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CRAFTED. is a show about great products and the people who make them. Top technologists reveal how they build game-changing products — and how you can, too. Honored twice by The Webby Awards as a top tech podcast, CRAFTED. is hosted by Dan Blumberg, an entrepreneur, product leader, and former public radio host. Listen to CRAFTED. to find out what it really takes to build great products and companies.
We all do need to learn how to tolerate the fear that comes with sudden drops in the white water and to trust in our own skill sets and to trust that the landscape around us is gonna change again. And there'll be another amazing swirl of momentum ahead. That excites me.
Dan:That's doctor Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, the chief product and innovation officer of BetterUp, a multibillion dollar startup that helps companies get the best out of their employees and helps people flourish. Gabriela is also a psychiatrist and the author of Tomorrowmind, A fascinating book about how to get ready and stay ready for the white water world of work today. On today's episode of Crafted, we'll focus on those skills and the ones like optimism that ladder up to them.
Gabriella:People are optimistic, are are much happier, they live longer, Their immune systems are more robust, and they're much more successful at work.
Dan:You'll learn what it takes to develop that tomorrow mind and how to not only stay afloat in the white water, but also enjoy the adventure.
Gabriella:There's a whole group of people that short circuits the dream big. How do you think about a wide enough array of what could happen before you start getting evaluative?
Dan:And in a future episode, and this is our first ever 2 part crafted, Gabriela will tell us about how BetterUp builds products and runs experiments. The company's products are an incredible mix of human coaching, learning, and AI. Welcome to Crafted, a show about great products and the people who make them. I'm Dan Blumberg. I'm a product and growth leader, and Crafted is my main gig now.
Dan:I'm here to bring you stories of founders, makers, and innovators that reveal how they build game changing products and how you can too. Crafted is produced by my new company, Modern Product Mines, and you can sign up for our newsletter and check out past episodes at modernproductminds.com. Crafted is sponsored by Artium, a next generation software development consultancy that combines elite human craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. See how Artium can help you build your future at artium.ai. So you're a physician and you're an entrepreneur, and I'd love if you could just start by telling a bit more about your experience and your training and what led you to tech.
Dan:Sure.
Gabriella:I went into medicine in order to help people thrive. I planned to train as a psychiatrist and do research on the broadest possible array of thriving related topics at a population level. I didn't expect necessarily for it to be a straight line through clinical medicine, but the world of behavioral health, behavioral science was changing quickly in exciting ways. And psychiatry felt like a great grounding to really understand the brain very deeply, to understand all of the interventions available and what we know about interventions to help change behaviors, to help us live healthily. And so it wasn't necessarily surprising when I became a clinical psychiatrist that that was not gonna be the right fit.
Gabriella:What was more surprising to me was it was still very unclear to me what would be the right fit and what would be the right place to work on those problems and to really try to innovate. Took me a little while, this was the late aughts, a little while of experimentation, doing a lot of spaghetti against the wall, but, what was sticking was all tech related. And that led me to ask some questions and be curious and discover the world of digital health tech, which was emerging and taking off in some very specific segments, not yet really behavioral health, but I could see how powerful that would be and how meaningful it could be as a platform for innovation, as a platform for, yes, delivering greater access to care, but really for experimenting in fundamentally new ways with what types of psychological challenges we can help people with and how.
Dan:What was the first sort of foray into tech?
Gabriella:Depends how you define that. So, one of them was a very inelegant contraption that we had at a local behavioral health clinic where I was serving as a psychiatrist for a largely unhoused population with no other access to care. And satellite clinics had been shut down around the county. So we were serving people who, were connecting in by telemedicine in the days where that was done on a cubicle television with 72 wires coming out of it. Mhmm.
Gabriella:So that was, not necessarily the place where I was innovating, but it was a place where I was like, oh, I see. Like, this is only made possible by these wires and this crazy contraption. And, wow, think about what else could be done if we really leaned into this idea of using technology to distribute and and innovate. I did consulting work more formally with a few companies, including Discovery Health. I was helping them think about new ways to train physicians in particular topics.
