Calculus of IT - Season 3 Episode 8 - IT aka the Pasty Anthropologist

Mostly true but also possibly just purely theoretical fact: IT's real job is studying human behavior, not fixing computers.

In this episode, Mike and I set out to explore why IT needs to think like anthropologists (e.g., observing how people actually work instead of how we think they should work) and discovered, as we tend to do in every episode, some uncomfortable truths along the way. It seems like the reality is that we design systems for idealized users, train people on features they'll never use, and then act shocked when they create workarounds or just Slack us instead of reading the wiki we spent weeks building. We realized that every workaround is a cry for help, every shadow IT solution is a prototype for what we failed to provide, and the shift-tab key is apparently still classified information in 2026. The conversation spiraled through: whether IT should be in every job interview (yes), whether we're designing for the people we have or the people we wish we had (wish), whether surveillance equals observation (it doesn't, but the line is thin), and why business analysts should've been behavioral scientists all along. We also mourned the death of CASBs, debated whether Mike's tolerance for "how do I use Outlook?" questions will last until 2030, and agreed that someday soon, not knowing how to write prompts will be a firing offense (Nate is banking on Q1'27). The breakthrough moment: if you could secretly watch how everyone uses your systems, you wouldn't be shocked by what they're doing wrong, you'd be shocked if they used them correctly at all. Next week we're tackling PowerPoint Incorporated, aka why the corporate world's only storytelling mechanism is a six-by-five-inch white rectangle and whether we'll ever escape it.

Listen at thecalculusofit.com • Join our Slack board at thecoit.us • Leave five stars • Be nice to IT people • Stop the ethnic cleansing • Learn how to use Word, or at least shift-tab.

—Nate & Mike

Transcript

Season 3 - Episode 8 - Final - Audio Only

Trance Bot: [00:00:00] The calculus of it,

season three,

verifying this identity.

Sometimes you just have to take it.

Sometimes you just have to take it

because it's season three divided Autonomy,

verifying identity.

The calculus of it.[00:01:00] 

Nate McBride: Watch out. 

Mike Crispin: Awesome. 

Nate McBride: Don't 

Mike Crispin: say we are recording. 

Nate McBride: Don't say any swear words.

Mike Crispin: You don't have to worry about that. 

Nate McBride: No swearing anything for you. You swear. Do you swear off swearing for January? 

Mike Crispin: I did not 

Nate McBride: swear. Did you swear off anything, anything for January? 

Mike Crispin: I did not. I thought about it, but um. I decided to have a beer. [00:02:00] 

Nate McBride: That is the smartest move. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. I was like, oh, maybe I'll try this dry January thing.

But I decided against it. 

Nate McBride: I tried it once. I barely made it 

Mike Crispin: silver rated. 

Nate McBride: No, I barely made it. It was years ago. I remember it still so plainly. I got to like January 3rd and that was it. 

Mike Crispin: That was it. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Nearly killed myself. Whew. That was close one 

Mike Crispin: that I hear. It's quite a struggle, but you know, you can do it.

People can do it and um, it's all good. I actually, I, I think in, uh, let's see, I think it was September of last year. I think I had one drink all month. I felt awesome. 

Nate McBride: Are you bragging? 

Mike Crispin: What's that? Are 

Nate McBride: you bragging? Now's. 

Mike Crispin: No, no, i, I saying that 

Nate McBride: no one likes to bragger Mike. I, 

Mike Crispin: I did it once and it was good.[00:03:00] 

Let's see if I can find her. These things worked out just fine. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. No one likes braggers. 

Mike Crispin: Oh no, I know, I know. So what's new? How are you doing? 

Nate McBride: I'm good. I'm up in Maine this week, just doing a lot of training. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, nice. Yeah. I saw you doing some snowshoeing and stuff. 

Nate McBride: Uh, well that's at the end of the day, I've been doing a lot of uphill.

I heard a race on the sixth. 

Mike Crispin: Awesome. 

Nate McBride: Up at Black Mountain, a Skimo race, so 

Mike Crispin: Very cool. Very cool. 

Nate McBride: Get ready for that. Yeah. It's a last two minutes standing format. So you just go on the hour, every hour, you gotta do a loop up and down the mountain. 

Mike Crispin: Nice. 

Nate McBride: And try to be the last one standing. I. 

Mike Crispin: I don't know if I could do that.

You're looking good, man. 

Nate McBride: Oh, yeah, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, yeah. [00:04:00] Looking fit. Looking good. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. You know, any kinda healthy diet of beer and chips and, um, the occasional banana 

Mike Crispin: beer and chips are good, 

Nate McBride: especially together.

I really think Chex Mix should be just a straight up meal. There's no need to play around anymore. Just make it a fucking meal. 

Mike Crispin: Chex Mix are, uh, 

Nate McBride: fantastic. Nuts and pretzels and salt. It's got most of the food groups. I'm no, I'm no dietician expert. Don't consult me for diet tips. But 

Mike Crispin: you like Chex Mix. 

Nate McBride: It's satisfying.

Mike Crispin: Do you like Chex Mix? 

Nate McBride: I like it until I get canker. So from eating it, like when my inside my mouth starts bleeding. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, bad. 

Nate McBride: I have to stop, you know, for a couple hours. [00:05:00] But I also found that very, very cold. Jagermeister kind of like rubs over those sores. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: And then you can just keep eating it. 

Mike Crispin: Wow. Very healing.

Nate McBride: You're not listening to me, are you? 

Mike Crispin: I am tanker sores. Putting some, uh, 

Nate McBride: alcohol. That's, that's what you, that's what you extracted from that. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. And then you, you drink some, uh, what? Fireball and that? 

Nate McBride: No, I didn't say fireball. 

Mike Crispin: Oh. 

Nate McBride: But 

Mike Crispin: what was 

Nate McBride: it You said it, it's, it's, it's, it's equivalent Yager Meister.

Mike Crispin: Well, well, oh, Jagermeister of course. Yeah. Trying to get my shit together over here. 

Nate McBride: Yager, Meister is basically just, um, herbs and spices. 

Mike Crispin: That's all it is. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Fermented and delicious. 

Nate McBride: Just, ugh, so delicious. 

Mike Crispin: I think we, I say it every time or I think every time it's been brought up in this co [00:06:00] podcast, someone has mentioned to how much it reminds them of puking in college.

But uh, yes, 

Nate McBride: if you try to drink half a bottle in 30 minutes of anything. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: So shall we jump into Claude Bot Mike? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Have you been playing with it at all or you've been looking at some of the craziness that's going on because of it? 

Nate McBride: No, I haven't touched anything. I was hoping that you would enlighten us as to why you think it's, um, any different than the rest of the Armageddon level shit that's coming.

Mike Crispin: I don't think it's any different than the Armageddon shit. I think it's more of an Armageddon. Get yourself in a trouble type tool for sure. Um. The early adopters are having some fun with it right now and using it to trade on the stock market and all sorts of things. But I think it's potentially a precursor to truly sort of replacing yourself [00:07:00] between the, uh, chair and the keyboard that continues to evolve.

And it's, I got my, it's just, go ahead. Sorry. 

Nate McBride: I was saying I got my email today from Goul that I have been given early access to personal intelligence. 

Mike Crispin: Oh yeah. I thought we already had that. As, 

Nate McBride: as a Google AI Pro subscriber, you have early access to personal intelligence. It lets you securely connect your Google apps securely connect being the phrase to get personalized help and suggestions.

Mm-hmm. Um, 

Mike Crispin: yes. 

Nate McBride: Fuck no. I don't know. Double. 

Mike Crispin: We got that as part of the ultra, the Google Ultra. You, you got it. It was a couple months ago. And yeah, it just takes everything in. 

Nate McBride: So you, so you're bragging. You're bragging again a second time. You're bragging. 

Mike Crispin: No, I'm not. I'm saying that. It, it just 

Nate McBride: takes, you have a Google, Google Ultra 

Mike Crispin: I did for a couple months.

Didn't really, 

Nate McBride: is that really his thing? 

Mike Crispin: It is, it is. It's 300 bucks a month. [00:08:00] 

Nate McBride: What the fuck? 

Mike Crispin: I was using it for, I was trying out VO and some of the video production stuff. They have wisp, a whisk, and, uh. It's cool. It's cool. And it's, it's so much stuff you can do with it, but I think the, what what's interesting about Claude Bot now, it's called Multi Bott now, because Claude's trademark, you know?

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Said, Hey, you cut, you're not gonna call it Claude Bot, you're gonna call it multi bott, or you're gonna call it whatever you want, but just not Claude bot. So they, this one guy who wrote it cre, you know, changed it. But, uh, I think we talked about it maybe in the second episode, is that AI type tools are moving more to the edge.

And this is just another example of it moving outta the browser and onto your computer and, um, and into your chat applications. The, the you interface with it using [00:09:00] WhatsApp and Telegram. 

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: So it's, yeah, it's definitely gonna be, it's probably a flash in the pan thing. Probably nothing super exciting, but it is, I think a.

Precursor to something else that's coming that's gonna be similar, and we'll have to figure out whether, but 

Nate McBride: everything 

Mike Crispin: that's 

Nate McBride: coming is a, is a precursor to something that's coming. Oh, sure. Nothing, nothing is the, 

Mike Crispin: that's, I think that's why it's important to learn about it and to get ahead of the game and understand as much as you can because 

Nate McBride: Yeah, but I take, I take the, I take the cycles to learn Claude Bot a week later, I gotta learn the next evolutionary shit.

I mean, it's, it's not like the monkey becoming a man, it's just a monkey becoming a worse monkey. Um, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. I, I haven't, I haven't set it up yet. I've just been reading about it and watching some videos on it, but it's, yeah, there, it's kind of fun to watch the early, early adopters. I, I think being a late, early adopter is, is [00:10:00] the best place to be, like the early, early adopters.

Great. It's interesting to learn from them, but, 

Nate McBride: well, I think being, I think there's a couple categories. There's the early adopter, there's the late, early adopter. There's the normal adopter, it's the late adopter. Yep. There's the, there's the, um, I was gonna adopt it, but then a week later, something new came out.

Adopter. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And then, then there's the no fucking way adopter. I, I tend to skew more towards the right side of that. There's a 

Mike Crispin: spectrum, 

Nate McBride: a spectrum of adopters. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: I tend now to skew more towards the, wait a second. Windows 11 came out. End of the spectrum. Um, that's more my, my speed these days. 

Mike Crispin: Hey. I 

Nate McBride: mean, 

Mike Crispin: there's only so many time, there's so much, so much time in the day too.

Like I would've loved to have played with on, with this. 'cause it sounds interesting, but I just could not take the time to. [00:11:00] To get it set up. And then, and certainly I'm not gonna give it access to my data, and people's clawed accounts are being shut down because of this as well. Because what's happening is, is they're opening up their computer and all their personal files to this thing.

Claude doesn't like what it sees. It's against probably its terms of use and it shuts you out. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: You know, so it's like people are kind of burning themselves with it and, uh, 

Nate McBride: well, it's the last, it's the last frontier for LLMs. I mean, I mean, Musk has been very clear about this. So is, um, alt shit about getting access to everyone's personal stuff, which is the last frontier for aggregation.

