Integrating DNA, Thinking, and Behavior in the Workplace

Jose Leal:

Hello and welcome to the Radical World podcast. I am Jose Leal with my partner Matt Perez. And today we have Dr. Antoine Eid. I hope I pronounce that right.

Antoine Eid:

Eid. Yes.

Jose Leal:

Eid. I want to say Eid or something like that. I'm Why. But Dr. Eid and I had the opportunity of meeting thanks to a, a common person who's introduced us a couple of weeks ago. And we had, I thought we had a blast. Of course, you were not feeling well. You're still not feeling a hundred percent. You've got some cough but you've got your tea, so hopefully that will they'll help you. And you're also going through some, a little bit of trauma in your life as being stuck where you don't want to be. Exactly. But you know, it's, it's important to, to sort of acknowledge that things are a little tough for you right now, both health wise and, and, and being stuck in Lebanon. Correct?

Antoine Eid:

Correct. But I feel great and I'm happy to be here. Yeah,

Jose Leal:

Thank you. Thank you for joining us. It's, it's really appreciate the fact that you've taken the time to do that with so much going on and, and your situation.

Antoine Eid:

Thank you.

Jose Leal:

So I, I like to start with just sort of like, who are you? Why, why is it important to talk to you about this and how did you become someone that's important to talk to about understanding humanity, understanding how we collaborate.

Antoine Eid:

Jose and Matt, thank you for having me today. And we met a couple of weeks earlier. I was an organic, very nice conversation from the start. I want to thank thank Karen Ziegler for introducing us. You're an amazing person, and I support what you stand for, and it's nice to meet people where you can instantly feel that alignment when it comes to helping others better understand each other. So conversation immediately led to this, and here we are. So, who am I? I am someone very intuitive both by my genetics and my and, and my skills who has learned to eventually accept that my intuition is the strong part of who I am, and it's not the thing that I should that I should keep silencing. And the moment I accepted that this is who I am I started putting that to to action, to practice, to actually use that intuition to help people better understand each other. And that's the conversation where you and I where you and I align on how what we want in this world and how we want people to to collaborate and cooperate with each other. So I have a long history of consulting the background with some scientific background in neuro science and behavioral genetics, which together allowed, allow me, allowed me over the years to do over 18,000 personality assessments including DNA testing, neuroscience based assessments, psychology based assessments to help people identify who they are, what they are made of, and how can they better appreciate themselves and others. And this slowly led to the creation of me yourself, which I found three years ago. And that's the world's first personality assessment tool that combines DNA testing, neuroscience, and psychology.

Jose Leal:

And what, what kind of, like, what upbringing or what experience led you to that insight to that type of intuition?

Antoine Eid:

I guess my journey is similar to most people's journey. We spend a lot of our effort in life trying to change those very same things that make us special and different and have something to bring to the world. We look outside and we see that there are some beautiful colors outside, and we suddenly want to be like these other colors. And we don't always appreciate that we actually might be bringing this new color

Jose Leal:

That we have our own color to shine.

Antoine Eid:

We have our own color, and that's going to make that whole scenery even more vibrant and nice. So just like anyone else I I've developed skills, behaviors through education, through life experience, but then I realized that I've been listening to my boss at work, my parent at home my, my my partner at home. And people sometimes very lovingly force you to develop certain skills that do not always match who we actually are in the core. And you look, I had the chance to meet with so many people who wake up in the morning and every single day do this thing that they enjoy and love, and say that they have a sense of purpose in what they do. And you notice the common thing between all of them is that what they do actually matches the genetic blueprint, matches what their, their innate strength, their potential that they were born with. It just allow themselves or had the opportunity to nurture that part. And now they say that we found our purpose. So I realized that my purpose was in using that strong intuition that I was born with. Can allow me to be sensitive, empathetic, and understanding of people's feelings and emotions to actually help them better understand who they are. Because people who, people cope with life in different ways. Unfortunately, the most common way is to suppress the reality, our reality, and deny what is actually happening and looking at something else. But sometimes, but sometimes in, in a lot of cases, looking at the reality actually reveals something beautiful about us. There's nothing to hide. We all have a beauty to bring to the world. We all have a value. And the uniqueness.

