Work For Humans
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© 2026 Work For Humans
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Too often business leaders are forced to choose between the needs of their company and the needs of their employees. It’s a lose/lose scenario leaving managers burned out and workers seeking other opportunities. At Work for Humans, we believe work can be designed differently. When you design work like products people love, your company wins. Work becomes irresistible, employees passionately buy into their roles every day, and your company takes measurable strides towards your vision.
206 Episodes
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Most workplaces don’t quite know what to do with faith. It often gets simplified, avoided, or treated as something too divisive to bring into professional life. Elaine Ecklund studies what happens when people try to leave that part of themselves outside the workplace, and what is lost when they do. Her research shows that faith is rarely just about religion. It becomes a window into bigger tensions around ethics, identity, belonging, and the struggle to feel fully present at work. In this e...
People often want conflicting things from work because they carry different ideas about what makes a good life. What feels meaningful to one person can feel draining to another, and those differences often go deeper than personality or preference. That is what makes Derek Sivers’s book, How to Live, so useful here. It lays out 27 competing ways to live, each one convincing in its own voice. In this revisited episode, Dart and Derek discuss how those deeper beliefs shape the way people think a...
Rational choice theory has become so familiar that it can feel like common sense. We talk about trade-offs, optimization, ROI, and risk as if they capture what it means to think clearly. But many of the decisions that matter most do not work that way. They are shaped by context, values, relationships, and the larger story of a life. In this episode, Barry Schwartz returns to discuss how rational choice theory became the default way we think, how it shapes work and decision-making, and what a ...
In many organizations, some people are focused on keeping the lights on. Others are pushing for change. But what if the future isn’t something out there waiting for us at all? What if it’s shaped by what we do—and don’t do—right now? For Reanna Browne, that shift starts with how we think. Change how we think about the future, and we change how we act in the present. In this revisited episode, Dart and Reanna discuss how the way we think about the future shapes what we do today. Reanna Browne...
An 81-year-old woman shows up for work at Home Depot while managing serious health issues. She isn’t there because she loves retail. She’s there because stopping isn’t really an option. That story is one of many Noah Sheidlower encountered while reporting on Americans working into their 80s and 90s. Together, they point to something that's changing about retirement: for many people, it doesn’t arrive as a clear finish line, but as something delayed, reshaped, or out of reach. In this episode...
Most organizations approach change as something to manage. A new strategy, a new structure, a new set of goals. But what if real transformation doesn’t come from plans or policies, but from experiences that change how people see themselves and each other? Claus Raasted and Paul Bulencea design those kinds of experiences. Through the College of Extraordinary Experiences, they bring together people from very different worlds and immerse them in something unfamiliar, often uncomfortable, and dee...
Josh Block became president of his family’s medical imaging company at 29, just months after layoffs had shaken trust across the business. People were asking whether he was ready. His answer was simple: not fully. But he knew what he didn’t know. That humility became the starting point for how he chose to lead. Instead of protecting his position or pushing for performance at any cost, Josh shifted from what he calls the “Me Cycle” to the “We Cycle.” In this episode, Dart and Josh discuss whe...
Many companies treat experience as the final layer of the business: a nicer interface, a friendlier script, a smoother customer interaction. But the real experience of a company comes from something deeper. It grows out of the systems, incentives, and environments that shape how people behave. If those foundations are wrong, no amount of design can fix it. Experience architect, Alain Thys, has spent years helping organizations rethink those foundations so the experience customers and e...
In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, making confident business decisions is hard. So we grasp for certainty. Numbers feel certain, but they often give us the false comfort of measuring the wrong things. In her book Embracing Uncertainty, Margaret Heffernan explores a different approach. Looking at artists, writers, and musicians, she asks what we can learn from people who produce extraordinary work in conditions where the future simply can’t be known. In this episode, Dart and Margar...
William Hurst is all too familiar with the disasters that have resulted from tops-down governance. Through years of fieldwork in China and Indonesia, William has seen what happens when decision-makers are cut off from life on the ground. In this revisited episode, Dart and William explore how companies experience similar problems when they try and optimize complex systems for narrow outcomes. William Hurst is a political scientist who studies power, institutions, and labor. His work focuses o...
