How you can harness smarter workplace behaviours

Garreth Hanley:
This is INTHEBLACK, a leadership, strategy, and business podcast brought to you by CPA Australia.Welcome to INTHEBLACK Today, we’re revisiting one of our most popular episodes from the CPA podcasts catalogue. Late last year, around the time of CPA Australia's Virtual Congress, Jackie Blondell sat down with bestselling author and adamant generalist Daniel Pink. They spoke about the innovative ways Dan approaches workplace productivity and behaviors, and his tips and ideas to help you enhance your potential and mindset at work.

Jackie Blondell:
Hello, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Jackie Blondell and I'm talking with Daniel Pink, the author of several provocative best selling books about business, work, creativity and behaviour. His latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, draws on neuroscience, psychology, and biology to challenge assumptions about human behaviour. Welcome Daniel, it's great to have you here.

Daniel Pink:
Hey, thanks for having me, Jackie. I'm glad to be with you.

Jackie Blondell:
You've described your job as being paid to muck about in scientific journals. You draw on countless research and data in an attempt to qualify our behaviour motivations, successes, failures in career and life. How important, given this isn't the audience of data driven listeners, is data to understanding and predicting behaviour?

Daniel Pink:
Well, I think data is important definitely, but I think more broadly, I think evidence is important. One of the things that I encourage your listeners, and I think that CPAs are already good at this, is that if you have someone who like me or anywhere else in life who is sort of making claims saying, "The world works this way. The world doesn't work that way," I think you one needs to approach those claims with something akin to generous scepticism and say, "How do you know?", all right? Oh, you might be right, but how do you know? And for me, what's really important in how we know is looking for evidence of any of the claims that I'm making. And one of the things that we've seen in the last 25 years is that there has been an explosion of research in behavioural science writ large. And if you go into that research, you can begin to find the evidence-based ways to make better decisions, to find greater motivation, to improve one's timing and to reckon with complicated emotions like regret. But again, what I want to do is draw on the evidence. And as a generalist, as a non-academic, as non-specialist, in some ways I have a comparative advantage there because I'm not siloed into a particular discipline. I don't say, "Well, the only truth is from economics. The only truth is from developmental psychology." I'm willing to look across disciplines and try to make sense of it and bring those research insights into people's lives in ways that help them work smarter and live better.

Jackie Blondell:
Do you ever find that data from different disciplines contradict each other and how do you deal with that in formulating-

Daniel Pink:
Sure. Sometimes. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's true sometimes. What I do is I try to triangulate as much as possible and look at different disciplines and see what they're concluding about a particular topic. And so relatively rarely do you see a direct contradiction. So let me think about in the research on let's say the research on regret, you very rarely see someone saying, "Regret has absolutely no benefit to human beings," versus someone who's saying, "Regret is entirely useful to human beings." You very rarely see a direct contradiction. What you see, is you see more likely different interpretations or different weights, W-E-I-G-H-T, weights, different weights on how important something is. I think that again, if you are a generalist as I am, you can look at different disciplines and you can triangulate and you can talk to people and try to make sense of that, and at the very least, explain to readers as a writer of popular books, explain to readers saying, "Hey, you know what? There's some disagreements about this particular topic. Here's the evidence for this point of view. Here's the evidence for that point of view. I'm not sure who's right."

Jackie Blondell:
That's good at a time when we are all finding it very hard to agree on anything. It's good to have that data to draw on.

Daniel Pink:
Well, I hope so. I mean, again, it's not perfect because one of the things we know about human beings is that a lot of times for certain kinds of things, particularly for morally weighty things, for controversial things, for politically freighted things, what we do is we have an instinctive emotional answer to the question, and then we look for evidence to support that. So I try to avoid that as much as I can.

Jackie Blondell:
Okay. Now you're speaking at the CPA Australia Congress this year on harnessing potential, looking at science based tools for navigating turbulent times.

Daniel Pink:
Yeah.

Jackie Blondell:
Now, given we are probably going to have even more turbulent times ahead, can you tell us a little more? Just give us a taster?

Daniel Pink:
Well, what I want to try to do is... It's interesting because I think it's relating to your previous question about what is research when research tells us one thing and other research tells us another thing. I think there's something to be said very clearly for intellectual humility. I don't think that's a deep concept, but I think it's important to recognise that we don't know a lot. We don't know everything. And it's important to approach any of our work or any of our decision making with some degree of humility. I think what's happening right now and what I'll be talking about in our session is that we're at a period in business, both here in the states where I am in and in Australia and elsewhere in the world where we're trying to sort things out. We're trying to figure some things out. We're trying to figure out... I mean, here in the states, a big issue literally the day that we're speaking is, "Okay, what kind of work should be remote and what kind of work should be in person?" And there's a big raging debate literally on the day that you and I are speaking in the United States about that. What is an office for? What do companies owe employees? What do employees own companies? And I don't think there are clear singular answers to these questions. But what I do think is that around the world, we're trying to sort out these questions. And what I want to try to do in my session is give people decision making tools and other kinds of mechanisms for making those decisions in more effective ways and lodging those tools and techniques in real evidence rather than in a particular philosophy or rather than in my guesses.

