One of the reasons you might suffer from a lack of creativity boils down to time. You have become so busy, so there’s no time for your creativity. But, what would life look like if you value your time as much as you value other things?
In this week’s podcast, join us as we welcome our guest, Katie Burkhart. She is an entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker. Katie has founded several companies and is currently the CEO of MatterLogic, where she and her team support leaders and organizations clearly define what it means to be a purpose-driven business. She advises business owners on how to align their time with their goals and run a purpose-driven company. Listen in for ideas on how to maximize your time and become more successful in all areas of life.
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Creative Thinking and The Value of Time in Business with Katie Burkhart
Welcome to Actions Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that we all need to try to do to achieve the life that we want, no matter what form that takes, focus on what really matters. We live in a world full of distractions, there are distractions everywhere, and we all now have a portable distraction in our phones, purses, wherever we put our mobile phones ready to distract us at any one given point in time and, sometimes, the difference between someone that truly succeeds at achieving what they set out to achieve, achieving the life they really want, and someone that doesn’t quite get there is how often we get distracted and how long we allow ourselves to get distracted for. These distractions can come in, of course, many different forms and my guest today, Katie Burkhart, is all about helping businesses focus on the things that really matter in order to achieve their mission. She is the mastermind behind a system called MatterLogic which she implements through her organization, MatterPulse.
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Katie, welcome to the program today.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Definitely. So, first of all, MatterLogic is the system you implemented. What did you view in the world that made you decide that this system was something that businesses needed to help them really focus on what matters?
That’s a great question. So, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of extremely passionate leaders who are excited about their big idea and how they’re going to improve or otherwise change the world, but I’ve also watched those same leaders struggle to pull themselves in one to many directions at any given time and, as a result, really stunt their growth and their ability to do what it is that they set out to do. In particular, I think about conversations with people where it’s like, “Well, this trend is here. We should be pursuing that,” or whatever and, all of a sudden, whether it’s between more ideas and things that they could do, because I find people with big ideas tend to attract ideas naturally, or through other things that are pulling their attention away from what it is they set out to do is that we need to go about fixing this and, inherently, gravitated towards the purpose of the model. But what I found in that process was that it wasn’t overly well defined. I ended up thinking, well, the issue is really that people don’t have the right data, they don’t have the right information, we should be trying to build technology to support that. But quickly, it was, actually, we don’t really even have a good definition for what it means to run a purpose-driven business, really to reap the benefits from it. Most people look at it as, “Oh, you did something impactful and it’s inspiring,” and I’m like, well, okay, but once you have the statement, and we’ll debate whether that’s the right definition later, what does that mean for how you run your business every day and what does that mean in benefit for how you grow your business?
And as you said, focus, and being able to focus on the things that matter is the number one benefit. Click To Tweet
Purpose-driven business, do you see a lot of people just saying, “Okay, I have a mission statement, I have a statement of purpose,” it makes a majority of people feel good and that’s enough right there as opposed to just understanding like every single thing that really needs to be put in place to make that purpose actually come into fruition?
So we see a lot of what we would call kind of purpose imposters and there are a number of big ones, like, “Well, we’re doing stuff with ESG so we must be purpose driven,” “We donate to a charity so we must be purpose driven,” “We made this really fluffy statement that doesn’t mean a whole lot but we have it, therefore, we’re purpose driven.” You sort of have people in that camp who are like, “I got my statement, I did the thing that I needed to do, now I’m going back to business as usual.” You will also have a group of people who are saying, “No, I really wanna do this. I really put thought into developing an actual purpose statement but I don’t know what to do after that,” and in fact, the last study I read said something like 56 or 60 percent somewhere like well more than half of business leaders don’t know how to operationalize it, like we’ve gotten them to the point of saying, “Well, I have one and I understand why it’s important but I don’t know what to do with it now that I have one. How do I actually run it all the way through my business?” We’re hoping to come into the conversation and say, “Okay, we worked that out for you. We’ve actually developed a system to make sure that it hits all the most important points of your living organization. Let’s help you run that through line all the way down to the bottom and back up again and so that things are really clear and you’re able to get aligned and then know how to stay aligned as you continue to grow.” So it’s interesting to see where people are falling but there will always be people who are sort of in that, “Well, I feel like I checked the box so I’ve moved on,” category.
