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Pressure Rising brings together organizational leaders, researchers, and practitioners to explore the one condition no leader escapes: pressure. What it reveals. What it requires. And what becomes possible when leaders learn not just to navigate it well, but to build the capability to thrive under it in ways that create meaningful impact and outsized results.
Scott Nelson (00:05)
listened to a great podcast on the myth of multitasking. The human brain is a single thread machine, by the way. There is no such thing as multitasking. And I know this from multiple times where I've tried to multitask and get in trouble. what is true is that there's people who are really, really
fast switchers and they can switch from one task to another. And you know, if you've got a, if you've got a, you know, a good solid performing team, there's probably somebody on the team that can protect the flank, so to speak, by being given the assignment to, make sure these other things are getting taken care of, or make sure we're not missing anything. Or maybe you hold them, you know, you.
You keep the focus on part of it, but you got to do a check-in, stop and make sure do we miss anything. And if you're under these different kinds of pressure, there are probably other signals coming in that might give you some insight into where new risks are coming up.
Mark Benson (01:18)
Hi, I'm Mark Benson. This is Pressure Rising, where we get curious about the conditions and capabilities that turn pressure into performance. Most of us treat pressure as something to merely survive. Scott Nelson doesn't. He spent a career building things where the margin for error is thin: things like medical devices, avionics, and products where someone's life depends on that thing working. Scott hired me into my first real job in 2001.
And I've been learning from him ever since. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Mark Benson (02:15)
All right, Scott Nelson, is such an honor to be here
with you. I remember, we've known each other for how long have we known each other? since?
Scott Nelson (02:27)
I think we might have, it might be 2001, 2002 at the latest. You were very early into logic.
Mark Benson (02:34)
Yes, I think it was 2001. But I remember just coming out of school and just becoming an intern at Logic. just remember that was, it just was one of those jobs that I just was really wanted to learn and I had no idea what I was doing. But I remember.
meeting with you and having some other job opportunities, doing networking and IT and other things that felt a little bit more familiar. And I just remember looking at the logic opportunity and thinking, wow, this is like, it would be an incredible opportunity, but I have absolutely zero experience and don't know what I'm doing at all.
Scott Nelson (03:27)
Well, thank you first of all for having me as part of this conversation. I remember it very well. I think you know you were, I believe the first, maybe the second, I can't remember. Was Megan Turanski at Logic when you joined?
Mark Benson (03:47)
I think she joined a little bit afterwards. Yeah.
Scott Nelson (03:49)
Yeah, OK, well,
so you were two of the three. But I had a I knew enough about. You know. Getting a technical degree. And being an athlete. That when I found somebody who could perform at a high level and at the time, I believe you were a nationally ranked tennis player and you played tennis at in college.
And you got a computer
science degree, which the hardcore engineers at Logic were worried that you would be too academic. And of course, I was fully academic in their minds, so they didn't trust my judgment.
You know, knew it just instinctively. knew that, you know, you were naturally curious as you just stated, you wanted to find out what was this all about and you were enthusiastic about learning. So that was easy. Those were my two hiring parameters.
But the fact that you could be an athlete and perform on a team and get a degree in a technical space, it kind of says that this is somebody that can learn whatever we need to learn and perform at under whatever pressure we happen to have. So I'll just say it wasn't a very hard decision for me. Of course, you also had the trail blazed by Mr. Sheard who gave you a reference. That didn't hurt either.
Mark Benson (05:14)
It doesn't
hurt to have a reference. But
Scott Nelson (05:17)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (05:18)
I'm grateful for that opportunity, Scott. And then as I've, you know, really grown up through my career, it's just been just so great to stay connected with you and to continue learning from you and also share, you know, things that I'm going through in my own leadership, you know, journey. it's just just really special and meaningful for me to have you on the podcast here.
Scott Nelson (05:43)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (05:44)
Thanks for joining.
Scott Nelson (05:45)
Well, if we were mountain climbers, you know, I would have stopped at some 14K thing, Pike's Peak or something. You're still on your way to see Sir Edmund's, Sir Edmund's Peak. You've gone a lot farther than I have. it's great to have been a part of that journey and watching you as you go.
Mark Benson (06:10)
Well, Scott, know across your career, mean, you've moved across physics, engineering, product management, also organizational leadership, and most people will plant a flag in one of those domains. And you have experience across all of those. But what has kept pulling you across boundaries in your career?
you know, what does that, I mean, if I might call it restlessness or whatever it is, but just the desire to cross boundaries and look at different functions that way in complex systems, you know, what is, what did that, what has that taught you about how complex systems actually work?
Scott Nelson (06:58)
Yeah. Well, we'll come back to the complex systems actually working theory as you know, but I'll start with your first question about what kind of what motivated me or pulled me around this way. You know, I've learned about myself.
I had another physicist tell me one time, we physicists always want to convert the real world into a mathematical equation, F equals MA or others. And I came to know when I got to Honeywell that I've always been a systems thinker. I've always wanted to understand how systems work. I think I understood. I certainly understand it now, but I think I understood.
growing up both personally and professionally that any given system is a subsystem to a bigger system. And to be a systems person you have to be very curious about how things work. You have to be very
curious about how's my system going to interface with this other system? How am going to ICDs and APIs and all the software language? I learned that along the way. So I was always curious about what other types of work did. If you're an engineer,
If you're not naturally curious about what the product managers are doing, then sooner or later, you're going to get a problem you can't deal with because they're going to give you something that's impossible. So there's, I think, curiosity and just the desire to learn. I think empathy. If you're in an organization and you got other parts of the organization, then you want to be empathetic to their, you know, your teammates, challenges and goals and understanding.
So I think that's, you know, been the main thing learning curiosity and learning. I've always just like, that's what physicists want to do. We want to understand how things work. As you know, I put in my, I put in my bio, said,
I got my degree in applied physics, which gave me the honor of being told by the engineers, Nelson, you may know how it works, but we make it work. And
Mark Benson (09:20)
Thanks.
Scott Nelson (09:21)
I told that to Mr. Wilkin about 90 minutes ago, and he kind of gave me the damn right answer back to that.
Mark Benson (09:29)
Right, this is Scott Wilkin that we've both worked with. Yes,
Scott Nelson (09:31)
Yeah, both, yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, we both worked with Scott, you know, a lot.
So I think that's, you know, that's kind of what pulled me around. Now what, get back to your complex systems.
I want to call out Ken Hoimy and Todd Carpenter who were two of the best systems engineers I ever worked with. They designed safe bus architecture, which flies all commercial aircraft today. They designed the 777 avionics system or a part of the team. And I think it was Ken that told me, cause we needed, we needed to hire a systems engineer in our group. And he told me systems engineers aren't trained. They're born. You know, we got to go find them. You know, we can't just go to the U and say, Hey, I need your next systems engineer.
you're graduating and it doesn't work that way. And I think what that tells you is there's a lot of intuition. There's a lot of awareness in a systems person. John Gall has Gall's Law. That's one of my favorites.
I'm going to read it verbatim because it's kind of funny the way it's written. but it basically says a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a system, a simple system that works. A complex system designed from the, scratch never works, and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. And I just think, you know,
It's one of these laws that is somebody's observation, but it's hard to find an exception to the law. And of course, as a physicist, I live the laws that can't be broken. I love laws. So I love Moore's law. I love Gall's law, all of these. So I think that's...
been part of my personal life is simplifying things to an understanding and a clarity, particularly if you can then explain it to others so that they can follow your vision. And I think, know, organizationally, if you get too complex of an organization, it just stops working and then you kind of tear down and build back up from something that works again, right? I think
that's true.
Mark Benson (11:53)
In my experience, there are people who just seem to have an innate like ability to ask questions about what they don't know or try to think about the connections.
between people, systems, tools. I've also seen cases where people can grow in their ability to think about systems, Do you believe that that systems thinking is something you're born with or is it something that can be developed?
