Digital: Disrupted: The Essential Ingredients for a Fulfilling Career

Episode Transcript:

Paul Muller: Hey everyone, before we jump into today's podcast, I'd love it if you could do me two favors. First, if you are a regular listener, please do give us a thumbs up or better still leave us a quick review on the podcast player of choice that you are listening to us on. It does make a massive difference to us. If you could do me that small favor, I'd be so happy. Second, if you could do our sponsors a favor and check out their website, rocketsoftware.com. Rocket Software of course sponsoring us since the beginning of this podcast to see why over 10 million IT professionals rely on rocket software every day to run their most critical business applications, processes and data. Hey, well I'm your host Paul Muller and welcome to another episode of Digital Disrupted. And today we are going to talk about a book whose author, and the title of the book, caught my eye recently.

So, we've invited them on, the author or should I say co-author in question is Paul Jeremaes, who's a former colleague of mine and he was the founder of the Hewlett Packard Innovation Lab in Switzerland where I first had the opportunity to meet him. And I was impressed by how he'd built really his own sense of agency, creating something that has become something of a legend, certainly within the company and eventually the industry. The title of the book also caught my eye, ‘Enter Your Flow.’ Now if you are tapped into the world of software development, you've probably heard that word a lot recently talking a lot about flow states as we think about developing and delivering software better and we think more about the work environment that knowledge workers find themselves in. And if you haven't, well strap in I think's going to be an interesting ride. Please welcome to the show Paul Jeremaes.

Paul Jeremaes: Great, thanks Paul. Unusual to have two Pauls on the call.

PM: If you start interviewing me, we'll know that we've crossed that threshold. Hey, we're going to jump into it. It's good to see you. It's been such a tremendously long time since we've managed to catch up, which is great to be able to talk about the book. But first, we do a little something called the lightning round to limber up our cerebral matter, are you ready to play the game?

PJ: If you are willing to take the risk I will be. Yes, go ahead.

PM: Well, your book's all about that really isn't it? So let's get going. First up, what would people say is your superpower, Paul?

PJ: Superpower? Well, if you ask other people, they will probably say relentless positivity, but if I think about it, I would say my superpower is abstraction. And I'll explain a little bit what I mean by that. The ability to abstract away from detail, make things simple for other people to understand. And with abstraction you can actually look at the bigger picture and put things into context more easily. So I would say abstraction would be my superpower.

PM: Love it. The most disruptive technology of all time?

PJ: Well, I would say that any technology which is sufficiently invisible, but we still consider it to be magic, would be a disruptive technology. And so, for that I would say wireless technology. And if you think about the early days of adherence demonstrated electromagnetic waves or what goes on today in terms of mobile phones, satellite communication, etc., etc., is all based on wireless technology, which I think we should still be able to appreciate the magic behind that.

PM: You know what you got me thinking, the electromagnetic spectrum, full stop, is incredibly disruptive. We go all the way back to Faraday. The best quality a leader can have?

PJ: Often they say that you're only a leader if someone's following you. And I think to be a leader you've got to be authentic. I would say authenticity and empathy. Today we talk about emotional intelligence but certainly I would say to be authentic is one of the most important qualities necessary today.

PM: Without a doubt. So you've mentored a lot of people up through the ranks. What's your advice to people starting their careers?

PJ: I think to do something, I think I would qualify that by saying a little bit more, do something that you enjoy. I would say do something where you can add value and also do something where you can learn and develop your own skillsets. And after that you'll pivot many times in your career. I started life as a musician, went on to computer science, been through various things through my life, but every stage, make sure you are enjoying what you're doing, make sure you're adding value and obviously people appreciate that value and you're learning, and it opens up from there.

PM: Well, we're going to talk in a second about framing, focus and flowing. So speaking of framing, the first thought that comes to mind when you think of purpose?

PJ: First word I'll say is passion. And I think from the passion you focus on your aspirations and that your purpose changes over time. It's not just one fixed passion throughout your whole life or career, but I think it has to come from passion, what you're most passionate about.

PM: Last question. If you could use technology to solve one world problem, what would it be and why?