What I think about is the challenge of someone who just has a dollar amount, say, “We want a revenue growth of 10 percent for our shareholders,” and there’s a pretty good process in place for operationalizing that in the sense of like, “Okay, this is what we need to do. This is the revenue stream, this is the payment to people, payment to vendors, payment to your employees,” etc., it’s a balance book type of situation and a customer acquisition one. But when it comes to operationalizing a purpose, I’ve seen materials come around like the triple bottom line, premise behind conscious capitalism with the six stakeholders and everything like that. Where do you think those falls short and what do you think people need to really think about when they say, “Okay, the purpose of what I’m trying to do, my business, my endeavor,” is there a specific way you need to measure how you’re enacting that purpose or is there a different set of operationalizing besides customer acquisition, cash flow, and all that stuff?
It’s a great question. So I’m going to start sort of all the way back and say the big shift is starting to say like the point of business is different. It always had a point and you landed on the first one, which is to make money. I’m here to make money and everything I do needs to be finely tuned to make me as much money as possible. There are numerous problems with that but from a strategic point of view and from a cutting out the noise point of view, if you exist only to make money, there are infinite options that you could pursue in order to make money, which just amps up noise in your business because you are chasing every latest trend, every, “Well, this may make us some short-term cash and who cares about the long-term ramifications to my business or anybody else, but we made money,” that was the only goal so it’s not an overly strategic way to operate. Whereas if you shift to saying the point of my business is to deliver value, to deliver value to someone specific, that’s actually why I exist, that is my purpose, and then look at how does everything I do drive towards delivering that value to actually fulfilling my purpose. Now you have to make strategic decisions because some things are going to fulfill that purpose, many things are not. You start to be able to cut out that noise and really find that focus on what you’re doing. And that goes for everything that you do.
What’s the point of having this meeting today? And if it’s not actually going to achieve something, probably don’t need to have that meeting, which really keeps people focused on moving the ball forward. To your question about measurement, like how do you know what’s going on, certainly, I think understanding where your money is coming and going from and why is a really important piece of understanding how money works, because, in the purpose of the model, it’s not the point, it’s actually the resource. We need capital in order to pay our people well so that our team is there to execute our mission. We need capital to expand our infrastructure so we can grow our reach. We need money as a resource to move our business forward. So we do need to understand where it’s going and why and whether or not it’s helping us to do those things. But more importantly, from a measurement point of view, this is as specific to your point as anything else, which it gets into did we actually make the impact? Did we deliver the value we set out to achieve or not? So if you know what outcomes you’re supposed to be delivering, have you thought about what we like to call your so what factor, which is did you actually, as the person on the receiving end, get that value or not and be able to actually monitor that, which takes more time, certainly the money, which we can be watching down to the dollar and cent every day depending on the size of your business. Impact is a longer game but that doesn’t mean that it’s less worthwhile or something that you should not be tracking as regularly as makes sense, depending on what those points are relevant to your purpose and what outcomes you’re here to try to achieve.
Wow. So, first of all, as someone who’s observed these trends and people just hop onto these trends without understanding it, agile development, for example, everywhere it’s like, “Oh, Google’s doing this or some other big company is doing this so we need to do that as well.” I had never really seen that connection between this money only model of business and hopping on these trends with reckless abandon, but it makes sense which is why my mind’s blown by this and understanding that, as you said and I want to repeat this for my audience, that when the only guiding principle you have is making money, you have an infinite number of possibilities and, therefore, it’s also easier to end up in a situation where a lot of people find themselves in which is where you’re like, “I don’t know what my purpose is yet. I know I wanna do something different, something impactful, but I don’t know what it is,” because there’s an infinite number of possible ways to make money. You can make money driving for Uber. If you decide that your purpose in life is to drive people around so they don’t drive drunk and kill people, then that’s actually 100 percent consistent with that purpose. But it’s a matter of understanding that and then you said get to that so what factor because it seems like it’s easy for someone to make a mission statement, and I’m sure you see a lot of these pretty vague mission statements that don’t really make sense or someone that says like, “Well, I know what I wanna do, I wanna help people,” well, everyone wants to help people, I think, or maybe there’s some sociopaths out there but, in general, everybody wants to help people so that sounds like this mission needs to be specific but it also sounds like is that when I think about all the different distractions there are out there, and there are just so many of them, there’s no one real magic formula as, “Oh, this is the worst distraction,” or, “Your screens are your worst distraction,” your mind, your chatterbox, it’s really about, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, understanding your purpose and seeing everything through the lens of that so that you say, “Okay, this thing is not part of that purpose and, therefore, I don’t need to spend my mental energy on it.”