Scott Nelson (12:23)
Yeah, the two things you described are very compatible. You know, the first is really curiosity. You know, and another thing that's really good to add to curiosity that I learned from the designers at Logic is empathy. And empathy, you know,
I was formally taught at Honeywell to listen better because for a while I wasn't a good listener. the way I was taught to listen better was to make sure I asked three questions before I spoke. And that, you know, asking questions, you know, so I've now these days, if I'm talking with somebody, if they don't ever ask me a question back, I'm pretty sure they're not listening. You know, that, you know, this is kind of my metric, right?
So what I would say is, you're kind of born, some people are born curious. always, you can watch, I watch my grandkids. I watch, we've got one Nels and he sits with things and if it's taken apart, he tries to figure out, he just tries to figure out how to put it back together.
You know, and there's other, you know, there's others that, you know, he also liked, by the way, if he finds a box with a puzzle in it, he likes to open it up and turn it upside down and make a big mess. You know, he, likes taking things apart, right? But I can see, you know, all children are curious, but some children will take curious to a level of granularity that kind of speaks to their future about they're going to figure out how things work.
And
those people you could say, OK, those are the potential systems engineers. They still need to be taught. They still need to learn about the process and the methods. you guys build tremendously big systems. And testing and validation is a part of systems that
You know, not everybody, you know, it gets hard, right? When you get done building something, you want to just, you just want to put it to work, but yeah, maybe I should check this before I do. And so, you know that, and some people are naturally inclined to write down everything they do. And that's really good. Right. And some people are taught comment, your code in line, you know, yeah, I know you hate writing, but put it in line, you know,
So I think the two things are both necessary. You got to have something to be a systems person. You got to be naturally curious. You got to kind of wonder how things are working. You probably have to have some empathy to know that it matters what you're working on and to whom it matters. And then you got to learn the methods. You got to learn from the people who've done it before, the people who built big systems.
big organizations and whatnot and they'll help you with maybe you'd say the mechanics of it a little bit.
Mark Benson (15:29)
Yeah, that makes sense. mean, so, you know, systems, you know, obviously like, you know, there's software systems, technical systems, there's also people that are part of systems too. And so when I think about systems or complex, even human systems, where it's a mix of software and people in maybe the execution of something, but there's also the building of it.
You know, so there's a system of people and technology and tools that creates systems itself. And so it's like systems of systems in a lot of ways. But when you think about like pressure in systems, so this can be technical systems, people systems, or a combo of both. But when they get complicated enough, like if you start with a simple system and then it grows and...
complexity maybe because it needs to or because it just happens. But when it gets complex enough, information can fragment in those systems and people sometimes can isolate, I'm working on this part of the system over here. And then it's like hard to communicate with people who are working on this part of the system over here. It can start to fragment. But.
You know, like what, I guess my question is what patterns have you seen that tell you that a system is starting to fall apart under load? Like if it starts, time pressure compresses, there's financial pressure, quality pressure, any number of those things, it can put a stress on a system. But as it's getting more complicated, it can pull apart under load or start to fragment. But what are some of those things that you look for?
Scott Nelson (17:21)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (17:22)
that tell you like that's something that's happening.
Scott Nelson (17:27)
Well, first of all, and go back to physics again, there are two types of pressure there, internal pressure and external pressure. And both exist in this context. Sometimes internal pressure can come from, I learned the fundamental unit of an organization is a team.
I believe in this, I've lived through this several times. I haven't worked on...
I can't say I've worked on a dozen performing teams, but I can remember the ones that I worked on that were high performing teams. I remember one specifically at Honeywell, and I remember the one at Logic that was a high performing team. And teams, you go through forming, which is usually an external thing where somebody puts you all together and says, you're going to do this. This group of people, you're going to do this. So then you have forming, and then you have storming. That's where everybody kind
argues to figure out who's who and who knows what and what you're doing. If you get through storming, then you get to norming, where everybody learns their role and takes their role and learns everybody else's role. And norming is really where respect is, it becomes to be the fabric of the team. And then you get to performing.
Performing teams are just wonderful to work on. If you put pressure on a performing team, they usually just get better and move faster and deal with the pressure. That's the nature of it. But teams are hard to build really big. And you could argue that a performing team can't be more than seven to 10 people.
Gore, the company of famous for Gore-Tex, they had a thing where they never put more than 150 people in the same site because they felt they couldn't maintain their culture beyond that or something. We kind of did that at Logic with 75 to 100 was kind of the idea for the number of people that could stay connected well. But the biggest, if you're looking for flags, if you're looking for symptoms,
The first one I would say is if I'm in an organization that I've been a part of for a while, it's going to be an accountable organization. It's going to be an organization that lives, do what you say you're going to do. And if the pressure gets to the point where somebody tells you they're going to do something and they don't do it and they're, you know, and there's somebody who usually does it, well, then you know that you got a lot of pressure and things are breaking down.
I see a granularity that doesn't make sense. Then I got somebody who thinks they're going to fix the problem with spreadsheets. Some outside thing, that's a breakdown, right? I see people behaving differently than they would naturally behave. You maybe they, you know, you can see breakdowns. Pressure gets to the point where somebody just disconnects or
They're different in a meeting. So there's different types of red flags that can come up. And some of them are face-to-face flags. Some of them can be, though, things you can see from the outside if you're looking at the work product of the organization or products.
Mark Benson (21:03)
Interesting. You mentioned that if you have a team that's performing, that if you increase the pressure on that team, they can produce incredible things. I guess that part of it is really fascinating to me, is not just when things are breaking down, but when have you seen pressure actually forge something and actually create
Scott Nelson (21:31)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (21:31)
better team cohesion rather than fracture it. You've actually seen it where it forges.
Scott Nelson (21:35)
Yeah. I think we did this in logic and the pressure that I think it's a good, a good pressure. know, there's some bad pressures and some good pressures, right? And part of your question, you know, a pressure is a pressure and you can have breakdowns either way, but a good pressure for me is growth.
And if you have a performing team that knows what they're doing and you put a growth pressure on them, if they're really a high performing team, they'll do a couple of things. The first is they'll find a way to delegate.
They'll
find a way to multiply. They'll find a way to get other people involved. And in some sense, they're expanding their team. But what they really probably are doing is subdividing the problem and then delegating to get it done. And the idea is to grow. you.
you'll grow the organization. The pressure at Logic was we were trying to grow the product business. We started the model with a, we'll hire somebody in professional services. They work at a 50 % margin. That means we can cover somebody investing in a product. And so we had professional services, we had to grow as fast as we could to try to keep up with the needs. is critical to a product development, a product organization.
we
were going to succeed, had to be able to hire fast. And that's kind of the way we, you know, we, and I mentioned that to Mr. Wilkin just a while ago. said, I think one of the things we were really, really good at was hiring.
I think we hired over the time I was there, we probably hired 150 people. And I can only think of less than 10, maybe a handful that we either had to fire or left on their own. And that was because of the way we hired, which isn't going to be scalable in the world of AI and a thousand people at a time, but it was right for us at the time.
Mark Benson (23:41)
What things did you look for out of curiosity that were markers? I assume it was
Scott Nelson (23:46)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (23:46)
team-based kind of interviews, but what were some of those markers that you looked for?
Scott Nelson (23:50)
Yeah,
that was, I think there would be, I think there would be three key parts to the way we hired. The first was we did network hiring. So almost everybody that we hired, you know, somebody in our team knew them. So they could, we had internal kind of validation, you know, and, it's not necessarily technical validation, but it could be validation of cultural fit or whatever. So network hiring.
