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Welcome to the show where we expose new perspectives on our ever evolving world through the lenses of various industries, cultures and backgrounds.
Our guests are disruptors, united by a common goal to bring their purpose to life.
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Whether they’re from the commercial world or third sector, from the global North or the global S, expect an inspirational journey that will transform your perspective on just what is possible.
My name is Philippa White and welcome to Thai Unearthed.
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What if the?
Real measure of success wasn’t how much we’ve achieved, but how deeply we’ve flourished.
And what if, in a world of material abundance and professional accolades, the most valuable investment we could make was in our own humanity?
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Welcome to episode 110 of Thai Unearthed.
This week I’m speaking with Doctor Narith Carlisle, a Harvard trained physician, educator and innovator whose work sits at the intersection of medicine, performance, science and human flourishing.
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He’s also a South African and also lived in Canada.
So there are lots of things that we have in common, which you’re going to hear in this episode.
Now, after witnessing the rising tide of burnout and disengagement in hospitals and boardrooms, and even in his own life, Narath set out to rethink what it means to truly thrive.
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And the result make Time Flow Labs, which is a system that helps individuals and organizations unlock the Super potential of time, focus and intention.
And in our conversation, we dive into why so many high performing professionals feel unfulfilled and what they can do about it.
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How to build a life and a business aligned with purpose, not just productivity.
The science of flourishing and how it’s being used by elite universities, executives, and even financial investment communities to rethink the future of success and why, especially in environments of material wealth, we need to start investing in humanity before the cost becomes too high.
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This is a powerful reflection on what I like to call the return on humanity, and it’s a reminder that success without intention is just another form of emptiness.
This conversation is as practical as it is profound.
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So if you’re curious about what’s possible when we prioritize well-being, purpose, and performance together, this one’s for you.
Let’s get into it.
Hello Nara, Thank you so much for joining me on TIE on Earth today.
2:59
How are you?
Wonderful.
Thanks, Philippa.
It’s such a pleasure to be here.
I’ve so enjoyed the podcast myself and I’ve learned so much and gotten so much great energy from it.
So so delighted to be here with you.
Well, I mean, we had our last conversation and we ended up talking about everything.
And I mean, just our pasts and our lives in South Africa and Canada.
3:17
And there were so many overlaps and Oh my goodness.
And by the end of that conversation, we didn’t even touch on half the things we were supposed to talk about.
So right, I’m looking forward to diving into a lot of this today.
So before we go any further, I’d love to just understand where are you?
Because I speak to people all over the place.
3:33
So where are you?
Sitting right now.
Currently I’m in Cambridge, MA, so here one of the towns around Boston.
I’m sitting in the Cambridge Innovation Center where I have a small office and do a bunch of my innovation work here.
Very cool.
I mean, just for our listeners, I’m looking behind you and I just see so many books.
3:49
And our last conversation you just kept talking about on all these, oh, have you read this book?
And Oh my goodness, there’s this philosopher and then there’s this.
And you have such an incredible background.
Thanks.
That’s often one of the fun things where we know being conversation.
I’m like, oh, that’s this part over here.
I mean, it’s a.
4:05
Section of exactly, yeah.
Yeah, I think it’s it’s growing up around physicians and then like working with a lot of them.
There are crazy number of incredibly well read people.
It’s one of the things that keeps me so humble all the time.
One of the attendings on our medicine services, Joel Escalzo, who’s who’s massive book.
4:21
He’s the one of the main editors of Harrison’s, which is sort of like our internal medicine Bible is there.
So I think of it as having conversations with people, you know, when you feel like, oh, I’m so alone and I don’t have all these great mentors around me because I’m not in location X.
But the truth is that many people have gone and put their best thinking into a book with great effort, as you know, with Return on Humanity.
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But, you know, when I read a book, especially like non fiction books, then I really feel that I’m sort of being mentored by them.
And I use it as a way to have a conversation with people.
So most of the time I much prefer to have a book that I could write in and put sticky notes in and, you know, sort of really work the book.
Which is why I’m so delighted that you spent the effort and the time and we’re brave enough to launch Return on Humanity Now a year ago.
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Well, thank you.
Yes.
And I think it has a lot, a lot of overlap with your world as well, which obviously we’re going to get into just really quickly.
One thing that I was super inspired by when I got off the last call that we had, because as I was growing up, many of my family members were physicians, but I grew up with a father as well who was a doctor.
5:21
And one of his closest friends was a guy who was also an anesthetist.
But before he became an anesthetist, he did a degree, I think he had a masters in philosophy.
And my dad always said Lawrence Brownell.
Lawrence is one of the most extraordinary doctors because he studied philosophy.
5:40
And those are two things that you would not normally put together.
But as our listeners will hear, this is a big part.
And I’m covered in goosebumps as I say it, because that I think sums up you.
You’re sort of my next Lawrence Frownell.
So we’ll get to that.
But.
Oh wonderful.
I’ll do my best to live up to that.