Jackie Blondell:
Can you give us an example? Let's take remote work versus work at the office. What sort of tools would you use to have a discussion debate or [inaudible 00:06:41]?

Daniel Pink:
Yeah, so I think that in that case, on that one I would draw on some of the research on autonomy and really recognising what are the conditions in which people can do their very, very best work. And what we know, and we've known this for decades, what we know is that people do their best work when they have a reasonable degree, like a pretty significant or sensible degree of challenge in what they're doing, but they also have what is known in the literature as decision latitude. They have some say over what they do, when they do it, where they do it, how they do it. So it's possible to have jobs that are not very challenging, and people don't flourish in those truly. It's possible to have jobs where people are challenged, but they don't have a lot of decision latitude. And that ends up being the perfect recipe for burnout. The better solution is to look at whether it's remote work or whether it's in office work and saying, "How can we create the conditions in which people have significant decision latitude, they have some sovereignty over what they do, how they do it, when they do it, where they do it?" What's more is that they're in jobs that are challenging, that are compelling, that allow them to be their best selves. And when we pair those two things, that seems to be the ideal. When we're missing, even one element of those, things can go awry. And so I guess one of the messages would be, when we think about remote work is essentially to default as much as possible to autonomy, to give people a greater say in not only where they work, but when they work. And when we do that, rather than dictating, "You must be in the office four days a week," when you push some of the decision making authority to people and you do this in a more collaborative way, you're more likely to get greater engagement, greater buy-in, greater psychological safety and all those other elements that we know contribute to flourishing effective workplaces.

Jackie Blondell:
It's certainly been a revolution over the last couple of years. I might take you back to when we last interviewed you many moons ago, I think in 2013.

Daniel Pink:
Yes. Many moons ago. Yeah.

Jackie Blondell:
Yeah, where we're talking in a whole different universe really about being on the cusp of a transformative age in business where the qualities of the right brain, inventiveness empathy and meaning, come into play. You talked about conceptual age careers that were hard to access remotely. Given what we've gone through in the last three years with this move a little bit more remotely, how do you see this playing out now?

Daniel Pink:
Well, in a number of different ways. Again, that body of idea is where I argued that certain kinds of metaphorically left brain abilities, logical, linear, sequential spreadsheet kinds of abilities were becoming easy to outsource and easy to automate and therefore were less valuable. And that certain kinds of metaphorically right brain abilities, exactly as you say, big picture thinking, artistry, design thinking, storytelling, empathy, is becoming more important. I think that has remained to be the case. And I think if anything, it has accelerated. The one thing that I didn't forecast very well was how good AI would be at dealing with some of these right brain abilities. So if you think about something like there's a programme that I have on my computer right now called DALL-E, D-A-L-L hyphen E, DALL-E I guess it is pronounced. What it allows you to do is type in a few phrases. So I could type in a phrase, something kind of ridiculous like two raccoons sitting on a beach drinking margaritas. Oh, here we go. How about this? Two raccoons sitting on Bondi Beach drinking margaritas, okay? I can type that in. And within a minute, I can get a computer rendered, artificial intelligence powered image of that what I just described. That's pretty amazing. So I might have understated the ability of AI, artificial intelligence, to carry out some of these metaphorically right brain tasks.

Jackie Blondell:
I think that I saw that on John Oliver's show on YouTube actually where there were so many things that they could recreate, but they couldn't recreate him marrying a cabbage. Anyway, that's [inaudible 00:11:18].

Daniel Pink:
That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I know. But here's the thing. The thing about that which is so interesting is that this software, DALL-E, D-A-L-L hyphen E, is very primitive right now and it keeps getting better and better and better and better. Now that said, that said, one of the things I argued in that work was that we're moving from the information age to the conceptual age, where conceiving ideas, where inventing things is becoming much more important. So even then, you need a human being to conceive of something as ridiculous as John Oliver marrying a cabbage or two raccoons drinking margaritas on Bondi beach.

Jackie Blondell:
How do you think that's going to be harnessed usefully in the future?

Daniel Pink:
I'm not sure.

