Earnest Empathy

 

Work Futurist Dominic Price on the importance of empathy and vulnerability in the experience of work, the power of creating change from within, and the deep convictions that inspired his milestone TEDx Talk.

 

Episode Notes

As companies around the globe struggle to find a new normal way of working —questions abound: How do we manage people’s desire for flexibility with the imperative to keep colleagues connected? And how do we make sure that we don’t regress to work models that have historically excluded much-needed voices and perspectives?

Perhaps no one thinks more about questions like these than Atlassian’s Work Futurist, Dominic Price. For nearly ten years he’s been leading efforts at the enterprise tech company to create a flexible employee experience based on listening, not speculation. And in his talk with Jesse, Dominic describes ways to embed earnest empathy into your own ways of working. Listen for his advice on how to drive change from within your organization, his reflections on delivering his immensely popular TED talk, and instruction on how to do a Personal Moral Inventory that helps you achieve balance in your life.

(6:46) The foundations of earnest empathy

(11:28) How to build belonging with authentic leadership, not labels

(14:10) Reflections on the journey to becoming a work futurist and accomplished public speaker

(23:54) How to make change happen from inside an organization

(27:54) Exiting the pandemic: hopes and fears

(31:38) The nuance of purpose

(34:45) Using the Personal Moral Inventory as a tool for achieving balance.

Guest Bio

Born to Joy in the harsh Manchester Winter of ‘77, Dominic Price has a career that has reached far and wide through Europe, US and Asia PAC. An accomplished TED speaker, Dom is proud to work at Atlassian, the home of the most intelligent t-shirt wearers in business. As the resident Work Futurist. Dom is Atlassian’s in-house “Team Doctor” helping Atlassian scale by being ruthlessly efficient and effective, and spends over half his time helping our customers navigate transformation, agility, leadership, and the future of work.

Dom has a deep passion for elite human performance, highly effective distributed teams, and building thriving businesses. He has previously been the GM Program Management for a global gaming company and a Director of Deloitte.

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+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Dominic Price: I started at Atlassian running project and program management. And when I joined Atlassian, we're about 700 people, we're about 8,000 people now. As we start to scale, my boss at the time sat me down and said, "I need someone to go and build our way of working for tomorrow that we don't know we need yet." And I was like, "Oh, that sounds exciting." The hope that I have right now that we use this false trigger of the last two years to go, you know what? Let's take this opportunity to do it. Let's redraw it and really challenge how we think about this.

And I think there's companies doing that and they're just going to get the edge and it might only be a 1% edge, but it'll be an edge that makes a difference. One of the things I've seen in the pandemic that's frustrated me is people guessing what other people's needs are, or even worse, just making statements. The technology that's available right now to listen to what people actually want is there. So why aren't we listening more?

I can't guess what your purpose is. In fact, if I do, all I do is project my purpose onto yours. The only gift I can give you is the gift of a mirror. If I hold a mirror right now, what do you see? Because I see you are part of the problem and potentially part of the solution. So you don't need to go to a conference. You don't need a mentor. You don't need a self-help book. You need a mirror, have a long hard look in that mirror. Why are you doing it wrong? And then just give it a go doing it differently. And you are in charge of that.

[00:01:30] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtric Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences. Hey, it's Jesse. The voice you just heard belongs to Dominic Price, work futurist at Atlassian. You might know Atlassian as the software company behind tools like JIRA, Confluence and Bitbucket.

The company's mission is to unleash the potential of every team. But what you might not know is that Atlassian is so deeply committed to its mission, that it's constantly looking forward and reasoning back to understand how to improve the experience of work, both for its own employees and for the employees of its customers. It's in this context that the role of a work futurist is incredibly relevant. If you're going to unleash the potential of every team, you have to first understand the changing dynamics that those teams operate in and then build solutions that work for everyone.

And in this moment, when there's still so much change around the returned office and how to build employee experiences that work for everyone, there's nobody whose perspectives in council I value more than Doms. Dom and I talk about how to rethink the old playbook of how and where we work, what it'll take to get employees and employers on the same page, how to achieve the seemingly opposing benefits of individual flexibility and team connection and how vulnerability and empathy have to come into play in building the new experience of work.

Dom shares why he believes there's actually no such thing as hybrid, talks about the thesis of his 2020 TED Talk, which was all about taking a moment to reevaluate individual purpose and happiness and underscores the opportunity we have right now to truly innovate to be more productive and inclusive. Dom's energy, animation and wisdom are invigorating to take in. And I think you'll get a ton out of the conversation. So without further ado, Dominic Price. I think I want to start swimming right away.

[00:03:29] Dominic Price: Let's do it.

[00:03:30] Jesse Purewal: I've been traveling a little bit more from San Francisco over to Utah for work, Qualtrics headquarters, et cetera. And it's interesting because within Qualtric Studios, we've been building up this documentary on the future of work and what's going on. And at the same time it's like, "Oh, Google's back to work three days." Our chairman, our CEO are wrestling with all the same stuff. It's funny, it's got the 2020 vibes of like there's change of foot, but it's start to seem like what got us through the last two years is probably not what's going to get us through the next two years. What's been occupying the space between your ears on this topic lately?

[00:04:04] Dominic Price: Yeah. I think there's a few threads you can pull on there, Jesse, you've nailed most of them right. One is we're feeling this pendulum swing, essentially those two years were so constrained, right? It wasn't that we chose to work from home for most people, we were forced to. And we're like, "Okay." And we adapted. And we did that without really appreciating that bizarrely the last two years were the least complex, because there was so many constraints. Now those constraints are lifting. We're like, "Ah, are you an office person, Jesse? Or are you a home person or a third space?"