Jose Leal:

I like to think, and I'm going to take a a a little step towards science here because what you've just described about the, the light we all bring to the world, if I think about evolutionarily speaking, that each and every one of us is its own experiment, that each and every one of us emerges with a unique makeup thanks to our parents and their parents and their parents and our environment, and try to execute our experiment to the best of our ability. And that when we don't express that experiment in full, then we don't have happy fulfilled lives because we haven't actually done our job, which is to run our experiment of this unique makeup expressing itself. And when we do express it, then that fulfillment comes about. Does that make sense to you? You're a scientist. I'm not.

Antoine Eid:

Absolutely. Absolutely. We all have, there are soon 9 billion people in the world, and there are 9 billion different journeys. The interesting part in this is that from genetic and from a genetic standpoint, we are all 97%, 99.7% similar.

Jose Leal:

Right.

Antoine Eid:

We're made of the same genetic component. What makes each one of us different is 0.3%, which is still made of the same component, only sequence different,

Jose Leal:

Slightly different. Yeah.

Antoine Eid:

And that allows us to develop in a certain way. So we are born with, with it, but we go through our own journey in life. It could be two twins living in the same house. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they still have their own personality and their own journey in life. Now, how much of that journey is actually allowing us, as you said, to explore, even nurture those beautiful things that we are, or that we were born with?

Jose Leal:

I, I like to call that our radical purpose, but it is, it's, it is the root of who we are and what we're doing. So I think, and there's,

Antoine Eid:

Sorry, there's scientific proof to this. Just within the scope of what I have been doing or the 18,000 assessments that I have done in the last years, I haven't seen a single genetic profile that does not contain any potential or talent in something. We all have something to offer.

Jose Leal:

Right.

Antoine Eid:

But we, we do not know that we actually have it. You could have a great musical talent, but never practiced or learned music. So that talent doesn't not mean that that talent isn't there.

Jose Leal:

Right. Right. And it's, and that's why autonomy is such an important thing, because if you don't have autonomy, you can't touch those things that you might resonate with and, and express them because they work, because you do resonate with them. If somebody says you have to go do X and you can't do y and that X is not the thing that you resonate with, then all your life is like, oh, I'm not good at doing something. Right. When in reality, it's the other thing that you haven't been exposed to. That was the thing that you were, you were capable of doing.

Antoine Eid:

Exactly. Because we it's not our fault we raised in that system. That actually focuses a lot on what we do not have and how we can develop it. Right. We're, we're raised to focus on we are weak. We need to fix things. We lack something and we need to get it through education, through experience. We focus a lot on a growth mindset. I need to become better. I need to become good enough, but good enough for what? For a certain environment and we choose to put ourselves in. They, it. That's, that's interesting because, because if you look at personality in in general, any personality trait, the only way you can tell whether a personality trait is a, is a, a strength or a weakness, is whether that trait is actually needed or less needed in any environment. Someone who's short or tall, for example, let's, let's take a simple example.

Jose Leal:

I use that one all the time.

Antoine Eid:

Yeah. Short and tall can only be seen as a quality or less of a quality based on whether you are applying for a job to work in a minefield or to go to the MBA. If you're applying to go to a work in a, in a mine, I mean not in a minefield, then being short is actually a great quality.

Jose Leal:

Exactly. To have.

Antoine Eid:

So the, the qualities that we have or the traits that we have are not wrong or right, good or bad. But the question is, are we allowing ourselves to be in an environment that actually recognizes and appreciates what we have to bring? Or are we committing to a lifetime where we struggling to build all of these skills that the environment is forcing on us. Right. But do not resemble us resemble us at all.

