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Full transcript follows.
Casey Wahl, guest on Vol. 3 of Diversity rocks innovation! grew up in Saudi Arabia and was later expelled from boarding school as a high school student in the US. In Japan, he experimented with several failed startups but kept persevering towards innovation. He went on to found Wahl+Case, a successful tech recruiting firm he designed with a view to transforming the industry. Through his efforts building EQIQ, we learn about Casey’s passion for the concept of “intrinsic motivation” and how his platform, Attuned, is fostering wellness at work. In this episode Casey shares his view of a future where we are more aware of the values and intrinsic motivations of our team members and are able to work with mutual trust and respect for diversity and individuality.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- Casey’s fascinating early life from the desert of Saudi Arabia to being expelled from boarding school in the US
- Why Casey’s startups failed – multiple times and how this experience turned into a book
- The over emphasis in the tech industry on STEM and IQ vs. EQ and human wisdom
- The danger of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation and its effect on creativity
- Where our values come from and how we develop and evolve them over time
- Why intrinsic motivation is like a fingerprint and how Casey is harnessing this information
- Casey’s hopes for the future and the pain points his company is solving in the workplace
About Casey:
Casey wants to change recruitment. He’s deeply passionate about the issue, and immensely frustrated with the reputation of the recruitment industry. Little innovation has happened in recruitment agencies over the last decades, with the industry often self-inflicting its negative perception by the plethora of indistinguishable recruiters with short-term outlooks. Casey is out to change all that. Globally. Analog (agency recruitment – Wahl+Case) and digitally (Justa, Attuned). It’s a big problem, worth a lifetime of work. Casey is a long-term resident of Japan with fluent Japanese and somehow got an Executive MBA from IE Business School.
Connect with Casey:
Website: https://www.eqiq-group.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CaseyDai2Asa9sa
Connect with Jackie:
Website: https://en-joi.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/enjoidiversityandinnovation
https://www.facebook.com/jackiefsteelephd
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-f-steele-phd/
Transcript
Jackie: Welcome to Diversity rocks innovation!
My name is Jackie Steele and welcome to Diversity rocks innovation! for our volume three edition. My name is Jackie Steele. I’m the CEO of enjoi Diversity and Innovation, and also a long time Canadian political scientist here working in Japan. Enjoi for those who are not familiar is a Japan based global facing company.
And we work in English and French and Japanese, and we’re committed to providing research, policy and evidence-based DNI training and education for leaders and corporations on the importance of intersectional diversity; if that’s a new concept for you, we’d love to share about that; accessibility, holistic corporate policy ecosystems that empower individuals and groups.
And of course, innovation. Innovation that supports efforts to bring inclusion and that fosters holistic wellbeing. And in fact, innovation that really supports democratic equality and that powers our people systems, by design intentionally. So the live stream today is intending to shine a spotlight on the beautiful diversity of the enjoi DNI thought partner network.
Each of these individuals are making a unique contribution and they are bringing their diversities to the fore and using their own model of inclusive leadership to change things here in Japan and also across Asia Pacific. So we call this live stream ‘thought partnering out loud’, and what that means is we’re taking on this practice, this new concept and practice of thought partnering which I learned about from a leadership coach in the United States, many years back, and it stuck with me as a really important tool to guide lifelong learning.
And to help us build solidarity with other people who are different from us and to learn from each other. So it’s a pillar of how enjoi as a business is committed to role modeling, if you will, this horizontal reciprocal giving of ourselves and of our talents as leaders and stakeholders working within and across Japan and Asia Pacific.
So each week I feature one of my esteemed enjoi DNI thought partners. These individuals enrich my thinking and they helped my business innovate. They helped me redefine and rethink how enjoi can be more innovative and how it can be mobilizing diversity in many interesting ways. So we just show up as two human beings as individuals.
We throw out the business cards to the extent we can. We’re just two people talking out loud. There’s no senpai – kohai relationships. Mentoring and reverse mentoring in the space. We moved beyond and in defiance of the, the various toxic socializations that we’ve been experiencing as we grow up over the years, be it around gender or race or sexual orientation or ability or language.
And we just show up together to learn from each other and to really respect each other’s diversity and each other’s individual radical individuality. I invite all of us to become open to the gray zones of race, gender, ability, nationality, sexual orientation, professional expertise, business cards, this, that, and the other titles, affiliations, shozoku, and just embrace the gray zones of all of those markers of our identities, and that enrich the conversation for our lives and for our communities.
So we’ll take 55 minutes and have a journey of seeking out those nuances. And we’ll find the joy really in diversity as a driver of innovation. And that makes really, I think, as a political scientist, the project of democratic, self-government so exciting. I know most people don’t find democratic self-government exciting, but I really do. And I think it’s worth pursuing in our homes, our workplaces, our communities, and also of course, through our transnational social justice networks or through our global sustainability networks. And also in our interpersonal relationships. Today, my guest is Casey Wahl and this is someone who I consider to be a trusted friend.
Casey has been a trusted friend, an inspirational colleague, someone who’s been amazingly generous as a mentor to me in this journey I have started upon, trying to learn how to be an entrepreneur and a CEO of a company here in Japan. And he has shared his learnings, his challenges as a business builder and a change agent himself here in Japan, and this has really genuinely helped light my way forward in so many pivotal ways. And given me such a sense of safety net and support. So thank you, Casey. And welcome to Diversity rocks innovation!
Casey: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. I think I’m just an idiot that makes a lot of mistakes and happy to share those transparently. That’s about it.
Jackie: No way. Not at all. There’s so many things, just so many gems of inspiration and advice. You’ve given me that have been really pivotal.
