Summary
In this final episode of the decision-making curriculum, Joe and Brett explore the concept of principles as distinct from values. Joe argues that values tend to be generic moral statements that don’t drive action (“we value honesty”), while principles are actionable guides that tell you what to do in any situation, enabling fast and consistent decision-making. He shares his five personal principles: connection connection, everything is an iteration, wonder!, embrace intensity, and loving accountability.
Joe traces how his principles evolved — from unconscious ones in his twenties (be scared of love, avoid pain, take care of others from obligation) to conscious ones refined over decades. He emphasizes that the process of wrestling with principles matters far more than the principles themselves. The power isn’t in arriving at the right set of principles but in the ongoing experimentation: testing them daily, understanding what they are and what they aren’t, feeling them somatically, and iterating when they break.
The conversation covers practical implementation in companies, where Joe walks through a bottom-up process: executives independently develop principles, experiment with them for a month, share learnings, then roll them out company-wide for further experimentation. He stresses that top-down mandates, lack of experimentation, and failure to keep principles alive are the primary failure modes. Each principle must be defined by what it is and what it is not, because any principle taken to its extreme becomes destructive.
Key Concepts
- Principles differ from values — they drive action
- The process of wrestling with principles matters more than the principles
- Define principles by what they are and what they are not
- Principles need a felt sense, not just intellectual understanding
- Principles in organizations must be bottom-up, not top-down
- Life is the sum of decisions you’ve made
Key Quotes
“A principle immediately tells you what to do. A value tells you what not to do. That’s another way to look at it.”
“The power of having principles is less about the principles you have and more about the process.”
“When you have a great set of principles, the authority isn’t in what you want, the authority isn’t in what you’re scared of — it’s in the principles.”
“Any principle, whether it’s in a company or whether it’s your personal principle, can be taken to such an extreme that it does almost the opposite thing.”
“If I look at my life and I think how did I get here, it was just the sum of decisions that I made.”
“Wonder — it doesn’t require me looking for an answer. It’s the openness and the ‘ah’ without the needing of an answer, which seems to drive much better decision-making.”
Transcript
foreign welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson good morning good morning hey how is the integration going for you at the Last Retreat man it’s it’s a lot it’s really good there’s uh that was a big one yeah yeah I guess context for listeners we just did a week-long Retreat and uh I was a participant in it on this one and got to go through the whole process which was beautiful um and yeah it’s awesome to watch you awesome yeah thank you I had this uh particular opening where I just felt into some like really deep guilt from early childhood and it moved and since then I’ve been having this kind of disorienting experience of there being sort of a like a memory in my body of where there used to be a small amount of guilt in many different kinds of interactions that was never about the interaction but like my mind would have previously made it about the interaction like yeah oh yeah I’m like talking to somebody about something I’m doing and I’m noticing the absence of being self-conscious like I’m trying to sell them something Adam’s kind of disoriented by it like oh yeah it’s just kind of nice to just be here and talk about it and there’s not a little bit of low level residual emotion from a long long time ago so yeah sort of stepping out into my life and seeing where all of the you know where that fractal amount of difference shows up in all of my interactions yeah that’s awesome that makes me happy and also just feeling generally more sensitive I’m noticing more subtle emotions in myself and noticing more subtle emotions if someone else is in the room and they’re feeling an emotion and I’m like oh what is this I’m like reminding myself yeah that doesn’t have to be mine that’s just something that’s over there yeah that’s cool yeah you look great you look wonderful yeah thanks yeah cool well now that I’ve sidetracked us right from right from the beginning I sidetracked us what are we supposed to do today Brett yeah beautiful Side Track thanks so for today we have the final episode in the curriculum for the decision series for the decisions course uh and we’re going to talk about principles awesome yeah good yeah that’s one of my one of my favorite topics and yet it’s one of those topics that I notice when I speak it and and I and I’m I like if I’m with a whole bunch of Executives and we talk about principles it it’s so close to other things that it gets disguarded as you know a values exercise or something like that like one of these exercises where we all get together and agree on something and then it makes no difference and um and yet it’s such a driving force in my life and the way that I live it’s it’s a it’s something I love talking about and and when I see it clicking folks it’s amazing how it changes their life and yet for so many I see that it it just gets disregarded as something that they’ve heard before some sort of