Why Our Tech Obsession Might Be a Work Obsession

So hey, Nir, we are. I suppose we should start the conversation talking about how we met, but for the sake of people who might have no idea who we are, we should probably talk about what we do first. We both have very similar line of work, but from two different industries. Why don't we talk a little bit about your line of work and then we'll. So I mean, it tangents with mine a lot too.

Sure. So yeah, I'll give my quick introduction here. So I used to work in the gaming and advertising space. And my last company after it was acquired, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And I had this hypothesis that in the future companies that could form habits would be the ones that would succeed. And so I was looking for a guidebook on how to build habit forming products and I didn't find any such guidebook. So that's why I wrote this guy. I wrote Hooked a few years ago and I've been since consulting and speaking and teaching about the basic principles around how to build habit forming technologies.

Yeah. And you know, my line of work has been looking at essentially the psychology around performance, whether that's creative performance, workplace performance, individual behavior, et cetera. And it's again been that idea that what are the cues around our environment that determine our behavior? Right. So this is what attracted me when I read Hooked. It was. It's not normally my line of work. I mean, I kind of thought of it as a marketing type concept, et cetera. And I tend to deal with performance and human behavior and motivational issues. But they're so related because so much of our behavior is actually affected by the system that was designed around us and put us into.

Right, exactly. Absolutely. And so my focus is really around how the products do that. It's interesting to read your stuff around how organizations do that. But in either case it's. It's a little bit surprising to most people because I think most people have this conception that we all are rational beings who do things through cost benefit analysis. And of course we do things that are good for us and we think things through. And of course, studying consumer behavior and behavioral economics shows us that oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes that is not necessarily the case that people do things simply because of how their environments are shaped.

Yeah, I mean, it goes back to the old. What is the old rule about? We tend to think everybody was rational, making homo economicus decisions. But the old rule is essentially that behavior is a function of personality and the environment. You can't change personality, but you can dramatically change the environment. And that's what, you know, affects a lot of different things. On the product side, it's a lot of how does the design of the product go into forming habits, making it sort of addictive? On the workplace behavior side, it's, it's, how do you design a workplace? How do you design a management system, a motivational system that really gets the right behavior out of those personalities? That environment piece is a huge factor.

Yeah. Yeah. So question for you. So a lot of times when I get companies that call me up and they say, hey, we want to make our product habit forming, about half the time I say, sorry, you don't meet the test, your product will never become a habit. And, and there are a list of criteria around what even has a potential to become a habit forming product. Now that doesn't mean they need to go out of business. There's lots of businesses that are very successful without forming habits. What I specialize is the kind of companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Google and Snapchat, these companies that at their core, if they don't form habits, they go out of business. That's kind of my specialty. But half the companies, I say, look, you're not going to become a habit forming product. You need to go figure out how to build more of a standard type model, which is lifetime value of your customer minus cost of acquisition, that's your profit and that's kind of more standard company. And so my question for you is, do you turn down some companies? I mean, do you look at a company and say, look, your workplace, it just ain't going to be engaging. Right. Like you're just not going to get high performance from people. This is just a standard, run of the mill, do your job, go home kind of gig. Or do you think every company has the potential to become a more engaging workplace?

Yes. No. So I mean my, you know, my concern is not necessarily, you know, it's interesting that you can look at it from a. Okay, here's the checklist. These are things that have potential to be habit forming. For me it's more about the type of work, if that makes sense. Right. So there are definitely certain types of work that like, I'm sorry, are never going to be the type of thing that kids wake up at seven years old and dream about growing up to be one day. Right. So there is the type of work issue. But what's amazing to me, what's never ceased to amaze me, is that even inside of that you can find companies that do things to build sort of the right workplace. Right. So to give you an idea from the organizational behavior standpoint, we sort of have this boogeyman, if we will. The father of scientific management is a guy named Frederick Taylor. And he came up with all of these ideas about how do you manage a factory, how do you manage people who have to do the same repetitive task over and over again. And he came up with a bunch of ideas that really, really did kind of kickstart the industrial revolution, except that most people don't do that industrial type of work anymore. So he's sort of Taylorism has become this kind of boogeyman that we look at, well, okay, boring, dull, repetitive jobs. Those are ones that, okay, yeah, scientific measurement still works, but over here we need to use lots of autonomy and we need to use lots of great. All of these things that we talk about when we talk about a great workplace. The thing that amazes me is that there are factories, there are companies where people are still giving their people autonomy, giving them a sense of being connected to a whole, etc. Places where Taylor would have done great, where the modern ideas still sort of work. Right? So the easy thing to do is talk about the type of work. Is it industrial work versus knowledge work? But man, honestly, even in the industrial work setting, there are places that are creating a communal feeling that are giving more autonomy and more empowerment over to the individual employee that are creating great workplaces. It's really quite fascinating.