And we're trying to label people in this way because it makes it easier for us to compartmentalize. You're one of these and she's one of those. And therefore I can establish how you work together without truly understanding what that means. And so we're faced with this complexity and in light of that, what I think I'm seeing or experiencing in a lot of organizations is this pendulum swinging to go, we need conformity, everyone in the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or everyone doing that without realizing the trade off we're making.

The exclusion zone that we are creating by doing that is horrendous. It's going to take us back 15, 20 years, not two years, right? So if you look at the people that benefited from the experience of the pandemic and the forced flexibility, right? I'm not pro office, I'm not pro work from home. I'm pro flexibility. I am pro build your own adventure that makes you Jesse do the best work of your life and be a good dad and a good husband and all the other things you are in life. And I think we can aim for that.

But what we've done is we've gone, Jesse, like here's the bit where you do your parenting thing and here's this other compartment where you do a work thing and we think your work thing should be 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday. Why? We've just shown we didn't have to do that. But when we do that and we force that constraint, in the short term it feels nicer. It feels more conform and more compliant. I just think it's a terrible idea. We're going to take all the richness of diversity, the richness of inclusion, the richness of flexibility of build your own adventure, the richness of feeling like you can be your true, authentic, best self. We're going to take all that. And we're going to leave it in 2021 and go, "You know what? Let's go back to the office. Let's go back to the mechanistic, industrial revolution that we thought we wanted to get rid of."

But now we're like, "Oh, kind of feels nice, right?" Even though it's not going to yield the things we want. So for me, I just sit in the irony every day of me to say, "I want to be more innovative. I want to be more creative. I want to be more fun. I want to be all these things. I want to be more agile, but everyone's going to work this way." And they don't see the irony of their words, let alone their actions.

[00:06:21] Jesse Purewal: What's the role of empathy here and how do we dial up the purposeful empathy, the consistent listening, taking action based on what people want? How do you do empathy at scale? I get if you're running a four person startup, you can get to simplicity and you can probably get to idealism at the same time. But we're a 5,000 person company. You're in a big company. You work with lots of leaders at big companies. How do you get them to wade in the water of empathy at scale?

[00:06:46] Dominic Price: Yeah. So it's an interesting one. I think the first step is you have to have the intent, which is unspoken, everyone assumes, right? Because it's published by the World Economic Forum and all these people say, "Empathy is a superpower." People go, "Yeah." And then they buy the book on empathy. And you know people that have done this, they read it and they're like, "I've read the book on empathy." And you're like, "That's cool. I don't care."

Empathy is this demonstration, it's a practice, it's a vulnerability and an authenticity of how you do it. It's not regurgitating, chapter four, and so we need to get away from the empathy is knowledge because it's not, empathy is an application, how we turn up. So you're like, "Cool, I'm signing up for that. And I'm signing up for the intent. I think it's useful. I'm going to invest in it."

Once you've done that, the tricky thing is to then go, "Well, how do I do it?" And I don't mean this in a negative way, but often I see it confused with sympathy. Which is quite easy for almost to go, "Oh, Jesse's kids are a little bit run down, a little bit sick, so he is working from home." Oh, I feel for Jesse. And you're like, that's sympathy, that's not empathy. Empathy's to go, "Okay. I know Jesse still wants to contribute, how do I change our working day or working week so that Jesse can still achieve the things he wants to achieve?" That's me walking in your shoes to help you be a better person. That's a very different step compared to sympathy.

So then we get that, and then your question is that's easy when there's four or five of you and you can do it in this intimate setting. How do you do it at scale? The one way we've done it is to actually equip our leaders. And we don't mean leaders by title. We mean leaders by position, right? You are in a leadership position because you have people that you influence or impact as part of a team or part of a network on a daily basis.

And we rolled out an exercise last year called the work life impact play. Basically it's to try and understand the chaos behind the camera for all your colleagues, because we all make this leap of assumption. I'm like, "Oh, Jesse's smiling today. That office looks nice. He's in the studio. I reckon everything's going all right for Jesse." And I'm like, I cannot see any of the chaos behind the camera. I can't see the family members and the kids and the dog and the parrot and all the things going on. And so I make assumptions, which is why this dimension, this two by two, Zoom or Microsoft Teams or whatever is hard for us because it misses so many signals.

And so what we said to people was let's help you build a higher fidelity version of that. Work life impact play says, "What's the working conditions of the person. Are they in a shared house? Are they sharing the internet with 20 people? What's their care responsibilities? What is the makeup? What's the environment they're in? What's the nature of their role? Are they in a role that's more deep working and individual contributor or are they in a role that's highly dependent on lots of people in which case this environment's probably quite stifling for them. And then what's the strength of their network?"

For me, I've been Atlassian for nine plus years. I had a network already that I relied on through the pandemic. But for the 50% of Atlassians that have started since the pandemic hit, they don't have the luxury and privilege of my network. And so how do I help them build one because they're not in the office bumping into Jesse to go, "Oh, I'm making a coffee. Jesse, what do you do?" And they're not going to book a meeting with you to ask that, that's too much of a step. So how do we help them build their network? And that for us build a huge amount of empathy that then turned into action and that's the importance.

Empathy alone is a waste of time. Empathy with action is really powerful when you're like, "Oh, now I know that Jesse you've got care responsibilities on a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that means that you do the drop off at school with the kids. I'm not going to book an AM meeting with you because I know that you can't make that. But until you told me that, I didn't know." So how we build that shared understanding of each of the situation, that's where empathy becomes powerful. .

