Rob Alvarez
, , , , ,
0

Why “More Effort” is Ruining Your Team (And How to Fix It) | Episode 452

  Listen on SpotifyListen on Apple PodcastsAvailable on YouTube Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD

Episode Summary

Michael Lukich, a marketing analytics leader with more than 20 years across consulting, data, and strategy, explains why the fix for a struggling team is almost never more effort. He walks through the closed-loop trap he built early in his management career, the systems thinking tools he now uses to find leverage points, and why over-measuring single marketing channels quietly starves the top of the funnel. Drawing on the Cabreras’ DSRP model, Donella Meadows, and nearly 25 years at the poker table, he shows how to see a whole system instead of optimizing one piece to the detriment of the goal. Listeners come away with a practical way to map any system, pick a single North Star metric, and design loops that let a team improve on its own.

About the Host

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Key Takeaways

  • Michael Lukich’s early management trap was a closed loop with no exit: he could not step away until the team improved, and the team could not improve until he stepped away, which pushed him to 75-hour weeks before he redesigned the loop instead of adding effort.
  • Accepting work at roughly 70 percent of his own output, paired with a tighter review cadence, let his team feel the consequences of their own decisions and turned him from a micromanager into a player coach.
  • The “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” credo pushes budget toward easily measured lower-funnel channels and leaves the top of the funnel leaky, because no one can defend upper-funnel spend in a boardroom. The fix is whole-system measurement through multi-channel attribution and mixed models, not more measurement.
  • Zynga over-relied on data and stacked Black Hat Core Drives that drive urgency and scarcity, a reminder that an A/B test measures one week, not how a feature performs as a system over two years.
  • Derek and Laura Cabrera’s DSRP model (Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, Perspectives) gives a four-part way to map almost any system, then find the bottleneck where one move has the biggest outsized effect.
  • Poker trains decision-making under uncertainty and incomplete information, including the faulty learning loop where playing well can still lose and playing poorly can still win, which is why Michael says half the frameworks in his book started at the poker table.

Topics Covered

  • 0:00 — The loop you cannot escape
  • 0:20 — Meet Michael Lukich: data, teaching, poker
  • 2:41 — Designing your own life as a system
  • 5:46 — Promoted into a trap with no exit
  • 11:14 — The marketing measurement trap
  • 13:53 — Frankenstein products, Zynga, and Black Hat
  • 17:34 — A practical system: pick one metric
  • 18:56 — Mapping systems with DSRP
  • 22:23 — The strategy dashboard and the North Star
  • 24:07 — James Clear, Ryan Holiday, and one book
  • 26:54 — Translation and poker as the perfect game
  • 30:25 — Where to find Michael and closing advice
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD

About Michael Lukich

Michael Lukich is a marketing analytics leader with more than 20 years across consulting, data, and business strategy, currently running marketing analytics for a major US marketing agency. He spent five years as an adjunct professor and has played poker for nearly 25 years, two habits that shaped how he thinks about teaching and making decisions under uncertainty. He writes the Stoic Systems Thinker newsletter, where ancient Stoic philosophy meets modern systems thinking, and is the author of the book of the same name. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife and two daughters.

Find Michael Lukich Online

Mentioned in This Episode

Some links below are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Free Resources and Get in Touch

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you, Rob Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

The loop you cannot escape

Michael Lukich (0:00): I couldn’t step away from the job until my team got better. But at the same time, my team couldn’t get better because I wouldn’t step away. I was just, you know, in this kind of, you know, feedback loop where I really couldn’t, you know, get out of it. And what I realized over time was that the fix wasn’t more effort.