They've aggregated everything else. There's nothing left to aggregate, but people's personal data. So once they, once they get over this hurdle, um, you know, yeah. We need is a couple more doge types in the government to release everything else except for the stuff that would potentially, um, convict a president.

All we need to do is release the rest of the [00:12:00] stuff and, uh, well we got the world, we have the world's largest LLM of crap. Um, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. 

Nate McBride: Well 

Mike Crispin: did you and others, I mean, a lot of the open source, uh, models are pretty close. There was, I think there was one last week that's, that's almost up to speed. Um, yeah, the, the, the Kimmy from, uh, China, I think that's what it is, is, um, it is near, I think it's near Gemini or Surpass Gemini, but it's free and you just download it, throw it on your computer and Yeah.

You know, if you got, 

Nate McBride: but. No, I don't either. The problem, the problem isn't whether or not there's a free model or there's a good model or the model's, you know, some percentage slower in milliseconds than some other model or 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: Whatever. I think what's happening now is, and I was kind of joking on our Slack board earlier, but we've moved past performance.

Mm-hmm. Usually when something new comes out, like, oh my God, that new car is [00:13:00] so fast. Or, oh my God, if I buy this, it makes my penis twice as large, or whatever. Once you move past the initial, uh, performance measurement, then people move into the brand. And the problem is we've, we've pivoted over towards now the brand recognition where, um, people that shouldn't know what Claude is know, and they use it as.

They don't, they haven't used it. GPT is still the verb, but pretty soon it will be just GPT that in the, in the idea of say using a bandaid. Um, whereas they won't care what the platform is and the brand, the brand recognition will take over. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: So you can, you can certainly have all these great open source models.

They're faster, they're better, whatever. But um, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, 

Nate McBride: it's the brand. Yeah. 

The 

Mike Crispin: gen, 

Nate McBride: it's the brand that's going to win 

Mike Crispin: the general, I mean, that's why I think in a lot of ways, Apple's in the driver's seat, [00:14:00] because a lot of people aren't, whatever Siri does, if it's awesome, there's, 

Nate McBride: it's 

Mike Crispin: gonna be, sir Siri does, 

Nate McBride: Siri does anything awesome.

What, what does Siri 

Mike Crispin: do that awesome. I just, I'm just telling you that if Siri becomes great and as good as Chatt, bt and faster and easier to use, and you've got Google and Meta and OpenAI stealing everyone's data. And Apple saying, Hey, you can spend two grand on this phone and all your stuff's private and you're going to have a great experience.

People are gonna go buy that. 

Nate McBride: Well, 

Mike Crispin: it's 

Nate McBride: not private. They're gonna, they're 

Mike Crispin: not gonna care about the model. They're not gonna care about the model. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. It doesn't, nothing's private anymore, Mike. I mean, the way that government's run, it doesn't matter what phone you buy. 

Mike Crispin: No. 

Nate McBride: You go back, back in time by that special black phone.

Everything is now, uh, is is it being searched without a warrant? There's no need for, its, 

Mike Crispin: it's not even, not even, I was gonna say like it, that's true. Absolutely. But it's not even the government, like you, you're, you know, you, you're, if you're in the middle of a, some sort of court case or you're in [00:15:00] your, your phone's discoverable, you can, you have the right to say no.

You can't search it. Um, yeah. But. Once they got it, they got it. Like signal's only so private until they have access to your phone. 

Nate McBride: Oh my God. So today I was, I was at a main, my wife came up today, she said that I visited a local cafe in my small town. 

Mike Crispin: I saw that 

Nate McBride: to pick up somebody. A 15 year 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Stoke Cafe, right?

Yep. I saw that pop up, right. Uh, right before that, before it was actually this afternoon. 

Nate McBride: Yep. 

Mike Crispin: I was gonna ask you 

Nate McBride: about that. That's crazy. Father, husband, uh, unbelievable. 15 years at a job and they just swooped in, picked him up. Bunch of white redneck dick shits just doing, making their happy. They're making themselves happy.

I couldn't believe it of all time. Unbelievable. Like, there's nothing better to do. Um, yeah. That's 

Mike Crispin: that's terrible. 

Nate McBride: It's so, it's so out control, man. So outta control. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, [00:16:00] 

Nate McBride: I wish man. Oh man. Honestly, there was a way to. I know that all these great, these great platforms are out there for people to sort of avert when they're, when they're coming, when they're on their way, where they are.

Yeah. So everyone else can sort of take shelter and hide. There's gotta be a way though to get even further out in front of that. I wish there was mm-hmm. Sort of even more notice, like there's 20 minutes before tornado, why can't we get 20 minutes before ice? There's gotta be a way someone's gonna have to you.

Where, where are all the, where are all the hacktivists? I mean, massive. There 

Mike Crispin: are a lot of, there are, there are big communities online. They're just, they're just, they're concentrated on major areas. They're not as dispersed. I think 

Nate McBride: that's, I mean, more like the cult of the dead cow types that are, um, you know, that should be doing this.

The site take downs and the, the malfeasance across the spectrum. Uh, where, where are all those people? Because they seem to have just vanished. We need the hacker community now more than I think ever in terms of, [00:17:00] um, assisting. Solving this problem, but maybe they're working on something. I mean, certainly there's more money to be made in other things that are going on.

Mm-hmm. I mean, crypto right now, center stage, it's just, oh my God, so much begging for the hostile takeover. But that's, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. Stable coin. Stable coin has emerged pretty 

Nate McBride: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: pretty much. I mean, outside the US is a huge, huge booster. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I mean, it helps that, you know, our president's making over a trillion dollars off of coin.

Um, and everyone, everyone kind of missed that one fed deregulation that's going on. Oh my God. There's so much crazy shit, man. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and honestly when I was like, I'm doing all these classes right now for my company on Gen AI and other technologies. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, yeah. 

Nate McBride: And our, our topic tonight is timely because.[00:18:00] 

A lot of what we are doing and a lot of what's happening, um, from a platform perspective, I don't think it's being designed anymore with the interest of the end user. It's being designed now to, in a race, a race, I don't know, some kind of made up race. Like we have to beat somebody somehow. Like someone's gotta be beaten.

Yeah. And so the advancements, which people that are into Gen ai, I mean actually into it, are still scratching their heads saying, why the fuck is it going so fast? Like, we had a good model, it was working six months ago, so now we can make fakes that are a little bit better or we can do something else.

Everyone's kind of asking that question as to when did anyone stop to start thinking about the end users? The consumers of your data, and when did everyone just shift to fuck it? Just release another version. [00:19:00] Okay, great. Now release another version. No one. 

Mike Crispin: Uh, so you feel like the user experience has gotten worse or more confusing based on some of the latest releases?

Nate McBride: I don't think it's the ux, it's not the clicking the button and pulling down the menu. Yeah. It's the why do, why does this thing exist? Message. Okay. And that's kind of lost in the narrative, um, of if you can ask somebody like, why is this, why does generative AI exist? Mm-hmm. They can give you all the things about what it does.

Mike Crispin: Sure, sure. 

Nate McBride: They can explain to you probably in pretty good detail, the average person on the street, pretty good detail. Oh, well, you know, it'll schedule fights for me, or it'll tell me, uh, how to do X, y, Z, but they can't explain why, why it's necessary, like, why it exists, like, why it came about. You can explain why there, why there's an ERP.

You can explain why there's a, an email platform. 'cause you need to be able to [00:20:00] send emails. So that's, therefore an email platform exists. You need to be able to, um, pay a vendor who's given you goods. Therefore, you need an system that can do AP and ar. So you can explain those systems, but a lot of things don't have explainability.

And the, the, when we sat and talked about this, the point of the conversation was why we, it are effectively becoming anthropologists, not anthropologists in the sort of denotative sense where we're trying to figure out why a skull exists in a grave. But anthropologists in the, why do people behave the way they behave?

How Yeah. And how much of their behavior that's changing. Is based on what we're doing say versus what the industry is doing. So case in point, we don't have an AI mandate at my [00:21:00] company, but we do push pretty hard on training mostly for upskilling and people to be able to at least understand there's a good time to use it and a good time to not to use it.

Right? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, I think a lot about what if I didn't push it as hard as I did, would Sure. Would anyone care? Would anyone be banging on my door? And it's not, not a reflection of my company at all, but I think that if I wasn't doing what I was doing, people wouldn't necessarily care so much. Maybe a small group would.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Where the more technologically savvy, say crowd, but no one would be banging on my door the same way. No one's banging on my door to do ar. Uh, the augmented reality. No one's banging at my door sure to do VR headsets. Cool. Technology came out. But a lot of times I feel like, or at least in the last few years, we're losing that, we're losing that gap of explainability.

So we're [00:22:00] here sitting as broker, we're, we're brokering what we think is best for the company, which has always kind of been a IT leadership trait, but at the same time, we're losing the understanding of human behavior. We're essentially forcing some sort of structure around human behavior. And as work becomes even more distributed, and God bless us when the next pandemic comes, my God, if we don't have our shit together.

But as work becomes more distributed and to a degree AI, augmented or force multiplied, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, um, I think there's, I think there's gonna be a very, very strong case for understanding human behavior at that point. Like if we don't. The IT leaders that sort of emerge as successful will be the ones that understand human behavior the best.

In other words, uh, another way to put it is how to read the room. I mean 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: That's what I think. So that's what we're covering tonight, which is the [00:23:00] reading the room part. Um, but in a, in a way, we also end up looking at legacy systems and we make decisions that they're the best for the moment, but it's a lot of places where we don't apply any rational human behavior, ana analytics, uh, we, we can reframe the problem of why everyone gets create and creation rights when they come into a company.

We're not, we're not a, we're not actually adequately providing a human analysis to that point. We're simply just going with what we have always done. Right. 

Mike Crispin: Well, I think people's behavior in, you know. To some extent, as a leader of any departments, you, you have to have some ability to understand the people around you, your peers, your partners, your potential reports and customers, right?

I mean, and I think the, at least from an IT perspective, one of the first things with the tooling [00:24:00] that you introduce if you do, is understanding how quickly people can take that tooling and do something with it, with or without training. So if they're not trained, they're willing, they're probably more likely if it's too difficult to use, to go around it and do something else.

And then if they are, they are trained and it gets everything the way they, they want to use and become more curious and they want to do more, and it builds a stronger bond. I know you, we've always talked about training and how important it is just being able to read, and I shouldn't say read, but reinforce that that's important.

To success and to making things more productive is not just sort of reading the room, but also sort of evangelizing the need for education. 

Nate McBride: Okay. Hold on. Lemme pause you for a second. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, 

Nate McBride: let's, let's go down a rabbit hole real quick, if you don't mind. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. Go. Yeah. 

Nate McBride: If I give you a pre-read and be honest 

Mike Crispin: Yep.

Nate McBride: For, [00:25:00] um, let's say there's a meeting on your calendar. Yep. Nates going, Nate's going to discuss with you turtles. 

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: And there's a pre-read. Are you reading the pre-read, 

Mike Crispin: browsing it quickly? Brows, 

Nate McBride: okay. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, 

Nate McBride: and 

Mike Crispin: that's, and I mean, I, you know, I guess I should, to be fair, it depends on the subject. If it's something that I under feel like is gonna be impactful and I need to know about, then I'll, I'll read it.