And we've been trying to practice that, but we are not doing it at scale. I don't think it's achievable. We're doing it at the network team layer, do it with the people that impact you, that you impact and then kind of leave everyone else to their own devices. Because if you're trying to do it for the whole, it's exhausting.

[00:10:27] Jesse Purewal: When we look at internal Qualtrics, some of the drivers of what satisfies people in a work from home or a more remote posture, there's a lot of talk about flexibility and freedom. What satisfies people that are a little bit more connected to an office or some kind of physical environment with other people is the connectedness and the belonging. And we also see and we hear a lot of people talking about burnout and I can't help but think about, you go through these kind of video-centric days, whether that's at home or whether that's in a remote posture or in a remote office, et cetera. Nothing's recharging you.

Whereas if I'm in the office with you, I'm going to go bump and run with another colleague. We're going to take a quick walk. I can discharge throughout the day. I'm using a lot of energy. But Man, a five to 10 minute dialogue with someone on a walk through the halls, maybe it's worth sometimes commuting to go get that. Maybe it's worth sometimes trading off some of that flexibility, freedom to get that connection and belonging. If it's fair to frame those in some ways as trade offs.

[00:11:28] Dominic Price: Yeah. I think the thing you've landed on there and this is where the narrative has frustrated me recently. The narrative which is binary. You are a work from home person or an office person, you're one or the other. And that just drives me insane, you're not. You have different needs at different times or in different environments that satisfy those needs.

The other one is the use of the word hybrid. I want to delete that word from vocabulary right now, because it's used in a way that just blurs things together and you're like ... I saw an article the other day, 78% of the teams will be hybrid teams in the future. I'm like, "What does that even mean?" It doesn't mean anything. If you actually click through on that and go, "What does it really mean?" What it means is you are always going to have a distributed team. How do you build that sense of belonging?

If you're in a distributed team as a leader, you have a new challenge. You still need to build that sense of belonging, whether you're in the office or not. How do you do it when you've got this distributed team. And it might just be distributed within the US or a state. It could be distributed across the world. Different customs, cultures and time zones. Suddenly that role of the leader is exponentially increased, right? It's not moving tasks around. It's not task management. You're leading people that are inherently different and diverse and want inclusion. You're like, "Oh, that's a completely different ask than we had before." When we frame it as going, if you accept that everyone's distributed, how do we then find the ways of building high fidelity stuff? So that the stuff you mentioned, that sense of belonging, you are spinning up a brand new team. You are solving a complex, gnarly problem.

I think it might be worth the squeeze to actually fly everyone in. The ROI is there to fly everyone in, let's do that together. Let's build that bond. I'm a firm believer that you build relationships in person, that you can then maintain online. If you start that same team in a purely virtual environment, the chances are, it's a lower fidelity connection. It's survivable, but it's lower fidelity. As you come up against obstacles, you're not going to have those social norms.

I liken it to back in the day, I used to do a lot of conference calls. I was a consultant back in the early 2000s and I'd be on these conference calls all times of night. And I always hated the other people on the end of a conference call, then you'd meet them and you're like, "Oh, they're actually really nice in person." And I'm like, "It was just that medium didn't lend itself to a meaningful conversation. So how do I build that connection?"

And so I think we can do that by saying, "What are the moments of high fidelity, high impact stuff, where we want to be really intentful and collaborate on purpose?" Whether we do that synchronously virtually or synchronously in person, that's one way. And then what's the rest of the work and how can that happen either synchronously online or asynchronously? And when we do it by task, when we do it by the nature of the work you're doing, the job to be done, I think we can break it down really effectively.

[00:13:59] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. So how does a guy who graduates with a degree in accounting and who started his career doing IT, IT ops discover a passion for work and thinking about the future of work?

[00:14:10] Dominic Price: I think I've always been an opportunist in my career. I've never had a career plan. There's nowhere written down is that I'd like to join a tech startup based out of Australia, but with two co-founders privately listed and become a work futurist, that was never written on a piece of paper nor should it be. Essentially the way I looked at it was, I've been really fortunate to have great mentors throughout my career, very different times.

And if I'm brutally honest, I don't think I really ever call them mentors. Sometimes they were friends or drinking buddies or just connection. It doesn't matter what you call them, but they were people who just got under the surface and invested in me in a way that made me go, "Hmm, maybe there is a different way of doing this or maybe there is a different path."

And that happened both at Deloitte, in my time there. And went off doing accounting and consulting. It's happened in other roles and it's happened within my career at Atlassian. I started at Atlassian running projects and program management. And when I joined Atlassian we're about 700 people, we're up at about 8,000 people now. But as we started to scale, my boss at the time sat me down and said, "I need someone to go and build our way of working for tomorrow that we don't know we need yet." And I was like, "Oh, that sounds exciting." Because that's like unknown. It's more about ways of working in humans and humans fascinate me. And so I was like, "I'll dabble with that."

We actually over time morphed that program management role from just delivery to say, "How do we prevent bad things happening in the future by building scale into everything that we do?" So a quick example, the year that I joined Atlassian, the previous year we'd hired 35 engineers. And at the end of year party, there was indoor fireworks and celebrations. We were like, "We hired 35 engineers." And I was like, "Wow." And I'm like, "That is awesome. What's the goal for this year?" They're like, "A hundred."

I thought, okay, well that won't work. You can't do hundred the same way you did 35. So we're going to have to change the way we do it. And so is that balancing access saying, "I don't want to piss on anyone's flames and tell you that last year wasn't good, last year was great. But what we did last year, we can't copy and paste. We've got to dial it up. We've got to change it because it won't scale. You can't just 3X something without throwing bodies on it. So let's work out how we do it differently."

