GUEST INTRO
ContraMinds Podcast (00:03.822)
Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Contra Minds podcast. In this episode, I’m talking to Logan Yonemak. Logan is the co-founder and CEO of Readiness Engine. Logan’s belief is that most business and innovation failures aren’t really about bad ideas and strategy, but it’s about people and teams, and whether they’re even ready with the capacity to lead. She founded the Founders Readiness Institute and built the Readiness Engine to exactly address this problem. Readiness Engine uses behavioral science and people analytics to measure what actually directionally predicts leadership success. I began my conversation with her talking about the various components of the Readiness Engine.
I also had a deep dive into the leadership spine map, which I found interesting on how an organization can look at itself in terms of departments and functions and how the leadership spine map can give good insights about the strength of the leadership and the people’s capacity to lead. The promotion risk heat map, which I also found very, very powerful in terms of people being ready to get promoted and where their weaknesses are. And I also asked her about the people’s readiness to reflect themselves and also grow and develop themselves in the areas where they believe there are strengths and weaknesses. She had some very interesting insights to share with me and I found this conversation very, different from many others that I have done.
Over to my conversation with Logan.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Q1
ContraMinds Podcast (00:32.47)
Logan, I wanted to kick off our conversation with something that I found really, really interesting in your profile and in the work that you’re doing. And most often what you really see there is you actually talk about this statement that I’m going to tell you right now, it says the strategy and the idea fails not because of a bad strategy, but it’s because of the leaders capacity of not being ready, right? And that’s quite a hard statement. And why do you believe, you know, sometimes leaders are not ready and what makes them take up a few assignments where they probably are actually looking at themselves and not looking at their own capacity realistically.
Logan Yonavjak (01:29.836)
Yeah, well, I think that there’s a, you know, obviously a couple of dimensions to that that I can touch on. But the first is that, yes, I think sometimes it’s like going to a buffet when you’re really hungry and you put a lot of things on your plate and then you realize you put too much on your plate and you can’t eat at all. I used to do that as a kid at this buffet, local buffet.
Yeah, so I think that it’s natural for humans, most people want to take on more, they think they can take on more, and they just might not have a good sense of their own limitations or capacity. And so what we’re diving into is the internal kind of configuration of an individual and a team. And you’re limited by things like emotional resilience. Maybe you haven’t built up good systems for yourself to handle stress, for instance. You’re limited by your ability, your team’s ability to be motivated and feel psychologically safe. So maybe you have a manager that is toxic in some way and it’s, it’s causes this fight or flight within the team. And you can also be limited by your ability to hold strategic concepts all at once. And that just could take practice.
Sometimes people are just not naturally attuned to multidimensional thinking, or they’ve just been used to doing certain types of jobs and they don’t really understand what it’s going to take in terms of complexity. So I think we’re just held back by some of these factors. And unfortunately, in most corporate environments or most roles, you don’t really take the time to understand these things about yourself.
And so I think it behooves managers, it behooves leaders to think more critically about these factors in weighing whether a team can execute, whether an individual can take on a role. So those are some of the things that we measure and think about all the time.
ContraMinds Podcast (03:41.142)
Nice.
Q2
And I can see that you started off as a Founders Readiness Institute and now we have the Readiness Engine. So what’s really the idea and the vision behind this transition?
Logan Yonavjak (03:50.493)
Yeah
Logan Yonavjak (03:57.133)
Yeah, that’s a great question. mean, startups like ourselves, we pivot often, right? I mean, that’s part of the nature of listening to the market. And I think my original idea, business idea, and my co-founders was to offer an assessment or set of tools for the founders that are starting, starting companies going zero to one, or just the early stages of a company. And for the venture capitalists and early stage investors who support them and who deploy capital.
What we found is just that our platform is widely applicable to many different settings. And so we have a very customizable platform. And that’s why we decided that this was more interesting to think about, you know, in many innovation settings, it’s more about are teams ready to innovate. who, how can you… assess people’s readiness to innovate. And I think when we have a better understanding of our team’s capacity and leadership capacity, we’ll have better innovation outcomes overall. So that doesn’t just have to be limited to startups, essentially.
ContraMinds Podcast (05:10.772)
Nice.
Q3
Do you see a difference between people in a corporate setting being not ready and founders not being ready? And how do you see the difference? You must have studied a lot of people and some of them want to be entrepreneurs, they become founders. And from what I can see in your reports and the studies that you seem to have done.
