Disengaged

James A. Seechurn
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Disengaged asks why most people feel detached from the work they do, and what it would take to change that. Organizations meet almost every problem with more control: more process, more measurement, more incentives. That response deepens the problem it was meant to solve, since control is what suppresses engagement in the first place. Each episode brings together writers, researchers, and practitioners in conversations about motivation, autonomy, pay, job design, and performance management, and about what it takes to build a workplace on a foundation of trust rather than control.

  1. 2 days ago

    How to Get Pay Right with Matt McFarlane

    Matt McFarlane and I met earlier this year on opposite sides of a debate about pay for performance. His team argued in favor and won the audience vote 62 to 38, and a week later he published a piece saying he had never been a fan of it. That opening carries the rest of the conversation: what pay for performance sets out to do, why the mechanism breaks at nearly every link in the chain, and what companies use instead once they stop treating an annual rating as the engine of everything. Matt runs FNDN, a compensation consultancy for startups based in Australia. He built the pay structures at Oyster that carried the company from 200 to 600 people across 70 countries, and he now hosts the FNDN Series podcast and newsletter and runs the Startup People Summit, a one-day APAC event for people leaders inside high-growth companies. We cover the companies that have taken negotiation out of pay entirely, the grip that benchmark data holds over compensation decisions, the tension between fairness and individual pay in collaborative work, what happens to the manager's role as AI absorbs more of the coordination, and the practical side of leaving a salaried job to consult. What we covered Why Matt argued for pay for performance in a debate and against it a week laterThe three percent merit budget, and what the annual salary survey roundups tell usRewarding a standout year with money, or using it to raise the standard across a teamWhy Matt left the job he enjoyed most in his career to build a compensation practiceHow his client window moved from 50 employees to 100 or 150, and what breaks at that sizeBenchmarking as a source of cognitive closure, and the living wage argument underneath itRunn's single rate per role, and the salary trajectory that made their people harder to poachCarta, 37signals, Buffer, and PayPal as models that remove the negotiationFairness as a relative judgment, and how quickly a good salary becomes an unfair oneWhy US companies resist narrow bands, and what wide bands say about trust in hiringThe bad hire label, the myth of the A player, and where responsibility for performance sitsThe player coach, the stretched leader, and ClickUp's million-dollar salary bandsWhat Matt tells anyone thinking about leaving a salaried role to consultPeople Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN Rowan Savage, co-founder and CTO of Runn Andrea LaRowe of 37signals, a previous guest on this show Books Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin Articles "How to Become a HR Consultant," Matt McFarlane, FNDN Series #7 https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/p/how-to-become-a-hr-consultant Organizations FNDN, Startup People Summit, Oyster, Runn, Carta, 37signals, Buffer, PayPal, Zappos, ClickUp, Buurtzorg, Gallup, Radford Find Matt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmcfarlane/ FNDN: https://www.fndn.com.au/ FNDN Series podcast and newsletter: https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/ Startup People Summit: https://startuppeoplesummit.com/ Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH.

