Hey, rich. How you doing?
Every so often it just hits like a lightning strike and you, you take a leap beyond just giving advice and instead you just end up changing the world.
Great. That's a wonderful way to start this podcast. It sets the stakes very low, and there'll be no problem meeting the expectations of the audience. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Welcome everyone to the Zian Ford Podcast. Uh, we like to give advice, but today we're gonna change the game.
We are.
here we go.
Okay. We, we should, this is actually how our relationship works. It would be like, Hey Paul, we're gonna go have this big meeting with some sort of really important client and I, I know you've fully prepared and you've had a lot of thoughts, but we're gonna do it actually, um, in using puppets instead. And I would go, okay, rich.
And it's this afternoon,
give me my puppet and then we'd land the business like there is a strategy to it, but, woo. Alright, so here we go everyone. Welcome to our world. Rich is about to blow it up. What the hell are you talking about?
We have a startup called a board.
We sure do.
and except for Paul and I, effectively the entire team, a team of about 16 people at this point is distributed, fully distributed. and then we came out of the holidays, which is essentially the month of December, which is like a drug fueled haze when it comes to running a company or starting a business.
You know, have you noticed it?
up and you're like, why am I in Forest Hills, Queens right now?
So let me,
I got here. Let's talk for
I, I need to, so let me.
December
Hold on. Here's what, here's what used to happen. Hey, I'm gonna take the week off between, uh, Christmas and New Year's. And they'd be like, sure, Paul, go enjoy a cool nineties band cuz it's the nineties and that's what people do. And go, you know, go watch Blues Traveler and then fast forward to 2022. The holidays begin the week before Halloween. Like seriously, everybody is like, poof boy. A lot of candy man getting ready for Thanksgiving and it is like a three month period now.
It, it Thanksgiving is like stepping into a void, of some sort. I think part of it is the way they made Cyber Friday into this multinational. festival of some sort, There's Cyber Black Friday, cyber Monday, and it just goes on and on and we don't know what to do except put shit in our shopping carts
It's just
K.
it,
then we kinda wake up January 8th,
it.
the third, by the way, the eighth.
Just straight up capitalism, man. Like capitalism is like, look, we're not getting enough. We need a little more. So hold on. But the other, the other thing I've noticed too is because everyone is remote now, I think it actually makes it worse because everybody is like very calendar aware. And so starting in October, they're like, whoof, boy, I'd love to get coffee, but it looks more like February now.
It's true. So this is my, my big innovation. So, okay, let me continue on the narrative.
Okay,
back and we're a startup and startups have to be nimble. feedback loop in sync, and I just, and I'm a generally paranoid person.
boy,
of the December haze, just kind of paranoid and anxious about if we were in sync or not.
out of what I love is people should just see slack over the holiday.
It's fair.
Yeah,
was good
you. You
was pretty good.
are, but, but there is like December 26th, 7:00 AM I'm worried. I'm worried. those will just be the words in this.
no, but I, yeah, and, and, and nothing's wrong. It's just, it's just not, it's, it's that, it's that ambiguity that breeds the anxiety
Well, I think you and I as partners, I used to wake up, get that message and go, oh my God, I need to be anxious too. And now I go, rich is an anxious person. Let's figure out what's making him anxious and talk about it and figure out what's real. And it's usually really productive. So there is just, just a little as we're advising, getting to know the other person. Psychology. It's really useful. All right, so here we are.
so I, I decide, I said, and, and the good news is we synced up with the leadership of a board and they were all in agreement. They're like, yes, we need to sync up. Well, here, there's too much ambiguity. We're moving forward, but are we moving in the right direction? Are we making, are we prioritizing right and whatnot. And so I put together essentially a series of two hour meetings every day for the week following. So there was like Monday at 2:00 PM Eastern Tuesday, 2:00 PM Eastern Wednesday.
Essentially, it's like, let's get in a room and hash this out. And
There's an element of re you're, you're rebooting, right? Like, let's look at each element of the app. Let's talk about our strategy. What were, what were we trying to do? Where did we end up? Because things drift. They naturally drift.