5:56
That’s something I praised.
So for our listeners, if you could just dive into your story, tell us a little bit about your journey.
It’s so rich and fascinating.
I was inspired by it, but I think it will help just frame what we’re going to be talking about today.
6:12
So perhaps you can just take us on a little bit of that journey, however much detail you want to go into.
So a little bit of background, my story, I there’s a lot to cover.
I’m going to mention a few things, but maybe we’ll dive into the ones that you find most interesting.
So like you, I was born in South Africa, my mom and dad, so born in in Johannesburg.
6:30
Both of them had really interesting roles.
My father, a medical student when we were born and then became a psychiatrist, but still one of the most biopsychosocial repetitioners I’ve ever known.
My mother, an artist.
I grew up most of the time in Durban, which for the people they don’t know is sort of on the East Coast, a vibrant city.
6:47
Really was competing with Cape Town to be like one of the main holiday towns, really big surfing areas, so some amazing beaches that we can talk about.
My parents really made a choice.
Despite their interest in being part of the transition South Africa out of apartheid, it was hard for a period of time to predict that when that was going to happen.
7:05
And so in the interests of not having their sons have to serve in compulsory military service for an apartheid regime and the difficulties of function subjecting, and then for the opportunities to give us different levels of education, they moved to Canada.
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We arrived in Newfoundland really, but in a tiny community.
Everyone of course, some from South Africa thought we were moving to New York, but we went to place never having seen snow before.
So we can talk a lot about buying 10 food and then did computer science in Toronto, then did some traveling in India seeking and trying to understand, do people have different levels of consciousness?
7:43
Can you, can you study or learn more about that?
Saw the light.
We’ll talk a little bit about some experiences, about how some experiences can sometimes resent to you and say no matter how hard the next steps are, it’s worth trying.
And so I returned back to Canada, studied for medicine, went to Dartmouth, worked some amazing people who allowed me to do some work internationally as well as here locally on quality improvement and safety related issues.
8:10
Then made the mistake of reading Mountains Beyond Mountains for anybody who’s not read it.
An incredible life changing book about how the world was changed and how it cared for.
People being treated for TB initially and then HIV by a small group of determined individuals who were here at the Brigham and at Harvard.
8:28
Was then determined to try to find a way to come here.
Was lucky enough to be accepted at the Brigham for residency and at Harvard Medical School.
So I came here, studied medicine as well as global health and social equities, so trained in hospitals and clinics here and then in Haiti and then Rwanda and continue to do work in Tanzania.
8:45
And the privilege to work with all farmer truly world changing.
As well as Howard Hyatts and Joe Radigan, who now runs the division of Global HealthEquity here.
And then did some work in innovation here in the United States with Clayton Christensen, who was one of the leaders of disruptive innovation, really trying to change care in the way that care is done, not just within the hospitals and the clinics out out in the community where there are dynamic teams caring for people.
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So did a lot of work there and then returned to do a lot more work in primary care working on the opioid pandemic and then the COVID pandemic.
And now I continue to do a lot of work both acting clinically as a teaching attending and the inpatient service at the Brigham.
I also am the lead clinical health and fanaticist for the Educational Institute.
9:28
So working on educational innovations across the hospital as a whole and multiple different departments and lead a small team doing research into AI, the use of AI and clinical education.
And then here at the Innovation Center, I do a lot of work centered on human flourishing.
A core part of that is helping people who are trying to do good in the world do better both themselves and in the way that they’re trying to do and achieve things.
9:51
So there I’m using some of my joy of writing computer programs.
So I built a platform called Make Time Flow which I want to make, you know, as widely accessible as possible.
So fascinating because obviously you, you sort of reeled that off and I for, for the people listening, I just think it’s really important to just sort of OK, there’s entrepreneurialism in there, started a tech business, there’s travelling around various countries around the global S understanding the challenges that people in communities face.
10:23
Then, you know, becoming a physician and working in various areas of, of medicine, and now it seems that you’re bringing these two worlds together.
And I just wonder, before we actually get into the the details, what was that catalyst?
10:39
Because you read the book, you touched on the book.
So we know that that book was a big catalyst to one of your life chapters.
But then there’s, it feels to me and from our conversation that we had before, this is maybe another life chapter that you’re sort of, you’re still bridging, but there’s a life chapter there.
10:55
And I just wonder what was that catalyst?
What’s a story that sort of what happened there to start moving into that bridging part of your life?
Often feel like oh if it wasn’t mono, if it wasn’t a mono story then was it confused so I’m not focused.
Did we not understand it?
11:12
And most of the time, when you really get a chance to sit with people, the vast majority of your experiences have informed your ongoing journey.
And while they’re not distinct phases that you’ve like, oh, I’ve left that behind much of the time.
When you continue to find ways to engage with life and you’re not feeling that you need to suppress anything, you bring the wholeness of you to it.
11:31
And you know this, ever since we as human beings sort of went into this cognitive niche that our adaptability has been sort of one of our key frameworks.
