Episode description

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of the PX Dojo, and the person who led people experience at the BBC - to dig into what it means to treat the experience of work the way a UX designer treats a product.

Meg's core argument: people experience is another flavor of experience design. Traditional HR builds around policy, compliance, and risk management. A people experience approach starts somewhere else - finding the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for the business, and what's good for customers, then designing solutions inside that overlap rather than treating them as trade-offs.

What we covered:

• Why traditional HR keeps shipping best-practice solutions that don't solve the problem, and what a design-led discovery process looks like instead
• Meg's path from architecture to UX to people experience, including the master's in organizational psychology she did to round out the work
• Why corporate environments resist experimentation in HR even though product teams A/B test routinely, and what makes an experiment "successful"
• The BBC and what productivity meant there - why getting clear on that question first matters more than any solution
• Pay complaints as symptoms - what's usually underneath them when benchmarking already says you're paying the market
• A case study from a credit analyst team where dissatisfaction with pay turned out to be a job-design problem
• Why dual career tracks still funnel people into management to chase money, and what flatter pay structures unlock
• Self-determination theory as a stress test for any HR change - does it add autonomy, competence, and connectedness, or remove them?
• Handelsbanken, Spotify guilds, and Haier as examples of decentralized models that lend themselves to a people experience approach
• Where people experience should sit organizationally - outside HR, as a guild that runs across the business
• Three things any HR practitioner can start doing tomorrow: ask better problem questions, stop asking for permission, document the work

People referenced

• Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of PX Dojo
• Adam Axton - co-creator of PX Dojo, based in Melbourne
• Dan Pink - "take pay off the table" framing
• Luke O'Mahoney - "table stakes" framing of centralized HR
• Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory

Books

• Purpose and Work - Jessica Zwaan
• What Pay Costs - James A Seechurn
• Drive - Daniel Pink

Organizations and resources

• Pollinate XD - Meg's consultancy, helping organizations move people experience out of HR and into the leadership function
• PX Dojo - three-month cohort program for HR practitioners, structured white-belt to blue-belt
• Humani - online HR community in Australia where Meg moderates an experience design circle and runs a book club
• Handelsbanken - Swedish bank, decentralized operating units
• Spotify - the guild model for cross-cutting disciplines
• Haier - the marketplace model of the organization

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of the Work for Humans podcast, and former head of business architecture for HR at Cisco Systems - to dig into the idea of work as a product.

Dart's core argument: companies have spent a century misclassifying their workforce. Employees fit the definition of customers, people who choose every day whether to keep buying the product called "your job." That reframe rearranges almost everything downstream - recruitment, onboarding, what managers do, how work gets allocated, and what good performance even means.

What we covered:

• The category error at the root of modern management, and why scientific management's framing of people as factors of production still shapes practice today
• How employees fit the definition of customers in a multi-sided business, and the route Dart took to that model through business architecture work at Cisco
• The limits of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a design framework, and what Dart found after asking thousands of people what job they hire their work to do
• Negative transformation - the ways work changes us into people we don't want to be - and why that belongs on the cost side of the ledger
• What it looks like when teams co-design their own work, including the four-dimensional bubble chart Dart uses to reallocate tasks based on what each person finds rewarding
• Managers as brokers optimizing flow between two customers, the paying customer and the working customer
• Common pushback on the model: does it scale, is it anti-capitalist, and why bother if the existing system seems to work
• Plus a short detour into the night Dart climbed the Golden Gate Bridge

People referenced

• Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of Work for Humans
• Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory
• Clayton Christensen and Bobby Moesta - Jobs to Be Done framework
• Joe Pine - experience and transformation economies
• Daniel Pink - autonomy, mastery, purpose
• Alfie Kohn - critique of behaviorist management ("pop behaviorism")
• Antonio Damasio - on emotion and reason in decision-making
• Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton - the knowing-doing gap
• Ricardo Semler - Semco's participative model
• Bart Houlahan - co-founder of B Lab, partner at Irrational Capital
• Sandra Loughlin - EPAM, on data architecture and AI
• Semmelweis, Pasteur, Koch, Lister - the germ theory paradigm shift, used as analogy for how slowly new management ideas spread

Books

• Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness - Richard Ryan and Edward Deci
• The Transformation Economy - Joe Pine
• Descartes' Error - Antonio Damasio
• The Knowing-Doing Gap - Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton
• Drive - Daniel Pink
• Punished by Rewards - Alfie Kohn

Podcasts and websites

• Work for Humans - Dart's podcast, 190+ episodes
• 11fold.com - 11Fold's site, including a curated Discord community and an AI search across the Work for Humans back catalogue
• PX Espresso - Luke O'Mahoney's podcast, where Dart appears as a guest
• Irrational Capital - the ETF Dart references that tracks how employees feel about work at the companies they invest in
• AeroPress - the world's best coffee maker
• Connect with Dart on LinkedIn

Alfie Kohn has spent decades dismantling the assumption that rewards work. His research across education, parenting, and the workplace remains some of the most rigorous and underread work on human motivation - required reading for anyone serious about how people actually behave. Punished by Rewards is the place to start, and it should sit on every compensation professional's shelf.

In this conversation, Alfie joins me to examine why behaviorism still dominates corporate management, what B.F. Skinner got wrong, and why financial incentives so reliably erode the intrinsic motivation they're meant to amplify. We dig into the role of promotion as a control mechanism, what the pay gap signals about corporate culture, and how the sales function exports extrinsic logic into the rest of the organization. We close on the cycle that keeps reward systems entrenched and the difficulty of moving colleagues past it.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to Alfie Kohn's work and books
• 07:12 B.F. Skinner and behaviorism
• 15:34 The role of promotion in corporate America
• 22:07 The impact of the pay gap on corporate culture
• 33:27 The vicious cycle of rewards and motivation