Why Fixing Work Fixes Everything

0:01I think we're trying to solve a software problem with hardware. Right now, for many companies, the software is glitching. We have burnout, we have disconnection, we have fragmentation. If you're to mandate any approach, whether that be return to the office or something else, you're attempting to fix that glitch by rebooting the hardware. But if the code is bad, the building's not going to fix it.

0:27Amanda Schneider:Welcome to Design Nerds Anonymous, the podcast that sparks curiosity at the intersection of business and design. I'm your host, Amanda Schneider, founder and president at ThinkLab, speaker on TED.com, and now officially a published author. My new book, Work for What's Next, published by Wiley is coming into the world. And this season of the podcast is built around the ideas inside it. Each episode brings you into a deeper conversation with leaders who aren't just reacting to how work is changing. They're actively shaping what comes next. Today's guest is exactly that kind of leader. Deb Golden is Deloitte's US Chief Innovation Officer.

1:15Amanda Schneider:For nearly three decades, She's worked at the intersection of technology, risk, and human potential, helping some of the world's largest organizations navigate disruption before it becomes crisis. Her work has been featured everywhere, from the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, to The Economist, Fast Company, and even the World Economic Forum. But what makes Deb's perspective different isn't just her resume. It's how she thinks. Deb has the rare ability to see patterns before most people feel the pain, and to name the systems that quietly stop organizations from evolving. I'm so proud to say that Deb also wrote the foreword to work for What's Next, because her work and her leadership philosophy sit at the very heart of this book.

2:05Amanda Schneider:It's all about trust, unlearning old rules, and what it actually takes to lead in a world where steady state is gone for good. All right, here's my conversation with Deb Golden. So excited to have you here and put you in front of my loyal listeners, my fellow design nerds. So I would love it if you could start out. You sit at the intersection of people, technology, and transformation every day. So for our listeners who maybe don't know you yet, could you introduce yourself maybe a little about your role, your work, and the kinds of innovation challenges that you helped solve at Deloitte. Absolutely.

2:44And first and foremost, thank you so much for having me here today. I'm super excited to talk about this. Your book is fascinating and amazing, and I'm really glad that we're able to uncover so much of it here also today. So, I mean, just a little bit about me. I mean, I've spent the last 30 years operating, as you mentioned, at the intersection of, I would say, risk innovation technology, but maybe most importantly, human potential. And so when I think about that, it's actually gone across federal government to the Fortune 100. But when you think about the types of work, it's really about seeing the patterns in the market before they become problems.

3:18And if we think about that, most people are very reactive to the problem in the balance sheet. I really spend most of my days helping massive organizations build that connected tissue needed to survive, particularly when we start to talk about technology and technology disruption. And I honestly feel like I'm so valued to be able to have gone through so many different kind of avenues and whether, like I said, that's traversing our global environment, our government environment, our commercial environment, having the ability to really learn from people, I would say has been a constant. And if you didn't look at my LinkedIn, one thing that you may not see when looking at a paper resume is, as you know, but for the audience, I am a longtime puppy raiser.

4:01And I love to do that for service dogs, particularly as it relates to veterans and first responders and where that connection is. And I'm going to bring it around real quickly. And again, it may sound like a hobby to many people, but it's actually the foundation of my leadership philosophy. You know, I think about what it means to raise a service dog. It really is a masterclass in influence over control. You know, you can't command a living system into resilience, right? You have to build a bond that's so strong, whether that's a system, whether that's a dog or an organization that makes the right decision, even when you're not holding the leash.

4:35And so for me, that's kind of the lens that I bring into the business, whether that's, again, the technology side, the innovation side, the risk side. But it's designing those systems that are secure enough to be safe, but brave enough to innovate. And I just not sure that we're entirely there yet as a society.

4:52Amanda Schneider:I've been so fascinated by your puppy raising initiatives. Will you tell our listeners where they can find out more information about this puppy raising? Because I've had so much fun following your Instagram? I support and work with a group called America's Vet Dogs and the Guide Dog Foundation. And you can find out all about them both on LinkedIn, Instagram, the website. There are many organizations that help service dogs find their forever home, and that could be serving a veteran or a first responder. The reason I like to work with America's Vet Dogs and the Guide Dog Foundation, everything that goes into being a puppy raiser, we enable someone's life to be better, greater for independence.