Meet Michael Lukich: data, teaching, poker

Rob Alvarez (0:20): Hey, Engagers and welcome back to the Professor Game Podcast. As you know, we are the number one gamification podcast where we talk about how gamification, game thinking and behavioral design help us boost engagement, multiply retention and build much stronger and more powerful products. And I’m Rob. I’m the founder and coach of Professor Game and I’m also the head of engagement strategy at the Octalysis Group, the leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy and in professor game uh and I’m a professor of gamification and game-based solutions at multiple business schools around the world and other global institutions like IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University and many others around the world. And before we dive into today’s conversation, if this is something that, you know, rings any bells, things like struggling with retention, adoption churn, engagement in your product service or business, and of course you’re interested in turning that around, look at our Core Drives in the Wild free guide. You just click on the link in the description and you will get it directly on your email. You’ll see how real business are successfully or unsuccessfully using these motivations in business situations. So just go ahead and click on the link in the description. And today we have Michael Lukich. Is that a good way to say it? Michael, welcome to the show. We need to know though, are you prepared to engage? Michael Lukich (1:39): I am, I am, yes. Rob Alvarez (1:40): Do this because today we have Michael Lukich who has built a career at the intersection of data, teaching and strategy. Always circling the same question. How do we make better decisions amid a complex reality? And over 20 years in consulting analytics has taught him to think in systems. Five years as an adjunct professor taught him to make those ideas accessible. And nearly 25 years as a poker player and taught him how to think. clearly under uncertainty. is the creator of the Stoic Systems Thinker newsletter and at stoicsystemsthinker.com and is the author of the Stoic Systems Thinker to be published by Manuscripts Press in May, 2026. When you see this episode, this is probably going to be already launched. He lives in Ann Arbor in Michigan with his wife and two daughters. So is there anything we’re missing, Michael, from that intro? Michael Lukich (2:30): think you covered it, thank you. Rob Alvarez (2:32): Brilliant. So Michael, let’s get started with the most basic question. What do normal, regular days or weeks look like with you? What are you doing these days?

Designing your own life as a system

Michael Lukich (2:41): Well, so I wear a lot of hats. As you mentioned there, I’m juggling a lot of things right now. currently from a professional standpoint, I run marketing analytics for a major marketing agency in the U S we are the marketing agency of record for one of the luxury major auto automotive companies in the U S. So a lot of my job with that function is helping to provide the intelligence. to our creatives, our marketing strategists, to help them ultimately move populations of consumers through funnels. I’m designing measurement frameworks, helping them to decide kind of where they’re placing their bets across the brand journey and ultimately getting people to buy more vehicles for that particular company. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m running a team there within that function. You know, obviously I my parenting duties as a dad. two young daughters. And then I’ve spent the last year writing a book on systems thinking. So trying to codify a lot of the systems thinking techniques and tactics that I’ve learned over the course of my 20 plus year career. And I’m looking at it through a different vantage point. I’m trying to overlay that with, Stoic philosophy, because I actually believe that the two of those are somewhat intertwined. I believe that uh actually if you look back and read a lot of ancient Stoic philosophy written by these great thinkers of 2000 years ago, a lot of what they’re saying are really systems thinking concepts. I think they were some of our earliest systems thinkers 2000 years ago, and we’re just kind of taking this ancient philosophy and we’re modernizing it and applying it to the modern problems of our lives. So those are the three main hats that I’m wearing on a day-to-day basis. In terms of just a regular day itself, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years, and I dive into this a lot in my book, trying to take the specific concepts that I’ve learned and apply that to, in my opinion, the most important system of all, which is the systems of our own lives. So I’m trying to design, know, essentially design my own life around these concepts to optimize for, for what I find as kind of the, end goal of what I’m trying to optimize for, which is living a productive and meaningful life and spending time with my family and really just getting the most out of, out of, out of a fulfilling life. So, so that’s one of the things we talk a lot about in systems thinking is that the behavior of an overall system really comes, it’s an emergent property of. the small individual like day-to-day, you know, minute things that kind of make up the system at the ground level. So a lot of my individual days are designed to, you know, focus the daily habits, the weekly habits on ultimately supporting my broader vision of living a fulfilling life and being the best dad that I can to my kids.

