What Holds Us Together When Everything Pulls Us Apart with Matt Poepsel

[INTRODUCTION]

"Matt Poepsel: We've tried to move so quickly, or we're just not connecting the dots well enough that even the good stuff is sort of eroding out from underneath us." 

Alex Cullimore: Hello, Cristina.

Cristina Amigoni: Hello, happy Friday.

Alex Cullimore: Happy Friday, we are recording on a Friday anyway. the ground. We just had a great interview with our guest, Matt Poepsel, who is just a fascinating thinker, a great researcher, and really great at breaking down complex ideas into very pieces. That was one of the most, I think, accelerated bits of understanding I've had in 40 minutes.

Cristina Amigoni: yes, exactly. he starts with a concept and the gears start moving. what does that mean? And how does it apply? And then he breaks it down. yeah, it's this, this and this and this and this and this. And now I can see where it's present, where it's absent, where the gaps are, how it helps with the benefits, with the cost of not having that is very fascinating.

Alex Cullimore: It's like, hyper-processed food, but in a good way. It's easier to digest.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yes. It's like hyper-processed food from organic land. ⁓ it is just pasta and tomatoes. I get it.

Alex Cullimore: ideas about how. so it really was just water and flour the whole time. We could have made this so much easier.

Cristina Amigoni: And flour yes! Even though it tastes like it's days and days and days of work.

Alex Cullimore: The culture of convenience is actually something we talked about a lot on this podcast talking about the idea of when that helps us and how we might be better at using that more intentionally instead of letting that run away from us and letting entropy start to define how we exist and how we start to separate. It's a fascinating conversation. I would hate to spoil any piece of it.

Cristina Amigoni: yeah, definitely. Go listen. us. Listen to him.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, mean, what are you guys doing?

Cristina Amigoni: We try not to talk a lot in this one, so.

Alex Cullimore: Enjoy!

Cristina Amigoni: Enjoy.


[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. We are joined by our guest today, Matt Poepsel. Welcome to the podcast, Matt. 

Matt Poepsel: Thanks for having me, Alex, Cristina. Great to see you. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, great to see you again. We were on your podcast recently, so this is a nice exchange. 

Matt Poepsel: It is. It is. Love to get to know you, and looking forward to today's conversation. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Tell us more about yourself. What would you like to share? 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah, a little bit about myself. I had a military background starting out, so six years in the Marine Corps. And that was pretty formative time for me. So I kind of learned the rules of the road, so to speak, my first real adult job. That was an exciting time. And I remember just really being impressed by leadership development and the nature of working very close-knit with other people to try to accomplish some pretty important things. And I thought, well, adulthood's not that bad. 

But when I got out and went to the civilian world, I was ready to continue my leadership training. And I wasn't emphasized quite as much as I might have expected. I kind of had to continue my own self-study, but I'll tell you that I just really fell in love with the people dynamics, people working together to accomplish really important things that never left me. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, that's super interesting. I would never have thought about that contrast, but it makes sense. There's probably a lot more structured thought going to put into that in a lot longer-term. Corporation, essentially. 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah, I had to think about it a lot because what I realized is that if you're in the service, you can't just go out and put out a want ad, job wanted to kind of – help wanted ad and go find somebody from another branch of the service, even. You have to promote from within. You have to develop from within. That's why I get so much emphasis. But you have very young people in charge of some really big decisions. And I think that's also a big part of it. But it's unfortunate. 

I think that we probably used to do a lot more formal leadership training in the past. I hear about IBM Academy, and GE had this major campus. And I'm like, "Where to let stuff go?" And, yeah, I think it shows today, too, to be quite honest. 

Matt Poepsel: Oh, it definitely does. It definitely does. I would say there's – well, yes, a bunch of young people who've made big decisions in the outside of the service as well, and they could use a little more training. 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah, when I was coming up, life seemed a lot simpler when I first got out and the Internet was really just kind of becoming a thing. I've been around that long. As I continued on, I really continued to study high-stakes environments, right? So when you think about the military fire service, all these kinds of things. And now I feel like every environment is a high-stakes environment. There's so much changing and so much rawness, and the stakes are so high everywhere that I feel like we're all kind of living in this very trauma-centric, high-stakes, walking a tightrope environment. But we don't have the fortune of having that leadership development from such an early formative stage. And that's where I think we get ourselves into trouble. 

Alex Cullimore: What are some of the bigger gaps you notice or bigger contrasts as you stepped out and were like, "Oh, hey, something's not here?" 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah. Mission was one, because pretty much everybody certainly that I served with was really committed to understanding at least the umbrella picture of why you're here. And you would start to really – you would get silly job assignments. We always had that, scraping rust off of something. But it's important. But it doesn't mean it was enjoyable. So it's not like it was an entirely cakewalk the whole time. 

But I think everybody had a sense of purpose and intentionality for national defense or whatever it might have been. And when I got to the civilian world, I thought, "Okay, I can just kind of take a smaller mission at a software company that I was working at. Everybody must be –" No. It just doesn't automatically happen. Yeah. What just happened? So now it's like you had to work artificially hard to sort of give and communicate that sense of purpose, something that I just kind of took for granted. That was another big one, Alex. 

Alex Cullimore: That absolutely makes sense. 

