Pod Insights How to Be a Better Human How to fix any problem (w/ Anne Morriss and Frances Frei) About this episode Some problems seem impossible. But this week’s guests say any problem can be solved. Leadership coach Anne Morriss and Harvard Business Professor Frances Frei are the power couple behind the book, Move Fast and Fix Things, the TED podcast Fixable, and more. They join Chris to discuss why any problem can be solved — whether the issue is in your business, family, or community. Learn how simple, everyday logic, authenticity, and empathy can guide you to the best solutions to your trickiest problems.
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0:01 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human and your gift will be matched five times.
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1:34 Chris Duffy? You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and today we're talking about problems. So how do you fix a problem? One time I lived in a place where whenever we told the landlord about a problem, he would send over this handyman to try and fix the issue. But the handyman fixed it always in the absolute cheapest and fastest way possible. Like one time, there was a leaky pipe, and the solution that this man came up with was to just wrap the pipe in like 20 feet of duct tape. It was truly incredible. Or another time, we had a hole in a cabinet door, and he came over and his solution was he just filled the entire cabinet. With that inflatable spray foam stuff so that there just wasn't a cabinet anymore at all. And I'm pretty sure that that is not how you're supposed to fix either of those problems.
2:18 Chris Duffy? But here's the thing, that guy actually was not the worst. There are a lot of people who don't even try and fix problems. They completely ignore the issues, or they make problems worse. And many, many, many problems that people are dealing with these days are a lot more significant than a weird cabinet or a leaky pipe. I'm talking about broken down systems. I'm talking about malfunctioning international organizations. Things like that can feel unfixable. But today's guests, Anne Morris and Frances Frei, they are all about finding solutions to problems, whether they're big or small. And those two, they refuse to accept the idea that nothing can be done. They never resort to duct tape or spray foam unless those are appropriate for the solution, and they so rarely are.
3:00 Chris Duffy? To give you a sense of how Anne and Frances work, here's a clip from Anne's TED Talk.
3:05 Speaker 01 Move fast and break things is still a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of each other, one or the other. That a certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for inventing the future.
3:20 Speaker 01 My wife and I have spent the last decade helping companies clean up this wreckage. And one of the main lessons from our work is that the trade off at the heart of this worldview is false. The most effective leaders we know solve problems at an accelerated pace, while also taking responsibility for the success and the well being of their customers and employees and shareholders. They move fast and fix things.
3:49 Chris Duffy? We're going to figure out how to solve problems, even seemingly intractable ones, right after this. But don't go anywhere, because Anne and Frances, the only problem they can't help me solve is how to get you back if you've shut off this episode before the interview even starts. So don't go anywhere, we'll be right back after these ads.
4:14 Chris Duffy? This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. What connects a hidden laboratory in the Amazon, giant pandas in China's mountain forests, research relating to the ocean, and communities living alongside wildlife in India? That's what you'll hear on season six of Planet Visionaries, stories from the explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders whose work addresses research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in specific locations. Planet Visionaries, hosted by environmental advocate and professional climber Alex Honnold, brings you real stories of discovery, determination, and research and initiatives relating to environmental change.
4:58 Chris Duffy? In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
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6:52 Chris Duffy? Today, we're talking with Anne Morris and Frances Frei of the podcast Fixable.
6:57 Speaker 01 Hi, everyone. I'm Anne Morris. I'm here with Professor Frances Frei from the Harvard Business School. She's also my co-author, my co-conspirator, my co-parent, my wife. We do all of our work together now, and we help organizations that are taking big swings strategically, operationally, and we also help individual leaders who want to solve problems.
7:21 Speaker 03 And Anne and I tried to work separately and just had a lot of fear of missing out. And we have become each other's favorite collaborator. I usually stand in the front of big rooms, and Anne does all of the intimate stuff, all of the one-to-one coaching.
7:38 Chris Duffy? Anne, in your TED Talk, you talked about this commonly-used phrase, "move fast and break things," and then you kind of flipped that on its head. Can you both talk about why moving fast and breaking things might actually not be the best philosophy when it comes to business or to life?
7:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, so it is this ethos that defined the innovation economy for decades. And of course, Mark Zuckerberg made famous and put it on company posters. But he wasn't the only one, and I think he was just saying out loud the assumptions that were defining a particular neighborhood in Silicon Valley. But then, of course, it had huge... Implications for everyone else starting things. I think with distance, we now know that that's not the best way to do things. So a big part of our motivation to write the book, which we titled Move Fast and Fix Things, was to get the word out that the most successful leaders that we know, and there's a lot of great research to back us up on this,
8:37 Speaker 01 are solving problems at an accelerated pace, but they're also taking responsibility for the success and the well-being of their customers, shareholders and employees. They're refusing this false trade-off that is built into this idea of moving fast and breaking things, that you have to choose one or the other.
