Clay Christensen: Hi, this is Clay Christensen and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call The Disruptive Voice. In this podcast we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at HBS, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you'd like to hear more about or if you'd like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the school.

Derek van Bever: Hi, I'm Derek van Bever and you're listening to The Disruptive Voice. We're here today in Morgan Hall, for a change, with Bob Moesta and Casper ter Kuile for what will be an unusual but highly welcome conversation, applying the theory of jobs to be done to religion. And we could not have two better guides to this terrain than Bob and Casper. Alumni of our course here at HBS will be familiar with Bob, the co-discoverer with Clay of the theory of jobs to be done. And Casper is new to our podcast studio, but by no means new to podcasts. He's the co-creator of the wildly popular podcast entitled Harry Potter And The Sacred Text, which has won more awards than you can count. Casper is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Kennedy School, and he's partnered with fellow HDS graduate, Angie Thurston to be the first class of ministry innovation fellows at Harvard Divinity School where their work focuses on understanding how our sense of sacred community is changing and evolving.

Derek van Bever: The website for their project, How We Gather, describes their work as a groundbreaking study of organizations that are effectively unbundling and remixing the functions historically performed by traditional religious institutions. In terms our listeners will understand as greater and greater numbers of young people fire church, as we've traditionally known it, what are they hiring and why? What are their jobs to be done and how are they fulfilling them? And is anything still missing? So welcome to The Disruptive Voice, Casper and Bob.

Bob Moesta: Thanks for having me.

Casper ter KuileThanks Derek.

Derek van Bever: I want to dig into two topics in our time together today. For both of you. I'd like to understand how you applied jobs theory to a topic like religion, and Casper I'd like to understand what your research has revealed about what organizations, people who self-identify as spiritual but not religious are hiring and why. So let's get into it. Bob, maybe we'll start with you. We've always applied jobs theory to business, to marketing segmentation, the like. How does jobs apply to a topic like religion?

Bob Moesta: So again, this all started as being able to build better products, but as you start to take it and understand it as a theory as kind of Clay has written it, and me as a practitioner has been able to apply it, you start to realize there are different resources besides money. And we usually look at what do people hire and fire in terms of, what are they paying for, what are they not paying for? But when you start to look at religion, you start to realize that it's time is now the currency, and what are they willing to put time into and what are they not willing to put time into, and where were they willing to invest that time, and where are they willing to get gain knowledge and knowledge becomes part of the outcome set.

Bob Moesta: And so when you start to apply it here, it's like there are people who are dissatisfied in one religion and decided to say like, "I'm not going to go to church anymore." And then they either find a new place to to to practice or they find a new way to practice. And ultimately they have those same hiring and firing criteria, but now it's about their time and not about their money. And so it's a very interesting aspect. The other part is it's not as functional, it's very social and emotional. And so you start to realize that all the same kind of techniques kind of play out to it. And so I think I've been doing, why do people fire one religion or hire a new religion for almost four years, five years. And it's like the most fascinating interviews I can come across.

Derek van Bever: Casper you've studied in depth, what are the organizations that people are hiring these days to fulfill various jobs in the spiritual realm, could you talk about that? What are people hiring and why?

Casper ter Kuile: Yeah, I mean to kind of zoom out for just a second, it is really fascinating to see how quickly this landscape is changing of people's religious affiliation. So now more than 23% of the American general public described themselves as nonreligious or nothing in particular. And that doesn't necessarily mean atheist. There's a much, much smaller percentage of people who say, I don't believe in God or I really hate religion. There's this really big number of people who are kind of nothing in between and they don't have any language that they use to describe themselves. But still two out of three of those people believe in God or a higher power and one in five actually pray every day. So it's not a sense that people like have rejected all their beliefs of something bigger than themselves. It's just that the places that used to offer that are mismatched with how they want to engage with it.

