Future of work activist and speaker Josh Allan Dykstra describes his vocation as “trying to help work not suck for as many humans as humanly possible.” As CEO and founder of The Work Revolution, Josh has plenty to share about the future of work and how to fix it in order to bring about change.
“We need a turnaround of the way that work happens, because the way work happens now doesn’t actually work for very many people,” Josh says.
As a keynote speaker and facilitator of the monthly leadership program Revive, Josh interacts with thousands of leaders about the future of work—particularly, the more human side of it and how to create a future that people actually want to work in. He describes his Revive leadership program as a “prescriptive pathway” for leaders to practice ideas and strategies for improving people’s workplace experience, and a sequential journey that a leader goes on with their team, in the service of helping people revitalize and feel more energized at work.
Here are some highlights of what Josh recently shared on the Life + Leadership Podcast, in conversation with host Tegan Trovato, Founder and CEO of Bright Arrow Coaching:
Human Energy
Anything a leader or organization is trying to accomplish starts with human energy, which is the power that moves everything inside your business. “Energy is the capacity to do work, and I think that means energy is really relevant to our work,” Josh says. “And the energy that actually powers our workplaces is human energy. Nothing happens in your organization unless a human has the energy to start it or to keep it going, period. They either built the system and they keep the system running or they get it started.”
Yet the future-of-work activist points out that generally the only time we talk about human energy is when people don’t have it because they’re experiencing burnout. It’s important to change the conversation to incorporate what makes people perform at their best and thrive. “How do we fill people’s tanks up with positive energy throughout their day, doing the work that they’re doing?” he asks.
Maximizing AI by Optimizing Humans
Josh describes his core approach to AI as figuring out how to “maximize AI by optimizing humans.” He notes that while adoption of this new technology certainly is a change curve, it’s one that has similarities to other change curves. “AI is another tool right now,” he says. “It’s a special tool, and it’s going to be doing some special things that we maybe haven’t seen before. But the change part of this curve we have seen before.”
With this in mind, he believes we can expect some predictable stages. “There’s a forming, storming, norming kind of a thing,” Josh explains. “That’s going to happen with this technology. We’ve played this game before.”
What’s different is that we haven’t seen a new technology with this much gravity move so quickly through the adoption curve. He warns leaders to be wary of the tendency to conflate large language models (LLMs) with the idea of AI. “These are kind of becoming synonymous, which I think is kind of dangerous,” he says. “LLMs in their current form are really not very intelligent at all. They’re making guesses based on a broad base of data, and so they usually guess correctly, but as we’ve seen, not always.”
He sees these concerns around accuracy as one of the biggest challenges in this area pending in the next year. “If you’re doing something regarding facts, make sure you’re factchecking, because these things are taking the most probable answer, not necessarily the truthiest answer,” Josh says.
Creative Destruction
Josh says that the older he gets, the more he appreciates the lessons of where we’ve been before—specifically, the cycles that tend to recur throughout history. “Somewhere between 80 and 100 years, we tend to see kind of this death and rebirth cycle happen,” he says. “We can see this when we look at demography, geopolitics, and societal systems.”
He believes that in the next decade, we’ll enter a metaphorical “time of winter.” “The current systems that govern the way we work, live, and play, almost all of them need to be reinvented, reimagined, rebuilt,” Josh says. “And I think people feel this, right? If you feel like this unsettledness of life, I think this is where that comes from, is that these systems were built for a bygone era and they’re just not serving enough of us anymore.”
Over the next decade or two, Josh predicts that one of our greatest tasks will be to take an opportunity to rebuild these systems into something that works much better for many more people. “Let’s try to bring in some wild hope into this and say, okay, how do we actually imagine something new?” he says. “That I think will help us keep going through the winter, because we know where the spring’s around the corner.”
Healthy vs. Unhealthy Organizations
David Marquette has stated that in healthy organizations, leaders take responsibility for the system and people take responsibility for their actions, while in unhealthy organizations, leaders blame the people and the people blame the system. Josh explained why Marquette’s quote resonated with him so much:
“How many times have we seen this, where in dysfunctional working environments, the leaders are blaming the people—’These entitled Gen Z’ers or Millennials’ or whatever the current story is,” Josh says. “And the people are saying, ‘My goodness, this system sucks. I’m at the mercy of a bunch of bureaucratic crap that I can’t change.’ And everybody’s kind of miserable, everybody’s pointing fingers, and nobody’s taking responsibility.”
