Dan Lyons - Lab Rats: Why Modern Work Makes People Miserable

Dan Lyons is the New York Times bestselling author of Disrupted. He is also a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and public speaker. He was a staff writer on the first two seasons of the Emmy-winning HBO series Silicon Valley. Previously, Lyons was technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of the groundbreaking viral blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (aka Fake Steve Jobs). Lyons has written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired.

First published in hardback in the United States of America in 2018 by Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Dan Lyons, 2018, 2019

The moral right of Dan Lyons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 392 7

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 393 4

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 395 8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Once again, with all my love, for my three best friends: Sasha, Sonya, and Paul.

Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation.

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular
Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

F irst, you are lucky to be here. Also, we do not care about you. We offer no job security. This is not a career. You are serving a short-term tour of duty. We provide no training or career development. If possible, we will make you a contractor rather than an actual employee, so that we do not have to provide you with benefits or a pension plan. We will pay you as little as possible. We do not care about diversity: ethnic minorities need not apply. Your job will be stressful. You will work long hours under constant pressure and with no privacy. You will be monitored and surveilled. We will read your email and chat messages, and use data to measure your performance. We do not expect you to last very long. Our goal is to burn you out and churn you out. Your managers may not know what they are doing. They also may be abusive. If you are female, there is a good chance you will be sexually harassed. HR will not help you. If you file a complaint, you will probably get fired. If you get pregnant or turn forty, you also will be fired. You may be fired even though you are doing a good job. You may be fired for no reason at all. We do not offer a creche. We do have ping-pong. There are snacks and beer in the kitchen.

O n a Wednesday morning in June 2017, I find myself in Menlo Park, California, sharing a small table in a faux European coffee shop with a woman Ill call Juliaand Im making a duck out of Lego bricks.

Outside, its sunny and warm. A late-morning breeze ruffles the big bright-colored umbrellas above the tables in the plaza. Inside, young techies gaze up at the chalkboard menu above the counter and sit at tables clicking at laptops. Django Reinhardts guitar emanates from hidden speakers. Nobody pays any attention to the two gray-haired people sitting near the window with their plastic toys.

Julia and I have never met before. Shes a cheery, round-faced woman in her fifties with a disarming smile and an easy laugh. Julia arrived carrying a big canvas bag filled with Lego bricks, and theyre now scattered out on the table. As were making small talk, she plays with the pieces, idly snapping and unsnapping them. Soon, between sips of my caff Americano and bites of a remarkably good almond croissant, I start tinkering with them too.

A few years earlier I briefly worked at a Silicon Valley-style startup in Boston, a disastrous experience I chronicled in my last book, before getting a job as a writer on the HBO comedy Silicon Valley.

Today, I have returned to the setting of that showwhich, while a real place, is also a state of mindnot for fun, but for research. For the last two years, I have made it my mission to speak to as many people as I can to better understand the modern workplace and why work today seems to make so many people unhappy. My theory is that at least some of the unhappiness at work comes from being herded into silly workshops where people are fed a bunch of touchy-feely nonsense about self-improvement and transformation.

Thats how Ive come to be on this coffee date. Julia makes a living running the weirdest kind of corporate workshops Ive heard about so far. In Julias workshops, she asks people, office workers like I once was, to play with Lego. This is an actual thing now, and the people who teach this take it very seriously. The methodology is called Lego Serious Play, and Julia is one of thousands of people who have become certified to run LSP workshops. Huge companies, including Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and Google, have embraced it.

When I first heard about Lego workshops I thought someone was pulling my leg. I was talking to a corporate trainerIll call him Edwardwho said, You know, you should talk to some of my friends who are certified in Lego.

Excuse me? I said.

Im serious, he said. He insisted that Lego training really helps people get better at their jobs. Its powerful, Edward said. The Lego bricks are a prop. They help get people to talk about how they feel about things, unfiltered. Its like kids who have been abused, and they talk through a doll. People talk through their Lego.

Oh dear God. I closed my eyes and pictured a bunch of poor Jims and Pams talking through their Lego, pouring their hearts out to a team of New Age quacks. This could be either the worst thing or the best thing I might ever see in my entire life. Maybe both.

Edward gave me a name and a number. Soon I was talking to one of the top Lego trainers in the world, a man who lives in Southern California. He put me in touch with Julia, who lives in Silicon Valley, a few miles from where Im staying.

Im a little disappointed, because I came here expecting, and actually half hoping, to meet a complete nut job or a shyster. Unfortunately, Julia appears to be neither. Shes very bright and really sincere. She has a masters degree in engineering and spent two decades writing software inside some serious organizations. Moreover, I really like her. I dont want to make fun of her. And yethere we are, in a coffee shop, playing with Lego.