How to Make Bureaucracy Work for You

because of this fun little thing called bureaucracy. Yeah, so we work in this world where we have to work with other people and they have competing interests in agendas, and there's a hierarchy and it's something you need to learn to navigate if you want to get your ideas through everyone. Everybody has had this root awakening where you have some great idea or you have a solution to a problem everyone's having, and you think that all you have to do is get a few people to understand

your idea and then it's off to the races. But actually what tends to happen is you have half a dozen meetings and fourteen different email chains, and six months go by and you're still exactly where you started, and you have no idea how it happened that way. And it's frustrating because it seems like a no brainer, but you just didn't get the right person to buy into your idea, or it just got lost in this jumble

of human beings. Right, and so how did we end up in this place where we have no idea who's owning what aspect of which job? And too many middle managers and all of these culprits that we love to target when we rail against bureaucracy. I'm so glad you asked. The hierarchy is an outdated organizational instructor that goes back to the Industrial Revolution. It was a way of organizing and dividing labor so it would be the most efficient way of doing things when people had very defined tasks.

But now most of us don't work in those kind of economies. Like so, like an assembly, right, an assembly line, you put your little part on the widget, and then the widget goes to the other guy who glues it to a different widget, right, and then there's someone overseeing those group of people in etcetera. Etcetera, until you have

the big boss at top. But now we work in these A lot of people work in the knowledge economy and the creative economy, and research has found that hierarchies when it comes to those kind of types of work, can lead to more conflict. And I mean we've experienced this. You can see why there's people jockeying for their ideas and and it's not exactly clear who's in charge of signing off on what ideas or whether they really have the leverage to get it through whatever systems they need

to get it through. Yeah, and there's been such a backlash recently towards hierarchies that they're all these experiments and altar organizational structures that try to get rid of hierarchy. So the most popular one is called holocracy, which is a really silly name where your hologram goes to work for you instead of you. Yeah, I would love that. It's funny because that's even more complicated than hierarchy. But it's allegedly a flat structure, so there's no managers. People

work in these things called circles. I went to medium, which used to use lists to see them do it, and they have the media medium, the media company medium, and they have these special meetings so that the good ideas do rise above, so it's not just like personality speaking, etcetera. It's an interesting idea, But the funny thing is that there's still a system you have to navigate, right, And you say, they used to use halocracy, So what happened? Yeah, about a year ago they gave up on it because

it's complicated and confusing. And there's this term called the tyranny of structurelessness, which is that when you try to remove structures, like new ones pop up, you know, and then it's even worse because they're kind of invisible, so it's even more opaque. Who really has the authority to boss other people around? And people kind of know, but

they aren't allowed to say it all out. Yeah, And again that that sounds like something you have to learn to navigate if you want your good idea to rise above the rest when it comes right down to it, No matter what kind of structure you work, and if you work with more than two or three people, there's probably a system that you have to learn, and you have to kind of have tricks and ways of doing

things that help you navigate that system. And our guest day is going to teach us some of the ways that we can get our ideas through and become more popular and well liked at work. We have here with us. Derek Thompson. He is a writer at The Atlantic and full disclosure, a friend of mine who I used to work with. He wrote a book called hit Makers, The

Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. Your book is about what makes things popular, and the book is about pop culture, so like music and art and politicians. But in the book you talk about this thing called maya, which is the underlying principle of what makes anything and maybe even our work idea is popular. Can you explain what that is? Yes, Maya m a y a. Uh. This principle comes from the father of industrial design. His name is Raymond Loewy. He was a French orphan. He

comes over to the US in the late nineteen teens. Uh. He starts off as an artist and he gradually gets into engineering and design, and he eventually designs the modern greyhound bus, the modern car. His student Baker, was named the finest automotive design of the twentieth century. He designed

the modern tractor. He designed the modern kitchen. He even designed the habitability of the first NASA spaceship, the interior of the first NASA spaceship, the concept of the portal where you can look through the glass and see Earth. That was his idea. So literally everything from tooth to

station windows. But they weren't know that they brought on Raymond Lowe because is this was the first time they were going to send people up into space, and Raymond Loey was the expert at designing things that people liked. So they said, how do people want to live in space? Help us understand how to design a habitat on a spaceship that people would want to live and feel comfortable

living in. And his theory for why people like what they like was called Maya m a y a most advanced yet acceptable, And his insight was that people are essentially intention between two opposing ideas. They are neo philic they like new things, and they are neophobic. They don't like things that are too new, They are afraid of new things. And so he had this amazing ability of marrying familiarity and surprise and understanding and anxiety into all