Casey: If you sift through all the other stuff, right?
Jackie: But you do it with such grace, and such like learning and vulnerability and humility that I think that is so important also for leaders to be able to say, yeah, this didn’t work.
Yeah, this kind of didn’t go how I’d hoped.
Casey: I think that’s going to be the next 55 minutes of, yeah, that didn’t work. This didn’t work.
Jackie: But I think there’s so many things that are working really well and so I also want us to shine a light on that because I am personally so inspired with so much of what you’ve been doing.
And I would maybe start by inviting you to share a bit about, I know most people, because we are foreign nationals in Japan, often this conversation starts with who are you? And one of the main parts of yourself that are really key to how you define your identity as yourself as Casey Wahl, what defines you and what is important to you in how you self define, and I know we self define differently when we’re back in our home countries versus from when we’re in our adoptive home countries of Japan, but maybe talk to me about where you fit yourself and how you would describe yourselves plural, here in 2021 today.
Casey: That’s probably one of the toughest interview questions I’ve had. And I’ve been live on CNBC and CNN and asked about China trade policy and the Shanghai stock exchange, which I don’t know much about on live national TV, but my identity…
I think a lot of it’s, with anybody, just shaped by how we grew up and how we learned about the world. So I grew up in a 900 person town in the desert of Saudi Arabia. So it’s kinda like a military base, but it was also an oil manufacturing or kind of oil refining facility in the middle of the desert.
And I was there from when I was one to 15. I almost got deported a couple of times. So they don’t have any English speaking education after high school or sorry, after middle school. So actually the company my father worked for basically paid for boarding school, so that way employees would stay, so I went to boarding school in the Northeast of America.
So that was a big shock. I think went from the desert…
Jackie: All by yourself?
Casey: Oh yeah, by myself. And I wanted to go and everybody has to go, but I wanted to go. But that was a culture shock. Cause you’re, I’m American, it’s kind of an American culture, but it’s like an American culture from like the 1950s or 60s in this military base and the desert, and then you go into, okay, it was the nineties at the time when I went into high school and I have no idea what the trends are. I think I used archaic words. My jokes are at a different pace than everybody’s. So now I got made fun of a lot. There were some not very nice epithets from that.
Finally got the hang of things, but then I got kicked out three months from graduation. I think I left them no choice. I had, I think that just goes back to the entrepreneurial thing, right? It must be a little bit of DNA. You know I do think entrepreneurialism can be learned, but at least for me, it was just always testing the rules.
And okay, what is the boundary? How far can you go? Just kind of testing things. So I had five or six on-campus suspensions and a couple of off-campus suspensions. It was just like, oh, well you know.
Jackie: Was it sort of, innocent truancy or were you like the engineering faculty, UBC building, a card of Lego on the roof of the engineering building for kicks or, there’s these stories that you see of different ways in which truancy plays out in different ways.
Is it, was it pushing boundaries that you were trying to explore your freedoms or were you also trying to just build something new or bring something forward that was different?
Casey: We were building forts in the woods and stuff like that. What we’re not supposed to do. There was alcohol and stuff related and exploring those boundaries.
And other, I can think, social boundaries being related, but there are quite a few pranks, and some all-school pranks that disrupted school for hours at a time and stuff like that. And I thought they were brilliant at the time. And I can understand, going back and looking at those how they can be, you know.
Jackie: Now as a parent, and someone in a different stage of life, when you think back, would you, if you were an educator in those schools, how would you have welcomed those brilliant pranks?
Casey: I think I’ve certainly got a high tolerance for it and, I think, people understand people like themselves. So I could understand somebody who’s doing the pranks. I don’t think I’m a bad human or there’s not really trying to hurt people’s feelings.
I’m not doing the Saitama squad and Yankee, type of thing like that, running around, riding around on the motorcycle super loud disrupting.
Jackie: We have that in our neighbourhood from time to time.
Casey: Even then it was setting me up for entrepreneurialism. So a lot of teachers just hated me, like absolutely hated me.
I didn’t study, but I got very good grades, I was lucky in that sense. And, they knew I was somewhere just waiting to catch me all the time. Others, I was disappointing. And then there was just like one or two that kind of understood me, and I felt understood.
And, I think that’s when I started to realize how important understanding is and how like one person just understanding you and seeing past everything else.
Jackie: Like seeing you, like being seen for, you’re a free spirit and that doesn’t make you a bad person. Maybe you’re not docile and controllable.
And in schools, we want our kids, we want our kids to be, I think the education system overly builds that in to accept compliance and obedience and docility, but then we’re killing the innovation. We’re killing the potential for thinking outside the box and the innovation in these great minds.
Casey: And just the humanity and the souls of them. Like I think if you’re forcing a kid that has lots of energy and needs to, like my young daughter, she’s just two, but she’s the same. She always tests the boundaries. She’s always doing physically risky stuff.
Jackie: She’s egging you on to see if you’re going to get upset by what she does.
Casey: Exactly. There’s a little bit of a twinkle in the eye, just, okay. She’s always socially programming and seeing what’s going there. So yeah.
Jackie: My six year old is like that. He’s very very active and yeah it’s interesting as a parent to try and figure out how to navigate that.
While wanting to protect, to keep their spirits untamed, right? Like we don’t want to tame them. How do we channel that positively? So you’ve written a book and I think, the first time we had spoken, you shared with me about the book you had written around entrepreneurialism in the startup ecosystem in Japan, and that you had been curious and I guess interviewed a whole variety of startup founders. What led to that project here when you were deciding just out of the blue to do this research and then turn it into a book to share?
