OKRs Q&A Podcast Ep. 66: The Brave New World | Andrew Bull, The Interstellar Way Of Life
In this exciting episode, Tim Meinhardt interviews Andrew Bull, the owner of The Interstellar Way Of Life. Andrew is also a wonderful podcast host and runs The Interstellar Business Show, available on all podcast channels. Andrew is all about sharing big ideas, great stories, and how to attack the brave new world. He discusses the skills employees and organizations need to really begin to thrive in this new way of life, and what organizations can do to ensure employee success in the business landscape over the next few years. Tim and Andrew also discuss how this applies to OKRs and the OKR methodology and how the new world is impacting the business landscape for all organizations, but also specifically technology companies. Andrew also has a new book coming out called Monsters of Team Performance so keep an eye out for it and we will update the show notes as soon as it is available for purchase!
To learn more about Andrew Bull, visit https://interstellarway.life
To learn more about The Interstellar Business Show, visit https://interstellarway.life/podcast/ To get on the waitlist for Andrew’s book, visit https://interstellarway.life/monsters-of-team-performance-book-waitlist/
To download a free copy of Atruity’s free e-book The Seven C’s To OKR Success – click on this link: https://atruity1.com/seven-cs-to-okr-success-e-book/
If you are interested in working with the Atruity team or have a question you would like addressed on the show, please email contact@atruity1.com or visit our website at www.atruity1.com
Tim Meinhardt:
Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of the OKRs Q&A Podcast, also known as the OKR Corral, where OKR insight is the king. I’m your host, Tim Meinhardt, President and CEO of Atruity, an OKR consultancy headquartered in our nation’s capital.
Before we begin, if you’re an OKR fan and enjoy our podcast, please subscribe, leave a review, and explore our website at www.atruity1.com. And finally, should you have a burning question you’d like addressed in future episodes, please drop us a note at contact@atruity1.com.
In this exciting episode, we have the pleasure of spending some time with Andrew Bull, the owner of the Interstellar Way of Life. Andrew’s also a wonderful podcast host and runs the Interstellar Business Show, available on all podcast channels and linked below in our show notes. Andrew is all about sharing big ideas, great stories, and how to attack the brave new world. You will have a wonderful opportunity to hear Andrew discuss the skills, employees and organizations need to really begin to thrive in this new way of life. He also discusses what organizations can do to ensure employee success in the business landscape over the next few years. We then discuss how this applies to OKRs and the OKR methodology. We also discussed briefly how the new world is impacting the business landscape for all organizations, but also specifically technology companies.
Andrew also has a new book coming out, so please keep an eye out for it, and we’ll update our show notes as soon as it’s available for purchase. So everyone, please grab that cup of coffee, put in those earbuds, and enjoy my fantastic conversation with Andrew Bull. So, Andrew, welcome to the program. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your organization, and what you do.
Andrew Bull:
It’s great to be here today, Tim, thanks for inviting me. So my full name is Andrew Bull. I’m from Interstellar Way of Life. We help teams elevate their culture and performance. Mainly working for B2B tech teams, but hey, I’m open to working with other people as well. I haven’t always been working in this field. I actually used to work in the film industry where I worked in many teams and led many teams, both in a field capacity in film studios and also in post-production, kind of technical environments as well. So that’s my background and the experience that I’ve built a lot of these lessons and my journey upon.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right? And you know, also you have a wonderful podcast, the Interstellar Business Show, and it has some wonderful guests; it had me on recently.
Andrew Bull:
Yes, I was just going to say that we did have a fantastic guest.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, yeah, haha! And so I was so excited to have you become a part of our program as well, Andrew. And we had such a great conversation. And let our audience in on a little bit about how you’re helping tech companies elevate their culture and team performance.
