Flow States in Remote Teams with Steven Puri

In this episode of Definitely, Maybe Agile, hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock welcome Steven Puri, Founder and CEO of The Sukha Company. Drawing from his unique background spanning Hollywood film production and tech startups, Steven shares fascinating insights about achieving flow states in remote and hybrid work environments.

Steven's journey from IBM software engineer to Hollywood executive (where he helped manage franchises like Die Hard and Wolverine at studios including DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox) provides a refreshing perspective on team productivity and creative collaboration. He explains how the film industry has long mastered the transitions between remote, hybrid, and in-person work—knowledge that proved invaluable when the pandemic forced tech teams into distributed environments.

 The conversation explores the neuroscience of creativity, practical leadership approaches to foster flow states, and how Steven's experiences led him to create a platform specifically designed to help remote workers overcome procrastination while maintaining wellbeing. This is one not to miss! 

 Key Takeaways: 

• Leaders can create environments where flow happens - Establishing boundaries like protected focus time (e.g., 9 AM to noon) allows team members to accomplish meaningful work before daily meetings begin.
• The "two-problem" approach to creativity - Having more than one challenge to work on simultaneously can unlock creative solutions, as your subconscious mind works on one problem while you actively engage with another.
• Remote work requires different "colors on your palette" - Different work modes (remote, hybrid, in-office) excel at different tasks, with in-person collaboration being particularly valuable for creative ideation and whiteboarding sessions.

Books Mentioned:

• "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - https://www.goodreads.com/es/book/show/66354.Flow
• "The Net and the Butterfly" by Olivia Fox - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30024684-the-net-and-the-butterfly
• "Atomic Habits" by James Clear - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121378-atomic-habits

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing Stephen Puri
• 2:17 From IBM to Hollywood
• 6:21 Remote Work in Film Industry
• 9:44 Remote Innovation vs. In-Person Creativity
• 14:51 Multiple Projects Spark Better Ideas
• 24:42 Respecting Flow in Teams
• 32:03 Leadership's Role in Supporting Flow
• 35:12 The Suka Company and Flow Tools

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome. It's great to be here again. Dave and I are joined today by Steven Puri, so I'm looking forward to welcoming him on the show. And, Steven, would you like to introduce yourself?

Steven: 0:23

Absolutely. Thank you guys for having me. I am the founder and CEO of the Sukka Company and we help people focus, especially in remote or hybrid situations, tech teams as well as writers and designers sort of thing.

Peter: 0:37

That's awesome, and you've got a very interesting background as well.

Steven: 0:40

I know what you're alluding to, so I spent between one and two decades making films. I was executive vice president over on the DreamWorks lot. I was a vice president at 20th Century Fox so I ran franchises there like the Die Hard franchise, wolverine franchise, a bunch of stuff like that. So, yes, I spent a bunch of time in film and a bunch of time in tech.

Dave: 1:01

That sounds like one of those conversations where we could just get sidetracked and explore all of the different franchises and where they go, and I'm sure there are great stories there.

Steven: 1:10

There's some crazy stuff. We'll see which ones we can fit into there.

Dave: 1:14

Maybe let's just kind of try and pull back into the well, you mentioned remote work, and when Peter and I typically talk about remote work, we're typically talking about post-pandemic development teams that always used to be in person, now suddenly working in a remote context. But you came to remote work from a different view. I mean, I know you've got tech in your realm of experience but I think you came into understanding remote work and putting things together from a different perspective.

