YouSaid · the spoken record

Evan LaPointe

lines on the record: 160
first: 2024-08-11
most recent: 2024-08-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And it's unfortunately in a lot of habitats, the habitat itself either allows or even rewards people that are super untrustworthy to kind of play the system and advance through the system. And as you talk to Jeffrey about the power conversation, like The worse the habitat, the more his suggestions work.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And it's not that none of these become unimportant because the other ones are kind of the gateways. I mean, your relationships require all three, especially your professional relationships. So yeah, it's more just like if experience is the only thing undermining you when you're otherwise very trustworthy and very skilled and able, that's a shame. Just fix it. And there's a whole bunch of ways to go about that. But I like to leave that to people to explore that creatively. Like, well, oh gosh, okay, I can change this to this, this to this, this to this. On the trust thing, do you hurt people? I mean, that's it. Do people have a reason to believe that you are risky or dangerous?”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to this point of the profile, like as you parse the profile, you'll find things obviously not a pleasant experience, like being really impolite, obviously not a pleasant experience, being super overbearing and assertive, obviously not a pleasant experience, being hyper low in openness and acting out of that and like telling everybody they're overcomplicating everything all the time. Not a great experience for people who are actually well intentioned trying to get it right. So there's concrete things that you can do with this knowledge in mind.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's the thing as you parse that list yourself, as you know, anybody listening parses that list, it's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? That is where to start. Not how good am I at my job? How much do I know? How critical am I to this process? But am I a miserable experience? And if the answer is yes. Don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, biologically speaking, the biggest bug in our programming as we transfer this to the business context is what makes the most sense in business is the most, you know, if it's a meritocracy, the best people with the best knowledge that we can trust should be in the room. And we will fight it with every fiber of our being. If they are a terrible experience And that's a bummer. And what's funny is you can flip it because we all either have friends or know people who have friends that you cannot trust. They have no ability to speak of, but they're a super awesome experience. What a great friend. So how is it that we get this thing completely flipped?”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you think about it, let's pick on Shreas one last time. What is his ability in utility off the charts? To what extent can he be trusted? Trust three. Off the charts. Will he ever damage somebody? I mean, not to my knowledge. He may have some really dark past that we don't know about, but as far as I've seen, not a lot of damage in his wake. And then thirdly, what kind of experience is he? He's an extraordinarily positive experience. So he naturally accumulates great relationship after great relationship after great relationship. And again, if you're that great engineer with a ton of ability, let's flip the middle dimension, and we trust you a lot, but you're a horrible experience. Are you coming to our offsite? Are you in this meeting? No, you're gone because we don't want you there. You're like a hurricane.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, and then here's the surprise ending the last piece of every relationship that you have is appeal. Appeal is how your brain interprets the shared experiences you have with other people. Whether or not you look forward to being around that person, whether or not you like their style, the feel of what shared experiences really are.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he's not going to sit down with the invoice and be like, Why did you need 13 horns instead of 11? Like John just gets to do what John does because there's so much trust in this kind of like beyond my event horizon kind of risk. Like it would be riskier for me to do it than for him to do it or her to do it. So that's kind of the level. But that matters more to a human being because the safety system If it activates your utility is sunk so if you're if you're an awesome engineer but you damage people it doesn't matter that you're an awesome engineer Because in the social network, the mesh of your organization, you are a node that has like a protective covering around it. Information is not flowing to you the way it would normally, and delegation is not flowing to you and access is not flowing to you the way it would normally.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. We're going to have Wolfgang Puck do all the most critical stuff. And maybe even set up the music and the decor and whatever. Or another example would be like when Steven Spielberg has John Williams score a film, he's not hoping John will do it as well as Stephen would do it. He's saying, just send me the bill. Try not to go too crazy.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our focus on the high value work. And we don't need all the low value work to go beautifully well or be artistically brilliant. So trust two is when we step up to almost like I need to do this myself. Is there anybody who could do it as well as me that there's no risk to me having them do it instead of me doing it? And that's where you get true scalability of teams. So if you can trust people enough, your brain's assessment of risk of giving this task to someone else or giving this knowledge even to somebody else that they'll treat it the way you would treat it a significantly higher positive trust that you can feel in a relationship. And then finally trust three is when we do hit these breakpoints in our brain where we say the way your mind works is beyond the way my mind works on this topic. So the classic example at the cookout would be if Wolfgang Puck was a neighbor.