I guess the workplace always has the advantage of, worst case scenario, you work with people. Hopefully, I guess not every workplace. In a lot of workplaces, you're working with somebody and at least other people have the ability to form tribes, to form communities, to care about each other, to build relationships. And so even if the job itself sucks, maybe the saving grace is that the people care about you and you care about them.

Right? Or that we take responsibility for each other.

Right.

Or that we, you know, used to be in the Taylor days, that there was sort of labor and then there was management. And management's job was to tell labor what to do. But the idea that we're all in it together and we collectively as a group will figure it out. These, these are, they're not new concepts because like you said, they go back to the idea of at the end of the day it's just people, but they're concepts that are kind of. What's funny to me is they're kind of new in the world of management, but they shouldn't be because they existed before there was this sort of management tier. But you're right. At the end of the day, it's just people. One of the things I actually joke about a lot of times with my students in business school is we talk about how often there are Excel spreadsheets to solve just about every problem, but all they really do is point out where the problem is. And at the end of the day, the problem's with people.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And how much do you think is autonomy? I mean, you think about the Hawthorne effect, where everything that's supposed to improve workplace productivity somehow does, right? Between changing the light bulbs or telling folks we're going to try program A or program B, somehow, miraculously, every intervention works. And so this Hawthorne effect, maybe there's some buzz in the psychology community. Maybe the Hawthorne effect is just that people will perform at a higher level when they feel like they're being watched, like they feel like they have more control over the situation. Maybe it's just a sense of autonomy, makes me enjoy my work more. What do you think about that?

So there's a couple different things to break down in there. So the Hawthorne effect is an interesting one. Elton Mayo, Hawthorne Electric Company. Fascinating study that no one can replicate, which, by the way, should give us a ton of pause. But the idea was that, like you said, we change this variable, productivity goes up. We change it to the opposite, and productivity still goes up. It really speaks to the idea that in human motivation, and this comes from the work of Edward Deasi and Richard Ryan. Our mutual friend Daniel Pink did a great job sort of summarizing their work and drive. Autonomy is a huge factor, but so is connectedness, and so is sort of that. That sense of being able to master something. Right. So in the Hawthorne effect, I think it's really a matter of connectedness. I think what really separates out, okay, these people were varying a bunch of different things, and productivity keeps going up. It's because they felt like you were paying attention, they felt like you cared. They felt like there was a connection there. Right. Some of that is explained by giving those people autonomy over saying it. But a lot of it is just this idea that, again, you actually listen to us, you care about us. You know, this is the fascinating thing about workplaces so often is that we give these kind of feedback surveys out to employees, and we say, or even to customers. Right within Mark, from a marketing perspective, we say we want to hear from you. Well, that only works if you then say, okay, we've heard from you, and here's how we're changing. But if you just take the survey, take the thing in, make the changes and don't signal that you've made any.

So it's not exactly autonomy, it's control.

It's control and it's connectedness. It's a feeling that we are. We're listening to each other, we're connected and we're making changes based on what you need. Yeah. So I wouldn't necessarily say it's control, like can you adjust the knob up or down? But it's a feeling that management and the people who are in charge are listening to you and care about you.

Right. It's a feeling of what I do will affect some kind of outcome. I'm not being controlled, I'm exerting some kind of influence.

Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.

Yeah. Very cool.

Yeah. So you know, one. So I have a question for you because one of the things that I see from an organizational standpoint and looking at communication and productivity and what factors affect people's ability to do their best work, it seemed like we were on this trend where the more communication and the more frequent communication we had, the better people could collaborate. And now it seems like we've hit some sort of overload. Something about email and social media and Slack and all of these sort of things, they seem so habit forming because we all got into the habit of it. And now it sort of feels like we need to break some of these habits in order to focus again and do all of that work. If I'm reading your work right, these are natural things that happen because of the product. But also, how do we solve it?