Exactly, and the way that we like to look at it is if you know what your purpose is, why are you bothering to do anything else? There is only so much time in the day to move things forward, like why are you wasting and doing something that isn’t fulfilling that purpose and moving your organization forward? Once you have it presented that way, it’s like, oh, it isn’t this ancillary impact thing, like it’s the whole point. It’s like, yes, yes, it is.
And figuring out what distractions exist for you is where not only your purpose but your core strategy really serves as a filter for what you’re doing because the purpose is the focal point but you also have to ask yourself a couple of other questions. Does it fulfill my purpose? Does it align with that? But then you can say does it fit within the unique capabilities of what we do here, which is your mission statement? What do you do here and is this a good fit for you? Does it fit with how we do things here, which comes to your values and, sometimes, you have to make adjustments to say, “Well, good idea, is uniquely what we do but we need to make some adjustments in how we go about doing this so that it aligns with our values here and the behaviors we wanna exhibit here.” And then, lastly, asking that question about your vision statement, does it create the world that we’re here to create? And that really, by throwing it through those set of filters, you’re going to weed out an awful lot of options that perhaps aren’t the best ones for you to pursue. And for those people out there who are like, “But, but, but it’s a big idea and it’s really cool,” just because you don’t do it doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it happen. Maybe you need to find a partner who has those unique capabilities. Maybe you need to spin off a separate company, incubate it and spin it off because it’s that important. There are lots of different ways that you can figure out how to bring that about and certainly you could make the decision that something is that freaking important that you need to expand your unique capabilities to make it happen but do so deliberately, judiciously, and understand what that’s going to mean for your organization versus, “Oh, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this,” which is where you get back to that noise factor and trying to figure out how to move things forward.
I guess one of the questions I have is how do people understand when something’s noise? Because there are certain things that are going to be, I want to say come across, at least to me, as auxiliary but everyone needs to do, like marketing, sales, legal compliance. These things don’t necessarily scream, “This is my purpose,” but every business has to do it in order to succeed, and so like, “My purpose is not to be a salesman but I need to sell my business in order to fulfill my purpose.” So how do people look at some of these tasks and some of these things and understand when something becomes this distraction that’s really not serving the purpose versus, I’d say, a business necessary component of what you do, what you operate?
So, I think that to ask exactly the question that you asked, is this something that is essential to us existing as a living organization. We have to file our taxes, as my grandmother say. You must die and pay taxes. So we have to pay taxes. We need to engage in some type of market, really broadly, we must acquire customers in order to do that, but I think where you can start to be more specific is thinking about how those things fit in with helping you to fulfill your purpose. So, instead of we’re going to spray and pray our marketing, which, in sales, which most of us since the term exists, knows that that’s not the best way to do it, we know exactly who we serve, we’ve talked to them so we know what value to deliver to them and really being deliberate about getting out to those people because we don’t need to get out to everybody, we need to get out to the people that we actually serve and how do we go about doing that. Same looking internally, like you need to support your team so that they can do their best work. That is 100 percent one of the most important parts of being a purpose-driven business, it’s not noise at all. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the TV show, Merlin. It’s a favorite of mine —
Oh, no, I haven’t seen it yet but…
It’s fabulous. So it’s a retelling of the King Arthur myth, one of our most popular, but in this particular retelling, Merlin is the title character and they chose to make Merlin and Arthur the same age and they’re young, I would say somewhere between 15 and 18 but they don’t give a specific number. It’s fascinating because, and I’m writing an article about this right now, they talk about them as being two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist or succeed without the other. And the same is true for your business, like you can’t deliver value to the people you serve if you don’t have the team there to deliver that value effectively. So one must go with the other, which is a huge shift, I think.