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then on the other side of trust, we kind of try to create some levels to this to keep it clean. And the fractal continues to grow a little bit, but we'll try to keep this simple. But I like to think of trust one, two, and three, three distinct levels of trust. And trust one is, let's say we're having a cookout. Trust one is Lenny, could you please bring the chips? Ideally sealed. But it's a delegation of a simple non-critical task, knowing that it is likely to get done and get done decently well. But I don't, it's not like as huge level of trust. It's the people that we work with where this type of delegation and especially if people delegate under the thesis of I want to do the high value work. So let me put the low value work on other people. That's all the low value work that we put on other people. And it allows us to pure.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trust can span from strongly negative to strongly positive in a relationship. And we felt that full range with different people in our lives strongly negative trust is the brain saying this person is dangerous to me. They are very likely to try to undermine me. They're very likely to not deliver something. Personal harm will occur by essentially kind of interacting in this relationship.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invest in your ability because it is so integral to every relationship you have, particularly professional relationships and your ability, knowledge, your reasoning, your imagination, your skill set, these are all incremental facets of you. And that's really, really key. Now, here's the plot twist your ability is actually not the most important part of a relationship, biologically speaking. There's two more that matter quite a bit more. And the surprise ending is that the third one matters the most, which is scary in some cases. So the second factor of relationships is trust. So trust in the brain, if we go very primitive back to the amygdala that we talked about earlier, trust is simply risk, human level risk.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To you is a function of your relationship, and it will contribute to the positive or negative force that you feel in that relationship. Like, wow, this person has a lot of ability. My appreciation is higher, my faith in them is higher, my cooperation with them is higher. If you question a person's ability or they've proven that that ability is kind of unreliable, those things start to kind of vector downwards. And we'll pick on Shreas through this as a good example because I think most of the people watching also know him. What is his ability? What is his utility as high as I've ever seen? I mean, it's every conversation, he's intellectually, conceptually additive to. You're better after you've talked to him every time. At least that's been my experience with him. And we all know people like that, that with various fields and various abilities. So that's one piece that's really important. And why, as an individual, it's so important to.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right at this point we have some help that we didn't used to have. But the other thing that goes along with what is a relationship is like how good is my relationship with person X? Like you and I both know Shreas and how good is our relationship? I would say it's awesome. Why is it awesome? I don't know. It's just feels great. So let's double click on a good definition and a good framework because once you actually know why a relationship feels great, that example or why a relationship feels super difficult, now we can start to build some strategies, some like actual action plans for them. So what we propose to people is if you take that third component of your brain ability, that is one piece of your relationships, especially your professional relationships. So if you know an engineer and you have an idea of something you want to build and they have the ability to build it, their ability and their utility”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the environment, the habitat is a huge component of this as our relationships, which is if you have great relationships where people trust each other enough to have this kind of cognitive dissonance conversation. And we have a habitat. Are free to discuss cognitive dissonance and logical disconnects. Like, that is really important to do. Then you activate fast influence mode, basically. So that's a really important thing. And then as you transition to relationships, well, what are the question that everybody kind of glosses over in my opinion is what is a relationship? I mean, I don't know how you feel about answering that question, but it's a really hard.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we were talking about relationships kind of as this off ramp or this kind of sidecar to influence. Real quickly, the fast mode of influence and relationships goes really well together. So we talked about the slow and the moderate. The fast mode of influence is cognitive dissonance. It's essentially saying in the moment, I'm not going to wait for you to experience anything. It's saying in the moment, how does this formula compute? Explain to me, Evan, how you being too blunt in feedback is going to end up in a human being changing. Why do you believe that? And especially it's that second phrase of why do you believe that like drill below the behavior down into the belief? What do you believe that has you doing this? And then we can explore how preposterous the belief itself is, which then bubbles up to the surface level of this.