And network hiring is tough when you're small, if you've got people that are well-networked, you can find enough people. We never made decisions by ourselves. We never had one person make the decision. It was always a group.
decision and sometimes I'm sure you were part of them. Sometimes there was somebody that got purely the technical deep dive responsibility in the process. Make sure they really know how to program 16 bit processors or whatever it is. And then the third thing is something I still believe in, which is
And this was kind of my thing. I always would meet with the people and my role was primarily to. Are they curious? Do they want to learn? Because we need learners and are they enthusiastic about what we're doing? It doesn't have. They don't have to be. You you being enthusiastic about what you're doing is it can be a mission alignment. You know our mission.
at
logic was to help people turn their ideas into products. You know, that was kind of our mission. You know, why are you here? Well, I'm here to make things work, make products work, make ideas work. And, you know, some people might have a mission that is different. You know, I have a mission that's going to make the world a better place. And if they have a different definition of the world, a better place, it's going to be hard for them to be enthusiastic about
the other mission. so enthusiasm is something that I think people are comfortable.
evaluating, so to speak, you know, how enthusiastic was the candidate, you know, about how are they excited? Were they, you know, kind of bouncing in the chair and smiling? And part of what you're doing is you're kind of evaluating mission alignment. Are they going to be comfortable and enthusiastic or are they going to be supportive of our mission as a company or as an organization?
Mark Benson (26:24)
Yeah, interesting. I mean, the curiosity part is fascinating, I guess, going back to what you had said earlier that from a systems thinker point of view that curiosity is one of those hallmarks of someone who thinks about systems is that they're always asking questions like how is a certain input going to affect the system or how
Scott Nelson (26:45)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (26:45)
are the environmental changes? is that that question on kind of curiosity specifically, was that kind of a way to find out who
who the system thinkers were.
Scott Nelson (26:56)
Yeah, because,
you know, so curiosity is a, let's just say it's a trait. You know, you can, you, you.
You can ask questions that lead you to evaluate curiosity and you say, what do you think about this? And if they don't care, you know, then maybe they're not curious if it's something important, but, curiosity is also, a, think of it as a fundamental to critical thinking and many, many organizations.
You know, they want to find people that are good critical thinkers because the critical thinking is part of innovations, part of problem solving and critical thinking is incredibly valuable. And there's lots of things published out on the internet about how do we evaluate, you know, what are Google's questions and can you solve this math problem?
When I interviewed, I interviewed with my employees, the same systems engineers, when I interviewed them to be their manager, because I was asked if I would lead this group of people, they asked me, I mean, it just totally off the wall. One of them came in, Todd Carpenter came into my office on the whiteboard and said,
show
me a divide three logic circuit with Nand and Orgates. And so he made me do a divide. And I did it because I remembered how to do it, but I figured out how to do it. that was his way of evaluating critical thinking. always liked the question with a student about how many ping pong balls fit in this room.
And I never knew the answer, of course. I didn't care. What I cared about was watching them think through how they were going to figure this out. And maybe they'd pull out a pencil and say, well, let's see. This room is, and I'm a physicist, so order of magnitude is, if you're within an order of magnitude on most physics problems, you get it right. So let's see. This room is 10 by 10 by 8.
So that's a hundred times eight. That's a 800 square feet. There's 144 cubic inches times 12. If they do all that, and I'm gonna say each ping pong ball is an inch. If
Mark Benson (29:18)
you
Scott Nelson (29:19)
they do that, then they...
I think you have to be curious to think about how do I solve the problem and you have to be a critical thinker to get an answer. And sometimes the answer doesn't matter. the it's watching them think that matters. Yeah.
Mark Benson (29:37)
the process of thinking,
interesting. Well, so.
When on teams, you have, let's say you've made these great hires, excuse me, like you did at Logic, and then they're working on projects. And I know at Logic there was so many projects that had all kinds of technical engineering challenges, but also customer management challenges. had their own timelines. Budgets weren't unlimited.
lots of constraints that we had to work within. But when you have a team of high performing people, or some really great people, and they're starting to perform well together, and then complexity spikes with that team, I know that it's human nature sometimes to have people, their focus narrows. When the pressure gets on and they focus on their lane,
In some cases, they might even protect the scope of what they're working on. They might stop asking questions because they just don't have time or they're so busy thinking about how do they get through this problem that's right in front of their face that they stop being curious. And there is a version of focus that I would call tunnel vision that's really disguised as discipline. It's like, we're being disciplined here.
focused and of course, focus discipline, those are good things. But when you do that and it actually starts cutting off your peripheral vision where you need, know, an engineer needs to stay connected, like you said, with product management, with the designers, with the customer, making sure that, you know, we're not only focused team by team, but we're also connected across teams. You know, how have you seen, been able to tell the difference between when teams are
staying focused in ways that they need to or paying attention to like actually the, you know, they're actually cutting off the peripheral vision that they actually need. So like if they're not staying connected and they're starting to get tunnel vision, like what are some of those things that you look for to try to prevent that kind of tunnel vision from happening?
Scott Nelson (32:06)
Yeah,
well, I think.
There's a couple of parts.
to this, you know, I think sometimes you need members of the team to have tunnel vision and be focused on something really, really critical, right? And that becomes their, you know, their role is to stay very narrowly focused, to not be distracted by the what else is, you know, and.
particularly if they're on the critical path. If you're on a project, a multidisciplinary project, and it's got a critical path, the people on the critical path, they got to make sure they don't get diverged or leave the path.
And others, first of all, there are some that will have the ability to multitask much faster. listened to a great podcast on the myth of multitasking. The human brain is a single thread machine, by the way. There is no such thing as multitasking. And I know this from multiple times where I've tried to multitask and get in trouble. what is true is that there's people who are really, really
fast switchers and they can switch from one task to another. And you know, if you've got a, if you've got a, you know, a good solid performing team, there's probably somebody on the team that can protect the flank, so to speak, by being given the assignment to, make sure these other things are getting taken care of, or make sure we're not missing anything. Or maybe you hold them, you know, you.
You keep the focus on part of it, but you got to do a check-in, stop and make sure do we miss anything. And if you're under these different kinds of pressure, there are probably other signals coming in that might give you some insight into where new risks are coming up.
If you're working on a new product, you don't want to be getting ready to launch and then have the competition come out with the same product or a better version of the same product. That's a classic, too focused, someone's not watching, someone's not paying attention.
Or
the team you're fighting is really, really, really good at staying quiet. Maybe that's just a really, really strong competitor and then you got to deal with that. So I think my first answer is going to be a leader.
has to kind of make some assignments and say, okay, you're doing this part, you're going to watch these things, you're going to help us evaluate these. And you got to have a timekeeper. know, if you, if you take a look at something that's not on the main path, it's not a key part of the focus, you can't, you can't do it for very long. You got to do it until you're comfortable moving on.
Mark Benson (35:19)
Yeah, it makes sense What about what about innovation? So like I mean we know when time Time and resources are scarce oftentimes people will feel this Uncomfortable compression, you know where there's the margin or what they feel like the margin for creative space shrinks However, as we both know like sometimes those constraints
are actually the absolutely necessary things that are needed to spark innovation and change in outcomes that otherwise would be really impossible. And so you've seen, I know both sides where there's constraints that are, they're unnecessary and they're limiting, like they're getting in the way and constraints that are actually helpful or even necessary for progress. Like how do you tell the difference between constraints that are necessary?
for progress and constraints that are completely unnecessary in getting in the way.
Scott Nelson (36:28)
Well, constraints, know, the word, the word, the key word here is necessary. And so if a constraint comes in, you know, in a little bit, you got to do a root cause. Well, why is this coming in? And then is it necessary? You're going to judge, you know, is a budget cut here necessary? Well, yeah, otherwise we're going to have to, you know, stop doing this all together unless we, you we, and we've got this much money and we got to use some money from here over here, you know, so.
Part of the answer is it's important to understand the source of the constraint. then I am a believer, know, they desperation is the mother of invention. Not all inventions are innovation that, you know, some of them are, but the constraints, I think the key, my definition of innovation is Drucker's, which is innovation is a change in behavior.