of his designs. And one of my theses in the book is that this principle helps us understand basically the popularity of everything in pop culture. We like new songs with old chord structures, we like new movies with old characters he Tho's adaptations and reboots, and we even like ideas and articles and podcasts that express in new and fascinating ways, uh, concepts that we've already somewhat intuited and

so therefore are a little old. And so it's this marriage of newness and oldness that is sort of the the god particle of popularity. So I want to imagine how this might play out in the workplace. So, like, say you're in a meeting and you have this idea of yours and it's an idea that you want people to buy into. How does this principle work with that? Right, So you're starting now with a really new, crazy idea, right that people don't like because, as you said, it's

just it's too new. Um, I want to get rid of all the chairs in the office, and I want to the office great. Yes, exactly, very new ideas that people stand the better circulation, they live longer. So Raymond Lowly faced this problem all the time. He thought that the mid twentieth century was absolutely disgusting, that the designs of this era were totally gross. He hated the way that trains looked in the early twentieth century. They look

sort of like Thomas the Tank Engine. They had these really garish protrusions, and that they're even with their chimneys and um uh, and they're they're sort of spindley designed. I think a lot of children what would disagree with you on Thomas the Tank familiar with the tank engine? Um And he wanted trains to look like we now sort of envisioned them, particularly sort of you know, the fastest trains that sort of looked like the shape of a bullet fired through water, right, that sort of sleek,

smooth shell. So he pitches this in the nineteen thirties to Pennsylvania Railroad and they say, no, that's a terrible idea, that that looks way too weird. We don't want that. He pitches it again a year later, and again a year later, and again a year later, and he starts off making the difference between his ideal design and the current design of trains really subtle, and then he just pushes them along the curve. He shows ideas, gives them designs that look more and more and more like the

current look of trains. This sort of this bullet fired through water, and eventually the executives that Pennsylvania Railroad become extremely familiar and they fall in love with his designs because they've seen them more and more and more, and they sort of walk towards his ideas. So what does this have to do with work. Well, if you're trying to get all the chairs out of a conference room, you don't start by saying we're going to have an edict that says no more chairs in the conference room.

Maybe you start by taking away one or two chairs so a few people have to stand up. And then you take away a few more chairs, so a few

more people have to stand up. And then when people are used to being in conference rooms where a quarter and a half the room is standing up, they begin to associate people standing in conference rooms with what is normal, with what is familiar, and then you can take away a few more chairs, a few more chairs, and then eventually you have a conference room table and no chairs, and you have conference rooms that are just purely standing affairs. And so what he would say is don't introduce this

new idea in its purely new form. Give people a little bit of the familiar at first, and then a little bit less less less less, and gradually expose them to your idea. That's kind of happened with standing dusks, now that I hear you talking about it, right, there were some weirdos who piled boxes their desks. Actually, Derek, I believe you did that. Had an Amazon box in my desk. Yeah, And then there were some pioneers who

had requested standing desks. And now workplaces are starting to give you the option of sit stand, and it's becoming much more normal to have the sit stand desk. It's not just some peculiarity of some weirdo person who wants to stand up. Now, Yeah, I think standing desk is actually a perfect like entry way into the conversation. But the principle has much more serious applications. Right. Let's think

about something like parental leave policies. There's certainly a time in the US where the concept of you know, private companies having print to leave was extremely rare and crazy. And what had to happen is that a few companies that could afford the policy had to introduce it, and then media reporters had to report on these print to leave policies and expose more people to the concept that, hey, maybe we should be a little bit nicer to not only mothers but also fathers who want to take leave

when they have children. And then as people become more familiar with the concept, they began to quait familiarity with normality and fact, and what is familiar becomes normal, and what is normal becomes conflated with the good. And so once again I think that you know, as the idea becomes familiarized, it becomes more powerful in culture. Yeah, and then we have candidates on both sides of the aisle talking about parental leave, which was unthinkable one political cycleogo

just study insane. So what about the opposite example, what about when you have an idea that everybody else feels is too old school? Like what if I want Becca to write a story about parental leave and Becca says, been done, been done by me and many other people. How do we make the familiar idea saying as a story, Yes, this is such a this is such an awesome question.

