# Tackling the Bureaucracy That Stalls Scale-up Growth using Stewardship and Agility w/ Michelle Holiday and Tyson Bertmaring: transcript

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Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/tackling-the-bureaucracy-that-stalls-scale-up-growth-using-stewardship-and-agility-w-michelle-holiday-and-tyson-bertmaring/

## The friction around leadership

Welcome to Scaling with Agility. I'm Yuval, and today I'm excited to have a conversation with Tyson Bergmarring and Michelle Volide, partners for a journey of stewardship and agility. Welcome to the show, Tyson, Michelle, Michelle. Do you want to get started? Tell us who you are, why we're here, what are you focused on?

Sure, thank you so much. I'm a consultant, a facilitator, an author, a researcher. My focus is on stewardship, introducing stewardship into organizations, the practice and mindsets in order to support thriveability, the ability to thrive within organizations at every level. And I'm joining from Montreal. Maybe that's enough for now.

And yeah, my name is Tyson. And the story we're going to talk about today is one that took place for over about three within Dyno Therapeutics. I was responsible for the GNA, the general and administrative portion of the company. And I was passionate to get into thinking about how we can integrate the work that we're doing together to make the organization more effective and more enjoyable to work in. And it took us down a path of thinking about different ways of working.

And my background in program management and scrum, I gave me a thought of, hey, maybe there's different ways for us to do that. So maybe a bit of context of the first time I met Tyson was exactly that journey at a dino where dino was already practicing, edge-on-in some ways in its scientific work. And it's people want to learn more about that. We will link to a couple of podcasts where Tyson and others at that story. One of the things that we've started to realize at some point is as we're improving the agility of the science organization, it's only the real product organization, it brought to light some questions and some opportunities when it comes to the rest of the organization.

So maybe let's start with that. What did you see, Patison? Both a dino as well as I think in earlier organizations that you were involved with when you looked at everything beyond the science, what we call GNA, in organizations often. So I started off in the military and you can imagine it's very command and control, very bureaucratic. But others, the time being.

Yeah, but it's in needless. I think it's needed to some extent, just based on the complexity, not the complexity. I would say the, actually, I don't know. I'm not going to defend it. I'm just going to say it is what it is.

There's a lot of control and bureaucratic processes that you have to follow. And like I remember one story where it took us a year to order office, office chairs for the entire organization. This is the military. And if you boil it all down, it was just because the government has been burned at some point in the past with somebody maybe taking advantage of a little bit of freedom to do procurement, and they create all these rules that require you to go through a bunch of unnecessary steps to get things done. I left the military and moved into the private sector, and a lot of the same things were present.

The organizations were much smaller. Whenever I saw something where I had to get approval for something that seemed trivial, was definitely within my area of responsibility or like, get approval on something I already did. This things that just didn't make any sense. It just spoke to me that the organization doesn't trust its employees. But I don't think that was why.

It was just that's just the way things have always been done. And so we just keep doing the same things over and over again. And so what really motive me was let's rethink how we're doing things and let's really lean into this principle of trust. If we trust people to work on million dollar experiments, we should probably trust them to make $10,000 decisions. That was really the driving force.

It was like, how can we create the conditions for people to work together in a more trusting environment with less bureaucracy, unnecessary bureaucracy? Michel, is that a common thread that you're seeing in organizations? The problems that I send is talking about? I call it the rules that have been written in blood. That's how we call that in the Israeli Air Force.

And it's the risk. It's always fighting the old issue, the old risk. Flosing the barn after the horses have left, whatever. I was in a conversation about this yesterday. We see it at every level of society and there's a push for deregulation of government.

And there must be a third way that isn't free for all and isn't control everything unnecessarily. So this is what I heard in what you were saying, Tyson, and it's interesting you bring up the military, because what I also heard from you three years ago is a yearning for the sense of cohesion that you experience in the military. So, how can we each individually be trusted and also how can we be more cohesive as a unit? And those two seem to be connected kind of in ways that aren't at the surface level, but we need both. So, yeah, it's interesting that you bring up the military and that's another piece that I remember.

