Guest host Emily Sauter, Future of Work Enthusiast & Managing Director at Accenture, speaks with with Dominic Price, Work Futurist at Atlassian. Recorded live at the Agile Australia Conference, their conversation covers insights about modern work that can apply equally in a fast-paced start-up or a 100-year-old financial institution.
Guest host Emily Sauter, Future of Work Enthusiast & Managing Director at Accenture, speaks with with Dominic Price, Work Futurist at Atlassian. Recorded live at the Agile Australia Conference, their conversation covers insights about modern work that can apply equally in a fast-paced start-up or a 100-year-old financial institution. Listen in to find out whether you're at risk of "over collaborating," and even how Dominic uses some of his best tips about working together to be a better parent. And you can find out more about how Atlassian and Accenture are helping businesses succeed at scaling enterprise agility by heading to our home page http://accenture.com/atlassian
Emily Sauter: Hello and welcome everybody to Scaling Enterprise Agility, a podcast brought to you by Accenture and Atlassian. It's all about how businesses can be more adaptive and responsive to the ever increasing rate of change around us. I'm Emily Sauter, and Nick Pulse is graciously allowing me to host this podcast from the Agile Australia Conference in Sydney.
I am both an employee of Accenture and Atlassian, and I often define myself as a “future of work” enthusiast. But today, I'm joined by someone I respect and look up to very much. The one and only Dom Price to talk about the future of work. Dom, welcome. It's really nice to have you today.
Dominic Price: Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation. It's going to be good.
Emily Sauter: Me too. The first thing I wanted to touch on is actually your role at Atlassian. So, you are a Work Futurist.
Dominic Price: Yeah.
Emily Sauter: What does that mean and how do I get your job?
Dominic Price: Let me give you the honest part of the answer first. We made it up six years ago. And we made it up because we were sat there having a conversation, and we're like, “If our mission is to unleash the potential of teams, we think we need to understand teamwork in the future.” So that we agreed on. And at the time, Scott, one of our co-founders, said, “I never care what you call yourself externally.” And so jokingly, we're like, “Well, if Dom's gonna think about the future of work, we should call him ‘work futurist’.” He's like, “not that.”
Emily Sauter: Really?
Dominic Price: And so once he said, “not that,” I'm like, “well, it's going to be that” and within a week it had been published in an article, in a paper and I was like, now it's a thing, right? The weird thing was whilst it started as a joke, we're then like, hang on, this joke's become true. We actually do need to do that.
Emily Sauter: Yeah.
Dominic Price: We do need to not navel gaze, but we need to look at time horizon three. And not to predict it. I don't care about predicting the future. I'm like, what might it smell, look and feel like?
And how can we understand that compared to today? Therefore, what bets might we place today? And so it became real. My frustration in the modern environment is, in the pandemic, everyone started to focus on the future of work, so it's now no longer novel; everyone's doing it. But you can have my job as soon as you take on the role of realizing that it's part future, but mainly modern. More modern work than it is future of work.
And it's a combination, as you understand already, of internally focused, “How do I help Atlassian scale?”But I spent two thirds of my time outside going, “How do I meet the market where it is and help organizations of all shapes and sizes scale?” And that's infinitely more interesting. Doing it for a 20 year old scale up is fascinating, but it's kind of easy. Doing it in a 200 year old bank; infinitely harder, almost more important, but infinitely harder.
Emily Sauter: Yep, that makes sense. there's actually a term that you use often that I want our listeners to understand. the term “spicy.” What does that mean?
Dominic Price: So, I think we spend too much time talking about obvious stuff.
If I think about some of the customer engagements, they're like, “Hey, we think we want to collaborate more. Can you help us collaborate more?” And I'm like, “should we talk about the fact that you have a bad culture?” And they're like, “that's a bit spicy.” I'm like, “it's not. It's the truth. Your culture doesn't enable you to collaborate because people are scared of speaking up. People are scared of sharing their ideas. You don't have psychological safety. And you don't have a mechanism for innovation. You punish people for sharing new ideas. So, until we talk about that, and unlock that potential, there's no point adding a tool in, right?” So I work with a lot of CIOs who are like, “we need a new tool to collaborate.”