And it’s one of the things that I’m really excited about for our kids, which is, you know, as we’ve moved from this industrial age where you have a single profession, you get good at that, you specialize and you do only that, then we move into this information age and knowledge work.
11:52
Even there, the kinds of work people were doing, we’re changing all the time.
And I think that it’s probably much more natural for us as and together is where we spend the vast majority of our history.
We would specialize, but we would always be adaptable and learn how to extend that.
And I hope that’s going to happen in an even more accelerated way.
12:09
While these seem like different phases, and while it seemed crazy, why would someone go from computer science and then having done like entrepreneurship, run software centers internationally, go back to medical school, then do medicine and like, wow, didn’t you waste all that time?
Like, no, now I’m in this now in this.
12:24
And then like everyone’s like, wow, how did you know?
So now you know, the practice of medicine is far more an interaction with these now intelligent systems for it.
And it turns out that I haven’t pursued specialities, but rather generalities because I’ve remained interested in systems of care growing up.
12:41
I got the sense from people around me, they’re like, you should be ready to serve.
Serving others is the way to have this rich life.
You know, part of my, my parents made-up my name.
Part of my name came from Narendranath Sivananda.
And my dad was studying at the ashram in Durban.
12:57
And Sivananda’s work, they were very proactive in South Africa, but they were places, yes, you could go to meditate, but they built a lot of the schools and the hospitals because their mantra was that spiritual work is service to humanity.
Spiritual work is the most wonderful thing, right?
That’s what everyone embodies, all of these religious traditions are like, and that’s the most wonderful thing to do.
13:15
So it always seemed to me that you should prepare yourself to be ready to serve.
And then combined with that, though, South Africa forces you like having an experience really, and growing up in South Africa, it forces you to realize that the world is not always on your side.
Most of the time I think it’s indifferent.
13:31
Sometimes, unfortunately, mostly due to human intervention, it can be actively against you.
I don’t think the world in general is against us, but much of the time human systems can do it, especially where there’s a feeling of constrainedness.
I see this in people’s thinking.
You know, Paul Farmer called it the poverty mindset poor people deserve.
13:49
You know, what do poor people get?
Poor people get poor health care and Partners in Health has their mission has been to make the care being off to poor people the preferential option.
It’s the care rich people would choose if they had access to it, right?
So this idea of how do you stand up world class healthcare for everybody everywhere around the world was 1.
14:06
So I think that yes, be ready to serve, but at the same time always be thinking about how you can have the biggest impact.
And that’s been the focus.
So for me, computer science was interesting.
I love learning to build things, thinking through information.
And there’s a way of like abstracting even philosophy into into simple like sort of information systems and what we can learn from it.
14:27
Really inspired by Alan Turing.
His work was this deep integration.
His paper is still relevant, right?
His paper on intelligent machines still relevant 1950s.
And it’s so sad that that we as society, you know, hastened his death because he was homosexual at a time in England.
14:44
This incredibly impactful thinker, someone who was very impactful during the Second World War and saving arguably a huge number of lives as a result of that.
But because our society could not understand that the values that we share couldn’t be expanded enough, his his life was tremendously curtailed.
15:02
This idea of like bringing these things together meant that I could think philosophically while studying computer science.
I could still stay connected to this idea that could this be connected not just to financial or military systems, but to things that connect us to humanity.
Education and expert systems seem to be the main goal still kept alive my my wish to say at some point, maybe I could be useful in bridging something in medicine.
15:23
Then through the experience in India, really seeing how somebody even without medical training did this and yet cured like a community of TB.
But now coming into the practice and going through global health, the my current specialty, my board certification specialty, not just in internal medicine, but in this in the specialty newly established called clinical informatics.
15:42
And clinical informatics is the system science of healthcare, right?
And when I, I much prefer to break down the words, right, it would be the system science of health and caring.
I much prefer to think of it that way.
And so it was true that I got to that space seemingly hypastically becoming to it with the sense that there’s power and using intelligence systems to help make caring better.
16:06
There’s a huge need for caring.
It’s hard to learn how to do and it’s hard to learn how to bridge.
Great, let me try to tackle that.
Then I find the speciality.
And then it’s true that there were two additional awakenings that I had and one was five years into working with Christensen and working in a healthcare start up.
16:22
I’m travelling around the country.
I work not only in hospitals and clinics, but I work with payers here in the United States.
I work with people out in the community trying to end chronic homelessness.
The most complex kids and how do you make their journeys better?
How do you get them the best possible care?
16:37
But at the same time, I learnt some of the real challenges around the systems of care, especially the way that we’ve structured it, unfortunately, in the United States and the bet that we made previously that we would make it an employee benefit rather than a universal concern.
16:53
And I think this challenge being, I don’t want health insurance, I want assurance of care and some of these needs that we have, you know, of we as human beings will have a need for care.
And so this is one of those areas where market forces can be helpful in driving innovations to make things better.