And if you're a product company or you're a service company, you're trying to make an innovation in your product or your offering. You're trying to get your customers to change their behavior. You're trying to get them to buy your product or use your product or buy your service. you can also, constraints can also create internal innovation where, you know.
certain amount of time per week is taken away and the organization has to figure out how to still get everything done. And so somebody has to come up with a new way to do things. Right. So those are, you know, I'm talking about how does how do necessary constraints help create innovation. So now if you do a constraint and, let's call it an artificial constraint.
if you create a constraint that maybe doesn't have a good founding.
These types of constraints, I think there's two types. I mentioned in our previous discussion about the guitarist, Brad Lording was a designer in our company and he loved guitar. And he talked about a guitarist who used a one string guitar to try to force himself to compose different music and stuff. think, and that was always an inspirational story to me where that's an artificial constraint.
that's done for a good reason. I'm gonna force myself to think differently about this and in the process, maybe I'll come up with something better. And so that's a artificial constraint, but it's got a good purpose. I think a lot of what you're thinking about with outside pressures and in today's world, political pressures.
Most of these are artificial pressures and maybe they've got malice attached to them. Maybe someone's putting a constraint on to make something bad happen for some other purpose. Those are hard constraints to deal with. when you have mal intent involved, that's a big, if you come to that conclusion as a leader, that's a big deal. And you're now solving a different problem.
How do I get out of the, how do I get back to people wanting to share the vision and the mission? Because a constraint of that type is gonna be counter to the mission of the company and it's probably gonna almost certainly it's counter to the values of the company. It's because it's disingenuous.
Mark Benson (40:21)
You know one thing that's interesting to me Scott is like you know self-imposed artificial constraints like the musician who's who's intentionally using a one string guitar in order to force a different way of thinking like that's that's really fascinating there you know, know in in like systems thinking and problem solving that often coming at it from a different side of the problem or flipping it upside down or
making a different assumption, like what if this wasn't true, then what would happen, you know, can be really, you know, helpful. But it's also interesting to think about so-called necessary constraints. Like, let's say there's financial pressure on a business. Well, people who are far enough removed from the reality of that financial pressure might view it as artificial, like the company's just being greedy or...
how much is enough or is this really a pressure or is it not and may, you know, maybe develop some cynicism towards that or something like that. But if that pressure is real and businesses face financial pressure all the time and that's very real in many cases, it's not always evenly felt across the organization, you know, where people in a leadership position, people in finance who
who absolutely know what's going on with the numbers would say, we can't spend this much money, we have to spend half of that. But that's not, maybe isn't always viewed as, like, unquote, necessary pressure, but it's the reality of that something important is actually there. And I guess, bifurcating it into two spends, like it's either necessary or it's artificial, isn't.
enough dimensions because there's just the reality of pressures that we've faced that maybe aren't always viewed as necessary by every person in the organization because it's unevenly felt, but yet it's the reality.
Scott Nelson (42:35)
Yeah.
Well, I think if you, if you play back, you know, you just said, you know, you know, necessary or artificial and, and, you know, self-imposed or externally imposed, you know, what, what we're doing is we're taking a look at the pressure and we're, we're, we're analyzing it. We're breaking it down to figure out more about
The pressure is the problem. So we're figuring out more about the problem because the answer to the problem, it comes from figuring it out. And if you've got financial constraints that are coming at you maybe from outside, competitive forces, market forces, this happens all the time. Those are real.
they have to be dealt with. And if the organization is left to analyze on their own and come up with this statement that, we don't really need to do this.
but it is in fact a real constraint. Well, that's where leadership has to make sure that clarity is there and they have to lead by example and say, no, this is real. I I've had numerous times where I've had reductions in salary or temporary to get through budget constraints created by, you can have a...
Private equity hates it if you have one customer that it takes out that provides 30 % of your revenue. It feels great to have somebody that buys that much stuff, but if they all of a sudden one day say, I'm not buying anymore, well, then you got a world to hurt, right? And so there are times when you have to deal with it. And I think part of what we're talking through is understanding the pressure and the answer to the pressure. Part of that is
you know, is that understanding self-imposed constraint, the one string guitar, that's just all positive. All right. That's a, that's a development team saying, Hey, let's say that we can't have larger than a 20, 23, 20, 32 battery. know, we don't get double A's. don't get triple A's. This is all we get. That's all them. That's all the space and weight you've got. How do we do this? Right. I mean, that's a
That's actually a user constraint, you know, that's a product requirement constraint, but you know, it's that makes it a different problem. therefore, and then innovation comes from figuring out how to deal with that, turning off things and turning thing. You know, there's all these different ways to deal with it. Um,
Mark Benson (45:25)
Yeah.
Scott Nelson (45:27)
the hard ones are, are, are ones that
The really hard ones would be ones where the local leadership, if you're part of a much bigger organization, the local leadership is asked to do something and whether they're not included in the explanation or whether they don't understand or whether they not paying attention. But when you get a discontinuity in the...
you know, in the, in the understanding of the constraint, the purpose of the constraint, the validity of the constraint then comes into question. And when you have a constraint that the, that the organization all of a sudden thinks is artificial and if they think it's artificial and, and, uh, you know, Mal, you know, got bad, bad vibes to it, know, then bad things are going to happen. Right. Um,
Mark Benson (46:24)
I guess a lot of it, I guess trust plays a big factor. And I'm thinking about constraints like schedule constraints where, you you've got Goldratt's student syndrome, which says that work will expand to fill available time. And so if you say like, well, we have a year to do this, it's going to take a year. But if you artificially say, let's challenge ourselves to do it in half the time.
Or we have to do it in half the time. then, you know, there's maybe a, not everybody's aligned on whether or not that's actually a necessary constraint or whether it's artificial. But sometimes, I mean, in my experience, compressing timelines like that can trigger innovative thinking that wouldn't otherwise be there. But at the same time, when it's self-imposed top down from leadership.
especially if there's not trust there or where trust hasn't been earned over time, that it can end up feeling empty.
Scott Nelson (47:33)
Yeah,
it yeah, that's a really. I think it's probably a really common one in product industries where. You know. You always want the product sooner if you can get it because then you can start selling it sooner and generate revenue sooner and plus you stop investing as much, but it's a it is a process that you know.
performance depends upon the communication, the clarity, and to some extent, there's always ambiguity in a situation like this. There's always...
You know, there's going to be a product requirements document that says we got to have this and this and this and this, and it's going to be derived hopefully from talking to users. but the reality is, I think it was Al Pacino that said, you know, the world is gray and there's a lot of shades of gray or something. And one of his movies, I heard the quote the other day. And so there's going to be a lot of my favorite is, and I've written about good enough, right?
when is the work good enough? when you design, if you're part of the project team and you're designing the project plan, know, you're, you're make it somewhere in that plan. There's a decision that this is good enough to go into final testing or this is good enough to MVP or, and maybe if that good enough, we're relaxed a bit, you know, you'd take.
You know, two months out of the schedule or something. mean, there's, there has to be a, there has to be a bottoms up, you know, analysis. There's gotta be then at tops down, here's what the business needs. And then, you know, a good organization is going to find choices. I remember I, I remember I went into CFO one time and asked for
money to do something. And he said to me, said, well, you haven't given me a choice. What's my choice? And what he was kind of saying to me, if I don't do this, if I don't give you the money, I was a product manager, what happens?
Mark Benson (50:02)
Mm.
Scott Nelson (50:02)
If I don't spend the money, how much does it cost me? And so he's thinking exactly as he's supposed to be.
You know, is this an investment I got to have to survive or is this an investment that I'm doing without really understanding? He, and, so he put a constraint, you know, on that. Wasn't it wasn't the tops down and constraint. was, Hey, give me choices. And then I'll help you pick the choice that makes the best sense for both of us. Right.