static yeah so okay I’ll be curious to see how we do on this one yeah so maybe maybe let’s start with differentiating what is it that you mean when you say principles that might help people not see it as what what you just described as what they might have previously seen as you know values or something else yeah yeah I don’t know when the whole values thing started I think it was Kobe he was a a guy he did the Franklin planner and he had this whole thing about values I remember doing it when I was first doing investment banking and then all these companies every company had to do values and so they only became these exercises and about you know and I suppose I think it originally was designed to be oh like who are we in this world and what do we stand for and I think there’s been two problems with those the first one is that the values became super generic um and the second is they’re really hard to act upon them like we value honesty oh it’s like right isn’t that what we’re all supposed to do generally anyways and so it wasn’t it wasn’t differentiated and then I think the other problem with it um is the is that it it was just kind of top down or it was you know some group somewhere in the companies came up with this idea of values and but when Kobe originated the concept I think it was closer to the idea principles that I have now in and I and I was reminded by that because we were doing this retreat in San Diego and we were in this house that was owned by these Mormons and I don’t know if cover is Mormon but it was adopted there and and so they had like their mission statement this family had a mission statement of values in the house that we were renting on Airbnb it was actually quite lovely I was like oh what a sweet sweet thing um the difference is however that principles for me is how do you make a decision by it meaning that okay uh my I value honesty for instance right right so unless I am choosing to be dishonest which is not a choice that I would make almost ever then there’s no choice that I’m that I’m gonna make based on that value whereas a principle it’s all designed on Choice it’s all designed on how do you make choices automatically because you live by a set of principles and so they should very much be um designed to create action and to clarify decision making so you don’t have to stop and think about big decisions yeah can you give an example of how how a principal might help you make a decision and yeah absolutely in the way that you’re describing the most articulate one that I’ve ever heard as far as the principle goes is something that um a gentleman from MIT taught me he says when we’re solving a problem and it’s a complex problem the first thing I was taught to do is go to the part I know the least about and and do a small experiment there that will teach me the most about the thing I know at least amount so and he gave this great description he said if I’m building a car and I know how to do all the bars of a car except for the drivetrain then I would what most of the time will happen is I’d build the whole car and then I build the drivetrain because I would build a thing that I know and then I built the drivetrain and then I’d realize my drivetrain wasn’t what I thought it’d be and I’d have to rebuild the whole car so instead what I’ll do is I’ll do this simplest experiment to learn the most about the drivetrain and then I will build the drivetrain first and then I’ll build the car around it and that’s a principle that immediately when you’re solving a problem you know what to do first look for the thing you know the least about figure out how to find the most in the simplest way that immediately tells you what to do so that’s a great principle for engineering okay what’s another what’s another example of a principle and kind of another Arena yeah so for me one of my yeah one of my principles is connection connection and so for me that principle tells me immediately um what to do in in most situations where there’s any kind of problem that’s happening so so for instance let’s say I am tired and I notice that my mind is being negative and and the world isn’t going the way that I want it to go what do I do first thing I do is connect and and for me that’s connecting with myself and the people around me if I’m having a um problem in the business and we don’t know how to solve it the first thing I do is connect I connect with myself about what I want I connect with everybody else to talk about the problem so that’s another example is like where for me connection is a principle and I ha and I use the words connection connection because it starts with connection you maintain connection and when in doubt you connect is something that allows me to know what to do in any time that there’s a problem that’s an example so so it sounds like maybe some of the distinction that you’re making here between the way that you see principles and the way that values are commonly held is that principles are something that’s sort of an action like from your principle can flow action in a situation whereas from a value a value might be more about how you want things to be generally but it doesn’t necessarily flow into into your decision tree or right like factor into it other than just to tell you what you should be doing According to some standard right right yeah it’s kind of more of a morality it’s kind of like uh the value situation is seems to be more of a morality and it’s about what not to do and principles are more about what to do and that’s another way to look at it another great example of a principle is um there’s you know there’s