And I say. “There you go. You have a perfectly good tool to collaborate; your human systems aren't working, right?” So spicy tends to come around from saying: how do we confront the elephant in the room and have that conversation first? Because until you have that one, everything else is a waste of time. So with most CIOs, I'm like “if you're driving a digital transformation And you've not got one track in that that's people and culture, you will fail.”
They consider that to be spicy, I consider it to be common sense, right? It's just like food. One person's spicy and someone else’s bland. But I'm like, until we have the honest conversation, there's no point having a second or third one. Because you're just going to add a new kitchen onto a bad foundation. Get the foundation right first. And it's very rarely sexy. But it's important stuff that when you get it right, you can build really robust stuff on top. But if you don't, anything you build on top is just going to crumble.
Emily Sauter: Yeah. And as someone who would identify as like a future of work enthusiast, I feel like, I don't know if it's as a generation or as a workforce, it's like, we're this close. People really aren't quite ready just yet to have those hard conversations about how the culture, the mindset, the behaviors have to change, but they're starting to be interested and starting to understand what that means.
Dominic Price: I think there's a spectrum, right? And any change with the first mover, those first movers have gone, right? They're doing it already. Thing is, the first movers aren't easy to copy. They normally have a unique situation that enables them to be a first mover. So you then look at the mid tier, right, everyone else, and you're like the 200 year old bank, or the 150 year old telco, and you're like, “You have so much legacy. You have so much history. You've got barnacles attached to the bottom of your ship. You can't move fast.” It's not about adding a new motor, you have to remove the barnacles off the ship. And you're like, the thing is, that's a big task. Like, the removal of a negative is a big task, but it also doesn't often give a massive dividend.
It doesn't make it any less important. And so I'm seeing appetite out there. What I think is fascinating, where we are today, is the number of organizations that have gone through a form of transformation in the last five years. Agile, Culture, Digital, right? One of the three, or all three. Who when you say to them right now, honestly, how did that go for you?
And they're like, “not awful, and not awesome.” Yeah. So you're like, okay, I therefore right now in market understand the lethargic nature of leaders who are like, “do I want another transformation? And whatever you promise me? Is it going to deliver? Because the last two or three delivered some benefit, but not the promised benefit.”
And when you add in the economic times right now, people are like, “I want a quick return. I don't want a three year transformation. I want value yesterday. So how do I show progressive value?” I think the appetite's there. It's matched by nervousness. And it's also matched by a desire to go: “raise the bar for me.
Don't, sell me a utopian transformation, sell me one I can consume and one that's got a high chance of success with my people, my environment, my products, my customers right now.” And so I think the secret sauce of anyone right now is meeting the market where they are. And I think too many people aren't doing that. They're coming up with great ideas and I'm like, not a bad idea. You've got to meet the market where they are right now.
Emily Sauter: And I think for a lot of companies I talk to, they see Atlassian as one of those first movers.
Dominic Price: Yep.
Emily Sauter: But I also think as a company, Atlassian, we are experiencing a lot of the things that you're talking about.
Dominic Price: Oh yeah, all those growing pains. Yeah.
Emily Sauter: Yeah.
Dominic Price: Which is why it's the perfect playground, right? It's not so unique that anything we do is irrelevant. But it's not so commonplace that I'm in the exact same situation as those people, right? So, I think we kind of doubled in size in about two years when the pandemic hit. And you're like, cool, phenomenal. And you're like, cool, that comes with growing pains. Stuff starts to go wrong. So you're like, cool, how do we navigate that? And so, I think we spot them earlier, and I think we have more of an appetite to resolve them. We are not immune to stuff going wrong.
Emily Sauter: Yeah.
