Ep. 44: Forget ROI - The Ethical Case for Good Org Design
About this episode:
Original Air Date: February 23, 2026Most org design conversations get forced through a narrow funnel: prove the ROI, justify the spend, make the numbers work. But if work is something most people can’t opt out of—and where we spend a huge chunk of our attention and waking lives—then “it pays off” feels like a painfully small standard.
This week, Rodney and Sam explore the ethical case for organizational design. They move beyond spreadsheets and profit metrics to ask bigger questions about leadership, power, transparency, compensation, and the human impact of broken systems. What do organizations owe the people who work inside them? Is better workplace design a moral responsibility — not just a financial strategy?
Mentioned in this episode:
Editor’s note: New CEO’s comp package is roughly $16m, vs over $70m for the prior CEO in 2020
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Rodney Evans:
So much of my fireiness about it isn't even just about morals. It's just like you can't run a good thriving organization that can evolve when all of the resources and all of the power flow in one direction and are concentrated there.
[Intro music]
Hey everybody. Welcome back to At Work with The Ready. I'm Rodney Evans and that guy over there is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
Hello, Rodney Evans and everybody out there listening.
Rodney Evans:
AI is rewriting the rules of work in the moment. It feels like the future of work has arrived on our doorstep. And so now the question isn't so much whether or not we are going to adapt, but how you design work for what is happening now.
Sam Spurlin:
You could say work design is no longer optional and the teams that treat it like a side project are going to get left behind. The ones that treat it as essential will keep up with the pace of change.
Rodney Evans:
So today we are going to dig into the ethical case for work design. I'm super excited about this. It's going to be a wild episode. I have so many fucking hot takes about this topic, but first we're going to check in and the check-in because I get to do it today. So it gets to be witchy is what is your energy like? Today, but also just generally right now. What's your energy like, Sam?
Sam Spurlin:
Interesting. You're catching me on a day and a 24 hours where there's just been some hard stuff going on in my life. Not huge monumental things, but some contentious conversations and some messed up things and some disappointments from people who are... You get bummed out when they disappoint you. So I'm bringing a little bit of some energy of, it's kind of nice to just put my brain into this world for a little bit because other parts of my life are annoying me and I think that probably I might be a little more dour than usual, which-
Rodney Evans:
Whoa.
Sam Spurlin:
... what does that even really mean?
Rodney Evans:
Look out.
Sam Spurlin:
No, I'm going to be a ray of God-damn sunshine. Here we go.
Rodney Evans:
Look, don't push it. You are allowed to be as grumpy as you want to. This is your show and you can be Eeyore if that's what the moment is calling for. I am similar. I have also very mixed vibes. I did some ChatGPT-ing this morning. I'm leaving on a trip tomorrow and this trip sort of crept up on me. It's been planned for a very, very long time. We're going on safari with some very dear friends and because it was planned so far in advance, I sort of forgot about it. And I have noticed this thing in myself where just before a big trip I always feel like I'm getting sick. I always feel like I don't want to go. I'm always like, "Why do we say yes to these things?" And I feel a little bit overwhelmed and I did a little bit of research this morning and apparently this is a real thing that is pre-departure collapse.
And a lot of people basically experience this little window between all of the planning and the getting of yellow fever shots and actually being on the plane as a real energetic trough. So the adrenaline does not carry us through all the way to the plane ride, and there's this sort of profound dip in between where the whole nervous system crashes and I'm right in there today. So as excited as I am about this episode, I would also not say that my energy is high. I do not feel buoyant today in the way that I usually do.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, well our combination will be fun for this.
Rodney Evans:
What if this makes us wise?
Sam Spurlin:
This is all it takes. Just be a little bit pissed off.
Rodney Evans:
Sam gets mad and I get completely exhausted, and then our wisdom increases by a factor of 10. We're going to find out.
Sam Spurlin:
That's right. We're going to go for it. We're going to experiment with it.
The Pattern: “good work” always has to prove traditional ROI and can’t stand on its own
Rodney Evans:
So Sam's going to do the pattern today because this show is his idea and I'm very excited to hear it.
Sam Spurlin:
Cool. So the initial thought kind of maybe coming out of the check-in round and my energy that I was bringing is that I found myself being really annoyed that we always have to kind the work that we do through a capitalist lens. We even just recently released an AUA short mini episode about the ROI of org design. We can talk about that all day long. And it's true a lot of the stuff that we talk about, obviously there's good evidence that human adaptive org design leads to better financial outcomes. And also I wanted us to just spend one episode setting the capitalist lens aside, the return on investment lens, the financial lens, and purely try to make the case for the work that we do, however you want to describe it through an ethical moral lens.