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we underestimate this kind of less concrete part of the business world. And that's, I mean, that's the genesis of this whole business that I was crazy enough to start after starting other companies in the past, which is like we are underestimating how much of our operational reality is a function of our human reality. And are we doing enough? Are we doing the right things to close the gap between what science knows and what business does? Do we even know what the science is? Have we educated ourselves to close the gap? And then it becomes super obvious, oh, this makes a lot of sense to be open and find the patch to my bug. And here we go.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead of just switching the difficulty setting to easy, which is like the enemies somehow become our friends as we go through this journey. It really can be that transformative, especially with a case like yours that you talked about. Okay, I am not as high in openness. I'm very high in conscientiousness. If I can admit this and ask different types of questions, everybody else in the room will be like the difficulty setting of this just went to like zero. The speed of it just went to way higher than it used to be.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't need a bunch of data for that to work really well. You know, if you said, hey, I'm not super strong at this and the rest of the room was like, well, wait, this other person's super awesome at this. Why don't the two of you work together? Then it's like under 30 seconds, we've unlocked potential that wasn't there. So that's, you want to get business. I kind of think of extending the video game metaphor. Not only are we choosing our characters or we are a certain character, but the business has a difficulty setting that we chose based on the habitat. And I've worked in and with way too many companies where we are playing the game in nightmare mode and every enemy takes a thousand shotgun shells to bring down.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to be more situationally aware and probably make a series of vastly better decisions than the team that has a lot less situational awareness than you do. It's a huge advantage. But when it comes to the concept of influence, yeah, I mean, figuring out these dimensions that define who you are and then using them to kind of say, I want the permission to ask a series of questions and challenge our thinking through this very intuitive strength that I have. Can we all see the value in that or do I need to further sell myself, right? And then you'll find like you can take on that character and play that role really well”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're definitely challenging each other using these dimensions of like compassion to be the character of caregiver or the character of like protector. And so there's a whole bunch of different kind of ways you could turn those dimensions into characters, but I think when you see the value of each of those perspectives, especially in product, I'm a really big fan of product. If you have dysfunctionally high compassion, dysfunctionally high openness you have Internal rewards and motivations to explore regions of product that other minds aren't exploring as intuitively. And you don't have to have the whole deck to be amazing at product. But you have some unfair advantages if you are super prone to reverse engineering just by your nature.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walked in the meeting with so that we feel differently about things walking out of meetings. So I think there's a bunch of different very useful dimensions. One could be very creativity-based. If you follow this big five format, they're kind of spelled out for you. Enthusiasm, interesting dimension. I want to challenge us on the through the lens of what do people get excited about? What makes people feel good? Does this make people feel good? Are there tweaks we could make to the product or this marketing campaign or whatever? I mean, look at what Seeky just did with Runway. I mean, like, I love that guy so much. And there's so many components of his character. And obviously the characters he's surrounded himself with that contribute to really next level stuff.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the dimensions are most valuable to people. I would say one of the dimensions is compassion, which is, do I want to influence by trying to help people, by trying to make sure that people, that we get it right and that people get value? And then the permission I'm seeking there is, can I ask questions about why are we not thinking about the user right now? Why are we not concerned with the value that they're getting? and challenge us in that way. I think there are characters based on logic and even belief, which is I would like to be the one to kind of insert more knowledge and insert more kind of causality into conversations and challenge causality in conversations to make us think harder and challenge what we believe and like break up the sacred cows of the stuff we”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy. Is it okay if I do that over and over and over again? And now you've bought future you the permission to approach things in certain ways that would yield meaningfully different influence outcomes, right? Like meaningfully different. Like I was able to do this and it accelerated something.