17:09
But it’s likely that across society, the most efficient system that’s going to happen and certainly the one that that speaks to truth and justice and fairness is going to be one that’s going to result in universal access.
That seems clear like this, this.
No, I don’t see any economic argument that that changes that, nor the human desire, nor my wish for everyone in the world to have access to to effective care.
17:31
What I did learn though, is that there are different value equations that are operating in healthcare today.
And unfortunately, the one that we hope to have happen is not the one that drives healthcare in the United States today.
We can soon dive into that.
Michael Porter’s done a lot of work, but I have these three equations that operate at the macro level and then the Mesa level, the one that I would work in as a clinician.
17:53
And then there’s this true value equation that I think we should all stay committed to.
This is the way of system thinking looks.
Let me give a brief primer of that to share how I think about that.
But and we could talk about those things.
I had this coming, this near death experience in a car and then I realized like, what am I working on?
18:09
It’s, I’m working in a for profit company in healthcare, yes, trying to make things better, yes, But am I making money by helping people or am I making money from sick people?
Always this great discrepancy within healthcare, the things that you see unfortunately affecting medicine.
And while I try to practice the human needles of generosity, right, This interpretation of generosity in the actions of people, small incentives that are constantly applied can radically change even the behaviour of really well-intentioned people.
18:37
Almost every doctor that I know is deeply passionate about providing great care and helping patients, but you provide small economic incentives that apply every day and all of a sudden your doctor no longer cares about you and the wholeness of your life.
They’re like, how can I see you in a 15 minute visit and do the checklist?
I’m like, that sucks.
18:53
So I had that coming to a moment and I all of a sudden realized that my my greatest impact was probably not going to be within a system where I wasn’t sure the incentives are fully aligned that closely led to burnout.
We’ll talk a little bit about some some of this huge amount of burnouts among people working inside systems that don’t align in these ways and they’re being asked to be take responsibility for that.
19:13
So I started looking for other things at the same time I had children and I wished for a life that was not just a standard cookie cutter go to school, get a good job and then whatever is that success like no.
So I started learning about thriving, which is for children to grow and develop vigorously and then stumbled across despite all this medical training, this field that’s emerging from positive psychology into this field of human flourishing.
19:37
It blew my mind, right?
So my world went from my North star was how can I help play a part in systems that are trying to create the best care possible for all into the audacious new enlightenment goal of my North stars.
19:52
Now, how can I play a part in helping create the best life possible for all?
And I, with the science of human flourishing and what we are learning about what are true measures of really satisfying lives.
They are not competing and dominating others.
20:08
They are not having the most stuff.
Those are very poor measures of life satisfaction.
We’re getting really strong evidence for it now.
So it’s super inspiring.
We have.
And I think are at the cusp of the possibility of having a life of tremendous abundance and the recognition that rather than us all pursuing terrible psychopathologies of power and domination over each other, we will, we will have the opportunity to pursue really rich lives in these 6 core domains of human flourishing that will let the vast majority of humanity live lives in which they are satisfied they’re the longest, healthiest lives they can.
20:45
And we can do that in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment and continues to let us solve huge problems and use, yes, cool technology.
I do it.
But there’s some things that we have to stop ourselves from doing first in order for that to happen.
I mean, there is.
So there’s so much here.
There’s obviously so much that I’ve touched on in the, in my book, I mean, return on humanity I touch on.
21:03
So I mean, I obviously don’t dive into quite much detail tell that you obviously know about you can teach at PhD on every single area there, but it’s obviously something I’m really passionate about as well.
And so much of what you’re talking about is this return on humanity, right?
21:19
And I would love to know coming from and as you were talking, I would just think, God, you know, it’s so extraordinary because I grew up in Canada, the public health system is very different to the US health system.
So already you know, you’ve been in you’ve been in South Africa, you know what the reality is there.
You’ve obviously been in Canada, you know the reality there.
21:37
You’re now in the the states working in medicine, which as you said, was a bit of an aha moment of Oh my God, what am I?
What am I doing?
Also being in the states at this this time.
So we’re talking about power, we’re talking a lot about coercion, we’re talking about sort of oppression.
And So what does return on humanity mean to you in the context of what your living in and also in the context of what you’re working in?
22:00
I think of it in two ways.
And I think, you know, the really positive way is we haven’t fully tapped human potential.
And certainly our experience in life and our current experience, especially since we have so much more of like sort of this interconnected nervous system, we have more sensory awareness of how people are doing.
22:17
But we’re currently in this vulnerable state in the world where we are developing, deploying technologies that we have not yet adapted to and not yet found ways to adapt to it.
But it’s very clear that there’s so much potential within people to solve interesting problems that matter to us as a world, as a planet, as life.
22:38
And that is very exciting.
And we’ve created many systems that allow us to release that and to extend not just our our own impressive natural intelligence, but to do it in a collective intelligence way.
We’ve also, you know, in spirit of Steven Pinker’s enlightenment Now, Yes, despite many downturns, many backward steps have continued to progress toward a world in which there is more flourishing.