8:54 Speaker 03 And in Mark's defense, he did, it was about 10 years later, say that move fast and break things wasn't the right idea. And then he changed it to move fast with a stable infrastructure.
9:03 Chris Duffy? Well, so you two are really dedicated to this idea of fixing things. I mean, you have your book, Move Fast and Fix Things. You have a podcast, Fixable. I think one of the interesting things about the way that you both approach fixing things is the idea of the time scale that you think is an appropriate time scale to work on. In your podcast, you work to solve guests' workplace problems in 30 minutes or less. In your TED Talk, you talked about how you can fix most really big problems in a workplace, or you can at least make a real impact on them in a week. And people, I think, tend to think of these problems as intractable, months, years, decades-long problems. So talk to me a little bit about the idea that problems can be solved quickly, or more quickly than we think.
9:44 Speaker 03 I actually would go even farther and say, if you give too much time, you won't solve the problem. So one of the reasons so many problems are so stubborn is because we're so permissive with them. Things will fill the allotted time. And if you give a lot of time, we will fill it with things that will slow down everything else. If something is important enough to solve, and we're very big advocates of, please don't solve it if it's not broken. But if it is important enough to solve, you've got to communicate to everyone that it's at the top of the priority list. And when you communicate to everyone that it's top of the priority list, you can't make it slide down and up and down and up. And so that what happens when people take a month, a quarter, a year to solve a problem
10:27 Speaker 03 is they just had it episodically move up and down the priority list. It's like, from an operations perspective, guaranteed to have mediocre quality at best.
10:36 Chris Duffy? It's interesting because immediately I want to be like, but what about this problem? And what about that problem? And I imagine that happens to you a lot, where people come up with all these ideas of problems that it doesn't seem like you could possibly fix quickly.
10:47 Speaker 01 Our usual pushback is if you look more closely, we can start with big messy problems that have plagued the human condition since the beginning of time. But if you really look closely at the movements that have made progress, and some of the movements may have lasted generations, it really did start with somebody deciding to make progress and taking real steps. That's really what we're talking about, is make the decision to make progress, make the decision that the problem you're trying to solve is fixable, and start the flywheel of action that's going to release all of the energy and emotion that is going to really accelerate your progress.
11:26 Speaker 01 The emotion we experience most often, you know, on day two after we show up, is relief, right? It's not that this problem has not been lost on anyone in the system because you haven't decided to address it. So the decision to address the problem, it's a huge accelerant. That's the posture we're trying to get people in, is to make the decision that it's fixable and take these initial first steps, and then do it again the next week, and do it again the next week, and do it again the next week. And the nature of the problem evolves as you go. But there's a lot of power in this week-long increment, because it's how we organize our lives. It's how we organize sprint, recover, sprint, recover.
12:11 Speaker 01 And so if you start thinking about problems in those sprints, you can move forward at a really exciting pace, and in a way that allows you to build enough momentum to really get that plane into the sky.
12:23 Speaker 03 I would say that when you ask people, "Look backwards, you solved a problem, look backwards, take all of the value-added steps, ignore all the false starts and all of that." How much time did that take? It is startlingly close to 40 hours. Startlingly close to 40 hours.
12:40 Chris Duffy? Obviously, you both work most frequently with businesses and with leaders of organizations, but I know from Talking to you that you believe that this works in society, in interpersonal relationships across the board. And I'll just speak for myself. Often I get kind of paralyzed by thinking about the scale of the problem, rather than by just doing something over and over. So this is a small example, but like, it seems impossible to write a book. For example, you both have written a book. I'm working on a book right now. But if you just write a page a day, in a year, you've written a book. And most people can write more than a page a day. But it's the hard part is sitting down and convincing yourself to write that first page, and then to do it again
13:20 Chris Duffy? the next day and the next day. I guess the more that I get older and see the world more, the more that I'm kind of convinced that a lot of problems are like that. Like, it's easy to throw your hands up in the air and say, how could X societal issue ever get changed? But what did you do today on that issue? It's really hard to do anything if you haven't actually done anything.