a guy named Ray dalio and he um he’s made his principles pretty famous and and one of his principles is that transparent markets are efficient markets which means that efficient markets mean the things that are actually of value rise to their value and and things that aren’t don’t so that’s an efficient market there’s no Arbitrage opportunity where things are valued because of um inefficiencies in the market rather than of their actual worth and so he sees his business as a Marketplace in itself and so he was like a transparent Market is an efficient market so I will have my business be transparent and that led him all the way to videotaping all the meetings and even if apparently even if you’re in a water cooler and you’re having a conversation about somebody you’re supposed to record it and then they’re supposed to be able to see it and so it’s like a complete the idea is a completely transparent situation and as The Story Goes you know everybody was opposed to it because they were like man the lawyers get a hold of this will be able to be sued and you can’t have this kind of and it turns out apparently they get sued a lot less because they have it all on tape and everybody knows it so nobody does any kind of crap so so it’s just like that transparency does make a like a very efficient market a very honest Mark I would say transparency more than an efficient market it it doesn’t allow um rotten culture the more transparent the culture the less rot that can happen the less dry rot in the corners can happen yeah so so in this case the principle could be seen as a thesis and your thesis could be correct or incorrect or lead to different results in the market like without without saying how correct or incorrect it could just leads you to different places you have different principles it’ll take you different places if you operate by a set of principles you’ll be able to make decisions really fast that are relatively consistent so you’re more likely to get to wherever your principles would lead you correct then if you didn’t have them exactly and and that’s I think you just said something in passing there that is so important which is that principles lead you when you’ve decided on a prince on some principles you follow them you know when we did the big 18 month course together and I’ve stuck the principles on the wall it was like that was the authority The Authority was the principals that we live by it and it didn’t matter about me or somebody else if there was a way to look at and say hey there’s a way that we can live more closely to those principles and that’s what we were there to do and so yes we we follow them and that’s another great thing to see is that when you have a great set of principles The Authority isn’t in what you want the authority isn’t in what you’re scared of it’s not in the fear the authority is in the principles and that’s what you follow and I guess something something that comes up for me there is whether it’s principles as thesis idea if you consistently make decisions based on something that you’re not aware of it is effectively a principle so you might be making decisions as a business that profit is more important than our people and you may never have explicitly said that but if those are the decisions you tend to make because there’s the fear of not making enough profit yeah then you’re going to go wherever those principles would lead you but you’re not aware of it so you can’t iterate on the principle that is right yeah so that’s true and in a way most of us are operating on a set of principles anyways it might be to avoid fear that might be the principle or the principle might be to um make as much money as possible in the shortest period of time um it might be just win at any cost and it might be to put somebody’s discomfort ahead of profit you know I see that happen in a lot of non-profits or even the viability of the company and so whatever that is that principle is is how you’re making decisions and one of the things about a principles exercise and the way that you live is that it brings those things to light and it allows you to iterate and modify them yeah yeah okay so sort of this idea that we are all operating under principles that we can become more and more aware of and then be more you know conscious of which ones we’re choosing to adhere to that kind of brings up the question of how did this particular form of relating to principles arise for you yeah how did this distinction come up in your life such that you could articulate it yeah that’s a great question yeah so the first one that the first principle that dawned on me before it was even conscious was the principle of embracing intensity and I started noticing um that when when I did Lean Into the difficult thing I think it started with therapy with Tara when we were first married and we were we were highly highly dysfunctional in our relationship um I learned that if we would discuss the difficult thing if we would address it no matter how scary it was that would make our marriage stronger and so that and so I started doing that somewhat naturally and then I realized okay well I wonder if this works in other parts of my life as well and in business I saw that you know the CEOs who like leaned into the the thing that people didn’t want to talk about didn’t want to lean into wanted to get the bad news one of the bad data they just were more successful and so leaning in there and then I had that experience that I’ve talked about a couple times of you know driving past a house where I felt really horrible because we’ve been you know evicted or