PJ: That's interesting. I think I'd have to focus on an aspect of education and if I wanted to use the words of the late Ken Robinson, I would say it's about rewilding education in the same way that we are trying today to rewild nature. I think we need to rewild education. And what I mean by that is getting a better balance between left brain and right brain thinking, which as we're discussing is part of the essence of what we've captured in the book as well. So, if we could use technology to rewild education, that would be fantastic.

PM: That's interesting. I mean, I don't know if we've got time to talk about ChatGPT in the context of that because I'd almost argue that, and this is my perspective, I’m a little biased, it could be an age thing, is that my nephew recently said he's just finished his final years of high school, graduated with ridiculously high grades, we're talking in the top upper percentile of the whole country. Very bright young man, but he's looking at ChatGPT and he is talking to his teachers going, why are you making us write essays anymore when we've got software that can do it for us? So when you talk about rewilding education, I mean personally that just sent off alarm bells to me, but I'd be curious, maybe we can dig into that a little later on. Before we do that, it's probably worth just sharing a little bit about you and your background because as you pointed out, you've had an interesting career, it's moved around a little bit. I met you back when you were the leader, founder, or the visionary behind the innovation center in Switzerland, which was servicing all of EMEA, but I think hosted people from all around the world. But your story starts before then.

PJ: Yes. So, as I said briefly, I mean I started my very early career as a musician, but then I went into engineering. I was a telecommunications engineer for many years and then got into computer science and from that became a lecturer, then a consultant, and then eventually got more into what I call the business of innovation. And that was more about helping other people to innovate. And that's why I set up the innovation centers in HP to get individuals and organizations to tap into their innate creativity. And oftentimes it's sadly ignored. So, that was my motivation. Then working on the book, what we're doing now with WorkLife Flow is very similar. It's connectivity between all those areas and it's all about making sure you're adding value and helping other people to engage in their own creativity.

PM: And I have to say, watching you back in the day, you looked like you were the king of the happiest place on earth.

PJ: Many people are very jealous of what we do, but that's one of the motivations why myself and my co-authors got involved in this particular initiative — to enjoy what you're doing because to many people working, there's a negative connotation associated with the word work and it's completely unnecessary. And provided you have the passion, you're enjoying what you're doing and you are, you're able to enter your flow as we'll talk about in a moment, then you should always enjoy what you're doing and it's such a shame not to. And I meet a lot of people in their early to mid-career, they're just not enjoying what they're doing and we are trying to change that.

PM: So yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the title before the inspiration. I imagine one's going to lead to the other—Enter Your Flow. It does sound like it could be the title of a Bruce Lee movie. I don’t know where that was coming from. Enter the dragon, Enter Your Flow. Some sort of Zen, Kung Fu mashup. Tell us a bit about the title and how you came about the inspiration to write it.

PJ: There's a lot of talk today about flow, in terms of the notion of getting into this state where you are relaxed but very concentrated. It goes in all domains. It’s about effortless mastery, when you are able to get into this flow state. I think everybody has experienced this one time in their life, this notion of flow. So what we've done with the work in Enter the Flow is focus on the reader or the individual to help them tap in to understand the conditions they need to get into that flow state to appreciate it. And it can be applied to any aspect of your work and your private life as well. But a lot of people tend to ignore that and other things take priority and sometimes people get stressed that they have negative attitudes toward work. So we wanted to find a way, a methodology of taking people through a process to enter their personal flow. And then it's not a destination because once you've tapped into that, you can apply it to everything you do and that's fine. You're able to find your fulfillment and happiness in what you're doing in a much more meaningful way.

PM: And your co-authors, these are people I'd never heard of from your professional life. I was expecting to see some names I guess that were related to your career, who I knew. How did you come about meeting them? I'm going to use the word eclectic and it's the only way I can think to describe this group of co-authors.

PJ: Well, initially it was by chance, three of us met in a bar in Geneva through a mutual friend. And we started talking. We all came from quite different perspectives. One of my colleagues is an ex-lawyer, worked for the United Nations, and another gentleman owns a business working in Barcelona. And we realized very quickly during the conversation there was something special we all had experienced in terms of working with people, both people that were happy and successful. Some people were unhappy and successful, some people were just unhappy and unsuccessful. And we felt as though we should tap into this and see if we could discover the essential ingredients to help people have a much more fulfilling approach to their career and their work life. Because we spend about 25% of our lives working and about 30% of our lives sleeping. So, if we don't enjoy what we are doing when we're at work, it's a big shame.