If it's something that I'm not quite sure why I got it or what my involvement is or any Okay. I'm more likely to just peruse it. 

Nate McBride: Okay. And if it's something that's just simply you're not interested in, you probably won't do anything and just go and listen to what the person says and they're gonna read it anyway.

Yeah. Okay. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. Yeah. It's like, oh, hey, they, they'll probably go through it now. I'll catch up with someone and then if you don't even get it in the presentation, you're like, oh, I'll catch up with someone afterwards and I'll follow back up with Nate and make sure I didn't miss anything. 

Nate McBride: Okay. Alright. So that's point number one.

I'll [00:26:00] hold onto that for a second. Point number two is, okay, let's suppose there's a, there is a training. And in that training I say you, you have to attend. We're gonna talk about generative ai, let's say for an instance. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: And I'm gonna teach you, in this training, there's a hour long training, there's a deck I'm gonna teach, show you things, et cetera.

Um, and let's say I do my best to be unbiased and not to force any particular method on you really to show you in the general sense. Okay? 

Mike Crispin: Yep. No problem. 

Nate McBride: But afterwards, let's suppose I say to you, then, okay, go and learn how to use this platform. Do this thing, if I haven't shown you specifically how to use it, if I haven't shown you how to do certain specific things with it, 

Mike Crispin: yeah.

Nate McBride: Then you're gonna go away and you're not going to have the behavior mm-hmm. Of somebody who's going to use it. Or you could develop a behavior that's antithetical to the corporation behavior or something like that. So I have to actually show you [00:27:00] how to use it. Right? Yeah. I'm, I'm designing a way for you to use that.

Now, let's suppose instead of a training, same pre-read example, I just sent you instructions on how to do a thing. Mm-hmm. He said, you, oh, Mike, you don't have to attend the training if you just read this manual on how to do that thing. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Are you more likely to, again, this is you, so be honest. Are you more likely to just say, fuck it, I'm not attending the training.

Gimme the thing, I'll read it and do it. And I understand people, some people like wanna be trained, other people wanna read. I'm just asking you, if I give you a document to do a thing step by step and you do that thing well, so sorry. If I give you a document to do a thing versus say, doing the training, are you gonna do that thing step by step the way I gave it to you?

Mike Crispin: Probably not. 'cause I, it depends on the con, I mean, it depends on the context, right. So from a training perspective, if you're training me on something that I [00:28:00] can understand is gonna be valuable to me 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Or, or that I, or that I need to learn to be compliant, let's say, which is less exciting. Yeah. But it's the truth then Yeah.

I'm gonna focus on it. But a lot of times with the training of a new tool, I think you and I are probably unique cases because we're, we are interested generally in the technology, but in terms of probably a lot of the people we're training, it's show me how I can get something done with this tool. That I do every day, not under this menu, you will find this feature.

Like they don't care about that. They wanna know, how do I use this tool to make X faster or X easier for me? 

Nate McBride: Sure, sure. 

Mike Crispin: And that's why the trainings are like, business use cases are hard with big groups because, so that, I would say for that, that point. But to the point around a big man, if there was a big manual steps 

Nate McBride: Yeah.

Mike Crispin: Chances are I would, I would probably peruse that and try components of it on my own. Okay. [00:29:00] And try my best to learn it, but I would not go step by step through the manual. 

Nate McBride: So, so, so in both cases there one case there, there's a pre-read for a thing and you're just going to read it or not read it depending on 

Mike Crispin: peruse it 

Nate McBride: involvement 

Mike Crispin: per Yep.

Nate McBride: There's, there's also a class and you're going to, uh, read the instructions or not read them again, depending on your level of caring or involvement. Mm-hmm. 

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: So. So you and I are in it and we have a certain remit to the company, which is to get everyone to a technical level of, um, understanding so they can not fucking destroy the company.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: But if we're anthropologists 

Mike Crispin: mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: Which again is the, the thesis for this episode. If we're anthropologists, don't we want to not do any of that? And I wasn't setting you up here for a trick question. No. What I wanted to get to Point was saying, this is what I think about. Like, if I'm gonna go ahead and teach you, if I'm gonna give you a pre-read, if I'm gonna [00:30:00] sit in a room and read a deck to you, wouldn't it be better if I understood how the fuck you work before I did?

That's 

Mike Crispin: exactly my point 

Nate McBride: before I did any of that. 

Mike Crispin: I guess that's what I was trying to say is what's in it for me? How, what do I do every day for me to read the manual you sent or for you to, or the training, it just gave me what is this tool for? What is it it, what's my day in the life and does it understand what I'm trying to do to, to know my job so that when they show me a generative AI or they show me a new tool that we're implementing that they can take me through a use case in which I'm like, oh my God, this is awesome.

I can do, I can get my job done faster. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: This, and they immediately know. But if we don't know and we don't know that sort of, not just the behaviors, but what they do every day, what's their day in a life that when you do an like cer, certainly I [00:31:00] struggle with this myself, is if you're gonna do an enterprise wide training.

There's 25 different use cases that 24 people aren't gonna care about each individual. One, they're gonna care about two or three or one or whatever. And you can't cover the, the canvas of real value because you're gonna have to give 'em some GNA use case that isn't really, is an operational benefit. It's not gonna actually drive anything.

Whereas you could go into clinical or into sales and give a specifical specific, specifical specific give, that's a good one. Give a, a specific use case. Give us a, a specific use case to each of their businesses and their behaviors that they go, wow, okay. Yes, I get this. And I mean, that was always one of the things when we'd get training from Zoom or Box or something in the past, it's like they just go through every feature, the whole thing.

And people would be like, I don't even know what this, why do I even need this? As opposed to like, here's a workflow for your [00:32:00] contract process. You know, and just go through that. So yes, to your point, like, we gotta understand, we gotta read the room. Okay. We've gotta understand who, who's doing what and how they will plug in.

And, and again, and the other piece is everyone learns differently. There are some people that would read a manual no matter what. They would rather do that. There's some that would be in a training and some that wanna meet with you in person and have one-on-one training. That might be the only way they feel comfortable learning.

Um, but yeah. Sorry, go ahead. 

Nate McBride: No, no. I was gonna say, so then here's two questions. One, why aren't we doing this? And two, why isn't the industry doing this? It makes perfectly logical sense. 

Mike Crispin: I, I think some places are doing it. I think it's just smaller training groups and, and, and use cases. I mean, we just talk about sort of this business partner model and.

Nate McBride: Lemme pause you for a second though. Just in the aggregate though, [00:33:00] you're not able to go to every single employee in the company. No. Teach them on an individual use case basis. And so, 

Mike Crispin: no, I think the InBetween is that you're going to smaller groups at a specific functional level, and hopefully they have the time to do that or that you're able to sell that use case.

And that's where the anthropology comes in, is being able to, to understand where there are gaps or where they're looking to excel, and being able to insert yourself in and train or, or educate those small groups on an opportunity to make them more efficient. And that takes the front wheel, right? That takes the interpersonal and, 

Nate McBride: okay.

Mike Crispin: And the knowledge, 

Nate McBride: let, lemme stipulate. Lemme stipulate and say small functional based training, which by I agree by the way. Makes perfect sense. Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. 

Nate McBride: Functional based training is the way for you, the IT leader. And your function to approach, uh, understanding of human behavior, uh, from a technological sort of to human level.

I [00:34:00] get that part, but what about Yeah, sure, sure. Why? What about the industry? Why, when did, why does the industry no longer care? Just, 

Mike Crispin: it's a great question. I, I don't know. I mean, I, I think there's a certain, excuse me, certain level of competence that some of these software vendors have that this tool is so easy to use or you're not paying enough.

If you pay enough, they'll do whatever. You, you, you'll do whatever you want, right? They'll set up a custom training for you. And I remember specifically, specifically with x, y, Z vendors, there are many of them who are like, yeah, we've got a great training package. It's $42,000. And you can, and you can have whatever you can, you know, we'll have personal trainer zoom meetings.

Yeah. Work with you once a quarter. Uh, we've got all the documentation for you and, uh, you. You know, they even get a level one help desk. Call us as many times as you want. So I think it's, I think it's just whether or [00:35:00] not you wanna, you wanna pay for it and then will you get the value out of it, because at the end of the day, they're gonna call you and ask you for help because you're more accessible and you're, maybe you're in the office or maybe you've built a relationship.

They're not gonna call up the vendor who's charging you for all these artifacts and all these other things. But, um, smaller vendors, I think the smaller companies think their tools are easier to use and that they'll just send you a link and you should be fine. And that's, I don't think that's realistic either.

Right? Like take Google, they'll just send you a link or Amazon, we'll just send you a link to something like, here's our documentation. Go figure it out. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I mean that, that I think is way so. Here, here's a great, well, not great that would be giving myself credit. Here's an analogy I thought I thought of just today.

So I was [00:36:00] in between meetings and I had on my little task list, a note to update my steam deck. I mm-hmm. And down in my sort of video game cave here in Maine, I have all the platforms that I've had for about two decades. They're all hooked up. And one thing I noticed was that I had this, uh, this case of CDs for my Wii.

And I remember when I bought those CDs, maybe only one or two of them had an actual instruction manual, I think like Zelda did and something else. But you have to go way, way back, way back in the video game world to find a video game that actually had an instruction manual. Mm-hmm. Okay. Because at some point they just said, you know what we're gonna do.

For every video game, we're gonna have the idiot play a idiot level, show them all the things to do in game while they're playing, and then we'll just figure the rest out. 

Mike Crispin: [00:37:00] Sure. 

Nate McBride: Fast, fast forward to today. You, you go and buy a steam game. Let's take Orna for example. Orna is a great example. Orna, there's no fucking instructions.

You download the game on your phone, you start playing and you spend a year asking everybody else what, what's it, what do I do? 

Mike Crispin: What am I supposed to do? Exactly. 

Nate McBride: Still, I'm 

Mike Crispin: still doing that. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, no manual, right? So, yeah, so the vendors I feel like, um, on a broader scale have taken a similar approach, which is if you can't figure out this thing, then you're too dumb to use it.

However, I'm gonna, I'm gonna caveat myself by saying, with the newest version of Chrome. Uh, newest version of Photoshop and I'm talking about some recent ones I've used. There are menus within menus. Within menus. 

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: I mean, just the location services alone, [00:38:00] functionality inside of Chrome is vast. Yeah.

But no manual. They want you to click that little question mark or ask the question. Right. And they've done a good job at supporting their user docs. But the experience, if, if we tried to bring that back into the corporation would, I mean for my entire career, 28 years, I've tried to use knowledge bases.

In 28 years, I have failed at creating knowledge basis. Mm-hmm. Um, yet people don't want an instruction manual. They want a human being to tell 'em the answer. 

Mike Crispin: Exactly. 

Nate McBride: Okay. Alright. So with all that being, with all that being said, I feel like it's not so much a pivot, but I feel like there's a moment. Maybe now is the time to start thinking about how much we could influence behavior if we really put our minds to it.