23:02
Yes, not all of it has been removed, but we’ve done this largely not by always amplifying our human emotions, but by instituting and manifesting in institutions things that embody the best ways that we can be together.
And we as human beings now have enough of an understanding of how to care for others, how to think about and be within complex environments, to understand our impacts upon them, to measure them, and to use science as a way of knowing.
23:30
We had created a dichotomy between values and science and you know, Sam Harris is really driving a lot of us to think there’s a lot of decisions that we’re asked to make that seem to be ethical decisions.
They can’t have an ethical basis, but you don’t know the outcomes.
You should use some of the principles and the techniques that we’ve used to understand.
23:47
Were those good decisions?
How can we make better decisions in the future?
These are the things that a flowering of humanity can help us drive more and more towards the world in which everyone flourishes and that we ourselves succeed.
I think that that’s the really positive side, the negative side.
I think that was my question.
24:04
I’m sure you’re going to have a much more erudite sort of response was this idea of return.
Return on investment is deeply embedded within current capitalist culture is a way that people think about measuring value as a way that this idea in order to be valued as a human being, should not require you to generate return.
24:24
Echo toll really sort of saying that a lot, a lot of the spiritual traditions really saying that you you’re here.
You are a being that that has value in itself.
We recognize that you have experience.
We should do what we can not to make you suffer.
We should do what we can to make you healthy and doing that to ourselves will make us have better lives.
24:43
Like that’s the beauty of like true humanity, right?
That’s our essence of what’s there.
We have dark paths to our nature.
People want, you know, become fearful and then they pursue power and domination and status.
And these ones to say that they can feel there are other better ways to deal with those things, I think.
24:59
But I think this idea that that you and I are doing at least some part of that to say I care about achievement.
A lot of my work centers around how can I do more?
I’m unsatisfied with the level that I’m contributing right now.
I see more potential, but doesn’t mean that I’m not valuable now.
25:14
I don’t want my kids to feel that like they have to achieve and be high achievers for me to value them, for me to love them.
That’s I think it’s something that I’m trying to find a way to have come through.
It’s certainly something that I try to do when I do these sessions on super productivity.
To say there’s so much more to you than this part of it.
25:29
That’s just be part of you.
And then I know that my way is to be striving.
I will always be striving in my life, but it doesn’t mean that I’m unsatisfied with myself.
The things that drive me to strive, I think are now more transcendent than I’m not good enough for a, for a long time.
I think in growing up in the South African schooling system, which is very old school.
25:47
And you know, I think people still seem to admire it, but that seems so broken that your, your sense of worth was based on the grades you were achieving.
I just wish that was not the case.
There’s so much to explore, so much potential.
So tell me about your how you think about that in return.
Completely agree with you.
26:04
And actually that’s essentially what I was trying to even say with the name Return on Humanity in the sense that intrinsically we all have this value.
The thing is, is the system of education or the system of culture, whatever culture that you live in or that school system, it’s kind of not allowed us to understand that intrinsic value that we have.
26:31
And actually it’s a superpower that I believe literally everybody has access to it.
The thing is, we’re not given permission to tap into it or even have access to it.
So even just to your point about fulfillment, we aren’t taught.
Does your idea of fulfillment equal your idea of success?
26:48
Have you even thought that you should live your life with intention and therefore live your life to fulfill you?
But do people stop and think about what fulfills me and actually you as a leader?
If you are unfulfilled, fulfilled as that leader and doing work that isn’t tied to what you’re really good at and also what what makes you happy and fulfills you, you’re probably going to be a terrible leader.
27:12
In fact, we’ve.
All.
Seen those levers?
We, we’ve all probably had them as a boss.
They’re horribly unhappy people who lead with aggression, who are, you know, create unsychologically safe environments.
So that’s not our Mecca.
That’s not really good.
27:27
It’s not good for that individual, but it’s also not good for me who’s working with that person.
The whole point of sort of return on humanity, it’s basically just saying the more we tap into these intrinsic, these competencies that we have, we have so much value that it’s not about making a return on us or proving anything.
27:47
It’s something that we have within ourselves.
And if we tap into that, the situation where you’re at is 100% better.
The thing is, it’s also using that language that it’s the language of business.
And if we want to talk about it being more sustainable, yeah, it is your business will be better if you want to use the word competitive, maybe we don’t want to use that word, but will it be, will it be more productive?
28:09
Will people be more engaged, which we know makes a better work environment and more efficient?
Yes, it will.
And so that’s, that’s sort of what I’m trying to kind of on Earth, I guess, with that language.
And, and it’s totally in line with what you’re talking about.
You talked about burnout.
28:25
And I really want to talk about this because burnout is as we know, I mean, it’s something that we’re all at risk of feeling, particularly to your point, you know, I, I like my work, I’m a high achiever, but Oh my God, you can very easily kind of tip the balance.
And in high impact professions like healthcare, it’s, it’s an issue, right?
