definition of value which comes out of our role, now we can change the definition of done. So a lot of teams talk about bias to action.

And, you know, hamsters have bias to action. They get up out of their straw and they turn that wheel as hard as they possibly can and they go absolutely nowhere. But if you understand the role you play in the world and you understand the value you produce in terms of time savings, cost savings, upside, you know, whatever it is that you do, then you can say, we should have a bias to impact, not a biased action. We shouldn't just do stuff. We should have an effect that has the result of value creation. Like, we should save people time. And now when you're a product team looking at this and you're saying, oh, here's a cool new idea, Lenny, let's do this. You can now use that as a habitat level permission to be like, oh, how does that produce value for people? How does that

make people go faster? Save time, get smarter, do something they couldn't do otherwise. And then you can still use that exact same vocabulary when you go sell it to them. This is how it makes you faster, smarter, more efficient, save cost. So it's like really logical deduction. And if people think that we should do something, build a product that doesn't create value, now instead of being inspiring, we can be logical. We don't build things that produce no value. That is not a priority until we can turn it into something that does produce value.

So you're turning culture into something. highly usable in getting away from performative culture into logical deductive culture. And I think that's really, really the key for most people is to say, let's understand why the world's glad we exist. That's why we have a TAM. That's why we have customers. And what does that imply about our standards for ourselves when we execute in value creation, even down to the email? If I send some wonky email reply to somebody's question and it doesn't produce value for them, I'm not done. I need to finish the job until it produces value for them. Quality standards are baked into this. That again is implied. Would our, would Warby Parker be happy? Would, would I be

happy that Warby Parker exists if they've shipped me something that's a two out of 10 in quality? No. So we can't make things that are two out of 10. And everybody has a belief. There are plenty of people that probably interview at Warby Parker that think two out of 10 is perfectly fine. Just get it to them. And like, no, we need a, we need an antibody to that belief. We have decision-making intelligence, which everybody believes, like, we should go fast, break stuff, or we should be super slow and get everything right or wherever in between. That's a fun one to talk about. And then finally, you have a teaming dynamic belief, which is essentially every single human's belief of what is acceptable treatment of other human beings. What state does that put the other human in? And a lot of people,

particularly like I'll pick on myself with the low politeness, we'll spend years thinking, I'm giving honest feedback quickly, this is efficient. And you're like, how is it efficient when it takes people six months instead of six minutes to act on your feedback because they just don't like you so much? And you have this appeal problem that keeps you out of all the rooms that like you're not actually, your utility, which, you know, your politeness is a utility transferred mechanism. But we don't want you in the room. So you're not a business benefit in this case.

So that's kind of the starting point. That's ground zero of habitat is do not build an habitat on the roots of inspiration. It doesn't work. It can work, right? If you do it super inspiring stuff and you're super inspiring people, then you probably have the artistic ability to pull that off. But even then, you'd still be better off if you would do it through logical deduction instead of inspiration. Say someone is like, okay, I'm going to improve my habitat, I'm going to improve my company culture, or I'm just going to start setting up a good habitat.

What's something they can do? Like, what can they do today this week to just start to do that? Is it sit down and think about what is the value we provide? Why do we exist? There's just something else you'd recommend. So the brain craves an answer to the question, why am I doing this? And not only are there things we should start doing, but I like to kind of, I like to deepen. the commitment in people's minds to what we should start doing by kind of thinking of it is we

should start doing things that we've been negligent in doing, right? Not just, oh, this would be even better, but like we are actually causing some habitat problems by being negligent in certain things. So the primary thing that people are negligent in is answering the question, why should I do this to their team? And saying you should do this because it's your job is a form of negligence, right? Like, you're not actually answering that question in any useful way. Because I could also answer that in the safety way, which I sort of just did by saying it's your job. I'm implying that there's a consequence. But I could be like, because if you don't, here's the specific bad things that will happen. You could be giving them a why in terms of reward

because, oh, if you do this, you get this. Or if we do this, we get this. But you could also be giving them a purposeful answer to why, which is not a form of negligence, which is to say, because our work actually matters. There are people out there waiting on us to ship this product to improve their situation, and they also want us to get it right at the same time. So bias to impact through that lens, we do need to ship this. It needs to happen, and it needs to be right, or at least right enough in its first version. So if you, if you, if you, have been negligent, and we all have at times, right, this is, I'm not trying to judge, but I'm trying to convict, right, to build some conviction, to build some commitment.