Andrew Bull:
Well, I think a lot of stuff just doesn’t get thought about really, because companies are so busy, bosses and CEOs are so busy with getting work in and trying to just keep systems running, that we don’t ever take time to reflect on things or fix that which is broken. We end up firefighting, and, you know, chasing after individual tactics or trying to deal with individual problems. But we don’t ever get to step back strategically and think about, “Hey, why is it that every time someone comes through the door, they’re really motivated for the first two months, but then six months later, they’re no longer motivated, and a year later, they’ve moved on. Or why is it that every time we hire a creative director for our agency or, you know, a new technical director? Why is it they don’t stick, why they always going somewhere else after a certain amount of time?” They just deal with the problem, right? They’ve got a contract or project they need fulfilling. So they just end up fighting the fire, but don’t deal with it. So part of what I’ve done is spend a lot of time thinking about this now, doing a lot of research, bringing together my thoughts and ideas into an overall strategy and approach for helping people improve their team and culture for the long term.
Tim Meinhardt:
Fascinating. You know, people sometimes don’t get to the root cause of what’s really going on within an organization, and it’s a shame. And they get a revolving door and they get a high level of turnover. They really don’t understand things. You know, you and I talked about your workshops a little bit, and in your workshops, you mentioned this—I love the concept—”Brave New World.” You know what? It is a brave new world that we’re all living in now. I mean, you and I off camera, were talking about the COVID situation. And you know, we’ve watched this latest variant from like a brush fire into all of our lives. And what is the brave new world in your opinion? And how is it impacting the business landscape for technology companies, or for any company, for that matter?
Andrew Bull:
Yeah, I think the impact is for everyone. I mean, in some ways, the term “technology company” can be applied to anyone. Like a farming company could be a technology company. But when we’re thinking about more office-based businesses, I would say that change is really hyper now. That’s a big one, that everything is so uncertain and moving so fast. Like my son’s off school this week, I hope he can go back to school on Monday, but he could be out of school again in two weeks. And so, from a personal level, I’m dealing with that. But then from a business perspective, there’s new software coming down the line all the time. We’re dealing with AI and machine learning. You know, the Metaverse and virtual reality, and all these things are changing around us. So change is really hyper, really fast, and we’re having to all have to adapt to that both personally, professionally, and the business does as well because the business end needs to adapt. If you’ve got a business that serves people like me who’ve got a son, then your business needs to adapt to serve my needs as well. So we’re living in this kind of crazy changing world at the moment, but that’s not the only thing that I think that makes up the brave new world. In total, we’ve got change is hyper, we’ve got the collapse of work-life boundaries, right?
You know, I’m at home now recording this interview with you, and many people are home now and, the office isn’t going to be what it was, I mean, some people are going to go back to the office in a full time basis, but a lot more aren’t going to be. Then we’ve got the fragmentation of the workspace. So, you know, I’ll be working with someone like yourself in America or someone in Australia. We could all be working on the same team or on the same project. Maybe it’s because the way that companies are built now is that the future companies won’t be built as huge companies with 1000 employees. They’ll be ten companies of 100 employees who just fit together as and when they’re needed. So everything is becoming fragmented and on demand, just like our shopping. And because of all of this, we’ve got our team members at risk of burnout struggling with all this change, both socially, professionally, and all the increased workloads that come with that. And then because of that, our team members want different things. They’re like, “Well, why should I have to work like crazy? Why should I be burning out at work because my boss is unreasonable, and the business isn’t set up the right way?” And so people are therefore looking around for other jobs and looking for that better work balance. And then right now, what that leads to is a talent shortage, right? That there’s not enough people around and people will move to the jobs they can. So this in a very big nutshell, is the brave new world.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, no, couldn’t agree with you more. I mean, we’ve had several podcasts where we get into some specifics and you talk about, you know, the collapse of the work-life barriers. And that’s a very real, very real issue. Burnout is a huge issue. And you know, we’re also dealing with, you know, for those who are in sales, you know, we’re changing as a business. Everybody’s companies are changing and morphing, but so is their client. So having to struggle with keeping up with what’s most important for them, they’re morphing as well. So you’ve got all of these moving pieces that are simply not in a place right now where you can fully understand them before they change again. And I don’t think we’ve seen nearly the end of it. You know, we did a podcast with an organization that was recently purchased by Microsoft, an OKR software company called Ally.io, and they were placed into this new Microsoft event they call EXP, and that’s the employee experience platform ,which will go under their software heading of Microsoft Viva, and what they’re attempting to do is kind of begin to make that employee experience a little bit more in focus for organizations, to keep them in touch because we all feel somewhat isolated of sorts in our new worlds.