The founders may not be ready to be a founder, right? And you also provide this as an insight to investors. So do you see a difference between corporate executives or leaders not being ready and founders not being ready? How do you see the components or the elements different from both of them?
Logan Yonavjak (06:00.087)
Yeah, mean, definitely I don’t have, you know, I don’t have a lot of quantitative data around this yet. We are doing a lot of work to evaluate some of the trends in leaders and some of the outcomes. Like for example, we’re looking at a body of work, publicly available data, looking at Y Combinator and Techstars founders and founding teams to determine their developmental capacity and some of the outcomes they’ve seen, whether it’s follow-on funding or an exit. So we are looking deeply into this, but what I would say from my own experience and then diving into this space is that it’s, you know, having a lower level of development doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a, that you’re not competent or that you’re not capable. It just means that you might not be ready for a specific role.
So I would say that starting with the startup founders, I think a lot of people have a misconception of what being a startup founder is, anywhere from being disgruntled with corporate America, or corporate, not just corporate America, but just being disgruntled working for other people, to having a personality that is very focused on achievement and outcomes, and then a lot of risk aversion.
So I think those elements are important but not sufficient all the time. Certainly we see outliers of people who have almost, they almost seem like they’re on the edge of burnout all the time. But…
typically there’s a number of things you need in order to be successful as a startup founder.
And this is what we did dig into the data before creating our assessment tool. We looked at 300 research studies and picked out these six constructs because they showed correlations, positive correlations with startup outcomes.
So I think one of the main things is coachability. So someone’s ability to take in strategic feedback. If they’re not able to do that consistently or they get defensive too soon, it’s very difficult to iterate on a product or the business model. So if you’re, if you go in with an idea and you’re not really listening to the external market about the actual idea itself, it’s more likely that you’re probably not going to make it as a startup founder. So I think when people go in and they’re stubborn and they, just have, they’re like, this has got to exist. And they don’t do customer discovery and they don’t understand, you know, what’s actually the reality of what people want or need.
Then I think those are some conflating factors.
And then in corporate America, you know, would say, coachability and the ability to hold, to pivot quickly while holding the goal in mind.
So I think you have to be able to pivot as a startup founder and that’s related to coachability.
So you want to make sure that when new information comes in, you can, you can say, Hey, you know, this isn’t working. Let’s move over here, but we’re still focused on this goal.
And then the last piece, while there are others, think the last piece on the startup founder side that I think is really interesting is this strategic complexity.
So being a startup founder, you kind of have to play all these different, especially in the zero to one phase, you’re playing a lot of different roles at once. So, especially now with AI, while it augments and can enhance your ability to do work, you still have to have a lot of critical thinking to know how to take the information and do something meaningful with it. So holding a bunch of different concepts in place at once objectively is a very important ability.
And so that’s why we test for that. I hate the word test, but that’s why we measure for that.
And then I think…
…on the corporate side, you do see people, think in general, mean, in innovation roles, I think that you tend to see a little bit more crossover with startup founders. But I think that in the corporate settings, there’s a little bit less maybe risk tolerance. People want to be a little more comfortable in their roles and you don’t have to necessarily take on so much risk yourself. I think the risk is more distributed.
And so, and I would say the ability to pivot quickly is, is while important, it’s probably less important because depending on the size of your company, you might not need to. So those are some of the things we see differences in, I would say. But again, I think what we’re trying to articulate is know yourself a bit more before you choose a role and know what that role is going to take in terms of some of these factors and make that part of the decision making process instead of just looking at the job function and saying, that sounds good, you know, but am I really ready for that? Am I really ready?
So.
Q4
ContraMinds Podcast (11:22.08)
So how are people taking it? Because I really read one interesting thing in your report where there is, what I call as a confirmation bias and then there is an affinity bias, right? So therefore my ability to assess myself honestly, okay, is a very big, I would say risk because it’s a very, very hard, I would say,
Logan Yonavjak (11:45.794)
Yeah.
ContraMinds Podcast (11:51.126)
analysis about myself when I’m looking at the mirror and saying, I, you know assessing myself honestly. So how are companies taking it? Because when you get in there, one of the challenges is some of them have already, you know, become functional heads or business heads. And you are actually talking about these people not ready even for their current role, right? So therefore, how do you really, you know, handle somebody who is probably not ready for the current role and somebody who is probably not ready for the role that they being promoted for. So how do you prepare them and how do people take it?