We often, we talk about it often as maybe a paradox, but not necessarily between these two things between cohesion and individuality between alignment and autonomy. One interesting exploration is what does it look like when we have just one of these things in the organization? What does it look like when we have none? And what needs to be true to create an environment where we have both? And I think maybe that's where we can go next.

I guess your vision, Tyson, for the GNA organization at DynoA, is learning from the different organizations, different experiences, what would it look like to have both? So let's maybe chart what does that ideal vision look like, and then maybe talk about what's the path there, and how does it meet the agility. So what was your vision? What did you have in mind? How does stewardship fit into it?

Maybe I'll start with decisions. I think it all comes down to, where does it all? A lot of it comes down to enabling people to have agency, especially where they are equipped to have agency. So you can think about it from how can we adjust the way that general administration, these departments, how they enable employees across the company to make decisions they're suited to make. Like for example, I have a home office And I need to equip it with things to make me successful at work.

You know, on one side, a company could say, this is a standard approach, everybody gets the same thing. And that may be administratively easy, you know, but it's going to not necessarily serve the needs of the individuals. The other side of it could be a free for all. And it's like, hey, you can get whatever you want. And you're gonna have some people that are gonna go crazy and ruin it for everyone.

But there's something in the middle where we're basically providing a framework for people to make decisions and the way that we thought about it was, there's principles that you can put in place that, and also rules. So some things that are black and white and enforceable, and then some things that are really unique to the individuals context, but between those two things, and also like the goal, like why are we actually providing you home office equipment to do your job. Between those three elements, goals, principles, and rules, the thinking is that there should be a sufficient amount of context for each person to navigate in their own context to make a decision that's right for them.

So that's one way to think is how can we empower employees to make decisions and it can be as simple as what's in my home office? It can also go to way more complicated decisions. And then the other way to think about it is how do we help people within GNA, the people that are providing the services to the organization, how to help them make decisions on how to design their individual services so that they are aligned with the whole. So that like, you know, one service in finance doesn't necessarily get designed in a way that creates problems for let's say HR and vice versa. And so I think it's both ways.

It's like, how do we create the conditions for employees to make better decisions for them? And then also for the whole, and then also for the service providers to do the same thing. So that's, I just think about it as decisions. And I could add to that, that it's not a single move to create those conditions. It's not a one time introduction of a rule or a principle, even, that it's something lived and practiced and deepened over time.

So in introducing principles, we also introduce practices of revisiting them, of sharing stories of how we made decisions and what information was necessary, what more information might be helpful the next time. So it's easy to think that it's just about setting up a certain static infrastructure, but it's really about a culture, ultimately. A culture supported by rules principles, kind of the tangible structural things and also the somewhat less tangible relational infrastructure as well. And I guess for me that's where the connection to agility comes in. So one term I use for what you're describing Michel is an operating system.

And what I hear you say, which is the way I think about it, is you cannot just install an operating system, not off the shelf and not even something based on custom development for the organization. It needs to be evolving. The organization is complex, it's evolving, it's organic, your operating system should evolve with it as well. For me, the whole notion of agility applied here is because we don't know for sure what the operating system with the culture, the principles should look like, we should try something and see how it's working, really see how it's working, what's the effect on the people in GNA, the people in the rest of the company, does it resonate, does it create the provision that we want, does it enable the agency that we want or is it creating a free for all and adjusted and adjusted in small iterations over time?

I like the operating system metaphor. We worked also with an organic metaphor, that it's an ecology. Therefore, it's relational, therefore, it's emergent and evolving it. And there are structural and static things within any ecology as well. So there are multiple ways to think about this approach and understanding.

I guess that I really like the framing of ecology, what I'm wondering is what is the thing that is there a thing that you do to help an ecology thrive? What's that thing called if not operating system? I think it's called stewardship. It's like gardening, it's tending, it's being in relationship with the system, finding ways to sense, to see and know this. That's the activity, right?

But what's the art, is there an artifact or isn't there? Like, am I looking for something that's not there? Like what's the result of being in spirit? The artifacts, the system, right? Like when, like what Michelle's talking about like tending, like one of the metaphors you can use as a gardener, right?

