Paul Galverson works for us in an unknown capacity…or maybe he’s doing research, no one can tell. He’s either from Upwork or Accenture, but based on his billing our Chief Financial Officer, Laura Kracklestein, who everyone is terrified of, figures it must be Accenture.

Which makes her quite grumpy as she feels management consultant-types are pure dooshes.

Oh wait, she says it’s not the consultants doing the work she abhors, it’s the senior managers/directors/leadership of companies like Accenture, who she deems “greedy, predatory, aloof, obnoxious, and smug.”

Which of course we love both hearing and piling on to, because there’s nothing as satisfying as judging people we’ve never met from afar, especially if they’re from New York and rich.

The Best Bathroom Ever

We surprised Paul last Tuesday when we walked into our secret Executive Retreat Meeting Room, Stay Out, MBAs Only, You Suck. This is an antechamber conveniently located next to the Executive Washroom, Advanced Degrees And G-Wagon Ownership Required, If That’s Not You Go Away You Can’t Pee Here, and it’s where we hide out to smoke cigarettes and tell bawdy stories of past triumphs, none of which are sexual because that would be creepy, weird, and lame.

You should see the air filtration system we put in this secret hideaway: no matter how many packs we smoke, it smells exclusively of bougainvillea, which we paid extra for.

So there we were, piling in, each of us holding a different flavor of American Spirit as signified by the delightfully joyful color variations of American Spirit hard packs in our hands, and much to our surprise and consternation there was Paul, scribbling away on our whiteboard which we only put in there for show. Even worse, Paul’s scribbles looked decidedly like something only someone smart would draw: kind of a combination Gannt chart/Pythagorean Theorem/sine wave type situation that instantly gave us both headaches and that particular kind of nausea that develops when being shown up in real time by someone who is clearly more talented, qualified, and capable.

It was all just too much to handle given our aforementioned plan to take a load off and screw around in general, as we always do between the hours of 11 a.m.-noon because work is hard and people are so serious all the time it just gets to be a drag.

But we were trapped, and thus Paul got us right in his crosshairs and started babbling about the importance of understanding feedback loops.

Thanks For The Feedback

Paul’s spontaneous, clearly unwanted dissertation involved lots of animated hand gesturing, sweating, and tap-tap-tapping on the white board with a black dry erase pen which was incredibly irritating, particularly because we all wanted to smoke.

Yet he brought up some interesting points about feedback loops, and how paying attention to them is a superpower that most of us don’t have because we don’t pay attention much of anything that doesn’t involve solely ourselves, or possibly the local celebrity chef’s global twist on classic comfort foods.

In fact, we found Paul’s points so impactful that we created yet another in-office-only, inspirational workday poster proudly displayed on every vertical surface that would accommodate its absurd size, which is approximately 18 feet x 17.5 inches:

Beloved Employee Feedback Loop Field Guide: Pay Attention, And You Get A Prize*

• The Universe Has Two Ways to Tell You You’re Screwing Up: Negative feedback loops (your thermostat, your mother) keep you alive through constant nagging. Positive feedback loops either make you rich or destroy everything—no middle ground.

• All the Fun Stuff Gives Instant Feedback: Likes, purchases, sugar rushes, getting into Twitter fights. Your brain thinks these matter because the dopamine hits immediately. Think about that next time you judge a junkie.

• All the Important Stuff Takes Forever: Savings accounts, exercise, team morale, climate change. By the time you get feedback, your car’s repossessed, your pants don’t fit, half your staff has quit, and a polar bear has eaten everything in your freezer.

• Modern Life Is Rigged Backwards: We’ve accidentally designed a world where bad decisions feel immediately rewarding and good decisions feel like punishment until much later. Well, maybe we’re accidentally partaking in this world that was clearly purposefully engineered to always make us reactionary mouth-breathing imbeciles.

• The Strategic Move: Build systems where smart choices compound faster than dumb ones can kill you. Make the good stuff addictive and the destructive stuff boring. Start by putting the destructive stuff down.

• Why This Matters Here: Everything we’re building should create positive loops that reward long-term thinking instead of quarterly panic attacks. NO MORE QUARTERLY PANIC ATTACKS WE’RE ALL SICK OF IT.

HEY EMPLOYEE: The trick isn’t fighting our nature—it’s designing systems that make the right choice the easy choice. Now get on with it.

There Is No Mary Poppins

The weirdest thing is, three days after we plastered all available vertical office surfaces with this latest installment of our perpetual behavioral science-inspired organizational psychology employee motivational corporate communication/instructional promotion, Paul stopped showing up. Then Laura Kracklestein realized his net-60 invoices totaling $102,000 based on his billing rate of $850/hour (he was supposedly a “Senior Consultant-Accenture”) lacked a direct link to the Accenture Billing and Payments Engine.

And worst of all, our various multi-colored packs of American Spirits were replaced with friggin’ Nicorette lozenges AND prescriptions for Varenicline (brand name Chantix) from some doctor in Toronto.

Despite the obvious correlation to Mary Poppins and the widespread (and highly distracting-from-work gossip) amongst all our teams that Paul was some kind of ethereal spirit guide, we on the Executive Team decided he was merely one of those overzealous weirdos who gets off on simply helping people, and is probably out on parole from some lux federal prison, probably for financial crimes.

Although, we must admit, it’s been kind of nice to disrupt our collective nicotine feedback loops, and it kinda proves you can redesign entire systems to work for you, instead of against you, if only you’d pay attention.

Now excuse us while we go chew some lozenges.