  2. 3 Sept

    Protecting the Potential of the Idea with Dylan Soopramania

    Dylan Soopramania is a creative director and consultant whose work spans the UK, Australia, and North America, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, EA Sports, KitKat, Hellmann's, and Google. He designed the covers for all three of my books and the branding for this podcast. We have known each other for thirty years, and this is the first episode recorded in person and the first under the Disengaged name. Advertising is the one industry where creativity is the product, which makes it the sharpest test of the argument in Close the Gap. Dylan's rule for creative leads is to protect the potential of the idea: push it to the point where you and your trusted partners feel uncomfortable, because ideas get killed in internal conversations long before anyone learns where they could have gone. The same problem sits inside every business that needs to innovate. If people do not feel safe suggesting things that might get shot down, they play it down the middle. Dylan's account of what happened when I stopped chasing him on the cover, that the more I backed off the more responsible he felt, is the whole book in one sentence. What we covered: What a creative director does, and why brands rent a creative's tone of voiceHow the Close the Gap cover came aboutGood briefs, bad briefs, and Hellmann's sneakers made from food wastePresenting irrational ideas to rational peopleMad Men is dead: culture now informs marketingProtecting the potential of the ideaPixar's brain trust and the Overton windowCulture fit as hiring people who look and sound like youWhy the modern company still runs on a hierarchy inherited from the church and the factoryThe KitKat catapultFocus groups, market data, and the sea of samenessThe manager as emulsifierTrust, control, purpose, and tensionWhy asking people to keep doing what they do well kills the sparkFreelance versus full timeLeaving Dylan alone: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one exampleProactive work, gold wall sessions, and 3M's fifteen percent timeExecutive pay, the C-suite, and the role of profitPeople: Steve Hey (Dylan's creative partner), Dart Lindsley (Work for Humans), Jessie Zwaan (job, career, calling), Amy Wrzesniewski, Aaron Dignan, Rensis Likert, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Overton, Paul Buchheit, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs Books: Close the Gap and What Pay Costs (James Seechurn), Purpose and Work (Jessie Zwaan), Brave New Work (Aaron Dignan), Colin Splodge and The Sizzledodge (Steve Hey and Dylan Soopramania) Organizations: Pixar, Coca-Cola, KitKat / J. Walter Thompson Sydney, Hellmann's / Ogilvy, Banana Boat, Google / The Hallway, 3M, General Electric, Patagonia, Buurtzorg, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Haier, AFL-CIO, MSCI Find Dylan on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/dylan-soopramania-5a439223 and on Instagram at @dyl_soop. KitKat catapult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD3DUt4eZZw. Close the Gap: https://amzn.to/4x4FAZ6 Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: DLQOKHPSWUMSTCMH

  3. 29 Jul

    Uncertainty and Closure with Arie Kruglanski

    Arie Kruglanski is one of the most cited social psychologists alive, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and a co-founder of START, the national center for the study of terrorism. He gave the field two ideas that shape this conversation: the need for cognitive closure, our drive to resolve ambiguity and settle on an answer, and significance quest theory, the claim that the need to matter sits beneath much of what we do. This episode takes both into the workplace. We start small, with a question that sent James to Arie's work in the first place: why do companies cling to performance ratings, job titles, and job architecture when the evidence against them is overwhelming? Closure is the answer, and Arie explains why noise, fatigue, and time pressure make people more certain rather than less, and why premature closure has been the mother of great mistakes, from Pearl Harbor to organizational change. From there we move to significance: the oldest complaint in history, the road that took Arie from architecture to psychology, and why pay has become the emblem of how much we matter. We close on the hardest problem of all, how anything changes, and a personal question about holding confidence and uncertainty at the same time. What we covered Cognitive closure, and why difficult conditions produce false confidence rather than better thinkingSeizing and freezing, belief perseverance, and why information that was available still gets ignoredThe Italian postal workers, and why people resist the idea of change more than any specific changeCareers as closure: why we follow available jobs over real passions, and Arie's own turn away from architectureThe quest for significance, from terrorism research to the workplace where most people earn their worthPay as significance, the CEO pay ratio, and the insatiability that comes with a bigness-oriented cultureBigness and Smallness, the reciprocal model of significance, and love as merit times appreciationCompetitive individualism, Arachne and hubris, and whether significance requires winners and losersWeber, Calvinism, and the roots of the American work ethicPsychological safety, loss aversion, and why change must start smallReligion as an ancient antidote to hubris, and what fills the vacuum when it recedes People: Arie Kruglanski (University of Maryland, START). Referenced: Dan Raviv and Sophia Moskalenko, his co-authors; Harold Kelley; Antonio Pierro; B. F. Skinner; Alfie Kohn (No Contest); Leon Festinger (When Prophecy Fails); Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (positive psychology); Carol Dweck; Angela Duckworth; Antonio Damasio; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (loss aversion); Amy Edmondson (psychological safety); Max Weber. Books: Uncertain: How to Turn Your Biggest Fear into Your Greatest Power; The Quest for Significance: Harnessing the Need that Makes the World Go Round, with Dan Raviv; and the new Feeling Big, Feeling Small: The Human Yearning for Significance and Wonder, with Sophia Moskalenko. Find Arie: through his books, and on The Quest for Significance podcast, which he hosts with Dan Raviv.