Dominic Price: We are just a playground where we get to experiment with that stuff early and therefore I think we get quicker solutions and more pragmatic solutions to market, not just in the form of technology, but in those human to human hacks, right? How humans work is something that we talk about quite openly and honestly, not just the things that go well, but the things that go wrong.
'Cause that is the amplifier that helps your tools be phenomenal. So you can buy the best collaboration software in the world, if people don't trust each other to share, collaboration software doesn't work anymore. Not because of the tool or the future, because no one dares share. If you get the human bit right, but you've not got the tool, you've got good behaviours, but it's in pockets.
You can't scale it. You get the behaviours and the tools working together, suddenly you get that harmony and you get exponential returns, but you've got to get them both singing together.
Emily Sauter: What would be like a spicy topic that Atlassian is trying to tackle right now when it comes to ways of working and future of work?
Dominic Price: Over collaboration.
Emily Sauter: What do you mean?
Dominic Price: Happens a bit in Atlassian, happens even more in industries that I go and help out, because this is how I help out, where we think that the more you collaborate, the better you get. Without realizing there's a massive tipping point and when you go off that tipping point, all you get is this very elaborate dance where everyone's collaborating with each other and nothing gets done, right?
Your sensors go off and you're like, “I have too many stakeholders. There's too many teams. I need to know what everyone's doing before I do my thing. And you're like, “hang on, but what if they need to know what you're doing before they do their thing?” And you're in this weird standoff where I'm waiting for you, you're waiting for me, nothing gets done. So over collaboration is this weird mistake that ‘every team is built equally,’ and therefore I care about every team's work equally, which is untrue.
And so the reflection is: which are the teams that I'm highly reliant on? So in an autonomous environment, very rare that you can ship by yourself. So you're like, “okay, there's four or five teams I'm dependent on. Couple upstream, couple downstream, they are in my flow of work. Those teams are critical to my success, right? I know those five teams for me.” Right now in Atlassian there's over 1 200 active teams. That means there's 1,195 teams that I don't care about. But it's really hard not to get distracted by what they might be doing, right? But every time I get distracted, that time is time I'm not spending moving my thing forward.
So it's a trade off, right? I've got a finite amount of hours in the week that I can work. So how do I make sure I focus that on these five teams, my team and the five teams around me who are critical to my success. A dollar spent there is going to give me a dividend. A dollar spent on this distraction over here, that someone else is working on, no dividend. I'm curious and I'm keen on it. That's over collaboration, right? It's when you go to meetings and you're like, “whatever the outcome of that meeting, it would never have changed my path. So why was I there?”
Emily Sauter: And I think we're talking a bit about, like, prioritization, alignment to OKRs…
Dominic Price: That's the business language, right? And it is. I think it's simpler than that, right? I think it's just about going, “I'm gonna pause. And I'm gonna look at how I invest my time. Am I spending it on the things that are gonna move the needles I care about? And that might be not my OKR, but a relationship with a team that I'm dependent on to achieve my OKR.”
Emily Sauter: Yeah.
Dominic Price: That relationship needs to be resolved and be effective for me to ship, for them to ship. That relationship is important, so how do I invest ahead? I can't wait till I need to tap them on the shoulder and go, “I need this favor.” It's “how do I build a trusted relationship so we have flow, we have shared understanding, we have commonality.” That could be done through OKRs. Could be done through a conversation, right? But it's the simple thing of going, “am I focusing on the most important things for my team to be successful? And not just my team, but the network of teams around me.”
So the reason I mention it, the two phenomenons I'm seeing right now, either side of that. One is, “as long as my team's okay, the whole system's okay.” Incorrect. So we're over indexed to, “I'm just going to focus on my team.” You're like, “I'm fine.” And you're like, “ Oh, no values reach the customer.” Because the team downstream of you doesn't know what you're doing. They have no line of sight, so when you passed on your value, it never reached the customer.