So my stab at a pattern here, calling it the ethics if profitable pattern and it's the pattern of leaders and orgs supporting people positive, complexity conscious org design only when justified by ROI and never because it's simply the right thing to do. What if we tried to make the most compelling case for doing this work through that ethical or moral lens only? So that's what we're going to try to do.
Rodney Evans:
I love it. I'm so excited about this and even you just opening it up that way made me think about how many things that are just morally very sound in order to play in capital B business capitalist systems have to be justified through this lens. It's like we have to justify like ESG, we have to justify DEI, we have to justify... It's like we only give health benefits because absenteeism goes down and it's like, yeah, health benefits should be like a human right. It shouldn't only appear on a spreadsheet if there's a positive percentage on the other side of the equation. So even as you were saying that, I'm like why is it that things that are just inherently good aren't good enough to stand as their own case? And that's what we're going to talk about today.
Sam Spurlin:
Indeed, it is. So I'm curious, is there a particular angle you wanted to take into this topic or how do we start to unwrap this present that I have brought to us?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Well, so I'll tell you my overarching hypothesis about this topic, which is everything that we do in organizational or work design as we're now calling it, and I think actually is the more accurate term, everything that we do in work design at some level is creating clarity. We are seeking clarity and part of that seeking of clarity is the myth busting of things that are long held truths about work. And so I feel like one of the ways in which we make the ethical case, because I think that's what we're doing today, is there is an ethical motivation to create clarity in organizations to do a few different things.
One is to allow people and invite people to question long held truths. The idea that productivity at an individual level is some kind of moral good or imperative, which is just bullshit. And that making power structures visible, making compensation structures visible, having conversations about why you're pursuing certain metrics. Just a level of clarity and a deepening of perception around systems to me is the ethical case for work design. It's like before we get to what you should do instead, we at least have to understand the rules of the game that we're playing. And mostly, mostly our systems are designed to obfuscate those rules from the people who are not benefiting from them, which is almost everyone.
Why a "good" work experience is the exception, not the rule
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And it's connected, I think, if I take one step back and I think about my entry into this topic, it's something around the idea that work, it's a non-negotiable for most people in the world.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
Most of us are not independently wealthy and can just kind of do whatever the hell we want. We need some sort of employment to take care of our basic needs. And because it's not a voluntary sort of thing that we're opting into, we all got to do it, it feels like there should be a certain level of do-no-harm aspect to it that we should be able to take as given that this thing that we have to do, we have no choice. And actually if you take even a slightly little bit more positive take on it or a positive spin on it, the way I often describe it is really if we're lucky and healthy, we get to spend most of our lives doing some sort of employment. Because there's a lot of folks who would like to be working who for whatever reason cannot.
So if we're lucky and healthy, we spend most of our lives in some sort of employment and for some people that is a prison sentence because the organizations that are available to them or they happen to be working with or four are just fucking miserable. And for others, I think for me and for you, it's fun.
Rodney Evans:
It's really a joy.
Sam Spurlin:
It's a playground to do, to experience a lot of the best aspects of human life. Flow, and contributing to something bigger than yourself and collaborating with other people. And why does that have to be the aberration that, like, if you're really lucky you get the good experience. Why can't that be just the default for everyone?
Why protecting yourself isn't "selling out"
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I love that. And I thought a lot this morning as I was prepping for this episode about this sort of antagonistic view that sometimes comes up in the anti-work discussions and subculture. There can be a bit of a sellout flag waved. I'm like, I am of the generation where selling out was just a sin.
Sam Spurlin:
It's the worst thing you could do.
Rodney Evans:
The worst thing you can do.
Sam Spurlin:
How dare you mix money or whatever?
Rodney Evans:
But that was back when we all thought that everyone was going to be able to buy houses and afford to have children. And now selling out doesn't seem so bad because there's no alternative. But actually my point is I was thinking a lot about this because I feel like in a lot of the rhetoric it's like, "Don't work for Amazon." And I'm like, okay, look, there are large companies that are extractive and horrible and toxic and all of the wealth and all of the stability flows up to the top at the expense of everyone else's safety and comfort. That is true. There are also nonprofits and art galleries and startups that are equally despicable in terms of the experience that their employees have where because of their mission orientation or their dependence on funding or their slim margins, they don't provide benefits, they don't take care of employees. They rely very heavily on either the coolness and the content or the mission of the organization to also be like, "You're lucky to be here."