If you have been negligent in answering to all these minds that work with you why we're even doing this, that's the starting point, is make sure everybody knows why, and that why is a shared why across the team. And not just the Simon Sinek big picture why, I mean, very specific why that you know for my team when we build training materials when we look at it through that lens of if we get this right this is what happens to teams and companies and products and their customers like there's a through line it's a big deal and that's why we can't do it this way or that's why we should get more obsessed with quality and why we should get more interdependent as a team and stop doing things that are just our own ideas but say hey lenny I I'm thinking about doing it this way. Is there anything you'd add before I hit go? And then you'd be like, oh, I think it would be 10% better if you did it this way. And then now our product is 10% better.

So that's kind of the square one is ask yourself, when's the last time our team had a conversation about why we're even doing any of this? What value it produces? Who is affected by our decisions? And if that hasn't happened in a while, that's not good. is another way to think about this your mission is that term yeah i think it's an alternative to mission i i try you know and i don't want to stomp all over mission vision values because i think they can work but i think it's easier for people to conceptualize the importance of their work if they understand we are playing a role not fulfilling a mission and like role implies obligation

there's no obligation in mission unless you kind of like feel the inspiration so powerfully. And these differences are subtle, but neurologically, it's different, right? If I tell your brain, here are the people counting on you to get this right, Lenny. Your brain activates a region called the anterior insular cortex, which starts to think about other people in the context of the solution you're creating. And if I say, we are here to change people's lives through this in a more general sense, your prefrontal cortex will still activate to solve the problem, but your anterior insular cortex will not to more deeply consider the humans affected by the problem. So you're adding to the toolkit of what the brain will bring to the table to generate

solutions. And if you activate more good regions of the brain, you get better solutions. So I lean into this personally. I'm like, you really don't need a mission statement. You need to understand the role you play. And people need to have some response, some physiological, like, I get it. to my actions impact people. And if they don't have a response, you should go find a human who does, for sure. One last thread I want to follow, focus. You have some really cool advice on how to help.

And this just comes from everybody wants to get better at focus. Everyone wants their team to have more time for focus. Everyone wants their engineers to sit there and build things faster, their designers to get stuff done. And it all comes from getting really good at focusing. creating space for focus on your team. What advice do you have for folks that want to personally learn to focus better and to help their team have more time for focus, get stuff done, essentially?

I mean, isn't this the question? Because this is where it all ends, right? First things first, let's look at the neuroscience that we have available to us, which is the study of focus is either is or as tightly as, associated with the study of what's called brain waves. That's becoming a lot more popular. We're seeing it like even in athletes, like professional golfers or studying how their brain waves are focused on the golf shot in which mode to put the brain into to play golf at the highest level. Same thing applies to work. There's a bunch of different kind of bands of brainwaves.

Most of them actually are when you're asleep. So your REM cycles, your deep sleep cycles, you're kind of like drowsy cycles. Those are brain waves, right? You can feel your brain turning off. You can feel your brain turning on when you dream. But when you're awake, there's really three primary modes that your brain is in. The nerdy side of this, kind of the nerdy language is alpha, beta, and gamma. Those are the distinct ranges of brain activity. And they basically represent how focused your brain is. So alpha is quite simply daydreaming.

So your brain is very quiet and empty. Easy metaphor is if you're in your house at night and everything's quiet, you hear things that you don't hear during the daytime. And that's what alpha is like in the brain. Your brain is actually working subconsciously a lot. But when you're busy, which is beta, your brain is too noisy to hear any of those little creaks and pops in the house. But when you're in alpha, you hear stuff. So the most common setting for alpha for most people is the shower. So it unlocks this mystery of like, why do I have all these ideas in the shower? Well, it's because your brain is in alpha. It hears these little creaks and pops inside of the attic.