Steven: 1:43

Probably different than most of your guests and I hope this is interesting for your audience, because I am the son of two IBM engineers. Dad was a hardware engineer chip design, basically CPUs, logic chips and mom was a software engineer. So my first job was actually at IBM as a junior software engineer because I was a Watson scholar. But I went to Los Angeles and went to university at USC, which has a big cinema school, so I happened to be kind of maybe a code monkey trying to figure out what to do with my life, sort of thing, and a lot of friends were naturally aspiring writers and directors and filmmakers as you're around in your dorm and I was in LA when film went digital and that little Venn diagram of people who could speak engineering and people who are personal enough to understand how to speak to a director was very small. But I was in LA when film went digital and that little Venn diagram of people who could speak engineering and people who are personal enough to understand how to speak to a director was very small. But I was in that little intersection so my career took off. I was like sure Life just handed me this. Out of school I started doing that and got super lucky. Let us be honest. You can work as hard as you want, you can be as clever as you want, but sometimes there is a luck element and I had a lot of it. So I'm going to say it right up front. Okay, so I happened to produce the digital effects, the CG effects, for Independence Day and we won the Academy Award for the visual effects on that movie. So a rising tide lifts all boats. I was there, started my first company, which was a CG company. This is back when Silicon Graphics was a powerful name in that business, right. So we raised about 15 million, built that company, sold it a couple of years later in my late twenties, and there's about a 6X multiple on the return. I was like, wow, this is easy, not knowing everything I know now, but it's not easy. And then, having worked so much with film, I got into film. Now, here's kind of that with that context. Here's the answer to your question. Working in film, I was like I want to learn how to produce a film. I want to eventually become a senior executive of a studio and help make movies. There were a lot of things. I learned that when I got back into tech about 10 years ago I was like, wow, some of the things here that are just evolving have actually been part of film for a long time. I'll give you a very concrete example actually been part of film for a long time. I'll give you a very concrete example In film for decades it starts remote.

Steven: 3:48

It is writers alone in their home on their little MacBooks, going to a coffee shop and writing to do with their buddy. Hopefully at some point you get something done. You go and have lunches with producers, go to a restaurant for dinner and you're trying to sell your wares. Maybe one of those ideas gets traction. A little money comes in.

Steven: 4:07

You set up a production office. One or two days a week. You have meetings in the office with production designers and line producers and location scouts trying to find where to shoot this thing. And then it's that hybrid thing. Then you are on set $125,000 a day, everyone's there all day, all night for several months of principal photography, right. And then it goes back to hybrid with picture editors, sound editors, foley artists working here and there.

Steven: 4:32

Then it goes back to basically remote and through each stage of that you learn as a producer or as a studio executive. How do you lead that? How do you inspire teams through that when it's like you're not seeing each other until it's like, well, you see someone show each other. You're sick of each other on set, no one's slept, you've been sleeping under your desks, practically sort of thing. And you learn also how to be an individual contributor in the situations.

Steven: 4:55

So that was what was really interesting to me, because when I got back into tech after I left Fox, I want to have more agency over what I built. I didn't want to be just the guy making the next diehard movie, which, admittedly, is fun from the outside, but from the inside it's just soap. That's how it is. It's soap. We market it next spring, this comes out of Christmas, we know how it works. And that was something that really helped me, because both companies I set up were completely remote and how those techniques could be applied to say, oh, you know what, here are things that help and going into the pandemic. That for a lot of people is a huge shock to the system. For me it was like, oh, this is like this era, and that's what I thought was really fun and interesting.

Dave: 5:34

As you're describing that, steven, one of the things that strikes me is so again, peter and I have discussed this challenge in many times is one of the drivers for bringing people back into the office is the impact on innovation.

Dave: 5:49

Yeah, remote work had, because there's lots of great things that came out of remote work in tech over the last few years. But an area of concern for a lot of organizations is what the impact on innovation? You're describing hugely creative industry that has overcome remote work versus innovation. So how does that happen? Is it driven by the leadership? Is it context?

Steven: 6:17

Let me say this Before I answer that. Let me say that there are some problems that are hiring problems and if your reason for believing like RTO is the only way to go, because you don't trust anyone's working, that can't be solved with any amount of leadership, any amount of it's just you hired the wrong people and, as you know, hire slowly, fire quickly. It's just period. So let us assume we're talking about teams where the right people are there, but they need to be led properly, fair, okay. So the way I the metaphor that I draw about what you just said is for many companies, on their color palette they had oranges and reds and yellows and with the forced move into remote work, it was like suddenly blue was a very important color in 2020, 2021, right, which meant you could paint lakes and blue skies, right. Suddenly you had more colors to paint with. I do think very much that remote, hybrid return to office or in office in person. These are a spectrum of colors and they all are good at certain things. I'll give you again some examples that I learned in film. I have never been on a Zoom or Teams or Gmeet or anything where I felt that the creative collaboration, the thing of like oh well, what should happen next in the UI? Or Dave and Peter in the third act, meet the dragon, what should happen? I've never felt the same way. I felt like actually vibing in the room, whether you're around a whiteboard or you're at a coffee shop, whatever. There is something human about just feeling each other's energy, being like no, remember, peter had in his bag the sword and there's just something about being that. It's not the same as staring at a little three by five of you. So I think that's one of the things we have to acknowledge. These are different. Tools Like this is a screwdriver, that's a hammer. Right Now I'll mention to a different but related concept around. That, which was something that I found about leading creative teams, was taught to me when I was 20. I was working again. This is my first footsteps into film.