Yeah, beat me. I don't know. I mean, I wrote Hooked about how to build at the point price, how to build these services that we find so compelling, we want to use them every day. Because the problem still is today for most companies making a product or service is that they have something really great, but nobody gives a damn. They have some amazing new technology that they can't get anybody to use. And even the things today that we take as second nature when we think about Slack and Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, these products didn't come to fruition by mistake. I mean, they were the process by which these products were made with the dream, with the hope that, hey, we have something really great here if people would just use it. Now, the byproduct of that is that we live in a world where there are so many great products and services, where there are so many things that are so enticing that sometimes they're hard to put down. And so this is this new age that we're entering. And the miracle of the age we live in is that we live in a world where so much of this is look really good, right? Free and readily accessible. We carry it around with us in our pockets and our cell phones. So in many ways it's a blessing. But as Sophocles said, nothing great enters the life of mortals without a curse. And so this happens with every revolution. The agriculture revolution. Turns out that the agricultural revolution, now for the first time in history, more people die of an excess of calories than a shortage of calories, right? More people die of gluttony and diseases of excess than they do of starvation. First time in human history. That's the problem of agriculture. The industrial revolution gave us, mechanization, gave us. Nobody wants to go back to the age before the steam engine, before we had industrialization. But of course now we have all kinds of problems from human caused pollution. And now we see this with the information age, that the downside of all these products that are so good at connecting us instantly, these products are magical. We're talking right now through Skype across thousands of miles for free. It's an amazing world we live in. But the price of that luxury of these miracles of technology is that attention has become a scarce resource. And so that's the price. And I think that now we are realizing that we are the guinea pig generation, that this generation that had to learn these technologies, people around our age, that maybe we weren't born with this stuff. And to us it's still kind of amazing. Our kids and grandkids won't think it's all that amazing. They'll adapt to it. But for us, it's still very novel and new and we haven't figured out how to put it in its place yet. We haven't figured out this critical question which I ask people to consider, which is, is the technology serving you or are you serving it? And I think that's something we should ask ourselves not only on an individual level, but also on a familial level around the dinner table. And we should ask that question at any organizational level. I can't tell you how many times I come into an organization to do a consulting session or do some work on their product. And three or four people are in the room on their phones while they're paying me my hourly rate to help them. It drives me nuts, by the way. It's always the person who's making the most Money, it's always the highest person, which drives me crazy. I think the solution is, number one, to identify this problem and then to ask this critical question, is this technology serving me or am I serving it? And it's sound. A lot of the stuff that I put in the book, if you take it, if you don't read it carefully, it looks like mind control and it looks like this boogeyman of controlling us through behaviorism. The boogeyman in my industry is B.F. skinner. You have Taylor, I have Skinner, these Skinner boxes that make people press these buttons all day long or press our apps all day long. But the reality is that this stuff isn't coercion. It's not making people do things they don't want to do. It's helping people do things they do want to, to do. And so for the most part, these things are great. But when people say, you know what, this is going a little bit overboard, they can put it in their place. The one asterisk, though, not to make this too long of an answer, but the one asterisk is. I find it much easier for people to figure out how to get their personal technology under control. Meaning when people figure out, hey, Facebook, I'm just using it too much, or this Snapchat thing, this is going overboard. When it comes to their own technology use, most people, there are some corner cases, right? There are people who are actually addicted to technology as opposed to just habituated. Most people can put it away. Just like when we walk by a bakery and we see that the baker's made some amazing desserts, we don't blame the baker and say, oh, my God, why did you make that delicious dessert? It's so hard to resist. Most people, they moderate their behavior. But then the tricky part, this kind of goes into your industry and your line of work is that what they can't put away is the work emails, the work Slack messages, right? It's not that people are addicted to the technologies. People are addicted to work. And the constraints of this 24. 7 work life that we have today is really taking a toll on folks.