And it unpacks them. He goes, oh, that's an interesting idea. It comes out of nowhere. It can be driving, gardening, car washing, cycling, whatever. As long as there's not too much cognitive load, then you can be daydreaming. And I'll come back to this in a second because there's a big permission problem at the habitat level for some of these focus levels. Beta is productivity mode. So if anybody you've ever seen somebody with a poster on their back wall that says, get shit done.

That's basically just a poster that says beta. on it. Like, I love beta and answer emails, have meetings, write code, and there are some gamma code, you know, deeper thinking scenarios where you're writing code, delivering presentations, making presentations, like so much of our workday is beta. And it's just, I mean, some of us have an infinite amount of demand for beta work. There's just a never-ending stream of stuff we could do and get done. And then gamma is your brain's intense focus. So if you're learning something really complicated,

like you're learning thermodynamics in college or something like that. And you're just like, wow, this is not easy. And you have to really push your brain to grapple with these concepts, connect the dots. I even remember certain things. That's gamma. And we feel that sometimes it worked, that here's a problem, a complex issue,

that we could tackle in beta by slapping duct tape on it, or we could tackle in gamma by reverse engineering and going deep. And that's where we start to connect the dots that we talked about earlier, that focus in reverse engineering are related. That in beta, you have no intention to learn anything new to get something done, to think more deeply to get something done, to reconsider an existing process or structure or framework in your mind to get something done. You're going to utilize those things,

to get something done. Gamma is where like we go, I would normally do it this way. I can see why that's not the right way. I need to make something new. I need to break my framework and build a brand new one right now to do something. So we generally spend too much time in data and work. And that's both a judgment call because I certainly have my own opinion about beta. I call it the conscientiousness crisis, which is conscientiousness wants beta, openness wants gamma, kind of think of tying these pieces together. And it's not that conscientiousness is like inherently a crisis, but when you meet teams that haven't done any innovation, haven't rethought the market, have become insensitive to changes in the environment around them, have become insensitive to their own employee problems

and are still just kind of like, you know, this locomotive that keeps on going irrespective of what's going on around it, it's that heads down form of conscientious. just beta that feels like now's not the time. Let's stay focused. Let's stay focused, et cetera. So we don't want to get rid of beta. We got a lot of work to do. But let's put a rule of thumb out there for people to explore because it's going to be subjective to every team and every company. But as a rule of thumb, if 25% of your year is spent in gamma and alpha, you're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep and being in this more daydreaming mode.

So what I wanted to circle back on is how could we possibly daydream productively? That's preposterous. And this is where you can build in your mind. And I do have another PDF for this if people want to see it. But you can build in your mind a three by three grid where we have the safety system, reward, and purpose system in columns. We have alpha, beta, and gamma, and rows. And we basically have a list of nine channels that the brain can activate to

generate different types of thinking. And most of the companies out there, most of the teams out there are primarily, all their programming comes from safety beta and reward beta. How can I be busy to get rewards, ROI, customers, deals, whatever, even promotions, self, more self-centered kind of rewards. And beta safety, which would be, how can I be busy? optics manage my reputation, avoid risk, that sort of stuff. So we spend, the crisis is basically realizing spending too much time in those two out of our

nine available boxes is probably not generating anywhere near the ideal outcomes. And if we could instead shift to the purposeful column by answering that brain's craving for why with an answer that explains it's not about you. It's not about us. It's about other people are counting on us to get this right. Does that matter to you? Because for most people, they're like, yeah, that's actually really cool. I can have an impact on like real stuff happening in other people's lives and in the world outside of me. So that that activates. Now all of a sudden we can say, okay, let's look at alpha across the top row. Alpha safety is when you get in the shower and all of your anxieties, worries, et cetera, come out of nowhere out of the attic of your mind.