Casper ter Kuile: So what we found is that there's a really fascinating growth in communities that are extensively secular. So they're not religious organizations, but what's happening in those places is profoundly religious. So to take one example, one of my favorites is CrossFit, which is of course a very large fitness community at this point with millions of people doing burpees and sorts of exercise things every day. And what happens within those communities is profoundly ritualistic. So for example, they name different workouts. The same workout happens in every CrossFit every single day.

Casper ter Kuile: So everyone is doing the same mix of running for a mile and jumping up and down and throwing around medicine balls. And that particular workout will be named after a soldier or service person who's died in the line of battle, for example. So they're honoring their dead. They're raising money for each other when someone is diagnosed with cancer. They're bringing each other's dogs to the vet. They are organizing Friday night drinks. They're doing all the things you'd expect to see in a congregation, even engaging with questions of civics and social justice, by organizing to lobby against big sugar and the soda companies, because they're so obsessed with, with health at this point.

Casper ter Kuile: And of course, one of the jokes that we can appreciate here at Harvard is, how do you know if someone goes to Harvard or does CrossFit, they tell you. Right? So there's this very evangelical culture about the CrossFit world, which is very much based on the belief that, I changed my life with CrossFit and I want you to change your life with CrossFit. So again, all of these things that you'd expect to see in a religious congregation were happening in a gym, even though no one would describe it as a religion.

Derek van Bever: That is fascinating. You profiled some other organizations as well, I think one called The Dinner Parties. So tender and meets such a deep need. Tell us about that.

Casper ter Kuile: So on the complete opposite spectrum, The Dinner Party, is a beautiful organization. And Bob actually did a Jobs To Be Done call with the founder, which I'll never forget.

Bob Moesta: No.

Casper ter Kuile: Whereas she was describing, it's a community of people who get together over dinner who maybe in their 20s and 30s have experienced significant loss. So maybe the death of a parent or a partner or a sibling or a close friend. And the founders just experienced that when you talk about death, especially at that age, it's kind of a conversation killer. And they wanted a place very easy where they could just be honest, honest about the sadness, but also sometimes about the relief or the frustration or whatever was happening, not just in the immediate aftermath of someone's passing, but really in that life after loss. So what is it like to be dating after your former partner committed suicide, for example.

Casper ter Kuile: And so a Lennon Flowers, who's one of the founders and just a wonderful human being was talking about creating a space in which people could be vulnerable. And Bob spent about 20 minutes pushing how being like, what do you mean by space? What do you mean by space?

Bob Moesta: What do you mean by vulnerable? I don't understand what that means. She's like, "Oh my gosh." It was very fun though.

Casper ter Kuile: This is what I love that in Jobs To Be Done interviews, Bob pretends not to know things, but he actually really does. But so you're seeing this whole landscape of dinner communities following death, maker spaces and arts groups, justice groups, fitness groups, all of these very different organizations that seem to be doing very different things. But the needs that they were meeting underneath was so consistent in our research. So much was about a hunger for community, a hunger for connection, a sense of transformation in yourself and in the world. A chance to be creative, chance to clarify your own purpose. And then my particular favorite was a chance to have people hold you accountable.

Casper ter Kuile: So often in religious communities, there's real hesitation now, especially in more progressive communities to hold people accountable because there's a long history of marginalization and oppression within religious communities. But actually accountability can be such an expression of care because if I hold you accountable, it means that I believe that you're capable of achieving the goals you've set for yourself and I'm invested in you succeeding. So especially in CrossFit, again, you see people putting these whiteboards on the wall where they say, I'm going to do 12 burpees by Friday. And then crossing off that moment, kind of people are clapping for you. There's a real sense of being held by a community, which I think in our super isolated culture right now that sense of being connected in a deeper way is one of the key things that people are looking for.

Bob Moesta: Right. It's the outcome that they really are seeking and that they actually can't find it-

Casper ter Kuile: Exactly.