13:41 Speaker 01 The scale of book can be paralyzing for people. But if you reduce it to chapter, and then if you reduce it to page, or I'm just going to write this next paragraph, or I'm just going to write this next sentence, that beautiful flywheel of action begins. And then suddenly, you are in a place, when you were looking at book as the challenge here, you weren't emotionally in a place where you were going to make progress. But you reduce the scale, you get your head around, you realize, oh, yeah, I can put this sentence together. I can do subject, verb, object, and move forward. That's what we're trying to do with organizations, and teams, and leaders, is to get them to realize that they actually can solve this problem. And sometimes, you know, scale is one of the unlocks, for sure.
14:26 Chris Duffy? Let's get some specifics in this. Rather than just talking about you all fix problems, let's start with a problem that you have worked on, and that was one of your favorites to work on. I know that's kind of an odd thing to have a favorite problem, but I'm sure you have one.
14:40 Speaker 03 I'll start with one. It's my recent favorite, which was, an organization was so strapped for time, they didn't have time to, they thought, to do the most important things. So, the young version of them, they got To make a lot of progress because they got to concentrate on what mattered. And the bigger portion of them, they just didn't have the time to do that because they were doing so many other things. And so the symptom was no time. Getting from the symptom to the real problem is another unlock. In fact, that's what we call Monday. That's the first thing to do. And so everyone was just lamenting how much time they didn't have.
15:22 Speaker 03 When we worked with them on it, and it's a very fun story, and we were able to liberate 50% of their time for all of them.
15:29 Chris Duffy? Wow.
15:30 Speaker 03 And they get to do higher quality work. And I think their problem was the same at almost every other company in the world, which is if you address the symptom of the problem, I don't have enough time, then you'll start thinking of, well, let's have no meeting Fridays and let's, you know, like, let's just do all of these things that address the symptom, but don't actually address the cause of what was going on. And when we helped them get down to the cause, we could address that in a really scalable and beautiful way that has shown this company that bigger doesn't need to be worse or less noble or less purposeful. It's actually better.
16:09 Chris Duffy? And what was the cause?
16:10 Speaker 03 And the cause was that they were inviting too many people to meetings. That was one of the reasons. I'm just, I'm inviting people to meetings that didn't need to be there, that didn't need to be there live. Notes would have done. The way in which I was running the meetings was about 2X inefficient. So for example, it was a very inclusive company, and they thought that everybody should have a voice. Well, that's a terrible way to run a meeting. But it's a terrible way because not everyone's voice is novel. So if you, Chris, have already said something and I have the same thing to say, the last thing you want to do is hear me speak. But because they didn't have anyone facilitating the meetings for rigor and for process,
16:54 Speaker 03 they were just these bastions of everyone talking and no idea was a bad idea and they weren't. So with some how to run, some meeting management and meeting facilitation, and then attendance guidelines and some follow-up, post-follow-up afterwards, we were able to bring it down to fewer, better meetings with fewer attendees, taking half as much time and achieving much more.
17:19 Speaker 01 Francis, the headline statistic on that example was astonishing. I think the amount of time people are spending in meetings in this organization is down 50%. And this happened in a matter of months. And as you said, commitment to some norms of meeting management. Who are we going to invite? Liberating people to just watch the video.
17:37 Speaker 03 2X speed, listen to the audio. Pro tip.
17:40 Speaker 01 We worked with one organization that introduced a new rule, no agenda, no attenda. So that if, you know, if the meeting invitation didn't come with an agenda, you could decline.
17:49 Speaker 03 By the way, the reason you need an agenda, just as a fun fact, because you have to know when to declare victory. If you don't have an agenda, then literally anyone can bring anything up. But if I tell you we're going to do these three things, when we're done those three things, even if we're only 20% of the way through the time, you congratulate everyone. But without an agenda, you can't declare victory.
18:09 Chris Duffy? We're going to take a break, but don't worry, we are not declaring victory yet. We'll be right back to keep fighting the good fight for solutions with Ann and Francis right after this. Don't go anywhere.
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20:03 Chris Duffy? a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. What connects a hidden laboratory in the Amazon, giant pandas in China's mountain forests, research relating to the ocean, and communities living alongside wildlife in India? That's what you'll hear on season six of Planet Visionaries. Stories from the explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders whose work addresses research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in specific locations. Planet Visionaries, hosted by environmental advocate and professional climber Alex Honnold, brings you real stories of discovery, determination, and research and initiatives relating to environmental change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative,
20:47 Chris Duffy? this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
20:55 Chris Duffy? And we are back. Today, we're talking with Anne Morris and Frances Frei about how to fix things. And very appropriately, they host a podcast that's called Fixable. I'd like to play a clip from that podcast for you right now before we get back into the conversation.