28:44
So what was that moment that you realized something needed to change, and how did you manage your time and energy?
Yeah, thanks there.
There is a tremendous problem with burnout.
And as you know, your audience may probably know, yes, you know, there are always tough times in work and especially when you’re tackling something hard or something new, which I’m hoping many people will do lots of.
29:06
Right.
So you are not sure it’s going to be successful.
There still seems to be so much longer to go.
It’s really hard.
How do you motivate and how do you push yourself there?
Yes, you need to sort of set limits.
But two, you need to figure out ways that you push yourself.
I think that’s sometimes the great benefit of having this experience make in sporting arenas where like you learn that technique and then then you bring that into other aspects of your life.
29:29
It’s one of the reasons I’ve been working with Hallie and we’ve designed these adventures for our children, these coming of age adventures that we do every three years starting at 9.
We’re modelled on Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, really focused on a physical adventure that that we design together, but they lead and then I accompany them as their guide.
29:47
But it’s in doing the physical things that we then realize that we can go much further than we thought.
And in so doing, it opens up the space to tackle harder cognitive challenges for ourselves.
So for me, I would say I’d had this privilege of being able to study in this field and then get this training that I had dreamed of.
30:08
And now I was a practicing Dr. and I felt like full ownership for my patients.
I, I wanted to teach well, I wanted to learn as much as I could.
I’m always thinking about like, do I know enough?
What more could I do?
Is this the point where I need to ask for help, right?
And have that humility and yet be caring about them in a holistic way.
30:27
What this means in the current system of Healthcare is that you’re just getting people assigned to you.
You haven’t had a chance to meet them yet.
They’ve handed over from some other doctor or someone has just said you deal with this.
There’s no teamness.
There’s very little relations.
And they’ve turned from a relational model into a transactional model because that’s how we know to pay for it.
30:47
And the worst part of it is related to all the other stuff that’s happening, which is, oh great, we’ll do this in a medical record, We’ll use an electronic medical record.
Our informaticists have helped us to to deploy this.
When we deploy electronic medical records, there are tremendous number of potential benefits that can happen a lot related to patient safety, but they’re often deployed as if we say, like, here’s an enterprise resource planning tool that we as a complex organization use and value.
31:11
Now use it to manage patients.
And you’re like, oh, thanks.
So it feels like a little bit of the Middle Ages of informatics, right?
So sometimes I hold my head low as I walk through and you’re like, who?
Who joyfully embraces their enterprise resource planning tool and then says, yeah, write and manage complex patients.
31:27
And then, you know, I’d worked in software development and LED teams and, you know, run these software centers.
So I know a lot about project management tools and soccer.
I teach project management and agile software for the informatics fellows at Harvard Medical School.
Great.
So you as a primary care doctor receive, you know, in America it’s 1800 to 2000 patients and what kind of tool do you get?
31:48
You get bolted onto your medical record, a plain text note system.
So then I get the worst possible e-mail system.
So imagine like an e-mail system where you just get a list of requests coming in at any time.
And they could be, oh, you know, I need a stool softener to, you know, sometimes my chest hurts when I’m walking around.
32:07
And you get this now and you’re going to get this for all of the patients that you have.
And it’s like just manage that.
So when we deploy medical records in health systems for primary care doctors, it increases the time that they spend by two hours a day because the boss and you’re like, how would that work?
32:23
They’re so expensive.
They’re not, they’re salaried employees.
So you’re a fixed cost.
If the organizations or institutions can get more time from you for that win to the organization, right?
So now they’re working very hard in a high stress environment.
Now I give to you this new technology and you spend two additional hours on it.
32:41
What is that time spent on?
That time is spent on biologing this messaging system and this crazy system and then doing notes.
Yes, some of that is thinking time, right?
So I appreciate that there is a role, but it’s not built to like augment your thinking.
It’s more built.
32:56
Oh, hey, you were doing this note.
Here’s a 20 page fax summary.
This kind of blurry about some other event they had just to integrate that into your visit.
So I’m there, I want to apply all the things that I do.
I don’t want to give up, but guess what happens to me, right?
So I am not able to show up for my family all of a sudden.
33:14
I’m not doing I’m not, there’s no way for me to win in this particular situation.
And then I’m worried that the things that they’re having me focus on are things that the hospital gets paid for and not what what matters the most the patient.
If you have that question, that fear, like you were leaving the doctor’s office and they finally ask you, well, hey, what, what really brought you in here?
33:32
We dealt all these other things that I have to do.
And that was like, not the way that I wanted to practice.
You know, I ended up having to like set a timer in the office because, you know, the vast majority of the studies show that when you show up at a doctor’s office to talk about hopefully your health, the doctor interrupts you within 27 seconds.
33:49
And I was like, so for me, I had to like set a timer.
It’s like it would be a 2 minute timer.
I was like super short, but it was be the one who just told me not to speak, right.
So my goal was to be focused on you, to listen and not look at the computer, but just look at them.