And I'm not talking about, you know, [00:39:00] use this platform versus that platform. I'm talking about actual fully influencing human behavior from the ground up. And I'm not, and I'm talking like at a scale of, hey, stop using the outlook, start using the Gmail scale and beyond. Because with, with the, an anthropological aspect, with the fact that people just want to be told what to do and their, their acquiescence to bias on many, many things, I don't think that there's a whole lot of distance between where we are today and any IT leader effectively.

Hopefully, no, none malicious, any IT leader effectively superimposing their desired model on a business by simply, I don't know, getting people to buy in the same way that a people are gonna buy into any [00:40:00] other vendor solution. And I'll just caveat everything I just said by saying there's some level of observation that comes with this.

And I think observation comes in two ways. One, user experience and two basic surveillance. Like if I can sit down with a user and just look over their shoulder for 30 minutes, I feel pretty confident I could write down 15, 20 things that they're doing. Absolutely piss poor, that can be fixed and there's no need for a new platform or software.

We just fix those things. They're gonna be on another level like. The other day, this thing was like Thursday of last week, I showed someone how to use shift tab to go backwards through fields. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: This is a person who, by the way, has been working in the I, the I biotech industry for about 25 years. Never knew that mine was blown, and I, I couldn't, I couldn't take the tabbing all the way [00:41:00] through back to the beginning anymore.

I just had to intervene and I'm saying to myself, okay, this person's not wearing that thing. But if I was gonna really do my job to an earlier point, I would not leave this person's side. I would spend days with them fixing all their behavior mm-hmm. To become more aligned with the tribe. This is the best, best way to put it, or the, the team.

Mike Crispin: Sure.

Did you just freeze? 

Nate McBride: No. 

Mike Crispin: Oh. Weird. My screen just froze for a sec. Sorry about that. 

Nate McBride: It's okay. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. If you had the opportunity to sit with someone and work with them and to help them sort of learn something new, that's gonna, they're gonna come back to you though. That's the thing. That's the good thing. If you can manage that and have Sure.

That [00:42:00] relationship as you're going forward, but you usually only have that five minutes to show them the shift tab. And if you had all the time in the world to kind of, I guess you said, kinda surveil and look, look over their shoulder. Um, 

Nate McBride: I think that's the important part though. This, the shift tab was a spontaneous event.

I happened to be there help, you know, talking to the person and helping them through a problem and I saw that their, their tab knowledge was limited, resolved it, but then you immediately have to ask the next question, which is, well shit. If I am responsible for this person's technological aptitude, and if I have the responsibility to theoretically make them better and faster at what they're doing, and I just witnessed a grave example of them being inefficient, then is it my responsibility as this quote unquote anthropologist to effectively correct the wrongs and all of the wrongs this person could potentially be doing?[00:43:00] 

Or am I, um, I don't know the, the, uh, the analogy I gave, it's a terrible one, by the way. You have to dip into your sci-fi nerdery. But, but in the second Star Trek, the newer Star Trek movie, they're on a planet and it's an ice planet, and they're told not to interfere with the locals. And of course, Kirk does.

And his. Away, thus changing the future of them forever. And I think sometimes if I could just sit down with every human being in my company for a little while, the potential downstream impact, and this is not an ego issue. This is more of a stop doing this, stop doing this, stop doing this kind of thing would be sub, I mean, it would be substantial.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: You could change your, 

Mike Crispin: you could change your trajectory. Right? 

Nate McBride: You could literally, I mean, it's through a thousand little nudges. [00:44:00] You could change the whole direction of a boat. It's the same principle, but, but if we don't do the surveillance, if we don't do this, and a lot of IT leaders don't have the time, they don't have the staff to do that, then effectively what we're doing is letting the industry do it for us.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um. I mean, so, so, you know, the, you know, the business analyst role, it's been around since forever. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. It's been there for, for 20 plus years. 

Nate McBride: Absolutely. I, it departments, you know, have hired business analysts and they're usually a specialist within a division. You know, you're one focus 

Mike Crispin: area 

Nate McBride: Yep.

R and d or g and a or clinical or some element of those. I think back on that role, and I think maybe for a while it was perfect and then it, it could have been changed into more of like a, a behavioral [00:45:00] scientist kind of role. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: Imagine if you business analyst wasn't just a liaison between the functional line and it, but was actually first and foremost focused on adjusting the behavior of their function.

Not just kowtowing to what the function wanted, but rather saying, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. Here's the best way to do this and, and amending that group, like that role kind of a, I don't know, behavioral scientist role or something. I think that's, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, they were supposed, but that was largely what they were supposed to do.

I mean, they, maybe they didn't, but they're supposed to say, look, I've been in your industry for a while. I know all the latest tools and the capabilities, and here's the best way to do this. I understand the business process, maybe not more sort of a behavioral and scientist or analyst PERS perspective, but more from a best part of the reason we'd hire them [00:46:00] is to go in 'cause they knew the tool sets and they knew the business process and they would help those functions along.

I think the biggest struggle was that because there were so many different functions with so many different to-dos in their day to day, that you could never make the case to hire one for each. And unfortunately it wasn't sustainable. Because then you'd have a business analyst and then they became business partners because they'd advocate more for the budget items in each function, and they'd then be spread up across multiple functions and they couldn't keep up and it didn't scale.

I think, at least in my experience, it's largely why I didn't work out well for me. But they were all supposed to be a many, many were many. I had some great ones that I, that I worked with that were much, very much plugged in in terms of enabling groups to do more with the technology or even just to enhance the process in general outside of technology.

Yeah. [00:47:00] Because they came from that background. But there, I think when we're talking about larger firms and larger IT departments, it's more it does exist and it, it, it is there and that having that ability to work with people and know what they need and understand how they work and tell the story is. Is, is there, I think it's very difficult to come by in our size organizations today, um, as smaller companies.

Nate McBride: Yeah. I mean, it's just one of those dream jobs, right? If I could hire a behavioral scientist type in my department now along with a full-time IT trainer, oh my God, right? Yeah. Like top two, top two roles I'd hire in an instant if I had the cash. No question about it. I mean, they're, they're, they're so transformative.

I mean, just the teacher alone, a full-time it teacher. Holy shit. Um, 

Mike Crispin: what of the [00:48:00] interesting, I guess ask I, I'd say different tangents here is that one way to realize some of the things people need is, and this is, I don't mean for this to be under that same umbrella of surveillance, but. Remember we had the CSBs, hold on.

Surveillance 

Nate McBride: is a surveillance, I'm sorry, I brought it up. Let's pick, pick a different word. So 

Mike Crispin: So you observation? Just observation. Sure. But we had CSBs back in the day and you could see the shadow, the shadow IT type things that are happening. But what it would do is raise the antennas and go, wow, we're seeing a lot of interest in this specific capability.

Yeah, 

Nate McBride: sure, sure. 

Mike Crispin: Let's go, let's go address that and let's go start having some conversations about how we bring that into a service catalog. And that that's often kind of by looking at the data, understanding the behaviors of the, of the, the company you work for through, even through the cybersecurity lens, helps you to [00:49:00] present better productivity options for people too.

It's 

Nate McBride: so interesting that you bring this up. What the fuck happened to cas? 

Mike Crispin: They still exist. I think largely these things are moved to the browser or to like Zscaler, VPN type solutions, like web filtering solutions. What? Um, just 'cause of consolidated in, they do the same type of things. They, they definitely do because it could, 'cause you don't want to pay for two things.

You can just buy one thing and they kind of just all built in. I know, 

Nate McBride: but, but the whole point of the CSBs was that reverse proxy functionality of 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Of understanding. 

Mike Crispin: Well, I got another answer. It's built into Microsoft's E five. So a lot of people will just use the CSB that comes with Microsoft. Oh.

To do everything 

Nate McBride: Mike, 

Mike Crispin: they'll use like the, uh, whatever. It's with all the OAuth connections and everything, he is like, oh my God, what is people connecting to? Uh, but yeah, I think they have A-C-A-S-B built into the E five. Now, I, I'm not using it, but I didn't pass Lives Cloud. It was [00:50:00] called like cloud app Discovery.

I think it was called. 

Nate McBride: Okay. 

Mike Crispin: And um, now it's called something else. I'm Hor or the enterra ID skew or whatever. 

Nate McBride: Rip CloudLock. Dude. Rip CloudLock. They went over to become an umbrella. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, it was Cisco, right? They Cisco 

Nate McBride: bought them. Yeah, Cisco bought 'em. Yeah. Those guys were awesome. And that was kind of like, at the time, I think it was like 2012, Cassie were coming out and you were like, Hey, yeah, go ahead and run a free assessment.

And you were like, I can't even unsee this, what my people are doing with their data. Um, on

All 

Mike Crispin: right. All right, all right, all right. All right. 

Nate McBride: Wow. CSB Marketplace G two

Security. G2 says Netskope. No. Netskope is still around. [00:51:00] PRIs Prisma by Palo Alto? 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Zscaler. Prisma we had for a little while, but Zscaler was 

Nate McBride: predominantly pure. W2 Citrix Workspace. Forcepoint, Cato, checkpoint. CloudFlare, Zscaler, Akamai Cloud. So 

Mike Crispin: kind of consolidated down into like the security service edge stuff.

The sess,

Nate McBride: oh, hold on. Oracle. CASB Cloud. Shit, I'm in.

I, well, my net scope wins.

Um, I mean, back to where we were, so, alright. No more [00:52:00] CSBs, that's too bad. We can't really understand human behavior. And other thing I liked about casbs was the fact that it wasn't a firewall. I didn't wanna know what terrible shit you were looking on the internet. I didn't wanna know what apps you were accessing though.

Trying to use my credentials and that was the key part. Um, we had a lot of great insights for the years. We used CloudLock at Amag. So 

Mike Crispin: CloudLock was a good product. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Was it cloud? She too. They had a similar csb. And what was the other one? That was early days. You, you were using it. I remember. Wait, had 

Nate McBride: CS b 

Mike Crispin: they had, they had a similar component built into the No, it was, um, what's the product they haves?

Not Cloud Sherpas that I was, who is it? I'm thinking of? 

Nate McBride: They were Gmail that bought by, um, some big consulting firm. 

Mike Crispin: It was the, it was an ops cloud. Not what was [00:53:00] the cloud? Not Cloud Sherpas. Is that what I said? Did I say something else? 

Nate McBride: It Sherpas,

Accenture bought Cloud Sherpa. 

Mike Crispin: It was, remember they, they, it was like SAS ops. Remember? They were big into SA ops. What the hell was the name of that company? It's gonna drive me nuts. But anyway, they were, they were, they were one and then there was the, they had the reverse CSB 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Product. 

Nate McBride: Well, there was a lot of 'em.

There was, uh.

Geez. Um, 

Mike Crispin: I, I'm, it's killing me.

Nate McBride: Um,[00:54:00] 

Mike Crispin: they were a small group and we spent money on a lot of money. And then at one point, and, um, boy, that must have been really effective. 

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: I can't remember the name. And we both used them. It was the only way to have Google to delegate Google mailboxes. They were the tool. You remember, remember that tool that, that you used to use to, to use a graphical interface on Google to delegate mailboxes to uh,

there was a number of things you could not do unless you logged in as the user on Google Workspace. 

Nate McBride: Better Cloud. 