21:09 Speaker 01 Let's get into the mechanics of trust. Because you and I think about this all day. We talk about it all day. And I think you go one layer deeper, which is what's really driving trust. And there's a very stable pattern. So describe the pattern.
21:25 Speaker 03 Yeah. So that stable pattern is that when we see trust between two people, we always, always, always observe three specific dynamics.
21:37 Speaker 03 And anytime we don't see trust between two people, one of those three is missing. So you are more likely to trust me if you experience that it's the real me in it for you with rigorous logic. So you are more likely to trust me if you experience my authenticity, my empathy and my logic. The real me in it for you with a rigorous plan that is worthy of your trust.
22:08 Speaker 01 Right. So we use this framework called the trust triangle all the time in our work.
22:12 Chris Duffy? Give me the three points on the triangle again.
22:14 Speaker 01 Logic, authenticity and empathy. And the idea is that you, Chris, are more likely to trust me. And if you are convinced of my logic, so if you're convinced I'm capable and can do something, if you're convinced that my thoughts and words and emotions are all aligned, like you're interacting with the real me, we call that authenticity. And then if I care about you and your needs and your success, we call that empathy. So one of the patterns we've observed is that if you think of these three pillars of trust, for most people, they're all three are firing most of the time. Right? But whenever we lose trust or fail to build as much trust as might be possible, one of these pillars tends to get a little shaky. It used to be the same one. Right? It tends to be the same one. So we call that your wobble.
22:59 Speaker 01 So Frances is a self-identified empathy wobbler. But that fix of being in this I-centric space to this we-centric, going from I to we might be the most efficient way to describe an empathy pivot. Really powerful choice to make. And it works for individuals, it works for teams, it works for organizations. This is a good example of not stopping at this kind of surface level analysis. Like we talk about Monday, you have to go beneath the surface and tunnel down to the root cause of a problem. You know, Frances is irritated at dinner and I'm irritated that Frances is irritated. Right? But it like, if we just leave it there,
23:42 Speaker 01 if I'm just pissed, if she's uncomfortable and I'm mad about it, like, we're not going to make any progress. So we spend a lot of time in our work trying to pop the hood on problems. And figure out what's really going wrong. And you know, we come from the Business Academy. And so we love a good framework, but the reason frameworks are helpful is because they do allow you to use the patterns of the past to reveal what's going on in the present and to really kind of surface what's underneath things.
24:12 Chris Duffy? Hmm.
24:13 Speaker 01 And the whole point of figuring out which one it is, is you have to steady the right pillar.
24:18 Chris Duffy? Hmm.
24:19 Speaker 01 So you can't solve an empathy wobble by doubling down on your logic.
24:23 Speaker 03 I tried it for a long time.
24:25 Chris Duffy? Oh, yes.
24:25 Speaker 01 Decades, for decades. Here's like an example we see all the time in organizations right now. You have Gen Z coming into the workplace, pissing off all of their older colleagues, asking for things that we didn't have the courage to ask, wanting to know when they were going to get promoted on day two. We would classify that as a, you know, as a logic request. You know, I wouldn't understand the terms of this arrangement if I'm going to give you my time, labor and energy, what am I getting in return? Fine. And organizations are saying, great, I hear you. Here are some extra yoga classes at lunch.
25:00 Chris Duffy? Mm hmm.
25:00 Speaker 01 You know, or here's some matcha tea. We know you kids like the matcha tea. Right? So you have to pair the solution with the problem, which means you have to tunnel down and really understand it.
25:10 Speaker 03 And that was an empathy solution to a logic problem. And not only does it not work, it enrages people.
25:15 Chris Duffy? I'm thinking about how we've already kind of touched on in one of the frameworks that you use in your talk, we touched on Monday and Tuesday. But can you give me just like the top line of like what each day is in this?
25:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. So Monday, we say find the real problem, right? And so that's going from getting it at the right scale and going from the symptom down to the cause. Tuesday is solve for trust because the dynamic, if there are people involved in your problem, there will be a trust issue in the lens of authenticity, logic and empathy. As you just saw, it can be very helpful. By the end of Tuesday, you're going to have what we call a good enough plan. You're going to have Plan V1.
25:52 Speaker 03 The job on Wednesday is to create an even better plan. We can guarantee you that whatever plan you had at the end of Tuesday, we can guarantee you a process that it will be better at the end of Wednesday. And that is if you invite people that you don't typically talk with. So if you solve this problem with your senior team, invite people that are not like your senior team. If you solve this problem with people who you just feel comfortable solving problems with, invite other people. So if you can bring difference to the table, and then be super inclusive of the difference. So we call Wednesday "Make New Friends." So it's bring difference and then convince them, be inclusive of their voices, convince them that what we want is their unique perspective.