Jose Leal:

We like to call that the environment that we've created, the fiat system and, and fiat thinking, because it's one of command and control. It's one of the dictating what's right, what's wrong, what must be, rather than allowing us to express what's right and wrong based on how we fit that environment. Not everybody fits every environment to your point. Right. I, I use the example, it's really easy as, as you just pointed out height. I use the example of my sister. My sister's just a couple of centimeters shy of being a short person by official designation. She's just a tiny little thing. And every time I think about the fact that I, I intuitively don't ask her to do things that require height, 'cause I know that she's not tall, it's obvious, but we don't see that in each other about other aspects, right? The, the stuff that we go, oh, this person's a sensitive person, this person has, is intuitive. This person is not intuitive. This person is analytical. All of those things, we don't express that to each other. We don't share that with each other. We may not even know that about ourselves. And it's when we, when it's obvious to me that that's who you are, then I don't expect of you to be something else. And humans are really good at say like, oh, your ex, that's what it is. And, and dealing with that is just a reality. But we don't, our system, our fiat system says everybody's the same and everybody has to be exactly good at everything that we say they need to be good at. And that's where I see that disconnect.

Antoine Eid:

Absolutely. And this is where we need to start looking at relationships differently because we spend sometimes very unintentionally, a lot of effort into, into, into trying to make everyone else around us behave in a certain way that is acceptable. What we do not pay attention to is that people are going to be who they're. They can make these temporary changes to accommodate, but they need to be who they are. And it's up to us to actually accept and learn how to collaborate and take advantage of these differences. Successful relationships do not necessarily require you to make a radical change for the sake of accommodating someone else. What they take really is being with someone else who is able to better accept you for who you're, a lot of people have, have tried to make that radical change. They've lost their motivation, they've become depressed, anxious all the time, not happy living in fear of not being good enough.

Matt Perez:

And they take it off in their families too.

Antoine Eid:

Absolutely.

Jose Leal:

Themselves and those around them. Yeah, absolutely. There I'm part of a an email thread that's been talking about IETF, which is a a group that writes standards, protocols for the internet. And one of the things they decided is that they're not going to, from early on, I think they started in 92 or something like that from early on, they decided that they're not going to vote on whether they're going to implement a certain standard or not implement a certain standard. And they decided that if somebody is against something, it's because there's something there. There's, they're, they're sensing intuitively they might not be able to explain it. They might not know why, but they're intuitively aware that there is an issue with whatever the proposal is. And so instead of saying, majority wins, go away, dah, dah, dah, dah, they go and they've been doing this all along and it's been a very successful community what they do is they say, you have something to offer to this protocol. We want to engage you more in this exercise. Yes. Not take you away, but be part of trying to implement it. And if your intuitions are right, you're going to find ways around the problems that are going to, we're going to run into, and we're going to use your intuitions rather than ignore your intuitions instead of saying your trouble, which is often what we do. 'cause The person who stands out is problematic. That person always says negative things. Right. Take them out of here, instead, that person may have something to offer to this. How do we integrate them? How do we benefit from their unique light using your terminology?

Antoine Eid:

I absolutely agree. Jose and I can confirm through personal experience, I've I've had a chance to work with thousands of leaders in over 30 countries, hundreds of teams. And the one, the two common things that I've seen in those teams are the more performant ones are the ones who are able to take advantage of diversity and a healthy level of conflict. And those who were less performing were the ones that were pushing for uniformity or conformity and of, and avoiding conflict. Right. Conflict is one of the healthiest things Yes. That, that can happen in a team if it is managed with positivity and access,

Jose Leal:

Right. If it's healthy.

Antoine Eid:

Yes.

Jose Leal:

Absolutely. So, so you started this work. Obviously we're, we're seeing the world in very similar ways. Our, our work with Radical world is really around the organization and how do we create organizations that recognize what you've just described, but operate and have a structure that support pretty much what you've just described, right? Because the recognition is we can do our inner work, as some people call it and then we set up a structure that has nothing to do with what that interim work dictates. Right?

Antoine Eid:

Right.