Mike Crispin: Better cloud. That was it. Better cloud. They had a, they had a, uh, CASB type capability at one point. 

Nate McBride: Yes, yes. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. So they were the one I'm thinking Better Cloud. Yes. 

Nate McBride: They're still around by the way.

I'm on their, their Slack board. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. They had that great community that they, or they [00:55:00] still do. That's, um, so that's right.

Nate McBride: If you could secretly watch everyone in your company, maybe you wouldn't wanna do it for everybody. Let's suppose you could secretly watch everyone in your company, like the way Palantir watches everybody in the company, in the country. Um, what would shock you, you think? I'm gonna talk like, forget the obvious low hanging fruit there or that question.

Mm-hmm. What would shock you about use? You think I have an answer for this? 

Mike Crispin: Uh,

I, 

Nate McBride: I'm talking about, I, I'm thinking about stuff that would make you be like, no, shit. I'm talking about shock. 

Mike Crispin: Shock. Oh, boy. I don't know. Um, I can't think of anything I super, that would really shock me. I, one thing that surprises me, I [00:56:00] guess, just in general is though a lot of resources are put forth, not just by it, but by other groups as well.

People do, don't really go looking for things, searching for help. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: They, like you said, they would like to speak to someone. Just like I, when I call up the, you know, T-Mobile or Amazon, I don't wanna go through all the prompts and look it up. I wanna just talk to someone and get it fixed. I think the same thing is true with a lot of the services we provide and.

Like, we have a great, you know, very good search engine that has, you know, is AI driven inbox, right? That give, people could just type in, I'd say 70% of the questions they ask would be answered by this thing. And 

Nate McBride: yeah, 

Mike Crispin: they just don't, they just don't do it. They would rather just message someone and talk to a, a person, which is fine, but it's not always [00:57:00] scalable.

I think it's great for us right now, we're a small company, but if you get bigger, that is not really, uh, sustainable unless you have a big MSP. Right. 

Nate McBride: Well, I think the thing that would, the thing that would shock me most, shock me now would be people using, people using search. That would shock me if I saw a large number of people using search.

Because right now I, I feel it's just, just a hair above zero. 

Mike Crispin: I guess that's kind of my reverse point, is like, I, I'm surprised how many people with all the resources that are provided, that people, and it's there, they don't, they don't use it. And No, that's why it would be shocking to you if, if everyone, I would guess I would shock if they did.

Yeah, you're right. No, I hear you. I totally hear you. Uh, but yeah, yeah, I would, I, I guess now I would be surprised because it has been such a long time where that doesn't get used. How many? How many? And we always talk about the intranet, [00:58:00] right? How many people, oh, we need an internet. 

Nate McBride: Internet, 

Mike Crispin: we, we, we need an intranet.

And then you build one, or you spend a lot of time socializing that one's been built and they don't use it, or they don't take the time to curate it or to do anything with it. Oh, my last company I had an intranet. Yeah. Did you use it? Oh yeah. Yeah. Really? I mean, like, I can't tell you, I mean, you've been part of internet projects with me, like the usage, you know, great for the lunch menu, great for the holiday menu.

Nate McBride: Oh, you gotta have that lunch menu, dude. 

Mike Crispin: And then people will say, and the holiday menu, then people will say, well, you didn't, you didn't build it well enough, or you didn't, you weren't focusing on the 

Nate McBride: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. The, the real estate or you weren't doing, focusing on the analytics or the search engine doesn't work correctly.

I mean, the, the fact of the matter is, is that people use the front page of an intranet and that's it. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: It's like the Google search results. So how much time are you gonna put into that? I don't know. Many [00:59:00] people who are, to be honest, that are, companies wear our size, they buy an out of the box intranet, or they use Slack, or they use something else, and even that doesn't get the traction it needs to get, to get the information out to people.

Nate McBride: If you were a true, true behavioral scientist, anthropologist, yada, yada, yada. You would really have one or three roads to pick. I think one you'd have the road that the industry wants you to have, which a person shows up on day one. There's no human beings. There's a box with their name on it and a laptop.

It says, open me. They open it up and it says, we're gonna assume you're not a dope, so click here, click here, click here. There you go. Do your fucking job. Mm-hmm. Then there's scenario two. They show up. There's you, you're there. You're greeting them. Orientation, but you're gonna kind of give 'em the high level, like, here's your laptop, here's the do's and don'ts.

You know, blah, blah, blah. Right. Then there's option [01:00:00] three. It's a three day orientation. You're with Mike for 12 hours. He's walking you through how to type, how to make documents, how every fucking thing you can do. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: People are conflicted. Because I think if you were to truly analyze them behaviorally, they'd be like, ah, just, you know, gimme like the middle road.

But in truth, they secretly want the low road. They want the, they want the show me every single possible that can do road, but they also don't give up the time to get it, and they're conflicted. Mm-hmm. Nobody, by the way, I think wants the top road. Everyone wants to feel in some way, like they matter on day one.

They're not just employee number X, y, z. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. Of course. I 

Nate McBride: agree. Maybe it's a minority people, like, I'd probably be like, just gimme the laptop and go away. Um, what's the wifi password? But I think for most people, they're gonna be in the last bucket in, in their minds. But in [01:01:00] truth, that's not the reality.

The reality is it's Mill Road. So what we have to decide.

And this is kind of a user experience ex kind of thing. But what we have to decide, you and I and other IT leaders is we have a finite amount of time to behaviorally change and in a positive way, this individual who is now to one degree or another going to potentially contribute to or destroy our corporate strategy.

And therefore you have to, in a lot of ways, make a lot of immediate calculations, but that person's capability to understand behavior change. And you also as an analyst have to be able to quickly assign them into one of whatever number of buckets you have for assigning people. I mean, I try to think myself about how I categorize people that I first meet orientation.

It's a pretty broad list, um, with everyone [01:02:00] getting the benefit of the doubt until the first time they go to change their password. And then they immediately start sort of losing points, right? Um, you don't know where the control alt keys are, okay? This is gonna be, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna work on you a different way.

Um, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. 

Nate McBride: But with all that in mind, like these, uh, cries for help is the wrong phrase, but it's all I got are these sort of quiet cries for help that we're not picking up on. In other words, I would say, I would argue to a degree that perhaps I'm doing my orientation wrong. Perhaps I'm not. Perhaps I could be more efficient, better, make it a little bit longer, a little bit shorter.

Fine tune it, fine tune it until the cows come home. But am I really listening to what they need before I even know them? [01:03:00] And is it just all simply one big cry for help? 

Mike Crispin: And I think every single person that starts at a company is, is different, different backgrounds, different exposure to technologies, different work.

The way they work, the way they learn. It's difficult right? To figure out the, the best way. 

Nate McBride: But we have to design our systems for these people that we don't even know, we haven't even met yet. So yeah. Are we design, are we designing our world for the people that we, we have the people we wish we had. Like I, I had to think about this too, which is, I know it's a sort of rhetorical question in to a degree, but when I, when I think about how I pick things and I install things and I design things and I teach things, I have to make sure I'm not doing all these things for the people I wish I had in the company.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. You gotta know 

Nate McBride: for the people. People I have right now. [01:04:00] 

Mike Crispin: That's right. And that's, that's where. I think the dreaded M word comes up. Many, many, many people know enough to be dangerous when it comes to Microsoft. And a lot of it leaders will feel the training overhead is lower and less complicated if you just go with what everyone else uses.

Nate McBride: But they're not taking it, they're not taking a behavioral change approach. They're taking a 

Mike Crispin: a, um, yeah, assumption. They're making an assumption. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Uh, and on the, on the odds that, you know, 60 to 70% of the market is on this platform, or I'm, I'm, I'm just one less thing I'm gonna have to train on. I'm just commoditized in a way and I'll, I'll focus my efforts elsewhere and, uh, and outside of the productivity suite of tools, like you made a great point many times that why don't we just [01:05:00] train people on Excel?

And word, right? Like there, there's so much in those two very important applications that depending on your function, you could squeeze a lot of juice out of those stones. And people don't, people don't know how to use them. They know how to do the basics. And I think what's really key is putting out the option.

If you want to learn this, then it's available to you. But even when you do that, you find there's not a lot of interest. And it's, I think that's kind of where it's, there's a little bit of a tug of war, like you said, to this conflict between the high, the kind of the top level and the top road. Let's say in the middle road.

I don't want to take the time to learn, but I want to know how to be faster and better. Uh, or I don't have the, or not that I don't wanna take the time, I don't have the time [01:06:00] and. That's, that's where we have to innovate and figure out how to, I think it's always going to be a challenge for us to, to, to accomplish sort of bringing people along to the journey and letting them have the experience.

Think how many people implement Coursera or LinkedIn Learning. They put all this stuff out. It's fantastic if you take a few minutes and look at it. Not, I won't say LinkedIn Learning, it's not very good at all. But Coursera, you know, let's put Coursera out there. Here's a look at these capabilities you can take, you can learn.

Um, and I find briefly, I find Coursera more effective because anything you attach to LinkedIn, no one is gonna wanna use Yeah, share your LinkedIn profile with, uh, with us, you know, uh, even though it doesn't do that, but that's what people will assume. But that's what I mean, like, you give a lot of, just like you give the search engine to your, to your point earlier, you'd be shocked if someone used the search engine, you know?[01:07:00] 

You know, the intranet not getting the usage it needs. Let's say even, even certain AI capabilities that have emerged, not getting the usage. Always pick up the phone and call or just text someone directly to you. Get a human. And until that, honestly, until the systems are as good as just talking to Nate or talking to your, your IT ex person or talking to Mike and just like someone who's gonna sit there with you and work with you and listen, uh, and help, I don't think there's any competition until that there's a way to do that for, for ev, for everyone 'cause IT and, and GNA organizations, I think a lot of times it's like the processes are available, the SOPs are available, the documents are available.

Some, some are good at reading them and [01:08:00] understanding them, and they complete their trainings and everything, but they still, when it comes around time to do them, they pick up the call phone and they call legal and they call quality, or they call it, they say, dude, I know I, I, I know I should have done this or took the training, or I should remember, I should remember this, but I just need a little help.

Just gotta get this one thing done. And that, 

Nate McBride: I think done your, your Excel. Your Excel and word, uh, analogy is, is, uh, insightful for many reasons, but also because,

uh, so the average employee of my company has 14 apps. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: So, on day one, you have eight, you have eight things that you can log into and use. Mm-hmm. Uh, from Slack to box to office, across the board, you have eight things now chances are good. You've been exposed to half. You've been exposed to [01:09:00] office, you've been exposed to, um, some email secure gateway, like chances are good, you can half are fine.

The other four maybe not so much. Then you have employees that are sort of in different departments moving up the scale. We, so, let me say, not say we, I'll say I, in my department, we basically take a position where we're gonna train you on the core suite. We're gonna make sure you're proficient enough there.

Not deadly, but proficient enough. And we don't even do the office part, which is a tragedy. Mm-hmm. But there's reasons for this. But we, we make sure you're efficient enough to do the other things. But if you come to me and you say, I need a new license for, I don't know, fucking benchling or graph pad, you're on your own.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: I mean, you're, you're on an island at this point, and. I'm hoping, and I know that these [01:10:00] vendors are not great. I'm hoping though that the person, as I encourage them to look at the help resources provided by the vendor, I'm hoping that this person will figure it out. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Um, and that's a behavioral element on me.