26:37 Speaker 03 So you have a good enough plan on Tuesday, it will be an even better plan on Wednesday if you make new friends. Now you're ready to take it for a test drive for the rest of the organization, but you need it to exist in your absence. But if I want people to understand this without me having to go door to door, I have to tell it in the form of a story. We really learn through stories. And stories are super memorable for us. So Thursday is all about how do you craft a story that can withstand our absence? So that everyone who hears the story or reads the story understands it as if I had a one-on-one conversation with them. That's Thursday. And then you get to go fast.
27:21 Speaker 03 So when we say move fast and fix things, you're only allowed to go fast on Friday. If you go fast on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, you're actually going to move fast and break things. But if with all of those things under control, now you get to do all of the beautiful speed accelerants. And so that's what we do on Friday, is show you the classic ways to speed things up.
27:41 Chris Duffy? The thing that it really strikes me about this, though, is how much of this relies on...
27:47 Chris Duffy? Psychological and self-awareness shifts. And I think that some of those can be really hard, even for the most self-aware people. So what about for those of us who kind of have the classic problem of self-awareness, which is, I think that I'm more self-aware than I am. Like, I think surely I've gotten the real problem. I already did Monday. And Tuesday, oh, I have built trust. But you actually haven't done Monday or Tuesday. How do you know if you're not as good at either of those days as you think you might be?
28:20 Speaker 03 Well, one way is when you get started on Wednesday, when you bring in the new voices, they're pretty quick to show you. But if you wanted to, like, save yourself from waiting till Wednesday, the test we ask you to do on Monday is, what's the symptom? Like, what's the annoying symptom? And what is your estimation of the cause? If they're the same thing, I promise you, you're not there.
28:40 Speaker 01 And we don't leave it to chance, Chris. We assume that all of us, at the beginning of the week, are overconfident. We've been trained to be overconfident, particularly if we're sitting at the top of hierarchies. We've been trained to be overly reliant on our intuition. So we're not going to give you the opportunity to do that. We're going to slow you way down and force you on Monday to make sure that you're solving the right problem. And we offer lots of different ways to do that. For instance, your point, the most humbling is to be in genuine, authentic dialogue with the people around you about what they think the problem is. Right? And that will tend to invite you into a more open, more curious space.
29:22 Speaker 01 One of the things that's interesting about the psychology literature that really looks at this question is that one of the key findings is that curiosity and judgment don't play well together. They essentially can't coexist in our brains. And so we really push people at the beginning of this process to tap into their own curiosity by any means necessary. But with the thing that you are measuring yourself against on Monday is not, do I have the right answers? Am I asking the right questions? We really, that's what we're solving for, really great questions.
29:57 Chris Duffy? But how do you convince people who are a little more skeptical or who are pushed back on the idea of that they even have problems that need to be fixed or that they want to fix them in this way?
30:07 Speaker 03 You're at the Achilles' heel of what we do, which is, we can only help people who want help. So one way we get people in touch with it is we ask the magic dust question. And so on Monday, we say, if you had magic dust and you could sprinkle it on what everybody else is saying a problem and you're not sure it's a problem, but if you could sprinkle it on that, what would be different, what would be better? And tell us with as much specificity as you can. And they'll talk around there, but you might hear some metrics and they'll come up with, you know, profit will go up a little. So we have the magic dust question and then we pause, a dramatic pause, and then we say, add a zero and then we'll help you. So magic dust to get in touch with how much better things can be.
30:51 Speaker 03 So you don't like thinking of a problem? Think of it in the future, how much better it can be. And then we want to turbocharge your ambition.
30:58 Chris Duffy? I love that.
30:59 Speaker 01 Chris, I think people do sometimes show up with some anxiety that this process is going to be exposing to the organization or to them personally. And what I want to say with the confidence of looking backwards, in 100% of cases, the teams walk away looking and feeling like heroes. The power of, again, releasing that energy and making progress on the things that everyone is getting stuck on is transformational.
31:29 Chris Duffy? I also imagine that many people who are listening to this are going to say like, I want to implement this, but I'm not the leader. I'm not the boss. How can I get my boss to take these ideas and to actually put that into place? What advice do you have for someone who is like, I'm not the decision maker, but I want the decision maker to do this?
