Samuel Bowles: Hello. My name is Samuel Bowles, as Stuart said. I'm from Mutually Human. You can find me on the Twitters there. I spell my name a little strange on Twitter.

Today, I'd like to talk about teamwork, which is a great segue from where we just were. More than that, I'd like to go a little bit deeper and I'd like to talk about how we design teams, if that's even possible.

What I'm not going to do in this talk is I'm not going to try to give you 10 silver bullets on how to create the perfect team, or even postulate how anyone else should do anything at all. I'd really just like to tell a story. It's a story that's a personal story, and it's also a story of an organization evolving. It's a story of a designer stumbling into management and then encountering some really hard problems and questions and returning to design as a way to unpack those questions and understand them.

Now, even if you don't manage people, we all work on teams. As we all work on teams, we all have the opportunity to influence those teams. I've found that the best strategies for organizational design are emergent and organic and that you have the ability to influence them, so I think everyone has that opportunity.

Does that sound good?

[audience member shouts]

Samuel: No? OK.

[laughter]

Samuel: Sound good?

Audience: Yes.

Samuel: One of the early things I learned in my career, when I was starting out in advertising agencies, is I realized that my creativity and problem-solving were not sufficient to communicate my vision. One time I was working on a particularly complex WYSIWYG interface, and I brought a developer over to see what I had spec out.

He took a look at it for about two minutes, as he looked over my shoulder with a scowl on his face, and then he said, about two minutes in, "No, can't do that."

[laughter]

Samuel: I was crushed. Not only was I crushed, I was perplexed. I thought, "There's got to be a way. There's got to be a way to accomplish this." I went back to my desk and I decided I was going to prove him wrong.

Now, I was young. I have since realized that this is a terrible way to win friends or influence people, but I learned something more important than JavaScript as I...

[laughter]

Samuel: [laughs] Yeah, there is something more important than JavaScript, which is that...

[laughter]

Samuel: I don't even know what's being said. [laughs] I learned something more important than JavaScript. I learned that in order to be successful in communicating with my coworkers, I would need to be able to communicate about the feasibility of the decisions that I was making.

I set out on sort of a quest to become a more proficient in the technical side of what it is that I do. I spent a lot of time improving my technical skills. Nights and weekends, learning languages and databases. I'm not a programmer but I learned enough to be dangerous in these conversations.

Dangerous, sometimes at the beginning was negative. Hopefully, I'm continuing to mature in that area, too. As I discovered this, I also found that there was even bigger gap in my knowledge. A gap that would, from there, take me many more years to fill. I discovered that I needed to understand the needs and language of business.

This is the part in my story where there would be like a swelling crescendo of music and I would show you montage of pictures of me starting companies and partnering and others and doing a bunch of things. Then I would land at Mutually Human. At Mutually Human, I've joined a company that shared a lot of my perspective and vision.

They offered me the opportunity to think about some really hard questions and engage in the design of the organization alongside of them. Thinking about how a creative engineering culture could come together, whether that was even possible, to build a really healthy way for that happened.

As I engaged with these problems, I kept asking myself the same question over and over again. I asked, are there general principles to organizational design? I really wondered, was there something that I can look to? I started going out and looking for heuristics. I started reading as many books as I could.

I read Taylor and Drucker and Ohno these management consultants. When I landed on Ohno, I discovered his book the Toyota production system. I went deep into this and I realized there was something here if I could just uncover it. But I wanted a shining example.

Some company that was nearer to home, both physically than Toyota, and also conceptually to the kinds of work that we were doing that I could look to as my shining example. I started looking around at all the companies around me and I came to a terrible realization.

How many of you know of an organization, maybe even your own, that would consider itself lean in some way? Wow. Just a few. Some of the places I've been there's a lot more hands that go up. Then, I often ask, "Of those of you who have worked in an organization that would consider itself lean, how many of those do you think actually are?"

That's when I realized there is a tremendous noise-to-signal. There are a lot of people talking about these things and not a lot of people practicing at least what I had read in Taiichi Ohno's book about the Toyota production system.

As I looked back on what I had read and what I had been learning, I realized that one of the things he kept talking about is he kept making these connections to nature. I took a lateral step. I said, "Nature's a really interesting thing. Flow is a really interesting thing. Nature has 3.8 billion years on us in terms of evolving a continuous-improvement system. Maybe there are some opportunities for us to learn something here."

I took a class in biomimetics. As I dove deep into biomimetics, I was learning about the application of nature's design principles. The biomimicry group calls this the conscious emulation of nature's genius.

As I dove into this, I realized that nature has this incredible economy of means. The cyclical nature of natural systems is an amazing example of optimizing for waste reduction.

