Evan LaPointe: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, cool. So are there a few things you could recommend to people to create a habitat that is conducive of good stuff? Let's start at the start here. So in the difference between what science knows and business does, let's kind of zero in on the fact that the way most companies approach culture has a very shaky track record. Like if mission, vision, values was an airline, you would not allow any family to fly on that airline. It does not arrive at most of its intended destinations. That is just a super important starting point because I'm going to kill a sacred cow here while we talk about this. And I don't want anybody to feel like I'm trying to be mean or anything. It's just it's worth looking at stuff that doesn't work and wondering if there's something that could work a lot better. So if we look at habitat and culture, it's really about what people believe. It's what people believe is acceptable, permissible, productive, and the biggest flaw in people's approach to culture. And interestingly enough, even at YC, they talk about this mission, vision, values, culture, stuff that comes later, let some stuff happen with the business that comes later. They're right to say that if that's the paradigm you're going to use because it's not going to work either way. So you might as well do it later. But if you're going to do it the right way and investigate human beliefs, and we talked about priming for example, culture is just the macro priming of the entire business of what your central belief systems are and then the permission that forms from those belief systems. So if you've done that really well, you should do that right at the very beginning. In what way should we approach this company, building this, working together, et cetera? That would be really, really helpful to get right from day one. And the belief system that people have, there are two approaches to changing people's beliefs. Mission, vision, values is what we call a performative approach. Meaning I'm going to come up with some expression of an inspiring mission, inspiring values and inspiring vision, and it's going to be performed well enough. It's going to be like if we were busking in the park, this is going to be a cool enough mission, vision, values that people throw some change into my guitar case and they buy into it, they gather around. And I think that's just completely the wrong approach because we're hoping to inspire people. We're hoping to be artistically talented enough to pull that off. The other approach is to be deductive, logically deductive, which is centrally speaking. There is hopefully a market out there that's glad our company exists, who is glad we exist, why are they glad we exist? And that's shifting our mission into something that we call your role, the role you play in the world around you. Who is glad you exist? Why are they glad you exist? And that is a fact. That is not an inspiring idea. That is like, okay, we work with this company that does AI-based optical character recognition, document ingestion, et cetera. Why is the world glad that they exist? ct. That is not an inspiring idea. That is like, okay, we work with this company that does AI-based optical character recognition, document ingestion, et cetera. Why is the world glad that they exist? Well, because we get 95% of the documents scanned into structured data that normally people have to transfer by hand. That's pretty compelling. Why is the world glad Warby Parker exists? Because before you used to choose between looking dumb and it being cheap and looking cool and it being expensive, and now you can look cool and it's cheap. The world's really glad we exist. Now that's true. I don't need you to be inspired to believe that that is true. And now everything that we're going to think about for the rest of our beliefs, we're going to deduce from that. So we're just going to use logic to build our culture, not inspiration. So this next thing we need to figure out is how can we understand the specific value that's created when we play this role in the world? We save people money, we save people time, we open up markets, we help people explore possibilities and potential they couldn't tap into otherwise, etc. So what's the role of Core? People are glad we exist because we tap into potential they had no access to before. And at the team level, at the company level, that could be a really big deal. So we know that and we say, "Okay, well gosh, that implies so much." There's so much we got to do now what value does that produce? And then I could say, okay, once we understand the definition of value, which comes out of our role, now we can change the definition of done. So a lot of teams talk about bias to action. And hamsters have bias to action. They get up out of their straw and they turn that wheel as hard as they possibly can and they go absolutely nowhere. But if you understand the role you play- But if you understand the role you play in the world, and you understand the value you produce in terms of time savings, cost savings, upside, whatever it is that you do, then you can say, "We should have a bias to impact, not a bias to action. We shouldn't just do stuff, we should have an effect that has the result of value creation. We should save people time." And now when you're a product team, looking at this, and you're saying, "Well, here's a cool new idea, Lenny, let's do this." You can now use that as a habitat level permission to be like, "Oh, how does that produce value for people? How does that make people go faster, save time, get smarter, do something they couldn't do otherwise?" And then you can still use that exact same vocabulary when you go sell it to them, "This is how it makes you faster, smarter, more efficient, save cost." So it's like really logical deduction. And if people think that we should do something, build a product that doesn't create value. Now instead of being inspiring, we can be logical. We don't build things that produce no value, that is not a priority until we can turn it into something that does produce value. So you're turning culture into something highly usable, in getting away from performative culture into logical deductive culture.…

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