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the idea of intentionality and just about everything. Like, are we letting trade winds push us into certain things or are we actually making choices? And I think that step of being intentional about your style and this kind of notion of a character is a wise step to take so that you can kind of have some guardrails as you go through this and some consistency, right? It helps other people understand the role you're playing in influence if you are consistently kind of coming from the same place. you're articulate about that style. Like I want to try to influence this organization by doing this this way. And you're going to see that from me over and over and over again. You've actually kind of given yourself a little permission. And also you can get some buy-in from people. If you do want to be more the barbarian or, you know, kind of approach, you can say, hey, I'm the devil's advocate approach or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly right. And let them know it and let them live with it. Don't cram it down their throat and make them accept it. If they live with it just a little bit, even just a couple days, that might be enough to come back to a much softer conversation.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah. And I think, yes, there's the challenge component to it, but I think the underappreciated piece of that methodology is that you're still letting that person see the world. You've given them new information that is breaking some calcification in their brain. It's not the challenge, it's not the moment of the challenge where all the magic happens. Like there's moments that occur later that continue kind of putting that calcium Lyman rust melting formula on this expectation or this kind of decision in their mind to the point where sometimes they'll turn around and be like, thank you for even telling me this.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People's body language. While you're saying these things? And here's some signs to look out for that when you've done this and you get this, that's probably a sign that people are bought in and still with you. And when you see this, that's probably a sign that people are pushing back. And you can ask this question in that moment and you'll probably hear answers like this. So you're like giving somebody a tool that their future is going to unpack. And the challenger sale kind of assumes a long enough sales cycle where you're not going to land the sale in the meeting. You're not trying to close them right there. You'll teach them some stuff and you'll say, hey, if you see this stuff, that's a pretty clear sign that you need to take action. So why don't we call you in 30 days? And 30 days later, we get on foot. Have you been seeing this? And they'll go everywhere I look. I can't not see it now. And that's how you influence a person in a few days, a few weeks.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That this doesn't work. And that can take months, that can take years, that can take a lifetime for people to learn this low way. And it is a form of influence, right? Like you are being intentional to say, I think the world will create enough failure that adaptation will occur. That is a form of influence, just the slowest one. And a lot of people listening probably realize, oh, that's what I'm doing. How can I go way faster than just letting things fail? So that's where moderate influence comes in. A great book to read for moderate influence is the Challenger sale. And in the Challenger sale, what we're looking at is the concept of teaching people something. And then when they live with this new knowledge, they'll see things that they weren't seeing before. So for example, in the feedback example that we can kind of keep using over and over again through this is, hey, Evan, you might want to notice.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know they're going off a cliff, and a lot of times we find ourselves in what's called the Abilene paradox. And the Abilene paradox is where everybody in the room knows it's a bad idea, but we're all like, we're in the classic Abilene paradox kind of, if you look up memes on Google, it'll be like the dad thinks that the kids might want to go camping. Mom doesn't want to go camping. The kids don't want to go camping. Dad also doesn't really want to go camping. But everybody's like, dad probably wants us to go camping. So let's give it a go. And like they all go and don't enjoy it. So that's, and we see that play out, you know, all the time. And a lot of people will just kind of say, I can't do anything. I don't have any influence in this case. Where's going to let him fail and they'll learn or this impolite person like me giving feedback the wrong way years in the past? Like, you know, I'm not going to sit Evan down and talk to him about this. He'll figure out on his own through failure.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where fast influence is easy and like the permission isn't there, then you're slowing the company down inadvertently by just not kind of clarifying this with the team. So slow influence is kind of the we'll let them find out the hard way influence. Like they're going off a cliff.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the one piece. Now, assuming the relationship is in place, and we'll come back to that and talk about that because that's a whole very actionable framework to unpack, assuming the relationship is good, I think the starting point for influence is to choose your character and choose your mode. It's almost like you're playing like Elden Ring or some video game and you're going to be like, am I going to influence in this way as like the hero or the, you know, the kind of like the exemplar of these things? Or am I going to influence through back channels? What is my character? And everybody for your personality kind of has a natural fit for like the character you're going to select as this mode of influence. And then you're going to pick a speed of influence, which is slow, moderate, or fast. And the habitat can help a lot with this. It's like if a founder is listening to this and you haven't created a habitat.