Cristina Amigoni: That's a huge one. Yes. Yeah. It's not that every task has to become a Nobel Peace Prize type of task. That's not what mission is. But do we all understand why we're doing this? Do we all understand how we can connect with each other to do this? And are we all marching in the same direction? Either it changes every three seconds in organizations a lot, or every department has something different. Every leader has something different that they're communicating. It's assumed. I'm like, "Well, yeah, we've got a poster. Read the poster." It's a lot more than that. It takes a lot more than that. 

Matt Poepsel: I was particularly frustrated once because it was like Friday night. We just failed, I should say, inspection. So we're scraping paint off the floor, anything, just small stuff, because some general was probably maybe going to glance at the building at some point. You find yourself in these situations where you get a little bit frustrated. And I had a sergeant come in and this is early in my tenure. And he said, "Marine, whether you're cleaning your weapon or you're washing that window, every act you take while you are in the service is an act of national defense." And I thought, "Whoa." Now, later on, I was like, "Yeah, right." 

But in the moment, you're kind of like, "Wow, could you imagine if you would approach everything that you do and just really think of it?" And he wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong. But it was just you had to kind of use your imagination perhaps, and some of those. But I think we've come so far away from that now that even today, I find that employees, in many cases, team members, and team leaders will feel like I'm doing really important work, but I feel so disconnected from the why that even the important stuff is becoming transactionalized. 

We've tried to move so quickly, or we're just not connecting the dots well enough that even the good stuff is sort of eroding out from underneath us, much less that we're training leaders how to constantly make sure people locally see themselves and their contributions in the context of the bigger win for the company or the stakeholders, whatever it might be. 

Alex Cullimore: One thing that I really enjoyed about kind of following your work is you talk a lot about some things like cultural entropy and how things tend to drift. And there's kind of this natural tendency towards that. And I'm curious how that relates back to this. Because in my mind, it feels like that why helps create some kind of container sometimes and it does feel like it's missing often. I'm wondering how much you feel like that has contributed to things like the entropy that you talk about. 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah, I think there is a default state in every system to move toward disorder. It's just how systems work. Things get more complex and we lose energy efficiency to heat in physical systems. And it was only recently that I really started to see this parallels, if you will, with human systems. And the same phenomena holds up. If we do nothing, then our organizations, over time, they begin to break apart. 

And what you find is that as organizations get bigger, that means there's more complexity, there's more opportunity for erosion. larger companies tend to fragment faster than smaller companies for that reason. And that cultural sort of identity, that energy, that magnetism that we can have, again, if we do nothing over time, you'll lose that culture. You have to constantly replenish it by hiring right. You have to reinforce it. 

As soon as you start promoting the wrong people because they're acting countercultural to your values, or if you fail to promote people who are good stewards of that culture, it speaks a lot louder. And over time, you realize that what you work so hard to build, assuming you did it all, can be lost. 

Alex Cullimore: It's a big assumption. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. 

Matt Poepsel: It's where that entropy sets in is that entropy is undefeated, right? There's no way to do it. But we can hold ourselves together. If you do things like we're talking about now, which is build that culture, that can insulate us a little bit. It's been a fun part of the research just to understand and try to find out what does hold us together in a world that's trying to pull us apart. 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, have you found what does hold us together? 

Matt Poepsel: It's interesting. The things that hold us together can be fast and free. But the biggest problem that I see, Cristina, is that we just don't necessarily tend to think in systems. We tend to think very linearly. We like to have things that are neat and tidy, but they don't necessarily represent reality. 

So a lot of times, if you think about a big product launch, or the end of some process, or a building goes up, we think about that very linearly. Like, "Oh. Okay." Well, let's stick with the building for a second. So there was just a flat land. We had to dig out the foundation, build the building. Okay, great. It looked pretty linear over the course of a couple of years, perhaps. But in reality, it was this constant cycle of decision, and feedback, and trial, and pivot, and change, and it's very loopy. It's almost like very wave, like trying to get there. It wasn't just a straight line by any stretch. 

I think that when we look a little bit deeper at what's actually happening, then we start to get an appreciation for how things really work and what causes problems, inefficiencies, misalignment, competing goals, frustrated workers, people withdrawing their energy. Today, people feeling burned out and frustrated, people feeling that their manager is acting out of their own self-interest, "So I don't trust you anymore. So I'm going to turn to AI to get my coaching." 

There's a thousand examples of things that are happening that on their own, they don't make a lot of sense. But when you step back, and you look at the system, you're like, "Oh my gosh, the system's doing exactly what systems do." And that was the first. It's not altogether comfortable, but it is the first step towards freedom, and liberation, and fixing things is to understand why this is happening. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, I can definitely see that being maybe less comfortable. Jumping into the idea that like, "Oh, wait. Oh, this is actually functioning as it essentially was intended, even if it wasn't intended that way. This is the natural outcome." How do you help bridge that gap for people? That's not an easy thing to do. Like you said, it's not common to necessarily think in systems. It's helpful, but not necessarily common. And it is uncomfortable. How do you help people step into systems? 

Matt Poepsel: It is. And I think that at the same time, it's almost like if you sat down to play a game that you had never played before, the very first question you would ask is, "How do we play? What are the rules?" Otherwise, if you just sat down and start passing cards or rolling dice, you wouldn't just randomly do things and hope for the best. You would want to know, like, "How does this set of work?" 