Casey: I think it was like entrepreneurialism, we’re creating things. It’s just this tightness of energy for me, it’s like got to be released.
And I think there was just so much pent up energy and that I had to write that book and kind of the reason was it was like failure, up until that point. So we had started Wahl + Case, a recruitment firm in Japan. And the idea was to innovate globally and do that.
And we were quickly pretty successful, we were profitable type of thing. So we started to try quite a bit of innovations, and we were doing different tech companies. I think we launched five kind of projects, whether they were full companies or not, and they all failed.
Some failed quickly, some failed very painfully. It was expensive. It was emotional. And basically, we were doing this, we were doing tech recruitment. So we were seeing what kind of startups and things were trending in Silicon Valley at the time. This was what, 11 years ago, when we first founded the firm and there wasn’t this startup culture at the time.
There wasn’t a lot of resources. So much has changed. It’s amazing. And this is how fast things change and how fast things normalize in Japan is incredible. But like their entrepreneurialism was still weird. There was really no resources for it, but I was meeting a lot of elite Japanese at the time.
And from Mckinsey or Goldman Sachs or Todai or whatever, and they’re like, oh, you became an entrepreneur. I’m so impressed. This is so amazing. I wish I could have the courage to do that. So we’re putting all these pieces together. So okay, we have some excess capital, we know how to hire people and we can, we have this entrepreneurialism bent. We see this talent that want to become entrepreneurs and we see, tech that’s trending.
And at the time there was this idea arbitrage, and there’s seven or eight months before, something in Silicon Valley got set up in Japan. So we put it all together and launched like five projects and five kind of companies. So we’d recruited the CEO, put in some seed money, try to build things up and they all failed and it was…
Jackie: You had top talent, you had money investment, but the secret sauce was missing.
Casey: I think it wasn’t their idea. And it wasn’t their kind of entrepreneurialism. And there were, we didn’t have enough capital to go through like the different stages of growth. We could get like early product market fit, but when you try to put them on this ladder of VC and again, VC, there weren’t that many VC.
They weren’t very risk-taking. They were like more corporate salary men than VC at the time. They’re like, oh, who’s these people that own some shares that help you set it up and we don’t trust them. We don’t know who they are. So nobody would follow an investor as well. So it was difficult and like basically, over two and a half years, learned how to build a tech company, we had engineers or how to build like a tech service, what goes well, what doesn’t go well in Japan.
And I felt that story had to be told and I really need to tell, like this was really painful. And so the idea to do it, okay, coming from recruitment, interviewing people and who wants to read about Casey Wahl’s story after he’s been an entrepreneur for two or three years, that’s not interesting. But Japanese like to read about themselves through a foreigner’s eyes, like there’s a whole kind of group, so I’m like okay.
Okay, let’s interview Japanese founders at the time and get them to talk really about the pain. And of course, because I had experienced it, I knew really what the different pains are. I could ask questions and questions. And there was never, there wasn’t any book like it at the time, like that really made entrepreneurialism human.
It was always these hero stories. Like okay, the founder of this company, he was so smart and he had this wonderful unicorn vision.
Jackie: It’s always the same trope of the brilliant genius who starts in a garage in Silicon valley.
Casey: And it’s a little bit too manufactured and it doesn’t feel human right?
Jackie: It doesn’t diversify the models of entrepreneurialism that we really need to have on the market. So that we’re really inspiring all types of people, not just the computer science, brilliant nerd, who wants to sit in the parents’ garage with two friends and build the next whatever it is. I think certainly as a woman, I’ve never found those stories inspiring very much. It’s not accessible to the backgrounds that I’ve come through on law and political science for one.
And it creates this stereotype that unless you’re in tech or in coding or in some kind of area of engineering or computer science that is, that’s not a part of, you’re probably not destined to be in the tech space. And so then you don’t see yourself in that space and you don’t see yourself as having a potential pathway of building something that’s tech related. I think this is something that through our conversations, I really learned from you on, at what point did, I think I asked you, cause I was having this sort of existential crisis of: Is enjoi going to be predominantly a consulting firm or are we going to be doing something different than that?
That is broader. And that maybe has a little bit more breadth and impact. And I was thinking about when did you redefine Wahl + Case from being in the recruitment and consulting space to being a tech company? And I think I asked you that question and it really helped me think about, okay, how would I pivot enjoi to then, maybe identify first and foremost as a tech company and secondarily with the consulting, supporting the build-out after, but that the tech pieces is first.
And then how does that change my relationship to tech as I’m coming out of law, political science, and not at all in the technical skills, engineering, coding. Do you want to maybe share a little bit about how the Wahl + Case journey, and how you’ve built out that tech identity and how you pivoted to be a tech firm?
Casey: Yeah, sure. It was long and again it’s just failure. So the idea when I started Wahl + Case, like the vision was to be global and innovate recruitment in a global kind of capacity.
Jackie: What was wrong with recruitment at the time that you felt you wanted to change it?
Casey: It’s still so broken.
If you ask people like the NPS, the net promoter score, for candidates and clients. They’ve all had bad experiences, right? So almost every candidate and client that’s worked with a recruiter, probably they’ve had a bad experience. Whether it’s not understanding them as an individual, misrepresenting information, not doing proper follow up, and recruitment, when people are changing jobs, it’s one of the most stressful, high anxiety times in their life.
And so I’m changing my identity. I’m going to a whole environment, a new environment, a new boss.
Jackie: Well and then you’re coming under scrutiny by all of these new actors who are like looking at your CV, and are you talented, are you qualified? And do we want you, like the rejection, that you go through when you’re on the market.