Josh believes refocusing leadership on systems is a healthy perspective for leaders to take, since leaders are ultimately charged with the maintenance of systems, and can also make systemic change and improvements to these systems. “We do sometimes forget as leaders that we are the single holders of the greatest impact in the organizations,” Josh says.
Opportunities for Learning
Reflecting on the early pandemic and the opportunities for learning during that time that were beneficial for human energy, Josh shared his thoughts on where we are today from his vantage point of working inside organizations.
When the pandemic began, Josh’s greatest fear was that people would forget the lessons learned. “We’re going to take this little break and we’re going to get a sense and reground ourselves into the world at a different pace, and we’re going to see the benefits of flexibility,” Josh says. “Then we’re going to see the benefits of seeing our kids or our friends a little bit more frequently, but what’s going to happen is leaders are going to forget almost immediately, and they’re going to try to push everything back to the way it was.”
While at first that didn’t happen, Josh felt he was initially proven wrong. “For the first, I would say year or two honestly, there was so much outpouring of understanding from employers and flexibility granted and working from home and all of these things—it was so encouraging,” he said. “And then over the last couple of years, I think we’ve seen a backlash in the other direction.”
With this flip backwards, Josh now feels maybe he wasn’t as wrong as he first thought he was. “It does seem now like we are in many ways forgetting what we learned,” he says. “But I feel like we got such a glimpse of something better.” He believes many people would like to get back to that more flexible, balanced, purpose-driven life and the good parts of what we learned through that experience and thinks we can recreate that—but he knows it won’t be easy. “It’s going to take some collective work from a lot of us to make that real,” he says.
The Fundamental Challenge
Looking ahead, Josh emphasizes that leaders are going to need to really challenge their assumptions. “This process of system decay and rebirth is really hard to look at—is this really working anymore?” he says. “I think in our bones, we feel that a lot of them aren’t, but that doesn’t really tell us what to make new.” He believes the fundamental challenge for leaders to really wrestle with in the coming 5 to 10 years will be: what do we want to build instead?
Josh highlighted one thing he wants leaders to take away from this podcast about the future of work: remember to focus on the systems. “You are the people who can make systems better, so this is within your purview and your responsibility to do so,” he says. “And so I hope you’ll rise to the challenge and really think about what we can build that will be better and serve way more of us than the current systems do.”
Finally, Josh notes that we need “much more inclusivity and love” built into these systems. “That’s the kind of future I want to work in, and I think a lot of people would feel that way too,” he concludes. “So I hope leaders will take that challenge. And you’re the ones who can.”
People in This Episode
Josh Allan Dykstra: LinkedIn
TRANSCRIPT
Tegan Trovato
Josh Allan Dykstra. Welcome to the Life and Leadership podcast.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, and you’re such a champ to keep our conversation today despite battling a cold. So thank you so much. So kind of you.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah, I was super excited about this conversation. And yeah if I sound a little congested, that’s why. But I’m happy to be here.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah. Great. Thank you. Well, listen to just key things up for our listeners. Give them just a little background about who you are and what you do for work, because all of our conversation is going to center around your work, what you’re learning through your work and what they might learn from your work. So start us off by hearing how we might describe your work, first of all.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Sure. Yeah. So I like to say I’ve really only done one thing for the last like 16 or 17 years, which is try to help work not suck for as many humans as humanly possible. And that work has taken me in lots of different directions. Right. So I did consulting and had workshop facilitation and, know, I then dove into the world of assessments, you know, there’s tons of those things and leadership retreats and team building and, we ended up certifying a bunch of coaches and consultants in one of my businesses. And then we built a tech product over the last five years, but it’s all been in service of what I like to call a work revolution. And I mean that word very literally. wherever revolution can bring up a lot of things for people in their minds. But what I mean is literally, we need a turnaround of the way that work happens because the way work happens now doesn’t actually work for very many people. And we need to turn a lot of those things around and so that’s what my work is about.