They naturally drift. And so by Thursday we didn't need all five days of meetings. I had scheduled five days we, by Wednesday, end of the Wednesday meeting, we kind of knew what the plan was. And by Thursday we were just sort of checking it, all the, checking all the boxes. But
This is the mark of the, this is a true, great executive move where you overschedule everyone and they're kind of exhausted just thinking about it. And then you give them back a couple days.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I think, I think car dealerships do this too with like rims
everyone. Everyone is so appreciative.
Well, it's the extra frying pan
oh, it's.
the late night TV ad. Right? So, But, and so it was immensely productive. It felt clarifying, the team was relieved, actually, not just us. And so I think this got me thinking, and this is a very, been a long unwinding word to get to this revolution in meeting
Okay. Okay.
We, something is broken with remote work. This isn't about trust. This isn't about whether people are productive. I don't care about how people use their time. As long as good things happen and the output's good, I don't care about that. So it's not about that. It's not about holding people, like making sure they're putting their hours in. I'm not interested in that.
Okay.
This is about what has been lost, um, since remote work took hold, which is Environment that just by design breeds collaboration and discussion. And the problem is, is that when you schedule a meeting, think about what you have to do. First off, you have to time bound it. Number one, meetings can't go on forever. So you're like, we're gonna get an hour. Number one. Number two, and this is the next thing that happens that sort of destroys collaboration.
You have to give the meeting a title, and if you veer off that title, you've, you're viewed as noisy or distracting, or not staying on the same page or whatever. So look, think about what's happened. We've essentially told one another that we're gonna. And we're only gonna talk about a particular topic, and then we're gonna disperse and then hope for the best. And what's been lost are those environments of discussion debate. Disagreement, meandering off the topic because it's, there is no topic.
We're just in a room they're hugely important. And this isn't about, oh my God, I don't trust my of this or that. I need to go see. This is about connecting, and I think that's been lost and I have a solution.
Okay, I, I, I don't really have anything to say at this point. I want to know your solution to human communication.
You set up a meeting called Chance Encounters.
This is something you can do on Craigslist when you see someone on the subway and you're like, Hey, I, I'd like to get to know you better.
Oh,
Oh, sorry. That's,
Let me
that's, no, no. Sorry. Sorry. I'm wrong. That's missed. Missed connections or something like that. Yeah.
Uh, maybe Chance Encounter does sound like a romantic novel. Let me think of another name. Um, stopping by the meeting is called Stopping by. Okay.
Okay.
is, it is one hour every day of the week a set time. Okay,
Okay.
me out. know you can't
Stop hitting. Stop hitting your desk. You're being very emphatic and it's upsetting the audio.
Uh, you can't
Okay.
everyone and say, oh, I can't make it today. You're not allowed to do that. You have to come to the meeting. The meeting may be five minutes. it may well be five minutes, that's okay. But you have to see each other day. You have to see each other every day, and you have to look at each other, and you may tell them, you may tell everyone about a movie you saw last night, or you may say, look, I had an idea and I wanna share it with you, or I'm concerned about something.
is nothing worse than the meeting that gets scheduled the subject is. Need to chat.
It is terrible. Now, hold on. I have a few thoughts here. One is, This is a tough one for the very shy person. Easy for you and me. I I got five minutes you put open. Somebody once said, I think it was like Debbie Reynolds once said, famous actress if you're young, once said if she did 20 minutes every time the refrigerator light came on.
When it open you just like you, you and I. It's just, you put us in front of a room of people and we, we explain why platforms are important or talk about what we did this weekend. I think so. So there's that. Okay. So not everybody is like conversational and chatty. Okay. There is a context for this and I've seen that people do like, Kind of study together. There's like tools and apps and networks where people just kind of hang, right? Because some kind of social progression.
So social connection makes tasks that are challenging easier. So there's an ambient mode for this kind of interaction, which is, boy, I'm having trouble getting stuff done cause I just keep reloading Twitter. Well come on into the study group will listen to a song and we'll all just kind of boost each other as we get it all done. So there's. What is the, what is it? So let, let's do it. Let's do it.
let me ask you this,
rich, let's have a chance encounter. Come on.
Oh, okay.
Okay. But the First of all, are you on time?
I'm on time.