But the problem is that recently, all the rules have changed. When we start looking at new generations who've come in, when we start looking at a shift to remote and hybrid work, when we think about the pressure, the economic headwinds, now the rise of AI adoption, what about talent shortages, what about all kinds of things like this? It has fundamentally changed the rules of the game. 

It's a twofold problem. One is that if we think we know how the game works and we haven't realized that the rules changed on us halfway, that's a problem. And then the second is if we just ever take the time to learn them at all, we're going to be frustrated when we don't get to experience winning, right? That's a huge part of it. 

And the thing that you said, Alex, it's really, really important here is that entropy, I think, is such an important concept, but one that's often poorly understood. We don't really talk about it much outside of seventh-grade physics, or ninth-grade, or whenever we took physics. 

Alex Cullimore: Where they define it once. 

Matt Poepsel: You define it once. You kind of move on. But the reality is when you think about what's happening in terms of how it feels, it feels like we're drifting apart. I talk to so many people who say, "You know what, you're describing something that explains what we're experiencing." We're feeling like disconnected from one another. We feel like Zoom is a poor substitute in real life. We feel like we're just seeing families move halfway across the country. We're seeing jobs that we follow the job, and then all of a sudden the connectivity isn't there. But we're not active in our communities either because there's so much great stuff on Netflix. 

And we don't realize that these things, these modern conveniences, being able to order anything you want to have it show up in your doorstep in 24 hours, these things are all nice and convenient, but they also have a side effect that is of reducing that sort of connective tissue. And so we feel that separation, but we don't have a word for it. Now, when we talk about entropy, that's an important first step. 

But the second step is to recognize that not only is entropy a thing, we've actually entered what I call the entropy economy. Because the reality is now the companies that do best are the ones that serve the needs we have that are unfortunately driving us into even more isolation and comfort. 

When you have unlimited content streaming to your TV, and you've got anybody who'll bring you food, DoorDash, you don't have to go to a restaurant and make eye contact with other people. They'll just drop it on the doorstep while you hide in the basement. You're like, "Wait a second. Hold on." What's happening to our human experience? 

And so I think people, it's not a coincidence that at the same time that we see that there's more of this isolationism than ever that we're seeing loneliness creep in as an epidemic in our society right now. And I think it's because there is this by-product, this separation, this distancing that's naturally there. 

I feel like we've reached a tipping point where the future is all about trying to get your work done with AI agents, to have every convenience met, to retreat into this seemingly convenient world, but one that's depriving us of some of that connectivity that we need happening in our homes. It's happening in our offices. It's happening in our communities. It's happening in our families. It's just happening. 

It's not that we have to go backwards. We don't have to stop this. I'm not going to cancel my Amazon Prime subscription by any means. But I think raising awareness that A, the rules of the game has changed. And B, it's only going to continue to accelerate. To answer your earlier question, when we're talking to leaders, that's the awareness. That's the education that has to happen first. We have to start seeing what's happening if we want to have a shot at doing something about it. 

Alex Cullimore: Appreciate then. 

Cristina Amigoni: There is this connection everywhere. But it's interesting because I think there is a way to use all these tools and conveniences without having to go backwards so that we can spend more time connecting, so that we can spend more of the energy connecting because we now don't have to do all these other things that drain our energies in other way. 

Matt Poepsel: That is true. I think there is that possibility, for sure. I don't know that we're at a stage yet where we're taking that. I think I've seen research recently that talks about how the people who are the most prolific users of AI are not getting that time back. It's actually getting worse. They're driving even higher levels of productivity, energy drain, and commitment. 

I don't think it's going to last forever, but I do think these are early days, and I think we have to be mindful about it. We just have to be mindful about where the energy is going and the effect that it's having on us, for sure. 

And part of the reason that this is so important is because whether you come down on the side of productivity and you want to have – and you think business is an engine, for example, organizations are engines for getting things done, the reality is that when we fall prey to entropy and we get pulled apart and this distance creeps into our collectivism, then it's inefficient. 

What happens is more of the available energy gets lost to what I call corrective effort as opposed to beneficial effort. So instead of being able to just pour all of our energies into doing the job we're all collectively working to do, now we've got to fall back and say, "Wait a second. We're misaligned in this way." Or now all of a sudden we've got this competing goal, or there's some feedback or communication breaking down. All that energy is almost like a tax, all that corrective tax that we pay. It's less efficient when we allow distance to creep in, when we don't stay really tightly coupled, if you will. 

But for organizations that really stay tighter, I like to call them this tightness, this tightness in the loops that we create and that we represent in our teams, they are much, much more efficient. And that, going back to my military experience, was something I lived at the time, but didn't appreciate, was how we trained specifically to stay in really close quarters and really communicate and be able to finish each other's sentences because we didn't know what was going to happen, the uncertainty, the high stakes, the danger. We had to invest in making sure that we had that cohesion up front so that we'd be ready for it when we needed it, right? I think that's something that now I appreciate a heck of a lot more. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it, that corrective energy. And we see that happen all the time. We usually describe that as just kind of friction within the organization. You end up with these things. And then it's harder not only just to feel like you have to take the step back to do the correction, but people have been so trained that like, "Well, I got to make this goal i got to do this by the end of the quarter," that even if they are misaligned and now there's two different versions of the goal moving at the same time, both really just want to continue on their path and don't want to take the time to go back, much less try and merge, much less try and figure out what they missed. 

