Smart Talks with IBM and Malcolm Gladwell - Couch vs. cubicle: is the future of work hybrid?

I hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially right, which is as much as I can never acknowledge around you being right. But uh, you always challenge me to think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. This chat was a part of ibm s Think Conference, where leading innovators talk about technology that makes a difference and other intriguing conversations

with global perspectives. Let's dive in. You know, I are going to have a conversation today about this moment that we're in, about whether something transformational has happened in the way we live and work and do not expects to agree. We disagree on virtually everything, but it's always with an undercurrent deeperfection. Adam, welcome, thank you. I don't know if we actually disagree on everything, but I kind of like

the sound of that. It's always important to start on to acknowledge the fact that there may be major riffs. So you're so Canadian, but keep going. I am very Canadian. So I'm going to confess that I may I would describe myself as a pandemic skeptic. And I was a pandemic skeptic at the very beginning of the pandemic. And I'll define what I mean by the skeptic. At a moment I wavered in the middle, and now I'm a

skeptic again. By pandemic skeptic, I mean I do not expect the pandemic to radically change the way we work or even live our lives. I think it's all going to go away. Do where whe would you? Where would you stand on that? On the continuum of radical transformation at one end, radical skepticism on the other. Well, I hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially ripe, which is as much as I can never acknowledge around you being right. But uh, you always challenge me to

think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. I think you know that I've already started to see some real changes, right, So let's go back to winter. I went to a bunch of CEOs and startup founders and said, I think the future of work might be hybrid. Let's do a remote Friday experiment where people have one day a week to work from anywhere. And every single leader I pitch turned me down. They said, we don't want to open Pandora's box. We think people will procrastinate constantly and our

culture is going to fall apart. And a lot of those CEOs have started rethinking, right. Some of them announced they're going to be permanently remote, many others are at least rolling out hybrid plans. And so I don't think the flexibility is going away, right. They've realized now I can hire anywhere, I don't have to maintain a really

expensive giant headquarters office necessarily. And I've got to imagine that some companies, especially when you look at the National Survey data suggesting that most people are expecting to work two days a week from home, and most companies are encouraging that. That seems like something that's going to change, don't you think, well? I yes, and no, um I feel like there was obviously a steady push in that direction over the last fifteen years or so. But my

I have some specific questions. So the first will be young people. My sense from the young people who work at my company and my memories of my own thinking when I was in my twenties was that going to the office was the single most exciting thing in my week. Right. I wanted to meet, I was new, I wanted to learn. When I was at the Washington Post, I was ten ft from Bob Woodward, the greatest reporter of my generation, was ten ft away. I knew nothing about reporting. He

knew everything. And I used to sit and watch him and listen, and I learned so much from that. Next to me was a guy named Michaelisakoff, another legendary investigate reporter. He was next to me. I would sit and listen, and I understood that the only way I would get I would learn that way was to go to the office, right, I mean, there was just no reason not to go to the office. No, do I feel the same way now?

It kick me seven, No, I don't. But if you're a company that employs young people, can you really hire the best and brightest young people by saying we're going to have you work out of your apartment or a Starbucks seems nuts to me. No, I don't think you can. But I also don't think you're gonna get the best and brightest young people by saying you have to be in the office every day and we're going to measure not your results, not your contribution, but the amount of

FaceTime that you contribute. That seems ridiculous. And I hope that that's one thing that the pandemic erased. I think you know we I guess we have precedent for this in some ways. So think about what Ricardo similar did at Semco as an interesting example, right, originally in Brazil now in Twentiesome countries, very traditional manufacturing company. They say we will let you buy back one day a week

for ten percent of your salary. And they're thinking, this is an early retirement move that will, you know, appeal to the baby boomers who say, all right, I want to enjoy a day a week of retirement before I get really old. But no, it's most popular among their youngest employees in their twenties and thirties, who want that day of freedom. And I think this is gonna be

a competitive advantage for companies moving forward. Right, the organizations that are willing to give you that little bit of flexibility are going to do a much better job attracting, motivating, and retaining people than the ones that say you have to be here all the time. Well so, but there's two things we're talking about here. One is workplace flexibility and the other is dislocation, right, remote work, And they're

very they're quite separate. So I am quite in fact, I practice flexibility, have been breaxting it for years and years and years. I love the oppoe. I don't go into the oppice every day, nor do I expect all of our employees to come in every day at the same time. For certain key events, like in my for a podcast, The crucial moment in the creation of one of my episodes of the Revisionist History is the table read, where we reenact the podcast that we're working on. I

read the narration and we play the tape. I have a team of six people and we've been doing those on zoom and I'm sorry it doesn't work on zoom And I actually said and to our staff, the minute we're all vaccinated, we are meeting again in person. Because this is creative work. It can't be done. I need your feedback in the room. I doesn't work on Zoom, so that you know that idea. I don't mind the flexibility.

