Productivi-Tree: The Human Side of Productivity

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Senior leaders in one organisation were spending forty hours a week deciding who works on what. Preston Chandler flipped the staffing model in a couple of months and the resourcing meetings disappeared.

Preston runs global strategic operations at WPP, a holding company of around 100,000 people, and co-owns Centered. He has spent two decades pulling decisions out of committees and handing them to the one person who should own them. In this episode, he explains why a slow decision that turns out right costs an organisation more than a fast one that turns out wrong, why the lag never shows up in any report, and what empowerment theatre looks like when a leader says "you own this" and then asks for the work to come back for approval.

You will hear what happened when one creative leader told his teams to stop bringing him work for sign-off, why Preston thinks RACI charts should be retired, what leader-to-doer ratios reveal about an organisation that has stopped moving, and why pouring AI into a company that cannot decide creates a traffic jam rather than speed. Santi closes with where decision making sits inside the four productivity vectors and the sixteen elements, and why it is the element that matters for medium and large companies.

Take one decision your team made last quarter, trace every step it went through, and ask whether one person could have made it on day one. That single exercise is the whole episode in practice.

Key Takeaways
1. A slow decision is still a decision. You decided not to change, and the opportunity passed.
2. Companies that decide faster also learn from their decisions faster.
3. Decision lag is a real cost that no leader volunteers as a metric, because it makes them look bad.
4. Empowerment with a mandatory approval step at the end is not ownership. It is a delay with a nicer name.
5. Decisions by committee have no owner. Name the one person on the hook, or stop the effort entirely.
6. Responsibility and accountability cannot be split, which is why Preston would retire the RACI chart.
7. Leader-to-doer ratios of roughly one to two signal an organisation protecting itself rather than shipping work.
8. AI adds options at speed. An organisation that cannot choose gets slower, not faster.

Guest Links
Preston Chandler, Centered: https://centered.work/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prestonchandler/
YouTube, Breakthrough Innovation: https://www.youtube.com/@BreakthroughInnovation
The Agile Code (free PDF): https://46125168.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/46125168/Site%20Documents/TheAgileCode_R5.pdf
Earlier appearance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPrmv9LF6q8
Books mentioned: The Agile Code, Breakthrough Innovation, ADAPT (forthcoming), The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
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🧭 Find Your Weakest Productivity Vector in 5 Minutes (Free Assessment) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
🎓 Productive, Not Busy (live cohort on Maven) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/productive-not-busy

Your process documents describe one company. The workarounds, the chasing and the four-day approvals describe another. Point AI at the second one and it copies the mess at speed.

David Dean spent 20 years in enterprise technology, 10 of them leading AI, automation and data programmes across healthcare, insurance, hospitality and regulated industries. In this conversation he explains the gap between the official contract of a job and the unwritten contract that keeps the work moving, why he puts 79 percent of the workforce in a group he calls AI survivalists, and what the inbox already records about how a company behaves.

By the end of the episode, you can do three things. Name the undocumented behaviours your own role depends on, so a tool decision stops being a guess. Spot an AI project that will fail before the budget is gone, using one question about who was asked. Start a work diary this week with nothing beyond the notes app on your phone.

Listen now if someone is about to roll a tool out across your team and nobody has asked the people who do the work.

Key Takeaways
1. Every job description ends with "other duties apply", and that line is where the real work lives.
2. Workarounds come from a need for control or a need to survive the week, and they outlive the reason they were created.
3. David puts 79 percent of workers in a group he calls AI survivalists, people who are neither for AI nor against it.
4. AI copies and industrialises human behaviour, including the dysfunction, which is one reason projects stall.
5. Lived experience and lived consequence stay human, so risk decisions stay with leaders.
6. The first sign an AI project will fail is that nobody spoke to the people who will use the tool.
7. A dictated work diary on your phone turns invisible behaviour into something a team can actually read.