There's so much emphasis on go get to the outcome that it ends up driving the entropy even more. And now you drive the disconnection, you drive the silos, you end up with people who are truly dedicated to different goals within the same organization. And now that engine is just banging cylinders against itself. 

Matt Poepsel: Happens all the time. And it's one of those things where when we allow sort of separation to enter into the freight, now we give rise to all those types of things. Competing goals create self-interest. And all of a sudden it's like, "Well, I'm in sales. I'm marketing. Well, my job in marketing is to give leads. So I'm going to drive up the lead count." And the sales are like, "Well, those leads are terrible." Just because you're hitting your goal, how can you be green on your dashboard and I'm red on mine? So instead I'm going to do this other thing. You're like, "Whoa, look at all these energy that's moved away from the cohesive collective goal." 

And instead, we need to understand that everything in any system like this, whether it's the pressure to hit the number at the end of the month, like a sales target, creates pressure, it creates dispersion, it creates distancing. That's the natural thing that's going to happen. But as humans, we have to be bright enough to say, "Okay, how do we actually combat this? What's the counterforce to this?" 

I like to say what's the gravity that draws us back together so that we don't drift apart, right? And that's where we start to see that there are actual forces that can sort of make up that gravity, if you will. And that's what I've really enjoyed most about some of the more recent research that I've been doing. 

Cristina Amigoni: What are those forces? Because we need to bottle them up and just spray them – 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah, let's do that. 

Cristina Amigoni: – everywhere. 

Alex Cullimore: How do we DDT this? 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. 

Matt Poepsel: Wouldn't that be great? Just fumigate the plane. 

Cristina Amigoni: Just from the helicopters or the planes. 

Alex Cullimore: We're going to crop dust this everywhere. 

Matt Poepsel: I know. Well, I'll tell you the first one that I found that I probably hadn't expected is hope. It's hope. And when you put a group of people together, if they have no hope that they're going to be successful, it's not going to work very well. So to me, whether it's an experienced team, whether it's a new team, I don't care if it's a sales team, I don't care if it's a pickup basketball league, whatever. Anytime you get humans together, they're going to have to work together and make some level of sacrifice to achieve a common goal, right? That's what most of leadership is. I think it has to start with hope. 

Now, hope in the research has always talked about two things. One is agency. Do I feel like I can make progress and contribute towards making this future outcome that we want possible? And the second is pathways. Can I see how we're going to get there? And so immediately we run into a problem. Because when you think about today – 

Cristina Amigoni: I'm going to say both things are very missing in a lot of teams. 

Matt Poepsel: My gosh. It's unfortunate, but it's true. And when you think about – so AI adoption. We're going to increase our productivity because now we've got all these AI tools we just invested in on January 1st. Isn't it going to be amazing? And the employees say, "No. It's not going to be amazing. It's scary as hell. And you're being vague. And I don't know what you want. You're just telling me to mandate that I'm using these tools, but I don't understand why or how it's going to help. I don't understand why you want it." 

And all of a sudden, now, if you ask the average employee and a team, and I have a team member, what gives you hope about your future state that you're working toward? They're like, "I don't even have clarity about where we're going, much less hope that we're going to get there." 

So when that happens, now all of a sudden entropy wins. Now we're a little further apart. Now, all of a sudden, things are a little less effective, a little less efficient, right? So that's why we've got to start with hope. We have to understand where we're going and make sure everybody can see their own sort of role in helping us get to that future state. That's the first one for sure. 

Alex Cullimore: I appreciate that you brought out the AI example because that feels exactly like a thing currently that has removed agency and pathways. Nobody is quite sure how they're using it. There's no pathways. And most people don't feel like they have a say in it. They just are asked to do things, like, "Oh, go use it." That is such a perfect example, which I think is incredibly prevalent from the – just anecdotally on LinkedIn, you can just see the overwhelm. And you can feel it in organizations when you're in organizations that are trying to do AI adoption. It is the thing that is currently thwarting both of those. 

Matt Poepsel: And when you read the executive reports, and you say, "Okay, I saw that your company's investing heavily in AI, you're telling the street about it. You're all excited about how it's going to help your EPS, your earnings per share, and all this good stuff." And then you go to the employees on the floor and say, "Yeah, I read this." And they're like, "Yeah, I don't believe that. I have no idea." There's a disconnect happening, right? 

And so I feel like the things that we're talking about today are fast and free. It doesn't take a long time to communicate a message or a direction, a vision, a mission, whatever you want to call it, and to help your employees see their role in it, and to answer any questions where you think you've communicated but they haven't received it. And communication is always determined by the receiver, not the sender. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yes. We say that a lot. 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah, you say that a lot. But I think that doing that, to a reasonable degree, is fast and free. And yet, if we don't do it, we're already stumbling right out of the blocks, right? That's a huge problem. That's the first one. 