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty out of sorts when it comes to relationships. And you even hear crazy mantra like we don't have to like each other to work together, which are like, good luck with that. I mean, just watch a text message pop up on a phone of a person who doesn't like you and watch their response time to the text message or their Slack message or whatever. I mean, you're talking about you've built in a multi-day, at least multi-hour delay into responsiveness. Sure, purely because the relationship isn't good. And then you compound that effect over whatever size your company is. That's, you know, that's massive operational inefficiency just because I don't want to respond to Evan right now.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll probably unpack a second topic and open up an off ramp here right at the beginning. But there's two things. There's influence itself and then there's relationships. We should probably talk a little bit about relationships. Trying to exert influence through a dysfunctional relationship is not going to go great. And most humans, especially when they go to work, are pretty...”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You haven't done enough situational awareness work, you have no idea if PLG is a remotely viable strategy for growing your business. It is remotely relevant strategy for growing your business. And company after company after company has leadership team obsessed with this concept that in principle we should be able to let people just sign up and swipe a credit card and onboard and great. No, we have a hypertechnical solution. Like that is never going to happen or it's like that's not the way they do budget or like there could be any number of ways that that's not going to work out. And that's those are just some concrete examples.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the category, I think. Is like have you reversed engineered how to get outcomes? And have you reversed engineered to predispose your mind to come up with really good ideas and good decisions as opposed to come up with decisions that are super disconnected from reality? Great example being like PLG. I mean.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a, because, well, I'm busy. I got a lot of stuff to do. I can't, I don't have time to go take a world tour, which is a lot likely, don't have the rest of our lives to talk about this. I'm not asking you to take a world tour. I'm asking you to stuff into your brain enough situational awareness that the decisions you make every day that affect all those people you're not talking to are considering those people that you're not talking to so less about an intended specific outcome in this case and more about do i really know the you know, that I would kind of think about this as like if we think about like aeronautical engineering, like do I actually have an understanding of the conditions, the flight conditions that I'm in every day in order to fly really well? And the answer to that for a lot of people is no. So reverse engineering is probably the whole category. I don't know if that makes enough tactical sense. I'm happy to be more descriptive, but like.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Occur. And that's why a lot of people they like accountability is a great example. Asking for accountability is the best way to not get it. Because asking for accountability activates people's safety systems or especially saying, I'm going to hold people accountable. Then everybody's like, oh, great, we should set up a whole movie set of facade houses that pretend everything's great with no substance behind them. And that's why so many companies end up that way. But yeah, I would say that's kind of the tactical. The second thing to understand about openness and reverse engineering is just situational awareness. Very few conscientious people spend, in my opinion, as a very open person, enough time immersing themselves in the reality that is every day situational awareness necessary to do their job. Simplest example of this is how many executives have ever talked to.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why I failed in those cases. But as soon as I started closing the gap and realized I need to try harder to like think about the story arc of this feedback, that becomes clearest to me how to do it when I have the intended outcome in mind for the feedback. Like I really would like this person to start turning the corner on this particular way of thinking. Like if you and I work together and it was about openness, we'd be like, what are some things that I could do right now to increment and set the stage for a big shift in openness as time goes on that you are bought into? And that's a very, if I'm impolite and be like, Lenny, what's your problem? Why can't you do this? Everybody else can do this. Your willingness to start turning that corner. I mean, it may be there because the safety system is active. You're like, oh, bad things can happen if I don't do this. But like, I don't want your safety system to motivate this change. I mean, in most cases, that's an optics-based change instead of a material change that will.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outcome. Like, I delivered the feedback, but the delivery wasn't the intended outcome. And the way that I delivered it actually reduced the probability of the intended outcome because I was being Too impolite, too direct in many cases, too harsh. And what is harshness due to the brain? Well, that's crystal clear. So what is the”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the best exercise for a conscientious person, especially to feel more open is to become obsessed with reverse engineering. And it's to say there's two forms of reverse engineering that I think are really helpful here. Number one, it would be reverse engineering against a desired outcome to truly understand the inputs that generate that outcome. And if we think about that at a big level, like, okay, we want to win a market, what are the real inputs to deconstruct that outcome and understand what our strategy should look like to attack all of the most relevant inputs that generate that outcome? I think that's the specific form. And then at a super tactical level, like if you're going to give feedback to somebody, and let's say, you know, like for me, I'm low and politeness. You're probably much higher in politeness than I am. And I struggled for years with feedback to generate the intended.