See, I was actually gonna ask you that, like, what is it about work email that makes it so addictive? That makes it sort of hook. Because again, like, if you, you know, if you signed up in 2008, 2009, to get a smartphone, right, you didn't think what you were signing up for was taking your work home with you every single night. But yet that's what we sort of started to do. And granted, it happened beyond that like, but it used to be that there was sort of a tier of employee that was so on demand, we had to give them a BlackBerry. In fact, they would even joke and call it a crackberry. Right? And we should have thought of that as a warning, but I guess we didn't, right? And then we thought, oh, cool, it's great because I can watch YouTube on my phone. And then we set up our work email on it and we're addicted to it. It sounds like, though, I mean, do you really think that the reason is actually that we're addicted to working? So even if we did away with work email, we would still have this sense of needing to be working, to be creating value, et cetera, throughout 24.

7 or let's eliminate one of the variables and see what happens. Let's say that tomorrow you win the lottery and you win $20 million. You no longer need to spend a day in the office ever, ever again. Do you still use Slack? Do you still use SharePoint or Salesforce or you name whatever other enterprise software? No, you stop using all that shit because the only reason you're using that stuff is because the boss wants you to. Most people won't say, oh, my God, I can't leave my job because I love using Salesforce so much. Not the software. It's the burdens of the job. It's the pain we feel. My boss is expecting me, My clients are expecting me. We're in a service business. We have to constantly respond all the time, like we're running around like chickens with our heads cut off. That's the problem. That's the real source of the problem. The tools make the problem worse. The fact that we now have the ability to stay connected makes the problem worse. But the fundamental problem, if you take out one of the variables, you'll see that people very quickly will stop using this technology. Had it not been for the workplace. Now that's not the case in the consumer web. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, people generally like to use those products. And so that's a whole other category where the product itself have perhaps a greater influence. I think when it comes to this enterprise, I think a lot of people, if they had $20 million dropped on them, they'd never check that work email account ever again.

I think if I had $20 million, I definitely would still use Facebook, but only to tell everyone about the fact that I won the lottery. No, actually, I mean, I'd probably need to cancel my account because I'd keep getting friend requests from people who Want to borrow my money from the lottery. So you bring up a really good point. And what's interesting about it is when we look at the research into human behavior, into motivation, into what actually creates increases in performance. For example, like my mind goes to the Kay Anders Ericsson study around deliberate practice. Everybody sort of loves to oversimplify it and say it's about 10,000 hours. But one of the other findings that they had was that the people who achieved world class level mastery, they also slept more than your average person. They only worked for about 90 minutes at a time and then they took a break. So we have this trend where we're realizing that maybe less hours working means that the hours you are working are more valuable. This is an interesting trend that I don't, I mean, I don't know how to turn it around in a 24 7. Always on culture where we feel like we're in a Service based business, etc. Does it just take a top down leadership saying, look, go home, be with your wife and kids and spouse and you know, and friends and loved ones, or is there something we can do on an individual level to kind of protect our swim lane so that we only work a certain amount of hours knowing that those hours will be more valuable if they're not 168 hours of the whole week?

Well, this is a great question. I don't have all the answers. I will say that some companies have the luxury to do this while other companies perhaps don't. In certain industries, the tech culture, the cancer that pervades these organizations of this 24 hour culture, they would actually be better served if they dialed back. So for example, there's a great book called sleeping with your cell phone, which was, I think the researcher, her name was Perla, if I'm not mistaken. But she did this study at BCG where she spent a ton of time at the Boston Consultant Group. And she just gave them a simple challenge. She said, what would it take? What would we have to do to give each team member one night off? One night off. Let's say this is Boston Consulting Group, right? They're in the same class as McKinsey and these big fancy top strategy consulting firms. And she kind of said, look, what if a client came to you and said, look, this is a value for our company. How can we give everybody in the company at least one night off a week? A lot of the consultants in this firm said no, that would be impossible. We're in the service business. Our customers expect 24 hour service. We can't do that. We'll lose all kinds of clients. But then she kind of said, well, look, it's a challenge to you. What would it take? How could you design that system? And what was fascinating about her book is that what she discovered in her research, that it really wasn't about the technology, that it was really about the fact that there was not open lines of communication within these consulting teams to raise issues. That it was about this fact that people felt like there was some sacred cow around. This is the culture of the way things always need to be. And we're not allowed to question that culture. But when people started questioning, wait a minute, why do we need to be 24 7? Why can't we have one night off? So you cover me one night when the customer called at 4 in the morning, you're going to be on call so I can have a good night's sleep. They discover, wait a minute.