Steven: 8:11

Right, I was at an ad agency that did trailers for movies run by two guys, super smart One of them to this day is a friend of mine and so I had gotten in there when I was a senior in college and worked really hard, and I was running the writer director department. So in other words, when we got movies in largely from Warner's and Buena Vista Disney. We would assign them to say, oh, you know, this is a perfect rom-com. Dave does this really well. Oh, peter writes action trailers, we'll give it to him. So I would be the guy who would sort of assign these right.

Steven: 8:39

So the guy who ran the company one of the two guys comes in. This guy, jeff. He always calls me Stevie. He's like Stevie, you know Bart. And I was like Bart the runner, the guy in the vault that delivers tapes and films and stuff around Hollywood. Yeah, nice guy man. He's like have you ever given him a trailer?

Steven: 8:54

I was like Bart, you mean the guy who runs the tapes around Hollywood. He's like yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like Jeff, you run you own the company, done, I'll find something for him. You got it right.

Steven: 9:09

So I found like a B title from Warner's that had a long due date, like we had a month to do the trailer. So if he in a week or two was like I don't know what to do, I could give it to like Peter or Dave. And they'd be like so how's Bart doing? I was like dude, he's never written a movie before. I sent him home with a B title two nights ago. I'll check in with him on Monday.

Steven: 9:27

I don't want to stress the guy out. He goes okay, fair enough, fair enough. So what else did you give him, jeff? He's never written a trailer before I gave him this one movie. He goes Stevie, it's about the other thing.

Steven: 9:39

You got to understand this about creativity. I was like what do you mean he goes if you don't give him another movie to obsess over the back of his mind, that actually does the cool. You're like chocolate and peanut butter. It's never going to have that time to do it because you don't have the great idea about the thing you're staring at he's like. If you want him to have a great idea, give him another movie and watch how he's going to have that idea. He's like have you ever noticed like you're driving and you're showering, you're washing the dishes? You have the thought he's like know that Whenever you're leading creative teams, you can't just stare at one problem. My entire career in film proved him right, my career in tech. I just watched that happen over and over and I was like I was lucky at 20 years old, that he came in my office and basically handed me this lesson.

Dave: 10:25

That's a great one. So just literally more than one problem basically.

Steven: 10:32

Yeah, and there's a great book about this on the neuroscience of this, called the Net and the Butterfly by Olivia Fox, and it talks about the executive network and the default mode network and how you kind of need to occupy the adult brain for the baby sort of early brain to go. I have that crazy idea. Peter, you're gonna say something. You're just about to say something oh yeah, I was just thinking.

Peter: 10:48

I've seen the similar concept to why, uh, if you're, if you're stuck on a problem, get up and go for a walk do you guys do that?

Steven: 10:57

do you get up and go for walks when you're stuck?

Peter: 10:59

yeah, I get stuck a lot. I do a lot of walking, yeah, yeah I do too.

Steven: 11:03

I I live right here in Austin. We have blocks. I couldn't do this in New York, I couldn't do this when I was in LA, but here in Austin I can go out and walk around the block and be like, oh, suddenly my brain is like refreshed and I have a new perspective on the problem.

Dave: 11:15

I'm going to ask you at some point to tell us a little bit about the company and the product that you have around that.

Dave: 11:21

But there's an element there on the creativity that very quickly leads us to this whole idea of flow and just how to get the brain and you're already beginning to touch on this how to work with our brains so that we're actually setting ourselves up for success. And what's interesting in an agile context is one of the conversations I'll often have is how accidentally or on purpose and you know nowadays it's been 20 plus years, so it's almost certainly been on purpose, by design, but the reality is probably partially accidentally and partially on purpose a lot of the ways of agile working is about working with our brains so that we're actually able to bring the best piece to the table. So you just touched on this idea of multiple problems, of getting out and having our adult brain work and our baby brain come in with the right ideas. What are the other aspects around flow? What have you noticed as sort of these key things that really influence a team to be able to get into that state of flow?