Jose Leal:

I need autonomy, but we have a system that doesn't provide autonomy. Right. I need to be able to make decisions for myself. And yet we have a system that's a hierarchy that says, oh, you can't make those decisions. That's somebody else's decision to make. So how do we build systems that are co-managed and co-owned? Because ownership is yet another aspect of, of this fiat system that says it's okay for you to make some decisions, but ultimately I'm the owner and I get to pull the plug on whatever needs to be done. So that's the work we've been doing. But, but you've been doing some work with organizations and individuals. Can you tell us more about how that works and what you do and what, what tools are the tools of your trade, as they say.

Antoine Eid:

Sure. So over the last 15 years, I've realized that organizations are getting more and more aware of the importance of using the existing talent, of using that difference. But they did not have the right tools. They had the right thinking, but tools were not always available. So what I decided to do is to actually use science to provide tools that can reveal that uniqueness of everybody. It's like you're getting important data about each person, which is only revealing their talents, their uniqueness, their value, and putting all of that in a pot, allowing leadership to better understand what they are working with and how can they move people from a place of lack and needing to be good enough to a place of what does each team member have to offer in this team, and how can we maximize this in the interest of both the individual and the organization? So I've built an algorithm with millions of entries that brings the genetic scores from a DNA test, from a cheek swab. We sequenced the DNA in a very safe and confidential way. And through that we review 54 different propensities or predispositions towards 54 behaviors at the workplace. We add that with neuroscientific and psychologic psychology, evidence on thinking motivators and acquired skills and behaviors. We put these together, we you map them together, and now you have clear evidence on what this person can actually bring to the table. So the whole thinking behind this is people have had enough working on themselves, people want to be appreciated and recognized, and the moment of that first day they start working in that team, they already come with a big bag of great personality traits, values on top of these skills that we've hired them for.

Jose Leal:

A skin bag, we might call it.

Antoine Eid:

Exactly. But then they just want to do well. So they're in this new environment, they're trying to adapt, they're trying to adapt their behavior to accommodate. And you realize with time that there's very little left of each person. We speak very highly of organizational culture. In my opinion, organizational culture is a double-edged sword. It helps people fit much faster. We want them to perform, we want them to start producing. Let's use that and that big tool of culture to make them conform faster. But in the process, people are giving up on the value that they can bring as an individual.

Jose Leal:

Absolutely. And, and how does that work when you bring them together? Is there, is it say the HR department that's getting the results of these tests, or are the individuals getting the results of the tests? Who's getting the results and, and how are they being shared within the organization?

Antoine Eid:

So it's two different journeys running in parallel, each individual is going through a beautiful time and structured development journey per individual development journey based on the results of their own tests, and in parallel the organization. So HR or leadership has access to a dashboard that can allow a certain level of viewing those dynamics. What is happening in that team? What is missing? And let me, I need to focus on something here. It's super easy to understand people's level of skits. There are so many, there are 75,000 personality assessment tools out there, most of which measure a certain level of skill or behavior. How good is someone at something? What is missing is how do we measure how happy and motivated they are while doing it? Because these are two different things. For someone to do something well, and over time, they need to know how to do it. And they need to also enjoy doing.

Jose Leal:

Have the motivation to do it.

Antoine Eid:

And this is what my test actually reveals. There are hidden motivators in our thinking, in our brain and in our genetics that guide that sense of purpose, that sense of fulfillment, passion towards certain tasks more than other tasks. And these do not show on the CV what we see on what we see on the CV, like a long list of qualifications, education, experience, etcetera. And we hire people based on those. Then we realize with time that I'm not able to get that person to be motivated and happy doing that job. It's because initially we only selected them based on their skills and not based on their motivators. Right. And this is what I'm bringing to the equation. I'm saying motivators in certain instances are actually the bigger influence in the, in the performance when it comes to certain tasks. So why are we completely ignoring that that indicator? It's there. It's from a saliva, from a, from a saliva sample. I can actually tell you whether this person has higher motivators towards certain things.

Jose Leal:

And, and for us, the way we see it now, we are not just trying to do what you just described, which is to say, to empower individuals and groups to understand that human motivation, that human purpose, if you will, is a reality and has ultimately is at the root of our behavior. Right. Everything else comes after I learned the skill after, and I either learned the skill because I'm motivated to learn that skill or because I was forced to learn that skill.