They're taking, they're pulling weeds when they're not supposed to be there. They're watering. They're doing a lot of things to ensure that the conditions are good in that garden for the garden as a whole to thrive. And that's not the responsibility of like any one person in the organization. That's all of our responsibilities in different ways.

And I think what Michelle, you're also getting at what the relational infrastructure is the stronger and the more relationships that exist within that organization, the easier it is to tend to the whole success of the organization. And so where you see organizations that maybe it doesn't seem as rich when it comes to the relationships, the depth and the amount of, it's relying on like three or four people to basically hold the whole thing together. Like that's really fragile versus like everybody being apart and it's actually much easier and much more enjoyable to be a part of those organizations. Cause everybody like cause like you don't want to be in the garden like being the only person picking weeds you want like everybody in there picking weeds that they see it right.

## What is really happening in the system

We talked a lot about soil as a metaphor within this ecology or ecosystem concept that it's invisible, but that's where the real work happens. That's how the plants grow. And so all of these projects, all of these activities are enabled by well-aggregated, well-connected soil. people seem to be able to think. So I guess that that all makes sense.

I guess the question, maybe a listener might ask themselves is, okay, do all of these things. Let's try to work with the garden metaphor. There's working, there's working day in and day out in the garden, or weekend and week out in the garden. Okay, let's actual work to grow the garden. But there's also the work on shaping the garden, deciding this is what I want to do in this area.

This is an area with a lot of, you know, wildflowers, weeds, whatever, do I feel good about it? Do I want to make a change in it? There are two layers of work and there's also the sketch or the, you know, you call it the system earlier, Tyson, the what is the what is the plan, the current plan, not the original plan, but currently, somebody goes to my garden. What is the intent, the content of that garden, the aggregation of its rules, principles, goals, the thing that we tend to, Is there a name for it? Like I get that the name of the thing is being in storage.

I also call it developing. You're developing your system, your garden, whatever. But one challenge that I see with both myself as well as talking to other people that are trying to wrap their heads around this is what are we developing? Like when we're building products, when we're trying to find cups, it's pretty clear what the product is. where developing our company's ecosystem, ecology, whatever you want to call it, what's the right name or what's the name that would resonate for people as what is it that they're supposed to be spending time developing, being in storage it for?

I think I know where you're going with this on this one and the word that we use Michelle was flow. You really want to create flow in the organization. You just want to make it really, really easy to accomplish the goals. We're not saying stewardship isn't a replace of the things that we know we need, which is a company strategy and company goals. It's really about how we're working together to make it easier to do those things.

Yeah, that's essentially it. To be able to configure the system in a way that is conducive for everybody to flow isn't And the decision of a few people in the company at the very top to figure out because they don't know everything. Everyone needs to be in practice of stewardship together to realize that system. And I can add a layer to that as well. We talked about how living systems work, how living systems thrive, that there are diverse parts and we want those to thrive and contribute as fully as possible.

There are structures and patterns of relationship. We want flow there. And there's a whole that ideally is greater than the sum of the parts. And we want that to have as much capacity as possible. And we want to do that.

The fourth aspect of living system is that there is life. There is more potential and more complexity than anyone can know and control. So this is where stewardship comes in that we're sensing and we're tending to those conditions. So we started this conversation talking about the most possible optimal agency for individuals so that it's enjoyable for them to work there so that we get the best of their productivity and their contributions. We want flow in decision making and in relationships.

And we also want the whole system to have more capacity than just a bunch of separate individuals. So what came to mind for me when you asked the question just now you all was most of all that capacity. that were cultivating its capacity, but you're absolutely right, Dyson. That only happens when there's flow, when there's agency, when it all holds together as a cohesive approach. And I would include organizational strategy in that as well.

It all comes together in that capacity of the whole. So I'm hearing us describing desirable attributes of the way an organizational system, a company system operates. We want there to be flow. We want there to be growth in capacity. We want there to be agency.

We want there to be cohesion across individuals and functions while there's excellence in functions. I think part of the system that we're describing is what are the attributes that we're looking for, which could be useful in and of itself. What's the target state? What's the goal we're striving towards? Like you're saying, the more people are aware of these goals for the system, for the ecology, the more everybody can drive towards it rather than just a few people.