Steven: 12:27

Okay, I will share with you things I learned, both my personal experience. Also, there are some very smart people who have written about this. So I'm going to acknowledge a lot of what I'm saying is not like I invented it, just I read it, tried it. It's true, and my wife also came up as a PM, so I've watched her career and her lead teams as she's risen up. So one thing is to respect flow, which I'm worried you said several times. That is a core foundation of what I built.

Steven: 12:54

The thing that I learned more than anything in the past six years of working with remote workers and trying to help people work is that you have to respect there's certain boundaries and it is. One good example is flow is not something you switch on and off in 20 minutes. You don't get into a deep work state, a flow state. Gene Samahi has written a lot on this and Cal Newport I mean a lot of people have written smart stuff on this. But if you have a team where you're like, hey, we are agile, we are iterative. Like you know, how do we transform, you know the we are agile, we are iterative, how do we transform the world through our agile methodologies, you also need to recognize hey, if I need someone to actually do deep work, it's a block where they are not going to be bugged. For example, when you're working in my platform and you go into a session, you can enable it will put your Slack and do not disturb. So it'll say, hey, I'm in a flow session, so it's just like you can leave a message. I won't get a notification and I'm probably out for two hours, but I will see you. I'm not ignoring you, Right, Same with the discord. It's just one of those like, let me help you create that quiet space. You can do something valuable, Right, and that is very different than pair programming, very different than working through you're going through grooming the backlog or anything like that. Those are team efforts. So I think it's the respect of both.

Steven: 14:16

For example, in the last company I ran, we blocked out nine to noon, so we didn't even do our daily standup until people had had time, without people talking to each other and jockeying for position and meeting. You had quiet time to do something meaningful and then report in. Hey, man, I got all this stuff done and it felt really nice to be able to say, before the day got crazy I actually accomplished something meaningful. Here it is. Oh, I got blocked here. You know I need help with this or what the usual sort of stand-up kind of stuff, Things like that. There are many principles there and I don't want to belabor this because now we don't have hours, but there, or do we have hours? Do we have hours? No, I'm waiting for. It depends on how many questions Peter asks, Until Peter slaps down.

Peter: 15:05

He's like something that we talk about a lot as well, and the this, this idea of trying to block off time, trying to time box things, to say we're we're going to spend the morning working on this when we're brightest, when our energy is at the highest. We want to be spending that time when we're focused on that creative work, when we're really sort of able to get deep into it, and Do you guys have calendar links like Calendly or something like that?

Steven: 15:26

Yep, do you block your focus time so that no one can book in that window?

Peter: 15:31

Yes, it only lets you book very specific times of the week.

Steven: 15:35

Fantastic Dave. Same Same again. That's cool. That's a great way to show yourself respect.

Dave: 15:41

It's an interesting one, because the one that I don't do is blocking lunch, which is I don't know if that's the British lunch is a sandwich at the desk and therefore it's not a big thing or something else, but it's just one of those points that I always go. I really should block the hour of lunch off, but never have done.

Peter: 15:59

Mine, I think, comes from working across time zones, which is an interesting piece around remote work is that it's difficult to block lunch because it might shift. I might be in the way of what is actually a very productive working time for somebody else who wants to get hold of me.

Steven: 16:15

The challenges of distributed teams, this is exactly true, but the advantage you can hire global talent right.

Dave: 16:22

Yeah, I mean that one's a really. So I've got a small team, but one of the interesting things is the diversity of the team, just in terms of different cultural backgrounds. Many different things coming together is one of the things that is most interesting, I think, around the availability of global talent at this point right.

Steven: 16:45

Lots of diversity. We have iPhone people and Android people. It's crazy. We're on the same team, but they don't text one another. I should think Exactly. We have a translator.

Dave: 16:57

Now, you mentioned something like when you're talking about innovation, you're talking about teams working together, and when we touched on flow, it sounded like you're talking about teams working together, and when we touched on flow, it sounded like you're describing that as a state which is really an individual, you know, cutting out distractions and working on their own. How do you see flow on teams? Is there some sort of venn?

Steven: 17:18

diagram where there's a crossover.

Steven: 17:20

I see a respect for flow on teams, right, but I haven't like, as soon as you get two people together, like we mentioned, like pair programmer or something like, it can be very productive, but it's not quite the same as the experience.