Thinking about the difference between money being the goal and your purpose being the point of the business, that is a big shift for leaders right now. Click To Tweet
I think how we’ve taken care of our people for a lot of businesses has basically been noise, like, “Oh, we gotta do this, people won’t come to ping pong table,” like we have to do this or people won’t come here versus what I think people are really pushing back for right now, which is, “This needs to be a good use of my time or I’m not going to work here,” which is a totally different type of conversation.
One of the things that a lot of employees want, especially younger employees, are some sort of work-life balance or work-life integration, whatever term, I tend to not get hung up on terms more than just like what actually happens, like they want room to take part in other pursuits that they need for their own wellbeing, whether it be going out to exercise in the middle of the day or mental health resources has become a much bigger and bigger thing. And, at first glance, if you think about something from a purely profit-driven or purely revenue-driven model, you’d say, okay, taking care of an employee’s mental health, whether it be giving them balance or actually providing mental health resources through your health care plan is a pure just cost from the money-driven model. It’s a pure cost, it’s a purely just, “Oh, this is gonna sink us money,” and the whole thought about it is that is that just going to mitigate risk, is it a risk mitigator to put this mental health resource in here or not. But when you think about it from a purpose-driven model, you almost getting to blur the lines of the whole customers first versus employees first type of thing, where it says, okay, if you take care of the people, the people will then take care of your customers. And, in that case, it becomes a much different way of thinking about some of these, I guess, newer perks that employees, especially younger ones, are now starting to — I don’t want to say demand but really inquire about when they do look for jobs.
Absolutely. Someone got upset in a LinkedIn thread that I was going back and forth on in that I’m always happy to talk to people who are excited about what I’m saying and people who are not, because sometimes you learn more from the latter than you do from the former. But the conversation was about like, “I don’t get it, it’s entitlement, whatever,” and it’s like turn it around. Presumably, you hired these people, you brought them onto your team because you thought they were an A player and because you need their contributions in order to do and grow whatever it is that you do. Why would you not want to invest in their ability to do that the best way that they can? I mean, do you really think owners of sports teams aren’t bending over backwards to enable their athletes to perform at their absolute best level? Absolutely, they are, because that’s it, that’s the product, like I need you to win the game. And we can have like a cooperation versus competition conversation later but I think the metaphor is apt, like you won’t be successful in achieving your goals without the help of these people, and, presumably, you chose them because they’re bringing something valuable to you. So we get really excited about bringing them in the door but once people are hired, we move to this mechanical management mentality where they become a commodity that we sort of treat like a machine versus recognizing that there’s still a person and there’s a lot there to be invested in and invested and supported in a different way in some cases than we have in the past in order to help them be really successful and I think that’s only going to continue as more and more work shifts to being sort of knowledge-based work versus strictly like, “I sit here and I put the head of a pin on pins all day every day.” I do not degrade that work at all, like we need all types of work moving forward and I think sometimes we forget that, that all work can be purposeful and that person needs support also, that sort of original type of work, that original assembly line type of work has pushed us into that, when people only work for money and we need to make sure that they’re on and they’re doing their thing and they’re doing it as efficiently as possible versus saying this is human, they have contributions to make, how do I help them to do that most effectively that they want to make their contributions here to help fulfill our purpose, our shared purpose here as an organization versus going and giving their contributions to someone else?
Yeah. And it’s really interesting because one of the things that I always say about our work culture is that for a few decades failed to really process this transition from the assembly line, from machine-based work to knowledge-based work, which I honestly believe requires a different way of looking at things. In the assembly line, the value produced is a pretty much one-to-one ratio or one-to-one relationship to the number of hours you are there. That is until you get tired and collapse. Whereas in a knowledge-based economy, some of the work that we’re doing now, that’s not even nearly the case and having someone there from the same hours every day can be a hindrance depending on how a certain person’s circadian rhythm works, say. So I’m trying to understand this from other points of view and be more sympathetic, what do you think is going on in the minds of the people who are looking at some of these changes in the way we’re doing work, whether it be the remote work, whether it be the health and wellness benefits, all the things that they refer to as entitled, but have had a lot of experience in this old 20th century one-size-fits-all work environment and maybe even liked it? There might be some fear in some people’s psyche in there.