31:49 Speaker 03 So I would say two things and then I'll invite Ann in. One of them is I would use some version of what is the upside and focus on that. And so with whoever it is that you want to do it, you're not going to convince them they have a problem. That's what I wouldn't do. But you might be able to convince them of how much better things could be. So see if you can captivate them with the upside. That's the first part of it. The second part of it is for you to be a credible messenger, fix something yourself in your own scope so that you can show you're a credible messenger. The best way to have implement change in an organization is have somebody come knock on the door and say, how'd you turn that around? So instead of just going around and saying, "Go to that door, go to that door, go to that door."
32:34 Speaker 03 Do something within your own sphere of influence that shows that you get it and you can talk about it credibly. And then I promise you, you'll be a much more palatable messenger.
32:44 Speaker 01 A lot of our work is helping people get in touch with the agency and power they do have. It can be a very common feeling, even as a, you know, chief executive officer with all of the decision rights on paper, to feel like you don't, you don't have the power to make things happen. And so when we coach people to get into that changemaker role, you can really lead from wherever you are in the organization. What is the hook that's going to get their attention? One, it may be that I have demonstrated that this is a really powerful approach. But can I also bring a whole bunch of data with me on why the status quo is not super sustainable? And the alternative is an exciting, beautiful future.
33:28 Speaker 01 We think in metaphors and learn through stories as a species. So what's the story you can tell from wherever you are in the organization about the beautiful future and the path towards it? From where we are right now, let's honor where we are and where we've been and create a compelling change mandate and then a rigorous and optimistic view of the future. That's the architecture of a great change story. And you can tell that from anywhere in the organization.
33:55 Chris Duffy? For me personally, so many problems feel dispiriting. Like, I think about a problem and then honestly, my main reaction, a lot of the times is like, "Oh, I just want to go to bed."
34:06 Speaker 01 Take a nap.
34:07 Chris Duffy? I want to go to sleep. It's 10 a.m. and I'm ready for it to be the nighttime because like, I just can't think about this anymore. And it's kind of hopeless and what am I doing? And I love the way that you two don't deny the reality and yet focus on, okay, like, that doesn't really change anything. So what actually can you do? For me, that just feels so hopeful in a time where I actually feel like there's not a ton of hope around problems in the popular culture.
34:33 Speaker 01 I think to my wife's dismay, we find ourselves thinking and talking about emotions all the time in this work. And Francis is an operations professor. This is the last thing.
34:44 Speaker 03 I thought I would be talking about.
34:45 Speaker 01 She thought she would be talking about. But it, I mean, it's very, you know, Friday Night Lights, Coach Taylor, clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose. You need really clear eyes. You need to know what problem you're solving. You need to look directly at the issue. And then you need to get into the emotional posture. You need to find that emotional frequency that's going to allow you to make progress. We sometimes joke about can do lesbian spirit. Like if we had to sum this up in a couple of words, it's can do lesbian spirit. Everyone has an inner lesbian, right? Who's like, ready to like suit up and go for it. And we just invite you to get in touch with her.
35:25 Speaker 03 And what I would say, Chris, is if you can't find your inner lesbian on 10 a.m., call a lesbian.
35:31 Chris Duffy? We don't normally title an episode like this, but it may be that this episode needs to be titled, Call a Lesbian. I think really what I would love for listeners to experience is just how you start. Like, I'll tell you what the thing is, and I kind of am like, I'm not quite sure, honestly, even if this is fixable. And I'd love to just hear how you start it.
35:51 Speaker 03 We're very excited at this prospect, Chris. This is, and even when we're not recording, you can call us anytime.
35:57 Chris Duffy? Oh, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
35:59 Speaker 03 We are the lesbians next door for you, Chris Duffy.
36:01 Chris Duffy? Okay, amazing. Well, so I have for several years now volunteered every week at a food pantry because I am a hero. An amazing, incredible person. Thank you so much. I accept your applause. But I'll just be honest that one of the biggest reasons why I kept going back, week after week, is because it was so fun. Genuinely really fun. Great group of people, probably like six or seven regulars. Every time I get there around the middle of the day on Wednesday, because I have a flexible schedule, we have a lunch together and then we sort a bunch of donations. We bag it up and we distribute it in that afternoon. And it is genuinely fun. Like, it makes me feel good about myself, but also it's just a great time. However, as there has been more need in the community, we've served more and more
36:46 Chris Duffy? people. And so that got a little stressful and we were able to solve that problem by doing some more outreach and fundraising. As a result, we kind of had money for the first time to buy supplies and food. And so we created like an oversight committee. You would think that this was like really big success. Like now we have our own bank account and we have like, we can do a monthly newsletter and raise more money and serve more people. And I think that kind of across the board, people felt like it's not fun. It feels more like a job and we all have jobs. We were struggling to figure out like, how do you continue to grow and solve this real need? But not make it so that everyone kind of feels like this thing that used to be fun now is like an unpaid job that is not actually that fun.