As I dove even deeper, I discovered that biomimics often talk about a set of principles they refer to as life's principles. There's six principles, and these are the principles -- evolve to survive, be resource-efficient, adapt to changing conditions, integrate development and growth, be locally attuned and responsive, and use life-friendly materials.

You can go very deep into these, and I can point you at resources to go deeper into biomimicry, but two of them stood out to me as easy places to start experimenting.

We wanted to run some experiments to find out if there were more human-friendly ways of approaching efficiency in our teams, and they gave us a number of strategies for each one of these principles. Under evolve to survive, they talked about replicating what works. I thought of this as similar to Mandelbrot's fractals.

This idea that very simple systems can be built together to create much more complex systems -- these very simple rules. We needed to find the things inside our teams that were working really well, and we needed to figure out ways to replicate them.

They talk about integrating the unexpected. As designers, we know all about this. We've had that lucky mistake, where we have discovered the unexpected in our designs and adapted it. We realized, as an organization, that we needed to embrace failure. One of the ways that we do that in our organization is we do these retrospectives at the ends of our projects, where we have a list of goals, many of which are tied to our company's values, we go through those goals, and we evaluate the project against how we did on those goals.

They talk about reshuffling information. We often use Edward de Bono's parallel-thinking tools, his six thinking hats, to think through how we deal with some of this.

Under adapt to change, they talk about maintaining integrity through self-renewal. Most religious traditions have some focus on having an intentional rhythm of self-renewal. We began to see this as a biological imperative that businesses should be adopting as well. In our business, we schedule into our project work flow times where we stop working on project work and focus in on things that will rejuvenate us and regain our creativity.

They talk about embodying resilience. We were looking through our organization, looking for the single points of failure in our communication and in our processes that would allow us to decentralize our communication, add variation and redundancy.

I had these principles. They were interesting thought experiments, but what I didn't have was my model. I didn't have a model, and I kept returning to this nagging question from Taiichi Ohno's work, where it seemed really evident that he was really resistant to even write about all this process stuff, because he was worried that it would become crystallized dogma.

That writing about a snapshot in time out of a continuous-improvement system was kind of a paradox, actually. That maybe by writing about what he was even doing, he would encourage people to slavishly copy principles instead of following his path of discovery. What did I have? I had some theories in a book. Had a frozen snapshot. I had some design principles. I had an instinct.

I had an instinct that there was hiding in plain sight, an evolutionary secret that I just had to uncover. I had some really big questions that I wrote on a piece of paper. A few of them were, how do you motivate people to act in alignment with the business or with the project's goals? How do you align their actions and how do you encourage continuous growth beyond the project?

It was as I thought about these big questions that I came to my next leap. I realized as I was preparing this presentation that there was actually another quote from Taiichi Ohno's book that had been sitting in the back of my head all along. I don't think that this ever occurred to me when I actually made this leap. But in preparing the presentation, I realized this was probably the genesis of this thought.

He said, "The key to progress and production improvement, I feel, is letting the plant people feel the need. Letting the plant people feel the need." It occurred to me that the most efficient communication and management system that we know of at this point in time is the human nervous system.

As we look at the human nervous system, we have this system that it's like Mandelbrot's Fractals. Made up these incredibly simple things and yet, it creates an amazingly complex system. We understand the mechanics of this.

We understand the electrochemical signals that happen, but we're only beginning to understand how little we understand about how they work in concert. We can feel with these, the reaction of touching a hot stove, but we can also feel the sensation as we listen to a symphony. They can communicate these merely binary signals like "Ouch."

They can also give us the intangible sensation that we might be getting sick. I began doing more research. I looked for heuristics. I came looking for another organization that I could look to and I came across a really interesting person right in my own backyard. A business leader named Mark Peters.

Now, Mark Peters successfully designed a nerve his organization that cleverly connected the people in his organization to the needs of the business. He's the CEO of Butterball farms. His father was the inventor of the Butterball Turkey which they sold the patents to. But today, they use another thing that his father patented which is, they create Butterballs.

[laughter]

Samuel: They came up with a process for creating these Butterballs which is surprisingly complex actually. The thing about Butterballs is that butter expands that freezes. It's really actually quite hard to create these.

If you've ever had hotcakes at McDonald's, McDonald's is their largest customer. If you've had hotcakes at McDonald's, you've probably had Butterballs' Butterballs.

[laughter]

Samuel: The thing you have to understand about Mark's father is that Mark's father was an incredibly astute businessman but he was a really quite terrible manager. As an example, between the years of 2000 and 2008, the turnover rate throughout all US business with 3.3 percent.

At Butterball, in one year, they filed 800 W-2s for 140 employees. But it's worse. That was really for only about 50 positions that were churning. Mark got used to the idea that they would hire 20 people on Monday and he would be happy if five of them were around on Friday. When Mark took over the company, he realized he wanted a different kind of company.