Mark Benson (50:36)
Yeah.
Scott Nelson (50:36)
And I think
that's part of what you just talked through is getting, you know, the interested and the relevant parties. And sometimes, sometimes the team that's being put under pressure and given the constraints.
you know, maybe the first thing they got to do is say, okay, here's, could do it this way. We could do this. We could look at it from a different angle. And sometimes you're looking to find that, you know, that sweet spot that, you know, the development team can get done and the business team can take advantage of it. You know,
Mark Benson (51:12)
Yeah,
yeah.
Scott Nelson (51:13)
I can be ready to sell in the U S you know, in September, I can't be ready to sell in both the U S and Europe until March. Can we get started in the U S you know, or something like that? Yeah.
Mark Benson (51:24)
Yeah, articulating the trade-offs.
Scott Nelson (51:27)
And, and sometimes, you know, sometimes you could say that's an error of the upper management for not asking, you know, or spending enough time asking. Sometimes you can say they, you know, they've got the constraints they need.
you know, the, team needs to bring back choices for, for meeting those constraints and, getting help and buy in on the trade-offs of the ways of doing things. It's very rare in my experience that there isn't some, you know, way to get things done. And the question is what trade-offs have you made on the way? You know,
Mark Benson (52:12)
So speaking of trade-offs, talk to me a bit about short-term versus long-term thinking. So when pressure is high, sometimes the fastest solution is not always the best one long-term, but it might be the necessary one because of the conditions you're in. Some problems, you can't afford to wait for a truly elegant solution.
So how do you know when a quick fix is actually the right call and when it's quietly creating a bigger problem down the road? The shortcuts near term are actually creating technical debt, systems debt that will need to be paid off later. Again, there's trade-offs there, but how do you know the difference? And also, how do you instill that kind of discernment?
in the leaders around you, you know, because it's one thing to think through that, you know, yourself, but as a leader of people and an organizational leader, how do you help people think through that and have the discernment to know when a short term, maybe taking shortcuts, but a short term fix is actually definitely the right call or when it's, it's actually not the right call because it's going to create massive problems down the road.
Scott Nelson (53:41)
Yeah. My first comment to short term or long term or short term versus long term is don't suffer the tyranny of or. It's always and, right? don't, no one has the luxury of doing only short term or only long term. It's always, the requirement is both, it's and.
And I would also say any short-term decision, whether by design or forced is part of a long-term strategy and execution. The easy short-term quick fix decisions are ones that the person in charge of strategy or the people in charge of strategy, they can see how that short-term fix is part of a pursuit of the longer term.
strategy and getting things done. You know, it's well, we were going to have to develop that radio anyway, two years from now. So let's just do it now. Let's get it done. Let's get this problem solved with it. And then we'll have that available to us. And, know, it's part of the roadmap. right. Quick fixes that are really create a lot of turbulence. You know, someone
You may have to make it and adjust, but you're always going to have a long, there's always a strategy, there's always a longer term.
So you got, know, can you isolate the quick fix so that it doesn't, you know, does the least amount of damage? you, know, can you get the problem solved? You know, these types of decisions, these time-based decisions, I've had a couple of really strong leaders that I've known over the years that,
You know, they, they absolutely abhor speculation and hypotheticals, you know, that we're talking hypothetical now. I don't talk hypothetical and I'm thinking, well, I'm a strategy guy. Everything is hypothetical. So,
Mark Benson (55:59)
Right.
Scott Nelson (56:01)
but, but they're also right. You know, you, it's hard to make a decision today thinking about what could happen three years from now.
But yet a lot of leadership decisions are exactly that. You know, I'm investing today in something so that I'm better prepared, you know, for when the smartphone comes out or when Apple does it, you know, there's all these, it's easy to do those things in in in the, in the armchair, right. And do hype, do them, do them looking backwards. But the,
Mark Benson (56:31)
Yes.
Scott Nelson (56:33)
but my first statement would be it's always and not or.
And if you as an individual are being asked to make that decision, get help. There are people that, there are going to be people that are, maybe they're more in tune with what the long-term plan is and how to integrate it. If you're looking at a really, really, if you're looking at a really foggy, uncertain future,
And that's part of the problem. You got to do something now. We can't wait any longer. Well, you know, that's a battle. That's a battlefield decision, right? That's OK. Let's let's live to fight another day. Let's do what we got to do and fight another day. And let's be as strong as we can when the net, you know, when that comes up. So. I think there's.
I think I really do think the, don't suffer the tyranny of or, know, classic one, you know, professional service businesses. got a somewhat unhappy customer with something that happened. You know, you got write-offs and so you got to find a way to, make the customer happy enough to keep them for another two, three years. Cause it's area under the curve is not just one invoice, you know, and those are leadership decisions.
I never like to make those by myself, of course. know, I mean, if I'm making a decision about a customer, I'm to want to talk to the sales team and say, how, what do you think here? How much more business does this customer have? What am I risking if I decide not, you know, to make them pay and so on and so forth. So.
you know, you're, you're kind of converting time to, it's a kind of, it's a space time continuum, right? You're being asked to do something today that you don't want to do, or that you're not sure is part of the long-term plan. Maybe you're being asked to change the plan.
Mark Benson (58:42)
Have you found Scott
Scott Nelson (58:42)
You do it.
Mark Benson (58:43)
that people who like in an organization, if it's grounded in, know, like maybe rejection of hypothetical strategy, what it might happen in the future. And it's just very near term focused. Like we have this to do now. So let's do it now. I can see that leading to a lot of just practical focused execution, but also it could lead to.
chronic firefighting where all you're doing is reacting in the moment to what's happening now without maintaining the kind of long-term view and holding those intention of like, what do you need to do now? Also where are we headed in the future and making sure that they're held in tension and not just oscillating between the two. But have you seen in situations
or in organizations where chronic firefighting actually takes hold?
Scott Nelson (59:33)
yeah. I would, I would say, I
would say not, you know, it's not that it could.
create problems. will create firefighting will create problems. It's not a good it's a given. You know I had this discussion with somebody just the other day they were stuck you know firefighting this and firefighting that and I made the comment I said boring is good because boring means you know what you're doing you know you kind of but and so.
Part of what you're, you I could say, and I've lived in, we had this, we had this situation, I've had this situation. It's really, it can be really dangerous for an organization when a leader, you know, a leader is uncomfortable with ambiguity. A designer, a design thinker, a designer sees ambiguity as opportunity.
If a situation is ambiguous, there's opportunity in there somewhere. There's an opportunity for me to do something that others didn't choose to do, and maybe it's better. And so you come back to it again, it's.
It's gotta be balanced, right? You can't just be doing firefighting day by day and, and, know, being counting instead of finance, right? You gotta be able to, you gotta look down. Someone always has to be looking down the tracks, right? If you're counting railroad ties and spikes sooner or later, you're going to get run over. And that is an organizational design statement. That is a leadership statement. know, leaders.
In my world, leaders know how to use spreadsheets, but they don't just live by them. They use them for purposes at the times they need them. But you've got to have eyes downstream. And if you're not that type of person, then you're still a strong leader if you hire somebody that helps you looking downstream.
I saw that at Honeywell, there was a guy in charge of strategy that I got was fortunate enough to work with a couple of times. And he was just fantastic at looking into the future and speculating, you know, thinking about what could happen. he, you know, they asked him a lot of questions, you know, he didn't make day to day operating decisions, but he helped them make day to day operating decisions that way. So I think that's an organizational
Mark Benson (1:02:02)
in a way that fits with our future strategy.
Scott Nelson (1:02:05)
design question in a little bit.
Mark Benson (1:02:09)
Yeah, and keeping that tension between daily decisions, but making sure that it fits in the picture of what's coming into the future.