Bob Moesta: At the religious communities and so all of a sudden it's a very, it's very awkward because like people will say, CrossFit feels like a cult or it feels like religion, but at the same time it's like, yeah, but there's no faith involved in it. And it's kind of like, yeah, it's just about living life. But it's about these elements of everyday life that they've actually incorporated.

Casper ter Kuile: This is one of the big distinctions that we've seen of how people perceive traditional religious spaces with these newer communities, that in a traditional religious space, especially through a Christian lens, we think religion is about belief, that it's about orthodoxy, believing the right thing. And with communities like CrossFit, it's all about orthopraxy doing the right thing. So it's practicing in a certain way. And so I mean literally like having the barbell in the right place on your shoulders.

Casper ter Kuile: Now when we say you don't actually have to believe the same way, I'm more suspicious of that because in CrossFit you get the same kind of interesting shared beliefs. Like for example, the paleo diet, it's super intense within the CrossFit culture. And when you look at it and you look at how religions like Judaism for example, have long had set foods that you eat and that you don't eat, which is not about the foods themselves, but it's about keeping the community together. Judaism was always having to live at the margins of different empires through the ages, and the way that you kept a diaspora together was by making them eat the same food, making them keep the same time with the Sabbath and things. So the way that CrossFit behaves, which is to say, we all eat paleo, it means that the community stays together. So there's these kinds of inherent little-

Bob Moesta: They are, but what I think is, I think the beliefs are actually, they come later.

Casper ter Kuile: Yes. That's true.

Bob Moesta: I think of it as an onboarding problem. What's happened is, is like I can't walk into this church unless I believe, and I can't be part of this ceremony unless I believe. And everybody else is like, "No, you can come work out with us." And over time it's like, yeah, I start to believe. So that's what people have kind of forgotten is this aspect of the religions as they got more and more kind of structured, they actually made belief the door people had to open and it was very, very hard. My understanding would say is that that people actually didn't believe they-

Casper ter Kuile: 100%.

Bob Moesta: But they wanted to belong so much better that they would say they believed and they actually believe later-

Casper ter Kuile: And statistically that bears out. That bears out, that people were already way more diverse in what they believed, but they would still say, "Well, I'm Presbyterian or I'm Catholic." Whereas now it's much more okay to say, "Well, I'm not really anything." Right? Like the social pressure has shifted.

Bob Moesta: That's right. That's right. But I think at the same time, these day to day, moment to moment needs of belonging, of making a stronger me, helping me, help me contribute to others, somebody holding me accountable. I think those are all there. And the fact is, is it's kind of how the world has basically kind of let that go away. And what's happened is the secular world has actually stepped up to fulfill those things

Casper ter Kuile: in really interesting ways. So for example, when we spoke with SoulCycle, which is a spin class, right? One of the instructors said, "Well, you know, it's not unusual for me to get texts from some of the people who come to my classes. Last Sunday someone texted me at 4:00 PM saying, 'should I divorce my husband?'" Right? So it's that level of what you might think of a pastoral relationship where someone's accompanying you through big life moments that's suddenly happening with leaders who are trained in fitness, but not like-

Bob Moesta: Yep. That's right. That's right. Not in any of those kinds of things. Mine, I remember was an interview where somebody basically doing SoulCycle and they literally said it was like going to confession. And it was this notion of asking me these really hard questions about myself in a moment when I was quote weak because of where I was and then balling like a baby and then it's like, "Yeah, it was so awesome." And you're like, "Wait, what?" You're like, "So how often do you it?" "Oh, I do it three, four times a week." Because it's like that whole notion of cleansing and it's like it's a very, very interesting notion that, and then you start to actually talk about like, "Well tell me about when you went to class." And it be like, "It was, but it was not as satisfying as basically those moments." And you're like, "Oh, so they've just perfected a lot of these little things." And it's like any big corporation, everybody's kind of eating from the bottom and doing certain parts of it better. That literally make it to the point where it's like, it's just easier not to go.