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and in some ways I think that's more despicable than at least they're honest about it. Like, "We're here to make money."
Rodney Evans:
Look, you know what you're getting.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, it was very clear. But some nonprofit that is here to change the world and they're going to treat you like shit the whole time and you're supposed to feel good about it, that really rubs me the wrong way.
Rodney Evans:
100%. And so I've taken this posture my entire career and I still believe in it. And I've had a lot of arguments particularly with friends and people outside of my working life over the years where they're basically given that you have more optionality than other people, why do you participate in this broken system? And by broken system, they're talking about capitalism in America because I have Fortune 500 clients and because I work at the top of those houses. And basically the tidy answer to that that is just a warm bath for the ego is like, well, if I help those systems become incrementally better blast radius for the employees one CEO of a 10,000 person company or a hundred thousand person company, changing their mind about work and creating humane conditions has a lot more effect than me going and working as the COO of a six person nonprofit probably. That's great. That feels very tidy. That rolls right off the tongue. The truth is closer to it's all fucked. And I think that depending on who you are and where you are, you have to choose what fucked arena you want to play in.
It's all bad. It's all bad-
Sam Spurlin:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
... and it's not bad because people are bad. It's bad because we have 150 years of design for extraction and we are living in an oligarchy in this country. That's why it's bad. It's bad because there's no accountability for CEOs and a tiny, tiny percentage of Americans are participating in the stock market. It's bad for a whole bunch of reasons. My point is I have always in my career been very mindful and very choiceful about the bad and there were times in my career where I was like, "I want to someday buy a home and I'm going to put up with these fucking maniacs for two years to get two bonuses with one extra zero that I've ever had in my bank account so that I can buy that home."
I will never criticize a person for being like, "I too have to survive in this system and I too, am going to do what I can do." And once one is in stability or can sort of see the system and have some influence, then I do feel like there is some pressure...at least for me, I feel some pressure to do something good with it and to not only engage with people who are monsters and be like, "You're doing great, Jeff, just keep stealing from your hourly employees." I do feel like when you get to a certain point, then it is your job to hold a mirror up to whatever extent your privilege allows.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, no, I love that. And when you were talking about how things are fucked, I wanted to take it actually one step further because the ultimate level of fucked that we all have to deal with is that we're all going to die.
Rodney Evans:
So true.
Sam Spurlin:
The absurdity of life is a thing that we all have in common and I think through a certain lens that's obviously very dire and can freeze you in place. And I think the other side I think that I have been embracing more and more is it's actually really freeing to know we all end up at the same spot and the choices that we make leading up to that final moment, they in some ways matter a lot less.
How to spend your attention on what's actually worthy
Not in a nihilistic way, but like... So I had this professor in grad school, he's the guy who wrote Flow and he gave a talk in one of our early classes talking about attention and how in a given second of paying attention, there's like eight bits of information that you can attend to moment to moment just as a person. And if you did just some like extrapolative math leading out, okay, so I can handle this amount of information in this amount of time and I live for roughly this long, you basically have a number which is the total amount of information that you could attend to in a given life.
Rodney Evans:
I love this. It's like your bank account of information. You get-
Sam Spurlin:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
There's a cap to process.
Sam Spurlin:
On how much you can process in your entire life and the moment to moment experience of how you process that limited amount of information is your life. It is the entirety of the experience that was Sam Spurlin or was Rodney Evans. And it just brought home to me that attention truly is all we really have moment to moment to determine what the quality of our life is.
And we go back to my first point about everybody needs to work in some capacity, the vast the majority of us, and the power that our organizations have to either respect or much more commonly utterly disrespect our attention, and it takes a much more ethics focused tone for me. The org design work now is like, are we going to help people live good lives or are we going to destroy them along the way in order to see some more money in our bank account?
Rodney Evans:
I mean I think this is what people who do employee experience are trying to get at, but usually it doesn't work that well. But what if the fundamental question was are we designing work so that people are spending their attention on worthy things? How much would that change a bunch of the kinds of interactions that we see people have all damn day?