Toxicity at work isn’t always obvious. Most times, it shows up as sarcasm, neglect, and unresolved conflict. Catherine Mattice learned this firsthand while working as an HR leader inside an organization where one person slowly broke a good culture. Leadership would not step in, and she watched good people leave. That experience led her to spend years helping organizations understand and address the quiet harm they often ignore. In this episode, Dart and Catherine discuss how toxicity emerges ...
Kentaro Toyama spent a decade designing technologies to fight global poverty and improve education and health. As co-founder of Microsoft Research India lab, he made a troubling discovery – innovative technologies can’t create change on their own. Realizing that social progress depends more on people than on the technology they use, Kentaro became a self-proclaimed “geek heretic” who now teaches others the importance of putting people over tech. In this revisited episode, Dart and Kenta...
Geoffrey West didn’t set out to explain work. He was a physicist trying to understand why living things grow, age, and die. But when his questions expanded into biology, cities, and organizations, they offered a way to think about why growth changes how organizations behave and why success often brings new constraints. In this episode, Dart and Geoffrey discuss why work feels different as organizations scale, why cities keep renewing themselves while companies tend to burn out, and what these...
After decades in education, Dr. Peter Liljedahl realized that many classrooms fail to engage the people inside them. Rather than accept that reality, he began challenging every classroom norm he could find, asking a single question of each one: does this increase thinking? What followed was a decades-long effort to redesign learning environments from the ground up, dramatically increasing student engagement and understanding. In this revisited episode, Dart and Peter discuss how rethinking c...
Ethical questions at work rarely show up as rules or compliance issues. They show up in the systems organizations design and the outcomes those systems produce. And even well-intentioned leaders can create harm without meaning to. In this episode, Dart and Ed explore legitimacy, responsibility, employees, power, and why acting ethically inside complex systems is so difficult, even when people know what the right thing is. Ed Freeman is best known for stakeholder theory, which challenged the ...
Experience is brand. The experiences people have with a company shape how they feel, what they trust, and whether they stay. Creating those experiences is not just about interfaces or marketing. It requires rethinking internal processes, digital systems, and the everyday realities of work. Alder Yarrow has spent decades helping organizations understand experience from the inside out, and why lasting growth depends on getting it right. In this revisited episode, Dart and Alder talk about exper...
While leading L&D at Creative Force, Aaron Horwath and his leaders began treating work as a product to be designed. That shift had wide effects, including something unexpected. Creative Force became one of the few companies to implement AI in a way that actually improved the experience of work. Instead of chasing tools, Aaron and his team started with people. In this episode, Dart and Aaron discuss why starting with people led to AI success, how work can be designed as a product, and what...
Every building comes with a set of expectations. Students are quiet in a library, but loud on a playground. Adults are focused in their deckchairs yet chatty on bar stools. Witnessing the limitations of conventional building design, Jan Golembiewski began to leverage design psychology to improve the lives of different groups, from inmates to the elderly. As one of the world’s leading researchers in architectural design psychology, Dr. Golembiewski works to create spaces that prioritize health...
Ideas don’t grow on their own. Something has to amplify them. Universities amplify what they teach, consultants amplify what they recommend, and money amplifies the ideas it chooses to back. If we want to understand how work changes at scale, we have to look at how capital shapes which ideas take root. Virginie Raphaël is redesigning that amplifier. In this episode, Dart and Virginie discuss how venture capital amplifies ideas, how trust networks shape who gets funded, and why rethinkin...
Dan Cable was doing his job and getting compensated for it, but there was a problem: he was going through the motions with no growth, learning, or sense of excitement. He knew he needed to make a change to excel. By exploring the neuroscience behind thriving at work, Dan has since used his experience to help companies like Coca-Cola and Twitter (now X) optimize employee conditions. In this revisited episode, Dart and Dan discuss the neuroscience of enthusiastic employees, the practices that s...
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