Casper ter Kuile: 100%.

Derek van Bever: I can imagine the epiphanies as listeners of ours are saying, I didn't realize that was what I was doing, but in fact that is how I'm fed, if you will, when I go to CrossFit or SoulCycle. And then also thinking, wow, churches used to do these things more or less well-

Bob Moesta: They had a rec league, right? That we'd go play basketball on Friday night and we'd all get ... But it wasn't structured to that point where it's like, I can't go to church once a week, but I can go to CrossFit six times a week. Like all of a sudden you start to realize prioritization is just backwards on it. It's very fascinating.

Derek van Bever: Casper, do the founders of these new kinds of organizations, are they aware of the vacuum they're stepping into? How do they think about that?

Casper ter Kuile: I think that's really shifted in the last five years. When we first started speaking to brands and organizations, they were extremely suspicious of even me calling from the Divinity School with with my colleague Angie. And now I think more and more the culture is changing so quickly about its tolerance or its level of safety with kind of spirituality more generally that now when we interviewed the CEO of CrossFit, he says, "Yeah, some people call us a cult and now I'm like, yeah, we are a cult." He literally describes himself as tending an orchard or like a shepherding a flock. I mean that's the kind of language that he's using now.

Casper ter Kuile: I think there's an awareness of it now, whether that's changing, how people are training their kind of individual gym leaders for example, or how people are paying attention to some of those deeper questions of what does happen when you have a cancer diagnosis or congregations know what to do when a child is killed in a road accident. And a gym is still going to be figuring that out when it happens for the first time.

Bob Moesta: This is why I think this is the concern is that people are actually hiring it for-

Casper ter Kuile: More than they know how to deliver that.

Bob Moesta: More than they know how to deliver it.

Casper ter Kuile: Exactly.

Bob Moesta: And then all of a sudden they're going to actually ask like, help me deal with the divorce. Help me with a death. And it's going to be like, I want to get married? Well, where do I go? And it's all of a sudden it's like they're going to be faced to go back to, to where, how do they make that happen? And so I think part of this is that they're going to get in some cases over their ski tip and it's not because of a say CrossFit, it's because people actually don't know where the line is, where it can serve or to help them make progress. And so because they have nowhere else to go, something is better than nothing, and that's the concern.

Casper ter Kuile: Exactly. We've seen that happen. There was one community that we studied called Camp Grounded, which is an adult summer camp. So in the midst of-

Bob Moesta: I'm in,

Casper ter Kuile: Right. Like who doesn't want that? This is a place where when you arrive, you're not allowed to talk about work. You immediately have to put your phone into like a little phone sleeping bag so that you aren't using tech. It's this kind of magical place where you get to be creative, you make up your own name. It's this beautiful community and one of the founders very sadly was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died at age 32. Young man called Levi Felix and that whole community, I mean loved, loved this man and we're preparing to host a funeral for him, but realized that they just didn't have the kind of inner resources or that liturgical design resources to know how to host a funeral with that level of sadness that you're in the middle of.

Casper ter Kuile: So they ended up turning to a rabbi, who was totally game and worked with them to create a beautiful personal service. But that was an example where they had to kind of go back to the tradition and say, actually, we need some help. Which for me is actually a really hopeful thing because it's not like religion has failed in everything and was totally useless. There's so much wisdom both in the practices and the teachings and the stories that can still, and is still relevant but needs to be kind of translated. And so the things I'm most excited about is when that old paradigm meets practitioners from the new paradigm and co-create something.

Bob Moesta: And I think they have a space together. The problem is they don't know actually how to interact in any way. And so partly they need either a buffer or somebody to make the introduction and to be honest, I think the old role has to actually kind of wake up to realize what it is. It's in their mind, it's in free fall and the reality is it's like no people have the same need, but the fact is that they know how to get it done and so if they were to understand jobs it would help.