Gabriella:And then my first in house executive role was at Castlight Health, which is a company that, in its time, was kind of a darling of the digital health world and was a health care transparency platform. So it was the first place where you could go online and shop for a procedure, meaning compare the cost of getting a hip replacement at one place versus another, which given how expensive those things are, even when you have insurance, seems like an obvious thing to be able to do. So it was a very interesting product. And in the immediate post IPO world, so I joined Castlight prior to the IPO, was there for the great fun and excitement of the IPO. And immediately afterward, there was a lot of interest in broadening the product portfolio, and we got to quickly bring to market one of the first platforms that combined tech based tools and remote access to a wide array of different types of mental health support.
Gabriella:And, it was amazing. It was there were there was I could count on one hand, the number of players at that point, I knew them all, and they're all great. And many of them are still in the space.
Dan:I wanna talk about the awesome book that you just published, Tomorrow Mind. You write about the whitewater world of work today and you quote the futurist John Steely Brown who said that for his parents, their career was like a steamship, full steam ahead. And for him it was more like piloting a sailboat where you had to have lots of skillful tacking. Today, it's more like kayaking through white water rapids. You need to be able to keep yourself afloat and heading in the right direction as rapids swarm around you, versus a kayaker.
Dan:I love this analogy. Describe the skills that workers need to navigate this white water. And if you could especially call out some of the skills that are most important for the makers, the product engineering design and data folks who are, listening to this show, what should they focus on especially?
Gabriella:Yeah. So we structure the book around 5 core skills that we in studying 100 of 1000 of people across industries who are navigating the whitewater that we have found to be most important in determining success and sustainable performance, as well as human thriving. The 5 are summarized by the acronym PRISM, Although that order of the 5 is not really how I think about them, but it's useful as a mnemonic. So the p is prospection, which is how do we imagine and plan for the future? And when you're kayaking in the whitewater, it's hard to get a sense of what could be around the bend.
Gabriella:But if you know if what's coming up is a sudden cascade versus another set of gentle bumps or maybe it's a calmer space in the river can give you a great advantage. So how do you see ahead to a wide enough array of possibilities that you can take some critical steps today to hedge against some of what could be coming. The r in prism is resilience. That's how do we get through challenge in a way that, at the very least, we're hopefully unharmed psychologically by the experience. And at its most extreme, highly resilient people are what Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls antifragile.
Gabriella:So highly resilient people actually grow stronger through challenge, and that is an incredible competitive advantage. It's an incredible superpower so that those rapids, they may still feel a little nauseating while we're in them, but we have a sense going into it. We're gonna be stronger on the other side, and we are. The I is innovation, of course, incredibly relevant to makers. Creativity and innovation, in some ways, it's our greatest human superpower.
Gabriella:And the pace of change around us, the volatility means that everyone, particularly at the edges of the business, is encountering novel challenges all the time. And if they're novel challenges, then they, at some level, require novel solutions or at least the application of a different solution, existing solution to a novel problem. So that's inherently creative. We've come out of an era historically, an industrial era, where for, you know, a couple 100 years, creativity wasn't necessarily an asset in a factory line. As we say in the book, a Neanderthal could probably operate some of the factory lines.
Gabriella:So creativity becomes a liability. And we have a social legacy around that, which is that only some people get to be creative. Only some people are inventors or artists. And that really works against us today because we are all creative. We all have this beautiful native capability that's part of being a Homo sapiens.
Gabriella:We need to understand that, embrace it and learn how to support it, learn what it takes to be able to show up with a full tank of gas creatively. The S in PRISM is social connection and specifically something we call rapid rapport. So, as makers, we're rarely working alone. We work in groups and often those groups are forming and reforming constantly. And they might be with people in different time zones who speak different languages.
Gabriella:All of which is to say that we are often working closely with strangers. And in order for that to work, we have to quickly get to connectedness and even trust. So how do we do that? And then the M in PRISM is mattering, which is our sense that it's important we do the things, the activities we do at work. In an era of pivots and tacking and shifting from one thing to another, we often have to walk away from many months of work, somewhat abruptly, and start something completely new.
Gabriella:And it creates a crisis of mattering. What was the point of what I just did? And what will be the point of this new thing I need to wake up and do tomorrow? And so being very connected to that purpose, being very connected to what is the ongoing purpose of the things that we did that may still give life in the world. And then what is the new vision?