Sam Spurlin:
And it's not like, "Oh, I can only spend my attention on the loftiest of ideas," or whatever. Because I think it actually comes down to this other thing that has really been burning me up recently, which is the realization that I think I spent enough time around really bureaucratic organizations where the moral injury that I am perceiving people having to experience working in a system that just flat out doesn't work. So I'm not even talking about what they company does or the impact that they're having on the world. Totally set that aside. That's a different kind of ethical conversation. I'm talking about I am forced to spend eight hours a day here and the primary way that I experience this organization is just utter incompetence. In order to do something that is incredibly simple, I have to jump through three hoops that make no God-damn sense.
And I know that. I'm a smart man. I know this doesn't make any sense. And the first time I had to do it, I probably tried to put up a bit of a fight and be like, "Oh, why do we have to do it this way? Can't I just do this?" And I had it so drilled out at me and that is the predominant way that I experience this organization. I think that is psychologically harmful to people to be forced to interact with a system that just straight up doesn't work because I think most of us have this psychological need to contribute to a system that actually works. You can see your effort turn into outputs that are making things happen. And I think a lot of the work design that we see in these organizations are, I put in a lot of effort into a completely black box where that effort is just goes away forever. That's a hard way to work and live, I think.
Rodney Evans:
It's a hard way to spend most of your waking hours is just on ephemeral nonsense, most of which has some root in a lack of trust or someone's ego. I mean I always used to say bureaucracy is just a function of mistrust. Every bit of sludge added into any kind of workflow where one might do good work is probably because someone experienced an ego injury at some point and added that bit of friction in order to make themselves feel better. I think it's a really interesting point, Sam, and I also am reflecting on so many conversations that I've had truly across the board. This has happened with people I've coached, it has happened with people who are clients of ours. It has happened with people who have moved on from The Ready who I speak to where there's this period of time when someone sort of stops just consuming the system around them and gets a little bit of perspective of what the whole thing is really designed for and what it's really doing.
And they go, "Uh-oh, I don't like that. I don't want to do the thing that you're describing. Now that I can see it, I want to opt out of it." And then, because life is hard, they convince themselves that they can live with that dissonance indefinitely. And usually that conversation sounds like, "I'm just going to keep my head down, push through because it's five years to retirement. I need this security. My kids are going to college. It's just as bad in the other place. I might get promoted next year." There's usually some very intellectual justification for what's going on in our heart, which is I'm wasting my life and it's hurting my feelings.
Why the power gap between leadership and workers is broken
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, well, and I've seen that even in folks senior enough and in an organization that you would think they have gone beyond that-
Rodney Evans:
They have transcended. No, it's the worst for them.
Sam Spurlin:
The very top of the organization has often obviously in most organizations the most power and also some of the most learned helplessness folks that I've ever worked with in my career.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I mean this is maybe first hot take of the episode.
Sam Spurlin:
Hot take zone.
Rodney Evans:
I have a very spicy theory about why that is.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay.
Rodney Evans:
I feel like when you are at the top of the house and you are making so much more money than you probably deserve, let's just be honest, I don't think that CEOs should make more than $10 million. Show me a person who is actually... Whatever, we'll talk about that later. CEO's just get paid to fail up constantly in a way that I think is disgusting while their line workers have to take three buses and hold two jobs and not have health insurance. This is just-
Sam Spurlin:
If only we could all aspire to be a failed CEO.
Rodney Evans:
I mean, no better job in America-
Sam Spurlin:
That's the career goal right there
Rodney Evans:
... than just like a middle-aged white guy who fucked up. I'll take it. I mean somebody call me, call me.
Sam Spurlin:
I'm on my way.
Rodney Evans:
Call me. I can fuck up your company. My point being actually if we just don't paint these people as villains, because I fundamentally think, again, this is a system thing, not an individual thing. When you're at that altitude of a company, and I would consider that altitude anywhere that you are making enough money that you have a lot of options, you could probably quit. You could probably say fuck it and just opt out. I feel like those people have to do a lot of reinforcing work so that the truth of the situation does not seep in and infect their brains.
And what I mean by that is if I am the new CEO of Target and I'm going to make, I'm just guessing, I actually don't know what his comp package is, but let's just guess it's like $60 million this year, I better believe that I am a magical unicorn. This is the way it has to work. That money is justified because no one else on earth can do what I do. My job is not to question the quality of my life or my employee's life. It is to, without thinking critically, keep blinders on and prop up this system that is making me rich.