And so the second force that comes in after that is mutuality. We've got lots of people working together toward a common aim. But are we all contributing in equal measure? And are we all going to benefit an equal measure? And that doesn't mean that it's all the same, right? I don't expect the CEO to be paid the same as somebody who's an entry-level worker or an individual contributor. But I think equally or an equal measure, I should say, that's important. 

And so a lot of what's happening here, too, is when you see a failure of mutuality, that's where distrust seeps in, that's where hesitation, psychological safety gets hurt, all the bad things happen. And where that's happening now, we can continue on with AI, where a lot of employees are saying, "I see what's in it for you as the employer, you're going to write me out of a job and improve your profitability." Okay. But what about another one? What about return to office? Is return to office mandates, are these landing evenly on all employees, right? No. 

Alex Cullimore: Not once in any of the ones we've seen. 

Matt Poepsel: No. Now all of a sudden we're like, we're failing the second test, which is around mutuality. When we start to say that not everyone's impacted equally, and when we take any sort of a broad brush stroke approach to this, then all of a sudden someone's going to get impinged. 

And I'm not saying that it's fair for the executives to feel a level of discomfort of saying, like, "If I can't see you, I don't know that you're working. I've heard horror stories." Somebody I play golf with it at the country club told me that one of their people was folding laundry on a company meeting. I don't know. It's all kinds of weird things happening out there. 

But whenever there's some sort of misattribution about employers saying, "Well, employees are lazy, and they'll take advantage." Or when employees say, "Well, employers are just money-grubbing, and they just want profits, and they don't really care about us," neither of those are universally true. But the misattribution happens when we don't understand how the game works, how the system works. 

So when we start to recognize that, "Oh, entropy itself, these forces of all the things we've been talking about are naturally going to pull us apart only by restoring mutuality and being transparent and understanding how can we make concessions on either side that assuage the other party." Again, it's not always going to be in perfect balance, but it needs to find its level. That's where we move past the misattributions and all of a sudden start to partner with one another, all the sides. 

The same thing happens, for example, inside of all teams. Let's say you have a marketing team, right? You have lots of different roles on a marketing team. Well, all of a sudden, how do we start to understand how each party gets to contribute in a way that is respected, and recognized, and valued, and all these things? If we feel lack of mutuality, somebody's playing favorites, all of a sudden, the distance between us is absolutely going to grow. 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, and as you said, like a big problem with whether it's return to office or any of the other rules of the game, even if there are rules, there's always exceptions. And that's where that disconnection, that mutuality is missing, all of that it's missing because we're in a hiring freeze. Well, but that department can do whatever they want. Or we have a return to office, and everybody has to be in the office three times a week, and then the executives are never there. So it's like, that doesn't actually work. You can't do that. 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah, and if I go all the way back to things that happened to me instinctively in my military training, I was part of this six-man special forces team. Didn't really think much about it. I became what's known as the mule. That means I could carry the most weight. I carried the batteries. I carried most of the water, more than the other team members did. Why? Because I was able to. Physically, that's what I could do. Guess what? That was my contribution to the team at that time was to be the mule. 

At that point, did I complain and say, "Well, how come everybody's not carrying equal?" That wouldn't have made any sense. We couldn't have moved as quickly together. It wouldn't have been as safe or as effective if we had. So instead, because I was so committed to the team concept, I knew that part of my job at that time was to be the mule. And mules do what mules do, right? 

It was still mutual in that example, because I wasn't as good at the time at navigation. The navigator was responsible for making sure we didn't get lost. It's like, "Okay, great." I had fewer responsibilities in one area, but more than another. It's like that's how the team doesn't have to be the same, equitable, that whole thing. But I feel like mutuality was established because we understood our strengths, our roles, our contribution. We were respected for it. Fast forward to today, though, even in a much simpler environment, no. That doesn't happen. 

Cristina Amigoni: And the respect piece is a big thing, especially if we go back to something you said much earlier in our conversation about how we're gravitating towards self-gravitating. We're probably getting Academy Awards and nominations for self-interest at this point. There's just almost like an active destruction of mutuality. There's an active destruction of like teams coming together because it's all about me. It's like I was hired. I need to show that I was hired for a reason. I have to provide value. So I'm going to destroy everything around us so that I can see, like, "See, I made the change." 

Alex Cullimore: Right. I think that exactly creates misattribution too. That's a ripe environment for misattribution. If you think it's about you and you want to do things, then it's so much easier to write off other people's initiatives, other people's incentives, other people's desires. Everything that they have decided to do, it's much easier to ignore and much easier to say, "Well, they're just acting against the mission," when you just decide the mission is what I've decided. 

Matt Poepsel: And it's a double whammy, to be fair. And I think, again, if we take a step back and look at how the game is played or the system itself, we're in a society where we're constantly bombarded more than any other nation on the planet with messaging about the way life is supposed to be. How comfortable? How big our 401(k) is supposed to be? What we're supposed to drive? And all these types. It's a very sort of consumer-driven message. 

And again, it's made us what it is, not a problem. It's not a judgment, but just saying that that gets in there. And so all of a sudden, we're like, "Okay, I have to be promoted at a certain rate, or I have to make a certain amount, or whatever." So that's the external drive. The internal drive is fear and anxiety. All of a sudden, whenever my fear spikes, because it doesn't even have to be there reliance at my company, I just go on LinkedIn. I read the headlines. It's scary. 