Promoted into a trap with no exit

Rob Alvarez (5:46): Amazing, amazing. Love that. And you know, with this whole perspective, you know, as I mentioned in the intro, it’s, you know, systems thinking, Stoic philosophy, you’re also very much into marketing, which is something we work on as well in gamification, but you’re also a poker player. you know, there’s many things that are sort of intertwining there with this whole vision of things, perhaps through systems thinking and so on. Is there a time you would call your favorite failure or first attempt at learning as we like to call it as well? And this has to do a lot with the way that we tend to think in games as well. You know, you’re playing the game, Mario is the t-shirt I’m wearing today. But you know, when you start, you, you just go around and you hit this mushroom and it kills you, right? Oh, next time I have to do it different. So you come back and you jump and you kill the mushroom or you step over it or whatever. How does that, you know, how does that hit you? Is that, is there a time where you can tell the story about this, situation? And of course, no NDAs need to be broken. Michael Lukich (6:42): No, of course, of course. mean, I think I have a couple and, you know, I’ll give kind of a more personal one first and then I can kind of give a broader, one of my favorite like industry failures from a marketing lens. Maybe, you know, personal one first, and I wrote about this a little bit in my book. I distinctly remember the first time as I was progressing in my career, the first time I was promoted into a management role and… You know, I went from, you know, being this individual contributor to all of a sudden now I had a team of four people and I’m trying to manage other people’s, you know, resources, other people as resourcing as well. And, you know, I, I obviously jump in and my obvious next move is to try to delegate, right? I’m trying to delegate to the rest of my team. And, you know, that’s sad. That’s my first step. And I tried and the work comes back wrong. Right? So I come back and I have to redo the work. I try leaning into coaching and. I’m frustrated because they’re just not, I’m not getting the same quality that I’m used to providing myself. Right. So I ultimately leaned back to, well, the work needs to get done. So I just go and redo the work myself. And next thing I know, I’m working 75 hour weeks. distinctly remember coming home and, you know, not myself at the dinner table and, you know, seeing relationships that are, you know, I’m struggling a little bit outside of my work life and my personal life. I eventually convinced my boss to get it, to bring in a senior consultant to help us out. But three months later, my calendar still looks exactly the same. It took me longer than I would have liked to admit that what I’ve ultimately built was this. closed loop system with like zero exit in play, right? I couldn’t step away from the job until my team got better, right? But at the same time, my team couldn’t get better because I wouldn’t step away, right? I was just in this kind of feedback loop where I really couldn’t get out of it. And what I realized over time was that the fix wasn’t more effort. It was how do I ultimately redesign this loop acknowledging that the work that I was going to get was probably 70 % of what I might’ve produced myself, but I needed to let my team learn through that the hard way. And that was the only way that they were ultimately going to get better. needed my team to feel the consequences of their own decisions and ultimately replace my hovering with more review cadence that helped me coach them and help me teach them turning more into a player coach instead of kind of being this like real time micro level macro man, a micromanager in there. So, you know, that, that was, you know, really ultimately what I came down to was, it was the most highest leverage move that I had at that, in that case there was removing myself from the loop there. And, and, you know, I, I ultimately, I faced that, that case where it’s like, when do you stop optimizing, you know, for that experience and ultimately try to build that system where my individual team members can actually like self-improve, which was, you know, kind of where I ultimately landed, but it took me a long time to get there. And, and that was, you know, a hard earned struggle to learn. Just saying it ex post sounds easy, right? But it’s like, when you see it, right? And you say, well, it’s like pretending to be, and you can take this for almost any team sport. Say, well, I’m the manager of the team, but then I’m also talking about soccer. I’m also going to be the goalkeeper and central defense and the right wing and the left wing. And you know, the mid, the central midfielder and the advancement fielder and you know, the attacker. Well, you just can’t do that. Like no matter how good you are. In every single one of positions, it doesn’t matter if you’re better than every single one of your teammates. You just can’t do it. There’s no way that you can do that. You have to accept the fact that they’ll have their talents and their shortcomings as well. Maybe you can swap players here and there. Like in the company, maybe there was a chance for that, but you know, when you see it like that, it’s like, that, that, that just makes sense. But of course you’re in the midst of it and it’s like, no, I can’t, can’t do this. You know, the client and all that. So, you know, it’s, is, I understand it is a struggle. It’s really hard to see a system when you are in the weeds itself, have to oftentimes kind of rise above, right? you know, I go back to this is where the Stoic philosophy I think comes in and is really helpful because I think back to stuff like this often, know, Marcus Aurelius would talk about in meditations, how he would love to kind of think about how he would see the world from the stars and look down on it from above. And if you don’t have that perspective, kind of looking down on things from above, it’s hard to it’s hard to make decisions and kind of, you know, when you don’t necessarily see that whole map.