We're now hiring 600 plus people a quarter. Each time we fundamentally change how we hire, but the overarching principle is still the same, we just had to re mechanize it, reassess it. And a lot of it is how we work. And so my role there sort of evolved. And then eventually someone said, "Hang on, we're doing this for Atlassian, which is great. Do our customers need this?" And so the opportunistic nature came up to go, "Hang on. If one of our values is don't bleep the customer and we are doing all this good stuff around changing our ways of working. And we're looking to organizations who are like, 'We're struggling with that.' We owe it to our intellectual honesty. Our mission is to unless the potential of teams. We need to get out there and share some of these stories."

And so it's just evolved over time, which I've been happy to take the leap of faith on. I know a lot of people have these last strict career plans and three year goals and five year goals. I'm like, "I'm going to see what the world is throwing out there. And I'm going to find a way of morphing my way around it and eventually it'll work out, but there is a lot of leap of faith in there."

[00:17:06] Jesse Purewal: That boss who sat you down and said, "You know what, let's have a go at what's going to work in the future." Clearly that person saw something in you about either agility and your intellectual model or the desire to just move kind of fast and try some experiments. What things do you recognize about your own mind and the way that it works that makes you go, "Oh, heck yeah, I'm up for that journey."

[00:17:28] Dominic Price: If I think more recently on that, there's a few traits that have come out where they're normally quite confronting, but you're like, "Yeah, that's that's me." One is the thankless task. There's a weird thing happens just inside my ears where I pick up on something, someone going, "Ah, yeah, I don't think that can be done." And I'm like, "Get out of my way. Watch me." If someone's like, "This is quite straightforward." I'm like, "I'll give that to someone else."

Straightforward feels boring, but the thankless task or the impossible task that sort of I was like, "I'm not sure we can do that. I think it's a good idea, but I don't think it's possible." I'm like, "Literally get out of my way and watch. Because I will do whatever it takes, I will get the right people around and tweak and push at the edges." And the experimental mindset, I didn't realize that was an important part of my schema until recently, but I've very much got this startup mentality of what can we do with what we've got and let's be scrappy and let's experiment and learn. I am absolutely addicted to learning way more than I am to delivery. So I'm very much a starter, I'm not a great finisher.

And thankfully I've worked with great people around Atlassian and in my career who have acknowledged that and gone, "We will surround you by people that are great finishes because you are not that person." Do not ever get me to finish a project, but you want me to spark one that's about to die or provoke one that really needs a kick in the ass, that's me. I will elevate that and then get me out of there because I'm not going to finish it. I'm going to start tweaking and fiddling with new things.

The real one that got me probably in the last few years, just as I've started to, I don't know if it's age or whatever, just started to reflect a little bit more is what actually motivates me. Because that was a question. And it came up when I was starting to look at purpose. Instead of looking at roles and career progression, I was like, "What's my purpose?" And so I started to look at some of the intrinsic motivators, but the things that when you really scratch the surface, some stuff, I was like, "Money's not a motivator. That for me is a hygiene factor. I'm a basic lad from the North of England. If I can afford a holiday back to the UK from Australia and I can keep my car on the road and feed me and my girlfriend, then everything else is luxury after that." I'm quite a basic chap.

And then one day I sat there and I got a ping on LinkedIn from this guy who's like, "I attended one of your sessions last year and I had a chat with you afterwards and here's the impact you had on me. Here's the things I went and tried. Here's what I learned. Here's what I've done. Here's how I've changed my career. Here's how much happier I am. And here's what I've done off the back of that."

And I just sat there and I was like, "Ah, that's it." That's the reason I do what I do. It's not for the immediate gratification on the day, it's to know that I've had a positive impact on someone's life somewhere to do one thing better, not to be the best because I don't believe in the best, but to do one thing better, to build a momentum, to then do one more thing better. If we all sign up to do one more thing better, eventually we'll create greatness. When I experience that, that's the thing that gives me this massive virtual hug of reassurance to go, "You know what? It's worth it. Carry on pounding the pavement and talking about things that might be uncomfortable because we're making progress."

[00:20:25] Jesse Purewal: I think also a willingness and an ability to be vulnerable. And I think a lot of people probably got to experience this. If they follow you as they watched the talk that you gave at TEDx in Sydney in 2020, which I know was a life goal of yours. You were really vulnerable, not just on a dimension about yourself, but bringing in your sister into it, talking about the struggle. And ultimately she succumbed to cancer. You had your own diagnosis you were wrestling with.

And there was a lot that you poured into that to make it resonate deeply with the individuals in the room and everybody watching around the world. I mean, I would offer from my vantage point, you have a willingness to not just be vulnerable so that it's like, "Hey, let's all be vulnerable." But taking it to a place where people can then relate and then go, "Oh, he's making a point off of the back of that vulnerability." And then they're saying, just like that example you gave from the LinkedIn message like, oh, now I understand, okay, parallels between me and him. And then it becomes almost this conversation with you, even though they didn't talk directly to you.

[00:21:24] Dominic Price: Yeah. It felt like a one-on-one conversation. It's a funny one to see this, just a comment I want to add there. It's just a bit of context for people, so I do a fair bit of public speaking. And one of the challenges I've had with public speaking, I actually genuinely love it and thrive it, so I can't help other people with public speaking because I've never hated it to learn how to love it. I just genuinely enjoy getting on stage.