And now all of a sudden, when I'm afraid, I'm scared, all of a sudden, I'm going to hoard knowledge. I'm going to try to shout up my accomplishment. So everybody knows I'm adding a ton of value here, people. Look at me, right? And then all of a sudden, somebody else who's a little less extroverted is feeling, "Oh, man, I'm getting overlooked." And then now this is how that distancing, that entropy is winning when that happens. 

Whether it's coming from the outside and we're just constantly saying this is what life is supposed to you like, or it's coming from the inside of fear and anxiety about holding on to what we have, both are bad. I mean, both, they're not bad, but they just create these counterproductive behaviors. They're not contributing to this counterforce we need that draws us together. And they're actually feeding into the entropy that pulls us apart. 

Alex Cullimore: That's a great example. You don't even need to see layoffs happening within – that's a good example of how social media has created this idea of connectedness without the actual connection. Then we have this idea, and it happens for executives. They all look around at other companies, like, "Oh, everybody's adopting AI. We have to adopt AI." Or employees looking around like, "Oh, everybody else is getting laid off. We're going to get laid off." It happens at any level. But all you have to do is look and see the stories. And then you imagine the translation to your life. And whether it's happening or not, it just feels like that. And then we seem connected because we're seeing what's happening at other places, but we're not actually connected to the context of those. We're naturally disconnected from that context. 

Matt Poepsel: And what you're looking at is through sort of a fun house mirror of the algorithm, which is going to show you two things. One, it's is going to show you things that this is what life is supposed to be like. Look, your best friend from college is out on vacation in Portugal. And how come you're not on vacation in Portugal? So all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, I got FOMO from that one." And then the other one is, "Oh, these thousand people just got laid off with an email." And you're like, "Is that email coming for me next?" 

So it's really you're getting the worst of it from both sides. And why? Because that's the way the algorithm gets the most clicks, right? It's human psychology. It's been designed specifically to keep time on site way up. So again, that's why I say the entropy economy is very real, not a judgment. Just saying, we've got to understand how the game is played. And I feel like once that's the case, we have a much better shot at doing the healthy things, the right things that keep our teams efficient, that keep our psychology balance to all these kinds of things. But it does feed it right into the third force. So I'll keep us going with that if that's alright. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. 

Matt Poepsel: Commitment. Am I committed to investing the energy into the team concept and into staying together as a team? And this is where you start to see that these are all interconnected. If my hope is low, my interest in being a part of that team is pretty low. When the mutuality isn't there, now I'm starting to withdraw some of that effort into the team from the team concept, right? 

And I think that's where it's like, do we even have the identity of being part of a team? Do we value that? Do we like to say, like, we're part of a team that's working on this thing? If the answer is no or if there's other sort of problems, challenges, we don't feel like we're making good progress, we don't have transparency, we're confused, we don't have clarity, all these things erode commitment to invest in the team. 

And when that happens, and you start to see that a certain percentage of people begin to peel off and withdraw, they have some discretionary time. I spend a little less time on this cross-functional team because I'm going to go back and do this other thing. That's where we really start to fray at the seams, if you will. And pretty soon the route is on at that point. So commitment is one of those things where it's not how a commitment feels. It is actually the expenditure of energy into keeping the team going, right? 

Cristina Amigoni: And especially commitment to keeping the team going. So not commitment to checking off my tasks or making sure I get credit for all of them or preserving my own self-interest and my own safety. But it's commitment to the team. How do we actually work as a team? 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah. And I think if you have ever signed up for a club of some sort, and you're like, "I'm going to do this every Thursday. This is so much fun. I loved it." Week two, you're like, "Oh, I got a lot to do. But I'm going to go anyway." Week three, you're like, "Ugh." Now is a sudden the thing I loved now feels like another to do on my list. By week four, you're out. 

What happened was your commitment waned over time. And it wasn't necessarily that something changed in you, but these external forces are constantly tugging at you, pulling you away, pulling you off of. Let's say it was a spin class or whatever it was, it was actually a healthy thing that you were excited about and wanted to do, eventually, entropy can win if we don't constantly reinforce that commitment. 

And so sometimes when it's not easy, you still have to show up, right? And sometimes when it was a tougher time, somebody has to kind of step in and play the cheerleader a little bit. You're not going to be into it all the time. We get that. But I think that seeing when somebody's having a tough time and saying, "How can I take on some of the load for you? Because you're struggling right now." That'll bolster somebody, and then that commitment will come back. They're like, "Oh, man, you were really there for me last week. I did ship that large project I was working on. I'm back now. What can I do? Where are we at? I'm back. Great." That's where commitment is. It's not like these things are static. It's all very dynamic. But we have to have the attentiveness to say that these things absolutely do show up in how we work with and through one another. 

Alex Cullimore: I really appreciate some of that. 

Cristina Amigoni: And as you said, they connect to the other forces. It's like if I show commitment to the team, now mutuality rises, which then hope rises. 

Matt Poepsel: Exactly right. 

Cristina Amigoni: It's all connected. 