whatnot and um and I just leaned in there to the emotional experience and and that created a tremendous amount of freedom and I kept on embracing that intensity and and I just realized oh this is just something that works across the board and it’s something that I do generally and at some point later on I I saw that like maybe I was creating intensity to embrace instead of embracing and it didn’t work and so then there was that distinction that was created so for me that was the first one and then I was like oh this is this thing in my life that once I recognize it I do it all the time even when I don’t want to even when it’s not the convenient thing even because I see that it works just so consistently and so well I just naturally do it much like working I know if I work out I feel better so I work out even though it might be uncomfortable and and that was the first principle and that’s where it all stemmed from then I started looking for the other principles and and what what works really well and living by them and experimenting with them and and then seeing what worked what didn’t work when it worked when it didn’t work I’m wondering if you could there was a moment in there that you mentioned the the driving by the house example I’m wondering if you have like uh if you could just kind of give us a different version of that oh yeah okay there’s a thousand there’s a there’s a thousand of them uh yeah during the retreat that we were we were doing there was uh you know oftentimes when we’re doing a retreat what happens is it somebody uncovers something that’s deep in them like you were saying you uncovered the um that little bit of guilt and if somebody uncovers something that is particular to their father oftentimes they will act that thing out with me and so during The Last Retreat I had somebody who was acting it out with me and normally that’s not a bother for me however this particular one was a bother because it hooked exactly with the thing that hooks in me and so when I see that person and they would try to trigger me I’d actually get triggered and instead of like just see it as you know the shame football that they were throwing around or the them acting out looking for their their process of healing and and so I was taking it uh personally and and so for me the whole thing is to feel this absolutely deeply feel that taking it personally is to feel the oh I’ve done something wrong here what am I you know allow that entire emotional experience through and then to love it and welcome it and and then I don’t I’m no longer triggered by them and I’m able to speak to it another one was I had a somebody about a year and a half ago write me a letter and there even if it was all projection it doesn’t really matter they were they had this thing where they just really wanted to tell me what was written when I read it I just one part of it just felt like a kick in the gut and so I reread that letter you know every day for I don’t know it was probably about a week until there was no more kick in the gut until I could totally be with that and there was no resistance to what they were saying that would be another example how do you state the principles that you were just describing in these examples was was that connection those are all Embrace intensity for me that was very intensity intensity so there there was this intense moment of a trigger or this tense moment of a gut punch and then how do I lean into that love that welcome that for me those are all Embrace intensity yeah yeah okay so before we move on I’d like to kind of just touch a little bit more on what makes these what makes principles important to you and in particular within this work yeah the the so if I look at my life and I think how did I get here it was just the sum of decisions that I made if I look at everything that’s going right and going wrong at least the part that I have any kind of control over it’s the decisions that I’ve made there’s some things that obviously I have no control over um so making decisions is an incredibly important part of of of the result of my life and and I S and the funny thing is I said it about companies way before I said it about myself or somebody’s life I would say you know the only thing that you have in a company is people’s relationships and people’s decisions like that’s really all that you have and those are kind of the atomic structure of a company and is but decisions that we make it’s also the atomic structure of our life what what we choose to do with our time and our energy and how we choose to be with people Etc that really is the result and so really looking at that process and figuring out how to refine it and make it most efficient is it for me is Paramount for living the life that you want to live or at least maybe it’s not Paramount because there’s a lot of ways to live a great life without looking at it however I would say it is such a great leverage Point such a great tool to really look at and refine the way you make decisions so how have your how have your principles changed and evolved over time or have you just been slowly alone down to the some core principles that seem to be true for you yeah they’ve changed a lot as you said at the beginning they were just unconscious whatsoever I think my principles if I think about myself in the 20s I’d say that my principles especially before therapy I’d say my principles were uh be scared of Love try to get love um uh don’t get it but try to get it be scared of it um uh find uh any kind of way outside of the pain from my self-abuse oh those were if I look at the principles I was