So we're talking about, we're talking about behavioral elements on the people and their expectations, but my behavioral element is one of optimism and hope after, okay, well you seem like you can operate a keyboard and so well, let's all hope for the best. Good luck. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. And it's expect, there's a certain expectation, I think, of certain roles and people come in, in a certain area that have wor, maybe they've worked with the lab notebook or they've worked with Benchling, or they worked with tools in the past and should have the expectation that.

To know how to use those business line tools, [01:11:00] uh, and that, that's hopefully been part of the onboarding or the vetting, if you will. But that's not always the case. And you know, it takes you, do I I'm the same way. And the assumption that the, the core business applications a company of our size, again, we're a small company like yours, that people are going to know how to use those tools and that the central suite of enterprise meaning tools that everybody has access to in the company, um, we, we will train and we will bring people along on those tools.

Nate McBride: Well, lemme ask question though. Do you guys use like Concur, orio, or anything like that? Yeah. Okay. 

Mike Crispin: We use eo. Yep. 

Nate McBride: Okay. So what do, what do you train, what do, what's your training like for perio? 

Mike Crispin: That comes straight from the finance function. 

Nate McBride: Okay. So there is a training. 

Mike Crispin: There is. 

Nate McBride: Okay. What [01:12:00] about, uh, do you guys use DocuSign or, um, 

Mike Crispin: box sign.

Nate McBride: Box sign. 

Mike Crispin: That's all. I, that's all it. 

Nate McBride: Okay. What about Concur for expense reporting? 

Mike Crispin: Uh, we do not have Concur, but that's, 

Nate McBride: that's a very, alright. Let instead, instead of dancing around, lemme ask you this question. Do you have any platforms that you have there that you just, that no one trains a person on that you assume that they know how to use from past experience?

Mike Crispin: Yes. The Microsoft stack, it's, there's no official training for the Microsoft stack like Outlook and or an Excel PowerPoint. It's strictly reactive to if someone has an issue and we help them through it or they have a need to do something and they ask and we help them. Um, but, but box, and I'd say Zoom is another one.

We don't. We don't really train. Yeah, we don't on at all. We don't them 

Nate McBride: either. Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Um, slack, there's an introduction as part of orientation. You do a intro 

Nate McBride: class for Slack. Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. And um, 'cause we don't assume everyone's going to know [01:13:00] that, but I think if we had teens, we probably wouldn't train on that.

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Um, you know, similarly, I think this, 

Nate McBride: it's such an interesting, such an interesting bias. You and I share the same bias and I think rightfully so. Mm-hmm. I wouldn't train anybody on any Microsoft app ever. If you asked me for fucking Vizio or something else, I'd be like, here you go. Good luck. Um, learn how to use Google to solve the problem.

I'm not spending the time. 

Mike Crispin: Exactly the second point, the point you just made, use Google to solve the problem. That, that, that is, I think, or, or more specifically YouTube. It's like most of what people need to learn or can learn or to make themselves more efficient or learn a tool best done on YouTube.

Trance Bot: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: go onto YouTube and here's a link to YouTube and take a look at this little walkthrough. And, uh, I, I, it's a very valuable tool. 

Nate McBride: [01:14:00] Incidentally, have you had a chance to play with learn about? 

Mike Crispin: No, I have not. No. Okay. 

Nate McBride: Uh, so I know Time is precious for you. Um, I have taken a few moments here and there to actually play with, learn about it is fun as shit.

It does rely heavily on the corpus of knowledge from YouTube and other resources that, um, Google has scraped. So it's not that big of a surprise, just a, it's a ni it's a kinder UI for learning a thing. But, um, it's a resource. I'm, I'm on the fence about we, we, we don't not support it, but I also haven't deployed it.

So it's kind of one of those little shadow things that if someone discovered it, I'd be like, oh my God, that's so cool. Why don't you use it and then evangelize it for me? Um, but yeah, I, uh, it 

Mike Crispin: would be ni it, it would be really nice if Gemini had a way of sort [01:15:00] of pulling that stuff. I mean, they can search YouTube videos and stuff, but to actually design screenshot training type stuff based on all the learnings.

Let's, 

Nate McBride: let's back up to, I just, I I, I'd be remiss if I didn't just back us up to what we just started talking about, which is I actually predicated, which is that once again, we're shaping human behavior or it anthropologists who are saying, I at least I'm, I'm not gonna put you on the same position, but I am saying, I'm not going to change your behavior.

If you know how to do X, you're gonna continue to do X, which is to say word, how to use Microsoft Word. It's, um, I mean, uh. Culturally speaking, if we think about anthropology at a sort of human scale level, um, they'd be no different than me walking into the jungle and finding a, a tribe that already knows how to extract coconut water from coconuts.

I'm not gonna show them a better way to do it. They've already gotta figured out. So maybe I [01:16:00] know a way that will do it 5% better, but I'm not gonna fuck with that. If someone knows how to make a new Word document and type in it, whether or not they know the rest of the ribbon, I really don't care. That's right.

Um, if it's part of their critical job, then they should already be an expert in it. That's the way I see it. 

Mike Crispin: Some of them should have con, everyone should have control of their, what they wanna learn and what they don't wanna learn, even if they don't know what there is to learn. I mean, there's only so far anybody can go to try and 

Nate McBride: that's 

Mike Crispin: do that.

Right. 

Nate McBride: No, it's true. I, uh. I often think, Mike, what our job is, uh, what is now and what's going to become, I feel like in the next five years, I'm gonna be less of a technology. Well, there won't even be a CIO in five years. But let's suppose there is, I'm gonna be less of a, [01:17:00] an expert in technology platforms and more of a, um, traffic cop a nudger, use this, don't use that.

Uh, check this out. Don't check that out. I'm gonna become more and more of a directional hall pass person. Then a, I don't know, a strategist. The strategy will be relatively linear. Mm-hmm. That's the way I'm seeing it going. So behaviorally speaking, the best skill I'll have will be the ability to read people and understand and.

Their role, their needs and how to, how to bridge those two as fast as possible. But I think also along those lines, you know, I had to renew my Airtable today for the company and I refused to go on more than a one year plan, so I paid a little extra, but that's okay. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, 

Nate McBride: that's fine. 

Mike Crispin: Um, [01:18:00] 

Nate McBride: but I began to think about, well, I don't really care.

You can charge me a premium for not paying for an annual subscription, but I wanna get to a world where I have so many applications that everyone has got a customized environment for exactly what they need. Mm-hmm. So it's not sort of a one size fits all. It's a, whatever it is you need world. I try to think about this and whether it's conceivable or not, obviously it'd be a huge headache on a licensed manager perspective, but once you get past that hurdle, mention every person that came in.

Unfortunately, or fortunately given the ability to create new, new, new, new data, if they had exactly what they needed. Mm-hmm. And, um, not to borrow sort of a trope from the world of fantasy fiction, but you had a wizard and Paladin and a sorcerer. And [01:19:00] a thief. And um, 

Mike Crispin: sure. 

Nate McBride: Barbarian, you had all these people that were just fucking awesome at doing one thing.

That's right. Give them the, give them the tools. Don't give them all the tools. Same tools. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. 

Nate McBride: Give them their own unique tool set. What an idea. But we'll never get there just a fantasy. 

Mike Crispin: We might, we might, someday. It depends on how people interface with tooling. I think over time it's, it's possible, totally possible that people sort of bring their own tooling.

And right now it was like, oh, well how would you have governance and how would you secure data and all these things. But I don't know. I

it, the, the risk versus reward component of technology is I feel like it's a pendulum [01:20:00] and it's never, it's never gonna end and we're gonna end. That's what's gonna keep us from moving forward is this back and forth trying to figure out what works and that's why people can't have everything they want.

'cause it's a risk, you know, even though the reward for them would be ultra productivity and huge flexibility and u being able to be unique, being able to truly work the way you wanna work without 'em, to work with the knee guardrails. And that's. Yeah, I don't think, we'll, we'll get there, but it depends. I think it depends largely on

the tools that are available in the next decade. I, geez, it's impossible to know really what's gonna happen, right? I mean, 

Nate McBride: well, I mean, I mean, so, so let's go back to the, let's go back to the, what would you, what would you do if you could design it again, if you could step back and build [01:21:00] for the people that you have, not people you wish you had, and you could do it in a way that they all had the things they needed wishlist in now, but would you do it, would you literally build a world where maybe not everyone needs office, but maybe this person over here just needs Slack and Outlook.

This person over here just needs Photoshop. This person just needs whatever. Would you, would you do that model?

Mike Crispin: I don't know. I, I, I think. Being able to give them sort of the app store model where they can take what they want, what they need and use it is, is very attractive. Kind of to the point around, I think you've mentioned it in the past, like guided autonomy, right? So look, here's, here's your, here's your little storefront.

You can do what you need to do within this [01:22:00] storefront. Here's two, these three tools do the same thing. And you know this one very, very well. Maybe no one else does, but you do, go ahead. You can use that tool and you're extremely productive. I think that's where sort of this app store idea works well. It's just a question of, um, compatibility and, and all that stuff.

So as we get to the web, that stuff gets a little bit easier to consume. But I think the app store type model. Where if you don't need it, don't use it, don't download it, would be, would be awesome. Uh, sort of what happens in the consumer space. But, um, and largely MDMs have tried to do that and you know, these, those type of platforms that tried to do that.

What the te 

Nate McBride: wasn't there a technology? God who was the vendor that was top of the pile? There was a technology, I'm going back to like oh 7, 0 8 now, but [01:23:00] 

Mike Crispin: soft tricity. 

Nate McBride: Yes. You could log, you could log in and check out software 

Mike Crispin: Fint install. Yeah. VMware had fint install and 

Nate McBride: install. Oh my God. 

Mike Crispin: And, uh, well, so Centricity interestingly enough is, uh, is how office is deployed today.

So you would download the click setup for Microsoft Office? 

Nate McBride: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: it basically streams it down and, and stores it in a virtualized container on the computer, which is essentially. It is electricity. Microsoft bought softer city. That's one of the main things they used it for was how they deploy office in Windows in a way that it's similar in all machines.

And then thin stall K kind of was more elegant and dyed over time. I don't think it was even fully bought. Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Fully brought, 

Mike Crispin: brought out. But it was much more elegant 'cause you could copy the whole container down over the file [01:24:00] system and you didn't need any special binaries except for that one binary that brought it all together.

Nate McBride: Right, right. 

Mike Crispin: And it was very elegant. Um, but it's virtualized applications are, were, were very attractive. The only reason they needed it was 'cause the registry is such a fucking mess. And that's why electricity existed was because you, you had to, you didn't have to deal with the registry and you didn't need admin rights.

Nate McBride: What a change. I'm, I'm so surprised that. In retrospect, that wasn't more of the, I mean, it was, it was a little, it was a little pre-cloud when it came out, but how that wasn't how the cloud was built. The cloud would've been ideally built around that idea. Do, 

Mike Crispin: do you know who else made an acquisition that was similar in nature to tricity?