The marketing measurement trap

Michael Lukich (11:14): I think another example of this is, you know, kind of when I think back to the failures, and this is kind of more of a marketing specific example, but I think about this a lot of how the marketing industry has evolved over the years. And I’m going to give a framework here, which I want to give credit to a company that I used to work for called MarketBridge. They were, you know, a former colleague of mine there was super smart and, uh, came up with this framework and I’ve been carrying it around for years because the diagnosis only gets more relevant over time. And it was the, if you really go back to, marketing back in like the 1990s, there was a very limited or even before there were a limited number of channels through which you could actually talk to people. Right. So, you know, you might’ve had TV or direct response mail or, you know, prints, but it was a manageable number of channels. And then as you kind of got to the two thousands and digital really started exploding. You started having, you know, hundreds and thousands of channels. And a lot of times alongside with the digital explosion, we got a lot more data. And that was exciting for me as, as a data person. What you started to see was you’d have these conversations with chief marketing officers. And one of these credos came up a lot often, which was if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. And inherently things like digital channels, there’s a lot of data. It’s a lot easier to measure those channels. It’s a lot harder to measure the, these upper funnel TV channels, you know, the brand channels. So at a lot of organizations, you’d see siloed teams, a team responsible for email, a team responsible for digital. They’re all competing for budgets and they’re all trying to tell their best measurement story. They’re all going to the CMO, the CFO with the data, trying to prove the worth of their individual channels and Money ultimately flowed to the channels where it’s easiest to actually measure those particular channels, which ends up being those lower funnel channels. So investment gets funneled down to the bottom of the funnel. You’re neglecting the top of the funnel channels. And as a result, you end up with a top of funnel that’s very, very leaky because no one could really defend upper funnel spend in a boardroom meeting. And the fix here isn’t necessarily more measurement. It’s actually just redesigning the whole system, understanding that we shouldn’t be measuring, you know, channel by channel on an individual basis. We should be looking at that whole system as a, a, uh as an entire system, looking through things like multi-channel attribution, using tools like mixed models. It’s actually measure the entire system according to a goal, as opposed to falling into this trap of sub optimization where you’re optimizing individual channels. to the detriment of the entire goal.