Logan Yonavjak (12:37.592)
Well, I mean, we have a number of different approaches here. I one is this is supposed to be a non-threatening approach. Like we definitely, in the reports that we generate, this is not about final judgment or saying that we’re really coming from the perspective of this is what we see in the patterns in which the transcript data that we evaluated. You’re probably in this range. We always say it, put it in a range. Your best day, you’re gonna behave more like this and your worst day is gonna, you’re gonna behave more like this.
And so we’re measuring kind of where you sit on a normal day or like on a typical day, here’s kind of where you land. So it’s always gonna be a developmental range. And then I think one of the most exciting things about what we offer is really clear next steps for how to get to that next level. And so one would hope that the person who takes this is coachable enough that they’re willing to continue to grow. so, but a lot of what we thought about initially in designing these instruments is that it’s a lot about incentive.
So,Startup founders like, you know, I haven’t seen a lot of startup founders come to us voluntarily. A lot of what, you know, it’s mostly the VCs or investors kind of requiring them to undergo this. And that’s not a, it’s not a judgment of anyone. just, I think people are busy and it’s often rare for someone to maybe seek advice or counsel if they don’t think they need it or they haven’t thought about some of these some of these considerations. So to me, it’s about incentives. So a lot of what we’ve built into our engagements is working with companies where they, you know, they’re requiring their employees to take this as part of a learning and development or as a promotion, part of a promotional process.
You know, to me also, there’s the dimension of like, especially in hiring people will, you know, most people are amenable to it, but we’ve received, like we just did some work with Stanford and there was a fellowship we were helping them as part of their evaluation process and several people declined to take it. It was, you could decline to take it and it wouldn’t affect your position. But it was interesting that several people declined to take it because some people have religious beliefs and they don’t want to be on camera. There’s a variety of reasons people don’t want to take it.
But when people don’t want to take it for the most part and there’s a fear, I feel like that’s interesting information. So as like a hiring manager, you know, you’re always being judged in some way by people. And I would just like, I would prefer to put my best foot forward and, and have a better understanding of like what I’m being measured on rather than just someone’s subjective opinion of whether I’m going to fit in with the culture. So it seems to me like a more objective way to make hiring decisions. So I find it interesting when people are afraid to take it.
ContraMinds Podcast (16:07.636)
Interesting.
Q5
Talk to me a little bit about the components of the Readiness Engine. see that there are, you know, there’s an internal operating system, there is coaching, there is resilience, there is adaptive capacity. Talk to me a little bit about these elements and why these elements are important in the leaders being ready for whatever role that they are taking.
Logan Yonavjak (16:30.318)
Sure. So, like I said, we looked at about 300 research papers. We looked at more, but the 300 we chose had dimensions of the constructs that we chose for the founders. And we chose these constructs for high pressure, highly complex roles. And like I said, we’re applying them to other innovation circumstances, but in the beginning, that’s what we were kind of double clicking on.
So yeah, think fundamental and this has been validated by many independent investors is coachability. I think when someone’s open-minded and know, in business school and in a lot of business training, it’s like, do you have a fixed or growth mindset? To me that equates with coachability. Like how open are you to adapting your own identity and how defensive are you around like protecting that identity?
And so much of growth stems from that in and of itself. So I think measuring, at the very least measuring someone’s coachability is a powerful tool. And we actually have a coachability micro score for that reason. If people just want to take one of our, of our constructs. The other ones, you know, vertical development is a body of psychological, adult psychological development and organizational psychology literature and research that’s been around for about 30 to 40 years. And so what we’ve done and what’s been difficult to do in the past because of there hasn’t been AI is we’re able to take this transcript data and look at a large volume of it quickly.
So in the past, people have had to take transcript data and hand score it. And now we’re able to digest that information a lot more quickly. And so we’ve been able to build in this developmental psychology into the fundamental basis of this, of these tools. so strategic complexity is what I was alluding to many, many times in our conversation is this ability to hold multiple perspectives.