Jackie Blondell:
I mean, it seems like it's fun thing to play with now. I mean, that's how old things start as fun and then they evolve.

Daniel Pink:
Exactly. It's exactly how I was going to answer that question. You got it exactly right. It's like, we don't know, okay? So let's go back to the early days of the internet. And I'm old enough to remember those early days of the internet, where we had these websites. We even had these things called weblogs where people were writing stuff. In the early days of email, I didn't think that people then envisioned that there would be a lucrative business for some writers in say, Substack email newsletters. I don't think people realised that so much of everything they buy would be bought online. I don't think that they would've imagined buying real property or automobiles or clothing online. So all of this is to say is like, "We don't know." I think what we can make a safe prediction on is that... Or at least a prediction, I'm not sure how safe it is anymore, is that what human beings will be doing is augmenting this machine intelligence. I don't want to compete with the machine. You can't compete with the machine intelligence. You want to augment the machine intelligence. I think an analogy there is if you look at some of the work that spreadsheets do, or even more rudimentarily if you look at what calculators do, just think about something super rudimentary on a spreadsheet, I can stack up 35 numbers and on my spreadsheet get the sum of those instantly. All right? That is as rudimentary as it gets for a spreadsheet. But I could do that manually. I could do that in my head at some level, but that's ridiculous. There's no reason for me to do that. What I need to do is understand why I'm stacking up those numbers. What some of those numbers actually means. Why I'm choosing those numbers over other numbers. And so I think a way to think about it is that as machine intelligence gets better and better and better, what human intelligence has to do is augment and supplement that machine intelligence rather than compete directly with it, because I cannot do calculations in my head or on a pencil and paper as quickly as Excel. Nor should I.

Jackie Blondell:
No. And also Excel can't actually give human advice to people.

Daniel Pink:
Precisely, like accountant. They don't know the context of the situation. They don't know how to take what the Excel is saying with the existing tax law, with the existing situation of that particular client. So when we think about things as big picture contextual, that kind of human thinking I think is going to be very, very, very hard to replace at least in the short term.

Jackie Blondell:
We hope you're enjoying INTHEBLACK If you are interested in the latest news, analysis, policy updates, and business insights, you should check out CPA Australia's With Interest Podcast. Join us as we dive into the news and delve into the business issues of the day. Each week we talk to thought leaders from across the accounting, finance, strategy, economic, and business spectrum, and you get their expert opinions. Now, back to INTHEBLACK.

Jackie Blondell:
Your book, The Power of Regret, it was published earlier this year. In it you advocate that reflecting on regrets makes us better, sharpens our decision making, boost performance and deepens meaning. How best can we learn from our regrets? I must admit being someone that hates thinking about my regrets, but [inaudible 00:15:21]-

Daniel Pink:
I hate regret too. Everybody hates regret. Ah, you're not alone. I mean, regret, Jackie, regret feels bad. It's a negative emotion. It's unpleasant. So the question really is though, what do we do with that negative emotion, okay? In my view, we haven't taught people how to deal with that unpleasant feeling well enough. So some of us will ignore our regrets. We'll put our fingers and our ears and we'll say, "No regrets. I always look forward. I never look backward. I'm always positive, never negative." That's a very American notion. I mean, at some level it's an Australian notion because I think that Australians in some ways are sort of only just about one notch off of Americans in they're irrational exuberance and optimism and positivity. But ignoring our regrets is a very bad idea. Now what's also a bad idea is wallowing on our regrets, ruminating our regrets, stewing on our regrets. That leads to despair. What we should be doing with our regrets is thinking about them, acknowledging them, confronting them, using them as signals, using them as information, using them as a knock on the door that we respond to. And when we do that, there is a raft of evidence. Again, going back to one of your earlier questions, there's a raft of evidence in a whole range of scientific fields showing that reckoning directly with our regrets, not ignoring them and not wallowing them, can help us become better negotiators. That's something that CPAs do. Can help us become clearer thinkers, that's something that CPAs do. They try to avoid cognitive biases. That help us become better problem solvers, that's something that CPAs do. That help us become better strategists, that's something that CPAs do. That help us try to find greater meaning in our lives, that's something that CPAs do on at least at some of their clients. And so when we think about our regrets, when we confront our regrets, not ignore them, not wallowing them, they can be a very powerful engine for forward progress.

Jackie Blondell:
Can you give me a scenario, drawing a scenario from the book where you've got an example? Because you've got various little case studies and people that moved through the book of how somebody learnt to balance that, no wallowing but using information from the regret to move forward in their career.