Scott Nelson (1:02:17)
Yeah,
yeah. And you can see, you know, if you see someone just constantly pushing away ambiguity, to me that's a little bit of a red flag. Ambiguity isn't a bad thing. It's something that creates questions, right? Ask a few questions, figure it out, decide what's best. But if you just totally avoid it, you know, we're only gonna do what we know. Well, now you're...
you know, unless you've been told to be a cash cow, you know, that's not the right strategy. Cash cows can just do what we've always done, but that's, know, what you're talking about often comes up in, this is the way we've always done it. And it's worked in the past. you know, it's true, but it, you know, if the organization has growth goals and the organization has a vision, you know, that
that operating model, you know, is part of the answer, but not the whole answer.
Mark Benson (1:03:19)
Yeah, I guess there's always going to be some form of ambiguity like that. I know in psychology, I think they call this ambiguity tolerance,
Scott Nelson (1:03:27)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (1:03:28)
which is a trait and is an indicator of whether people can thrive in an environment that has a lot of, sometimes chaos, but pressure, lots of ambiguity, pushing the boundaries of what's possible, forging into the unknown. And that's a really uncomfortable thing. And I know not everybody
wants that, certainly it's not comfortable. But to have someone who can really thrive in an environment that's like highly innovative, high pressure, it does seem like, I mean, my experience checks out with this too, that a degree of ambiguity tolerance and actually jumping right into the middle of ambiguity to create simple solutions from a messy problem space is actually one of the defining characteristics of a great systems person.
Scott Nelson (1:04:17)
Yeah, I think you'll find, and we saw, I saw this when I worked with the designers for sure, but you'll find that someone who is really averse to ambiguity will also be averse to making decisions. Because what ambiguity requires is, you know, for you to analyze and think about it and make a decision, take a direction, right? And
It's one of the things that designers are really good at. You know, when they look at three or four different potential shapes of a new product or something, they seem to always know which one they like immediately. You know, I'm looking at them and saying, well, I could see where this could help with this and this could help with this. they're like, no, it's this one. You know, they're not, and they're comfortable with their decision and they're comfortable making decisions. And I think you'll,
I
think you'll find that in strong organizational leadership. People are comfortable making a decision and moving on, and they make them quickly. Ambiguity can kill you if you slow down too much.
Mark Benson (1:05:30)
Yeah, that's interesting to think about. I guess it makes sense that if someone is really uncomfortable with ambiguity, they're probably also uncomfortable with making decisive decisions within ambiguity.
Scott Nelson (1:05:41)
Yeah.
And, and you could go the next step if they're uncomfortable making decisions, they're uncomfortable with accountability.
Because decisions, you got to be accountable to your decisions as a leader or as any team member. You make a decision, you're accountable to that decision.
Mark Benson (1:06:00)
There's obviously an aspect of healthy accountability that can vary by organization and culture. You know, when someone makes a decision, a decisive decision in ambiguity that doesn't turn out perfect because not every decision will, how is that penalized or how is that celebrated
Scott Nelson (1:06:20)
Well.
Mark Benson (1:06:21)
or how is the learning carried forward?
Scott Nelson (1:06:23)
I was just
saying, you started with the word penalized, but of course now we get into fear of mistakes, fear of failure. it was an interesting study recently that somebody tried to evaluate for a large language model.
what is the kind of the optimum failure rate of the model as it makes predictions to learning. And I don't know exactly how they did this, but they built a tool and they built a measure and they came out with like 30%. If the model doesn't fail at least 30 % of the time, it's not gonna be learning as fast as you want it to.
I used that in a talk and I said both my grandson and I are learning much faster than these models.
Mark Benson (1:07:26)
That's funny. And I would
think that that percentage that would surprise a lot of people is being higher than
Scott Nelson (1:07:32)
Well, the
Mark Benson (1:07:33)
what they would think.
Scott Nelson (1:07:34)
people that are fear of failure people said, well, it should be zero. You shouldn't make mistakes. And so I think this is the other part of the cultural part, Is accountability to mistakes, absolutely. But it's not.
you know, accountability doesn't always mean punishment. Accountability, you know, first and foremost means, well, okay. And I did that. I said this at logic. I don't care if we make mistakes, just don't make the same one twice. Right? You know, I mean, that's, that's the, you know, what, that's where you not learning. It's proof of not learning by making the same mistake twice. But, but that's, that's an important part of it is, you know,
There are some times when accountability has to have, I think, consequence, let's say. And there's other times when accountability is learned fast and, you know, you can, I think you can reduce consequence with agility in learning, right? You you can, you can make the consequence less impactful if you adapt more quickly to the learning.
Mark Benson (1:08:41)
Yeah, I found that using the concept of blameless retrospectives is really helpful. To actually specifically name the fact that we are not here to blame. It could be a human error, a person who deployed something to production and they fat fingered the wrong thing and caused an incident. No, obviously that's not good, but.
the most important thing is learning and not about blaming because it,
Scott Nelson (1:09:14)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (1:09:15)
I mean, is that your experience too? mean, as soon as blame starts taking root, all of a sudden that becomes an unsafe environment to start making mistakes starts feeling very dangerous personally.
Scott Nelson (1:09:24)
yeah. If,
if, you know, if blame becomes part of the process, then fear of failure becomes inherent in the organization and an organization that's afraid of failure. I mean, Eric Reese wrote a whole book about called fail fast, fail early. Right. You know, I mean, the whole thing is learning fast. And if you've got fear of failure,
You failure is one of the, is the, is the dominant. I saw some chart. I think I have it in a slide. The dominant way humans learn is from failure. And so if you stop failing, you stop learning. so the fear of failure as a culture is not good. but.
failure,
it doesn't win. So you can't say, I'm just going to fail my way to victory. That's not going to work either. you know, there's a, there's a balance and, you create an organization that's not afraid to fail, but hopefully usually wins because they've learned and they don't, you know, they've just learned and they've learned how to adapt really quickly. Sometimes you can have something that doesn't work.
And if you adapt fast enough, you might be the only one that knew it didn't work. You know, the outside world sees what it wants to see, even though it was messy getting there. I always thought that about when we were at logic and talking to, you know, with spreadsheets, mostly, you know, growth is messy. You know, it's not a clean plan thing. Growth is messy. And so.
Keep your eye on the growth metric and I'll take care of the messy metric. I'll take care of the mess.
Mark Benson (1:11:13)
Scott, what about staying grounded? like when, you know, we talk about near term versus longterm thinking, sometimes the near term demands, they pull people in multiple directions. Yeah. For instance, there's several things that are all top priority. Like they're, they're, they're not, it's not clear which one is the top and it's easy for a team to lose the thread.
of what is actually important in an organization. And I would say this applies to values sometimes. It can also apply to prioritization of initiatives organizationally like that. how have you stayed anchored to things that actually matter when the pressure gets on? And how do you keep the team focused and having some level of resolve around the strategy and direction when the pressure to react and to
fray attention is very real and present. How do you
Scott Nelson (1:12:14)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (1:12:14)
stay grounded?
Scott Nelson (1:12:17)
Well, I was known with my Tamarack development team for never having fewer than three number one priorities.
Mark Benson (1:12:27)
Should get a medal for that.
Scott Nelson (1:12:29)
Well, but here's the here's the reality, right? I mean, I did. You know, we did have a lot. You know, we were trying to get worse startup mode, right? We're trying to get everything done, right? And. You know, in the best of all worlds and enough people, we would all of these would be somebody's number one priority, but we were working as a team. you say, OK, here's get Jeremy Fisher was my my head of engineering and but Jeremy knew that.
If we had three number one priorities and if he looked at them and said, yeah, I really can't, know, this isn't and anymore, you know, you got to pick. Well, then, you know, then he knew he was empowered to tell me pick, prioritize. All right. And how did I prioritize? Well, you prioritize.
If
you're a startup, first and foremost, you prioritize by survival. Which one's going to kill me if I don't do it? And you go survival. If you're in an organization that's a little bit bigger and a little bit less survival-ish, I think.