You know, if you think about every system you’re in as a constellation, there’s all these relational aspects. So, you know, when you’re at work, it’s your, your manager, your coworker, the project you’re working on a framework or tool that you’re drawing from, some kind of software systems. So have to be able to hold a lot of different pieces together to be able to execute on something. And so someone’s ability to do that objectively and hold them all at once is one of the things we, core things we measure. And we do that by asking people open-ended questions, scenario-based questions, and seeing how they refer to the system and how many kind of perspectives they’re bringing in. So those are kind of like three of the main things we measure, but I think they’re all really fundamental to a person’s capacity to continue to evolve in their roles.
Q6
ContraMinds Podcast (19:44.694)
Okay, and how important is resilience and adaptive capacity?
Logan Yonavjak (19:52.557)
Well, you know, I think a lot of people talk about the grind, you know, like, you know, it’s all about working until you’re exhausted and you have to keep it’s this kind of one track way of thinking about producing. think we’ve become a very like producing oriented culture and any, like if you,
…if you take, like the athlete analogy, athletes can’t, you know, function 12 to 15 hours a day they have to bake in rest. I mean, the professional athlete community, they have coaches and they have all sorts of support systems around them in order to function at their highest capacity. And so why don’t we have things like that for high performing professionals, like white collar professionals? Why don’t we have those, those support systems in place?
So I feel like we’ve sort of dropped resilience from the equation. It’s just like, well, here’s, here’s a bunch of work to do. Just keep going until you fall down essentially. And maybe you have your own techniques to handle that. A lot of coffee, people take Ritalin. You know, people have these really dysfunctional patterns that they’re leaning on in order to accomplish and accomplish and accomplish.
So I just feel like, you know, there’s a lot of research to show that our brains really just can’t process information for 18 hours a day. It’s just not, it’s not really a useful exercise to just keep pushing yourself. So how do we bake in breathing exercises or pauses in the day or coaching or exercise, or how do we get systems in place so that we’re not having to work 18 hours a day?
So I just, think the culture of, of that really needs to change and we can we ask people questions about how they’ve set up systems for themselves to be resilient.
ContraMinds Podcast (21:53.398)
Okay.
Q7
And talk to me a little bit about the Leadership Spine Map. I found that very interesting. So in an organization, how do you really apply the leadership spine map and what do you really discover out of the leadership spine map?
Logan Yonavjak (22:14.21)
Well, I think the idea there is that there is this backbone to being able to function at your highest self, at your highest version. I mean, this is what we’ve built is a lot about self-actualization. Maybe people have been exposed to like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or the process of self-actualizing. We’re kind of making that more explicit, you know, in work environments, if you will.
And so, there’s this, know, like your vertebrae need to align in order for you to have, you know, ergonomic posture and for your body to function properly. And so you really need these foundational pieces of the spine in order to be able to function at your highest. So I think we liked the word spine because it’s so, you know, you think about just like how much your back is fundamental to, yeah, your posture and your wellbeing. And so that was kind of the analogy we drew. But yeah, I would say that these are just building blocks and these are all vertebrae that we need in order to like really hold ourselves up and be functional.
Q8
ContraMinds Podcast (23:30.486)
So therefore, when I look at the leadership spine map really, there are multiple departments and multiple functions in a company. And some parts of those functions, the spine is probably not robust. They’re not strong enough. And in some parts, they are strong enough, but organizationally, maybe the spine is a little weak, certain spines in the functions and department might be strong, then how do you really bring them together?
So I’m a company, I really look at the leadership spine map, I see that two divisions or two departments have a strong spine map, but two departments don’t have a spine map. So then how do you really solve that problem?
Logan Yonavjak (24:24.802)
Yeah, I mean, that’s where I think you need the coaching piece where, you know, where you develop a developmental trajectory for the individual or team. I mean, that’s when you need intervention. I think the ideal is you have, I mean, I imagine scenarios in corporate settings or businesses where people have been thinking about this from the beginning. So like teams are constructed with this leadership’s kind of spine in mind. And so there’s always going to be tweaks you need to make, but fundamentally you have a team that is aligned, you know, overlaps in their skills and their abilities and they’re working towards their highest good, right? Or their highest self. That’s obviously not happening in many, many settings. So you’re kind of coming in in the, in the middle of something or something’s already broken. Well, I mean, just like anything, there are intervention strategies and you have to kind of use tools to assess whether or not it’s fixable or whether or not like the people are coachable and they’re willing to shift.
And I think that’s why you do a diagnosis of something or why you assess something so that you have a better sense of how to intervene.