Gabriella:That's something that we need to be thoughtful about, connected to, and particularly for people leaders, they're the narrators of mattering today. And if they can't do a good job telling the story of why those labors and those efforts matter, they'll lose the confidence of the people on their team, and therefore the willingness to keep doing the work.
Dan:Yeah. How do you teach resilience?
Gabriella:So the most effective way for building resilience as an intervention design, and of course, in an era of generative AI, it's still TBD, just how much effect you can drive with gen AI alone. Our approach at BetterUp is we combine the AI with the human coach, and we're really looking to accelerate that. All of the things and all the 5 components of Prism are things we can develop. So these are aspects that are based in in behavior and mindset and things that we know we can change. And resilience is is one of these that certainly can change through coaching, and it can be approached in a very personalized way.
Gabriella:We look at how people become more resilient by what skills they develop and then how effective those skills are in driving resilient outcomes for them. So we've analyzed like a 150 different types of psychological constructs and skills that could be influencing resilience. There's 5 that matter most. The number 1 is emotional regulation. How reactive are you emotionally to the events around you?
Gabriella:Our emotions are important signals. They carry a lot of information, but if we don't process them, if we don't pause and reappraise, then we are at risk of being reactive and taking actions that ultimately may work against us. So the process of developing emotional regulation is really a lifelong journey, particularly starting in adolescence, but there's no one among us who can't benefit from being even more emotionally regulated. And the greatest, most resilient people are highly emotionally regulated. It doesn't mean they stifle their emotions.
Gabriella:It doesn't mean they're unaware of their emotions. The opposite. They're very aware. They're very comfortable with them. They know how to take that pause, step 1.
Gabriella:And step 2 is reappraise and get yourself out of the limbic system and into the glory of your executive control networks and your frontal lobe and really think carefully. The second is optimism, which is a huge topic of study and kind of a fundamental component of a lot of, studies of well-being. And it's not pollyannish. It's not thinking that you're gonna win the lottery. Optimism is about even when things are really tough, how do I see forward to a positive future?
Gabriella:People are optimistic, are much happier. They live longer. Their immune systems are more robust, and they're much more successful at work. In the face of challenge, optimism motivates us to keep going. So in those rapids, people are not resilient, won't even try anymore because they're so sunk in their pessimism.
Gabriella:The 3rd component that drives resilience is cognitive agility, our ability to go back and forth between the forest and the trees. So we're thinking about particularly challenging set of rapids, reading the signals, then figuring out, okay, how am I gonna get through it and doing that? But sometimes you pick a strategy and you have to change it. So how quickly and nimbly are you able to reevaluate your strategy, keep track of the signals in the environment without getting into analysis paralysis and going back and forth between them. And then the last two components, self compassion, our ability to extend to ourself the grace we give others in moments of challenge, and self efficacy, which is our confidence that we can accomplish what we set our mind to.
Gabriella:If we're in a tough spot, we may be able to see forward to what needs to be done, but do we believe we can do it? And if we don't, then we're much less likely to try.
Dan:And in practice, how does it work? How does one learn to be more optimistic, for example, or or or any of the other characteristic you mentioned?
Gabriella:Each of them works differently. And one of the reasons coaching is so powerful is that you want as a coach to know where to focus. So, you know, for you, Dan, you might be really high in emotional regulation, but low in self compassion. And you're shaking your head.
Dan:Just you know Emotional regulation.
Gabriella:Giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Dan:I appreciate that. But I I at least on the home front, I can certainly work on that. I'll admit that.
Gabriella:So there's specific exercises, lots of there's actually emotional regulations where we have the greatest arsenal of interventions. Each of them, the interventions are gonna be different. And it's part of why personalization is so important. There's not a one size fits all for developing these things. And for each of those 5, there's different exercises.
Gabriella:Some of it starts with insight, self awareness, being able to name it, to understand it, to recognize it, to recognize when you're showing up with low levels of it. Okay. In that moment, what can I do differently? You start with, you know, lower levels of challenge, you increase the level of challenge. Eventually, you get really good at it, and you've actually rewired your brain to know how to respond, take different actions, process your thoughts and feelings, accordingly in in order to get to a different outcome.