And you and I were talking about it off camera, how unusual it is for someone to go out and make, you know, just what would have been a general day of going out to see different people and doing things and how it seems like, wow, it’s now how am I integrating that with what a business world that we’ve been essentially relegated to, which is, you know, various video conferencing on an ongoing basis and how that begins to impact your life as well. So I couldn’t agree with you more. Times are a-changing, and I think we’re just beginning to see that. And the other thing you mentioned was this artificial intelligence, machine learning, new software programs. You know, I’m a little gray in the tooth. So for me, every time I have to learn something new in the software world, that’s a big stretch for me. Other people who are younger and more adaptive to it seem to pick it up quite naturally. So, I think that those things also come to bear as we start to look about how our worlds are really changing much more rapidly than we probably are all prepared for. So let’s talk for a minute, Andrew, about these new skills that employees need to have to thrive in this brave new world. What are your thoughts and concepts around that?
Andrew Bull:
Well, I think before we do that, I want to just talk about a few of the business consequences of this brave new world, if that’s okay.
Tim Meinhardt:
Sure. No, please.
Andrew Bull:
Some of the things that we’ve got are to do with “people are going to become unmotivated.” I’m very naturally motivated and I know lots of other people will be. But some people need to be in the office environment where they’re next to their team members. You know, you’ve got that built-in accountability system of the physical workplace, whereas when you’re at home, it’s much easier possibly to get distracted for some people. So one of the impacts we’ve got here is people becoming unmotivated because of some of these challenges, And maybe almost because it becomes like the business is almost so virtual and so digital that it becomes almost not very tangible. Anyway, it’s like someone telling you you’ve eaten dinner, right? But you’ve not actually experienced dinner. So maybe that’s one of the things like, it’s hard to like, motivate yourself for this body that doesn’t really exist. And then I think the other issue we’ve got is with communication and cohesion. Those things are also going to become more challenging or are a challenge already for people. Sure, we can talk like this remotely and it’s great that we can do that. But we’re missing out on things like body language, just being out to chill out and share a beer together at the end of day and de-pressure together. So we’re missing out all those things. And we’re going to be losing day days to ill health as well through burnout and so on as well. So there’s a lot of business impacts as well.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right. You know, it sometimes does feel almost surreal. You know, you talk into your computer all day and the day ends and you did business, but like you said, it’s someone told you you ate dinner. I love that, by the way. Let’s talk a little bit about either what businesses are doing to kind of help that frame itself a little bit. And then what type of skills do people need in order to better survive in this new world?
Andrew Bull:
Well, I think they need what I call brave new skills to deal with this brave new world. So I think one of the things we need to give people who work in our teams is an ownership mindset. We need to help them start owning projects and tasks within our business. We’ve got to move away from this whole approach of spoon feeding projects and tasks to people. We’ve got to be able to treat people in a more mature way. So I think that’s a big one. We’ve also got to try and encourage people to have a growth mindset, so everyone is continually wanting to learn and do new things, and most people do want to do that. Personally, I’ve been in a job like my old job in the film industry. I got to a plateau and I stopped learning, not because I didn’t want to, but there weren’t really the opportunities there, and I was kind of just going through the motions in a lot of projects. And I don’t think that’s very healthy. I think, you know, once you stop growing and learning new things, well, there’s only there’s only one other way to go, which is to decay, unfortunately, and start going downhill like a sunflower, right?
Tim Meinhardt:
Start going the other way, right.