I think a lot of the cultural shifts that are attempted in corporate environments are very superficial. It’s like, oh, let’s give everybody, you know, a boost with like Bagel Friday or like we need to have people buddy up with a mentor. And it’s, fine. I mean, it’s good that people have at least something to generate culture. And I’m not denigrating some companies are very sophisticated with this, but for the most part, I don’t think we’re getting underneath enough. I don’t think we’re going under the iceberg. You know, Carl Jung, a famous, you know, the father of psychotherapy in the US…well, he was Swiss, but you know, he really talked a lot about the conscious mind being the tip of the iceberg. And there’s all this stuff going on underneath in our unconscious and our collective consciousness. And so, I mean, how many corporate environments are even talking about that concept or touching on those areas.
So not that we’re here to do psychotherapy for people, but I do think that certain interventions can at least make things, make patterns available to in a way that you can actually start working with them. And that’s what I think is most important is just bringing awareness and having a more standard way to do assessments and have the vocabulary to talk about some of this stuff, like most people don’t even have the vocabulary.
Q9
ContraMinds Podcast (27:20.256)
So when I look at some of the elements of the Rediners engine, what I find interesting is the internal operating system and your ability to be conscious about it, like just now what you said. Can this be cultivated or has it to be emergent in the person? What has been your experience?
Logan Yonavjak (27:46.595)
Well, you know, I find that most people are open to some sort of change. I think what’s lacking is a roadmap. think some, it’s like any other set of skills, like there’s a bit of a bell curve and some people are really, really self-aware and focus on self-actualization and growth for whatever reasons. And then most people are kind of in the middle and there’s people who are extremely reluctant to affect any change or, you know, they think of themselves as static, which is, you know, bizarre to me, but I’ve definitely encountered people like that. So I, that’s why the coachability of micro score is fascinating because it’s like, you get to see where people land on that spectrum.
And, but I would say that it’s for the most part, people are generally willing to entertain, opportunities to change, but I don’t think we’re giving people enough concrete ways to do that. And left to their own devices, they’re busy, they’re doing other things. They’re trying to, they might have kids, they’re trying to just do their daily tasks, get the laundry done, get the grocery shopping done. So I think you need, that’s why we have ways to climb the mountain. Like we need guides for the most part in order to help us up the mountain. And so many people are going to stay at base camp, but the ones who want to go up the mountain, then you have a clear kind of way to do that and people who’ve done it before.
Q10
ContraMinds Podcast (29:23.712)
So how do you really guide them? So if you can share some example of, you don’t have to name, it can be confidential stuff, but if you were to give me a example of how do you really guide them? So it’s almost like saying that, okay, I found this gap. This is how I want to guide this person. So how do you go about guiding the person?
Logan Yonavjak (29:50.403)
Well, I think it depends on where they’re starting from. A lot of it is asking initial questions. So a lot of it’s getting people to ask themselves questions. You know, when you’re on a sales call, one of the most powerful things you can do is get someone to articulate how much it’s going to cost them to not use your tool, like what their current strategy is costing them. So I think getting people to verbalize where they’re at and what it’s costing them is really powerful. And that’s why that self-reflection, like not prescribing, but sort of inviting people to start self-reflecting with the right language and non-threatening language is really the most powerful starting point. We ask people to ask themselves specific questions.
So we usually give people three developmental pathway kind of roadmaps for depending on where they land in their assessment. So for instance, someone with like a mid-level relational intelligence score. So there was a founder that we worked with who, I’ll give a concrete example. I think it’s a lot easier to do that.
We assessed a founder who has a kind of high, level of relational intelligence, but a low, you know, purposeful agility score. So meaning that he is really good at relating to other people, empathizing, listening, putting himself in other people’s shoes, but his ability to pivot quickly is limited. And we found that that was largely because he has a harmony bias. So he was like concerned about hurting people’s feelings.
And he wanted to get everyone’s input before making a decision.
And I’m not saying that in some cases, consensus isn’t important, but in a lot of cases, what you want from a leader is for them to take charge and okay, I’ve heard, you know, people’s feedback and now I’m going to move on something.
And he just would get stuck in the analysis paralysis because he didn’t want to.