I think what you’re seeing 100 percent is that change is happening. There are those people that are like, “Whoa, change, I thrive on change, I’m gonna be the first person making the change,” but that’s like, typically, a fraction of people. Most of us are not wired that way. It’s uncomfortable and for those out there who thrive, “I come in, I do my job for 40 hours, if I want to get a promotion, I put in 50 or even 60 hours and that’s it and I work at this company for 40 years.” I think about my grandparents and how they looked at work and I took my paycheck home and I supported my family and that was an awesome thing and they were very comfortable in that concept and I think they look at some of what’s happening now and they’re like, “You should be working harder, you should be really appreciative that you have a job,” because, for them, that was hard just to have one and have one that paid sufficiently to take care of their family. But what’s interesting is, at the same time, they wanted my mother, their daughter, to go further and do better, and my mother did the same thing, “I want you to go further and do better, I want you to have a career or something that you love doing that also allows you to be independent,” taking care of the self piece didn’t go away so it’s woven in there but actually seeing the differences can be really uncomfortable and I think, specifically looking at managers and CEOs, which is usually where you see the most downing of the shift, I think for them, I wrote a piece about how micromanagement, how to have some empathy for that person, because they’ve been promoted because they had skills and talents.
They are struggling with the fact that, well, if I’m not monitoring your computer 24 hours a day, how do I know that you’re working? For someone like me, I’m like when the project doesn’t show up at the deadline, you’re gonna know. For them, it’s a fear, it’s an insecurity that things aren’t happy because that affects their day, it affects the respect of their team, it affects the organization’s ability to actually get things done, and you so intelligently pointed out that as we’re shifting to more knowledge work, even in businesses that are still manufacturing based or construction based or whatever, even in that, those are being supported by robotics technology and other things, how are we thinking about the fact that just because someone is logged into their computer between the hours of nine and five does not necessarily mean they did anything productive or effective, and how can we start to shift away from an output model, counting the things, the different things we did to an outcomes model, which is actually looking at the difference made by whatever it is that we did. Did you actually deliver the value or did you just go through motions? And I think that that’s going to require more trust on the part of leaders, in the people that work with and for them to be able to do the job and different types of controls and checkpoints to know if something has gone wildly off track because people confuse autonomy for, “I can do whatever I want whenever I want however I want.” It’s like not exactly. You should still be giving your people support, they should still have guidelines, they should still know where to go when I have a question, like throwing people into the deep end and being like, “Good luck,” is not really the right answer, but it is a different way of working, one I sort of loved since I started my first company.
And I think, for a long time, those were not necessarily the traits that we prioritized.
Leadership is something that people don’t really necessarily learn, it’s something you need to develop or, I guess, traditional instructional learning, I want to make the distinction between the learning by doing which is a more powerful but also more costly, I guess, way of learning because learning by doing means you try to start a business and it doesn’t work because you got distracted or you marketed to everyone and everything or you marketed to too few people, even though that’s less of a problem, frequently it can happen, versus the instructional learning, the traditional learning. So leadership seems like it’s mostly learned by doing and some people out there are still learning how to be a leader.