Casey: Exactly. And even the interview process is a different skill set, like being good at your job and interviewing are totally different. So there’s some really good interviews that aren’t great at their job. And vice versa. So it’s super stressful.
And I think both sides, on the, like, the client that’s hiring, they don’t have a lot of visibility about, okay, who are the candidates available? If you think of your typical hiring manager, they only get to hire like once every two years or so, and they want that awesome, awesome unicorn.
And they want champagne for beer money and okay, those are the wrong expectations. And they have to be educated by the market and people aren’t going to be 120% qualified and work for 80% pay and you know. So they’ve got to go through that kind of learning curve and that emotional curve and same on the individual side.
So I think like from both sides, there’s so much time that’s just wasted. There’s not enough information on, like, people are going in blind on these big life decisions. I think the decision-making is very broken, about how people go about making decisions and what we were talking about, diversity and inclusion, what you were saying about kind of entrepreneurs.
And like they have this pattern that they know, but that’s not going to…
Jackie: They hire the, certainly what I’ve seen in the last two years of just looking at every research results I can find, on hiring processes and from a DNI perspective and how, ironically, what I’ve keep finding is that it corroborates the last 25 years of what I’ve been looking at recruitment in two political parties, where the people recruiting are recruiting people like them.
And they’re recruiting the usual suspects who look like them and who talk like them and who come from their same, Todai , or whatever Keio or Ivy league backgrounds. Predominantly men recruiting men. And so if you don’t have any kind of a process to diversify recruitment process, the recruiters are the gatekeepers for political parties, or be it the recruiters who are the gatekeepers for companies, they’re not diversifying the talent pool because they themselves have all these blind spots on thinking that excellence is this one monolithic image.
And it happens to look a lot like themselves. We need to move outside that box and say, okay, social affinity biases play out in a really interesting way, but we need to then say, okay, how do we build out processes that check all of those blind spots we have, and not just through a one-off unconscious bias training workshop, but memorizing the 30 unconscious biases are not going to make us have a better process.
If it’s not really built into the DNA of the process itself to say at what levels are the blind spots and the bias is going to manifest, and then how are we checking that and mitigating that at every single stage. And you don’t really see that happening. And then, and that’s assuming that the data…
The AI driven data, checking the CVs and scanning like, pre-screening all the CVs, are weeding out, they’ve already weeded out so many candidates through the AI system sometimes. Because you’re not showing up with the undergraduate degree in computer science, or you’re not showing up with full bilingualism in English and Japanese for the Japanese market.
Even if the job doesn’t require Japanese language skills, sometimes that filter’s turned on. And so there’s just a funnel that just reduces down to who the actual hiring manager even gets to see and consider, is so narrowed superficially. And I wonder what is your experience you’ve built a really interesting service that you could maybe speak to about how you’re combining, I think you say, I’m going to find it.
I know I wrote it down for EQIQ, so maybe you can also, that’s a good segue to talk about what was the Wahl + Case journey and then how you’ve pivoted towards the EQIQ journey of being a CEO of EQIQ as a larger entity that’s building a broader base and infrastructure of these services, but the EQIQ, I love the motto that you say you balance the EQ of consulting with the IQ of technological innovation.
Casey: You delivered that so fantastically. Thank you.
Jackie: How do you, but how do you protect for, this is such a big piece around AI and big data being fraught also because programmed by imperfect human beings who build their biases right into the way the AI machine codes and then scans for CVs. And how do you mitigate it?
How do you deal with that for your…
Casey: I think what you’ve just talked about and this is what I find fascinating and humans, we need to work. We need to have industry. We’re an industrative species. And if we don’t like, there’s going to be a lot more war and all these kinds of negative things.
And how do you hire? But we’re talking about hiring and all the problems involved and it is, bias is so easy, I think to hire properly, you almost have to unlearn to be human. It’s okay, I want to hire somebody. Great. And I need to trust them. It’s that trust component is there, and there’s lots of studies on trust.
Okay. It’s easier to build trust with somebody who has five commonalities with you. Five kinds of things. And some external ones are very easy, right? So people get into these patterns and like when a company is busy and they have a lot of stress and they’ve never been trained properly, so they’re going to easily fall into those types of patterns.
I think larger companies where this becomes an issue and they have the resources and they can unteach some of these biases and kind of show the trust and the output. Having more diversity and kind of more inclusion. It’s incredibly difficult and this is what we want to solve.
And this is what I wanted to solve with the company is, you know what I was, I love recruitment to death when I was coming through it. Like I had a ton of bosses that said, Hey, it’s not rocket science. But it is. It is. It’s beyond rocket science, I really think. We’ve got what, how many million billions of neurons in our brains and how many connections between all of those, like all of the end points and the way we go to decisions is so different, right?
Jackie: And emotions, factoring on top of, and the adrenaline and the immune system and the nervous system, all interrupting.
Casey: You go in and you meet a charismatic manager, oh, that was really exciting. That was stimulating conversation.
I want to join a company, but it’s a horrible work environment. Perfectly normal case type of thing. So you’re making a bad decision with bad input. Whether we’re making bad decisions with the bad inputs, because of our own biases or we’re over-relying on our friend’s information or family’s information, or does that come down to data type of thing, or what are the data inputs? It’s very complex and this is what we want to do with the EQIQ, right?
So there’s a humanity side that we don’t forget about being human. We don’t forget that: hey, emotion is a part of how we make decisions. Emotion is a part of having satisfactory lives. It’s a big part of who we are. It can’t be all data. And this is where I get frustrated with tech companies, it’s all data all the time.
And it goes back to, all right, AI is going to solve everything.