Guest Links
David Dean website: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/
About David: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/about/
An Inbox Between Us: AI and the Reality of Modern Work: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/book/
Media: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/media/
Appearances: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/appearances/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidchristopherdean/
The AI Mirror (David's newsletter, published on LinkedIn)

Chapters
0:00 Why AI and people both have to earn trust
0:52 Find your weakest productivity vector in five minutes
1:15 Meet David Dean, business AI realist
2:37 Twenty years in enterprise tech, and what it taught him
5:10 Why AI pilots run on assumptions and stall
7:17 The official contract and the unwritten one
8:54 "Other duties apply" is where the real work hides
12:54 Control, survival, and the workarounds nobody wrote down
16:39 The 79% nobody is designing the rollout for
21:16 Why pushing tools at people never lands
25:14 Four behaviours that keep work moving
26:33 Risk, lived experience, and what you give up
31:14 Output above quality, and where that ends
32:45 How AI industrialises dysfunction at scale
37:42 Quickfire: the AI use with no business value
39:07 The meeting costing twenty four thousand dollars in payroll
40:29 The slide every company puts up and nobody believes
41:16 The first sign an AI project will fail
41:55 What to put on your calendar before Friday
42:34 The frontline worker who felt replaceable
46:46 Where to find the book and the audiobook
47:31 Double down on human capital, differently

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
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🧭 Find Your Weakest Productivity Vector in 5 Minutes (Free Assessment) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
🎓 Productive, Not Busy (live cohort on Maven) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/productive-not-busy

Your team has good software and the work still feels heavy. Nobody wants to say it out loud, because the tool was approved, paid for and announced.

Mike Toguchi has spent 25 years inside that exact room, in universities, nonprofits, foundations and corporates, and he has a blunt diagnosis: the technology is rarely what broke. He walks through a nonprofit scholarship programme that put AI on top of a convoluted review process and got "continued mess, faster mess", and he explains why a team that cannot say what is working has no feedback loop, only a sign-off.

By the end you will be able to spot survival mode in a team whose tools are running fine, test whether you have approval or alignment before a project goes sideways, and run a readiness check before you sign the next renewal.

Listen before your next software renewal lands on your desk, because the cheapest version of this lesson is the one you get secondhand.

Key Takeaways
1. A tool amplifies the workflow it lands on. Mike: "a lot of times the technology ends up being the thing that exposes the fissures in your workflow as opposed to fixing them."
2. Survival mode looks like smooth technology and overwhelmed staff. The signs are unclear ownership, incentives pointing in different directions and no line back to the mission.
3. Automating a convoluted review process gave one nonprofit richer summaries and worse decisions. Mike: "It's not making the process cleaner."
4. Approval is a signature. Alignment is a shared understanding of the problem, the success criteria and the tradeoffs, held together by a feedback loop people can actually use.
5. Every organisation runs two processes: the documented one and the real one. Mike calls them prescriptive and descriptive, and the gap between them is where the workarounds live.
6. Low adoption tells you something about leadership. Mike: "I think adoption is a leadership issue."
7. Readiness takes three things and none of them takes a year: strategic discovery, stakeholders bought in, due diligence done. Then hit the gas.
8. AI gives time back only when leadership decides what the time is for. Otherwise it scales the same busywork at higher volume.
Guest Links
Mike Toguchi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miketoguchi/
Tectonic: https://www.teamtectonic.com/
Orchestrate: https://onlineapplications.net
Orchestrate AMS: https://www.orchestrateams.com/
Mentioned in the episode: Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Mike's book pick), Slack, HubSpot.

Host links: https://santiagotacoronte.com/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiago-tacoronte/ | https://x.com/TacoronteSanti
Free Productivity Test: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
Productive, Not Busy (live cohort on Maven): https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/productive-not-busy
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
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🧭 Find Your Weakest Productivity Vector in 5 Minutes (Free Assessment) https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment

You have the title, the salary and the team, and you are lying awake working out how to get out. Nobody at work is having that conversation out loud.

Kimia Penton has it for a living. She runs a global PMO inside a Fortune 10 company; she is President of the PMI Dallas Chapter, and she would take a six-month paid sabbatical over a promotion tomorrow. She is also an organisational psychologist, which is why her account of burnout doesn't match what you have heard. She says she would happily spend a week in a music studio, packing her lunch so she does not have to stop, and leave refreshed. The hours are not the problem. The problem is being in a role where you have no agency, no trust in your leader, and nothing you recognise as yourself.

Listen, and you will come away with three things. One, the two moves to make now so stepping down is even an option later: never let your day job be your only identity or network, and never grow your expenses to match every raise. Two, the test Kimia applies before joining any team, which has nothing to do with the title or the money. Three, what emotional regulation looks like in a meeting that is going badly, from someone who has had to raise her voice five times in twenty years and can tell you why each one counted.

If you have a promotion conversation coming, have this one first.