But in doing that, I've met so many authors, thought leaders, people that I would've put on a pedestal before, and then I've met them backstage and gone, "Ah, you're just a character. That's not you. The person that wrote the book must be someone else because you are not authentic." And then literally the minute the camera turns on, they're on and they do that performance. And then you see them afterwards and you're like, "No." And it's not all the time. There's lots of people I've met that are truly authentic, they're the exact same person, [inaudible] , Esther Perel, the whole of people that I'm like, "You're just the exact same person off stage as you are on stage."

But I had a fascinating experience the other week when I was talking to someone before I was doing an event with them and then she's like, "I feel like I met you in one of your events. You're the exact same person now as you were when I've seen your presentations." And I was like, "Yeah." In my mind I'm like, "What's the alternative?" And I'd forgotten that there is absolutely a choice there. And I think we all make that choice every day. Do I turn up the authentic version of me and not apologize? Not be the wild wild West and in people's Facebook, but do I know who I am and what my identity is? And can I own that? And if that's a yes, own it. And if it's a no, work out why you're wearing a mask. And we all do at different points of the day, I do, you do, we all do where we wear a mask for whatever protection, whatever reason.

But what's the mask I'm wearing and why am I wearing it? And I think that was something that a mentor did to me a while ago, they were like, "I've seen that version of you, that version and that version, which one's the real you? And I was like, "Damn." That cut really deep. And I was like, "I don't want different versions." And so I think that's an option for all of us, just to ask the question, why are we wearing the mask and what are we wearing it for? And what's the scenario where we're going to be comfortable to take it off?

[00:23:14] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. You talk about public speaking being a natural talent or a gift that you feel you have. I would add to that list of writing. I think you write concisely and yet pragmatically and beautifully about a lot of things with respect to the future of work. One of the things that deeply resonated with me as a reader was a piece that you wrote a little while back about, if you're somebody seeking to make a change in your career or have a new experience at work, don't forget the option of staying where you are and making change happen from the inside. Why do you think people default to the complete change of scenery versus tending the garden? And what do you think is lost if they don't reflect on how do I better the current circumstance?

[00:23:54] Dominic Price: Esther Perel talks about this really well in terms of relationships. If something's going wrong in a relationship, do you run to the next one? Do you run to or do you run away from? And I think in the work context and I've had this in my career before where you're like, "I'm not happy where I am, the grass is definitely greener on the other side, I've seen this company's adverts. I've seen the videos. It's going to be awesome."

And then you get in there and you're like, "Oh, the same thing's happening." And then after doing that a number of times you're like, "Oh, maybe it's me." It's funny you mention it because the guy who pinged me on LinkedIn, that was his story. He was like, "I need to leave this place. It's toxic." And he gave me all these reasons why. And all I said to him was, what have you done about that? And he just froze.

He's like, "Well, nothing is toxic." And I was like, "Was it toxic when you arrived?" What have you done to stop it being toxic? And if the answer's nothing, if I asked you that question in an interview, I'm never going to give you a job. If you believe that you are a passenger, I don't hire passengers. I hire people that are active. Even if you get it wrong, if you tried and got it wrong, you're going to get a gold star. If you stood by and watched it go wrong and commented on why it went wrong, you ain't going to get employed anywhere fun. No startup is going to hire you. So what's stopping you? What is that honest visceral blocker that's stopping you from trying it? Because the human capital you have, the relationship you have, the knowledge, the intellectual wisdom is in that organization.

Your chance of having impact is infinitely higher there than a place where you've never worked before. So just give it a red hot go. And the fascinating one for him was he actually did give it a red hot go for six months. And he is like, "I got to a point where I really had wind in my sails and I knew exactly the change I wanted to make. And I got blocked and blocked and blocked." He said, "The very first interview I went for I got a new job and I'm now in my place and with my people in my zone, but I still got the wind in my sails. I would never have got that job." And maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't, but it was one of those things of going, honestly, you've got this experiment waiting to happen. Worst case scenario, they fire you. You don't want to work there anyway.

We're going through this alleged great resignation, whatever you want to call it of massive job opportunities and labor shortage. If there's ever a time to roll the dice, it's kind of now, it's not that risky to give it a go. But what happens is, and this is the secret that a lot of people don't realize, the most effective way to drive change in an organization right now I believe is role modeling, no other way. If you want sustainable change, meet the leaders who have influence to role model that change.

I've seen it time and time again with successful agile transformation versus unsuccessful, where the leaders are like, "Ah, I'm going to transform as a leader and I'm going to transform my rituals. I'm going to become agile." You're like, "Ah, when you role model that, five people watch you." And so you're successful. And five people see that and before you got it, you've got exponential change. You never had a change program. You never had a rollout plan. There's not a change program manager. You just did it by doing it.

I just love to say to people like, "Give it a go where you are." And the thing that makes me laugh the most is when people go, "The problem is management." You will have heard that. And then the problem is management, I'm like, "Cool, what's your title?" I'm the head of whatever. You are management. They actually saw in the other week at an event I said to them, "The only gift I can give you is the gift of the mirror." If I hold a mirror right now and you have a prolonged hard looking that mirror, what do you see? Because I see a manager, you are management. You are part of the problem and potentially part of the solution.

So you don't need to go to a conference, you don't need a mentor. You don't need a self-help book. You need a mirror, have a long hard look in that mirror at why you do it wrong and then just give it a go at doing it differently. And you are in charge of that, there's no business case, no approval, no capital expenditure, just give it a go. And when you see that, you see those little steps of momentum, it's brilliant.

[00:27:25] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. Kim Scott talks about radical candor, holding up that mirror, where you are challenging someone directly, but caring about them personally, you have radical candor. And when you have radical candor, you can unlock a lot of really insightful and interesting pathways in people in this moment. Let me ask you about this moment, hopes and fears. So we just went through two years of a crazy experiment brought on by the pandemic, as you think about the next two years or even just where we sit in this moment. What are your top hopes for right now? And what are maybe some of your fears?