But if someone said to me, I'm in Denver, Colorado, and I'm your producer and I'm going to work from Denver for now, and I say you can't work endever, I'm sorry, you can't. You need to be unless you're willing to fly in two days a week and then fly back, fly into New York and fly back. It

doesn't work. Malcolm Gladwell, you are one of the smartest and most creative people I know, and yet you can't bring yourself to imagine doing a table read for a product that's audio only without seeing people's faces, when you yourself wrote in talking to Strangers that we overrate seeing people's faces. No, no, no, I don't interesting interesting. Why do I need them in the room when I'm doing a table read? I need them in the room because

it's imperfect. So I'm creating a product for audio, but I'm only in round one of what will be four rounds, and I mean I'm handing in something that is very much your work in progress. I need immediate, high quality feedback B. I have found I also need my entire team to pipe up. And I have found that people's responses are inhibited online and that doesn't work for me. I need everyone I want to say, I want to I keep telling them that this, even dumb comments are useful,

and I feel, I feel maybe this is incorrect. I feel that on Zoom people are editing themselves more and even one when I'm doing a table read, one comment, even a dumb comment, can be transformational in the final script, so I can't afford closing their mouth when they should

open it. I accept the whole premise. I think all of it makes sense, except the basic idea that you can't create the psychological safety you're looking for, that freedom to take risks and point out problems and that ideas fly. That you can't create that in an online environment. So let me throw out a couple examples of how I think this works. First of all, adm Adam position healed myself.

Are you trying to tell me that you're gonna give up on teaching in person now that you so in love with online that Wharton is gonna go going to turn into a digital platform. Is that what you're saying. That's exactly where I was not going, but sort of going.

Let me say a couple of things here. The first one is that I just came from a table read a work life episode that we did over zoom, and I got better feedback than we did when we did these face to face, because we know that you you know the science of brainstorming right in group brainstorming, and this is true in group feedback too. You run into production blocking where we can all talk it once and

you lose ideas. You run into ego threat where people are worried they're gonna get judged and we lose ideas, and you run in into conformity where the hippo that's you, the highest paid person's opinion. As soon as that's known, we all jump on the bandwagon. And we know that if you can give people multiple channels for voicing their independent ideas, they're better off. There is a chat window

and zoom. I don't know if you're tech savvy enough to have discovered it yet, but I will tell you that I have had both in teaching online and also in the group table reads of my podcast and in actually getting feedback from my students on the early drafts of Think Again, I have had more honest and more i would say, diverse comments than I've ever gotten before because there are all these people who would not speak up out loud, but we have this very the active

chat window going, and it allows me to get everybody's participation in. So, no, I don't want to leave teaching online only, but I would sure love, like I've been able to do online, to call on someone who's gonna bring up a relevant point or debate me on something, as opposed to the random hand that happens to be willing to speak, which is usually a white male extrovert and least likely to be the person that I want to learn from. Uh you know so, No, No, I'm not.

I'm saying you and I are probably an agreement in the sense that I have that mode as well. So as we go through the drafts of my episodes, we move from an in person to an online thing and people weigh in editor's way, and it's a it's a Google dog. People can make all the comments they want and they do, so I have that I'm just saying there's a particular moment in the creative process where the room and the energy in the room is important to

measure and to feed off. But wait before you leave that, Before you leave that, I think, I think that's an important distinction to make here. Um. I think, so you're talking about what Anita Wolley would call it burstinus, right, that sense that the room is literally bursting with energy and ideas. And I don't know how to recreate that online. Right. I feel like we're violating one of the laws of thermodynamics every time I have a zoom session where I

put in a ton of energy unless comes back. And I think that part is very hard to replicate in the online environment. But I think sometimes the flow of ideas is still worth it. Yeah. The second and more important point, though, is about fun. So I have had, You've had more conversations, but I've had, you know, a lot of conversations with college kids over the last year, and I have yet to find a single college kid who found the last year more pleasurable than the year

before it? Right? Or high school kids? They all hate it? Why do they hate it? Because it's not as fun now? I just the same is true of employees. Sure, even if you convinced me that Zoom was a more efficient way to get feedback from my employees. You cannot convince me that they're enjoying it more. And ultimately, if they're not enjoying their jobs, we're doomed as a company. As

simple as that. The whole point, the founding principle of Pushkin Industries, from the moment this company was I'm now talking about my company that I started two and a half years ago. Jacob and I when we sat down to start the company, we were like, we're gonna make cool things. Number two, We're going to have fun, right and if everything is online, it's not fun. And as far as I'm concerned, we've failed. I want to have fun.