Tegan Trovato
Wonderful. Okay, so you’re speaking to thousands of people every year, you’re in smaller rooms facilitating hundreds of leaders a year. And you have this program called revive, which is like a monthly leadership program. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that? Because I want to go into what your experience has been with leaders through that monthly program and what you might be seeing. So tell listeners at a high level what it is you’re in the room talking about with them first.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah. So generally what you’re going to bring me in to speak about is something around the future of work. So how do we create the future that we actually want to work in? So if work isn’t really working for very many people right now, which it’s kind of objectively not, how do we actually create a future where we actually want to work in? And so that’s what you’re going to bring me in to speak about. so I speak kind of in this future of work category, but it’s all about the human side of stuff. So we could talk about AI, but it’s really about…
How do our humans intersect with this thing called AI? How do our humans experience change? How do we make change more energizing for people? How do we actually create a culture that’s life-giving and not life-sucking? So it’s going to be all of that kind of stuff. And then the idea around the program like Revive is to bring in the practices. Because you can get a lot from a keynote, you can get a lot from a good event or from a good speaker. You can get a new idea and that could really help you think differently. And that’s wonderful.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
And then you’re going to go back to the office and you’re going to have a thousand emails staring you in the face and you’re going to have back-to-back meetings. How the heck do you put any of this to practice? How do you put any of this to work? it’s really hard when you get back into the workflow of daily life. And so a, a, a prac like a program like revive is really going to help leaders know what to do with their teams is going to give them a little bit more of a prescriptive pathway.
Tegan Trovat
Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
For knowing, this month we’re gonna focus on this, and these are the things we’re gonna practice together. And the next month, you’re gonna get a new practice, we’re all gonna practice that together. And so it ends up being this kind of sequential journey that a leader gets to go on with their team, and it’s all in the service of helping them revitalize their energy and feel more energized at work.
Tegan Trovato
I love it. Love it. Man, I don’t know if I want to go to AI next or energy next. So well, since your conversations with leaders around AI relate to energy, why don’t you take us through your concept around human energy? Because you’ve been talking about this probably for as long as you’ve been speaking, right? 17 years or something like that. And here we are all talking about tech innovation disruption. And the question is like, what is it that only humans can do now and in the near future? So I love watching your work around human energy stay relevant for so many years and become more relevant than ever this many years later. Wild. So tell listeners about your, what you’ve framed around human energy and what they might be thinking about when they hear this concept.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, energy is kind of a funny word, right? So when we hear energy, we could be thinking a lot of different things, right? You could be thinking of fossil fuels, or you could be thinking of crystals and healers, or you could be thinking of renewables or photosynthesis, right? Like there’s a whole lot of things that people could be thinking about when they hear that word energy. What I want to encourage people to do is really think about it in the sense of like physics, right? In physics, energy is defined as the capacity to do work, right?
Energy is the capacity to do work. And I think that means energy is really relevant to our work. And the energy that actually powers our workplaces is human energy, right? Nothing happens in your organization unless a human has the energy to start it or to keep it going, period. Right? They either build the system and they keep the system running or they get it started. It’s unique. But it’s this really like kind of underserved, underappreciated thing.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
That anything that we’re trying to accomplish starts with human energy. And yet, when is the last time we had a conversation in our organization about human energy? The closest I ever hear is we talk about it when we don’t have it. We talk about burnout. And that’s a good start, but it’s just not enough because you cannot create excellence by reducing pathologies. This just isn’t how life works. And so just treating burnout.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah.Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Please do that, right? Like that’s a good start. But really we have to get to what makes people at their best, what makes them thrive and how do we fill people’s tanks up with positive energy throughout their day, doing the work that they’re doing. And so when I say human energy, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s the power that really moves everything inside your business.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah. Yeah. And I also appreciate that burnout, the burnout conversations reactive and, human energy can be a proactive one if we make it such. and I feel the word thriving comes up for me when I think of human energy and burnout, I only have to say all the synonyms or things that come up for me on that word. Everyone felt them.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Exactly.
Tegan Trovato
As they heard us talk about them. So love that work. And you have a great TED talk on this topic for our listeners. We’ll make sure we put that in the show notes for them to go enjoy your broader, longer-range thoughts on that one. So, let’s talk about AI. Since we just opened by emphasizing how much
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah.