Daniel Pink:
Oh, sure. I mean, there's so many examples of that, I mean, in career and their personal lives. So I'll give you one. There's a guy named Jason who I interviewed who's in the book, he's an American guy. He started working when he was very young. He didn't go to university. He started working when he was quite young, right out of a secondary school, but he did very, very well. And so he's now in his early 40s. Or at least when I talked to him, he was in his early 40s. He's Probably in his mid 40s now. He worked for 25 years. He did very, very well in Corporate America. He kept rising in the ranks, made a decent amount of money. And yet he has nothing to show for. He never saved any money. And the reason for that is that he spent too much and saved too little. Suddenly he looked up at age 43 and said, "I've got nothing. I've been working my butt off for 25 years and I have nothing to show for." So he has what I call a foundation regret, which is that he made small, bad decisions early in life that accumulated to negative decisions, bad consequences later in life. So what does he do with that? He can't undo those 25 years. What he can do are a bunch of different things. Number one is that he can start being more financially responsible today, not a week from now, not a month from now. Today. And so he can change his behaviour. What's more, which I thought was very interesting with Jason as he told me his story, is that he happens to work in human resources. In his work in HR, he is counselling, younger people in, "You got to save for retirement. You got to put money aside. You can't be a spend thrift." And so he's using that terrible feeling that he has of being regretful about spending too much in saving too little to recast his own life, but also to redirect others' lives.

Jackie Blondell:
It's a lesson for us all. And back to Jason, it's also a lesson in do what you say, not just tell others to do what you say.

Daniel Pink:
Amen. Amen. I think that's true for all the CPA leaders who might be listening to this. I mean, I've been writing about business and organisations for 20 years now. And if there's one thing I know for sure, Jackie, if it's the one thing I'm absolutely certain about, what leaders don't realise, is that employees listen to them way less than they think, right? So the leaders are always talking and opining and advising and people listen to them way less than leaders believe, but employees watch leaders way more than those leaders believe. And so if you are acting in accordance with your values, if you're doing what you want other people to do, I mean, again, it's pretty conventional, if you are being a reasonable role model, then that can have a big effect, yeah.

Jackie Blondell:
Now, lastly, I want to just touch on your Pinkcast videos. I've been enjoying a few of them.

Daniel Pink:
Oh, thanks.

Jackie Blondell:
For the listeners, they're one to two minute how-tos. They are lively, they're amusing, but you also learn from them. So I thought we could do a few of them just quickly with you so you could give us your take. It's audio, not video, sorry, listeners. But here we go.

Daniel Pink:
Okay.

Jackie Blondell:
Can you tell us why you don't like to do lists and what you do instead?

Daniel Pink:
Oh, okay. I'm okay with to-do lists, but I think there's an even better list that we can do. This is an idea that's been around for a while. Tom Peters has talked about it. Jim Collins has talked about it. It's called a to-don't list or a stop doing list. And I have these, which is you think about all the... Think about the things that drain your energy, that divert your attention, that sort of make you feel, "Oh my God, I don't want to do this anymore." And you make a list of those things and you stop doing them. And for me it's things like answering routine emails, okay? So what I try to do throughout the day, what I try to do is I avoid answering routine emails throughout the day. There are a lot of meetings that are a waste of time for me. And so I try to avoid going to meetings. So I make a list of things that I want to stop doing, look at that periodically and try to avoid doing them. And it's liberating, I have to say.

Jackie Blondell:
I think I'm going to try that one out. So I might jump to one that's sort of connected to that one. Why is the failure CV or resume a good idea? Why? Our resumes are often big ourselves up and they're often audacious about our skills, but what about the other flip side? The failure CV?

Daniel Pink:
Right. And that's okay. I mean, audacity in resumes and gleaming this in resumes is okay. This is not a replacement, this is an addition. This is an idea from Tina Seelig at Stanford University. What she suggests is that we should all have a failure resume where you... I've refined this idea a little bit. What my favourite way to do it is this. Your resume's a list of all your accomplishments, your accolades, your achievements. A failure resume is the reverse image of that. And so what you can do is you can think about, okay, make a list of, say, five or six or seven screw ups, failures, mistakes, setbacks, make a list of things like, "Oh my God, I can't believe how much I messed that up." So list that in one column. Then in the second column list, the lesson you learn from that. And in the third column you list what you're going to do about that, what you're going to do about it. I've done this. Here's the thing. As they say in Silicon Valley, it's like, "I eat my own dog food." So I would never recommend anything to a viewer or a listener that I wouldn't do myself. And so just as I have a stop doing or to don't list, I've done a failure resume. It's painful, but it's very useful. And so what I like about it is that it affords us a systematic and organised way to look our mistakes and look our setbacks in the eye, derive lessons from them, and then come up with a plan to use those lessons, to improve our lives going forward.