Steven: 17:33

I don't know if you guys I'm sure you have had this where you look up and two or three hours have gone by and you're like didn't even look at the clock, didn't even go to the bathroom, but wow, like I can push the, I'm ready to make a commit, like this whole thing is like ready to view and you just lost track of time. I've never had that with another person, cause there's always some interaction layer that's stops that, but maybe someone does. I don't can't say that I'm, you know, the end, all be all about that. Maybe someone does get in front with other people, like I know, when you talk about like there's that famous like Picasso thing about you know he stayed up all night. He's like I forgot to go to the bathroom, I didn't think to eat, but you know, here's Guernica, by the way. What do you?

Dave: 18:12

think it's pretty good right and then.

Steven: 18:14

But you have, like the Michael Jordan that quote about it's just me and a ball. So I feel like it always does reduce down to like everything collapses and you're like this is the one important thing, whether it's your IDE, whether it's, you know, your Figma, whether you know it's Jira Flow and Jira I'm not sure I'm clear.

Dave: 18:40

That one, that's definitely one to watch out for.

Steven: 18:42

That's expert level, man. You're beyond scrum, master Jedi.

Peter: 18:50

One of the pieces you touched on earlier that may tie into that is when we talk about bandwidth, when we talk about when people come together for sort of the deep knowledge work, the standing in front of a whiteboard with somebody else collaborating on something you can both visually see is by far the highest level of communication bandwidth you can have, cause you're you're both visualized, visualizing, you're communicating, you're able to be and see the other person's body language and how they react to things yeah, which is much, much harder to do over an interface like this.

Dave: 19:21

Yeah.

Peter: 19:22

You miss out.

Steven: 19:23

Overall envision pros or this.

Peter: 19:25

Yeah, you miss out Overall Envision Pros or something.

Steven: 19:27

Yeah, not sure about that one.

Peter: 19:29

Yeah, I haven't quite bought into that one as an idea yet.

Steven: 19:32

Do you know what they cost after the tariffs? You could buy a Hyundai for less.

Peter: 19:39

They were expensive to start with, but yes.

Steven: 19:42

Sorry, back to you, I digress.

Peter: 19:47

It's very true. It's very true. There's a piece around all of that flow as a community. I started with a good friend of mine here a few years back called Flow Collective, where we actually spend a lot of time talking about flow, but a lot of the time we're talking about flow in the sense of how work flows through an organization. There's a lot of roots in Deming and lots of roots in thinking about how do organizations operate as a whole and thinking about systems and that flow through the organizational system, which of course all comes down to the individual ultimately. But the nature of flow and the way it's used is a little different yeah, and you know the, the flow state that.

Steven: 20:29

You know mihaj, she sends my book. He talked about flow. He's like I named it this because it feels like at a certain point you're on the river and it carries you, it increases your momentum because you're being carried by the flow of the river and, yeah, things do flow through organizations and related concept.

Dave: 20:49

It's interesting how there's an overlap there, right, the flow through an organization, through ideas, go through the organization, so on. There's a desire somewhere to get the people who are in that flow state to contribute to that flow in some way, and there's always the talk of things like 10X, developers and things like this, these sort of superhuman people who can deliver something like above and beyond what anybody else can get to. Yeah, yeah, that it really actually isn't built into the flow that Peter's describing, which we look to in organizations. They seem to be, there's overlap, but there isn't, if I'm getting it right, peter, would you add anything to that?

Peter: 21:27

I think it ties into the adage of the parts of the system have to be able to work together as a whole. It's that analogy. Whereas if you, for example, if I take the best engine out of a Ferrari and I take the best wheels off a Porsche and I test the best framework for a Lotus and I take the best wheels off a Porsche and I test the best framework for a Lotus and I put them all together, no guarantee the car won't even run. I can't put all these different pieces together and expect the thing to work well. Even though they're all the best of the best individually, they're not necessarily going to come together and work as a whole. So there is a piece where to create a team and an organization that works well together. It's not just about the strengths of the individuals, it's about how do we work together as a team.

Steven: 22:10

Yes, and hopefully you do have leaders that both inspire but also technically know how to structure the work of the team and coordinate them. Something that you brought up a moment ago I'd love to pick up on when you're talking about 10x engineers is. A good friend of mine was one of the first iOS engineers. If you ever hear that story about the six guys that Steve Jobs put in the window of this office to write the first apps before he unveiled the iPhone. Alan wrote Remote, the very first app ever made. He wrote books, the iBooks thing. He wrote some of these right, and he is truly one of those guys. It's just like hold on, hold my beer, you know, and comes back and it's like oh wow, we had a team of 18 people who are going to do that next week and you did it over lunch. It's just like that thing right.