So in curistice, and if you look at your experience trying to bring this language of stewardship and goal of the system to dine on, What's worked well, what have been some of the challenges? Like if I go wake up somebody in GNA or in the scientific organization, middle of the night and use this language with them, what kind of conversation would it be? Or not middle of the night? Or over coffee in the morning? Yeah, maybe the easiest way to explain the primary feeling that people have moving into this initially, because it was difficult is that if you look at typical modern organizations, we've designed them so that there's very little overlap between people.

We kind of put people in little boxes and there's space around the box where they're not overlapping with somebody else. And everyone's happy because they have agency in what they're doing. But we all know there's things that slipped into the cracks that like, well, those two people didn't talk at the right time or they needed to work on that together, but they didn't know because they just think of themselves as two different boxes. But we accept that to be like, that's just how work is. We don't necessarily see that as that's a problem when we need to rethink the way that we're working.

What stewardship does is it puts people like overlapping in some ways. It causes those little boxes on the organizational chart to get a little blurry and that makes people uncomfortable. Like, what am I responsible for? What are you responsible for? So that whole tension around responsibilities and who's supposed to be the one that makes the decision on certain things, those things start to get challenging for people to navigate through.

And that you go through a period of that, I think it's natural to go through a period of like, okay, so we're supposed to be working in this way, okay, let's figure out how to navigate that and come to a new higher plane of existence. So I would say if you talk to people, it would be that they might not say it in the same words that I'm saying, but essentially what we did was deliberately put people into conflict with each other. And going through that journey together and coming out to the other side better is what I think it's worth enables flow and enables more of these things. You make it sound pretty terrible, doesn't it? It's uncomfortable.

We put them in conflict. We make it blurry. And yeah, all of that is true. And I remember people were unhappy. People were stressed and bad decisions were being made.

And now I'm painting it in extremes. But it's hard to be isolated and not to have full information. That's also uncomfortable. And to be just churning out stuff without full awareness of what it's contributing to. So I remember people asking people first saying, I don't have time to collaborate with these other people sitting next to me.

I am just full out. I got no extra gas or capacity. And how is this going to change my day to day? And our answer was, you have to the only way out of this kind of rat race is to collaborate. And it will change your day to day for the better.

Like that's the idea. We're not trying to make it worse. And that's what I saw happening as well. Creating patterns and structures of being in relationship, sharing information helps people make better decisions, be more effective and ultimately more efficient, be more joyful. It felt more like belonging.

It felt more agile. You've all only living systems, only something that's alive can be agile. It's such a beautiful fit. All of the methods and principles of agility are exactly what's needed in a stewardship approach. And you know, it's a difficult shift.

It's not only a shift in practices, but in mindset, but the goal is that it's better. I mean, if I think through the tailorism that you're talking about, Dyson, where we design organizations for efficiency, we build departments. It's the classic way we scale organizations, right? at the beginning, there's one person that does everything. The founders take care of everything.

I'm a solo consultant, you know, there aren't a lot of conflicts between the finance people and the sales people in my organization. But, you know, at some point when organizations scale, the typical play, the responsible adults play is to split into functions, to bring in a responsible adult CFO. responsible adult head of people in product teams bring make the developer that is great at user experience or user interface, get them to hire people in that space and on that space and specialize and over specialize and become very, very specialized in the one thing so that you can be very efficient in it. And one of the things that I see in organizations that I meet is that the result of that specialization is that people convince themselves that their work is decoupled, that they can do things themselves without collaborating.

They've convinced themselves that that's the right way to work. You look at, I asked them where are the dependencies in your work? How do you, let's look at your work and look for the dependencies. hard to see them even though they're there because people are telling themselves this lie in order to feel good about the way they're working that they can actually be self-sufficient. They can do this thing.

But this thing is not valuable in and of itself. It's just a piece, a piece of the widget. So yes, I agree with you, Michel. Because in agile in agility, we connect these silos to create value, to organize around outcomes and value and tending to an ecosystem that connects different pieces in stewardship. It's the same thing or it's the same vibe.