37:31 Speaker 03 Here's what I would do for your Monday, which is, what is it that you liked so much about the problem? And not from hearing you, I'll tell you the three things I heard, and then you can tell me and maybe adjust them, which is, you like it because it was purposeful, it sparked joy, and you accomplished something.
37:51 Chris Duffy? Yeah, the only thing I would add is community.
37:52 Speaker 01 Community, yeah, I actually wrote that down, Chris.
37:54 Speaker 03 Great, so community. So now, we now know the architecture of any future solutions. So if I put Oversight Committee there, first of all, it's not going to make its way out of any of our data, because joy, not a single Oversight Committee in the history of time. Accomplishment, they don't accomplish anything. They just, I mean, it's just, community, it's no, it's now it's them and us. And now, if it's just for Chris, then maybe the organization moves on without you. But if this is for like, the core of the folks, and these are it, we get to discard all solutions that don't have this. And here's, what's on the other side of discarding the Oversight Committee, is a solution that actually will work at
38:36 Speaker 03 scale. So it's not that this thing isn't scalable, it's that the first solution that people came up with, they poured liquid cement on it, but it was knowingly wrong, but we don't stop there. And it's not knowingly wrong if you don't detail out purposeful joy, accomplishment, and community. But when you do, everything becomes self-evident.
38:54 Speaker 01 What I love about that, Francis, is we're starting with the assumption that the creation of this Oversight Committee was a well-intentioned attempt to solve a problem. So, like, let's just honor the stakeholders here. And then if we assume it was a pilot, if we bring, like, an experimental framing to this, you know, what worked, what didn't, what do we want to keep doing, what do we want to stop doing, what do we want to start doing, if you can invite the system from where you are, which is, you know, a lowly volunteer, you don't have a lot of formal authority here, but if you can bring the stakeholders into evaluating this step, and learning from it, as opposed to just marching forward.
39:34 Speaker 01 Then I think, you know, that's one possible route here. I mean, one of the challenges for a lot of nonprofits is they don't think, they don't manage their volunteer workforce with the deep awareness that you got to get something back. If you're not getting paid for this, what else, what are you getting back? You're getting this really powerful list. You're having fun. You found a sense of community. You got like a kickback in terms of your own sense of self. That's really powerful. That kept you coming back week after week. But all of that psychological income is now gone under the new regime. Like if we scale that problem over time, that's a big deal. There's a step here that we often talk about on Monday, which is discuss the undiscussable. Everyone's frustrated in the system. My suspicion is that the Oversight Committee is not having a great time either.
40:19 Speaker 01 Right? Because they're pretty disliked right here. Right? That's what holds a lot of us back. We're like, oh, I'm not a UN level conflict negotiator. So I'm not going to have this difficult conversation. No, the teams that make progress are willing to get in there and talk about it. So if you, with the informal authority you do have here, which is that you're donating your time and you're pretty spectacular at it and you're, you're pretty representative of the other volunteers this organization is going to need to thrive. If you can make this discussable and then bring this experimental framing to people who do have formal authority in the system, like here's our feedback on how this is going. Here's some suggestions. Our expectation is that you can find a breakthrough here.
41:05 Chris Duffy? It's so helpful. It's so true. And it also makes me think of the only real, deep marriage advice that I would give and that I live by, which is you have to say the thing you're afraid of saying and give them a chance to respond to it and give yourselves a chance to work through it. And of course, that's true in every setting. That's how we work as humans is like with kindness, right? It's not say the mean thing, but it's like say the thing that you're afraid might not be okay to say.
41:31 Speaker 01 My shorthand for that, Chris, as I've learned it is we have to use our words.
41:36 Chris Duffy? What you just said, use your words, it makes me think that so much of what you've talked about with fixing problems and with identifying problems and all that, these are also skills that I find myself really learning and using as a parent, right? I mean, like, asking why five times. You know who's great at that? A young child. Why? But why? And what? And why? You know who's really good at having to learn to use their words rather than just to feel the pure emotions? Young kids, right? Who's curious about the world? Young kids. So, so much of this feels like things where it's in some ways like stripping away the bad habits that we've learned as grownups and having to get back to
42:16 Speaker 03 It sounds exactly right.