Antoine Eid:

Exactly. Yes.

Jose Leal:

Right. And it may be that I be, became very good at that skill by force, and it shows in my CV that I am good at this skill by force, but in reality, I only do it when forces around. I'm not self-motivated to do it. And so the work that we've been trying to, to do is create a new kind of organization that recognizes that at its root, fundamentally understands that, and that say an HR department today whose job it is to try to manipulate all of these things, that, that, that becomes part of the community of participants in the organization. That it, it is a part of understanding just as we should be able to have the same conversation within our, our our partners at home and our friends groups and so forth. That understanding should become part of the, the soup in which we're in, rather than having a third party say, as an HR department, you guys should be here and there because we're manipulating the situation. Right. So for us, how we create new kind of organization is very fundamentally important because we can't, we believe we can't keep doing what we're doing as far as organizational structures, because organizational structures are actually demotivating us. 87% of people are disengaged at work. And that's what you've just described. They're disengaged because they're doing the things that they're not motivated to do. They're doing them in ways they're not motivated to do. They're doing it for people that don't motivate them. All of those things are the reality in our current environments. So we're, we're working to, to sort of put the organization on its head, flip it around, and put the people's motivation as the basis for how we work rather than the structure of the organization as the basis of how we work. Does that make sense to you? Does that,

Antoine Eid:

Absolutely. And I agree with you. I think this is becoming a must in organizations. But if we look at this also from a systemic standpoint, the world, look at what is happening in the world around us right now, our failure to accept that someone else speaks a different language, has a different skin color, has a different way of viewing the world, things and situations has led to nothing but conflict. Where do you think the world is heading in the next few years if we continue like this. It has become imperative that we change the way we understand each other.

Matt Perez:

Yes.

Antoine Eid:

We cannot afford to keep pulling in our direction anymore, because there's not going to be any one left in a few years if we continue like this.

Matt Perez:

Well, people like, like Musk and others are working towards not needing anybody. They're, they're working towards everything automated. They control it. And you know, whatever people think is, is besides the point. So the people in the world are pushing for that are pushing for a world that's independent on human beings. And and we happen to think that we have to be the of human beings because that's all we have. That's where creativity comes from. And and that's all we have in spite of AI and all the garbage. That that's, that's surprising now because so that's the situation now. So we're, we're in, we feel we're in a situation where there's a world that's going its own way. It started in England somewhere. And but it is, it's, it's not going to help us. It's going to kill us, and it's going to make life's not worth living is one of those things. And and when it's changed, that.

Antoine Eid:

Clock is ticking and there needs to be a radical world, a radical change in the way we in the way we think we deal and we understand collaborate and collaborate. Yeah.

Jose Leal:

And that's what we name it. Radical world.

Antoine Eid:

I, I happen to be living, to be right now in stuck in a war zone. And I can see. I've been, I've been watching tv watching the news for the last few days. It's really funny. You've, when was the last time you were on TV watching people debate? And one of them said, you know what? I think you're right from now on, I'm going to change my mind. I'm going to go with what you're saying. Has anyone ever been convinced by someone else's logic on tv? I've never seen it.

Matt Perez:

No. I've never seen it

Antoine Eid:

Always have something opposite to say always, yes. As if this has become the norm.

Jose Leal:

That is to.

Antoine Eid:

To always disagree and to always misalign, because that's what makes us individuals.

Jose Leal:

Yes.

Antoine Eid:

And it doesn't have, this is not part of our individuality.

Jose Leal:

No. But it's not just making us individuals. It makes us part of a group

Antoine Eid:

And also part of a group. But then, but then when you take a closer look inside that same group, you see that these differences are already, are also happening inside.

Jose Leal:

Of course. Of course, of course. That's why.

Antoine Eid:

Once said, have you noticed that anyone driving slower than you in the street on the road is an idiot? And anyone driving faster is a maniac. Because our speed on the road, on the highway is actually defining the standard always.