Dan:And when it comes to some of the other key skills that people need to be successful in in in today's white water world of work, creativity and perspective, how how do you teach those types of skills?
Gabriella:I'll start by saying, I mentioned that the order of the skills in prism is only helpful as a mnemonic. It's not how the skills build. The way that it's ordered in the book, we start with resilience, super foundational. It's one of those things you're gonna drown in the white water without it. Mattering, which is perhaps equally foundational, and it's the fuel to help us work on these things.
Gabriella:Social connection, again, so essential for our well-being. All of those three things need to be in place to a certain extent to really unlock our ability to do prospection and innovation well. And one of the reasons is that both of those things require effective involvement of the default mode network, which is our daydreaming network. So prospection, thinking about the future, innovating, creating something, imagining something that doesn't exist, both are are creative in a in a particular way, and both require this network that's actually not available for conscious manipulation. So just like we can't tell ourselves to go to sleep, we can't tell ourselves to be creative, and it has to do with mental capacities that are not within conscious control.
Gabriella:The default mode network, the richness, the quality of the associations we make, the breadth of ideas that we can imagine, it can be inhibited by high levels of stress, by high levels of limbic system activity. Right? And, and this is actually why some companies are seeing that the quality of the creative output from their work products was not as high in some of the most stressful moments in COVID or in really stressful moments that the of organizational transformation. So Sure. First and foremost, often people come to coaching to work on those things.
Gabriella:And actually what you have to start with is build up that tank of gas around those foundational layers to get them back to a good place. Now, let's say we're dealing with someone who's, who's in a really good place mentally, and they're looking just to dial in those two things. As an example, prospection happens best when it's something called pragmatic prospection, which is sort of a balanced approach. And that happens in 2 phases as described by Roy Baumeister and colleagues. He's one of our longtime colleagues at BetterUp and one of the most widely published psychologists today.
Gabriella:The first phase of prospection, if I ask you to think about where would you like your career to be in 10 years, most people, and this is healthy, will have a few seconds to minutes where they think expansively and possibly optimistically. It's a healthy thing if it, if it's something good and positive is in your mind, and maybe you can expand it beyond that vision immediately came to you. But pretty quickly, and for people, this is again within now minutes, it can it can tack in. For some people, it's just a few seconds. We get into a different phase that's much more evaluative.
Gabriella:We start questioning the thing that we thought of, start saying, is that real? Is that really possible? Well, what would I actually need to do to make that happen? The first phase Roy calls dream big. 2nd phase, get real.
Gabriella:And both are super important. To be great at prospection, those can both be dialed in in different ways. There's a whole group of people that short circuits the dream big. So they don't even put a wide enough array of possibilities on the table. And this could be true for a personal future.
Gabriella:It could be true for a corporate future. It could be true for a team future, a product future. How do you think about a wide enough array of what could happen and really entertain that before you start getting evaluative? On the evaluative side, there's a lot of cognitive biases. So when you think about behavioral economics and Danny Kahneman, there's a lot of biases that come into play here that get in the way of effective prospection.
Gabriella:An example is if you've ever done a home renovation, you may know that you are likely as the person doing the renovation to underestimate the cost and underestimate the time that it will take to do that. Whereas someone who has done a renovation, but is not the one doing it, could as an outsider, maybe give you a more accurate assessment estimate of what that might look like. So those sorts of biases, some of them are systemic and, species wide, and we can name them and help people overcome them. And some of them are more particular to who we are and the way that we work and we need to uncover some of that and overcome it. We see that the leaders who are best at prospection, who are most effective at this kind of planning, whose teams are best on it, they actually spend between those two phases, they spend the most time in the get real phase.
Gabriella:They spend a lot of time planning. That is somewhat counterintuitive when you think about the whitewater, when you think about the wide array of possibilities, you could say, well, isn't it just a waste to spend so much time planning when as soon as you plan for one thing, the reality has changed, and now you gotta replan all over again. So that is in some ways, it's surprising. On the other hand, the only way you're gonna take action today is as a result of that planning, is as a result of really playing it through. It's actually really helpful to develop a greater capacity for planning to learn how to extend that window before you hit planning fatigue.