5:29And they do it at free of cost. But like I said, I have learned more from my puppy raising experiences than I candidly could ever learn from just sitting behind the desk.

5:40Amanda Schneider:Obviously it comes down to trust, whether we're talking about raising puppies or as you said, kind of figuring out this collaborative culture. So I wanna transition this trust idea to the book because it's really where the book begins. We talk about something that we call the trust gap. And I think one thing that makes our approach to this generational research different is that we don't start with generational stereotypes or what this generation wants that makes someone else feel like they have to give something up so that the younger generations get what they want. We start with business challenges.

6:12Amanda Schneider:And so when I look at what I'm hearing from our audiences about challenges they're having, it's really around creating culture in a hybrid world. When we ask thousands of workers across generations, what's the hardest part about working in a hybrid world? One of our most interesting findings is that twice as many Gen Zers said that trust or a growing trust gap was the big issue when compared to baby boomers. So, Deb, from your vantage point inside all of these incredible organizations that you work with, do you see this trust gap going? Why do you think this trust gap is growing? And maybe if you've seen anything or heard about anything that helped close it, I'd love to hear about that.

6:53You know, I think we're seeing a gap because what I'll call the architecture of trust has fundamentally changed. And candidly, I don't think we're even remotely finished with the renovation yet. I think when we think about what corporate trust means, you know, for a long time, corporate trust was environmental, right? It relied on the osmosis, the hallway, the conversations, the open door, the physicality of being visible at work. It was built on proximity. But when we moved to hybrid models, and by the way, that doesn't just mean our physical sense moving to hybrid. That means the technology and the systems also moved outside of a corporate office, if you will.

7:33We removed that physical scaffolding, but we didn't replace it with digital equivalence. And what I think we're seeing from generation changes is not that, you know, one is better or worse, but at the end of the day, Gen Z isn't asking for more trust than, say, the boomers, but they're asking for structural transparency. And I think it's a very interesting way to look at this concept of trust because I've heard people talk about it and say somebody wants more than somebody else or less. I think it's just a matter of difference of how we look at this structural transparency. And again, if you go back to thinking about the physical cues of the office, everybody was historically operating even in a vacuum.

8:13When we built systems, you know, 70s, 80s, 90s, we built the system based around four walls and everything of that system operated within that wall. And so when I think about the organizations that are closing the gap, those are the ones that are treating trust as a design challenge. They're replacing accidental proximity with intentional visibility. So designing clear, repeatable rhythms of communication that allow people to feel secure without needing to be in the same room. And if they are in the same room, how do you actually make that much more purposeful so that when you gain that trust, it's based on sight to trust, inclusive of the signal?

8:52Because we have so much noise in today's day and age, it's really important to be able to discern the signal from the noise.

8:58Amanda Schneider:I wholly agree. And one of our previous podcast episodes was titled, The Future of Work Will Be About the Entanglement of HR, IT, and Workplace Design. And I think when you talk about some of those silos, it goes even to the business functions that haven't fully integrated and certainly haven't transitioned for what I'll call a digital first world. Because I would argue, even if you're back in the office five days a week, this globalization effect is a real thing. and you're likely collaborating with other offices. The visual in my head is like, we changed the model of how we're working and yet office structures have not changed.

9:36Like physical office structures haven't changed. And so even in its most basic sense, if we haven't actually changed the physical structure, how are we enabling our people to do the very things that you're talking about? And I would take it a step further. As you mentioned, the hard work really is in redesigning or I would even say reimagining these systems. Because a lot of what I've seen is that companies are trying to address the systems of HR or IT, but they're doing it with the frame of what they knew about yesterday versus the frame of what they need to reimagine for tomorrow. And I do think that that's critical if we're going to look at, quote unquote, redesign.

10:16We really allow ourselves to reimagine what that connectivity, quote unquote, needs to look like.

10:21Amanda Schneider:I love that you talk about reimagining that. It was actually one of the most impactful lessons from the MBA program that I was in, is they said, you can't improve what you can't measure. Let's go back to your innovation work and kind of tie that to this concept of old and new rules. What are some of the outdated rules that you still see companies clinging to? And why do you see them so incompatible with how work is happening now? I'll probably pick on two. And one is this old rule of the idea of the container. We designed many organizations for the world where boundaries were solid, employees were inside, the market was outside, the value was created within the walls.