What happens in alpha reward? It's when you kind of have these breakthroughs of how to get a deal, how to win something. Like, it's used to daydreaming, but your brain is like primed to daydream in a certain way, whether it's about anxiety or anger or whether it's about rewards you care about. If it's purpose, this is where, you know, from a vision perspective, a possibility's product perspective, you're going to have all sorts of crazy, cool ideas pop into your mind. If you've primed your brain to be in purposeful and then you daydream. And you can do this. Like in the middle of a day, certain companies, it's easier than others.

But if you can push away from your desk and just go sit in a park or something for 10 minutes, 20 minutes and calm your brain down, like listen, something cool will probably happen in your brain. I can't guarantee that. But you have to experiment with it to find out, like how it works for you. And then the same thing per gamma, when you hear phrases like, we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives, that is the gamma, the gamma prevention team kicking the door down and saying, we're here to get you back into beta. You know, everybody, you know, put your hands behind your backs, sort of a thing. And that's where the habitat and the focus kind of matters, because you

will not ever get a gamma idea from a beta mind. You will never get an alpha idea from a beta mind. So if your business needs some breakthrough daydreaming, interesting ideas in order to create adjacencies, to build new products, to seek new markets, to better fulfill the role you're playing within this market, then team has to have permission to enter that intellectual focused state or that you're turning that channel off. You're like taking that off of the programming available through your particular subscription. And the same thing applies to gamma. The habitat basically needs to establish that gamma is a viable channel for a lot of work.

And there's permission to go into it. You can certainly overdo it. That's why I say 25%. You don't need to spend half of your year, three quarters a year year in gamma. It bonkers how smart you can be. If you spend three or four hours in an afternoon in that deep focus state, you'll just do stuff you'd never do. and if you can get the team to have off-sites that are gamma-focused, you know, everybody scatter and be alone and do this stuff

that are gamma and alpha-focused, that are productive and you bring ideas back, you're just simply going to generate thinking and outcomes that you wouldn't otherwise. And it may be that 10%'s right for you. It may be that 30% is right for you, depending on how dynamic your market customer base are. But just to ask yourself, like challenge yourself with the question. The stuff is so fascinating.

I wish we had like another hour just to dig deep into this because it feels like just this alone is going to really transform the way companies operate. So let me let's try to give people something tactical they can do to create more space for alpha and gamma waves. And essentially your advice is a fourth of your time should be spent if possible in alpha and gamma time. Is that right? Yeah, I think that probably is overabundance in all honesty. But if you think about it through like the lens of. a quarter if you're going to be on a set of cadences and this is probably the tactical advice is like look at your cadences and say at the quarter level that's probably the right level of fidelity

for most people to look at their calendars in terms of like what big stuff should we be doing because six months is usually too long to do anything big too much has happened in the world year is definitely too long to wait for a cadence to kind of kick in so quarterly is really good and what's nice is when we when we cluster our gamma time on this quarterly cadence we can take a lot of the stuff that would be what we call calendar invaders, you know, these random conversations that come up out of nowhere, and we can be like, well, we're getting ready to have an offsite, this quarter's offsite in two weeks.

Can this idea wait until then to be processed? So you kind of get this nice little black hole effect where a lot of distractions having a new home because you've actually said we're going to distinctly do stuff. You're saying yes, but not now, to a lot of distractions. But yeah, I think that's the ideal cadence. And that for some teams, it needs to be, you know, maybe a half a day or a full day.

You'll figure it out based on, you know, your own business. But what per quarter is a necessary amount of time for us to break beta and go into deep thinking analysis mode? How healthy is our operation? How smart are we being? Are we delivering value? What needs to be re-evaluated from the market's experience, the customer's experience, the team's experience.

Let's look at these different views of the business and make some prioritized decisions about we're going to make specific improvements this quarter for these areas. And then even once a week, maybe just find half a day if you can, maybe, but maybe less than half a day, a couple hours, to be in gamma once a week.

And you'll kind of feel it out from there. But the reason the rule of thumb of 25 is out there is 25 is kind of the risk point because most people will be like, we're not even spending 5%. Or the perfectionist team might be like, we're 50. So if you're far away from that rule of thumb, that's a pretty good indicator.