Jose Leal:

Yes. Yes. And, and everybody when asked is better than average as a driver.

Matt Perez:

There was a show on NPR that was were said that men something, women something, but, and children are better than average. All children are better than, but it's not just children. It's is is adults as well.

Jose Leal:

Well, and it's how we've judged our world. It's about the ideological stance at the structure of, of our governments. It's a, the ideological stance at the structure of our organizations. It's not about human expression. Yeah. Human expression is, is the, the last thing we worry about. In fact, we've decided that we need to control human expression because we don't understand it. And so it's a variable we cannot control, right? Yes. And, and so we've built systems, systems of, of politics, systems of law, systems of, of organization that are built around trying to squash that variable. And it is that variability that is life itself. If, if it, if we weren't unique, we would be robots. We would all think the same. We would all act the same. We would all do the same. And in essence, we would be missing the vast majority of reality that exists because we wouldn't have the perspective to, to, to see that reality. We'd only be seeing a very narrow bandwidth. And that, I think that's the work you're describing, Antoine, is how do we see that human beings provide the answer to all of these things? Not the problem. What Matt described earlier about how many are seeing the system as the better we automate, the better we use technology to solve the problems of these humans that are problematic, the better things will be. That's the opposite answer of what we're talking about, which is what we need is to actually lean on humanity and life itself, not to run away from it or try to control it.

Antoine Eid:

I agree.

Jose Leal:

So what, what we have run, oh, Carlos, you have failed us. You didn't give us our 40 minutes. Our coming message. Carlos is our producer, and we had talked about closing up the show in 40 minutes. So Dr. Eid, what, what would you say is is sort of the, the way you would describe this conversation that we just had today and, and wrap up your work and, and how it ties to a radical world that we've been describing?

Antoine Eid:

Well, thank you for the opportunity and the amazing conversation. I would like to leave with a few words. Science isn't always a bad thing. It sometimes is an amazing thing. That can, that can provide evidence that can help humanity. And what we do is one of them use science, do not avoid or, or get stuck in old ways of assessing people's performance at work. There are new technologies, there are new ways of looking at people's performance and understanding people's personality. Use science, look into genetics, watch out for the meet yourself space is revolutionizing the way teams work together. You're doing this anyways. You're trying to get the best out of people, but try to understand whether you are pushing them to develop in the right direction. So do they meet yourself, assessment personally? Do they meet yourself? Assessment in your, within your teams is going to change the motivation and the sense of purpose.

Jose Leal:

Well, thank you very much for, for the time, for the conversation especially in the situation that you're in and, and how you're feeling.

Antoine Eid:

It's my pleasure. Thank you.

Jose Leal:

And safe travels to you as you, as you head back to the uk. Thank you safely. I hope this has been a, a really nice conversation. I'd like to follow up in, in a maybe a few months and think a little bit more about how your work intersects with the radical world.

Antoine Eid:

Okay.

Jose Leal:

Because I think your focus has been on helping organizations as they stand today. And, and I think there's a lot of power in what you're doing to help create new organizations, new kinds of organizations that start with your understanding at the root rather than the other way around trying to convert organ, the, the mindset of organ preexisting organizations, fiat organizations as we call them. So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for, for joining us and next week. I was going to say next week we've got Tim Inger. Tim is partner at Enterprise Transformations at EY what used to be used earnest and young. And the topic is beyond bureaucracy and Igor organizations. Tim, we've known Tim for quite a while. He's been around the teal world the self-managing world, and it'll be the first time we've had a a, an on-air conversation with him. So I'm looking forward to that. Again, Dr. Eid, thank you so much for, for joining us, for spending the time. And I'm, I'm hoping that this is the beginning of a long-term relationship between your work and, and the work that we're doing here at Radical World.

Matt Perez:

That's the lines for a movie I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful, beautiful ship. <Laugh>, but but it, it, it fits. It fits. That's fine.

Jose Leal:

All right. Thank you very much. We'll see you soon.