Is that wrong? Why are you? Why are you standing in the way of my enjoyment and my employees enjoyment. I'm standing in the way of your enjoyment because you would never be allowed to run a company. Can you? Can you imagine Malcolm Gladwell, see, yeah, like you know what, we're gonna make cool stuff. It almost as important as we're going to have a lot of fun. That would never work. Well Street would laugh you out of your

job in a day. Wait, wait wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, Adam, in the course, don't count pandemic here in how many years have you been teaching teaching? I don't know, fifteen maybe, Okay. Do you have fun doing it? Of course that's part of the fun. Hold on, hold on, hold on. If you didn't have fun doing it, would you have left your job as professor by this point? No, because I think it's meaningful and I'd rather bet on

purpose than pleasure. You would have gritted it out for fifteen years, even though it's like every morning like, oh do I have to do this again? And you would have like looked at your wife and she said, Adam, there's no way around it. Just grab your hard hat and go off to the salt mines. Please, I'm not buying it. You would have got because a million other things you could have done that that could have made you a good living, that you could have found fun.

You would not have stayed a professor. It wasn't fun. Okay. Maybe it depends on how you define fun. So I'm thinking now of Dan Coyle's distinction between deep fun and shallow fund, and when you stay fun, I'm thinking about shallow fund, which is you know, we're going to go and party and we're basically going to revert to our college selves. That is not my idea of fun. My idea of fund is deep fund, which is we're working

on hard, interesting problems. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we're you know, we're really puzzled and confused, and we're trying to get to the bottom of an important question. And I think you can have that kind of deep fund in a virtual world. In fact, it's the same kind of deep fund that I have when I'm writing books, and I think you have it too. Isn't that fun? Are you saying that the time you spend sitting in front of your computer writing New Yorker articles and best selling books

is not fun? It is. It is fun, but there's a lot. So let me tell you about a conversation I had this weekend with an old college friend of mine who's now uh he's a senior this trade or a big hospital system, very large hospital system, and he was talking about what the last year has been like and also every time I've seen him, but over the last five years he has registered a long complaint about electronic medical records, which are part of this conversation, right

so as his rule has gotten more digital. He will tell you he's now in charge of he's the chief well being officer for his hospital system, and they have a serious problem with morale in their ranks. He will be the first to tell you this. Why do they have a serious problem with him? Among other reasons, because the people entered the profession to do something and have

an experience that they're not having anymore. My friend can decontrack when people are online late at night doing their electronic medical record and they're they're logging on eleven at night two and it's just not He's like, that's the death of I'm not gonna be able to retain those people. They're not going to do good work. They're gonna turn out.

That's the daily reality of his job, is that they're trying to do something very important in society, and the people who are charged with doing that are not enjoying themselves. What do they enjoy? They enjoy sitting down and getting to know a patient. That's why they became doctors, right, and so this last year when everything's been done really has been hell. Correctly, that's not why they became physicians. So like, they're not gonna want to do we want

to continue this for them. No, there'll be no one left in the hospitals to cure patients, give them their patients back, because that's the deep fund is gone when they're on computers all their love. Yeah, I think we're in strong alignment there. I definitely do not want to take somebody who got into a profession to help people and say you're going to spend of your time entering

information and electronic medical records. But I think that's the presence of an unpleasant, pleasant task, right, not anything inherent to working electronically or virtually. Um. I think there. I've met surgeons over the past year who said, you know what, going remote has been the best thing I've been able to do because I can spread my expertise around the world more efficiently. I don't have to travel to go

and do a grand rounds. I can reach patients who you know, otherwise wouldn't be able to benefit from my care. And that's been a really meaningful changed my job. And so what I want to do is I want to I want to keep that connectivity and meaning, and I want to subtract out some of the things that are clearly a source of burnout and a chore for too many people in too many jobs. So look, wait, let's let's talk about your job for a moment. We alluded

to it earlier. But so you're at a school which is very selected and which charges a lot of money right for presumably because of an expectation of a certain kind of experience. So what do you do? What do you guys do next year? In the year after, do you do you cut your tuition and a half and go zoom classes or what are you gonna do? I

don't know yet. I think it's an open question. I think the first thing we should be doing is running experiments, which you know, look, I'm obviously, like everyone else, devastated by the pandemic, but given that we're stuck with it, it has been a good excuse for us to do a lot of rethinking and experimentation. So I mentioned the

chat window earlier. When I started teaching online, some colleagues and I said, all right, we're gonna use hashtags, and we had students put in hashtag question if they had a question, hashtag on fire if they had a burning question or comment. And that means if I see on fire, I will literally stop in mid sentence, floor is yours? And that way you know you can jump the line um. We had had then added hashtag a ha if you had a Eureka moment, which helped me track what people