So fail. So then they swing the pendulum and they go, “right, well, in that case, it's whole organizational change.” The whole organization has to shift, and you're like, “that's not gonna happen, is it?” Or if it happens, it's not gonna happen anytime soon. So we flip between this, it's just me, or it's everyone. And forget that there's this wonderful sweet spot in the middle of going, right, everyone's built equally. Find the five teams you're relying on, upstream and downstream and build a trusted, real relationship with them. Again, it's not sexy or glamorous, but you're like, you know what? You do that effectively, your shoulders come up, and you start to see flow across the organization.
The third sin in most, let's call them enterprise organizations or more traditional businesses I work with, is they are so hell bent on the hierarchy, on the org structure, they think the people they work for are more important than the people they work with. And I'm like, untrue. The people you work with are substantially more important. But the org chart doesn't say that. So when you think about it, like, I'm working in a cross functional team right now, and I have other teams I'm reliant on. The org chart that we have as an export from Workday doesn't show that anywhere. We have to show that through different mechanisms, and it's fluid, and it's messy, and complex, but that's the actual work that's happening. The org chart does not represent the work that's happening. So why do I care about it? Well, we like it, because it's static.
Emily Sauter: Yeah, I can relate to that a lot. I want to also ask you about something you mentioned earlier. Psychological safety because yesterday, I think you and I were both in the room with Lois Romero as she was talking about how to rethink psychological safety and hybrid teams. That talk really resonated with me and I was curious to hear if that resonated with you? And also, what do you think about the importance of psychological safety?
Dominic Price: I think it's missing the stick. As a concept, it's been around since the 60s. It's been popularized brilliantly by Amy Edmondson. And I love the work that Google Project has done. I love all that. My issue with it, if I was allowed one, would be it's like showing someone pictures of a fit person a lot, but not acknowledging that they're fat.
Stop telling me that psychological safety is important. I believed you ten years ago. Help me build psychological safety. Help me identify when it's missing. Help me know when it's there, right? And so I think the gap has moved on. I think people have bought into it. They're like, “you know what, I’m with you.” Whether you call it psychological safety, you can probably call it ‘belonging’ more. And I know the words of what it's meant to smell and feel like, but how do I know, what's the thermometer that I shove into a team to know if I've got psychological safety or not? I can't ask people. So I think the conversation needs to evolve. And as it evolves, it gets really murky.
I don't know, and therefore I'm going to make efforts to build it. I know, I think I know when it's there, but I know less if it's missing. And so, I know the activities to do to build psychological safety. I do those with my teams. I know the listening activities to do to get that signal that is something off track, is something not quite right.
And so we invest heavily in that. I formed a new team earlier this year and we gathered in person and we spent a good amount of time forming as a team, not a backlog, not a strategy. How do we want to turn up? What do our meetings look like? We each did a my user manual, right? You buy a TV from Walmart, you get a user manual.
You hire a human that don't come with a user manual. So I'm like, let's do my user manual. So we did all these activities and I was like, is this a bit soft and fluffy? It may feel soft and fluffy, it's really important. So I get it. It's amplified in distributed teams. Whether you're hybrid and you are fully flexible, whatever.
Whether you're in an office and you're spread around the world, right? I think there's a whole lot of stuff we got for free. When we had the uniformity of nine to five, Monday to Friday in an office. Because of that uniformity, we got cohesion for free. We got bonding because we're in a shared space.
We had incidental conversations. We had things in common because we shared this space. We've now taken that commonality away. And we've built a moat between people. We meant to build a bridge. We've accidentally built a moat. And that moat is distributed work. If we leave it as a moat, we will see reduction in psychological safety, and you'll sense this because your teams will be very transactional.
They'll know what they're doing, but they don't know why, right? When you change that moat and go, I need to build more bridges, how do I make this team cohesive? How do I build that hyper-fidelity conversation, where we have innate trust, we can speak up? I feel like I could be my true authentic self. There is a low cost, low recourse to being wrong.