So this is, first of all a question they faced all the time in the book because I'm writing in hit Makers about pieces of sort of pop culture icons. I'm writing about uh, impressionism and star Wars and Snapchat and Facebook and things that people have read a lot about. So the he was, how do I bring each story

to a bit of a surprising place? Right? And in many ways, I think that one of the challenges of writing things or making things that are interesting is that interesting isn't just purely new, and it's not just purely familiar. Interesting always takes something that you're a little bit that you're a little bit familiar in, and then pushes it a little bit further into the future, makes it a little bit advanced, and then that's when your brain sort of hooks onto it and says, huh, this is a

really cool idea. So if you're writing a story about print to leave policies, that comes after thousands of stories about print to leave policies, right, the trick becomes, all right, how do I find an angle that no one's written about this before? Um, maybe you know we're talking about we Becca just brought up the fact that uh Ivanka Trump Um, rather surprisingly for the Republican Party, Um made print to leave one of her items in the Republican

National Convention speech. Um, maybe the interesting take isn't all of the liberal companies and you know, tech companies that have printed leave policies, but is prin to leave policy now becoming a Republican issue as well? Is a surprising group taking on a familiar cause. And then you begin to say, oh, yeah, that is something that someone who's interested in these ideas, uh might might like to read about. So you've touched on another one of your principles that

you talked about in the book. That so we have maya, which is one thing, but then also repetition and how that can be really important in getting people to buy into your ideas. Yeah, there's a chapter about the psychology of music, and one of the most basic principles of music is this idea of repetition. It's true even of

just speaking. If I have a sentence and I start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again, the brain starts to hear that done done, that dada done, and you can't help it. Repetition distinguishes the cacophony from music. It transforms sound into music. And this is true not only for rhythms and guitar playing, but it's also true for speech. Every ancient Greek rhetorical

device is essentially a form of repetition. You have a napro, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence win St. Churchill, we shall fight them in the air, we shall fight them on the landing fields. Repetition at the end of a sentence Abraham Lincoln. Government of the people, by the people,

for the people. But the most powerful example, and the one that I think shows up a lot in UH, in memos, UH, and in really persuasive speech even around the office, is called anti metaboli, which is an A B B A structure. JFK. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, or in an office setting, the problem with your editing isn't too much criticism. The problem with your editing is not enough constructive criticism. And I do think that.

So wait, can you back up and explain, like, break down the A, B, B A in one of those examples. Yeah? Sure, So h let's take Hillary Clinton. Um, women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. A is B B is go ask not what your country can do for you, A b ask what you be can do for your country A. And so this a B B A structure is called chiasmus or anti metaboli, and

it is absolutely rampant in political rhetoric. But the magic of this as a matter of persuasion is precisely that it turns and otherwise uncatchy idea into musical language, and people sometimes fall in love with the music before they even process the substance. This can be a dangerous thing when it's sort of on a grand political scale. But right now we're simply talking about, you know, the office setting.

And so I do think that there are lots of examples where when people have, you know, an issue with a boss or an issue with a colleague, um, sometimes the most persuasive way to make that case is precisely to make it with a little bit of musical language. You know, the problem with you editing isn't too much criticism. The problem with you editing is not enough constructive criticism. The problem, like, the issue isn't that you talk too much in the office. The issue is that you talk

too much when I'm on the phone. Disability to sort of establish an idea by initially establishing its counterpoint is like a very very uh used and tried in true way of making the idea click. Yeah, we often talk about compliment sandwiches, but we mean A B, B A what would we call that? I'm not sure, but compliment abbas? Yeah that Yeah, it's a good management tool. So if Becca wants to sell her great parental leave story idea, now she has to figure out a way to talk

about it with an A, B B A pitch. Right, parent to leave is in a women's issue, women's issues, we might have to work on it, right, but yeah, but sure, but something like um, right, uh, what you would say, parent to leave isn't a women's issue, print to leave as a family issue, or printal leave isn't isn't a mother's issue, printal leave is a father's issue. Um that. There there are ways of of establishing the idea, even in surprising ways, to use precisely this kind of antithetical,

slightly musical language. That's actually a great tip that that goes well beyond just journalists the news room trying to pitch stories, because I feel like there's lots of meetings where you want to get something out of it, and you'd have to prepare ahead of time with what you say.