Okay.
on time.
Rich.
time.
Rich,
Actually, you know what? No, let's make it a little looser because we
Okay?
meetings. Okay?
Mm-hmm.
you have to show up between three and three 15. You have to show up in the first 15 minutes, and you can't be late. If you come in in those 15 minutes, has to be in a place for 15 minutes. If you come in at 3 0 8, that's okay.
Okay.
It's about,
All right.
that.
So it's 3 0 5. It's 3 0 5 and Chance Encounters has popped up in my calendar. I go into the Google Meet. Hey, how, how's everybody doing?
Ah, I'm having a tricky day today. Susie is just, I don't know what's going on. I think she's distracted my, my gut's telling me she's not happy and I'm trying to talk to her, but I just need this work done for now, and then we'll sort it out later.
Wait a minute, was Susie on the call? Okay. That's important you, because it's much, much, much less
awkward.
Yeah. Um, oh, so, so it's not for everybody in the company, it's for a cluster of people.
it's for a, absolutely, it's for, for people that do better when they are working together, which is so many people.
All right, let, lemme start. Okay, so, okay, so what are you gonna do about Susie? I don't know. She's, you know,
I
actually rich. She, um, was in a terrible grain threshing accident yesterday and, and so I don't think you'll have that problem anymore.
Oh, I didn't know. That
The answer
explaining that.
help Susie, she got caught in a green treasure.
Do it again, Paul 3:07 PM
Okay. Hey Rich, how you doing? You see the game? Uh, what sport are they playing right now in this season? When, where are we now? It's January
Oh,
Football.
upset. The Vikings last night. It was a good match.
Yeah. New York Giants, Minnesota Vikings. Two teams. Yeah. Pretty great
Um, listen,
love this. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay, keep going.
app and had a thought, I
Uh,
I wanna share. I wanna just get your thoughts and I want you to react to it. This is not formal, just gonna throw out the idea. Pause.
I I do like that. I do like that. I like the, because what happens, you are correct. You have an idea about the.
I can't schedule a meeting called Idea.
This is real. You have an idea? Well, here's, here's the, here are the patterns that work today. Slack. Hey, do you have a few minutes? At which point the person goes, you're my boss. So yes I do. And then they're braced, right? Like they're braced for some sort. You have a few minutes means put on your armor. If you are like a designer or engineer, put on like five inches of plate metal because here it comes.
It doesn't even have to be a designer engineer, right? It that's just, just org chart.
So that's, do you have a few minutes? Okay. So then there is, um, and then there's the more formal like product roadmap, planning and standup where it's very task oriented. This is real. The thing that you are discussing is out of our world. And here is the thing you are discussing. I'm gonna, I'll give you some examples. I read an article, boom, and now when the boss reads an article, Five alarm fire because it's just
It's true. You can't share anything,
No, but if you come into a context and you're like, I was reading this thing, I want to know if you think that this, if this approach would let us have faster development times and usually like it's a way to introduce an idea without enforcing a policy.
There are no expectations, Paul, and, and the other thing is, It. Look, there are power dynamics at play here. Some people are managers of other people, and the fact that you're just even giving that person some FaceTime is a big deal. I have been, I've, I've managed many teams in my career, many people in my career, you know, you can almost feel that moment. They feel like this is my chance to. Why I'm pretty good at this thing in this moment.
And that could be in the kitchen or that could be injected into a meeting. It's so forced. It's so, um, there's no need to have that pressure. People want to impress other people. That is still a thing, right? And the fact that you're like, you know what? I'm gonna use today's four 30 up to inject my idea, it doesn't go well, it's not fair to that person to not have that. To spitball and talk because there's an agenda
I actually, I came into this rolling my eyes and the gaps that you're talking about. Here it is. I was reading this article, maybe we've been doing it all wrong, like to play with big ideas without consequence.
What has happened with everyone being distributed and everything being very structured and with chat and so on, is everyone has decided that every speech act has to create a response and it, what happens is all of those interactions actually pick up the hierarchy in the organization because of the way the meetings are scheduled. So whereas.