You’re spot on, there are different ways to learn and there are some things that no matter how many articles I give you on leadership traits, you’re just not going to know until you step up and give it a try. And I think that’s where sometimes team members can be quite scathing of their manager slash boss slash leader and it’s like sometimes that’s earned and deserved. Other times, it’s like give them some benefit of the doubt, they’re learning also. How do you do that together? Because there isn’t like a great way to do it other than to actually go and start trying to do it and to bring in mentors and advisors and hopefully other smart people to help balance out what you don’t know or even teach you what you don’t know so that you get that opportunity and mentorship, people who lead by example, so that when that manager moves up and you move into their role, you had something to watch all this time to say, “Oh, that’s actually how I should be, being comfortable mentoring others and leading by example.” I think it’s something that we like to say but don’t think about the time investment that actually goes into doing that versus a couple 100 bucks to go take this online course and you’re going to get this little certificate at the end. And I don’t mean to suggest that that’s a bad thing, learning that way, there are skills that can be learned that way, but recognizing that there are other things that don’t get learned as well that way and how do we make space for that, because in addition to, number one, being paid well, which I can’t leave out of this conversation, I think sometimes people want purposeful work so I can pay them less and it’s like no. First and foremost, you’ve got to pay them well for the time they invest in their work. Giving them purpose, where they’re doing work that really allows them to bring their skills to the table and be part of something bigger than themselves and gives them that time freedom that I think has really become one of the biggest benefits most people are looking for. The last piece that becomes really important is mastery over their skills. Every single person I interview to come on board to my team, one of the big things they will say that they want to be able to do is be in a position where they can learn and grow and try new things. So, if you’re not thinking about making that a priority beyond the, “We got a new machine so we have to teach everybody how to use the new machine,” which is, again, an essential thing you need to do but really thinking about what other skills, what other things are my people really itching to learn and how do I build a flexible model that allows me to get that out to my people so that, again, they can learn and grow here versus feeling like they have to leave in order to learn and grow.
I think we all want to feel like we’re on a path. One of the things that you mentioned is mentoring, and on this podcast, I also interview a lot more people who are coaches of some kind and the types of coaches has expanded from, I remember when I was a kid, you were either a business coach, a life coach — I think it was just those two categories actually, and now people can be like any type of coach. So when it comes to these ideas of coaching, mentoring, even therapists and stuff like that, in the world the way it is today, those types of things become more important as part of the human experience because I feel like, traditionally, those types of expenses have been given a lot more scrutiny than purchasing, say, the common material items that the 1990s and turn of the century culture, for example, would normally necessitate, like, “Oh, I’m gonna get my kitchen remodeled,” tends to be much more free flowing money than, “I’m gonna bring on a coach, a mentor, a therapist, someone to do that type of thing to really work on how I’m responding to situations, how I’m working.”
I think it depends drastically on who you are. Certainly, as business owners, that’s really up to me whether or not I choose to invest in that and whether or not I see it as a priority to invest in for my team or just something for myself or if they should be doing that. So I think you get a very different sort of range of looking at that across the board. Looking at it as far as is this something that we should be doing as a society and/or work community, I would say yes. One of my long-term fascinations is with learning in general. I was the world’s biggest nerd. Best day of the year every year was the first day of school. I’m there with my new outfit and my backpack and my freshly sharpened Ticonderoga number 2 pencils, ready to go, man, like love going to school.
The Ticonderogas.
Oh, got to have it, man, because it’s just not really a pencil otherwise. So ready to go, loved going, and one of the things that struck me as I sort of went through and I pursued an MFA so I went through school pretty long, traditional school was what happens when I’m done going to school? Like how do I keep learning all of the things that I probably should be learning or being exposed to because the world is going to keep changing? Even what I studied in school, in some cases, is no longer the way that it’s actually being done. There are options and opportunities that were not covered in the course material because they didn’t exist at the time that it was covered. So, what does that mean? And we know, and I cannot remember where I read this, that one of the best forms of instruction is one on one. So, how do we start to feel comfortable saying that, actually, we’re really committed not only to having a great workforce but a great society, how do we make that more available? And I don’t have a brilliant answer to the underlying question, which is how do you make that more affordable, a big piece of that, hence why MOOC courses, that big trend there for a while because it was cheaper but not necessarily better learning or targeted to where you are and what you need to work on. I myself delayed investing in a coach for quite a while and it’s one of the few sort of mistakes, true mistakes that I made as a business leader, like took me stepping back and saying, “Where are the people who I’m sort of identifying as successful? What are they doing that I’m not doing?” One of the most overwhelming trends was like they all have a coach and I don’t so I probably should go get one of those and I consider him now like the leader of my A team and I’m much more comfortable being like I’m building a team around me because this idea that I’m going to do it all myself is pretty much a fallacy as far as being successful and helping me to grow and see things that I didn’t see. So I’m hoping that that trend continues to grow and that people feel comfortable doing that and that we can find ways to do it that are still effective, still compensate the person doing the coaching fairly but open it up more to people who have different budgetary availability to make that investment.