Andrew Bull:
Yeah, so I think we need to encourage people to grow and learn new things. And obviously in this world of hyper change, that’s very important. But it’s not just about growing and learning how to use the next piece of software, it’s also about growing in maturity and mental complexity as well. And one of the ways we can do that is with something like emotional intelligence, for example; starting as individuals to master why I’m happy, why I’m angry, why I’m sad, why I’m jealous, why I’m resentful, and start questioning those things and actually having more mastery over them and not just take them for the sake of it, because those things might seem not relevant to a business. Why do I care if my team member is feeling angry today, right? As long as they get the project done, as long as I get over it at some point, it doesn’t matter. But the reality is, when your team member gets a stink on for a couple of hours, they’re working less effectively. They might be a toxic person within your business for that time and not a good person to talk to new clients or colleagues. And so there’s an impact and all of these things add up. And in this brave new world where everything is hyper and moving fast and things are under more pressure, and businesses have to be adaptable and agile, we need people to be working at a higher level because the payoff here, right, is if people can work at a higher level, than a business can give more back to them. If I’m better able to manage my emotions and get through my day more effectively, I can complete my projects and tasks earlier. I can check out work earlier and spend time with my family. That’s the payoff. So there’s an upside for everyone here.
Tim Meinhardt:
Before we continue with the interview. We’d like to tell you a little bit about Atruity.
Stephanie Meinhardt:
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Tim Meinhardt:
You mentioned two or three things I want to go back and circle around a little bit. The first one was, you know, this ownership mindset. You know, I’ll relate it to objectives and key results. One of the things that I think is a superpower of OKRs is that empowering the employee to kind of be able to say, “Look, here’s the framework. This is your duties and responsibilities. This is what the company wants to be able to accomplish, not only over the long term, but you know, our mission, our long term, what are we doing annually? What are we really want to get done this quarter?” And then giving that individual that that sense of ownership that you talked about to be able to say to them, “What is it that’s most important that you need to get done to support our collective efforts and become team of teams?” And so I’m a big believer in empowering people and asking them to think for themselves. I think it gives people more self-satisfaction. I think it gives them the ability to essentially be able to buy into their own, what it is that they’re doing on a regular basis. And so I think that was an excellent point.
And the growth mindset, you know, I could go with so many different directions with this…humorously that, you know, I remember one when I owned a couple of years ago and I was at a particular conference and you know, they were talking about training, you know, engineers and training our software developers. And then, you know, running the risk that they would take those skills and actually leave us. And this futurist said, “Well, let’s reverse that. What if you don’t train them and they stay?” It just impacted me and said, “Wow, I want to be able to offer that to people.” And look, we need to build a better mousetrap, the company that we have in order to keep people here, give them that freedom, give them that ownership mindset. And this was well before I got into objectives and key results. But I think that ability to learn and be able to stay crisp and educated and be able to chart your own professional path a little bit, which is one of the things I think that organizations are finding now, is that in order for them to want to be able to have and keep wonderful talent, they need to know them intimately and what turns them on and where do they see themselves professionally as they move forward? And how can we help you, from an educational perspective, attain those things that are most important from you? So creating that work environment from an organizational perspective is critically important.
And then I love this thing about emotional maturity. And I think, you know, I wish I knew more about this intrinsically. But you know, I think it boils down to listening and communication sometimes, that, you know, we all like to talk, but sometimes we fail to listen, and sometimes listening to what’s going on with an individual and asking those deeper questions, getting to know that individual a little bit. Because it could be that, hey, listen, they had a sibling or, you know, a relative that’s struggling with a health issue or something that we may not be aware of in today’s environment. And because we are stripped of the things that we normally would be able to do, which is that, you know, watercooler conversation, that having a pop after work and being able to decompress with somebody. And so, you know, I think you’re 100% right in that we want to be able to have high producing teams. We want to create an environment where there’s that good and solid open communication with people because I think that’s what ultimately can help overcome some of those areas, and be able to take someone who is “not happy” with something and be able to turn them into a high performer.