11:01Today, value is created in a broad set ecosystem. You know, the teams extend far beyond a single payroll. They could be gig workers, they could be AI agents, they could be partners, they could be clients, they could even be competitors. And as we think about that, all of those individuals are co-creating in real time. And if you try to run a quote unquote networked reality with a contained mindset, you're going to create friction and you're not going to get the highest amount of value that you could possibly get. So for me, the first kind of old rule is, you know, don't build with inside the container.

11:35And again, the container isn't just the physical organization. It's how you look at a truly bound ecosystem to create the most amount of value, regardless of whether that's inside or outside the walls. I mean, that would be one. The second one I might add on to that is unlearning. And, you know, I love to use the word unlearning, but unlearning that standardization equals fairness. You know, in the past, we treated everyone the same to be fair. And I think in a complex, high-performance environment, standardization actually becomes a vulnerability. And so if we think about unlocking true human potential right now, we have to move towards mass personalization.

12:14How do we build systems that are flexible enough to support different working styles, life stages, cognitive approaches? You know, the goal isn't to force everyone into the same template. It's to design a platform where different types of talent can plug and perform. And I just think historically, the old rule, if you will, back to your question, is that again, standardization equals fairness. And I think with the advent, obviously, of AI, We can democratize things like innovation. We need to do the hard work of recreating systems, again, reimagining systems that are flexible enough to support all these types of thinking, being, doing, if we truly want to evolve where we are and really solve some of the world's most complex challenges.

12:57Amanda Schneider:I love that you brought up unlearning. You're going to read about it to all of our listeners. You're going to read about it in the foreword of the book. But Deb's whole TEDx talk was all about rethinking and unlearning. and she didn't just talk about it. She really modeled it from the stage. So I'll leave you with that piece of curiosity if you haven't checked out her talk.

13:19Amanda Schneider:As the home of Neocon for decades, the mart was built on the power of physical presence. You came to Chicago, you walked the floors, you experienced it in person. That foundation still matters, perhaps now more than ever, but we've also taken to heart the reality that how people engage has changed. ThinkLab's data shows that one of the things professionals value most at Neocon is CEU education. Today, many more designers are accessing that content through our digital platform, dramatically expanding reach while strengthening the in-person experience. That shift wasn't about replacing what worked.

14:01It was about building upon it. We believe that leadership in this industry means the willingness to rethink, to evolve, and to serve our communities in new ways. For Neocon 2026, we've introduced several new product offerings, including Illuminate at Neocon, a show within a show featuring design-focused architectural and decorative lighting,

14:27Amanda Schneider:and the Neocon Collab, a curated multi-brand environment that will create an elevated, inspirational experience in our seventh floor exhibit hall. And we're proud to continue shaping what's next together.

14:48Amanda Schneider:Going back to kind of your first rule that you called out to, I think one of the pieces we have to rethink and unlearn is that work is synonymous with place, that work is a noun. Today, work is a verb. There's still a workplace. That is a noun. And I think that mistakenly, some people say by focusing on people and process first, that the physical environment is less important. And I would argue that ironically, as we're freed up from a set work location, it requires more design work, more of a physical space to make people want to come to it. On that front, do you think that this is making a sense of place more important or less important as we really try to figure out this digital first world?

15:32Everybody thinks and learns and interacts differently. I wish I could say, you know, everybody would be more productive in this way or everybody else would think better. But as we all know, it's like, where's your best idea come from? It's not usually because you've spent hundreds of hours building a three-year strategy, you know, tied to something. It's because you've allowed your brain to walk around in different capacities. And that could be walking around by getting feedback from others in an office. It could be taking a minute to do a walking meeting outside the office. There's so many different ways that people think and interact and kind of just get that tenacity about how to go and build something for tomorrow.

16:12And I think what it ultimately comes down to is signal fidelity, right? We have so much noise again happening. The clarity that any asset has or that any leader has is the fact that they can be clear. There's so much noise. There's so many things going on. What is their priority? And if you can actually become more clear so that it's not noise to the individual. What do you expect when you're in the office? Is it just simply to show up to show up? That's probably not getting you the outcome that you want to get. Or if somebody's in the office, what is it that you want to be able to achieve from that?

