The Ultimate Change Agent
It’s a doozy.
The following is an email I wrote to my co-founder after a night of reflection on a comment made by someone we had been introduced to. Cue doozy.
So, the comment yesterday from [investor] sparked a number of thoughts in my mind, and it clarified a few key points around the long term vision of workZeit, where I want to take this, and where I really believe we can take this.
I think we’ve been caught up in the here-and-now over the past few months and I admit I lost sight of what the real end goal of the company was. Which, hey, it needed to happen; we need to make the here-and-now work to get to the long term. But, I think it’s important to take a step back and really look at how the “now” is related to workZeit 2023 and beyond.
One thing I think resonates with both of us is the concept of wanting to create real change. Not just talking about change, not just measuring change, but actually creating it — making it happen and bringing it to life. I think we were both drawn to behavioral psychology in the first place because we want to understand how people work. But, we don’t just want to understand (because just understanding is never enough for us, now is it?). We want to understand so we can influence, and in turn, so we can not be influenced unwillingly ourselves.
There is a reason we both decided to become creators — a designer and an engineer, musicians, artists.
We want to bring things to life. We want to make them real. And we want to make shit happen. That’s why we’re founders, right?
We don’t believe the here-and-now is enough, and we’re crazy enough to believe we can influence the future in a huge way, which brings me back to workZeit. By understanding how individuals work, how companies work, what motivates them, and what drives them forward we can take the first step towards creating real change. Chade Meng Tan says that to bring about world peace we must first start in the workplace. The workplace is where individuals spend a majority of their waking lives, and it is what drives economies and entire nations forward, for better or worse. So, it looks like we’re in the right spot to bring about real, monumental change. (We were never ones to beat around the bush, now were we?)
workZeit as it exists now will allow us to better understand the driving forces behind companies and individuals, but this is only the first step. We will monitor the effect of our tool, its relationship to outcomes, the ripples it creates in the workforce. We will gather an army of data that will arm us for the fight forward to change. This data will help us understand not only what change happens, but why it happens, and how it happens. We will take things further than any theory or behavioral study has ever gone, and do it on a massive scale. We will move from understanding to creating. We will be the engine that drives change, the tool that helps people move from talking about change to actually making it happen, the resource any individual or company will go to when they want to see real results.
workZeit will be the flash of lightning that creates a spark, the wind that transforms that spark into a wildfire, and the rich ash from which a vibrant new world can grow, unlike any other we have seen before.
workZeit will be the ultimate change agent.
/doozy