You know, I’ll close and go on to my next question; one of the things we do with objectives and key results is when we set up a program, you know, I make a joke humorously that there’s an old Johnny Depp movie, Pirates of the Caribbean, and he’s talking to the other pirates. And so they’re arguing about something, and they said, “Well, this is really this is about, you know, the rules of pirating. And they go, it’s not really a rule. It’s more like a guideline.” And so, you know, I think that term, from rules to guidelines, gives that area of flexibility to talk and say what’s working and what’s not working, because something very small could not be working versus something that’s extremely large. So let’s be intelligent enough to have some flexibility so that everybody has a chance to be their best. Andrew, those are wonderful. I mean, I just I love that. And how do we how do we give people the opportunity corporately to develop those skills? And then how do they themselves be able to use those skills if given the opportunity? And so, you and I talked just a little bit about objectives and key results, and I don’t know how much you really, truly read on the subject, but you know, how do you think all of this applies to or relates to the OKR methodology in your opinion, Andrew?
Andrew Bull:
Well, I’ve read a little about OKRs, because I got interested in them, but I wouldn’t profess to be in any way highly skilled in them. But what I would say is if you’re going to work towards objectives and key results, and you want to hit them in a smooth fashion and not find yourself hitting unexpected roadblocks and obstacles, you’re going to need your team performing at a high level, otherwise every time you try and do stuff, you’re always going to be hitting a barrier. So if people don’t have an ownership mindset or…it’s bigger than an ownership mindset because it’s the whole culture needs to be around ownership. It’s fair enough, if I’ve got an ownership mindset and I go into a business, so I’m like, “I’m ready to own this task and project,” and you’re the boss and you go, “Actually, that’s not how it works here. People just do explicitly what they’re told.” Well, then it doesn’t matter if I’ve got an ownership mindset.
So it’s having that whole culture and positive attitude towards ownership and empowering people. If you do that, I think you’re going to get people buying into projects and find it much easier to get projects completed, because people will be involved from the beginning. People won’t feel like there’s a “them and us” situation. There won’t be like, “Well, there’s the guys over here who are laying out the explicit plans for what we need to do. And then it’s just us guys over here who have to work hard and make it all happen.” You won’t end up in that situation. You’ll end up with everyone working together, so I think that’s a very clear way—actually having that kind of correct ownership culture really helps you achieve your objectives. And then I think when it comes to growth, and I think you made an excellent point about helping people progress with their own individual professional goals, and I think that’s brilliant.
But I think there’s a whole part of growth which is overlooked. So we all think, “Oh, you know, you’ll finish school, you finish college, university, and you’ll have your degrees in computing, computer science, and then you learn new software, get new professional qualifications.” But there’s a whole load of development that doesn’t happen for a lot of people after they leave school and maybe even earlier, around things like communication and listening and understanding and empathy and being able to set up your day the right way to be successful. All of these, maybe what are so-called softer skills, which are also massively important. So I think those are the things we need to look at growing as well, because I think you could be the best computer programmer in the world, but if you’ve got a problem with communication, then actually, you could be the slowest computer team leader in the world, and you’d hit those OKRs at a much slower rate. So I think it’s about revaluing some of these other skills and not just looking at the standard things on peoples’ CVs is what’s important to be to be successful now.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah. Andrew, thank you. Gosh, you hit on such a great point when you talked about, you know, that company culture, you know, and it has to come from the top. We need to build into our organizations a place where people can…it’s OK to take a risk. It’s OK to try something. It’s OK to put your best foot forward, really try to accomplish something that you didn’t think was even accomplishable. And if you got 90% or 80% of the way there, that’s still a major win. And being able to give people that freedom to be able to say, “Look, I think there’s a better mousetrap here and I want to be able to give this a shot” and not being able to feel like your job’s in jeopardy as a result of it. So that whole concept of empowerment, I think, is really, really terrific.
And you know, and the soft skill element of things—could not agree with you more, that, you know, the ability to have good communication…I worked and did some consulting work with fellow that I’ve known since college, and he was a very successful businessman and took a company from startup to public. And we had a very philosophical conversation one day about what he thought was important. And he looked me straight in the face and said, “It’s communication.” He goes, “There’s never a problem in business, there’s just a communication issue.” And so I’ve always looked at it being a good communicator and having that ability, you know, from a communication perspective, to be a good listener, as well as being someone that wants to find a common place for things to work their way through. Because in business, every little agreement is an agreement, and an agreement shouldn’t always be one sided. It should be what works for both people. And I think sometimes we get caught up in this world of not being educated enough to what it takes to have that empathy, that ability to listen, and those softer skills, as you mentioned. And I think those are really critically important as we move forward, even more so as we move forward with, you know, with—and I’ll just use your term—in that brave new world.
