Evan LaPointe: evaluation

Transcript context

…So I took, it's basically the Big-5, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, and formerly known as neuroticism, now called need for stability. I'm looking at it right here. And I'm actually, and I knew this about myself, I'm pretty low on openness, which I don't like to see, but it very much aligns with exactly what you said, I'm not great at big vision thinking. Like when people propose, say a designer on my team proposes this whole redesign big vision rethink of the way we, I'm like, no. It's my pain cave, like you said, and that's exactly what this test reflects. So I think it's a really powerful example of just understanding this is the way your brain is going to respond to things that are totally out there, inconceivable, or how would you call it? Somewhat conceivable but not necessarily believable, and that being aware that that's how your brain works is really powerful, being aware other people have a very different experience with that is very powerful. And your advice here is one, this combination of this habitat, create this habitat where you have all these versions of people's ways of thinking, where some people are in their happy cave when they're thinking big, and then along those lines, your point about vulnerably sharing, hey, this is me, I am low in openness, people need to understand this on my team, and let's work together to not let that hinder us. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because if you think about these ideas as pegs in holes, we're going to take a creativity shaped peg and try to put it through a more pragmatic shaped hole, there's a translation problem there, and it's a huge burden. If the team actually needs to be innovative, it's a huge burden just in terms of time spent on that translation, to translate the visionary strategic ideas that are accurate but are inconceivable into ideas that feel believable for those who need that more grounded thing. And of course the most common scenario here is ROI, which is the classic question to ask about any idea, what's the ROI? Well, if the idea is inherently generating nth order effects instead of first order effects, like what is the ROI of having fresh flowers in the lobby of a Four Seasons hotel? There's two possibilities for the Four Seasons, they either have an answer to that question which satisfies the pragmatic shaped hole, or they have said in their habitat, we don't ask those types of questions because they're a huge waste of time. And if you're thinking about a competitive market, most of the people that you interview are in highly competitive markets, the team that spends less time translating satisfactory language before they move, which inevitably they'll move, and sometimes they'll move because the market forces them to. They spend so much time locked up in the ROI conversation or the justification, the translation conversation, that eventually customers start leaving, employees start leaving, and they're like, oh, okay, it's becoming more believable now. Well, because moved out of the realm of ideas into the physical world that we can see right in front of us. And that team, because they got stuck in the translation phase instead of the experimentation phase, has a huge disadvantage in the market, and if you're competing head-to-head with one team, this is what I loved about the Figma conversation, that habitat inherently is built for speed because the habitat itself, words are tattooed to your brain that are like, we will not spend time in the translation phase, we will not spend much time. And we see this a lot in the interplay between finance departments, product departments, and things like that, where an overpowered CFO can start asking questions for which there are no answers, that just we're dragging the team into a different language that is much more literal than the more experiential language of the business, so you can see this play out all the time. But I think vulnerability is great because if you are sitting in a meeting, you Lenny, and you say, this is not my thing, basically everything you're saying is inconceivable, now I'm being honest with you, nobody's going to hate you for being honest, they're actually going to be glad that you are honest about the gap instead of glad that you are super certain that you are the right human to index off of in the decision-making process. And the thing you recommend being open about is this is my personality, this is my CORE identity, I don't know the language you'd use, but it's not I think all this is inconceivable, it's I think all this is inconceivable because this is the way I think.…

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