We're looking to work on the system. We're looking to get away from or to maintain. expertise that comes through the specialization, but connect the dots for people. And it's uncomfortable to people. It's uncomfortable to people that are working on the science to get the scientists working in the lab to talk to the ML and AI engineers and the computational biology.

Those are people that think very differently originally and we're trying to create a melting pot for these people And it's hard for UI engineers to be together with back end developers. And they resist it. They say, we don't need this. Why are you forcing us to do this weird thing? And I don't think it stays there.

## The practical shift

It doesn't stay uncomfortable. It requires some adjustment. And then there's value because as you start to see more of the system, you realize that you can make better decisions. So that's the very practical part of it. and also in well-hosted, well-structured conversations with your peers.

It also feels good and human. It feels like belonging rather than isolation. So it's awkward and difficult at first and then incredibly rewarding on multiple levels. So speaking of rewarding and how to sell this. If I look at the world today, it's very different than the world of even three or four years ago ago when we were navigating this journey.

It seems like everything is managed. Even more things are managed through Excel sheets these days and rewarding. It might be a, I don't know, what you're seeing. Are you seeing people motivated, more people motivated to do this through the fact that it creates a rewarding, more rewarding experience for them and their organizations? Or Or are you finding yourselves having to give them more tangible explanation of what's the benefit of stewardship?

I find myself having to reach out to more tangible benefits to agility for sure. It makes me think of this conference that you recently organized, Tyson, which was a bit of a show don't tell as I understand it. didn't sell it as stewardship of this broad system, but it was. And it was bringing people together in conversation in a relationship who wouldn't normally be that way. You're talking about genetic agency, the genetic agency technology conference.

The whole conference was organized around a single purpose. Like we're all here because we want to, the work that we're doing, we want to enable individuals, patients to have more choice over how they improve their genetic health. And that's something that everybody could connect our work to. So how are you connecting that to this? You're saying that?

I'm saying that that was a similar approach to what we did within DINO. know, there was a, I know there was a bit of selling stewardship. But most of all, there was, how do we accomplish the company's mission better? That's at the center. These are some ways we can do that.

We're going to experiment with different ways of collaborating in order to accomplish the company's mission more effectively. And we tried some stuff out, we tried out being in conversation in different ways, in different configurations. And then grew it from there. So that's part of my answer, you all, to how do you sell it? You don't necessarily sell stewardship, but you sell what it's in service of.

And just to get a little bit in the opposite direction esoteric, I think what the world needs more than anything is spaces where we can practice being in diversity and complexity, diversity means just difference, different functions, different types of personalities, different priorities, and to navigate that complexity together. So I see a lot of interest in that, as long as it's in service of something that we all care about, it can't be random and generic. But if we have a common purpose, then this is a really welcome way of working towards that purpose. That's what I see. So maybe there is a structure that I'm trying to work with for for agility.

So maybe maybe a diversion for a second. So in the world of agile in the world of agility, one of the patterns that we're seeing is people don't care about agile anymore. Not as much not as much fewer people care about it. So it doesn't make sense. And I think we've even seen that you know, a dino.

It wasn't about uppercase a agile that wasn't the purpose. The purpose was agility of the organization, helping dino find feet for purpose ways to do science and feet for purpose ways to, you know, run the company's operating system, whatever. But what I find is that in order for the mission of agility to reach more people these days, it needs to connect to expensive problems that the organizations have, for lucrative opportunities that the organizations have, as well as probably to some philosophical thrive or problem that people feel like, this shouldn't be the way we work. Like Tyson is a great example. Tyson has this, you know, in my experience, in my perspective, this burning fire of this is the wrong way to do GNA.

Beyond the, you know, the tangible impact of this wrongness, you know, tell me if I'm wrong, Tyson, but I feel like for you, this was, we need to do it in a better way. for other people, a lot of it is, okay, there's that, but also how is that going to move the needle? How is that going to help us achieve our organization's mission for them? There's this component. So what is this, what I'm looking for in the world of agile is, what is this problem that people are feeling?