living by those are the principles I was living by and and I think there was also taking care of others even if it wasn’t I know that’s true taking care of others even if it wasn’t good for me those are the principles out of a sense of obligation that obligation made me good and moral and so those were what I was living by but I wasn’t conscious of it at all and then when I started thinking about it consciously um a couple of things happen the first thing that happened was you know the Embrace intensity one happened and then the next obvious one was the connection one uh and then I noticed that I had some that were overlapping and and some that weren’t as useful um and some that were more moral and less action-based so all those things moved for me and and the ones that I’m with now I’ve been consistent for about five years but even one of them changed a little bit I had one it used to and I think the first iteration of it was uh uh what are you curious about right now and then there was an iteration of it is what’s the what’s the question was the principal and now it’s just wonder exclamation point it’s just like Wonder and it feels like if and and so what are you curious about was a was a pointer to look for the unknown to see the thing that you wouldn’t otherwise see to keep a learner’s mindset it was all an indication of that and I find that Wonder is a stronger force it it doesn’t require me looking for an answer it’s the openness and it’s the ah without the needing of an answer which seems to Drive much better decision making problem solving than trying to get to the answer that that try and disconnects me and so that one is the only one that’s changed in the last five years but I’m constantly thinking about them which I think is the most important part is the experimentation and the thinking about it and reviewing it is more important than the actual principles is what I’ve noticed okay so so in these examples you’ve described principles that have worked for you as an executive coach living in Sonoma County and I’m curious like how would this work if you switch contacts entirely and let’s say you’re a soldier in Ukraine right neither of us have context on that but what would you how would you imagine that that your principles would play out there yeah that’s a great that’s a great great holy crap great question um so I’m hoping that they would be similar but my like if I if I let my imagination go for a minute and and I would think oh you know connecting with the unit that I’m in and having that strong sense of connection would be incredibly important connecting with myself on a regular basis so that I was not acting out of fear but acting in the way that I wanted to act would be really important embracing intensity would be really important rather than you know running away from the emotional experience or running away from the job that needed to be done or doing the job that needed to be done half-assed because I would think that that would be really important um I would think that Wonder Maybe now that I think about might not be as important in that situation uh probably not I don’t know I think it would be I mean if you’re if you’re following an order or following a tactical plan you need to be in Wonder to notice if something has changed if you’re not in wonder yeah you know especially if you’re doing things that are deadly yeah consequences could be severe yeah I could see how you would know that jumping off of incredibly tall objects yeah you must stay in Wonder yeah and wonder yeah so I would hope that they would be the same but however I would I also have like there are sets of principles for certain contacts that I use like there’s sets of principles I think about for marketing for instance when we do marketing I have the all these principles it’s about connection it’s about embracing it saying the thing that people normally wouldn’t say it’s it’s being in wonder about what where people are it’s constantly iterating there’s another principle I have however there’s marketing principles I have too which is like everything you do in marketing isn’t meant to sell anything it’s just to help people see the appeal of the next step of the process and so for me that’s and another principle I have in marketing is that a marketing needs to be teaching so meaning that the marketing isn’t to sell something it’s to create an epiphany and if people want epiphanies they’ll keep on following following the marketing so to speak and so so if the marketing isn’t part of the teaching then it’s not the marketing I want to do as an example those don’t apply to everything and so that I’m sure that there would be some principles to war that I would acquire and be thinking about so that I can make split-second decisions that I have no idea what it would be and I would also think that these principles might be modified like connection connection so if I have somebody I’m competing with in on a business context I’ll still connect with them I find that that works really well in fact it’s one of silicon Valley’s like I think one of their big strengths in is that a lot of people who would be competitors actually work together in this field and and that whole like 100 competition all the time thing um is very different than back in the IBM days for instance uh however I might not want to connect with the like depending on the position if I am like a private foot soldier I’m not really thinking about connecting with the Russian private foot soldier on the other side if I’m the general I might be so I want to connect with where their position is and information