  4. 16 Jul

    The Employee Advantage with Stephan Meier

    In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Stephan Meier — behavioral economist, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia Business School, and author of The Employee Advantage — to explore why the next great shift in business is from customer-centricity to employee-centricity. Stephan's argument is that business has made this journey before. Companies moved from a product-centric to a customer-centric model, building tools along the way — segmentation, journey mapping, personalisation — to understand and delight customers. Those same tools can now be repurposed for employees, and the companies that do it will create an advantage rivals cannot easily copy. As Stephan puts it, hard is good: a culture where people are engaged, motivated, and innovative takes years to build — and that is exactly what makes it difficult to compete with. What we covered: The evolution from shareholder value to customer centricity to employee centricityThe zero-sum fallacy — Amazon's Harry Potter gamble and Costco's employee-first economicsWhere money works, where it stops moving the needle, and how a $5 favour destroys a friendshipPurpose — Kennedy's single mission for NASA and the janitor who wasn't mopping floorsThe engaged coach — clear direction with real empowermentEli Lilly applying customer journey mapping to female talent progressionH-E-B's cult following and the four-star truck driverHaier's RenDanHeYi model of autonomous micro-enterprisesBuurtzorg's self-managing nurse teamsJust right tasks — why the reward for good work is more good workAI-powered internal talent marketplaces at MasterCard, MetLife, and UnileverThe workforce of one — segmentation and personalisation through one-on-ones People Stephan Meier — author of The Employee AdvantageAlfie Kohn — author of Punished by RewardsDart Lindsley — host of Work for HumansJessie Zwaan — value beyond priceMegan Bernard-May — people experience designUri Gneezy — Stephan's co-author on incentivesTeresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — meaningful progressJos de Blok — founder of BuurtzorgJoseph Overton — the Overton windowDan Gutman and Stuart Gibbs — the just right books Books The Employee Advantage — Stephan MeierPunished by Rewards — Alfie KohnMy Weird School series — Dan GutmanSpy School series — Stuart Gibbs Organisations Amazon, Costco, Starbucks — customer centricity case studiesEli Lilly — employee journey mappingH-E-B — the employee-centric grocerHaier / GE Appliances — autonomous micro-enterprisesBuurtzorg — self-managing nurse teamsMasterCard, MetLife, Unilever — internal talent marketplacesNovartis / Sandoz — one-on-one personalisation Find Stephan at stephanmeier.com, where you can subscribe to his newsletter on the human-centric future of work — each edition comes with an original stop-motion Lego movie.

  5. 2 Jul

    Purpose and Work with Jessica Zwaan

    In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Jessie Zwaan — VP of People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work — to dig into the gap between the purpose companies advertise and the work people actually live. Jessie's argument cuts against a lot of HR orthodoxy. Most people don't come to work for the company mission, and pretending they do creates a dissonance employees feel but rarely voice — an Emperor's New Clothes problem she traces through the anti-work movement, which she reads as a funhouse mirror held up to HR. Drawing on Joe Pine's experience economy, she places work on a spectrum from service to experience to transformation, and argues most workplaces are experiential, and that this is fine. People are motivated by connection, autonomy, and creativity far more than by mission — so design work around what you can genuinely offer instead of selling a purpose no one believes. What we covered: Work as a product — the three symbiotic products every company runs, and why employee experience behaves like a subscriptionPine's experience economy applied to work, illustrated through a cup of coffee, and where most workplaces actually sitWrzesniewski's job, career, and calling orientations, and why performance doesn't differ across themThe purpose gap, and how to close it without overreachingThe anti-work movement as a funhouse mirror of HRLeveling guides and job architecture as systems of control — cognitive closure, familiarity bias, and why bare-bones winsWhether AI will fix decision-making and performance management, and why the answer is mostly noThe T-shaped employee, and applying deep expertise broadly in an AI eraThe perception of laziness across generations (Dickens wrote fifteen novels and never worked afternoons), and the shift from individual to collective measurementPeople Jessie Zwaan — author of Built for People and Purpose and WorkDart Lindsley — host of Work for HumansJoe Pine — the experience economyAmy Wrzesniewski — job, career, and callingPeter Fader — author of The Customer Base AuditStephan Meier — employee segmentationArie Kruglanski — need for cognitive closureRensis Likert — participative managementAndy Whitlock — The Human HalfHuw Slater — OliTeresa Amabile — the progress principleBarry Schwartz — critique of rational choiceBooks Purpose and Work — Jessie ZwaanBuilt for People — Jessie ZwaanWhat Pay Costs — James Alexander SeechurnThe Customer Base Audit — Peter FaderCome Up for Air — Nick SonnenbergOrganisations Leapsome — where Jessie leads people strategyIntuit — finding purpose within a constrained missionThe Human Half — Andy Whitlock's consultancyOli — Huw Slater's companyModern People Leader — collaborators on Jessie's Substack, PL Build

