Work For Humans
Episodes
204 episodes
What Does It Mean to Be Rational at Work? | Barry Schwartz
Rational choice theory has become so familiar that it can feel like common sense. We talk about trade-offs, optimization, ROI, and risk as if they capture what it means to think clearly. But many of the decisions that matter most do not work th...
The Future of Work Starts Now: What You Do Today Shapes Tomorrow | Reanna Browne, Revisited
In many organizations, some people are focused on keeping the lights on. Others are pushing for change. But what if the future isn’t something out there waiting for us at all? What if it’s shaped by what we do—and don’t do—right now? For Reanna...
Still Working at 80: When Retirement Isn’t an Option | Noah Sheidlower
An 81-year-old woman shows up for work at Home Depot while managing serious health issues. She isn’t there because she loves retail. She’s there because stopping isn’t really an option. That story is one of many Noah Sheidlower encountered whil...
Designing Transformation: How Experience Changes People | Claus Raasted and Paul Bulencea, Revisited
Most organizations approach change as something to manage. A new strategy, a new structure, a new set of goals. But what if real transformation doesn’t come from plans or policies, but from experiences that change how people see themselves and ...
From “Me” to “We”: What Leadership Is Really About | Josh Block
Josh Block became president of his family’s medical imaging company at 29, just months after layoffs had shaken trust across the business. People were asking whether he was ready. His answer was simple: not fully. But he knew what he didn’t kno...
Building a Customer Movement: How Companies Create Experiences That Work | Alain Thys, Revisited
Many companies treat experience as the final layer of the business: a nicer interface, a friendlier script, a smoother customer interaction. But the real experience of a company comes from something deeper. It grows out of the systems, incentiv...
The Hidden Cost of Certainty at Work | Margaret Heffernan
In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, making confident business decisions is hard. So we grasp for certainty. Numbers feel certain, but they often give us the false comfort of measuring the wrong things. In her book Embracing Uncert...
The Cost of Managing From Above | William Hurst, Revisited
William Hurst is all too familiar with the disasters that have resulted from tops-down governance. Through years of fieldwork in China and Indonesia, William has seen what happens when decision-makers are cut off from life on the ground. In thi...
The Toxicity We Tolerate at Work | Catherine Mattice
Toxicity at work isn’t always obvious. Most times, it shows up as sarcasm, neglect, and unresolved conflict. Catherine Mattice learned this firsthand while working as an HR leader inside an organization where one person slowly broke a good cult...
Technology Alone Won’t Change the World | Kentaro Toyama, Revisited
Kentaro Toyama spent a decade designing technologies to fight global poverty and improve education and health. As co-founder of Microsoft Research India lab, he made a troubling discovery – innovative technologies can’t create change on their o...
The Problem With Scale: What Growing Too Big Does to Work | Geoffrey West
Geoffrey West didn’t set out to explain work. He was a physicist trying to understand why living things grow, age, and die. But when his questions expanded into biology, cities, and organizations, they offered a way to think about why growth ch...
What Classrooms Reveal About Designing Better Work | Peter Liljedahl, Revisited
After decades in education, Dr. Peter Liljedahl realized that many classrooms fail to engage the people inside them. Rather than accept that reality, he began challenging every classroom norm he could find, asking a single question of each one:...
What Complex Organizations Do to Ethics | Ed Freeman
Ethical questions at work rarely show up as rules or compliance issues. They show up in the systems organizations design and the outcomes those systems produce. And even well-intentioned leaders can create harm without meaning to. In this episo...
The Experience IS the Brand | Alder Yarrow, Revisited
Experience is brand. The experiences people have with a company shape how they feel, what they trust, and whether they stay. Creating those experiences is not just about interfaces or marketing. It requires rethinking internal processe...
What Happens When AI Removes Friction from Work | Aaron Horwath
While leading L&D at Creative Force, Aaron Horwath and his leaders began treating work as a product to be designed. That shift had wide effects, including something unexpected. Creative Force became one of the few companies to implement AI ...
Psychological Design: How Environments Predict Our Psychology, Behavior, and Ability to Thrive | Jan Golembiewski, Revisited
Every building comes with a set of expectations. Students are quiet in a library, but loud on a playground. Adults are focused in their deckchairs yet chatty on bar stools. Witnessing the limitations of conventional building design, Jan Golembi...
Investing in the Future of Work: A New Path for Venture Capital | Virginie Raphaël
Ideas don’t grow on their own. Something has to amplify them. Universities amplify what they teach, consultants amplify what they recommend, and money amplifies the ideas it chooses to back. If we want to understand how work changes at scale, w...
Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do | Daniel M. Cable, Revisited
Dan Cable was doing his job and getting compensated for it, but there was a problem: he was going through the motions with no growth, learning, or sense of excitement. He knew he needed to make a change to excel. By exploring the neuroscience b...
The Business Case for Experience Design: A New Lens for Work | Mat Duerden
We experience the world through what we notice, how we feel, and what we remember. Yet most organizations still focus on products instead of the experiences those products create. Mat Duerden has spent his career studying how experiences work, ...
Rethinking Career Design: How Traditional Education Set Up a Generation to Fail, and How to Course Correct Today | Farouk Dey, Revisited
In an ideal world, college would help students explore possibilities and imagine a future that fits who they are. Instead, many choose majors before they know themselves and get pushed onto a career conveyor belt with little space to discover w...
Workflow Friction: The Missing Link in Work Design and AI Transformation | Stephanie Denino
Friction is part of every workplace. It shows up in the meetings that don’t need to happen, the unclear steps, and the small barriers that make work harder than it has to be. It’s a cost we’ve come to accept, but it doesn’t need to stay that wa...
Designing Your Life: How to Use Design Principles to Get What You Want in Work and Life | Bill Burnett, Revisited
From kitchen tables to self-driving cars, everything around us was designed to solve a problem. Bill Burnett, award-winning Silicon Valley designer, believes we can use the same approach to design careers that bring fulfillment and joy. By usin...
Work-as-a-Product: How Dropbox Redesigned Work for the Virtual Era | Melanie Rosenwasser
Dropbox didn’t just adapt to remote work. It redesigned work itself. After the pandemic, Melanie Rosenwasser and her team joined forces with Dropbox’s designers to study how people actually work and what they need to do their best thinking. Bac...
Immersive Experience Design: How to Use Story to Design Work Experiences | Stacy Barton, Revisited
Stacy Barton was assigned an exhaustive project at 9 pm and had to complete it by 6 am if she wanted to receive a paycheck. While most of us would have deflated under the pressure, Stacy saw an opportunity; it was time to get creative. By being...
The Master Servant Doctrine: How Feudal Law Still Shapes Modern Work | Elizabeth Tippett
Modern work is haunted by an idea that began in feudal Europe. The Master Servant Doctrine gave employers the right to command and control workers while imposing a duty to provide for them. That ancient logic still shapes the modern workplace —...