Tegan Trovato
It’s such a hot topic. I mean, we at Bright Arrow are having a ton of, I told Josh, responsible fun with AI because in our work, it’s so much is confidential and qualitative. And, but there’s just, it’s been disruptive even with the partners we hire here who were like, wow, we don’t need to pay a firm to do some of these things anymore. AI is already mature enough.
So my gosh, if we’re experiencing that as a, as a small size business, then, broader enterprises are going to reap substantial benefit from figuring out how we best interact with it. What do you see as most opportune for leaders from your seat? Because I know this is one of your keynote topics. So, what comes up for you around this one as you, as you speak with executives and senior leaders?
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah. Yeah. So I like to talk about, how do you maximize AI by optimizing your humans? And so that really is kind of my core approach to this, right? That this is a change curve, but it’s one that has some similarities to other change curves. Right? So at some level, AI is another tool right now. It’s a special tool, right? And it’s going to be doing some special things that we maybe haven’t seen before.
Tegan Trovato
Hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
But the change part of this curve we have seen before, right? This is how we adopt new tools and how we adopt new technologies. Those are things, so humans are going to go through kind of predictable stages here, right? So, where we see innovators get on board and then we see early adopters. And then so it’s going to go through that change curve. And then we’re also going to see kind of like the way that this gets absorbed into the work is a little bit like the way a new team gets formed, right? There’s a forming, storming, norming kind of a thing. That’s going to happen with this technology. We’ve seen, we’ve played this game before. We’ve played that particular game before. So think that’s one thing for leaders to remember is parts of this should feel really familiar because we are simply adopting a new tool and your people are going to go through all the stages of difficulty and challenge and adoption that it takes whenever you bring in a new tool.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
That said, I don’t think we’ve seen a new technology with this much gravity move so quickly through the adoption curve. Right? Yeah.
Tegan Trovato
Right. So quickly. Well, and its own evolution too. It’s constantly changing. It’s wild. Yeah.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah. Yeah. So I think, so I am just, you know, I’m absorbing as much as I can about this technology. And I hope leaders are doing this too, as much as they can. know it’s hard to stay on top of it because it is changing so quickly. but yeah, it’s, it’s a really, really fast moving curve. so I think that’s important to understand too. from what I can tell so far, you know, there’s a couple of, of kind of, you know, just thoughts I have about AI one.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
We’re starting to conflate large language models, LLMs, with the idea of artificial intelligence or AI. These are kind of becoming synonymous, which I think is kind of dangerous. LLMs in their current form are really not very intelligent at all. They’re making guesses based on a broad base of data. And so they usually guess correctly, but as we’ve seen, not always. Sometimes, I really like to make stuff up.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes.
Josh Allan Dykstra
And when you get into mathematical reasoning, it’s even worse, right? The models get really brittle. And so there’s a lack of intelligence inherent in LLMs in their current form that I think we really just need to be wary of. There’s a truthiness we need to get to that I don’t, I see this as one of the big challenges that I’m curious to see how OpenAI and Google and like, how do they address the fact truth side of what these models are producing. I see that as one of the key challenges in the coming probably six to 12 months that I really hope gets addressed because as these things, OpenAI at the time of this recording just released their web search, there’s concerns around accuracy. And so I just want people to remember that as they’re using these tools,
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
If you’re doing something regarding facts, make sure you’re fact-checking because these things are taking the most probable answer, not necessarily the truthiest answer. So I think that’s really important. Yeah.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Okay. We talked to we talked about you and I privately about just the creative destruction that will come from this and in the possibilities of what we could learn from past innovation cycles. Is that part of what you talk about with leaders and in your keynotes is this this kind of thinking about how to make this creative destruction opportune for us and really bringing in lessons from the past as we go.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think as a, this is where it becomes helpful to be a little bit of a student of history. You know, I was, was never a really great history student, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the lessons of where we’ve been before and specifically the cycles that tend to reoccur throughout history. So from where I’m standing, it seems like we are in these kind of cyclical patterns where every, you know, people will, you know, different thinkers will tell you different things around the actual timelines of these cycles. But somewhere between 80 and 100 years, we tend to see kind of this death and rebirth cycle happen. And so we can see this when we look at demography.