  6. 4 Jun

    37signals with Andrea LaRowe

    In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations at 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Hey - to find out how a high-trust, low-control company runs day to day. Andrea's core argument: stop tying pay to performance and you strip a layer of politics out of work. 37signals benchmarks salaries once a year to the 90th percentile of the San Francisco tech market, with no negotiation and no manager involvement, and rewards tenure through a profit share. Reviews still happen, on each person's anniversary, but they're a check-in rather than a lever for pay. What drives the work is intrinsic motivation - and a small, flat, bootstrapped company built to support it. What we covered: How pay works - benchmarking to Radford's 90th percentile, no merit cycle, no negotiation, and why managers stay out of itWhat reviews are for once pay is off the table, and why staggering them by anniversary beats an annual scrambleThe five-level structure - why level three (senior) is the baseline, why level five (principal) is reserved for people moving the industry forward, and how judgment separates people at the topProfit share based on tenure rather than individual output, and why it doubles as retentionHow a high-trust company handles a low performer - visibility, honest conversation, skill problem vs engagement problem, and why PIPs rarely earn their keepThe "manager of one" - hiring people who seek out problems without waiting to be toldThe 2021 decision to draw a line on political conversation at work, the roughly twenty people who left, and what it revealed about when leadership steps inWhy staying private and bootstrapped for 25 years let the founders decide what the company is for, and why equity isn't the draw people assumeSelf-determination theory - autonomy, competence, relatedness - and how 37signals delivers all threeWork as a product - treating work as something employees choose to buy, not something handed downSix-week cycles, kickoffs and heartbeats - the light mechanisms that stop a decentralized company splintering into silosAdvice for anyone stuck inside a pay-for-performance cycle People referenced Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations, 37signalsJason Fried - co-founder and CEO, 37signalsDavid Heinemeier Hansson - co-founder and CTO, 37signalsDart Lindsley - 11Fold, host of Work for Humans; "work as a product"Luke O'Mahoney - SapienX; "work as a product"Megan Bernard-May - Pollinate XD; "work as a product"Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory Books Rework - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier HanssonIt Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier HanssonFirst, Break All the Rules - Marcus Buckingham and Curt CoffmanWhat Pay Costs - James Alexander Seechurn Organizations, podcasts and websites 37signals - bootstrapped company behind Basecamp and HeyBasecamp - project management software; Basecamp 5 launched recentlyHey - email softwareRadford - compensation survey used for benchmarkingRework - 37signals' podcastThe 37signals employee handbook - on their websiteSemco - Ricardo Semler's company, upward-feedback modelHaier, Handelsbanken and Buurtzorg - decentralized organizations referenced