He set out on a mission to change the nature of the company that he had inherited. He put in new lunchrooms, new locker rooms, instituted leadership trainings, started communicating in Spanish and English. There was a huge improvement and he changed the face of the organization. He moved it from being a dead end job to being an employer of choice.

He improved their customer service and he grew the business. But there was a big problem. What he didn't realize is that the business was about to be threatened with bankruptcy. What he didn't realize is that they had slipped into a negative cash flow position, which Mark didn't even understand. He's not numbers guy. Their margins were shrinking.

He sat down at his desk and he tried really hard to understand what was going on. Why they weren't able to pay their bills anymore. He realized that they had about 60 days until the company would run out of money entirely. He worked even harder at his desk and he came up with what he called a rough through put number.

Which were basically pounds packed per labor hour on their plant floor. He realized that they were currently packing 18.5 pounds of butter per labor hour, which would result in a projected $228,000 loss for the company at the end of the year.

He also realized that increasing sales would not be the answer to the problem because they were losing money on every pound of butter they were packing. He came to the conclusion that they would need to get to 22 pounds packed per labor hour in order to bring the company to break even.

Which he thought, "3.5 pounds packs for labor hour. No big deal, we're going to get there." Not realizing that was a 20 percent increase in productivity. He came up with a crazy solution. He went to his managers on the shop floor and he said, "Look, I want to propose that you take a pay cut."

"I'm going to take you from $12 an hour to $8 an hour. It's the only way the company's going to survive. The thing is, is that if we get to 22 pounds packed per labor hour, I will split everything that goes over that with you 50-50. The managers agreed. About 50 percent of them agreed to do this.

Within 30 days, the 50 percent that who'd agreed were making more than the 50 percent who hadn't. So they moved everyone over. In 60 days, they were at 24.5 pounds packed per labor hour and they made an annual profit of $720,000. That's not even the coolest part.

This coolest part is that they moved their employees from working 60 hours a week for $35,000 a year to 40 hours a week for $50,000 a year. Because when they aligned the interests of the employees with the company, the nerve ending that they created allowed them to feel the decisions that they were making.

Allowed them to make the changes they needed to adapt, to evolve and to feel the pain and the pleasure of the business both at the same time. We tried to align our business in the same way and we failed. We were working on a strategic planning initiative on the leadership team and we were planning for the next year.

We were going to unveil some moderate changes within the business. We've been working on it for a while, scheduled a meeting, sat everybody down and said, "Here's what we're thinking."

It was crickets. Everybody just seemed OK. There were very few questions. We thought, "OK, good. We're good." But in the next few days, we received three letters. Now, I'm about to do something that's really, actually kind of hard.

I'm about to share with you one of the things that's been one of the most painful experiences for me, moving into a management experience that I've ever encountered. I got permission from some of the employees who wrote these letters to share a couple of small quotes from what they wrote.

This was some of the hardest stuff I ever read. One of them wrote, "I feel misled. What communication I've had, basically with Samuel in one on ones isn't matching what appears to be the opinions of the leadership team." Misled.

It wasn't true that he was misled but there was a misunderstanding and it was a terrible misunderstanding. Another wrote, "I feel like my ability to be a fully contributing member of the team has been diminished. I worry that what it means is that I won't ever be the type of employee that I used to be."

No manager ever wants to hear his teammates say, "I feel misled, I feel diminished and demoralized." It's the last thing you want to hear. We were surprised and concerned by the miscommunication. We realized that it was a legitimate, valuable and it wasn't universal.

We realized that communicating in that one meeting what we were saying in one communication channel was not the resilience and redundancy that we needed in our communication patterns. We needed to communicate through multiple channels and create multiple ways, nerve endings, for people to be able to feel the changes that were happening.

We needed more holistic communication. We decided to try to do something different. We decided to try to measure something we didn't know if it was measurable or not. We decided to try to measure our culture. We created a value metric that was based on what we call The Six B's. The Six B's of being human at Mutually Human. These are our six B's.

Be passionate, be engaged, be generous, be collaborative, be human. We came up with four declarative statements for each one of these value statements. These were examples of them. Our team is motivated by their own interests and enjoyment of their work. Our team is free to take risks and fail in the pursuit of learning.

We had people answer these on a Likert scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree. We took this all together and we created a report card for our business and how we were doing. Now, we didn't get in many. Would you like to see report card? No? OK.

[laughter]

Samuel: This is the report card. Each one of these bars that you're seeing here represents one of the questions that they rated us on. The line at the top is the best answer we got on the question. The line on the bottom is the worst answer we got on the question. It generated all kinds of discussion.