Matt Poepsel: And that kind of brings us to the very last one, the fourth one that I've found so far in this kind of ongoing discovery, which I call synchrony. And when you think about, for example, a crew team in riding in the water, if their strokes aren't coordinated, then it's inefficient to try to move that boat through the water. It's the best analogy I can think of as far as the reason that you have a cox in there calling out the cadence is because it's the most efficient way. 

The way they do their work mechanically actually enhances the performance of the team and the outcome. So this comes down to, are we doing our work in a way that makes everything sort of more congealed, more cohesive? Or are we doing things like, "I'm just going to communicate our project status in a way that's most convenient for me? I don't really care if it makes it easy for you." 

Cristina Amigoni: Never seen that happen. 

Matt Poepsel: Never seen that happen. Yeah. My job to communicate status. Here's how I like to do it. So I'm just going to do that. And you're like, "Okay, you're doing your job, but the way you're doing it's actually making it a lot harder on the rest of us." That would be an example of a failure of synchrony, right? 

So instead of being able to do the work in a way that makes it easier for everyone to do their work, that we can sync everything up, all of a sudden, we're out of phase. And now somebody who says, "I like to write really long detailed emails." And you're like, "Okay, but I don't like to read them. Can you give me a TLDR? Can you give me an executive summary? I just need the gist." "No, I don't do that. I'd be thorough." And you're like, "Okay, great." 

Now all of a sudden, entropy creeps in a little bit, right? Now, all of a sudden, my mutuality's off. Now, my commitment's waning, right? So it's like these things, all four of them, they feed into each other. And I think that's why it's been very interesting to see how if we're able to check the box on these things, make sure we're constantly attentive to them, their current state, how can we figure – these are what I have found make up this gravity that will hold a team together, that will keep us tight so that we can be more efficient, that we can have a better working experience, that we can find the level of fulfillment that we want. That doesn't happen if we get loose. We've got to get tight. 

Alex Cullimore: That makes sense. And I appreciate the general nuance you've brought to each of these concepts and forces because I can see a lot of ways that people would otherwise misuse it. If you just hear the word commitment, then there's a lot of people who are like, "Well, see, I was up till three." And now you're losing the mutuality because you're like, "Oh, other people weren't up until three." Or do you get the mutuality of like, "Well, I did exactly my part." 

But I love your mule example of like, "Well, okay, but my part just looks different, and it still contributes to the team. I'm carrying more, they're navigating more. There's still the mutuality there." And I could see how people can think or even defensively posture as if they are doing these without the real understanding that you're bringing here about these have to be put in the context and the nuance of, no, you're doing this for cohesion and with cohesion, not to show that you individually are doing one thing. 

Matt Poepsel: 100%. This is where I started to get hope myself when it comes to all of this. At first, I was having a hard time understanding how can I even put language to what we're experiencing? We've all felt it. We all feel like it's off. Things feel harder than they should be. I don't feel myself right now, all kinds of things. But we didn't have the language for it. 

So by hitting on this notion that entropy is present in all systems and that when it happens to us, we feel it as separation, we feel it as distance fragmentation, it was like, "Oh, well, if we understand it, then we can do something about it." Then understanding the fact that gravity exists as a way to kind of pull our teams together. That was another important step on the journey. And now what it means is that we can actually measure it. As a scientist, we can measure the current state of these things. We can improve them. We can watch the resulting impact, both to things like engagement, reducing absenteeism, making performance go up. All the things that we want in our organizations and our teams, we can watch those things get better by taking the interventions that the measurements tell us. It's a diagnostic. 

I just think it's very empowering and exciting to think that we don't have to go backwards. We don't have to cancel any subscriptions or memberships. We don't have to change what we're doing, but we can all of a sudden find those fast and free things to do differently, to offset, to develop that counterforce to what systems always do, which is to break down. That's what systems do. 

And now when our entire economic engine is a system that's breaking us down, I think that it's twofold. The stakes have never been higher, but at the same time, there's hope because we can understand it like scientists, we always do. We can figure this out, and we can do something about it. And I find that incredibly empowering. I think it's not a pessimistic tale at all. I think it's very realistic. And I think it's very responsible for us to understand sort of what we're going through and why and commit ourselves to doing something about it, both to make our businesses run better, which they need to, but also to help our people and serve them better, which we need to. We have a responsibility to do that. 

Alex Cullimore: I feel more hope after this conversation. 

Cristina Amigoni: I know. I do too. 

Alex Cullimore: We're breaking it down and thinking about it. So if you were to leave people with an idea of something they could try, what would be something they could try to help them draw those loops a little tighter? 

Matt Poepsel: I think it might be just to step back and to take a look and feel like you can feel it. How tight are we as a team, or how loose are we as a team, right? So even without the measurement, just think about so many of us in different areas are part of teams. Even my family, we're a team, right? The goals might not be as clear. We may not have KPIs, and dashboards, and business intelligence systems. 

Cristina Amigoni: OKRs. 

Matt Poepsel: But we have goals. We have things that we try to do together. Okay, great. But then also at work, I'm probably on eight different teams at least. Okay, but are all those teams the same? No. So if you take a step back and maybe just take a blank sheet of paper and list all the groups that you're on, all the teams, whatever you want to call it, spin class, put that on there too, and just say, loose or tight, scale of one to 10. Like, where do they fall? And just draw it all out there. 