Jackie: It doesn’t give us wisdom. It just does not ever. It’s like for me as a political scientist from a social science background of 25 years, it’s frustrating that the natural sciences, in the old, the olden days and the good old, like going back to Aristotle, we did not break down knowledge systems into natural science and social science.
We just had sciences and knowledge and wisdom, and political philosophy was as core to understanding the world and that the world isn’t flat, right? Political philosophy was as essential to exploring with observation and actually using scientific testing of the real world, those were integrated.
And I feel that superficial division of how we break things down. There’s this idea that data equals wisdom, but data requires critical thinking skills and high-level analysis to really weed out the noise of data, that isn’t really helpful evidence. And what is the actual core data that gives us evidence-based decision making that is generating wisdom and wise practices, right?
Casey: I think that is so wise and so true.
Jackie: Sometimes I feel like the big data, we need to have big labs and big data and the quantitative this, that, and the other, as if you could bypass humanity and wisdom and ethics and political philosophy. And why are we doing this? What ultimately, why are we doing this?
And if it’s not about, in principle every company says they’re doing it because they want to contribute something good for human wellbeing, but then why would you bypass the human in the processes of the data collection or of the data processes? So it is a bit mind boggling.
Casey: Those are my current pet peeves.
And I think I could go on rants on that. As especially in startups, in tech, like there’s an overemphasis on STEM, going back where entering it, it’s like okay, if you don’t come from a STEM background type of thing, and how important STEM is and STEM should rule the world and STEM should be in the education, but we are human.
Storytelling is critical to humanity, and if you want to do anything, like why aren’t we taught more storytelling in school? Why aren’t we bringing this? So this is where data cannot, sometimes it can help us, but it doesn’t give us storytelling skills, communication. Our happiness comes from communication and mutual understanding, right?
Where are we learning this? Is that built into tech products? 99% of them, no, absolutely not.
Jackie: And building trust within community.
Casey: Exactly. So I think a lot of the tech and the current trajectory is this STEM, is this data and bigger systems and you know that, why are we doing it? Okay. We’re making life a little bit more optimized.
We’re making it more efficient, so it can be productive, but is that what we want to be as humans? No, we don’t want it.
I don’t need data to monitor everything. Like I should, in touch, if my body is off, I don’t need a watch telling me. I should be able to be in touch with feeling that type of thing. And this is where I think people like yourself, and we need more people from the humanities to bring that into the tech.
And I think this should be the next wave for the next 10 to 15 years. The nice thing is it’s getting easier to start up. You can buy the different components. AI is pretty much going to be a commodity in the next several years. You can buy different components and plug it into your system.
And of course, if you have a humanity background, you have an ethical kind of training. Okay, what data are we putting into this? And over time, people do want to buy a human system and that makes them feel better. Not just only efficient too.
Jackie: I think you can trust it. There’s reasons why I think we will never completely automate so many jobs. I know that it’s core to the Japanese industry to think that robots will solve caregiving and a whole bunch of other things. But there’s a point at which, in some areas, I’m not sure we want to have a robot caregiving us when we’re at a certain point of vulnerability in our life, or wanting to be caregived by someone who has warm emotions, where we would feel that sense of trusting connection.
And so we have to think through what are the ethical implications of when we’re going to farm out and what can you really farm out and outsource to being automated. And what still requires high-level critical thinking and human judgment on the ethical front because things can go wrong very quickly, if we don’t bring in those checks and balances.
We even have a hard time doing that in our human processes and our people processes. As human beings. So why do we think we can do it better with robots is beyond me. I know that in, for example, Canada, in the last, I would say 10 to 15 years, there’s been a push to say, we talk about STEAM and it’s STEM plus the A for Arts to try and regain the balance that it can’t just always be this absence of art and philosophy and music.
And of course we know the research shows that people who do really well in languages and in music, generally do well in math, because this is just all code or language. And so when we think about, and you see people who are highly trained in music and they actually do quite well in the math sides of things, they also speak three languages or four languages.
They have access to understanding different codes of interaction and behavior through the different language communities that they have now, culturally acclimatized to, to be able to speak those languages at a high level. Those are skills that we are forgetting is part of coding. It’s part of math, it’s a part of logic and it’s a part of how we think through connection and community.
I don’t, for myself and for you, I imagine what you would say and how you would say it in Japanese and the cultural norms around connection and community. And shinrai kankei right? Like how relations of trust plays out in how you speak the Japanese language is quite different from how you speak trust or perform linguistically performed trust in English.
And all of that’s code. But it’s very highly sophisticated coding through language and the culture together, all immersed. And I guess I would love to hear you speak a bit more about intrinsic motivation, because I think this concept is really exciting to me.
I’ve done, and have been building out more of an interest in the last, really it started with my own mother, frankly, in the last… Raising me, she was always talking about positive psychology and emotional intelligence. And how do you build your communication skills and how do you build them?
She was very enthused about those topics and was an entrepreneur herself. So the irony that here I have this role model of a mom who was an entrepreneur her whole life, but I had never seen myself in that role as an entrepreneur until very late in the game. But so, how does that knowledge around emotional intelligence and psychology, cause I know that’s deeply embedded into the concept of intrinsic motivation that you use within the Attune software service and consulting. Can you talk more about this concept? Because I think it’s really interesting.
Casey: Yeah, absolutely. I’m still excited about the last one. So like STEAM, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that. I really wish Canada could have a larger voice. I’m sure that they try, but it’s too much dominated by Silicon Valley and I think it’s very myopic, but like STEAM is fantastic. And I think, I really wish whatever I can do to help, but please, you’re doing something great. I think that needs to be said more and more for people to understand that.