And we can see this when we look at geopolitics and we can see this when we look at societal systems and. The, the interesting thing to me is that we’re about to enter like the next decade is really a time of winter. Like winter is coming. and I don’t know, maybe, maybe people want to think winter is here, but I don’t think it is quite yet. there is more death to happen. I think, figuratively in our systems that the current systems that govern the way we work, live and play, almost all of them need to be reinvented, reimagined, rebuilt. And I think people feel this, right? If you feel like this unsettledness of life, I think this is where that comes from, is that these systems, they were built for a bygone era and they’re just not serving enough of us anymore. And we feel that dis-ease in our daily lives and in our work systems, in our education systems, in our finance systems, in our government systems, right? So this will be the great task that I think over the next decade or two is that we’re gonna get an opportunity to rebuild these systems into something much better that works far better for far more people. And I think that’s pretty exciting.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is exciting. And the thought of winter makes me feel like it could be hard. When I hear that, that’s the feeling that comes up. I think, but also things have been hard. We’re doing okay, right? Like we can do this. We’re resilient as humans. And the other thing that comes up for me when I think and talk with others about systems is that the systems you referenced are so complicate and multi-layered that we can’t really make a single decision to change the thing. And so sometimes things have to break fully for them to be reborn or reimagined. And that’s the winter to me when I hear you say that. Yeah, it’s going to be an interesting journey. man.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yep. Yep. Yeah. I think that’s, I think that’s well said. It is. It is. But yeah, if we keep our eyes on the spring, you know, I think if we keep our eyes on it, if we start to put a lot of our creative energy towards, okay, if we get to rebuild this stuff, what do we want to see built? I tried like, let’s try to imagine. Let’s try to bring in some wild hope into this and say, okay, how do we actually imagine something new? That I think will help us keep going through the winter. Cause we’re, we know where the spring’s around the corner. But we can start planting the seeds now.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, that brings me to one of the other things that I’ve been marinating on in anticipation of talking with you. And that was something I read that you recently put out on your website, at least the time at the time of this recording. So for those of you listening, Josh Allan releases a blog a week and they’re always so insightful and, pretty fast reads, which I, and I’m sure everyone else appreciates, but impactful. And the one that I am thinking of right now is, when you quoted David Marquet, in saying in healthy organizations, leaders take responsibility for the system and people take responsibility for their actions. In unhealthy organizations, leaders blame the people and the people blame the system.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah, I just.
Tegan Trovato
Why did that stand out to you? I mean, you sound like a David Marquet fan number one, which you’re welcome to fan out real quick if you need to. But also what, what stood out for you about this quote? That’s great for leaders to be thinking about.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah, I appreciate David’s work so very much. And I think if there are leaders out there who aren’t familiar, if you want one person to follow who really does kind of bite size leadership lessons, his channel on YouTube is fabulous. And yeah, this quote, it just felt so resonant to me. Just because how many times have we seen this, right? Where it’s like in dysfunctional working environments.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
You know, the leaders are blaming the people. Those right there, these entitled Gen Z’ers or millennials or whatever the current story is, we’re blaming the people. And the people are saying, my goodness, this system sucks. Right? I’m at the mercy of a bunch of bureaucratic crap that I can’t change. And everybody’s kind of miserable, right? Everybody’s pointing fingers and nobody’s taking responsibility. And so I just think this this focus of refocusing leaders, refocusing our leadership on systems is a really healthy perspective because leaders really are the ones who are charged with the maintenance and kind of upkeep of systems. This is your job as a leader. Your individual contributors are kind of at the mercy of these things, but you, if you’re a senior leader, you can change these things. You can impact these things. And so I find this to be a really helpful, healthy, refreshing perspective for leaders to have. It’s like, that’s where I should find that. That’s where I should keep my focus is on these systems. Because what happens is that most people actually, well, I think this is kind of interesting is most, most of us don’t actually make as many decisions as we think we do. We make a decision, we choose a system, and then that system actually chooses a bunch of things for us. So let’s think about, you know, if you choose to go to a university, right? If you get that privilege, you get to go to a university, you choose the school you’re going to go to. Okay. You made that choice, you know, unless your parents made you go there or something, but like, let’s say you chose that school after you do that. And maybe you choose your major. A lot of things are chosen for you. What classes you need to take, how much money you need to pay, what time do you got to be up in the morning to get to those? Like your whole life now is being directed and guided by the system you chose. You’re no longer making decisions. The system is making them for you. And this happens all over the place. This happens in healthcare, depending on where you live. Right, you are either opted into a healthcare system and then that system’s gonna make a whole bunch of choices for you. We see that kind of the really deleterious effects of a bad healthcare system here in the US a lot. Right, so, but we see this all over the place. So anyway, point being, leaders, your responsibility is to work on these systems. You are the ones that can make these things better. Please keep your focus there.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. That’s right. We do sometimes forget as leaders that we are the single holders of the greatest impact in the organizations. Each decision, where we spend our time thinking, where we allocate our resources, and not just on the organizational system itself, but then it has a ripple effect into tax systems and communities and legislation. mean, it is, we forget as leaders how impactful our role is, and that it’s not just the one in front of us.