And for the ones that are high on the right side, they're kind of higher in terms of their tighter loops, then just say, like, "What's different about those than these others that are loose?" And just think about it through the lens that we've talked about with hope, and mutuality, and commitment, and synchrony. You'll see it. That's my biggest thing is if we start to see the world differently, we can't unsee it. And that's where I think we are on this journey together, because certainly I haven't figured it out yet. This is active wet paint research. 

But I'm encouraged enough to say that, you know what, that exercise right there will be pretty telling for any listener who's willing to take me up on that. Take the five minutes to analyze the different teams you're on and figure out what makes the difference between the ones that are tight versus loose, and do those four forces we've talked about. Do they help explain it a little bit? 

Cristina Amigoni: That's a great exercise. It's not a one-and-done. And so it is the constant like, "Okay, this week, today, this month, whatever it is, this is my score." Tomorrow, "Oh, something just happened. The score changed." And so the work to keep the team together, to keep the entropy away, it's daily. It's minute-by-minute. It's hour-by-hour. It's every action, every thought, every inaction, every word. It's just constantly there. 

Matt Poepsel: Constantly in a dynamic environment, which is good news and bad. We're not fixed. It'd doesn't mean we can't turn things around if we're not in a good spot today just because the team is loose. That's not a problem. We just have to tighten it, right? 

And when you think about things that happen, "Oh, we just lost a major customer." Uh-oh, how's that going to show up? Took a ding to hope. Okay, what about my level of commitment? Am I starting to look at the door? Do I need to start updating my resume because we're probably not going to make it? Oh, man, I don't want that. I don't want that distraction. Let's explain specifically about how we knew this was coming. We did a thing, whatever, or I don't know. But there's lots of things that we can do. But if we just don't stop to recognize the way that the system works, then all of a sudden, what we get is randomness, and we get frustration. We get what we have today. Engagement is down. Burnout is up. Performance flaps around unpredictably. We can't have that. 

I feel like you're exactly right, Cristina. It's a huge dynamic that we're in. You can't just say like, "Oh, my team's tight. I'm all done. See you later." Maybe 30, 40 years ago, but certainly not – 

Cristina Amigoni: For now. 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah, exactly. For now. 

Cristina Amigoni: What about tomorrow? What about in an hour? 

Matt Poepsel: Yeah. As soon as that next headline rolls in, right? 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Exactly. Or whatever distraction, internal or external distraction. 

Alex Cullimore: Well, thanks so much for all of your thoughts on these. These are fascinating entry points into understanding entropy, the entropy economy. I like how you describe it as the entropy economy. That makes a lot of sense internally as well as just kind of how it feels. To help bring us home here, we have a couple of questions for you. First of all, what is your definition of authenticity? 

Matt Poepsel: When I think about authenticity, I feel like there's a certain structural integrity to it, right? So there's a wholeness to it. I always like to say that leaders are healers of separation. All the things we've been talking about today, the way it shows up in people, the way it affects us negatively, leaders are here to heal that gap, to really bring us closer together, to connect us with the best parts of ourselves. So to me, authenticity is wholeness. 

I get so many people who say to me, "I feel off. I feel hollow. I feel incomplete in some way." And I think what they're saying is that they're not experiencing that full authenticity. Because if it was authentic, well, we should never be afraid of it, right? But our fear and anxiety is off the charts right now. And I think that there's an old saying that whatever's solid and sound is quiet, but whatever's loose makes noise. It's true of a babbling brook, true of a can full of pennies, or whatever. And I think that that's how I feel when I think about authenticity. There's a certain wholeness of fullness there that I'm certainly still striving for. I don't know that I've made it or ever will. But I feel like my most authentic self would be just really accepting the wholeness that I can bring to my leadership and hopefully heal some separation that's happening out there. 

Cristina Amigoni: That's a great definition. Yeah. That's a really good definition. Our last question is where can people find you? 

Matt Poepsel: LinkedIn's the best place for me. I've just loved being on that platform because it's great at relationships and conversations, sharing ideas. I find that that's the place where I hang out the most. I'd love to be able to answer any questions or make any connections that people might have. 

Cristina Amigoni: Excellent. Yeah. And yes, definitely check out Matt's posts because they are very insightful, very powerful. Every time I read them, I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to answer the questions." Because there's always a question. It's like, what's the reflection moment? 

Alex Cullimore: They're great. 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, thank you so much. 

Matt Poepsel: Thank you both. I really appreciate it. And I've always enjoyed the conversations. It's great to be traveling the road with like-minded people and just exploring and swapping notes. It's one of my favorite things to do. 

Alex Cullimore: Thank you so much, Matt. 

Cristina Amigoni: Great way to end a week with a little hope, a little more hope. 

Alex Cullimore: And thank you, everyone, for listening. 

Cristina Amigoni: And thanks to everybody for listening. 

Alex Cullimore: Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We are Siamo. That is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. And if you'd like to reach out to us further, or reach out with any questions, or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast@wearesiamo.com. Or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is wearesiamo. Or you can go to wearesiamo.com and check us out there. Or I suppose, Cristina, you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us anywhere. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. And we'd like to thank Abbay Robinson for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you, and Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score. 

Alex Cullimore: Thank you, guys, so much for listening. Tune in next time. 

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you.

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