And so based upon that, we decided, well let's get together. And we started formulating ideas about how we could actually have a bigger impact with these ideas. And we started working on that about three years ago now. And then I'd worked with our illustrator, Kevin Woodson, over many years for graphic illustrations. And so we thought this would be a great opportunity of finding a way to engage the reader in their personal journey and then tapping into their left brain and right brain thinking. So the book is very much an interactive journey capturing people's ideas as they go through. Our belief is that by the time you get to the end of the book, the book is more valuable than when you started because you've added your own content. So, you essentially become a co-author of your own work life journey. And as we worked, increasingly it became more obvious that we had some essential ingredients here that just needed to be shared.

PM: Look, and I have to say I haven't made it all the way through. I only received it last week. There's quite a bit as you say, because it's not—for those of you who might have listened to the title, and especially if the subtitle itself, you might think it's a bit ‘woo woo’ and it's definitely not that. But you might also think that it's one of those how-to books and it's very prescriptive. But one of the first things that struck me was that you had illustrated it and it reminded me very much of some of the envision sessions you would do in the innovation center when you'd have businesses in there and you'd draw some of the things they were talking about to bring them to life. So, it immediately put me back in that mode. But the other was that, as you say, the book is incomplete. There are entire pages where I've got to write things down into the book in order for me to be able to progress meaningfully to the next stage. Now it's not onerous, it's fairly light, but it is a continuous theme throughout the book. You are always sort of stopping after I'd say about 10 minutes, 15 minutes of reading and having to make some notes before you can then meaningfully move on to the next section. What was the impetus to take that approach? It's rather unusual for what I describe as a business book essentially.

PJ: I think this is one of the challenges that most people face today. That is just taking the time to stop and pause. A lot of people talk about mindfulness today, meditation, all sorts of things like that. But taking the time to stop and think, am I enjoying what I'm doing? Am I in the right frame of mind to be doing what I'm doing? Am I bringing myself a hundred percent to my task at work or have I got other things on my mind? Am I gradually quiet quitting from my job because I'm not so engaged as I was before? So on and so forth. We go into a lot of detail in the book and that was one of the reasons we wanted to make sure the book was talking to the reader. And the reader was taking the time to reflect on their own notion of what's going on in their lives. Because if you don't do that, you can't make changes.

PM: Well said. So let's talk a bit about the three main sections of the book. Because you've divided it, there are sub chapters within each of them, but there are three distinct points within the book, the frame, focus, and flow. Maybe you want to walk us through each of them and why you chose that order.

PJ: Happy to. And this is quite important in terms of - we tried to come up with a very clean and clear, simple methodology or process to go through. So the first section of the book is called Frame. And there’s three main chapters there. First of all to reflect on what it means when you go to work. Some people are now working remotely, some people still travel to work, but as you're going to work, are you taking a hundred percent of yourself to work or are you partly leaving yourself somewhere else? And people always have things on their mind. But it's good to take some time to think about your current context when you are going to work, are you really taking yourself a hundred percent there? And the second part is when you're at work, what about your colleagues?

What do you know about them? How much interest do you have in your colleagues? This comes back to the empathy and showing an interest. And same goes for the organization you're working for. Do you have a good feeling about the overall purpose of the organization? Are you well aligned or are you just there for the salary? And so that's the next part of the frame. And the third part is motivation. What really motivates you? And this is probably the most important part of the frame, your current context. Are you mainly motivated by intrinsic or extrinsic motivations, your salary, your status, your title or whatever? Or are you in touch with your intrinsic motivations? And we believe there's an imbalance today with a lot of people. They're just focused on extrinsic motivations and sometimes they're not necessarily good ones. And so this question again, balance and digging a bit deeper to understand what are the true things that motivate you and try to make that all explicit in your current context or your frame.