Andrew Bull:
Yeah, 100%, and I think you made a great point about how our problems are for want of communication. The psychologist and philosopher Alfred Adler said “All problems are interpersonal problems.” And I think that’s a great thought, really, because I think often when, yeah, maybe a computer can go wrong sometimes. But how many times do you lose a contract because your computer went wrong or something like that? It’s normally because there’s been a bad conversation between people, there’s trust broken down. More and more it’s things like this where things go wrong. So, yeah, communication and people skills are key and getting to really know yourself at a much deeper level as well, which comes back to the emotions and thoughts and stuff, yeah.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe we’ll dovetail into my last question, but I really want to…let me rephrase this. What can people do today for themselves to help ensure success in the employee landscape over the next 24 to 36 months, Andrew? What do you think they should be doing?
Andrew Bull:
Okay, and I want to come back around to your points about blame as well and people being given the opportunity to try and fail because I think those are really interesting. But to answer your question about what people need to do to be successful in the next 24 months, I think they need to empower their teams by increasing transparency and having mature conversations. And this is going to be hard for people because a lot of people are used to hiding from each other. Some team members want to hide what they’re doing from their bosses, and their executive leaders. And some bosses—guess what? They want to hide from their team as well, because maybe they don’t feel like they know as much as they did or they feel a bit out of touch. So people have always got a reason to hide from each other. But all of that hiding is creating massive inefficiencies and future communication challenges, which will become those relationship problems that we’ve just been speaking about. So I think if we can increase, if we can empower people by increasing transparency. So we can say to our team members and go, “Look, this is how things work. This company needs to make $5 million a year to remain in business and be profitable, and we want to keep you all employed and we want to treat you well. We want you to have nice jobs and work nice hours, but we need to be successful as a business. These are the resources we have available. These are the goals we think we should be going after. We’d love your input. We’d love your ideas on how we can do this and lets all work as a team and make this happen.” I think we need this level of empowerment and transparency and mature conversations for our businesses to win.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, Andrew, wonderfully said. That is just beautifully said. So I want to thank you for being on the program today, this was really outstanding, Andrew, and I love the work that you’re doing. If people want to get in contact with you, how can they reach you? Where can they find you these days?
Andrew Bull:
You can head to https://interstellarway.life. That’s my website. Or you can search for Interstellar Business Show, which is my podcast available on your normal channels. Although that’s not just my podcast, I have lots of excellent guests like Tim on there, so that’s not just about what I specialize in doing, but head to https://interstellarway.life. I also have a book coming out shortly called Monsters of Team Performance, where you can learn about monsters like the Blame Blog, which is that monster which encourages people to point fingers at each other within the business. Or things like Cold Porge, which encourage a culture of surveillance within a business. So, yeah, you’re going to love that book. So head over to my website where you can get in contact and learn about all these cool things.
Tim Meinhardt:
Wow, wonderful. Andrew, thank you so much for being on the program today. We have to do this again. I love the way that you bring things to light, and this has been a wonderful time that I’ve spent with you today.
Andrew Bull:
Thank you very much, Tim. It’s a pleasure.
Tim Meinhardt:
Thanks so much for taking a few minutes to listen to our OKRs Q&A Podcast. You know, OKRs provide such an excellent, agile framework which is critical for today’s business needs. It’s such a pleasure to have such wonderful people share their stories and journeys with us. Please, should you ever need assistance with your OKR journey, do not hesitate to reach out to us and contact us at www.atruity1.com, and make sure if you have a minute, to rate our show. Have a great week. Stay healthy. And of course, stay happy. Thanks, everyone.