Bob Moesta: My favorite was, I think when we did the first conference, I was there and I just remember talking to one organization, it's like, "Well, so how do you guys innovate?" It's like, "Well, we give money to the churches." And it's like, "Well what did they do?" "Well they just do a bake sale." But the notion of trying to understand how to compete in these spaces is like, they're just not designed or educated in how to do those things. So the beauty of what you guys were doing at the Divinity School was like the notion that you and Angie are the first two ... By the way, Angie, I miss you. I wish you were here. Please. Please.

Casper ter Kuile: She's the real brains.

Bob Moesta: Yes she is. She just happens to be in down in D.C. But the notion was the fact is there that nobody actually thought about innovation from the religious side and that one is that again, people are making progress in their life and that people aren't leaving the church. They're actually going somewhere else because they can make more progress. And so everybody actually only changes to make things better in their life. And so if people are leaving you, you need to understand one, where are they going? And they'll say, I'm going nowhere. Nowhere is somewhere still. And so part of it is understanding what are those firing criteria, what are the hiring criteria of the new and how does it work?

Casper ter Kuile: And what's hard for institutions, I'm sure this is maybe similar to businesses, is that the people who do stay are usually the ones who are happy with what is still there or at least satisfied enough and so there's less and less incentive to kind of fire your existing customer base in search of that elusive group out there who are no longer [crosstalk 00:18:40].

Bob Moesta: So I've been doing some interviews where in one religion where you start to realize that there's the variation inside the congregation gets so wide, that you could actually start to see that it's going to bifurcate. It's literally going to split and be an old school and a new school, though they're fairly new enough that you wouldn't think that it was happening, but the, the old school wants all these really staunch things-

Casper ter Kuile: It's never too soon for a schism in religion.

Bob Moesta: Yeah, I guess that's right. But the notion is is you can see it from a mathematical perspective of like as they go one way this side gets mad at that side and this side, and all of a sudden it's going to be like there's going to be some event that has to happen and then boom. They're going to be okay, there's going to be the old version and the new version, and it's like any other organization. It's very amazing.

Derek van Bever: Casper, after the How We Gather Project, you and Angie undertook a project that I think you called Something More, where you were looking at what are the responses of traditional faith organizations to these changes? Is anybody handling this well and what would it look like if someone were handling it well? Bob, you said we need to find out a lot more about who's firing us and why. What other practices would you suggest for somebody who's feeling in it? Who's feeling on the wrong side of this movement?

Casper ter Kuile: Yeah, I mean the first thing to say is like, listen, if you're happy in a congregation that's great. There's no shame in that at all. One of the things that we've been most excited to see is religious denominations or institutional leaders who say, "Okay, I'm confident that I have something to give, but I'm also completely clear that I don't know how to serve this group of people who have fired traditional religion." And so the most inspiring stories for me are people who go out into the world and try to come alongside. Who say, "You know what?" Let's say I'm a Methodist minister and Methodist in Florida have done this, who went out into their local community to look at literary organizations like CrossFit or libraries or all sorts of other places where people were congregating and to go to those leaders and say, "Hey, can I be a mentor? Can I be of service? How can I help?" And really orient themselves around the learning and the work of these newer communities rather than to say, I'll fund you if you host communion or I'll do this.

Casper ter Kuile: And so one amazing minister in the United Church of Christ, a liberal American Protestant denomination, when he was essentially Bishop in the Southwest, he ordained community leaders who didn't claim the UCC, who didn't even claim to be Christian and who had never gone to divinity school. So he was really giving positional power to people way outside of their mainstream to try and lift up and say, look, it can look like this. I see this person bringing people together in community to serve the wider community, to create beauty, to create reflection. To me that is a faithful expression of our community belief system. And so I'm willing to stand behind you. So that kind of reaching out beyond your own kind of paradigm to try and serve the places which you think have integrity. That that to me is hopeful.