  7. 15 May

    The People Experience with Megan Bernard-May

    Episode description In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of the PX Dojo, and the person who led people experience at the BBC - to dig into what it means to treat the experience of work the way a UX designer treats a product. Meg's core argument: people experience is another flavor of experience design. Traditional HR builds around policy, compliance, and risk management. A people experience approach starts somewhere else - finding the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for the business, and what's good for customers, then designing solutions inside that overlap rather than treating them as trade-offs. What we covered: Why traditional HR keeps shipping best-practice solutions that don't solve the problem, and what a design-led discovery process looks like insteadMeg's path from architecture to UX to people experience, including the master's in organizational psychology she did to round out the workWhy corporate environments resist experimentation in HR even though product teams A/B test routinely, and what makes an experiment "successful"The BBC and what productivity meant there - why getting clear on that question first matters more than any solutionPay complaints as symptoms - what's usually underneath them when benchmarking already says you're paying the marketA case study from a credit analyst team where dissatisfaction with pay turned out to be a job-design problemWhy dual career tracks still funnel people into management to chase money, and what flatter pay structures unlockSelf-determination theory as a stress test for any HR change - does it add autonomy, competence, and connectedness, or remove them?Handelsbanken, Spotify guilds, and Haier as examples of decentralized models that lend themselves to a people experience approachWhere people experience should sit organizationally - outside HR, as a guild that runs across the businessThree things any HR practitioner can start doing tomorrow: ask better problem questions, stop asking for permission, document the workPeople referenced Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of PX DojoAdam Axton - co-creator of PX Dojo, based in MelbourneDan Pink - "take pay off the table" framingLuke O'Mahoney - "table stakes" framing of centralized HREdward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theoryBooks Purpose and Work - Jessica ZwaanWhat Pay Costs - James A SeechurnDrive - Daniel PinkOrganizations and resources Pollinate XD - Meg's consultancy, helping organizations move people experience out of HR and into the leadership functionPX Dojo - three-month cohort program for HR practitioners, structured white-belt to blue-beltHumani - online HR community in Australia where Meg moderates an experience design circle and runs a book clubHandelsbanken - Swedish bank, decentralized operating unitsSpotify - the guild model for cross-cutting disciplinesHaier - the marketplace model of the organization

  8. 7 May

    Work as a Product with Dart Lindsley

    In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of the Work for Humans podcast, and former head of business architecture for HR at Cisco Systems - to dig into the idea of work as a product. Dart's core argument: companies have spent a century misclassifying their workforce. Employees fit the definition of customers, people who choose every day whether to keep buying the product called "your job." That reframe rearranges almost everything downstream - recruitment, onboarding, what managers do, how work gets allocated, and what good performance even means. What we covered: The category error at the root of modern management, and why scientific management's framing of people as factors of production still shapes practice todayHow employees fit the definition of customers in a multi-sided business, and the route Dart took to that model through business architecture work at CiscoThe limits of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a design framework, and what Dart found after asking thousands of people what job they hire their work to doNegative transformation - the ways work changes us into people we don't want to be - and why that belongs on the cost side of the ledgerWhat it looks like when teams co-design their own work, including the four-dimensional bubble chart Dart uses to reallocate tasks based on what each person finds rewardingManagers as brokers optimizing flow between two customers, the paying customer and the working customerCommon pushback on the model: does it scale, is it anti-capitalist, and why bother if the existing system seems to workPlus a short detour into the night Dart climbed the Golden Gate BridgePeople referenced Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of Work for HumansEdward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theoryClayton Christensen and Bobby Moesta - Jobs to Be Done frameworkJoe Pine - experience and transformation economiesDaniel Pink - autonomy, mastery, purposeAlfie Kohn - critique of behaviorist management ("pop behaviorism")Antonio Damasio - on emotion and reason in decision-makingJeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton - the knowing-doing gapRicardo Semler - Semco's participative modelBart Houlahan - co-founder of B Lab, partner at Irrational CapitalSandra Loughlin - EPAM, on data architecture and AISemmelweis, Pasteur, Koch, Lister - the germ theory paradigm shift, used as analogy for how slowly new management ideas spreadBooks Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness - Richard Ryan and Edward DeciThe Transformation Economy - Joe PineDescartes' Error - Antonio DamasioThe Knowing-Doing Gap - Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert SuttonDrive - Daniel PinkPunished by Rewards - Alfie KohnPodcasts and websites Work for Humans - Dart's podcast, 190+ episodes11fold.com - 11Fold's site, including a curated Discord community and an AI search across the Work for Humans back cataloguePX Espresso - Luke O'Mahoney's podcast, where Dart appears as a guestIrrational Capital - the ETF Dart references that tracks how employees feel about work at the companies they invest inAeroPress - the world's best coffee makerConnect with Dart on LinkedIn

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About

Disengaged asks why most people feel detached from the work they do, and what it would take to change that. Organizations meet almost every problem with more control: more process, more measurement, more incentives. That response deepens the problem it was meant to solve, since control is what suppresses engagement in the first place. Each episode brings together writers, researchers, and practitioners in conversations about motivation, autonomy, pay, job design, and performance management, and about what it takes to build a workplace on a foundation of trust rather than control.

Information

  • Creator
    James A. Seechurn
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    16
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 James A. Seechurn
  • Show Website
    Disengaged