Yeah.

Not only is that possible, all these other things are possible. So the technology obsession, the cancer of overusing technology, and this more and more and more go, go, go culture was actually just a symptom of this greater problem of, wait a minute. Why is this a place where we can't talk about our problems? And what's interesting is that same exact metaphor we see all over the place. We see it in the family. Why is it that dad watches football every night? Why can't we talk about that? Why can't we have a. Why can't we get together and talk as a family as opposed to watching television? Why is it that teenagers are on the phone all day? Maybe it's not because of technology, maybe because they're running away from something, maybe because there aren't these lines of communication to actually address these issues. It even goes, I think, to the personal level that if one finds that they are truly addicted to technology, again, I don't think it's just a technology. It's an opportunity for personal reflection. What am I escaping from? Why do I have a discomfort with being bored for a few minutes? What's going on that I constantly need to be tied to my cell phone? So the idea I'd like to propose is that this technology is the canary in the coal mine. Whether it's at the organizational level, at the family level, or at the individual level, there's usually something going on.

You know, that's interesting. It actually reminds me of something I've been saying often since Under New Management came out my most recent book. It deals with a bunch of different practices. One of them is banning or severely restricting email. But one of the things I often point out is people ask, well, these are great, but how do we add these onto our culture? How do we add them onto our company? The truth is, they're not actually practices of addition. They're practices of elimination, but they're practices of questioning. They're practices of saying, well, wait a minute. They're practices of people saying, I want to do my best work, but this is standing in the way. And so we need to eliminate them. And in some cases, that's email. In other cases, it's the hiring process. In other cases, it's the performance review system. But it has to deal with that question of the people who are doing the best work. They should have the right to question sacred cows, to kill sacred cows. And yet so often we just assume that's always the way we've done things, so we shouldn't disrupt it.

I couldn't agree with you more. I think that these habits of mine, these ways of doing things just because they've always been done, I mean, that pervades so many different aspects of our life. And whenever I see those, I relish the opportunity to be like, wait a minute, you're right. Why do I do things this way? What can I challenge you? Because there's so many opportunities in life, I think, to challenge those assumptions around why we do things the way we do. The worst thing we can do. The worst thing we can do is to believe that these technologies control us. That the data shows us, Studies have found that when studying addicts, that addicts that believe that a substance controls them, they're powerless against those substances. Guess what? They have the highest relapse rate. Because when we believe, oh my God, email is so addictive, or the world's going to fall apart if I don't check this email and respond back to work by believing that we are powerless. Of course we are. I think that's a great insight that you make of. The real challenge is how do we question, how do we build a culture? Talking back, I think there's something very important there.

Well, you know what's funny is that what I encourage a lot of organizations to do too. So you're saying is that the real challenge is feeling like these things control us. The real challenge of organizations is buying into the lie that you control your people. Right? So we live in an era where so often we feel like, well, they'll do this because they're the employees, etc. But we live in an era where especially talented employees Know that they're. Everyone's essentially a free agent. Everyone has the ability. They're all volunteers. They have the ability to walk out and go and find sort of different jobs. So the assumption from an organization that you can sort of control and modify the behavior is a dangerous assumption. Because the truth is, most people are working for you as long as you're working alongside the things that they want to do. When that breaks down, so do you.

That's a really fantastic insight. It's so prevalent, I think there's this notion, there's this myth that, oh, if I pay you, you'll do whatever I want. But that's slavery, right? Do you really want employees that work for you just so that they don't starve? Is that really why you want them to work for you or nothing? I mean, if you're hiring great people, nobody's going to work for you just because they're afraid of paying their bills. They've got other options if they're good people. So why would you want people who just do whatever you say every time on command just because you pay them?

No, I totally agree. So you see, like I said at the beginning, when we started this whole thing, that on the surface, it looks like we write in two very different spaces. In reality, we're right there kind of in that same space as we close, though. I'm curious. I'm just going to ask you this as a random question. We've been talking a lot about questioning assumptions, changing behaviors, what doesn't control you, etc. Or what's something that you thought maybe controlled you, or maybe that you were addicted to, or an assumption that you had had to be a certain way, that when you questioned it, you ended up changing your behavior. Oh, I'm willing to answer the same question, by the way, but I'm gonna put you on the spot first.