And I think it's very difficult if a system has afforded you a lot of the trappings that capitalism promises us. Money, positional power, a lot of reporting relationships, a private jet, I don't know, whatever your thing is, I think it's very difficult to have a critical perspective of that system. And so when that dissonance creeps in, I think it's almost like it almost becomes work to just be like, "Shut up. No, I don't want to hear about how these people don't have childcare and their little babies are at home alone in an ice storm. I want to hear about how happy the shareholders are this quarter and how I'm going to get a bonus, because I cannot hold these two truths in my mind at the same time."
I don't honestly know psychologically what it must take to do that professionally as your job-
Sam Spurlin:
About $60 million.
Rodney Evans:
... but I imagine it's hard. $60 million. No, but how do you do it? How does one?
Sam Spurlin:
Well, yeah. And I think-
Rodney Evans:
And the reason I'm pointing to compensation specifically is because when we talk about the ethical case for organizational design and a lot of the way that work design could be better requires actual investment in humans and training and slack and systems and benefits and other things. And the answer is always no, there isn't any. And actually there is, but it's held in a very specific altitude of the company.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. There's something about what you just described there, and I don't know what the number is for me, I'm sure everybody has a different number, but the concept of like, fuck you money, get so much money that you could just kind of do what you want. I feel like most of these CEOs and often quite senior folks in large organizations have so much beyond fuck you money...
Rodney Evans:
So much beyond.
Sam Spurlin:
... and they never use the fuck you move on it.
Rodney Evans:
No.
Sam Spurlin:
And it's easy for me to sit here and be like, "If I hit fuck you money, I would be saying fuck you left and right." And maybe, I don't know. I feel like I haven't had fuck you money, although I've certainly made more money than many folks and I've been very fortunate in that way. So part of me is like, oh, would I even know that I had fuck you money if I had it? I would like to say yes. I'd like to say I haven't actually experienced that yet, and then when I do, I would know it. But what's the point of gaining so much power in an organization and just in life and all of those comforts that $60 million and beyond can bring you and just never doing anything with it, never doing anything with an ethical flavor or moral tinge to it because you're playing the capitalism game. I just can't wrap my mind around that sort of psychology.
Rodney Evans:
I can't either. And there are so few outliers.
Sam Spurlin:
Is this why we don't run Fortune 100 companies, Rodney, me and you right now?
Rodney Evans:
100%. Yeah, 100%. I couldn't be good at it. I mean partially because I think it would be very difficult for a lot of us to not opt out if all of those conditions presented themselves.
Why ethically designed companies are rarely publicly traded
But actually more than that, I think a lot of people who are working at that altitude, they have gotten to that place because they are so wired not to ask the question, "What is enough?" They're so wired for growth.
Sam Spurlin:
Growth at all costs.
Rodney Evans:
Growth at all costs.
Sam Spurlin:
You got to growth. If you're not growing, you're dying.
Rodney Evans:
Growth of the stock price, growth of the comp package. Just more. And this is the lie that capitalism has sold us just and as a country we have just bought hook, line and sinker that more is ultimately good for all of us. And it's not. More is good on paper for a small group of people who are unconscious and then it sucks for everybody else because in order for that small group of people to have more, it means that everybody else has to have less.
And to me, this is in part why a lot of the best case studies that we see that I would say people have taken the ethical path in terms of work design are in privately held companies. This is the reason that you read about a company that has always been, even very, very large companies that are like family businesses, generational, private, like Mars. You read about a company like that and it's like it is familial. People do really talk about the culture as being supportive and collective and collaborative and kind. And I think it's hard to do that when you're publicly traded because the only game-
Sam Spurlin:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
... is more. And I don't know how you make the ethical case unless it is directly related to more.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I think that's totally fair. As I was thinking about this episode and doing some light research, I read somewhere, and I don't remember where, but this idea that in capitalism we basically ignore massive negative externalities in order for it to work.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
Ignore the impact that you're having on the world or your communities or the people. There's obviously no monetary impact for those things. And because we can basically ignore these externalities, we can make the money make sense and work on the balance sheet. And I wonder if the whole triple bottom line idea of if that could become more and more of the norm and actually needing to account for the impact that you have on the world and the people who work for you, it starts to shift the actual numbers in a capitalism sort of sense that you start to care about that stuff a little bit more. Because as long as you can basically ignore massive costs, then why would you do anything about them if you are of that persuasion?
Rodney Evans:
What's the triple bottom line?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, triple bottom line. Basically the idea that we are looking at more than just do we make money or not? The profit aspect of it, but also incorporating the impact on society, impact on the planet. And once you've incorporated those numbers into the extent that you could put numbers on them, that is the true impact that you had. And the people and planet side are usually pretty ignored in typical capitalism.