Frankenstein products, Zynga, and Black Hat

Rob Alvarez (13:53): That sounds amazing. fact, I have tried to remember which episode it was where I’m talking about, now I work at the Octalysis Group and I can talk more openly about the Octalysis framework. And one of the things that I was initially, because I’ve been a product manager as well, not in the marketing, but in the product, product perspective. And of course I’ve been in gamification for a while and there’s some things that are kind of irreconcilable between the two. And one of the bigger issues with, product management as it’s seen, and this is very modern and it’s, very good. It has many advantages over sort of traditional product management. In fact, I teach it at the university. think it’s, it’s an improvement from what we were doing in the past. However, there is an issue and it’s an overarching issue. You know, the Japanese call, talk about Kaikaku and Kaizen, right? Kaizen, these small improvements is 1%. And it’s a brilliant concept. Don’t get me wrong. Works for many, many things. Small improvements. Versus Kaikaku, which is radical innovation, right? The problem is when you see it only through the eyes of Kaikaku or these incremental changes or looking at feature by feature, looking at the data, yeah, how did this… Problem is there’s two problems, main problems. One is you can end up very easily with a Frankenstein. All those silos start doing their own thing all over the place and you don’t have a coherent story. You can’t look at the whole picture. And of course that makes you not optimized. for what is ultimately more important, which is not which is the best channel, but it is where do you get the overall best results? If that means this channel is going to perform worse and this one, which is very small is going to perform better, but that means that you overall get more clients. Well, that’s a good thing, right? You think about it in systems, right? So that’s one thing. When you don’t think in systems, you get Frankenstein. And the other thing is that there’s this whole issue with data, data tense. And there’s a good example of this Zynga. games, right? You probably remember some of these. They over relied on data and yes, you know, they all you do this feature. It gets people to come back more every day this month. Fantastic. Put in the feature, another feature, another feature. They had, they managed to keep this manageable outside of Frankenstein, but they were over relying on what we call Black Hat Core Drives, which is things that drive urgency, scarcity, and make you feel as a player, as a user. out of control because that’s what data gives you immediate results. Right. It says, did this work that AB testing, which was better this or this? Well, of course, if you measure in a week, it’s going to tell you what performs better in a week. Do you do AB testing for two years? No one does AB testing for two years. Not YouTube, not anybody. Right. Because that doesn’t make sense. The problem is you’re not thinking of how does that perform as a system. And sometimes in the longterm makes sense. So, so that’s one of the things that we found is very challenging of that approach. And it’s where definitely I think that product management can, can benefit from having a vision of, yeah, I have this feature, it works better. But how does that affect the system where motivation has to be considered not only in the immediate urgency, but also with higher Black Hat things that make you feel better, make you feel in control, although they don’t drive the urgency as a Black Hat. How do you combine these two things and then extrinsic and intrinsic rewards? It’s a whole. deep topic, it definitely reminded me of that very, much. Good stuff, good stuff. So Mike, with all your experience and all the stuff that you’ve been doing in terms of, you know, seeing that, you know, it seems like systems thinking and the way you approach it has a lot in common with, some of these, at least overall with these philosophies, what would you say is a good practice when, when looking at a project, looking at a marketing campaign or a marketing strategy, what is a good practice? Like maybe do this and you’ll, you’ll definitely get, get better results.

A practical system: pick one metric

Michael Lukich (17:33): No silver bullets. That’s usually not the case, but is there anything you would say goes in that direction? I think in general, try to kind of frame it. I try to, I live a lot more with frameworks, right? And I don’t think there is, you’re obviously like what you said there, there’s no kind of magic silver bullet that’s going to be, you know, do this. And you are obviously guaranteed towards success, but it’s, you one, think you want to be hyper focused on what is the desired action or what’s the desired goal, right? And you need to be crystal clear on, on your, what it is that you’re trying to optimize for. Right. Because obviously like you’re not going to able to optimize for something unless you’ve, very, very clear on, uh, you know, we want one metric or one, you know, KPI that we want to, you know, as our, as our number one, and maybe there are multiple KPIs or multiple metrics. mean, oftentimes there are, and you know, that’s tends to be one of my biggest challenge on a day to day basis is working with exec, with other executives or clients or whatnot. And they want to try to optimize for too much. And you know, we can have. multiple priority metrics, that’s fine, but we need to have some sort of prioritization, right? So which one is the most important, which one’s the second most important and so on and so forth. Knowing that when there are conflicts between those two, what takes precedence over one, right? So there’s having some very clear clarity as to what it is that you’re trying to accomplish.