Derek van Bever: I'd ask our listeners who are thinking about the health of their own religious organizations to ask themselves the question, how much are we organized around filling the building-

Casper ter Kuile: Oh, so true.

Derek van Bever: Versus going out into the world? I mean that building can become an albatross.

Casper ter Kuile: I mean it does all the time. And the two things that people always measure within congregations is how many people showed up and how much money did they give? And so if that's all you're measuring, rather than are people becoming more courageous, are people welcoming in refugees in their homes? Are people hosting street parties, are people looking after each other? If you're measuring those things, you're going to see a healthy community emerge, because that's where you're going to focus your energy. Instead the first question that nearly every congregation asks is, how do we get people to come on Sunday? Which is just the wrong question.

Bob Moesta: I think part of it is, one is to realize that there's kind of two worlds. I always talk about the difference between the supply side and the demand side, right? And to realize that the demand side is where the progress that consumers or customers or parishioners want to make. And what's happened is, is that the rules by which the supply side provides services is in some cases not going to be, to your point Casper, like to choose what they're not going to do. I think that's the hardest thing for any company to choose, let alone any organization.

Bob Moesta: So part of it is to actually know where you actually serve well and when you serve well. I think in people's 20s they're more apt to leave. But when there's death, as they get near to death, as they get married, there's other things that then, there's other dominance that cause people to come back and have two worlds. And so part of it is to understand how the world is changing. And to be honest, my belief is by people leaving and coming back, they'll be actually stronger than if they had never left at all.

Casper ter Kuile: It's not like there's no need, right?

Bob Moesta: Right.

Casper ter Kuile: Like in terms of one in four Americans now say they have no one to talk to in their life about things that are meaningful to them, which includes spouses and family members. So just starting to try and build relationships of meaning. What happens for young parents who have kids, it's super isolating. What about if you're looking after aging, like there's so many life where people need help.

Derek van Bever: I'm curious, in official jobs lingo we talk about integrating your capabilities to fulfill the social, emotional and functional attributes of a job. Should they be integrating to build these capabilities or do they find themselves falling short of the things that their congregation need of them? If I can use that collective now.

Casper ter Kuile: Yeah, I mean in some places I think they're doing a pretty good job of meeting it. I mean you mentioned the SoulCycle example before where you're asked these kinds of questions.

Bob Moesta: Yep. The aggressions, yeah.

Casper ter Kuile: So things like who you riding for today? What do you want to leave behind? So they're kind of integrating that reflective practice and there's other places where there's more of an emphasis on social engagement and civic action. What I think is true is that in a way that a congregation used to bundle up a whole set of services, including 100, 200 years ago, education, healthcare, all sorts of things. Now, people attending to Insight Timer or Headspace for their kind of practice instruction. They're turning to podcasts to get the piece of wisdom. So you're kind of unbundling all of the offerings that were traditionally in one place. And so I don't think any of the communities that we've looked at are even trying to replicate that full 360 offering, which sparks all sorts of interesting questions.

Casper ter Kuile: Is the future of religion actually much more dispersed? Does a priest or rabbi no longer do bar mitzvahs and weddings and lead a weekly service and do Torah study with a congregation. But maybe you just do the Torah study and you just do the leading of ritual in front of the community. So we, I think we might begin to see more of an unbundling of the jobs that religion used to do. And frankly, the fact that people are growing up more and more in mixed faith households. The fact that we're more and more used to diversity in terms of our classrooms, our workplaces. We're beginning I think as a culture to feel a little more suspicious when we are only with other people who believe what we do. I think generationally, there's much more of an interest in being with people who believe other things. And so I think even the future of how we think about spiritual community might be much more diverse than kind of the way we've been seeing it before.

Derek van Bever: BSSE alum in our audience are thinking about interdependence and modularity right now.