about them so it’s like you know keep your friends close and your competitors closer so I think that they would they would there would be a modification I would understand the principles differently and and probably more deeply and then that would affect and so I constantly am trying to apply these principles in different contexts to see if they still work and see what I can break about them and see what needs to change and so I I would assume that that I would under my understanding of these principles would change if I was in a war as well yeah so ultimately you’re saying here that your principle of everything is an iteration applies to your principles as well that’s correct yeah I’m constantly the the power like I said the power of having principles is less about the principles you have and more about the process and I think that this is the thing that gets people all the time is that they whether they’re CEOs or they’re creating their own personal principles it’s like I’ve got them and that’s it and then what happens is like uh you know three years later they’ve completely forgotten their principles and they’re not living them and and so I think I think one of the Steve Jobs I think was Steve Jobs one of his principles is wrestle with your principles that was one of the that’s the job is to continually wrestle with them and so that’s the same yeah that’s so for me it’s the same thing it’s everything is an iteration that each of these things I’m it’s a process of learning it is not a process of of knowing yeah yeah okay so let’s let’s talk a little bit about you know while you are iterating on your principles how do you keep them well defined how do you define them such that they are actionable principles and they don’t start drifting into the space of you know shoulds immorality or yeah values and lose their teeth yeah that’s great so I mean so I I I I really think it’s important to keep to about five principles not having too many is you don’t remember them and you can’t wrestle with them as well so my my principles I think we’ve gone over some connection connection everything is an iteration everything in iteration for me is um about never thinking that a and everything then there’s an answer and B never having the shame of getting it wrong it’s just about you’re constantly learning and you’re continuing to iterate Wonder exclamation point Embrace intensity and loving accountability and loving accountability is how do I hold accountability without shame is another way to say that so when I’m defining them I Define each as what they are and what they’re not and that’s a really important thing so any any principle whether it’s in a company or whether it’s your personal principle can be taken to such an extreme that it does almost the opposite thing so a great example of this is um inclusion it would be let’s say one of your principles is inclusion inclusion taken all the way to some end is very destructive and it isn’t what’s meant by inclusion anymore so it like are we including murders are we including people who are toxic for the environment are we including like what what are we inclusive of exactly and so inclusive and say if I was to have a principal like inclusive it would be you know be open to it would be defined as something like being open to um being open to different points of view from different backgrounds it would be um uh seek to understand before you seek to prove wrong things like that it would be very much about that kind of inclusion and it would not be things like everybody has a voice even if they’re not contributing like if you’re not being a part of the solution having a voice is actually quite detrimental or it would not be um that we are including things that are outside of our principles as an example so really important to to talk about what they are and what they are not and to have like clear examples of them is very important and and that’s what you run your tests on so if let’s say if my principle is inclusion or that wouldn’t be my let’s say one of mine actually um everything is in iteration um if that’s my principle then I’m constantly running experiments okay so is it an iteration for instance that oh just put the the thing on the website don’t care if the grammar is good that’s just an iteration that doesn’t feel right to me that’s like no we can we can make it as best as possible so I don’t I don’t want to say we’re not going to do quality because it’s an iteration what I do want to say is we’re going to do our best work but we’re going to see that the best work is going to have problems and that to get it done and test it is more important than to try to get it perfect and so I need to understand both sides of the principle where the limits of the principle are and so to do that I always Define it by what is and what isn’t the other thing that’s really important is it you’re you’re trying to convince you’re trying to um convince Us in the right word but you’re trying to affect behavior and so you need to use some marketing techniques as whenever marketers are really good at affecting Behavior right so for me making them memorable everything is an iteration loving accountability these are things that are very Wonder these are things that are very memorable to me and so I’m more apt to use them and to make them memorable and that needs to be part of um but the other thing that is really important is that I need to have a felt sense of them to really be able to Define what the principle is somatically what does it feel like to be in everything is in iteration what does it feel like to be embracing