And just about Japanese and trust, and the robot commentary… certainly Japan has this leading edge in robotics and a lot of things will be automated, but you know, like the Japanese business ecosystem is driven by relationships, right? It’s very relationship driven. It’s not efficient. There’s still fax machines. There are still horrible forms you have to fill out. But it’s relationship driven. And I think this thought, and this is why I’m quite excited about now Japan’s getting into digital ministry coming in next year, type of thing like that, but I think they will have critical thinking about, okay, what is the human aspect of this?
How do we keep this Japanese identity in relationship? And you were talking about trust and trust is critical for us as humans to be satisfied, and to accomplish anything. But in Japanese, there’s more words of trust than there are in English. Like trust is broken down to different things.
And one of the interesting insights that I’ve seen in, at least for my work, is when it comes to work, there can be “shinyo”. You can trust somebody to complete their task or you can trust somebody’s competence, and then there’s “shinrai”, you trust them as a human, like a deeper form of trust.
So what they say, even if it’s negative, you get this higher level of psychological safety, but if you trust that shinrai, okay, you can get more negative feedback. You can have better discussion. You’re going to have more innovation type of thing, but so much trust is just, shinyo it’s transactional.
Okay. I can get it to complete the task, but then you don’t have that so I think that concept needs to be spoken about a lot more within organizations and move just from shinyo to shinrai. Like really trusting them as a human being. So on to intrinsic motivation. Yeah. So going back to helping people make better decisions when it comes to hiring and retention.
Jackie: To have Shinrai kankei whether they want to have, whether they think they can see the possibility of relations of trust or deep trust, shinrai kankei in their new employer context. You’re helping them gauge that?
Casey: Exactly. So like up until Attuned came out, like, how do you know somebody’s intrinsic motivations? It’s really hard to do that.
I’ve interviewed thousands and thousands of people and I’d ask people, okay, what are you motivated by? Do we even have a common language? Do they have the self-awareness, maybe they’re quite complex and they have multiple motivations. This was the inspiration to do it because that motivational alignment with somebody entering a new organization and what that manager can provide, how they communicate, and basically like the research heart of it is intrinsic motivation is connected to somebody’s value system.
So it’s connected to their values towards work. So what you value equals what you’re going to prioritize, the goals that you’re going to set and these connect to your intrinsic motivations, which is more sustainable than extrinsic motivation. And I think most managers are, have been trained, and most organizations have been set up for, okay, incentives and more extrinsic motivations type of thing.
Jackie: Can you give me an example maybe, or a couple of examples of what is the difference? Maybe you can define for those of us who are less familiar. What would constitute intrinsic motivation examples versus what would be examples of extrinsic motivation?
Casey: Extrinsic would be more incentive-based, okay. Here’s a reward.
Okay. So we’re going to have a competition for this week. Okay, who can make the most number of phone calls? For example.
Jackie: So the competition element, someone is attracted by that.
Casey: That could be that, or it could be, like here’s like a prize or a shout out or something like that. So those can be, and with extrinsic so it’s basically in the wording, like it’s something coming from the outside to try to motivate you. So you have an external force doing that, so it’s the carrot mistake is more the traditional kind of way of looking at it, but it’s quite short term. Like it doesn’t last, there’s lots and lots of research that it doesn’t, it’s not sustainable and it ruins creativity, basically.
So there’s quite a lot of research for that. And then intrinsic motivation is, this is where it’s coming from inside. Again, going back to my story about why I wanted to write the book, writing a book, I hated it. It was painful.
It was horrible. You don’t want to write it. Like a lot of people go in with an extrinsic motivation. Okay. I want to be on the bestseller list. I want to get extra passive income. And you have to write that book. And so it’s intrinsic motivation. So that’s something driving you from the inside.
That’s more sustainable. And you’ll overcome a lot more difficulties and more obstacles. If it’s raining, if it’s cold and you’re going to go to work, you’re going to go to work more excitable and it’s a lot more sustainable.
Jackie: Is it some kind of passion? Not passion, but like it’s internal values?
Casey: It’s internal values. So again okay, what is the priorities for you and what are your values for work? And your value systems are mostly set when we’re in our formative years. So when we’re kids, when we’re teenagers, our early adulthood, and values are a learned thing. So we learn our values from our environment.
We learn it from our parents. We learn it from our schools. We learn it from our communities. So values can change over time, but they’re the lowest level of our kind of psychological makeup, right? They’re the deepest thing. There’s no way for us to visually see them until Attuned came along. So now going back to the decision making, now that we can see each other’s values towards work.
Jackie: And Attuned measures…
Casey: And as you have this report, it comes out, it shows very clearly, okay, here’s Jackie’s values. Here’s Casey’s values. Here are my intrinsic motivations. And then we can map out the team. We can map out the gaps between individuals and what I really love about it is we can see the motivational gaps because as you get larger and larger people, of course, you’re not going to have the same motivations.
And what we found is intrinsic motivations are like a fingerprint. They’re very unique. There’s 1.7 million different combinations. And this is why managing people and managing people not like you is very difficult. Like how do you understand them? But now like just graphically, we can say, okay, here’s somebody different than Casey.
And I can see where our value gaps are and there’s explanations and it no longer becomes emotional.
Jackie: That’s just a different facet of diversity that enriches the team. If you harness it right.
Casey: Exactly. And the first part is understanding. If I can just understand that they are different and we have a shared common language and we can communicate a little bit, then we should be able to work together and build trust.
But unless that, okay, it can become very emotional if we have different values, right? If somebody has a different personality say, oh, that’s his personality. Okay. He overreacts whatever it might be type of thing. But if somebody’s values, like I just don’t understand those values. You can, it’s very difficult to understand people’s values and react positively.
