Ep 122 - Why Organizations Break at the Intersections: The Problem of 2 Right Answers (w/ Dr. Timothy Tiryaki)

Well, I think we just got your philosopher on.

I was going to ask you, and maybe you still want to respond to this, is how has the philosophy shaped your work? like either in terms of identifying this as a system problem with some gaps or how you're thinking about it in terms of AI.

Whether it's just philosophy alone or maybe it is, but it's also very pragmatic and realistic in the sense of when I was early on in my life and career as an engineer and working on operational efficiency projects and programs.

You're kind of an unusual cat because you got the philosophy and the engineering.

Although I guess there's a lot of logic.

I guess there's a lot of logic in philosophy.

I don't know what type of beast I am either.

But yeah, the joke aside, yeah, I have a bit of an interdisciplinary background.

But again, I think that's what helps me see and understand from philosophy to business to leadership.

But the operational efficiency maps, when we mapped a whole process did the classic fishbone diagram, the five Ys, the Ishikawa diagram, Y, Y, Y, root cause analysis.

I have not seen a single fishbone analysis that did not have an element of communication or team or the human aspect.

It was never just about process bottleneck, machine bottleneck, supply chain bottleneck.

There was always a human side of the equation.

Oh, I love

that.

The first time that I noticed this, I barely passed an exam in university on operational research, not because I didn't know how to solve it.

It was an airport optimization problem, planes landing and taking off and buses and shuttles and people optimizing pages and pages of equations.

I remember having this moment of pause, this moment of... noticing i started hearing the pens writing and looking around and i'm like this is not just about the equipment the devices the numbers and i started thinking about i didn't have the words i have now i started thinking about are these people working well together are they in the right place are they good teams and leadership are they led well like culture how does that work and so it's these ideas that i didn't know that i was curious about to understand and that's what kind of pushed me on a path in life to understand that that optimization or success or it's it's not it's not just one side of the equation it's not just numbers it's not it's something whole it's holistic interrelated so I started looking at that and as I went down the engineering path and from there went on to strategy and culture I kept this kept coming back like It's not about the best strategic plan.

It's not about just the best culture values definition, right? It's about the leaders, the cascade, the embodiment, the relationship, and the human side was making such a difference.

Yeah, this may be very AI of me to say, but when you're talking, I was thinking the human side is better.

largely the inefficient side, right? Like, it's, you know, it's, it's, you know, culture is coordination.

And, and so, like, that's the reason why we want it.

It's, you know, a strong culture allows us to sort of dance to the music and not step on each other's feet, because we can anticipate how other people are going to behave.

But when you're sitting there and you're doing the math and you're like, okay, we could churn, you know, this many widgets out with this equipment, like, you know, it's op management, right? it never comes out in reality because the human side is there's always some degree of inefficiency, whether it's inefficiency in the culture or disconnect between the culture and strategy or just team dynamics where like you're gonna have days where the teams don't work so well together or you have a key person take off and the new person you know, a new person doesn't just like plug in and become the old person.

They have their own strengths and their own weaknesses and everybody has to like recalibrate.