were learning. And sometimes I realized I hadn't got my point across. Other times I saw that I clearly made a point that I didn't even realize that would making was making. And then in some cases too, it was kind of a guide for students to track the learning that was happening as it went. My favorite thing that was hashtag debate, where if somebody wanted to disagree with me or one of their classmates, I could get them

into the conversation UM. And I think that it's such a small innovation, right, but I don't want to lose that when I go back into the classroom. I want to keep that dialogue going. I don't know what that's gonna look like yet, but I wanted to happen. And then the other thing that that really opened up that I've never been able to do before is we brought

guest speakers from all over the world. Instead of just asking the people who live in or near Philly, I was able to go to people in multiple countries, on multiple continents, um in lots of interesting places, and say, hey, would you come to class for half an hour? I think I might go guest speakers fully and permanently remote now, because it means we can all go on zoom and we can have an awesome conversation with somebody who would never show up in my class. So I want to

see us do more of those kinds of experiments. But I don't want to give up on the burstinus or the connection that happens in the physical classroom. Is that fair? Yeah? I did it, It's fair. I would a couple of caveats here, which is that, Um? I wonder whether there isn't a great deal of nuance and variability in different audiences responses to digital environments. So I need an as to a question. Suppose I have a room full of

kids in a economically disadvantaged neighborhood there in fourth grade. Um, how much what is the right what is the right mix of online and in person for that group versus your students are not only are they much older, but they are you know, the best in the broadest, So the cream of the crop is it? Does that make a difference. Are they are is a more mature and disciplined and um intellectually engaged group of students better suited for online experiences than kids? You know, I think both

of us have suspicions about the answer that question. But I wonder whether we need to get a lot more nuanced in what mixes worth work best for what kinds of students and what kinds of situations. Yeah, I think that's such an important point. I haven't seen good data on it yet, but I had the same intuition that tech savvy and also some degree of intrinsic motivation is a huge set of contingencies for determining whether online is

going to be even remotely engaging no pun intended. I also think the type of work and the type of learning we're doing really matters. So in general, I hate sports metaphors when applied to work, but I'm gonna use one here. Normally, I think, Okay, we haven't agreed on how to keep score, we haven't agreed on all the rules, and we don't have a referee. We're also leaving out

maybe half the population. But this is a rare exception where when we study independence and organizational psychology, we distinguished between pooled, sequential and reciprocal independence. Say that five times fast. I prefer to think about them as individual sport, relay sport,

and team sport. So if your job or your classroom is basically an individual sport like gymnastics, where everyone's gonna do their own floor routine and their own bar and their own vault um, you don't need that much coordination. You can do a lot of independent, individualized remote work and learning because the whole will basically be the sum

of the parts. If you're in a relay sport, though, the person who's handing the bason to the next runner needs to actually talk to that on her and then also the person at the start needs to talk with the person that finish to make sure they're going in the same destination or the same direction. I think the most important context for really getting real synchronization of time and space is probably when we're playing a true team

sport like basketball or soccer. Right, if I'm gonna pass you the ball, and then you're gonna send it back to me, and then I'm gonna send to someone else, and then it goes back to you again, and everybody has multiple pairs of eyes and multiple touches on the project or the lesson. That's when it's it becomes really difficult to substitute for the face to face, in person experience. And I don't think we've had enough of these conversations in our organizations or in our schools asking what are

we doing right now? Are we playing individual sport, relay sport or team sport? Yeah? Yeah, no, absolutely, um Adam. As always, this was delightful. UM. I'm still slightly baffled that we seem to have so little to disagree about, but yeah, there's always hope for next time. Next time, I hope with both of us, are you know, bloodied and torn by the end of our encount her, But

in this case, this is not the case. So but thank you very much for joining us, uh, and thank you UM to IBM for for bringing bringing us together and sponsoring this lovely conversation. Thank you thrilled to be here,

this is great fun. Thanks for having me, Thanks again to Adam for having a great chat with me about the ever present cubicle versus couch debate, and thanks to IBM for setting up such an informative conference Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Emily Rostag with Carly Migliori, edited by Karen Shaker, g engineering by Martin Gonzalez, mixed and mastered by Jason Gambrell and Ben Toliday. Music by Grandmascope.

Special thanks to Molly Sosha, Andy Kelly, Nea La Belle, Jacob Weisberg, Head of Fane, Eric Sandler, and Meggie Taylor, and the teams at eight Bar and b M. Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and I Heart Media. You can find more Pushkin podcasts on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, See you next time.