It is always a challenge because most coaches are people who have a lot of experience, have a lot to offer, and one on one is always going to be a little bit more pricey because being in class with 10 people, and even think about an example of a yoga class, someone can charge 10 bucks a class and have 10 people and they’re still making 100 bucks but if you can give a one on one to get 100 bucks an hour, well —
You got to pay it.
— charge that one person, and then there are some coaching models, of course, that do really well with that kind of group learning environment, but like you said, there are some things that need to be one on one because what works for one person doesn’t really work for another person. And I’m guessing that’s why it would be missing the point to just say like, okay, when it comes to distractions, here’s a list of the 10 most common distractions that people encounter that caused them to waste time in their businesses.
Yeah, that would be hard because what’s a distraction for my business may not be a distraction for yours because your purpose is different. But I think if we look at it at an individual level, I think we can certainly find some key themes, like the overpowering notification noise, we’ve all been trained like Pavlov’s dog, that bing goes off, we’re like, “What does it say?”
Oh my God, I need to check my Slack right away even though I’m like cooking dinner right now. Yeah.
I’m a tech minimalist. Some people are just like, “Well, you’re backwards.” I’m like, it’s not about being backwards. Technology is a tool. If it’s not helping me to achieve what I need to achieve, then it probably doesn’t need to be here, continuing to review, do I need all this tech, do I not. Following that adage of turning off your notifications so that you choose to check versus it telling you when to check is a huge one. I leave mine off most of the time, I turn the thing that turns my email off so I don’t see the things coming in so that when I sit down to say, “Okay, it’s checking my email time,” that was my choice. That’s definitely the whole technology sphere. I think it’s fascinating. And then thinking about the other piece that I have been working to deal with is identifying and working on those things that, just like a business, presumably you have goals you need to achieve and being able to have systems for yourself of, “Oh, but I just read about this cool idea and I think it’s really exciting,” like put it in your idea pen, review those quarterly, like whatever your system is for making sure that you don’t take yourself away from the doing, because ideas are awesome, execution is better to keep moving things forward.
Yeah. Anyone can have an idea, and if you have an idea, it’s likely someone else has had it at some point.
And even if they do, there are so many and recognizing that even though I think some people look at our time and they say, “Well, life’s pretty good,” like, yeah, but it can always be better. Like there are so many ideas, there are so many opportunities, your ability to launch a website, send email, even build an app, like everything has become so much more accessible whether you have particular skills or not, it can be and it’s one of my — I almost said technology — just the abundance of ideas is one of the biggest distractions for just individuals, let alone businesses, to sticking with whatever it is they chose long enough to determine if it’s working or not.
I think so many things don’t come to fruition because we didn’t see instantaneous results or something shinier came along. Click To Tweet
The world moves at a really fast pace, especially like when you talk about the school stuff, I don’t think anyone had a class in college called Blockchain 101. You do have to give things the right amount of time to see, as you said, see if it’s going to work. In your business, what types of organizations do you typically engage with?
So we like to look at organizations that have big ideas. They’re people that serve other people and they’re typically working in a distributed fashion, whether that’s between multiple physical locations, physical and virtual locations, or totally virtual, and they have a team of somewhere between 30 and 1,000 people.
Okay, so you have that niche size, essentially.
We can work with large organizations but we’ve been focusing on some of the smaller ones first to make sure that it works there. And the reason that I get excited personally, and this is a personal choice, other people could go out and deal with the bigger as we grow, but I love working with smaller teams because you have so much more opportunity to refocus the entire ship versus the larger and larger the organization gets, the harder and harder it is to be like, “Wow, you got noise all over the place, it’s gonna take years to try to get this course corrected,” versus smaller teams usually can do it more rapidly and more thoroughly and, admittedly, it’s more satisfying to see them reap all the benefits versus a fraction of them.
And with this course correction, is this something that’s a continuing struggle, like, for example, you could get your ship right, be like, okay, we eliminated these five things or however many things there are that are really distracting us, taking up our time unnecessarily, but then like 18 months later, something else comes up or 18 months later, the world changes in a way where to serve the purpose that you want to serve, suddenly, what you were doing in September 2022 is not really working well in March 2024?