I'm a big believer in you mentioned values. I'm a big believer in when you set up an organization to have really well, you know, do a good job with mission vision values. I, you know, we said it logic. We had great values at logic. We had a great organization. Values are what makes the decisions when, you're not around. Right. And if you have good shared values with everybody, you don't really have to worry about not being around. Right. But in terms of grounding,
You know, in, in the midst of pressure and grounding in the midst of competitive attacks and whatnot. mission is really important because mission is why, you know, why are we here? And if you can't, if you can't answer the, why are we here? If you can't stick to that.
You know, well, then you're losing your purpose in life. You're losing your reason for being here. And that means you're going to be losing customer, you know, preference and customer support. vision is important then because vision is that, you know, what do I want to be when I grow up? What do I want to be three years from now, five years from now? And vision helps if you're prioritizing a number of investments, for example.
If one of those investments, you know, if the lack of one of those investments will absolutely make it impossible to achieve the vision. Well, that's a big deal. Right. And so then you got to think about, can I reprioritize? Can I get. Monies from somewhere else.
Visions should not be reorg, visions shouldn't be redone every year. That's cheating. That's like having an AOP that's recast in the middle of the year, right? That's not an AOP. So I really believe strongly in the mission, the mission vision. And mission at SmartThings, I'm guessing, I'm almost sure your whole team had a...
what I would call a societal mission. What do we want to do for our customers and the people that buy our products and whatnot. But you also would have a very important mission for what's our purpose and what's our mission here within the larger organization.
You
know, it's our job to, get people to buy more product or it's our job to get people to really, really believe in the event, in the brand, you know, or de-commoditize the brand. Maybe our product, maybe our mission is to de-commoditize the brand, you know, these, these are, these are things that help one deal with, you know, staying grounded in, in, and of course,
Sooner or later, you're going to have to adapt. You're going to have to change. You're going to have to pivot. There's no way that you don't constantly have to make decisions about adapting and pivoting. But when you make those decisions, I think the mission and vision are part of you know, part of the context in which you make them.
Mark Benson (1:17:04)
makes
sense. mean, I'm also a big believer that values and mission are incredibly important. I think, you know, it's one thing to have a mission statement that's just on a poster or values that are written on the wall or stated once. It's a whole nother thing to take those values and actually use them as guides when you're making decisions. And values don't always tell you like,
decide A versus B or exactly what to do, but they do inform how you make decisions, how you treat people, the values you uphold, what do you think about customers, quality, whatever those values are, but the more that you actually integrate those into the fabric of the way that the company works, how performance reviews happen, how promotions happen, how decisions are made, how customers are treated, how you think about product decisions, that it's...
then it starts getting real. And there's great examples of companies, and Amazon comes to mind where they've put so much effort in integrating their values into everything that they do. It's definitely something that I am a huge believer of, and I think it really matters, especially under pressure, where people can burn out so much more quickly if they stop seeing why their work is making a difference.
I don't know what you think about this, I've seen a lot of people burn out, but not because they're just working too hard. They can be working.
really long hours and not get burnt out if they believe what they're doing is making a difference and it matters and it's purposeful. And sometimes people can be working not that much in terms of quantity of hours, but where they can't answer that question, like you said, of the mission, why are we here? Why am I here? Why does this matter? That can lead to boredom, disengagement, burnout and exits.
Very fast.
Scott Nelson (1:19:13)
Yeah, no question.
No question. And sometimes mission.
I think there's sometimes, I think there are times of external pressure where an organization's mission will come into question. The most common is the employees start to believe the only reason the organization exists is to make money. And just making money, you know, is not a strong mission.
It's kind of like price, unless you're Walmart, price is hard to compete on. And of course, Walmart's a fantastic company and they've done a fantastic job competing on price by changing the whole way that they bring product to market. Right. You know, that's how they do it. but if you, if you, you know, if you lose your mission to, just here to make money.
A lot of people don't work just for money. lot of people work for family or a lot of people work because they believe that we're going to make other people's lives better. know, Apple, think was the golden circle, right? Famously, you know, we're going to make computing available to everybody. You know, we're, we're going to make, you know, they had a very strong why. I think that's, uh,
That was Simon Sinek, right? It start with Y. Yeah. And
Mark Benson (1:20:51)
That's right. Yeah. Yep.
Scott Nelson (1:20:53)
I think that's one of my favorite books on this topic because that Y is mission. And you're absolutely right. If you lose mission, if somehow the company looks like it's not performing against mission, then burnout is very likely to be happening or just self-selection. If you have a new vision, does something different.
then
somebody might say, have a different idea about my personal vision or mission.
Mark Benson (1:21:25)
Right, Yeah, there might be a person who has a belief that the company should be doing something different, which probably rarely gonna have 100 % agreement on every business decision. But then there's also things that people believe that are principles, values, things they care about. And those are lines that they're very personal and they matter.
Scott Nelson (1:21:51)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (1:21:52)
But yeah, it can get...
It can get tough if you've got like a company decision that's saying we're gonna go, you know, this way or address this problem space with these types of customers and someone strongly believes we should actually be addressing the different customers.
Scott Nelson (1:22:12)
It's
a, it's something that I believed a lot in logic and we grew for 15 years. this is an area where consistency matters.
If you have a mission and then you stay consistent to it, then it doesn't mean everybody's going to come work for you. mean, there's a wide distribution of people that have different values, different missions, different visions for themselves. But over time, if you're consistent with your mission and you pursue it as a company, as an organization, over time, you're going to attract and keep and develop people who believe in that mission as well.
And so now you have less fault lines in your organization. You have less risk of fractioning because that mission has pulled people together over a period of time. And particularly if the organization's gone through several big stressors, then people are going to see, we'll get through this. We've done it before.
But if you've got to, you, sometimes it happens in an organization that changes leadership too fast, you know, the mission changes when the leader comes in and those types of organizations are going to struggle, you know, from time to time with having to rehire people or having to retrain people or, you know, creating new, you know, new cultures.
Sometimes, know, mission, vision, vision, mission, vision values is, you know, that's the heart of culture. Right. And culture, I remember learning somewhere along the lines. If you want to change the culture plan on seven years, you know, that's a long time, but I think it's true. I think it's true. takes a long time to build a culture.
Mark Benson (1:24:09)
Well, it's also true that it can last for a long time once you get that there too. mean, after seven years, if there's other changes and then there could be a new culture that's forming that probably also takes time too. So I don't know if the rate of creating culture is the same rate as deteriorating a culture or changing it, but there's definitely, you know, it has some staying power over time.
Scott Nelson (1:24:33)
Oh yeah,
it's cultures like inertia. I mean, it keeps things moving. That's why I like the values statement. The values make the decisions when you're not there. That's an inertia statement. I have a decision-making inertia that's carried by the mission and values of the organization. And so even if I'm not there,
you know, the organization will continue, you know, on the path and making good decisions and making the right, you know, taking the right actions. There's physics everywhere, Mark. mean, the
Mark Benson (1:25:10)
So let's keep.
Scott Nelson (1:25:13)
organizational theory is basically just physics. only say
that's not true.
Mark Benson (1:25:18)
It's the laws of the world we live
in. I love how we can apply those to people though. They're so apt in a lot of ways.
Scott Nelson (1:25:26)
Yeah.
Mark Benson (1:25:27)
Let's get practical for a minute, Scott. So thinking of product thinking, you've built products I know where the margins for getting it wrong was very thin. You know, have to design like an industrial medical scientific device that needs to do something. I know
from back in logic days, we worked on implantable medical devices, pacemakers, defibrillators, heart monitors, things like that. The margin for getting it wrong is thin, and the user on the other end, or the doctor, or whoever's using it, they definitely feel the consequences. But I guess the question is when you think about product thinking, what is it about?
high pressure, like being under pressure to really deliver what it matters. What has that taught you about product thinking that low stakes, calm environments simply can't?