And that's the first part of the book. Then we move on to actually digging deeper in terms of the focus part. What are the things you really enjoy doing? And this can be quite challenging for some people because you might be doing something which you are not a hundred percent into. You are doing it for a variety of reasons. But digging deeper into that in terms of what your aspirations are, what are you trying to do? And this actually starts to get at the heart of your passion and your purpose. Go through some very straightforward and very simple steps, but quite crucial steps to tap into those areas. Because we believe that every individual could grow in terms of their expertise and skills. And especially being aware of that to make sure you have the right conditions to grow.

PM: I was going to ask you on that point, and I'm personally conflicted about this, which is why I want to toss it around with you. I don't know if you've seen that short snippet of a video that Scott Galloway gives where he basically says, the worst advice you can be given by people standing at the front of the room at a university, and they're usually billionaire guest lecturers, is follow your passion. Because no one's passionate about chartered accounting. No one's passionate about, I don't know, oil, iron smelting. But when you get good at it, you become passionate. Does it make any sense to you? Does that resonate or do you have a different perspective?

PJ: If people just use the word passion, then it gets a little bit too abstract. I think basically what the starting point is, there’s kind of five steps to it. First, you need to think about what changes you want to see in your world. And it's not a question of saying the world, focus on your world, what changes you want to see in your world and how can you contribute? This comes back to the value you are delivering. Why do you believe these changes are necessary and who needs the changes? And then you think about who would value these contributions. So you can go through a very simple process to make it real and then you start to understand what it is you really should be doing. Now, obviously people are good at many things. Sometimes they decide not to master a particular skill or area because they're focused on a career or some other job.

But I think it's just a question, having a clear understanding of what is really giving you that pleasure, where your passion is, and that ultimately defines your aspirations. Coupled to that though is a very important step and that's identifying what your limiting beliefs are because oftentimes people say, well this is what I'd really love to do, and they use this horrible word, but I can't do this. I've got a family, I've got a mortgage, I can't do this, et cetera. And so, you need to identify the limiting beliefs and then find a way of getting rid of those, overcoming them, or at least be conscious of them to know that you can go down the path where you would get maximum pleasure and satisfaction and also feel as though you’re contributing value. So there's a number of steps required to tap into that passion, purpose or your aspirations. 

And then the second part of this focus in the book is looking at creativity and innovation because as the title of the book says about flow, some people might pay lip service to flow, but they've never really thought about it too deeply. And we believe one way in which you can actually experience flow is by thinking about your own creativity and innovation. And this can be very simple things based on things you enjoyed doing in your childhood, building sandcastles, jigsaw puzzles or whatever. Or it can be more highbrow in terms of playing a musical instrument, painting, and doing various creative activities. But to tap in or to have a better attitude to your own observations, when you see something you think this could be done differently, what if we do something differently? And then doing something with your ideas and then you suddenly get dragged or sucked into your flow state and that's when the feeling of flow comes home.

And what we believe is that you need to identify your own personal conditions, but getting in this flow channel, that doesn't mean to say you’re on a high all the time, but you need to actually understand the conditions that you require to get into flow. So, when you have a particular job to do or task to do, make sure you're in the right frame of mind before you do it. Then you can experience the flow as you're doing it. And this is where even if you're doing the jobs you mentioned earlier, which might not be the most exciting in the world, you can still enjoy them and get pleasure from what you're doing. And I personally believe that any job could be a pleasure if you have the right attitude and think about how you can improve it and perhaps innovate at the same time. A lot of people in certainly large corporations today will spot things that they think could be improved.

They don't say anything about it, they don't feel secure in their job environment and they don't think it's their job. And we've got so many examples in the book to illustrate this to speak up and that's all part of this creativity and innovation phase. And then we move on from the focus to the flow part of the book. And this is where having experiences and getting a much clearer understanding about what is it you want to do or should be doing with your life and your work. How do you find your voice? How do you actually articulate what is you are doing and make sure that other people understand you and you understand other people and how do you make decisions about your work life to go forward? Because the work life journey is, there's no particular destination, but it's a question of enjoying it as you're going along. And that's why we go through these three phases. The frame, understanding your current context, the focus, understanding your main aspirations, creative innovation and the flow about understanding the conditions for going forward.

PM: The simplicity and as I say, the natural progression of ideas is fabulous. I'm curious, as you've been working on some of these ideas and knowing a little bit about your background, how much of this was document and now you are testing it in the real world and how much of this had you built through the testing process and you've canonized it now into the written form. Tell us about a bit about the development process.