Was Google, Google bought Green Border and built Chrome on it? 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: The jailed, the [01:25:00] jailed aspects of Chrome back when it was running on K-H-T-M-L, uh, SFAR Web, web kit basically before the, yeah, that, that was all based on Green Border, which was an acquisition, which put a green border around ie. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: At the time.

And then that was the virtualized container, I believe that Chrome chromium was built on. And, um, yeah, so, so all virtualized technologies that got built in, but. The menu aspect of deploying apps was largely lost because they got baked into one specific app. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And, uh, so snap, if you run snap on top of Linux, for example, this is the basis in which you stream an application to, to Linux in a container.

Docker is a form of virtualization for applications that are built now. So I think they still exist. They still exist. A docker's bigger than ever. 

Nate McBride: I know. I I was always, whatever we talk about Docker. Like [01:26:00] a 

Mike Crispin: garner. Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Garner. Um, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, 

Nate McBride: no, I mean the, the premise is everything from having an os with apps on an iron key.

I mean, we've tried to come at this multiple different ways. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Uh, assigning a software package to a personality or an individual, it doesn't seem like it's ever fully worked. Um, at least, if not, not to the scale where everyone's doing it and it's becoming sort of a zeitgeist effect. But for sure, um, we were truly doing it.

Anthropology, 

Mike Crispin: you know, it does it really well today. Apple, you put an apple onto a, a Mac onto any one of the leading, you know, the, um, you know, JI or Jam for whatever you, uh, you have a, a managed app store. You can pick and choose what anyone uses. Auto apps, it's beautiful, [01:27:00] but it doesn't work well on Windows.

So, I mean, it's, it's, what I'd really like to see is more education on the Mac for people who've never used them before, because I think there's a huge total cost of ownership benefit if people know how to use them. 

Nate McBride: Just go to the, go to the Genius Store. Have you seen the people working there? There are like 50 year Apple veterans.

Mike Crispin: Uh, there's gonna be like a, I, I keep reading. You never know what's actually gonna happen with Apple, but, but there's gonna be like an $800 MacBook Air that comes out this year. And I mean, like, to me that's throwaway. Like, that's awesome. Like just give consultants those for 800 bucks and then they can go, like you said, go to the Genius Bar, genius bar if they need help.

Or, you know, I all over the country, all over the world, 

Nate McBride: I was being sarcastic about the genius power part. But, um, well, Apple's going to offset the cost of those low price MacBooks with their new lapel pin. [01:28:00] 

Mike Crispin: Oh my gosh. Don't get me started. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, don't get me started, man. In fact, I just got myself started.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna settle down. Um. 

Mike Crispin: Dude, those max studios are awesome though. The, what? You have you, you got a couple of those 

Nate McBride: right? My M two, my two M twos. Oh my God. I love those things. They're my babies. 

Mike Crispin: Fantastic. Awesome. 

Nate McBride: My babies. Um, I should buy more just on principle. 

Mike Crispin: They're great machines. 

Nate McBride: Uh, all right, well let's sum it up.

So basically Sure thing.

Uh, I mean, I think that there's a gap somewhere. I can't really put my finger on it and articulate it where it is, but there's a gap between what we mean to do, which is right. And I feel like we are trying to do right by every employee, every person that works in the company. We're trying to give them an experience that's ideal, but ideal more to the whole than the individual.

I [01:29:00] mean, there's no way I can teach every single person in the company individually. Based on their behavior. But I can do it at the very least, at a functional level, making some assumptions about behavior. I can do it at a corporate level where I am not even acknowledging behavior, I'm just acknowledging rote use, but for the, for the, the greater good.

Whereas we're essentially, we're trying to figure out behaviors all day, every day. And this is kind of across the board, everything from how do we support this ticket? How do we install this thing for that person versus this person? Like how do we respond to this individual? It's constantly ongoing. We're constantly doing behavioral profiling, I guess everyone we talk to, but more so the thing I'm gonna walk away with, and I'm still, I've been thinking about it for weeks, [01:30:00] months maybe, and I'll keep thinking about it, is how am I adapting my behavior?

To, um, bring others, bring others into the, into the world or onboard, I guess. Like, how am I, how am I making that bridge? Am I doing it with bias? Am I doing it with, um, an or an ordained position against your going to come my way? Or am I truly doing it objectively? 

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: Obviously, I have to pick platforms for my company.

I have to pick strategic directions for my company. So in that sense, you're coming along for the ride no matter what. But I think that's the takeaway here as it, we we're relegated into this legacy of anthropological decision making based on experience. The people we get our years [01:31:00] of working with, that exact same type type of person that's come in before.

We've seen these people before, like, you know these people. Yeah. It doesn't matter what their name is or their title, you've seen them before. You've encountered them. You know exactly what they're gonna say and do and how they're gonna behave. That makes us kind of, um, I don't know. Behavioral experts.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. You get to know people quite quickly. You're often the ones who spend the most time with them on the first few days. Right. And you get to know them if you're do, if you're doing it right. I think. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And if you're, if you're, if you, then it, it, it does build, build trust and also build confidence that you're there to support them and get them through everything they need to get through.

Often they, you get questions that aren't related to it, which is great. That's how, you know, you kind of plugged in with people. I think we intend to do right by, sort of by every employee [01:32:00] and to build systems. That, you know, that we manage, we, we want, we wanna be able to instill trust that they'll do the right thing in the system itself.

But there's often the case where they, they may not have the experience with the, with the system, or they're not experience with a computer even, or just basic, like we were talking about some of the basics earlier. Um, and it, it, some, it creates friction, right? So it's kind of, it creates friction. So, you know, we've gotta continue to compartmentalize.

We kind of, at a functional level, I guess, to start, you know, as after that orientation happens. 'cause like you said, everyone's different. So some of it is what's the catchall after you do the orientation to help make people productive, uh, and just making it easier. How fewer clicks, how can you make fewer clicks?[01:33:00] 

Can you make it easier for people just to get through things as best you can? And, and I think in our industry that's hard because there's, there sometimes there has to be a lot of clicks. Not to oversimplify it, but 

Nate McBride: ask you two, two follow up questions. One, is it our job to make it easier for them to do their job?

Is it truly, is it truly our job to do that, number one? 

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: Number two, what's the point in time do you think, in our career where we'll no longer have tolerance for someone's inability to use a core application? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, it's a good question. I, I think it's, it depends, it depends 

Nate McBride: on the company. Do you think it will even happen in our career where, you know, in say 2030 someone comes in and says, uh, how, how do I use Outlook?

Would you tolerate that? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Uh. 

Nate McBride: Uh, 

Mike Crispin: [01:34:00] figure word. It's a great, it's a, it's a great question, and I, I do ask myself that today. Where, I mean, h how, how can you operate outside of work not knowing how to use a, a computer, um, or to some extent it's just, there, there are times you run into people where they just don't have some of that background, or, and, and you kinda like, it still is our job to help them along, and that's certainly what we try to do.

But it's also confusing. It's also confusing as to how sometimes that, that does still happen in the 2026. Um, but you, yeah, there's only so much you can do. It's, it's, it's, it's, how do I say it? Like it's, you can, you can't make someone productive who's not willing to learn. And [01:35:00] that's, I I think we've all run into that, uh, a number of times they just want it fixed.

They just want it fixed. And when it breaks again, they're gonna call you. They don't wanna learn to fix it themselves. And again, this is a small percentage, but we do run into people like that and, uh, and over our careers and I don't know, I, I don't, I don't, I feel like the tolerance is forced because it's, the expectation is that we'll continue to, to do that.

Nate McBride: So 

Mike Crispin: whereas in, whereas in other parts, uh, of the organization expertise, like I'm sure it's not tolerating if you don't know how to do certain things. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Right. 

Nate McBride: It's always been, it's always been an interesting question, which is you and I get to see people on day one and we shake our heads like, this person's a senior director of clinical and they don't know how to fucking send an email.

And we train them. And all I can think [01:36:00] in my mind is they must be really, really good at clinical stuff. Uh, yeah. To have gotten this far and God bless you. Good luck. Um, and I keep my mouth shut. Yeah. And by the way, that doesn't, I, there's nobody at Lio, I'm, I'm referring to right now. That's just a example.

But the, the this day will come when if you don't know how to do so many things already, some people won't survive in the corporate world. And I, I've been telling people, my company right now, one of those things, and the very nearer term will be how to be really good at writing prompts. Mm-hmm. And so you can walk in 2027 to a job and they're going to be like, okay, well just set up your, your profile.

You have to log. They be like, I don't know how, like, what are you talking about? And they're sit there trying to write a prompt. Maybe we set their profile or something and they're gonna fail instantly, terribly. 

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. [01:37:00] Yep. 

Nate McBride: Um, anyway, 

Mike Crispin: and, and I think one other good point in that same area being the prompting is that if, if you don't know how to prompt, you're gonna spend a lot of money.

So if you don't know how to prompt and you're being charged, your company's being charged for how much you consume, which is the model, and that's inevitable. We, we've talked about that in season two. It's inevitable that you're gonna have tokens and you're each, each employee is gonna use tokens. And if you're not good and you don't have elegant prompts, you're gonna start spending a lot of money.

Now, maybe that's a problem that gets solved, you know, better automation. We're not using chat bots, we're using something else. Yeah. But at least for the current time, if you select Opus 4.5 and you start asking. One sentence questions until you run outta context. You're gonna spend a lot of money. [01:38:00] You're gonna spend a lot of money, and someone's gonna look at that and go, what is this person doing?

Nate McBride: Believe 

Mike Crispin: me, 

Nate McBride: I am just all, just as anthropologists. And by the way, I'm now dubbing us anthropologists. We have a very, very wonderful study of human behavior coming at us in the next 24 months. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. I know what you just say. I think, 

Nate McBride: uh, so

I, Hmm.

I don't wanna say anything bad. So lemme just, let me just sum it up by this. We have to figure out, you and I, uh, some way of intervening and. It sounds like some sort of dramatic word, but I feel like as it just a duty to my [01:39:00] company, if someone comes in at orientation and they're sitting there fumbling around trying to do basic things, I have to raise a red flag and mm-hmm.

And then when they, when they start taking basic mandatory trainings for Box and Slack and Claude, and it's just not going well. Yeah. I mean, I have, I think I have a responsibility 

Mike Crispin: and I think I, I, I, I have done that before from the angle of, not, not so much productivity, but, but oh, this person may not, you know, in my mind I'm thinking how is this person gonna be productive?

Is more from the angle of this person will easily be fooled in a cybersecurity situation. Yeah, like if they can't, if they can't do the basics on a computer, there's a very good chance that someone will socially [01:40:00] engineer them. If they're a target, right? If they're a target and they'll be socially engineered and they have access to data, they have access to a number of things, the more senior they are, let's say perhaps, and that's when to raise the red flag a little more.

It is more, I think more understood and custom and it gets people's attention a little bit more to give you the opportunity to work with the person now. I mean that's an approach I've had, I've taken in my career is more taken it from a risk perspective on the cybersecurity side, just saying, gee, I'm a little nervous.