One of the things that were interesting is that, in measuring this, we weren't sure that the measurement is really the perfect thing but the discussion that it generated was perfect. It got us all talking about these things. One of the things that we were most interested in is this next visualization. This is each person's answers. It was all anonymous.

I don't even know who all the people are there up there right now. What I do know is that each one of these is a different person's answers to the survey. What's most interesting about this is that each person is dramatically different.

We often feel, as we are operating in an organization that the things we feel are right and wrong inside our organizations are the things that are right and wrong inside our organizations. But the reality is, is that each person is coming with their own very unique experience to the table.

When we start to try to figure out how to do the messy part of figuring out, "Then how do we actually manage this?" We realized that there are many perspectives. In order to manage for those many perspectives, we need many nerves.

We need people to be able to feel and interact and experience what the organization is doing in multi variant ways if we're going to have any success at all. We're still experimenting as an organization. We are not perfect. We have a lot left to learn as we explore this new model that we're thinking about as we design nerves inside our organization.

I'll leave you with one last thought. As I've made a transition from being a designer all the time, or having designer in my title, to having position that's more sort of a management position in our organization, a lot of people ask me, "How do you like your new role?"

It's one of the weirdest questions in the world to me because it belies the fact that most people expect that I've changed roles at all. It doesn't feel like that to me at all. I feel like all I've done is change who my client is. My client is now the people who work inside the organization.

I'm still designing experiences for the people I work with and for our clients. I'm still framing problems, I'm still proposing experiments, and I'm still iterating, iterating, iterating. The cool thing about all of that is, is that as all of us struggle in the teams that we all work on, these are all things that we can all do. It's your turn.

There are worthy problems to consider on the business side of all of the businesses that we work in. There are really, truly wicked problems. The kind of wicked problems you wish you can work on. They exist when you have to work on designing for people. You guys are all equipped to do that work. Go do it. Thank you.

[applause]

Host: Any questions coming off of this?

Samuel: Yes.

Audience Member: Can you give an example of, what you mean by designing a nerve ending? After you got that feedback from your staff, what are ways in which you created feedback channels? Or what was it you did exactly?

Samuel: Yeah, absolutely. I think that one of the things, like the example that I gave of the report card that we're doing. We're now doing that on a quarterly basis. We're surveying the company and we are asking them to give us feedback on our culture.

We're watching over time to see...I don't have enough data yet to prove this, but my theory is we're going to get a lot more interesting information from that survey as we do it over time than we do at any given time. There are problems with it because there are definitely problems with the methodology.

How someone's day is going, will affect how they're feeling about this particular survey. One of the things we've been experimenting on that front, that I didn't mention, actually, there was a gentleman here in the audience, I think he left.

Karl Erickson wrote a blog post that he's been experimenting with. I guess they found there is a way...Social researchers have tried to find a way to discover whether or not people are happy. It has been a really hard problem and they've done all this research and really delved into it.

They've come up with...There actually is one question that you can ask people that is the best predictor of whether or not people are happy. It's really technical, but the question that you ask people is, "Are you happy?"

[laughter]

Samuel: That's it. So, the thing that Karl has postulated and we've been looking at implementing this as well, is asking people regular basis. Having a little pop-up that pops up on everyone's screen a couple of times a week that just says, "Are you happy?" Then measuring that over time.

Because what we like to be able to do is after we've made a particular change in the business where we've changed how something is happening, we would like to be able to sense, "Oh, the morale in the company has dropped to this point. We probably shouldn't be changing anything because it's really costly to morale. We're going to wait for a little while we're going to introduce this change here."

That's another example. Another really quick one would just be linking compensation to the profitability of the company. We do a pure profit share bonus the end of every quarter. Those are some of the ways we're experimenting with just how do you connect business needs to the people who are doing the work? How do you connect the management to sense what's happening within the organization?

Christina: Thanks, Samuel. Good talk. The example you gave of Butterball's Butterballs, I'm going to say that all week...

[laughter]

Christina: ...is, they had a lot of staff churn and as a manager, you know it's expensive to recruit hire. That's a cost. Was that was motivating your company? Or what other motivations are there to create more of these nerve endings?

Samuel: No, that wasn't what was motivating our organization. Our churn is not one of our problems. The thing that was motivating our organization more than anything was, the initial question I was asking, is how you do you get developers and designers to work together better?

We realized that one of the things we needed to do was get everyone on the same page and headed in the same direction with the business. We needed to find ways to create alignment between teams inside the organization and also there's just simple financial goal of, how do I get people to look for waste in the organization and eliminate it so that we can feel good about that?

Because if you tell people, "Yes. Let's eliminate all waste." It can be a really, really negative thing that can sap the humanity out of the organization. We wanted to pursue efficiency as an organization while maintaining humanity. I think that was what we were really aiming for. Thank you.

Host: Thank you, Samuel.

[applause]