Yep. So, great question, one so often not asked is that, one, when we work with organizations, it’s very common to do this type of work with the C-suite and then it’s like, “Dictate that down and have a great time.” We don’t. We actually build working groups of all their stakeholders so there’s a working group of the people you serve, there’s a team working group, there’s a leadership working group, and if you have another stakeholder group that’s really important to you, perhaps funders or donors if you’re a nonprofit, or even partners, that’s a really big piece of your model so that as we’re implementing MatterLogic, this different way of thinking and running our business, we’re doing that with input from all of these different groups and all of these different groups are getting the learning, the skill expansion to be able to use the logic once our team leaves. One of the big pieces of that is looking at their decision making process. Do we make decisions in line with our purpose or not? Because if you really think about a business, it’s a collective group of people making decisions every day, because you take no action without a decision first. And the other piece that we work to give them is what we call calibration, which is what you do monthly, quarterly, annually, and every three years to make sure that you’re engaging these different groups, that you’re continuing to get input, and that you’re adjusting accordingly to make sure that you’re staying aligned around what it is that you’re here to do with purpose, you’re here to fulfill.
Nice, and if someone listening right now has an organization, 30 to 1,000 people, and would like to get a hold of you or hear more about your business, what will be the best way for someone to contact you or learn more?
The best way to get a hold of me personally is to find me on LinkedIn. You’ll find that I’m probably wearing a black shirt on a white background so I should be pretty easy to find. I will absolutely take messages. If you say, “Hey, I heard you on this podcast,” I will make sure that beyond my usual 15 minutes, I will give you a full 45 minutes to talk about your business, what you’re doing, and what I can do to help you within the span of 45 minutes or beyond. That’s the best way to find me. But if you want to learn a little bit more about MatterLogic as well, please feel free to visit www.matterlogic.co. We’ve actually put a lot of our thoughts, most of the system up online so that people can access it and learn more about it as you choose.
Nice, and then one final question, because we’ve talked about some trends, we’ve talked about how people are looking at work differently. What do you see the world looking like, say, 15 years from now, if your mission and the mission of the people you work with and a lot of similarly aligned people were to continue to make some progress?
I think there’s a couple of trends emerging, when this will all come and take shape, 15 years may not be enough time, but looking at two particular things. One, I think starting to see work as everything we do, anything that we invest our time in and takes effort is work. Whether you’re doing it for pay, you’re supporting your family, you’re investing in a hobby, it all takes your time and effort and starting to look at life as all of those things versus continuing to try to look at work and our other crap as if they were completely different things —
All in buckets.
Yeah, because they’re not, they’re all taking your time, which is what makes up your life, ultimately. And the second trend that I see emerging and I think if we were successful would be continuing is how we actually look at individual workers and instead of seeing them as this faceless, “That’s our human capital,” sort of mechanical approach, seeing them as actual individuals and that these are — much like the Star Wars Rebel Alliance versus the Empire, that these people are choosing to come, they’re choosing to contribute to our organization, and how do we treat them whether that’s because they actually are subcontractors, when sort of this traditional employee sort of frame starts to fade away, or because we’re simply treating them differently regardless of the legal structure. We start to see that coming together of individuals into a group as opposed to this kind of machine that we’ve been building with people involved where necessary is a trend that I hope continues.
Well, I certainly hope it continues as well, because cog in a wheel, as an ENFP, that doesn’t really resonate well with me. But, Katie, I would like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. And I would also like to thank everybody out there listening, tuning into Action’s Antidotes, encourage you to tune into some more episodes and continue to follow on the story of bringing people to the place where they’re more likely to be doing the things that they really want to be doing or the things they choose to show up to as opposed to the things they feel like they’re obligated to do.
Thank you so much for having me.
Excellent. Have a fantastic day, everybody.
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About Katie Burkhart
Katie Burkhart is the mastermind behind MatterLogic™, the simple system for running a purpose-driven business, and has quickly become one of the go-to experts in the space. She’s a serial entrepreneur, unbook author, keynote speaker, and jargon slayer. She synthesizes connections to make the most of the time we invest in our work. Connect with her on LinkedIn, subscribe to her newsletter, and get her Weekly Brief.