Mapping systems with DSRP

Michael Lukich (18:56): I’m a big fan of mapping systems, which sounds simple, but it’s just… drawing out the components, right? I, we talked about this briefly before we actually started the recording here, but systems thinking, one of the, there are two of the people who I came across a lot in my research to my book. They’re system scientists out of Cornell. Their names of Derek and Laura Cabrera, their husband, team. And they’re both system scientists. They wrote a couple of books. They’ve authored a bunch of papers, but they believe that the foundation of not just systems thinking, but all thinking. comes down to these four rules, which is distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives, and they call it DSRP. know, distinctions being that something is an identity or another, right? We have to actually define something and name something. uh A systems, meaning that systems are made of parts and holes. And even when we dive into those, those parts are also systems of themselves or holes of themselves that are made up of… parts themselves, right? So understanding that relationships, each of these parts have, have influence over each other. So understanding those, those relationships and how, how those things, you know, interplay with one another, what are the feedback loops involved, you know, and so on and so forth. And then the perspectives, meaning that we can look at the same problem or look at the same view through multiple lenses, right? You may see something different than the way I see something, which is the, might be different than the way a different. you know, potential user sees something as well too. But with these four components or these four building blocks, we can map out, you know, essentially any system. know, I’m a big fan of just getting on whiteboards and drawing out systems and really defining out, you know, with a nice drawing, what does the map or architecture of a system look like? And then from there, it’s, it’s, it’s trying to identify where can you have, like, where are your biggest leverage points? Where is a move within this system? that can have the biggest outsized effect. It often comes down to where is the bottleneck, right? So where are you leaking the most users? Where are people spending the most time? Where’s the most friction? What’s the biggest problem? But that tends to be the biggest opportunity where you can spend time on trying to improve that system. And then from there, it’s making the decisions and executing. And I guess the last thing I’ll just kind of bring in is I think any good process needs to have some sort of review or iterative mechanism in place to continually try to make sure that you are aligning back to what your overall goal is. It’s uh easy to, the example that you just brought up, it’s easy to fall into some sort of a sub optimization trap, right? Where you’re optimizing for a small component of the system, not the system as a whole. That’s okay. That happens to us all the time, whether it’s in marketing, whether it’s in our own lives, right? We do this all the time where we try to optimize for something. You go to your own life, right? And you talk about you’re trying to be, you get on a fitness plan and you’re like, I’m going to go workout six times a week. And then next thing you know, you’re exhausted and you kind of over-correct the wrong way and it spills out into the rest of your life. So we fall into these self-optimization traps all the time. It’s important to make sure that we have regular review cadences to kind of reset us and make sure that we are always pointed to our North Star, our overall goal that’s kind like lead us to where we want to ultimately strive towards.

The strategy dashboard and the North Star

Rob Alvarez (22:23): Love it. And I’m sorry, but I have to bring a couple of things back as well to, know, what is on the strategy dashboard, as we, as we call it. We always like to have the business metrics and you said about prioritization. That’s one of the rules. Like you can have a hundred things that you want to measure, but you have to have them ordered and especially the top three, maybe top six and some clear examples that, know, when you, talked about desired actions before the interview, it’s when you get, get it, go to a webpage. Right? You know what they’re prioritizing for at the moment. Not just, you know, accept cookies or don’t accept cookies. You should be able to clearly distinguish, even if it’s in a different language that you’re able to understand, what it is that you want them to do. That should happen in a marketing campaign. That should happen in an app. That should happen in a webpage. That should happen when you enter an experience. It should always be very clear and that clear prioritization. If it’s done well, it should be aligned to the overarching top business. metric or, you know, next most important business objective. If you cannot impact number one, then fine. That’s a kid. How does it positively impact number two or worst case number three? Like there’s no, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong here. You completely need it to go for sure. So love that. Love how you, how you, how you put that together as well. And, and you know, it all comes back, you know, the, systems thinking and having that North star, always making sure that everything you do is always hitting on that business metric. direction and we call it business metrics, but this also applies for NGOs, this applies for education, this applies for many other things as well. It’s just a title that we gave it, but that’s, that’s very, very crucial to the way we work.