It’s not just the calendar we look at when we get into the office in the morning. There are huge ripple effects for the smallest things that we’re responsible for.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yep. Yep. And, and a lot of people just don’t even see the systems, right? These systems are so invisible and they just kind of live in the background of life that a lot of people, right. It’s why people kind of end up blaming the system, because they, don’t quite realize how these things work and, and leaders have not taken enough responsibility to make them better. but yeah, so, so many people just kind of live their life at the affect of the systems they’re a part of and.
Tegan Trovato
Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah, leaders really can make life better by working on systems.
Tegan Trovato
So Josh, some of the things we talked about offline prior to this recording, we talked a little bit about the pandemic and the opportunities for learning that we had through that and some of the actions that we took during that time, which were really beneficial for human energy. What are your thoughts on some of that? And then what do you see us doing today as you’re working inside of organizations?
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah. Yeah, my greatest fear, so right when the pandemic started, I don’t think any of us really thought, my goodness, this is gonna last years. I think, if you remember back at the beginning, yeah, I was like, we’ll be back to work in three weeks. Yeah, were all kind of misguided on that. But my…
Tegan Trovato
Right. I certainly did not. Yeah. Yeah.Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
…very initial thought was, okay, however long this lasts, I am, because we really didn’t think it would last that long either. I was like, we’re going to forget. We’re going to, we’re going to take this little break and we’re going to like, get a sense and like reground ourselves into, into the world at a different pace. And we’re going to see the benefits of flexibility. Then we’re going to see the benefits of seeing our kids a little bit more frequently or our friends a little bit more frequently, you know in in outdoor spaces back then of course And then we’re gonna but what’s gonna happen is leaders are gonna forget Almost immediately and they’re gonna try to push everything back to the way it was And you know at first that didn’t happen And I was really proven wrong For the first, know, I would say year or two honestly, there was so much…
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
…kind of outpouring of understanding from employers and flexibility granted and working from home and all of these things. it was so encouraging. And then over the last couple of years, I think we’ve seen a backlash in the other direction. The winds have kind of shifted again as capital markets have gotten really strained. They started getting really weird in 23 and people kind of started freaking out about what does that mean for our businesses and our investments and our real estate? And my goodness, we got to get people back in the offices. So we’ve really seen this kind of flip back. so maybe I wasn’t so wrong as I thought I was, right? Because it does seem now like we are in many ways forgetting what we learned. But I feel like we got such a glimpse of something better.
Tegan Trovato
Yes.Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Like for all of its difficulty and for all of the things that happened in the pandemic, they were really hard for a lot of people. And we don’t want to gloss over that at all. There also was something peaceful and I think important that we can glimpse in that period of time that we might want to use to inform us around how we do the rebuild. Like are these some of the things that we want to build?
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
When spring comes. I think it might be. I think there’s a whole lot of us who would like to get back to a little bit more of that more flexible, balanced, purpose-driven life. I think we can create that, right? It’s going to take work. It’s going to take some collective work from a lot of us to make that real. And it probably is going to require a few more breakdown systems. But that’s that’s what I think of these days is I think that was a glimpse that we can hold onto and recall and maybe try to create again the good parts of it, the good parts of what we learned through that experience.