I'd be nice person, seems really intelligent. But like, there's some very basic things that I'm concerned. Just my first impression is that if some, if there's some sort of issue, um. It's, it's, you know, we need to keep an eye on it, so we'll flag it in our, in our, like a Nova four system, let's say. We'll start looking at it.

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And we'll see what the [01:41:00] trends are just in the basic phishing tests. And if that kind of aligns with our assumptions, then I, I raise it. So I have some data, I've some backgrounding, but that's how I've approached it when I see something really glaring. But outside of that, it's, it's pretty reactive, like, okay.

Yeah. We're gonna help you along 

Nate McBride: one, 

Mike Crispin: if it's one final, 

Nate McBride: one final question on this topic. Do you agree or disagree that it should be involved in every single interview for a new hire and a company? 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: Okay. I do too. 

Mike Crispin: I think that's, that's a change that needs to occur. It's just how much, what, that's a resource you need to have and you need to prioritize.

I think that's, it depends on how big your company is, but yes. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: I think there is an, I. If you don't want call it, it, call it, you know, digital experience or whatever. It's like just to have 

Nate McBride: No, 

Mike Crispin: because we were like, 

Nate McBride: oh, don't I fucking call it it? Hey, great to meet you. I'm the [01:42:00] CCIO. I have 10 questions for you.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Here we go. Oh, 

Mike Crispin: I do, I do. More and more. It's, it's becoming more and more necessary. Yeah. And 

Nate McBride: yeah, it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be a critical, I mean, I, I recognize the fact that it would be a lot of time, at the same time I could head off potential, a potential disaster. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. And 

Nate McBride: I feel like I kind of have a responsibility in that, in that way.

Mike Crispin: Yes. I think it's a good way to, it shouldn't be happening during an orientation. It should be more proactively addressed as part of an interview. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Agree. 

Nate McBride: Okay. Good stuff. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, absolutely. 

Nate McBride: Excuse me. Oh my God, that was, that was, that felt good also. That was terrible. 

Mike Crispin: So is it quiet? Can you see the stars up in Maine?

It's nice and quiet. 

Nate McBride: It's quiet, it's peaceful. I, right before podcast, I went out and did a [01:43:00] snowshoe, um, 

Mike Crispin: beautiful. 

Nate McBride: Um, and we, on our property, um, I have this like, nice one mile loop. It's pretty chill. Um, I don't know, I, I have a race on the sixth. It's really probably a dumb idea to do it, but I need to get so much avert on the mountain.

Like, just basically just go up as much as possible. And if I could have a mountain that was 10,000 feet, it'd be ideal, but this one's only three, so I had to go up and down a lot. But, um, yeah, if you, if you do watch the Olympics, you, oh, I'll, you wanna watch the schmo events? S 

Mike Crispin: schmo. Okay. 

Nate McBride: Because you will see something that, and, and all the things I've ever done in my life, exercise wise, every single sport I've done, every exercise piece of equipment I've used, all the endurance things I've ever done.

Nothing [01:44:00] has ever taxed me harder than skiing uphill. Um, oh 

Mike Crispin: my gosh, I can't even imagine. My gosh. 

Nate McBride: This, this, this morning my daughter and I started, it was negative five degrees at the base. Okay? 

Mike Crispin: Oh gosh. 

Nate McBride: Um, within, I wanna say 600 yards, maybe, maybe a little bit longer than that. I had my hat and my gloves off within the first, within the first kilometer, I had my jacket unzipped.

Now as it's, it's as you go up the mountain, as it gets colder and colder with the wind Yeah. And 

Mike Crispin: stuff. But 

Nate McBride: the time I get to the summit. My jacket's off tied on my waist. Gloves and hat are stowed. I have bare, basically bare hands on my poles. I'm you're redlining the whole way up. I mean, it's fantastic.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Wow. Then you get to the top, you put all your shit back on and snowboard back down. Um, [01:45:00] and then rinse, repeat. So I'm loving it up here. Um, it's peaceful too. And there's no ice. There's no ice raids here up here because it's too cold for ice. Uh, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, good point. 

Nate McBride: So 

Mike Crispin: next gonna say the anxiety level must be like your stress level must be through the floor when you're up there.

Just peaceful and yeah, 

Nate McBride: it's reduced, relaxed. I'm very productive. Like, you know, whenever you get a few hours with no noise and a computer in front of you, how productive you can be. Yep. I mean, I was just crushing it today and we'll keep doing it the rest of this week. Um. But next week, uh, we're getting to the thing that I decided not to write a book about, but I wanted to, which was PowerPoint Incorporated.

We're gonna talk about why the hell it is. It's our only way to tell a story in the corporate world. [01:46:00] Well, how, like, how did that happen? And do we have options? What are they? Why don't we use them? Um, how else can, can anyone tell a story? Is it sort of indicative of our complete inability to be creative on anything that we resort to a six inch by five inch white space to tell a big, giant story?

Um, who knows? But PowerPoint incorporated the storytelling crutch is next week. I've been waiting for this one for a while. I fucking hate power. 

Mike Crispin: That'll be a good discussion. 

Nate McBride: I hate it. I hate the fact my entire career, it's been existing and nobody knows. Like I've seen Prezi, I've seen Lucid chart presentations, which are actually really cool.

They're all so novel, but it's still the same thing. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: It's still someone standing in front of a room clicking a thing to show words on the screen, [01:47:00] and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully not reading them to the audience. Um, 

Mike Crispin: exactly. 

Nate McBride: So that's the next week. By the way, we never really introduced the show, so welcome to the calculus of it episode.

Have a 

Mike Crispin: great night 

Nate McBride: episode, episode eight. Um,

I'll just cut that in and put it like towards the beginning or something. I suppose.

Mike Crispin: It's all good. It's all good. I do just, you know, I do wonder if, if, you know, the, one of the, uh, we can talk about it next week. Uh, I thought just in terms of, you can cut it out if you want, but I think is that, just forget for next week, is that the, the pre-read reference slide. Reference slides, right? Yeah.

[01:48:00] But if people looked at those more often, I think, I mean, and, and, and I'm sure they do in many, many cases, but you could rely much more on having the discussion and telling the story. 

Nate McBride: Yes, 

Mike Crispin: thank you. Oh my God. Right. So, so, but I think part of it is having, instead of just reference slides, having the buildup.

Before the discussion. So the context, the socializing, the idea, all the things that you need to do before you present. You don't need slides if you, if you can build the foundation before the presentation. That's the skill to make the present. Even the presentation more enticing to your is if you can socialize the idea beforehand and have them have all the data they need before you have the presentation in [01:49:00] which you can influence them to be excited about what you're gonna present.

It's the pre-work that makes, gets rid of the slides. Like that's why what con what concept? Take the buildup of the, the, um, of any big product announcement with the exception of Apple, right? Is that so much hype and buildup and dah, dah, dah da and maybe Apple's a good example. Rumors and all this other stuff.

Yeah. That when it's time to present. Jobs would put a couple words in the slide and it'd flip through. And everyone's waiting for what's coming next and what's being said. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And simplicity of present is all the socialization, the marketing, the so that when you get in the room, they ask questions and you have the discussion.

Nate McBride: It's 

Mike Crispin: not as much about telling the story, it's about the discussion. 

Nate McBride: You know what PowerPoints are? They're the worst comic book ever. When I do my PowerPoints, people always get on my shit [01:50:00] because I don't use the corporate template. I pick themes like so jellyfish, for instance. So all my slide backgrounds will just be jellyfish in the ocean and I don't, I don't use the same fonts.

I do all kinds of shit and I'm like, if you're reading this and you're paying attention, you're not listening to anything. I said, you didn't read my pre-read, and this is somehow interesting to you. But I try to make it so it's a visual art show. That you can't, like if it's a white background with like white jellyfish, I use white text.

Yeah. Which are like, I can't read the words that they're like, it's exactly right. 'cause I'm talking, I'm talking to you. Don't read the fucking words. 

Mike Crispin: You, you, you know how many slides over the ears I've created where I've got one, I've got, I've got five real slides, but I've got 12 slides because there are callouts.

So it's like, because you don't [01:51:00] know if you're gonna have the opportunity to present them or not. So it's like, okay, here, here's slide one. Right. With the stuff on it. Slide two is the same slide with a little bubble on top with a call out. Yeah. Slide three is a bubble on the, because they wanna make it into a PDF.

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: So you can't use, you can't use, not that you would, but use animations or anything. So it's like you've got 12 slide and then people go 12 slides. I'm not reading this. Right. So it's like there, the, I agree with you. I think there's, it's just, it's time for some sort of change. And this, it's, it's really about being able to just talk about something and the slides are reference.

Uh, they could be packed full of crap, but they don't need to be used in the presentation. The presentation should be just the agenda. 

Nate McBride: All right. So we, we, let's, let's, we don't wanna spoil the surprise. All these are great things. We're gonna [01:52:00] bring all this back up. I have so many fucking problems with PowerPoint, so it should be a good episode.

I'll get Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: we'll do it. 

Nate McBride: I'll get, uh, ready for that one. Um, okay. Well, thanks for coming. Give us all the stars. If you listen to this episode, uh, I'm still trying to figure out what, what. Podcast platform is run. I know we're still on Apple. I think we're still on Spotify, but I'm not sure I checked to other things, but, um, 

Mike Crispin: we we're on Spotify.

I saw 

Nate McBride: call today. Yeah, we're, we're on Substack, which is important at the C oit us. The COI us. T-H-E-C-O-I. Us You can join our Slack board. It's awesome. We got new people that I joined this week, so welcome to all of them. Um, uh, be nice to old people. Um, if ICE shows up in your neighborhood, take pictures and video and post it.

Mm-hmm. And show what atrocities are being done. Have your pet spay or [01:53:00] neutered. Um, take in people that need help or give them help or assistance if they're having difficulty. Um, it's a good human thing to do, uh, especially if you have more than they do. And in the meantime, learn how to use word.

Mike Crispin: Use word use. Learn how to use word or just use Google Docs or pages, 

Nate McBride: learn how to use paint. 

Mike Crispin: Did I see, I saw a post this morning, I think. Do you know a line, the guy Linus, who does the tech reviews? He was, he was on like Jimmy Fallon a couple weeks ago. He is, he is from, he is a Canadian guy. He's been on forever.

He is been on for a long time, builds computers and stuff. He posted something about, Microsoft wants to know where Windows 11 went wrong and he, he shows how he opened up Microsoft Paint and it asks [01:54:00] him to log in. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: He's like, what is this crap? What are they doing? 

Nate McBride: Well, and they have, and my, when it was 11, they have stickies and then stickies old.

So there's like the new stickies. Then there's the earlier stickies. Just gimme the fucking stickies. 

Mike Crispin: It's just unreal. 

Nate McBride: Anyway, all right, well fuck them too. Um, all right, well stay good. I will chit chat with you on the next week. 

Mike Crispin: Sounds good, man. 

Nate McBride: All right, dude. I'll talk to you. 

Mike Crispin: Talk to you. Have fun 

Nate McBride: later.

Trance Bot: The calculus of it,[01:55:00] 

season three,

verifying this identity.

Sometimes you just have to take it.

Sometimes you just have to take it.

It's season three divided autonomy,

verifying identities.

The calculus of [01:56:00] it.