[00:27:54] Dominic Price: My fear is that we created a whole load of more equality and inadvertently created a whole lot more equality for minority groups and maybe the less abled, maybe the people that can't afford to live in metropolitan cities or those with care responsibilities, whatever the situation that makes someone not compatible with Monday to Friday 9:00 to 5:00.

But me and you know they've got an amazing brain and an awesome heart. I'm not hiring people for manual work. I'm hiring people for their brain and for their heart. They happen to transmit it through their hands, but their hands are less important. Well, those people exist everywhere. And I think we saw that, without hiring through the pandemic, we doubled in size in the 18 months of the pandemic and we were hiring people all over the world and we're like, "We would never have hired those people before. And they're great people. They bring this diversity, this rich tapestry of doing things differently. That is huge. That is such a massive payback.

There's reports [inaudible] of how much diversity pays back in terms of top line, bottom line, your innovation and diversity, inclusion, I'm sold on. So you're like, "Cool. We got it for free." And now we're about to swing the pendulum back and go, "You've got to come back into the office." Even if it's one day, three days, five days, it doesn't matter. You've got to come back. Suddenly we're anchoring that person in a physical place when I don't think we need to. And by anchoring them, we lose them.

And if we lose them from that, I think that's just a terrible shame because the voices that we keep, which are probably essentially middle-aged comfortable conservative white guys like me and you, the voices we keep, we already hear from each other a lot. The voices we end up missing were like, wow, they were just dissenters, they were doing it differently anyway. They're the voices we have to bring in. And I'm really worried that we're going to mute the very people that we need to be hearing from.

And so I think if we take that step back and go, "Okay, prime opportunity, we've come out of this weird experience, what work that we want to keep, what didn't work that we want to get rid of and what are the new things, the new constructs we want to hold to be true. And let's build a modern organization." There's a lot of narrative getting carried away with the future. And is it the Metaverse? And is it this? And is it 5G? I'm bored of it, mate.

I think the reality is let's build a good modern organization. We can skate into the future in the future. But right now let's as leaders sign up for building a modern organization where our people can thrive, where they are engaged, where they do have purpose, where we have a clear mission, where we're delighting our customers and we know it, and we've got that nimbleness and agility and we can see our future markets and we're innovating and creating and we're doing social good.

And that is a hope that I have right now that we use this false trigger of the last two years to go, "You know what? It was due and upheaval. Work wasn't great at the start of 2020. So it was always due and upheaval, let's take this opportunity to do it. Let's redraw it, not redraw the whole thing, but let's just redraw the constructs and really challenge how we think about this." And I think you'll already see this, companies doing that and they're just going to get the edge and it might only be a 1% edge, but it'll be an edge that makes a difference.

[00:30:40] Jesse Purewal: How important is it for a person's personal purpose and a company's purpose or ambition to intersect in a world where you can now see so much potentially heterogeneity in the employee experience, whether you get to stay where you want to work, or whether you have to go to a different place to work, whether you have certain strictures or not, whether you have a certain team or not, the number of variables now is so open.

And so on one hand I'm like, "Oh, well, then you got to have a bull's eye to purpose." If my purpose is aligned with the company's going, that should cut through the clutter. But on the other hand, that's maybe a privileged thing to say, like maybe actually I just need to minimize my commute so that now I can keep my family at the center. We've talked a lot in the brand world about purpose, has purpose had its day? Does it now get eclipsed by all of these other things in the alchemy or it's still going to stay of the utmost importance as people look to what's next?

[00:31:36] Dominic Price: I like the thread there. Because I think it's right and wrong. I think purpose is as important as it's ever been, if not more important. But I think maybe we've been doing it wrong. I had a fascinating chat with Dan Pink about this last year and he educated me about purpose, big P and little P. And he is like, "We've talked so much about purpose big P, which is you put the cape on, I'm saving the world and I'm going to climb it and everything." And you're like, "We can't all sign up for that." That doesn't feel achievable for us, therefore it's actually demoralizing. You sign up for that and you're never going to get there. You end up in a worse position. So then what's my purpose, what's the small P purpose and do they need to be intrinsically connected or do they just need to not be violently opposed?

And I've come to the sensation that as long as they're not violently opposed, we're good. But I think what I'm seeing right now is personalized purpose. So this is what you just talked about, if my living environment is such that the purpose for me is putting food on the table. And Jesse, your offer to me is we've got ping pong tables in the office and we'll give you a meal if you work till late at night, I'm like, "That's the opposite of what I want." I don't want distractions at work. I want to be so efficient at work and paid okay, so that I can feed my family.

And so actually the gift that you've given me is having the opposite effect. And so this is when we come back to the neuroscience of it and understanding belonging and purpose and psychological safety and the things that bring us together. If you give me a delighter as a motivator, but you've not satisfied my basic needs, you're just annoying me. What that means is I can't guess what your purpose is. In fact, if I do, all I do is project my purpose onto yours.

And I think one of the things I've seen in the pandemic that's probably frustrated me is people guessing what other people's needs are or even worse, just making statements. I was working with a leader recently, they're like, "The people I worry about is the graduates, what they need enlisted out these things." And I'm like, "Oh, is that what they said?" He's like, "No, but I was a graduate once and that's what I needed. I was like, "No offense, mate, but that was 35 years ago. But the world's changed quite a bit in those 35 years."