Like so, if you want to go ask your boss for a raise, you tend to think, Okay, I'm gonna go in and I'm going to talk about all the work I did, and I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna say this, when maybe all you really need to do is come up with a really catchy forward phrase about how hard you've been working and why you deserve I mean, one thing that I actually find from meetings and these sort of conversations with people about you know, whether it's

salary or responsibilities, Like the meetings only come away with you. You only come away with a one sentence summary anyway, right like you're getting the raise or you're not. Either you are getting this new responsibility or you're not, or the you're it's seventy percent chance you're gonna get it or thirty percent. You know that all these meetings are always incredibly easily summarizeable, and so I'm constantly thinking, like, well,

the outcome of the meeting was one sentence. Maybe I should have gone into the meeting with one sentence like that. It's it's I should have focused it by saying it's just about this, right, Um, the problem with my job aren't the responsibilities that I have, the problem with my job are the responsibilities that I don't have? In want and so, right and so do you just very clearly say I want to keep what I'm doing and add a little bit more? Did you just did an A

B B A B YEA your responsibility? You write the book? Yeah, all you can do is talk this way. My friends are absolutely horrified by my language because now I only exclusively talk through a completely bend to your will into everything as I'm constantly giving from all my friends and like Pa gave me an enormous amount of money. So we've been talking about how to make your ideas more popular. But are there things in the book to make you

a more popular or well liked or respected person at work? Yeah? I think there are. I think there are two ways at this question. Um. The first is that the very first chapter of my book is called the Power of Exposure. And it's this idea that, as we discussed, UH, we tend to like things more the more we see them. A very old classic example is when Impressionist art came out in the eighteen sixties, seventies and eighties, people were absolutely horrified by it and they thought it was disgusting.

But now you show any six year old a picture of Monai's water lilies, and they run to it and say, oh wow, how great. Uh. They're they're used to seeing this kind of art. They're they're used to associating it with fame and beauty down Stravinsky's Right of Spring like cause riots, right, exactly, yeah, Or you could say the same about rock and roll. It was this was horrifying race music in the late nineteen forties or the nine and fifties, and that we think, and then it became mainstream,

and now we think of it as old fashioned. So you have these these hype cycles. Things are too radical, then perfectly radical, and then overly familiar. All right, So what does this have to do with popular in the office? Abraham Lincoln has this great quote, I don't like that man. I should get to know him better. And it's this

lovely idea that I think we've all had. We've all had this experience where there's someone in the office that we think it's a little bit weird, we think might even be mean, we think might dislike us, and then we have like one beer with them, you know, like one long meeting with them. We tell our story, they tell theirs, and we stop thinking of them as this radical beast. We're like, oh, they're just a human being

like us. They're going through their own war, they have their own problems, and of course we can get along. And becoming just a little bit more familiar with some of these people at work makes us like them more. So. The first idea would be, if you are a little bit of a weirdo, and I'm sure there are some weirdos listening in the podcast, UM, understand that a little

bit of availability simply makes people like you more. The second thing that I that I thought about particularly relation in the book is that you know, popularity in the office or in any setting really can have sort of two definitions. There's likability and their status. Like Ability is sort of is just a sheer volume play, and then you know, status is is a little bit more intensity.

So in the book I talked about how like if you have a culture with millions of people reading US weekly, but none of them talk about US weekly at parties, UM, But then in some elite parties who have a lot of people talking about things like Thomas Picketti's Capital but never reading past page five. Then what is the bigger effect on culture US weekly? Which is the likability play? Or capital which is the status play? And I think in the office, you know, people want different things. Some

people want to be likable, that's their goal. Other people are like the reality TV star who says I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to win, and they care more about status. So when thinking about office place popularity, I think it's important to distinguish between between status and likability.

And also I think that's worth pointing out that we haven't brought this up, but being popular and while liked and having status can be extremely gendered, and a woman doing these things might come off different than a man.

My god, yeah, my guests would be without having the research right in front of me that for purely cultural reasons, women in the office might feel like they have to be likable more than they have to nakedly pursue status, whereas for men it's sort of culturally acceptable to baldly pursue status at issue popularity in movies, for example, Hollywood screenwriters face this challenge a lot very strong Uh, female characters are sometimes seen very negatively by audiences, whereas this,

you take the same line and you put it in the in a male executive's mouth, and he seems like a badass. He seems really cool, and you put posters of him on your on your dorm room wall, like uh, you know Gordon gekkowin Wall Street. But you think about something like you know, Devilwares product an incredibly strong female character, Miranda Priestley. She says a lot of things, she does a lot of things that if a man did it, we wouldn't consider it weird at all. But she's portrayed

