Work For Humans
Too often business leaders are forced to choose between the needs of their company and the needs of their employees. It’s a lose/lose scenario leaving managers burned out and workers seeking other opportunities. At Work for Humans, we believe work can be designed differently. When you design work like products people love, your company wins. Work becomes irresistible, employees passionately buy into their roles every day, and your company takes measurable strides towards your vision.
Episodes
189 episodes
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...
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1:08:17
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 179
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1:06:43
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...
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1:09:15
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, ...
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Season 1
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Episode 178
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1:09:33
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...
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1:05:53
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 177
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1:03:23
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...
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1:01:39
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 176
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1:05:42
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...
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1:05:36
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 —...
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Season 1
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Episode 175
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1:02:28
Designing Time: The Future of Experience Design | Dave Norton
Most organizations think about the design of work in terms of products, services, or customer journeys. But Dave Norton has spent his career arguing that experience design goes much deeper. It is about shaping how people spend their time and, i...
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Season 1
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Episode 174
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1:04:53
Designing AI Tools That Think With You | Dmitri Glazkov
The tools we use shape how we work, what we see, and how we think. Dmitri Glazkov, Strategy Lead at Google Labs, initiated Breadboard and helped launch Opal—tools that let people connect prompts into systems that think together like Tinkertoys ...
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Season 1
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Episode 173
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1:08:48
Vitsœ: Building a Company That Lasts by Breaking the Rules | Mark Adams
Most companies chase growth by selling more things to more people, faster. Mark Adams has spent nearly 40 years proving there is another way. As Director of Vitsœ, he runs the company with one mission: to help people live better with less that ...
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Season 1
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Episode 172
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1:13:19
AI as Dramaturg: What It Means to Create Art with a Machine | Matthew Gasda and Isobel McCrum
When playwright Matthew Gasda credited ChatGPT and Claude in the program for his play Doomers, it sparked a debate about whether machines belong in the creative process. The play wasn’t written by AI. It used AI as a dramaturg, a kind of philos...
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Season 1
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Episode 171
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1:03:20
Stories Over Surveys: Unlocking Human Truths About Work and Life | James Warren
Surveys and numbers can capture averages, but they can’t reveal the raw humanity of lived experience. Stories can. Stories connect us, capture nuance and emotion, and uncover the “why” behind our choices in ways numbers never will. In this epis...
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Season 1
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Episode 170
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1:12:08
Architects of Transformation: Unlocking the Real Value of People | Michael Smith
Leaders today are under pressure from every direction: an unpredictable economy, the rise of AI, and the constant demand for transformation while keeping the business running. Few people see those challenges more clearly than Michael Smith. He ...
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Season 1
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Episode 169
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1:13:00
Leadership Beyond the Individual: Relation in the Space Between Us | Jim Ferrell
One line in Martin Buber’s I and Thou stopped Jim Ferrell in his tracks. It made him realize that leadership isn’t inside the individual — it lives in the space between us. That insight became his new book, You and We: A Relational...
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Season 1
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Episode 168
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1:01:24
Skills at Scale: Building Organizations That Truly Learn | Sandra Loughlin
For years, Dart doubted that companies could actually make skills the building blocks of work. They felt too abstract, too static, too disconnected from real daily work. But Sandra Loughlin proved that in some cases, skills can deliver real val...
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Season 1
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Episode 167
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1:08:29
What the History of Germ Theory Teaches Us About Paradigm Shifts at Work | Dr. Robert Gaynes
The germ theory of disease is one of the greatest breakthroughs in human history. But it took more than 2,000 years of false starts and resistance before medicine finally recognized that germs cause disease. In his book Germ Theory, Dr...
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Season 1
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Episode 166
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1:30:01
Human-Centered AI: Designing Ethical Systems for Trust and Human Agency | Emily Yang
Emily Yang’s work sits at the intersection of AI ethics, governance, and human experience. She is an early advocate for bringing human-centered design and responsible innovation into the heart of enterprise AI, especially in HR and talent funct...
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Season 1
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Episode 165
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59:20
Hope Before Purpose: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants | Jennifer Moss
When we think about fixing burnout, most conversations start with purpose, work design, or leadership. But according to Jennifer Moss, the real starting point is hope. And not vague optimism, but cognitive hope—a measurable skill that gives peo...
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Season 1
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Episode 164
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1:08:47
The Magic of Code: Wonder, the Experience, and Future of Programming | Sam Arbesman
Sam Arbesman writes deep, beautiful books about the boundary between technology, knowledge, and wonder. His most recent book, The Magic of Code, is another profound exploration—this time into the wonders revealed by code. Sam describes code as ...
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Season 1
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Episode 163
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1:10:27
Work Should Be Fun, Not Just Productive | Bree Groff
Bree Groff’s new book, Today Was Fun, pushes the reset button on expectations about work. There is no reason work can’t be fun. About half of the things that make it un-fun are self-inflicted—we can just stop doing them. Take off the s...
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Season 1
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Episode 162
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1:07:44
The System Is the Problem: Rethinking Business at the Systems Level | Sandra Waddock
Sandra Waddock has spent decades exploring the systems beneath the systems, asking questions about purpose, story, and the deeper operating logic of business. Sandra argues that the current model focused on growth, control, and short-term profi...
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Season 1
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Episode 161
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1:03:43
Customer Centricity: Designing Your Business Around Your Best Customers | Peter Fader
As one of the world’s leading experts on customer centricity, Peter Fader noticed that many businesses were making a critical mistake: they were treating all customers the same. Peter argues that customer centricity means focusing on the custom...
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Season 1
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Episode 160
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1:16:44