So we really encouraged him and had a bunch. We had a bunch of follow-up questions about scenarios in which he had done this. When then we had questions about what it was, what it was preventing him from doing and what, the counterfactual of his, business could look like if he actually moved. so envisioning some of those potentials and that visual and like, then how do you get from here to there and how do you practice this in your, then cut. So there’s like specific practices that you undertake at your next meeting and the next meeting, and then you go back and you talk to your coach about it.
And so it’s a lot of scenario, some role playing. So that’s just one example of tension. You know, like someone can be really high in one area and they just, for whatever reason, they’re hung up on making the decision.
Does that help?
ContraMinds Podcast (33:00.662)
Yeah, beautiful. it’s a bit of, you know, I would say a lot of qualitative stuff and that’s something that you’ve got to be able to kind of prod them into it is what you’re really saying, right? So.
Logan Yonavjak (33:16.866)
Well, I think I agree. is this. I think this these topics will always remain in the more vague and fuzzy. It’s not it’s not math, you know, and in certain kinds of math. But I do think we’re making it more quantitative and standardized. I think there are actually deep patterns that show up at different levels of development with different skills associated with them. And that’s what excites me, because I think like we were saying before, there’s some people who are really good at picking up on the subtleties and seeing these patterns and other people may not pick up on them. So we’re making them visible to everyone now based on sentence structure, based on how people talk about things. And one of the things that gets me really excited is what people aren’t saying.
So we’re able, we call it negative space analysis. So when we’re listening to someone’s transcript, they may not have mentioned pivoting or relating to other people or they may not have talked about a team they’ve worked with. And that’s interesting data. It’s like, why haven’t you talked about this in any of your, in any of your stories? And so how are you actually thinking about these topics? Have you not thought about them at all? And so those are just curiosities that I think we need to keep in mind too. Like what aren’t, isn’t being said.
ContraMinds Podcast (34:44.502)
Interesting, and
Q11
how do you measure progress? Because again, it’s a very interesting way where it’s not like, it’s a score, right? So therefore it’s important that, like how, it’s not like a physical exercise where you can look at my weights and I’m reducing and here it’s a little more esoteric. So therefore, how do you measure progress?
Logan Yonavjak (35:10.658)
Well, there are some pretty concrete ways you can measure progress. It often takes three to six months, if not longer, to really get to that next level. But one specific way, like I’ll just take strategic complexity. So maybe somebody scored pretty low on that in the sense that they’re not really, they’re sort of like self-focused. They’re not really holding a lot of different pieces of the puzzle in mind at once.
And then, so they have like maybe one or two perspectives they’re holding. Six months later, they’re more aware of this and then they articulate three to four to five perspectives. So they’re actually bringing in different frameworks, they’re holding different patterns in mind, and they’re juggling that all at once instead of just focusing on the immediate kind of meeting their own needs or their own perspective.
And so there are kind of like measures that we can look at and how someone talks about their experiences. So there are actually like concrete sort of, I would say markers. It’s not a perfect science, but it does have a lot of pattern to it.
Q12
ContraMinds Podcast (36:27.574)
Do you see a lot of correlation between resilience, adaptive capacity, coaching with rate of learning?
Logan Yonavjak (36:40.866)
Well, I forget who brought this to the forefront most prominently, but when someone is worried, you know, this poverty mentality, actually they’ve looked at IQ and how…
…when you’re worried about meeting your basic needs, you’re actually less able to allocate mental resources. And so you’re, you’re, there’s actually a drop in IQ that they’ve measured with people who are experiencing significant and ongoing poverty. so I think that is a sort of, I’ll, I’ll take the leap and say, when someone’s really emotionally stressed, there’s a nervous system response where they’re sitting in their sympathetic,
I believe it’s a sympathetic, I always get them mixed up parasympathetic,
sympathetic where they’re sitting in the sympathetic nervous system more of the day when they’re emotionally stressed. And so it’s harder for someone to learn, you know, in terms of cognitive functioning and with the neocortex, it’s harder to learn new things when you’re in a state of fight or flight. And so I would say that, yes, if someone has systems in place to reduce the elevation of their nervous system, then that’s going to allow new information to come in and for them to grow and change more readily.
Q13
ContraMinds Podcast (38:10.486)
I just wanted to also look at the promotion risk heat map. I also found that interesting. And for an organization, you look at people’s performance, you look at their KPIs, of think of promotions. But the way you are looking at the promotions heat map is probably very, very different from what I’ve kind of seen people do the promotion. So talk to me a little bit about that.