Rodney Evans:
That makes sense to me.
The principles and values behind ethical orgs
Sam Spurlin:
So when I was trying to put on my hat around, all right, what's the skeptical take on this whole topic of conversation? I mean obviously holding capitalism aside is a huge impact on everything that we're talking about, but the other thing kind of critique that I think you can make is whose ethics, whose morals?
Rodney Evans:
Sure.
Sam Spurlin:
The moral relativism of like, "Oh, what you think is good? That's what we should be doing?" And I was trying to challenge myself to come up with what are a handful of values or principles that feel non-controversial? And I'm wondering if you have any that kind of come to mind for you that would held no matter what. If an organization was doing this well, was being ethical, being moral, what are some of the principles or values that they're likely adhering to? And I have a few if you want me to get us rolling and I think you've actually mentioned a couple of mine already through some of the things that you talked about.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, okay. The ones that are coming to mind for me are very sort of operational. So you start because I'm not sure that I have a principle level idea, but I have very operational level ideas that I'm compelled by.
Sam Spurlin:
Well two that you kind of already talked about that I had on my list here. One, I think in general, transparency. Maybe not in all things all the time, but a general belief that being transparent is important I think is likely to show up in that, particularly because of the second thing that you brought up, I think you talked about this earlier, making power more explicit and visible and the word that I came up with was contestable, can we talk about power and where the power lives in this organization? I don't think what I'm saying is we are in a completely flat, nobody has power over anybody else. I don't think that's a thing that's really all that possible, but I think there are ethical ways to have the relationships where certain people have more power in certain domains than others and we're all okay and it's transparent and it actually helps us do better work.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I like that. I think that there's something in my mind that is around policy standardization that's like I don't necessarily understand why the vacation benefits, health benefits, severance benefits are so different by level in an organization and it's like as a leader of an organization, if the basket of rewards or incentives that your lowest level employee gets makes you feel like you might have a panic attack because it's so thin and insufficient to have any stability, that's probably not good. I'm not saying that the CEO and the person at the register have to make the same money or have exactly the same things, but I have some kind of principle in my head that's like the spread shouldn't be so big. It shouldn't be that there are two people working for the same company and one of them commutes every day on a jet to his office where he has insisted that everyone come into work and someone else is experiencing medical bankruptcy.
I'm like, those two people shouldn't work at the same company. I just feel like there is a spectrum that can still be quite wide in terms of power not being equally distributed but doesn't just feel inhumane. You're not recreating a massive wealth gap under the ceiling of your own organization where it's like I should make a hundred times what the lowest... Pick a multiple that's fucking reasonable and be like no one should have more than 10 times more. No one should have more than 50 times more. It shouldn't be like the CEO makes a thousand times more than the... That's just so gross. It's so gross. And again, just to belabor this point, we are talking about this because of the ethical case for work design, but part why this really lights me up and pisses me off is because so many publicly held companies that were around have cut out so much fat that they can't do anything interesting.
They can't hire the people they need to do good AI experimentation and they can't have the offsite that they need to actually slay their dragons and they can't invest in the office redesign that would actually create the kind of space that their employees would want to come into because all of the money has been funneled to this one very small group of people and now there's nothing left to do good work design. And so partially I am mad about it because it's disgusting and I don't know how some people sleep at night and partially I'm mad about it like this is why your company is garbage is because you've taken all of the muscle and ligament and fat and it's just fucking bones clacking around and that's why it feels like the soul is gone and it doesn't work. And so much of my fireiness about it isn't even just about morals. It's just like you can't run a good thriving organization that can evolve when all of the resources and all of the power flow in one direction and are concentrated there.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. Are you familiar with the political theorist John Rawls?
Rodney Evans:
No.
Sam Spurlin:
I think you described his theory of justice for how society should be set up I think in a very similar way.
Rodney Evans:
Oh.
Sam Spurlin:
So basically he has this idea, and I'm doing this off of the dome from my undergrad political science classes-
Rodney Evans:
Nice. Lot of callbacks to Sam's academic career today. I'm loving it. Prof Spurlin is in the house.
Sam Spurlin:
The veil of ignorance, basically being like if we think about how society could be set up in terms of who is doing well based on various demographics, you'd want to set the society up in such a way where if you were randomly placed into that society, would you be okay with the opportunities left-
Rodney Evans:
I love this.