Steven: 22:53

And what's interesting is he? I noticed with him he has a flow practice that is very similar to things that I've seen in film. I'll give you be very specific. So Alan, for example, up in Mill Valley, has his own little studio with beautiful screens in his garage, right beneath his garage, in the little valley that they're in and away from the kids, away from his wife, goes out there certain time of day, certain light, the whole thing it's like that's his position and it is something where in the middle of the day it doesn't quite work right. Or even with a child it doesn't quite work right.

Steven: 23:27

And I'll tell you what's funny is so the guys that I had created that company, centropolis, with back in my 20s, the director and producer of the movie, they had a similar thing about writing, where there was a house that they rented down in Puerto Vallarta, mexico, where they would write their scripts, and it just had that magical thing for them Bad cell service, bad internet, the whole thing, just this cloister thing, the way they like the light in the morning, help them write in the morning, this whole thing. So when they were going to write the next movie after Independence Day, they called their assistant and were like, oh, rent us the house. We're going to go to our place, to our workstation work, and the house had already been rented for the. It was like we have to deliver this movie, we can't write it this way. Oh, my God, what are we going to do?

Steven: 24:13

And they, roland the director, called his attorney and said I need you to buy the house. Just figure out how to do this. By Monday I need you to have bought that house in Puerto Rota and he did, and that's where they just kept writing and it was that important to them that in a sense, their workstation was there, and there is something about the way our minds mentally align with the light and the room and the thing and the hopefully lack of clutter.

Peter: 24:42

There's a piece out of one of my favorite books, atomic Habits, by James Clear, where he talks about the. You associate both physical space with where you're working. So if you're, for example, if you spend all of your day in front of a screen answering emails and working communicating with people, but then you need to go do something creative, perhaps get up and go to a different place in the house where the lighting's different, where the seats are different, where you're in a different environment, and do the creative work there instead.

Steven: 25:11

So true.

Dave: 25:12

As you're describing that, steven. I'm just thinking about as a leader working with remote teams, but also working with people who are so productive in a flow state. What's as a leader? How do you kind of work with it, rather than like you're either just fingers crossed, hoping they'll get the flow state when the deadlines are approaching, or is there something else that a leader is going to do to empower people to get there?

Steven: 25:38

I'll tell you this. What I've noticed is that leaders can make room. They can keep the lane free to go. Hey, you know what? For example, my company nine to noon, no one's going to bug anybody. You can create space. But it's usually peer-to-peer that that kind of practice spreads, where it is like one dev talking to another dev being like hey, man, you're my young Padawan, whatever. Let me tell you how this works. The same way, you learn about rubber ducking and you learn about pair programming, things like that. Same thing.

Steven: 26:06

In my platform, the three biggest cohorts are devs, designers and writers, because they all have communities, they talk to each other, they share. This is the tool that I'm using. This is the thing I learned. This is the post on the new LLM you have to hear about. And they all have knowledge. Work to do, like everyone in my platform is basically college educated over 30, money with post-grad degrees, and they have a respected flow practice. They're like I block out this time because their leadership says this is how we move the company forward. It is not meetings all day long. Nobody in business development, no sales people, use my platform. This is not the platform for people who are on zoom all day long. Yep, yep, yep no, I'm interested.

Dave: 26:49

You also didn't say leaders and managers as a as a cohort, which is interesting.

Peter: 26:55

Yeah.

Steven: 26:58

You're managing up or you're, you know, managing down.

Peter: 27:00

It's one of the pieces of advice that that I give as a coach to leaders that if, if you have those conversations, position them to one end of the day, like don't try it, like don't hold them at, like the middle of the day and the middle of the morning is worse yeah, just kill the flow, it's like completely agreed.

Steven: 27:18

Yes, what else can I answer for you?

Dave: 27:22

well, I can keep exploring. There's just some very interesting conversations as we're looking at.