And the experience of that was radically transformative.
34:06
And I was like, this has to be different.
I have to be doing something in a different way.
So the first step for me was was reclaiming my time and attention.
The reason this is related is because social media, those things are doing the same for people.
They’re just stealing people’s time and attention.
Yes, there’s some value in it, but it’s a very small amount.
34:23
For me, my radical transformation and the entry into Make Time Flow was building a timer system for myself that let me flip the question like from, Oh my God, how much time do I spend on that 30 minutes every time you open up your e-mail inbox to how much time do I want to spend on this?
And then what else am I going to do?
34:39
I want to do that all day every day.
And that radically changed sort of my life and my experience.
At the same time, I was working on an innovation with my daughter called the Hilo System City.
My daughter and I was saying, hey, I have this like button that sends a signal to a server come from Amazon.
34:57
And I was like, hey, I could make this a stress button.
And my daughter, in her wisdom at 12 years old, was like, yeah, that’s nice, dad.
You could know how to stress, but you should also have a second button.
And that second button should be, I love what I’m doing right now because she was like that at school if she hadn’t yet and beaten out of them.
35:14
They’re like, they’re times when learning is tough and the times.
And I really love it.
So we built a small pad with two buttons, and she helped me put the little monsters on it with the happy monster and the stress monster.
And then we deployed that in our clinic.
And then I learned three amazing things.
So one was everybody used it despite it not blinging or doing anything or being an app, or they used it a few times a day to share it.
35:34
The second one was it helped people realize that they were happier at work than they realized because our brains are not built to remember satisfied experiences.
We remember the beginning is the end.
We remember stressors 6 times more than we do anything else.
So most of the time people’s reflection at the end of the day is like, Oh my God, that was so stressful.
35:51
But the truth was that there was a huge amount of satisfied experiences.
And that’s true in medicine.
It’s true in other spaces as well.
And then the other thing we, we looked like when I’d taken it away from one nurse and I was going to hand it to another, the nurse came to me the following day and said, like, hey, could I have my stress button back?
36:07
And the other nurse showed up and said can I have it too?
So CB got really inspired.
We did a small study in three primary care practices and we’ve got this ridiculous super simple device.
It’s got 2 buttons and it’s goal is to bring emotional intelligence back into organizations because they are emotionally blind.
36:23
You’ll tell your boss once something stresses you out, maybe a second time, but then you’ll just be silent, even though it still bugs the heck out of you.
And at the same time, we expect people to all love what they’re doing.
They don’t know love what they’re doing.
They don’t know love the same things.
But if we knew what those were, we could radically change the experience of most work environments.
36:39
And it’s a simple tool to do it.
So people listening so these launching and running this company and she is looking for pilot sites and places that want to bring it to that’s OK.
Anyways, the thing they want to do it.
Yeah, that’s so cool.
So I I’m very keen to understand just can you describe what is make time flow?
36:59
Because you’re, you’re, I mean, I don’t know how how many hours you have in your day, but you clearly have more than anyone else.
Or it’s this productivity sort of skills that you’re using to be able to fit everything in without burning out.
So if you could just bring that to life for our listeners to just understand what it is that you’re doing and how that works.
37:17
The two ways for people to engage with us and then tools that I’d wanna make available to them so they’re centered around the same thing.
And the goal is to help people level up in achieving their own potential and live a really good life.
What I’m calling deep success, right?
I want you to achieve the most good you can in the world and I want you to have a great life while doing it.
37:35
I think it’s possible.
I think there’s a tremendous amount of evidence.
How do we do that?
The two ways we do it are high touch and then high scale.
The high touch one is through cognitive high performance solutions.
That’s Helly’s leading that you work with me or one of the other coaches in the system and we use all the tools and techniques we know to help you level up.
37:53
We do that for one-on-one sort of high end, sort of executive coaching right now with customers here and then internationally.
And then we do corporate and team transformation stuff, a lot of alignment with, I think some of the work that we’re doing and stuff that I would love to think about Thai experiences because I think there’s a, such a rich potential transformational experiences.
38:12
That’s the high touch experience for me.
A lot of my work is centred around Make Time Flow itself and that’s the platform.
And so if you’re, and we’ll send out a custom link, which will be specific for them, it’ll give people some access to the pro version for the first six weeks.
Make Time Flow is a platform that you can just go to right now and you can get started using a system that does 5 key things.
38:34
There’s five key things.
One, it’s got like this cognitive high performance and human flourishing trained AI coach that will accompany you in transforming and thinking through how to transform your life in these 5 core dimensions.
The platform’s really strong in.
I accompany people and I accompany the AI coach a little bit within the platform to help make sure it’s customized to what people are trying to do.
38:55
I help people reclaim their time and attention by giving them a simple tool to be intentional with their time.
I connect that with a highly effective task trust system to make sure that things don’t get derailed or fall off the rails or get forgotten, but they also get them out of your mind so you’re not managing it all in your head.