Then what do we do and what are the results? So with agile, it could be we want to improved organization speed and impact and predictability and those kind of things that we could talk about. I'm curious what would that look like in the world of sturgery? Like what's the problem that if the listener is seeing in their GNA organization or in their company overall, they might want to think about sturgery as a lens, a perspective, an activity to to work towards a better ecosystem. Yeah, it's like, I think every single time if you're operating in your company, every single time you come up against a policy that you don't understand and it doesn't make any, and when you do understand, it doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't actually contribute to the mission. It's just a relic of what's just what we've done. That's just how the industry operates, but it doesn't need to happen that way. So every single time you come up against a hurdle that makes it harder for you to accomplish the mission of the company in a responsible way is an instance of why we should be doing something differently. And I imagine for most listeners that probably happens every day, there's something.

And I could add to me, stewardship is recognition of the complexity of an organization and therefore of the need not only for command and control. And there are things that need to be controlled, but not everything. So to recognize what should instead be tended and how to be in the practice of discerning that, of noticing and sensing, and not as an individual but as a system, develop the system capacity to notice where there's something that is wrong or potential that could be developed. So if we're asking what's the problem that it solves, it's either individuals are burned out, stressed out, not contributing as much as they could, not productive, whatever at the level of the parts, as I said earlier, or there's some aspect of infrastructure and flow that's blocked or that's possible that you want to explore or there's not enough cohesion and we're not delivering on the mission.

So really it's a function of noticing all of that complexity, all of the life in the system and growing as much capacity to notice and tend together. Let me add to what you just said, Michelle. One tension that we uncovered was the way that we're working is different than the way the industry works. And as an individual, you're thinking about your career after Dino and you want to set yourself up for success there, right? And for most of these functions, there's a typical career progression where you make it, you know, you keep ascending.

The experiences and the work that you're doing may not neatly map to that very functional specific trajectory that you may want to be on. And so one tension is how can you sell that what we're doing here is actually setting you up for even more success than the trajectory that you've been told you need to take, which is going up, let's say the HR track or the IT track or something like that, by operating within a system like this and exposing yourself to not just a subsystem but the whole system, you become a much more complete understand thinker about how a company actually works. And so even if you want to continue up that track in HR, for example, you're going to do so with a much better appreciation for how companies function.

And I think selling it that way to the individual can make them realize, okay, this may be different than maybe other organizations that I'll work out in the future, but I'll leave this company with even more skills than I would if we stay with a more traditional GNA function. And let me give a really simple example, because it sounds really abstract and philosophical, I think, but Tyson, you brought up the home office equipment scenario. That was real. That was a very simple situation, we thought it's pretty simple. Let's explore what a stewardship approach to that would look like.

This dilemma, how do we handle home office equipment? And it had been done in a fragmented siloed way. So operations made some decisions. First that everybody gets, I think it was, everybody gets the same thing. Get to kit.

Yeah, that wasn't happy for the individuals. Then And then here's the full menu and people liked that better, but it cost the company a lot of money. So then there was the policy that you get a budget, but you get to keep the equipment when you leave. This was kind of a new twist. And that seemed because part of the issue was, what do we do with all of this random inventory then when people leave?

So that created an unintended consequence. So then the choice from operations was, well, just keep it. But then we discovered from finance that that makes it a taxable benefit. So that, okay, we didn't see that coming. So we brought together those different perspectives in a conversation to understand what is this ecology that surrounds this policy for home office equipment.

And it was a wiser choice then, a wiser policy decision in the end that took into account operations, the individual employees, needs and interests, the companies, budget and limits, and also tax policy. So it's just finding your way to wisdom and effectiveness and as much efficiency as makes sense. And then that was expand. We even did that, we did that immigration, we did that for COVID-19. There were lots of different policies that applied to that approach.

So maybe to connect it to the world of edge, in edge, we talk about development, right? An important decision in the life of an organization, a system, a product is what are the things we should just run? We should run a policy. We should run a service. we should operate it and what are the things which we need to develop?

What you're talking about, Michelis, developing and evolving a service to the employee and ability to work effectively from home. And one of the ways we get out of the deep specialization is we, in this case, we've created, you've created a cross-functional team that has the people from the different functions. They each represent their function, but even the fact that they have direct conversations, they work through a challenge together, they developed. They see, they sense, they respond to what they see from the actual experience, the early warning signals or traction or whatever it is. As they're working through this together, things rub off.