Tegan Trovato
Totally. So I’m so glad we went back to chat about this because I immediately came back to this is the kind of systems work we just talked about leaders needing to be aware they have influence over, right? This is a good example of creative destruction. This is a beautiful example of past innovation cycles. This is social innovation, right? To take care of ourselves through a challenge as people.
And so I appreciate you pointing out that like, we may not be there anymore, but we can remember this and take inspiration from it again when it’s time. And you you mentioned real estate, right? It’s such a big economic driver for why we needed to get people back in an office. Well, that’s a great example of a system, right? Like we’re economically bound to this thing. And I understand as a business owner, how painful it is to have real estate that’s not being used. And also,that didn’t help the humans, right? So like when do we start reprioritizing and allow that system to fade away and so that a new one can be born? And it’s not a light question because that’s only one system that comes into play into that social innovation, right? So crazy.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, yeah, it’s going to require us as leaders to really challenge our assumptions. Right. And then this, this is the kind of the process of, of system decay and rebirth is a really hard look at, is this really working anymore? I think in our bones, we feel that a lot of them aren’t, but that doesn’t really tell us what to make new.
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Right.
Josh Allan Dykstra
And so that’s going to be, that’s the fundamental challenge, I think, for leaders to really wrestle with in the coming five to 10 years is, you know, okay, what, do we want to build instead? And yeah.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. You know, I mentioned earlier for our listeners that human energy has been a focus of yours for many years. And, you know, I’m also, I also do in my work, I’m constantly able to think about what makes people thrive and what diminishes people’s light and joy and how we can make work a place of healing and growth. And, and so I’m saying all that to say, I have found something in my life that I find worthy of working on for decades. And because it’s so dynamic, we can think about it all the time. And I have my personal why, which I’ve shared with listeners in the past. I’m wondering what your personal why is that this topic keeps getting you up every morning and helps you hit the road every week and be in front of leaders talking about it every day. What might you share with us to just understand more about you personally?
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, yeah, so my personal why is something like helping as many humans as possible live fully alive lives. So, and I think this is why work has become such a focus of my work, because we spend the majority of our lives there, right?
You see the people on your work team more than you see your spouse or your partner, your kids, probably. You see these work people a lot. You spend like just an inordinate amount of energy and time and focus and mental thought on this thing called work. And so if we want people to live in a more fully alive way, work has to become something. Yes.
Josh Allan Dykstra
That’s a healing place and not a damaging place. And that does require a little bit of revolution. That requires quite a bit of turnaround because right now work is pretty damaging and not very life-giving or healing. that’s, but yeah, that’s kind of what keeps me going. So your point is it’s a very complex issue. It’s a very complex topic. There a lot of angles to it. But I think the, the, the upside of making this better…
Tegan Trovato
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
is really big.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah. bigger than we could possibly quantify yet. Beautiful. Well, as we’re concluding our time together, you know, what is one thing that you want leaders to take away from this podcast about the future of work?
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah, I think. Well, I feel like I’ve been, you know, spinning my broken record on this topic, but I’ll say it one more time, which is please focus on the systems. Right? Like you, you are the people who can make systems better. So this is within your purview and your responsibility to do so. And so I hope you’ll rise to the challenge and really think about what we can build that will be better and serve way more of us than the current systems do.
Tegan Trovato
Mm.
Josh Allan Dykstra
We need so much more inclusivity and love built into these systems. And that’s the kind of future I want to work in. And I think a lot of people would feel that way too. So I hope leaders will take that challenge. And you’re the ones who can.
Tegan Trovato
Yeah, absolutely. Josh, thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining me today. And listeners, if you are planning a leadership event soon or an annual all company event, Josh Allan Dykstra is the guy to come be on your stage to have people thinking about the future and marrying human intact. mean, just go to the website. You can see what some of the topics are. But you got a good taste today of what makes Josh tick. And I’ve personally seen him speak so I can attest to the dynamism.
And Josh, thank you for bringing some of that to the podcast today.
Josh Allan Dykstra
Such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for what you do.