We talk about failure and errors as lessons learned and we apply those lessons. We all know what that feels like, but when you're in that environment, you're a (inaudible).
Emily Sauter: I think taking that analogy and thinking about, like, my own authentic self: I would be the dragon, I think, guarding the moat and the bridge. Another question I want to ask you because you talked a little bit about with psychological safety needing that thermometer…
Dominic Price: Yeah,
Emily Sauter: …and I actually think there's something you've developed: the Personal Moral Inventory.
Dominic Price: Yeah
Emily Sauter: So, I've spent some time on it. Productivity and profit, get that. People, planet, purpose, love all that. I find those things to be really meaningful, but help me understand, with that framework and with that tool, how can people use that to drive better teamwork and collaboration?
Dominic Price: So, I probably wouldn't. I'd use that to drive better self awareness. I use the Personal Moral Inventory to go, “where am I at as a human in my life? Not anyone else's marker on me, not anyone else's expectation of me, not family, friends, colleagues, no one. My expectation of me.” Which is brutal, because your expectation for yourself would be, you need to realize what that is first, and then you need to score yourself against it.
I found this late in life as a leader that actually being selfish as a leader is hugely important. And that you've got to, not wholly, but you've got to get yourself right first before you can be able to play with your team.
Emily Sauter: You've got to show up as your best every day.
Dominic Price: Right. And then once your team's highly effective, then you can do the network of takes. And you can do that upstream and downstream. We tend to go the other way: “Things aren't working. All right, let's go and blame other teams.” You're like, “oh!” Maybe start with yourself. Maybe try the mirror first. Mirror on you, the mirror on your team, then the mirror on the network.
Emily Sauter: I like that.
Dominic Price: I always do it in that sequence.
Emily Sauter: So talking about your personal journey, roles that are important to you, showing up as your best self. There's a new team that you created that involves a really, really cute set of twins. And I know that you've been very open about life BK, Before Kids, and AK, After Kids. So, what's one thing you've learned about what it means to be a teammate in a totally different sort of team that you can share with us?
Dominic Price: I'd say if I had to pick one right now on instinct, it would be ‘communication.’ I think when it was just me, and then when it was just me and my girlfriend, we could communicate in a laissez faire fashion and it worked itself out. The consequences of miscommunication with twins is significantly higher.
So, therefore communication has gone up the table for us in terms of how important it is, but also the different forms. So we do good day to day communication. Where are you at with the kids? Where are you at with work? What's going on? We do good daily end of day communication. How was your day? What was great today? What didn't work? What do you want to achieve tomorrow? And then we do great weekly communication, like, have you bought nappies? Or do I need to buy nappies? I'm going to order those on Amazon. Do we need milk? Like, where are we in the week. And so we've built this cadence of very open communication.
But it's not broadcast communication. It's listening communication. And it's sense checking. Here's what I said, did you hear that? Because if you, if you didn't hear it, it probably wasn't communicated. And so that has been something that I think we were probably good at, and good was sufficient before, but with kids we've had to get excellent at, otherwise that miscommunication has weird side effects.
So, I don't think it was a magic wand that we waved, we just did it incrementally. I was very fortunate to have 20 weeks of paternity leave, 10 weeks I took when the kids were born. I took 10 when they were 7 and a half months old and we went traveling together. Having that same shared lived experience meant that that communication is a real thing. It's not a theory, it's not a poster, it's like we do it every day and we design it. But having that open channel has been huge.
Emily Sauter: That's awesome, thank you for that.
Dominic Price: It's gonna be fun. Thank you for having me.
Outro: You've been listening to Scaling Enterprise Agility, a podcast from Atlassian and Accenture. You can learn more about Agile Australia, where this conversation was recorded, as well as the work Atlassian and Accenture are doing together by using the links in our show notes. We'll be back with more conversations soon. Follow us now in your podcast app, and you won't miss an episode.