Oh, I gotta go first.

Sure.

You know, my life. My greatest successes in life have come from questioning assumptions. Questioning, like, basic assumptions. Some of those are very personal. I don't want to share all of them, but I've made a lot of changes. I do a lot of weird things. I like to say that being normal is weird. That if you're not weird in some way, like if you don't do something that's really kind of out there, you're not testing assumptions enough. You should do something that when you tell other people, they say, really? That's kind of strange. I mean, even when I was 18, I took a year off between high school and college. This was in 1997. AmeriCorps, the domestic peace Corps, had just been created by the Clinton administration. I think I was the first or second class to ever try it. Everybody told me, that's a stupid idea, you're never going to go back to college. My parents tried to plead me not to do it after their friends said it was a terrible idea taking a year off between high school and college. Now we call it a gap year, but at the time, nobody. It was one of the best things I ever did. My wife, I happened to be Israeli and Jewish and my whole life I was told, oh, you have to marry a nice Jewish girl. My wife's Chinese. I had to test assumptions. I had to try something, break the mold, see what would happen. It caused a lot of friction. It took me a long time to reconcile it. There's a lot of. I mean, I could give you a list of about 30 different things I do that most people think is really weird and crazy. But I think that's where I've had the most growth in my life.

Wow. So yours is actually way more philosophical than mine. I was just gonna say to the point about being addicted to these technologies, but also to the point about like the trend in technology is to have everything all in one. A while back I started realizing maybe there's benefit to having lots of different.

Right.

So for example, I have two devices. I have one that is that work email, the professional author, social media, all of that. And then at the end of the day I switch that out for an iPad that just has like my personal Facebook and then Netflix and entertainment type stuff. But I've also sort of been notorious about the idea of like there doesn't have to be an all in one solution. Sometimes I work on two different computers because one works better than the other, et cetera. So this, it's sort of just that all in one trend. And by the way, as we leave like that two device strategy for dealing with email, this is a great way to test whether or not you're addicted to email or whether it's just the technology. Switch devices and if you still find yourself running to the other one, it's you, it's not the device.

Right? Right. So you put all work emails on one device and personal emails on the other.

Everything work related is on an iPhone. It's right here, right by me as I'm recording. It's got all of my work email, the work and professional social media accounts and all that sort of stuff. And then when I leave my office, we're in my office in the basement. When I go upstairs and I'm done for the day, I switch that out for an iPad that just has Facebook, my personal Facebook, and has Reader and Flipboard and Netflix and those sort of things. It's just a kind of a content consumption device.

So you can't even touch work when you're upstairs. You can't touch work even if you want. Or you could, but it's very difficult.

I could. I'd have to walk back downstairs and go get the device. Exactly. And it's really helped me create a separation between the two mentally and found out that, you know, in my case it really was the ease, the temptation. It wasn't the.

That's a good one. That's a really good one. Let me give you one more actually.

Okay, go for it.

So I was finding a few years ago that every night at around 10 o', clock, 11 o', clock, when I should be going to bed, I was still on the web, right? Still surfing interesting information, reading articles, responding on Facebook, just doing all the fun stuff that we find on the web or emails. And I wasn't getting to bed on time. So I bought myself a $10 outlet timer and I plugged this outlet timer into my router. So every night at 10pm my Internet shuts off. Now, like you, I could turn it back on if I wanted to. You could go back downstairs and get your work phone. But the fact that I have to do extra work to do that. Right. Uses this principle we talked about earlier about shaping the environment, add a little bit more friction and now I have to be mindful of. Wait a minute. Is this actually really what I want to be doing or is this kind of just a waste of time of mindless behavior? So that's been very, very helpful to me as well. But I like this two phone strategy. That's really smart.

Yeah, well, I mean. And try it. And I'm actually gonna run to the hardware store right now and buy an outlet timer to try it on my router. Cause good call there. So for those that I guess are watching or listening or reading, you now have two different challenges around this technology, this communication thing to do. So pick one of them and go for it. And in the meantime, Nir, this is been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for having it with me.

Thank you. I really enjoyed it. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.