The person from operations that is working the same room in the same team with somebody that's focused on finance and somebody that's focused on IT and somebody that's focused on HR, they start to learn some stuff. It doesn't mean that they'll become an HR experts overnight. We don't need them to. They don't necessarily want to. But they have a better shot at being the first operations employee in a new startup, they do need to be more of a generalist, what we call a T-shaped person, and they become a better asset to even a bigger team.

But what that requires is the leaders of these groups also acknowledging the devalue of being T-shaped in expecting and finding people and nurturing people that want to do this that want to become T-shaped. And there are a lot of overlaps between that and what we see in development organizations. It's non-trivial to acknowledge that the great UI engineer also cares about the other aspects of the product that they're building. And when I was back in the trenches, one of the best experiences was to go to the customer side to travel from Israel to New York, to a lay to a customer site and work on the system that the customer is using. Both because you saw the customer and the real experience of the system, but also because it required you to understand how to operate the whole system.

You didn't have a front and then junior year and a back end and an networking person. You had to do it all. And that was a growth experience that we tried to make sure everybody undergoes. Really nice. You were saying something earlier about different levels of work.

## What leaders should pay attention to

And one of the ways I talk about that is the ants eye view and the birds eye view and inviting people to take a bird's eye view. And they never lose that perspective. Even as they go down to the ants eye view, they take it with them and become T-shaped as you're saying. It's one thing that. It's becoming T-shaped and it's becoming, I mean, I think there are a couple of things here.

understanding the whole value stream, understanding everything that needs to happen. All of the different roles of the ants in the colony. But it's also, for me, the bird's eye view is not just understanding, it's also working on the architecture of the colony, evolving, deciding, what do we need to do now? Is this sufficient? Is this effective?

What are some ways we should beyond our, I don't know, do ants really think about developing their colony? I don't know. Instinct. Yeah, it's instinct. So we want to get beyond instinct is part of what we're saying here.

The advantage we have as human beings is we could step out of the instinct of running our organization day in and day out and think proactively about designing it and evolving it. And we can tend to our organizations. If we don't, we're like ants. And we can draw on collective intelligence as well. One thing I want to add here is a listener may be wondering, well, like, what does this actually look like in practice?

And at the highest level, we're not saying that you get rid of the relationship that exists functionally, where you have someone that may have a lot of experience in HR and then people that perform HR services. Well, we're saying we keep that and horizontally, if we can organize the G&A function into a collection of services versus a collection of individuals on a org chart, then you can organize those services and two teams, like working groups, cross-functional teams, whatever you want to call them, you organize them based on which set of services are highly independent with each other. And that's how you work on a day-to-day basis, but you still have your functional leadership to lean on for your functional growth, because that's still important.

I actually see a couple of different alternatives. So going back to the inside view and the bird's eye view, the inside view is the instinct running the service I could see. I think we've even seen a dino that running the service could still be through the classic departmental structure of GNA, especially if we've done a good job of decoupling, automating, especially in these days with AI, but maybe we don't even need humans as part of running the service. Maybe AI can be the end, and people, humans, can take the bird's eye view more of the time. In the bird's eye view, it's especially crucial to look across the Wall Street.

So to make it concrete, if you're OKR, Let's say your goal, your rock. For this quarter is we really struggle with onboarding new talent. It's a huge headache for the people that are in the organization. It's a huge headache for people that want to come. We're viewing from people that they've burned out even before they joined the organization and we want to revamp it.

So what we might do in the quarter is take the bird's eye view. We might bring together people from talent acquisition, from leaders inside the organization that are interviewing people from operations, whatever it is, whoever needs to be part of the view in order to really look at the whole ecosystem. And these people might work together. They might work together for a while on developing a new increment of how we do onboarding, of the onboarding product. they might actually run that increment for a while, 10 to the onboarding for a while, but eventually they might split up.

We don't necessarily need that team to continue forever. That's a choice. There's a concrete hand-off point between developing the services that we provide and running. So what you're saying, Yvall, is that the function still operates services that are going well, there's no need to improve them, we're just running the service. But if we need to develop a new service or if we need to improve an existing service, then you form teams around that.