It's a good time to audit yourself. When you hear the term deep work, is that generally referring to gamma time? Yeah, people can use that term in a couple of ways. I think a lot of people call deep work, don't bother me beta, which could be one. And other teams might call gamma deep work.

But it's probably more appropriate. I think don't bother me beta is for some teams they need to be told like, no, no, use this team, use this time not just to not be interrupted, but to think differently about problems, to think about is the architecture even right? Is the way we are thinking about this even right? Not just get a lot of stuff done. It's not just like sitting in your email and write documents. It's actually tried to think about bigger problems.

things that are challenging your brain, not just like, I'm just productive, getting stuff down, getting step down. Awesome. Something that worked really well for me, similar to what you just recommended is having, I had two blocks of time during the week, that were two hours or three hours long,

or it's just don't bother me deep work time. So I had it, I think Wednesday morning and Friday morning for like two or three hours. And actually in the calendar is, like, if you book something during this time, I will slap you. And that worked really well.

And nobody, nobody complained. We covered a lot. Here's the things we've covered. I was just taking notes on all the advice that you've shared. How to help people run better meetings. How to get better at developing vision for their team and company and product. How to be a better influencer. How to build better relationships.

How to create a better culture for your company. How to create more focus and more productive focus. That's a lot. I'm very proud of our conversation. Before we get to a very short lightning round, because we've gone pretty long, I want to keep it short. Is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with that you think might be helpful before we close up.

No, I don't think we need to. I mean, there's certainly a lot more that we could talk about, but I think we don't want to melt any minds. We want people to kind of walk away and be like, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that. So definitely pick, you know, two or three wins. I kind of call them pots of ocean to boil instead of oceans to boil. So like get a few pots of ocean to boil first and focus on that for sure.

And definitely make one of those pots if it's a problem area for you. what kind of experience you are. I mean, that's central to everything. Everything else works better in the whole system once you've boiled that pot of the ocean. And then things get easier. And then I guess the only last thing I would add is think of everything we've talked today. It might help to put some language to it as floor risers and ceiling risers because your company has a horizon of performance that you're heading into.

And there's a bottom end of that range and a top end of that range. So as you get better at meetings, not only are you like increasing that, you know, you're raising the floor to get rid of bad meetings and waste. And you might be saving a ton of time or converting useless time and a useful time, but you also might be raising the ceiling. And I would be really specific with yourself and your team about which outcome are you chasing? Is it both? Is it one or the other? And say, like, we're actually trying to raise the floor so that our performance never goes below

a certain range. We get faster, as smarter as a result, fewer mistakes. Or are we actually trying to uncap a ceiling that we're dealing with right? now, especially around things like strategy and vision, if we feel that those conversations always end up feeling like inconceivable arguments, we have a ceiling on our business's performance. As a result of that, can we raise that ceiling and explore a higher horizon of performance for the business? Amazing.

Evan, with that, we reached our very exciting and very quick lightning round. Are you ready? Yes. Let's do it. All right. So let's start with what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Well, the obvious first one is never split the difference. I recommend that book to like everybody in the universe. I think if you haven't read it yet, you shouldn't get your driver's license. It's just, for those who don't know, it was written by Chris Voss. He was an FBI hostage

negotiator and it explores how to negotiate with people and not just hostages, but your colleagues, your parents, your wife, like everybody. And there's some very surprising technique in there that is unexpected, like not trying to get people to agree with you, but getting them to say no more often. Instead of saying, hey, Lenny, are you willing to do this? Say, hey, Lenny, are you opposed to doing this? And it's just this reversal. And I'm giving you the out is the way he explains it. There's a whole bunch of other technique.