intensity so there’s a somatic response for me to of really feeling into what it is to live in that principle what’s the state that it brings me to and what’s the state it doesn’t bring me to so I don’t have just an intellectual one I have a felt sense of it because the felt sense is what helps me make decisions quicker than just an intellectual one yeah I’m curious how that would apply to a a business principle like Ray adalia’s regarding the efficiency of the market like how does how does that yeah that would be yeah so for transparency transparency if that if that’s my principle there’s a very clear feeling that I have when I’m hiding something there’s a very clear feeling that I’m like and I’m sneaky there’s a very sneaky feeling and and so for me transparency very much is like oh this and transparency also if I’m living it at its very edge then there’s a little bit of fear like to allow you know to open the kimono fully so to speak to to video that thing there’s going to be a little bit of fear to it so I know like oh that is that’s the edge of my transparency whereas being transparent in a way that hurts somebody wouldn’t feel good in my system and it wouldn’t be an edge of like oh my gosh it wouldn’t be like walking into a giant room and being on a stage it would be like hurting somebody and that would be a very different somatic experience yeah and then extending this to being if there was a principal in a company of transparency anybody in a meeting could sense if if there’s not transparency in that meeting and there’s there’s a way that you can feel that you feel the tension in your body you feel something off and if the principle is to speak to that then that’ll produce a lot more yeah and more transparency and so they have great transparency but I hear something that I can almost guarantee they don’t have they have algorithms for their I mean this is a hedge fund company Ray dalio’s company is a hedge fund company I’m sure they’re not like giving like the janitor the algorithm for their you know for their for their Alpha hedge fund or whatever it is so so even there there’s like there’s a what is it and what is it not right it’s you have to Define it both ways and and there’s a clear feeling it would not feel the same way as videoing a all the meetings and watching videos where your name was mentioned would feel one way and like handing Trade Secrets off to the janitor would feel a very different way in the body yeah yeah okay what else what else comes up for you around around definition of principles um the the other thing is that the definition is less important than the experimentation the the again the most important thing is okay so here’s a principle I want to live by every day you do an experiment every day maybe two or three times a day you do an experiment how did that work what what worked for me does it work overall because there’s no principle that you’re going to have that’s going to feel great all the time I’m sure that for instance one time that videotaped meeting lost them some money you know or lost them a really good person I’m sure that it nothing works 100 of the time when it comes to humanity and so doing lots of experimentation and really understanding it and keeping it alive and constantly doing the experiments constantly it’s something that you’re revisit on a regular basis and wrestle with it as it were that’s more important than anything else because it’s it’s what you know of it if I say transparency to you and I say transparency to me they could mean and feel very different ways and so what’s important is that experimentation and that is particularly important inside of companies particularly important inside of companies that it’s not something it’s not something that five people do it’s something that everybody experiments with and learns from yeah so that but that brings up the question how how if you are the leader in an organization do you you know build an organization that operates on principles when you’re only one person and you’re not wanting to to do this in a top-down way but that’s the only leverage point you have yeah so this is so seemingly I have walked a ton of uh CEOs through this intellectually and and then I’ve actually gone into companies and done it with CEOs before and there’s a lot of subtle steps that if they’re missed um just then they just it won’t work and so so the way I’ll tell you how I do it I’ll tell you where the missteps typically are so the way that I would do it is I would say okay um we would go to the executive team and say okay here are the here’s the assignment come up with five principles that you think that we should run the company together and then all of them would present it to the CEO and the CEO would present theirs and so they would all do that independently so that you had independent thought pretty soon you would find out that everybody really probably agreed on the same five principles that the different wording different things and maybe two become one but it’s pretty much you’re gonna find there’s not gonna be a lot of disagreement typically I’ve never had it and then once you have that then the executive team experiments with them they do one one experiment every day for one principle for five days and so maybe it takes about a month where they experiment with all the principles and they online share like they have a channel where it’s like I did this principle this is what happened I did this principle this is what happened they’re all sharing and learning from each other’s experiences so that you don’t just get one person’s experience from it