Logan Yonavjak (38:36.269)
Yeah!
Logan Yonavjak (38:41.07)
Well, I think we’re just highlighting some of the factors we talked about. Like it’s just adding in, it’s sort of like a paradigm shift. You know, we’re asking for people to see a different set of information about individuals. So in the past, I like this because I’ve come from finance. I’m like past, past leadership performance does not equal future leadership performance. So like we’re making assumptions that someone’s ready for a next level of complexity or a role that requires more of them, maybe it’s more emotional demand, without actually assessing whether that’s the case. And yes, there’s informal ways of assessing that. And some people are better at it than others. But I just would argue that we’re missing a lot of the, we’re looking at resume, we’re looking at what they’ve done in the past. We’re looking at their credentials. We’re looking at maybe a little bit of feedback from their from people they work with, but those are often biased because people don’t, they can be traced back you know, what they say can be traced back. So how do you get more unbiased perspective on whether someone’s ready for a role? That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to develop a baseline and say, here’s a way to think about this. And it just added into your perspective, just added into the way you’re evaluating someone. It doesn’t have to be the only criteria, but why aren’t we looking at these factors?
Q14
ContraMinds Podcast (40:10.902)
Does a personal operating system have to align with an organization’s operating system?
Logan Yonavjak (40:24.6)
Well, actually there’s my co-founder has some really great ways of talking about this, but there’s organizational developmental capacity in addition to there being team or individual levels. So most corporates are sitting within like the three to 3.5 range and there are characteristics associated with that, like execution driven, profit driven, efficiency driven, and those are cultural attributes that I think we would associate with most corporate environments.
Often when people maybe have like a personal revelation or they start to get disgruntled with their corporate setting, it’s because they’re actually developing past their kind of immediate environment. And so they might not be aware of these factors in the way that we’re talking about them, but there’s something in them that’s wanting to grow and maybe have a bigger impact. So I think the impact investing community is an attempt at thinking more broadly and widening the aperture about what investing means, for instance. So we’re thinking more about the environment and about society and other impacts that besides just having a profit or returning capital. So I think these are people who in the finance community sort of evolved and said, hey, why aren’t we thinking in a more complex way about the ecosystem we’re in and why can’t finance service some of these other outcomes? So that’s like an example of things evolving at a bigger scale instead of just the individual or team.
ContraMinds Podcast (42:02.614)
So therefore the organization, the person outgrows the organization’s operating system is what really you’re.
Logan Yonavjak (42:09.036)
Yeah, yeah, I think it happens. And I’ve met plenty of people who just couldn’t, you know, they just couldn’t take their corporate culture anymore. Just they felt like they wanted to grow past that and they needed to find a new opportunity. And that’s a lot of times what leads people to start companies.
ContraMinds Podcast (42:25.546)
Yeah. How open organizations to take up a concept like this because they are used to the traditional assessment methods, right? Because they are all standard cookie cutter kind of methods, how do I hire? There is a set of attributes, then if I want to promote, I have a certain set of attributes. Suddenly you’re coming in and actually disrupting it, right, in a way. So do you see a certain set of organizations being open to this in their, I would say, maturity and growth? Or do you see established organizations not open or new industry kind of organizations open, what are you seeing as the market reality?
Logan Yonavjak (43:12.942)
I don’t think we have enough data on that yet. I mean, we can go through and use external markers to actually pinpoint where a culture is. And we want to do some of that work. We haven’t done it yet. But you can sort of evaluate a company culture in an aggregate way, like I was talking about before. So that’s exciting. And I would like to do more of it. We haven’t done that yet. What we’ve been reliant on is our team and our contacts because most of us have, this isn’t an ego response, but we’ve scored pretty high on the assessment. We tend to attract people who are also at those levels.
I think that’s just an intuitive kind of experience we’re having. So we’re looking for people within companies that have a higher level of development who see the value of this. And yes, I’ve run into plenty of like in the venture capital community, there’s been a lot of resistance towards towards these tools and so I have seen resistance come up for various reasons and ego can be a lot of it. Like, hey, I’m already good at this. don’t need any more information. We’ve got a good process. So I just try to move on respectfully when those things happen, so.