Bob Moesta: Exactly. Right. That's exactly right. That's where I was going is that, to be honest, it's now going to actually become more of I'll say a consumer market, because they're not going to know how to choose and so they're going to fall back on CrossFit when somebody dies. And the reality is that they're going to have to understand what they do well and what they don't do well and where should they send them. Because I think those are part of the issues where they're going to end up integrating into something that they really don't want to do or that they're not really good at. And the fact is if they start to integrate to that, it has implications on the core jobs that they do in the first place.

Derek van Bever: That's a true statement.

Bob Moesta: I think that was part of the problem is when big religion actually aggregated up, education and everything else, that's how it actually kind of had to morph all of its core kind of competencies to basically fit into everything, into one budget. And so my aspect is to be very careful about what you choose and what you don't choose to do.

Casper ter Kuile: That's really interesting to me. And this is helpful because within religious traditions you're seeing certainly over the last 20 years, a real interest in kind of returning to authentic practices from before.

Bob Moesta: Yeah, this is what we used to do.

Casper ter Kuile: Yeah, exactly.

Bob Moesta: Let's go back to basic. What you find is like think of Kraft Heinz. We're just going to go back to ketchup and mustard and the basic things we do and we're going to do those really well. Now let's be clear. Kraft Heinz isn't growing. So part of it is that they're able to hold what they have but, they're actually not going down. It's like people buy ketchup, they're buying ketchup still. Right? But the reality is if they're trying to grow the congregation that's a different story.

Bob Moesta: So that's where I think it was almost like build it and they will come, which is a very supply side kind of mentality. The reality is, is that we have to think about kind of where is demand? What is progress for parishioners?

Derek van Bever: Casper, we've got a few minutes left or a couple of issues I wanted to talk about with you. One relates to a blog post that you posted maybe a month or more ago where you talked about the ways in which the workplace is starting to become more of a center of community for I guess, millennial employees to overuse a term, but do you see that in the offing? Do you see people entering the workforce looking to the workplace to fulfill more jobs than it has in the past around that feeling of belonging and community?

Bob Moesta: Yeah, I mean that was definitely a really interesting experience that we had. By and large the story is fewer and fewer people are looking for religious community. Looking for that kind of spiritual practice, et cetera. But the one place where we kept hearing people say, well people are asking for more of it, was from employers that their younger employees wanted more community, that they wanted not just the kind of like yoga offerings and meditation rooms, but that they wanted this job to be kind of formative for who they are becoming as a human being. And so employers have kind of taken back because they're used to providing a retirement account-

Derek van Bever: Absolutely.

Bob Moesta: But it's asking a lot of a business or any organization that employs you to also be this meaning making community for you. And frankly there's some ethical questions about can you really be in a loving community with someone who can fire you? I don't think so. So one of the questions that I was exploring is are we going to see a future whereby just like you might have employee assistance program that's provided by your employer, but not actually operated by them, right? There's a real wall between if you're struggling with addiction for example, or if you need help with financial advice.

Bob Moesta: Are we going to see a future where your employer also facilitates your connection to a community of meaning in some way where you know, you might meet with a community coach once every month who helps you connect to interesting events that are happening or facilitates introductions to other employees who love nature. That kind of thing. I think that's the kind of additional benefit that employees who want to attract the top talent might be looking at because such a consistent need amongst this new generation of workers.

Derek van Bever: We're aware of some organizations, Jan Rivkin profile, The Barry-Wehmiller Company, that attempts to erase that boundary between the employee and the whole person. It is terrifying to most employers to even imagine that. Bob to you have a point of view on that?

Bob Moesta: So to be honest, I believe that employers have been there before and I actually think unions have been the reason for it. So unions are that separation. That it was most of the people think unions were there for representation and basically what I've had wrong doing and basically to negotiate, but a lot of the unions is there-

Casper ter Kuile: That's so true.