But the more of that technique is in a team, the better. The better the team does. That's the no-brainer. The second one, I would say, since we've kind of covered this topic a little bit about, you know, Habitat today, if you enjoy reading books that are sort of root canals but you're better off because you read them there's a book called never not never split the devil there's a book called the person in the situation it was written by some researchers some psychological researchers and what it explores is the difference between how personality influences your behavior and how the situation you're in

or like we talked about the habitat you're in influences your behavior and if you're not yet convinced that either of those matters, like, oh, it doesn't, I'll do what I do regardless of the habitat or I'll do what I do regardless of who I am, that book will melt the face off of that existing mental model conclusively. It's really valuable knowledge to understand the mechanics of how the situation influences a person and how the personality influences the person. And then I guess the last, maybe we'll put a fork in the road of a choose your own adventure. If you're a real student of the game, and you want to go 10,000 leagues under the sea on this stuff, there's a series of books

called the Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience. You can find it on Amazon. A lot of them you can just get on your Kindle for a lot cheaper than the, you know, the library decorating version of it. But that is bonkers. It talks about how your brain applies to intelligence, emotionality, relationships. It's incredible knowledge. If you instead want to keep it more in the part of the world you experience and can see

and not the brain Thaler wrote a book called misbehaving it was kind of the major book about behavioral economics and again we spend a lot of time

in companies talking about the way people should act instead of the way people do act and behavioral economics is essentially the version of economics

that's about how people do act not how people should act so I think that's a great field of study and then again Robert Green's whole library is super valuable, especially human nature, if you're into kind of that.

He's a little darker of an author. Certainly kind of doesn't pull punches about human nature. So those are all great books to explore. You have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? I look more at the category level of products. I really like products that have great ergonomics. A lot of people underestimate the value of what it feels like to use the product. Are things in the right place at the right time?

I just started this newsletter that's kind of like, how do you break all of what we do into bite-sized pieces for people who are super interested in this stuff to get something weekly? And it exposed me to Beehive, which is a very well-designed newsletter platform, high ergonomics. I don't ever find anything hard to find. I can get things to work the way I want them to work. So just I like that example. And I remember even back to when I was obsessed with finding the perfect backpack to try. travel with. And then you find these brands where you're going through security and you didn't

even know it, but there's a pocket designed for your phone in exactly the place you would want the pocket for your phone to be. And you're just like, that's so great. I love that this team designed this pocket just in the right spot. So that's really my focus is ergonomics and product. Final question. I say you tweeted that people are telling you that you look like JD vans, which is hilarious. Do you think this will be a net benefit or net hurdle? It'll be an incredible benefit to Halloween because it's totally clear what I'm going to do for Halloween. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm going to have to see what people in the street, fortunately, I live in Park City, so I don't run across a lot of people in the street who want to yell at people.

But if I lived in, you know, Chicago or something like that, I would have no doubt somebody would come up and throw something at me. But yeah, I'm neutral on the topic so far, minus the Halloween bonus. We'll see. We'll see how your life changes. Evan, this has been amazing. There's so much richness to this conversation. And like I said, we've covered like basically everything people want to get better at as product manager, you could say. Two final questions. Where can folks find the stuff that you do to dig deeper, to learn more, to learn more deeply from you?

And two, how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, I mean, they can certainly find a lot of the stuff we do on our website, core dash sciences.com, find a link to that profile you talked about on there, which can be super fun to take. and insightful, the newsletter, all the stuff that we do, you can kind of find out there. And then certainly Twitter. I mean, I, I've always been like really prickly about people that get on Twitter to post only and not to interact. I'm kind of the opposite.

I really love people's questions and pushback. And just yesterday, I've probably spent way longer than I should have out of my portfolio management, you know, approach to time, just on a thread where I was talking to this really interesting a woman about this debate almost about the probability of people doing things based on their beliefs, which was, and we had some kind of bystanders watching the whole thing happened. I had a meeting with a good friend Rod afterwards where we talked about how that all went. So I loved to talk to people and answer questions, and I'm sure people will have plenty of questions that they'd love to dive deeper into. So I'm on Twitter for sure. And then how you can help me?

I mean, fortunately for me, I'm in the business of helping other people, whether those are individuals, teams, companies. So the most helpful thing to me is you helping yourself. So if you find our content valuable, if you want to have awesome managers or anything like that, and this sort of science-based kind of more efficient approach to getting there would be interesting, then reach out. We don't bite.

We're pretty easy to work with. And that would be super fun to have a conversation about what your team needs. Evan, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. This has been really cool. Yeah. Same for me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com.

See you in the next episode. Thank you.