Dave: 27:27

Maybe I'll just extend on the the piece there and then I'm sure peter's going to come in with a stopwatch at some point oh yeah but so so I'm just thinking about the conversations that we often have with with technology teams, non-technology teams but helping them sort of empower and get as much off of the leaders played or the managers played and actually empowering the teams to go away and do things, and one of the big pieces is about managing work, and this was something that is is, I think, underpinning the, the push to get people back in the office. Part of it is I don't know what people are doing. Yeah, I can't see them, I can't tell what's going on. So, whether it's work management tools and we touched on jira and things like this what other things do you see as a leader who maybe wants people to be working in a hybrid way or remote and so on? However, they have that feeling in their gut that says, but I don't know what they're doing. How do you address that? What have you seen? We?

Steven: 28:30

talked about one of those things first, which is, if you don't hire properly, it's very hard to fix. I mean it's better to say you know what. This doesn't feel like the right company for you or the right environment for you. Let me help you move on right. So there's absolutely that If you were having a gut feeling of like hey, man, peter's killing it and Dave, I don't really know what is probably yeah, you're right and you didn't hire correctly. The other part of that is the value alignment, like does that person have values that align with the mission of the company? Like, if you believe climate change is a big thing, if you believe, did you seek out this company because they do that? Oh, we are making electric vehicles or batteries or vehicles, or we're doing wind energy. Is there a thing where it's just like we inspire Dave because our values, our mission, aligns with your values? And if it's not, if it's something where it's like actually Dave is all about windsurfing and I'll tell you this is a mistake that I made in my previous companies really great designer, like very talented dude, but in Hawaii, and really really was focused that point in time on surfing and even though he had like two or three kids. I was like, oh, this is a serious family guy, like he's at that place in his life where he's just. No, there was definitely a sense of like you know what? I bet the surf was good this morning. That's why the designs aren't done and that sadly led to that conversation of like I just don't feel this is a fit. This is a small team dude. We can't have anyone who's not pulling their weight plus. So I guess in that sense it was a hiring thing. I had misjudged who it was and good guy, but just his values were not aligned with what we do, which is, I believe, passionately. I want to give people the ability to work anywhere, to focus, to feel like they're doing the thing they're meant to do. They're great at it. It feels really good.

Steven: 30:21

One of my members said to me this, which summed up everything that we do. I was bugging him. I was like give me some feedback from the outside, outside the bubble, what do you like about the platform? And at the end of like eight or 10 minutes of chatting and me to kind of learn, I was like you know what? It was really nice. Thank you for taking the time to chat. It's really helpful just to hear from you, know our members, what's up.

Steven: 30:41

And he said the question you wanted to ask you didn't ask. I'll tell you the question you should have asked me. And I was like that's a pretty bold way to phrase it and I'm probably a little too diplomatic to say that, but yeah, what would be the answer to that? He said at three o'clock I can be playing with my kids, or at six o'clock I can be like where the hell did the day go? He said the difference is that I open Suka in the morning is did I open Suka in the morning? I pay you so I can be playing with my kids at three. Got it, thank you.

Steven: 31:17

And that lives in my head permanent real estate ever since he said it, that that is ultimately what we do. We give you the tools to do something great and have a healthy balance. Where you're performing, you know you're doing the thing you're meant to do and you also are like I'm healthy, I'm spending the time with my kids. If you've got them, your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your hobby, whatever it is, knowing this is the life I was meant to lead.

Dave: 31:42

You probably need to say just a little bit about the company as well. I was thinking that.

Peter: 31:47

I was thinking, if we're going to wrap this up, what is the company? So, if we're going to wrap this up, what is the company?

Steven: 31:53

So what we built is really built on the foundation of what Shin-Sent-Mahai wrote with Flow. We talked about Newport and Clear. There are a lot of smart people in this thing. If you read a dozen of the top books, they boil down to four or five key principles. They all have their own lexicon, they have their own examples, their own books you all have to buy for $25. So there's a commonality to that.

Steven: 32:16

And what we thought is how do you put these together in such a way you can help people get into a flow state that time that two or three hours in the day where you go, I'm going to do the most important work of the day now and have me a force multiplier. So we built a really simple app I'd like to think it's somewhat elegantly simple that has a smart assistant that helps you get over the problems that might stop you, the problems that I hear about for five, six years all the time. Some of them are very obvious on their face. For example, the number one thing I hear from people is hey, man, I get ready to go, I get ready to start in the morning and I procrastinate. Okay, well, why do you procrastinate? Well, sometimes I look at my task list and I know what's assigned to be a linear Asana. It's just well, I'm not really sure. And then I know I've got meetings to do so. We have a smart assistant that looks at what you have to do and says you know what? Let's be realistic. You're going to get three things done today. Let's choose the three most important things that have to get done and then looks at them and says hey, by the way, I know you're a writer. He's like write a book. You're not going to get that done today. That is not granular enough for you to have a win. How about we make that? Outline your first chapter? Okay, can you do that in, let's say, 45 minutes? And then you look at your task list. You go oh, yeah, I can tell you my first chapter. I've kind of thought about that when I'm driving. I know what I'm going to do there. Oh, the second, I've got to go fix that. But I have a suspicion where the buggy is and the yeah, I can do that, and it gets you going.