Q15
ContraMinds Podcast (44:31.286)
So if I were an early beginner in my career and I was looking at the readiness engine, what would your advice be to me to prepare myself for the next decade or so? What are the things that I have in my elements that I need to work on from whatever research that you have seen. Can you tell me two or three things that I believe you believe are really important?
Logan Yonavjak (45:04.93)
Yeah, I mean, I think if you’re early in your career, it’s remain open and coachable. Like…
…I think young people tend to be more coachable and open-minded to begin with. So usually that’s not as big of an issue. But I think laying the foundation for personal resilience early on, like having habits and practices that aren’t just about grinding, you know, in the grind culture and remembering that.
And I think younger generations are more, you know, there’s been a pushback in terms of working a hundred hours a week and, you know, older generations are in some ways frustrated with like Gen Z and such about like their work habits. But I think that there is a kind of evolution happening of young people pushing back on the extreme kind of work culture, at least in the U.S. So I think building in practices, whether it’s a breathing or yoga or meditation or some combination of those things where when you’re getting stressed and overwhelmed, you have tools to deal with that. Yeah, I think those would be two things I would say.
ContraMinds Podcast (46:20.214)
So what do you think resilience and patience for them is more important because sometimes organizations move slower than what they believe. Therefore is patience also do you think is important?
Logan Yonavjak (46:29.614)
yeah.
Logan Yonavjak (46:34.712)
For sure, I I have to remind myself of that all the time. I feel like things always move slower than I want. But yeah, I think that you have to, that’s just, that’s mindfulness practice and really staying present with the moment, which is all we ever really have. But you have to come to that on your own and understand, like, you have to just enjoy the process itself and remind yourself of that. Because if you think too far in the future all the time, yeah, you’re losing sight of the now and that really is all we have.
Q16
ContraMinds Podcast (47:10.526)
And if I were in the mid-stage of my career, maybe, you know, you would have learned patience a bit, maybe, you know, coachability, as you rightly said, is important. Is there any other component that comes to your mind if I’m in the mid-stage of my career that you think I should focus on?
Logan Yonavjak (47:31.81)
Well,
…I think this idea of strategic complexity, especially as leaders, think often there’s a bit of, in marriages often there’s a joke about women wanting men to be mind readers. I think that sometimes as leaders, we forget to share our thought process with those we’re working with.
We kind of expect them to just… except what we’re telling them or not really explaining and pinpointing the frameworks we’re drawing on or the assumptions we’re making. So I think that would help a lot of leaders smooth out their relationships with those they work with by just being more explicit about, here’s kind of where I’m at. Here’s how I inform this decision. These are the kinds of complexities that I’m working with. And just voicing those. I think just being more transparent with our our mental constructs and our thought process and that would help a lot.
ContraMinds Podcast (48:36.274)
And if I was a senior leader, what do you see as the challenge with AI and industries getting disrupted? What are the, what aspects of the readiness engine components that I put my focus on?
Logan Yonavjak (48:51.874)
Well, I think we’re seeing that, you know…
…yesterday, and I’m using this in a kind of proverbial way. Yesterday, a lot of the job functions were kind of rote and more, like less complex. were just functions that more people did, but that now AI can do, things like, you know, basic, I hate to call out specific roles, but like basic bookkeeping or certain legal analyses, things at the junior level are being kind of gutted from the system because AI can really do that. So you want leaders who are able to handle complexity and pressure and who can sit down at the computer and talk to Claude in four different dimensions and evaluate whether what AI is producing is a meaningful input to the work. So, I would say that ability to hold complexity is kind of more important than ever. So evaluating people who can do that would be like the most important piece of the puzzle, at least from what we measure.
CLOSING
ContraMinds Podcast (50:04.054)
Fantastic. Thanks, Logan. It was really interesting talking to you. I found the Readiness engine, the components of the personal operating system, I found it very different because it starts from the inside rather than the outside. So I thought that was very interesting. That’s the reason I thought we must have a conversation because my belief is also pretty similar in terms of the alignment between the inside and the outside really takes you to a different level in terms of aspirations and drive. And that I think is something that I found interesting in the reports that you shared and the examples that you had shared in my earlier conversation. So it’s a very interesting journey that you’re taking. And I see this as very critical because work styles are changing, type of work is changing, the way industries are changing. I believe this can be an interesting, I would say, pathway for people to look at. So, lovely talking to you and thanks for taking time and talking to me.