as a little bit of a B word. And I think there's a reason why there's a scene in that movie where Ann Hathaway opens the door and sees Meryl Streep crying over the dissolution of her marriage. The screenwriters needed that because audiences want to think, oh, the strong woman isn't the real woman. There's a crack in the exoskeleton and you can see the vulnerability belief, and that's

the real Miranda Priestly. She's actually vulnerable. Audiences need to see vulnerability in women in a way they don't need to, and men, and of course that has all sorts of implications in the office place when men and women are

competing for the exact same jobs. So it sounds like before you try to go out and get what you on in the office, you really have to think about exactly what it is you want, whether you're trying to get a project done, or whether you need status or how much status you actually need to get that thing. And your book has given us so much to think about in that respect. So thank you so much for

coming on and talking to us. Thank you, it's my pleasure. Well, that was really interesting, and one thing that surprised me was how much we ended up talking about popularity and likability and being liked. But as Derek's research shows, there's an intimate relationship between being liked and actually getting things done around the office. Yeah, and that reminds me of a kind of unfortunate thing that happened to me in

my first job. And I've mentioned this before, but I had this idea of, you know, if I'm just good, I'll succeed. And I'm at my first job and a few weeks in this man pulled me aside who I had been working with, and he said, you know, if you are less salty, you'll do much better at work, Like you need to change your attitude, which was unfortunate that he said that to me and obviously stung my ego. But I did change my attitude and he was right.

I started having more pitches get through, and my stories did better, and editors liked working with me better. And I did have to learn that you play a politics game with the people you work if you want to

get ahead. Right. So at that job, the way for you to play the game was to be nicer, right, which obviously we've talked about this is very gendered, and the way that women play the game is different than the way men play the game, and often when women play the game, they can't get as far as they

want to write. The game changes depending on who you are, right, But you have to at least acknowledge that there is a game, Like, if you don't acknowledge the game, you're not going to succeed, at least within the structure of most workplaces, right. And that's the real value of some of these tools is keep having the good ideas but also know there's extra stuff that you need to do for people to really hear and implement your good ideas fun and now it's time for half big takes, happy

fake takes. All right, Francesca, what is you are not fully formed idea that you want to share with the world this week? Yeah, everybody needs to know this one. Um, when you are at a restaurant, So you're at a business lunch and the waiter asks you whether you would like sparkling or still water. In some regions they call tap water. It's also known as just those the free water that comes out of the faucet. Um, get the sparkling water. You're an adult, Come on, like, it's not

it's it's better. It's a more special experience than drinking water. And just getting the still water just makes you seem cheap. It's probably not that much more expensive to just get the fuzzy stuff. This is how I know I'm not an adult. I always get the tap water, right, But that wouldn't it feel like just special and kind of naughty and just like just really cool if one day you were like, go ahead, bring me the fizzy stuff. Your life is so exciting. No, I'm pretty wild, but

all right, yeah, get the sparkling water. Becca, what's your happ big take. I want to stand up for airplane food. Oh boy, if you are traveling and you're flying on an airplane, First of all, I always pay for a drink, an alcoholic beverage, depending on the time of day you have to. It's the only way to get through the flight. And it's just not that expensive. It's okay, that have to back up. It's seven dollars for a drink in New York City. That's about par for New York City prices.

I understand that everybody lives in New York City. It's more expensive than a drink safe from my hometown. But okay, but you're defending the food prices too. I'm also defending the food prices and the food quality. If you buy something in the airport, it's probably going to be similar quality, similar prices then on the plane. So why don't you just buy something on the plane and it makes it special, just like yourselfs are half big take. Okay, okay, I

can buy that. And this has been half big takes, half bake takes. So before we go, we have some exciting news out of game Plan HQ. We now have a voicemail line. Yeah, and we want you to call us with your half baked takes, so leave us a message and we might use it on the air. And the number for that is two and two six one seven zero one six six And thanks for listening to another episode of game Plan. You can find me on Twitter. I'm at rs Greenfield and I'm at Francesco Today. You

can tweet your happy takes too at game Plan. And if you like the show, please head on over to iTunes wherever you listen to podcasts and rate us and review and subscribe. It really means a lot to us. The show was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson head a podcast. It's Alfa Keith and we'll see you next week. Hi. Also, once I was in the Puerto Rico airport and it was thirty five dollars for a chicken sandwich. So was it a good chicken snow? It was horrible.