So we bring it more kind of in an objective way, so it can deepen communication, can deepen trust and add to that diversity and inclusion. And because it’s the intrinsic motivation, it creates room for more creativity and more innovation.
Jackie: I imagine that, and perhaps correct me if I’m wrong, particularly for managers to have feedback. I know there’s different SWOT analysis that you can do on the strengths and weaknesses of your team and map out those things too, but that’s more maybe skills-based.
And what you were talking about is a much deeper inner sort of drive. For example if I know that this person on my team really would like public recognition for their role and that for them, that’s going to just make them feel seen and make them feel good about their work. That’s their internal, intrinsic, maybe motivating need that drives them to do a great job. Maybe another person on the team, it’s something different. I’m not sure, you can guide me on what would be the other, but it helps me be a manager, then know how to meet the emotional, not completely the emotional needs, but to predict…
Casey: They are emotional as well, yeah.
Jackie: In some ways.
Casey: If your manager doesn’t understand it as a human being, you’re not happy. You get negative emotions from them.
Jackie: Well, you’re not seen.
Casey: Exactly. And this helps you be seen.
So I don’t have high status needs. Like my status needs to be publicly seen, be publicly visible. And I’ve managed people with very high needs for that. And, before Attuned, oh, they’re just being narcissistic again. When I get into my negative kind of, catty like…
You know, I’ve done other stuff. I’m not always asking for recognition. I get into my catty negative humanity, which is part of me and without that objectivity, without that understanding, without that ability to see them. And now I can have a negative lens towards somebody like that as a manager, because I have different needs and vice versa.
I have very high rationality needs. I love debating, I love intellectually sparring.
Jackie: This is where we enjoy the conversation too.
Casey: Right? So it comes very naturally. There’s members on the team, they hate it. When I asked that third why they’re like no, please no. I’m a manager. I’m whatever, like I have this status.
Why don’t you just trust my opinion? I’m like, no, it’s not about you. It’s about the idea, and I’m like why can’t you understand that?
Jackie: We’re seeking truth here, right? Truth seeking right?
Casey: Patience isn’t necessarily one of my highest virtues. So this helps me be more patient as a person.
Jackie: Definitely. I certainly have found what limited experience I’ve had with Attuned very exciting to read about it in your most recent article, I think you put out on LinkedIn, which I found really interesting too, and how it mapped out. And you talk about that in that article. So I am excited to continue to learn about how this is something that we can use, not only in companies, but I’m even just thinking…
I’m serving on a board of a women’s organization, FEW Japan, of course that you are actually, Wahl + Case is supporting as an organizational member. So thank you for that. But I often think, what are the benefits even for the nonprofit sector to be thinking about how they would use Attuned because working in the nonprofit sector, often it’s volunteerism, right?
And so if I even just think to the volunteer boards I served on in Canada 20 years ago, that team building space, there’s probably a lot of overlap on people coming around a sense of being mission focused, like wanting to support women’s empowerment or wanting to support refugees or wanting to support reducing child poverty.
There are these commonalities of the values that are bringing those volunteers to the table to work in the nonprofit sector, to move the dial on those organizations that have change agency and social impact, but it’s not like a CSR initiative. That’s not their professional jobs. This is their volunteer role, as a citizen or civic duty, or maybe it’s their upbringing. I don’t know. My parents did a lot of civic volunteering out of Christian upbringing in a small town in Canada.
But I think even for the nonprofit sector then, to understand, even within everyone having that, maybe altruism motivator out of volunteering, wanting to volunteer and give their time. There might be other things they’re also wanting to get out of that experience that then I think they could find out about themselves would be interesting too. So for a lot of different organizations this is a really interesting way to build a team.
Casey: Yeah, I think anywhere where there’s two humans in the room or two humans connecting, it can be quite helpful. And if you probably think of your own kind of non-profit experience, I’m sure there were unproductive conversations and unproductive times, and it’s because people are coming together quite often with different motivations and they have a different kind of core driver for that.
And you can’t get alignment. And I think this can help get alignment, right? Can create higher levels of psychological safety. So you should be able to achieve more as a group. But yeah, like “kon katsu”, like it’s still a thing in Japan. And there’s been ideas…
Jackie: Promoting marriage matching.
Oh my goodness. Are you kidding? Absolutely I can imagine.
Casey: So we’ve even had ideas like, hey, okay, when the husband and wife fight, well they’re fighting typically because of values and if you have big gaps in value sets…
Jackie: Absolutely. And in terms of how life partnering plays out, what are your aspirations for a life partner?
Are you looking for a traditional division of gender roles in the family, patriarchal old school version of the 1950s household, or are you looking for life partnering that’s more holistic and there’s this individual respect and playing to your strengths.
Yeah, absolutely. You could get that information right off the get-go. I think a lot of women would be like, woah, dodged a bullet! And maybe men too. And maybe some men are looking for more outside the box partners, but maybe they’re not finding women who code as outside the box. It’d be interesting to see on a dating app how much individuals would reveal their real selves.
Casey: I think it’s a bigger population after, I think it’d be quite large, especially if it’s like that kon katsu level like, okay, this is going to be a life partner.
Jackie: Yeah, for sure. You’d want to really have some serious information on what’s the match.
Casey: Self awareness is pretty big and people ultimately just want to be happy.
So you have to kind of, if I reveal this, the tendency is okay, I’ll attract somebody more aligned and I can be happier.
Jackie: Yeah, I highly recommend that people go into marriage or just life partnering, even if we don’t even worry about the legal iterations of that, just go into life partnering with a little bit more evidence-based approach.