Steven: 33:40

And there's beautiful music. We have like a thousand hours of flow music, all scientific research by the best practice 60 to 90 beats per minute, non-vocal, melodic, certain key signatures. There's binaural. If you have headphones, you're into binaural. We have binaural playlists If you like.

Steven: 34:00

Nature. One of our sound engineers was in Kathmandu, recorded two hours of rain in the Himalayas. We threw it in there. It's super popular. So now we have streams in Japan. We have the surf in Cyprus if you want to listen to that. We've got all sorts of nature sounds around the world. I think Emerald Lake or Banff Lake or Victoria, one of those Canadian lakes with birds around the lake, all sorts of things.

Steven: 34:22

There are Pomodoro timers, healthy breaks, because, yes, you can find your own rhythm. Maybe it's 25 and five, for me it's 55 and five. I always find after 25 minutes I'm in the middle of a thought. So there are timers just to go. Hey man, you know you haven't gotten up for an hour. Why don't you get up and go downstairs and get a glass of water, you know? Or if you want to do a stretching exercise, here's a two minute stretching exercise. You have time to go for a walk. So we try to build a lot of these things in of saying, like, how can we give you a beautiful environment with music, a smart assistant to help you, timers, healthy breaks and a score.

Steven: 35:01

At the end you can sort of see like, how did I do? Oh, this is where I was opening YouTube to check that video on the react thing. But then I saw the political video and then I saw the one about you. You could see it and you, hopefully you learn. So feedback is also an important part, as you know flow from his book. So that's what I do. We make a simple app. It runs in your browser and it's a fun community. You can see other people in their social facility. Excuse me, social facilitation is an important part of flow for some people. Just knowing that it's like why do you go to coffee shop and work? Because sometimes it's nice feeling the energy of other people, even if you don't chat with them. It's just like all in it together.

Peter: 35:42

That's what I do and it's free to try, and they can find it at yeah, no, it is free to try.

Steven: 35:48

I just wanted people to to everything that I learned in the past two companies and then this company. I wanted people to be able to benefit if it helps them. We have, by the way, this is my most proud statistic metric. We're going to call it kpi our month over month paid retention 96 the people who find us and get into flow. It's a daily habit. It's like why would I work for six hours if I can focus for three? Um, so that's really nice. And our number one source of traffic is referral.

Dave: 36:20

It's just literally peter going to dave dude, try this I was going to say I'm going to go find that, uh, the katmandu in the rain, because I live in vancouver I was gonna say I can record. I can record a lot of rain for you. I do think we have to go pieces.

Peter: 36:33

Yeah, it has been fun, thank you guys for having me. Well, so thank you for coming. It was, it's been a pleasure. We normally wrap up these conversations with three key points, and since there's three of us, we each get to nominate one. So I'm going to say hey, steven, what's your favorite point to take away from the conversation today?

Steven: 37:04

That leaders in technical organizations can create the environment where flow happens.

Dave: 37:11

I like that Dave can create the environment where flow happens. Yeah, I like that, dave. I'm going to refer back to one of the first stories Steven shared, which was the adding something to somebody's plate and adding a second thing to somebody's plate. So they've got that the adult brain and the baby brain working together.

Steven: 37:31

The other thing lesson from Jeff Kellman. There you go.

Peter: 37:35

Now you see, for me, that was the one I was going to pick too because I thought that was a good story. Good to know. Okay, it is a good story. It is a good story. I think. Actually the what you're doing and what your company's doing is is quite fascinating. I'm certainly going to give it a try myself, so I think that's a good point to bring home, and so thank you again, steven, and thank you, dave, as always.

Steven: 37:59

Thanks everyone for listening.

Dave: 38:01

Thanks again, Steven. Until next time. Until next time.

Peter: 38:04

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.