PJ: Out of experience from testing these ideas, working with people, we've been interviewing many, many hundreds of people in terms of tapping into their current understanding of work, helping them. One of my colleagues is very much involved in mentoring and coaching different people. We work with other organizations as well, the Conscious Business Institute who are also very much involved in helping organizations creating a better environment for people to thrive and get pleasure from their work. And so we've done a lot of research and that's why we've taken three years gathering this information, validating our ideas and refining as we've gone through. And as I said, why I mentioned about the abstraction, the idea was to have a very simple framework to help people go through this journey. And now we are continuing with that process on trying it out on different groups, as well as individuals, going forward.

PM: And I'm glad you raised that point. It was a great segue. I can see this being applied individually and certainly it seems to make sense. Again, my recollection of you is just this incredibly powerful individual in getting a group of people, often from the same company into a room and then aligning them around a sense of purpose, a sense of vision. You're an incredibly talented facilitator like that. My question was going to be could this be applied in a group setting? If, for example, you're a manager or a leader and you're looking to try and raise the caliber of the whole team through being maybe a little bit more self-aware and for each of them to find their own flow state. Thoughts on that?

PJ: And that's why parts of the frame are focused on your relationship to your colleagues. This is very important. And also understanding the role of teams, how they operate together. Because oftentimes in companies, people go on leadership training courses or team building courses and everyone wants to be a leader. Nobody wants to be a team player. And that's why the analogy we have used throughout the book is about going on a ship. We talk about flow because when you're on a boat or a ship, everyone has a different role to play. Different people have different skill sets and you have to learn to work together. And that's also very important. Understanding that and appreciating your colleagues and making sure that the right people are doing the right job and understand how it contributes to other people's success as well. And coming back to the leadership question you were asked at the beginning, it's very important as well for leaders to develop their people as well, to give them space to grow and develop maybe within or without the organization. I have many examples of my team members that grew within the organization and then they went on to do other things and you had to encourage that. But oftentimes, unfortunately, people are focused on the extrinsic motivations and these sorts of topics get missed or overshadowed by other priorities. 

PM: Yeah, look, the other thing I'd say is, and what's been going through my mind as we've been talking about this is, why aren't more people doing this with their teams? And I still suspect we've got this hangover from the industrial age, which again, let's give it credit where credit's due. We had 300 years of ingrained management training that were refined as Deming documenting most of what he was doing at the tail end of the industrial area. I mean he canonized, he put into law the things that made successful industrial companies. There really hasn't been, I don't think, as much work done around what it means to be a modern knowledge worker. So in the world of manufacturing the industrial world, it's very much a physical thing. You can see and sense success, you can measure it, you can put a micrometer across it or a voltage meter or whatever it might be. You can weigh how many tons of iron you've refined. But in the world of knowledge work, it is a lot less well bounded, it is a lot more nebulous. And I suppose if I could maybe offer my reflection, this book is a bit of the beginning of a how-to for managing a team of knowledge workers where flow state is an incredibly important, yet almost impossible to define attribute of the success of a team.

PJ: You’re quite right and the insights, I think by taking a more group or organizational approach to this, what you're able to do is make sure the individuals are a hundred percent engaged and they're giving their best. And there are many examples as well we've given in the book about teams that have gotten this right. And I think one of the reason we've written the book for the individual though is because there's a belief that if the individual is more confident in themselves, they're more resilient then if there's change. And there will always be change in the organization when change comes along, not to consider that to be a negative or a slap in the face, you're confident in yourself and you adapt with the change. Unfortunately, a lot of people wait until there's a trigger event which is imposed upon them before they do anything about changing their work life flow.

And what I mean by that, they’re made redundant, or they have a health issue or whatever. And so, the trigger is kind of a wakeup call, and our belief is that you can do this earlier and make sure that you are always in alignment with your personal values as you go forward. So, the individuals are more resilient to change because I've had a fantastic career from that point of view. You're there for a particular reason and I think this is why there has to be this cohesion in an organization, in a team to get the best value from the employee, individual employees as you go forward.

PM: Paul, fabulous stuff. Congratulations to you and your co-authors. How has the reaction been so far to the book?