Cause you know, I’ve been in different relationships and had failures and been there, done that. And it’s like the job. It’s a huge identity shift, right?
It’s oh, okay. I thought that this was going to be the lifelong relationship. And then ten years in…
Casey: You go through all the emotional problems as well, yeah. Am I good enough? Am I a bad person type of thing? Am I just negative? Should I be more patient? Whatever it might be. I think it’s the same dynamics.
Jackie: And maybe if it’s value alignment, it’s like you’re investing in vain because there’s just not a good fit on the intrinsic motivations of how to life partner with one another. So that’s an excellent, interesting area you can innovate in Japan. Absolutely. On that note, I’m going to ask you to give us a last, sort of, your hopes. You’ve done a lot of work supporting women in the entrepreneurial space, women’s startups that you featured them in that book. You obviously wrote the script for the movie, ‘Start up girls’. The Japanese movie ‘Start up girls’, which is interesting. Obviously you’re a supporter of FEW Japan, which we’re grateful for.
But putting aside those pieces, for your role as a leader in Japan, and I certainly see you as an inclusive leader in Japan, and that’s why I’m so happy to have you in the thought partner network inspiring me and helping me learn. What are your hopes either for your industry? Or for Japan? Or for the world? The sky’s the limit. You can decide what scope you want to talk about and what would be your, where do you want to see things move the dial in the next five to 10 years?
What do you want to see change?
Casey: I would probably just put it as a lifetime. Like I want to solve this goal. If we look from a very work perspective, how do we make it better and more inclusive and have more diversity and just basically more understanding and more trust and more psychological safety in our work environments and making those big decisions.
And that’s my goal professionally, and that’s a problem for a lifetime, I think as running an organization as a founder, it’s like social justice. I’ve got a couple of those bones in my body. And I think a key part of it is the distribution of happiness.
And you don’t want, being aligned, just a few people very happy and some okay. And a lot unhappy. And when it comes to diversity and inclusion, it’s really a discussion about power. So I have a little bit of power, so we have some economic power, we have some organizational power and can we use those to help, you know, that social justice cause, make it more inclusive, increase the happiness level and help people that might not have had those opportunities, where systematically they’ve been overlooked or they don’t get the chance as well. Yeah. We can take those chances, we can embed that into the organization.
So I think as an organization, just want to build that and do as much as we can. So those processes are there. You know that mentality and that thought process is there. I think there’s a lot of things to overlook, but, I guess I’m from, let me just change my world. Let me be nice to my kids.
Let me be nice to my wife. Let me be nice to my friends, to the people I meet at work every day. And if I can make one person’s life happier, they can probably make another right. And I, what I’d love to see is, now that we’ve had Corona, everybody knows the R zero, the replication rates of Corona, but there is a replication rate of happiness. There is a replication rate of anger. Do you know what they are? No. Most people don’t know what the replication rate of happiness is. But it’s higher than Corona. So if you go out and you make somebody else happier, they’ll go out and make 2.2 more people more happier as well.
So that’s what I can go do. And I’ll try to do it as much as I can. Of course, there’s days when I’m angry and I’ll try to keep that replication rate low.
Jackie: Go off to the bedroom and scream in a pillow.
Casey: It’s just being human. And I want to do more of that and help more people, if people could understand what is the replication rate of happiness. And everybody knew that, I think they’d have a happier…
Jackie: And their personal power in that. How personally, individually powerful we actually are in that particular piece. And so the change agency really can begin from that position, that power of one. Absolutely.
That’s a fabulous lesson and takeaway for our audience today and for me as well. Thank you very much for such an exciting and dynamic discussion. I always learn so much and enjoy speaking with you every time we meet. This is the first time we’ve done this digitally though.
I was realizing the last conversations were always really long coffee dates in Tokyo. But I look forward to that day as well, when we can get back to some of that normal. So thank you, Casey, for sharing all of these thoughts and lessons today.
And I’m not sure if people have clued in already or started putting this on their radar, but we are coming up to the 10th anniversary of the east Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown.
March 11th, of course, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years. So we will be doing a special live stream commemorative series. I’ve had the pleasure of doing what we call participatory action research. So the last five years where I would go into communities and I would follow young women leaders in post-disaster Tohoku and learn about their leadership, what they were pursuing, what the roadblocks they were experiencing in local, rural communities in Tohoku, and then how they were navigating and overcoming those challenges to bring their visions and their ideas for their communities forward.
And so we’re going to kick off next week. It’ll be our first live stream, actually held in Japanese and we will feature Mizuho Sugeno. And she will be joining us from Namie in Fukushima. And she’s originally from Nihonmatsu, which actually was one of the hearts of organic farming in Japan. And she will be sharing all of her insights about organic farming practices in Japan, how the post-disaster context led to using the skills of, basically, organic farming to restore and bring back the soil because of course they had to restore the soils from all the nuclear damage and the cesium and the different techniques to do that, to be able to restore the soils, to be able to re-engage in safe farming practices in Fukushima. So a world of experience that we will learn about from a young woman leader who really has given me so much inspiration, and I’ve learned so much already from the last five years of following her journey.
So tune in to that and I will just issue a quick reminder that of course enjoi Diversity and Innovation is here to offer a multidisciplinary team. We have professionals capable of supporting on DNI for companies, for education, for leaders, and we would love to work with you.
So give us a shout. You can find us at www.en-joi.com we want it to be enjoyable and fun, even if it’s disruptive and we unlearn things that make us uncomfortable. And then we relearn how to have fun with diversity. So thank you for joining today. Thank you so much, Casey.
This has been so fun. Thank you so much.