James Clear, Ryan Holiday, and one book

Rob Alvarez (23:59): And Michael, with what we’ve been discussing and part of the perspective you’ve seen, you know, both you describing and me, me sort of replying to you and getting back with some, some, some other, you know, things that come, come to my head. Is there anybody that you would think, I’d really like to listen to the perspective of this other person, you know, answering these questions as well on the Professor Game Podcast. Michael Lukich (24:18): You know, I thought about this and I, there’s a couple of people actually. So, you know, one, think would be really interesting is, you know, the massive bestselling author, James Clear. think, um, you know, I think of, when I think of like Atomic Habits, like to me, like Atomic Habits is just the gamification of self-improvement, right? So like, right. But like it’s, you know, I would be, I’m sure a lot of what he does, it’s the same DNA of everything that you cover. It’s just applied to behavioral change. And I think that would be. somewhat interesting, but I’m also going to like say this from a more Stoic lens. think Ryan Holiday would be an interesting one as well because oftentimes, and I struggle with this a lot as a marketer is as marketers, it’s easy sometimes to kind of tow the line, right? Of the ethical side of things, right? And oftentimes for me, at least, I think anytime you get close to that line, like that’s generally too far for my comfort, right? Like I want to steer towards. kind of being far away from that boundary. But I’d be interested of just a Stoic angle, especially from a guy like Holiday who has a marketing background as well too, which is a useful counterweight that kind of grounds engagement design in more of like an ethical frame as well too. Rob Alvarez (25:34): Makes a lot of sense and keeping up with the recommendations. What book would you recommend these engagers? Next to your book, which is coming up and will be available and hopefully send me the link. So when we launch it, it’s there. Michael Lukich (25:48): I that. was not going to recommend my own book, but I appreciate that as well too. I actually, The Bible of Systems Thinking is uh a book called Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. uh She wrote this, uh she was a systems scientist, devoted most of her research and work to environmental systems. But again, as we’ve kind of learned from systems thinking, a lot of these concepts apply to… uh systems across all different types in all different domains. And this is just a foundational text that gives the language of systems. talks about feedback loops and stocks and flows and inflows and outflows delays. It’s a great, great, great book that is really codifies the language through which we can actually map out all of the designs of all of our various systems in the world. Rob Alvarez (26:41): Makes a lot of sense. And you were talking about feedback loops. That’s fundamental. If you’re creating gamified systems, people have to receive feedback. there’s, it’s only a one way thing. It usually is a lot harder to design around and gives you mixed results. Let’s call it in a way.