16:46So that when people hear, you know, noise, they can either discern the signal or they don't hesitate. And so for me, I think you need to balance that with understanding not just clarity on the destination, but autonomy on the route. So many people just don't do things and it's inherent in our human nature. We want people to have different ways of achieving the final answer. I mean, it's how we're going to innovate the most. We don't want groupthink. We want people to be able to understand what the North Star is, the why and the what. We should absolutely enable and engage with what I'll call proactive debate, right?

17:21That is how we play to everyone's strengths. So I don't think it's a or will it be completely physical or will it be completely digital as we think about the world tomorrow? I absolutely think it's an and. But I think having that sense of clarity and the autonomy to discern the route is going to be what gives people the confidence to move with velocity because they know actually where they're headed.

17:43Amanda Schneider:I love that. And I think a line from the book is clarity is kind, but it's not only kind, it's contagious. When I was preparing for my TEDx talk, I had a line in my talk. It's still in there, but it changed a little bit. It was something like the future of work starts being with people being clear about when and where they work best. And this came up from actually some future forum research that says more people care about when they work than where they work. But as I was practicing and making my poor best friend Beth listen in to this thing over and over, she said, Amanda, because of the work you do, you have thought about this so much.

18:20Amanda Schneider:But honestly, I've never thought about that before. Work is just somewhere I went from eight to five, because that's what you do. You get a job, you get a key card, and that's just the way it is. So one of the challenges I put forth in the book is really challenging the individual to think about when and where they work best. And I have some exercises to walk that individual through on their own. But on the contrary, I'll say that that can feel quite scary for large organizations because you can't possibly, if you've got 400 employees, accommodate 400 different ways of working. However, without that clarity, you know, our design and architecture audience can't design better spaces if we don't know what better means.

18:56Amanda Schneider:So how do you think organizations should balance maybe that individual clarity with those company priorities? You know, I think we're trying to solve a software problem with hardware. You know, if you think about the physical offices, the hardware, the culture that typically supports companies, organizations, the rituals, the connection, the behaviors is the software. Right now, for many companies, the software is glitching, right? We have burnout. We have disconnection. We have fragmentation. if you're to mandate any approach, whether that be return to the office or something else, you're attempting to fix that glitch by rebooting the hardware.

19:33But if the code is bad, the building's not gonna fix it. And so when I think about the opportunity back to my, whether it be unlearning or re-imagining, we need to re-imagine the purpose of convergence. Why were we together? And what is the value of together, right? Today, particularly in an AI forward world, we don't need the office necessarily for what I'll call production. We can produce from anywhere. What we need the office for is collision, right? We need it to create positive friction that creates sparks, right? The unplanned interactions, the celebrations, the complex problem solving. And I think when we design spaces specifically for high value human collision, the office stops being a mandate and starts to become a magnet.

20:17And we need to make the commute worthy of the human investment. And I think if we do that, people will start to realize why they're being pulled in with that magnetic force, not just because they're told to show up from nine to five. They're there because they want that friction and they appreciate the value of the spark that it creates.

20:36Amanda Schneider:I love that you use the word collision. Collaboration is so overused. It's like we forgot what it even means. You know, as we think about this idea of collisions, you know, I've heard things like ROC, return on commute. I've heard ROI, credit to Gensler, who shared this one at one of our Think Lab events, which is return on interaction, really looking at what people are looking for from the office. And I love all these fresh takes. If you listen to the media and hear what people are saying about this office movement, we're still in the middle of this RTO movement. And one of the things I challenge in the book is this RTO movement is trying to fix a how problem with a where solution.

21:17Amanda Schneider:So in your view, what are companies getting wrong about the relationship between space, culture, and behavior? And what do you think it could look like if they maybe start to reframe the challenge correctly? I think the wrong is probably associated with the fact that they aren't looking at the intersectionality of the very things you just talked about, right? They're looking at, if people are back in the office, I should be more productive. Like, you can't just mandate that. I guess you could mandate that, and we've seen what the results are for that. And they're varied, right? They're varied.

21:50And I actually think it goes back to what is the purpose? So in the type of organization you're running, maybe being in the office matters because you're actually building widgets. If you're building a physical widget and you've got throughput that you have to have in the office, then being together matters in a very different way than say if you're doing something that, you know, everyone can be remote and should be remote. But I think part of the complexity that's missing is that connectivity to the last piece, which was around not just human connection, but human intelligence. And again, I still go back to everyone works very differently.