Jackie Blondell:
Great and lovely. And lastly, why do you carve out an hour to think big and why is it important to do so even for left brain individuals such as accountants?

Daniel Pink:
Yeah. Yeah. So this is an idea that I've been working on for a long time. And as you say, Jackie, I try to do this myself. Our brains, our minds, our being needs to toggle a little bit between loose and tight, between exploring and between executing. And I think a lot of times in business, particularly in professions like CPAs, we're very focused on executing. We're very focused on achievement. And that's cool. But we got to carve out some time to be loose rather than tight, to be explorers rather than executors. And the only way people will do this, particularly accountants or people who are in somewhat intense, is that you have to carve out some time to do it. So there are a lot of practises like this. One idea which comes from the United States is something called a Schultz Hour, from our former US Secretary of State, essentially akin to our foreign minister. He, years ago, would take an hour every week where he would just think. He would think and he would try to think about how he could do his job better, how he could serve people a little bit better. Nobody except for the president of the US and his wife were allowed to interrupt him during that time. There's another idea that's been out there for about a decade now called Genius Hour, I love this idea, where companies, organisations will give people an hour each week and they'll say to them, "Go. Leave your job, leave your desk." So this is back in the days when people had desks, "But leave your home office desk. Leave your workplace desk. Go somewhere else. Don't do your job. And think. Think about a better way to run this operation. Think about something we're doing for our clients that we should stop doing. Think about some process we can get rid of. Think about something, a better, a new product offering that we can have." And this has been known here in the states as a Genius Hour, one hour of this intense undiluted autonomy. There's some evidence showing that it leads to some big breakthroughs. Again, for me, we might aspire to do that. We might aspire to say, "Oh, I want to be creative. I want to think in a divergent way. I want to fashion cool ideas, but I don't have time to do it.' The only way to remedy that is to actually build in that time and give yourself an hour a week for a Genius Hour, an hour a week for a Schultz hour. One of my favourite examples is from the University of Manchester in the UK where this laboratory of physicists led by Andre Geim has every week, what they call Friday evening experiments, where they take two hours every week, two or three hours every week and work on stuff that the only rules are it can't be anything you have funding for, it can't be anything where you have a paper due and it can't be anything boring. It turns out that in this laboratory at the University of Manchester, during their Friday evening experiments, these two hours of undiluted autonomy, they made a breakthrough that won them the Nobel Prize in physics.

Jackie Blondell:
Oh my God.

Daniel Pink:
So I'm a firm believer in that. And here's the thing. We're not going crazy here, okay? We're not saying, "Oh, everybody should have two days a week off to do what they want and [inaudible 00:27:37] in the meadow." We're talking about one hour, two hours a week. And for most of us that's doable. And we need that time. Our brains need that time. Our souls need that time, just to wander and to wonder, and to be divergent and exploratory rather than convergent and executing.

Jackie Blondell:
Well, that Manchester University story does show to our finance audience that the return on investment for that type of time can be very, very good.

Daniel Pink:
I'm telling you, man, if you just look at the ROI of that one hour, because what you're talking about, "Okay. I can do rudimentary math." Your denominator is that is one, it's an hour. So the numerator, the ratio on top of that is going to be very large. In contrast to the 39 hours or plus that you're working on the convergent things, the ROI is going to be more... I think the ratio is going to be lower. So again, I'm not advocating. I think it's really important here is that if you remember a long time ago, and I wrote about this years ago, like the American company, the search engine company, now big company on a whole range of different fields, Google, had something they call 20% time where they gave people 20% of their... They say, "If you can spend 20% of your time working on whatever they want" and Google quietly shelved that several years ago because 20% was just too much. But one hour a week is not too much whether you are a writer in Washington, DC in the Us, whether you are a nurse in New York city, whether you are a CPA in Melbourne or Sydney or Canberra.

Jackie Blondell:
Absolutely. I love the idea. I'm going to be advocating that one. Well, Daniel it's all we have time for. It's been a very quick skip through scientific data and your experiences. I look forward to listening to you talk about more on turbulent times and scientific data at the CPA Congress. Thanks again, Daniel, for your time.

Daniel Pink:
Thanks for having me.

Garreth Hanley:
If you've enjoyed this episode, help others discover INTHEBLACK by leaving us a review and sharing this episode with colleagues, clients, or anyone else interested in leadership, strategy, and business. To find out more about our other podcasts, check out the show notes for this episode. We hope you can join us again next time for another episode of INTHEBLACK.