Gabriella:It's not necessarily what we all wanna hear. And it's one of these areas where there's, it's just a mismatch between the world that we evolved for and the world that we find ourselves living in, thanks to our own technological innovation. But that's one of our findings that I think has been important to share with people is that actually more planning, is leading to better outcomes as long as it's being done having done an effective kind of dream big phase first.
Dan:Yeah. I think I'll I'll butcher the quote. You may know it by heart. I think it was it is it Eisenhower, like, effectively, plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.
Gabriella:That's great.
Dan:Yeah. So I I've definitely seen that. We've talked about this so far from the individual's perspective, from an employee's perspective. What are some of the ways that employers can can help their teams build the skills that you say are so, essential?
Gabriella:Yeah. So the number one answer I'll give you is coaching. Now I work for a coaching company. We do coaching. We believe in it strongly.
Gabriella:There's also, a part of that answer that's about the manager and the leader. And that the role of the manager and the leader today is really much more of a coaching role than a management role. You know, management implies they're sort of a finite problem set, a finite set of resources, and you're moving pieces on a game board. Coaching is more about there's emergent realities that you need to help people respond to when you're not there, when you don't see it coming, they need to be positioned to be successful. Coaching also speaks to a reality where you hire someone for a job.
Gabriella:And by the time you find them and they get started, it's 6 months later, since you wrote the job description, the job's totally different. So all of those things point us to a much more dynamic set of work, a much more dynamic set of responsibilities. The good news about that is that A, coaching is very effective and B, this is all about growth and progress. And growth and progress feels so good to us as humans to feel that we're gaining new skills and we're learning new things and there are new adventures ahead. And organizations that can lean into that, that can lean into this as opportunities for career mobility, opportunities for growth, that that's really what they're there to help you do.
Gabriella:And that in doing that, they're gonna benefit because they're gonna have this much greater organizational agility. I think that's, that's really successful. So beyond the offering coaching, beyond the culture of coaching, I think organizations that are looking at their talent as a, as a dynamic pool, a pool where people who filled one need today could fill an entirely different need tomorrow. A pool where also there's gonna be more inflow and outflow, and that's okay, and that's natural. I think that that's something that is hard.
Gabriella:It's hard because transitions are hard. It's hard because transitions are expensive. But it's also part of the ebb and flow of massive technological disruption and global supply chain. And so evolving how we think about what the relationship should be with different types of talent, talent that's more likely to kind of come and go, to name that, to be, comfortable with it, to be open about it, I think is is really important for the integrity of those relationships.
Dan:Yeah. I I used to work as a product manager at LinkedIn, and, they're always talking about your next play. Or ever everyone who left for either a new role internally or externally, it was everything that was oriented on your your next play, which I believe Jeff Weiner, the former CEO, took from, coach Krzyzewski, coach k from from Duke. I think that's that's what he wanted his basketball team to always be thinking about, like, next play, next play. And that was that was core to the sort of ethos there.
Gabriella:It's great. And it's prospection, by the way. And it Yeah. It's optimism and prospection at play.
Dan:That's doctor Gabriela Rosen Kellerman. And coming soon on Crafted, we'll hear how as the chief product and innovation officer at BetterUp. She's building products that enable the development of a tomorrow mind at scale. BetterUp pairs coaches with powerful AI tools so they can offer the kind of executive coaching that used to be reserved just for executives. BetterUp is using both good old fashioned AI and the new jam.
Gabriella:We have a ton of experiments happening with Gen AI, way more obviously than what's in production. And there's so many different ways that it could possibly help our coaches, help the people getting the coaching, help the partners who are funding the coaching. So we feel like kids in a candy store.
Dan:Crafted is produced by Modern Product Minds, and you can sign up for the Crafted newsletter at modernproductminds.com. And of course, we love it when you rate and review the show in your favorite podcast app. Smash that subscribe button. You know the drill.
Gabriella:Those rapids, they may still feel a little nauseating while we're in them, but we have a sense going into it. We're gonna be stronger on the other side, and we are.
Dan:Crafted is sponsored by Artium, a next generation software development consultancy that combines elite human craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. See how Artium can help you build your future at artium.ai. Thanks for listening. Please share Crafted with a friend.
Gabriella:The river can give you a a great advantage.