PJ: Fantastic so far. We’ve gained a lot of interest from organizations actually as well, individuals that have read the early draft of the book and want to spread this within their organization. So, this is just to start from that point of view, we're just launching now other initiatives in terms of building up the community around work life flow. And I think it's kind of a good impact, hopefully.

PM: I love it. If people are interested in bringing this into their organization or just learning more about what it is you do and the research that you do, where can people go to learn more to engage you?

PJ: We've got details in the show notes for this episode. There’s a work-life flow website and then people can download information from there. The book of course is available on Amazon and sell sites like that. So, I think this is a starting point and we can encourage people, there'll be other material they can download in terms of templates they can use for their own hope work, if you like, even with their colleagues and work on some of the topics in the book.

PM: I would normally wrap up here, but I did say at the start of the show we'd have a little side bar chat about ChatGPT. Now I know you're a technologist, you've been looking at technology all of your life, as well as a creative and a musician, so I guess actually this is the intersection of the two, isn't it? Because generative AI is now mimicking what we would consider to be the domain of humans, which is the concept of creativity, of generating content. What are your thoughts about that? I'm just curious, did you think about getting ChatGPT to write the book for you?

PJ: A lot of my early research when I was in Pearl College was about human computing fraction. And that's where I started a lot of the work in the area. And I think today there's still this fear, unfounded fear, that somehow computers are taking over. Certainly ChatGPT, what it's doing is fantastic, but humans have to learn to interact and collaborate and cooperate with technology much more fluidly. If you like, and I'll give you an example, there are many instruments today if you take, you can buy electric violin or some device, some which you classically consider to be an instrument. But when someone's playing an electric violin, there's many other things you can do with it, special sound effects, synthesize, et cetera. Since you are learning a new instrument, and so if someone that's very good at playing an electric violin is not necessarily a good violin player on their own.

So you have to learn the new instrument. And I think with ChatGPT, it's another technology, we just have to learn how to use it. It's not a threat and it's fantastic what it can do and what it can't do. You have to be aware of that as well. So I think there's always a same with technology adoption or in general you can either consider a technology to be disruptive in the negative sense as an enabler or enabling technology. It can either be enabling or disabling, chat can be enabling, but we just have to learn to work with it and not be fearful of it.

PM: Two last questions. First one, would you as a musician listen to an album written by a computer?

PJ: I have listened to a lot of music, but personally because I, I'm more of a piano player, my ear doesn't enjoy so much. It's very flat. The way it's quantized is not so enjoyable. So, I'm still more of a pure, I'm quite old-fashioned from that point of view, certainly a role, but I explore all of these things. It’s the same with modern jazz, you have to dive into it more deeply to appreciate it and then retrain yourself to understand what's going on.

PM: Yeah, nobody understands bebop, let's be honest. And this comes from the father of a trained jazz musician. Alright, on that final question, the show sponsor Rocket Software, again, a big shout out to them. They've got a set of corporate values that they talk about, company values that matter to them, empathy, humanity, trust and love. You don't need to pick one of those four. Just curious what matters to you right now?

PJ: I think helping people to tap into their flow because as I say personally, I find that once you've defined your flow channel, you don't want to come out of it. And that's the thing. And so as I say, this relentless positivity that I talked about earlier on, it comes from there basically. And I think you want to share, help other people. I know many people that are in jobs which are very stressful for a variety of reasons, but they haven't, have not yet had the trigger to stop or to change. And so we are just trying to find ways of helping people to wake up because as they say, life's not a rehearsal. And if you're not careful, spend too much time on the wrong things, it goes by very quickly.

PM: Absolutely Paul. It has been an absolute pleasure having you on. It's been far too long between gin and tonics. Great to see you. So thank you for joining us and thank you again to Rocket Software for bringing us another episode of Digital: Disrupted. And thank you for listening in. If you like what you've heard, do give us, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, a thumbs up on whatever pod catcher you happen to be listening to us with. You can also reach out to me on the Twitter, I'm still on the Twitter, our handles @Xthestreams or our show sponsored for that matter @Rocket. So if you've got any questions for our guests such as Paul or ideas for topics you'd like to hear covered in future episodes, drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. With that, we'll see you all next week. Stay disruptive for everyone.