Translation and poker as the perfect game

Rob Alvarez (26:54): In this whole Stoic systems thinking and perhaps, you know, a gamification tilt to that, what would you say is your superpower? That thing that you do, you know, it doesn’t have to be absolutely unique, but that thing that you do at least better than most other people that makes you stand up. Michael Lukich (27:07): Yeah, I think for me, my superpower is translation. And a lot of my job is sitting at the intersection of various kind of domains in the business world. I’ve, you mentioned this in the intro, but I’ve worked in working in, in, marketing data and technology for the last 20 plus years or so. I I’ve had to jump from boardroom meetings with CMOs straight to. meetings with my data engineers to meetings with the technical teams to meeting with product managers. And oftentimes I’m having to have similar conversations, but translating that to the various audiences that I’m in in those various meetings. know, I’m in the CMO CFO conversations and it needs to boil back down to. How are we making money? How are we earning revenue? How are we maximizing our profit? Whereas I translate that back to having a conversation with our data engineers, then we need to talk about APIs and data pipelines and how do we transform the data into something more manageable. Our product managers are building dashboards and trying to ship features to various end users, right? So all of these are, I’m swimming in the same lanes, having similar conversations with the same kind of core set of topics. But having to be able to translate that understanding for each of those audiences, what they know already, what they don’t know already, and how can I kind of take each of those topics and frame it in a way that’s going to not just be something that they’d understand, but something that can help them make better decisions and help kind of them to get better, kind of get a good sense of the landscape of the world. Rob Alvarez (28:48): Amazing, amazing. Thank you very much for that. And now a typical question that tends to be very hard. Maybe you already know the answer for you, but it has to do with games, right? So I would like to ask you, maybe I have a guess at what the answer is, but I would like to know what is your favorite game? Michael Lukich (29:04): Um, so I’ve, uh, I, I, I’ve been a game. I’ve been, had a love of games through my entire life. So I’ve, uh, um, you know, played, think it kind of yields to my competitive side of things. My answer I guess came in my, uh, in my intro here, which is I, I’ve played poker since I was, I started playing poker, you know, right around 2000, right around 2000. So I’ve been, you 25, 30 years playing poker. To me, poker is. the perfect game where a lot of the analogies or lessons that I draw from life comes from poker. mean, it has everything in it. There’s a variable rewards. I’m trying to make decisions under uncertainty and incomplete information. There’s social mechanics there. There’s a faulty learning loops, right? Like just because I play well doesn’t mean I actually win and vice versa. Just because I play poorly doesn’t mean I actually lose. There’s every Stoic principle that that I have, you know, there’s a perfect analog in poker, every systems principle, half the framework in the book, honestly, started at the poker table. So that to me is my favorite game. But I mean, I actually like I play a lot of games anyway, I still, you can see the, you know, monitor double monitors that I have behind me, I tend to play some computer games as well too. So I love games.

Where to find Michael and closing advice

Rob Alvarez (30:25): Amazing, amazing. So Michael, thank you very much for the time you’ve invested today with us and the Engagers. Is there anything else you’d like to say? Of course, let us know where we can find out more about you, your upcoming book, which again, when you’re seeing this, it’s already live. I don’t know anywhere you want to lead us. Michael Lukich (30:40): Yeah, I mean, to me, just, I wrap it up as, you know, one of the things that I’ve learned over the course of, of writing this book over the last 18 months or so. And one of the perspectives that I’ve kind of had is, you know, while we call it systems thinking, to me, systems thinking is just thinking. It’s just, it’s thinking in a, in a structured manner and it’s applicable to all things. think there’s overlaps or parallels with, you know, a lot of the other kind of, you know, schools of thinking, design, critical thinking. mean, they all kind of. swim in the same pools. um, you know, I guess, you know, just from there to me, the advice that I always give when people are thinking through like, how do I kind of get, get started with systems thinking or whatnot is just starting, starting with understanding the map of things and not necessarily the individual mechanics. So trying to find out, you know, and map out what the entire universe looks like and find the individual leverage points that you can make, you know, where you can actually have an outsized impact within those systems. And then the last kind of Stoic piece that I would say there is focusing on the specific things that you can control, because oftentimes in systems, there’s lots of things in systems that are completely out of our control and focusing our energies and trying to change those things is kind of a pointless exercise. So zeroing in on those things that you actually can control. And that’s where you’re going to have the biggest bang for your buck. In terms of like just kind of learning more, mean, my book, The Stoic Systems Thinker, it’s going be published in the upcoming week. So, you know, end of May, it might be pushed to early June before it actually gets on Amazon. But you can find out more at my website, which is stoicsystemsthinker.com. And I’m on LinkedIn as well too, under Michael Lukich. So people can reach out to me there. Rob Alvarez (32:23): Amazing, amazing. Thank you once again very much. for your engagement, for being here and delivering all your value to the engagers. And remember, engagers, if you are having any of the issues that we’ve been discussing regarding, you know, systems thinking and how that integrates into an overarching strategy for engagement, for adoption, churn, any of these issues that you might be facing, remember you have a free guide if you click on the link in the description, which will arrive directly to your email. All you have to do is click on that link. And as we always say before, we take off, it is time to say that it’s game over. End of transcription

Discover more from Professor Game

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.