Key Takeaways
1. Long hours do not cause burnout on their own. Losing agency, working for a leader you do not trust and doing work you no longer recognise yourself in is what does the damage.
2. Wellness apps and on-site gyms are one more thing on the list. Kimia has given up on her company's app. Culture is the retention strategy, and culture is set by the team leader, not the mission statement.
3. Before you can step down, two things have to be true: your job is not your only identity or network, and your expenses have not grown to match your last raise.
4. Build the next thing in parallel while you still have the job. Kimia teaches a university course on Friday nights now because she wants to teach more later.
5. Robert Walters found that 52% of Gen Z professionals in the UK do not want a middle management role, and 69% call it high stress and low reward. The responsibility went up, the autonomy and the pay did not.
6. Staying calm in a conflict takes more discipline than escalating. If you are known as reactionary, people stop taking you seriously unless you are reacting.
7. Asking your direct manager for performance feedback is overrated career advice. Their word does not have to define you.
8. Your job title is not your identity.

Guest Links
Kimia Penton, website: https://kimiapenton.com/
Kimia Penton, music: https://kimiapmusic.com/
Kimia Penton, book (Power, on Purpose): https://www.amazon.com/Power-Purpose-Authenticity-Becomes-Leadership/dp/B0GH5Y4RM8
Kimia Penton, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimiapenton/
Kimia Penton on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2x1RG5Y0QitBt9mqrEaOFQ
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
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Find Your Weakest Productivity Vector in 5 Minutes (Free Assessment)
https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment

You run the house, you run your job, and every week you end up further behind.

Lisa Woodruff has spent more than a decade studying the invisible work of household management, and she found that overwhelm at home is a planning problem, not a personal failure. The fix she teaches is to run the household the way a CEO runs a company: batch the admin, fund two or three projects at a time, and plan the season ahead instead of reacting to the week.

In this episode you will learn:

- How the Sunday Basket replaces an hour of daily admin with one 90-minute session and frees up about 5 hours a week
- Why organizing your own closet before the family spaces is what makes the rest of the house stay organized
- How to use time, talent and treasure to pick fewer home projects and finish them faster

Listen now if you feel like the harder you work at home, the deeper you sink. Lisa shows you the first two steps to take this weekend.

Key Takeaways

1. Batch the household admin. Bills, forms, mail and weekly checklists go in one basket and get handled in one 90-minute to two-hour session. An hour a day becomes one sitting, and about 5 hours of the week come back.
2. Organize for yourself first. A family room cleared on a long weekend is a mess again by next weekend. Your own closet, bathroom shelf or desk stays organized for three or four months and supports you every morning.
3. Run the home like a CEO, not a manager. Check time, talent and treasure before you start a project. Two or three projects a quarter get finished. Eight get started and stall.
4. Plan the season, not just the week. Summer camps get booked in February, trips while everyone is healthy, big personal goals when the family calendar allows. Lisa finished a PhD at 54 by planning it this way.
5. Lower the bar for done. The invisible scorecard built from Instagram and Pinterest makes the workload look bigger than it is.
6. Set a stop time. Lisa stops all work, business and household, at 6:30 pm, even with to-dos left on the list.
7. If you are overwhelmed right now: clean out your closet this weekend, and every evening write tomorrow's list, including the weather, the outfit and the meals.

Chapters

0:00 The Sunday Basket: one session instead of an hour a day
1:30 Meet Lisa Woodruff
2:35 Where the idea of invisible work came from
4:59 Are women still doing more of the work at home?
7:30 How Lisa made her invisible work visible to her family
9:34 Swiss cheese organizing, and why your closet comes first
11:46 What a household CEO does that a manager does not
14:19 Strategic planning at home: camps, trips, retirement, a PhD
17:23 Time, talent and treasure: CEO skills applied to the home
19:47 Too much work, or not organized enough?
22:53 Productivity guilt and Lisa's 6:30 stop time
24:45 Escaping Quicksand: how overwhelm pulls you under
27:31 Two things to do this week if you feel overwhelmed
28:52 How the Sunday Basket frees up 5 hours a week
30:36 Should household managers use AI?
32:48 Can anyone learn to run a home well?
35:30 Quickfire round
37:36 What's next: the Productive Home CEO framework
38:23 Where to find Lisa

Guest Links

- Organize 365: https://organize365.com/
- Escaping Quicksand: https://organize365.com/escapingquicksand/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/organize365/
- Organize 365 Podcast: search "Organize 365" on any podcast app
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.