Sam Spurlin:
... to you? And you just kind of describe that in an organization. If we have massive disparity between the lowest and the highest paid, would you be okay going into that organization and being randomly assigned a role? Maybe you get super lucky and you're the CEO making a thousand times more than everybody or maybe you are the janitor who has to have three jobs to piece together a life. I think ideally we're trying to create organizations where, yeah, there's variety in there. You may want to fall on certain side or not, but you wouldn't be absolutely devastated to land in the lowest part of the organization. I think that's not a bad way to think about it.
Rodney Evans:
This is a great mental model.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. John Rawls can thank him for that.
Rodney Evans:
I mean I think I made it up on this podcast.
Sam Spurlin:
You made it up. You're right. It's called the John Rawls Rodney Evans theory
Rodney Evans:
Two people can have the same great idea. The sort of principle for me here is know the spread, commit to a spread that's reasonable and then design accordingly.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. Yeah, I love that. A couple other ones that I jotted down as good principles are, we've been, I think poking at them through our conversation, but just to say them out loud, there's something about treating people as ends in themselves I think is important. It's a lot of what we're here. People are not just means to accomplishing things in the world, they should be respected as ends in themselves. And that shows up in lots of different ways, a lot of the different people positive stuff that we have talked about before. Because I think the other thing, not to belabor, but you can go back and listen to our whole people positive episode to see that we're not talking about everybody being nice all the time.
Rodney Evans:
Of course.
Sam Spurlin:
If your takeaway from this conversation is, "Rodney and Sam think everybody should be getting along all the time," that's not what I'm talking about, what we're talking about-
Rodney Evans:
We're really described as nice, either of us, by anyone. So just to be clear, that's not the aim.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I don't know. I mean it's nice when people are getting along. It's more fun than not, but just the sign that people aren't getting along is not evidence that you're inherently in an immoral or unethical sort of system. But treating people as ends in themselves. And then one that I really am becoming more and more I think militant about is that I think if your organization doesn't have some sort of profit share, what are you even doing? If you are contributing to an organization that is making a profit and there's no way at all for you to participate in that? I don't know. I am sure there are situations where it is just not feasible or whatever, but my default stance would be we have some sort of profit share unless there's really good reasons that we can't figure it out or do it for some reason.
Why joy at work shouldn't be nickeled and dimed
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I love that. I agree with you. Another one that occurred to me, I've really been on one lately. I think it's because I've been spending more time on the internet than I usually do. I've been consuming social media, which I don't usually do because it's bad for me, but man, I really hate how now everything feels like it is sponsored by or in collaboration with or part of some kind of commercial transaction. Just like everything that there is, and this is related to a principle for an organization because in a living organization, you should do some things that are just for fun or you should do some things just because you fucking feel. It should not be that in a company, every moment of every day must be tied to some kind of important commercial output. A, because that's not how human beings do great things and B, because that's not how human beings are.
We just are not robots. Though I know we're on the precipice of being replaced by them-
Sam Spurlin:
Trying to.
Rodney Evans:
... soon enough. Although according to a lot of what I read over the weekend, the AI also wants to be treated with some empathy and respect that it is not currently experiencing. But it's like I had a moment about this. So we had retreat last week and we were in Durham and we played a game that is commonly known as Mafia. The version we played is some kind of werewolf something. But anyway, it's a really fun, have you played this game? It's like a role playing game with a lie?
Sam Spurlin:
I think so. Like a deception game? Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And before we did, it had a moment where this was my idea to have a game night and where I almost wanted to explain how playing games together is really good for increasing empathy and blah, blah, blah. And then I was like, wait a minute, these are not people who are asking me for receipts about this instinct. No one is questioning the value of us doing something fun together. Calm down. But even I feel so programmed to justify the commercial reason for what we're doing, and I have more flexibility and freedom to not do that than basically anyone on earth. And I still fall into the trap of being like, "Well, if we spend an hour on werewolf at the expense of something else, is that a bad idea?" I think a principle for a company is like every single thing does not have to have a business reason. Sometimes you can do things in a system full of humans that are just human for the sake of humanity, and the rest of that sentence doesn't have to be so that you get why.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. As a small example of that, I've caught myself at least six or seven times in this episode almost following whatever we were talking about with the ROI reason for it.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
I almost just did it right here. The idea that there's, in organizations where we're doing creative work that's never been done before, the idea that you could define every small thing that needs to be done now and even into the future is just insanity. But that is again, looking at it through the lens of how are we most productive? How do we survive as an organization? And I agree with you, you can just do fun shit sometimes because human beings like that.