42:17 Chris Duffy? Our pure children selves.
42:19 Speaker 03 So I hadn't thought of it quite as cleanly as you just said it, but we do often say there are so many parallels between leading, between parenting, and between coaching. What you just added to that, which is really lovely, and being a child.
42:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, the visual that's coming to me is like the, that evolution of man. Because I think it's on Monday where we really want you to be a little kid and just wide-eyed and curious about the world. And then Tuesday, we want to get, we want you in the sandbox playing. And then Wednesday, we want you to do this hard thing, which is to make new friends. Nobody wants to do that. But by Friday, we actually want you to stand up as an adult.
42:56 Speaker 03 And run!
42:57 Speaker 01 And like, lead, and run! Run! And lead the charge. And so it is a rapid-fire human development experience, Monday to Friday.
43:06 Chris Duffy? I love that. Okay, I cannot let this interview go without bringing up that in some of the research for this show, we found in an interview Francis that you did, you said, and I'm quoting here, "Impossible. There has never been a 48-hour period where I haven't consumed some stand-up comedy. What role does humor and laughter play in allowing for problems to be fixed and allowing us to use these skills and have these transformations?"
43:32 Speaker 03 So I watch Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Kennedy Center acceptance speech at least once a week. And one of the things that's in it, and it is so re-watchable, and she is underrated, with as big of a star she is in the world, underrated. But one of the things that she says with beautiful comedic timing is, and she goes on with this punchline of, "And then this bad thing happened. Hilarious. And then this bad thing, hilarious. And then I got another record-breaking Emmy, and then I found out I had cancer." Hilarious. My parents got divorced. Hilarious. Does all of these things, but then she says, "There is not a single thing," and she says it as she can, "not a single thing that is not made better by laughter."
44:16 Speaker 03 And she had just listed all of the things that you would say wouldn't, might not, and every one of them, she was the credible messenger for. So here's what I love about comedy. One, it does the sanding for me. It just sands away all of the armor so that people can talk directly to me because I'm laughing and I'm like... And then they come in with some of life's most important lessons. So Julia Louis-Dreyfus in anything, but if you haven't watched the Kennedy acceptance speech, and if you're a Seinfeld fan, she brings out the dance in it, which is just incredible.
44:51 Chris Duffy? Beautiful. I love that answer.
44:52 Speaker 01 We use humor all the time in our work. In our experience, I think it is the fastest path to shared humanity and connection between two human beings. And often what we're trying to do is invite people to be human beings in their own environment. Right? Because sometimes people are armored up with their executive, you know, character, right? And we have to peel some of that back for them to sometimes see problems clearly, see the stakeholders who are in pain in their environment, and that's part of the process. And, you know, humor allows us to connect with them at the level of a human being.
45:36 Speaker 01 And then, again, it's one of those very infectious, flywheel emotional impacts where then other people around them and us can also show up as three-dimensional human beings.
45:47 Chris Duffy? Beautiful. Well, Anne and Frances, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for making the time. This was incredible. It was really a true joy.
45:53 Speaker 01 Oh, Chris, we will meet you anywhere, anytime, for anything. So don't be shy.
45:58 Chris Duffy? Careful what you say, because I'm going to take you up on that.
46:01 Speaker 03 What she said, and preferably if we're consuming some stand-up comedy.
46:07 Chris Duffy? That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guests, Anne Morris and Frances Frei. You can find their podcast Fixable wherever you're listening to this. And you can find more about them at anneandfrances.com. That's A-N-N-E and F-R-A-N-C-E-S dot com. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects, at chrisduffeycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team of fixers. On the TED side, we've got Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Chang, Chloe Shasha-Brooks, Laney Lott, Antonio Le and Joseph DeBryan. This episode was fact-checked and fixed to truthful perfection by Julia Dickerson and Matthias Salas.
46:51 Chris Duffy? On the PRX side, we are already doing Friday's work while the rest of you all are only on Monday. We've got Morgan Flannery, Nora Gill, Maggie Goreville, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thank you, thank you, thank you to you for listening to our show. You make this possible. If you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five-star rating and review. No matter where you are listening, please share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it. We will be back next week with more How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening and take care.
47:27 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human and your gift will be matched five times.
48:15 Chris Duffy? With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/Bank. Capital One, N A, Member FDIC.
48:45 Speaker 04 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer.
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49:15 Speaker 04 That's G O O dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini. Hi there, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. And this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.
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