Scott Nelson (1:26:32)
First of all, I think a way to...
cast your question is in like mission critical products, products that are, is that right? Products that are very, you know, the margins for error is that you were taught when you said margins, you were saying the margins for error are very narrow.
Mark Benson (1:26:57)
Yeah.
Margins for air are thin. The quality requirements, maybe it's just to get specific, maybe it's a military or industrial product that's got to meet certain temperature standards and
Scott Nelson (1:27:10)
Yeah, yeah.
Mark Benson (1:27:11)
you got to hit a certain bill of materials target and you, you know, there's not a lot of wiggle room. You got to really hit that and it's a high pressure thing. But I guess the question is if you're designing systems like that, what has that taught you about?
product thinking where, say you're by contrast working on products that really, they're more proof of concept, they're not gonna launch at scale. Do you think about products, like how does it sharpen your product thinking when the stakes are high?
Scott Nelson (1:27:45)
Yeah.
You know, you could say that, you know, these mission critical products, you know, that you're building something that really matters to somebody. You're building something that they're in case of military and medical, can say lives depend upon it, right? You know, and so there's, there's,
there, it's a little bit like, you know, being at the free throw line in a tight game with three seconds left, right? I this shot is a really important shot, right? So, you know, for me personally, I've always enjoyed working on mission critical things. And part of the reason is, is because if you do it right,
And you win, you get to see your product used because it's a mission, you know, it's a mission critical product. It's going to be a mission critical job that you're helping do. What do I learn about it? You've got to be more intense in your, you know, really, I think really a little bit more.
Intense at the front end with empathy got to make sure that you really talk to listen and question your users to make sure that you understand what matters to them and You don't do any nice-to-haves In military programs they have they have a very rigorous requirements review must-haves nice-to-have don't need you know and because you'll have
10 pages of requirements line up, you and you got to line them out so that you know what matters, right? That's part of the process. the key at the front end is making sure you have a lot of empathy and you talk to not just, you got to talk to the right customers, make sure you're, you know, talking to the people that are going to use the product and, and as many of them as you can and make sure you don't miss anything.
during the development, you're then trying to manage the other constraints you mentioned, cogs and whatnot. I find that to be a little bit more mechanical. There can be some innovations required, but I think that's a little more mechanical. think the other part where mission critical becomes...
more intense is then testing at the end. You know, you can't.
you gotta, know, V and V, you gotta verify and validate, you know, you gotta, with medical products, you gotta verify that it does what you said it was gonna do in a way technically, but more importantly, you gotta validate that it does what the patient expects in their hands. You know, they, it works the way they need it to work, which hopefully is the way you intended it to work, but that could be a disconnect too. So,
I think what you're talking about is mission critical products. I could say back to you, well, all products are mission critical to the business. If you don't sell them, you're not going to make money, and then the business is going to not survive. But it's a different world when there's consequences to a product not working the way it was designed, so to speak, or the way it was specified.
to be honest, I've always found that to be motivating. It means you're working at the highest level of, you know, of the, of the discipline. Cause you're working on things that really, really matter to people.
Mark Benson (1:31:19)
Thinking about the next generation of product leaders, Scott, and system builders, what do you think that this next generation of product leaders and system builders fundamentally misunderstand about pressure
Scott Nelson (1:31:35)
this generation grown up in a different environment in the context of pressure than what I grew up in.
and how do they have to be careful with their environment and how do they have to be careful in terms of dealing with pressure. One of the things, and you know this deeply, when you're under pressure and you're making quick decisions, you gotta have good information. You gotta have information you can trust.
And if you don't have it, you got to be able to get it fast. You got to know where to go. You got to go. You got to have somebody you can trust. I feel like, um,
I feel like this generation has, you they, you know, I know they've grown up in a context, you know, they've grown up in the context of the internet and social media. We didn't have either of those when I grew up.
If I wanted to look something up, went to the library and looked it up. And I had the advantage that nothing, you most things didn't get published because it was so expensive and let, and there was a certain expectation of processing and validation and referee journals and all this kind of stuff. I feel like today that if there's a risk to this generation,
I feel like the internet and social media are given more trust than they deserve. I don't know that this generation has as much skepticism as I do about things that I read and things that I see. I gave a talk and there's a video, an AI video of a dog.
walking on the ledge of a building the way a cat would. And so that basically someone programmed the dog to walk like a cat. And I said, this makes me sad because my grandchildren can never trust anything they see on a screen.
They just can't.
Nothing is true if it's on a screen, no pictures. And that comes from somebody who grew up with Life Magazine and National Geographic. know, without question, I figured everything I saw in there was real and true and wonderful. Right? And so you're dealing with pressure. I think they have to be careful.
You know, they can't give too much trust to the information that they're getting, or they're going to have to make sure that they can trust the information that they're getting. you know, in our day, you know, early when we were working together at logic, you know, we only had a few places we got information and we knew what to trust and what not to trust. But I think, I think in general, if they feel pressure, they're going to have to.
make sure they ask a lot of questions and they use a lot of skepticism and they got to get to the, they got to get to, if you're to make good decisions, you got to have good information. And I don't know that they, I don't
know that they've been trained to identify good information. I think they, and you just got to be careful about that, I think.
I think going forward, the concept of pressure is going to be...
It's like we said earlier, you gotta ask a lot of questions. Why is this pressure happening? know, well, who's who? What's the motivation behind it? What are we accomplishing? I think they I think they're going to have to be very diligent on that, but I think then when they get the answers to the questions, they may have to be an extra level of skeptical than you and I were. To make sure that they're getting information. From. Places they can trust.
I think they also have a fundamental difference in the quantity and probably quality of face to face communications with, you know, people and fellow workers and things is, different now than it used to be. And so
I have a lot of meetings on zoom these days and I miss the meetings with in the stadium at logic where we have 11 people and you can watch the body language and you know you can get so much more information from the face to face and if I'm to be dealing with pressure I'd rather be in a I'd rather be in a meeting of five people in one room making the decision than I would at five zooms and why do I say that well
because I grew up that way and I, and I, you know, I can see a lot more that, and, you know, we're visual animals, so I can see a lot more, which gives me a lot more information. So maybe what I could say is they have to put more value on face-to-face and in office again. You know, we're still going through the transformation of COVID on remote and hybrid.
Uh, I could say everybody should work their way back to, in office, but I don't really believe that either because I can feel myself being really, really productive when I'm working by myself sometimes. So I can't really, you know, I can't really, uh, you know, do as I say, not as I do. I'm not going to say that, you know, but it's a, um,
I think the other thing that I would say is pressure is a good thing, know, professionally. Pressure forces you to think, it forces you to work in teams, it forces you to innovate.
And I don't know if this generation has been forced to accept or to embrace pressure, or if they've always been given the opportunity to move away from it. And the reality in business is you won't be given the opportunity to move away from it. If you do, you'll be leaving the building, so to speak. I think pressure...
Be ready to embrace it and maybe love it. Maybe love it for what it helps you do and helps you learn.
Mark Benson (1:38:40)
Well, Scott, thanks for spending the time and talking with me. It's just I've learned so much from you over the years and just hearing hearing you now and being able to ask you these questions has just been eye opening to me. But Thanks for all the things that you've taught me over the years.
Scott Nelson (1:38:59)
Okay, well, I've enjoyed since we first met and I know I feel good. I'm flattered by the fact that you give me credit for some of your own success and how far you've gone and it's great to see and I'm happy for the people that work for you. I know I've known several of them and I...
I know they've they've felt good about working with you and for you as well. And so I know you're doing you're doing a lot of, a lot of good things, Okay. Take care.
Mark Benson (1:39:30)
Thanks for saying that, Scott. All right, thanks. Talk to you later.
Bye.