And that could be for any length of time, it could be a week, it could be a month, it could be a quarter, a year, whatever much time is necessary until the goal is accomplished. That's essentially what you're talking about. But the actual functional operations of a service that's performing as expected stays within the function, the department. That's definitely one pattern I see often. In some cases, the result of taking the bird's eye view might be, yeah, we actually need a cross-functional team on an ongoing basis, maybe onboarding.

We really need the cross-functional team to look at the onboarding day in and day out rather than run it in silos. And that might be the result of the development team working on that concept. That brings up another aspect too is that there's certain people that really enjoy work that's just, you know, you tell me what to do and I'm just going to keep doing this work. So that's more of like an operational service that's just running really well. And they take pride in making sure that it runs well.

And then there's some folks that they really just want to spend all their time designing and like improving and not operating. And that's a challenge to navigate and stewardship is that you have a collection of people that are kind of both of those types of people. But the work isn't stable enough to be able to line people up in a way that's best meets their needs and best meets the organization's needs. So it goes back to what you're saying, Michelle, it's constantly evolving and living and that's what makes this challenging. that you need to have the frameworks and the structures in place to allow you to change with the...

I guess the question is, do you invite, do you force ants to become birds, or do you let them be ants? Like, I would say you invite them to do the bird. Yeah, yeah. But except that some ants want to be ants. That was definitely part of our approach at Dino.

Put out an invitation and notice who are the ones who thrive at the bird's eye level and do small experiments with them to demonstrate to the others and know that some people will never see what they see, that it will broaden the circle and hire for birds if you have a chance, probably. Yeah, we talked so much about the importance of curiosity in hiring, hiring for curiosity. And it's really a system view that takes shape. We haven't talked, we managed to talk for almost an hour without talking about AI, which is great. I'm happy we've done that.

I think they're... But you've read it up once. That we probably don't need humans at the end, so... I just didn't get to that point in the arc. We just didn't get to that point in the arc.

I think we would have gotten there. I think maybe a follow-up conversation can be about what does the end say? How does the world of the ends change with AI? Like, is there less need for your ends? Do more of the ends need to become birds to thrive in the world of AI?

I think the answer is yes. Like, I think what's going to happen, it's the same thing that's happened everywhere, like e-commerce everywhere, right? Like those roles that don't necessarily need a lot of human judgment are easy to replace with automation. And where humans need to continually evolve to is to a higher state of a system understanding, not just to be relevant in the workforce, but I think as a society for us to solve problems, like big, huge problems that are on a global scale. Like, we just, we need to be spending more of our brain capacity on the system than on things that computers can do.

We need to be using more of our brain capacity period. The way I'm here. And not only the individual brain, but the collective brain. Collective brain. Yeah, exactly.

But that's part of the individuals is they'd be able to connect into that. Right, so we might, that might be a fascinating follow-up conversation in this arc. What does stewardship look like in the age of AI? So, sign me up. For today, I think let's call it a wrap.

But before that, if people want to dive deeper, meanwhile, if people want to dive deeper into stewardship, Michelle. Where would you send them? Well, I have a book called The Age of Thrive Ability, Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World. That's one place in a website of Thriveable World. And Tyson, how do people stay up to date with what you're trying to do in the world of biotech?

So now I've shifted my attention from internal, from GNA, to actually thinking about partnership ecosystem. So that's actually where I'm spending most of my time right now is how do we move away from more or less a hub and spoke model where you partner with companies and they only really interact with you to one where you can form networks and then even ecosystems where there's emergence that's possible. Emergence of opportunity for everyone can benefit from. How do we do this also to share information that can be relevant for all of us? Essentially, how can we do this in a way that allows us to benefit from both competition and collaboration at the same time?

This is where I'm spending most of my time. A lot of what we did in stewardship for those three years is I'm leaning on a lot of that knowledge and then also before that with Scrum and Agile Ways of Working. But maybe if you just want to reach out to me and my email and I'm happy to answer questions. It's a journey, right? There's a lot to still do.

All right. Well, we're shell links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you, listener, for staying with us, exploring how to scale, scale organizations with the Glic Tien stewardship for Tyson and Michelle and Yuval. See you next time.