Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right
Photo by Tomasz Filipek.
No, no, you're not understanding. She's very analytical. And me, I'm more creative.
Mazel tov! That sounds like a wonderful mix for co-founders. Between the two of you, you must see around so many corners for your business and your industry. How lucky.
The co-founders sitting across from us are tired. They are in a Chinese finger trap of their own making. One pushes, the other pulls. One pulls, the other pushes. They are stuck. Stuck with each other. And stuck as in cannot make any forward progress.
We don't do formal co-founder coaching so it's a bit of an anomaly that we're here at all. But every so often, a friend of a friend will ask if we can help. We are usually the very last stop on a very long road when all of the other options have been exhausted. So we try to get caught up before offering advice.
How did we get to now? And what have you tried so far?
Their answers jump from DiSC assessments to Myers-Briggs types with a dash of StrengthsFinder. They've been trying to map themselves and diagnose what they already know. The two of them see the world very differently. For all the language around the ways in which they are different, they are no closer to knowing how to work as a team.
Up up down down
I'm not even sure where to start. OK, let's see. The executive who is leaving is very bad at her job. The person who has been doing all that work behind the scenes started here as an intern and worked her way up. But the board doesn't know any of that and so they are bringing in another executive but that person also seems very bad. And then the summer staffers are all very upset because they haven't had raises and the cost of living has gone up and then...
Whew. There's a lot going on in this story. And at least 80% of it doesn't matter for the core question at hand. Which in this specific case is, "How do I get the board appropriately involved in key work during an exec transition?"
But the storytelling isn't tidy. In part because it's hard to know which details we'll need in order to be helpful. So the default is to share all of them, no matter how small, just in case that's the key to unlocking the whole thing.
Left right left right
I don't get it. I spend a lot of time assessing the next rational move, both in business, and also for people at work. And while I'm often right for businesses, I can't predict worth a damn when it comes to people. But you two can. What's going on?
We try to explain. But it's hard. We get some version of this question a lot. How do you know? How is it that you can listen to someone talk about work and consistently know what's going to happen next?
There's a big answer but we've never tried to write down the whole thing. So you'll have to bear with us. It's not Barnum phrases. We're not psychic. And it's not witchcraft.
It's worldview.
Puzzle Theory
There's a pattern to how the business press and airport-bookstore crowd talk about work. A set of assumptions that are almost never stated out loud, but are ubiquitous. It's a whole theory for how work happens, a worldview that goes:
Work tends to suck. You might have a great boss or colleagues who insulate you from it for a while. But the trend line for work is down and to the right.
Management is a title/honorific given to people who have successfully played the game long enough. It is about status and power, and is usually an obstacle to be overcome.
Employees default to being disengaged, lazy, and cynical. They need a combination of perks and surveillance to be kept productive.
Problems at work are puzzles to be solved. There are tricks and cheat codes that more senior people know. Success at work comes from learning how to say the right words or perform the right rituals to force your company to give you what you want.
Your coworkers are also puzzles, and are best understood by figuring out the right category — board member, Gen X, ENTP — for them.
We've started calling this whole barrel of monkeys Puzzle Theory, and it's everywhere. Every think piece about what Gen Z wants from their workplace is running on Puzzle Theory. The personality-typing industry and its pivot from Myers-Briggs to Big-5 is Puzzle Theory but make it science-ish. TikTok has a whole sub-genre of use-these-words cheat-code Puzzle Theory.
This theory is attractive for a few reasons. One is that sounds true, especially if you feel lost or out of place at work. Your coworkers do use weird business language. They do talk about their favourite personality-type systems. And just like fashion, or knowing which fork to use for salad, those things are absolutely in-group signifiers. Understanding how they work is an important part of getting into some rooms.
The other is that sometimes there really are cheat codes. If you have a bad boss trying to pressure you to quit, saying "this feels unfair" will get you one kind of treatment from HR. Knowing and using the words "constructive dismissal" will get you something completely different.
You can get yourself to a place where, whatever problem you have, you feel certain that there's a trick that will solve it. Like work is a giant game of Myst and you just have to refill the paper tray on the printer, use three more action words in your email, and find a copy of Jason's StrengthsFinder, and then the key to the executive washroom will appear from behind a hidden panel in your desk.
The problem is that it usually doesn't work that way. The reason we get these people coming to us, struggling with unsolvable puzzles, is because work usually isn't a puzzle with cheat codes. And people never are.
People Theory
The more we see Puzzle Theory out there in the world, the more we're asked to comment or provide an alternate perspective, the more we've realized that we have built a different worldview. Our assumptions go:
Work is whatever we collectively make it. It can be good or bad in many different ways. It's a product of the systems of communication, trust, accountability, and division of work that we all participate in building and maintaining.
Management is a job. Most people aren't trained on how to do it well, but they should be. It's a specific role and the people paid to do it should be accountable to the org for how well it's done. Like everyone else.
Most people show up to work wanting to do a good job. And if you find people who don't, you should fire them.
Problems at work are usually about miscommunication or misalignment. Solving them usually involves getting people together to understand what's going on and design a better outcome.
People are fully realized, complex, flawed humans, not NPCs. They are driven by relationships, self-perceptions, competence, and motivations. They are best understood by talking with them.
This worldview, let's call it People Theory, is just a different lens. For any given situation in the past, you can construct a Puzzle-Theory story for why it happened, or a People-Theory story. It's hard to call one more "correct." But that doesn't mean they're equally useful.
If you look for it, you'll find People Theory all over our writing (you'll find a few where we talk about cheat codes, too). And we obviously aren't alone. McGregor was saying surprisingly-similar things about Theory Y back in the '60s and probably informed our own thinking on it. Co-active coaches have talked about people being "naturally creative, resourceful, and whole" since the '70s, at least.
The reason we've all been hammering on about this is one part values-based. We prefer to live in a People-Theory world and to understand work in People-Theory terms. But what we've also found, all of us, is that People Theory has a lot more predictive, and problem-solving power.
When you understand that the person running that project cares more about avoiding personal embarrassment than they do about budget or metrics, you can cut through a lot of 4-dimensional chess. We can skip 5,000 words of background if we know that your board members are volunteers with good intentions but limited attentions. And when co-founders are talking past each other, it almost never helps to flatten one another down to their scores on some personality inventory. And it especially doesn't help to flatten someone else that way, and tell them about it.
Puzzle Theory gets all the press, though. It sells quick and easy fixes, and those are very popular. So mostly we're just asking you to notice it. Notice when you're being told that everything is a puzzle to figure out. Your work is not just a series of puzzles. There are no cheat codes for people. And it's all made of people.
- Melissa and Johnathan