I think you have to actually then make a secondary deal in your chance encounters, missed connections, whatever we're calling it, which is that nothing will be particularly binding out of that meeting. And that's the hard one. You can look someone in the eye and, and now they can say, I'll send you an email, or I'd like to discuss this later, but. But the, it is not a place, it will only work if it is not a place to assign work or to create structure. So are we doing this at a board?
Are we like now one of those startups that's like, we have a new management strategy, it's called Whole Democracy and we're gonna.
I threw it out into our board Slack, and my team will hate me for mentioning this, but there was radio silence. In fact, slack stopped working for half a
Well, it, it kind of proves the point that you need the meeting. That's, this is the terrible thing about proposing that in Slack because if everybody's like, yeah, we need it, then maybe you don't. But if they say nothing, then you probably do.
Exactly. And so there's just gonna be more meetings and those meetings are gonna have a little less structure. it's funny that you'd say, you know what one of the requirements is? Nothing is binding. That's like saying when I see you in the kitchen and we chat for a bit, nothing is binding. Like that's how insane that sounds, right? Why? Because you're working back from the calendar invite paradigm, right?
A very formalized, structured thing that are really for strangers to connect, not strangers, but like org A needs to talk to someone at org b, they coordinate calendars, but teams, and when I say teams, I don't just mean peers. I mean, your team of six should connect with you. They value that time, that free flowing time to say some things. Do you have to buy into ev? No, you won't. Actually. Sometimes you'll be like, Hmm, I think you're onto something.
I don't know if I agree with how, how you wanna solve it, but I agree there's a problem, for example, and that space is gone. It's truly gone.
You know, no, it's, it's, everything is assigned now or, or it's weird, right? Because, uh,
what I'm talking about,
yeah. And everybody got super excited about how. working from home would demolish hierarchy, but as far as I can tell, it has really created a whole new kind of hierarchical structure. And it's great. I love working remotely. I, I get it. I go to an office with you four days a week, so that's a little less remotely. I do miss having an office. I don't mind it. I don't know. I go back and forth. I don't mind. I, I have no problem working with people remotely.
I think I need other humans, but, um, alright, so Chance encounters.
It is, you know what, this is akin to just to close this, uh, close this out, and I, I, obviously, I'm, I'm, I do this, by the way. It's a management trick I do, which is I come forward with very like, clear, tangible plans as if like, I've been thinking about them for six months just to spark conversation. Um, and look, you know what, this reminds me of recess. I think recess is one of the most important times of the school. For kids. I really do.
It's that it's less structured, it's more social are made. Sometimes kids keep drawing even though they just finished art class during recess. And I think that's hugely important and I think it's missing now.
You know what people used to do is they would go to lunch and they would complain about their bosses, and then they would talk.
Yeah, that's
would stop. They would stop complaining about their bosses for five minutes and talk about something they care about.
That's right. That's
And it doesn't, it could be sports, it could be their work, it could be the thing. Most people care about their disciplines and their crafts, and they want to talk about the things that they're interested in.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I do think there's something that's, I I do believe something's been lost. How do we get it back? I don't wanna be orthodox about, oh, remote work is bad. I'm not getting into that. But there is something that is now missing that is real.
I think it's okay for us to have a startup and to have one little management quirk concept that we're trying out. Most, most startups are like, everyone has to drink only pro, um, soy protein beverages, and we all worship a cube. Like, I mean, they, they're, they get bananas. And so this the one little weird thing where we're like, Hey, now this is something we do for our culture. Let's have a culture. That's okay. We'll try some.
Um, great.
Okay, so when's the first one?
in 20 minutes.
Oh, God. All right. All right, let's do it. Let's do it.
All right. Uh, reach out to us. Sometimes we'll give advice. Sometimes we will revolutionize how people communicate.
Very,
you'll find on this podcast?
very exciting. We got some good emails from the last one, so we'll respond to those in a future episode. Talking about watches and craft and all kinds of stuff, so, alright, friends, well if you need us, [email protected]. It works. It's a good email. Check it out, zdi ford.com. Subscribe. Give us five stars. Anything else Richard?
no. I just want everyone to have a wonderful day with their team,
All right. Let's go. Have a chance encounter.
Take care everyone.
Bye.