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, then you become the person who needs everything translated into your language because when your weakness flares its head up, it slows everybody else down. So it's really just from an operations business fluidity perspective, a team that is highly unaware of its weaknesses is going to have a lot of slowness and a lot of problems as a result of that. They don't have to fix all their weaknesses, but be aware of them and know who is attached to your weakness.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the right way of doing the whole thing. It's like, no, no, no. If you've ever lived a day in real life building a real product, the dynamics shift a lot throughout the course of product lifecycle, as an example, or really any life cycle as an example. And the peak humans as the dynamics shift are very different peak humans. Lenny is awesome here, contributes here, 10% contributes here, 98%. Evan contributes 98% here. Please get Evan out of the room when it comes to these meetings. Like that's great. And yes, we should lean into our strengths, but not so much that we don't know our weaknesses. Because another human strength on your team is the patch for the bug of your weakness. And we run buggy software and companies and we say, oh, I'm leaning into my strengths. I don't need to worry about my weaknesses.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And consider the second and third order effects and so on. And what would the project plans? And to your point of being both conscientious and agreeable, you are this master of coordination and alignment naturally. So like when that phase of the project begins and we have to get people bought in, high functioning together, getting on the same page, staying on staying focused, getting the project done. All of the people that were good at the beginning with all the vision and strategy, they are just a complete disaster in that face. So like that's just how things really work in the real world. And I think we're so again focused, like we talked about at the kind of at the beginning, we alluded to the fact like there's you have to unpack enough complexity. I love the Einstein quote, make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. And we've made things way simpler than possible in business by saying like.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aren't as natural to you kind of just realize we're not in the phase yet of judging and ranking and prioritizing these ideas. That's not where we are in the overall storyline. So let it happen. And then if you can improve those ideas, improve them. And once ideas kind of have that early stage, that kind of like what Johnny Ive described as like the infancy of an idea when it's really weak and delicate and susceptible, if you can nurture that idea to kind of adolescence where it has a little bit of ability to defend itself, then now you're in a situation where your conscientiousness can start to think about things like how would we resource this? What sequencing makes the most sense? What is the ROI of these things relative to each other?”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely right. Yeah. I mean The truth is, we look at, I mean, taking that Canva example of coaches and managers, not only does that change the way an employee feels about the way this connection they have is invested in them, but it also changes inherently a lot of the meeting dynamics and teaming dynamics from like, okay, hierarchical feeling things, manager, to more mesh-based intellect, right? And within the mesh, you don't have to worry too much about the hierarchy anymore. You can kind of say like, this is the nature of my contribution. So even in the vision and strategy piece, maybe your contributions to idea generation, they're going to be some and they're probably going to be good. But those are not ideas to protect in the state that you brought them to the table. Their idea is to set on the table so that people can surround them and improve them. And then as other people contribute ideas,”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That stripe is really good at this, right? Especially from the early days, that great documentation justifies all sorts of second order effects that then will lead us to this first order effect you're asking about.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, your brain is just going to feel agitated when you're around vision. But, I mean, you can still do it, right? You can still ask people to translate the key tactic is, okay, it's not this, you're predestined to suck. It's more if you're low in openness, especially if you're also high in conscientiousness, then recognize your native language for ideas is a mismatch for the native language of vision in really, really good strategy. And then you can be open about that and be like, you can ask for some translations. And you can ask for, I mean, trust doesn't have to be non-participation. You can actually say like, it would help me trust if you could explain this gap. Like a great example would be a second order effect. Like, why should we have awesome documentation? How are we going to make more money if we have awesome documentation? Ah, great question. Don't be hostile in the way you asked it. But like, just help me understand what thread are we pulling? Well, we're pulling this thread of customer satisfaction, retention recommendation, et cetera.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two dots. I'm not seeing how they're connected. Logic. Like now let's activate the prefrontal cortex with this sentence instead of Lenny. That's dumb. I completely disagree. Let's activate the amygdala instead”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source