when that’s done then the CEO because they are the CEO is the final decision maker says these are the experiments this is what they mean and what they don’t mean and then you release them to the company and then you say okay we’re going to experiment with them and the whole company experiments with these principles and you do it on and I’ve done this in like a 1200 person company where they’re all like there’s channels slack or whatever Channel and where they’re talking about the experiments they’ve done and they’re learning from one another and then they’re saying here the problems are this this this this principle worked this way but I didn’t know about it this way and then there’s all this adjustment and learning and so they’re all learning from each other what the principle living by this principle actually means and where where they can put it at use and then and then again the CEO gets to decide what changes if any changes and and how to define them based on all those experiments the other thing that I have done with one company which is a very flat organization is before the executives came together the whole company had a week to to you know watch this video I made about how to do how to make them and and then and then they got to suggest some that the executives could pay attention to or not so they they were also part of the brainstorming process and then every quarter or so they’ll take one of the principles and say Here’s the principal that we’re living by and they’ll all experiment with it and do we want to change it is this still or here’s a new one that we want to try out does this work do we add it do we subtract something and so it’s an it is a way to wrestle with the with them and that’s then that’s how it works and so what what stops working for people when it doesn’t work what are the pitfalls how does this not work no experimentation people aren’t being held accountable for the experimentation uh top down here the principle somebody goes out into a room and says these are the principles um or some small group goes out into room says here are the principles none of that works um the other thing that I do at the end of the once all of this is done then everybody’s responsible everybody in the company is responsible for finding and committing to one way of reminding everybody to live to the principles and maybe that’s making a sign that you put in the bathrooms or maybe that’s um you know having a discussion group once every quarter or maybe that’s you know changing the way that um you do reviews uh so that the principles are a part of the review process or maybe that’s changing the sales pipeline so that let’s say connection is a bigger part of the sales but what happens is after the the the processes be done everybody’s responsible for implementing those principles some way in the company everybody everybody has an assigned that that they get to choose on their own and so that again makes it so that it’s a lived thing it’s not just an exercise that was done and so a lot of times um CEOs will either assign those tasks and that doesn’t work needs to be volunteered it needs to be out of their own initiative and then uh or there’s just no tasks it’s like okay we did the exercise now we’ll live by those principles and I’ve had people in companies like create emojis for the principles and then that becomes shorthand inside of the inside of the company and I’ve seen it so that like it just becomes you know the principles who become shorthand or it’s like decision making it’s like oh yeah what’s this principle say we should do and then everybody’s like okay that’s what we’re doing and so when it works it works really well it saves so much time even though there’s a you know it’s kind of like being a great parent or training a dog it takes a lot of upfront time but it saves a tremendous amount of time on the back end yeah yeah what else what are some I’m curious to just kind of get some disaster stories from you and uh in principal setting uh you know Discovery rollout yeah so the only thing that doesn’t work for people is that they don’t wrestle with them they don’t constantly iterate they’re not running the experiments and that’s when the principles fail for people and they don’t fail like they don’t blow up people’s lives what I notice is what they do is they just don’t live by the principles and then they’re back into the old patterns and so they don’t make decisions quickly gracefully or I would say with a better result uh in companies the there is one other thing that has happened in some of the companies where they have like we have our mission statement which is meaningless that nobody looks at and we have our core values which is meaningless and nobody looks at her it’s meaningful and nobody looks at and then they’re like okay now we’re going to do principles and there’s like a now we have a mission and we have the we have the what do I listen to It’s just confusing the the signal to noise ratio is just way too high and so I think it’s really important if a company’s going to do it to really prioritize how you’re doing this and what’s really needed and what’s not needed and what’s being listened to and and like anything you have to edit really well you have to throw stuff out to make it work yeah yeah yeah that’s it awesome yeah awesome well thank you very much appreciate your time and uh I’m glad that we got this uh last one for the decision course created and I look forward to our next one yeah me too looking forward to it awesome all right thank you bye thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com [Music]