39:12
And it frees your brain up to do what it’s going to do best, which is think big thoughts.
I want you to connect your work and your daily activities and shutting down and having a rich life through all of these core domains, meaning and purpose being a core dimension.
And then the final one is I wanted people to be helped by it.
39:28
So we do that by helping them design magmatic personal experiments, which they run in the side the platform, like connecting to our community and then seeking out one-on-one coaching if they need to.
My goal is to have the platform always be centered around the individual, the way that the platform works, the the people who aren’t generally leaning in or I suspect, like the the listeners of this podcast, which is they are leaders themselves, whether they’re in leadership positions yet or not.
39:52
They’re people who every organization needs desperately, which is they’re people who take ownership and they find a way to make it work, which is sort of my definition of leadership.
I would say it’s like the speed of C to B, which is my preferred approach.
We’re looking for people who see and use the platform go, hell yes, I want this for me.
40:08
I want this for my team.
I want to share this with others and we in the journey of getting through that.
But I tested useless living it myself every day.
And it helps me do what I do.
And I still work out most days, two hours a day during the day.
And I probably will confirm this for you or not, but like my goal is to be a really wonderful partner and a really wonderful father.
40:27
And so I’m committed to getting home every night, the weekends, we commit to doing these adventures together.
And I work in my community as the head of the Humanist Chaplaincy, the the head of the board of the Humanist Chaplaincy.
And I think deeply about ethical and community based choices and decisions.
So my goal is to measure myself within it and to do it.
40:44
Oh my God, Yeah.
Do you have a quote that sort of sums up what we’ve talked about?
There were two that I wanted and 1 was just the one.
Quote from Humanocracy by Michaela Zanini.
We are defined by the causes we serve.
Our identity is discovered in the challenges we embrace.
However modest our means and find out our capabilities, we can gift ourselves the exhilaration of a noble quest.
41:05
Thankfully, there are plenty of deserving problems to go around.
It got me, It got me.
OK, and then from enlightenment.
Now it’s.
We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life, enabling order, and in constant jeopardy of falling apart.
41:20
We were shaped by a force that is ruthlessly competitive.
We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity.
Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources and open space for a kind of redemption.
We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts.
41:39
These endowments have found ways to magnify, find their own power.
As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature.
We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one.
But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.
42:00
Beautiful.
I just love that.
Thank you.
I knew you’d have good quotes.
Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to tell our listeners?
I think there was one question that we didn’t get to, which is like, what’s the one thing that I would have leaders know about?
And it’s this idea that many people are worried about underwork and they have this mental model that’s linear, right?
42:20
So if I just put in more effort, I get more results.
The sad truth is that I think that mental model is wrong and that it’s not a linear curve, it’s an optimal curve.
So the inverted bathtub and what people need to do is they’ve lost.
They’re so worried about underwork, but the truth is that they’re real harms to overwork as well.
42:37
Thinking of yourself as a cognitive high performance athlete is the way that I have found most effective for myself to prevent myself from overworking.
Like saying, oh, I’m going to get strong and going to the gym and weightlifting for 16 hours a day is a sure recipe not to get stronger, but to get injured.
This happens again and again inside our work, especially when we are doing our cognitive hype forms work.
42:58
The things that are the most creative and the most transformative, helping people to understand that they shouldn’t be overworking, and using things like the performance break and the default mode network, the superpower that’s within your brain are some of the most powerful ways to unlock true creative and most holistic ideas out there.
43:17
Oh my gosh.
I mean, I literally you’re, you’re a perfect example of someone who literally manages to do and read.
You read so many books all the time.
I don’t know how you have time for all of this.
Anyway, you are a true inspiration and I love the fact that you guys reached out and and that we’re in touch because there’s a lot of synergy there and I just really appreciate your time.
43:38
Thank you for joining me.
Thank you for sharing your passions and your journey.
We didn’t even get talking about the monk.
Oh my God.
Anyway, he did touch on it.
He did touch on it, but I, I didn’t have time to ask you about it.
But anyway, thank you for your time and until the next time.
43:57
Thank you, Philippa.
We just won’t say thank you.
Your energy and the work that you’re doing in the world we think is so important, so wonderful.
So we’re so inspired to get connected and so honored to be on the podcast.
Hey everyone, it’s Philippa again.
44:12
I hope you enjoyed listening.
Now if you’d like to dive a little deeper, why don’t you check out my book Return on Humanity Leadership Lessons from all Corners of the world.
It reveals how putting people first is actually the smartest, most competitive business strategy of our time.
44:29
And if you’re ready to breakthrough disengagement, spark innovation, and build agile, purpose driven teams, let’s talk.
Whether it’s workshops off sites, keynotes, or full scale leadership programs, we’ll shift paradigms and create the change you’re looking for.
44:46
Visit philippajwhite.com to learn more or get in touch.
A huge thanks to Benna Vieira for the music and to Pete Morgan for his help with the editing.
Until next time, and I hope we’ll meet again soon.