So instead of telling them what you think they want, and this isn't some weird plug for Qualtrics, but the technology that's available right now to listen to what people actually want is there. So why aren't we listening more? I think the power of listening has been lost on so many leaders who swapped it for a second guessing, but if we go and listen, I think we can get some real pills of wisdom. And then we focus our efforts on the really meaningful change. And that's when you connect your purpose to their purpose, not in this, everyone gets an individual purpose thing, but in let's aggregate and understand what the collective needs are of our organization, where are there underrepresented groups and how can we serve and delight them?

And they may be different to how we serve and delight our other groups, doing that makes sense. It's a great investment, but I think there's one way of doing it for all or even worse, just telling people what they want and not using great tools out there that enable them to instead listen to what people want is a misstep.

[00:34:26] Jesse Purewal: Purpose happens to be one of the four elements of what you have labeled the personal moral inventory. Can you just talk a little bit about how you arrived at the four kind of dimensions there and how you think about its ability to coach people through thinking about what they're looking for?

[00:34:42] Dominic Price: Yeah. So a bit of the context for people, I was in two weeks of quarantine, having had my own rush with mortality, with my own cancer diagnosis, having my sister pass away, unfortunately being able to visit her in the UK before she passed away. And then find myself alone, locked in a hotel room for 14 days. And thinking that experience is either going to send me on a downward spiral or an upwards one.

And the only person that decides if I go up or down is me. So how do I not let this experience bury me? So I'm like, okay, I knew I needed some kind of framework or scoring system and I didn't know what it was, but niggling at the back of my mind was a reflection on the past four or five years when I had just flogged myself for the purpose of work, everything was about being more productive, more profitable. And it's all about career growth and I'm like, "I wonder what trade offs I've made." I don't think I've made them consciously, but I wonder what trade offs I've made.

And when I did that, I ended up looking back based on the world of finance and also the world of military, the four Ps, productivity and profit is number one. There's people, the impact that you have on yourself and the impact you have on the people around you and how you care for those people, your community, your friends, your family, the people in a circle that make you who you are. There's this idea of planet. What impact am I having on the environment around me? Am I leaving the planet in a better place than I found it? And then the fourth P was purpose. Why do I do what I do? And I sat there with a cup of tea one day in quarantine. And I'm like, "Why do I do what I do?"

And then that progressed to a deeper conversation again with myself, which was, what's the legacy I want to leave behind? What's the point of all this? Because if I get to a certain point and I look back and I'm like, "Well, I was busy and I did stuff." That's not going to give me a smile. What is the impact? And it's not saving the world. I don't need to be a superhero. Therefore, how can I understand what impact I can have? And then how do I build myself to actually go and have a chance of having that impact?

It was a rough conversation because purpose isn't something I truly sort of tapped on before. And the hard thing there was realizing that my short term purpose I've had before around visiting my sister, looking after her and her family and stuff, that had all gone. And then my secondary purpose, which was standing on stage, that's what gave me that buzz and made me feel alive. That was gone, because the pandemic had hit.

And I'm like the two things that fed me, that fed my energy, that fed my purpose, have both just disappeared. And one of them definitely won't return. And the other one, I don't know when it's going to return, and I don't want stop to shoot them, I want them back, I want to go back in time and I want that. I enjoyed that adrenaline. I enjoyed that kick. I enjoyed that moment. Why can't I hit rewind and go back? And yet, well I can't. Okay. I can only go forward. So then what am I going to do to create that forward momentum?

And I still assess myself using the personal moral inventory probably every six months or so, just as a refresher, just to come up for air and look at where I'm investing. And every time I've got adjustments to make, not criticisms of myself, but little habits slip in and good habits have stuck around. But it's just that constant reassessment of going, "What's my portfolio of how I invest in me, because I am the most important person. And then how do I do that to have a positive impact on those around me? Whether it be relationships, the planet, work, which is just one component of why we exist and then our meta level purpose."

[00:37:56] Jesse Purewal: We'll link to in the show notes so that everybody can see the framework and understand it and interact with it. But what was really educational to me as I watched you present it for the first time when you did the TED Talk was my mind went of course to the net. And before I could finish the calculation, you're like, "I know where your heads are going." The point is not to net it out. The things that you do to harm the planet are not offset by the fact that you're making more or less money. And so it was just a really interesting way to go like, don't be tempted to make it all square. Use it as a tool for reflection.

[00:38:30] Dominic Price: It's a good point. You're right there, Jesse. And that's what prompted the conversation of going, "This is about balance." It's not about that nets off with that therefore I'm all right and I can walk away. It's about us taking ownership and accountability, which is how do we choose to build our balance. And one of the things people will see if they watch, I purposely don't define what the scores mean because it's very different for everyone. Some people who are in, as you mentioned before, if my focus right now is family and putting food on the table, maybe I'm making sacrifices on planet and purpose. I'm going to sacrifice my purpose because I'm going to work with someone that pays me more. Because I have to put food on the table. You're like, "Okay. Make that a conscious trade off."

And that way you're not going to feel guilty because you've done it on purpose. So you're like, "Cool." And therefore you have got a purpose. Your purpose is to feed your family. Inadvertently you've given yourself that purpose, but maybe you're not living your pay. Maybe you want to be an environmentalist, but that can't help you feed your family. So you've made the trade off decision. But doing that consciously and then understanding when do you gift yourself? Where do you invest in yourself? Either in career, your products profit, or certainly in people space.

One of the popular bits of feedback I got from a whole cohort of people was like when I scored myself on the people thing, I was going to score myself a plus one, because here's all the things I do for other people. And then in my description I say, "The first person you need to look after is yourself. What are you doing for your own physical and mental health?" And they were like, "Yeah, I realized I wasn't doing anything, so actually I became a minus one."