Rodney Evans:
Everything does not have to be in service of a growth related outcome. It just doesn't. It just doesn't. Sometimes you can just do things because they're right or because they're fun or because you just fucking feel like it because you're a grown-ass adult and you have some authorship over your experience on this planet.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. All right, as usual, let's spend a couple minutes here at the end just talking about some specific ideas that folks could potentially run with if they heard anything that was interesting over the last 40 minutes or so. So Rodney, what's your first idea for bringing some of this to life?
Tip 1: Don't accept performative change initiatives
Rodney Evans:
My first idea is because a lot of people who listen to this show are involved in change in some way. They're leading a change initiative or they're the leader funding a change initiative or they're the PMO tracking a change initiative. My first idea, because a change initiative is a container where a lot of trade-offs are made and where the ROI thing comes up a lot, right? It's harder to sort of question the status quo than when you're in the big transformation to be like, "What are we doing here and why?" So I have two invitations if you are somewhere around change. One is what are we doing here and why actually understand why this change? Why now? Is it just an ROI play? Is there something else going on here? What are we designing for? Let's really get dug into that and see if there is something more than just dollars that are related.
And two is don't accept performative change initiatives and people call us to do this work. I see too many change initiatives that are like, we just need to calm this thing and jam it down people's throats so that they believe the party line and basically we don't lose productivity from them and they don't become distracted by this thing that they don't want. And so we need your help convincing them that this thing we're doing is in their best interest. I'm being a little bit like hyperbolic, but it is kind of a-
Sam Spurlin:
Not hyperbolic, honestly.
Rodney Evans:
... version of that sometimes. And so I just feel like if you are in and around a change initiative, be on the lookout for like, is this actually experimentation leading to a new state or is the initiative some sort of propaganda campaign to get people to shut up and color? And if it's the latter, see what you can do to agitate that because A, that's not how change happens. And B, ethically, woof.
Tip 2: Audit your existing principles and values
Sam Spurlin:
Ethically, woof. There's the title of our episode today. All right, so mine, I've been pretty critical of lots of fictional and real organizations over the course of the last hour or so, but I do think there is an impulse in every organization for what we were talking about here.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
And it usually shows up in some sort of values or principles. Every organization seems to have these, and the ones where these are treated as design constraints are the organizations that are actually taking these seriously. So I think an interesting starting point if you're trying to check your organization against some of these ideas that we've been talking about is to look at whatever existing values and principles you have and do a bit of an audit around how is this showing up in the organization? How is it not showing up? If we really, really believed this value that has been written down here, what would we have done more of over the past 18 months? What would we definitely not have done over the last 18 months? What would we have done differently? I think that is an interesting playground for an initial take at figuring out how to bring more of these ideas of ethics and morality into an organization.
Tip 3: Don’t let leadership gaslight you into conforming
Rodney Evans:
I love that. My last thought is sort of related, which is where you see the divergence of what a leader or an organizational statement says is important, says is ethical, says is principled and their behavior. Don't get gaslit by these humans in systems. And it is all related, right? The system is designed to do what it does, which is mostly to get allegiance from the people who steer it to produce what it's supposed to produce, which is money for someone. I think sometimes even if we end up conforming and even if we make choices to work in ways that we don't think are optimal or we don't think are ethical, we can still choose to not be gaslit by the people and to the environment around us, to some extent. We can still hold our own sovereignty that because I'm working for a boss who believes in hustle culture and whatever, 9, 9, 6 garbage they read about that morning on their fucking tech bro Twitter, you do not have to agree.
You might decide to conform because you want what that gets you. No shade to that. We all do what we do, but you don't have to believe in that nonsense just because you want the money or you want the equity or you want the position or you want the venture fund. You can still be like, "That shit's gross and unethical and also I want these things." And you don't necessarily have to believe in unethical behavior just because a person who has more power than you believes in it, even though that's very, very easy to fall into in companies.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Well said. All right. Should we wrap here?
Rodney Evans:
Let's wrap it up, Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. As you all know, we're looking for new topics for the show, so if you have a pattern or an idea, I guess a thought that you think would be fun for an episode, shoot us a note at podcast [at] theready [dot] com.
Rodney Evans:
This show was engineered by Taylor Marvin and produced by our friend Jack Van Amburg. At Work with The Ready is created by The Ready where we help organizations around the world change the way that they work. Thank you so much for listening to us.