Bob Moesta: A lot of the unions are there to actually be able to go and talk about what happened at work today. Well let's go have a beer or drink. The aspect of having comradery and being able to actually have people like me and who are in the same position as me, that we can actually have a conversation that I don't have to worry about, man ... And so I'm not saying that unions will come of this, but it's the same kind of functionality.

Casper ter Kuile: That's fascinating.

Bob Moesta: And again, most people associate unions with demands and all these other things, but there's an underlying tone of union and it was about being able to belong and being able to share, being able to be a part of a committee.

Derek van Bever: I'll say.

Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. And there was singing clubs and outing groups and-

Bob Moesta: Exactly.

Casper ter Kuile: Right, there was a whole life.

Bob Moesta: Exactly. So this notion is that it's new. I don't believe it's a millennial thing. I believe that it's just, it's a different form of the same kind of job.

Casper ter Kuile: Definitely. Well, and in this post that I wrote about, I looked at kind of industrialization in new England. I was trying to draw the comparison between how religion and manufacturing have had this long relationship where in the mill towns in Massachusetts, literally the owners paid for churches to be erected as a way of kind of crowd control, to limit alcoholism and various other things. But it was just an example of this longstanding relationship between faith potentially and work.

Bob Moesta: That's right. I think it's right that there's some minefields and some rat holes that you've got to be careful of, but I think the fact is having those separations and having places where people can go and people can feel comfortable and all that kind of stuff. I think this is the learning we have ... I mean this is why I'm optimistic about the future, is just these are all wonderful questions to be asking. But they don't know how to frame the questions. So I think as soon as you ask the question like, oh, I can do it this way. So part of it is people aren't reflective enough yet.

Derek van Bever: A couple of very quick lightning round questions before we go. First of all, a certain number of people will listen to this podcast. Tens of that certain number or perhaps hundreds will listen to the next episode of your podcast, Harry Potter And The Sacred Text. Could you tell us a little bit about how did this come to be and what do you do in this and?

Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. Well it's been a surprise for me to, let me put it that way. Really this is the genius of my cohost Vanessa Zoltan, who wrote her thesis about reading Jane Eyre as a sacred text. And maybe the only thing I added was saying, well, let's read a book that lots of people have read and might want to engage with us with, which is of course Harry Potter. So the podcast is essentially applying traditional religious reading practices, but to Harry Potter, which is obviously a secular text.

Casper ter Kuile: I think what's been interesting to see is that people were already turning to these books, especially in times of sadness. So after a breakup, after a death of a loved one. And so I think all we were doing was saying, hey look, this is happening. How can we give people a little more structure, a little more ways of doing what they're already doing, but with greater depth. And so yeah, we now go on tour and have hundreds of people in a room doing a close reading of one word or a few sentences of one of the Harry Potter books. Really, not just as a tool for escape or kind of fiction, but as a way of reflecting on our own lives and how we want to be in the world. So just like you would read the Bible, we would go with Harry Potter.

Bob Moesta: That's awesome.

Derek van Bever: In the beginning.

Casper ter Kuile: In the beginning, yeah exactly.

Derek van Bever: Bob, any last words before we-

Bob Moesta: I'm just happy to be in the room with you guys.

Casper ter Kuile: Me too.

Bob Moesta: We haven't connected in a year. So this is just wonderful stuff.

Derek van Bever: Thanks Bob.

Casper ter Kuile: Thanks for having us, Derek.

Derek van Bever: Those of you listening in, will know now why we were so excited about this podcast today. If you had been in the room with us, you would have seen the sparks between Bob and Casper and know that as you follow the work of these two individuals, you are following people who are fully engaged in the progress humans are trying to make. The ways that we're trying to make it and our hopes for the future, even if we are counting the days.

Bob Moesta: That's right. Everything after that day is bonus. So, it doesn't matter. Just having a day.

Derek van Bever: On that note thank you and blessings to all of you.

Bob Moesta: Yep.

Clay Christensen: Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time, good luck everybody.