And a lot of their friends were like, "No, but you do so much for us." They're like, "Yeah, but I've not done anything for myself." I'm like, "Cool, that's a rebalance." Because if you are the savior that's doing everything for everyone else, you are going to burn out. You can't be the savior anymore. So you have to look after yourself at some point. And so it's prompted some fascinating conversations with people.

[00:40:13] Jesse Purewal: Dom, what would people be surprised to know about what it takes to prepare for and successfully deliver a Ted Talk?

[00:40:20] Dominic Price: It's a weird one for me. I imagine everyone says this, but everyone feels like it's a unique experience. I think the thing for me is because it had been a sort of goal of mine for a while. And I knew the people at TEDx in Sydney, I'd interfaced with them at different events before, we'd spoken probably three years before it came around. And then they were like, "This year's theme is raw. And Fanella who was the curator, she's like, "As soon as we started on the theme and it was rawness, slightly we thought of you." And I was like, "Cool."

And the weirdest thing was to go, I'm only going to do one Ted Talk, which is weird. Because I'm like, I do thousands of talks, but I'm only going to do one Ted Talk. So you're like, wow, that's just lifted the bar. This is one moment. And so I had this fascinating trade off going on in my head, which is the thing that people would expect me to deliver on is the future of work. That's my stick, that's what I talk about, it's where I'm the most comfortable, the most confident. I can tell my jokes, I already have the story in my head.

And I actually said to Fanella, "If you told me that it was today and I had to come and perform, I'm ready." And she's like, "Well, that's not the right talk then." And I was like, "I knew you were going to say that." And so it was then that chance and you talk about the vulnerability of sitting down with a few people and saying, "Hey, here's what I actually want to talk about, but is that okay?"

And so I had a colleague of mine, Louise, in our comms team, a good friend as well. And I talked to one I wanted to talk about and she's like, "That." Everything that we ideated with, we had a whole other people contributing. She's like, "We can do that anywhere else. But that thing you just said, that only is ever going to exist on the TEDx stage." I think what surprised people is I was in a weird way almost for choice of topics, but it's like, how do you find the topic? And the real bar was authenticity, vulnerability like this one off moment. The hard part of the decision for me, my dream of TEDx was having seen it in the Sydney Opera House and in other sort of big venues in and around Sydney, it's this grand performance.

And I know the talks I've seen live, ones I've seen on video and the camera turned around and you see all the faces and the tears and the emotion. That's what I wanted. That's what I was hungry for. And they're like, because of the pandemic, there's a maximum of 20 people in the room. And I was like, "Oh." And so they gave me an option, you can delay till next year. We'll guarantee you a space for next year, assume the pandemic's gone and it might be in person. So the decision I had to make was do I go in the moment and miss what I saw as part of the prize, which has been this room and the adrenaline excitement of just 20 people in the room versus 20,000. Or do I wait a year and potentially lose the point of the story?

Because I couldn't have told that story a year later, it's not the same story. It's not authentic anymore. And so that was one whereby do some big decisions. And then the final decision that I think would surprise people. I made a promise to Louise, my comms person, a few other people, and a friend of mine who helps with my speaker bookings. And I was like, "I will never retell that story in full." So if anyone, for any fee asks me to come and redo that Ted Talk for their company or their leaders or their whatever, and deliver that as is, I will never do it again, because to do that authentically it's on that stage, on that day with me opening up. And I can't just retell that story as it is because it's not a packaged keynote. It's me standing on stage just being me. I'm going to do that in that moment and I'm not going to do it again. I'll do all the vulnerability again, but I'm not going to retell that story for profit, because then it loses the whole point.

[00:43:43] Jesse Purewal: Well, it's also a testament to the degree to which you have respect and admiration for the energy and the gestalt of Ted and all the people that have proverbially and literally come before you there, where it's you're honoring that, not just in the 15 minutes you are on the stage, but in perpetuity. And I think that's really powerful. That's a really neat testament to what Ted has built and what you have built that we talked about shared interest, shared passion before. It's like there's a real shared interest between what Ted is trying to build and the kind of authenticity that you bring. I think that's pretty cool. Well, Don Price, it's been fun as always, great to be a dialogue partner with you again, and to spend some time with you. You're still on that list of like, we got to do the IRL.

[00:44:26] Dominic Price: We will find a placement because our first opportunity for in real life was probably Qualtrics, it was meant to be what? March or April, 2020, that got canned. And I was going to fly out there and do it all. And then the pandemic hit, went and ruined all that. But I still plan to come out to some point, because I think there's a great chance. Those conversations create new moments. And that's what I'd encourage everyone to go and do. Whether it be in asynchronous or in-person or virtual conference, find an intersection where you're like, "What can we do together? What's just one thing we can work on that actually benefits everyone?" I think the more we do that, the more we build that momentum.

[00:44:58] Jesse Purewal: Oh, I love it. Momentum and connectivity and getting to a sense of connection. Dom, thanks. It's been a pleasure. Appreciate your time, your energy, your wisdom. We'll see you soon.

[00:45:08] Dominic Price: Thank you. Cheers Jesse.

[00:45:09] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review, and tell a friend. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, and our head of social media, Chelsea Hunersen. From Studio Pod Media in San Francisco, our show coordinator is Nicole Genova. Editing and music are by producer, Sterling Shore, and executive producer, Katie Sunku Wood, with sound engineering by Ryan Crowther. At Vayner Talent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hannah Park, and Yvonna Lynn provide publicity and promotional support. The show’s designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Our website is by Gregory Hedon. Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

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